3DPlot[Water]

I went rafting with my PE Class today. It was a beautiful clear day, the water was cold, and we saw salmon nosing their way upstream. But, what I want to describe briefly is the way that I couldn't help but see the shapes of the water as a 3D Plot of wave equations. In the Matrix, I think there's a scene where Cipher? is reading off of the monitor which has the classic green characters cascading down it. He says he doesn't see the characters anymore, but rather the 'people' they represent. I felt like I was seeing the opposite.

On the river, I sometimes felt that I was not looking at water, but rather at a 3D display of position-valued images of the wave function. The river has it's own harmonics, and each feature has characteristic frequencies which it allows or eliminates as the water follows along, obeying laws of enegry described by physics. It was beautiful.

And later today, I was making bread and found that the rim of the shiny metal bowl was reflecting a ring of light into my batter, which, when properly angled, became a cardioid. I was so excited. One of my friends tried to steal my joy by arguing that, physically, it wasn't an actual cardioid, and the 'mapping' taking it the light from the rim of the bowl to the cardioid shape was not the polar mapping. It wasn't exact enough for him. He argued that it was like claiming to represent everything with a polynomial by Taylor expansion, and I shouldn't be so excited about something that was, at best an approximation.

I told him that what he said was true, but I argued that if he found a Taylor polynomial expansion in his bowl, he'd be excited too.

I think the following line is necessary here:
I heart cardioids... <3

Luke 10:25-37

We did another scripture study tonight.
I think I'll try to do these consistently.
And hopefully they'll eventually sound more professional.
here's what I sent to our study group:

********

I kind of like writing these. This one won't be as involved though.

Luke 10: 25-37

A man who studied Jewish law asked Jesus what he should do to inherit eternal life.
Jesus asks him how he reads the law.
The man replies with the 2 great commandments (Found in Deut 6 and Lev 18, I believe) of loving the Lord and loving your neighbor.
Jesus says yeah. do that.
so the guy asks who is neighbor is. I guess he didn't feel that the law was clear enough on that.
Jesus tells the story of the Samaritan and asks who was the neighbor in the story.
The man says, "the one who showed mercy"
Jesus says yeah. go do that.

Things to consider:
We found it interesting that in "Love the Lord your God with all your heart/soul(psuche)/strength/ and mind", the word for 'love' is "agapao" - the verb form of 'agape' - which seems to be a very intentional sort of love. Love that is based in the will as opposed to the spleen (where compassion comes from). Much of the Empire was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy which placed a great deal of importance on the mind or will and rationality/order/logos. The word for 'mind' is 'dianoia' which doesn't seem to be anything particularly new: thoughts, understanding, feeling.
So what would intentional love mean?

The first two men to walk past the injured men were a priest and a Levite. It's interesting to consider that both the priest and Levite had important religious duties to uphold, and since touching a dead body makes you unclean, they would have risked defiling themselves and therefore being unable to attend to any of their religious responsibilities that day. In their minds, they would've been totally justified. They can't allow themselves to be unclean, so there's just nothing that they can do about the injured man. The Samaritans were sort of a discriminated-against Jewish sect. They held different beliefs and to touch a Samaritan was also to render oneself unclean. So actually, if the injured man was Jewish, the Samaritan could have been defiling him by helping him.
Michael suggested that the Samaritan is kind of operating from a position of having nothing to lose, and this plus seeing what is most important gives him power to cross social categories. We considered this in light of the call to die to ourselves. What are we in a position to lose?

Also interesting was the idea that when people talk about someone being a 'Good Samaritan', they often mean that the person did something right. But actually, in the story, the priest and the Levite were the ones who did their duty in staying clean and the Samaritan is the one who broke the social rules to help the injured man. We tried to think of ways in which we think we are right and justified, but perhaps we're really just buying into what our social categories tell us about what is the right thing to do when Jesus would have us do something different.

Another thing is, the story is not about the Samaritan helping his neighbor the injured man. The story is about the Samaritan being a neighbor to the injured man. The teacher of the law describes him as 'the one who showed mercy'. Jesus says, 'go and do likewise.' So if we intentionally make ourselves a neighbor to everyone, then everyone is our neighbor by association.

So basically, what we have to think about is - what does it mean to go about living with an intentional love for God and for our neighbors? What does it mean to love them like we love ourselves (and one might ask, do we love ourselves?)? When can we be 'doing the right thing,' but not showing mercy? What does it mean to show mercy? What, exactly, is Jesus asking us to give here?

And man, how awkward would it be if you were an outcast that no one associated with, carrying an injured man who you shouldn't be touching, into the city where no one accepts you, to look for help? How badly would you have to want him to be safe in order to put yourself through that?

Man.

happy Thursday,

-Tracy

oh - too slow.

I wanted to write this post about originality and the frustration of thinking you invented some item or concept only to see that someone else has not only already thought of it, but enacted it.

But someone else has already both thought of this subject, and ... posted it:

Ironically, the date on this post is the date I saved a rough outline draft to remind myself what I wanted to post about. The actual date is currently 12.06.06 at 1:55am, and is in partial response to [link removed for now] on quite the character's blog. Furtherly ironic, quite the character started his blog after me, partially on my suggestion and is now posting things that I wanted to post about things that I found.
(It's ok. It's just the rust on the irony)

I'm talking about xkcd.
I've been wanting to make a comic. Almost started. There's a lot of things I've wanted to do that I've almost done. But not quite. There's some momentum to overcome there, and in the meantime, someone else is doing what I wanted to do. xkcd is so wonderfully hilarious and yet so painful because aaahhh ... I could be doing that. But I am not. And he's doing it first. And... he's doing it really well. So I guess it's ok...

And then I tell quite the character about xkcd and that he should start a blog for his drawings. And quite the character goes and makes a post that says essentially what I wanted to say about xkcd, before I do. Even though the date on this post clearly indicates that I started a draft on this subject before he even had a blog.

I guess that's what you get for sitting on an idea for too long.
There's too much in the world. Too much to do, too much to learn, too much to see. Ideas should not be indoor pets.

Ah, and as long as I'm talking about ideas,
I should've posted this a few hours earlier, and then I could say something like Remember, remember, the 5th of December in parody of how I missed saying that on the 5th of November (V for Vendetta reference).
But - hah - not only have I missed Nov 5th, but also now, Dec 5th.

So many things to think, and
even when I have the thoughts, it's

Always

just a little too slow.

What it boils down to

So I've decided that it is possible to let ideas simmer too long.
I have several drafts saved that are just a couple of ideas scattered on the screen that I wanted to save to write about more completely when I had time. They will probably appear as coming before this post because of that, even though I will obviously finish writing them sometime after this post. I sort of thought that by this weekend I would have some of that time. I was wrong. I should've remembered that I'm in college. I'm currently struggling to keep my head near enough to the surface to catch a breath now and then, and I think I will spend this week doing the same. I'm nearly caught up with my work, and what a surprising feeling that will be when I get there. In the meantime, I hope I don't become uninterested or too distanced from the things I intended to write about because then they will feel like more of a chore, I won't explore the ideas fully, and I'm sure it will be less interesting to read about. I hope I get them before they boil down to a basic sludge.

I'm posting this as a reminder that my posts will probably be written either all at once, or rather far removed from when they were first considered. I hope to catch my ideas while they're still distinct and have some texture worth describing out to some kind of conclusion.

There are so many things I have to do, it's making time go by a little faster than I'd like. I'll just have to notice the individual moments a bit more.

There are so many things I want to do separate from my classes.
Writing is just one of them.
School is getting in the way of my learning...

At least I will always have my homework to keep me warm.
Stacks of freshly-printed papers have a surprising amount of heat.

Time, I guess.
Use it how you will, however you think of it.
I suggest Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman.

And now I've got more homework, so the bait that I have sitting out for myself of earning some time with my own thoughts will have to stay on that back burner.
Oh, Entropy.

Later, I will attempt to defy Tom Stoppard
by stirring these things apart.

