What you find in a library.

I don’t blog often, mostly because a lot of what happens in my life doesn’t really merit a blog. However, for two reasons I feel the need to post something today. Number one is because I have a ten page paper that I need to write, and if I am not procrastinating then I know that I will need to do that paper, which I don’t really want to do. Number two, because there is something that is worth writing about in my life.

I have been up since 8:00 trying to write this paper, and it is not 3:30 in the afternoon and I have nothing written. To be fair I do have all of my research done, but that’s about as far as I am. I am at the UK library as we speak, sitting in the central hub that I recently moved to after a disturbing encounter. I started on the fourth floor in the history section, which made sense since I am typing a history paper. I was enamored with the bookshelves that collapse into each other to save space with a push of a button. In my procrastination, I spent about ten minutes pretending to look for a book while I was really just playing with the moving bookshelves. I finally dedicated myself to a cubical and sat there to start typing my paper. A few minutes after I sat down, I notice that the cubical next to me has just been occupied, and then a few seconds later I hear the sound of lips smacking together. My first assumption is that some college student is here with his girlfriend and he just kissed her, which was a little weird that he would do that so loud in such a public place, but otherwise not too big of a deal. Then I notice that these sounds don’t stop, and being that the cubical only comes to about knee height, I decide to look at the feet of the people next to me to see what is going on. I could only see the feet, and this was all that I wanted to see frankly, but I extrapolated from the picture that I got that a girl was putting her foot up towards her boyfriends mouth, and I guess her boyfriend was kissing her feet. Of course this was weird, but after hearing multiple lip smacking sounds, I was expecting a lot worse. This wasn’t what I expected, but just weird. I wanted to pull a doctor Cox and get up and turn around, pull up a chair next to them. Needless to say it was distracted by this couple next to me making out with each others feet. It was hilarious but distracting. So I moved to where I am now writing this entry.

I thought, “who would come to a library to do this?” This was of course after I asked the simpler question, “who would do this?” Then I realized that a library might be the perfect place to do this provided that you have to be in a public place. I mean, it is a huge place and it is easy to find a corner and..do your thing…in private. I don’t know if they knew that I was there or not, but I made noises loud enough for them to hear me, and eventually I left. As I left, I saw that they decided to abandon there spot to try somewhere else. It turns out they weren’t college-age people, they were just some high school kids.

Change

So being that I procrastinate a lot, I have this habit of checking people’s blogs for updates on a regular basis. I have about five or six blogs in my bookmarks that I check daily, and usually about once a week somebody has updated their blog. Mostly they are from my friends, or at the very least, people I know. When I check the blogs, for the most part they are filled with stuff about the Christian life and are titled things like “Life, God and the Arts” or “The Blog of Encouraging Love” or some such thing as that (I made those names up, but you gt the idea). Mostly people use these to post thoughts that they have had that day and want to share with the world, at least this is the way that I did it for a while. There is nothing wrong with it, except that if I am writing a blog I might as well entertain people so that said blog will actually get read. When I was reading back over my older posts I realized that I don’t even care about what I am saying, so why should anyone else? I had to “contribute to the Christian blog community” though.

I figured I would just write about the things that I am REALLY thinking about. Let’s face it, at any given moment in time I am probably not thinking about how to induce community in the church. Don’t get me wrong, I am really dedicating myself to figuring out how to run a healthy church so that I can do it at some point, but nobody else cares about my two cents on that. Most of the time I am imagining what the most hilarious situation would be in the situation that I am in, like “wouldn’t it be great if we got this entire classroom to start singing ‘Rocketman’?” That is more entertaining, plus last time I wrote about stress, I tried to be “funny” and the blog stats said that about 85 people read that one, which is miles away from the 2 or 3 I usually get. So if you guys like, it I’ll just stick with doing that. Maybe if you guys like it enough, I might even get the opportunity to throw a little bit of my own opinion in there, eh?

(cheesy romantic Christian title goes here)

Sometimes I see something, or just come to know about something that just makes me laugh, or at least wonder what on earth people were thinking. One such thing that I just recently found out existed are “Christian romances.” O.K, so when I say that I don’t know what people were thinking when they created Christian romances, maybe I was exaggerating a little bit, because I know that when people write these things, a ton of single Christian girls are going to read them.

