Monica's a jerk: loving, Invisible Children, NotW, going places.

Here's what I think:
It is not our job to make others unhappy. In fact, our job is quite the opposite. We are sent here not to be troublesome, not to pick at minor flaws, not to be unnecessarily bitter and mean; rather, we are put here to be more understanding, loving - to act in such prophetic empathy that we indicate Christ's life itself. We are human. We are sinners. Under that 'bitch's' or that 'asshole's' circumstances - with her upbringing, childhood, mental illness, heartache, genetic make-up, scars, everything - you would have done exactly the same thing. There is no special part of your soul that makes you more likely to do the right thing; there is no 'spark' in you that makes you good and other people bad. There is nothing about you - raw, stripped-down, bare you - that makes you better than any other person. If you do the right thing, it's because God has blessed you with the discretion and the motivation - a result of many things, an upbringing or a strong conscience or whatever. And when you do the wrong thing - because inevitably you do - it is not any bit excusable for the reason that you do the right thing most of the time, or do the right thing more than others do - or for the reason that you think you had justification or are somehow unique in a way most other people aren't.

This humility, combined with a love of God, should motivate us to love other people. Not to judge them, or be continually annoyed by them, or idealize them, or to think they're stupid, but to love them. Loving people does not equal talking behind their backs or acting mean or making snide remarks or calling them stupid or judging them, ever.

How do we forget so easily that we are to love?
If you're so convinced they are wrong (Bill and Ann), if you are so intent on changing them, you should remember that you're not going to change people if you don't love them. That's just not the way it works.
And there's not much point in it any other way.


It's occurred to me that you don't have to be going somewhere to be doing something worthwhile. As a senior in high school, I'm tired of 'going places'. I'm ready to settle down a bit, and start doing the things I want to do. Because, after all, I could die before I get old. And I want to have something done by then.

Which is not to say I'd like to stop making progress. On the contrary, I'd like to start. Because, you know, you can't make any progress when you're always working towards leaving the place you're in.

My little brother ordered some stuff off the Invisible Children website and it came in the mail today (and by today I mean somewhat recently - this post has been a draft for a while). (I love that kid. He definitely figured many things out much earlier than I ever did - he's twelve.)* What he bought was a t-shirt and bracelet. What he got was a t-shirt, bracelet, about four boxes, a DVD, lots of cardboard and foam, some pieces of paper about what he bought and about some more stuff, and also lots of cool colors and stuff. The excessive use of the word 'stuff' in this paragraph (count: 4, I think) was unintentional, but I think it provides an accurate implication as to the thematic focus on 'stuff' here. The Invisible Children organization has sure got it right. When I send my money to them, I really just want stuff. I might act as if I'm trusting them to give my money to people in Uganda that need it, but that's just a fallacy because what I really, really, deep-down-inside want is some nice, squishy non-biodegradable packaging material. And (I'm speaking to the people who run Invisible Children here) make sure you hire at least one more designer because you decorated the DVD case (note the use of a box! Not even just a DVD slip like NetFlix uses!) just fine but the outside of the box was just a little dry for my taste - try some more color!

Ultimately, though, Invisible Children people, I'm impressed with you. You're doing a fine job. I really respect all the money you put into production and salaries and stuff. You even put an extra piece of cardboard around the DVD box in case it fell open or something. That, on top of all the styrofoam - you can never be too careful! And here's the kicker - I went to your website, to check out your financials, and nobody will ever guess what I found. More colors and neat designs and emotionally swaying pictures and stuff!! Right there, on the annual report. So, thank you. I really feel, here, that I have "become part of the story".

Interesting to me that an organization cannot motivate our society to give money to a people without any without exploiting our flashing-lights, smoke-and-mirrors materialism - they have to make cool videos and provide the option of neat clothes and make it attractive to lure us in. I'm disgusted by all parties. Myself included and above all.

(I understand that this was unnecessarily caustic. Invisible Children, I really don't hate you, I promise.)

*Placing groups of parenthesis right exactly next to each other except for a measly period and space is the new cool, if you didn't know.


