i wrote a sentence in my essay already!

I hate writing essays for English because I can't ever get enough information to hold a big enough picture to write a good essay.  There are just too many parts to the picture that can't be accounted for by a single person- then I get picked apart by ravenous teachers.  And I just don't write these essays very well because I don't care about them.  I have been sitting here for three hours now, trying to write, and I have done one sentence.  This may be the hardest essay I have ever written, and it probably shouldn't be.  I am just paralyzed by fear, I guess.  I am paralyzed by not knowing enough and knowing that I won't have enough information about King Arthur, even if I spend my whole life researching him, to have a valid and legitimate opinion for the paper I am about to write.  Ugh.  Opinions are the worst.  No one should have any.

fluttering beast

Did you know that the stars in the
    sky are just a reflection of stars
    in the ocean?
And that the million-tentacled
    beast moving slowly from us,
    fluttering in its majesty, came
    from the boiling belly of the earth,
    where land is not land and
    where water isn't either?
I could stretch, back pressed against
    the black, writhing twilight, gently
    grasping, relenting twilight, I could
    span the horizons, plucking from the
    vine of the skies.

soundtrack for my soul

So a couple of weeks ago I was on a small trip to Lava Hot Springs with my pals, and Morgan said she wanted to make a soundtrack for her life.  Morgan and Jamie started talking about how that was a good idea and that they would choose music that fit their lives.  I thought that was a cool idea, so I am ripping it off.  Sorry, Morgan.  At least I'm giving you credit, right?

But this idea got me thinking, and I started to try and figure out what songs I would use if I were to do a soundtrack for my life.  Would I want songs that would show my somewhat eclectic tastes, or would I want songs that had changed my life somehow?  How would I choose them? I started sorting through artists and songs, and what I decided I would do is choose music/artists that have a way of creating moods and feelings that fit my soul better than any other music.  What I am going to try and say is really hard because I don't know how to choose the right imagery to represent this idea.  But my soul seems to be able to connect on a lot of frequencies (i.e. feelings, emotions...), but there seems to be a frequency that my soul connects with and vibrates best on.  It seems to be my frequency.  When I am there, I feel like I am closer to being my real Self than at any other place.  Does that make sense?

And not only do I see that connection as a frequency, I see it as a huge, dark shape.  It is soft and smooth.  It is round and straight at the same time.  It's somehow me, and it's somehow where I feel best.  It's a place and it's a feeling and it's me.

I realize that this probably makes absolutely no sense, but what I want to say is that I chose three artists that help me get to that place that is me.  I don't know if everyone reacts differently to the music of these artists, or I sometimes wonder if everyone tried, they could get on the same frequency that I vibrate so well at and can really see who I am.  Can other people come and see where I hum?

Anyway, the three artists I chose were Peter Gabriel, Sufjan Stevens, and Jonsi/Sigur Ros.

Peter Gabriel for the incredible faith that defines him and I want to be representative of me.  He, to me, is a solid rock that is just pressing on in life.  I think of stable ease and continuous forward-movement when I think of Peter Gabriel and his music.  And of all the artists, I think he produces more music at my frequency than any other artist.  He somehow gets right to the heart of my soul.  I could live happily in the world his music creates.

I chose Sufjan Stevens for the neurotic/paranoid aspect of his music.  He is constantly looking for something, grasping at everything, tasting and digesting as much as he can, trying to salvage happiness out of everything he finds.  Happiness is elusive sometimes, and my worst moments are when I know that I am happy now, but I know that it will skirt right out of my grasp the second I try to hold onto it.  His music is representative of that.  It gets me to that place, and helps me try to come to grips with it.  It's therapeutic for me.

Lastly, I chose Jonsi/Sigur Ros because they define the part of me that longs for beauty and hope.  Someone called Jonsi the "messenger of ecstatic hope," and he is.  No one else makes my heart ache so much for beauty and then promises it more eternally than Jonsi.  He makes my soul want to burst from my body and dance in the shifting green heavens.  However, it is all tinged with just enough sadness.  It is a beautiful sadness, though, that makes you feel peaceful...

So, with these three artists, I present to you the soundtrack of my soul.  I feel like you can know the core of me, who I am and how I feel, through these songs/artists.  Of course there are more that I could choose, but these seem best representative of my Self.

Jonsi- Boy Lilikoi

Sufjan Stevens- From the Mouth of Gabriel

Peter Gabriel- Signal to Noise

Sigur Ros- Inní Mér Syngur Vitleysingur

Sufjan Stevens- Impossible Soul (Part 1) (Part 2)

Peter Gabriel- Love to Be Loved

Sigur Ros- Svefn-G-Englar

Genesis (Peter Gabriel)- Supper's Ready (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)

Please enjoy. (The only one of these with an actual video or a video worth watching is Svefn-G-Englar.  The rest are good for listening...)
What songs show your soul?

(PS.  Last year I saw every single one of these artists perform live.  It was a good year.)

just want everyone to know how great my school is

I m geting a gr8 edycashun!  R skool s verry poppyoularr!  CHEK THS OWT!!

http://news.byu.edu/archive11-jan-mostpopular2011.aspx

riding a high horse on a soap box

A poet named William Butler Yeats from about one hundred years ago talked about an idea he called "gyres."  Here is a gyre (I drew it myself.  It's not supposed to turn into a square at the end.  You get the idea, right?):

You'll notice that the center is where the turns are the closest together.  The turns are tight and strong, as opposed to the widening gyre where the turns are getting weaker and weaker and further and further apart.  He used this to represent the complex procession of time and he actually had the whole past and history of the earth mapped out.  Here is what part of it looked like:

It's kind of cool because he plotted the rise of the big civilizations on the timeline- cultures kept maturing and getting stronger and stronger until the Roman empire was created.  That was one apex of the gyre.  After that, the gyre started its cyclical spiral downward as the Roman empire declined.  This led to the lowest point on the cycle of the gyre which was the death of Jesus Christ.  However, with the appearance of Jesus Christ and His establishing Christianity, the gyre started to spin back outwards and get stronger and stronger; thus, the decline ceased and civilization started getting stronger and stronger.  This pattern is repeated over and over throughout the history of the earth.

Here is why I like the idea of the gyre and why I think it works.  Think of the beginning of Christianity- at first, the members were few but quite converted.  It started out with some of the most powerful testimonies of Christ ever offered (i.e. Paul, John, Peter...)  They started the gyre spinning out and helped it gain momentum.  As the gyre of Christianity increased in power and strength, the bigger and bigger it got.  It really formed the European culture, totally shaping it and making it what it is.  Eventually, basically everyone was a "Christian" in name and at some point, there would have just been too many people who were a part of Christianity who actually didn't really believe in it and did not live by it.  Thus, the widened gyre had been stretched too much- the gyre was spinning too wide to handle, and must have started its decline.  You can see that it declined in the dark ages and look at Europe now- once predominantly Christian, now you are hard pressed to find someone who believes in Him.

I think I have been very broad, general and sweeping in talking about this, and so this isn't exactly a great persuasive idea.  But do you kind of understand the basic idea of a gyre?  It's strong at the center, and as it expands and widens, it loses its force and thus must slow down and the arcs get closer and closer to the center.  When it gets close to the center, it starts spinning faster and faster again, expanding outward once again.  Spinning, spinning.

I think, and maybe Yeats thinks this too (I haven't done enough research to say if this point is true or not), I think that individuals and their lives can also be represented by the gyre.

