I dont like Ike. At all.

I cant sleep. It's like 330 saturday morning. I think the eye of Ike is passing over Galveston right about now, and I can't help but feel sick inside for the people who chose not to evacuate. I served my LDS mission in Houston, and spent a lot of time in Galveston itself, as it was part of my zone. I actually had knee surgery in Galveston while on my mission. I spent even more time (8 months) in smaller, lower-lying communities to the north and west of Galveston. Places like Port LaVaca and Palacios. Places right on the gulf, where people live in trailers. I truly fear for those places, especially because there are so many people still there who I love deeply. I feel so disconnected from them, and truly don't feel like there is anything I can do. I wish I was there to help them. In Clearlake, where NASA is, I hear the mayor is urging people even now to evacuate low lying areas. I know those areas. One apartment complex in clearlake called Harbor Tree used to flood with even the mildest of summer rainstorms. We would walk through it wet to our knees after a storm. Every stairway was rusted up to the third or fourth step. I feel sick for what they must be going through now.

For those of you who have never lived or seen that area of Texas, it is truly beautiful. Palacios is a tiny shrimping village, flat land, baptist churches, mostly gravel roads. The kind of place that hasn't changed in fifty years. Some of the happiest moments of my life were spent there teaching and serving people. We would drive our car out to the most remote of places, tiny colonies of trailers twenty miles away from anywhere, huddled around a small water tower. I remember one time we were on a drive like that, looking for a country road address and we came across a historical site/marker. It said that there had once been a city on that spot, settled before houston, that rivaled it in size and commerce, but that hurricanes had leveled it twice and the settlers had just given up. I stood at that marker and realized without nostalgia just how extreme Texas can be. I only pray now that destruction escapes most, but especially the ones I love and have left behind.

We beat all the families reunions (and their laptops)

So I got the position as an official blogger for the Utah Jazz.  Thanks for all of you who went and voted. You guys are off the hook.  

I don't post about sports on this blog, but a few sports are a really interesting part of my life. Tivo makes watching sports easier on the schedule, and there are always fascinating/hilarious parallels to be drawn between athletic competition and life in general.  Hopefully I can start sharing some of those parallels when the Basketball season starts up. Again, the website is Jazzbots.com. It is in its second year as the official community site affiliated with  the Jazz. Lets see how this works. 

Seminal Geography

The major periods of my life have all been begun by a move eastward. Growth in High School was interrupted by a move east to Provo for College and eventually graduate school, then that period closed by a move east to New York City. In terms of personal development, I can trace myself maturing eastward across the continent. As I write this I am in San Diego, and I realized last night as I drove home from the wedding of a close high school friend, that my vacation this year has retraced the steps of my eastward migration, and in doing so helped me revisit lost versions of myself.

The funny thing about old friends is that they have a way of treating you as the person you once were, and this makes it easier to fall into the attitudes, even the mannerisms, that defined you in those times. When I went back to Provo this summer, I did so without a real purpose. It’s not the first time I’ve revisited Provo and it won’t be the last, but the days without a clear goal gave me time to reflect on the place. One day I was up on BYU campus doing some random errand and in Ten minutes I ran into four people who were relatively close friends around 2004 but who I haven’t kept in close contact with. I chatted with all of them and by the tenor of their questions I was able to see some of the ways I have changed from the person I was in 2004. That day put me in a reflective mood, and I spent the rest of my time in Provo noticing emotionally important places as I drove or walked past them. Apartments where I had lived, street corners where I had had meaningful discussions, places I had taken girls on dates, Streets I had run down in happiness, and others I had walked down in insecurity and pain. It seemed everything in that small town was a landmark and it especially struck me how certain landmarks from my earliest memories of Provo were right next to landmarks from my last few months there. There was an aspect to their closeness that reinforced the length and roundness of human experience, and the pattern that God forms out of every discordance. Above all I was filled with deep gratitude for the experiences and the people that helped shape me in Provo.
Then I drove west to San Diego, to attend the wedding of the friend who was most responsible for the first steps of my adult maturity. At the wedding I ran into another large group of old friends. It was amazing where their lives have taken them in 8 years. Some that I worried about are doing just fine, like stylist for a Conde Nast magazine fine, while others were still floating around the same bar scene and still others were absent, lost to drugs. The way they interacted with me, how they treated me with consistent goodwill, helped me remember the person I was in high school, and just how much I have changed. I’ll keep those personal observations to myself, which perhaps is the greatest indicator of how New York has changed me, but I again felt the deep gratitude of having a place to go back to, and having people in that place that treat you like not a day has passed.