21 10 / 2011
"For you will have peace to the extent that you have God, and the further you are away from God the less you will be at peace…Thus you may measure your progress with God by measuring your peace or lack of it."
21 10 / 2011
"The basic difficulty seems to be that people in religious circles always need someone or something to blame. I even catch myself doing it when I think of Baptist preachers. Religion somehow attracts those who like to lay down the law and point the finger of accusation, seldom realizing, incidentally, that the congregation just adores a colorful scolding."
19 10 / 2011
Iceland Trip
In the summer of 2011, Jeannie (my girlfriend) and I took a trip to Iceland. We started in Reykjavik, and then drove south and then east across the coast. We saw lots of waterfalls and multi-syllabic words, plus an arctic fox, a raven, some puffins, not so great food, a Taco Bell, and much more.
28 9 / 2011
“Depersonalization disorder (DPD) is a dissociative disorder in which the sufferer is affected by persistent or recurrent feelings of depersonalization and/or derealization. Diagnostic criteria include persistent or recurrent experiences of feeling detached from one’s mental processes or body. The symptoms include a sense of automation, going through the motions of life but not experiencing it, feeling as though one is in a movie, loss of conviction with one’s identity, feeling as though one is in a dream, feeling a disconnection from one’s body; out-of-body experience, a detachment from one’s body, environment and difficulty relating oneself to reality.”
23 9 / 2011
15 Favorite Albums
I know film. And while I love music, I know enough to know that, well, I don’t know music, not like I do film. When I look at Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums list, it’s embarrassing how few I’ve heard a single song off of. Nonetheless, below is a completely self-indulgent and uneducated list of the 15 musical albums that have meant the most to me.
1. Radiohead’s “Hail to the Thief” (2003)
2. Everlast’s “Whitey Ford Signs the Blues” (1998)
3. House of Pain’s “House of Pain” (1992)
4. Radiohead’s “Kid A” (2000)
5. Snoop Dogg’s “Doggystyle” (1993)
6. David Gray’s “White Ladder” (1998)
7. Nirvana’s “MTV Unplugged in New York” (1994)
8. Rufus Wainwright’s “Poses” (2003)
9. Tracy Chapman’s “Tracy Chapman” (1988)
10. Marilyn Manson’s “Mechanical Animals” (1998)
11. House of Pain’s “Truth Crushed to Earth Shall Rise Again” (1996)
12. Eminem’s “The Slim Shaddy LP” (1999)
13. Nine Inch Nail’s “The Downward Spiral” (1994)
14. Tupac Shakur’s “All Eyez on Me” (1996)
15. Beck’s “Sea Change” (2002)
22 9 / 2011
Pop Culture Consumption: 2010 Report
I saw 70 films this year:
- 6 one stars
- 6 two stars
- 42 three stars
- 15 four stars
- 0 five stars
My average film rating for the year was 2.91.
Of the 70 films, 43 were new (released in 2010). Here’s my top 15:
- Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)
- *Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Alex Gibney)
- The Kids are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko)
- Greenberg (Noah Baumbach)
- *127 Hours (Danny Boyle)
- *The Fighter (David O. Russell)
- The Social Network (David Fincher)
- The American (Anton Corbijn)
- Cyrus (Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass)
- Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)
- The Town (Ben Affleck)
- Please Give (Nicole Holofcener)
- Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn)
- Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (Jan Kounen)
- Last Night (Massy Tadjedin)
*Actually watched in 2011 and do not count towards totals listed above.
The most disappointing 2010 films I saw were (listed in no particular order):
- Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton)
- Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)
- The Other Guys (Adam McKay)
- Dinner for Schmucks (Jay Roach)
I also saw 27 older films for the first time (films not released in 2009). The films from this list that I enjoyed the most include (listed in no particular order):
- A Single Man (Tom Ford)
- The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Vallee)
- Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater)
- Little Children (Todd Field)
- Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron)
Television
I saw one or more seasons of 5 television shows this year (both old and new shows; listed in no particular order):
- Reno 911!
- Bored to Death
- The Sarah Silverman Program
- Parks and Recreation
- Modern Family
Books
As always, I didn’t get to read as many books as I would have liked this year. In 2010, I read the following (listed in no particular order):
- Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen
- Straight Up and Dirty by Stephanie Klein
03 1 / 2011
"For me, I couldn’t ever keep quiet. I came from a situation where for a very long time people were discriminated against, made to suffer for something about which they could do nothing—their ethnicity. We were made to suffer because we were not white. Then, for a very long time in our church, we didn’t ordain women, and we were penalizing a huge section of humanity for something about which they could do nothing—their gender. And I’m glad that now the church has changed all that. I’m glad that apartheid has ended. I could not for any part of me be able to keep quiet, because people were being penalized, ostracized, treated as if they were less than human, because of something they could do nothing to change—their sexual orientation. For me, I can’t imagine the Lord that I worship, this Jesus Christ, actually concurring with the persecution of a minority that is already being persecuted. The Jesus who I worship is a Jesus who was forever on the side of those who were being clobbered, and he got into trouble precisely because of that. Our church, the Anglican Church, is experiencing a very, very serious crisis. It is all to do with human sexuality. I think God is weeping. He is weeping that we should be spending so much energy, time, resources on this subject at a time when the world is aching."
22 12 / 2010
"posturing: to behave in a way that is intended to impress or mislead others"
13 12 / 2010
"Most days of the year are unremarkable. They begin, and they end, with no lasting memories made in between. Most days have no impact on the course of a life. May 23rd was a Wednesday."