If my life is represented by a gyre, then right now I am on the phase where the revolutions are beginning to be condensed and closer to the center.  My spinning is slowing and my arcs are condensing.  Why do I say that? I don't know if you noticed, but recently I started to dip my little feetsies into a lot more pop culture than I usually do.  I felt like I had a strong grasp on who I was and I was spinning strong at my center.  So, I started to spin faster and wider outward, expanding, engulfing and experiencing a lot of things that were brand new for me.  I had a lot of new experiences, but the one that might be most telling and so I will focus on it the most is the music I started listening to.  I started listening to rap.  Before this, I could not even stomach the stuff.  It was so counter to everything I believed in in my heart and it grated on my soul so much that I could not listen to it.  However, as I was expanding outward, I started to find that I could actually find what the allure of good rap music is (I believe that everything- I hope I can say that word- that is influential and popular in our culture has something good somewhere in it- or it could be something good twisted...anyways...  Maybe sometimes that something good is a little harder to find some things than in others, but I think it's there.  There is a mood rap music fits that I've never seen anything else fit.  There is a mood that country music fits- the mood where you are just on the road with friends or just sitting enjoying a free sunset and everything is pretty carefree.  End of tangent.)  So I was spinning and spinning wider and and wider to the point where I feel like I was losing control and I was so far away from my center that I could hardly remember what I believed any more.  I realized that this was happening a week or two ago.  It just hit me that I was doing things that I never had before, and I wasn't sure that I liked what I was doing and I wasn't sure if those things were really making me happy.

So I started to slow down.  I started to let the edges of the gyre condense and come back in.  What did that mean, music-wise?  I started listening to calm music that let me think.  I started to listen to a lot of classical, beautiful music.  I started listening to (for those interested) Owen Pallett and Jonsi and Sigur Ros and Jonsi and Alex and Peter Gabriel and Antony and the Johnsons and (haha) The Owls.  The point is, I started coming back to who I have always been.  This poem was inspired by this idea that I've been discussing:

watch me slide back into my Self
like the gyre's swift arms
have run their course,
have collected their life,
and sink back into the center.

hi, i'm home.  and it's nice to be back.

What does this mean for me right now?  Oh it means great stuff for me, but I am not sure for everyone else.  I have started to try to objectively look at the things that my culture is trying to feed me.  The objective view I am taking is kind of "is what I am consuming soulfood?  Will what I'm doing feed me in a good, uplifting way and make me happy?  Will what I'm doing bring me peace and help me find who I am?  And does it fit the morals I truly believe in?"

This has helped me find a peace I have been without for far too long.  I have, in the most literal sense, slowed down.  I have simplified my life and started focusing on the most important things.  I am still working on coming back to the center, but it's working wonders on my happiness.

Why might this be bad for everyone else?  Because now I am starting to hate our culture again.  Looking at a list of the music that is popular now makes me so, so sad.  And this is the point that relates to the title of this post.  I am going to denounce the same music I found myself loving a week or two ago (keep in mind, I do think that this kind of music has its place, but that place is not on the forefront of the music scene and should not  be most prominent in our lives.  Also, I am probably going to be offensive.  Sorry.  At least you can have the satisfaction of knowing I will be eating all my words, because I always do.)

I took this little image from playlist.com just now.  Look at the top searches:

If our culture is on the same principles of a gyre, we are now past the part that is swinging out of control and onto the decline part.  Look at who we are venerating, even if subconsciously.  We may not think, "Oh yes, I think what Katy Perry has to say about a lover making her feel like she is living a teenage feeling again is the most important thing I can focus on."  We don't consciously walk around thinking that.  However, when that is the sort of stuff we spend most of our time listening to, we have essentially made that a priority, right?  We have chosen that as being more important than other songs.  If we spend our time listening to stuff like that, it is obviously becoming more important to us to listen to Katy Perry singing about light drivel, little fluffs with catchy hooks and good beats, than to Sufjan Stevens trying to understand the balance between sanity and insanity, trying to find happiness (and himself) in wellness in a world that is way too big for us.  When we do something, anything, that something we are doing is obviously more important to us than something else.  (Me?  I'm writing this instead of an essay I am supposed to be doing for school.  Meh.)

I heard a really, intensely scary statistic the other day that may be at least in part a result of the music that is at the front of the scene right now (or the music is a result of this statistic...they are somehow connected, right?)  My friend who is also going into teaching here at BYU told me that a recently taken poll found out that the percentage of Americans who read two books or less after completing a university degree is 80%.  That means that 8 out of the 10 next college graduates you see will pick up and finish only one or two novels in the next 50ish years of their lives.  Some might not even read any.  What the heck??  Does this not freak anyone else out?

