i've eaten an inordinate amount of thai food recently.

imagine my confusion at receiving fortune cookies, which i'd thought was a feature pretty much solely associated with chinese food, i guess it was more pan-asian than i'd imagined. anyways, a couple of the fortunes i found curious, so i'll share them here. the first one said:

you will be rewarded for your patience and understanding.

the other one said:

with integrity and consistency, your credits are piling up

any and all insight, constructive or otherwise, is appreciated.

feeling: slightly confused
thinking of: never working out before seven again. ever.
music: "complicated" avril lavigne

that pt barnum was on to something.

i remember when i was in middle school about twelve or thirteen, i knew this guy his name was brandon, who was quite a bit older, five or six years. usually people that age have very little use for people in middle school, brandon wasn't really all that different that's not to say he wasn't a good or even a nice guy, he was definitely that, because i guess people of any age have very little use for people in middle school. anyways, i guess that i was seen by him as sort an exception to that rule because we became friends, pretty good friends too, in a lot of ways, he was the first person who i can say was ever a mentor to me.

well you know how it is, when you're that age and you've got a friend who's that much older, you tend to pick things up from them, and the thing that sticks out that i picked up from brandon was music. now beyond the fact that he introduced me to both U2 and steve taylor, those particular artists have very little in common. i mean you'd have to have been hiding under a rock to not be at least slightly familiar with U2 and you'd have to have been looking underneath some rocks to have heard of steve taylor, so consider today a bit of an education. sometime in the early 80s, taylor wrote a song called "am i in sync?" which cited as inspiration a woody allen quote saying "i don't want to acheive immortality through my work, i want to acheive it through not dying." what the song gets into is the idea of people willingly (on some level) looking foolish in order to ensure some sense recognition by a greater than average number of people or rememberance for a greater than average number of days, weeks, months or years.

you had to have known this wouldn't simply be about a song, and that the reference to pt barnum wouldn't be there for nothing, he's the one who told us that there's a sucker born every minute, but i'll get to that in a minute. one of the features of pop culture these days, twenty years or so after steve taylor wrote his song, is the reality television show, in which people willingly (on some level) look foolish in order to ensure some sense of recognition by a greater than average number of people and rememberance for a greater than average number of days, weeks, months or years. so there's this show, it's called american idol, i bet you've heard of it. you know how it goes, what ensues is the willing public humiliation of a great many (nearly without exception unwitting) people in exchange for a sniff of fame. they're not the only suckers though, we're all suckers, even me. maybe we don't end up assaulting any judges eardrums necessarily, but while we're at the same time disgusted by the whole thing and not so inadvertently amused by the humiliated, the producers back a dumptruck full of money up to the bank vault and fill it full of the advertising dollars we make available to them.

and that's not even the worst part because i saw an article the other day that said that producers are set to put together a "christian" version of the show, obviously it won't be called "christian idol" or anything like that, idolatry being a pretty severe violation of commandment number two and all. now there's a lot that i could say, mostly about the sort of subculture that christianity promotes for itself seeming largely incapable of coming up with an original idea and subsequently piggybacking on any idea someone else has that makes a halfway decent amount of money, but i'll save that for another day. so the show won't have idol in the name, instead it'll be called "gifted," the obvious connotation being that the finalists received their ability to sing from the Almighty, those weeded out in preliminary rounds having recieved them ostensibly from satan, who knows, really, i could be wrong about that.

i don't suspect that the program will want for contestants, i hope that i'm wrong about that and that a dearth of willing participants will make the "idea" people realize just how silly this whole thing is. but in the end it seems as though that pretty much no group of people is exempt from the desire for quick fame, and there are a couple things that seem noteworthy. that there isn't a significant difference between those in secular and religious circles with regard to the desire for fame. the difference is that "gifted" will be ostensibly about using one's gifts for the benefit of God's kingdom. i don't suspect that will be the case as much as we'll see people who want to be famous for Jesus. the other thing that seems pretty interesting to me this is the first "christian" attempt at a reality show and that it's an adaptation of the one that has the glossiest finish, the least amount of rough edges and most stresses perfection, i don't think is at all a coincidence.

i'm wondering if a tv show has to do the same things people do to become christian.

feeling: like a sucker
thinking of: getting on "gifted" i'm quite talented, really.
music: "am i in sync?" steve taylor

third of three

so we're very stubborn and simple people.

i suspect many will disagree with me, but it's not the government's job, especially in a secular entity such as a democratic republic, that is to say a non-theocratic nation, to acknowledge God in its rhetoric or its symbols. is it a nice thought? for many it certainly is, and one that provides a great deal of comfort. both the level and the type of comfort that come with this issue, however, are potentially dangerous to anyone who has a desire to cultivate a faith that is alive on a level deeper than the surface.

people are so worried about God being acknowledged by the government or being a part of the pledge of allegiance, or whatever, nearly seeming to take personal offense when that acknowledgement is threatened, it's sort of ridiculous. i bet that nobody even asked God if he wanted to be in our silly pledge, not because he wouldn't want to be glorfied, but because he wouldn't want to be co-opted into something that is far less than what he is. don't get me wrong, i love our country and i love God, but what bugs me is that when we tie God up with every hokey lil patriotic sign or banner, we elevate america to a level equal with God or we diminish God to a level equal with our country, idolatry on one hand and blasphemy on the other, not so warm and fuzzy anymore, is it?

when people's fights for faith are over stuff like this that is because of the context, in the final analysis, trivial, the strength of witness is weakened, not strengthened. one thing tony campolo says from time to time is that america is babylon, it's the best babylon, but it's babylon nevertheless, and that when our focus is on babylon, it is necessarily not on God's kingdom. i suspect God wouldn't care if he was acknowledged by any nation in its rhetoric and symbols if those of us inhabiting that nation who purported to represent him did a better job acknowledging him with the way we lived.

there, i'm finished.

feeling: marginalized
thinking of: the scourge of real simplicity
music: "americanism" MxPx

second of three

so where was i? oooh yah, the pledge of allegiance.

well you know how it is, one good turn deserves another, and so the ruling fills the folks on the other side full of piss and vinegar, which is to say that they're offended. they say things like the ruling is another step in a process that will deprive the faithful and devout of their freedoms, and that bad things are in store for the country because of yet another refusal on the part of the government to recognize the Almighty, or in any case a concept thereof. so naturally, they decide to fight it tooth and nail. all the way to the u.s. supreme court the case goes where it's thrown out on a technicality, as the court ruled that the guy who brought the case to the 9th circuit court didn't have the standing to press the case on his daughter's behalf. so "under God" gets to stay which, one might imagine, would have satisfied those conservative types of the mind of defending this sort of innocuous civil religion.

if one was imagining that, one might most definitely have been mistaken, because really it just seemed to piss them off, mostly because they didn't feel that it went far enough. they felt as though the case should have been judged by its merits and they wanted the supreme court to say definitively and unequvocally that the idea of taking "under God" out of the pledge of allegiance was without merit. the sentiment was that the supreme court had a chance to significantly reinforce, well i'm not actually at all sure what they wanted to reinforce beyond a sort of rubber stamp sanction of certain symbols that give people warm fuzzy feelings.

i say that mostly because when the judicial system has in the past ruled in favor of keeping those kinda phrases on national symbols the reason given in the majority opinions has been that those kind of phrases are nothing substantial when it comes to anything religious. don't tell that to any of the "under God" hawks though. to hear them tell it every time a tacit acknowledgement to God is taken from the repertoire of national symbols we're just spiraling further and further away from him, relentlessly sliding down the slippery slope of humanism, and relativism and any other bad -ism one would care to name or make up.

and people have very active imaginations.

feeling: like watching cartoons
thinking of: mexico
music: "took out the trash and i'm never coming back" mojo nixon

first of three

trying to offend some people is like trying to make them breathe.

i came across this thought a couple years ago when i first read the redneck manifesto by jim goad. the context of that line was a chapter about political correctness and the white liberals who held so tightly to ideals of sensitivity and tolerance and the like. the idea was that nobody had to try at all to do something that would outrage such people, that there was so much in the world that, in their view, was terrible and unaccepctable they simply woke up every morning offended and outraged.

so our friend goad was definitely right about the liberals, especially since, beyond the fantasy many of them harbor of belonging to some oppressed group of people, they don't really have any reason to be so pissed off. it would almost seem as though among white liberals, there is an inverse relationship between actual level of oppression to level of affluence, but that i s'pose is fodder for another entry on another day.

what he didn't address, at least not right then, was the level of whininess of those on the "opposite" end of our culture's perceived ideological continuum. now there's no doubt that the conservatives at least have a better reason than the liberals to be irritated. the stuff they're upset about is stuff that's of at least some level of personal concern, stuff like what their kids see on tv and learn at school, stuff reasonable parents should care about anyhow, but then you see how some folks react to the supreme court's decision regarding the challenge of the pledge of allegiance.

