Life isn't a garden

My dinner tonight was from a nice little restaurant in Berkeley called Intermezzo. It was a chef salad that no respectable person should be able to finish in one sitting. But then what do you do with leftover salad?

Dashboard Confessional's new album comes out tomorrow. Who's ready to get mopey and self-deprecating?

My friends have changed. I'm not sure it's for the better. I talk to some people on the phone and they don't seem the same. However, some haven't changed and I really enjoy that they are those people I can depend on to always be the way I remember them. Is that necessarily a good thing though? Perhaps not. But it's gotta be better than those who have lost their respectable identities.

I freakin' love cycling. Cycling is not only better than sex because it just is, but also because I'm okay with cycling at any time of the day with other people around.

I just wanted you to know, I think about you every night when I fall asleep. And you are in my dreams, just like in a movie - the one you wanna see, with the happy ending.

My True Nature...Revealed.

It's 1.30 in the afternoon on a Saturday. It is Gay Pride weekend in San Francisco and the city is alive with rainbow flags and nervous glances. A lot of people are excited and just as many are hoping for the weekend to be over with.

I'm sitting on the outside porch of a coffee shop right across the street from the Berkeley campus. But they don't serve coffee here - closest thing you can get is an americano (which is diluted espresso), which is almost the same taste. I came here so that I would not spend my money.

As I sat and read from "Blue Like Jazz", a girl stopped as she was walking by and asked if I liked the book. She thought Don Miller was a bit pretentious and she did not like his paternal allegory of God's character. She was a nice girl and a brave conversationalist.

Near the end of our conversation, she asked if I was from the Carolinas. I laughed and said that I, in fact, had lived there and wondered how she knew. She said that I had a bit of an accent. I never knew that I had been so changed by my time in SC and so unchanged since I've left. You've scarred me Carolina - in the best way possible.

I miss God. I've been having a lot of trouble breathing lately - kinda like mild asthma. Probably nothing real serious, but every time I struggle to inhale it brings to mind that my soul will suffocate without enough of the Spirit in me.

So I bought this bike last week. I'm really pumped about it. One of my co-workers is in to cycling and he and I are going to ride up Mount Diablo in a few weeks - 11.5 miles up, average 7% grade, last half mile is 16%. It's a doosie.