Action Figure Daniel

Author: Daniel

  • “You Find You Can”

    An excerpt from “You Find You Can” by Daniel Evanko

    You find the hour lonely and you don’t know that you can stand the silence any longer.
    You find you can.

    You are bruised, battered and beaten and you don’t know you can heal one more time.
    You find you can.

    You have tired so many times before and you don’t know if you can try one more time.
    You find you can.

    You must say goodbye to your best friend and you don’t know if you can bear it.
    You find you can.

    You feel the tears welling in your eyes and you don’t know if you can hold them back.
    You find you can.

    You already miss them and you don’t know if you can do it alone.
    You find you can.

    You see their heart breaking and you don’t know if you can walk away and not look back.
    You find you can.

    But then you stop, you don’t know if you really can.
    You find you can’t.

    You run back to them for one last embrace and you wonder if friendships last forever.
    You find they do.

    You say goodbye once more and walk away and you wonder if they love you too.
    You find they do.

  • The Best Person

    “They’re just not the best person for the job,” Boss said.

    “I know, but at least it will get done,” was my reply

    “But it could be anyone,” he continued. “We picked Friend almost at random,” he sounded a bit defeated. “We’re paying Friend too.” He paused for a moment before continuing. “It could have been anyone: Confidence, Smooth, Respite, anyone. Truth, we just picked Friend without thinking who would actually know the best price to sell it for.”

    “But at least we would have some money,” I said. “Some money now is better than a little more money later. Isn’t it?”

    “I guess so,” Boss said in defeat. “If nothing else, we’ll at least have a catalog of the stuff.”

    There was a brief moment of silence. I was about to escape when Boss tried once more.

    “Stalwart would be better,” he exclaimed.

    “But look who we have painting doors at the DC,” I said. I had spent most of that morning painting three days at the warehouse.

    “You didn’t have to paint those,” Boss said. “Stalwart could have done that. It would have taken a week, but it would have been the right person.”

    “And yet, it has been four years since we got those doors and they still hadn’t been painted,” I said. “At least this way the doors are painted and we Friend will sell some of our stuff.”

    There was a moment pause between us.

    “It is better to just get it done, even if it is the wrong people doing it,” I said as I smiled and left.

    The moral is that sometimes you can use management to get things done but sometimes you can’t. Sometimes everyone, including the managers are so busy working on yellow alert with nearly critical issues that the small things slip through the cracks and once they have slipped long enough, like unpainted doors, you get used to them and stop thinking of it being incomplete and just think of it as a bad job.

    At least, one week before I leave back to school, the doors are painted.

  • I feel rich

    What seems like forever ago (2 years) I changed hosting accounts for my domains, including evanko.net, to consolidate my various websites into a single hosting location. The move was swift and brought with it the current layout and added a photo gallery to the mix. The photo gallery made me happy. There was but one problem, I only had 5 GB for all of my sites. That may seem like a lot but some of my sites are pretty big. So for two years I have been making sure to not go over my capacity.

    Today I logged into my hosting site and notice a different number in my disk space. It didn’t make since, and still doesn’t, so I called and asked. Apparently I have 150 GB for my sites. Suddenly I feel rich with web space!

  • A Quiet Moment

    I have decided, after years of trying to capture the majesty and beauty of sunsets, that it can’t be done. Well, not so much that it can’t be done but that it’s not supposed to be done. You’re not supposed to be able to look at a picture and get the same peace, calm and tranquility as if you were standing atop a hill watching the great blazing sun surrender to the pale, piercing moon; as the world shifts from its vibrant, lively colors to the sharp, silvery hues of night. Sunsets, as with sunrises, would turn into something of cheap experiences not worth having if we could just flip through a book that had capture the same richness as if we had seen it with our own eyes.
    There is also the matter of timing. Being at the right place at the right time to watch the sun or moon rise requires careful attention to their timing. It is a reminder that no matter how important you are, no matter how well you calendar, no matter how many alarms you have, the sun will set whether you are there or not. It is a reminder that no matter how small you feel, no matter how insignificant you see yourself, no matter how desperately you want more in life, the sun will rise whether you are there or not. It is one of only a few events that the time is completely arbitrary and completely out of our control.
    Sunsets are not tied to a precise hour and minute but rather to a precise moment, a quiet moment, a solitary moment, a moment that we can let our souls revel in the beautiful and decisive timing of the universe. The moment is so unlike any other we have in our lives. That moment serves to remind us that we are both the grand and absent. We can see it, experience it and enjoy it but it would happen just the same without. Seeing the moment reminds us that God has definite precision though we are sometimes too small to see it. But it is there as surely as we watch as the sun lowers itself over the edge of the world.

  • If it were a snake it would have bitten you! part 2

    August came and I was getting ready to go back to school. Through the hectic process of purchasing store of stuff and opening two stores of our own a lot of stuff that nobody wanted to deal with at the time had been crammed anywhere it would fit. Most of the stuff went to a back corner of the warehouse where few but me ever ventured. Through the summer I had grown tired of hearing “didn’t we buy one of those from the stores?” The rumored list of the items purchased had proved impossible to find, and I wouldn’t have trusted it anyway. I decided it was high time to gather all the technology stuff from everywhere, get rid of the useless stuff, repair the worthwhile stuff, and get as much as possible into production.

    Going through the warehouse was fairly easy as most of the technology was in one place. Confidence and I took a truck load of stuff to a donation center and I began amassing a second pile. After the warehouse was cleaned out I took on the supply room.

    The Supply Room had long ago become the premier storage center for everything that nobody knew anything about. I decided to clean the whole thing out and organize it. I had chosen the perfect day as there were few other people around to monitor what I was throwing away. My general rule: if we haven’t used in four years, we probably won’t use it in the next year. The donation pile grew and grew, nearly doubling in size.

    Towards the end of the cleaning I rearranged the files and tackled the bottom shelf. On the bottom shelf was a number of white Plexiglas sheets with white tube screwed to them and wires running everywhere. They had appeared on the bottom shelf sometime while I was at school and nobody knew what they were.

    I pulled them out and as I carefully read the tiny writing of the tube and realized that alien-like things were the antennas that go to the used wireless devices. I had seen them all summer, it just took a while to realize that I was actually looking for them. If they were snakes they wouldn’t have gotten me. But if they were walking sticks, they could have stayed there for a very, very long time.