Taking Off and Landing

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.

So, I’ve been dating this girl for about eight months now. Fantastic woman. The only problem is that she’s in an master’s program, and what she wants to do can only possibly be done in Waco.

And so, the dilemna: I want two things with all my heart: 1) for her to stay in Waco, and 2) for her to be able to do what she has both been trained to do and what she wants to do with all her heart. I’ve told her 214 times that I don’t want her to take a life-sucking job just to be able to stay here, and that we will make it work if she moves to Ft. Worth or Bryan, and these are true statements. I love this woman, and I think “foolish” is the word to use for doing otherwise.

And so, the rub: to love her means to do that which is absolutely fricking killing me. Her parents are in town this weekend and her roommate, another grad student, moves Monday, and so the question of moving came up again. She’s had interviews Ft. Worth and Bryan, and we’ll see how this all shakes out in the next two weeks. If you’ve been watching The Office the last few weeks, I feel like my life has been paralleling Jim’si internal struggle as Pam applies for a job that will actually be something other than a receptionist. By the way, last night’s episode was brilliant.

Michael Scott is everyman. I digress.

So, I stand at this crossroad and trust that God knows where this goes. There’s only one way to do this: to do it.

To the six of you who still peruse this site on occasion…

The birth of new writing has begun. I am done with my preliminary exams, which means two things:

1) I’ve forgotten more in the last week than I will possibly ever know again.

2) I have, within reason, permission to start thinking and writing about exactly what I want to think and write about.

The latter begins now.

**

The moment came in the midst of prelim preparation when I couldn’t stand to read one more theological text, one more rumination on the meaning of the incarnation, one more ruinous attempt to relate God to the world: I was completely and utterly done. I was completely and utterly done not only because 27% of the stuff I read for my exams was a complete and total waste of time, except for purely historical reasons, but because in the midst of studying, I was losing myself. I was losing my friends, my bounds, my connections.

They say that the most damnable part of torture is the loss of one’s identity, in terms of time and space. By denying the tortured access to the outside world, the victim is at a loss of the past or of the present. By walking them under death’s ladder, they are denied a future. By keeping them alone, in darkness, they are denied knowledge of even their own bodies, until in the throes of physical exhaustion, they reach out to the torturers to save them from even their own bodies, looking to the one who can stop the anguish to give them a touchstone of any kind. Thus, the Stockholm Effect: when the tortured start to identify with their captors, for in the world of captivity, it is only the torturer who effects the pain, and only the torturer who can give the victim any sense of who they are.

I can’t possibly compare four months of exam prep to torture, but the Stockholm Effect is true. First, you break under the burden of the material, growing to loathe it. Second, you become broken under it, and want it to stop. Finally, you become completely apathetic to it, except for the fact that this stuff has now become, over four months, your primary way of relating to the world.

One night, as I sat on the front porch with a roommate telling me about a terrible day at work, for the first time in months, an image of my studies came to me as a comfort, and I knew something was left: that the studies weren’t destroying me, but carefully reforging my thinking in all kinds of ways–disorienting the oriented, subverting the careful, loosing bonds, breaking chains, scrambling eggs.

She told me about a family who had been selling their youngest daughter for sex. Six years old. And I could listen. I couldn’t offer anything by way of explanation, for evil is the one thing that cannot be explained: it can be crucified and buried, but never explained–where it comes from, where it begins–the human heart? bastardized desires? jealousies? spirits and palpitations? And so, I gave an image from Karl Barth:

In describing what it means that Christ came in our place, Barth describes the humanity of Christ forever taken up into the Trinity, so that in all eternity, the resurrected Jesus is with his scars, his pierced wrists and ankles. And so, all the terrible things that people do to one another, all the infidelities and hatreds and malices, all the burdens and broken glass, all the death is taken up by Christ and is not forgotten, but remains visible for all eternity, overcome as a reminder not only of what our true destiny is, but of what our true destiny denies: that the crap we do to one another is the last word.

In one week, I leave for Vancouver. I can’t wait for a week of cool weather and sushi.

1) I am banned for life from the Video One store chain.

2) I love eggplant, especially grilled.

3) My first alcohol was while working at a Christian camp.

4) I really don’t care about New York City at all.

5) I nearly died climbing the mountain in Ireland.

6) I made a living for two years as a photographer.

7) Skirts are not made for three people to wear.

8 ) Life goal: to ump summer league baseball.

9) Life goal: to go to all the major league ball parks. 3M Park doesn’t count.