I hope it does.

A man who I can sympathize with, even though he is mostly unfair, wrote about this in an article about the state of our Stephen King-horror-novel-driven society.  He might be able to sympathize with me here, too.  His name is Harold Bloom, and you have to take everything he says with a grain of salt, but he is on the side of things that is trying to swing society back round to sensibility, so he is deeply embedded as far as he can be in his side of things. 

He talks about the decline of the ability to read Shakespeare in the conclusion of his book, The Western Canon:

"When I was a boy, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, almost universally part of the school curriculum, was an eminently sensible introduction to Shakespearean tragedy.  Teachers now tell me of many schools where the play can no longer be read through, since students find it beyond their attention spans.  In two places reported to me, the making of cardboard shields and swords has replaced the reading and discussion of the play.  No socializing of the means of production and consumption of literature can overcome such debasement of early education.  The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.  Trotsky urged his fellow Marxists to read Dante, but he would find no welcome in our current universities."

Scary?  I also liked this article he wrote for the Boston Globe.

Bloom vs. Stephen King

So what is the conclusion, here?  Why did I write all of this?  I think it's because while I was swinging out of control in the wide arcs of the gyre, I had forgotten that there are more important things out there than little Justin Bieber singing about his little crush.  There are things more important than parties and fun beats.  There are things more important and satisfying than just "having fun."  I think that if we just stand the music of Ke$ha next to, say, Beethoven, it is easy to see there is a difference.  And I do firmly believe that one is deeper, richer, and more satisfying, even if it is less fun and harder to find the joy in it.  

I watched a movie about another poet named John Keats.  He recited a lot of his poetry in the movie.  The words worked inside of me in the most amazing way.  There is something that is rich and full of flavor in things that are dignified and lovely.  It brings you to a soft and beautiful, lush place that none of the radio's music brings you to.  We are deep beings living in a shallow society.  Our souls want so much more than we're getting.  There is love, real love.  There is beauty and there are feelings in art (this poem deserves so much more discussion than I am going to give it now, but wow, this poem is incredible.  You can read it if you want...).  There is life in truth.

I want to be the only person to inherit my own soul.  It is no one else's.

Viõrar Vel Til Loftárasa

I let myself flow onwards.
I swim through my mind back and forth.
My soul still sings the song we once wrote together.
We once had a dream.
We had everything.
We rode to the end of the world.
We rode on searching.
We climbed skyscrapers but they were all destroyed.
The peace is gone now.
I lack balance.
I fall down.
Still I let myself flow onwards.
I swim through my mind but I always come back to the same place.
There is nothing left to say.
This is for the best.
God will provide a day for us
tomorrow.


-Sigur Rós

i've told you before

Night delicately dances along the thin edge of the spindle
The glimmer, is it a twinkle in her eye?
Fragile stars crumble and shatter in her hands-
Little trails of light scatter in a deluge
Look how far she moved the moon from the mountain!
As for the worlds there are none as big as I
The blood in my lungs emerge oil on canvas
They are punctured on the spindle, punctured on the spindle
I dangle like crimson string wanting a breeze
And it feels like every piece of me is gloaming. "ah. ahh ahh. ah."
And I taste the air- lemons...

Abstract visions of you, crying,
"Every farmer is a champion of life!"

I can still hear you.
And the evangelical stripes rust
But they weren't metal
And towers are razed

But they weren't tall
Flowers trampled

Stacks toppled

Trains drowned
Art exposed
Visions condemned
Tigers burned
Seals broken-
Everything resolved into ash

Say my name...just say my name, night!
    I, I, I I I...

         am still here...
Tangible words force their way through cavities
They exclaim,
"Heir, Love is not twice and Love is not continuity!
We've seen the muscles that twitch to make your heart

Bend
And each strand that has been broken will mend.

But now, let each fiber ache

As each is anchored by pain

Let them all fill your soul with

The sweet taste of life

and Sound.

For this is living.  This is life.

Then this is winning.

This is giving up the knife."

With that, I saw you.  You.  You.

You were my stomach wrapped around a stake

You were the pulsing of the pain

You were chosen outside the course of any vein

I dig deep but I can't see outside the red

And the wind picks up the branches and leaves

With the apples and the crisp smell of snow

Everything starts to shake as the air rends

Splits and rebounds, waves resound

Life and creation fall into themselves

Shaking an elixir of time

Which I drink again

But

Night,

You are a theme

You are a force

And you, you, you you

Are Not Immortal.

I've seen that rapid sparkle before...

how fast was i going?

watch me slide back into my Self
like the gyre's swift arms
have run their course,
have collected their life,
and sink back into the center.

hi, i'm home.  and it's nice to be back.

undertow- you are an ox's curly tail.

I want to say something that comes from Henry David Thoreau's (someone else I know has the same favorite author) Walden.  He is here talking about the way the hides of oxen tails retain their form and shape forever and ever-

  "Next Spanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of the Spanish Main — a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess, that practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, 'A cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form.' " 

I wrote a poem a while ago:

                    I hid in the deep cave

                          hid in the smoke

                                       walked with stick

                        Languor in slow-sinking mud

                    I ate tired mice

                        And saved all my coupons

                        No matter where I go

                        I can't escape my self

Frankly, this scares me a little bit.  

Here, I wrote this last summer.  It goes along with kind of the same thing, but it's a little less scary to me.  I will post it here:

I've been thinking about the inner man.

Thoreau compared it to the curly tail of some beast; no matter how much you press and pull and try to straighten it, even after a length of twelve years, the tail still has the curl. Our innerman is who we are, our core, our center.

While thinking about this, I listened to Stop Whispering by Radiohead, and there is a line in there that says, "And the thin man say I don't wanna hear your voice."  All of a sudden, I imagined (why did I imagine this? I don't know) a scary, gaunt (or like the song says, thin) person.  That's the image that popped into my head.  I thought how sometimes exceptionally skinny people can carry a scary persona with them, like they feed off of darkness instead of food, and they wear black cloaks and have hooked noses. I thought, why would some people want to have that persona? Why that particular image?  Why do any of us choose the image we choose?  Why do we have the persona we have?

It led me to the idea that our inner man, each of us individually, is a certain piece of a whole. There is a complete spectrum of every element and thought and feeling and everything, and we are each of us a piece of that spectrum.  We are each important.  We are exactly who we are, no matter what.

What we build around that unchanging inner man element are our virtues and our habits. But those aren't who we are.

All of us, all together, are a whole.  We complete a beautiful spectrum of everything, and each of us is a unique piece of that spectrum.  That is why we have to find ourselves, so that we fill our niche in the whole.

Then later on in the summer I wrote this poem after a really cool (like awesome, not like the temperature) night.  I felt like I was in a dream.  Maybe I had done exactly what my inner man was.  I let it out, and it made me happier than I had been in a long time:

It must be a dream
When life comes easy to me
No more agitated pulls on the heart
No more straightening the twisted tail
Sequestered life no more
Because life becomes more than me
And it becomes more than you
I think it becomes all it's meant to be

I wrote this about a year ago:

Someday we may be a shimmering mass
Of each other, all woven in
Pulsing light and sound

So where has this taken us?  Did any of this connect?

I wouldn't fight to the death defending these ideas, but I like them.  But not as much as I like this.

Oh and I like you, too.  When I say you, I mean YOU because you just read this.  I LOVE YOU <3

Night

Night hath become mine enemy
I am volcano
I am light wanting out

Night hath become naught but questions
I am moon in sky
I am wanting orbit

Night hath been my haunting
I am king of men
And my stomach hurts

Night
Is
The
Worst
Pattern

i wrote a long time working on a blog post

and then gave up because I hated it, and decided to just post this, because it makes me laugh.  My brain, you can die.  I don't care.  Blogs, you can die, too.

I might be turning into a miserable person...at least I think I'm funny, which is solace enough for now to keep me happy.

GOOP.

