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"The mystery of God is not a riddle to be solved through human ingenuity; it is a panoramic vista of..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 05:55:20 -0700

“The mystery of God is not a riddle to be solved through human ingenuity; it is a panoramic vista of indescribable beauty that reveals our own smallness and frailty.”

- Adam S. McHugh, Introverts in the Church

I watched Indie Game: The Movie recently, and this game, FEZ,...

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 11:40:00 -0700

I watched Indie Game: The Movie recently, and this game, FEZ, fascinates me—and Elly. She saw it and now she wants to play it with me. I like the aesthetics, the fact that it’s all about low key exploration (not enemy bopping and avoiding fire/bullets/lava/death), and the quirky pixel art; the biggest thing I like is the idea that the game is designed to make people think in different ways, shifting perspectives to find new angles on existing problems.

"When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything..."

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 08:42:27 -0700

“When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.”

- Zadie Smith’s first rule of writing

Butterfly in the Sky/ I Can Go Twice as High

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 09:03:17 -0700

Elly: Sssss. Eh-eh.
Janice: Close. When two E's are together, they make an "eeee" sound.
Elly: Sssss. Eeeee.
Janice: Right, now put them together.
Elly: Ssss-eeeee. Ss-eee. See!
Janice: That's right!
Elly: That's like magic!

My parents gave me a $30 Barnes & Noble gift card for my...

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 14:53:04 -0700

My parents gave me a $30 Barnes & Noble gift card for my 30th birthday back in June. I used half of it on these three books: one on design and creative thinking; one on lectio divina (sort of for me and sort of for school); and one non-Disney, non-princess, non-Berry Bitty City coloring book.

They are all on their way now. Thanks, mom and dad.

"We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. He’s been through weakness..."

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 08:40:57 -0700

“We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. He’s been through weakness and testing, experienced it all—all but the sin. So let’s walk right up to him and get what he is ready to give. Take the mercy, accept the help.”

- Hebrews 4.15-16 (The Message)

"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 08:27:14 -0700

“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”

- Francis Bacon

"The Israelites completed all the work, just as God had commanded. Moses saw that they had done all..."

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 07:28:16 -0700

“The Israelites completed all the work, just as God had commanded. Moses saw that they had done all the work and done it exactly as God had commanded. Moses blessed them.”

- God restores. His people, who grumbled, complained, and strayed, end up doing what they are asked.

God remains faithful. Even though he was angry about the golden calf, angry enough to tell Moses that he would wipe them out and start over with a new Mosesite nation, he lets these same people build him a dwelling place so he can be with them and show them that he is their God.

{Exodus 39.42-43, The Message paraphrase}

A List: The New Gungor Album is Fantastic (or, We Live in an Age...

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 07:30:00 -0700

A List:

The New Gungor Album is Fantastic (or, We Live in an Age When People Making Formal or Official Items Will Include Some Unexpected, Less-Than-Formal Language to Remind Us to Enjoy Life and Not Be All Stuffy All the Time, Exemplified by the Band Member Credits in the Liner Notes onGhosts Upon the Earth)

raucous noises

the smallest hands of the clapping

kitchen utensil bashing

sleigh bell ringing

other raucous noises

pedal board latch shredding

the fastest of the clapping

electric guitar bowing

Propecia consumption

sweat pants

misdemeanors

tattoo proselytizing

"We must be purposefully kind and generous, or we miss the best part of existence."

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:07:07 -0700

“We must be purposefully kind and generous, or we miss the best part of existence.”

- Horace Mann

I always root a little harder for the guys with 2 on their...

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 20:46:32 -0700

I always root a little harder for the guys with 2 on their jerseys because that was my number playing 2B/SS/3B in high school.

Refsnyder cut down a Carolina runner at third yesterday, hit a couple of dingers, scored the championship winning run, and took home the Most Outstanding Player.

"What we want for our children, truly, is engagement. We want their love of the cello to grow, to..."

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 07:31:41 -0700

“What we want for our children, truly, is engagement. We want their love of the cello to grow, to evolve and endure throughout their lives, whether or not they perform, whether or not they are ever exceptional cellists. … Loving something for its own sake—not for its potential in fame, glory, or music scholarships—is far from ordinary. It’s an extraordinary blessing—a strength of character any parent would wish for their child.”

- Kim John Payne, Simplicity Parenting

An Observation and Two Favorite Quotes from a Book I Recently...

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:45:33 -0700

An Observation and Two Favorite Quotes from a Book I Recently Finished

The Observation:In reading Flanney O’Connor’s words/thoughts/discussions on the nature of writing fiction, one of the highlights for me was her the notion that stories should show humanity pushed to its limits, both positive and negative. Stories shouldn’t stay safe or in the middle. They should spelunk the depths, explore the edges, trying to find the dropoff at the end of the human personality.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Timedid that, but it took me awhile to figure out how. Christopher, the main character and narrator, is at an unstated point along the autism spectrum. He does complex math in his head to calm himself, sees and remembers everything, and really wants to figure out who killed Wellington.

About halfway through the book, it was difficult for me to feel invested in anything more than finding out how the plot resolved because that is what Christopher focused on. I couldn’t see emotional development in the character. He just repeats his patterns.

Then, the part at the train station made me realize that this book assumes a different set of edges for this particular human. The dropoff at the edge is the same as a normal day for most people. After I realized that his emotional development was happening in excruciatingly difficult interactions with everyday people like policemen or ticket takers or booksellers or his own father and mother, this book helped me think not only about how individual people are different, but how they each react to the same (sometimes seemingly ordinary) stimulus in drastically different ways. A situation does not need to be extraordinary for every human in order to push the limits of humanity.

Quote No. 1 (Christopher’s pragmatic, yet unintentionally poetic explanation of the end of all things, which made me think of the part in Fahrenheit 451 when the bomb drops and Bradbury beautifully and horribly slows down time, and also of the Book of Revelation with its astronomical anomalies announcing that this will be all for the current incarnation of our world)

And when the universe has finished exploding, all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come down to a halt and they will all begin to fall toward the center of the universe again. And there will be nothing to stop us from seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

Quote No. 2 (A little perspective on acknowledging how we are all imperfect, whether we are labeled or not)

I’m meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

Janice and I are just a shade over a month shy of ten years, and...

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 16:29:00 -0700

Janice and I are just a shade over a month shy of ten years, and I thought it was cool that I saw this wedding announcement/invitation for someone else’s wedding that oddly enough looks like Mr. and Mrs. Appleman*.

I married a homecoming queen with long dark hair (thus, the tiara fits), and she ended up with a nerd with a penchant for dark frames, a pseudo-fauxhawk, and neckties.

We’re going to San Diego next month to celebrate: cool hotel, bicycle rentals, hanging out on the beach, Padres game, the Gaslamp Quarter, flying not driving**.

Marriage is a beautiful thing, and we’re just getting started***.

*She doesn’t like that title. My students call her Janice at her request.

**We’ve had quiet enough cross country automobile travel over the past couple of months, thank you. The odometer read around 3100 miles round trip after our trip to Kansas and Oklahoma earlier in June.

***I just turned 30, and people kept asking me if felt old. I do not. Not at all. I feel like I’m more the person God wants me to be than I ever have been, and at the same time, I’m excited about how much I can still learn about teaching, parenting, discipling, reading, writing, influencing, etc.

Summer Reading: One of My Favorite Writers is a Dead, Southern,...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 08:23:04 -0700

Summer Reading: One of My Favorite Writers is a Dead, Southern, Catholic Woman

Flannery O’Connor didn’t write Mystery and Manners; the book exists because the people in charge of her estate collected various papers—published, unpublished, spoken—into a volume that revolves around no particular locus but delivers evidence of certain gravitational centers in the solar system of her mind.

First, the creative work of any writer is grounded in the concrete: sensory details provide the grist for the mill. This sentiment arises in several different places in the book, and since she didn’t sit down to pen this particular book with this particular central point, the fact that multiple works point to the same conclusion proves that the sentiment was deeply ingrained in her writer’s life, an idea submerged into her way of thought that surfaced whenever necessary and beneficial to those with which she was communicating.

She makes the point that sensory information is how all humans get all their information about the world. We collect nothing other than what our eyes, ears, nose, skin, and tongue can bring us in terms of data about our surroundings. That would seem to fail to rise to the level of themes, of abstract ideas like freedom and hope and desperation, because we cannot directly taste freedom and hope and desperation. The idea of our senses being our only connection to the outside world can start to feel constricting: we only have the acid of oranges, the scratch of sandpaper, the clamor of construction equipment, the glare of focused sunlight, the freshness of newly-cut wood.

O’Connor, though, speaks of the freedom to see. She advocates that writers (and I would add artists/creatives) observe what is there. O’Connor is a devout Catholic who would know that the Bible instructs us to taste and see that the Lord is good. She is also a believer who is not afraid to compare the milk and honey of a life with Jesus with the bitterness found in biting into the world. She advocates for that, too.

If a Christian creative is to be effective as either of those classifications, he must connect to the community, know its manners and modes of operation. Separation is not possible. O’Connor is from the Protestant South, and her fiction is not bashful in its portrayal of racial, socioeconomic, intellectual, and moral differences or difficulties. Her characters use racial epithets. They pursue illicit physical relationships. They lift hands and other instruments of violence against their fellow man. They do things that people do when they are pushed to the limits of human existence, and they do so in the dialects and cities of the South that O’Connor knew.

I’m going to use Flannery O’Connor early in my Honors Sophomore English class next year, and this book will serve as a basis for what we talk about. She writes honestly about what she sees and hears, paying attention to the reality of the world, not bending it to fit what might be perceived as Christian art, and I think this will be a proper way to open up two semesters of reading and writing in a school that integrates the theological truth of God with the observable truth found in his creation. We’ll read several of her short stories together and look at how they push people to the limits of our experience, how they experience both the fall of man and the grace of God.

"Brother Lawrence, an uneducated kitchen worker who spent much of his life at a Carmelite priory in..."

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 20:46:09 -0700

“Brother Lawrence, an uneducated kitchen worker who spent much of his life at a Carmelite priory in Paris, spent life eliminating those distractions. His ambition was to live every moment in prayer, and his sense was that connecting with God was more a matter of simplicity than religious effort.”

- Jordan Green on Brother Lawrence in Besides the Bible

Summer Reading List (Part 1)

Sun, 27 May 2012 15:00:00 -0700

First Book of the Summer: Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne (Janice and I are reading this together, to be followed by Grace Based Parenting)

Books I’m Packing for Our Trip to Oklahoma+Kansas: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon,The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, and Diceroscope No.1 by Pusch Ridge Christian Academy’s Creative Writing 2.0 (three novels! a literary anthology!)

Last Tuesday, Janice assembled IKEA furniture for the...

Sun, 27 May 2012 11:01:52 -0700

Last Tuesday, Janice assembled IKEA furniture for the girls’ room while I consumed Sprite, Saltines, and soup on the couch. While parked on the sofa, I watched Senna, a documentary about Ayrton Senna, a Formula One racing legend.

The film is 80% old race footage, 15% old interviews, and 5% home video of the Brazilian family hanging out on boats and beaches. It’s amazing because Senna is a kind of racing savant, complete with a nemesis (that’s Alain Proust, “The Professor,” a cold and calculating character of a racing rival). The story feels written, not lived. Senna is great from youth, a hero on a quest who faces turns and reversals, obstacles and wrecks, politics and spirituality. I couldn’t help but wonder when Wes Anderson will latch onto this story, making Senna an inspiration for a quirky racing movie, much like Jacques Cousteau was for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Senna is a character. He is a man. He made me think about why we view sporting greatness in the way we do. Some of the old interview footage is the Man On The Street kind from Brazil. The citizens there repeatedly juxtapose bleak living conditions with the joy of being from the same nation as Ayrton Senna, World Champion. He holds pours champagne on his head, holds golden trophies aloft, and waves his country’s flag. They refer to him as their joy.

The story is beautifully wrought. It made me forget about the fact that I am not interested in the racing as a sport whatsoever, and allowed me to focus on the fact that we are all living stories, chasing cups, hoping to win, fighting through defeat, wondering whether or not we should keep going, doing what we love because it is something God made us to do.

via minimalmovieposters: Senna by Paul Johnstone

Summer Reading:I have four books I’d like to finish, a...

Fri, 11 May 2012 23:51:33 -0700

Summer Reading:I have four books I’d like to finish, a stack of seven waiting for me on the top shelf of my bookcase, and three more ordered from Amazon today.

Summer Writing:On the way home from the Second Mile Men’s Retreat, my friend Lawson voiced an observation that rang true at the time and lingers as something of an unintentional challenge. He acknowledged that I enjoyed both reading and writing; he then told me that it seemed like I’ve got reading down, but that I need to work on the writing. That is correct, and I want to make sure I do something about it this summer.

Generally speaking, I probably average at least one new writing project idea per week. They are usually about the size and weight of a solid magazine/web article/short story. They can often be sorted into creative nonfiction, and sometimes into short fiction. They are always enticing, full of potential, things I want to pursue but feel I just don’t have the time, etc.

Nope. I’m going to make time this summer. I love writing, and I would rather do it than not.

So: Discipline! Looking for idle time that can be turned into fruitful time! Production! That’s the idea.

Today Was A Good Day

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 21:27:18 -0700

Ashley’s “Enjoying God + PRCA Greatest Hits” morning devotion.
Daniel walking into first hour sporting a bowtie.
5th Hour’s ridiculous Research Project Success Checklist, including such items as “Motivation,” “Shock Collar,” “Listen to Eye of the Tiger,” “Don’t use Wikipedia…as a citation,” “Coffee is your friend,” “<—in moderate amounts,” and “Prayer.”
All the final submissions pouring in for Diceroscope.
Getting the HNRS Research Checklist done
after eating carne asada with the Guatemalan exchange students
and finding out that we might have a sweet Fall Break trip in the works.
Chilling at the new Cartel for the first time
and seeing four Second Milers while there (I’ll try a Gibraltar sometime, Chad).
Learning to spell swagger like this: M-I-N-I-V-A-N.