"visions of pills that put you in a loving trance, and make it possible for all white boys to dance"

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” Actually, I probably don’t, and I never have smelled napalm, but anyway it sounded good to me. It’s early, 10:27 on a Saturday morning, and I have no idea why I’m awake. Especially since I played NHL 2005 until almost 2:00am last night, but hey I’m up and that’s all there is to it.

So yesterday I spoke briefly with my long lost friend Crystal. It was cool, because I had been thinking about trying to call her for the last few days but found my evening schedule, jam packed with this or that. So Crystal and I spoke briefly and made an appointment for me to call her this coming Sunday. Anyway, as I woke up this morning I began thinking about Crystal and all the times we’ve had together. Many of them obviously took place in Regina, but I had a good time remembering skipping out of Faith and Culture class with her and Jeanne as our friendship was developing, having a really big and awesome talk outside of the Woodward dorm one night (only to be visited by my good friend and ally Tim Houghton at the most critical point in our conversation), really wanting to go to the Christmas Banquet with her, taking a trip to her house with Jeanne, Jamie and Tim, her constant encouragement of me and many other things. Now as I look back at my friendship with Crystal (which I cherish very much) I realize that we have had a couple occasions of hard times fall on our friendship for one reason or another.

For instance, you may not know this my faithful readers, but in my freshman year of CBC I started a website very similar to this one. I would write daily events, thoughts, feelings and so on. It was specifically designed for my friends back home, so no one at CBC knew about it, until one day two girls found out about it by accident, which I was ok with at the time, cause we were friends. Little did I know that their knowledge of my web-site would be my downfall! Anyway, I had asked this one girl to the banquet and during the course of the two weeks after I asked her our friendship came to a grinding halt and my friendship with Crystal was blossoming. (Now I’ll admit, I was starting to have a crush on Crystal), but I was stuck with this other girl. Now Jeanne, told me that Crystal wanted me to ask her to the banquet, which at that point in my life, was both the best news and the worst news that I had heard since the day I heard that milk came from cows! It was really good, because I liked Crystal and wanted to go to the banquet with her, but it was horrible because I had already made a commitment to go with another girl. And yes, our friendship really did deteriorate over the course of two weeks; CBC was a very strange place, very emotionally charged! Anyway, the other girl, sensing our lack of connection let me off the hook, told me she was going home that weekend. And I was like woo-hoo! So I ran and found Jeanne, told her of my good fortune, and she told me of my bad fortune. Crystal was now going with Seth, because she thought I wouldn’t be able to take her. AAARGGH. This was a very emotional time for me as a young freshman. So I was without a date. To make matters worse, it came to my attention that Crystal actually liked Seth, and they were going to date. For me, that really did make matters worse, and that is when I penned my most controversial internet update to that point. I wrote of my frustrations to my friends on my website and quoted a Weezer song to help express myself. Now through, those girls who were no longer my friends, Seth saw the website and assumed I was calling Crystal a lesbian, which I was not, and he told Crystal as much, thus putting quite the mis-understood damper of my friendship with Crystal, and the entire world outside of Tim Houghton and Dave Defries.

The point is, we patched things up, and Crystal forgave me. Later on in our friendship, Crystal dated a guy, who we as her friends didn’t like, and who didn’t like us, so unfortunately there was a bit of a split. And this was very painful, I wish I would’ve been more proactive in not allowing this to happen but I was concerned with a girl named Val, what a gong show! Anyway, when it was all said and done Crystal forgave me for acting like such an ass, and not treating her the way a real friend would have.

So what am I saying in all this, I realized my experiences with Crystal have taught me about forgiveness. Forgiveness is not an easy thing to do, even at the best of times, but I am commanded to it by God. I am even told to go so far as to love my enemies and pray for them. I think that goes against the cultural norm in this day and age don’t you? Now I’ve always understood that I have been forgiven by God, but i struggled to think of a good time when someone forgave me that wasn’t God. I’m thankful for Crystal’s friendship and for her forgiveness of all my stupid actions, she has taught me about friendship and she has shown me God’s forgiveness. Thanks Crystal, I miss you a lot. You should move to Calgary!

Today’s song of the day is a gem by Ben Folds. The song is called “Annie Waits” and is the first track on Ben’s solo debut “Rocking the Suburbs”, and is the pre-curser song to “Zak and Sara”. Anyway, it’s a grand song, and I think Ben plays it on a Grand Piano. I listened to it this morning, and I decided that I would share it with you as the song of the day. If you have the desire or the means, I challenge you to check it out. On another note, I wonder if I could put together an album of all the songs of the day and have it be like the soundtrack to my website…man that would be cool, how many of you would buy that?..or at least listen to it?