So its been awhile since I’ve posted a blog entry.  You also might be noticing that even after all this time, there is still no new photo at the top of my page.  Well, that is because of some technical difficulties.  I haven’t updated the blog in awhile out of shear laziness.  Or maybe busyness.  I’ll let you pick.  The photo though, that problem belongs to iPhoto.  I took some pictures of our winter storm here in Philadelphia that I’d love to share with you all, but for some reason my iPhoto and my Photoshop have stopped speaking to each other.  I hope they get over their fight soon so I can actually get some photo work done.

Speaking of photography, I’m getting a great Christmas present this year: my first very big art sale.  I received a custom order for a very large print, the final size will be 48 by something that I forget, but no matter.  48 inches.  ON CANVAS.  Its going to be stunning and I can’t wait to see the final result.  For those of you wondering, it is Arret.  I can’t wait to see it!

Ever since NerdLives ended there has been a whole in my life I haven’t filled.  Its not a big deal, just a little nagging sensation, a desire to talk, write, and live nerd.  My blog just does not cut it.  You know how some good ideas, some ground breaking, earth shattering ideas begin with scratching a note on a paper towel, or a napkin in a restaurant?  Well this isn’t one of those, but I scratched an idea down today in my journal.  I don’t know if anything will come of it but I will convey it to you in its original form:  nerdlives + blogosphere + reality tv = NEW NERDLIVES.  Let me know what you think.

Since I mentioned busyness I think I’ll expand a bit.  The semester is finally over.  Celebration!  It has been one of those end of the semesters, the kind that you can not wait to come to a close.  I turned in my last project yesterday so the tether has been formally cut.  However, you’d think I’d be able to stop and relax now.  Unfortunately thats not the case.  I have a number of things to finish for the ordination, including a long essay on my call to ordained ministry.  That normally wouldn’t be a lot to take care of, except that there are two holidays, a wedding, and getting ready for a little trip I’m taking in two weeks.  Did I mention that I’m going to India for three weeks?  Oh yeah, that’s right, on January 3rd I’m flying to India.  I’ll be back on the 22nd.  Then God willing the postulancy conference will be the next thing on my plate.

So if you are one of the friends I’ve neglected over the last few weeks or months I apologize.  I’m great at making friends, but during the busiest of times, during the most overwhelming of moments, when it seems like all of the work just will not get done, it is easy to forget about the people in your life that you are doing it all for, the reason you wake up every day and go to work.  I mean, we don’t work for works sake right?  We work so we can enjoy our life.  As Christmas comes this week let us remember to take the time to forget the busyness, forget the schedules and the deadlines, and just enjoy the moments with the people we love.  Because if we don’t, we bother with everything else?

I’ll leave you with the words of a certain rumbus pant wearing sponge:

Sorry to everyone who reads my blog that its been so long since I’ve put anything up.  I have some food related posts coming up also.

I posted the rest of these pictures here at my gallery, so please enjoy!

Here was my process.  I first created a marinade for the tempeh, following her recipe and put that in the fridge.  Then I marinaded tofu and slices of eggplant in soy sauce, curry, and chili powder.  I forgot to put in nutritional yeast which I had intended on doing.

After marinading for an hour I then cooked them on medium heat about five minutes on each side.  Then I stacked them with a store bought Southwestern Garlic and Cilantro Salso in between to hold it all together.  It was pretty spicy and the flavors didn’t come across well but the texture was great.

Overall I’d say that the total prep time wasn’t worth it for the dish.  Enjoy the pictures and I’ll keep you updated on my next experiment.

Is that scrambled eggs?  In fact no!  That would be my tofu scramble, the wonderful breakfast I whipped up this morning and enjoyed on my second day of eating vegan.

