I am so culturally with it

Tonight I went to the Portland Polish Festival. I:

-ate potato pancakes (platskis). Amazing.
-ate a cheese dumpling. Equally amazing, but also death-defyingly rich.
-listened to a polka band play the hokey pokey once and the chicken dance twice.
-got elbowed in the face by a random festival-goer.
-accidentally knocked over a little boy while polka dancing. Don't worry, he got over it and I got more careful.

slowly going the way of washington mutual

Goodbye Washington Mutual. I'd been hearing for a while that Washington Mutual was in some major hot water and when I read the news last night, I saw that Wamu was finally toast. Goodbye, Washington Mutual. Hello, JP Morgan.

All this talk in the news about banks and governments taking on banks' bad debt and investments had me thinking today about its echoes of Biblical and theological truths (read: penal substitution). As I was reflecting on how Jesus took the hit and "bought up" our crappy investments (read: idolatry), I remembered something I read by Martin Luther on Christ as the church's groom a couple years ago I thought I'd share. It's from his Freedom of a Christian:

"[Faith] unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom...Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ's, while grace, life and salvation will be the soul's; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride's and bestow upon her the things that are his.

If he give her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers?"

notes from the aboveground

Right now I am listening to Green Day's album Dookie and it is incredible. This album is one of the first ones I can remember listening to. I listened to it when I was in 5th or 6th grade and it brings back memories of pretending to be dinosaurs and Star Wars characters on the playground.

I started reading Robinson Crusoe a few days ago. I figured, "I am in a new place, trying to figure out what the heck I am doing. Sometimes I feel like all I have is God. Robinson Crusoe went to a new place and all he had was God. I bet that would be a good book to read now." Now, I am certainly not as lonely, and my food hunting is as easy as driving to the grocery store, but there is a slight affinity to my boy Robby and for that I am enjoying the book.

here's my take on things

Today I was walking home and I saw a homemade sign on a telephone pole that said "SAVE THE EARTH. KILL ALL HUMANS." People really love the environment here.

"Tim why were you walking home when you could have been driving home in your awesome car?"

Well, I was watching a bluegrass band play at a bar that was not very far away from my apartment (sidenote: Today I thought about starting to call my apartment Yavin 4, or, Hoth). I never cease to be amazed by bluegrass music. I love its simple lyrics, technical playing, and twangy tone that grates on my ears in a way that is inexplicably pleasant. If I were going to write my own creation myth, I would have something like this:

A Thunder Storm fell in love with the Mountains. They had a child, and the child's name was Bluegrass. Bluegrass mostly resembled the Mountains, but in his most emotional and honest moments, he resembled the Thunder Storm.

gatha round

Let me tell you about Aaron Copland. I was thinking about Aaron Copland this evening and I was inspired.

Aaron Copland is a composer. He is considered by many the first "great" American composer. His parents were Jewish Russian immigrants. He was born in Brooklyn.

Aaron Copland wrote pieces of music that a.) are great and b.) have really cool titles. For example, he wrote a ballet called "Billy the Kid" (1938). Who writes ballets about Billy the Kid? Only awesome people like Russian-American Jews named Aaron Copland. He also wrote something called "Rodeo" (1942). Not "Ro-day-o" like about shopping or something, but "RO-DEE-O" which is a lot more awesome and has to do with chewing tobacco and broken bones. And my personal favorite title of his is especially epic and earth-shattering: "THE FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN" (1942). I wish I was smart enough to call something "THE FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN". But alas, I am not.

something i saw today

Today I saw a law office that was about as Portlandesque as it gets. It had a sign out front that said:

"Dog Injuries and Bike Accidents"

what i think

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the philosophical underpinnings of blogging and I find myself locked in a soul-wrenching quandary that I cannot resolve:

On the one hand:
Writing in a blog about things that don't really matter is terribly narcissistic, unproductive, and irrelevant. While lying in my bed in the cold, lifeless recesses of the night, I think about blogging, "Blogging is the dumbest thing in the world! Who even cares!? What a load of Nietzschean poppycock!"

On the other hand:
I derive a kind of pleasure from blogging.

Thus:
I persist in doing something that I both dislike and enjoy. I am a conflicted creature.

The reason I bring this up is because I have had two ideas about things to blog about recently and both of them initially seemed like great blogging ideas, but upon further reflection, I thought, "Really, who cares?"

Well, maybe you do.

