Waco has entered that season when the sky unzips, prior to that season when the wind blows and gives us relief for a few months. It’s a good time to be in Waco, as I cohere better to the blustery weather than the good. Today is lunch with one professor for no particular reason, and a session of reading through a chunk of the dissertation with my director. This morning, I told my wife this morning that the dissertation is what some guys call “the other woman”; she asked me what I meant by that, at which point I realized that the metaphor is both sexist and kinda stupid–it’s not like I’m sexually attracted to my dissertation, or that I’m slipping off to meet my dissertation in the afternoon, but rather that, like any relationship, it requires a lot of time and attention. So, let’s just call it “that friend”, the one who overstays their welcome and asks a lot.
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I’m putting together an Advent mix, but with a slightly different spin on it. Instead of doing the thing where I just put a bunch of Christmas-y songs together, I want to do a mix that traces out the nativity story, in song. For example, “Sit Down/Stand Up” by Radiohead is a fairly ominous tune, perfect for mornings like this when the rain deluges the city streets.
OR.
It could be the perfect song to put in between a song for Jesus’ birth and escape to Egypt, when the children of Bethlehem are murdered. It starts off slow and steady, and erupts into a torrent of sound and energy, retaining the mood and sorrow.
So, I need suggestions. I don’t have any master plan for the mix yet, but I want to play fast and loose with it. In other words, this is more a mix of mood suggested by the contours of the nativity story, rather than songs that specifically talk about camels or angels. I mean, the songs COULD talk about those things, but I’m looking more for mood. Be creative, and let’s put something different than the normal Christmas song mixes.
There’s still life in this old blog yet, which was begun back in 2005. But like all continual series, occasionally, there’s a loss of focus. Scrubs lost its way for about two seasons; MacGyver jumped the shark more than once, bringing the infamous Murdoch back from the dead once or twice until it could figure out how to limp forward to its eventual demise. Sometimes, I wonder that my beloved Office is starting to move that direction by bringing a wedding and a baby into the mix. A thing starts off with a small, managable premise, and before long, life has inhabited the skeleton and flesh of the thing and taken it by the hands in directions it did not want to go.
All this is to say that this blog, in the future, will not be about a few things:
1) Anne Lamott. I loved her back in the day, but not so much anymore. There’s a few reasons for that, but mostly, I don’t need her anymore. I don’t need her breaths of fresh honesty, because I grew into my own skin and can speak my own honesties without needing someone to do it for me.
2) Marriage. Sure, I’ll tell some funny stories here and there, but this is not a confessional. I have my confessors and my confidants, and the wicked wide web is the worst of all possible places for the ins-and-outs of something as mysterious as marriage.
3) My dissertation. I spend at least an hour a day on the damn thing, and I’m not going to let it invade this blog as well. I’ll probably start a separate blog to work out problems with that, but that’s not what this is about.
Once you cut out the last two, you’ve cut out a large swath of my life to draw reflections from, either from sacredness or sheer redundancy. But I’m discovering that virtuality only gives us the illusion of intimacy or the simulation of life, and that giggles and farts don’t translate well into ones and zeros. The Internet is what it is, or what it will be, or what it must be–namely, a vast intertwining of random tidbits and laughters, dark corners, t-shirt kiosks and the occasional light. But it is not a comfortable couch, a cold beer, or an old friend.
So, here’s to you, Internet. You serve us, and may it never be said that we serve you and your endless stomach, chewing, ever-hungry, fattened and never full.
