Daniel’s Pilgrimage

Alicia and I went to the theatre and saw Brokeback Mountain tonight. It’s a big deal for us to even go to the theatre because neither of us really likes the experience. I think we went once or twice in all of 2005. But this movie has gotten a lot of press, including being featured on Oprah today, which motivated us to see it.

Alicia seems to have really enjoyed it. More than I did anyways. I thought it was a well made movie, but one thing bothered me throughout the whole movie. It bothered me that they portrayed love as something that has to be sexual. Love is not wanting or needing to possess the another person, that is lust. I want to be the kind of person who can love someone, pursue their best, even be affectionate to them, without it being sexual or without one person trying to possess the other. This movie is closer to most people’s realities than my ideals. Hollywood has incredible power, I just wish that would use it to inspire us to rise above our own mess more often.

Of course most of the publicity about the movie focuses on the idea of two masculine men being lovers. I’m not homophobic(I got over that in college), so there wasn’t shock value to it for me. It was sad that they wanted to be together and society made it unacceptable. But it was equally as sad to me that neither of them really learned to love anyone well(although you saw the first hint of it with his daughter at the end).

I had coffee this afternoon with John Murden of Church Hill People’s News fame. We had a good time talking about the neighbourhood and life. Thanks for getting together John!

As Alicia wrote, I’m back in Richmond. I survived a crazy week of work that included an almost 16 hour day on Wednesday. There are still loose ends left over from it, enough to keep me busy during the beginning of next week. It was nice to see my family and come clients. I didn’t get to hang with many friends. I missed Scott entirely because he had to work(next time!), but did get to have dinner with Leslie. I had some nice time at a few client’s sites. The C&T Mortgage crew is always fun.

In other news, we got vanity domain names. We picked up danielfarrell.com and aliciafarrell.com on a special from Yahoo domains. Right now Alicia’s just points to the simplepilgrimage website, but I’m working on mine as a work thing(see next part).

I had a little epiphany about work while driving home. Brad and I joke about how our boss Jeff always just refers to the business as himself. All the rest of us answer the phones “Kite Tech, this is Daniel” or the like. Jeff just answers is “This is Jeff Kite.” He’ll sell a job and we’ll get out there and say we are from Kite Tech and they will look confused… then we say we work for/with Jeff Kite and they know exactly who we are. I’ve always thought it was funny. But the genius of it didn’t hit me until I was driving home. People generally have at least a little distrust of impersonal corporations, but they can trust people easier. And what is the difference really between Kite Technology or another company? The difference is the people. Jeff sells himself and that sets him apart. People know his name, they have his cell phone number, they can reach him, he’s personal. So I’m gonna switch gears a little on my sales work here. At least for a while, instead of being Kite Technology’s Richmond office, I’m going to be Daniel Farrell, computer consultant. I’m not ditching Kite Tech, just changing the focus. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ll be in Maryland the rest of the week for work. I’ll be leaving sometime this morning and not returning until Friday evening. If you are an RVA reader, I’ll catch you next week. If you are a MD reader, give me a call and maybe we can hang out this week.

Happy MLK day everyone. I, like lots of people, still had to work even though it is a federal holiday. But I just wanted to write and say that Martin Luther King is one of my heros. I’ll leave the social commentary to Ross who did a very job with it.