DMak.org

I’m migrating away from my dedicated server to cloud services… gmail for email, dropbox for storage and tumblr for blogging.

I imported my wordpress backup, but images and links are broken.  For now I think I’ll leave them that way, but maybe later I clean it all up.

A while back when I was back home for the holidays, I was looking through some old elementary school stuff in a desk drawer when I found a notebook entitled “Tales From The Fifth Grade by Douglas McMorris”.  Its a collection of all the papers I wrote (by hand) in the fifth grade for english glass.  Naturally I started reading to see what on earth I was thinking in the fifth grade (or at least what the teacher was telling me I needed to write about). Most of the papers are either descriptions about things with new vocabulary words or directions on how to perform a task, but there are also opinion pieces (I argue for year round school in one and say that “fast food restaurants are better than normal restaurants”) and a few brief stories. One story is about a boy in 1867 Texas who decides to go to Mexico to mine for gold and then for some reason kills a rabbit with a hatchet and cooks it on a camp fire.  He manages to strike gold in his mine, but gets robbed by Mexican soldiers on his way back to Texas (decent plot twist for a 10 year old). Another of the stories is more or less the plot line for a bad Michael Bay sequel to Jurassic Park and set to take place in 2010 (far into the future for me as a fifth grader)… I decided to share it, unedited below:

Mr. Hang was a guard at the Tokyo Zoo.  He is about 25 years old, 6’ tall, and very rude.  He was watching the new dinosaur exhibit.  In a few days it would be the year 2010 and when the New Years party was on in Tokyo, Japan no one expected this would happen.  When it did, the city declared that it was in a state of panic and couldn’t do anything about it. The dinosaur exhibit is mainly fossils, but there’s a massive cage.  The scientist didn’t tell any one what was in the case.  The scientist had been prevaricating for over 20 years.  They had found the dinosaur in a inactive volcano during 1990.  It was a very powerful tyranosaurs.  It rammed the cage door and finally broke through the 3” thick steel.  The dinosaur then rammed the brick wall that surrounded the cage.  When the bricks flew from the blow by the dinosaur they landed on Mr. Hang The dinosaur left the zoo and headed to ward a skyscraper.  The skyscraper was the tallist in the world with 128 floors.  The dinosaur rammed the building and 75 floors collapsed.  It couldn’t be stopped.  The dinosaur was hungry, but couldn’t find any thing to eat.  He tried a human and like it.  Now he was leaning over and scooping his mouth over the street to catch people.  He didn’t expect it, but when a semitruck rammed into his face he stopped.  Now he was heading to ward the airport.  An air plane was taking off behind him.  The wings of the air plane hit his legs, and he fell down.  When he got up he stomped on the air plane. As soon as Mr. Hang found out what happened he drove his car over to the airport.  When he arrived he had a way of apprehending the dinosaur.  He told the scientist what he was going to do.  It was a plan the scientist hadn’t thought of and Mr. Hang, who was a guard, had been contemplating it.  His idea was to ram an airplane into the dinosaur and then while he was on the ground net him.  Mr. Hang would have to be the pilot, which could mean certain death.  Mr. Hang got in the airplane.  He started the engine up, and he was about to take off when the dinosaur kicked the jet.  Luckily Mr. Hang had jumped out of the jet right before the dinosaur kicked it.  There weren’t any more planes left, now they called the U.S. army for help.  The U.S. army came with 5 M-1 tanks, 2 armed rocket launchers, and 3 heat seeking missile silos.  When they got there the commander of the army said, “Lock on and fire all weapons.”  Blood splattered every where, covering half of Tokyo. Today, in Tokyo the remains of the dinosaur have been preserved in a national monument as a reminder of the day the dinosaur escaped.

Apparently I was a much more creative kid than I remember… and appear to have known a lot more about weapons than dinosaurs or Japan. For the record, I made the doodle on the top on my iPad today… any drawing from the fifth grade would have been considerably worse, if thats possible.

As many of my friends know, I have a bit of a problem when it comes to spending quality time editing my photos.  I take a lot of shots and do quick reviews, but have a hard time diving in and taking the editing process through to the end.  So I end up with a lot of solid shots that simply never see the light of day.

I just finished the fall semester so this is a great time for me to relax a little, focus on work and spend some quality time with some long lost shoots.  I’ll mostly be focusing on stuff I’ve shot in the last year, but may go a little further back.  To help motivate me I’m going to be posting a new shot each day to flickr and Facebook.  The flickr set will appear below and grow each day (fingers crossed), comments welcome:

[flickrset id=”72157628398657075” thumbnail=”thumbnail” photos=”” overlay=”true” size=”medium”]

I always have my iPhone with me, but almost never take photos with it, so this is iPhone photo a day June… One photo every day taken, edited and uploaded from the iPhone.

Here’s the flickr set, updates will appear throughout the month:
[flickrset id=”72157626865764438” thumbnail=”thumbnail” photos=”” overlay=”true” size=”medium”]

[flickr id=”2225237538” thumbnail=”medium_640” overlay=”false” size=”medium_640” group=”” align=”none”]

Now that the semester is over it’s time to start reading for fun again, heres the list so far any other suggestions? Fiction or non-fiction.

Fiction(I’m a fan of distopia)
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (started long ago)
The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Religion/Church
For the City - Matt Carter and Darrin Patrick
Radical - David Platt
Myth of a Cristian Nation - Gregory Boyd

Afghanistan
The Places in Between - Rory Stewart (half read a year ago, time to finish)
In the Graveyard of Empires - Seth G. Jones (half read)
Shadow of the Silk Road - Colin Thurbron

Poverty/Third World Development
Wars, Guns, and Votes - Paul Collier (half read)
Fixing Failed States - Ashraf Ghani
Failed States - Noam Chomsky
When Helping Hurts - Brian Fikkert

Middle-East
Son of Hamas - Mosab Hassan Yousef
Syria Revolution from Above - Raymond Hinnebusch
Pity the Nation - Robert Fisk

Long list and I won’t finish some of them but hopefully I’ll finish the ones I’ve already started and a few others.

[flickr id=”5739104782” thumbnail=”medium_640” overlay=”false” size=”medium” group=”” align=”none”] Just finished with finals and decided to give the website a much needed overhaul.  I’ve decided to add a portfolio which will hopefully grow over time and stay interesting and ultimately decided to keep the blog.  This is going to be a bit different than what it was before… less emotional dumping and more about sharing insights on current events, geo-politics, faith, technology, and the odd intersections between these topics. Some words of wisdom going into this:

And any man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn damn thing at all — K’Naan::Take a Minute

I sat down a few days ago and wasn’t thinking about how crazy this last year has been… Its been a blast, but insane at the same time. I realized I travelled so much that I was pretty sure I forgot a few of the places… so I sat down and made a list so I won’t forget, thought I don’t think everything made the list… I’m sure I still managed to forget someplace:

Jan:
Chicago
Philadelphia

Feb:
San Diego,CA

Mar:
Orlando, FL
New York (Long Island)
New York City

April:
New York (Long Island)
New York City
Kampala and Mbarara Uganda

May:
New York (Long Island)
New York City
Monterrey, Mexico

June:
Charlotte, NC

July:
New York City

Aug:
Boulder, CO
Memphis, TN

Sept:
Memphis, TN
San Diego, CA

Oct:
Bentonville, AR

Nov:
Amsterdam
Amman, Jordan
Damascus, Syria
Istanbul, Turkey

Dec:
Nashville, TN
Henderson, KY
Tulsa, OK
Bentonville, AR

Seems like time has flown by this last year. Hard to believe I’ve been working and traveling for more than a year now. Its unreal to me to be honest, I don’t feel like its been that long, nor to I really connect with how things were before which is odd.

Its been interesting lately to see how much I’ve changed since last year, been reading through old journals and even blog posts and its really bizarre for me. Whats crazier is to look back to high school and my first year at UT. It seems like everything has changed, I don’t even recognize that person.

When I came to UT I was extremely awkward introvert. I didn’t really hangout with anyone but my roommate most of my freshman year. I don’t really know what I did looking back… I think I played video games and watched a lot of tv, but not much else. Pretty sad because it was an awesome opportunity for me to meet people and grow in my faith as well as learn a little responsibility…. that didn’t exactly happen til later.

Its bizarre to me because I don’t think I’m an introvert anymore… I hate being by myself most of the time. Thats not always true, but for the majority of my days it is. I hate coming home to an empty apartment or house… I don’t think I could ever live alone. I don’t really watch tv anymore except with other people. Everything I do for entertainment I seem to like more because its a context for spending time with people than being entertained…. music is probably the only exception to this, but even then as I listen to music I’m thinking about who I know that I think would like it.

Even my political views and moral views on somethings have totally swapped. I used to be opposed to alcohol in any form, in any amount by anyone… so much so that I barely attended my own sisters wedding reception because they were serving it. I look back at that now and think “How could I have been that closed minded… how could I let my view on something lead to such judgment of those I love”.

I used to be enthralled with war strategy and technology, especially aviation. Until my junior year of high school I wanted to be an aircraft designer… mostly working on fighters for the military. I have literally a hundred pages of drawing for potential planes and even a few weapons systems I did back home. Before that I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a kid. And now if you know me at all you’ll find all of that very bizarre.

I actually remember watching the news after 9/11 when we invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq with awe of the US military might and how amazingly strong and courageous and at the time “right” we were.

I remember debating at good ‘ol DHO my freshman year about the death penalty and I was ardently for it. That is not the case now at all.

What I’ve realized is in most of those areas my views on something were shaped by what I thought and I had seen and learned from others. These were not grounded in the Truth, but rather my own mind and the opinion of those around me… and yet I would have claimed that truth is not relative! How hypocritical… to have thought I knew what was right when I was blindly following things other than the Truth.

All of these things I write to remind my self that God is continually molding and changing me and that there is no area of my life big or small in which he cannot work.

I seriously doubt at times that He can change certain things about me. There are areas of my life where I seem to regret the past yet keep repeating it, and for all the change that has happened in the last 6 years, some things have stayed the same. What it boils down to is that on some level, consious or unconsious, I doubt that He who has conquered sin and even death can change me. The real issue is not doubt though. My theology tells me He can change anything, and more than that my experience confirms it.

Why do I doubt then?

I think the answer to that is that when I doubt I’m really doubting myself… I’m looking at how many times I’ve tried to do something, to change something and failed and attributing my failure to God…. how messed up is that?? I simply need to let go in certain areas of my life. give up control because I’ve been fighting on my own in vain for too long.

God simply never ceases to amaze me though. In so many ways in the last few weeks, he has blessed me beyond anything I could have ever asked. Sometimes its easy of me to forget that and turn to doubt and despair, but He always brings me back and everytime He teaches me to trust Him and everytime another piece of me falls away, another bit of control is given up, and my heart is set at rest and I feel free.

two months to the day since i last posted, lots has happened, went to uganda, new york again, monterrey, charlotte, home a few times, and a few other random places, crazy couple of months

lately i’ve just been thinking, thinking way too much about all kinds of stuff. it seems like only a month or more ago i had a lot of things figured out and now i’m pretty much clueless about it all. the last few weeks have been up and down and i’ve been in a funk that isn’t readily describable and not linked to any one thing in my life but rather a mixture of a lot of uncertainties and fears that i don’t fully understand.

its late now though, and i’m tired of thinking

——-

I can’t stop staring at myself
My face reflected in this empty plate
I can’t decide if it’s the devil
Or if it’s just something I ate
‘Cause he’s been down there all morning
He’s patiently waiting at my gate
He’s throwing rocks at my window
“Hey won’t you come on out and play with me”

And everyday when I get up
I see folks trading in their crowns
For all these paper or plastic lives
An opiate for the masses’ hounds
And pride like a vestige of lives lost
The stench of the old folks coming around
Now with the news I heard today
I can’t tell if this world is lost or found

You go, I’ll be waiting here
And I’m awake, no I cannot sleep
So I’ll sit upon this rock is you
I ain’t standing up for nothing

I’ve never seen my congressman
But I can’t deny that he exists
‘Cause I’ve seen his legislation pass
I’ve seen his name on the ballot list
Same I can’t deny this fallen world
Though not my home it’s where I live
How can I preserve and light the way
For a world that I can’t admit I’m in

‘Cause I know who you say you are
But these crows can’t be made to stop
So I’ll sit denying by this fire
I ain’t standing up for nothing

Lack of interest leads to
Lack of knowledge leads to
Lack of perspective leads to
Lack of communication leads to
Lack of understanding leads to
Lack of concern leads to
This complacency denotes
This approval denies
The truth

But I can’t stop staring at myself
It’s my face reflected in this empty plate
And I know that it’s the devil

So you lead, I’ll be close behind
So you speak, I’ll hang on your words
You gotta lift me from this hardened tree
‘Cause I ain’t standing up for nothing
——-