THIS is why you never take a woman’s word for it that a war movie is good.
Did you ever see “Enemy at the Gates”? Same sorta story (without quite as much skanky), but that was a good war flick. This one sucks.
Journal Entry: My Life
I just wrote a short email to an old friend, to let him know I’m moving and, in a page, make up for not talking for six months. Err….
I ended it with a line that seemed right to the email, without really thinking it through before writing it. I DID think that line through after I’d read it, and it’s more profound than I meant it to be and more accurate than I would have expected it to be, too.
Thought I’d share it with you. I give you credit for helping make it true, anyway.
“Been thinking of you, and good ol’ times, and wanted to drop you a line and let you know I’m still alive, and life is (while not yet what I dreamed it would be) pretty damn good, and looking to get a little better, even.
“Hope you’re well.”
And that goes for all of you.
Harry Potter
Who would have guessed a children’s book could inspire so much adult language in its readers….
Harry Potter (Major Spoilers)
Okay, I’m halfway through the book, and here’s my most recent theory:
Harry is falling in love with Ginny, throughout the first half of the book. Well, I think Harry is going to just keep getting more and more obsessed with Ginny, and worried about her (y’know, with all the disappearances, and all the danger now that Voldemort is loose), and eventually he’ll just kinda flip out, and go make a deal with Voldemort to protect her.
But, of course, Dumbledore is watching closely, so he’ll confront Harry about it, and Harry will get really angry (like he did in book 5), and then Ginny will show up to tell him he’s being a total prat and he should be nice to Dumbledore, and Harry will totally lash out at her, and accidentally hex her, and then Dumbledore will try to restrain him and they’ll end up fighting all over this abandoned lava world until Dumbledore finally wins and leaves Harry for dead.
But then Voldemort’s drones will rescue Harry and put him back together. He’ll survive, of course, but…corrupted. More machine than man….
And then he’ll kill off all the Jedi.
Journal Entry
We bought the house in OKC. Everyone who reads this, knows that already. Most of them were there, even, before dinner.
We bought the house in OKC. A week from tomorrow is my last day at work in Tulsa. We’ve got the move, and I’ve got finishing up here, and then I’ve got all the learning my new job and (with any luck at all) we’ll have the hassle and stress of selling our Tulsa house. Nobody’s looked at it yet.
All that is to say, mebbe I’ll update again soon. Mebbe the new job will have enough bureaucratic slowness to it to grant me the downtime I haven’t had in a while. Then again, mebbe I’ll just spend all that downtime working on programming projects and reading articles about the nature of addiction.
Or, y’know, writing on my actual books. Who knows. It’s a crazy world, all ’round.
A Word of Advice
Never, ever, under any circumstances, ever, try Coca Cola Zero.
Ever.
Greatness: From Me to You
This is what I would have you know:
Life is big. Really big. It’s amazing. It’s…dynamic. We stop it from being so, every day, for our own comfort.
That’s okay. It’s nice to be comfortable most of the time. There’s a certain thrill to going camping, sleeping under the stars, eating fresh-caught fish pan-cooked over a little campfire. But…well, we don’t have to live like that. Camping is just a fun little bit of excitement we can sprinkle into otherwise comfortable lives.
What I want you to know, what I really want to get across to you, is that the comfort is something we’ve made, for our own sake. We haven’t changed anything underneath — it’s all still there. We CAN still go camping. You can go camping within an hour’s drive of Denver and it feels like the most remote wilderness in the world. Even with all the civilization that is Denver.
This is important. This is a big deal. You can step outside of your comfort, into excitement, into magic, into legend. It’s all there. Jason and the Argonauts, David creeping into Saul’s camp, fire from Heaven and so much for Baal. Not just that, though. Garden State. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. American Beauty (*sad sigh*).
Think of your favorite movie. Your life could be like that. It’s not, because it’s more comfortable to not live life like that. But you could wake up tomorrow and make your life like…whatever movie you’re thinking of. Life is that big, it’s that powerful.
I’m not asking you to. I’m certainly not suggesting. Hell, how often do I actually go camping? It’s nice to know it’s an option, though. Remember that, when you’re feeling trapped or bored or insignificant.
A Word of Advice
Never, ever, under any circumstances, ever, try to close on a house in a different city in a two-week timeframe.
Ever.
God: The Holy Temple
Why do you go to church?
Greatness: Constructed Reality and You
Here’s the thing: you’re already familiar with constructed reality on a day-to-day basis.
Have you ever had a dream that felt real? So real you couldn’t tell it was a dream until afterward? A dream in which all the pieces fit together, logically, within the dream (even if they seemed entirely absurd after you woke up)?
That’s a constructed reality. Dreams are our minds’ way of communicating to us, when we’re unwilling to listen to direct signals. It builds up a whole world for us, a whole universe, and lets us experience what we refuse to accept in logical impulses.
My point is this: our brains are GOOD at building realities. We all know it. We all experience it all the time.
Have you ever seen someone hypnotized? I very much hope so. It’s an amazing experience (being hypnotized, yes, but even just watching). You tell someone he’s a chicken and he begins to behave as though he’s a chicken. Yeah, that’s a silly one. My favorite is the three-year-old. Watch how someone becomes a three-year-old, within his own mind.
As a matter of fact…HAVE you ever been hypnotized? You can realize you’re participating in an imaginary universe (you’re conscious the whole time) even as you are completely submersed in it. You’re not ACTING, the suggested scene becomes truly real for you and imposes itself on you, but there’s a part of Man that can sit outside and watch, even as the body and mind are caught up in the illusion.
That’s a very important point, right there, and it’s what keeps the rest of what I’m saying from being just mad, useless ramblings. We are capable of stepping outside and watching the play, even as our bodies and minds are trapped within it. Most of us choose NOT to, which…
Well, you’ve heard that rule about hypnosis, that the hypnotist can’t make you do anything you normally wouldn’t do. That’s not entirely true. It’s possible, in normal hypnosis, to let the monitoring part of your mind…go to sleep. Most people don’t (they don’t trust the hypnotist), but it’s possible, and then you just go along.
It’s also possible, as a hypnotist, to build so deceptive a world, so captivating an illusion, that the environment itself (rather than your suggestion) causes the hypnotized to do something they wouldn’t normally do. Maybe you couldn’t Command a hypnotized woman to take off all her clothes in front of a huge audience, but you could convince her that her clothes were full of vicious, biting ants….
Both of those are real concerns. What we do, with our science and our logic and our arm’s-length consideration of philosophy, is put to sleep that monitoring part of our mind. We like to stop thinking of this world as an illusion, because that’s less WORK. It also means we no longer have the freedom to manipulate our own role within it, or to stop the play if it gets too absurd (or repulsive).
We need to be reminded, from time to time, that the reality we’re living in is just an illusion we’ve dreamed up for ourselves. We need to look at it from the outside because we (especially we Christians) know we have that power, that perspective. Constantly examine your life, your reality, to make sure it’s not misusing you, not leading you down paths you don’t want to follow.