Speaking of materialism, who knows the brand Not of This World? This is a brand marked by the fashions of the time - trendy, changing, tight - with a Christian message. I don't really have anything against this brand or anything, but it kind of bothered me when I noticed that its chosen, official Bible verse is Colossians 2:8: "Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ." What is this organization doing if not catering to the world? If not trying dearly for manipulative persuasion? - "Christians can be cool, too! You don't have to be unpopular to be a Christian. Look! I believe in Jesus and belong to the world, and am desperately clinging to this fallen nation."



I am an idiot. I just had one of the most humbling experiences of my life. I am an idiot. I got done writing the bit on Invisible Children, and then went back and read my bit on loving at the beginning of the post, and what a punch in the gut. I am such an idiot. I think I'm gonna publish this anyway, just so everyone knows what a jerk I am.


Currently reading:
the Bible
Death of a Salesman (or, rather, should be reading - it's for school)
the latest issue of PopSci, yay!
nothing. :(

Currently listening to:
Jon Foreman (guess what: his song, "White as Snow" -> Psalm 51)
Wavorly (guess what: their song, "Sleeper" -> Ephesians 5:14. I think.)
Something Corporate
Esterlyn

Nonchalance, humans suck at loving, this life in time, and perseverence.

Somewhat fragmented post today:

Why, please, is it a good thing to not care what anyone else thinks of you? Isn't that selfish? Isn't that just a clever excuse to get away with anything, to rationalize anything you might have done that you would have felt sorry for? If it's not, "Everyone else does it, so it's okay," it's "The only reason somebody else doesn't do it is that they're not unique and assertive like I am."
Not always the case, of course.
I just think that the only vacuum it's good to live in is the one in which God rules completely.



Humanity sucks at loving, I'm finding. I thought that I had eliminated all expectations of man but I thought wrong, because my standards have recently been lowered a step further. It is very evident to me lately that we are ultimately selfish. As much as we care about someone, as much as we love him or her, it is fundamentally in our nature to choose ourselves when we should choose others, when it is love to choose another. It comes that if there is a decision between doing something for someone else's good and doing something that might make us satisfied or feel good or benefit us, it takes a lot not to choose the latter. It either takes a lot of God making us better or a lot of the kind of love that is in action completely selfless but is only maintained that way because it is entirely selfishly rooted. That is, the kind of love in which it's not really much of a sacrifice at all (because it doesn't feel that way) to us to sacrifice ourselves. (Am I making any sense?)
It seems that we are not loving someone at all each time we don't put him/her first. In that moment we don't love.*

I knew that human love was never perfect, but I was under the impression, for some reason, that it could be pretty much unconditional. I was so wrong though! It takes so much deliberation for it to be even relatively unconditional. It is not easy to love someone all the time, no matter what. (It is impossible to love perfectly - that is, to never screw up, to never hurt [i.e. cause any detriment to] a person - but this is beside the point, I suppose.) We flare up, and lose control, and for a moment don't love. We are apathetic, or lazy, and forget to always be loving. We are stubborn, hold grudges, and are unable to eliminate baggage enough to just allow love to flow. We are judgmental, or not understanding, and it warps our perspectives.
We don't only fail in love under ignorance, we also fail under precise clarity.

I am very bothered recently by the nature in me that stops me from loving when I am perfectly aware that I should, the way in which I could, and what is stopping me from doing so.

I suppose I am just discouraged, and sad. Humanity rears its ugly head always, it seems, when I least expect it.
The best we can do, I think, and what we are obligated to do, is to love deliberately and furiously. A common theme for me of late, I suppose.

*The truth in this depends on, of course, what you consider 'love' to be, and instances in which 'love' is not.



It seems lately that endings are never good. Even if that which is ending was not good, the best we can hope for is bittersweet, for there's always the longing for it to have been better.



It used to trouble me that this life was so short and minimal compared to what eternal life should be. How could that be? Why would God have even given it to us? What's the purpose? But I'm developing a new perspective. I am so limited by my perception of time and am trying very much to overcome that. Suddenly I'm seeing this life as only a moment of truth, of sorts. A decision. A climax. A struggle. It's organized in the confines of time perhaps to indicate its impermanence and temporality (dictionary.com says the word is "temporalness" but I prefer this) in comparison to eternal life. I think, maybe, I am seeing it as a momentary break in eternal life. It is the means of reaching eternal life (and I'll point out that by eternal life I mean the afterlife inclusively) or, rather, the road you walk before you get there.
This is really, really hard for me to express. Do I make any sense?



I know I'm not done falling; I know I'll never be. My only goal - and still a very lofty one - is to always get up knowing a little something more.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
Winston Churchill

"Successful men keep moving."
Conrad Hilton

"For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again."
Proberbs 24:16



Current music:
The Classic Crime's new Seattle acoustic EP, except minus all the songs that aren't on their purevolume, because Circuit City and Wal-Mart and work hate me and don't have it in stock. :(
Still Fighting It and Fred Jones, part 2, by Ben Folds

Currently reading:
nothing. :( Every time I pick up a book I feel guilty because I should be doing homework.

My duty is to love and boys with long hair.

Title sounds like my duty is to love and my duty is to boys with long hair. Oops.
Topics: Boys with long hair, and 'my duty is to love'.

I am finding myself becoming more and more jaded and I cannot reason myself out of it. I don't enjoy it. I hate it. Help me!

A friend (nahidface) asked me my opinion on this issue: When is the time to abandon our responsibility to keeping peace in order to fight, and when is the time to sit back and watch injustices occur?


My reply was something like this:


First, my primary responsibility is and always will be to love.

Second, if I am going to fight for a reason that is not purely stemming from love, I will be fighting for truth. Truth, to me, is what is eternal, lasting, and top priority. Truth is what affects beyond any earthly influence.*

Third, any other fighting I do should be a direct result of love. If I fight injustice, it should be because I love God and His people, and thus do not want them to feel the effects of injustice. If I fight hunger, it should be because I love God and His people, and thus do not want them to be hungry. If I fight a tyrannic government or power, it should be because I love God and His people, and thus don't want them to be oppressed. Etc.
The minute I begin to fight out of hatred (I would like to say anger.) towards the people who are doing the injustice, or making people hungry, or oppressing a people, rather than fighting out of love for the suffering, is the minute, I think, that I go wrong. The minute I begin to fight out of selfishness -- to further my reputation, or appear altruistic, or get attention, or to make friends or find a good boyfriend or earn money or get a cool new t-shirt, or so many other reasons -- is the minute I go wrong. The minute I begin to fight out of pride -- believing I'm doing good for the world rather than God is doing good for the world through me (which can be interpreted in many, many different ways, I think) -- is the minute I go wrong. The minute I begin to fight just out of habit, even, is I think the minute I go wrong. And many other possible distractions. The minute I abandon love to fight is the minute I go wrong.
Because fighting is not, I don't think, good, unless necessary. It is disturbing the peace and joy.
I don't even think fighting just for the sake of justice or un-hunger (etc.) is good. We should fight because we love. Again, I believe the minute we abandon love to fight is the minute we go wrong. And so if fighting means un-loving (which isn't even hating!), in any way whatsoever, if it means un-loving Hitler or racists or Saddam Hussein or serial killers or rapists, then it should be avoided. If our desire to fight for anything ever conflicts with our duty to love, it should be set aside. Love should never be abandoned.


Would like to point out that this is only my idea of an ideal. I am utterly unsuccessful. And the idea's awfully recent, anyway.
Gandhi, I think, was the best this earth has seen (that has lasted in the history books, at least).


*Of course, I believe that most often fighting for truth is a direct result of love anyway. A love of truth? Is this a valid love (that is, a love worth fighting for)?
If it is, then that would make a love of justice a valid love. Is fighting for a love of justice different than fighting for justice?



Awfully unrelated, but: geez, I am getting frustrated with long-, straight-, shiny-, soft-haired boys. It's so unattractive and unmanly to me, and it seems so completely about appearance because, really, we all know long hair is inconvenient, especially if you're going to bother conditioning and treating it constantly so it feels and looks nice and especially if you're in a cool band and rock out on stage all the time. Why do heterosexual, talented guys enjoy looking like girls? There seems to be no reason other than to be stereotypically unstereotypical.
To each his own, I suppose.



