It looks like this is quickly becoming a photo journal of sorts. I wrote a song with my buddy Giovan the other day at his place in downtown LA. I took this pic from the parking structure across the street. The sky was amazing that day. Too good to pass up.

Found this in the same vintage store. REALLY wanted to get this…

Found this in a vintage store the other day. Really wanted to get it…

My coffee did this all by itself. What does that mean exactly? Ha!

So, I’m gonna be pretty open for a second.  Well, as open as I can be without making completely private information available to complete strangers.  

Recently, I’ve been learning a lot about myself.  And let me tell you, learning about yourself is not always the most fun process.  It can actually be really painful.  But there really is an element of truth in the cliche phrase “no pain, no gain.”  Any kind of growth is a painful process.  But when you do it right, or just stick with it, it is worth it in the end.  At least that has been my experience.  The thing is, it isn’t just me right now.  I know  a lot of people who are going through tough times.  Actually this year has been tough for a lot of people I know.  

But I just want to take a second and say that if something is painful in your life, I’ve learned that ignoring it and hoping it will go away doesn’t help.  And I want to encourage you to press into it and find out where it goes, because maybe there is a bigger reason why it’s in your path.  If anything, another reason to press in is because sometimes the most important thing/biggest hindrance is sitting in a HUGE blind spot that you don’t even realize you have.  And once you realize it, you wonder how you’ve missed it for so long.  And sometimes the only way to get to that realization is to go the unpleasant route.  

So, all that to say, we’re all in there doing this life thing together.  And in order to make it better for yourself and for others around you, sometimes you have to look in and fix stuff in there before you can look/go out to help fix other people and circumstances.  So, this is just a reminder (based off of what I’ve been learning) that 1. there may be a bigger reason than you realize as to why things are happening the way they are. 2. don’t ignore your reflection/what’s going on inside yourself.  You may have a huge blind spot and not even realize it.  And 3. Hard times come and go.  There is hope to be found.  And if you don’t know where to find that hope, contact me through my website (link up top).  I can help point you in the right direction.

In case y’all missed it on my website or from a tweet, here is a little version I did of Silent Night.  Enjoy, and Merry Christmas :).

Ok. So it’s been three months since my last blog. (ha, sounds like I’m starting off with confession. I’m not Catholic though). And I’ve made a decision. It’s only December 14 and not quite New Years yet, but I’m going to start posting the random stuff on here that goes through my head and is too long to tweet. Hopefully it will be thought provoking, but I can’t promise you anything. I can say it will probably be more like a stream of consciousness, and hopefully you will still want to be reading all this by the end of it. I’m going to try to be intentional with it and do it consistently, but I can’t promise anything. I hope to inspire you and add something to your life, because there is a lot of crap out there that doesn’t, and I really hope this isn’t one of those things.

So come on this ride with me. I’ll do my best to contribute things to this world that make it better and more beautiful if you do the same.

Hot chocolate. My current substitute for coffee as well as current obsession right now. And yes, this actually was my cup of hot chocolate I took a pic of myself.

So today, I was watching Nat Geo.  I love Nat Geo.  And I really love it because, unlike lots of other types of TV and entertainment you can actually learn something/fill your head with knowledge unlike other channels where the opposite happens. 

I sat down and turned it on while beginning to eat my turkey sandwich. A show was on titled “How the Titanic Really Sank.”  Sometimes Titanic shows intrigue me, sometimes they don’t. Today it was the former.

The basic premise of this particular episode/show was walking through all of the little details that ultimately led to the tragedy.  Among things like forgetting to replace the missing binoculars in the crows nest and missing transmissions from other ships about ice bergs in the water right where they were headed, another point was brought up about the quality of the rivets that held the actual ship together.

Apparently, in the shipyard where the Titanic was birthed they used two types of rivets, steel and rot-iron. The rivets used on the front of the ship, where the ice berg hit, had been made out of the rot-iron which were about 1/3 of the strength of the steel rivets.  And not only that, the rot-iron they had used was grade 3 rot-iron, a grade below the standard quality grade 4 rot-iron.  After making this discovery, the researchers speculated that had they used the steel rivets, or even the higher grade rot-iron, the ship could have held together long enough for help to arrive before it completely sank.

This really struck me.  And it made me think about all the times we sacrifice quality for speed or to save money.  And then later, we often end up loosing much more than what we thought we had saved.  I mean, what would our world be/look like if we all went for the best quality outcome every time?  What would our world look like if we had all done that since the Titanic sank? Things would probably be way better.  So I had this thought. It was true then, and its true now. Quality never gets old.

David Carson giving his thoughts on design.  Good food for thought.