I got crucified in ashes.

So tonight I went to my first Ash Wednesday service ever. Some people may wonder how this could possibly be the case. To them I say, visit a Southern Baptist church and you will begin to realize. We are really good at emptying bathwater, and especially good at the accompanying activity of baby-chucking. 

Anyhow, for you all tonight on this Ash Wednesday, I present a multivarious fare of life lessons and observations from the past weeks. 

1. I miss seeing news footage of Mardi Gras in Mobile, especially the mug shots. 

2. This shouldn't make me laugh, but oh how it does!  

3. Sir Joshua Reynolds, master British painter and President of the Royal Academy, writes the following: One advantage, I will venture to affirm, we shall have in our Academy, which no other nation can boast. We shall have nothing to unlearn. (Discourses on Art, Discourse 1) And that makes me smirk the wise, knowing smirk of one who knows something the speaker doesn't. 

4. My favorite two commonplaces from week-before-last:

Swede: The [Lordship] quiz is so simple and my mind is just so complex!

Swede: The lordship quiz is like coming in here with all your armor on and ... well ... 

Claire: You realize it's a sumo wrestling match. 

5. Well, now, who'd have thought?  The funniest thing is that you can hear the indignation in the cracking of their voice. 

6. This may become the goriest action movie ever made.

7. I don't even believe this mess. For crying out loud.

8. You know you've been doing too much school work and too little sleeping when you start responding to people in Latin, only stopping when you realize that you don't know the word for narrative. This is, of course, a purely hypothetical situation. 

9. I found this very interesting. 

       Gen. 3:7 (ESV) Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. 

      Matt. 21:18-22 (ESV) In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, "May no fruit ever come from you again!" And the fig tree withered at once. 

      Matt. 25:41-46 (ESV) Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food ... and these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

10. I'm just glad that the little sidebar of followers now calls itself Google Friend Connect. Otherwise, who knows how I might try to connect with them. 

11. Ladies and Gentlemen, I announce, with great trepidity and hopeful expectation, the appearance of an incredible blog. Behold the Jons.

12. A quick little free-verse I jotted down at some point during week-before-last's Disputatio. Not good but begins to get my point across:

sprinting with a leather bag

slosh-burned

two til and sprinting past waiting hatchbacks

a dollar lighter

but it's this heavy water 

gives me wings. 

Thank God for Americano Fridays. 

I philosophize

Sadly, this is so, so, so very accurate.

I particularly enjoy the Germans' respective objections to the final goal. Brilliant. Or, as someone in our class would say, "Brilliant, Mr. Python, brilliant."

I have found something both fun and addicting

Judging a book by its cover. It shows you the cover of a book, and you guess how many stars Amazon users have given it. I did this 30 times, and got 10 right. That's after going to 3 and 15, so I'm pretty proud of myself. It's a lot harder predicting where people are tasteless than you might imagine.

http://www.judgeby.com/

Props to the oh-so-wonderful Good Morning Silicon Valley newsletter; my concession to my inner geek.

Burn After Reading

Ok, anyone who has watched "Burn after Reading"; what did you think? What was the main message that the Coen brothers were trying to get across? I'm really curious, because this movie took me completely by surprise.


Although I won't summarize the plot, I will give my 2 cents worth about the appropriateness of the film. It wasn't appropriate; it's just that simple. There were some elements in it that I would not even want to describe; it's just too vulgar. On the other hand, it reminded me a lot of a Flannery O'Connor short story (after Alli mentioned it), and also a little bit of "A Confederacy of Dunces".

Also, it was hilarious.

I am Rob's questions of "what did I just watch"?

I watched a very interesting movie the other day. I needed to unwind after a day of studying so Kaleb and I rented and watched "Fight Club." This is, by far, the strangest movie I've ever seen and my thoughts on it are not solidified yet. As a result, I'm going to treat you to my thoughts on the matter and I simply ask you to bear with me.

I am going to summarize the movie's themes a little for those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure of subjecting yourselves to "Fight Club."

The movie seems to be about the shaky personal identity of modern consumers. The modern media and the ethics of consumerism have trivialized life to such a degree that no one truly knows who they are anymore. A name is not good enough, a name is simply an identifier; it's not an identity. My parents could have named me something different and it is conceivable that I would still be the same person overall. Even if I can trace my family name to two or three hundred years back, I have not truly learned anything about me. There most be something else, something more basic that defines me as a person.

It seems to me that people tend to define themselves by their religion. If someone asked me "What are you?" I could answer in a number of ways but I would probably answer with "I am a Christian. I am a child of God, born in sin but redeemed by God's grace - the blood of Christ." My identity as a Christian is the most meaningful and the most identifiable thing that I can point to illustrate to others what I am.

Consumerism is essentially a religion in disguise. For quite some time people have been inadvertently turning Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness into a very redundant list. This is, perhaps, a strange way of saying that people are slowly equating these three terms. And sadly, many people equate "the pursuit of happiness" with "getting as much stuff as we can." Therefore, these people believe that life (and the job of the government) is about being free to acquire as many possessions as possible.

Since, consumerism is a sort of religion it follows that people would tend to define themselves using its terms. However, consumerism only manifests itself in people's material possessions. So, in the same way that I identify myself as a Christian many people inadvertently identify themselves with their possessions. But because this identity is hard to illustrate to others they simply decorate their lives with a myriad of possessions and people will slowly start to figure out what kind of people they are. So the movie asks: "What if you lose everything?"

Spoiler warning: I might not be able to resist telling you the ending

The movie is a psychological drama. The film makers invite the audience to enter into the mind of a man who goes for days without sleeping. He is a recall coordinator who has to travel all over the country doing inspections. He describes himself as being a compulsive buyer of household items. He tries to solve his problems of identity with the kinds of things he uses to decorate his house. After trying to solve his problem of identity with his possessions he tries going to numerous support groups to get a high off of sympathy and crying. This fails when he realizes that there is a woman attending all of his support groups that obviously does not have the diseases the support groups are for. He ends up going four days again without sleep and this is when some part of him rebels. He begins to develop an alter-ego named "Tyler Durden" who personifies rebellion against established consumerism, radical existentialism, and charisma. Since we are seeing everthing through his eyes, the film makers very successfully make the audience think that Tyler Durden is a real person. Tyler Durden blows up our hero's condo and forces him to redefine his life. He has imaginary fights with this person (while really simply beating himself up) and sets up clubs all around the country called "Fight Club." This is where all the men who are sick and tired of their normal consumerish lives go to beat themselves up. Eventually, these clubs form into a terrorist organization called "project mayhem." Project Mayhem's main goal is to destroy everything that makes a modern consumer's life possible. Although, our hero remains involved with "Fight Club" project mayhem evolves without the knowledge of the first personality (the one who imagines Tyler Durden) and thus his alter-ego does things which he cannot control. He rigs up all the buildings of credit-card companies with demolition explosives and manages to get all civilians out of the buildings through the extensive "Project Mayhem" network.

As the story progresses, our hero becomes more and more like Tyler Durden (as personified by Brad Pitt). Even though the two characters stay separate (in a mix between Multiple-personality Disorder and schizophrenia) he begins to act more like his alter-ego, the man he wants to be. When he no longer needs his alter-ego, he shoots his alter-ego through the head (don't ask me how this works) and becomes an authentic human being, defined only through his actions - the marks he made on the world.


That's just what I think about it. This by no means exhausts the subject. I could be completely wrong and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about it (especially the part where he shoots himself in the head and he manages to survive, but Tyler Durden disappears; that was weird).