Just finished The Great Divorce, by C.S.L. Will hopefully get time to talk about later.



Current music:
all of the songs on The Almost's purevolume.
Truth in Sincerity (album), by Amber Pacific
Still Fighting It, Ben Folds (Five? I don't think Rockin' The Suburbs was a solo album.)

pride, music, love is real, tied to the flesh

Pride is an enormous subject with me. I'm gonna start with a definition. Ambgtr (maybe I should start using nicknames like companionableills -- I know I'd have fun with that) can attest for the semantics problems we've had because we didn't bother to give our personal definitions.

When I speak of pride (most often, at least, and when I'm speaking of it here), I'm referring to pride the sin. Pride the sin is believing that you are good without God. It's trying to be God without Him. It's attributing your talents or skills or hard work or whatever it may be to yourself, rather than to Him who gave them to you.
(It's horribly ludicrous, in other words.)

The Devil is the epitome of pride. He works with pride, through pride; he is pride. Pride is something I have really struggled with, and, to me, it is the root of all sin. A man is greedy because he wants more things, and he wants more things very often because he wants more than his neighbor, and he wants more than his neighbor because he believes himself to be the best. It gets more complex than that, but that is only one example.
In short, if we didn't believe ourselves above having God in complete control, then He would be in control. If He was in control, we wouldn't sin any longer.

So, um, that was an introduction to pride? I originally was going to say a lot about it but it's 12:22am three days later and I haven't finished my homework and this post is long enough anyway. Next post, probably.



This is a blog from the Andrew McMahon of Jack's Mannequin and Something Corporate, and it's what I want from my music. I am very, very picky. This might sound very cliche and not at all unique, but I look for music that is real and sometimes I have trouble finding it.
Music is a bit of heaven, and a powerful emotional device, and a means of motivation, and a method of catharsis, and whatever you want to take from it, really. It can be damaging. I am very careful with my music.



Sometimes I feel things in my chest and know that they're not necessarily lasting. It's not until I feel them in my gut that I know they're there for good. Those are the things that tug at my heartstrings. That's what is my core.

I was talking to someone I really look up to the other night and he expressed a feeling he had, before conversion, of emptiness. He felt it inside of him, physically. He'd spend time around strong Christians and sensed a core, stability that he was missing.
God is my rock.

All of this is such great evidence to me that we are truly tied to the flesh. I am not a materialist or empiricist and really, philosophically, often lean more towards idealism (I suppose technically I'm a dualist maybe?), but my faith tells me that our reality is, in fact, inherently real. I cannot prove this -- my TOK (theory of knowledge - a required class for the IB program) classmates, or at least the ones that discuss things with me, know what I mean. It is a matter of faith and so I take it to be true. God tells me that He made all things and they are good. I take that to mean that my body and the things around me and the world I live in are useful tools in knowing God, becoming closer to Him, loving Him and loving His people, and I believe that the things God put on this earth can be and are used by Him to reach us. Music, food, water. The question is, to what extent? I'm not actually going to get into this yet, though.



I'm sure we've all heard DesCartes's "Cogito ergo sum. [I think, therefore I am.]". (What a coincidence because after writing this I read this week's TOK chapter and it talked about this.) Love proves my existence to me the same way Descartes doubting proved his (he may doubt that everything is real, but there has to be a doubter and so, he exists). I love people, and so something is being loved. I can't technically prove the existence of that something, but someone is certainly acting upon that something, no matter how little basis for doing it that someone has. I guess this is part of what I was trying to say at the beginning of this post.

