Thursday on Thursday

listening to "Rusty Cage" - Johnny Cash

Break is good. Holidays are good. Rest is good. I near burned myself out this semester and it's been nice to rest from that, to go to sleep reading Chesterton at night, and to wake up in the morning when I want to wake up. There are still things that I need to do, there are still responsibilities, and there is still stress, but it has slowed considerably.

listening to "As Ugly as I Seem" - White Stripes

I've been reading Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday", reading "Paradoxes of Catholicism" by Robert Benson, and debating with a friend about Catholicism. Sometimes it tears me apart. I like Chesterton, I enjoy reading his stuff. The Man Who Was Thursday reminds me of a R.L. Stevenson short story called "The Suicide Club". It is dark and brooding with a noble and likable main character thrust into events beyond his ken. I can still see the ideas though. Chesterton is one of those authors which Catholics and people who wish they were Catholics will recommend. They usually will rave about a set of "Father Brown" stories, about a priest who doubles as a novice detective. It's not that I don't like Chesterton, but I can see the ideas germinating in Thursday that will eventually result in Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism. I don't like that. The more I read of Paradoxes, and the more I read in scripture, the more I see how grievous are the offenses that Catholic theology (if you can call it that) commits. Dad gave me some words recently that we need to be wary of anything that takes away from the power of the cross. Then, as I further explored the intricacies of Catholicism, it simply blew me away that one could be so blind to the very Word of God. Anyways, Catholicism gets me all worked up and the fam wants to watch a movie.

Will

Tree Rings and Tea Things

Had my first class this morning; Geog 121 - Earth and Atmospheric Science. It fills up my lab requirement for TWU, but like every mandatory class here, I think I'm really going to enjoy this one. It was just the intro class today so as soon as the professor mentioned that his office was in the back of the Tree-Ring Lab it set the wheels turning and I spent the rest of the time engrossed in sketching the layout of ideally what a tree-ring lab would consist of (super sweet).
The apartment is shaping up very nicely and on my first shopping trip I purchased three different boxes of Celestial Seasonings tea; Chamomile, Sleepytime, and Original India Spice. I purchased them for the double purpose of having both tea and coffee to offer to house guests and so that I can get a feel for the drinking of tea, an area where I have barely any experience (I just finished my second cup of coffee this morning). It is pretty enjoyable stuff, but with the amount of people coming through our apartment and just generally hanging out, I'm burning through it pretty fast.
The beard is coming back in quicker than I expected so Henderson will not be flying solo for long, but in the meantime it can be rough going sometimes. The support received from guys is definitely heartening though.
I have one more class at 11:40 today that I am extremely apprehensive about; Math 101. I'm all prepped though; I already have the textbook, I bought a three-subject notebook this morning, I bought a scientific calculator at Staples last week (and then promptly found my long lost graphing calculator once I moved in), and I have drunk copious amounts of coffee this morning (read: buzzzzzzz). Bring it on Math 101!!! Just try me...
Will

Fresh

I suppose you could say that the incubation period for this blog has reached a close. Back in March, when I published my last blog post, I had begun to get a nagging feeling about importing my blog to facebook; I'm not sure what it was, whether a lack of reader accountability or just that the publicness of the medium subtly changed the openness of what I wrote, but I decided to stop importing my blog and coinciding with this I halted all blog activity. Halting blog activity was only ever barely consciously to purge any facebook readership and make people forget that this blog existed, but hopefully it served that purpose. Regardless of my reasons, I suddenly feel refreshed, I feel as though there are things that I have been holding inside that need a forum (though this is more of a monologue) and so I have come full circle to the reasons why I started blogging in the first place. I must confess that there was a time when I questioned whether I would ever start blogging again, but alas here I am again and so, it seems, are you.
On to the poetry! I have not written as much as I would have liked to over this summer, but upon returning to the lower-mainland I have begun to feel my inspiration returning at a rapid pace. Here is a little something I penned while I was waiting for my bus in Langley. It even talks about real people and real places! Enjoy,
Will

Two-Step

Two-Step twitching at his neck
as though to shake a cold
or lose his breath
everybody stops to stare
to see his naked faults exposed
laid bare on pavement stuck with gum
and littered down with cigarettes

everybody - all the busy bodies
mime like Simon Says to him
some mock and some feel pity
but no body burns to even talk to him

Two-Step feels no need for charity
questioned he pretends to elegance
and all your sympathy will melt
like symphonies dissolving when
no matter what you've done or do
Two-Step turns and walks away from you

Storming...

I have one post in my history, Sound From the Garages, which keeps getting spammed. I just went and deleted the 19 junk comments that had accumulated, and that wasn't even the first time. Unfortunately you can't just select them all and hit delete, it's a real pain to delete multiple comments on blogger. So I'm a bit skeeved. You might even say I'm a bit irate.
Anger is interesting; there's a righteous anger that does exist, but mostly that's just God, mostly we miss the point with our anger. We like to get up in somebodies grill when they do us wrong, at least I know I do. But do you know why Jesus stormed the temple? It wasn't for himself, it was for his Father. That's made pretty clear when the disciples remember Psalm 69:9, "Zeal for your house will consume me", referencing Jesus' zeal for his Father's house, not for himself. I mean Jesus was the one man who could really get righteously angry when somebody did him wrong, but he was the one man who only got angry on other people's behalf. When he calls the Pharisees a brood of vipers, he's not saying that in defense of himself. He straight up says it two verses before; "Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come."
So that means that a lot of the time when I get angry, it's just trite and trivial stuff. What it doesn't mean is that we shouldn't get angry. No way. Not even close. There are a lot of reasons why I don't believe in pacifism, but the main one is that we're called (especially as men) to get really mad at some stuff. One of them being sin, another being injustice. Men are also called to be protectors (I love the fact that my name means "resolute protector") and when it comes to that we should not be afraid to get violent. If somebody tried to hurt one of my sisters, I would seriously mess them up, I would not even hesitate.
Anyways, now I'm getting irate again, just thinking about guys that wouldn't lift a finger to protect their family. I'm not usually one for ranting of this sort in a blog post, there's an inherent lack of accountability in this medium that can make ranting dangerous, but sometimes I get passionate about stuff and I get carried away. But really, can you blame a guy for being passionate about something? No. You really can't. Keep it pregnant.

Will

Crickophany

Listening to: Meaghan Smith - The Cricket's Orchestra
Weezer - Raditude

I've been reading Lewis Carroll lately. I started with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and then I finished that off with Through the Looking Glass. Then I read through the more serious Sylvie and Bruno and have just started reading Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. The Alice books were similar to what I expected (although they were a lot darker than I thought), but Sylvie and Bruno is a different thing entirely. The preface to part I was probably the best preface I've ever read, with Carroll delving into issues of mass-produced literature and producing original ideas, the urgency with which we should spend our time, ideas for projects he didn't think he would have time in his life to accomplish and hopes that others can, problems with "hunting as sport", and of course a bit of an introduction to the work at hand. If you never read Sylvie and Bruno itself, I would recommend that you read the preface.

I've been listening to Meaghan Smith lately (Except for a couple of songs, I wasn't that impressed by Weezer's Raditude). I first heard one of her songs in the movie 500 Days of Summer, where she did a cover of the Pixies "Here Comes Your Man". I didn't think about it much at the time, but then I heard the song when I was in the collegium and realized that it was a darn good cover of a Pixies song, and being as the Pixies aren't the kind of band I would ever think of somebody covering, I thought I would check the artist out. Her music has a super-chill indie feel, mixing a fifties pop sound with synthetic beats and a bevy of unique instruments. It's pretty low-impact stuff, all things considered, but it is a pleasant diversion and good background study music.

Anyways, midterms are fully done, as of this morning, and I'm looking forward to final papers, final projects, and finals. I [obviously] haven't blogged much this semester, but this is partly due to the fact that I'm so close in proximity to the bulk of the people I know, enabling face-to-face conversation as the preferred method of communication. Having said that, I'm saving up some real meat-and-potatoes material for my next post. The next post will also be the first to not be imported directly to facebook. The social networking scene is just not the right environment for a blog to flourish. Til the next poetry-infused blog post, keep it pregnant people.

