Idol chat

I'm watching tonight's episode of American Idol right now, so I have to make this quick. Just a few thoughts on a few of the contestants. This is only the second season I've followed, so I'm not good at picking out the winners. But I do have a few favorites, and a few I can't wait to see go home.

Top 3

1. Syesha Mercado

SYESha, in my opinion, is currently the best female on the show. She's got great stage presence, a gorgeous, powerful voice, and cute hair. I don't know that she's MY number one, but I think if America had to vote on a female winner right now, she'd sweep it.

2. David Archuleta

As Randy says, this IS the "year of the young ones." This little tyke, age 16, is absolutely incredible. And I KNOW Simon is dreaming of the empire he could build with this guy--he would, indeed, be the next big thing in the circles of Hannah Montana, Mary Kate & Ashley, The OC, and the like. The Jonathan Taylor Thomas of today, if you will. I like him, though. A lot. Every song he sings is phenominal.

3. Banjin

Meet MY top contestant, Banjin. His high pitched bark and good grooming won me over immediately. His voice and tone have a real star quality, and I think he has America's musical sweetheart written ALL over his fur. His top performance: Celine Dion's "Power of Love" which he pulled off stunningly, though I'd pegged him as the indie rock type. Good luck, Banjin.

Bottom 2

1. Danny Noriega

This one bothers me, but really only because I don't think he realizes he's a man. It's one thing to be gay, but realize you're a gay MAN. This one, I think, actually believes he's a woman. And it irks me.

2. Jason Yeager

When I see him perform, I feel like I've literally just eaten an entire bowl of melted velveeta. To top it off, he ended what would be his final performance on AI by striking a pose reminiscent of Mary Katherine Gallagher on Saturday Night Live--but held it for an extra 8-count. Sianara, Mr. Yeager.

Personally, my favorites are Michael Johns and Brooke White, but I don't think either will win in the end, sadly.

A question: Do Ryan Seacrest and Simon absolutely HATE each other? Is it me, or is this season packed with far more sarcastically mean and awkward moments between the two of them?

I don't get it.

I just read an article in which Sen. Barack Obama was compared to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

What?

Again, this is not a political slice of the World Wide Web, as there's enough of that out there already, but I'm really having a tough time with this one. I'm just not seeing any kind of parallel between this senator from no where and the great MLK, Jr.

Can anyone help me with this????

lemon lovers beware!!

I've never been one to ask for lemon in my water. Now I'll DEFINITELY never ask for it. Laura, this post is for you. Think about this before you ask for tons of lemon in your water...

Update on the Ped Egg: It works. Well. My feet are very smooth--smoother, in fact, than they've ever been. Probably since I was born. The only problem: Ever since I spent a summer working in Charleston for Piccolo Spoleto, I seem to have lost feeling on the bottom of my big toes. I don't know why. I think it was the night job at the restaurant 82 Queen--I was constantly on my feet walking around for hours at a time in very uncomfortable shoes. Whatever the reason, there seems to have been some nerve damage, because ever since that summer, I don't feel anything on the bottom of my big toes.

I know you don't want to hear details about my feet, but I had callouses on my big toes. So, I targeted this area with the Ped Egg. Well, not a good idea if I have no working nerves there. I went too far with the egg and chafed them raw. I can't FEEL anything, but it certainly doesn't look good.

I still recommend the Ped Egg for those of you who have functional nerve endings. Thanks Heather!!

Feet and rockstars

It's Saturday again, and I'm soaking it in. My roommates are all working today, and it's really cold outside, so I've decided to spend the whole day cleaning. Not just my house--I am going to fix my feet and hands. And let me tell you--that is no easy task. Since I've started teaching, my feet have taken the biggest hit of all. I do wear heels to work a good bit, so a lot of the damage is my own fault (I have to do what I can to look as old as I can in that place).

I went to get the Ped Egg today. Heather posted about it awhile back, and ever since I took her advice on trying the Laughing Cow cheese, what she says goes. Laughing Cow changed my life, so I expect the Ped Egg to do the same. I plan on using it with the most miraculous foot scrub of all time: Toe the Line. I'm also using some 60 second manicure scrub. Whatever that is--I just know my hands and feet are nasty, and something must be done. I'll let you know how it works.

On to topic #2: Thursday night, several friends went to hear our friend Greg's concert at WorkPlay. Yep-I'm friends with a real, live rockstar, and that's no exaggeration, folks. It was fantastic. Here is the cover of his newest album, designed by another of our friends, Susan "swan" Dennis. Isn't it cool?

I leave you with a thought sent to me via email this morning by one James Entrekin:

based on the scriptural foundation that Christians are called to serve...

"the mainspring of [our] service is not love for men, but love for Jesus Christ. If we are devoted to the cause of humanity, we shall often meet with more ingratitude from men than we would from a [cat]; but if our motive is love to God, no ingratitude can hinder us from serving our fellow men. No matter how men may treat me, they will never treat me with the spite and hatred with which I treated Jesus Christ. When we realize that Jesus Christ has served us to the end of our meanness, our selfishness, and sin, nothing that we meet with from others can exhaust our determination to serve men for His sake."

welcome, weekend

Saturday...sigh. I. Love. Saturdays.

I made french toast casserole for breakfast this morning (recipe courtesy of mere), drank a lot of coffee, and have caught up on season 5 of 24. I'm not going to tell you what happened in the episodes I watched this morning, in case any of you plan on going back and watching the seasons, but I will say that one of my favorite characters died. Are you ready for this? I cried. Yep--shed actual tears--real tears. Over a TV character. Jimmy was kind of glad the guy died--actually he'd been anxiously awaiting the death--because I always talked about how hot he is.

Well, RIP _______ _________. I will remember you always.

Last night I went to a birthday party for friends Harris and Daniel. It was a pajama/camo party--the pj's in honor of Harris, who might as well be a narcoleptic, and the camo for Daniel, the hunter. We ate breakfast food, and it was spectacular. The Grahams came! It was a smite weird, not gonna lie--it really didn't even seem like they were married--until the ring on Will's hand caught my eye and I remembered they were going home to the same house. Good times.

Just one more slice

I am not about to turn my blog into a deep well of gravity/solemnity/whatever your word is, but today's Slice of Infinity I just had to post.

Lately, at work and therefore at home, I have been absolutely, completely, wholly, and altogether conclusively bone-weary, drained, and depeleted of all energy, enthusiasm, life, zeal, and persistence. That was one wordy sentence--but such is necessary to express how I've felt this week. It's not been a sleepy kind of exhaustion, nor the result of a couple of hard days at school. Rather, this is more of a soul-weariness, the kind that makes you feel emphatically weak--mind, body, soul, and spirit. I've felt as though I've absolutely nothing left to give--and that whatever I did still have would be received with complete apathy anyway. This article may have pinpointed the reason why.

I wanted this job for a plethora of reasons, but the heart reason is hope. Nothing and no one is more defiant than hope--not even my students. And the hope of Jesus breaks through anything. So, the deepest reason I wanted this job was to show the students that hope and the One who offers it--and to help them see what, tangibly, that means for their lives.

Well. I'm not sure how effectively that is happening, or even if it is happening, but today's Slice hit the nail on the head for me in a lot of ways. In order for me to invite my students into the right house, do I need to change jobs to be able to best do that? The answer is not easy, and I'm definitely not about to quit my job. I'm just thinking out loud. This is long--grab a cup of tea if you've got the time to read it.

02/15/08
The Right Side of Pain
Jill Carattini

We shuffled back and forth between the states that sat like metaphors between our divorced parents--a summer, a spring break, a Christmas without one of them. The pain of the one we were leaving was always palpable, but we always had to leave.

It’s strange the things we interpret as children with the limited perceptions we have. I was six years old when I silently vowed I would not allow anyone to keep me on the wrong side of people in pain. As a result, I have spent a lifetime collecting strays, searching for the oppressed, feeling the pain of others, and desperately attempting to bind broken hearts, usually without much success. Every church I have ever been involved with has been one somehow marked by suffering.

As long as I can remember, I have been somewhat frantic about expanding my circle of care. The world of souls is a sad and broken place. I was certain of this because I was one of them, and I vowed that they would not be alone--or perhaps more accurately, that I would not be alone.

There were other unhealthy patterns to my ever-expanding circles of care. With each oppressed group, I came among them with the best of intentions. I gave everything I could and some things I could not--love, time, money, tears, depression--until I collapsed, no longer able to give anything at all.

I always thought I was retreating out of necessity because taking in pain was understandably exhausting. I figured that the metaphorical house I tried to keep filled, at times, simply needed to be emptied. I was opening up my house until people were hanging from the rafters and lamps started getting broken, and I was falling apart.

Little did I realize, the house was falling apart before any of them entered in the first place. I was inviting them into the wrong house. Sometimes God in his mercy must tear down even walls built with good intention. "Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain... In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat--for he grants sleep to those he loves" (Psalms 127:1-2).

Such was the case with me. In my house the broken and the oppressed found care with limits, hospitality with conditions. But we are like olive trees who “flourish in the house of God,” says the psalmist. For in this house, we can “trust in God's unfailing love for ever and ever” (Psalm 52:8).

Describing the disparity between the mind of humanity and the mind of God, Abraham Heschel writes, “The [human] conscience builds its confines, is subject to fatigue, longs for comfort, lulling, soothing. Yet those who are hurt, and He Who inhabits eternity, neither slumber nor sleep.”(1)

In other words, God never sleeps or slumbers because those who are hurting never sleep or slumber. Try as we may as caretakers we cannot be as God to the hurting. We can stay awake with them in their pain and suffering, we can care for them as neighbors, but the house in which the suffering find unfailing love is the Lord’s. This is the house to which we must bring them. This is the house in which we must live.

In this season where we journey again to the Cross, might we be as the friends of the paralytic who carried him all the way to Christ. Though I still seem to move toward broken communities and still struggle with the weight of some of the things I see, I realize I struggle equally with the apathy that makes me want to flee from it all.

But I am convinced that the right side of pain can only be accessed through the house of God, a house built not by human hands, but held up by the beams of the Cross. Here our souls find a house with rooms prepared for them and a table set with room for our enemies.

God has invited us into the kingdom; the doors of a great house are opened wide. And it is a house where hospitality is not a conditional sharing of personal pains, or a self-centered preoccupation with suffering, but an extension of Christ's invitation: Come to me, all who are weary and I will give you rest.

A post so long it hath no title

Bangs update: After the initial bangs venture last Tuesday, I was obviously under a false sense of bad hair invincibility, because I went back on Friday to get them cut a little "fuller." I was satisfied with the results all weekend. Excited, even.


Then I went back to work on Monday. You know how it is--after a long day at work, you really have no idea the kind of toll the day took on you until you get home and look in the mirror. I don't, anyway. I always want to scream when I see myself in the mirror after a day at school. I leave the house looking semi-normal, ready for work, yet when I arrive back home, I look like I've been stranded on a desolate island, with no shelter, left for dead. In really bad weather.


My point is this: I failed to take this into consideration when I went back and asked for "fuller" bangs. On Monday, after my first day at work with said bangs, I got in my car to go home and had to muffle a scream when I saw myself in the rearview mirror.


I looked like I had a mullet on my forehead. A seperate living entity perched right below my hairline. I almost gave it a name.


So now, I pin them back for work--looking like a schoolmarm is a small price to pay to restrain the animal now living atop my head.


On the weekends, though, unleash the monster.


In other news, Kate and Will Graham returned from their honeymoon Sunday night! I talked to her yesterday, and they had a phenominal time. They went to St. Lucia and stayed in a three sided hut (it was a resort, but hut sounds cooler) on a mountain overlooking a rainforest. Doesn't that sound amazing? She said you could look out one window/balcony and see mountains AND ocean, and look out another and see vocanoes. It doesn't get any better than that, if you ask me.

Allow me now to share with you an article I read this morning that I just love. Ravi Zacharias International Ministries is an apologetics ministry based in Atlanta. They send out an article everyday: "A Slice of Infinity." They're always really good. Sign up to receive them here.