It does kind of intrigue me though, because I know that for the most part Christians are not capable of doing anything that takes a page out of popular culture without making it just cheesy. You know what I am talking about: those t-shirts that have the skittles logo on them but instead of saying “skittles” it says “scriptures.” So when I picture Christian romance novels I picture the photo on the cover looking a lot like those on regular romance novels, except instead of sensuously holding onto each other both people are sensuously holding onto a cross, with wind blowing through their hair. As for the story line, it probably would be like the regular romance novels except less sex and they both come closer to God in some way or another. Of course there will be sex at the end, but only after they are married, and the book will probably play it up as one of the most intense experience in the world, but it’s alright because they are married.

People will probably read them, which is kind of weird to think about coming from a Christian College campus. I say this because girls on this campus already have this extremely romantic view of how relationships should be. Maybe this is because “relationships are ordained by God” and therefore there is this kind of mystical idea that comes with them, at least this is how I always thought of it. I have not read a Christian romance novel, but I can definitely see the same mindset coming into play here. The girl finds the one guy in the world that God has chosen for her. Out of all people in the world, God has one person in mind for each person to marry, and in these books I can see people finding that one person and having an amazing relationship with them. Maybe I should not be knocking them too badly without reading them, but then again the alternative is reading them and then making an informed decision and why would I do that?

Stress

Well, I have a lot to do today.

With my heavier workload, I have decided to spend my time blogging instead. This is just how procrastination works for me; I don’t even have a subject in mind yet of what I would like to write about, but blogging is something that does not need to get done, and therefore it is this very thing that I am doing. I was hoping that in the process of introducing the reason that I am writing today, I would have figured out a good topic to write about, but that has not happened yet, and so I am still filibustering.

I think I will just go with procrastination:

You must understand that I hate stress and try to avoid stressing out, even when I am in stressful situations. People who know me sometimes get frustrated because I am “flexible,” which basically means I just let other people make the decisions like where to eat and what to do, that kind of stuff. So when it comes to stress, I thought I figured out this clever little system. Whenever I figure out what it is that I need to do, I just think about a good time when I can do it and then forget about it. An example might be that I find out that I have a test coming up on Friday. I might say “I am not doing anything Wednesday night, so I will study then” or something like that. This works out really well for someone like me, who just likes being laid back and doesn’t like experiencing stress, because I don’t need to worry about that huge test anymore, I can just think “I’ll do it then” and then go and play PlayStation or something.

My roommate doesn’t understand this as well as I do. It will be Tuesday afternoon and I will just be playing a video game or something meaningless like that. He will remind me, “you need to study for that test on Friday” to which I reply “I am doing that tomorrow,” but then he sees that even though I am doing it tomorrow, I am not doing anything right now so why can’t I just to it right now. I can’t do it right now because it is not on the schedule until tomorrow!

I’m exaggerating, I don’t do that all the time.

Alright, so this system works well until procrastination enters. I don’t always do the things that I say I will do when I say I will do them. Sometimes I waste time writing posts for a blog that nobody will read when I should be doing work. But look at it from my perspective: I don’t want to do this work. I still don’t like stress, but at this point my way of dealing with it is by still not thinking about the stuff I need to do, even though at this point I really should worry about it.

Hey, I will do it eventually.

Something to Ponder

In Romans class we talk a great deal about how the New Testament in general and Romans in particular does not know an individual Christianity. This means that the way we treat Christianity today, this “I have a personal relationship to Jesus” isn’t in the New Testament world. Everything they do is as a community.

In our churches we might say “read your Bibles individually to bolster your individual relationship with God” or “pray to get into a better place with God” etc, but in the New Testament times my relationship with God is indistinguishable from anyone else’s. That being true, our teacher suggested that our pursuit should be a communal one, not one where individual relationships are grown. In other words, we should act like it is “our relationship to God” and not “my personal relationship to God.”

Watching the “Watchmen”

I was among those who were made ecstatic by the announcement that Alan Moore’s classic “Watchmen” was coming to the silver screen. It is the “most celebrated novel of all time” and the only graphic novel to win the Hugo award.

I will admit that although I liked the book, I did not finish it by the time I heard the news about the movie. It was about three years ago at Christmas that my mom, who is a comic book fanatic, bought me Moore’s “Watchman” because I was such a fan of the movie “‘V’ for Vendetta,” the book also being written by Alan Moore. I didn’t think much of it, and so I let it sink to the back of my bookshelf for a year or two. I picked it up again upon the recommendation of a few friends who read it and were blown away. I was only halfway through when the movie was announced, and by the time I reached the end of the book one thing was clear: Zach Snyder is going to have one heck of a time making it a movie.

I didn’t consider it “un-filmable” as so many critics did, but I did realize that the task needed to be handled delicately. And if making the movie was not hard enough, Snyder had thousands of geeky fans waiting with both excitement and fear. Excitement that this was finally happening, and fear that it would be butchered. With all of this hype, plus the difficulty it would take to bring the book to the screen, the movie makers had a big job. In the end, the movie didn’t quite reach the level that people were wanting.

Obviously, books and movies are different media, and one great mistake the movie made is that they took the story from the book and plopped it right down into the movie. This worked at some points of the movie, like the origin scene of Dr. Manhattan, but often the things that worked well in print didn’t do so well on film. Books gives the oppertunity to ruminate on what is going on, and so a lot more information can be given in books. In the film, there is a lot going on and it would be hard to keep it all strait if you have not read the book.

Another major problem was that the parts that they chose to change really subtracted from the overall quality of the movie. The book portrays a world without hope that is wallowing in misery and on the brink of destruction, but it is all more subtle. I should mention that even though it is more subtle, every reader knows what is going on; the world is miserable and there is a nuclear war coming. The movie, however, didn’t present this reality through vague hints and small but noticeable indicators, but rather it was an ever-present reality that peppered every dialogue and discussion. In my opinion this was a bad move to make, because it was a huge distraction from the main story. They  changed the ending as well, but that wasn’t a bad move.

The movie makers had a big job to be sure, and an immense amount of pressure from the fans. Despite the fact that the movie could have been made a lot better, I would not consider it a dismal failure either. Zach Snyder, the director of Watchmen, took a great book, and made an O.K. movie out of it.

You know What Really Grinds My Gears…

I am a mac user, and as such I have grown to like Macs to some degree, but I just can’t deny the flaws that I have found in them. The biggest one that I can think of is that they just don’t seem to be compatible with just about anything you could possibly imagine. Every single program ever written needs to make the decision whether or not they even want to make their software available to Mac users, and if it is an important program that they just decide to leave out then I guess the Mac user will just need to learn to go without. The biggest thing that comes to mind is Microsoft Word. I find it funny how Mac users, myself included, builds Mac up as some sort of super-computer but then complains when they can’t use Microsoft word on it. This has been fixed because Microsoft decided to go ahead and make their software for Mac. Still the problem remains that every program or software ever written needs to be specially published for Mac just for Mac to use it.

This means that PCs are so much more versitile. Macs pretty much seem to have their own brand of everything, but a lot of simple programs like adware trackers and stuff like that aren’t really very professionally done. If I want to find a program that serves a specific, simple purpose, I generally track it down to some high school guy who made it one night in his mother’s basement. Most of the time they just don’t function all that great. This isn’t a problem for PCs because all you really need to do is type “adware tracker” into google and about 100 sites pop up giving you the top rated software for tracking adware. Type the same thing in, but adding “for Mac” and you get high school Freddie’s newest tinker-toy.

So I know that if I have a problem with this kind of stuff that there is this “boot camp” software out there that can make my Mac run a PC on the other side, but there are still limits. Yeah, the software is compatible now, but the drivers themselves are different. The hardware itself, like the actual graphics card for example, does not have the capacity to do the job that, for a PC it has no problems doing. Another problem is that some software that is great for PC work just on the PC aspect of the computer. That’s confusing, so here’s an example: if I download adware, then I get a program that tracks down adware on my computer, but it only sweeps through the PC portion of my machine. So if, say, I have a problem with adware on my Mac side and I download an adware blocker for PC on my PC side, then it will not help track down the adware on my Mac side because it just takes care of the PC side.

