proud to be an american?

i was at disneyland with my family a couple weeks ago and saw someone wearing this shirt.
while my bro-in-law thought it was funny, it actually made me kind of angry.
why do americans have to have this attitude?

i love yard sales

this morning we held the 'life group yard sale extraordinaire' to try and raise some extra funds to offset dan and alyssa's expenses for the international adoption of the beautiful sofia, while also trying to get rid of some excess junk. i wasn't able to stay for the whole thing, but i would say it was a success on both counts. and also quite a bit of fun. while my heart's desire is to be as minimal as possible and to stop my frustrating cycles of accumulation, i was irresistibly attracted to the random box full of medical and chemistry supplies. while i wasn't able to beat the yard sale vultures to the clamps and scalpels and various beakers, i was able to scoop up these great little bottles. you can never have enough cool little glass bottles.
uh, unless you're trying to have less stuff.
crap.



well, i still like them.

deathly hallows

i just finished reading the first 5 chapters of harry potter and the deathly hallows and am already completely emotionally exhausted. all of the previous harry potter volumes have taken me on a roller-coaster ride of joy and tears, and this one looks like it is going to beat them all.

i just had to take a break and calm down a bit. but i hope to finish it by monday.

and don't worry, i won't spoil it for any slow readers out there.
that would just be mean.

following sean

ever since netflix made it so darn easy to find them, i've been watching a nearly endless stream of documentaries. some good, some terrible, and every once in a while, some are splendid. i watched one of the splendid ones this weekend. it was called following sean. rather than butcher the plotline, i shall quote the synopsis from the website.

Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck first met Sean while living as a graduate student in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury neighborhood at the height of the 1960s.
The city was awash with the trappings of America's cultural revolution-the San Francisco State University campus flooded with cops in riot gear, the Haight filled with drifters and idealists, and, on the third floor of Arlyck's building, a come-one-come-all crashpad apartment. It was from this top floor commune that the precocious 4-year-old Sean would occasionally wander downstairs to visit and talk-and one day Arlyck turned on his camera.
Sean's casual commentary on everything from smoking pot to living with speed freaks was delivered in simple sincerity throughout the soon-to-be famous 15-minute film. This First Child of the notorious decade may have shaken the audience with his simple sentence- "Sure, I smoke pot"-but it was his barefoot impishness which would encapsulate the hope that lay in front of the nation: a promise of infinite possibility.
Thirty years, three generations, and a lifetime later, Arlyck has returned to San Francisco in search of who the adult Sean might have become. And what he finds, to his surprise, tells him as much about his own east-coast migration as it does about the Californian life he left behind-that the choices we're handed and the choices we make are, very often, quite odd bedfellows.

it was beautiful and thought-provoking and a wonderful, subtle study in sociology. i was not expecting for it to be a reminder that even when others seem so different, we all actually have so much in common.