We thought you’d like to see the TV coverage of the event.
WAFF 48 covered the event, but their video is not yet available online.
As we’ve told you before, a group of community leaders all gathered at the Iceplex on Thursday morning to voice their support for the UAH hockey program. We’ve gotten the video in, and it’s all on Jeff Winchester’s (’06) YouTube account. Please note: if you see large areas of whitespace below, please refresh the page. I see this issue with embedded YouTube videos from time to time.
Here they are, in order:
Nathan Bowen (’00)
Mark Russell, District 2 City Councilman and President of the Huntsville City Council
Doug Martinson, Huntsville lawyer, Martinson & Beason, PC
Ralph Stone, head of Huntsville Sports Commission
Keith P. Young, M.D., Huntsville pulmonologist
Bob Whiteford, Sergeant Major
Fred Hudson, founder of Huntsville Amateur Hockey Association
Michael Voljticek, assistant director, Von Braun Center
Eric Artrip, Huntsville lawyer, Watson, McKinney, & Artrip, LLC
Remember: give, speak out, show up. We are working on online giving. If you haven’t signed our petition, please do so.
I’ll quote the release verbatim.
###PRESS RELEASE###
Community Group Forms to Save UAH Hockey
Group has secured over $500,000 to support program but Chancellor Portera must hear support from the community
Huntsville, AL (September 8, 2011) – Local business leaders and several UAHuntsville Alumni today announced a grassroots effort to save NCAA Division I Hockey at the University. According to recent reports UA Chancellor and UAHuntsville Acting President Mack Portera is considering abandoning NCAA Division I hockey at UAHuntsville. Since word of those plans spread supporters of the program have secured over $500,000 in pledges to support the program and offset any financial losses to the University over the next three years.
“Hockey at UAHuntsville is a part of our community and we need to save it.” Said Doug Martinson, a local attorney and former school board member. “It is Huntsville’s only Division I sports team and brings national recognition not only to the University but to the community as well. We need Dr. Portera to work with us to keep this program at the NCAA Division I level. Going to club level hockey is not an option and will only kill the program and provide no real benefit to the community.”
Several groups of community leaders have met with Chancellor Portera to express their support for NCAA Division I Hockey at UAHuntsville and have asked that the community be consulted in this decision and have pledged to do what it takes to ensure the success of the program. Both the Madison County Commission and the Huntsville City Council have passed resolutions calling on the Administration to work with the community to save hockey at the NCAA Division I level.
“We have reached out to our alumni and friends in the community and have asked them for much needed financial support.” Said Nathan Bowen, a UAHuntsville Hockey alum that now runs the Thunder AAA Hockey Club “All we are asking for is a chance to work with the school, reduce the financial burden on the University and put a long-term plan in place that will allow this program to continue to put the city of Huntsville, the University and our Student/Athletes consistently on a National stage. In a few short weeks we have raised over $500,000 in pledges to support the team and have organized campus and community drives to sell more tickets and raise excitement about NCAA DI college hockey in Huntsville. The outpouring of support shows that hockey at UAHuntsville is important not only to the alum, but to the Huntsville community as a whole.”
Despite several requests from the community Chancellor Portera has not yet disclosed what must be done to save the program or provided a fundraising target required that would keep the program at the NCAA Division I level. Several community efforts are now underway to show support for the program and to persuade the Administration to give the community a chance to save this program.
“We are calling on the community to join our efforts and get involved.” Said Geof Morris, founder of SaveUAHhockey.com. “Go online and sign our petition at Saveuahhockey.com, join our Facebook page, buy a season ticket or just come out to a game. The only way we can be successful is to show Chancellor Portera that we support this program and we are not going to let him take it away from our community.”
The University of Alabama in Huntsville ice hockey team took to the ice for the first time in 1979 to the rock anthem “Sweet Home Alabama” and finished out the season with an impressive 21-1 record. A grass roots effort from the beginning, the UAH hockey program has its roots firmly planted in the melting pot that is Huntsville, Alabama, with multiple National Club Championships, Two NCAA Division II Championships, and made two appearances at the NCAA Division I Tournament losing both times by only one goal. Huntsville, Alabama is the Hockey Capital of the South!
It was a good press conference. The only player alumnus on the dais was Nathan Bowen (2000), so this group can’t be dismissed as a bunch of former players miffed that their beloved team could be going away. These were leaders of the Huntsville community: doctors, lawyers, engineers, businessmen, and professors. We had Huntsville natives and transplants. All of them love UAH hockey, and it very clearly showed.
I sat in the back to just get a sense of the room, and by the time the conference started, the players who were meeting on their own for conditioning drills had filed in to sit around me. There was a lot of nervous body language at the start, but by the end I could tell that they felt more confident about the program’s future. I know we did. Like many Charger fans, I know that there are a lot of people that love this hockey program as much as I do. It’s easy to know that, but it’s quite another to feel and believe it. I do after this morning, and they guys seemed to get that as well.
If you haven’t yet—and you’re slacking, because 2,350+ had signed as of the time of this writing—go sign our petition to let Mack Portera know that we want UAH hockey to stick around. Many of you have asked about giving, and we’re working to provide you a place to give. We’ll post about that as soon as we have it.
Save UAH Hockey!
We have received this media advisory:
Community Group Forms to Save UAH Hockey
WHO: UAH Alumni and Community Leaders
WHAT: Community Leaders will announce grassroots efforts and call on community to get involved to save NCAA Division I Hockey at UAHuntsville. Leaders will ask all UAH alumni and hockey fans to show support for the program and to help persuade the Administration to give the community a chance to save the only NCAA Division 1 Hockey program in the south.
WHEN: 10:00am, Thursday, September 8, 2011
WHERE: Huntsville Municipal IcePlex, 3185 Leeman Ferry Road, SW
For further info: Jennifer Gordon, 256-536-3833
I’ll be there and will have more information tomorrow.
I got the okay from Pat Joyce to reproduce his comments on the Save UAH Hockey petition. If you haven’t read them, you’re in for a treat:
The University of Alabama-Huntsville is nationally known for two things. One is a disturbed psychopath who in a fit of insanity decimated one of your academic departments. The other is your Division I ice hockey team. I’ve been told that your institution is somewhat competent in sciences but most of the world will either know this nor care unless they’re specifically interested in your scientific competency. Bottom line, to the most of the country your institution is unknown and people do not care. Interesting, isn’t it?
Athletics is advertisement. Athletics is involvement. Athletics is community. Fair? Absolutely not! True to academic purism? Not even slightly. True? Absolutely. Investment in athletics at an institutional level brings in people who are willing to advertise on your behalf. They are willing to say your praises. Direct students to your institution. Direct business to the same. More importantly, its a commitment to your community which always operates in a synergy with each other. What you see as a large cost can also be seen as outreach if done correct. What I see from this is that you haven’t invested properly in your opportunity. Your hockey team is leverage and an opportunity. Instead of it being an anchor why not try to see it as an asset. Sure, you may not understand it, but does that not mean you are failing to appreciate your institutional assets?
I am a proud alumni of a school in a similar situation. The University of Massachusetts-Lowell may not carry the same level of science plaudits as UAH but it certainly tries. We’re a engineering-focused liberal arts school in a semi-urban setting. We’ve also been (twice) under the threat of losing our institution defining hockey program. Thankfully we were taken off the brink… but admittedly it did take a former congressman to take the institutional reigns to change things around. Nevertheless, things at Lowell are changing and the lever wouldn’t have been there without the hockey team. Without the hockey team we wouldn’t have the opportunity for institutional progress to make UMass-Lowell the second best public school in Massachusetts (and dare I say the best public school in Massachusetts).
