It’s Sunday and that means it’s time for video blog number five. This week’s video was provoked by an AT&T flash ad I saw on a blog site. I’m not sure which one, but it was probably Appleinsider.
The video is short and speaks for itself.
My birthday passed recently. No, I won’t say exactly when. And It’s no secret, I don’t like them. Well, not all birthdays. Just not mine. I don’t like that kind of attention. This however seems to be something people can’t stand about me, and instead insist on finding a way to make a big deal out of it.
But I suppose at the end of the day I appreciate that people care, even if it is unbelievably annoying.
Well, since my friends and family seem to be full of wise-cracks over my disdain for birthdays, I thought I’d share the birthday cards I received from them. Don’t worry, there’s only two.
This one comes from my friend Amy who sarcastically struck out her “happy birthday” message.
If you read this blog often, you’ll also know that I absolutely loath children’s television. Especially Miley Cyrus. Well, not as a person. Just as a role model for my 10 year old niece. Well, I suppose based on that, my family seemed to think this card was perfect for me.
I’m really nothing of a poet. Some people seem to think in verse. I do not. However, tonight as I approached my house in the cold, these words seemed to come out of me even before I could sit down and write them. And, since that is uncommon for me, I thought I should honor whatever poet in me may exist. So, tonight I share this poem.
An Isolated Poem
I’m walking slowly.
I don’t have to. I want to.
I can hear the sound of my feet,
one by one
each as they meet the pavement.
The souls in my shoes,
they converse with the walkway.
They are numb from their efforts
and their arguments.
Yet still they discus everything
I can’t understand.
Memories and feelings.
People and places.
Generations I never knew.
Generations I’ll never know.
The roots of my being,
my histories, catastrophes.
All in a hundred split seconds.
Thupp. Thupp. Thupp. Thupp.
My skin learns harsh truth
from the air that passes over it.
A million needles on fire
press against my surface.
Yet the feeling is of cold.
And in spite of searching,
wishing, hoping, needing,
there is nothing to learn.
And under the weight of a knit hat,
Against the sides of my head,
my ears are pressed firm.
In spite of harsh elements,
they are comfortable.
They are warm.
They are the privileged members.
They contemplate nothing.
They do not care.
But that, they don’t even know.
And they’re content.
“…For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.”
There’s an important truth embedded here that I sometimes overlook.
“Lawlessness leading to more lawlessness…” Sin leads to more sin. Have you ever been stuck in a series of habitual sins? Have you ever told yourself that quitting cold-turkey would be too hard and so you thought you might try and ease yourself out of your sin pattern? I definitely have. It’s never worked for me and I’m betting it didn’t work for you either.
That’s because sin begets sin. When we sin, we sin more. That’s the problem. If we want to break our sin-patterns, we’ll have to stop more than that sin in specific, but focus on Sin as the grand tyrant it is.
I sometimes sit and think about how strange a time it is to be alive. In the world of technology, more has changed in the last 200 years than in all the time leading up to it. That’s pretty incredible. It means we have to be willing to look at everything with fresh eyes.
Even though there may be things that were true of the human experience for a very long time, they may very well not be true any more.
I was thinking especially about cameras. They’re less than 200 years old. In terms of an art medium, this is one that is extremely young. Even though we’d have difficulty imagining life without them. Which makes me wonder what kind of affect the advent of cameras has had on growing up.
It wasn’t until 1900 that the first camera was mass produced, and shortly after that it became something of a household staple. Regular families started having pictures of their kids. It wasn’t long before they started having pictures of their vacations, too.
What was it like for the parents seeing their children grow up with this crazy device that freezes a moment in time and saves it forever? It must have been fascinating.
The advent of personal video cameras, I’m sure, was a similar experience. When I was growing up, my family didn’t own a camcorder, but I was fascinated by them. I imagine that it would be a surreal experience for me to watch a preteen version of myself on screen. Yet millions of people now have that experience and don’t think twice about it. It just is the way it is.
Now it seems like something similar is happening again with the introduction of social media. Search YouTube and you will find millions of videos people’s children. There’s practically an entire generation of children that are growing up on YouTube. That’s bizarre.
It seems impossible to predict the effects of a rapidly mutating social and technological culture on Children. But part of me wishes I could start right now and experience it for myself.
sVery recently, a somewhat successful blogger, mother and Christian, made public her shift in thinking. More specifically, that she has become an atheist. I have to commend her honesty and bravery. If she was as active in her church as her post made it seem, she almost definitely has lost most of, if not all of, her church friends (which statistically among Christians would mean all of her friends. Of course, her own experience is all conjecture on my part).
I am not going to link directly to her post. Specifics aren’t terribly important and digital gossip is still gossip I’d like to avoid.
In her post which puts some background under he conversion, she links to a number of YouTube videos which decry Christianity and the Bible. The YouTube videos, like usual, take many of the harder passages from the bible and isolates them from the whole of scripture. Or, assumes a lot of things about the state of naturalistic thinking and the reason behind that.
