Conversational Snippet, pt 2
[Getting ready for bed.]
Kat: Hey Chris?
Chris:Â Yeah?
Kat: Next time you set my alarm for me…
Chris: Actually set it?
Kat: Yeah. That would be good. Fortunately, I had this weird dream that I was in K___’s Sunday School class, and he kept pointing at me…
Chris: As if to say, “You’re late”?
Kat: Yup. So apparently, my subconscious had it handled.
Chris: I put tremendous faith in your subconscious.
[slight pause]
Kat:Â I don’t know whether to find that reassuring, or vaguely disturbing…
God needs to be personal
Once again, while flipping channels this afternoon, I ran across the movie Signs. I’ve talked about that movie in previous iterations of my blog, but today something different struck me, and it seemed worth writing about, so here goes.
I’ve said before that Signs isn’t about aliens, it’s about faith. But more specifically, it’s about having faith in a personal God who intervenes in our lives.
I’d say as an Episcopalian priest, Mel Gibson’s character had faith in God prior to the death of his wife. Where that faith fell short was when God “failed” to personally intervene and prevent his wife from being killed in a freak accident. He lost his faith so quickly, and so completely, because a God that isn’t personally involved in our lives is basically a moot point.
I know many people who say they believe in a vague, impersonal concept of God. But I don’t know any people who say that belief has had an actual impact on their lives, for better or worse.
In the movie, Reverend Graham loses his faith after his wife dies as the result of an unlikely string of coincidences. It seems clear (to him) that his wife’s death is a meaningless, random accident; convincing him that if there is a God up there, He doesn’t bother to intervene on behalf of His servants.
Towards the end of the movie, all these odd, random threads that have been strung throughout the plot begin gaining relevance. The climax of the plot is when coincidence builds upon coincidence until it would take more faith to believe there isn’t a higher power who is personally involved in seeing that everything works out for the best, than to believe otherwise. The glasses of water everywhere in the house, the brother with the powerful swing who is now living there, his son’s asthma, and his wife’s final words, all come together in one moment of meaning and significance.
Suddenly, Reverend Graham’s logic is turned inside out. A string of unlikely coincidences led to his wife’s death. But his son is spared, thanks to an even more unlikely set of coincidences, many of which were contingent upon his wife’s death. He realizes the limitedness of his own powers of perception and recognizes that God may have seen what he couldn’t. But more importantly, he realizes that God does get involved. He does intervene on our behalf. There is Someone up there looking out for us.
For a person who lives in “the Bible belt” and doesn’t get out a great deal, I get the opportunity to talk about my faith to people who don’t share it, and are curious an awful lot. What I hear in their questions is this unspoken question: “Maybe there’s a God and maybe there isn’t. What I really want to know is why it should matter to me?” In their lives they’ve had pain and suffering, because we’ve all had pain and suffering. People like to talk about transcendence and enlightment, and how suffering is just a product of attachment, but I think those statements are another way of dealing with the same aching, painful question: Why do I suffer? If there’s a God, and He’s powerful enough to create the universe, why doesn’t He protect me?
Deep down, we’re all six-year-olds knocked down by a bully in the playground, wondering where our Parent was. Wondering why and how he or she dropped the ball and let us get hurt.
If I wanted to, I could probably give all kinds of reasonable, rational apologetics for why I
believe in the God of Israel and his Son, Jesus of Nazareth, the promised Messiah. There are all kinds of cool books just chock full of neat, historical and archaeological tidbits and evidence.
But I know that none of those things are the reason I believe, and none of them could make me believe or disbelieve.
I believe, because like Reverend Graham, and Job, and a billion other people, I have stood toe-to-toe with God and demanded an answer to that six-year-old question. And like Reverend Graham and Job, I didn’t have to wait long for an answer that knocked me to my knees. I believe because God is personal. Because He has always been involved, intimately, in my life; I just had to believe in order to open my eyes and see it. And once I saw it, it was too much to deny. Humbling. Freeing. Life-changing.
If You Give a Squirrel a Latte…
In my last post, I reviewed Hoodwinked!, and it occurs to me that we also recently saw Over the Hedge at the drive-in. Interestingly, both movies have a scene that tries to portray the exact same scenario: a hyperactive squirrel gets a heavy dose of caffeine that shoots him into overdrive to save the day.
I’m a storyteller by nature, and I find visual storytelling techniques, whether live theatre or CG animation, to be really interesting. So it was really fascinating to me to see the two completely different ways Hoodwinked and Over the Hedge approached such a visual gag.
In live theatre, you can approach a joke or a physical gag in two ways: first, is set up the joke or gag really obviously, so the audience is sort of “primed” to laugh. The difficulty with that approach is, what you pull off has to be at least as good as the delivery the audience had time to anticipate. The other way is to set up the joke or gag, and then take it in a completely unexpected direction. The down side is there’s a little moment of disconnect while the audience “catches up” with the joke. But the upside is, you usually get a much bigger laugh.
Without spoiling either movie for those who haven’t seen either or both, I can say that one took the “set ‘em up and knock ‘em down” approach and the other took the “set ‘em up and throw for a loop” approach. I’m no film critic, but I did feel like both films executed well.  But FWIW, the “throw for a loop” approach had me laughing a lot harder, and a lot longer.
A Queenly Rampage, and a Hoodwinked Review
It’s been a poopy day in the Queendom, today. And I mean that literally and figuratively. The HRH has been in rare form all day.
Yesterday, we added a new item to The List of Stuff I Never Imagined I’d Need To Say To My Kids: “Maddie, we don’t put ramen noodles in our pockets with our fork.” Today’s new item? “Maddie, we don’t eat screws, nails or nickels. Ever.”
Even so, I managed to install and customize a couple new themes here, and update my del.icio.us account with relevant tags.
Yesterday, we all went to see Hoodwinked! at the Corydon Cinemas (who have the worst website I’ve ever seen. It’s so bad, in fact, I suspect a certain local “computer services” company bought the logical domain and deliberately put a really bad site up on it to try to convince the Cinema’s to pay them to design a better one. Now, that’s an interesting marketing technique. Tick off your potential customers before they hire you…)
Right now, they’re having the “Family Film Festival,” which means that all summer long, they’re playing free matinee showings of kids movies on Wednesdays at 10 and 1. Of course, you have to pay for concessions, but still. So anyway, me, Joshua and Maddie went and we actually had a great time, after we managed to find at least two seats together and after we managed to convince HRH to go into a dark, blacklit theatre.
So anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by Hoodwinked. The plotting, dialogue, voice-acting, and even music were really well done. Apparently, it was done on an extremely low budget in terms of CG projects. And no, the animation isn’t as good as a Pixar or Disney 3d movie, but frankly, I don’t go to a movie to be amazed at the lifelike quality of all the hairs covering the main character’s head. I go to be entertained by a lively, well-written and acted story. On that score, it was a lot better than Chicken Little, which wasn’t bad but didn’t have me busting a gut laughing all the way through it like this one did. If I had to name one overwhelming strong suit, it was that this film was laugh out loud funny from beginning to end. And extremely family-friendly in content. Using the German snack food “schnitzel” as a cuss word is about as blue as it got.
My personal favorite character was the Wolf, played by Patrick Warburton, who was The Tick in the short-lived live action tv show, but is more popularly known as Elaine’s boyfriend David Puddy from Seinfeld. I suspect the kids preferred Twitchy the Squirrel and Japeth the singing goat, voiced by Bill Gaither’s son, Benjy. I must admit, Japeth was pretty funny–he had one joke but he managed to stretch it out for half the movie without it getting worn out.
Next week is Cheaper By The Dozen 2, which I think we’ll skip in favor of the following week’s feature Curious George.
Okay, okay… the font sucks
But I still really like the “paper journal” idea for a theme. Will keep looking for a better font.
In the meantime, here is a very nice theme that I didn’t design, called “umalas.” If you want something girlier, try “Girl In Green.” If you want plain vanilla, go with Wordpress Default.
Geez, crazy people expecting to be able to actually READ my blog… picky, picky, 
Enneagram Nines, GTD, and “stuff”
Most of my friends know that I’ve been studying the enneagram for a few years, and that I’ve been trying to implement David Allen’s “Getting Things Done (GTD)” system for my personal organizational needs for a year or so now. GTD is really similar, to Constructive Living/Morita therapy which is really good for Fours. The basic idea behind CL/Morita being “Feel your feelings, but do what needs doing.” and that when you don’t sit around thinking about your collective neuroses, you’re not suffering from them. Productivity as a path to mental health for those whose natural bent is to spend too much time on neurotic inner reflection. It actually helps a lot, when I remember to DO it.
But here’s the deal: productivity can also be a path to mental health for those whose natural bent is to spend no time on inner reflection. And here, I’m specifically talking about a personality type that also spends little time actually getting things done, either. (Prescribing CL or GTD for a Three would be a bit redundant). I’m talking about Nines.
Nines have two specific issues that GTD can help with. First, there’s that niggling tendency to not ever get anything done. Most Nines have raised procrastination to a high art form. (Fours can be guilty of this too, but that’s not the subject of this post.) Secondly, Nines tend to have a problem with too much “stuff.” And GTD addresses “stuff” both physical and mental, admirably.
I was going to include a little clip from Clarence Thomson about Nines and Stuff, but his site seems to be down. So here’s my paraphrase: Nines tend to carry around a lot of stuff for two reasons: first, because Nines love comfort, and they need all their stuff with them at all times to ensure their constant comfort. Secondly, Nines hate making decisions and prioritizing; it’s extremely draining to them–so if you’re a Nine, it actually seems like less effort to haul ALL your 500 cds with you everywhere you go than to go through them and make a decision and prioritize the ten you might actually be able to listen to on a half hour drive.
Here’s how I define “stuff:†anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step. [pg. 17]
That’s a quote from David Allen, in relation to how he defines “stuff” in GTD.