I will also relate that my graduate school would not be what it is today without athletics. The state of Connecticut made two very large commitments to the University of Connecticut by way of large financial institutional upgrades. I know that UAH isn’t UConn and UAH sits in the shadow of UAT, Auburn, and UAB. Nevertheless, with UConn the only reason they got those funds in the first place is because their successful basketball program made people start to give a damn about the institution.
Dropping ice hockey is a myopic endeavor as it fails to even consider what you can be. Generally, with many institutions large cash infusions help out a lot… but another thing that can spur things along is attention to smaller details and basic “tender loving care”.
In the end, writing your institutional failure into stone is your choice. Maybe somebody will give you a medal for your failure. I can’t imagine a situation where you are in fact doing the school and the community a service. When you lose a hockey program you do more than improve your balance sheet. You lose a community, you lose what makes you different, and you lose a small army which sing your praise.
This is your choice.
– Patrick Joyce, B.S. UMass-Lowell 2004, PhD UConn 2009.
We’re at 1,200 signatures and counting. Patrick’s words voice the strong feelings that those who love UAH Hockey have. Sign the petition and ask your friends to do so—it just takes a couple of minutes.
Want your voice heard in an editorial? Email me at g@saveuahhockey.com. Please keep it under 500 words, respectful, and opinionated.
First things first: go sign our petition and flood Mack Portera’s INBOX. We’ll wait.
Okay, you’re back! Cool. Keith Rowe wrote a good bit for the Thunder Hockey community last week, and we want to expand on the idea. Let me quote Keith to give you a sense of the urgency:
… [H]ow everyone can help I’m going to explain where we are in our current campaign. We were told last Wednesday [August 23rd] that the annual financial number that needs to be raised over the next 3 years is $500k per year. We set up a three-year pledge system to allow the new UAH Athletic Department personnel, under the leadership of Dr. EJ Brophy, time to put together a long term business and marketing plan. The knowledge of the imminent danger of losing the program has been insulated to the UAH Hockey Alumni to date. The reason for this was to make sure we had the correct information—i.e. $500k annually—to convey and to keep the current UAH Charger Hockey players separated from the issue until it was officially stated from University officials.
Last Tuesday [August 22nd], the UAH Hockey Coaching staff met with Chancellor Portera and he indicated there is a possibility of dropping the Division 1 Charger Hockey program to the Club level, and a decision could be made in early October.
However, there have been some exciting things to happen since these meetings last week: 1) With our Pledge drive only being exposed to UAH Hockey Alumni and Blueline Club Members, we have raised nearly $200K/year. 2) Local politicians have offered to help fund a much-needed marketing position within the UAH athletic department. 3) The Huntsville City Council, along with Mayor Tommy Battle, passed a resolution to support the Division 1 UAH Charger Program in any way they can. 4) Local and national media are willing to help in any way possible to get the word out.
[Emphasis and editing mine.]
Keith argues for three ways to help: give, speak out, and show up. Here’s how to do that:
Give, speak out and show up. It’s that simple. You show interest by being invested, and all three of these will clearly show your investment in hockey here in Huntsville.
Here’s some good things that happened in my life in August 2011:
Aug 01: Eryn and I figured out our crew’s concert attendance schedule for the fall.
Aug 02: I got dispensation from the English faculty to get an override for the tech writing course I need to take for a BS degree.
Aug 03: I rallied from a shitty start to the day to finish well. That hasn’t been the case lately. A great conversation with Kelsey over coffee made my afternoon sing.
Aug 04: Good talks with Lucas and Kelsey, then a looooooong one with Vickie and Jeremy. Can you tell that I love to talk? Also, I got the override done and am now wait listed in two courses. Come on full registration!
Aug 05: I worked through my own hypomania with enough self-control to keep from buying a new car when a good deal was presented to me while my WRX was in the shop (again).
Aug 06: I thanked my folks for helping me through yesterday, because they were a good check on things.
