writer's block

I have not been posting lately because I have been kind of working on an article for a magazine produced at my church. I say kind of working because all that I have really been doing is fighting writer's block. This typically happens to me when I do not have a precise set of parameters in my mind as far as what the final result should really look like.

This past semester I poured hours and hours of work into a paper for one of my classes, far more than I should have, because I was not convinced that I was following the construct that the professor wanted. In that class everyone got to see everyone else's paper, so when I looked through everyone else's work I noticed that I had written more than one thousand words more than the next largest paper, and I did not accomplish that by filling the paper with fluff. There was no maximum page limit on the papers and so I overcompensated to be sure I was doing the right thing. Looking through some of the other papers, it appears that most other people had a different approach.

With this article I am not completely certain how casual or spiritual it is supposed to be. My natural inclination is to type a step-by-step lesson, but that does not feel exactly right for this magazine. At the very least, this is not something that I expect to be obsessing about too much longer. My article is due on the third, and I think I have actually settled on a topic. Finally.

typhoid baby

This weekend we are getting a good reminder of the value of taking steps to not spread germs. Golden and NJ both caught colds last week from an event that we went to and those have spread to CD and me. I have long believed that a cold was one of the worst things I can catch because I don't really get sick enough to skip things but I do get sick enough to be moderately miserable. The past few days this has been aggravated by NJ having a hard time getting to and staying asleep at night, and now CD going through the same thing.

I think everyone with kids has several stories about the impact of illnesses. It always seems to be a real gamble to take either of the kids anywhere because a significant percentage of the time the kids are in a situation where there might be germs (church nursery, carts at a store, restaurant booster seat, etc) they catch something that works through the family for the next two weeks. This is compounded by the fact that different people have different standards for how sick they or their kids have to be before they don't go to church, or the store, or a restaurant.

So, if we tend to skip a lot of things it is not because we are avoiding everyone. It's because we are trying to avoid everyone's germs.

past performance

As part of the process of setting up my laptop I have reorganized many of the documents on our main computer so that I can properly copy what I need onto the laptop. While I was going through the documents I came across some folders containing homework and various papers that I wrote for some of my undergrad courses. Looking back on that work now, it is amazing to me how much time I spent on such a small amount of work and how mediocre my writing was.

I remember well the very first paper I had to write when I was in school. The paper was a simple four-page research paper on a composer. I remember spending way more time than I should have for a four-page paper, and looking back on the paper, it is a little embarrassing the level of effort it required for as lousy as the final result was. My papers from when I was a senior were better, but that is not saying much.

The one good thing about all of this is that I know that I am still learning years after graduating, and I know I still have a way to go. My question to everyone else is, how do you feel you are growing as a person. Are there areas in your life where you look back at where you were five, ten, or twenty years ago and see that where you were and where you are are completely different?

the case for television

I was asked recently what Golden and I do together, or what we have done together, as a couple. I hesitated before answering because some people appear to look down on this, but we have always watched TV and gone to movies together. We do other things as well, but our "us" time has always been largely comprised of TV and movies. My question is why should we feel bad about our television habits? I have heard a few arguments which I will detail below.

It's unhealthy

While I agree that excessive TV watching can be unhealthy because it is associated with a lack of activity, so can excessive book reading. I don't feel that the health argument applies to me because if I watched less television I would not be replacing that time with exercise. I would be replacing it with Internet, gaming, and reading time, none of which is active.

It rots the brain

There are shows that I believe have to decrease the intelligence of the audience, but I think those very rare. Actually, if we are to believe that books, theater, and music make people more intelligent, it seems counter-intuitive to believe that entertainment built from these things (even the mass-market kind) would do the opposite. Someone I used to work with once compared Shakespeare's writings to soap operas in a less than positive way, and I wonder if more people wouldn't agree if the Bard were to write today.

It thwarts creativity

One of the arguments go that, while with books you have to visualize everything that is happening yourself, with television your experience is more passive. This could be true, but my experience tells me that my experience is only passive for slowly-paced shows, and this mimics my experience with slowly-paced books as well. As an example, when I read Captain's Courageous in high school I really had to fight to stay engaged in the story. My brain was not becoming more creative for the experience.

I think that watching shows and movies that pose scenarios that cause us to ask what we would do in a specific situation or perhaps speculate some unknowns about a story (Lost comes to mind) can actually make people more creative because the creative parts of their brains are forced to become engaged.

