Out of Control

Every Monday night I lead a men's group of guys who are around my age who attend my church. (Church@Hoboken. Sorry for the plug, but this church is something that I am VERY proud of.) Dinner Group as we call it has been one of the best experience of my life. I always look forward to each week. The conversations you can have around a freshly grilled meal in plastic chairs on a balcony in Hoboken is just an overwhelmingly amazing experience. Its weird to say this but I honestly think that Monday is my favorite day of the week solely because its the day I get to know, learn, grown, and serve with some of the most respectable men I have ever met. The most comforting thing about the group is just knowing that you have 10 other guys who honestly care.

Any who, the reason I bring them up is because one of the guys in the group made the statement before group started on Monday that, "death is the only thing in life that we cant control." While I'm not going to make the argument that death is in our control, I disagree that its the only thing that we do not have control of. Although this is all assuming that we are all on the same page that there are things in this life we don't have control of, and to me that is because of a higher being. (But debating that can last forever, and if you would like to have that conversation get a hold of me and we'll work out a better forum to discuss that.)

Perhaps I am jaded but I really don't think love is something that we can control. I am not so sure that who we love is really in our control and I am sure we all know that we can't control who loves us back. If love was truly in our control would we still "fall in love?"

Like death, love is something that finds us. Sure we can choose eat healthy, exercise and other things to help avoid death, but its still not in our control when a drunk driver crosses the center line. With love, we can make choices to help love find us, or purse us, such as the way we dress and behave. (Take note that I mean this in the the sense of love and not lust we are trying to find.)

If love was something thing that we can control then we would find it a truth that we could force ourselves to love anyone else. I don't know about you by there is no comfort in someone who is forced or is forcing themselves to love you.

I know some people will be turned away when I bring Him into this but hang with me. When Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment in all of Law he replied that the second greatest was, "Love your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:31) The problem is that when people try to love our neighbor as ourselves, they then try to hard to force that love. I do not believe that genuine love is something that can truly occur without building a relationship with that neighbor. It can also be said that a lot of the time people try to control the situations in which they love our neighbors, and again how real is the love when one person is controlling the environment?

Maybe this is where a lot of relationships problems are created. Sometimes we send so much of of our time forcing ourselves to love someone, controlling the situation, or even trying to convince them to love you back. When in the end, really its just out of our control to begin with.

After writing all of this, the only thing about love that I am confident is that "Love is not something that is in our control."

I think there are more things out their such as joy, perhaps peace too?....but I'll save that for another post.

How do you feel about the subject? Is love something you feel like you can control? Is there something besides love that you feel is out of the control of peoples hands? Or do you feel like everything is in your control?

... if so I think we'd all enjoy hearing your thought, you can use the comment section below to share your opinion or a link to your site with your response.

Face to Facebook.

I guess I have to address my absence, but I warned you this would come. I appreciate everyone who has been eager for my next post, I just feel as though I dont want to cheat you by writing a half assed article, therefore if I am going to write I need to be motivated. Plus, with my grammar as bad as it already is that would make it like a quarter of and assed article.

Below is a response I wrote to one of my friends blogs, Click Here to read her post, and the below will make more sense. Feel free to contribute with your own thoughts as always, like I've said before if anything I dont just want this to be my thoughts.

In reply to Twitter-fied,

I enjoyed your article, I think you make some solid points, and thought that I might try to defend the other side a bit more.

First I'd like to say that I am currently not apart of the Twitter community, however I have considered several times about joining, but at the end of the day I end up deciding against each time. To me I see Twitter as more of a fad, as we have seen in the past with pogs, pocket pets, and beepers. I would say its most similar to the fad of the beeper, in that both forms of communication are very one demential which will eventually lead to its downfall.

With twitter you can only really express yourself in only 140 characteristics, to me thats just not enough. People dont just want sentence updates about your life. They want to see pictures, They want to know your opinions. They want to see who your dating, how you spent your weekend and what your views on life are. These are the elements that make Facebook superior to Twitter.

