Category: Writing

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artistic immortality

The whole world is talking about Michael Jackson’s death.  Twitter and Facebook and YouTube are full of fans who are mourning, and even people who were not fans, just musing on mortality and celebrity and legacy.  A friend of mine posted a status update on Facebook, wondering if artists ever face their mortality, or if they just think they will live forever, like their work.  I think she was reacting to what Madonna said about Michael Jackson’s death:

I have always admired Michael Jackson. The world has lost one of the greats, but his music will live on forever!

My friend, I know, is a Christian, and to her, I think, it’s a problem that people would not realize their own mortality. However, though I am a Christian, thinking on this statement and its implications, I suddenly realized I was seeing the statement through the eyes of an English major. Didn’t Shakespeare say something similar? Some quick Googling and I found the sonnet I was looking for. Though I’m sure Shakespeare addressed similar themes in other sonnets, the one I was thinking of was Sonnet XVIII, one of his most famous, though it is generally the first half that gets quoted:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Perhaps I’m reaching a bit to pull Shakespeare and Michael Jackson into the same post, but the idea of work living on long after its creator is gone is a longstanding theme in literature and art. And though I believe in an afterlife, and I don’t believe anyone is ever really gone, I also understand that in many ways, legends like Shakespeare and Michael Jackson never really die in the sense that their work, what we loved and knew of them, is always with us. You just have to pop over to YouTube today to see this on display– they have a collection of Michael’s videos on the front page, ready to be clicked by the millions who are mourning the King of Pop. So long as men can breathe and eyes can see, so long live the videos, and they give life to thee.

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looking for mcdreamy?

Last night I was looking over my blog stats on the Lapple, sitting next to Jon on the couch.

“At least five people every day find my blog by searching McDreamy because of that post I wrote about you.”

“How disappointing for them to be looking for McDreamy and finding me instead!”

“Well, they at least get a picture of the real McDreamy.  I’m keeping you all to myself!”

So, here’s another pic for all you searchers somehow winding up here!

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jon and kate disintegrate

I’m about to write something that may seem a little radical to many I know.   So consider yourself warned.

On the one hand, the whole world has Jon & Kate + 8 fever, and it seems that their big announcement tonight is that they’re getting divorced, as People Magazine reports that papers have already been filed in Pennsylvania.  I firmly believe that being on TV is not a good thing for families, but I don’t think it’s just the quest for the spotlight that doomed this family.  Even from early episodes, it was apparent from the way they spoke to each other that Jon and Kate did not respect each other.  And though Kate often goes on church speaking tours, I did not see a lot of Christian love and grace between them.  Of course I’m just an armchair quarterback, but I calls ’em like I sees ’em.

And so, I’m faced with a sort of bipolar response to this, as a committed, happily married woman, and also as a child of divorce.  You see, I believe that divorce is sad and tragic and to be avoided whenever possible.  MY Jon and I both  agree that it is simply not on the table for us.  Based on the experiences of family and friends, I do believe that any marriage can be healed with love and grace by the power of God.

But. Continue reading “jon and kate disintegrate”

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cats rule, dogs drool, & i’m fine with that

happee puppee trofee wife
happee puppee trofee wife

Generally, people fall into one of two categories: cat people and dog people.  Sometimes the two categories overlap, but most of the time, they don’t.  And there can be as much animosity between the two camps as there are between Democrats and Republicans, jocks and nerds, Razorback fans and LSU fans.  Cat people pride themselves on their emotional superiority.  They don’t need an animal to worship and adore them, they say, they can handle an animal who isn’t always happy to see them, who doesn’t always welcome their affections, who doesn’t require constant stimulation and attention.  Dog people enjoy having an animal who can be trained, who responds to commands, who can be taught tricks, and who can be taken to parks and out on other fun outings.  Some people even try to genderize cats and dogs, suggesting that cats are more like females, and dogs are more like males.

I think I take a different tack.  I am firmly in the dog-person camp, though I think cats are adorable and sometimes wish I had one to sit in my lap, purring while I read or watch TV– though I am convinced that the mere fact of this desire means that any cat I ever had would absolutely refuse to participate in such activities.  No, to me, a dog person, there is division even among dog people.  Dogs are, you see, like different types of girlfriends, and I fear that in this respect, I’m like the dog-owning equivalent of a male chauvenist pig. Continue reading “cats rule, dogs drool, & i’m fine with that”

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happy father’s day

First of all, since it’s Father’s Day, I thought I’d take the opportunity to plug one of my favorite blogs, which happens

Image via Googles LIFE photo archive.
Image via Google's LIFE photo archive.

to be written by a dad, and which I think will be turning into a book at some point in the near future: 1001 Rules for my Unborn Son.  Though I will say that I think most of the rules are equally appropriate for girls as well.  Which brings me to MY dad.

My dad has 3 girls.  Sometimes when a guy will mention that he has three daughters, other men will express sympathy that this poor man did not get to have a son.  And while my dad has, at times, loved to crack jokes about being surrounded by women, noting that even all of our pets have been girls, he truly loves it.  I know this, because my parents adopted their third daughter only a couple of years ago, so I’ve had the benefit of watching him with her, and seeing him as a dad with his daughter through the lenses of my adult eyes, filtered by my 24 years of experience as his daughter.  He loves being our daddy.  Every giggle or squeal that he can get out of us warms his heart.  He truly lives to make us smile.

Now perhaps it’s because my dad’s mostly a cerebral guy, not into male jock stuff, but we weren’t particularly raised with ideas of “boy stuff” and “girl stuff” or the idea that my dad would have any more fun with us if we had been boys.  He took us on car trips to dig up crystals and gave us long lectures on rock types and geological formations, and the way mountains are made.  It would not at all be unusual for him to  pull the car over to look at the strata of a particularly interesting sedimentary rock formation.  He forced us to dig in the garden and pull weeds and harvest tomatoes, chores I often hated, but appreciate now that I’m an adult, trying to grow some of my own food.  He created elaborate treasure hunts for us to follow, riddled clue by clue, until we got to the big treasure at the end.  He also created elaborate Halloween parties, with dry ice in cauldrons and his entire bug collection on display on a kitchen table, and all sorts of other delights that scared me so bad I wouldn’t go in our basement for several years without trepidation, but which were the talk of our friends well into high school. Continue reading “happy father’s day”

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captain of the bus

It’s been a while since I regaled the Interwebz with a wacky tale from my adventures on the bus, but I’ve got a good one for you this morning!  It had been a fairly normal ride, for the most part, notable only in that for the first time in over a week, I wasn’t huddling under an umbrella and trying not to get splashed by passing cars while waiting for the bus to pick me up.  A young man sat down next to me, listening to something I wasn’t even sure existed any more: a discman.  I flipped through my Google Reader on my Blackberry.  The bus approached one of the major stops on the route.  Suddenly, Mr. Discman stood up, grabbed the bar over head with one hand, and put one knee up, foot on the seat like he had a lil Captain in him.  HE THEN PROCEEDED TO PELVIC THRUST THE AIR RIGHT NEXT TO ME, wiggling his hips side to side, front to back, and all around.  He did not say a word.  The bus stopped.  The doors opened.  He got off the bus.

“FATHER IN HEAVEN!” exclaimed the lady sitting across from me, fanning herself.  “LORD! LORD!”

I just burst out laughing from the absurdity of it all and said, “I have no idea what just happened.”  She smiled at me.  We both laughed.  The bus moved on.

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this i used to believe? goalposts, grief, God, and Godwin’s Law

Image via thisamericanlife.org
Image via thisamericanlife.org

As I was cleaning my house Sunday morning, sweeping floors, vacuuming up dog hair, doing loads of laundry, unloading dishes, dusting, I was catching up on listening to several of my favorite podcasts.  In particular, I listened to an episode of “This American Life” called “This I Used to Believe.”  It’s a take-off from the NPR series “This I believe” about people who used to believe strongly in something, but no longer do so.  You can listen to this episode at this website.