In a few words, the woman remade these points with her own lexicon. Citing misogyny, slavery and child abuse as some of her biggest contentions with Christianity. Though in the length of the whole post, these were pretty small points. Perhaps the “wrinkles” in the fabric of her faith which eventually lent themselves to a full fledged tear.
When she really got down to a heated monologue it wasn’t about Christianity, it was about the Church.
This is long, but if you’re a Christian you ought to read it!
The woman absolutely did not want to serve as an elder in her church for a second term. The woman did not like being an elder. Being an elder was mostly about money. How to get it and how to spend it. She came to understand just how much money it took to maintain the large brick church building that stood empty six days a week. The amount of money it took made her sick. It was thousands and thousands of dollars every month. She thought about how all that money could be used to alleviate human suffering and misery and instead it went to to heat and cool and pay a mortgage on a huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week. She thought about the hundreds of dollars that she gave every month to maintain the huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week. She thought about how if she gave that money to a starving family or a hospital in Africa or a school in the slums of Brazil, she would be doing a much better thing than when she gave that money to heat and cool and staff a huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week. But the bible commanded that the woman give ten percent of her money to the church and not to starving people in Africa. The bible was more interested in the empty building and not the miserable people who were suffering and so was god. The woman did not want to be an elder anymore because she wanted to forget about that money that went to heat and cool the huge brick empty church building, but the woman felt like she had to be an elder. Because that is what christians do. They serve the church… or the the expensive brick building that stands empty six days a week.
What has she said here? She’s said, in extreme brevity, that there was a painful mismatch between the money they had and what they spent their money on.
In the case of this woman, it seems that her church failed to help her, or at least give her the tools, to iron out the theological wrinkles in her faith. If that isn’t one of the churches important functions, I’m not sure what is. But more than that, her church’s self-absorption led her to misunderstand the whole point. Unfortunately, it ended sadly. Though my own story must lead me to believe no one is out of God’s reach. There is still hope.
I’m heartbroken for this woman, and my own lack of faith leaves me fearful for the huge number of people in the current church system. The church cannot continue like this. It’s disgusting and stories like these are just the refuse of something that should be beautiful, but instead is disfigured and grotesque.
So, can it stop already?
Do you ever wonder why it seems like every movie looks awesome after you see the trailer? Especially action movies? I mean, we really can’t trust trailers. Well, not most of them anyway.
Remember the trailer for the movie Sunshine? It was the sci-fi action movie about the team of scientists headed to reignite the sun which was on the verge of extinction. The movie was alright. I enjoyed it. But it was nowhere as tense as the trailer had led me to believe. Or how about the movie The Day After Tomorrow? The previous movie from the doomsday director of 2012 and Independence Day? While ID was pretty awesome, The Day After Tomorrow was a pretty big disappointment, though you’d never have guessed based on the trailer. Or to continue down the road, how about the X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailer? That movie was terrible. But for some reason I still went to see it.
I could really keep listing movies. In fact, if you’ve caught the drift I’m going for, you can probably start naming movies yourself. It seems that regardless of what movie they make, they’ve got the art of a compelling movie trailer down to such a science that absolutely everything looks awesome.
You just can’t trust the trailer anymore. Some people I know wish they wouldn’t show trailers for anything. I used to disagree because watching the trailer was so much fun. But now, seeing no other alternative, I’m beginning to agree.
I have a hypothesis as to why this phenomenon is taking place: It’s all in the music.
Sometime around 1993-1995, someone in Hollywood figured out that epic sounding music was a sure fire way to sell movie tickets. If you watch the trailer for Terminator 2, you’ll notice that it fits pretty nicely in with modern trailers. The music is the most epic possible mash-up from the movie’s score. If you rewind into the the 80’s and watch the trailer for the first Terminator, it’s borderline silly by today’s standards.
But today, enter the music from such commercial artists such as Corner Stone Cues, X-Ray Dog or Immediate Music, and it all starts to make sense.
These groups (which I must say I’m quite a sucker for. I have them all in my iTunes library.) make music that is specifically intended to sound like soundtracks, although it’s not tied to any one particular movie. It’s like a store-brand soundtrack. Feels and sounds like the real thing, but it’s actually not. These groups, and groups like them, appear in virtually all trailers that don’t feature a song from a pop artist. And the songs are so awesome sounding that a string of action packed scenes placed on top of them automatically turn to visual gold.
While it makes the trailers pretty fun to watch, it almost seems like they’re not trying as hard to make really great—or at least really fun—movies, cause they know we’ll go see them anyway. Though, that might sound a little too much like a conspiracy theory
I imagine at this point it’d be pretty much impossible to go backwards to the way things used to be, which frankly, wasn’t so great either. (Really, I’m glad the guy with the weirdly deep, raspy voice isn’t working so much anymore)
I suppose for us movie-goers, we’ll simply have to become more scrutinizing in our taste. Which movies we choose to go and see will have to send a signal to Hollywood that a really awesome trailer isn’t enough to get the eleven bucks out of my pocket.
You’ll have to do better than that, Hollywood.
