on contemplating a few things

let's go for a list of contemplations, because it's quicker, easier, prettier than I could ever be in paragraphs:

1. switching over to WordPress, because everybody else who is using it seems to make things look a lot nicer than Blogger.

2. entering the blogospheric static concerning this year's hotly contested election by wagging a lyrical finger at the opposition and accusing barack obama of soullessness or sarah palin of lipstickery or john mccain of jowlyness or finding a reason not to care instead of hinging emotional well-being on something to which I only contribute one vote.

3. riding my red, red bicycle to work.

4. talking to the gorgeous barista at my favorite coffeeshop, but still thinking of people in faraway places

5. wondering for how many people number four has applied to in the last twenty minutes. probably me and the man staring longingly out the window, hand to his chin for the last thirty minutes. no one can sit so still, without contemplating the beauty of a barista!

6. moving out this weekend and how many trips I'll have to take in my car to get my crap from my folks' place to a new place.

7. seven, it has always been seven.

on the public square

i've been debating, for what seems like years, whether or not to post poetry on this blog. i don't know if this is read, for one, so it might seem like a tree falling into uninhabited woods. But, if this happens to have readership; i'd like to know and might start the electronic foray into self-publication.

That might also be a principle, extroverted insecurity of my own, but i'm also unconvinced that this Internet thing is a legitimate avenue for poetry. it still seems distant and impersonal despite all the personified profiles of facebook and myspace. Maybe this is hung on the hope that we're not so distant from one another, just distinct from the other expressions in previous eras, where poetry was read in the public square, when poetry carried upon itself the duties of storytelling and prophecy, when poetry came out of community.

Perhaps, it is our concept of community that has been so expanded and digitized that i can't see the voice poetry has for that broad a place. Because, you don't see what i see–you don't walk past the anti-Semitic graffiti underneath the train station at College Avenue like i do, you're not where i am–i'm terrified that the exercise will be meaningless. It could all be another bookmark, another RSS on your Google reader, another stop along the on-demand-and-there-it-is. But, is that any different than walking up to your bookshelf, assuming you have a bookshelf, and pulling this from it, feeling the pages in between your fingers and smelling the glue in the binding with each flick and turn?

It is certainly different, and i'm waiting to make sense of the feeling of its difference.

on wanting you, friend, to particpate

okay, okay. I'm going to do this: a semi-functional post. Because struggling with the Incarnation, Word become flesh, can sustain a blog for only so long, I'll actually do something of utility. How do you like me now?

As I'm sure you've gathered, I'm going on an internship with the HNGR program at Wheaton College. I will be working for six months at FOCUS in Kampala, and I would like to update you on the situation. I will occasionally post on this "thingamajigger," but they will not be functional/helpful/all-that-advantageous-to-be-read (see, I can still undermine myself in a semi-functional posting, hooray for the inadequacy of language!).

All that to actually say, if you would like to receive e-mail updates from me while in Kampala, please make comment that you would like that. Feel free to attach any other encouragements or salutations, because I have no idea what my readership is here. And, I like it when folks respond to my words, it helps them (the words) enter into the communal space–try that one on for Anabaptist size (hooray for obscure theologies!).

And it makes this whole weblog a little less artificial. But it is so, so artificial, isn't it?

So, let's war against the artificiality–let's be vulnerable (in e-mails, where I know who's reading, who they are, what they sound like, what they tend to wear, their demeanors, the impressions of their characters). That doesn't work as war against the weblog, but don't overdo it.

"some people wake up on Monday mornings
barring maelstroms and red flare warnings
with no explosions and no surprises
perform a series of exercises"
"Simple X" - Andrew Bird

On the state of being

It is hard to post without some sort of instant of stimulus. I must not be the blogger that gets cut off in traffic and angrily marches to his computer and says, "So, this guy on 294 just whips his sedan into my lane ..."

No, no, I'm not nearly that confessional. (If I am confessional, like Plath, I'll do it in a parenthetical and it will make the whole thing seem trivial. I could say things like: I have no idea what it means to love, I am insincere, I am cripplingly averse to commitment and I don't like that, I try to make myself like music that isn't that good if it's obscure. But, because I've placed it here--in this parenthetical--it is negligible. A remarkable way to distance myself from you, right?) If I were to confess, it'd be something useless like I put an empty ice tray in the freezer. Do you see now why I keep things away from the blogosphere?

So, this guy on 294 just whips his sedan into my lane, and I ... am ... pissed.