Thoughts and obersvations on life.......

It's been a while since my last post. I'm taking a break from the rat race for a couple of hours, so I figured I might as well write something. Trouble is, I'm not sure what to write about. I guess I'll just put down some thoughts I've had recently.

*Why did it take the government a year to declare that we are in a recession? It's not like anyone actually believed that we weren't in one, right? Then again, I don't know much about economics, so maybe I'll just shut up.

*It feels weird being a senior. I remember when I was a freshman and looked up to the seniors with a sort of awe, as if they were a higher race of beings or something. I imagined what it must be like to be preparing to enter college, with a firm plan for the rest of my life. Now I'm in my last year of high school, and I feel no sense of closure at all. To tell the truth, I feel more lost now than I ever have. Maybe I'm just getting old.

*I half-followed the recent terrorist attacks in India. To tell you the truth, I wasn't really that interested. I mean, only 172 people died. That's not a genocide or anything. Reflecting later on the event and my reactions toward it, I was stunned. When did words, pictures, and even videos of events like these lose the power to affect us? We turn on the TV and watch as the lives of human beings just like us are extinguished, shattered, and ruined. We don't even blink. In fact, we're bored. That sort of stuff doesn't interest us. So we turn on the video game console and blast away at digital representations of ourselves, sated in the gore and violence that fills the screen. 172 people lost their lives, and countless Americans (me included) yawned and turned away. When did we lose our soul?

* I have had the opportunity to work on a program for our youth ministry at church. The entire senior class (which is twenty or so people) has been put in charge of creating a Christmas party for everyone. It's been........yeah, it's been .........great. Interesting how quickly we discover the true nature of ourselves and of others when we work together on a project of this size. Show's on in a week or so. Pray for us.

* Will someone tell the people in the Obama Campaign that the election is over? As soon as the results were in, I unsubscribed from the mailing lists. Yet my inbox is still flooded with messages that often don't have anything to do with the President-elect. My favorite was one from the campaign offering free downloads of the movie Hair.
Did these people actually have a life before this election? If they did, now would be the time to return to it.

* All controversy aside, His Dark Materials, the fantasy trilogy by renowned atheist Phillip Pullman, are actually great reads. I enjoyed all three books from the series. Pullman is an extremely talented author who weaves a strong, enjoyable, and engaging tale that is, while not on level with the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, certainly close to it. It was especially interesting to trace the author's worldview through the trilogy and notice how, while in the end his characters destroyed God and achieved his version of a perfect world, he was unable to bring the story to a satisfactory conclusion. His ideal world, one where humans live on without God, as part of the "Republic of Heaven", is empty and meaningless. This shows rather clearly in his books, no matter how hard he tries to disguise it. Most Christians won't even go near these books (and the movie version of the first one) because of the worldview portrayed in them. I, however, think that it is possible to disagree with the worldview of an author yet enjoy his work.

* How many of you are sick of Christmas music? I am. I walked into Wal-Mart the other day and heard "Rockin' around the Christmas tree". That almost drove me crazy.

* I recently tried to read the book Blood Meridian by Cormack McCarthy and had to put it down. I usually enjoy his work, but Blood Meridian was different. It was a gripping and well-written tale, but the level of brutal, graphic violence contained in the work was incredible. I understood and appreciated the point McCarthy was trying to make, but I just couldn't get past the violence. It got me thinking: How much violence does an author need to put in his work to hammer his point home?

* Why is it that Christmas seems more and more empty as the years go by? Every year I seem to over-reflect on how meaningless the whole charade actually is, and end up thoroughly depressing myself. Maybe this year I'll just stick to the hot chocolate and candy canes.