God is in the Rain

Have you seen V for Vendetta?
It's got an amazing blend of themes and images.
There's one scene where Evie, the female protagonist is standing outside on top of a building, head shorn, just emerged from a trial by torture which has left her with nothing more to fear. While imprisoned, she happened upon a note hidden away by a previous prisoner for her to find. The prisoner makes a reference to how her grandmother always told her that 'God is in the Rain'. There is a storm growing, and V tries to give her a his coat to protect her from the rain, but she fixes her eyes on the falling sky and brushes past it, walking farther out into the open. Reaching the edge, she whispers to herself: God is in the rain. The rain seems to be a cleansing, a renewal, a promise of life despite. She raises her hands abover her head, beginning to laugh.
This image exactly parallels the one we have seen of V standing amid the flames of the burning lab. He raises his hands above his head and roars. It is Vengeance, retribution, justice. Appropriately, he is the fire that consumes the corruption of the Old England, and she is left to initiate the New England.

I was walking down the hill to work
after solving a geometry problem
feeling strong in my new life on the other side.
It was raining.
I lifted my arms above my head, saying 'God is in the Rain',
and started to laugh.
new life feels so good




I bet that didn't make any sense. That's ok. This entry is for me, to remember.
I finally finished describing it today - 9.30.06 at 23:28

But you should go watch V for Vendetta. The images are amazing, both visually and symbolically.

Luke 4:13-32

I mostly want to post something today, because I like the numbers in today's date. Maybe I can get good numbers on the time stamp too.

We've started a scripture study group in my dorm.
Some of us kept discussing the topic after other people had to go off to jobs and such, people seemed interested in hearing how the conversation went, so I hastily typed a sort of discussion summary from some notes to send to them.

Please don't judge my writing or coherency by this.
This is what I sent:

I typed this really fast.
I hope it's coherent:

hey guys.
Some of you left on time, but we kept talking. Here's what we talked about.


The passage is Luke 4:13-32

Jesus goes back to Nazareth and pretty much introduces himself and his ministry by reading from Isaiah 61. The people are impressed and then he says some stuff that makes them upset enough to want to throw him off of a cliff. But he escaped with typical Jesus-y mysterious ease and went to go preach somewhere else where he apparently did not make enough inflammatory remarks to make the people want to kill him.

The text from Isaiah 61 is
http://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/Isa/Isa061.html#top
quoted in Luke
http://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/Luk/Luk004.html#13
Jesus chooses to quote the top part (It's possible that Isaiah 61 was the Scripture passage for that week, so I'm not sure how much of it was his choice of where to read. There are other important aspects of synagogue services that may be significant, but I don't really know enough about them)

Our questions:
What does it mean to preach the acceptable year of the Lord?
What does it mean that it's been fulfilled?
why does Jesus start up with the 'Doctor, heal thyself' stuff?
Why does everyone get so angry so fast?
How should we interpret the passage from Isaiah?
Why does Jesus present himself in the synagogue in this way?
Verse 13: he escapes. How?

I only really started taking notes after people had to leave, so I might not cover some of our initial discussions here but:

We wondered if perhaps Jesus was using the whole situation to try to clarify that his message.

"The Spirit of the Lord [is] upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
To preach the acceptable year of the Lord."

was in complete effect for everyone. Not to you and you and you. the TIME for this has begun. For everyone. And perhaps the people of Nazareth thought of it as theirs. That he had come back to his hometown to bring deliverance and healing and sight to them. And Jesus goes and cites times in their own religious history when God has sent healing and provision not to His people the Jews, but to foreigners. The widow that Elijah was sent to was not a Jew, though many Jews starved in the same famine. The Syrian that Elisha was sent to heal was not Jewish. This may have been especially a big deal back then because the people of the time didn't have this concept of the afterlife in which all things would be made right. If God was going to bring justice to someone, they thought it would be brought in the present lifetime.

I don't think Jesus meant to say that his message was NOT for them, but often, messages like this sound noble and good until you see what they actually mean in real life. Example) before the destruction of the 1st temple, Israel at this time (the audience of Isaiah) was an overall prosperous nation, but many of the high-class (financially and religious) had attained their status through a system which became oppressive to the poor. The poor cried out to God for justice and provision. The rich also asked God for justice. But if God was going to equal out the whole scenario that means raising up the poor.... at the expense of the rich. Going to Cairo, or even going to DownTown Portland sometimes reminds me of how ridiculously rich I am in comparison to so many people. How can I ask God for justice unless I am willing to be brought down so that others may be raised up and we can all be restored to an equal footing again?

Anyway, the Jews have an entire religious history built up of what to expect from the Messiah and what they expect from Jesus - Joseph's son. Jesus proclaiming healing to them and then citing times that healing had been specifically for non-Jews must have sounded like blasphemy. This is no way for a Messiah to talk.

So here are some questions...
What if all you knew about Christ was how he presented himself to the synagogue and specifically, what he quoted from Isaiah 61?
How do you respond to this announcement?
If you were introducing Jesus, would you have done it this way?
Does it make you think any further about who he is and what he's trying to do?
What does this mean for us if we claim to be his followers?
If you were introducing yourself to a church, what would you choose to say about yourself?

What if Jesus walked into your church and said a bunch of stuff that sounded like heresy?
We tried to think of things that we wouldn't expect Jesus to say and hit the wall of, "well, if we don't expect him to say it, we assume he wouldn't."

We couldn't really come to an exact conclusion, given that what we were discussing was unexpected things. But I think a general consensus was that it's worth pondering - in what ways do we try to make Jesus fit our expectations, and in what ways is God perhaps trying to call us into an understanding of something different? In what ways do we ignore it because it's not what we expect it to be?

Man, this was a long email.
Good job if you actually made it this far.
I definitely haven't covered everything we talked about. I guess you had to be there.. ;)
I hope I remembered the main points though.

This is one of my favorite passages, and if anyone wants to tell me what they think about it or talk about it sometime, I'd be more than happy to hear your opinion.

Let me reiterate that this is one of my favorite passages.
It's so beautiful.

-Tracy

I hope that I'll remember to come back to these ideas and flesh them out sometime. If this stuff (what Jesus was talking about) is true and real, it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. I'm so glad we have God that wants beautiful things for the world and for us, even when we don't even understand what it would look like for the world to be this way.

Ich bin fraviert

I feel like I should post something.
about how other people have entirely different lives that I know nothing about.
How the government tricks us into thinking we need to eat 3 meals a day.
How society raises us to categorize our relationships and believe that we should (especially at my age) be finding an oppositely-gendered heterosexual partner.

I don't understand how this happens.
how does it happen that you can trick yourself into thinking you know someone well enough to correctly judge that you could merge lives with them? Why is this something people pay attention for? Sometimes I think that I don't know what I want, because my standards of what counts as friendship are much different than what everyone else seems to go off of.
Leave me alone, society.
Just let me keep my friends.


i just want people to be free.

This post needs major editing and will probably be deleted, or attached as a comment because I refuse to delete things.

Oh, and I'm not sure what timestamp this post would show, but I wrote it at like 1:00 or something am on the 20th

***I'm choosing to edit. The current time is 21:28 on Sept 30th. I am somewhat removed from the ideas I previously wanted to write about, but I'll try to do them justice. I'm sure they'll pop back up again sometime in the future, anyway. I have a rough outline I wrote for myself back on the 20th which I will now try to flesh out.

A friend of mine told me a story in which her father was trying to order plane tickets to fly from Los Angeles to Germany. Her father can speak German fluently, and was conversing with the airline representative in German on the phone. He was trying to ask for tickets from Los Angeles to Germany, but the represetative kept telling him Du bist fraviert - you are confused, that's not really what you want. Naturally, this was upsetting since her father was convinced that he did, in fact, want tickets to fly from California to Germany. But always, the response was Du bist fraviert - that's not what you want. This is what you want: you want tickets from New York. No. Not New York. Cal-i-forn-ia. This went on for a while until he realized that what they were trying to say was that they didn't have a flight from Germany to Los Angeles. Her father would have to buy a ticket with a layover in New York. But they wouldn't come out and tell him that directly (I think this is a cultural thing), and instead tried to tell him nicely that he was mistaken and only thought he wanted a ticket from California when really he wanted a ticket from New York.

Sometimes I wonder how confused I really am.

Do I want to be in a relationship?
That's a stupid question. There are many kinds of relationships. Certainly, I do not wish to be isolated.
The question now is,
Do I want to be in a romantic relationship?
It seems like the thing to do. The vast majority of people my age have had a boyfriend or a girlfriend by now. It also seems like an expectation that people who don't currently have a boyfriend or girlfriend would want one. Some friends tell me that even if it doesn't work out, it can be beautiful and worth it. This seems true, but maybe not necessary. And there are many beautiful things in the world that are not romance-related. I think sometimes we focus too much on things we don't have to appreciate the situation that we're in right now. I'm in college, I'm doing interesting things, I'm learning interesting things, I'm learning more about myself and who I want to be, and I don't feel like I have enough of that for myself to really be able share with someone else. This is also a little strange because my parents met each other in college. They got married before they both went to Grad School. If I was my mom, I think I would have met my dad by now. I don't know how they had time and energy for each other.
I probably sound pretty selfish so far. I should clarify that if I was in a romantic relationship, I would make sure that I put what I felt was the appropriate time, energy, quantity of myself into it. But that's not the current situation, and I'm not planning to go try to get myself into such a situation any time soon.

My standard of a friendship is pretty high. I think that I probably have/had some friendships that are/were closer than many other peoples' romantic relationships. I think that in general, we are more influenced to emupate models in society and in our every day experiences than we'd like to admit. Specifically, I think many people only start dating because the are eligible, and it seems like the next thing to do. It's what people do, right? Isn't it the right idea?
Many of our relationship terms seem to be categories imposed over a spectrum of involvment between two people. I'm not really sure about these categories and how they relate to actual situations. Like I said, I think I tend to count friendships as a closer relationship than I seem to observe in the general population. Sometimes I wonder if my standard for a romantic relationship is impractical. Anytime that I've been in what I considered to be a really good friendship with a guy, other people have assumed (incorrectly) that we were dating just because we seemed to understand each other and spent time with each other. I actually get really annoyed with feeling like I have a crush on someone. It's so distracting. It feels like having tunnel vision or blinders to the rest of the world. I get frustrated about all the things I'm probably missing because for some reason, I have to focus on some person. It's so useless. Most of the time, I know that nothing can come of it, so I just have to convince myself that I don't need this, and to release the focus.
Yet another of my friends told me of a version of Utopia he'd read about. In it, there was love, but not marriage - it wasn't that exclusive. And there was no sex. He seemed to find acceptable grounds for the first part, but the Utopia with no sex part really seemed to baffle him. I don't know, that Utopia sounded pretty good to me (No, I have not had sex).
Sometimes I don't handle a crush right, and it gets worse. It actually starts feeling good, and I become concerned for their life as much as, if not more than my own. I start wondering what Love is and if this qualifies (so far, the answer is always no). And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if,
maybe this is how I should love everyone.

Everyone is a pretty big thing to think about. I guess I'll just try to start with loving each person I know as much as possible, and it seems that the more I know about someone, the easier it is to identify with them and love them - they become beautiful.

My image of love right now is one of those braided ropes they have on huge ships. I've heard that if you get a foot caught in a loop when the line is going out - like on an anchor - it can cut right through your ankle. In The Old Man and the Sea, the Old Man can tell so much about what's going on under the water by feeling the minute tremors of the line at the surface. I've also heard (perhaps in The Old Man and the Sea) that if such a rope is stretched taut when wet, that the water springs from its surface like fleas. How much tension, how much strength must be on that rope, yet it holds? I think perhaps, that this is something that Love is like.

I think I should establish this sort of connection as a priority with God before I go about trying to find or build it here among people. I currently think that it would be pretty awesome if I could connect with someone in this way. I also think it would be awesome if everyone felt connected and supported by each other this way. Whether or not it would be better to be in a 'relationship' or not, I definitely shouldn't underestimate the valuable time I have now by myself. There is so much work to be done, and so many beautiful things in the world that perhaps someday I can share with someone else, but that I should learn to properly enjoy on my own first.

I'm not confused. I know what I want.
I want, as some grafitti in the girls' bathroom advocates: "Peace, Love, and redistribution of wealth."
I want people to be agents in their own lives, despite the categories that society compels compliance to.
I want my friends to be able to go home to Sudan and rebuild their country.
I want the people on the edge to be remembered
and to know that they are not forgotten.
I want the meek to inherit the earth, I want those who mourn to be comforted, I want love to be real and active and intentional and to drive out fear.
no more fear, no more hatred, no more misunderstanding, no more separation.
love.
I think God wants these things too, and I want to work with him.

The confusing part is figuring out how to go about this. Sometimes I think it should just be me and God, and I will take his dreams for my own. But you know, if the whole world had that mentality, we'd miss out on the human community that God seems to encourange, and the blessing of being able, even commanded, to love one another.

Finding ways to work for these things seems more important to me than finding someone to call a boyfriend. And it wouldn't work out unless he wanted all these things too.

I guess I do want someone to share life with. Life is multiplied, not divided, when it is shared.
But I don't trust the commonly accepted societal terms of how I should go about sharing my life.

Apparently, all I can think of right now is to write things on this blog.
And I can't bring myself to type 'I love you' because blogs seem a little more distant than that. So far.

The time is 23:07, 9.30.2006

Simmering Stage Fright

I find it interesting that last night it was difficult to resist telling people that I'd started a blog.

I'm trying to keep a lid on it in what my writing teacher referred to as 'simmering.' You don't tell people about the ideas you have before you write them down because there's something vital that gets lost in the initial telling. In order to get the full flavor rather than a list of main topics, it's generally a good idea to keep things in your head (in what my math teacher would refer to as 'mulling it over'), close your mouth (obviously, to keep the pressure up), and force the ideas to channel out through a pen or keyboard. I'm sure Bernoulli's got an explanation for this kind of thing. This keeps the ideas from deflating into their relatively bland shells and blowing off like tumbleweed.

The thing that made my first sentence interesting is the fact that this morning, I felt totally intimidated by my potential blog audience. And I don't even have one yet.

I think this is good motivation to be as clear, precise, and true to my own honest ideas as possible, since both friends and strangers .. and my older, more experienced, - hopefully - wiser self might be able to look back on this in the future (I refuse to delete things - I reserve the right to modify, but I will not delete).
I hope that I don't look back on any of these posts and think they're 'cute'.

My future self is a tough crowd.
So are the future projections of friends that I will inevitably refer to in the course of this blog.

This better be good.

Faith, Hope, and Love

One of my friends just emailed me to tell me that today (Sept 17th, in case I don't finish this draft in time) is a huge holiday in Bulgaria (and perhaps for Eastern Orthodoxers everywhere). It's a holiday for the Saints Faith, Hope, and Love, and for their mother St. Sophia who is like, the guardian of wisdom or something. ...This would be very interesting to look at with a mind to the gnostic portion of Christian movements back in the day. Thankyou, Ancient Christianity class.

Anyway, It seems appropriate then to quote 1 Cor 13. It's kind of nice when you're sitting around thinking, man, what IS love anyway? And 1 Cor 13 has all these 'Love is...' statements. It's good to hear and think about because really, when different people say the word 'love,' they often mean very different things.

There is what has come to be termed the 'Love Wall' here on campus. It is the a wall that serves as the end of the last bathroom stall in one of the women's restrooms. The wall is made of medium-small square tiles and people have written on the grout between tiles and on the tiles themselves. Everything is about love. Most are statements that begin with 'I love...', many are comments about love, and even some questions.

I'm going to come back to this post later. I'm really being distracted by my Geometry homework. Why not just post this and then add more later? I'd really like to be able to complete a couple of tangents within a post to make a fuller, more complete story. And, it seems best to explain as much as possible all at once so that in the future, I can make references or elaborate rather than having to continue something that I didn't tie together in the first place.

Once, I copied this section onto the wall:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.

Someone wrote next to it something like,

Not so complicated, Love just is

I know I have the 'Love just is' part right, but I'll pull a Thucydides and say I don't actually remember what the first phrase was, but it was something to the effect that I had tried to write too much about what love was.

I'm gaining a fuller appreciation of the ideas that 1 Cor 13 beautifully records, incidentally:

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

I'm not sure how to explain this, but I guess that until recently, it hadn't occurred to me to think about what Paul was actually talking about knowing in part or knowing fully. And even when people told me interpretations, it didn't really hit home. But, consider After Apple Picking by Robert Frost:

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.