Aug 07: Went to my home church for the first time in 2011. [I know.] Later, I got to take photos of Vickie’s family. I was reasonably pleased with how they turned out, and it was a lot of fun to get to know them.
Aug 08: I had a nice email conversation with Kari in the morning. It was like old times. 
Aug 09: Got to meet and started to know Ted Amey, long conversation with the hockey coaches, then hanging out with Eryn and Lucas before she leaves for Auburn. 
Aug 10: I got cleared by the pulmonologist for surgery.
Aug 11: I finished read Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mixtape, which I read because I love music [and mixtapes], but mainly because I wanted to see inside the life of someone else who is a young widower in an effort to better empathize with my brother, whom I love. I was drawn to this line: “No matter how good I get at being Reneée’s widower, I won’t get promoted to being her husband again.”
Aug 12: The car is back up and running like a top.
Aug 13: Derek and Sandra played in my hometown.
Aug 14: I got out of town and did a four county drive. With the car back in good shape, it was good to open ‘er up. That on-ramp at AL-35 and I-59 SB is still cooling off …
Aug 15: It was cool enough outside to open the windows. I live in Alabama. This is weird.
Aug 16: Doug was here! Also, I’d lost 5lbs when I expected to be level.
Aug 17: First day of classes! Aieeeee!
Aug 18: Second day of classes! I’ve now been to all three classes, and I don’t feel overwhelmed. In fact, this is probably going to be easier than I thought it would be.
Aug 19: Yay, Ashley’s back! Got to talk to her a bit about digging up baby bones in Greece.
Aug 20: I rode out a really bad insomnia episode. I couldn’t go to sleep until around 0700 today, and then only for a couple of hours. Today has just been about holding it together.
Aug 21: 11 hours of sleep later, I felt like a normal person today. Doug’s here on his way back through to Mississippi, and we had more hangtime today.
Aug 22: Bought a new iPad after my brother bought my old iPad. It’s sitting in the dock to my right, untouched since the sync. It’s shiny.
Aug 23: I didn’t let a crippling migraine cripple my day.
Aug 24: I’ve been sick today, but I got some reading done on Jane Eyre, so it’s not a complete loss.
Aug 25: Hangout time—okay, bromance time—with Lucas.
Aug 26: Another step closer to surgery! I could actually have it in two weeks except, you know, life.
Aug 27: Good times talking to, in order, Kelsey, Ashley, Lucas, and Vickie & Jeremy. I also got lot more of Jane Eyre read.
Aug 28: I picked up the new-to-me dining table and chairs from Vickie, talked to Jeremy and her step-dad a bit, and then got Jon’s help with the offload. New table! Six years into owning the house and I finally have one. Ah, bachelor priorities.
Aug 29: I made the decision to drop the CS class I was taking. I originally wanted to take one or two classes. I got caught up in it and tried to register for four and got three. I’m dropping down to two, both of which I’m really quite interested in, and I think that’s the right number for me right now. I found the CS professor’s pedagogy to be quite annoying.
Aug 30: I got an amazing amount of things done today between school and surgery prep and everything else. It’s definitely been an in-the-groove day.
Aug 31: I completed this list! Thanks to Kari for the inspiration.
“Girl reading at the bus stop”: Dave Hoffman
Rosemarie Urquico1 wrote a piece entitled “You should date a girl who reads.” in response to a Charles Warnke’s paean to illiterate women. I happen to fall in Urquico’s camp.
I come from a family of readers. My parents both read, and they passed the love down to both of us. Our family gives books as presents: birthdays, holidays, just because. Our houses are liberally sprinkled with books. The ledge of my loft area has a number of as-yet-unread books on its edge. I’m in the middle of four different books right now. It’s how we do.
My brother taught me to read on the sly. He was eight, and I think he taught his two year old brother to read merely to get me the hell out of his room. The family story goes that I picked up the San Antonio Express-News one morning, carried it to my mother, and asked, “Mom, what does rapped mean?” Imagine my mother’s surprise that not only was her second son reading but she now had to divert me from any conversations about sexuality, forced or otherwise.