(this has many curse words.  just letting you know.)

school makes me want to die

That is all.

all i want are your bitter tears

This is one of my favorite essays I have ever read.  It is about motivation of, well, humans, and how motivation is generally used in teaching and how it actually should be used in teaching.  It's all very basic stuff but it scares me how many teachers actually neglect these most primal principles of the human psyche.  Right off the bat, you can tell that this guy is pretty different from your run-of-the-mill English boi.  He is smart.  He uses logic in teaching and understanding people.  I feel like this is stuff teachers should be using because it just makes sense, but they don't.  And I don't know why my font is so huge, but I like it!  I hope you do, too.

Onward!  Read the essay, please please please!  Pleeeeaaaase read the essay!

Love, Zach

 http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/nonreaders.htm <- this is the essay.  Also, he swears once.  And that's cool because he is sticking it to the man, kind of, because this was published in a pretty well-circulating, proper English journal.


ps.  as a comment on this post, soon, I will add an essay that I wrote about this essay.  Essays all over the place!!

some stuff

This first thing is some stream of consciousness that I got while I was in church today.  I like exploring what's inside me.        


           I brought you back to Stavenachi.  "So, here we are."  We looked around, we looked at each other, and we, yeah, we looked up.  Do you want me to bring you there, or do I submit it to your imagination?  I mean, it's Stavenachi; you know the seasons, you know the blood, you know the restlessness of the buzz.  And you know how we loom together in the sky.
           When we came the last time, I had a toothache.  There was no doctor, and you had to nurse it back to whole.  You make me whole.
           We saw a man of such gentle humour.  He was plugged into a machine that could have been a wall.  Funny pipes and tubes wrapping around and penetrating his heart and brain, he was attached to the machine.  He was a part of the machine.  He was.  Who was programming who?
            Stavenachi runneth o'er.
            Stavenachi, Stavenachi.




This next thing is a picture, as you might be able to tell.  Maybe not...but it is a picture.  This I also did in church today.  I guess when I draw I like to start out with a shape and add to it as it seems like it needs to be added to, so things I draw are very rarely premeditated.  They just kind of take on a life of their own as they come out of me.

"which direction are you going, sir?" "oh i forgot to stop moving... i was bent- i was very, very bent."

And this last thing is a picture that was inspired by this song.  It actually was premeditated.

I don't know what else to say in this winter.  Today is too weird/serious for me.  I wish it was summer.

this is an example of what i see when i meditate

I pointed my finger at the cloud suspended above my head
And the mirror reflected
And lifted me to heaven

If I were to change one thing about this picture, I would make the head coming out of the cloud further out of the cloud.  It's supposed to be a reflection-thing...

name

I have always thought it was strange when people took pride in their names.  Mine has never really meant anything to me.  I was not named after anyone, and the name Zachary was just beginning to become popular when I got the name- so I had no "Great Zach" to look to and take pride in.  And Johnson?  Ha.  Ha.  Open your phone book and look at the "Johnson" section.  You might be able to save an entire rain forest worth of paper by not including the "Johnson" section in even a single phone book.  You think I'm exaggerating?   Just look at it...

Anyway, the point is that my name really hasn't meant anything to me- no great Zachs and no great Johnsons (you could possibly argue for the original black power ranger for the Zach part and maybe Michael Johnson or "Magic" Johnson for the Johnsons, but, meh, I won't).  But I think this is good.  I think that a lack of something to draw pride from, in regards to my name, has given me a blank canvas to work with.  I can give my name meaning.  I can make it great, even if it's just in my eyes.  And you know, lately, my name, Zachary Johnson, has sort of started to mean something to me.  It's not (haha the first time I typed that I actually wrote "It' snot" hahaha oops...snot...) just some letters and sounds all strung together.  My name's taking on a color.  And a shape.  And new additions to its meaning are added whenever I sign my name to the bottom of writing that has shaped the way I think.

So this is an entirely vain post.  It was meant to sound deep and stuff (haha), but it just sounds forced and weird.  Sorry.  Take this from it- I actually like my name.  Maybe that means I like my self?

