Archives for "Ramblings"

Clark Kent: True, the guy’s sweet and smart. Too bad he comes off as completely nerdy and willing to be walked all over. He’ll love from afar but never speaks up about it—or anything thing else, really.

Superman: Seriously, if you think it doesn’t take an alien amount of confidence to flit about wearing that spandex outfit, you’ve got another thing coming.

Think about it—these two are the same guy. Same looks, except for the glasses, but COME ON! Glasses and a button-up shirt are the worst disguise ever! Clark Kent’s real disguise is his lack of confidence.

And really, it all comes down to confidence. The ability to be who you are and be unapologetic about it. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt for the guy of my dreams to have rock hard abs and to be squeaky clean, nice, tactful, unattainable to everyone else, and to always leave me wanting more. But in order to do more than simply catch my eye, he has to be confident.

The genocide in Darfur. The Crandall Canyon mine disaster. Read the news for three minutes, and it’s hard not to become overwhelmed by the human suffering. Especially when you realize that so many millions of lives are so intimately and infinitely effected by the things that so many of us know only superficially—AIDS and malaria, hunger and water crises, genocide and war…this nightmarish list could go on and on. So many things are so heartbreakingly wrong for so many people.

With all of this happening, where do you devote your time and attention? Do you support efforts to aid the civilians in war-torn Iraq or efforts to support the war-wounded U.S. soldiers and their families? AIDS efforts in Africa or AIDS efforts in the States? Cancer research or cancer patients? Seriously, I could donate my entire net worth to a charity, and it wouldn’t even make a ripple in the overall scheme of things. (Granted, as a twenty-something recent college graduate, my donation wouldn’t be that much.)

But the principle here…what good is one tiny bucket in the face of a hurricane?

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A few days ago, I got my hands on the John Mayer Trio’s new album. It’s fabulous. However, in his song “Another Kind of Green,” Mr. Mayer sings the above lyric.

And it got me thinking…is that idea really accurate? Is it true you find a hand you can settle for and then hope the house doesn’t win? Just get close enough to the right guy and that’s good enough?

That sounds so unromantic…

My new favorite person is whoever invented bedtime. I think maybe that was God. Or my mom. But, hey, whoever it was, they got it right.

Note: I have every intention of posting my thoughts on my recent trip to London. I really do. It’s just that every time I think of London right now, I feel forlorn and homesick (even though it’s not my real home) and it makes it extremely hard to concentrate on anything for the next several hours. So this post will be a little more on my current level of mental acuity.

Two things. First, on my recent trip to England, several times I found myself saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I lived then so I could have seen _________.” Second, I’m always playing mental games with myself. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe it comes from my parents trying to keep me quiet and/or distracted. Regardless of the purpose, I’ll always find myself playing games with words and phrases. Combine those two and you get this post.

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The fourth of July is upon us once again. For the next week or two, it will become impossible to go outside without being greeted by an olfactory mix of barbecues, bug repellent, and the ever-present smoke and sulfur. We’ll be celebrating the birth of this great nation with full patriotic pomp and circumstance—parades and picnics, floats and flags, candy and crowds.

Yesterday, I went to my city’s annual patriotic celebration. In classic American tradition, this celebration has gotten bigger and better each year since its inception. The closing fireworks were so spectacular that they elicited involuntary “oohs and aahs” from even the most seasoned veterans of firework displays. It was a complete success. But really, does this pyrotechnic event truly symbolize our American identity?

One of the most famous American symbols, the Statue of Liberty, points us in another direction. Written in the pedestal on which the statue stands, is the following invitation:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Not only does the statue welcome the poor and downtrodden to our country, it does so with an implicit promise that America will become a “land of opportunity” to these people, that circumstances in our country will be markedly better than those they left. Continue Reading

When I die, I do not want to go to heaven and then watch the events of my life unfold on the big screen. I’m sorry, but I don’t. I’ve lived it once, and, quite frankly, a good portion of my life has been rather boring. For instance, who really wants to watch themselves sleep? Every night? For their entire lifetime? No thank you.

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t like to see select moments in my life. I just want the ability to select what moments I see. That’s why I hope that when Google’s inventors get to heaven, God gets them busy designing what will come to be known as Google Life. (I know that God could make it himself, but I think he’s probably got better things to do. And since the Google guys are so good at what they do…you know: Google Mail, Google Earth, Google Maps…they deserve to spearhead the Google Life project.)

It’s got potential, people! Think about it: You know those situations where you’re having a conversation with your mom and you say, “Remember that time when we saw John Denver at the fair?” And then your mom says, “No, we never saw John Denver. You must be thinking of someone else.” But you still feel fairly certain you saw John Denver and your mom is crazy? That’s where Google Life comes in. You type in as much information as you think you remember—John Denver concert when I was 10—and Google Life searches through your entire life and brings up relevant results. And then you watch the video version (on that big screen, with heavenly picture and sound) and you and your mom both know who is right and who is crazy.

(Okay, I admit it—I’d really like to have Google Life right now. I mean, my entire generation is so used to instant answers to most who, what, where, when, why, and how questions…it’s frustrating that we can’t have the same instant gratification for these questions in our own lives. However, I recognize that since God’s got exclusive access to a free and unbiased account of my life, I’ll have to wait for heaven in order to get it.)

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a very special place in my heart for puns and wordplay. In today’s issue of the Salt Lake Tribune, Paul Rolly included several puns from an “earlier” edition of the Washington Post. I’d come across these well over a year ago, and enjoyed them enough to pass them onto a good friend who appreciated them but didn’t fully trust their attributed source.

The vague wording in Rolly’s column renewed my interest in finding the original source. After spending a few minutes with Google, I got my answer. (Seriously, what did we do before Google?) Turns out, these were first published as part of the Washington Post’s Style Invitational column. From 1998.

Seriously, 1998?! Think back to 1998—back when politics was dominated by the Lewinsky scandal, back when Michael Jordan beat the Utah Jazz in the NBA finals (again), and back when N*Sync was cool. Are you kidding? Essentially, this columnist decided it wasn’t enough to forward this to everyone in his contact list—rather, he had to forward it to everyone within the newspaper’s circulation.

For the record, yes, I still think the wordplay is amusing. But not nearly as amusing as the fact that the Salt Lake Tribune actually paid someone to publish this.

Who knows where this is going to go…