See this seed here? In six months it’s going to be corn!

I was sitting in a meeting at work today, bored, tired, and thinking about how I don’t want to get stuck doing this for the rest of my life. And then I got to thinking about just how intangible my life is sometimes.

It’s like I live my life in boxes. I mean, what do I actually do during a given day? I wake up in one box (my room), get in a moving box (the bus), arrive at another box (my office), and sit in front a magic box (computer) that connects me to other people who are also living their lives in similar boxes. And at the end of the day, what do I have to show for my work? Nothing I can touch, or smell, or hold, or taste, or even really see. I have information, stored in small electronic pulses somewhere in the ether. It’s like this strange dissociated reality, because nothing is really “real,” it’s all just ideas.

And I look around, out the window, at all this “real” stuff like buildings and cars and sidewalks and restaurants, and it’s mostly populated by people who are just living in boxes too! I feel like modern living makes us so dissociated from the real, favoring this second, intangible reality of ideas and information and electrons. What’s all this living about anyways, all this eating and breathing, smelling, touching? I love those moments with I feel the realness of life just wash over and consume me, like I am a part of it, and it is a part of me.

It makes me want to be a farmer, because the work they do is actually real. They take a seed, place it in the ground, and through the miracle (yes, it is a miracle in my book) of photosynthesis it becomes food. A farmer makes something real, something tangible, something I can hold and smell. It’s almost magical.

People Are Just People, Just Like You

My friends Ali, Christina, and I went out to lunch today, at this really swanky cafe. On our way back, we passed by probably three or four homeless guys. They were really friendly and polite, telling us to have a good day even when we didn’t give them anything. Now, assuming that they weren’t being sarcastic—and we all know how great (terrible) I am at detecting sarcasm—I thought that was pretty amazing and maybe even selfless. They could have been rude, or said something mean, but they didn’t.

Ali turned to me and said that she never knows what to do in that situation, to give them money, or buy them food, or just walk away. I’m really terrible about this too. I never know what to do, so I usually do nothing. And even when I do do something, I still feel wierd about it. It’s like we treat the homeless like vending machines for our consciences. We put in a little money, or time, or food, and we get a little bit of feel-good back. This just strikes me as a little hollow.

Don Miller talks alot about the importance of being relational, that humans are meant to be with each other. Jesus spent a lot of time just being with people, complete strangers sometimes.  And I think that the first step in this is to recognize the “human-ness” in other people. Like Regina Spektor says in Ghost of Corporate Future:

Cause people are just people, people are just people, people are just people like you

And I think that is just so true. People are just people just like me, just like you. We all have our lives, which are real and happening right now. When I just give my money, how is that being relational? How is that recognizing the humanity in this other very real person right in front of me? I think that if I was serious about making a difference in someone’s life, then I would actually get involved in someone’s life. I would build a relationship with the beggar who I pass every single day on my way home from work, take him to dinner once a week. I would volunteer on a regular basis at the homeless shelter, get to actually know the people who come in there every day.

But I don’t do this. This is hard enough with people I am close with, let alone complete strangers. It’s just so easy to write-off people sometimes, to just discount them as other, as things. It’s like we can’t trust other people (maybe for good reason? I’ve been swindled plenty of times). But maybe that’s part of following Jesus, to learn to trust, to learn to hope beyond the cynical walls we build around ourselves. Kierkegaard describes faith as hoping for the impossible “on the strength of the absurd.” Maybe the world would be a better place if we would take that extra effort to genuinely see the lives behind the faces we pass every day, if we would extend understanding to people, on the absurd hope that they won’t hurt us.

The flip-side of this must be forgiveness. Because when you do get hurt (which will happen), the only response that doesn’t toss you into cynicism and nihilism must be forgiveness. God hasn’t given up on us humans, He doesn’t see us as a lost cause. I don’t think He is cynical or jaded or nihilist. The whole Old Testament is one big story of giving understanding (love) again and again, only to be betrayed. But He forgives us, again and again.