Love,
 The Grand, Chartreuse, Eloquent, and Beholden Zachary Johnson

i have felt really peaceful, lately

Jus' thinkin' ' bout th'ternal universe
An' th' way it wraps its purple arms
'Round th' sun
It's no practice in elegance
It's jus' a dance
Like all 'em as 's come before

indulge me for a second here...

Hi.  Before I start off, I will tell you right now that I always end up eating my words.  I suspect there will be no deviation in this case from the course I have steadily pursued in the past (my words are of course delicious, if you were wondering).


I would like to give some advice to BYU's students-


1.  Lighten up.  Not everything deserves the somberness and gravity that the Holocaust should receive.  My gosh, we are talking about your favorite food!  I don't need a discourse, in heavy tones, about why it's your favorite food and a spiritual experience you've had with it.


2.  Learn to:
   a) make jokes
   b) take jokes
   c) smile
   d) stop being stupid


3.  I don't care if you served a mission.  I don't.  And I don't care about the charity you recently organized.  I don't care about your recent marriage.  I don't care about your new nephew.  I don't care how happy your cousin in Taiwan on his mission is.  So maybe I'm a total jerk, but please please please please please understand that there is life outside of this little cultural bubble we live in, and it, as far as I have seen, is just as real and just as relevant and just as important to understand.  Give me something new.  Give me something real.  I don't really care about your weird, one-sided happiness.


4.  There is life outside of school.  Live it.


5.  There are other people besides you, your wife, and the Lord.  And we need love and are trying just as hard to give it.  Please smile and say hello to me.  I just did it to you.


6.  People who are gay are not bad people.  People who swear are not bad people.  People with tattoos are not bad people.  People who do drugs are not bad people.  People who are insincere, self-righteous, and too hung up on themselves to actually find out who they are, are bad people.  Remember this.


7.  BYU is just a school.  It is not something we worship.  So stop doing that.


Alright, well, WELCOME BACK TO SCHOOL EVERYONE!  I hope you all had a nice break!! :D  Bright, shiny happiness as far as the eye can see!


And as a special treat to end this blog, I have included here two emails from some of my classmates.  You see, at the end of the semester, a mad rush of stupid study groups are organized and people send out mass emails to everyone in the class.  I wish they would stop, which is beside the point, but with this particular class, after the study group had assembled and finished studying, a bunch of people who Didn't Attend the Study Group sent out more mass emails asking for the study group's work to be sent to them.  I kind of roll my eyes, but here are a couple of responses to the emails asking for other peoples' work to be emailed to them.




"Hi class,

Please STOP sending emails asking us to send you our study guides. Its not our fault you couldn't go to reviews even if you weren't feeling well. Plus, its not necessary to go to a review in order to fill out the study guide. Trust me, I've done it with all three. Asking someone to give you their study guide is basically cheating and goes against what Brother Wilson's instructions were. He said it is NOT a group worksheet and doing that defeats its purpose. So please stop. If you need help then ask a few students to get with you and study together.

Thanks"


Lovely, huh?  This next one's just as special. Well, actually, maybe even more special.




"Hi New Testament Class,

I just wanted to write something about the last emails that we have been receiving...

I don't think that it's bad to "share" the study guides because it's a way to help others and be charitable. It's true that we have to do things by ourselves, but not because of that we are not going to help others.

We live in a competitive world, however, it's important to help others when they need it.

Right now we are having finals and some people are struggling more than others, and not helping them is just not being a true child of God. Remember that if you do not have charity, you are nothing :P

I know that "sharing" a complete or part completed study guide is not very fair, but because of circumstances if people need help I suggest that it's ok if they ask for help.

That's all I wanted to say :) Oh! And one more thing.. Every body can decide what to do.. They have their own agency :).. They can decide whether to keep sending emails or not ^^

I hope you have great finals! :) ( Sorry for my bad spelling haha xD)"


Oh good!  Interweave your biased and unfounded philosophy of God and religion into a petty argument to make your point!  Oh how I love it here!


Love, Zach J.


PS.  This is a scathing, piercing and good song.  Please listen to it.  "It's a Hit."  "No one wants to pay to see your happiness/ No one wants to pay to see your day to day/ And I'm not buying it either, but I'll try selling it anyway."

rasta rasta mcfarland

I sleep                                                                                             I sleep

I sleep and                                                                                       And 

Yeah, my blood                                                                               My blood

It pumps, courses through                                                           Courses through

My body. The red of the sand                                                          The sand,

Is not the blood that pumps through                                                  Through

My body. I sleep? Yeah, I sleep and the                                           The

Red seeps. A red film over my eyes, red over                                    Red over

My body. I must be wrong, and the pillars must be                            The pillars

Right, because they never move.  They never move over                   Over

My body.                                                                                         My body

How does one come to grips with the thought that one can't know anything at all?  I don't know anything.  Every choice has consequences...

I just read C.S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce," and I like his vision of eternity.  There is just one thing that bothers me (I am sorry that this might not mean anything to anyone)- in C.S. Lewis's eternity, humankind are creatures destined for happiness like we can't believe, if we only do one thing; the one thing is essentially shrugging off everything that we are now and allowing ourselves to be consumed by the love of Christ.  So, who we were before isn't important.  What we do in this life isn't important.  What we learn in this life isn't important, because it has no bearing on eternity.  All we have to do is be humble enough to grasp the power of Christ and not reject it in the eternities.  That just takes so much away from life, in my eyes.  It makes life meaningless.  In C.S. Lewis's vision of eternity (and here, I will concede that he is just trying to paint a small picture of eternity while living here in time, and a true picture just can't be made), I could do all kinds of horrendous things and when the time came for me to be a child of Christ, I just shrug everything I was off and forget it all and start life anew.  I don't know, maybe that's how it actually is.  We can repent.  We can ask forgiveness and be forgiven.  Maybe it's that Lewis doesn't emphasize the pain of change and repentance.  There is just something a little bit off.

Or, am I wrong about my perception of life?  Is life really unimportant?

I take life very seriously.  I feel like I try to give my all to living life, but maybe it doesn't matter.  Maybe we are here for a minute, and things don't start really mattering until the eternities.

I can't buy that.  I think why this is all bothering me so much is that Lewis's vision of eternities rings so true with me, I want his model to be able to fit inside mine, but his vision cannot hold my idea of life.

Nothing's coming to me anymore.  I think I need to spend more time with these ideas, and maybe I will update this post later on.  I want to post it now because I like the poem.  I also like having all these incomplete thoughts on my blog and in my journal and in my writings.  I don't think any of these ideas are perfect and none of them probably hold very much water, but these all pretty roughly map out how I am thinking and show the path my mind is treading.

But really, I am pretty sure that outside of things like love and, well, maybe just love (keeping in mind that for me, love is a very broad range of things that are all housed under that roof- God, self, faith, hope, etc.), there is not a single thing that any of us can actually know.  Everything else is basically relative and subject to change.  Every bit of knowledge that people have ever had about the universe has been completely turned over and thrown out due to new knowledge and new evidence from proceeding generations, and this is going to keep happening.  What I am saying is, I don't know anything.  No one really knows anything.  But we keep on going because it all feels very rewarding.  As long as we have the feeling (love, again), we keep going and we stay the course.

I have one more thing to say- there are a lot of people in the world who deserve our love and attention.  There are a lot of people who could be dear, perfect friends if we only had time.  As time is unilateral and finite, we are very limited right now, in life, with who can give our time and love to.  I do believe that in the eternities, that will be rectified.  People who will be our friends and who we want to give time to because we love them but just can't, will be able to receive that love in the eternities.  All the love our friends deserve to get here but can't get from us can be given when time is done.  Right now, we just have to focus on our errands (and sometimes those errands suck, and they hurt, and they are hard, but hopefully they help you get where you're going... And hopefully, they are not all bad.  Sometimes they are good and fun.  I now ramble.  It's kind of therapeutic).

I wish I could tell everyone I love how much I love them...