I have very similar mental images from both of these passages. I see Robert Frost looking into the pane of glass.. or ice.. in the same way that Paul looks into the poor reflection of the mirror - Seeing a vague semblence, but never fully comprehending what it means. I think that this is a natural part of trying to understand things here on earth. Real things like love, justice, peace, God, our own selves, life, death... No matter how much I think I understand one of these topics, I always discover that I wasn't quite right. There's something else that I strain my metaphorical eyes to see. I'm learning more about the world. I'm gaining more experiences through which to understand both new things and to understand more fully things I thought I knew before. I'm onto something, I know. But, I don't understand completely. But someday, someday we will understand. Clear as a clanging cymbal or a crashing gong. God is love, and I think that when I really believe this (I always think I believe this, but then again, I also think I know what it means to believe something), when we really believe this, it will all fit together.
Or maybe I'll understand when I go home
and there is nothing left to keep me from being face to face with my God.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell

Dear world, please keep searching. Faith, Hope, and Love are real, even if we don't understand what the entirety of this means.

A conversation with one of my friends:

"You know what I hate about Christianity?"
I try to figure out what he's going to say and take too long
so he told me.
I don't remember the exact words, but it was about how Christians so easily throw around those heavy words - like love. They use them so often, but nobody stops to really talk about what they mean

I thought this was funny because I'm a Christian and I'd just been typing (chat) with some other Christian friends about love.

But I think he's right. Churches find it so easy to throw those words around. They're a huge part of Christianese, but when they're so common, nobody really stops to ask, wait. what did I just SAY

Maybe they should read the Love wall. There are so many different contributors. It would be something to think about.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

This has been the NIV translation of part of 1 Cor 13. I do like how the KJV translates 'agape' (love. not from the heart or the spleen, but from the will) as 'charity.'

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom
There is no fear in love, but love drives out fear
God is love
love ye one another
Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends
As the father sent me, so send I you
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength
Love your neighbor as yourself

This is hard teaching. Who can understand it?

and this is a long post. Who can read it? ;)

Now we know in part, but then we shall know in full.
Take heart, for he has overcome the world.

Thankyou, my friends.
I do not know the name of this holiday, but
Happy Wisdom, Faith, Hope, and Love day.

I am not good at saying these things, and apparently not that much better at writing them. But, someday I will figure out how to say, "I love you" with all its significance in all its glory. I doubt it will be with words. So much of life is a kind of love charades as we find ways to act out what we cannot say.

loving is labor
labor's life
life's forever
-Biomusicology Ted Leo and the Pharmacists

Introduction

It all happened rather quickly, I think - this decision to start a blog. I generally viewed them as time wasting devices, and my writing media of choice is pen and paper (70 pages, spiral, college-rule). I didn't have anything I wanted to tell other people, especially not on the internet, and what I wanted to say to myself was easily transcribed in ink (it was pencil, until I realized that pencil more quickly rubs away with time).

Clearly, my opinions are changing.

Perhaps it's the influence of college, but I feel much more able to get my ideas out onto a computer screen now than I did before. Plus, I don't have as much of a chance to sit down with a notebook anymore. However, thanks to homework and email, I'm never very far away from a computer. This medium is slowly becoming the more convenient one. It seems somewhat necessary as well. In notebooks, my thoughts are spaced out linearly with respect to both time and space, since the best way to arrange notebooks is to stack them next to each other and flip through when you want to find or reference something. However, more of my notebook references are coming from/resulting in drawings or photos or websites. These things are readily acessible and referenceable with a computer, but not so for actual physical paper. And, I don't like scrapbooks yet.

I'm becoming more interested in preservation and presentation. Unless something happens to the data I post here and it completely disappears, it will not wear away or turn yellow or smudge. And, when I get this site organized, it will look nice. I guess I think of this blog as a compiler for things that contribute to how I process the world I experience. After all, this is what I intend to do: I have several years worth of notebooks, many things not written in said notebooks, a cluttered desktop (physically, and on my computer), and things which I should've written down but haven't yet. They're scattered, but they're important components. I would like to bring them together in the same place.
So this blog is for me. Not for you.

But why on a blog?
In addition to being convenient, a blog gives some semblance of an audience. I would like very much for my future to include publishing writing or art or photography. Lots of other writers and photographers have blogs. I used to think that was sort of silly to resort to publishing on a blog. But, since this blog is for me, I decided I would like to use it to practice putting something out for a (possibly) unknown audience. It will be both my archive and my resume (I don't know how to make the accents on vowels yet). But not completely.

I took a poetry class last year, and we mostly worked on revising our work for an audience. This was interesting because though I've written a lot, I've always written for myself. Interestingly enough, I understand (or later discover) all the allusions in my writing, but for some reason other people often don't get these things. This results in images which I think are compelling actually diluting my work because other people don't understand what they refer to and to them it has content equivalent to filler. If I want to someday write something for other people, it will be good to practice containing the power of ideas in images that have relevance to the world outside of me. However, I also hope that recurring themes and images will begin to define and reference themselves so that their allusions will mean something to more than just me.

I'll help you out. The line about the 'power of ideas' was a reference to V for Vendetta, possibly one of my favorite movies right now. The further connotation then (I may not be using the word 'connotation' exactly right) is that, properly contained, the ideas shall be bulletproof. 'Bulletproof' here is a reference to how they should have the ability to stand in all significance and make clear their interpretation to the any reader. Digging deeper, we remember that V, nameless and faceless, contained an idea. No, he wasn't exactly bulletproof, but the idea lived, and when she was asked, 'Who was he?' Evie replied, '... He is all of us...' His idea was not his alone, but was taken up by an entire population who understood - maybe not entirely - but yet understood, and this had power.
I want to be able to choose words and images carefully enough so that people other than me understand. I think it's possible. I know we all have different connotations and experiences with words. I know that in Intro Linguistics right now, I'm leaning towards more of a social rather than formal interpretation of language. But, I think there are some inescapable ideas, images, experiences that run deep through humanity in general. And if I can just choose the right words in the right order at the right times, the verbal packaging will correctly betray the idea inside.

I've been typing for a while, and I need to move on to other things (starting a somewhat ambitious blog with time constraints all ready... we'll see if this works out...). I'll start wrapping this post up.
Here are some basics:

I will try to be disciplined enough about my writing to think about things and write about them in a coherent, interesting manner on a somewhat regular basis.

I anticipate that since a reason for this blog is to practice presentability and writing for an audience, I will not make this into some kind of diary for my most inner personal secrets. I still have a notebook. It shall not go unused.
I've often considered online journaling or blogging to be associated mostly with people who had nothing better to do, or just wrote about how depressing their own little lives were. I figured, if I actually wanted people to know stuff, I'd just talk to them. I will justify writing on the internet by supposing that I probably won't write anything here that I wouldn't tell you if you asked me. I further justify myself by remembering that I now have friends in different parts of the country and talking with people is no longer as easy.

At this point, you may wonder: if this is so, why didn't you tell me about your blog?
I wanted to keep it to myself for a little while. Yes, I do want experience writing for an audience, but just typing into this screen is enough to make me imagine that someone might read it. eventually. This is enough of a threat to discipline my writing with.
And, even though I'm posting on the internet, and it's supposedly nothing I wouldn't tell you if you asked, it's still a little weird.

It's like growing plants indoors before you transplant them to the garden.

And I think I secretly wish I had an old blog to look back on (yes, I know I have old notebooks).
I heard that the thing in architecture these days is to make homes look as if they are old farm houses which have been built up over the years. So they are made in little attachment-looking blocks with stone for part and bricks for part and wood for something else. I learned this because my parents are thinking of remodelling or building an addition to our house. We have an old farmhouse. Apparently, if we put an addition onto it, we will have what everyone else is trying to imitate in their new houses. I think the new houses are disgusting. They look so new and fake like giant barns with no purpose. It's this obscenely giant awkward bulk in the middle of like, a few neatly clipped acres. It looks nothing like a farm. They are like, the Wal*Mart to our Ma&Pop old farmhouse.

But, anyway. That's kind of what I'm trying to do here, I think. If I post for a while before telling people, it's almost as if they're discovering something old when really, it was current but they didn't know about it.
sneaky, huh?

I really hope this blog won't be like a disgusting, imitative, fake farmhouse.
I determine that it will not.

Well, here we go.

In the beginning

Claim: existence.

to show: relevance