you're likely familiar with at least the gist of the story, a california atheist hears that his daughter's class at school daily recites the pledge of allegiance and subequently decides that this means that atheists are a threatened minority and that he'd better sue to get the words "under God" removed from it, ostensibly for the benefit of his daughter (of whom his wife, not he, has exclusive custody, a detail that would later prove significant), but more likely to project himself as a member of a victimized minority group, because face it how many victimized minority groups do white guys with medical and law degrees get to be a part of? the man presses his case, wins in the 9th circuit, a bench most sympathetic to his plight, and "under God" is removed from the pledge in all schools under that court's jurisdiction.

what we find is that regardless of how ideologically divergent people claim to be, they're really not all that different.

feeling: duped
thinking of: my younger days
music: "study humans" MxPx

born in east LA is a funny movie.

there's one scene in that movie in which INS agents are rounding up some darker hued types suspected of taking up residence in sunny southern california illegally to send back (ostensibly) across the border. in the hubbub they get cheech, i think his character's name in the movie is rudy, who's phenotypically similar, but speaks perfect english, saying all the time that he was born in east LA. the INS agent, of course, doesn't believe him and asks him who the president of the united states in order to corroborate his assertion. cheech, rightful, though ignorant citizen he is, says something to the effect "uh, that actor, he used to be in 'death valley days', uh john wayne!" which seals his fate as he ends up getting deported. i suspect there are countless *ahem* phenotypically unsuspect people who either don't know who the president is or couldn't identify a picture of him, but that's neither here nor there.

in any case, the answer cheech gave was wrong, not because it wasn't a hollywood actor who'd been in some B-level westerns, it was, it just wasn't john wayne. the guy i'm sure cheech meant to identify was ronald reagan who, i'm told recently died. i don't remember much about reagan as president, he was first elected the year i was born, 1980, so i really wasn't at all in the mode of thinking politically for any of the period of time during which he was the president, i was all of eight when his second term ended.

so like i said, i don't remember much of him. i do remember that my mom absolutely adored him or seemed to anyway, but then she adored jimmy swaggart and wanted me to go to his bible college and we all know what happened with him. his death seemed to affect quite a large number of people, as he came across as the sort of man who incited a high level of affection one way or another, having so slight a recollection of him as president i didn't really feel affected all that much. although over the weekend while i was watching some of his funeral proceedings i noticed his epitaph and really appreciated the words that were on it.

it read:
i know in my heart that man is good
that what is good will always and eventually triumph
and that there is purpose and worth in each and every life.

getting down on people is exceedingly easy in a world where you have constantly to deal with them, see how cynical i am? and i wasn't even trying right then. i know that he wasn't as heroic as his devotees believe him to have been, and that he wasn't as evil as his detractors suspect he was, but that quote conveys the optimism and faith in people that characterized him and that i think so many people admired about him.

well, they either admired that or the fact that he got rid of the commies.

feeling: encouraged
thinking of: the first point of calvinism, the T in TULIP
music: "ghost riders in the sky" the highwaymen

it's tuesday again.

i wrote last week about 24 and how it sort of gave tuesday a claim to fame, made it worth looking a bit forward to, because i mean face it, it's tuesday, the only thing it really has going for it is that it's not monday. i suspect i have an aversion to that particular day of the week that comes from the one semester in college that i had class on tuesday pretty much straight through from 8-5, but that's neither here nor there i don't guess.

anyways, i was talking about how the latest season of 24 finished last week, which would seem to relegate tuesday back to its previous "monday-lite" status. i mean tuesday seems to lend itself to being a tv nite, and there's so very little that i actually like on tv, which i s'pose is more good than bad. so anyways, when i was younger, probly around ten or so my family were big fans of this show called "the commish" which featured this balding, pudgy guy as commissioner of a suburban police department in new york or somesuch. it was a solid show, nothing really dramatic, but enough of a story to keep a good pace for an hour and tidily wrap itself up in the same amount of time.

so fast forward about a dozen years or so and you find the same lead actor in a show on fX called "the shield," which is about as different from the commish as different gets, they're both cop shows, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. the suit-wearing, balding, pudgy commish evolved into this head-shaven, black t-shirt wearing, absolute hardass with a most definite "ends justify the means" mentality. in contrast to the commish, there's nothing at all tidy about the shield, and given my postmodern sensibilities, that's the sort of thing that made me really dig it. the combination of the long arcs the stories have (nothing gets wrapped up in an hour) as well as the ambiguity of the characters like vic, the old commish, is the kind of thing that makes you feel really conflicted about wanting him to "win" or even considering him the "good guy."

i started watching it toward the end of this last season, and i s'pose the fact that they ran promos for it during 24 helped, it'd make sense that those shows would draw from similar demographics. even though the similarity is what drew me in, the shield scratches a bit of a different itch than 24, the drama is just as big, but the stories revolve around smaller stuff, to where disbelief didn't have to be suspended quite so drastically.

