At least, all that is true in middle school.
There is a shift that happens, I would say in the later years of high school, where we all become nerds to some extent. Yes, maybe there are those few who still exist who have no sense of hygiene, that (at the age of 27) stay up all night playing video games in their parents basement, but for the rest of this discourse, I am not referring to them.

Nerds are obsessive.
If you were to study a herd of nerds in a middle school for some time you would see that their attentions continue to come back to focus on something outside of themselves (in contrast to the “cool kids” whose focus is aimed inward toward themselves or inward at those circle of friends they have).
And as you grow older, you see this tendency more and more in the people around you.
In high school the same obsessive behavior can be seen in almost all students. Teenagers devote their lives to the study and devoted love of musical instruments, sports, and art.

Jocks are just nerds with a cooler name.
The love and devotion they have for the sport or sports they play reflect the same obsession seen in all nerds.
The downfall, the enemy of the nerd, is just that which changes nerd to jock, cool. It is this cool that distracts from the wholehearted pursuit of the goal.
The cool factor is the instigator, causing the rifts between those who were once friends. Cool causes dissention among teammates.
The difference between the cool and the nerd is that nerds strive after a goal, and their merit comes from their ability to realize their goal and is not dependent on others.

Cool is a drive for the goal perverted into pride.
Cool needs that recognition, merit or praise, and gets it, not by achieving his goal, but by asserting himself over others. In the pursuit of cool, the once pure pursuit of the goal is distorted; attention is distracted from it and misdirected.

My goal then is to be the nerdiest nerd who ever nerded.
I need to focus on my goal, and not just pursue it but deny the urges that seek to build a false sense of accomplishment and prestige.

I want to be excellent at what I do.
I don’t want to advance at the expense of others.
I strive to achieve nerd-dom.

My wife and I moved from Colorado, to Kansas. I know, crazy.

But we did it.

My wife and I moved out here so she could take hold of an amazing opportunity to study ballet at one of the top schools in the nation.

We left all of our friends behind.  Its sad, but I manage.

We set off to make new friends.  This, as I soon realized, is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

What makes it so hard? The friends we left behind.

I love those people.  Not only do I love those people, I am convinced that in the town of Grand Junction, CO, that they are the best people.  That out of everyone in that town of 100,00+, our friends were the best people we could possibly spend our time with.

I’m sure if you knew them you would agree.  They are the most talented, loving, hospitable, easy to talk to people you could possibly know.

This leaves me at a loss for what to do.  I haven’t, in the month that we’ve been here met, or even seen anyone like we knew in Grand Junction.  And I’ve tried.  We have met people, gone to church with people, double dated with people, and they’re all good people, fun, funny, but not our old friends.

I have been grocery shopping, or walking around Wal-Mart, looking for people that could be a potential Natalie or Caleb.  And I even know how ridiculous that last statement is, but I miss our friends.

I think I am becoming very judgmental.  With the friends that we have made, I have wondered weather we should keep being friends with them or look for friends like I know must be out there.

I say I know they are out there, but I don’t know.

And the more and more I come to think about it, I don’t want to find another Dustin, Mary Kate, Neil, Wade, or anyone like the Biocic’s.

Really, I would be glad to meet them. What I mean is I don’t want to replace them, as if I could.

It’s a new adventure in our lives.  I cling to the great memories that we have made with friends.  That’s an important distinction I don’t want to pass over.  Friends, not the friends we used to have in Grand Junction, still friends.

I’m a person that puts all of my energy into the task in front of me, but that’s changing.  I now realize that because of that way that I was so focused on the now, I have fallen so short on remembering.  I’ve been terrible at keeping up with friends I have had in the past.  It’s a hard transition, but I’m learning.

Slowly, but I’m learning.

Heres some good concrete textures for you, download the highest resolution images in the zip at the bottom of the post.

Download a .zip of all 8 textures here.

And without further ado, Scotosaurus!

Click here to download Scotosaurus

Font Fabric

An independent type foundry based in Bulgaria. Super unique fonts that are sure to wow you.

League of Moveable Type

An open source type movement. The LoMT puts up some killer fonts.

Type Oasis

Not as pretty to look at it still has some links to some sweet fonts. They even organize them by theme, so you can get all the pirate fonts you need in one place.

Da Font

The Walmart of the font world if walmart didn’t make you pay for anything. They have everything, even hosting some of the fonts from the above mentioned sites, but you do have to sift through some junk while your there.

Deviant Art

No one you would ever think to check here for great fonts but its gottem’. Some are great fonts created by actual designers, some are pissed off 13 year olds with pirated software in their parents basement that don’t understand how to use the programs they have.

