Friday, June 15, 2012

Dreaming A little Dream

*Sorry I didn't edit it before. I was in a rush but that isn't really an excuse. Here, version two. I think it's a bit better. Also, I must tell you about my night watching the hipster and the homeless in the social tango of friday nights in Dallas.

The fire red sky peeks through my blinds, teasing me awake. My eyes, forever obedient to the light and not my brain slowly open to a dimly lit room filled with grey shapes tinted in faded greens and blues. I turn to glance at my clock, worried I'd over slept and it's green eyes whisper, "It's three oh eight, sleep child, sleep." My rushing heart calms and I turn back to the soft mountain of pillows that makes up my headboard.

I wonder if the special ops people in my dream got out of the building before the missiles blew up the floors we were on. As I slip back into oblivion, the panic I felt in the dream becomes thick and oppressive. I feel a need to rush but I'm not sure what I should be rushing to. I see people in front of me surrounded by mountains of broken armor and debris. They are talking but it's hard to make out what the subject is. They don't seem to notice me. This makes me wonder if I have some kind of optical camo or if I'm just not worthy of their attention. I notice how this is the case in most of my dreams. They madly kick and rake the piles with their hands looking for something. I walk past them and one of them mumbles something about survivors and loose ends. I make my way out of the room, which is so large the scale frightens me. It would appear the room was full of people before it was full of unwanted remains.

I walk down a flight of stairs wide enough to drive a vehicle down and find a team of people who are familiar to me. They seem to know me more than I know them. They ask if I am okay, I assure them I am fine, one man in particular seems concerned with my well being. He is rather striking with intese grey eyes and a chin that last saw a razor a few days ago. He looks tired and holds my gaze longer than what's comfortable. No one says anything for a heartbeat before he suddenly starts barking orders to the small team. Team is almost a stretch as there are only five of us. I have a feeling that recently our team was much larger. The three other people rush to obey and I am left with the man with the commanding eyes. He says nothing to me but we look at one another, our eyes unable to look away from each other. Nostalgia rises in my chest as he steps closer and I know I meant something to this man. I look at his face and his eyes are red around the edges, recent tears hiding in his crow's feet. I open my mouth to say something but one of the team returns. They are talking but I can't understand what they are saying. Someone is playing the piano. The rest of the team returns quickly as the music gets louder. I start to feel like someone is pulling me from another dimension. At least, I imagine this is what it feels like to be pulled from another dimension.

The room starts to fade from around me. The team doesn't seem worried and neither do I. The music is getting louder as the room vanishes and again my eyes slowly open to a loud rumble from the other side of the window. The melancholy piano beckons me to awake and I reach for my third hand, alarm clock and general life device, my phone. I silence it into letting me dream for fifteen more minutes and caress the softest of my pillows as I reach for oblivion again. The storm clouds outside lull me to a dreamless sleep.

I miss the man with the intense eyes. I wonder of he misses me.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Showing Love

photo credit Michelle at maladjustedmedia.com, from this blog post

Fridays go one of two ways at work for me. Either they are full of unrealistic amounts of work that need to be finished before I leave or they are painfully dull as I will have nothing to do. Okay, that is slightly untrue, but from my perspective it is. Last Friday, June 8th, was somewhere in the middle of that scale, full of waiting on other people so I could finish assignments. While I was waiting, I came upon this article on HuffPo | Religion. I mean with a title like Jesus in Drag, how could I not read it?

What I expected to be an article that bashed the church for its non acceptance of gays or about some radical protest that included drag queens dressed as Jesus. What I got was the story about how a straight man, Timothy Kurek, learned to step outside his comfort zone and identify with the gay community. He did a social experiment were he lived as a gay man for a year and at the time he wasn't planning on writing a book but as the year went on, he felt compelled to share his experience with others.

What struck me about the article was his description about being in the closet and how detrimental it was for him:
The combination of knowing I had to constantly hide my true attractions and orientation, with the reality that I couldn't even hope for the possibility having a relationship, was overwhelming. And what I went through is NOTHING compared to the experience of the average gay and lesbian. They were never able to say "only 12 or eight or six more months of this before I get to be me again."
As a women who doesn't have to hide the fact that I'm attracted to men, I still have a hard time approaching men to show them I am interested. Mostly because I'm scared they won't be interested in me but also I'm afraid their reaction will include ridiculing me for being interested in them. If I was attracted to women, I have no idea how I would handle it. How could I handle constant rejection from people passing me on the street? Have you seen the way people look at LGBT couples as they walk down the street, it's terrible. If I did approach a woman I thought was attractive and she reacted violently to my interest, how would I handle that physically and emotionally? Reading that article gave me new respect and love for my gay friends. It also reminded me that I have a lot to learn about relating to people and showing them Christ's love.

I'm a firm believer in the fact that we serve up the bible in America with a generous slathering of cultural bias. We spend so much time using the bible to justify our ridiculous live styles, we miss the real truth present in it. We have become so weighted down by possessions and expectations that if someone were to live their life according to the principles in the Word, we wouldn't recognize it as biblical living. We would either put that person on a pedestal and tell them how much better they are than us and how we could never do what they do or we would write them off as crazy, telling them they are taking the bible too seriously and avoid them so we wouldn't feel guilty when they came around.

I'm not saying because of this article I'm going to sell all my possessions and tour around the country yelling scripture from the top of my lungs but it has made me keenly aware of how I view people and how I treat them when they are in my presence. Here's to showing people the love of Christ and making good first impressions.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Gramblings! It has begun.

For what seems like ten years, me and my friend Mattie have been talking about starting a podcast. We also talked about making a transmediated Pride and Prejudice and seventeen other projects but of course all those things had to take a back seat to school. Now that school is over, we have this interesting thing called leisure time. Time to do one of those seventeen project and the first one we picked is the podcast.

You should know that Mattie and I are basically the same person. We like a lot of the same kinds of things, laugh at the same jokes and genuinely enjoy spending time together. When we first met, we would spend a long time talking in the parking lot after class because we like making each other laugh so much. It was after one of these many parking lot conversations that we had the idea that we should record our parking lot talks and put them on the internet. We started calling these talking sessions Gramblings because they were general ramblings we had while in grad school. We recorded the first one this past Saturday and had so much fun we went over our agreed upon time limit. 

So for your listening pleasure, here is the first episode of Gramblings. It's work and kids safe so listen whenever you want. Or RIGHT NOW!

You can follow us on twitter too, @wearegramblings.


Monday, June 4, 2012

American Bible Challenge Hits Dallas

In an effort to achieve one of my goals I talked about in a previous post, I ventured out to Vista Ridge Mall Saturday to take some pictures. I was informed that an open casting call was taking place for a new game show on The Game Show Network. It's going to be hosted by Jeff Foxworthy and the title of the show is American Bible Challenge. From the sound of it, the show is going to feature contestants from around the nation who know the bible the best.

Having not heard of the show before, I did what every person who uses the internet does when they need information, I Googled it. What I found was various blogs and articles asking more questions than providing answers. I did find the basics of the show, those being that eighteen teams of three will compete for a charity that will be the beneficiary of the competing team's winnings. How these teams will compete, how long the show will be on and how much bible knowledge you need to know to actually get on the show Google couldn't tell me. I decided it was time I go see for myself. I recruited my mom and her best friend to join me and we headed out to Lewisville.

When we got to the mall, the audition was easy enough to fine as it was located just inside a popular mall entrance. We first saw a crowd of around two dozen people standing, in movie queue formation, to the right of a pair of well lit stages. The stage on the right was small and had a background with the logo of the show repeated on it, like you would see on a red carpet. A few feet to the left of this stage was a much larger one framed with boldly designed banners announcing the presence of GSN and the American Bible Challenge. To the left of the main stage was a table covered in American Bible Challenge swag and signage and next to that table was a table for the local christian radio station. As contemporary christian pop music blared, we absently took up the clipboards we were handed and strode to our place in line.

As we filled out the forms, the standard "we want to get to know ya!" kind, we struck up a conversation with the lady in front of us. Her name was Clara and she was from Lewisville. She'd heard about the audition on the radio and wanted to participate because it was something completely different. She also wanted to support anything that would encourage people to see Christ in a positive light as she felt society has been discouraging people to have faith. She had one more reason she wanted to audition for the show, a reason I sympathize with, and that was she wanted to see a Hispanic person competing. I looked around and out of the thirty or so people present only half a dozen were people of color. Knowing that Dallas has a huge African American and Hispanic church going population, it was sad to not see more people who looked like me.

We waited in line for about ninety minutes and I got a chance to  take a few pictures. Unfortunately, we didn't get to try out for the show as my mom had an appointment to get to. We left Clara and told her we would be rooting for her if she ended up on the show. All in all, it was a good idea to try something new.


So, you wanna be on tv?


Mom filling out the forms.

The eager crowd. 




This lady looked fabulous in her pink.

KLTY was there giving away a lot of prizes.

American Bible Challenge Swag.

She was delightful, the table attendant. 

Friday, June 1, 2012

This Unexpected Life of Mine

FoRReals has been deemed Masters. 

I recently found out my crush from high school is having his second child. At first I was sadden by this news, thinking that instead of his beautiful wife in his Facebook pictures, I could be there holding a beautiful little brown one year old girl with blue eyes and impossibly curly black hair. I started to think about how all my teenage life plans had me married with children by now. I started to feel like I'd failed myself, that I some how let myself down because I hadn't fulfilled those plans.

But then I started to think about were I am in my life. Granted, I've accomplished very little in the way of my life plans but let's face it, plans you make in high school, outside of general ideas of education and seeking a passion, are silly and should be abandoned as soon as humanly possible. I remembered the accomplishments I had completed so far in life and how great those things are. I mean, I just earned a master's degree for crying out loud and I was feeling like a failure for not achieving more in my life. That's me and Mattie above, by the way, right after graduation. It was bitter sweet that day. I'll write about graduation at a later date, back to high school life plans.

I think it's time I went a little bit easier on myself and instead of making plans, start listing goals. Goals are so much easier to achieve than plans because plans only exist to achieve goals. How I'd forgotten this, I don't know. I think I was focusing too much on the steps than the purpose of those steps.

So. Goals. This could be difficult in prioritizing which ones are most important but none the less, here are a few I want to reach before the end of the summer:

  • Finish LBP videos
  • Start a podcast. Or two.
  • Write on my blog at least twice a week.
  • Take more pictures.
  • Start a board game club.

I should say this is a short list, edited down from the wish list I made two weeks ago. That list was impossibly long and not possible to complete in one season or four. I know this is a new beginning to something exciting. What that something is, well, we will have to discover together.