I got the chance to travel to South Dakota to see the fireworks at Mount Rushmore for July 4th. Pictures in the usual place.

Musical acts that I need to see live at some point in my life:
1) Radiohead (check)
2) The Polyphonic Spree
3) U2 (and it does sort of hurt to admit it..)

.. put suggestions (and disagreements) in the comments :).

-s

This next song is from an album called Kid A that went number one over here in the United States. We have no idea how that happened, really. In England, they thought we’d all gone mental.

We thought that was the point.

Admittedly, I promised that I’d have pictures up by now.

However, I made the brilliant move of leaving the vast majority of my pictures on my computer in College Station, then promptly left town. I did manage to get a few pictures from a trip to the Holistic Gardens last March - one trip, honestly, of several that I need to process and upload - and I went ahead and uploaded them to the usual spot.

-s

On the off chance that the previous post was noticed by someone watching my long-dormant RSS feed or something, I thought it might be worthwhile to point out that that the pictures section actually has some content now. Not much, mind you, but some - in addition to what’s there, I have a number of macros taken in the holistic gardens this spring that I need to post, so with any luck that should be up by the end of the week.

-s

Last week, a group of us went to a discussion panel run by the Muslim Student’s Association.

I’m not exactly sure what I expected. I guess I expected to get some sort of understanding with Muslims – not a terribly innovative idea, but certainly the most obvious one. While it’s certainly true that, to an extent, understanding was what I received, that was not really the core of the message that the group presenting was trying to communicate. Instead, they managed to (rather expertly) speak about how the issues confronting them were more or less the same issues confronting us – Christians, America, people, whatever.

The result of this is that I ended up feeling challenged (and to an extent, inspired) in my own faith much more than I anticipated.

The highlight of this, I suppose, came when a question was posed to the panel about what likely is the most popular issue regarding Islam today: how, exactly, does a mainstream Muslim deal with various forms of terrorism and extremism promoted by various groups that claim the same faith? The answer that the panel gave – one of several, but the one that stood out to me the most – was a rather simple analogy. “What if I told you I was a surgeon?” the panelist said “Would you allow me to operate on you based on that fact alone, or would you look at my past patients, my record as a surgeon, and base your judgment on that?” Continuing on, the panelist drew a rather simple conclusion as to how this applied; stating that while those men called themselves Muslims, they don’t act as a Muslim should, and, as such, one can’t really judge Islam by their actions.

Something in this seemed incredibly convicting to me. This is an issue that I feel like I, as a Christian, face every day: my perception, at least, is that almost everyone I run into on the street has some sort of exposure to Christianity, and so much of the time I find that the exposure that people have is terribly embarrassing to me. While I was thinking about this, I was reminded of a talk I heard Donald Miller give when I was a freshman (ok, to be technical, a talk that I heard a recording of when I was a freshman, whatever) where Miller recounts the story of being on a radio talk show – confronted by a host that was rather anti-religion – and I really think that it does a wonderful job of explaining what I feel like is so important here:

“Defend Christianity,” the host said.

“I can’t, I don’t want to defend it,” Miller responded, “I mean, you have a quarter of a million listeners, and every person listening to this radio show has a different definition of Christianity. I mean, there’s a guy driving a cab who was, you know, abused by a minister somewhere; There’s a gal listening to us who thinks Jesus is her best friend and she’s rubbing her Bible for good luck. I’m not going to defend what anybody thinks Christianity is, it’s a relative term. It’s not a sacred term, it’s not a holy term, it’s not a biblical term. I just won’t defend it.”

Essentially, these two comments – the Muslim panelist’s analogy and Donald Miller’s comment to the radio show host – get to the exact same thing: if my faith is my personal choice, why should I have to defend your perceptions of it?

If I’m honest, though, I generally feel obliged to – and this, I think, is my problem. Or, at least, I feel like that is a limitation that I need to work with: somehow, I need to make all previous perceptions of Christianity – from the mildly insane guy handing out fliers by the mall on up – to fit within the framework of whatever explanation of my faith I give, and that any explanation that simply states that some people don’t represent the values of Christ is flawed in some way.

Perhaps the deeper problem here, though, isn’t even the idea that all of this needs an explanation, but rather the idea that this is a reasonable argument for me hiding my faith. The fear that we will be judged against society’s impressions of what we say believe is such a hard thing to get over, at least to the extent that those you are sharing your faith with have a negative impression, somehow, of your belief system.

And that, maybe, is really what I need to get over.

-s

On Thursday, I went with Jeff to the holistic gardens, and had a much better time with things.

Those of you that have been around for a long time might remember that I used to write things here as opposed to simply using this as a dumping ground for random pictures I have taken. Of course, I’m not sure that anyone who remembers what was here in 2004 actually still reads this, but that is beside the point, I suppose.

At any rate, my mood (as of late) can be rather well summed up by a song from an odd, mostly unknown band from Colorado that I happen to like.

Enjoy, I suppose:

my car broke down in arizona,
have to ride the bus again,
at ten-o-clock on tuesday night,
with thirteen cents and a broken pen.
i put my backpack on the bench,
tell two people i don’t smoke,
see the cop across the street,
he thinks that i am selling dope,
i could have walked another block,
to get away from the scene.
why does it always come to this,
where zero meets fifteen?

and so i gave my thirteen cents,
to the man who peed his pants.
he passes out and falls on me,
i watch my change fall from his hand.
i see the lady next to me,
holds her baby black blue.
the junkie gutter-punks keeps asking
where i got my new tattoo.
what does it matter anyway,
thirteen cents or all i own?
how can i ever save the world,
on cup-o-soup and student loans?

i want to try and save the world,
but it never goes that way.
God i don’t know what to do,
down at colfax and broadway.

now the man with no shoes on,
says i don’t know how to play.
he says i fumble all the time.
he thinks that i am john elway.
i put my face down in my hands,
water wells inside my eyes.
what do i have to give them?
does it matter if i try?

i can’t stand to see you suffer,
i try to intellectualize,
a formula to end you pain,
it doesn’t work,
God knows i’ve tried.

sometimes my cup is overfilled.
sometimes i’m too afraid that i’m going to spill..

So, I took my recently acquired Tamron 90mm Macro out to the Bush library today.

Obviously, not the most amazing Macro shots ever, but hey.. it was my first day to really try. After I got home, I messed around with the lens a bit more, with this probably being the most interesting result: