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 |    My primary Writing.com blog. |
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Logocentric (adj). Regarding words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality (especially applied as a negative term to traditional Western thought by postmodernist critics). Sometimes I just write whatever I feel like. Other times I respond to prompts, many taken from the following places:  "The Soundtrackers Group"  "Blogging Circle of Friends " "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" "JAFBG" "Take up Your Cross" Thanks for stopping by!  |
| Prompt ▼ The first foreign country I visited was Spain in 2009. My cousin-in-law's parents were missionaries at a Christian school outside of Madrid for almost a decade and hosted us for their last summer before returning to the States. After years of wanting to travel but never having the opportunity, my wife and I soaked everything in and immediately fell in love with international travel. The following year (2010) we visited London for the first time and I surprised my wife with an overnight trip to Paris, which we followed up two years later with a trip specifically to Paris in Spring of 2013. Later that summer, my wife went on a mission trip with his sister's church to Brazil (Sao Paulo, specifically), and I followed her on a second mission trip a year later in Summer of 2014. The next few years were filled with lots of domestic travel for various reasons (mostly short getaways and attending weddings). Other than my wife's third trip to Brazil for Thanksgiving 2017, we went on trips to Hawaii, Nashville, New York, Portland (Oregon not Maine), Reno, Seattle, Texas (separately to both Austin and Dallas). When we were getting ready to start the foster-to-adopt process and start our family, we took one last "big hurrah" trip to Thailand in July 2018, and that was the last international trip we've taken. I was hoping to visit three different continents before our parenting journey began and thanks to that last trip to Thailand, we were able to get stamps for Europe, South America, and Asia in our passports. Since then, being new parents and the whole global pandemic thing have really put a lot of our travel plans on hold, and our list of places we want to visit has only increased in the intervening years. If I were to narrow down those places to a short list, the top three places I still want to visit at this point (which one is first depends on the day and the price of flights  ) are Japan, Australia, and either Ireland or Italy. There are a ton more places I'd love to visit someday but whenever my wife and I talk about international travel, those are the destinations that we most often check first to see what's available.With the kids' adoptions being finalized earlier this year, we're just waiting on their official paperwork (new birth certificates so we can get new social security cards so we can get passports), and once that happens we'll be cleared to start traveling the world again!  |
"Blog City Prompt Forum" | Prompt ▼ I remember this quote. It's from a commencement speech that SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts gave at his kid's graduation ceremony from some boarding school somewhere. At the time it was met with mixed reviews, with many either celebrating its irreverence or dismissing it as faux-intellectual nonsense. The version in the prompt is actually an abridged version, though. Here's the full text of that section of his commencement speech: "Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes." He gave that speech back in 2017, before the Supreme Court replaced Anthony Kennedy with Brett Kavanaugh, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barrett, and Stephen Breyer with Ketanji Brown Jackson. Back before the Court's most recent term where they overturned Roe v. Wade, gutted the federal government's ability to regulate major types of environmental pollutants, and have dramatically limited the rights of states to regulate guns (funny how they say we must entrust reproductive rights to the states, but gun rights are too important to be left up to individual states to decide...  ), all things that are wildly unpopular with a significant majority of Americans.In retrospect, maybe this is exactly the kind of person that John Roberts has always been. Someone who prides himself on being moderate and sensible and an institutionalist is, at heart, a "fuck your feelings" type who foreshadowed five years ago what they were going to do when given an opportunity. After all, it's good for us to be treated unfairly, to be betrayed, to lose and have your opponent gloat over their victory. The really important part isn't how badly you get screwed over; it's whether you learn something from the experience. Spoken like someone who has routinely done the screwing over and has rarely been screwed over himself. Don't get me wrong, I do think there is a grain of truth in what he's saying about the fact that we are all tempered and shaped by our failures. We often learn the most salient lessons about who we are and what we believe in the face of adversity. I guess I just have an issue with the messenger on this one. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who by most accounts has led a pretty charmed life and now has the power to change the course of history in this country is telling a bunch of middle school graduates "I hope you'll fail at your dreams and be disappointed so you learn to suck it up." For me, it's kind of like being lectured on your parenting skills by friends who have live-in domestic staff, or like an inheritor of generational wealth giving you tips on how to build a fortune. At best, it's the misguided advice of someone who hasn't actually practiced what they're preaching. At worse, it was a subtle warning of what was to come... an era where we're all going to get jurisprudentially fucked and his advice for when that happens is to basically be the dad from Calvin & Hobbes and tell us all how it "builds character." I used to think John Roberts took his role as the steward of the Supreme Court seriously. That he actually believed in the fair and balanced application of the law was more important than partisan politics. The more I read about John Roberts and the actions he's taken since helping the Bush team argue in Bush v. Gore to stop the count in Florida and declare Bush the winner of the 2000 presidential election (a decision he directly benefitted from by subsequently being appointed to the federal bench), almost all of his opinions and decisions have frequently aligned with the interests of the Republican Party. And I don't mean with conservatism as a general judicial philosophy, I specifically mean key decisions that have implicitly and explicitly entrenched the political power of the Republican Party. I know all this sounds a little ... but seriously, look it up sometime. See what Roberts had to say in Exxon Shipping v. Baker about corporate responsibility for wrongdoing. Or Citizens United about corporate political donations being considered free speech. Or Heller, which disregarded the "for the purposes of a well regulated militia" part of the second amendment (odd for so many "originalists" on the court to decide in that specific instance that the founders didn't know what they were talking about!). Or Shelby County v. Holder where states with a record of voter rights violations no longer needed the federal government's approval over new voting laws because racism doesn't exist anymore. It's remarkable how often Roberts' opinions aren't just generically conservative but are very specifically in favor of a course of action that benefits the Republican Party in efforts to entrench its own power. Maybe a guy like that shouldn't be telling a bunch of kids that he hopes the struggle and fail. Then again, maybe someone who seems to be putting his thumb on the scales of justice is exactly the kind of person who would tell kids that he hopes they learn something from inevitable adversity and disappointment with the system.  |
"Take up Your Cross" | Prompt ▼ My favorite church activity is Bible study. For a long time I didn't read the Bible, and for a while after that I read it quite skeptically. To be honest, I still do that, but I now have a much greater appreciation for the text, thanks to years of listening to really smart sermons, and realizing that a bit of confusion and uncertainty is kind of the point. Once I accepted the fact that the Bible isn't supposed to be a step-by-step blueprint, I was able to really appreciate all the nuances it contains, including inconsistencies and pieces of it that can be vastly misinterpreted by different people. As a piece of literature, there's nothing quite like it. How it was written, how it was compiled, the sheer among of complexity and different authors and styles and types of writing... it's a remarkable text. I love attending Bible studies where people who are much more familiar with the text than I am weigh in on their interpretation of certain passages. I'm particularly enjoying my church's current Bible in a Year study where we're reading the entire Bible, cover to cover, between January and December. Our pastor, who has a number of advanced degrees not just in theology but also ancient languages and history and other supplemental studies that are applicable to the Bible, meets with us once a week to talk through what we've read from both a historical and pastoral context. I've really gotten a lot out of this particular bible study and I anticipate it will encourage me to continue to read more and learn more about the Bible for years to come. "Take up Your Cross" | Prompt ▼ This struck me as a really odd question. The entire Christian religion is based on following Jesus. Almost the entirety of the New Testament is about following Jesus. Most Christians spend their life seeking to discern God's will for their lives. So Jesus decides to do a one-day encore performance on Earth and he's going to spend it with you... and the question asks what I'm going to do that day? How can it be anything other than saying to Jesus, "I'm doing whatever you're doing" because I'm not the most important person in that meet-up. The question makes it seems like we should be debating what to do with the presence of Jesus as if he were an out-of-town relative, or a VIP visitor from work, where you're debating whether you should plan a chill day of showing him one of your favorite shows on Netflix and ordering in Thai from the pretty decent place next door, or if you should make reservations at a cool new restaurant and maybe take him out for a night on the town.  What's being proposed in this question is nothing short of world-changing. Jesus, a figure that up until this point, modern Christians have had to read a very old book about and do their best to intuit what he would do in a given situation, is back and willing to spend time with you. The New Testament is full of stories of his disciples following him around, or those who follow in the footsteps of the disciples and try to do what he would have done if he were with them during the time periods depicted in Acts, Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, etc. I just can't fathom any response other than, "I just want to go wherever you go, and do whatever you do." The whole point of the Christian faith is that we're supposed to follow Jesus' teachings... what better opportunity to do that than if he were to show up on your doorstep. If Jesus said, "Let's go to the beach, there's something I want to do there," I'd grab my keys. If Jesus said, "Hey, are we close to Jerusalem, because I want to check on something," I'd book us plane tickets. If Jesus wanted to kick up his feet on my couch and said, "I have some thoughts on some things," I'd grab my laptop and start taking notes. The whole point of the Christian faith is that it's not about us; it's about Jesus. I have no idea what he'd want to do if he showed up on my doorstep one day. All I know is that I'd be far more concerned about what he wanted to do than what I wanted to do... and whatever he wanted to do should be something I automatically say "yes" to. |
WDC 48-Hour Challenge: Media Prompt | Prompt ▼ I was trying to think of something to write for this month's media prompt about this song and instead of doing a short story or writing about how the song makes me feel, I thought it would be more interesting to write about some behind-the-scenes information about the song itself. If you're familiar with the Rewatchables podcast, it's a podcast where the hosts rewatch classic (and not-so-classic) movies and, with the benefit of hindsight, answer questions like "Who won the movie?" and "For whom was this movie the apex mountain of their career?" and things like that. One of the sections they have in the podcast is called "Half-Assed Internet Research" and that's exactly what this is. I have no idea if any of this is actually true because I didn't work on the song, but according to my own half-assed internet research, I discovered the following:  The song was inspired at least in part on Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The line "'cause baby you're a firework / come on, show 'em what you're worth / make 'em go awe, awe, awe" is based on Kerouac's line "burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Aww!'" In the interests of full disclosure though, the most interesting part of the inspiration anecdote, as she relayed to Billboard in an interview is that it was combined with "this very morbid idea... when I pass, I want to be put into a firework and shot across the sky over the Santa Barbara Ocean as my last hurrah," she said. "I want to be a firework, both living and dead." The song is most familiar to people with the lyrics as, "You just gotta ignite the light / And let it shine / Just own the night / Like the Fourth of July," but that last line was originally "like a firefly" which Perry wrote because she thought that fireflies remind her of fireworks every time she sees them at night. But enough people kept misquoting the song that Perry eventually changed the lyrics and now sings it as "Like the Fourth of July" herself at concerts because she thinks it's a better fit and thematically works with the imagery of the song a little better. The one thing she didn't change the lyrics on was the "make 'em go awe, awe, awe" line. Many people misattribute it as "up, up, up" or "ah, ah, ah" including her fellow American Idol judge, country music star Luke Bryan to whom she specifically said, "It's not up, up, up and it's not ah, ah, ah. It's awe, awe, awe. A-W-E. It's awe, awe, awe everybody, get it right!"  The song recently became relevant again quite recently, not for it's popularity but for the politics. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Perry tweeted "'Baby you're a firework' is a 10 but women in the US have fewer rights than an actual sparkler smh" which, you know, would have been fine if not for the fact that just a few weeks prior she endorsed Rick Caruso in the Los Angeles mayoral race, a billionaire developer who - while running as a Democrat - has a long, long history of supporting conservatives and anti-choice candidates. In the words of Twitter user @KayTeeeOh, "Girl you endorsed Rick Caruso maybe sit this one out"  Hope you've enjoyed this little half-assed internet research details about the song! |
Explainer ▼ Movies  Interceptor The Lost City No Time to Die Thor: Love and ThunderTelevision  The Bear The Boys (Season 2) The Boys (Season 3) Invincible (Season 1) Obi-Wan KenobiWith a couple of exceptions, I was mostly disappointed with the movies I saw this month (except for Thor: Love and Thunder which I really liked), and I was mostly really happy with the television I saw (except for Invincible which I had a hard time getting into). Interceptor was a garbage action movie about a nuclear deterrence platform that's taken hostage and Elsa Pataky is some sort of weapons specialist who is, of course, the only one that can stop them. The action is pretty weak, and the characters and the dramatic scenes are even worse. Unless you're an Elsa Pataky stan or will literally watching any action movie, it's safe to skip this one. The Lost City and No Time To Die were both movies that came highly recommended by a number of people I know, and both fell short for me. They were okay, but didn't really knock my socks off. Obi-Wan Kenobi was fun to watch as a Star Wars fan, but I'm really starting to wonder why they keep going back to the same well. The Star Wars universe is one of the richest, most well-developed, expansive media franchises in the world and they still... just... keep going back to the same core characters. As much as I enjoy these little glimpses at "the stories between the trilogies," I'm getting really desperate for new content about some of the characters and storylines that haven't been done before. I really hope they figure out to do more with the remarkably diverse IP they've created. The Boys continues to be one of my favorite shows on television. It's so dark and twisted and satirical; I just love it. You haven't really experienced all the superhero genre has to offer until you've see "Herogasm," an episode that focuses on an annual super-powered orgy.  This was honestly shaping up to be the second month in a row I picked it as my top choice, until a couple days ago when I started watching...The Bear. Jeremy Allen White (Lip from Shameless) plays Carmy, a virtuoso chef who leaves behind a promising career in the fine dining world to take over his family's crappy sandwich shop in Chicago after his brother commits suicide. It's a really touching story about a talented young man struggling with his promise, trying to make something of himself, set against the backdrop of everyone who knew his brother coming to terms with his unexpected suicide. Hulu's really knocking it out of the park lately... between this and Dopesick which we watched late last year, they have two really outstanding series in the past two years to be proud of. TOP PICK: The Bear |
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