Five Reasons I Am Loving This Semester:

-starting the day at one a.m. watching "Boondock Saints" and a short documentary on the sociological impact of growing up in American ad-driven consumerism and the unchecked creation of needs and insecurity, with all the fervor of eight angry young hairy men fomenting revolution (why is it that revolutionaries are always hairy?) Why has Christianity become a program of social control? How can we say we are free when we are slaves? We will change our world.

--sleeping and then doing a little honest labor with happy social interactions

--trying all day to study for my Foreign Policy exam tomorrow and succeeding only in having six amazing and varied learning conversations: Confusion and Hope with Musser, Basic Pottery with Rachel, abstract art with Hnatiuk, Community and Wholeness with Cheryl, photography and third-world life with Adkins, and great movies with Dave Lilley.

--by the time you reach senior year, your professors are your friends and your friends are your professors. i a priveliged to be surrounded by people like Cheryl, the Adkinses, Hnatiuk, Kanski, Farrow, Brautigam, Halulko, Mitchell, Nafziger, Musser, Alex, the Arensen Ladies--the discontented and passionate.

--writing a little free-form poetry

--listening to loud Irish drinking songs

--eating delicious Big Al's food

--my bank account is back to three digits!

--a good email from my brother

--a chat with two old RA's

--and finally, a fifty-minute brainstorming session with my housemates to generate creative ways to abuse the fact that the main source for Ben's next paper is a man with the unfortunate last name of "Butt."

This year rocks.

conversation of the day:
Paul: [munching on a fortune cookie leftover from the ISA banquet] "My fortune cookies says 'Now is the time to ask that special someone on a date.' "
Me: "Dude, who's that special someone?"
Paul: "Man, I don't know!"
Me: "Ahhh, that's horrible! Now is the time, man, you gotta get working!"
Paul: "But I don't know who she is!" [opening another fortune cookie]
Me: "Dude, that sucks."
Paul: [reading the next fortune] " 'Do not desire what you do not need.' "

Rush Limbaugh makes money because people listen to him.
So does Dr. Dobson. Sean Hannity. Anne Coulter. Bob Jones IV. and Marvin Olasky.
On the nightly news, they have a slogan: if it bleeds, it leads.
People campaigning for office--campaigning for influence and furthering their ideologies--know that the best way to secure a vote is to scare a voting bloc. Things like wars and terrorists, social security and disintegration of society get people's attention.

Because we grew up watching movies and reading stories about heroic, last-ditch attempt victories against all odds against the forces of evil, we tend to try to structure the world that way. The evil fiscal liberals want to tax and spend our economy into oblivion; the gays and lesbians want to steal the souls of our children and eat them; the atheists want to silence and contain Christians; the public educators want to indoctrinate our children. Fear drives us to desperate, valiant action against the faceless hordes.

Reading the Internet Monk brought a lot of these thoughts to the forefront. They're thoughts that have been growing for a long time--Michael Moore helped me with his insightful "Bowling for Columbine," and Dennis Miller's brilliant "Blue Like Jazz" was an inspiration, among many others, including Father Anthony Ugolnik, who visited our campus two weeks ago.

The future of Christianity in American lies in this question: will we embrace the fear of the people around us and continue to construct safe ghettos for the kingdom of heaven to stagnate, or will we embrace the unquenchable life and love embodied in the indescribable, unstoppable kingdom of heaven? I think we have forgotten that the kingdom is here--among us--living in all its mustard seedy, yeasty, salty power. It's not a kingdom of fear--it's a kingdom of laughter that's never afraid to share common life with outsiders, even the socially dangerous ones. Its inhabitants aren't scared by sin or by schemes--it's amused at their pathetic attempts to thwart heaven and saddened by the condition, their misunderstanding of heaven. It is not afraid or disdaininful or dismissive of sinners, because it is made of sinners who identify with the sinners walking around them.

It embraces people no matter who they are, just how they are: bitter, jealous, gluttonous or homosexual. It's not afraid to laugh with, to relate to, the ones society calls the lowest of the low, the inhuman ones: perverts, monsters, murderers--because everyone in the kingdom knows they began as freaks, perverts, lustful angry pitiful murderers.


I will not stand with a church that cuts itself off from the people it was called to. I will not fellowship silently with a church that discriminates among sinners. I will not be called a Christian if that means despising homosexuals, women trapped in prostitution, and the poor. I will not call myself one with a church so afraid of the people around it that it builds walls to keep the honest out. I will not worship with a church that is so afraid of unpredictability and the possibility of screwing up that it ostracizes and cripples its artists and refuses to attempt or commit to any venture that is not a sure-proven thing, already safely mapped out in a book available at the local Christian bookstore.