Anyway, I wanted to post this one, called "Miltons in a Weary Land." All of these bits of wisdom make you think and nudge you toward growth and fortitude, but this one in particular got my wheels spinning. If you have a few minutes, give it a read. This is now officially the longest post in my blogging history. And I don't even have any pictures to go along with it.

01/10/08
Miltons in a Weary Land
Ravi Zacharias

Milton! thou shouldest be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again:
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

This was the cry of William Wordsworth early in the nineteenth century as he saw the demise of English culture underway. The Church, the state, the home, the writers and shapers of society were called to task, for the nation had lost its soul and was hurtling headlong towards moral defacement. “Milton!” he cried, “England hath need of thee.”

I remember wondering similarly as news unfolded of the unthinkable tragedy at Columbine High School. Sadly, this would not be the last of its kind, or the last of my wondering. As one who stands before audiences all over the world facing hard questions, I am sometimes tempted to ask a question of the questioner, “Do you really want a solution or is the constant refrain ‘why’ a way of escaping the responsibility of the answer?”

Jesus wept over his own beloved city and said, “If only you knew the things that belonged to your peace, but now they are hid from your eyes” (Luke 19:42). Their problem was not the absence of answers, but rather, the suppression of them. When we cry out “Why?” in the midst of the unthinkable violence of our time, our predicament, I believe, is the same.

There are some clues we already have--enough to bring correctives within our reach. But do we really want the truth? At the start we would do well to remember that no out-ward environment alone can completely eradicate the destructive. But that does not mean that there is nothing we can do to minimize the murderous instincts of some.

There are issues in our society that we must have the courage to address, though they are not popular and never will be, for they stare at us in the face. Our societal indicators are important because they are pointers to the malady. At the root of our cultural rot is a wanton failure to admit our contradictions, and contradiction is to reason what evil is to life. When our reasoning is contradictory, the argument breaks down. When evil invades a life, life breaks down.

Those of us in our middle years have only a faint clue of what the world offers to the young long before fact is tied to feeling or one’s conscience is steadied and empowered. We have given our children contradictory assumptions about life and are then shocked at their evil behavior and the disintegration of their lives. This cultural breakdown did not happen overnight. Simplistic and canned answers that assert our rights without paying any heed to our thrill-worn culture will exact a heavy price.

Here is the hard fact that underlies all our contradictions. We want pertinent answers without granting that absolute freedom and absolute truth are mutually exclusive. The painful reality is that the answer is inextricably bound to what we are willing to sacrifice. One of the two must be qualified if the other is to hold sway. The choices life offers us are not value-free.

In his cynical way, Malcolm Muggeridge reminded us that all new news is old news happening to new people. He was right. The parents of the first family in Eden questioned whether God had really spoken. Here autonomy squared off against the revelation of God. A value-free society was introduced. Second, the son in turn questioned whether the altar really had any worth.

Secularism evicted the sacred and planted the void within. Denying the place of a moral law and thwarting the legitimacy of worship built the first cemetery at Eden. And so it is that we all agree with Muggeridge’s unhappy reminder that atrocities are not new, only the victims are. We would do well, however, to remember another piece of news which is equally old.

In C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters a senior devil is training a junior devil on how to destroy faith in God from the hearts of people: “Work on their horror of the same old thing. The horror of the same old thing is the greatest passion we have put into the human heart.”

How appropriate that warning is. We ask why, while we have an aversion or horror for the same old solution. But the story of Littleton, the story of Lancaster County, the story of Virginia Tech, in an extraordinary way, has brought to light the power of the same old thing. Once again, God conquered not in spite of the dark mystery of evil, but conquered through it.

Emerging from the ashes of such stories are the Miltons who walk in lowly service and whose souls are like shining stars--the pastors who shepherd the Rachel Scotts and the Cassie Bernals, the professors who nurture truth in a world that would have it sacrificed, and the brave who stand out when many of us would shrink away. The world has need of them. They guard the souls of those who can stare into the guns of murderers and say, “Yes, I believe in Jesus Christ,” and die as an act of worship.