Archive for Thoughts
August 11, 2006
Getting a Breath
5:00 pm | Religion | Thoughts | Comments: 9
A word that is often used in the English language, yet seldom understood, is “inspiration”. You’ll hear people tell you they were inspired to do things. Such things tend to be works of art or some other creative endeavor. Ask people about why they enjoy a certain song and they might tell you it’s very inspiring. The funny thing about inspiriation is that it’s something you feel, but it’s not an emotion. So what is inspiration?
A dictionary will tell you that inspiriation means “stimulation of the mind or emotions to a high level of feeling or activity.” I think we can all agree on this, but what’s really happening there? A stimulation makes me think of reacting to a certain color, or putting your hand on a red-hot electric range. Is it really as cut and dry as a mere stimulation, a programmed response by the brain? Maybe. It’s hard to know where to start with this. From my own experience, I know that alot of weblog posts, for example, are the result of what I would call inspiriation: some form of stimulus that gets me in a particular mood, at which point thoughts and feelings just start coming to me from nowhere. I remember a long time ago asking a music store clerk if he’d ever listened to Randy Edelman’s iconic sound track to the movie Gettysburg. “Only when I want to get inspired”, he replied. If I can be forgiven for stating the obvious, music is a very powerful inspirational force, which I believe nobody can escape. Getting inspired can mean having emotions evoked within you; that certainly fits our original definition.
Music, of course, isn’t the only source of inspiration in life. Life experience in general is a huge source of inspiration; you might say it’s the only source, if your idea of music is that it’s one way of relating the human experiece without words. Being in love might inspire a poet to write about his beloved. In fact, almost any emotion can be the inspiration for a poem. So we see that emotions can be inspirational in themselves. You could say, then, that inspiration is a medium by which people relate emotions to other people. It’s still not that simple though, because it’s not simply the inspiration that relates the emotion; it evokes in us that which relates the emotion. So once again the actual nature of the matter is enigmatic. To me, at least.
Inspiriation doesn’t have to be so closely tied to emotion, as it so often is, however. As Christians, we talk about the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. This use of the word is very literal; we believe in the very “in-breathing” of God, which gives us renewed spiritual life. Overall, I’d say that I’m still thinking about it all. What is it, really, that moves us when we hear a certain song, visit an old familiar place, or embrace a long-lost loved one? A good question, my friend.
August 2, 2006
Salt the Sidewalk!
5:23 pm | Religion | Thoughts | Comments: 11
Before I get written off as a criminal pessimist, allow me to illuminate you all. Work is a long, dark winter in which the only break in the clouds is knowing that we’re doing it for God’s glory. Christians don’t like their jobs or do them well because the work is so great; we do it to achieve a higher purpose. The work itself is what it is; long, tedious, frustrating, taxing, stressful, often quite a cutthroat business.
A Christian performs his calling willingly and gladly for Jesus’ sake; that doesn’t mean that Christians are all called to lives of glory and splendor - in this mortality. There’s a reason this life is referred to in the Bible as a “veil of tears”. This life is what it is: long, tedious, frustrating, taxing, stressful, often quite a cutthroat business. The only way we’re going to get through it without getting extremely depressed is looking to God for our help. All lasting joy is in Christ, none of it comes from this world.
I’m not saying that work is all bad. I personally enjoy long, dark winters. And I’m also not saying that there aren’t good times as well as bad. But let’s not get pie in our eyes and imagine that life and work is always going to be birthday cake and sparklers; it’s going to be tough and there will be lots of times when you will be looking desperately for a break in the clouds. I hope that you all know where to look when that moment arrives; in fact, I hope you will have been looking there all along.
July 31, 2006
Quick Thoughts of Summer
4:34 pm | Thoughts | Comments: 6
Mel Gibson: A drunken, anti-Semitic tirade? The only way The Giblet’s evening could have been worse was if it had all happened while he was being arrested for D.U.I. Oh wait, it did. A great quote from Gibson indicated that he “owned Malibu”. Not any more, Mel.
97 Degrees Farenheit: Today’s temperature is simply absurd.
The International Community: Befuddled as to why Israel didn’t honor its 48-hour airborne cease-fire. Let’s sit and think for a moment, folks. Why would a country currently at war be unwilling to ground its air force for a full two days? Because it’s a stupid thing to do. Israel is making some pretty sly moves; it throws a bone to the U.N. with the announced cease-fire, then continues operations against Hezbollah as usual. The confused and panicky questions thrown at the Israeli official this morning on the BBC News Hour were priceless.