You might be wondering why I’m talking about this at all on my art blog, or when it is that I became a vegan.  Here is some background information for you.  First, I’ve been trying to mix health, fitness, and religion here into my blog because those are things very important to me as well as my art career.  Also, art has been slow for me with my seminary life taking off, and since this vegan thing is at the front of my mind at the moment, I’m going to talk about it.  So since when am I a vegan?  Since yesterday!  And I don’t know if I actually consider myself a vegan.  Labels are a funny thing, especially eating labels.  I know for certain I don’t eat any meat.  I realized that for some time I had been eating almost vegan at home.  Its particularly more difficult, or at least more tempting, to eat dairy products and eggs when eating out of the home, and so most of my non-vegan food consumption was at restaurants or at others’ hospitality.

So I decided for various reasons to see how eating vegan would go for me.  I’m not going to share my reasons because they’re mine and mine alone, and the point here isn’t to evangelize other vegans.  Instead lets call it a test, or an exploration, because that’s really what it is!

I’m going to blog on how it goes, and what I’ve been eating.  I’ll share some recipes, and I’ll share what I’m enjoying.  I’ll tell you what works and what doesn’t!  Just as a note, the reason why I put vegan lite and freegan at the top is because I don’t plan on being exclusively vegan.  I plan on not buying any animal products for the home (for myself, my wife is not vegan).  However, I will eat anything other than meat given to me for free, so in that regard I’m freegan.  Some freegans eat meat if its been given to them freely, but that is a step I won’t be taking.

So now that we’re clear let’s talk about tofu scramble!  This is the second time we’ve tried tofu scramble.  Today’s was a super success.  I developed this recipe out of a recipe from Vegan Ronin, but I made some adjustments.  I used extra firm tofu and it worked great.  This was delicious, creamy, not spicy but flavorful.

Tofu Scramble with Curry

Ingredients:

1/2 a block extra tofu scramble

2 tablespoons soy breakfast meat or sausage

2 tablespoons nutritional yeast

1 teaspoon curry powder

2 teaspoons tumeric

1 teaspoon minced garlic

1/4 of a sweet onion diced

Saute the onions in light oil on low to medium heat till they begin to soften.  At the same time, press and dry the tofu, then crumble into a bowl.  Lightly mix together the rest of the ingredients, then add to the saute.  Saute them on medium heat until the tofu begins to brown.

This dish is so easy and was completely delicious!

What else did I eat today?  I had Punjab Eggplant for dinner with a banana.  Last night we went out to the Trolley Car Diner in Mt. Airy.  Was I tempted to eat non-vegan?  Not at all!  I had a summer vegetable quesadilla with a black bean hummus.  On the menu it had white cheddar cheese, so  I just removed the cheese and boom, it was vegan!

So it goes well so far.  Enjoy the recipe and the pictures and keep checking back for updates.  Thanks for your support!

As the culmination of a week long mission experience in Steubenville OH, the teenagers and adult leaders together sang hymns to God, read from His Word, heard a sermon, and washed each others’ feet.  The form for this service could have come from a formal liturgical prayer book.

On a Thursday night not in Holy Week, the teenagers and adult leaders together sang modern praise and worship songs, had a talk about God, and then prayed over each other spontaneously while washing each others’ feet.  The gathering looked about as far from a traditional catholic Maundy Thursday worship experience as is possible for a Christian gathering.

It is this very dichotomy that is characteristic of the emergent experience.  Thursday night’s service was both rooted in thousands of years of tradition and completely non-traditional at the same time.  How is that possible?

Perhaps the most influential aspect of Barthian theology on my own personal theology has been the dialectic method.  It might not take exactly the same form in my own theology as it did for Karl Barth, but the very idea of a ‘yes’ and ‘no’, two opposing answers to every question, has had a profound impact on my theological thinking.

The emergent experience is both a ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to tradition.  It is yes in its form and no in its substance.  Its yes in its theology and no in its practicality.

As a seminary student, my weeks are normally packed full of church services.  My particular seminary does a good job of varying the worship experience, at least to slight degrees.  However, after a long and arduous semester of studying theology, the past week in Ohio was nothing short of a complete spiritual refreshment, in the same way that the emergent foot washing service was a refreshing take on a traditional service.  Studying theology is one thing-living theology is another.

Cori and I went on this trip with All Hollows Church in Wyncote, PA.  We didn’t know any of the youth.  We only knew our friend Dennis, the youth director at All Hollows.  It certainly took us out of our comfort zone to travel 6 hours on a week long mission trip with youth we had never met.  By the end of the week, my comfort zone was shattered, freeing me mentally and spiritually to serve God and neighbor.

We learned about the true meaning of fame, wealth, and power, and how to radically follow in the footsteps of Jesus.  We followed in those steps as we ran a kids club, working with 40-60 of the most troubled children I’ve ever seen.  We visited nursing homes, picked up trash, painted walls, and much more.  We made new friends and had experiences that will stay with us forever.  At Youth Works the theology is deep and the experience is wide!

One of the most exciting parts of this trip were the new friends we found in the YW staff: Kim, Kryn, Mark, and Eric.  The four were absolutely incredible.  These were four of the most Godly people I’ve ever met.  I can’t begin to describe the impact each of them had on my life.  They truly had a servants heart, and I pray that I can live for Christ as they did this summer in Steubenville!  I’m also blessed to say that we will be seeing Kim, Kryn, and Eric in Philadelphia next week, as long as time allows.  I will be very sad if we don’t!

I could talk about this week forever, but instead I will leave you with a few more photos from the week.  Unfortunately, I forgot my cable so I was only able to take pictures the first few days.  However, I think that my camera was one of the things I needed to let go of this week, to fully become immersed in the experience.

I imagine that after today, I will blink and my summer will be gone.  Tomorrow I have a Crafty By Nature, this week we pack, next Saturday we move, shortly thereafter is Prologue and then my semester!  I will take the refreshment I received in Steubenville and use it to be productive.

Please keep Steubenville, OH in your prayers, as well as Youth Works in general, and the four staff members as they embark on their last week of the summer.

So how did I do it?  Where did these changes come from?  A lot of people have asked me that question: friends, family, random store clerks.  Yet every time someone asks me that seemingly easy question I stumble to find an answer.  The easy response is “the South Beach Diet”.  That’s essentially the right answer.  A secondary answer I might give is “I did South Beach for awhile and then became a vegetarian”, however that never really feels right either.  I became a vegetarian because I was already conscious of what I ate from the South Beach, and all but the last 40 or 50 pounds of weight lost was before I was a vegetarian, so I was already well on my way to my goal without it. I could give some generic answer like “determination” or “discipline”, both of which are true, but feel more like an ego boost than a helpful response to someone who is asking the question with eagerness for an answer.

I’m getting used to two different looks that I get rather frequently.  The first look is the confusion when someone I know doesn’t recognize me because they haven’t seen me in awhile, or didn’t know me before the weight loss.  The second look is hope: hope that I have an answer, a golden ticket to easy weight loss.  The truth is there is no golden ticket and if there was I certainly don’t have it.

So how have I succeeded where so many others have failed?  Why was I able, after 22 years of obesity and overeating able to turn my life around when so many others have fallen into the cycle of overeating and weight gaining with intermittent crash dieting?  This is what I was trying to figure out today during my 5th mile on the treadmill, and I decided if I was going to find the source of my weight loss I’d need to look at the source of my obesity first.

When you grow up fat you get labeled.  You’re not just a person like anyone else who happens to be over weight.  You are a fat kid, fat is what you are.  It becomes a crucial part of the way you see yourself compared to everyone else.  Once you see yourself as a fat person, especially when you grow up that way, its hard to see yourself any other way.  You hear the voices of other schoolchildren in your head, reminding you that you’re fat.  You remember being the only one not able to do the push ups or the sit ups or the pull ups.  You remember being the one the girls will never like.  Eventually you can’t imagine anybody else loving you, and when you can’t imagine others loving you, it becomes hard to love yourself.

These are the sorts of things that can run through the head of someone with weight problems.  However one of the first things I’ve learned in my short time as a seminarian its that everyone, regardless of weight, age, gender, race, sexual orientation…everyone has these voices in their head.  Everyone has a child version of their self reminding them constantly of all the things they can’t do, all the reasons why they’ll fail.  Everyone hears their parents, providing the subconcious motivations for the decisions they make.  Everyone is a broken child trying to make their parents proud and the other kids like them.

If my broken humanity is the reason for my weight loss, you’d think my original motives for weight loss would be more pure in contrast.  This is simply and sadly not the case.  My reasons for weight loss are complicated, and I’m not sure if I know why I suddenly decided to change my life.  Maybe its the voice of my father in my head, repeatedly reminding me that I’m lazy and I should get up and do something.  So if my motives for starting a weight loss program were driven as much by my child self as my weight gain, why did I finally escape the cycle of loss and gain, loss and gain?

I realized today that the source of my discipline, of my determination, and my success is much more fundamental than my brokenness, than my hurting child voice and the other voices deep in my subconscious.  The truth is there is something more fundamental to all of us than what is wrong with us.  There is something deeper, something much more original.  We are originally and fundamentally good.  At the core of each person, behind the motivations that drive us to do all the terrible things we do, to make all the mistakes we make every day, there is something good.  We, and not just we as individuals, but the whole universe, are beautifully and wonderfully made.  We’ve spent so much time concentrating on all the bad, on all the hurt in the world, that we’ve forgotten about the good, and this has been our biggest mistake.

What does this have to do with weight loss?  I think, and I don’t say this with any certain confidence, that the reason I was about to succeed in my weight loss, is that I found something deeper than my flawed broken self.  I found a voice telling me that I could succeed.  That I could amount to something.  I’m not the fat kid, I’m just me.  I have the power to make myself into whatever I want, to be whoever I want to be.

I’m sorry to say this isn’t a golden ticket to sure fire weight loss.  I don’t have the miracle cure to eating problems, or the ultimate motivation for going to the gym every day even when you really don’t want to.  It isn’t easy.  There have been many moments when I wanted to go eat a cheesesteak or a pint of ice cream but knew I shouldn’t.  There were many times when I did anyway.  In the end, it took a lot of discipline and determination, constant reminders of my goals, a network of support from friends and family, and lots of prayer. And as corny as it sounds, if you set yourself up for success and believe in yourself you can achieve your goals.  I think the pictures below will be proof enough of that.

Three images from McDowell WV
Abstracts, especially Arret, and Hier Oeffnen

Lomography
New Pieces from Media

If All the Forest Trees Were Pens #1
and anotherand another

and still another
Media Theater

Montreal Alley

This Saturday I didn’t expect to see a beheading, but as we stormed the Bastille and cried for blood, a beheading is what we got!  This was the most fun Second Saturday in Media I had been to yet.  Not only was my work being displayed at one of the nicest restaurants in the town, but I got to paint with a flying puppet painter.

The flying puppet artist is Colin Magness, or Ssengam Niloc if you go by his business card.  Oddly his card doesn’t mention his paintings, sculptures, or photography, instead it claims: Wizard, Alchemist, Time Traveler.  At the Second Saturday he was a human puppet, suspended in the air in a creation contraption, allowing passerbys to come along and paint as a community.

My abstract collection will be at Picasso all month, but I definitely have my eyes on my next target.  Levi is being featured in the bank window this month, and its a great spot for foot traffic.  Enjoy the rest of the photos, and next month on the second Saturday, head down to Media for an awesome evening of art and music.

My Thursday night Dungeons and Dragons game recently made the switch to playing Deadlands, a weird-west horror-esque RPG set in the 1879 North American frontier.  My wife Cori made me a Marshall Screen.  To those who don’t play table top RPGs, the screen keeps the Game Master, or in this case “Marshall”, apart from the party, allowing him to have notes they can’t see, and secretly roll.  My favorite function of the screen is handy charts and notes on the inside.  This particular screen not only has art work on the outside for players to see, but a map for them to use.  Thanks Cori!