Idea 1:
What would it be like if you were the lady whose voice is on all of those annoyingly long cell phone voicemail recordings that you have to listen to after the real voicemail message? How does that lady function in the world? Does she tire of hearing her own voice when she calls her friends? When you call her voicemail, are you nearly overwhelmed with how much of her voice you have to sit through?

Idea 2:
I have a sore throat right now. Probably caused by some mundane and uninteresting sickness. But: If I was pretending to be really manly, what explanation would I give for my sore throat?
-I dropped a white-hot piece of steel rebar in my mouth on accident?
-I ate a porcupine raw?
-I have an alien living in me and it is trying to get out?

Two ideas, both glorious in their childhoods, but both terribly foolish in their adulthood.

So is blogging.

Thus spoke Timathustra.

My Blog: The Nucleus of Egotistical Self-Realization

You know, I've realized a couple things over the last few days.

1.) On facebook, it "suggests" people for you that you might know and asks you if you want to be friends. I've realized that I get a kind of pleasure out of rejecting people I don't know. Sometimes I pretend like I am actually talking to them and they are asking me to be their friend and I am saying, "I DON'T EVEN KNOW YOU. WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE!? GET OUT OF MY FACE!" and then I get in my hummer and peel out.

And then I think, "Why do I get pleasure out of something so stupid and mean?" and I realize that I am still really feeling the Fall.

2.) I've realized (again) that bluegrass is amazing. Seriously, amazing. Some country music is twangy enough to where I am irritated, but bluegrass is so far over the "unpleasant" end of the twang threshold that I really like it.

And I am reminded of an idea I had one time about starting a band that would be a new genre: thrashgrass. It would be made up of bluegrass type instruments (mandolin, banjo, violin, guitar, bass), but would also include a lot of screaming and rat-tails and breaking stuff.

an idea for a concept album for a metal band

Last night I saw an article and I thought it would make for a good concept by a metal band, preferably a metal band called "Juvenile Justice Complex" or "The Wookie Wakes":

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,418204,00.html

You have to read it...it's short. But black holes in the center of the earth caused by overly-ambitious scientists makes for great metal music.

it's all about me

"Did you see the special on 60 Minutes?" said the jovial ex-farmer with a shine in his eyes.
"No...I didn't", I replied as we stood before dozens of egg cartons at the supermarket, "What did they say?"
"Well, shoot, I almost THREW UP when I saw one of them special investigations...I guess they take expired eggs, throw out the carton and put them in NEW CARTONS with the OLD EGGS!"
"Wow...that's crazy...wow..."
"Listen here, son. I grew up on a farm, so I KNOW. You gotta take an egg to the light, and if you see anything red in there, well you just gotta THROW IT OUT."
"Wow...thanks...I'll keep my eyes open."

That was what happened to me last night at the grocery store. I also accidently put my grapes in another lady's cart and she gave me a death stare (not a Death Star) and said, "Excuse me? That's my cart."

All in all, it was just another wild Saturday night in Portland, Oregon, where the dreadlocks flow like the Columbia River and there are more dogs than children.

I moved to Portland a few weeks ago to attend Western Seminary. Here are my favorite responses I've gotten from people when I've told them I am going to seminary:

"What the heck is that?"

"Don't be offended...but isn't that for Mormon people or something?"

And my personal favorite came from the mechanic at the auto repair shop yesterday: "Seminary!? That's great...I'm not supposed to give these away until you've spent $3000 here, but I'll just give it to you. It's a 10% off anything you get done here and it has no expiration date."

Maybe you are thinking, "Oh, EXCUSE ME, Tim. Do you think you can just crawl back here to the blogosphere and update your dumb blog and pretend like you haven't updated it in THREE MONTHS?!"

Well, faithful reader, sue me. I will try to be better about updating my blog, but I'm not going to promise anything. Blog updates are dependant upon a couple of variables:

1.) the amount of interesting/bizarre stuff that happens to me
2.) the amount of time I have
3.) the amount of energy and personal drive I have

You know what they say: Bloggin' ain't easy.

But lately I've been convicted about my lack of blogging updates because my friend Katy Fults is really good about updating her blog and she lives here too, so I figured, "I could update too."

Why are you still reading this? Who reads boring stuff like this where bloggers give a treatise on why they are going to start blogging again? I don't know.

Though many interesting things happen to me on a daily basis, I have now lost all personal drive to write about anything else. So, this is goodbye. For now.