PipeSmokingProfessor

Writer is not politically correct

Untitled

She ascends in all her glory
her robe is virgin white and trimmed with gold
hands move like still-life albatross
cool with dew, beautiful

He came to bring fire on the earth

The master of the house had saved
His last, His finest, His funeral wine
her lips and chin are stained and drip
she's drunk her fill of wine
with dirt and blood her feet and knees are scathed

and zeal for His Father's house consumes Him

The bride is a used prostitute
a crippled whore who's been abused
She anoints Him for burial
the whore has saved her best perfume

and He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty


Listening to Jacaranda by Josh Garrels and Electroshock Blues by the Eels
I've never been one to explain my poetry, I feel that the poetry should be allowed to speak for itself and the reader should be allowed to understand the poem on a different level than the writer understands it. This is important. There are poems, however, that require a certain amount of explanation. A lot of the time poets who read their works aloud will give it a brief (or lengthy) introduction to ground the audience in what they are about to say, give them some sort of emotional stake or purchase in the poem to increase its impact. I appreciate how that might be necessary in vocal readings, but when someone is reading it for themselves, they should be allowed to encounter the poem on its own level. If a written poem needs some explanation, it should come after the poem.
Having said that, I think that this one could do with a little bit of explanation. The poem is essentially a love song about the church. It is paradoxical intentionally because the church in itself is such a paradox. On one hand we have Hosea, where God tells Hosea to marry a prostitute and then, when she leaves him and goes back to her old lifestyle, to take her back. Hosea is a powerful example of how God loves his people, Israel, but also the church. The church is the prostitute who keeps on going back to her sin, and we have plenty of problems, plenty of dark things in our past, but on the other hand the church is the bride of Christ. Though she is dirty and sinful, she is washed clean by the blood of Christ. This is essential for Christians in our post-modern world, especially younger Christians. Even though we see all these things that we don't like about the church and we see all these problems that the church has, it is absolutely and fundamentally important that we are part of the bride of Christ. So unless in the case of clear heresies, we need to do everything we can to stay in the church, to change it from the inside out yes, but not leave it because we disagree with little things the pastor says or little issues we have with authority (because issues with authority is a pretty big killer these days). We need to stop shopping around for a church that we like, we need to become committed to a community of believers. I know the metaphor sounds repetitive and cheesy, but we really do need to "plug in" to the body of Christ. God has been getting at me for the last few weeks about the importance of His church and I've been trying to write that poem for almost as long. So I'm excited to be finished it. I haven't got a title, but I hope it speaks for itself. Keep it pregnant people.

Park Ranger

Moving Past That

My last attempt at making a schedule for my blogging (the best of the decade lists) ended in me losing all motivation to blog. That's the way it's been for weeks so I think it's about time I moved on. I had this revelation the other week that I didn't end up blogging about because I wanted to blog about some stupid top ten lists. This cannot be allowed to happen.
We all have our own understandings about what heaven will be like and we all interpret different passages of scripture to mean different things about it, but a lot of this is simply empty speculation that could be entirely misleading. This can lead us away from what we really need to focus on. The most important thing about heaven, and one of the clearest things about it that we can draw from scripture, is that we will be with God. Whether or not we will have electric guitars in heaven is completely irrelevant and so are a multitude of our other concerns. We will be with Jesus!!! and fundamentally that is enough.
The reason why I'm blogging this at three-thirty in the morning is that I went out to Denny's with some of the guys in the dorm and had some man chats and lots of coffee. I feel incredibly untired right now. It's been a good two weeks back at school so far, but I've got a monumental amount of coursework this semester. I finally got into my pols 312 class (I fought pretty hard for that one) so that cements my number of courses at five. It seems like a pretty normal number, but some of the classes, like math 101 and hist 135, have a colossal amount of weekly homework, which, in the case of the math, can be pretty challenging. So there we have it, I'm overworked, tired (not momentarily), full of joy for the ways God has been challenging me this week, and looking forward to the possibilities this semester holds. Also I miss my family and the people in town just a little bit. Unfortunately not enough to pull me away from Trinity this weekend as I have a bunch of things I need to do for next week, but enough to make me blog.
Although I'm not going to post a list of the top ten discoveries of the decade anymore, I still think that one of them deserves mention. I'm referring to GJ 1214b of course. What's that you ask? It's only the most earth like planet ever discovered. It's star is not too many light years away from us (within striking distance you might say), it's only about twice the size of earth, it's within the inhabitable distance from it's star, and it's covered in water. Kamino anybody? It was only discovered in the last days of the decade, but I'd say it still counts pretty good.
Now that I've gotten that out of my way, I feel like I can move on, so the next blog isn't constricted by what I was thinking I might want to write about when I was writing the last blog. That's just a dumb system. Keep it pregnant people.

Will