Hobbesian Opaqueness

"we stretch and retract, we come and we go
measuring actions and leaving alone
but my measure of truth is that I wander restless until you are close"
-Heather Styka

Thank you all so much for the emails and comments since my last couple of posts. I have to be a little oblique about things because I don't know who is potentially reading my blog. I know that a friend of mine got in trouble with his employer for posting his resume online, and I just don't want to cause a lot of stress at a time when I can't really take it. In fact, that little paragraph is probably a little much already.

Things are going much better now, though why I couldn't say, which is a little scary in its own right. One begins to wonder in these times why we cling to the myth that there is a singularity to a person that someone can get to know when inside we are full of such internal conflict. It's no wonder that our conceptions of each other, even the clearest ones, are so full of potential pain; we base our actions and relations on what we think are hints and clues to the psyche of others but which bear more resemblance to chaos.

It is in these moments (whether of clarity or obscurity I don't know) that I wonder exactly what it is to be known by God. I don't even know or understand myself all the time, and while I take comfort in feeling known by Sharon, if I don't even understand me from the inside how can her vision of me really be accurate? Does God see past the parts of me that are dying to see the "true me", or is it more complicated than that, like, God in His triune nature is better able to deal with the multiple warring factions within my mind and body in His knowledge of me?

If the latter, then I start to despair of ever really knowing what God (or anybody else) is like, because my faculties are so tuned to distillation and refinement: I sift and reject whatever is not simple in order to create a predictable theory of otherness.

All I can say is that thank God something so complex as salvation is not left to me.

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

Lamentations 3:21-23

"and I'm praying that we will see
something there in between
then and there that exceeds all we can dream
so we can talk about it

and all these twisted thoughts I see
Jesus there in between"
- "So I thought", Flyleaf

The Confusion Sets In

"confusion never stops
closing walls and ticking clocks...
come out upon my seas
cursed missed opportunities"
-"Clocks" by Coldplay

(Double references tonight. Name the band responsible for the title for bonus points, though it's pretty easy.)

This one should hopefully be pretty short. I have an open, non-rhetorical question that I hope isn't airing too much dirty laundry: how, in marriage, do you say you're sorry for something that you can't change? Corollary: how do you show your spouse that it isn't their fault either?

Sharon and I did a lot of thinking and praying before coming to Grove City. I knew any move would be both exciting and hard for me; working remote especially was gonna be rough. At the same time, a move was in order; it was not only what we thought was the will of God but I can see so many ways it is going to (and already is) working out great for us. But the weather starts to turn, and I haven't been able to make the friends I'll probably need, and the last few days have been especially rough. We both know what's ahead, and it will probably be better than our worst fears but still worse than our hopes.

I hate the next part.

Politics and Entertainment

"Donna: Why are you a Republican?
Cliff: Because I hate poor people. I hate them, Donna. They're all so poor, and many of 'em talk funny, and don't have proper table manners... my father slaved away at the Fortune 500 company he inherited so that I could go to Choate, Brown and Harvard and see that this country isn't overrun by poor people and lesbians." --The West Wing

Pull up a chair for storytime, boys and girls.

Last night I watched this video a friend posted on her Facebook page. Turns out she meant to post this video. Watch a few seconds of each to realize they aren't the same video before continuing.

Now, Sharon and I have been talking about the amount of crap (read: utter distortions and falsehoods) being thrown around this election. I don't think we're denizens of policy, so when we recognize huge misrepresentations being thrown around surely that means that to real politicos this election must just be a whopper of spin. We saw the first video above last night before bed and thought it was really funny, because it is obviously so over the top that certainly it was meant to be funny (though, we've seen a number of email forwards with the same level of poise, so obviously it does hit home to some people.)

Today, I see this post on a blog of a new friend of ours here in Grove City. As you will see in my comment on said blog, I think he is referencing the first video posted above, when in reality he is referencing the second, and I say something over the top about propaganda. I was pretty upset, you see, because I thought he was taking the first video seriously, when in reality he was making the point that the first video was clearly produced to make fun of.

What is the moral of today's story, boys and girls (other than, of course, to always follow links and never do real work because if you don't watch the whole video there might be slaughter of innocent bunnies at the end!)? There is an unbelievable amount of crap in this election, and I think it's because both sides are very very scared of the opposition.

I'm not really sure how we got to this point. I've been friends with a lot of people pretty far to the right and pretty far to the left, and while I obviously have my preferences I don't think any candidate up for election is a terrorist or a Nazi or a bimbo or a normal middle class guy (Obama, McCain, Palin, and Biden, respectively - and yes, that last one was a joke). So can we please stop saying it and have an informed discussion?

So, anyway, I'm apologizing in detail over here on my blog (since a multi-page comment didn't seem to make sense) for misreading Warren, my new friend, about his post.

But it does open up the larger issue about why we care about what we care about in the political season. Warren's comment is telling: "If McCain was at the center of something like that, I would be just as creeped out and I suspect the McCain campaign would distance itself from it." I'll buy that, but why should it even matter much? People do creepy/strange/stupid things (yes, Warren mentions it was on the Obama website, but I doubt it would've been if people weren't looking for "feel good" reasons to vote anyway instead of hard facts.)

I think the reason it seems to matter (it certainly is for me when I admit it) is that politics actually is getting too complicated. I frequently read things in op-ed pieces that I later find out are just flat wrong or misrepresented: how many of the facts that I hold on to are actually opinions reached by oversimplification just to fit into a newspaper (or web) article?

Anyway, rather than offer you a bunch of cutting insight into a load of political issues (which I can't do) I'm gonna instead go to the other extreme. Here are the SNL appearences of McCain and Obama. (The Obama appearence isn't as funny, though the rest of the sketch mostly is. If you just want to see Obama say the famous line, skip to about the 4:45 mark. Also, I googled for that clip, and frankly the content on broadcaster.com is a little scary, so maybe don't look around too much. McCain's news editorial, on the other hand, is really quite funny.)