On a kind of irrelated (I'm gonna get way ahead of you all and point out to myself that this isn't a word) note, love (and, really, emotion in general, but I like talking about love) is much more real, philosophically, to me than anything else. In TOK we talk about the ways of knowing (emotion, language, perception, thought) and really, the only one I really trust is emotion. I won't go into why the others are generally very unreliable (maybe another time) but emotion is something, really, that is pretty reliably outside of ourselves. I'm getting myself kind of tied up here because all my ideas for the effects of emotion rely pretty much on perception or language, but for the most part emotion is not really part of us. Though we might have control over emotions, the very fact that we might want or have to have control over them indicates that they are separate ('outside', I think, is not the right word) or not of ourselves. Emotions uniquely make us act certain ways -- it's not like when I see a tree and so decide to walk around it (and so the tree made me do something), where I could very easily not walk around that tree. I made a conscious decision to walk around the tree. I didn't really have to, but I, myself, decided to and made me do it. Maybe, though, I was feeling particularly masochistic that day and so instead of walking around the tree I ran into it quite painfully, probably. If I didn't have those bad feelings of myself, that emotion, I'm sure I would have avoided that tree. Or maybe I was feeling bad about myself but I thought about it and realized that walking into a tree was an awfully ridiculous thing to do, so I went around it. My point is, I still thought about it. If I didn't have that emotion, I wouldn't have given it a second thought at all. I would have walked around the tree because that's generally what common sense would have me do. But when I have this emotion, it requires some thought or control to walk around the tree when I otherwise would do it automatically.

All I'm really trying to say here is that emotion is pretty reliably (not provably [haha! didn't think that was a word], I know) not of ourselves. (But this is a ridiculously knotted argument because it may in fact rely entirely on perception [that is, sense-data, for those of you who read the TOK book]. How sad.)

This is not to say that emotion is always correct (not the word I want, really) though. Example: Once, I had a dream that somebody I knew did something really, really stupid and irritating. I woke up mad at him, and couldn't shake that anger for about a day and a half. I even talked to him about it. Completely unbased (what is that red squiggly line doing there?!) emotion.


Maybe, though, I'm mistakenly considering 'perception' as a way of knowing (which, to me, mostly includes language) and our 'sense-data' (we have sensations of color, texture, heaviness -- the color, texture, weight itself is a sense-datum) to be the same thing.
Well shooot. That switches things around a lot, I guess.


So I went maybe a little wikipedia/link crazy on this one. Maybe not. I also have discovered that my vocabulary sucks. In the normal sense but also in the I've-got-to-stop-making-up-words sense.
This is one of my more rambly (another red squiggly line :[ ), stream-of-consciousness posts and I'm going to apologize to and virtually pat on the back anyone who did me the favor of reading through it. Maybe not as high a substance-to-word ratio as desirable, but I'd still like to hear what you have to say.

Currently reading:
Catch-22, Joseph Heller

Current music:
Between the Trees
Notre-Dame soundtrack
First Time, by Lifehouse
Twenty-Four, Switchfoot
Globes and Maps, Something Corporate

love, observable data and the origin of life, belief

I think a lot can be told about a person in the way he or she loves. I don't believe this tells whether this person is good or bad. I don't even believe the amount of love in a person's life tells that, because I'm talking about love(a): giving a piece of your heart to someone, being attached to someone; not love(b): you are my neighbor and I am nice to you, I put you before myself because I'm not a selfish person. Love(b) takes integrity and effort. It is not more shallow than love(a) but in many ways it is less complex and encompassing and dynamic. Love(a) comes, for the most part, naturally and it takes effort to fight it and we truly express this love in very different ways. (Gary Chapman, actually, has consolidated these into what he calls the five love languages.) Anyway, I guess what I really want to say here is that if we've seemed to lose ourselves our best way to get back on track with our identity is by looking at our caring for those close to us. I only say this because I have experienced it, and maybe I have no idea whether it's true with anyone but me. But when I seem to blend in with those around me, or, rather, when everyone in the crowd seems to have a stronger personality than I do (or whatever it is), if I look to how I care about people, to those I really love, that love is strong and true and tangible in my actions and feelings. And so I know that I'm real.
I think that I originally had more to say about this. Oh well.



Anyway, another heated discussion in biology yesterday. I'm gonna illustrate here the point I don't think I communicated very well in class:
We are studying possibilities for the origin of life and I have a problem with it because they are taught as theories and so, in other words, they are presented as consented fact.

