dreams

i keep having dreams that i'm in the gardens and woods at versailles. they are very good dreams.
but then i have to wake up.

time for a random movie post

i know, i'm really on top of things when it comes to music and movies. here's my year-and-a-half late recommendation.

hot fuzz. what to say?

a brilliant and completely absurd British cop flick.

any movie that ends in an A-Team-esque shootout with octoganerian villagers is good stuff in my book. i laughed to the point of tears.

rent it.

or better yet, you can borrow mine.

i just got home...

...from my first MLS game.

i have three words.

fan. freaking. tastic.

the LA Galaxy vs. the Columbus Crew.
ending with a 3-3 tie. but only because the ref seemed to have selective vision. how you can miss seeing a player getting body-checked while running full speed, and then missing a goal because of it, i really don't know. sheesh.
seats in the front row, just off of the center line. i would have come home with some great photos if my camera battery hadn't died 2 minutes into the game.
i guess there's always next time.
oh yes, there will be a next time.

anyone else missing the office?

not too long ago i was listening to an interview with Steve Carell on NPR. for much of the interview they were discussing his character on The Office, Michael Scott.
at one point he quoted Ricky Gervais, the co-creator of the original BBC version of The Office as saying 'everyone knows a Michael Scott. and if you don't know one, you probably ARE him.'

ohboyohboyohboy

yet another one of my various quirks is that i can sit and read through cookbooks like they're the new john grisham novel. i will periodically make 'oohs' and 'ahhhs' and exclaim that i had never thought to put rosemary in a shortbread cookie. but it sounds fabulous! let's try it!!

today i bought the new cookie book by martha stewart. she may be crazy, but the woman knows how to put together a kick-ass cookbook. it is a page-turner of 175 cookie recipes, organized by texture. i may start at page one and work my way back. everyone prepare yourselves for the cookie onslaught.

it is on.

really?

just when i thought christians could not top themselves, they come up with yet another website that makes me shake my head and sigh incredulously.

6 hours later...

...and the amazing Pat Fish finished tattoo #4.

its really a good thing i don't plan on ever having kids, because that needs to be the last time in my life that i experience pain that intense. and neverending.

pictures don't do justice to how beautiful it turned out. so next time you see me, have me show you.
oh, and no bearhugs or backslaps for the next week or so. i will have to hurt you.

a very good day

well, so far 32 is shaping up to be much better than 31. that won't be hard to do, since 31 blew.

on the anniversary of my birth i was bombarded by several text messages, a number of phone calls, a plate of hommemade brownies, an e-card, an impromptu birthday lunch and flowers, and an evening of guinness and apple boxty.

i feel loved.

word

The second feature of many communities both in the postindustrial West and in many of the poorer parts of the world is ugliness. True, some communities manage to sustain levels of art and music, often rooted in folk culture, which bring a richness even to the most poverty-stricken areas. But the shoulder-shrugging functionalism of postwar architecture, coupled with the passivity born of decades of television, has meant that for many people the world appears to offer little but bleak urban landscapes, on the one hand, and tawdry entertainment, on the other. And when people cease to be surrounded by beauty, they cease to hope. They internalize the message of their eyes and ears, the message that whispers that they are not worth very much, that they are in effect less than fully human.
To communities in danger of going that route, the message of new creation, of the beauty of the present world taken up and transcended in the beauty of the world that is yet to be – with part of that beauty being precisely the healing of the present anguish – comes as a surprising hope. Part of the role of the church in the past was – and could and should be again – to foster and sustain lives of beauty and aesthetic meaning at every level, from music making in the village pub to drama in the local primary school, from artists’ and photographers’ workshops to still-life painting classes, from symphony concerts (well, they managed them in the concentration camps; how inventive might we be?) to driftwood sculptures. The church, because it is the family that believes in hope for new creation, should be the place in every town and village where new creativity bursts forth for the whole community, pointing to the hope that, like all beauty, always comes as a surprise.

N.T. Wright – Surprised by Hope