Another thing that will lead to Twitters failure is that they are never going to be able to get out of being compared to facebook. As a result of this relationship, twitter is going to fall into the trap of become more like facebook, losing its only uniqueness. Eventually, twitter is going to believe it will need to offer it customers more. Twitter gained a lot of its popularity though its ease to update through texting ability, but this is a feature that Facebook can easily and already can do.

I'll try to get back to the point of your article. I thought I would just back fill a bit with the difference between twitter and facebook.

Kelly, you talk a lot about getting away from real world communication, but you have to ask yourself would that communication exist if Facebook wasn't there? No one would disagree with you that nothing compares to real face to face contact, but what do you do when that isnt an option.

A lot of this issue comes down to time. While I would agree that I waste my share of time on facebook. I dont have the time to have conversation to give updates to all of my friends across the world, and I think that facebook makes for a good substitute to that. Personally, I consider myself blessed if my schedule and my best friends schedule works out well enough to have a 15 minute phone conversation.

If anything, I think its brings us closer, I am able to share the beautiful sunset I saw in the morning on the way to work with people that live 300+ miles away from me, or tell them how I feel about a concert I saw the other evening. In a way it is a giant scrapbook of my life, that I dont want to lose. Just a few weeks ago I was able to use facebook to catch my friend up on the 6 months she missed while she was away in Asia, which without it I would just have stories, but through facebook it brought those six months to life.

Front-to-Back

At the beginning of the year like others I decided to set some New Years Resolutions for the year. One of them was attending more live events, specifically music concerts. In high school and college I worked mostly to fuel my love of attending live concerts, but that stopped when I turned 20 because I just couldn't stand being overcrowded, pushed around, and I became very envious of the people who could watch shows calmly from the bar area.

As a result, I told myself I wasnt going to another show until I was over 21. Unfortunately, this hiatus ended up lasting until I was 23 and since than have only seen a handful of shows. Thus, I decided that this year since I am blessed to live in an area that has so many venues, each diverse in their own way and so many bands that I enjoy come to play that I would make a better effort to attend their shows.

My first concert this year was Kings of Leon at Madison Square Garden. The show was okay, it was only a disapointment because my friend Jason and I waited until the last minute to get tickets and our tickets ended up being behind the stage, so we spent the entire show running from security. It was ridiclous to see so many people in one place for a music concert though. Below is a picture from the show, and shows how enormous the crowd was for the concert.

Two Monday's I attended a Jimmy Eat World concert at Terminal 5 with my friend Ryan, (I came to find out that he is in a very successful band, Tokyo Rose, which has toured with a lot of the bands I love) The show was fantastic. We had a great place to watch the show from the 3rd floor looking down with a clear view and only five feet from the bar, so we never had to worry about losing a spot when we went to grab a drink. (picture above)

The show was very unique from any other show I have been to. This tour Jimmy Eat World was playing their album Clarity, that put them on the map, and playing front-to-back. Meaning that they would play there entire album from the first song all the way til the last song. What an great way to thank your fans and celebrate a ten year anniversary of an album. I am hoping this is a growing trend among bands. Late last year Ben Folds Five reunited for myspace to play, "The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner" album (Click here for the show.)

Having some time to think of this I came up with a list of albums I would love to hear live. I am not saying that these are the best albums of all time, more like I have a personal connections with the albums and enjoy the entire album from front to back, and when you go see the bands play they dont play everything from the album. I apologize if you know me well because this will be rather predicable list for you:

• The Blue Album -- Weezer. My friend Josh once got me surprise tickets to see them play live for my birthday, easily one of the most thoughtful and meaningful gifts I have ever received. I would just love to go to see them play and open with "My Name is Jonas" and even more so close out the show with a long rendition of "Only in Dreams". Heck they could even do an encore of the Pinkerton Album after and I would never go to another show in my life.
  
