fake smart 8.January.2009

You know, I was going to tell you that I may just take 2009 as a break from blogging.  The pressure of a blog without fresh posts would dissipate just like that.  But that was before I wrote my last post.  I had underestimated the power of writing (and bread dough) to make my world feel right-side-up again.  There is that quiet contemplation of organizing abstract thoughts into words that balances me, soothes me.

Not that I have to blog in order to write.  Justification: (1) my blogging makes you happy (Dude, if it doesn’t, I suggest you stop reading me!), and (2) blogging gives me a little push to finish my thoughts coherently.

Then I read Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.  One of the first points Carr made was that he (and I, admittedly) read differently than ever, especially on the web.  We skim.  I skimmed Carr’s article before I decided to blog about it.  And then I thought to myself:  do any of my readers really read my posts in their entirety?  It’s kind of a depressing thought that readers don’t savor my every word.

But back to the article.

“[W]hat the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” Carr says.  Many of us have lost our ability to sink into a good book.  A few pages may make us anxious for a change of pace.  I wonder, too, if this skipping from activity to activity and from thought to thought has made us desire everything to be bold and flashy at athletic events, at church services, and on television.  It’s as though if we aren’t distracted, we’ll get bored.

Carr seems to agree:

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

Can I just admit that it feels warm and fuzzy to have someone who thinks like me, who is suspicious of this whole technological surge that revolves around the Internet?  But, as Carr says, sure, “you should be skeptical of my skepticism.”  Maybe Google-style research is mostly good.  After all, reading books isn’t a natural, instinctual activity anyway.  Maybe the way human brains process information can just change, and we’ll come out better on the other side.

But then again, I doubt it.

“If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,’ we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture…. As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

spreading my web wings 26.July.2008

I am honored to be guest blogging for Amy at Crunchy Domestic Goddess today. Come on over to visit!

the beast is glaring 9.July.2008

Tonight, I loathe the machine that drew me back in to its white-blue glow only to laugh in my face: “No new emails! Mua ha ha ha!” (I have never used the term ”Mua ha ha ha” before.  What a guy thing.)

I started reading Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology today.  I’ve only begun the book, but I’m already so enthralled.  Eric Brende (a Topeka, KS, native and Washburn, Yale, and MIT graduate) and his new wife move to a electricity- and motor-free community for eighteen months.  Brende talks about how technology takes so much energy to sustain itself that sometimes it doesn’t improve the quality of life at all.  I know — we all say we know this.  But why, as Brende did in high school, do we continue to work our jobs to pay for our car… just so we can get to work?  In his year and a half of isolation from the modern world, Brende hopes to figure out what balance of technology is healthy and helpful.

In a way this is tied to our need for the therapy of nature, as Richard Louv talks about in Last Child in the Woods.  Our mental, physical, and spiritual health, our ability to imagine and discern — would these be all the more agile if we worked with entire bodies in the living, breathing world?

When I am sucked back to the computer to feed my checking-email-and-blogs addiction, I hope to gain some new bit of information — perhaps a book recommendation, an idea for dinner, warm greetings from my family.  I guess I’m trying to expand my mind, finding fuel to feed my passions.  But in all the checking and staring at the flashing screens, am I actually damaging my mind?  Am I turning it into a stagnant button-pressing machine?

A couple weeks ago, I wondered how much it would matter if I let my blog go to pot.  No more guilt about not posting on a regular basis, no addiction to the comments from readers.  What if I wrote in a notebook instead?  Wrote a book or a journal?  Maybe someday, I’d still have readers — those who were patient enough to wait for me to arrange and edit and publish any good bits of writing I may have churned out.  Maybe it’d be a better use of your time, too, than to watch me muddle through my questions.

blogland favorites 27.March.2008

I haven’t been overly generous in publicizing the blogs I read, so here’s a special post to recognize my favorite blogs created by people I’ve never met.  (If you’re interested in reading my friends’ blogs, check my comments.  I figure they’ll provide a link if they want to be found.)

1. the ashram

Oh, how I love this blog.  It is written by members of a Christian community in Lexington, Kentucky.  It is brimming with examples of how to communally live in the fullness of Christ.  These people have creativity, passion for living holy lives, concern for the environment, intentionality in creating meaningful relationships.  The bloggers publish thoughtful poetry, powerful quotations, important and timely web links, and compelling photography.  I just wish Lexington, Kentucky were a little closer to Dallas.

2. Owlhaven

This is my favorite adoption blog, to date.  I think Mary, the author of Owlhaven, may well be a superwoman.  She shares a lot about the goings-on of her ten children (a mix of biological and adopted kids), and throws in some adoption advice and helpful house-running tips along the way.

3. zenhabits

This popular and highly successful blog is well-organized, topically focused, and inspiring.  I don’t visit it often, but I know it’s there as a great resource on how to live simply and minimalistically. (Is that redundant?)

4. walk slowly, live wildly

Hands down, my favorite blog right now.  This girl is my hero.  How can one person be so spiritually focused, creative, interesting, unafraid, and green all at the same time?  She loves books, has dreads, and tours the the country in an RV that runs on veggie oil.  She has another blog, happy foody, where she sings the praises of eating raw (a little too brave for me), but walk slowly, live wildly is where I hang my hat.

5. The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

Okay, I’ll admit, this one is getting a little old, but some of the posts are a lot of fun.  The blog’s sole purpose is to publish pictures of signs that use quotation marks unnecessarily, which, obviously, is right up my “alley.”

6. The Pioneer Woman Cooks!

I stayed up way too late last night reading this blog for the first time.  This is the secondary site of Pioneer Woman Ree.  Her other site is undergoing a facelift, but I think it’s almost done.  I was overwhelmed with all the pictures when I read the first post, but Ree is so funny in her cooking banter that she drew me in.  Her recipes are not fancy or health-conscious, but they sound yummy (and the pictures are pretty!). 

the curse of anonymity 24.September.2007

There are pieces of me I’m afraid to tell, out in the open like this.  I’m afraid to tell of my journey in the Apostolic Christian Church, afraid to tell of my journey away from it.  I’m afraid to talk about my family too much, except the parts that exude joy.  I’m afraid to name names, to describe deep hurts, to delve into the details of marriage and money.

But I am a writer.  Sometimes I think I can only be a true writer when I am willing to lay it all out on the table.  In a way, to describe my deepest thoughts and pains and longings is to expose my jugular for anyone who comes along.  Or maybe it’s more than that.  Maybe it’s also exposing the jugular — or the private parts? — of the people closest to me.  My family, my husband, my former churchmates — they didn’t sign up to be written about like any old fictional character.

I wonder if creating is the most vulnerable profession in the world.  There is no taking back, no unpublishing, no privacy.  Unless, of course, you don’t write with full abandon.

Sometimes I wish that the stuff I wrote for others didn’t have to have a sense of anonymity about it.  I wish I could write whatever was calling to be released from my soul.

one of the fallen 7.July.2007

“There ain’t no money in poetry. / That’s what sets the poet free. / I’ve had all the freedom I can stand.” -Guy Clark in “Cold Dog Soup”

She gleans hundreds of comments because she can write. I feel like an imposter when I scan her blog posts like they’re any old cheap, chatty update on life. I read her latest post from the end to the beginning because I caught a line and tasted the quality, and I had to have more. One doesn’t skim poignancy. So I moved up, up, up, and saw how she had molded her thoughts into art.

I had to admit I’m a little like the poor, lost, fallen people our waiter was talking about last weekend. He used to be an artist; now he just works at Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue — which, if you have to be a waiter, at least that’s a place with food worth its salt. But our waiter said he’s not an artist anymore. People don’t care about beautiful things. They only want ugly things — that’s what he said. He said we live in a fallen world where beauty isn’t valued. But it’ll be redeemed. It’ll be redeemed. And then he walked away with our smeary plates of bones and barbecue sauce.

I cling to my words, and I hope for art. But on the days when I’m feeling weak and tired, when I’m in subordination to tasks instead of Beauty, I just serve my tables and wait for redemption.

i’d rather be reading… 2.July.2007

…but I feel like I owe something to the two beautiful people who deposited comments in my inbox after nearly a month of blog silence on my part. I definitely didn’t deserve three comments this morning [last Thursday], so it was like a handful of grace extended to a woman in desperate need some verve. So, my dear commenting friends, I give you what may be my day’s most valuable moments: naptime.

I just laid Isaiah down in his crib after he fell asleep in his carseat. (He’s in such a chatty stage right now. “Da-da-da-da, ta-ta-ta, buh-buh-buh, pbpbppbpb [blowing bubbles, a.k.a. spitting]” are his favorite things to tell me these days.) I was thinking, Please don’t wake up. Please don’t wake up, when he opened his eyes and said, “Da-da-da-da,” and then went right back to sleep. It gave me a good laugh. That’s the kind of thing that keeps me going.

words without pictures 10.May.2007

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there’s no need for both, at least not on this blog. And since I’m a novice of photography, words are my tool of choice.

My generation has lost previous generations’ hunger for words — for novels, for poetry, for the ability to express oneself with the pen. And it’s really sad, you know? People would rather sit in front of a television to see a story with their eyes than to have it painted in their minds by reading words on a page. All this film media dulls the imagination, I’m telling you.

I volunteered to keep a blog for our small group at church. One of the first comments I received was “more pictures!” More pictures? Aren’t my words worth enough? To top that, I heard someone else (who considers himself a bit of a guru of writing composition) call blogs without pictures “boring.”

So many blogs out there post a picture with every entry. “Oh, look! There’s a picture of a guy with a beard! I bet I’d be interested in this post!” The photograph may draw me in, but as I scan through the post, my attention wanes. The words hold little value. And then I realize that the pictures are only there to cover up the writer’s empty brain. Lured in again… and left to dry and die in the sun.

Call it boring if you want, but I have resolved to keep passage picture-free. It challenges me to write words of value, to think before I post. I’ll try not to waste your time; I’ll try to keep you coming back. And hopefully — someday — both of our brains will get a little exercise.

bathsheba 9.October.2006

I disrobe myself — paste it out there for all to see. And you see; you take it all in like famished children. A few of you smile, or nod; you acknowledge me.

The others stand and stare behind sheets of one-way glass. I know you’re there. My sensors are up; you leave your evidence — food wrappers and footprints.

My food! My soil! But I can’t tell who, or why. I only know when, and I know how many. Sometimes the footprints are few. And they match the soles of the shoes of those I love. Other times, the footprints are that of an army — uniform, cold, silent. I disrobed before an army.

And now I disrobe again…

i, nebuchadnezzar 28.September.2006

I feel this pressure to write, but I don’t have anything. I’m blank. I know the pressure comes from everybody-else-doing-it, and if everybody else is — Rachel’s friend Jill, newly-married Michelle — well, then, by all means, I ought to be too. After all, I’m the “writer.”
Till now, my blog hadn’t been updated in probably weeks. When I read, all I can see is everyone else’s proficiency in words and sentences, and my total lack thereof. Everything I write sounds the same.
I wish I could break free from my intense desire to compete, and really just write for the sheer joy of it. Then, when I read, I wouldn’t feel so inadequate (or is it that I feel challenged?); I’d just glean the authors’ beautiful harvest of words without feeling like I’m stealing their food. I do find some sense of joy in the writing process, but too often I just bask in the glow of “I wrote something comprehensible. I am a writer.”
But writing isn’t the only thing I macerate in pride. I do it with about everything, I just realized.
I wash the windows and think: “I bet these are the cleanest windows on the street, even if they’re not perfect.” I even said to Kyle yesterday: “I bet hardly anyone washes their windows.” What was I thinking? That I deserved an extra pat on the back for being so above average?
And then I look at my successful pregnancy. I walk through my house and say to my imaginary inquirer: “Actually, I’m feeling great for being eight months pregnant! I never expected to feel so good at this stage.” What a wonderful body I must have to be so suited for carrying and bearing children! Never mind the fact that the notoriously hard part — childbirth — looms somewhere in the future.

“At the end of twelve months [Nebuchadnezzar] walked in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon.
The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?” -Daniel 4. 29-30
And, well, we all know what happened to him for the next seven years.

Here’s Kathleen Norris, who brought me back to earth (or maybe up from it): “Christians often speak of having a call to a particular form of ministry. But from the earliest churches, it has been brought to our attention that this is mostly a matter of a pedestrian inheritance. When Paul, in his first letter to the members of the church of Corinth, asks them to ‘consider your own call,’ he emphasizes that ‘not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.’ Declaring that it is for this very reason that God chose them, so that ‘no one might boast in the presence of God’ (1 Cor. 1: 26,29), Paul makes it clear that if we take inordinate pride in the spiritual gifts we have been blessed with, the joke is on us” (from Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith).