songs stalk me

Songs and bands have been following me around lately. I'll sing a song or have a song in my head, then a little bit later will hear that same song. This may not seem so strange, initially, but it's more strange than it sounds. Early this quarter, for instance, I was over at my friends' house, and they put on a Third Eye Blind song. This is not a song that I ever hear, one that I don't think many people have listened to for years. But I rode my bike back to my dorm that night, and as I was putting it in the bike storage, I hear the same song playing out of a different room.

Or this weekend, I was walking back to my room from lunch, and started singing "Rain drops keep falling on my head..." Then I got up to my floor and was in a friend's room. Maybe 30 seconds to a minute after being in there, the guy across the hall put that song on (or it came on randomly, not sure). I froze. I asked him if he'd heard me singing it, and he said no.

Then tonight, I was singing an Aerosmith song in the cafeteria. An hour or two later, I'm sitting in my room and I hear that same song blasting from another room. I haven't heard it in months, if not longer.

Anyway, that's a lot of the stories. Most of the other stories involve weird Queen experiences.

the 60s

I went to a symposium on the 1960's tonight, and I left wondering if the 00's will be known for its apathy, as the 60's is known for its activism. Maybe it will just be known for watching stupid tv shows.

angery

I've been very angry lately, and I don't know why, and it tires me out. I don't feel very loving towards others, and it's a lot of unreasonable anger, even at people I don't know and who aren't doing anything to deserve it.

I don't feel like my life is very meaningful right now.

silence

I woke up today wanting to read the Bible. This was odd, because it's usually not something I think of or want upon waking, and lately I haven't been reading it or really wanting to read it. So I opened it up to where I last left off, and immediately began to feel resentful. I was reading from 2 Samuel 2

After this, David asked the Lord, "Should I move back to Judah?"
And the Lord replied, "Yes."
Then David asked, "Which town should I go to?"
And the Lord replied, "Hebron."

This felt particularly insulting in light of my own situation, where I'm thinking a lot about moving and whether or not I should move out of the dorms, and where I will move if I do, and that I'm not getting anything very conclusive out of God. Nothing like a voice at least.

On that note, I would like to know more about the silence of God. It's something that is very integral to my relationship with him, and something that I'm drawn to as well as fascinated and perplexed by. I want to read more about it and reflect more on it and how it's influenced my life, and how different situations would have been if God had simply answered my questions. The purpose in the mystery of God's silence. Or at least the meaning of it.

pill

I sallowed a pill earlier today, and I swallowed it without drinking anything with it. About five minutes later when I burped, I breathed out a cloud of powder. I was shocked.

Too many things to do.

truth

Here's one model of understanding the world, truth, knowledge, etc:

When officials are learning to spot forged money, they don't spend their time looking at forgeries. All their time is spent, instead, studying real money, and by learning to spot real money, they are better able to spot forgeries.

I've heard this used multiple times in my life as an example of how Christians should approach the world. The idea is that our understanding of truth increases the more that we study "the real thing" (e.g. Christianity, the Bible) and that it doesn't improve by studying other religions or other points of view.

Unfortunately, this model is arrogant and simplistic, and it misses the point.

First, this model is experientially false. Not false with dollar bills, since I don't try to identify forgeries, but false when it's applied to realms of knowledge. I know from experience that my understanding of Christianity and the uniqueness of Christ has increased as I have studied other religions and other points of view.

Second, this model is incredibly arrogant. It assumes that we know what the truth is. What I think this would come down to is "The Bible is God's infallible word, and by studying this we learn what truth is." Infallible and non-contradicting are different things, but the Bible is contradictory, at least. This model of understanding the world ignores that the contradictions of the Bible, along with all the rest of it, must be interpreted. It ignores that Christians themselves disagree on fundamental issues of faith, and that a monolithic, homogenous Christianity in many ways does not exist. It also, perhaps, ignores that Christians' understanding of the Bible has increased when hermeneutics converses with other areas of study, such as science and archaeology.

The idea with that little tale is that you study truth to spot out what is false. How and why it is false are unimportant, but the fact that it is false is enough to know that I shouldn't learn about it. But this leads to a lack of understanding and to people making stupid claims about what other religions actually say. I just hate all the vibes that that model gives off, all the isolationist and close-minded and arrogant vibes. I usually get very angry when I hear it.

Whatever. Here's a different model that I cling more closely to:

Humans get sick. To cure them, it is important and necessary to study sickness, to study disease. Studying healthy bodies shows you how all the cells and systems should be functioning, but it ignores the reality that bodies don't function properly, that things break down and sicken.

I guess that's why people say to have the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

parasites

So I've had parasites in my face for a while, in the hair follicles. These parasites make my skin red and very flaky, and I feel self conscious about it, a lot. Especially frustrating is that when I was in Thailand, I went to the doctor and he gave me medicine and told me to use it for a month. So I used it for five weeks. But it didn't go away, I think it's actually worse than it was before, probably because the dry air makes my skin even drier.

But it's not all glass half-empty folks.

I was thinking the other night about how people all around me are suffering, and how I forget that a lot. I forget that everyone is going through something and forget to be sensitive to that and sensitive to how I can help in whatever way. So I wanted a way to remind myself, and thought about something I could wear that would remind, something that was annoying or painful. Not terribly painful, obviously, but something that would remind me. Then today it hit me that my face should be reminder enough. It's itching constantly and I'm constantly thinking about it, what better thing to remind me?

Anyway, I don't make that connection to be trite or to pretend that my parasites are suddenly a good thing. They're not. But, however long I have them, hopefully they can remind me that I'm not the only one and that, ultimately, skin falling off my face in large chunks is a pretty minimal problem compared to a lot of the shit that other people go through.

This feels like a very suburban revelation.