I like the ability to customise and tinker with my computer. This is why I seem to get a lot of viruses, which I will hand it to Mac, has been great at avoiding. But I think that my next computer will probably be a good ole’ PC.

Starbucks

First of all, I should mention that that this post is absolutely an excuse to procrastinate from my 20 page paper that is due, followed by a test that I need to study for.

I just think that Starbucks is kind of a funny place. Don’t get me wrong, if I were given Starbucks coffee I would drink it. I know that it recently lost a major taste test to some pretty bewildering places, and if I were given a choice then I would not choose Starbucks over some places that are a lot better, but I don’t necessarily oppose it. I just think that it is funny how the atmosphere of Starbucks is exactly the same no matter where you go.

Case and point: I just got back from a trip to the Bahamas, and while I was over there I noticed that there was a Starbucks in the middle of nowhere. Right next to this Starbucks there was a half-delapidated building that sold some beach junk, and the area was surrounded by Bohemian culture. Bohemians were riding around on their rusty bicycles with a gallon sized jug of water strapped to the back. And then there was this completelt out of place Starbucks, and sitting outside of the Starbucks were two white guys wearing business suites reading the newspaper…in the Bahamas they were wearing business suits. This whole scene was completely out of place because there were not even any white-collar businesses around. It just seemed very funny to me how in the middle of this tropical area where there was obviously very little money, and a fairly poor economy, there is a thriving Starbucks with two white guys sitting there in full business suites.

Just an observation.

Introducing Community…

I said before that I change my mind a lot when it comes to my future. I was recently contemplating whether or not to even go to grad school. This is the crossroads that I am at: either I complete seven more years of school and then teach on the college level, or stop now with my undergrad and do ministry. I originally wanted to spend about fifteen years in ministry before going for my doctorate, but then I realized that with a family this would be incredibly unrealistic.

Last night I spent a significant amount of time thinking through these choices I have. I have found in my time at Bible college that the Biblical text presents a view of the church where it is impossible to do church without being community-minded. In fact, that is what church is! It is bearing one-another’s burdens and using our “spiritual gifts” to benefit the church. Love and unity are not just a small section of what it means to be a Christian; it is all-encompassing. My overall passion is connecting people in the church with each other, and whatever I do as a job, this is what will be at the center of it. This is the thought that colors my decision for the future.

My original desire in being a college teacher was to benefit the church as whole through teaching the Biblical text on a very in-depth level. I said that it would be useless for me to teach college unless it accomplished the goal of building up the church. I still agree with that, but the more I pondered the idea of going this route the more I realised that my ultimate goal of creating community-mindedness would not be in my job description, and even if I make it a priority to do this, it would only be a secondary goal for my teaching job.

If I teach, then I could absolutely teach future church leaders about community-mindedness, but I would really only be teaching those who are willing to pay to come to Biblie college, where as my desire would be to work this into the church. Therefore, at least right now, my decision is to start working in the church.

Grad

I have recently been contemplating grad school. I know my goal after grad school, which is to do ministry where there is need to do ministry. The next step would be going into teaching Biblical Studies. The reason I want to do this is a post in itself, but the question I am faced with is where I want to do grad school. I am looking mostly at Trinity or Asbury, but depending on how finances work out I would love to go to Yale (looking at the school catalog I have found out that the classes they offer are pretty darn good). I am thinking of Trinity because although it is not on par with schools like Yale or Princeton, it is always seen as a giant in the world of Biblical Studies. This being the case, I just assume that it is a great school for Biblical Studies. I am considering Asbury on the recommendation of a professor here at CCU, who says that for the price it is a great school. Plus it is conveniently in my home town. This professor that recommended the school went to Princeton for a semester to get his Masters in Theology (only required eight extra classes tacked onto his M.Div). This seems like a good idea.

Of course I will change my mind in a week anyways. I always do.