It negatively impacts culture

The negative influences of television probably outweigh the positives, but I hold to the belief that this is because many of the people who could make a positive impact through television have directed their efforts to other things. One possible solution to this would be to support shows that positively impact culture and to encourage others to do the same.

There are other arguments against television as well, and some are probably valid. My main point is, though, that television is not any more a vast cultural wasteland than a lot of things that are seen as culturally redeeming. Is going to the play Legally Blonde (or Grease, or Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang, et al) really culturally superior to catching it as a weekend TV movie special?

Now that I have staked out one position, perhaps someone reading this has some thoughts to counter mine. If you do, you know how to air them.

what's in a word

I thought I had posted on this topic earlier but I cannot find any posts on the topic in my searches of the blog, so here it is (possibly again).

One of my friends in high school frequented the youth events for a church that neither of us attended. As a result I sometimes went along as well, but not very frequently. One night we were riding in the church van on the way back from an event, I think it was bowling, when the guy sitting next to me mentioned that he wanted to kill himself. I don't remember how we got on that topic, but my impression of the little that I knew about him led me to believe that he was partially serious, but that the main point was to find a reason not to do something so permanent. It could be that he was just pulling everyone's leg, but I have to say that he did not seem the joking type.

There is something weird that happens when you are around someone who you believe might actually be intending to kill himself or herself. Everything all of a sudden becomes about that one person and there is an edginess that everyone gets because they don't want to say or do something they would regret and be responsible for someone doing something so drastic. As would be expected, at least a few of the people in the bus felt that it was important to quickly convince him that life is worth living. This is when two of the girls in the bus started telling him that God loved him. Honestly, it sounded cliche and I think (and I thought at the time) that that was the last thing that he wanted to hear and that it was the last thing that would stop him from doing anything rash. I can't remember what specifically I said to him and I don't know that it was any better, but I remember his disappointed expression at people resorting to, "God loves you," as if he had never heard it before.

I don't know what happened with that guy. As I said, I didn't attend that church and he apparently rarely did either. I knew his name at the time, but I forgot it soon afterwards as I am apt to do. I have often thought back to that conversation, though. Had I been given the chance to do it over again I probably would have gotten his contact information and tried to give him more opportunity to describe what was so crappy about his life. I also have thought about how much a shame it is that, "God loves you," and the similar phrase, "God is love," are so cliched that when I hear it I don't think about what that really truly means.

There is probably no more important truth, as far as Christianity is concerned at least, than, "God is love." I think that so many people misunderstand the word love, though, that we interpret the phrase with a more superficial meaning or a just plain different meaning. I think that love in this context means a willingness to selflessly sacrifice. I think that it would be just as accurate to say, "God is sacrifice. He gave it and He demands it." This is backed up in Paul's letter to the Romans.

"Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."- Romans 5:7-8

John wrote the following on our responsibilities.

"This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome..."- 1 John 5:3

I can only speak for myself, but if I were cynical about how cliched the phrase, "God is love," is I would take it as a breath of fresh air for someone to tell me that God is sacrifice. It's specific. It's stark. It forces a decision as to whether I am going to accept that sort of a God or not. Most importantly, that God is sacrifice is more difficult to say with the pretense that what the listener is going through isn't such a big deal.

The reason I have been thinking about the topic of cliched words lately is that I have noticed, especially in my more recent classes, that a lot of the concepts behind the overused business buzzwords are actually quite good. I know this is a step down from talking about love and God, but it is still what got me thinking. Synergies are the abilities of groups within a company to work together in ways that their output is greater than the output of the groups individually, and they are vital for most mergers to make any rational sense. Paradigms are the mental constraints under which we think and they often disallow us from understanding the value of finding other better ways of doing what we do, and ignoring paradigm shifts usually results in the company in question going out of business. There are other cliched words that represent important concepts as well, but my point is already made. A few people at some point thought that using the buzzwords without giving the associated concepts the required respect to be effective and all we ultimately ended up with were Dilbert strips mocking synergies.

Since I don't think that anyone who reads this abuses religious or business buzzwords and cliches, this is probably written to the wrong audience. Perhaps this could be a word of warning lest anyone consider starting to use them without paying proper respect to the underlying concepts. Just say no.

housekeeping

I just have a quick housekeeping note. I am getting a laptop within the next couple of weeks. That will probably give me more opportunity to post with some regularity. My laptop crashing, CD being born, and schoolwork have all been directly responsible for my lack of posting over the last six months. The blog simply cannot compete with household and school duties. I have a couple of ideas for blogs in the near term, but I just need to take the time to type them. Watch for more.