Thanks Mike and Jeff (college friends and former roommates with me ) for the insightful comments to the VT blog.

Satya (member of the Vestavia class of 1999; frequently abused by my fantasy baseball team) has started a blog about medical issues and whatever else he feels like discussing, which can be viewed here.

These three blogs aren't even close to all the blogs I read on any sort of regular basis. But isn't it funny how good blogs are at making us feel like we're listening to someone, almost in person? Blogs are a critical part of the way I learn all sorts of new things, which is a pretty incredible statement if you think about it.

For those people who actually attempt to better understand the world around them, blogs are an unbelievable tool. I can actually read what you think, but at MY pace and as many times as I need to understand your point of view. In real life, if you were saying all that stuff, I'd probably just tune you out. And then where would we be?

I don't think we have a good grasp on just how far communication gets advanced when blogs are part of the equation. It is certainly leaps and bounds beyond where it would've been otherwise.


Now, for an unrelated note: one of my all-time favorite songs, "Dream in Color" by Black Lab, is a song you should definitely download. I remember clearly the first time I heard it - I got the album for Christmas in 2005 after being excited to find out Black Lab had a new album out, and heard the song in my car when I was driving to work one day. I stayed in the car once I got to work to play it through again and have been listening to it frequently since that day.

In case its not clear up front, I listen to a ton of different music. All sorts of stuff. When a song stays with me like this after the first couple of months, I know its something I'll be listening to probably the rest of my life simply because it resonates with me so much.

[Black Lab's first album, "Your Body Above Me," which came out sometime around my 8th or 9th grade year (1994-1995? Somewhere around there. I think.) was spectacular in its darkness and moody temperament, but the second album ("See the Sun") which "Dream In Color" is taken from is just as good. "Wash It Away" was the radio single from the first album, so some people will remember the band from their bit of radio exposure they got early on. A third album just came out recently but I haven't purchased it yet from Black Lab's website, though I will be doing that soon.]

While the lyrics of the song are fairly abstract, the song paints an unmistakable picture of romantic optimism and addresses the ambiguity between what happens in our lives and what we intended...or dreamed. The song also uses imagery of marriage and partnership to make the shared vision that the song discusses even more powerful and compelling.

The song could be dreaming of an as-yet-unfulfilled vision - a dream that hasn't yet come to pass - or the song could be reflecting on a life gone by, made complete through marriage and looking forward to meeting again in the afterlife. Or the song could be at some point inbetween.

The song just explodes musically, thanks to some brilliant instrumentation and clever engineering, which helps illustrate the unbridled optimistic tone of the piece.

In the work environment, regardless of industry or profession, you've got all sorts of people who long since forgot about dreams. Not only do most people lack any sort of vision as to what dreams might be possible to achieve, and the discipline through which they might be attained, but most people even go as far as to seem incapable of deriving any joy from their day-to-day existence at all. This isn't to say these people don't smile, laugh, make a joke, etc...but when you watch them over time, you can clearly see they are making a trade-off out of perceived necessity, and not out of passion.

The post-9/11 world (and I suppose its the post-Virginia Tech world, now, too) we live in is a world that fears any risk exposure of any kind, and craves continuity and stability. People simply can't tolerate the temporary vagueness, the momentary ambiguity, brought on by change. Therefore, people end up stuck in veritable no-man's-land, and they stay there. Sometimes for a career.

"Dream in Color" and its triumphant story is a perfect reality-check for me, helping hold me to the truth that God didn't put anyone here to be complacent, to be lazy, or to not fulfill potential by chasing passions in life. And...we weren't put here to chase those dreams alone.


"Dream In Color" - Black Lab

Kiss me once
Just once
You think it's love
Or something close

Do you recall
you say I was sleeping
but I know what I saw.

There were nights I swear we flew.
Dreaming in color, I was dreaming beside you.
Now the sky has gone to gray;
colors have blurred this picture we made.

Ask me once, or twice,
well, they ring them bells,
they're throwing rice
at you and me.
But it wasn't enough...
say, what more could I be

There were nights I swear we flew.
Dreaming in color, I was dreaming beside you.
Now the sky has gone to gray;
colors have blurred this picture we made.

So sleep all day, and watch TV all night...
pictures playing in black and white.

I close my eyes...
I close my eyes...

There were nights I swear we flew.
Dreaming in color, I was dreaming beside you.
Now the sky has gone to gray;
these colors have blurred the picture we made.

There were nights I swear we flew
Dreaming in red, I was dreaming with you
Now the sky has gone to gray
Colors have blurred this picture we made

I was dreaming in color.

There were nights I swear we flew...