I hope. Absurdly.

I just had to share with you NOW

I don’t know who you are Jenny Owen Youngs, but you are hilarious.

I can’t believe this is happening to me now!

Of all the days to have a minor foot injury! Today is the last Friday of July, which means only one thing: Critical Mass. I have blogged about the Critical Mass before, because it was the most amazing thing ever. And so today, as I am riding my bike home from work, thinking about how much fun it will be to go ride in the Critical Mass in less than an hour, guess what happens (don’t guess—I’m about to tell you). I am doing a sweet track stand at a stop light a few blocks from my apartment when my foot slips and I fall over. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but I somehow landed funny on my foot and crunched it up bad enough that I can barely walk right now, much less pedal.

I have been looking forward to Critical Mass like Christmas, and unfortunately since I leave Boston before the August edition, today was my last chance this summer. I like to think that God has my back here and actually saved me from getting decked by a road-raging driver, but I have a suspicion that he doesn’t work like that.

Oh well, this will give me the chance to update the blog. Like I am doing right now. Let’s see what else have I been doing/thinking/reading recently? I went to Florida last week for family vacation, which was splendid. I was reaching that point in the summer where I really needed a change of scenery. You know that feeling, where you’ve been doing the same thing at the same place for weeks and weeks and weeks, and it just kinda starts to wear on you a bit. It’s also probably because this last month and a half has been the most sedentary I’ve been since at least November (see here, here, and here for more info). So, my trip to Florida came at just the right time. And now I am back in Boston, refreshed, tanned (sunburned), and ready to face the world, or at least the giant hole developing in my bathroom’s ceiling.

While in Florida, I saw The Dark Knight which pretty much blew my mind. Heath Ledger was amazing. There will be a few wannabe-amateur-critics well-intentioned folks out there who are going to hate on him, because they are the type of person who feels that nothing can ever actually live up to its hype, and well, let’s face it, Heath as the Joker has got to be the most anticipated and hyped performance in years. But let me tell you, his performance not only lives up to the hype, but is even better. He is captivating, in every sense of that expression. The Joker dominates the screen, forcing the audience to hang on his every word and gesture. And Heath also completely embodies the role—I never once thought there was anyone behind that makeup besides the Joker.

Time to get really “Holla-Scholla” now: I also really like both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight because they are lively dissertations on morality and philosophy.  It’s all very Nietzschean, probing the meaning and relevance of morality in the modern age. See, Nietzsche felt that we must move “beyond good and evil,” and create our own system of values and judgments—much in the same way that Ra’s al Ghul and his League of Shadows believe that destroying Gotham is not only morally acceptable, but demanded in order to restore “justice” to the world. Bruce Wayne, however, believes in a morality, that good and evil are separate and distinct entities. The movies explore the validity of that claim, by exploring what the good man must become to overcome evil. In Batman Begins, the hero handily defeats the villian, and restores faith in the idea that good is good and evil is evil. The sequel, however, is much more ambiguous and very unclear about whether Batman’s actions to save Gotham are justified. Is good always good? Must we accept some evil in order to preserve some good? I hope that the third part of the series will answer these questions in a way that affirms our morality, because without a clear good and evil, what separates us from the beasts?

Enough of that however. I am currently reading Paradise Lost, which is fantastic (although I disagree with pretty much everything Milton says). I’ve been thinking about the border between awareness and action, that fine line between talking about changing the world and then actually changing the world. I think that the important thing to remember is that Jesus gave everything, so if I claim to follow him then I should look into doing that as well. Hopefully I’ll put together a post about that sometime soon. On a similar note, I found this post over at Indexed quite true. I’m firmly convinced that Boston is incapable of making a top-notch hamburger. I’ve tried three or four places now that everyone up here swears by, only to find them mediocre at best. I am thinking about buying a digital camera. I am also thinking about buying an amp for my electric guitar, who I miss very much because it is Texas and I am here. How about this for an album title: We Have Questions. I like how epic it sounds—I just need to make sure the music lives up to it.