I will not reject the church in its many, flawed forms. But I will not stand within its tragic walls, and I will not be silent. The Kingdom of Heaven and the fellowship thereof is for all and equally so, and it is for now, and it is the only kingdom worth living and dying for--the only kingdom where you can have life, and the only kingdom where death makes sense.

Hah! Back in action! This weekend is merely a sore throat and persistent cough now, and film class has given me impetus to be excited once more. This week we are watching Lawrence of Arabia and The Third Man--both British films. I love Brits! Especially exciting is The Third Man, written by the same author as the book The Power and the Glory, the amazing Graham Greene who does an astounding job taking evil out the realm of the fanstastic or fairy tale and into the mundane where it lives every day. Want to watch them with me?

Film class also has the power to disturb. Joining The Last Laugh and Battleship Potemkin, not to mention M and Citizen Kane, Ladri Di Biciclette ("The Bicycle Thief") has reminded me again that bad things happen to people who cannot find jobs: society is a pitiless machine that rolls over people's dignity with its iron cogs. The closer I meander to the ranks of the unemployed, the more I am convinced that a society that does not provide people with meaningful place is no society at all. And I take too many people to the hospital from the nursing home to believe that American capitalism concerns itself with meaningful social relationships.

If I'm lucky, I'll manage some meaningful place riding a camel across a large desert, discovering a shady haven in a rocky outcrop just in time for afternoon tea.

observations on the passing scene, in no particular order:

-just chilled a little with Dave Pascoe, of Tanzanian fame. good times! i sure am scared to graduate and leave this wonderful school, but on the other hand i love reminiscing, so there's something to look forward to...

-i hate being sick. it makes me wish i lived at home still.

-i just found a trove of Animaniacs songs on the network. here's to the bestest cartoon show ever!

-i love ibuprofen. it keeps you from biting people's heads off.

-i need tea. now. it's a good thing it's almost lunchtime. i think i'll abscond with some from the cafeteria. perhaps i'll cache some teabags surreptitiously for later.

-

yet one more log on the burning bonfire that is my ambition to travel:
the see-thru loo

as if to spite my passionate resolve to write only good and beautiful things, only literature, life or fate or awful cockup (in the words of the nutty British rock star from love actually) would have it, the times demand a news flash:

*as i was resigning myself to call around Rochester for a good eyeglass shop to shell out a few hundred bucks to get my vision back, i opened an innocuous anonymous intracampus mail envelope to find the lost lense for my glasses. fifteen minutes of work with a leatherman and a twist-tie and you can't even tell they were broken! I CAN SEE AGAIN!!!!!!

(and I can buy coffee at the coffee shop and food at the Jube again!)

and now for something completely different

*to take advantage of someone else's misery for a moment of sheer integrative studies genius, let us all pause and offer our sympathy to Katrina Lao, that pioneer of bloggers, who suddenly and without warning lost her three-years running blogspot site to what Dr. Oakerson would only call the vagaries of having only an imperfect property right. perhaps if she was a Peruvian street vendor she could have called a voluntary organization to protect her pitch, but alas it is gone without even a chance to redirect her vast network of friends, family, admirers and stalkers to her new address at msafiri-k.blogspot.com.

additionally, for those with free time

*my alternate site for more literary/creative/depth of thought projects now has another long stream of semi-disjointed thoughts coopted from my journal. see deadmoosetalking.

this broadcast brought to you by bad sleeping habits, Tikka headlamps, Compaq "Comcrap" computers, and glow-in-the-dark SPAM boxers which are currently glowing for all they're worth. and my roommate, the Russian Faire Princess, who is blissfully snoozing the night away. and my new and super-cool discman that reads a massive collection of mp3s i burned freshman year. and Sting for "Desert Rose" which is either incredibly cool or very patheticly cheesy. or both. like me. :)

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

done.

(sleep!)

"Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted-and few have been able to resist the temptation for long-to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. There is a world of difference between the belief that all nations stand under the judgment of God, inscrutable to the human mind, and the blasphemous conviction that God is always on one's side and that what one wills oneself cannot fail to be willed by God also.

"The lighthearted equation between a particular nationalism and the counsels of Providence is morally indefensible, for it is that very sin of pride against which the Greek tragedians and the Biblical prophets have warned rulers and ruled. That equation is also politically pernicious, for it is liable to engender the distortion in judgment which, in the blindness of crusading frenzy, destroys nations and civilizations-in the name of moral principle, ideal, or God himself.

