Saturday, January 31, 2009

There are other larks than me, and sometimes I don't feel like the lark.....

-Zack
"And I'm trying to make you sing"
-David Crowder

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Happy Thursday

Here we are, another thursday.
In band, there used to be a "happy thursday" tradition. I wasn't the biggest fan, mostly because I really never liked marching band practice in college. Actually, as much as I liked the overall experience of band, I never really liked band. When I look back on it, I'm glad I did it, but I rarely actually enjoyed being there. Strange I guess. Maybe. I don't know. I just know that I liked being in band but never liked being at band. I guess. Hard to explain.

I'm not sure what, about the new america we're getting into, I'm most worried about.

As a person, I'm a big Barack Obama fan. But I don't think his policies as a liberal were what many evangelical-obamaites (of which I would consider myself, in hindsight but not at the time...I'm still more anti-neo-con than I am probama....actually, I always planned on voting for Obama because he is black. I figured another white president wasn't going to do anything for race relations in the U.S. so why not give it a try no matter what? As it is, I think race relations are a more important Kingdom issue than basically anything people will talk about with Obama's presidency...for now at least) saw coming. I'm glad Guantanamo is closed but the stimulus package is nothing but disappointing...why does it have to be so contingent on random stuff? Can't we just live by principle and make decisions for ourselves?

I always have been too libertarian for party politics, and that stings more now that I picked a winning horse, so to speak.

George Voinovich would be the best thing to happen to the 2012 republican primary, but I don't think he can win. He's too unradical a true conservative and too true a conservative to win the positively neo-base.

Whatever. 2012 is Obama's to lose...although he's not done the worst job at that so far either. But we're one week in. One week.

Try her boy, but she'll still do what she please. As they say. They being Anberlin. The song being the oddest closing song to any of their albums. A great song...but the broken link between Naive Orleans-Fin-Miserabile Visu. It just doesn't fit. And that's why I think Anberlin might be singing my life story. Too weird to post. Maybe I'll tell you in person sometime.

I do know that Stephen Christian is the most underrated voice of this generation's Christianity. He's like the Chuck D of right now if you replace Black America with New School Evangelicals.

And that can be refuted. And that is why I'm right. And I am still postively post-modern.

I wasn't quite sure what I was going to write about when I sat down to write, but I wasn't quite sure I had much time to write much of anything either. And now I'm running out of much to say.

Unlike last year, January hasn't given me strong musical, literary, or filmic glimpses of year-long greatness. I hope that isn't a sign of things to come. My artist of the month thus far has probably been Nas, but he's not sustainable because, for me, rap is very much a fluid art-form. I can't connect with certain songs for too terribly long...just in general I guess, but I attach more to people than songs, and it's Nas right now, but just til I find something new then I'll consume that for awhile and move on. It's consumer culture and its hip-hop culture. And I'm somewhere between, cultivating the post-modern culture that transcends hip-hop and consumerism. Trying to at least. Evangelical, at least.

I don't know why I'm finding myself more and more attached to the word, Evangelical, lately. I've always kind of disliked it because it is utterly laced with undesirable connotations in the larger (and unadmittedly unpost-modern) culture that controls American thought...I call it angry-white America....or the wrong collective. They think too much about what and who they are and therefore are nothing of what they claim. More correctly, I should probably say the majority culture. But it's really a group of loud white people more than a majority. That's much of why I am who I am and so utterly unaffectable. Because I see it as loud and I see them as swayed. And I do and am neither.

I like Thursdays until 1.
-Zack
"She appears composed so she is I suppose"
-I'm Going to Love You Anyhow, Eliott Smith

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Everything gives me the idea to write about something but I can't figure out quite what, which
means I probably won't have said anything of much importance by the time this is over but, at that
it doesn't matter much, because in between words, well, that is where the meaning is. Deeper, it
lives, deeper than the surface, deeper than the names or the things. The ideas are bigger than that
inside the places we all reside. And if you look close enough, closer than that even, that is where
everything lives.

There is something.
And that is all I can say.
-Zack
"Six a.m. in the hands of the morning I am a skyline and you are the sun"
-Ominous, John Mark McMillan

Monday, January 26, 2009

Sometimes faith is just following, one step at a time. Then, even partway through the journey, you can look back on the steps and realize that in your faithfulness, God was more faithful than you ever could be.

-Zack
"I hope to find myself for good in you"
-You, Switchfoot

I don't think I have any readers....

It's a lot harder to tell if anyone is reading or not without comments than it was on Xanga. Biggest difference number 1.

I should probably even explain the migration at all.

After all, just about everyone with a blog I've ever read is on Xanga. The difference is, everyone with a blog that ever updates these days is on this google/blogger/blogspot/all-that-is-blogdom interface. Of course, I don't think any of them ever read my xanga page, so I might have migrated to the realm of marginalized, readerlessness.

But that is alright. I won't lie and tell you that I didn't make the move because I thought I had a chance for more readers here. To be honest, I don't think I had but a couple of readers that should be loyal enough to read this instead (and I honestly think this is a more reader-friendly interface), so it's not like I've lost much if anything, and the potential for gain is larger. Xanga gain, if it was going to come, was going to come from random xangaites picking my page up for whatever reason, and that isn't exactly what I want.

I'm kind of all for random people deciding your writing is interesting enough to read, but it's not the goal by any means.

What is the goal anyway?

Well, I think every blog has a different goal. The majority of them that I read are people that are abroad journaling/posting pictures and that's nice. Some of them are just funny ala stuff Christians like, and some are about basketball (I'll admit that's probably most of what I read, but that's on ESPN, not here), and some are pictures of the day.

But I write to write. I can't even refer to this as a blog. I'll refer to yours as one, but I can't do that for me. Online journal perhaps....online journal for mass perusal, yes, but not a "blog." That just sounds like a disgusting word.

But I will call this style of writing that I'm currently engaging in "blogging," as in talking directly to you. Mostly, I talk to no one.

I just write.

I just have to.

Twitter/facebook statuses are called microblogs, so a blog is, I guess, the story of your life, documented, by you. Some day, someone will collect a bunch of blog entries into an autobiography.

I don't think you could do that to me very well, even though I've had a "blog" (as a thing, not an idea) since about the beginning of my dating life, the summer before my junior year of High School. Maybe for awhile, but not recently, was what I did "blogging."

Publishing, I guess, is what I could call it, when I'm doing what I do.
Or just expressing.

Being post-modern is so annoying when you're trying to name things. But that's the point really.

Sometimes, in my mind, I call them imprints of the soul.

Post-modernity gives credence to things that would otherwise be judged as base, classless, banal, or unimportant. As a result, it's largely a vicious cycle of granting agency to immature people demanding agency who grow up and see such neediness as immaturity, but have realized that you can't remove agency from anyone with the proper ethical stance. If you think there is no proper ethical stance with post-modernity, you don't understand post-modernity.

It's more a question of definition than reality.

And that's really where Jesus comes in.

And the Centurion.

Luke 7:1-10. Come to Oasis this Thursday, Lowry 120 at 7 p.m. to find out more.

-Zack
"Nothing's like before"
-Simple and Clean, Utada Hikaru

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Blessed

Today has reminded me why I want to go on staff. Actually, this weekend has, in an "all the good reasons" sort of way. I don't want to talk much about it really, not on this, not so impersonally and to the wind.

But sometimes God just makes you want to hug the world.
-Zack
"When life is in discord praise ye the LORD"
-Paperthin Hymn, Anberlin

Friday, January 23, 2009

History

Where this was:
www.xanga.com/dulacian