College: Today I turned in the final assignments of my undergraduate career. To quote a local brogging legend, “The long, dark winter of work awaits me.”
June 29, 2006
Or was it?
8:20 pm | Sci/Tech | Thoughts | Comments: 24
I started up myspacing again. Sue me. At any rate, what I love about myspace is it’s so crapped up that every 3rd page load or so it encounters an error that is purportedly sent to the myspace technical group. I send about 100 errors to the myspace technical group just checking to see if I have a message. Those are busy people.
You know how on 9/11/2001 planes hit the World Trade Center towers, a field in Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon? There’s a good possibility we’ve been misled. I’m always up for a juicy conspiracy theory, and I found one recently. A while ago somebody in France put up a website called Hunt the Boeing. The website raises questions about the validity of the claim that the Pentagon was hit by a plane. I think that anybody who looks at the pictures of the Pentagon impact must conclude that there was no plane. Instead, the conjecture is that the Pentagon was hit by a missile that day.
Even if it wasn’t a missile as such, it’s obvious that it wasn’t a Boeing 757 with 80 tons of jet fuel. It wasn’t a plane at all. Why were we told it was a plane when it clearly wasn’t? Anybody’s guess, I suppose.
March 13, 2006
The Internet Life
9:51 pm | Culture | Sci/Tech | Thoughts | Comments: 5
I was talking with somebody yesterday regarding MySpace. In the quite likely event that some of you don’t know what MySpace is, it’s just another one of those websites where you post a bunch of information and pictures about yourself and add all your friends. What struck me the most about the conversation, and about my own experience with MySpace, is how much emotional energy people will invest in something as simple and potentially deceiving as MySpace. People apparently fall in love with other people just from a MySpace profile? I don’t really see the logic in that sequence of events.
It’s something I’ve been noticing with today’s youth (which I’m still considered a part of). Kids these days are communicating on the internet more and more. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Personally, I think we’d all be better off if Instant Messaging and Facebook/MySpace just disappeared. In fact, life wouldn’t be so terrible if weblogs disappeared. This is not to say that I don’t take part in or enjoy these things - in fact I do lots of IMing, Facebooking, and weblogging. That’s my generation, after all.
I’ve talked before about the pros and cons of weblogging. So what are the pros and cons of spending hours IMing and checking Facebook? I’m still thinking it over. The real problem is that, as with anything in this world, it can become an idol and take over your life. Online time and interaction is just another thing that needs to be brought captive to Christ in the life of a Christian. If you’re not a Christian, don’t worry about your online time, you have bigger fish to fry, believe you me.
March 10, 2006
Thoughts on Thoughts, and Other Thoughts
12:16 am | Random | Thoughts | Comments: 9
Thinking about thinking really isn’t that difficult. All you have to do is begin and you never know where you brain will take you. It’s not like reading about reading, which is terribly boring. Basically thinking is done in two ways. First is the way everybody else does it. Secondly you have the way I do it, which is what we like to call the “right way”. I’ll give you an example. Say you have a dog that poops in front of your TV. What do you call this? Clearly the dog, who is placing the poop strategically infront of your television because it knows that you pay all your attention to it oftimes, is being smart with its poop. This is opposed to dogs who are not smart with their poop. Such dogs include dogs who are indifferent with their poop and simply drop bombs randomly around the house, and also dogs that don’t realize they are pooping and get scared when they turn around and see it. With all that in mind, remember that it pays to train yourself to think and that reading SIO will help you attain such a lofty goal. Remember, the dry season is almost over and the summer of Bloggage 2006 will shortly be upon us. Prepare yourselves.
February 17, 2006
Post-Secondary Educational Terrorism
11:35 am | College | Culture | Thoughts | Comments: 6
In twenty minutes I intend to walk into DEV 109D and bomb a test. That’s right, folks. It’s not a suicide bombing, as that would be extreme.
We’ve been talking about diversity in Management class lately, a topic that is so worn out after two decades at Grand Valley that I could teach a graduate class on it myself. It’s always awkward to watch videos on diversity when you have a room of thirty white people who are all trying not to look at the one black dude in the classroom out of courtesy. Now I’m not saying that Grand Valley isn’t diverse, it actually is. Personally, I don’t see any particular need for a diverse campus.