This is a really summarized version, but here it is, PowerPoint-style:
- identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
- get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
- create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
- put your stuff in the right place, consistently
- do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
- iterate and refactor mercilessly
So, basically, you make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just get rid of. Everything you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment—both now and well into the future. This gives you an amazing kind of confidence that a) nothing gets lost and b) you always understand what’s on or off your plate.
And that is a quick summary of GTD from Merlin Mann of 43 folders.
GTD is both appealing and healthy for Nines. First, a big part of GTD is establishing routines for checking your lists of what needs to be done. Routines are like GOLD to Nines, because there’s no decision-making involved in running on a routine. However, they don’t skate out on decision-making completely and get to go on auto-pilot.
Decisions still have to be made about what to do at any given time and situation. Which is really stretching for Nines. So GTD gives a Nine basically no excuses for not dealing with their “stuff.” As long as they follow their routines for keeping their lists up to date, and keep their lists with them, then they just have to pick something to do from an existing menu of choices, organized by context. Organizing their stuff into shorter context lists, only one or two of which will be appropriate at any given time, limits the number of choices and makes decision-making much easier for them. Unlimited choices paralyze a Nine. And they tend to view requests and/or demands from others to do stuff negatively. GTD gives Nines a tool to manage and direct themselves.
So if you are or know a Nine who needs help getting his or her “stuff” together, GTD is an excellent tool.
Conversational Snippet
[Heard in the car on the way home from Burger King.]
CHRIS: Ah, well. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
[slight pause]
KAT: You wanna know what the road to hell is paved with?
CHRIS: What?
KAT: Those CDs that AOL sends out.
CHRIS: [nodding] That, and credit card offers…
Well I met him in a swamp down in Degoba…
Today, Joshua got what I believe to be the coolest Kids Meal toy, ever. A Magic 8 Yoda.
Yup. As if it’s not cool enough to get your destiny declared by a plastic 8-Ball, you can get your destiny proclaimed by a tiny plastic Yoda. In Yoda-speak, even.
The title of this post is an homage to Weird Al’s terrific “Yoda,” sung to the tune of “Lola” by the Kinks. And in a related item, the Lambert and Lindsey blog now has a link to his newest song: “You’re Pitiful” a take on James Blunt’s excessively annoying “You’re Beautiful.”
Wish Me Luck
Well, I have an interview tomorrow with an IT contract company. A temp agency for geeks, if you will. So wish me luck.
I love coding, but sales sucks. If I can get someone else to find me work, so I can just show up and DO it, that would be ideal. ;) And I love contract labor. It’s like being the Lone Ranger. People are in big trouble, they have a problem, they need help. So you ride in on your white horse, assess the sitch, resolve it, and just before it starts to get boring, you ride off into the sunset with everyone still impressed and singing your praises. It rocks.
But I’m still trying to cross the divide between “administrative worker” and “IT worker” as far as how I’m perceived. True, both are knowledge workers, but there’s a rather massive skills-and-pay gap between them. My skills fall sort of straddling the line between them, but I’m working on building more IT skills.
Part of the problem is that I’m a woman, and to some people, “woman” = “secretary” no matter how many proficiencies you have. Part of the problem is that I don’t have a degree, too. But a guy with light skills would have an easier time getting his foot in the door as a self-taught coder.
I was reading a programming manual last week, and the writer said that the three key aptitudes one needs to be a programmer are interest, imagination, and persistence.  No matter how well it pays, if you’re not interested in programming for it’s own sake, you won’t do well at it.  And it requires a lot of imagination to do the problem-solving and design work involved. But by far, the biggest thing he said was persistence, because there will always be problems, and a good programmer has to have the tenacity to stick with it till it’s worked out.
I think I’ve got those three things in spades, but I could be biased. 
Killing Butterflies
I had a sitch today that reminded me of the old story of the naturalist who was studying butterflies. One day, the guy, bored at the prospect of watching another butterfly struggle for hours and hours to exit the cocoon, decided to make a tiny hole in it.
Predictably, the butterfly exited a lot faster and more easily.
It also died that same day without ever taking wing. Apparently, the exertion of fighting it’s way out of the cocoon was what pushed the fluid out of it’s body and into the wings, effectively expanding and “inflating” them. The butterfly the naturalist “helped” came out quickly–and with saggy, flacid wings and an overweighted body incapable of flight.
It turns out, the struggle was not only not meaningless–it was necessary.
It’s tempting when you see someone going through a difficult time to want to short-circuit the process. Especially if it’s a situation you’ve been through yourself. But you can’t just go sticking holes in other folks’ cocoons. When you do that, you don’t just cheat for them, you cheat them.
Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to help people who are going through a hard time. It means be smart about it, and aware that sometimes helping isn’t really helping.
Cloud and Townsend write in Boundaries, that in life, our troubles and struggles are either knapsacks or boulders. Knapsacks are the things that are a part of life, which are ours to carry. Boulders are those big things that could crush us if we tried to handle them under our own power. We run into trouble when we start trying to carry other people’s knapsacks, or refuse to ask for help with our own boulders.
Well, I’ve been guilty of both in life, but I’m learning.
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