The part that made me hit pause, walk away from my chores, and sit down to blog was the second segment of the show called “Team Spirit in the Sky”.  It was about a woman who saw a story on the news about a Texas football coach (I can’t help but picture Coach Taylor from “Friday Night Lights”) from a Christian school who touched the lives of an opposing team from a juvenile lock-up by having fans from HIS team learn their opponents’ names, cheer for them, form “spirit lines” for them, and root for them when his team played them.  For many of the lock-up’s players, it was a unique experience to finally be rooted for in any sense of the word, and for the coach, a chance to live out in some small way the biblical idea of loving one’s enemies.

The woman telling the “This I Used to Believe” story was a woman wrote to the coach after seeing the news story to tell him that though she was a lapsed Catholic who became an agnostic following the death of a close friend to cancer, she is glad that he is living out an authentic Christian faith for his players and everyone else in his community.  And at first, the coach responds, and I, the listener was thinking, “YEAH! This guy is getting it right!” The coach says he feels that God is speaking to him about this woman who has emailed him, and they begin a correspondence.  She even agrees to talk on the phone with him, intrigued that God has been waking him up many nights in a row, bothering him about what he needs to say to this woman who has lost her faith because of one of the most classic questions in theology: why do bad things happen to good people?

But then the coach totally drops the ball. Continue reading “this i used to believe? goalposts, grief, God, and Godwin’s Law”

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kicking it, kicking homelessness

The other night, Jon and I Netflixed a really great documentary called “Kicking It,” which is about the Homeless World Cup.  It was a great film, focused on six individual players from different countries as they make their way onto teams and to South Africa to play soccer.

At first, it may seem like a strange form of outreach, forming soccer teams of homeless people.  I mean, aren’t there other, more concrete things they need beyond a recreational activity?  But soccer is more powerful than it may seem.  Just being on a team, having goals, getting to celebrate small successes is a new experience for many of the players, who are often lonely outcasts, estranged from family, battling addictions.  One player from Ireland was attempting to end a heroin addiction, and being on the soccer team in essence gave him a reason to keep living, a reason for his mother to finally be proud of him, a reason to get clean.  Another player from America had been abused and rejected by his family, and was dealing with lots of anger and abandonment issues, but being on a team was sort of his first experience in a functioning “family,” one that expected him to deal with his anger in more appropriate ways. Continue reading “kicking it, kicking homelessness”

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murderers and humanity

I’m still thinking about and processing the violent, terrorist acts committed against George Tiller and yesterday at the National Holocaust Museum.  I’ve been

This image is what so profoundly affected me at the National Holocaust Museum.
This image is what so profoundly affected me at the National Holocaust Museum.

 to the Holocaust Museum twice, and both times, it profoundly affected me.  I remember sitting on the floor in a room filled with Holocaust victims’ shoes, sobbing.  This room is toward the end of the museum, and yet it moved me more than anything else in the museum.  Perhaps because of the idea of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.  Perhaps because it just engaged all my senses.  I could even SMELL the shoes.  Visiting that museum  gave me both a profound sense of the evil humans are capable of perpetrating on one another, but also of the indomitability of the human spirit.  You can try to take away someone’s humanity.  Treat them like animals.  Attempt to eradicate them.  But you can’t control someone’s spirit.  You can’t take away their faith.  

 

In the wake of horrible tragedies, it is easy to see the perpetrators as not human.  I’m guilty of it.  I am a pacifist, generally, but in the wake of something awful that one human has done to another, I know what it is to want vengeance, to want an eye for an eye, though I rationally know that this “leaves the whole world blind.”  I know, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “through violence you may murder a murderer but you can’t murder murder.”  While it may be easier to simply dismiss these hate-filled killers as somehow less than human, it just isn’t right.  The Nazis, in all their horrific violence, were still humans.  Scott Roeder is a human.  James von Brunn, hateful as his prejudices are to me, is a human.  Someone loved them.  These killers were someone’s babies.  How did they get from there to where they are now?  I don’t know, but it’s worth exploring.  People may hate, and people may have prejudices, but a variety of factors contribute to making a hateful person into a murderer, a terrorist. Continue reading “murderers and humanity”