I also find myself drawn to friends who read. All of my close friends do, and even if we don’t read the same thing, our thinking lives are enriched by what we take in. I have more than a few friends who are librarians—honest-to-God MLS-holding librarians—and a few who also seek to be published authors. The readers have a need to know, and the writers have a need to say. I find both qualities to be important in my associations.
As I told my friend Lucas last night,2 one of the many reasons that I’m still single is because I am only interested in smart women. A mind that regularly encounters a book—fiction or non-fiction—is a mind that exercises and thinks. I believe that it’s important to think critically about new things because it keeps the mind sharp and pliable. I hope to never stop reading books that make me think about things in a new way. I think all readers share the risk of confirmation bias, but I try to move past that when possible.3
Why date a girl who reads? To quote Urquico:
Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
…
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop.
Of course, all that is about her and how she’ll relate to you. It’s as important to consider it from the man’s side:
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
[Emphasis mine.]
Physical beauty fades, but the power of a strong mind stays throughout a woman’s life. The mind of a woman that reads will always be beautiful to me, and that’s all the beauty I need.
I hit my mark: the kid who doesn't want to be back in school.
With more free time than I intended to have these days1, I’ve decided to go back to school. I still live close to my alma mater2, and I knew that I could get re-admitted with a minimum of fuss. The premise was pretty simple: with Washington a mess and my likely next engineering career path on hold until government contracts are let, I’ve got the semester to knock out some coursework. I tried to get to full-time status, but I just couldn’t get the fourth class I wanted as I didn’t apply for admission until late July.
I had options as to what I could do, and here’s what I considered:
Mind you, when I was an aerospace engineering student, I needed just one additional 300-level mathematics course to have a minor. Did I do it? No. I saw math as a tool and not something to be studied, so I kept on with my other studies4. If I could go back 11 years and tell me that I’d be in this position, past me would have a good laugh.
Why mathematics? I see mathematics as foundational to the sciences and engineering disciplines in the same way that English is foundational to the liberal arts. If you can logically think through a mathematical construct, you have a sense of the issues at hand in the same way as a focus on the study of my mother tongue would have me carefully considering the words that I choose to speak and write. Having a mathematics background will keep me from being pigeonholed as an aerospace engineer, as I do have a greater breadth and depth of knowledge. Engineering curricula are designed to teach you how to think about problems and their solutions, but shortcuts are often sought to maximize efficiency. That’s nice, but I find myself wanting to dig a bit deeper.
I could also teach with a mathematics degree, something that I could not do with an engineering degree. I don’t know if secondary education is for me, but I would like to try it. If I cannot find a job in the short- or medium-term, my goal is to support myself with substitute teaching and tutoring work. It will make for busy times, but these bills do not pay themselves.
I have to complete eleven classes to get this degree, eight of which are upper-level mathematics courses. I’m in the foundation course now as well as a couple other general education requirements for a BS degree that weren’t a part of my BSE curriculum.5
Back when I was getting my first1 baccalaureate degree at UAH, students were not automatically issued email accounts. This was 1997, and the University’s IT department created individual, access-limited accounts on a UNIX machine. If you knew what you were doing, you could do a lot of UNIX stuff with that email.uah.edu account. I knew enough to be dangerous and find the limits. [Somehow, I didn't get shut down.]
Getting those accounts was an interesting process, though. Students went to the SGA office and filled out a form to get an account. We filled out a form by hand. This was peculiar to me then, and it’s a historical footnote that I wanted kept alive. After joining SGA that year, I was a part of the team that handled those requests for IT. I asked one of the staff members—who still works for UAH, so I won’t name him—why this was done, and he told me that SGA got involved because IT got overwhelmed with requests, and SGA was equipped to know which people were and weren’t students and then get information to them as appropriate.
Fast forward 14 years and the IT system now makes it impossible for me to pay them. We’re talking seven clicks after a login, and then only if you know exactly where you’re going. Maybe I should give the SGA my debit card number.
When I first had a Web site on the Internet on a domain that I owned, it was on IJSM.org, which I registered in January 2001. I was in my third year in college and found myself wanting a voice. I’d been doing small-scale self-publication on the Internet for a while, running a sports e-zine titled Top of the Key. I picked up the domain and hosting at a time when I realized that I was drifting away from the writing on that site. We had talked about trying to do something national with it. That would have been a terrible idea, especially as Ralph was trying to get me to leave college to pursue it. Eep. We were an American McCarver written by lesser lights and more mainstream voices, stuck bridging the eras of email publications and Web publishing. TOTK was email-only from its inception in 1995 until we started putting it on the Web in the early 1999 timeframe. I spent a lot of time on the ezine, both writing and editing. Like many publications of that size, it finds a voice in the person who heads it. Plenty of folks said I had a good one, but I kinda cringe at some of the stuff I wrote then.1
IJSM.org was always based on the credo of The Indiana Jones School of Management: “Plan B? I’m still working on Plan A.” Improvisation has always been my modus operandi, and back then it was almost a raison d’être.2 It described the early personal writing well as I struggled to find my voice. I never posted cat photos, but you knew when I had a sinus headache or a was mad at one of my roommates. That site would have been so different with a place like Twitter, as I could have focused longer writing on it.
My personal publishing always goes through feast and fallow seasons, and there are a lot of reasons for that. Not long after I started personal publishing, the estimable Noah Grey said to me, “You should get your own domain. You won’t always want to be ijsm.org, but you will always want to be Geof Morris.” He was right, so I took the moniker gfmorris and made it my domain root. Now, nearly a decade later and three years after I took all the content here and moved it here with the idea of rebooting it, all the content is here on gfmorris.com. What makes me sad is that I can’t3 link up the content that was published under the templates it was published with. It would be great for everything that went out on IJSM.org under that template show up in the themes I used. It would be great to show the site as it was, not as it is going forward.
IJSM.org will actually fail for a few hours while I get DNS changes propagated to park it atop gfmorris.com. Everything will be copacetic from there. I have to keep the continuity, and no way in hell am I selling the domain.
I recently got the EF 50mm f/1.4 USM back in working order. I’m so happy to have it working after it being broken the better part of a year, but boy am I out of practice using it, even though the roses have grown in and I harvested a half-dozen to make room for more. Sadly, today really wasn’t the day for shooting:
That said, I kept after it, because I figure any day I shoot is a day I learn something. ((I hear Will and Nick saying, “You could learn to light, dumbass.”)) So, here are the three that I’m not too embarrassed to share:
This is the same shot you'll see below, straight out of the camera.
Same shot as above, but cropped and processed.
Here’s what was going on: I was seated and shooting about eight inches above and ten away from the flowers. The blue backdrop is my 2010-11 UAH Blue Line Club polo. The roses are held in a half-litre Mexican Coke bottle. ((TACO BUUUUUUUUUS!)) The original shot is ISO 4000, f/2.2, 1/25sec. I was shooting full auto-focus because, again, I couldn’t frickin’ see straight. I would have been very happy if anything was really in focus, but the only one that seemed close to it was the bloom at left.
The below is obviously cropped to that bloom, and here are the adjustments: white balance skewed bluer to reflect the lighting1, kicked the black point up and brought up the brightness while dropping the exposure, desaturated it, and then processed much of the noisiness in Neat Image. Now, if I’d had any kind of lighting kit, this could have come across as a much more interesting shot because there would have been plenty of light. Instead, I’m lame.
I then switched to a shooting point on the landing of my staircase that used the ceiling as the backdrop:
Boy, I processed the hell out of this one.