24 still rips though.

feeling: unclear
thinking of: winnsboro, texas
music: "cut the mullet" wesley willis

second of two

so i have short hair now.

in fact, it's shortest i've had it since that tenth grade year. that could mean a few different things, for example, people that know me might be inclined to think that it's really not short, as such, based mostly on the fact that my penchant to sport hair that'd always seem to possess some of the qualities one might find in a mop. right now, however, this isn't the case because my hair's not just short for me, i mean it's short, like completely devoid of any and all shagginess.

this is a somewhat recent occurance, it happened three weeks ago. i can't really put my finger on what spurred the desire get it cut, maybe it wasn't really anything at all, i do remember feeling quite impulsive when i went about it. so anyways, i walked down to supercuts, which i realize was a gamble in and of itself and left pretty much feeling like i did that day sophomore year, feeling like i looked like a dope. check that, i felt worse, i didn't even have the consolation of going to state this time.

so almost immediately i regretted it, so much so that i thought about taking the clippers to it. i really felt like it was that bad, but that too would have been impulsive and no solution either. i feel like more than anything else, what drove me nuts wasn't that it was bad, three weeks out, i can say it really wasn't. what was most shocking was how drastic a change it was. it's funny how something as trivial as that can get to be the kind of thing in which you wrap up some concept of yourself. i mean it wasn't the kinda thing that made me contemplate not leaving the house til it grew out.

i did wear a hat all day the next day, though.

feeling: adjusted
thinking of: patience
music: "memphis" rancid

first of two

i used to wrestle.

i started in seventh grade. everybody remembers seventh grade, nobody, i'm fairly certain remembers it very fondly. my experience wasn't all that different, there were some things about that year that were totally badass, and plenty of other things; like wrestling, i didn't win a single match that year; that totally sucked. the thing about seventh grade though, is that you're not really smart enough, or independent or whatever enough to care how you wear your hair.

well, you know what happens as time passes, you get older and you transform from a clueless and totally awkward twelve year old to a dopey and only slightly less awkward fourteen year old. i wasn't any different. one of the things that i thought was really cool was that i could grow my hair long. this had extra appeal mostly because my dad was a really straight-laced, clean-cut type who i'm fairly certain wasn't a huge fan of the shag on my head.

so back to wrestling, it's one of those sports where they care how long your hair is, like there were a few times i'd show up for weigh-ins and the referee would decide my hair was too long and shaggy to wrestle and i'd have to get it cut before i left the locker room. and then there was the fact that my coach didn't seem to like it either, and he'd cut it himself. the big deal was sophomore year, my first year to qualify to state, team policy was that every first-time qualifier had to get their head buzzed. i didn't really like it, but it was state and i didn't have much choice, so i went along.

had i had more of a choice i suspect i would have gone along anyway.

feeling: dopey
thinking of: kicking back
music: "missle toe" pspazz

i found it hard to believe
someone like you came for me
you put this love in my heart

i tried but could not refuse
you gave me no time to choose
you put this love in my heart

i wanna know where the bad feelings go
when i'm depressed and i get down so low
but then i see you calling to me it's alright

i wanna tell you right now
i'm not afraid to say how
you put this love in my heart

there's some times when i doubt
but you always find me out
you put this love in my heart

cause when i see all that you've done for me
when i was down i had to believe
cause you followed me hard
proving all your love

and i know the loneliness i had before
is gone now i never feel it anymore
cause your love it has released me
from all that is in my past.

so much more i could say
if i could just find a way
you put this love in my heart

is all this real or a dream?
i feel so good i could scream
you put this love in my heart

i wanna know where all the bad feelings go
when i'm depressed and i get down so low
but then i see you calling to me it's alright.

you put this love in my heart
you put this love in my heart
you put this love in my heart

you put this love in my heart
you put this love in my heart
you put this love in my heart.

--"you put this love in my heart" keith green (via MxPx)

laura is amazing. first, she's from texas, which is enough to kick anybody up the amazing scale quite a few notches. she still lives there and bearing that in mind, what really makes her awesome is simply this:

me: you wanna come over tonite?
her: yeah!

i just felt like it bore mentioning.

feeling: alright
thinking of: a couple years from now
music: "you're not alone" MxPx

a note of clarification, from sunday's entry.

there's nothing at all sexual about a "man-crush," basically all that it is a way to describe one man's admiration of another to the point that he sorta wishes he was him.

it's completely innocent.

i'm not trying to convince myself or anything.

really.

feeling: odd
thinking of: the rest of the month
music: "i can be friends with you." MxPx