  
• Something to Write Home About -- The Get Up Kids. Even though they generally start every show with "Holiday" you cant beat how the album start with a gigantic guitar slide. The album just has such a good flow to it. I cant start this album without listening to the entire thing.
  
  
• Parachutes -- Coldplay. It would be incredible to hear them play this in an intimate setting because the arenas they are accustomed to just wouldn't cut it. I would also love it if they played this whole album acoustically.
  
  
• Open Eyes -- Snow Patrol. Again I'm gonna need a small venue for this one.
  
  
• Whatever & Ever Amen -- Ben Folds Five. If you never seen a Ben Folds concert I highly recommend it. I have never witnessed anyone play with such passion and work the crowd like he does. He genuinely enjoys playing because you can really witness him just having fun and the only time hes not touring is when hes making another album. Anywho, because of the passion he plays with it would be something else to see him play this album straight through. Oh and hes got to play with the original band because the harmonies wouldn't be the same without the other 2 members.
  
  
• Emotion is Dead -- The Juliana Theory. This album is so good it really makes you wonder why they couldnt reproduce anything as close to good ever again until their inevitable break up. Similar to Weezer, I love how they end the album on a long drawn out song.
  
  
• FutureSex/LoveSounds -- Justin Timberlake. If this album doesnt get you up and moving you might not have a pulse. Unlike Coldplay and Snow Partol I am going to need this concert to be in a giant arena. Also Rachel, Jolleen, and Erika must be in attendance.
  
  
• Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo -- MxPx. The thing I love about this album is I can sing every single lyric to this album out of no where. Such a fun album.

So that completes my list tell me what you think or share yours in the comments below....

The Lenzian Calendar System

Hard to believe how quick this month flew by, but I love it because we are inching closer to the inevitable spring. The quickness of this month got me thinking that maybe it was just that the month is 2 or 3 days shorter than the rest of month. That got me thinking, we need a Lenzian Calendar System (LCS) in which every month was only 28 days...

28 days a month times 12 months gets us 336 days in the year, leaving us two ways of going about the remaining 29 days:

• Option One -- Forget the 29 days all together. Doing so would screw up the weather calendar and seasons since each year we would fall behind by a month. But who cares though its not like we can tell what the weather is going to be in a given month now a days anyways? Heck this week alone it will probably be 75 on Tuesday and the following Tuesday we will get 4 inches of snow. One benefit of this would be that those people who have birthday in winter months can now look forward to having a summer birthday for once! This same idea really screws up holidays like Forth of July and Christmas, which would people in a outrage when it snows at your Forth of July party or that your plastic baby Jesus in your lawn melts from the hot summer sun. Okay so option ones got some flaws so lets move on..
  
  
• Option Two -- Add a 13th month of 29 days and every four years a month of 30 days to replace the leap year. Now if this going to happen we are gonna need to make a rule that when this month does happen everyone in the world is not allowed to work (well not everyone, food service /entertainment industry I am looking at you) and we need to have a global party. It would be great to because it could be the first holiday in the world that everyone would celebrate, since not everyone in the world stops for holidays like, Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Years as the Western world tends to believe. Plus who wouldn't look forward to every four years when there is ginormous global party on the 29th and 30th!
  

I like option two for the Lenzi Calendar System, so let's expand on that...

Where do we place this extra month? Placing it at the end would be bad idea because New Years is already a holiday and if were going to make a new holiday we don't it to clash one that already exists. With that in mind we need to look for a time where there is a gap in the holiday schedule and I cant think of a better place to put this new month that in between July and August. Currently we have July 4th and then nothing til Labor day, time to break that up right? Placing it here would be beneficial too cause we can start giving people whole new thing for people to complain about since this idea wouldn't be ignorant of western society but of the northern hemisphere society.

So who wouldn't like the 13th month? While they would no longer have to worry about the 4-4-5 schedule, accounts would hate the idea of not having even quarters in the year. Solution make your quarters run off of the season changes. Cant really think of any one else who would be impacted so much, but I think business would like it because it would make comparing monthly easier. Same goes for you at home too with your utility bills and establishing a budget.

Under the Lenzian Calendar System holidays would be unaffected by the calendar shift, since there are no major holidays that fall after the 28th. If you are thinking Thanksgiving or Memorial Day you're forgetting that because they are flexible holidays, in which they occur on the final Thursday/Monday of the month their given month.

Now for the people who have birthdays on the 29th, 30th, 31st of the month, they can pick any day they want with in 5 days of their birth so that there is not a flood of birthdays on the 28th or 1st. Think about it, if the people born on a February 29th get over it and so can you.

As a person who loves consistency, I would enjoy the LCS because until the year change every day would have a designated day since the month would always start on the same day. Therefore those of us who get payed bi-month, like myself, would know with certainty what day you were getting paid. Plus it would be even 14 days each time. For example, next month is going to stink because I am going to get paid on the 13th because the 15th falls on the weekend, and then will have to wait a staggering 18 days until I get paid again.

So lets get some comments going. Whats your thoughts on the Lenzian Calendar System? What do you like or dont like? Where are there flaws or benefits that I am missing?

Beauty is in the Sky of the Beholder

Today I chose to share with you my favorite picture that I have ever captured. I took this picture on the walk to the subway to work one morning last year. I love the variety of colors in the sky and how all the colors just work in harmony together so naturally. The way the light reflects off the flowing river or even how a city of the size of New York City can be silhouetted against the power of the sun. There is so much going on that we take for granted every day that it just eclipses the city. Which is just the complete opposite of the truth since it doesn't take many hours here to come to the conclusion that the world revolves around NYC (WRONG!)

While all those are good reasons to love this picture it has much deeper meaning to me. Allow me to share...

Even though Hoboken is now where to be seen in the picture, every time I look at this shot it helps me recall the reasons that I enjoy living in Hoboken. A lot of people I work with in the city like to rag on Hoboken, mostly because it's in New Jersey and they believe its as terrible as the rest of the state. But that's far from the truth (except the corrupt government, they would tax the homeless if they could find a way). The only ones I tolerate are the people that actually live in Manhattan, but they don't get the pleasure of seeing the sunrise over the city, having an apartment that you don't feel like your living in a shoe box, or my favorite part the ability to escape! Brooklyn may be nice because they get to see the sunset on the city but I guarantee the majority of them are too busy still at work to take notice. And then the totally unacceptable is the people from Long Island, which is pretty much just New Jersey with GED.

The other pleasure I get from this picture is that I like to think that this is the sun rising or a new beginning to a new point in my life. I guess that means I'll have to retire in on the West Coast, so I can take a picture of the sun setting on my life. On second thought I'll just be dead or too busy watching Matlock to need that picture in my life.

News to Me

Although I haven't lived in Greensburg, PA for more than a month, since May of 2006, I still get great pleasure from reading the Westmoreland County section of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. I think I go to it more for entertainment then necessarily the news.

Here are a few classics in no particular order:

• Hunker man gets probation for mailing cow head-- This story is just gold. For crying out loud this man was only trying to send his wife's new boyfriend a friendly gift. It almost make it acceptable or in the very least understandable that the man is from a town named Hunker.


• Defendant says second-hand ring sparked assault -- "Slaby woke up in O'Toole's bed after a nap with his penis glued to his stomach, his testicles glued to his leg and his rectum glued shut." I mean you can't even make that stuff up. How deep does this guy sleep?


• Reed cited by police for Sheetz tirade--This story happened a few weeks ago when Steelers kicker Jeff "Skippy" Reed ( soon to be on VH1's Celebrity Tool Academy) was arrested in a Sheetz for disorderly conduct. Hey, I guess we can at least be happy that he washes his hands after using the restroom?

Recently a friend of mine who also lives with me in Hoboken introduced me to my new favorite section, "Police & Courts" where you can find all of the judges decision for the week. It quite a fantastic way to get an update on what stupidity your old high school classmates have been sniffing, stealing, or beating.

Since reading this section, two things have really stood out to me. The first is how it blows me away how many DUIs there are in a week. Reading this makes me really glad I live in a city with a good public transportation system or a taxi serice. Don't get me wrong I am in no way justifying drinking and driving but what options are you giving your citizens ? It makes no sense that a town the size of Greensburg does not have a taxi service. Would this service not provide some much needed jobs to the area and you can even tax the riders to make extra income for the city?

The second thing is the sentencing of criminals for drug use or drug possession. For example, pleading "guilty to smell/inhale toxic releasing substances and possession of a solvent for release of toxic vapors/fumes" will land you 6 months to 2 years in jail for the first offense. I dont feel like sending them to jail or as they like to call them these days "correctional" facilities, helps them. Dont get me wrong, I am not saying they should be let go scott-free but why do we not sentence them to 6 months to 2 years in a rehabilitation facility and get them actual help? To me prisons should be for violent criminals such as murders and child-molesters, and to criminals who are harmful to society like drug dealers, child-sex offenders and white collar criminals. I understand the connection between drug use and how it can lead to other petty crimes, but so does someone who is addicted to alcohol. Are we not putting these users in a society with violent criminals who are professionals of crime instead of professionals of recovery, the supposed purpose of prison? Moral of the story, if your going to be addicted to something make sure its something that not "harmful to society" like alcohol, food or tobacco.

Your First Look Through a Lenz

Greetings!

Welcome to my blog, "Life Through a Lenz". Pun-tastic title I know.

I think I may know a few things you're already thinking:

1. Oh my! What is Nick Lenzi doing writing publicly, does he know that he cant write? Listen people I know of my short falls on writing, but I'll try my best to get my grammar correct and to use the correct word. My hopes for this blog are not to display my writing, but just general thoughts on life and things I care to share with others. I write like I talk so if you know me, it will make it easier for you to read cause you'll get my tone. Maybe I should have done a podcas. While I do have a quality radio voice and even better radio face, seriously who wants to listen to me speak for an extended period of time when I can write a blog post that will take you 2 minutes to read. Which brings me to my next point...
   
2. Great another blog of someone who has the illusion someone cares about their opinion! Wooohoo! That is probably the biggest reason I didnt start this sooner cause who am I? But I have been inspired by other blogs and books I have been reading and I feel as if I might have something to add too. I hope my posts can be a mixture of how Donald Miller talks about challenging issues with humor and honesty, the passion of Mondesis House, the reader contribution of This Is Why You're Fat, the ability to share an experience of SeriousEats, capturing the city like Andrew, the willingness to share whats currently on your heart/mind of ramblings, musing and ...insight, and the constantancy of ..my outstreched fingertips. Which inevitably leads me to point number three...
   
3. If I know Nick, this will last 2 weeks, but at least thats 14 days longer than his diets last. Hey I dont blame you for this one. When trying to come up with URL for this blog look at the ones that were already taken:

• lenzi.blogpost.com (1 post) -- Last post Thursday, March 27th, 2003--you're a disgrace to the family name what a waste.
  
• lenz.blogpost.com (1 post) -- Last post Friday, November 15th, 2002-- on a positive note only one more post to go to exceed expection for a Lenzi blog!
• lifethroughalenz.blogspot.com (10 posts)-- Last post Monday, September 26th, 2006
  
• lifethrualenz.blogspot.com (28 post) -- Last post Saturday, September 8th 2007
• ltal.blogspot.com (4 posts) -- Last post Monday, January 24th, 2007--the thing makes me mad about the last 3 is that they're not even Lenzis so its not even punny they just think their photography is cooler with a "z" in stead of an "s".
  

Man that sure did give a lot of hope! I have no transition here, but I can continue to use three more dots...

I hope my posts can be a conversation starter. The last thing I want from this blog is for my opinion to be the end all be all. I'll be the first to confess that I am not always right and that my taste are strange. So please don't be afraid to leave a comment or share your opinion.

Hope to see you around!