"On the other hand, it is exactly the concept of interest defined in terms of power that saves us from both that moral excess and that political folly. For if we look at all nations, our own included, as political entities pursuing their respective interests defined in terms of power, we are able to do justice to all of them. And we are able to do justice to all of them in a dual sense: We are able to judge other nations as we judge our own and, having judged them in this fashion, we are then capable of pursuing policies that respect the interests of other nations, while protecting and promoting those of our own. Moderation in policy cannot fail to reflect the moderation of moral judgment."

--Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations

or in the name of democratic capitalism.

have just rediscovered grits. amazing. am currently bobbing head like an idiot and tapping my foot. and mouthing the lyrics at blazing speed. in the middle of the coffee house. boo yah! also found street-brit hip hop group The Streets. good stuff.

six pages of my last fifteen pager done. i'm going to bed. tomorrow is writing day. and after that comes a lot of finals. i am very tired.

i want to eat real bananas. do you?
i want to fly to tanzania. do you?
i want to swim in might rivers. do you?
i want to sit on a warm rock. do you?
i want to talk about hippos. do you?
i want to jump off waterfalls. do you?
i want to sip chai with maziwa. do you?
i want to eat at the HastyTasty. do you?
i want to make music with Mike. you too?

let's go!

sigh...why did we let it go by so fast?

---

p.s. but...!
i'm sitting in Houghton's brand-new and very charming coffee house, listening to my friends Jon and Jon and Alan and Blaine and Mike and Aileen play improv jass Christmas tunes. that's incredibly cool :) now all i need is some caramel apple cider...who wants to buy me a caramel apple cider?

Went and saw the Nutcracker last night, performed by a rather impressive Russian ballet troupe. Very cool. The world is full of beauty. Sometimes that beauty takes the form of fairy tales, and the beauty is the excitement of mystery and possibility that fills every day.

In another note, a friend of a friend double majored in ballet and AIDS relief and education at a major ivy league school. good grief.

I am listening to Five For Fighting's "America Town" album. In spite of all the scorn certain women have heaped upon the band in general and "Superman" in particular, I'm increasingly impressed and thinking, hmmm...

I think I'd like to buy this CD. Perhaps its the stress...


--Recipe for Futility:
One 15 page case-study on Imperial Japan through the eyes of Robert Jervis' Security Dilemma.

One 5 page paper on political theory in Herman Melville's Billy Budd, for the charming and harsh Herr Doktor Meilaender.

One 8 page paper on East African Folklore, for my favorite professor. Except it's several months overdue.

One 8 page paper. For my senior seminar. hmmmmmmm...

And four finals. Four blue-book finals.

An ominously sore throat and swollen lymph nodes and achy head.

Blurred vision.

I am going to die...

but not yet. not today. today, Hans Morgenthau and John Mearsheimer are on my side. and if not, Thomas Merton will always be my friend.

"Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste
with a distempered appetite. To be generous,
guiltless and of free disposition, is to take those
things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets..."

-Lady Olivia, Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare may have been a dirty man, but he was brilliant too, and he knew human nature. Nothing makes you a prisoner like self-centered pride or arrogance, and nothing makes you free like laughter.

with a satisfied smile, i clicked the little spell-check button at the top of the night's effort. i wrote nine pages of reflection on Tanzania and me and philosophy about life and culture and it was a pleasure to write and hopefully just as pleasant to read. oh, i am immensely satisfied. it's good to write something and feel like a competent writer again.

i was skipping along quite nicely, telling the dictionary to ignore words like "Arensen" and "homestay" and "Wasafwa" and "intercultural studies" when suddenly my spell checker popped up the word "Kenote" which is really strange because Anne Kenote had absolutely nothing to do with my Tanzania experience; she hadn't even learned to say "Hujambo" and kupiga "Hodi! Hodi!" yet. How did she get into my paper? and then I remembered seeing her near my computer with that mischevious little smile on and I thought, wait a minute...

and here's what I read smack in the middle of a paragraph about Dr. Arensen's old friend the Commissionary (and his wife) in the Sudan and his avid love for checkers:

"Right in the middle of important, pressing business or entertaining visitors they would stop for an hour of games and tea and cheerful, inane banter. Then they would up and get back to business, filling both with ample gusto. And I think that Anne Kenote is the coolest, whatever I was writing about, I now count as rubbish because the thought of the illustrious Anne takes over all previous thoughts a man can entertain. So that’s all. Grade me as you will but I refuse to recant. I will die with these last words on my lips..."

And I'm very glad that I spell-checked this document before printing it up and handing it in. And Anne Kenote is a hilarious and creative individual (by the way, in case you run into Anne, make sure you say it like "Comma", not "Can" or "Fanny." She hates that.