You can always tell when a professional athlete, actor, or musician has lost all sense of reality. Instead of bothering with the meager masses who refer to themselves as “I” or “me”, the true Diva quickly acquires the ability to see him/herself as others do. And no literary technique communicates this newfound self-enlightenment like the third-person reference. It’s called an illeism. And if you don’t immediately have a an athlete, rock star or politician in mind, Continue reading
All tweeted out
My friend Lex has shaken me. I hate to use words like crisis and liberation and revelatory when I’m not talking about God, but those are the words that keep coming to mind as I’m here in the midst of a shaking.
Twitter is bad.
I tried giving up Twitter about two years ago, when I saw that the good folks at Good Morning America were tweeting, as a show. And they were doing a piece about Twitter and what it is and why it’s hot and new and here to stay and who tweets and how to tweet and why it’s not something to be afraid of anymore. I decided Twitter’s utter hipness, it’s Facebook-dethroning appeal to me, was dead. The secret was out. The sarcastic, crude, snobbish, exclusive, inclusive, community, authentic, artificial secret was revealed, the medium was corrupted. But no one on Twitter agreed with me, so I didn’t give it up after all.
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Some thoughts on frustration, or, I started this post on December 11, 2010 and just now came back to it.
Frustration is a result of pride.
I guess.
That’s all I can figure out at the moment, because after a few intensely frustrating hours of life, I feel shallow and pitiful trying to maintain my anger at things not going the way I want them to go. It feels childish to sit here at my desk and avoid paying bills by feeling persecuted because other people aren’t behaving as robotically as I expect them to. It feels so wrong, in fact, that I know there must be something deeply wrong about it.
Whining sucks. I know this from experience with it. Continue reading
Work and Thought
Reading can be a tricky thing, because all we have is ourselves. What I mean by that is we can only understand so much, our us-ness limits so much. That’s what makes great writing so great, it pushes or pulls us out of our us-ness into the perspective of someone else. The worst thing you can do as a literate person is isolate your reading to those things, only those things, that are identical to your own perspective. Being human is best when it’s rich and complex, a diamond with many facets. Otherwise we remain coal. Solid, yes, but solidly dull, in need of a few million years worth of pressure.
That is my prologue to this. Everything I write is my perspective. I hope it’s enough of a different perspective to be interesting and maybe even to help shave a dull edge for you every now and then. I’m not sure if I get better by describing that perspective better, or by allowing it to be changed into a perspective that merits writing about.
All this background could preface any discussion, but I wanted to get it out there sometime, so have it.
As a male, 30, agriculturally and religiously raised and trained, I’d like to talk a little bit about work. Continue reading
You can call me Divine Master
My boss outed me today.
It is funny to me that I’m only 30 and already working for a younger boss. During our Taco Bell lunch, he was saying he turns 25 next week.
“When I turned 25, I was still in school,” I said, thinking about how different my life is from his. He’s in the tenth year of running his own business. As a sophomore in high school, he already had two employees. As a 25 year-old, I was goofing off in seminary, living off student loans and my Grad Assistant stipend. Continue reading