if, you cannot guess from the last, slightly garbled post, this new year has brought a significant personality change. it's hard to blog when i really don't understand why exactly i'm blogging (the inveterate sorrow of the purpose-driven life).

(the real issue is that my writing style is sickeningly stale, inspite of incessant thesaurical expeditions for adjectives).

but, good news breaks the gloom. My brother just got a job! At an international school, to boot! In TANZANIA!. To quote said brother, "We're shaking the dust of this continent off our feet come August!"

This lends itself to several cheerful conclusions:

1. Holcombs are internationally desireable workers.

2. Dreams can happen!

3. ...if you diligently work on making them happen, and...

4. you patiently fish for the right connection.

5. God makes things happen through surprises

6. According to the standard laws of kinship and sharing, I now have a place to crash in Moshi, Tanzania! :)

having bloggered consistently for over a year and consistently tired of my stylistic quirks and quibbles tendencies and influences not to mention grammatical constraints
i almost decided to quit blogging altogether
because even stream-of-consciousness blogging has become self-aware
--it seems i have created a monster

temptation strikes&%)#resort to DADAism
from a text"all that was left to the intellectual was sardonic laughter."
Brunel and Dali cooperate on a film: Le Chien Andalusian (The Andalusian Dog), a series of random unrelated shots whose guiding principle: no shot, sequence or placement could be logically explained
no dogs, andalusian or otherwise, are featured

assauling a paper god of reason
a rebellion against the bare logic of Metternich, Clausevitz

?the beginning of postmodernism
burning idols to the human mind

so I was in the checkout line at Wal-Mart tonight, sheepishly holding a bottle of Suave Passion FLower Extract Shampoo and a pink loofah, and I look over at the magazine rack, and what do I see?

A headline reading: "First Humans were Gay!" accompanied by a picture labeled "Adam and...Ed?"

Now, these sorts of magazines are known for stretching credulity, but, really...think about this for a second. Just for a second. I mean, it really, really, really REALLY doesn't make sense. At all. Even allowing the sort of suspended disbelief enjoyed by the X Files. I think perhaps even Mulder would have taken umbrage at that one...

check out this amazing poem on Moeller's blog.

i'm sitting at home playing with my new toy: a walkman that plays MP3s off CD. amazing how much meaning a new toy can add to life. :)

So I've had this conversation several times with various friends over the course of the past few months. It generally degenerates into discussions as to the relative hotness/homeliness of British actors and the fact that Keira Knightley is an amazingly gorgeous exception.

The discussion starts out like this: British people are homelier than American ones (to all of my British friends--I apologize for the crassness of this statement. it will perhaps make more sense later). I back up this assertion with a simple test: name three British actors and three British actresses who are unquestionably good-looking. Then name three Americans for each. It's quite simple...British cimena is strangely (in comparison to America's tendency to cast models in ugly duckling roles and the corresponding legitimacy crisis) full of realistically imperfect people. Gap-teeth, normal body weight for women, moles, less-than-impressive hairlines...REAL people!

Imagine my horror, then, at reading the following from Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz.

"Television drives me crazy sometimes because everybody is so good-looking, and yet you walk through the aisles of the grocery stores, and nobody looks like that. Somebody told me that in London people don't judge you as much by the way you look, and I think it is true because late night on PBS they play shows out of England and the actors aren't good looking, and I sit there wondering if anybody else is watching and asking the same question: why aren't the actors in London good looking? And I already know the answer to that question, it is that America is one of the most immoral countries in the world and that our media has reduced humans to slabs of meat."

Crazy! Where does this Miller go off stealing my idea? Ooooh...vindication...someone who had that same idea published it. Hmmmm.....

"The problem with Christian community was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in Christian community, but it was conditional love. Sure, er called it unconditional, but it wasn't. There were bad people in the world and good people in the world. We were raised to believe this. If people were bad, we treated them as though they were either evil or charity: If they were bad and rich, they were evil. If they were bad and poor, they were charity. Christianity was always right; we were always looking down on everybody else...

"Hatred seemed, to me, the product of ignorance. I was tired of biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them. I was tired of Christian leaders using biblical principles to protect their power, to draw a line in the sand separating the good army from the bad one. The truth is I had met the enemy in the woods and discovered they were not the enemy. I wondered whether any human being could be an enemy of God...

"On the other hand, however, I felt by loving liberal people, I mean by really endorsing their existence, I was betraying the truth of God because I was encouraging them in their lives apart from God...I felt like there was this war going on between us, the Christians, and them, the homosexuals and hippies and feminists...By going to a Unitarian church and truly loving those people, I was helping them, I was giving joy to their life and that didn't feel right. It was a terrible place to be..."

"It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things. My realization came while attending an alumni social for Westmont College...

"Mr. Spencer asked us about another area in which he felt metaphors cause trouble. He asked us to consider relationships. What metaphors do we use when we think of relationships? We value people, I shouted out. Yes, he said, and wrote it on his little white board. We invest in people, another person added. And soon enough we had listed an entire white board of economic metaphor. Relationships could be bankrupt, we said. People are priceless, we said.

"The problem with Christian culture is that we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money...If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps, we feel they are priceless...

"With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did."

Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz