Today's Musings

A blog for no other reason than I am bored.

I'm currently in the midst of 4 (maybe 5...) books, all of which are fantastic. Harry Potter 7 is currently taking the place of "most read" and boy am I loving it's children's book greatness.

For those interested, I'm planning on substitute teaching for a year while working another part-time job for a year. Future possible plans include teaching (English in the states) or working in higher ed... both of which require more schooling. Hopefully the next few months of living at home will help me in finding what I really want to be doing with my life. Who knows, I could also just go with my initial thought of working for a non-profit here or abroad.

I applied to work at a coffee shop today. The one downside is that it's about 20 minutes away but I loved everything else about it. It is independently owned ("damn the man"), there are great couches/tables/places to drink (I love the atmosphere), it's downtown Howell amidst other "hip" stores, the people working there seemed to enjoy their lives, the application asked personal questions, not just references/former jobs (they care more about persons than most places I've been applying to). I hope it works out...

David Sedaris is a hilarious author (memoir-ish stuff). In one of the final chapters I was listening to (he's great on audiobook...) he described an encounter with a 9 year old by in the swimming pool at a YMCA: (paraphrased)

9-year old boy: Do you believe in God?
Sedaris: No.
9-year old boy: Why?
Sedaris: Because I have hair on my back. There are people in this world who rob and kill and destroy and have no hair on their backs while I have hair on my back. That's why I don't believe in God.
9-year old boy: You're going to burn in hell.

A frequent contributer of NPR's This American Life, you should check him out if you're looking for a light read (/listen) with a sophisticated tone to it. Warning: most of his books contain R-rated material... don't say I didn't warn you.

Finally, while driving back from the coffee shop, I spotted a license plate that had a Michigan State University S emblazoned on it. The rest of the license plate held the letters AVIOR on it, resulting in a licence plate that read: SAVIOR. I'm not for sure if this was one of those over-anxious Christians who felt compelled to have their license plate somehow make reference to Jesus (and his/her alma mater) or someone audacious enough to claim to be the Savior. Either way, slightly ridiculous.

Unashamedly

I am unashamedly advertising SwagBucks on my blog (over there on the right). You can use it to build up points and buy stuff... practical stuff like giftcards to iTunes or Barnes & Noble. Simply use it as your search engine and every now and again, you'll be surprised by a new Swagbuck (it makes surfing the web many more times exciting). Click on the ad to sign up and then I'll win 'bucks whenever you do.

Have a good day.

Abso-fruit-ly!

Truth.
It's absolute.
Commentary:
"There is no such thing as nonfiction. There is no such thing as truth. People who really know what happened aren't talking. And the people who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up. It's the same with your own stories, the ones that circulate around with your family and your friends. We're all part of the same hypocrisy" _Tom Waits
"Of absolute truth, none of us are knowers. And we often aren't especially good with the truth we do know" _David Dark
^"12Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known" _I Corinthians 13:12
"I've got a stranglehold on this decision
All those opposed can rot in hell
Any day now the words will form a sentence
You'll be reduced to nothingness"
_Artist:Menomena Song:Rotten Hell
"³³"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' ³⁴But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; ³⁵or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. ³⁶And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. ³⁷Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one" _Matthew 5:33-37
"1. truthiness (noun)
1: "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert)
2: "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true (American Dialect Society)"
Thought of the day: God is true and is absolute and I see dimly. I'll let my yes be yes and no, no and try my best to avoid any sort of truthiness. Not knowing may be the first step to knowing.

sins and mistakes and the distinction

Taken from a comments section of a blog I regularly read (BurnsideWriter'sBlog). Interesting thought that I had previously never really considered:

"... it drives me nuts when people refer to sins as "mistakes"; if you cheated on your wife, or posed for pictures you now regret, or embezzled money, or used a racial slur, you didn't make a mistake. A mistake is when you misspell a word, or when you say "Jerry Lewis" when you meant to say "Jerry lee Lewis". A sin is a sin, not a mistake. I should know. I've sinned a lot. Calling it a mistake is a way of minimizing it."

Books and Movies

"It is a guarantee that whenever it is announced that a popular book is being turned into a movie, white people will get upset. This is partly due to their fear that something they love will be made accessible to more people and thus enjoyed by more people which immediately decreases the amount of joy a white person can feel towards the original property. Yes, it’s complicated."
-StuffWhitePeopleLike

Speaking of which, who's ready for a mediocre rendering of Harry Potter 6 tonight?

I don't even really like Beck that much...

Part of a conversation between Tom Waits and Beck Hansen (http://beck.com/irrelevant_topics)

TW: ... Where does this "Best" thing come from? Is that human? Is that American? Is it all over the world? Everyone wants the best eye surgeon, the best babysitter, the best vehicle, the best prosthetic arm, and the best hat. There's also the worst of all those things available and they're doing rather well. (Laughs.) Denny's is doing great. It's always crowded. You have to wait for a table.

BH: Also this obsession with ranking. All the "Best of" lists. I get asked to write "Best of" lists occasionally. An emphasis on ranking things. Having a hierarchy and having it be written in granite, written in stone.

TW: It's economic. So you can charge more.

BH: Yeah, it must be. But maybe it's just a need to have some order that's been established, and that everybody has been notified. I don't know.

TW: There's too much of everything.

A Surprising Inversion

The movie, Brothers:


My Dad has been in Poland since late May. Today, I drove my mother to the airport. She'll be in Poland for a while. Jorjette left to go to Michigan's prettier coast on the West side. What I'm getting at is that brother Kenan and I are home, bachelor padding it for a week. We do nothing better than watching weird, indie movies (okay, the occasional blockbuster sneaks in too). Tonight's selection was a movie called Brothers.

Brothers is a Danish film from 2004 that garnered a little bit of acclaim from Cannes and Sundance but as far as I know, probably went unnoticed on the whole. It was certainly the first Danish spoken movie I'd seen. I checked out the trailer before hand and noticed a couple things, 1. it was a Focus Features movie (good), 2. the name of the movie was Brothers (uncertain), 3. one of the brothers was very stereotypically "rough" looking (bad), 4. the song playing over the trailer made me feel like it was a good movie even though I was only watching the trailer (does that make sense?).

[Fyi ... I won't give away any specifics, but I may hint at general themes that may act as spoilers]
The basic premise of the movie revolves around two brothers, one of whom starts the movie being released from jail and the other has a wife and two daughters but is going back to war. There's tangible tension between the two brothers and the parents are obviously disappointed with the jail bird brother. As you can see in the trailer, the good brother is thought to be killed in war but returns a few months later to his distraught family. Leading up to watching the movie and throughout the first third of it, I expected a simple redemption story about a "roughneck" brother who turns around his life when he's called upon to be there for his family.

What I appreciated about the movie wasn't that the "bad" brother showed signs of "good" (the "ragamuffin with the heart of gold" character is hardly a new role) but rather that the "good" brother showed signs of "bad." A pivotal moment depicting "good" brother's "badness" halfway through made me realize that this movie had an extra layer to explore. The idea that the best of us are capable of evil is a poignant one, especially for those of us with relatively clean records. It is easy to fall into one's assumed role of being good, bad, or otherwise (fill in the blank) yet we must make decisions on a case by case scenerio. We are living, breathing, organisms that are constantly capable of a host of varying actions. Reputation plays its part but we are larger than others' perceptions.

I can't really go any further without dropping plot points but I appreciated that the brothers' morality (I'm over-simplifying a bit with the term, morality) moves in an inverted motion. I encourage a viewing of this movie, specifically before the Hallmark-ish American version is released this December. Go!View!Think!

Musical treat

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico 'Sunday Morning' from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Beck (& friends) re-record a few tracks. Found here.

CRAM it up

Been CRAMming for the last week and a half. It's a summer honors program for high school juniors and seniors. My job consists of hanging out at the front desk waiting for the students to get out of class so that we can play. I also drive 12 passenger vans and talk on a walkie-talkie.

The first week of classes went relatively smoothly. Then the weekend came. It saw some major hiccups resulting in a couple of late nights, running around, and rather intense conversations. Needed conversations.

My time here is about half over and everyday makes me realize that we're all broken people. These students have a heck of a lot more going on than what is apparent after an initial small group meeting. Just like I have a heck of a lot more going on than is first apparent. The walk towards reconciliation (between God and one another) is slow, difficult and easy to avoid. But hopefully the idea of Christian community is communicated to the students. The idea that we all mess up, we all fall short of any sort of perfection, yet God has given us each other to restore ourselves to Himself and to the group. It's a beautiful experience.

Picture Update

I finished college.






I'm looking for a job.








I'm preparing for a 3 week PA job back at Taylor.







I'm working on one last summer class.





I'm trying to start [real] life sanely.