I should be abused for what I did to that poor image. Or, well, maybe it looks good if you can see straight. I’m not sure, and I’ve looked at it on my large monitor. Just think: that’s the best of those. Cringe-worthy.
I’ll be honest: a lot of this is self-shaming, even if I kinda like the second shot. I’ve got a 430 EX II and no clue what I’m doing with it—other than using it on a cable because on-camera flash is for chumps.
After trying for a day to fix my Lion-broken scripts, I finally gave up and asked folks at Apple’s discussion forum about my problem, and the very first response by Pierre L. nailed it:
Try replacing this one line:
set content to thisMessage’s source
with these two lines:
set theSource to thisMessage’s source
set content to theSource
That worked like a champ.
Updated scripts are available: spam_uce_gov.scpt and spam_paypal_com.scpt. As always, these are provided for free and are unsupported, although I’ll try to help if I can.
These roses budded in my front flower bed back in June
For many, summer is about love: summer romances, May and June weddings, long days stretching out and giving the day that last gasp of diffuse light before the night is quickly upon you, thought not long to stay. I don’t know what this says about me, but I’ve never been one for love in the summertime. I typically find myself falling in love in the fall. I don’t know if it’s autumn breezes chasing the muggy sullenness of August or whether I associate fall with new school years, even nine years removed from attaining my degree. It’s just where I am.
I’ve spent time this summer chronicling the roses that grow in my front flower bed, arcing near and sometimes over my walkway. 1 Part of that is to provide an affront to my current state of employment. These are interesting test subjects to break out of the concert photography that is my bailiwick, and hell, they’re convenient.
These blooms were fully developed when I took these photos in the second week of June.
I was encouraged by a few—Nick chief among them—to avoid clichéd shots. This explains the handful I shot from behind.
In the same vein, I’ve been thinking about my reception to loving and being loved a bit differently of late. Like many a single male, I’ve fallen into the “if I get married, I’ll feel complete and be content” thought trap. Instead, I’ve focused on preparing myself a bit for the eventuality2 by thinking about what I need to do in a relationship, how I need to be. If I can focus on being secure in myself despite my circumstances—and if the last ten months of my life have taught me anything, it’s that I can be happy with who I am and who I wish to become despite shitty circumstances—then I can be surprised at the wonderfulness of love when it abounds. I believe that it would be nice to know just who I am before I try to introduce anyone else to that person.
This is one of the roses from the second shot 13 days later.
When I posted the decay picture on Facebook, one of my former colleagues told me that I needed to deadhead the roses. I was unfamiliar with the concept, but it’s pretty simple: once decay has set in, trim the stem right behind the bud. Doing so prevents the decay process from progressing down stem to the branches below it. I gave it a shot, and after a few days, the bush—well, it’s not a hedge-like bush, but more something you’d tie to a trellis3—began growing like crazy4. The progress frankly shocked me. Two weeks after that growth was fully found, I’ve got a couple of roses already bloomed and a half-dozen buds ready to open in the next couple of days. I’m excited to see it.
As I deadheaded a friend’s rosebush today5, I looked at the dead blooms and their stems. I saw that the oldest of them had exhibited the most decay down the stem and into the larger branch structure below it. The older the bloom, the more woody the stem was: brown, inflexible, brittle. As I snipped away, I got to thinking about my past history. The more firmly I hold on to what once was, the worse shit gets. I’ve only been the one to end a relationship once6, and I usually fight the end with everything within me. I think that’s probably because I equate the end of a relationship to my self-worth. I’m hoping that I can see a breakup differently now, because my thinking about myself is quite different these days.
These new roses should go somewhere other than the half-liter Mexican Coke bottle I used to hand them off to the neighborhood coffeeshop where I spend a lot of time these days. Those roses lasted longer in the store than their homebound compatriots did. I need to keep snipping the decayed relationships out of my life and focus on the opportunity I’ve got ahead of me. I’m as ready as I can get right now.