10) For my 28^th birthday, we did dinner and snuck a bottle of wine into Borat.

11) There exist pictures of myself in a Speedo.

12) I’ve been skinny-dipping in three states.

13) I lived on an organic farm one summer.

14) I was a camp counselor for five autistic children.

15) Ideal locale: North Carolina—snow, mountains, beach, forests in one state.

16) My favorite colors are blue and grey.

17) Mom still sends me holiday gifts: St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day…

18) Hot dogs with relish rule.

19) I gravitate towards sweet beers.

20) I’d love to vacation in Montana.

21) I don’t understand the allure of Swedish pop music, except maybe Aha.

22) A good evening is tea, Miles Davis, and a book.

23) I have run a marathon.

24) I never had allergies before moving to Texas.

25) One of my favorite smells is photograph fix.

26) I live between Catholic theology and Mennonite practice.

27) I would love to go to Australia.

28) I’ve never been to Canada before, and will go twice this summer.

29) I hate Dallas. May the apocalypse strike it first.

30) Heavy metal makes great driving music.

31) Nicholas Cage’s only good movie is Raising Arizona.

32) I am John Cusack. Or would like to be circa 1987 John Cusack.

33) Three books that changed me: Brothers K, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Cost of Discipleship

34) Since turning 25, my B.O. has really ramped up.

35) I rarely floss, and feel guilty about it.

36) My taxi broke down in Mexico.

37) I have performed a wedding and screwed up the wedding license.

38) I’d like to go back to Nona’s in Springfield and see if the chicken parm is as good as I remember it.

39) I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as “public reason”.

40) I still pull out my Christian punk albums on occasion.

41) I like one of the three dogs at our house.

42) I call Waco home.

43) Jesus came to me in a dream once on a Ferris Wheel.

44) The only movie I’ve ever walked out on was Toys (Robin Williams). Not funny.

45) I like live theatre more than movies.

46) Love the cranberry juice, don’t understand grapefruit juice.

47) I get nervous about failure and success.

48) I sweat a lot. I mean, like buckets. In the winter.

49) My favorite baseball player growing up was Mike Schmidt.

50) Neil Golemo has a great cackle.

I’ve taken to watching a lot of Scrubs lately. And my gosh, it’s funny stuff. I may have to repent of my rant about Zach Braff some years ago. I don’t think he’s the savior of our generation, and I still didn’t think Garden State was anything worth writing home about, but he’s pegged my inner thought life to the wall. More than once in the last month, I’ve wished that my life was a Scrubbs episode, and that someone was dramatically interpreting my inner depiction of me dripping onto the floor like a pat of melted butter.

For the record, I’m going to start posting daily. This is just a first stab at a) making good on this promise and b) being coherent for a solid paragraph.

Bullet points. Break it down.

**

It’s been a long few days for those associated with Truett Seminary. The last remaining original faculty member died this past week, and the funeral was this afternoon. Ruth Anne Foster was one of the most gracious and amazing women I knew, and this afternoon was really a difficult time for all involved. We knew it was coming, but just the same, when a saint is translated to glory, it doesn’t make it any easier. But thank God for a life well-lived, and a legacy that burns in a multitude of hearts. She and Dr. Chip Conyers, who died in 2003, are the ones I look to in terms of how I want to nuance my life as an academic: fully grounded in the reality that life has a telos beyond what we write or publish. I mean, most of what I write will be chaff on a threshing floor ten minutes after I write it, anyway.

I’m staring down the barrell of three projects that have to get done in the next nine days. Two in-class presentations, and my first major paper. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I about had a heart attack this afternoon when I came downstairs to find my roommate’s truck gone, and the door standing wide open. Turns out a plumber was around, fixing yet another leak in our decrepit, yet beloved, house. Needless to say, in June, I’ll be finding a new residence–one sans wood rot.

Nine days, and I’m on a plane for Boston, and a much-needed weekend break from school. I’ll come back to hopefully find myself amply motivated to kick my own ass for the remainder of the semester.

LOST Premiere tommorrow night.

I love my family and and am missing them pretty terribly at the moment.

And it’s baseball playoff season. Praise be to God–I can breathe easy again. Go Tigers.

I’m leaving for a roadtrip in about three days. When I return, I’ll have three days of summer left.

I’m taking suggestions.

Barber has one of my favorite pictures of all-time up. It’s from our trip my sophomore year to see Bill Mallonee in concert in Dallas. Thanks to Barber for showing my glistening 19-year-old self the light of day.