Affirmative Action has two sides: those against it say that people should get things and go places on merit, not by some government-implemented system that boosts them. Those for it say Affirmative Action only guarantees that people who are meritous get that which they have earned or deserve. I side with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who says that a black man can achieve whatever he wants in America without the meddling of the government. That’s not saying there aren’t racists out there, which there certainly are. Racism is one of the issues we deal with in America, and we always will be dealing with it. There needs to be a balance, however, between protecting people’s rights and overreacting by hand-feeding people under the assumption that they can’t feed themselves when it’s been proven that they can.
February 16, 2006
Random Thoughts in the Early Morning
9:21 am | Random | Thoughts | Comments: 3
- Does anybody care about tech stuff?
- I think ducks are cool, ducks and penguins mostly.
- People shouldn’t wear shirts that say “Staff” on the back, it’s pretty lame.
- If I get one more medication leaving dumb notes in my shoutbox I’m going to burn somebody’s house down.
- A long time ago, or so I’m told, cornflakes were supposed to kill people’s sex drive. What was up with that?
- Speaking of sex, did you know that sex comes between quinque and septum?
- Wubble.
January 30, 2006
Democratic Process, the Terrorist Way
9:12 pm | Politics | Religion | Thoughts | Comments: 14
Was anybody not skeptical about how Palestine would handle democratic bric-a-brac like elections? Only the hardcore idealists. The Palestinians made the very wise and forward-looking move of electing a terrorist organization to run their pseudo-country. Funny thing about Palestine holding these elections; it was supposed to legitimatize the Palestinian goverment. Instead, the country is now in the hands of Hamas, a bunch of crazy Moslem nutjobs. The alternative to Hamas was Fatah, which, in contrast to Hamas, is a bunch of crazy Moslem nutjobs.
The Democratic Way was given a whole new flavor last saturday with the addition of the Crazy Moslem Nutjob Way. Terrorists Moslems with guns, members of Fatah, stormed the Palestinian parliament building in protest of the election results. Democratic Process says let the people decide; Crazy Moslem Nutjob Process says kill the infidels. Sounds to me like a match made in heaven.
Originally as I wrote this post, I inserted the word “radical” in between “crazy” and “Moslem” throughout the post. I removed it, because the truth is the sort of terrorist behavior we see out of these Hamas and Fatah lunatics isn’t all that radical within the Moslem system. What I love about all this is that we’re no longer seeing Moslems mad at “Zionists” and Israelis; now they’re hopping mad at each other. I can’t wait until the ultimate show-down when they all die in one massive mutual car-bombing and a real government can be set up in Palestine.
December 5, 2005
Beyond Mediocrity
2:59 am | Culture | Thoughts | Comments: 6
As promised to ex-blogger and sellout John, I’m talking about Harry Potter. Potter! What a noob. Sorry folks, but the kid hasn’t gotten a clue yet, and he’s almost allowed to drink in Germany. That’s pretty scary. I have always maintained that as far as movies go, the Harry Potter movies are O.K. movies. Not the best by any stretch of the imagination, mind you. There’s just a few minor issues I have with the films, and no I am not talking about witchcraft.
The biggest problem is the li’l fella himself. From the very first moments of the first movie, people have recognized and been in awe of Harry Potter. Why does he still act so freaking surprised about it? He’s dumb as a box of rocks, that’s why. Seriously Harry, after four years of being Mr. Celebrity why is it still such a big deal when random people know who you are? If Potter were smart, he could make some major bones with advertising gigs, maybe a sponsorship or two. Instead he wanders around in a state of clueless wonderment stumbling through one amazing coincidence after another.
What’s the deal with the Hogwart’s teachers, anyway? Seems to me that in every movie there’s some terrible danger threatening the very lives of the students and these amazing magical “masters” have no idea what’s going on or how to stop it. The fact that everybody at the school is at risk of dying in each movie doesn’t seem to send the message to parents that it’s not exactly safe to be sending their kids off to the place. In the fourth movie, Dumb-bledore not only doesn’t know what’s going on around him, he actually allows kids to enter a contest that might kill them. Yea, nothing says quality education like getting fried to death by a dragon or drowning in the lake while your professors watch helplessly. I hope Hogwart’s has a policy for giving out diplomas posthumusly.
Lastly, what ever happened to Draco? In the first couple movies he was actually a decent bad guy. In the latest film he got maybe 3 minutes of screen time. Pathetic. Another dumb thing about Harry Potter & Co. is the way they hold their magic wands like pistols. What’s next? Gangsta magicians holding their wands sideways? Is that even possible? I rate the new Harry Potter film 1 out of 10, because if I were 14 years old I would think Hermione was pretty cute.