He fights back.  He has a strong will.  He seeks out the top doctors in their fields to help him. They take his body on a roller coaster ride of treatments.  Waves of steroids and antibiotics pass through his body.  For brief moments he seems, even fells, better.  Though sometimes he could almost be getting better, he always ends up in the valley between the crests of the waves that have gone and are coming.

The doctors never find the cancer, the source of all the complications.  They devote all their time and energy to trying to get the man healthy enough to make it through he night, then the next night, then the next.  They never discovered the cancer, and if they could have, could they have cured it?  The man died on a Sunday morning in early September.

…

A few days ago a I sat in a living room with some friends discussing the book “Celebration of Discipline,” a book explaining and expounding upon the spiritual disciplines of prayer fasting meditation solitude etc. Just in the introduction it provided such a revolutionary though to me, I got stuck. We were stuck on that one point in discussion for so long it was soon later than we had all meant to stay. The thought, maybe common and tucked into the folds of other theological principals, opened my eyes to a course of action in my pursuit of Jesus that had never before been clear.

The thought -

“Will won’t heal.”

I don’t remember if that is the exact way the author spelled out his precept in the book, but that was my take-away.  “Will won’t heal.” Our will, our determination, drive, often times our stubbornness to do it all on our own, will never bring us to the point of healing.

To fully understand this thought it is important to grasp the foundational concept of why we need healing.  Quite simply, the problem is sin.  Not simply, the problem is our ineptitude to comprehend that we, as humans, are incapable of conquering sin.

Yes, we may agree that Jesus Christ was the one who conquered sin, rectifying our relationship with God, allowing us to have a life with God, with God as a friend.  BUT, the thing that we, as humans, have a difficult time admitting is that we are not good enough. Christians get stuck trying to live up to the new life that they profess to have in Christ, when it was Christ that attained that perfection for us. We are to now live in the knowledge of that and with the ambition of following and sharing how/why to follow Him.

There, in those sentences just prior, lay tucked in the folds the thought that I wish I had grasped onto before now.  No matter how hard we try our will, will never, can never make us whole.  God, and God alone is the healer.  We can try and fight back at the sins that plague our lives all we want with all our will power, with great determination to get it right this time, but we will fail.  We are not strong enough to make ourselves better.

The question then, the one that leads to the course of action previously mentioned, is why would you put so much effort, focus and concentration of our will on what we can see has historically been and will continue to be a losing battle?  Why do we fight so hard to lose every time?  Is there a better aim for all of our efforts?

So we know that Jesus has conquered the problem of sin in our lives.  But we fight it ourselves. We know that God is a healer.  And we strive to fix ourselves by our own means.

Why would we not just take that effort, that we pridefully devote to remedying the problem ourselves, and devote that time, those thoughts, that concentration to taking our problem to the God we know will heal.

God will heal us, make us whole and cure the root of the problem.

It is as if we seeing the symptoms of the disease that has laid hold of us and are attacking the symptoms.  We wage a war on our desires, urges and habits that contradict God, all the while ignoring the capability of God.

Its like we’re fighting cancer with antibiotics and steroids.  Our will is not a proportionate response to the problem of sin, no matter how strong we are.

The entire time, as we wage our own war for a battle that has already been won. We sit discouraged because we have lost again. The healer is waiting for us to notice him, to give him our attentions.

What I have come to see as the correct response to my own problem of sin, and also to the symptoms of greed, lust and everything else that comes with it, is to redirect my efforts into the healer, the one true God.  Just being around him can, and has, healed me where my own will has left me wanting.

Not that I wage no war on my sinful habits, I deny them fulfillment when they rear their ugly heads. But that is a band-aid, an aspirin, only temporary relief for a problem that has plagued humanity since the beginning.  The God of the universe, through the death of his son Jesus on the cross has made himself available to us as a refuge and as a healer.

The fruits from the discipline of a life spent with God, actually with God not just as a Christian, will heal us.  We will, through Christ, overcome ourselves, free to set off for the task the God has in reality set before us.  We can move on from the foundation of repentance from dead works on to the life that God actually has for us in him (Hebrews 6).

Its a Dragon

I dare say the worlds smallest origami dragon. I get all excitable when I find posts like this and now that I have a blog I have an outlet, no matter who, if anyone, reads it.

There are tons more where this little purple faux-fire breathing devil came from too. A whole flicker page full of them. There horses, snowflakes, elephants, you name it, shes folded it. Check them all out on her photo-stream.
Nano Origami