It is not everyday that you turn 22. It is even fewer days that this age has much of a palpable impact on your life. Today, both of these rarities are happening to me.
The thing about my birthday is, there is little to no reason you should care that I successfully exited my mom 22 years ago at a hospital in Orlando, FL. Truthfully, neither should I. Some people I hope will take this opportunity to declare what they've always thought, but never had the forthright decency to say: "T.J., I don't give a rip about you." I would like to say thank you to these people.
However, I am not saying that you not care about me, or that I am alive (although I welcome such a sentiment if you are so inclined), but rather that you should not change how much you care on my birthday.
I used to place great significance on my birthday, gathering expectations doomed to be left unfulfilled. Birthday after birthday I was disappointed when ----- didn't come to my party, or when I didn't get ----- as a gift, or that ----- didn't call me. It is a very exhausting way to live: constantly being disappointed.
You might find it surprising that I found it surprising when January 19th rolled around, people still cared that I existed. Maybe they didn't come to my party, give me that gift, or call me, but they certainly seemed glad that I hadn't perished since the last time I saw them. This, I can only assume, is because they love me.
It seems, then, that real love is not a hit-and-run. Jesus doesn't come to save you and then say "Peace out, see ya when ya die!" He's there constantly, and wants you to be there too. Similarly, I can show, you can show, we can show that we love others in the 364 very merry UN-birthdays almost better than the one birthday per year we all have.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Snow
Snow is complex. Not chemically: a couple of hydrogen and an oxygen come together below 32°F (0°C) in the atmosphere, eventually becoming too heavy to stay afloat and drift, tumble, flurry down to an oddly expectant planet.
Snow is complex because there is such dichotomy in its existence. Perhaps this rings true for many things that I am simply overlooking, but I can think of few comparable examples that can bring such simultaneous elation and chagrin.
Sunday night, along with a large number of my college-attending peers, I was overjoyed to learn the school administration had bowed to the weather's whim and given us a snow day. The sentiment carried over to Monday morning, when most woke up at a later than average hour due to the nonexistence of academic obligations.
Yet, once pelted with a snowball, or after taking an unexpected dive on an inopportune sled ride, the love for snow died quickly. Complaints of the cold, and the wet, and the driving difficulty all began to drown out the adoring comments we had for the precipitation just a few hours earlier. Those comments returned Monday night, and Tuesday as well when we received two additional snow days.
Similarly, snow has great connotations for both death and birth, innocence and degradation. Christ is said to have washed us whiter than snow--so it is a standard of cleanliness and purity. But, at the same time, snow brings desolation. There are few things as harsh and violent as cold, and as subtly destructive as ice. For many, snow spells death. Any vegetation or unsheltered wildlife is certainly doomed at the arrival of snow.
The only things that can survive snow are those that can fight it. Humans combat it with our central heating and snowplows, but we welcome it with adulation. Snow is, like almost everything else in creation, complex. Love to life to death to doughnuts have a pro and con comparison, a good and bad connotation, especially humans. The beauty of it all, and at least one purpose of art, is sifting through the light and dark of it all.
Snow is complex because there is such dichotomy in its existence. Perhaps this rings true for many things that I am simply overlooking, but I can think of few comparable examples that can bring such simultaneous elation and chagrin.
Sunday night, along with a large number of my college-attending peers, I was overjoyed to learn the school administration had bowed to the weather's whim and given us a snow day. The sentiment carried over to Monday morning, when most woke up at a later than average hour due to the nonexistence of academic obligations.
Yet, once pelted with a snowball, or after taking an unexpected dive on an inopportune sled ride, the love for snow died quickly. Complaints of the cold, and the wet, and the driving difficulty all began to drown out the adoring comments we had for the precipitation just a few hours earlier. Those comments returned Monday night, and Tuesday as well when we received two additional snow days.
Similarly, snow has great connotations for both death and birth, innocence and degradation. Christ is said to have washed us whiter than snow--so it is a standard of cleanliness and purity. But, at the same time, snow brings desolation. There are few things as harsh and violent as cold, and as subtly destructive as ice. For many, snow spells death. Any vegetation or unsheltered wildlife is certainly doomed at the arrival of snow.
The only things that can survive snow are those that can fight it. Humans combat it with our central heating and snowplows, but we welcome it with adulation. Snow is, like almost everything else in creation, complex. Love to life to death to doughnuts have a pro and con comparison, a good and bad connotation, especially humans. The beauty of it all, and at least one purpose of art, is sifting through the light and dark of it all.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Tron: Legacy
"I believe positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time. We all long for redemption, for catharsis."
--Dom Cobb in Inception.
As a writer, I find it hard to dispel this point, and its relevance lays the foundation for most of the way I evaluate entertainment. Good stories are essentially redemption stories. Tron is no exception.
The movie as a whole was phenomenal (more on what I have to say about it later). Stunning visuals that brought to life an environment literally out of this world. But what impressed me more was the blatant realism of the characters placed in an explicitly artificial world. One character, Quorra, talks about how Kevin Flynn has been teaching her about self-sacrifice: "removing yourself from the equation." But its not only positive characteristics that were real: the various programs also demonstrate greed and betrayal on a level comparable to humans. Which makes sense: no creation can surpass the perfection of its creator.
Perfection, the intended goal of Flynn's Grid (where the movie takes place), stands apart as the most interesting thing to take from this movie. Flynn nails it when he says "The thing about perfection is, it's unknowable. And yet its right in front of you." While I would say that we cannot create perfection, and we cannot know it, but we can experience it. We cannot know God's perfection, but we can, through his grace, experience it--be in it. To a lesser extent, you can experience perfection in the grace people show each other, but as all things humans touch, that grace is tainted by those less graceful actions we commit.
From a narrative stand point, Tron hit the mark. The message was woven among the visuals and plot in a subtle but ever-present manner. While trying to escape CLU's numerous attempts to achieve perfection, Sam, Kevin, and Quorra find a little bit of their own: to sum it up in a cheesy Beatles ending: "all you need is love."
Monday, December 20, 2010
Hallelujah, By and By
The drive from south Miami to Orlando to see Grampa and Granny takes a few hours. In most of the pictures I see of me and my Grampa, I am doing something with him. We are playing with blocks: I love building things, and he is a self-taught artist, so it works out. I remember playing baseball in his backyard, and the times he lets us ride on his lawnmower or in the trailer behind it. I walk into his garage while he and my dad are working on our red Dodge Caravan. I have a vague recollection of either a child-oriented lecture on mechanics, or perhaps just eavesdropping on what they are saying. He comes down and helps my dad fix our house after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
He is an average sized man, especially when standing next to my six-foot-four dad. Although, when I am a young child, he seems to be the biggest man I know. Everyone speaks well of him: as a kid with everything figured out, I know my mom has to say nice things, it is her dad. But even my dad makes it seem like he is the biggest man in the family. “When you marry a woman, you marry a family,” my father tells me on more than one occasion. I can only assume he has his father-in-law in mind when he says that.
It seems that in all my memories he looks exactly the same: He wears glasses (although he didn’t used to); His hair has always been grayish white. He is never bald, but never has a full head of hair. Even in the old pictures of him, his wife, my mom and her sister, his blonde hair, not balding, looked just like the “Grampa” I visit through the years. He laughs a deep, manly chuckle that only comes from a palpable enjoyment of life and seems to assure you whatever was just said is undoubtedly funny.
We call him “Grampa.” Not Papa, Grandad, Grandaddy, or Granpa. No, he is very specific: he wants to be called Grampa, with an “m.” I don’t know why he wants us to call him that, but we don’t mind. He never asks us to do anything unreasonable, and so as a kid it seems natural, right. As if there is some natural way the world should be, and that way includes me calling him Grampa.
Now that I think about it, he hardly asks us to do anything at all. There is the leaf-raking session every time we visited the house they moved to in the Northeast Georgia mountains, but even that was enforced by my parents, not him. The one request he regularly makes of us is not to fight with each other. The only time I ever see him cry or get angry is when I fight with my brother or sisters. He explains a concept I am reluctant to accept: how “He’ll always be your brother,” or “You’ll always have your sisters, and you need to be there for each other.”
Naturally I try to listen to what he says—my Grampa is, after all, the smartest man ever. I mean, he lived through part of the Great Depression, and World War II. I remember the first time I really understood that. I was astounded that I knew someone who was alive during a time in actual history. He shows me one of his elementary class pictures, and the one thing that strikes me is the lack of shoes. There are only a handful of children with shoes, and Grampa isn’t one of them. In the picture, he doesn’t seem to mind.
My Grampa always impresses me when I think of him, though I can’t tell you exactly what it is that impresses me. It isn’t his stint in the Army at a radio relay base in Africa during the Korean War. It isn’t the successful ownership of Professional Carpet Systems for almost a decade, during which he employed my dad between jobs. It isn’t his car phone—very prestigious to have when they pre-empted the cell phone—although as a kid this is one of the coolest things about him. He always quick adapts to new technology—the computer, internet, and e-mail—not a common feat among his peers. It’s not the multiple battles with heart issues, the quadruple bypass surgery. It isn’t even his faith: a go to church every Sunday and let God’s love show between each visit sort of faith; the kind that preachers preach about when they’re really talking about Jesus. It isn’t any of these things. It is probably all of them, and then some.
He tells me once about how one time in church when another guy had the nerve to put his arm around my Granny before she was dating Grampa. He explains how there rose up in him an incredible urge to throttle the guy. He didn’t, naturally. It was in church. My mom tells me about how he got my Granny. She was the Baptist pastor’s daughter, and their first date was to—gasp—a drive-in movie, an act comparably abominable to dancing. Sometimes I see the old 1950s couple transported to their living room: Still with the pet names and a kiss on the cheek and the occasional clasped hand.
I have a faint memory of his pipe but I may just be imagining that. My Grampa would never smoke. Except that he used to smoke cigarettes but switched to a pipe because my aunt was allergic. He quit the pipe and threw it into a sinkhole next to his house the day his father died of lung cancer. “It’s a three minute addiction,” he says once, “If you can withstand it for three minutes, it’ll go away.” I don’t smoke, so I doubt I’ll ever know if that’s really the case or if my Grampa just has extraordinary willpower. But I sure as hell am not going to pick up a habit that my Grampa tried and then quit. He is, after all, just about the smartest man ever.
As religious as Grampa is, going to visit him never feels like going to church. I’m always learning things, but never being preached at. His favorite hymn is “I’ll Fly Away.” It’s an old country church hymn about going “to a home on God's celestial shore...when this life is o’er.” I never know it is his favorite until they play it at his funeral.
My dad chokes up a little when he tells me. I don’t understand why everyone cries: he didn’t flinch in the face of death—he is escaping “like a bird from prison bars” to “a land where joy shall never end.” But they aren’t sad because it isn’t his time, or because of the tragedy of it all. They are crying because when a man as big as my Grampa passes, you mourn.
He is an average sized man, especially when standing next to my six-foot-four dad. Although, when I am a young child, he seems to be the biggest man I know. Everyone speaks well of him: as a kid with everything figured out, I know my mom has to say nice things, it is her dad. But even my dad makes it seem like he is the biggest man in the family. “When you marry a woman, you marry a family,” my father tells me on more than one occasion. I can only assume he has his father-in-law in mind when he says that.
It seems that in all my memories he looks exactly the same: He wears glasses (although he didn’t used to); His hair has always been grayish white. He is never bald, but never has a full head of hair. Even in the old pictures of him, his wife, my mom and her sister, his blonde hair, not balding, looked just like the “Grampa” I visit through the years. He laughs a deep, manly chuckle that only comes from a palpable enjoyment of life and seems to assure you whatever was just said is undoubtedly funny.
We call him “Grampa.” Not Papa, Grandad, Grandaddy, or Granpa. No, he is very specific: he wants to be called Grampa, with an “m.” I don’t know why he wants us to call him that, but we don’t mind. He never asks us to do anything unreasonable, and so as a kid it seems natural, right. As if there is some natural way the world should be, and that way includes me calling him Grampa.
Now that I think about it, he hardly asks us to do anything at all. There is the leaf-raking session every time we visited the house they moved to in the Northeast Georgia mountains, but even that was enforced by my parents, not him. The one request he regularly makes of us is not to fight with each other. The only time I ever see him cry or get angry is when I fight with my brother or sisters. He explains a concept I am reluctant to accept: how “He’ll always be your brother,” or “You’ll always have your sisters, and you need to be there for each other.”
Naturally I try to listen to what he says—my Grampa is, after all, the smartest man ever. I mean, he lived through part of the Great Depression, and World War II. I remember the first time I really understood that. I was astounded that I knew someone who was alive during a time in actual history. He shows me one of his elementary class pictures, and the one thing that strikes me is the lack of shoes. There are only a handful of children with shoes, and Grampa isn’t one of them. In the picture, he doesn’t seem to mind.
My Grampa always impresses me when I think of him, though I can’t tell you exactly what it is that impresses me. It isn’t his stint in the Army at a radio relay base in Africa during the Korean War. It isn’t the successful ownership of Professional Carpet Systems for almost a decade, during which he employed my dad between jobs. It isn’t his car phone—very prestigious to have when they pre-empted the cell phone—although as a kid this is one of the coolest things about him. He always quick adapts to new technology—the computer, internet, and e-mail—not a common feat among his peers. It’s not the multiple battles with heart issues, the quadruple bypass surgery. It isn’t even his faith: a go to church every Sunday and let God’s love show between each visit sort of faith; the kind that preachers preach about when they’re really talking about Jesus. It isn’t any of these things. It is probably all of them, and then some.
He tells me once about how one time in church when another guy had the nerve to put his arm around my Granny before she was dating Grampa. He explains how there rose up in him an incredible urge to throttle the guy. He didn’t, naturally. It was in church. My mom tells me about how he got my Granny. She was the Baptist pastor’s daughter, and their first date was to—gasp—a drive-in movie, an act comparably abominable to dancing. Sometimes I see the old 1950s couple transported to their living room: Still with the pet names and a kiss on the cheek and the occasional clasped hand.
I have a faint memory of his pipe but I may just be imagining that. My Grampa would never smoke. Except that he used to smoke cigarettes but switched to a pipe because my aunt was allergic. He quit the pipe and threw it into a sinkhole next to his house the day his father died of lung cancer. “It’s a three minute addiction,” he says once, “If you can withstand it for three minutes, it’ll go away.” I don’t smoke, so I doubt I’ll ever know if that’s really the case or if my Grampa just has extraordinary willpower. But I sure as hell am not going to pick up a habit that my Grampa tried and then quit. He is, after all, just about the smartest man ever.
As religious as Grampa is, going to visit him never feels like going to church. I’m always learning things, but never being preached at. His favorite hymn is “I’ll Fly Away.” It’s an old country church hymn about going “to a home on God's celestial shore...when this life is o’er.” I never know it is his favorite until they play it at his funeral.
My dad chokes up a little when he tells me. I don’t understand why everyone cries: he didn’t flinch in the face of death—he is escaping “like a bird from prison bars” to “a land where joy shall never end.” But they aren’t sad because it isn’t his time, or because of the tragedy of it all. They are crying because when a man as big as my Grampa passes, you mourn.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Are You the Walrus?
There is part of me, hidden under layers, that heavily lauds any attempt at skinny white boys doing good, clean hip-hop. Enjoy this dated piece of Christian hip-hop history:
Monday, December 13, 2010
Books Ruin the Movies
For most of my thoughtful life, I have been of the opinion that this shirt is mostly correct. It seemed to me that every time a piece of literature was adapted to film, the medium proved sorely lacking. Naturally, the easiest person to blame is someone else, claiming that no creative expression can match up to the individual imagination.
That would be the way I have always looked at it: the Lord of the Rings movies were fantastic, and it was enjoyable to see the story visual depicted. But, the battle for Helm's Deep was not as epic as the one I read. Nor was Saruman as evil. Nor Minas Morgul and the Ringwraiths as terrible. But I don't think this comes from a shortage of creativity on the director's part. I think the books are the ones to blame.
A recent Curator article spoke to this--the author essentially saying that no one who dove headlong into the books will ever be able to fully enjoy a film adaption, because it will always be the second time he or she has seen it. This has been my experience--I have only recently been able to get caught up in the emotion of book-to-film adaptions that I have read, because I already knew what was coming. I didn't even frown when Dumbledore died, I was too busy critiquing the differences they had made in the plot that lead up to it.
The solution, obviously, is to stop reading books. Or, and this is just a thought, we could try really really really hard to treat the movies as their own story. Certainly, you won't be surprised when Mr. Male Supporting Role dies tragically, or when Ms. Protagonist admits to that love affair, but you can enjoy the d*mn movie--which you probably paid $10+ to go see--without musing about your superior creative direction for the film.
I should say, my two favorite movies--Star Trek and Pride and Prejudice--represent both sides of this issue. Granted, I have never read the Jane Austen classic, but I know the story so well that it never surprises me. Yet, each and every time I am pissed at Darcy's arrogance and surprised by Elizabeth's ironic pride. I cry every time I watch Star Trek, and fist pump multiple times in celebration of a certain explosion or stellar cinematography. So read the book, then forget about it. Go enjoy a movie.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Deconstructing Childhood Construction
When your dad works for the church, your family doesn’t have much disposable income. As a kid, I rarely picked up on this—I didn’t mind eating the store brand cereals or wearing Wal-Mart clothes. What I was aware of, though, was the fact that my family didn’t get as many new toys as my friends’ families. This wasn’t a problem, but it did result in one necessity: recyclable entertainment. My personal venue for such reusable fun was my substantial collection of Legos.
The infinite combination of seemingly endless plastic blocks occupied a significant portion of my childhood. The spaceship of today was tomorrow’s race car, the next day’s superhero base, and the next week’s medieval fortress. For me, the joy was not in the imaginative battles and adventures the finally constructed sets could engage in, but in the creative process itself. I would rather have the opportunity to build one set than play with three. My brother would hastily construct a not-to-poorly designed car and then immediately begin to ask if I would play some variation of a race or demolition derby. For me, this was unthinkable! How dare he suggest I risk destroying that which I had spent such a lengthy and tedious amount of time constructing!?
The constructs I was most proud of were perfectly coordinated in structure and color; not a single Lego brick was unnecessary or out of place. I would naturally build any brand new set exactly as the instructions indicated. The longer the pieces were in my possession, however, the more likely they were to be shuffled and recycled into a new, inventive piece of sci-fi machinery, the specific engineering of which only I could explain. These prized productions would then proceed to occupy a special location on top of my dresser or bookshelf, safe from the war-mongering grip of my “less scrupulous” fellow creator.
Yet, even my carefully conceived and composed creations were eventually destroyed, if only to make way for the next great endeavor of my early engineering career. Sometimes, I wonder if I missed out a little bit. Not that I would trade the care I put into making each and every set. I have merely found myself pondering my brother’s consistent, endearing urge to just play, and mine to think and create. Maybe my 10-year-old self could construct a happy-medium bridge between the creative process and simply enjoying the participation.
The infinite combination of seemingly endless plastic blocks occupied a significant portion of my childhood. The spaceship of today was tomorrow’s race car, the next day’s superhero base, and the next week’s medieval fortress. For me, the joy was not in the imaginative battles and adventures the finally constructed sets could engage in, but in the creative process itself. I would rather have the opportunity to build one set than play with three. My brother would hastily construct a not-to-poorly designed car and then immediately begin to ask if I would play some variation of a race or demolition derby. For me, this was unthinkable! How dare he suggest I risk destroying that which I had spent such a lengthy and tedious amount of time constructing!?
The constructs I was most proud of were perfectly coordinated in structure and color; not a single Lego brick was unnecessary or out of place. I would naturally build any brand new set exactly as the instructions indicated. The longer the pieces were in my possession, however, the more likely they were to be shuffled and recycled into a new, inventive piece of sci-fi machinery, the specific engineering of which only I could explain. These prized productions would then proceed to occupy a special location on top of my dresser or bookshelf, safe from the war-mongering grip of my “less scrupulous” fellow creator.
Yet, even my carefully conceived and composed creations were eventually destroyed, if only to make way for the next great endeavor of my early engineering career. Sometimes, I wonder if I missed out a little bit. Not that I would trade the care I put into making each and every set. I have merely found myself pondering my brother’s consistent, endearing urge to just play, and mine to think and create. Maybe my 10-year-old self could construct a happy-medium bridge between the creative process and simply enjoying the participation.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Are Pennies Useful?
What follows is an incredibly insightful yet entertaining rant against the penny (and the nickel). He makes a compelling argument against the production of pennies and nickels, and also points out that it is a non-political issue, which could help facilitate bi-partisan communication:
As I see it, pennies are all but useless. The only thing I use them for are putting in the "give a penny, take a penny" plate at registers, the Salvation Army red buckets during the Christmas season, and for throwing at people.
So I ask: Do you think the penny is a good thing to keep around? What are some reasons for keeping it?
As I see it, pennies are all but useless. The only thing I use them for are putting in the "give a penny, take a penny" plate at registers, the Salvation Army red buckets during the Christmas season, and for throwing at people.
So I ask: Do you think the penny is a good thing to keep around? What are some reasons for keeping it?
Monday, September 13, 2010
Video Games as Art
When it comes to "art," I tend to be very inclusive yet critical at the same time. That is to say, I am willing to accept most everything as "artistic," but once I have, I will be very critical of its quality.
Video Games: It would seem very apparent that video games are art: they possess a story, with an often well developed plot and characters, and there is very obviously a significant amount of visual artistry that goes into developing them. Why then would Roger Ebert, the renowned movie critic, declare that "video games can never be art?"
Ebert's argument is that video games are an activity, as their name suggests, a game. And that as such, they are automatically removed from contention as being art. Citing the examples of Bobby Fischer and Michael Jordan, he states that those players never sought to have their activities deemed as "art."
First, do we not often look at sports stars or participants in various hobbies and activities and say "they make it an art?" Second, Ebert is arguing against the players of the video games as artists, where it seems the creators of the video games are the obvious artists. While Fischer or Jordan may not be "artists," someone had to design and create the chessboard and basketball equipment, and it would be either naive or elitist to say that their work is not art.
While I would agree with Ebert in that "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." And a great number of video games, while still acceptable as "art," are, to put it plainly, very crappy pieces of art. But anyone who has seen something like the video below must agree that in the very least, video games are creative and inspire creativity, which is, in my belief, a core part of what "art" is.
Video Games: It would seem very apparent that video games are art: they possess a story, with an often well developed plot and characters, and there is very obviously a significant amount of visual artistry that goes into developing them. Why then would Roger Ebert, the renowned movie critic, declare that "video games can never be art?"
Ebert's argument is that video games are an activity, as their name suggests, a game. And that as such, they are automatically removed from contention as being art. Citing the examples of Bobby Fischer and Michael Jordan, he states that those players never sought to have their activities deemed as "art."
First, do we not often look at sports stars or participants in various hobbies and activities and say "they make it an art?" Second, Ebert is arguing against the players of the video games as artists, where it seems the creators of the video games are the obvious artists. While Fischer or Jordan may not be "artists," someone had to design and create the chessboard and basketball equipment, and it would be either naive or elitist to say that their work is not art.
While I would agree with Ebert in that "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." And a great number of video games, while still acceptable as "art," are, to put it plainly, very crappy pieces of art. But anyone who has seen something like the video below must agree that in the very least, video games are creative and inspire creativity, which is, in my belief, a core part of what "art" is.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Swept Me Away
I know a couple who had the Avett Brothers' song "Swept Me Away" as their first dance. I think it is a novel idea. What are the criteria for deciding what your first dance song should be?
It seems to me that it should be one that both of you like, but also one that is not just popular, but endearing and long lasting. Not that it has to be "timeless," but it ought to be one that you will always have around and will, say, teach to your children:
Your thoughts?
It seems to me that it should be one that both of you like, but also one that is not just popular, but endearing and long lasting. Not that it has to be "timeless," but it ought to be one that you will always have around and will, say, teach to your children:
Your thoughts?
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