Science is based entirely on observation. We look at the world around us, observe the way things interact with each other, watch nature, detect patterns, and draw conclusions that -- emphasized strongly by the teacher ("Proof is the bad p-word! No such thing! We don't ever say 'fact'!") -- are justifiable but not set in stone. (Justified vs. unjustifiable is a topic among my friends in TOK, actually. Maybe I'll bring it up later.) There are entire systems set up (the scientific method, for example) that ensure that scientists are drawing valid conclusions and not being hasty. Complex processes are required in the scientific community, always encouraging the researcher and observer to think creatively but always completely objectively. And nothing is (that is, should be) accepted by the scientific community unless it has successfully passed through this security system.

Every single scientific believer/researcher/student/whatever that puts faith in one of the 'theories' for origin of life is brushing the "We only draw valid conclusions!" doctrine off of his shoulder with a scoff. The observable data that is the entire foundation for every single valid scientific conclusion drawn (every theory) is made up in the origin of life theories. The problem with figuring out what was going on at the creation of life is that at the time, life hadn't been. So, um, we weren't there to observe it. Nobody knows, or has any way of knowing, the composition or state of earth a kajibillion years ago, and science isn't even close to being agreed on any possibilities concerning that topic.

Every theory I've heard for the origin of life is a great, plausible possibility for how life began. It is not a valid conclusion. The only conclusion that can be drawn is, "If the circumstances on earth were exactly like the ones I made up for my experiment, life probably would have begun this way." If somebody could show me that a meteor containing organic matter landed on earth under the right conditions a kajibillion years ago, then I would say, "Yeah, you know, panspermia is almost certainly the way to go with how life began." If someone could confirm that Miller and Urey were right on in the atmospheric conditions they created with their experiment I'd be of the opinion that Oparin was way cool. If someone was able to prove to me (or even just give some evidence!) that there was a lack of atmosphere on earth and the sun's rays weren't as intense a kajibillion (which is, in fact, a mathematical term [incidentally I'm lying]) years ago, then I would have no trouble agreeing that the top 300meters of the ocean probably froze over and that whatever origin of life idea that depends on this condition I can't remember is probably correct.




It is very frustrating for me when people assume that I am stupid or ignorant because I am a Christian. I will bet those people a thousand dollars of which I am only sort of in possession that I have thought about it a significantly greater amount more than they have. I'm an intellectually- and logically-based, critical, inquisitive person. I have a lot of trouble believing something if it hasn't been logically and rationally worked out for me. I ask the same questions you do, and then I find answers to them.
I am so sure this topic will come up again, but for now I will leave you with some lyrics and a recommendation to read some C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity, specifically.

The Truth, by Relient K
And I've collected all these thoughts
and I'm dying just to lose them
and if your words are true or not
I'll die trying to prove them

But I'll just have to accept
That my mind is so inept
When the only thing that's left
For me to do is to trust you

Convince me
Because I really need your help
Oh convince me
Because I can't see this for myself

I'll put the emphasis on the evidence
Begging for the proof (whoa)
Sometimes the hardest thing to believe
Is the truth

This is so unnerving
I know you've never lied to me before
But the things you're telling me
I can't yet believe yet can't ignore

But I'll just have to accept
That my mind is so inept
And the only thing that's left
For me to do is to trust you

I'll put the emphasis on the evidence
Begging for the proof
Sometimes the hardest thing to believe
Is the truth

You said to place our lives into your hands
Confide in what you'll do
Sometimes the hardest thing to believe
Is the truth

It's a world full of cynics
Who say to stay alive in it
You gotta stick with what you know
But the soul is always aching
For the heart to start taking
A chance by letting go
So let go
Let go
Sometimes the hardest thing to believe
Is the truth

You said to place our lives into your hands
Confide in what you'll do
Sometimes when you're trying to sleep
And all your doubts and your faith don't agree
It's because
Sometimes the hardest thing to believe is the Truth


Current music:
Daisy, Switchfoot
Darlin', Between the Trees
The Truth, Relient K
Rules and Regulations, Rufus Wainwright

Currently reading:
Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller