Some News and Thoughts

I’ve finally finished this semester’s cluster of courses. While I was able to take two of them online, I still had a full plate with 12 credit hours. So I’m glad to have a break. I’ve got about a Spring and half-a-Summer semester left to finish up my general education requirements. From there, I’m still deciding whether to pursue a computer science degree at Northeastern Illinois, or Interactive Arts and Media at Columbia in Chicago. The pros and cons are there for each, but Northeastern is much cheaper upfront (no loans!) and is almost in our backyard. Columbia is a hatful of cash and an hour commute to the loop each way. But the program looks really great, so we’ll see what happens.

I’ve finished reading a book called “The Gum Thief” by Douglas Coupland and am midway through a collection of short stories called “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor. Each of these stories, including those in “The Gum Thief” seem to have a few themes in common.  They all deal with the world sort of closing in on either the assumptions that the characters have, or the “secure” possessions or people in life that they cling to. It’s been interesting to read these themes as discussed in the deep south of the 50′s and in the big box office supply stores of today (as in the Gum Thief). Plus I love Flannery O’Connors injection of religious spirituality into her stories as it reflects the tension between God and the Modern Age of the South, but becomes a universal foreshadowing of post-modernity, and that of the subjective morality that her characters encounter. I told Andrea that on this break from school I’m putting myself through an “O’Connor 101″ course, where I hope to read all of her writings.

Christmas is on the horizon and the kids are excited. We’ve been following an advent calendar with a series of small stockings hung across one of our bookshelfs and each drawing a family, Christmas-themed activity from it every night. We also had the kids put out shoes on the 6th for St. Nicholas to come and fill with goodies. We don’t really celebrate Santa Claus, but agreed that sharing the story of St. Nicholas was a good compromise. We’ll probably end up in Michigan for most of the week following Christmas, seeing grandparents on both sides and keeping clear of this unpredictable Chicago winter for a time.

Filed under: Family, Life, Writing, christmas vacation, college plans, family update, o'connor 101, ten gallon cowboy hats, the gum thief

Lights That Turn On By Themselves

We’re back from holiday at my parent’s house in Grand Rapids, having been delayed one extra day due to not wanting to travel through the Sunday night snow storm. It was a really nice visit – full of turkey, insane amounts of pumpkin spice coffee and Lego Star Wars. Since they moved to Michigan last June, our kids have loved hanging out at their house – the spaciousness of it just begs for their favorite games, often with descriptive names like “chase” or “comeandgetme!”. As is necessary of any grandparent’s house, it’s a place that they love to be.

We caught some good movies while we were there – 3:10 to Yuma, We Own the Night and No Country For Old Men, which we’d seen before, but not the super big screen blu ray edition which is pretty sweet until you get to the Scene Where The Bone Is Sticking Out In High Definition, Yikes.

Bones aside, it’s nice to be back for the final stretch before Christmas vacation. Finals for this semester’s classes are slowly clouding my schedule, but I’ll try to keep writing. Until next time!

Filed under: Family, Life, blu ray, Family, lego star wars, movies, thanksgiving, too much coffee

The Perpetual Machine

Buy Nothing Day 2008

I first saw the movie “What Would Jesus Buy?” at Cornerstone Festival in 2007. Inside of porta-potties that shamelessly dotted the midwestern farm, I saw posters advertising the film screening later in the week. They were complete with a preacher of some sort in fist-raised-mid-damnation-proclamation stance, sporting a rockabilly hairdo and a line of white-robed devotees kneeling in front of a huge wal-mart sign in either a show of adoration or a plea for mercy. “What Would Jesus Buy?” was scrawled across the top of it. As you can obviously tell, it was inevitable, I had to check it out. In the movie barn, with the fans humming in the background, I watched the journey of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping as they traveled from store to store preaching of the “shopocalypse”. They challenged people to re-evaluate the store-crazed Christmas traditions by walking through mega-malls in robes, holding impromptu choir concerts and invading starbucks stores in an attempt to give Rev. Billy audience for fervently preaching of the ills of consumerism. He stood on street corners, surrounded by his church, asking people to evaluate the products they purchase in light of the world around them – the environment, the social welfare of 3rd world workers, the effects of equating happiness with stuff in the minds of their children.

It was an impactful movie. It was moving to see such a huge group of people (his Church of Stop Shopping) banding together in the face of opposition – publicly questioning a cultural norm which has successfully begun crawling over the edge of an economic cliff.

This Christmas we’re making more of an effort to be creative with our money. Andrea and I are buying each other classes – wheel building for me, home birthing for her – rather than the usual gifts from the store.  The kids are primarily receiving hand made things and we’ve rid ourselves of a TV which would try to portray the norm as something different – something we won’t have, and won’t buy into this year. We’ve still got amazon lists, still have a couple of things we’d each like to have, but this year we’re trying to make a conscious effort to step back from the frenzy of stuff and focus on what’s around us – each other, our family and our friends. The amazon list will always be there (cue: internet recession?), but there are only so many days available to make connections with those we love.

…And it also beats standing in line at 3:00am this Friday morning.

Filed under: Culture, Family, Reflections, black friday, buy nothing day, classes for christmas, consumerism, cornerstone, croched star wars toys, Culture, shopocalypse, what would jesus buy