My books don’t fit on the shelves, my clothes don’t fit on the racks, my guitars don’t fit in the corner, and finding somewhere appropriate to display my special beer glass collection is a hopeless luxury.

Being confronted with such constrains has got me thinking about how much Stuff I own in general. My footprint is probably relatively small compared to most of the people I interact with regularly. But when I think about much of the world, whose Stuff could be wrapped in a blanket and slung over a shoulder… well, I’ve got a lot. And let me tell you, it’s hard to be mobile with 2 large bookcases full of books, never mind the ones that got relegated to storage!

On the other hand, my situation could be unique even for Americans, given that I probably have more Kinds of Stuff than most people. I’m not just into books, but music and film, so there go 5 or 6 boxes just for CDs and DVDs. I’m not just into playing musical instruments (adding 5 guitars, a keyboard, and a trumpet to the mix) but into recording, so chalk one box up to computer interfaces and cables, another for mics, and then there’s the oddly-shaped mic stands… And I could keep going–I have 4 large backpacks filled with all kinds of climbing, backpacking, frisbee and snowboarding gear.

In short, if you take away my hobbies, you take away the Stuff. I’m not sure if this is the case for most people or not. But as I have an abnormally large number of hobbies, so I have this abnormally large number of Kinds of Stuff. And, with the exercise of trying to fit a lot of stuff into a small space as the perfect (perhaps ironic) metaphor, I wonder about how and why I’ve decided to cram all these pursuits into the finite space of my life. That’s what I’d call Metastuff.

I suppose answering the Metastuff question for me is the same as answering the question of why I’ve chosen to pursue many things at once rather than focus on one thing (as most people seem able / resigned to do). It’s a question I wrestle with on an intense and daily basis, and it creates a profound ambiguity at the core of who I am which I’ve talked about plenty of times before.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind being put in a situation with my Metastuff that mirrors the one I’ve been put into with my Stuff. If life narrowed, I’d be forced to discard some Metastuff, forced to come to terms with the fact that not all of it fits. Perhaps such a pruning process would lead to greater fruitfulness! Or perhaps it would just make me depressed. But one thing I’m pretty sure of: I’m not going to do it myself.

We talk a lot about how we Americans or Westerners have a disproportionate amount of Stuff. So maybe I’m more profoundly Western than I realized, with all this Metastuff. Maybe a superfluity of Metastuff (or Opportunity or Potential or Choice) is relatively new in the West, even. But maybe we should talk more about it, too.

At this time of year, the blog is usually full of ruminations on the birth of Christ (like this entry) or self-pity wallowings (like this rather plaintive entry or this poem from last year). But right now I have neither the time nor energy to be deeply profound nor (believe it or not) deeply self-centered.

So I thought I’d share, as rather paltry gifts, a few links to things I’ve loved recently; you may find them interesting!

First, for anyone who like me has been completely annoyed by (what I am calling) the “Dawkins Meme” of recent months, I want to give this article–a review of Dawkins’ new book by Terry Eagleton (who’s not, I don’t think, a Christian). The problem with Dawkins is not that he’s wrong–if we were to quantify beliefs, I’d probably agree with more of his than your average fundamentalist Christian–though certainly some basic ones differ. The problem is, as Eagleton says, his unwillingness to see surfacely-nuanced differences in “religious” systems that actually have huge under-the-hood ramifications.

Second, to all and sundry, I want to gift two podcasts done by St Paul’s Theological Centre in London, which happen to be interviews with NT Wright. The first podcast is on gnosticism, and the second podcast is on, among other things, “apocalypse”. I would go so far as to make the second one mandatory listening for any thoughtful Christian; it’s that good.

I have to admit, of course, that I’m drinking the NT Wright Kool-Aid at the moment. I’ve been reading his Christian Origins and the Question of God series, and am almost done with the second (long) volume, on Jesus. It’s been one of the most groundbreaking works I’ve read in a while. Last year I read some Kierkegaard and reflected that he had done more than anyone to re-affirm my love of Scripture as something worth remaining conversant with. Now, I’d say the same thing about NT Wright; I feel that I’ve been given a whole new (and better) way of reading the gospels (and much of the Old Testament). It seems as though I was dealing with something two-dimensional, and now the text has sprung to life amidst a vibrant and colorful context. My exegeses of almost every parable and saying of Jesus have been subtly, if not fundamentally, alered, and many things now just make sense that were opaque before.

This isn’t to say that Wright is correct on all his points (though as a novice in historical studies it’s hard for me to launch a critique), but rather that the overall story he is weaving answers, it seems, more questions than any other view I’ve come across. It has the result, of course, of turning much conventional “Christian” (particularly western fundamentalist) wisdom on its head–a result I’m amenable to in any case. So, if you are a Christian who cares about the content of your beliefs and whether or not they make sense, read these books.

Third and finally, I have a gift for lovers of language learning. I recently discovered that the iTunes music store has many language-learning podcasts available for free download. I found one for German that has 100 lessons, each ~15 minutes long. That’s essentially a 25-hour language course, free! I discovered these podcasts from a very helpful list of language-learning podcasts. From what it looks like, iTunes has a lot more that didn’t make this list, so I’m sure further exploration would be fruitful.

So again, I wish all of you a very happy Christmas, focused indeed on reflection on the having-already-come of the Messiah, and the having-already-been-inaugurated of the Kingdom of God. I leave you, therefore, with this excerpt from an article by CS Lewis (one that my family reads every Christmas Eve), which pretty much sums up my feelings about this time of year:

But I myself conversed with a priest in one of these temples and asked him why they kept Crissmas on the same day as Exmas; for it appeared to me inconvenient. But the priest replied, “It is not lawful, O stranger, for us to change the date of Crissmas, but would that Zeus would put it into the minds of the Niatirbians to keep Exmas at some other time or not to keep it at all. For Exmas and the Rush distract the minds even of the few from sacred things. And we indeed are glad that men should make merry at Crissmas; but in Exmas there is no merriment left.” And when I asked him why they endured the Rush, he replied, “It is, O Stranger, a racket”; using (as I suppose) the words of some oracle and speaking unintelligibly to me (for a racket is an instrument which the barbarians use in a game called tennis).

But what Hecataeus says, that Exmas and Crissmas are the same, is not credible. For first, the pictures which are stamped on the Exmas-cards have nothing to do with the sacred story which the priests tell about Crissmas. And secondly, the most part of the Niatirbians, not believing the religion of the few, nevertheless send the gifts and cards and participate in the Rush and drink, wearing paper caps. But it is not likely that men, even being barbarians, should suffer so many and great things in honour of a god they do not believe in.

The problem with good stories is that we cannot always live in them (barring the “good story” which is hopefully and supposedly the whole of our life–but right now I’m talking about good fiction stories; the kind that make you wish they were real). The problem with the best stories is their singularity of message: “Good stories are real! Believe in them!” And of course, they’re not real either, strictly speaking. There are no narphs and scrunts lurking round small ponds in my hometown, waiting to magically awaken greatness in me via some ancient link.

Even so, the problem has rather more to do with their truth than falsity. When I look soberly at reality I don’t find the details of Lady in the Water or The Silmarillion or Le Morte d’Artur, but on the other hand I do suppose that I believe reality really is something like those stories, at the end of the day. Reality involves things other than what we can see; reality involves hidden purposes and identities meant to be discovered; reality involves the endowing of normal human beings with abilities that, to someone from a different world, might seem magical.

No, the problem is not with the absence of “magic”–the problem is with my inability to see everything around me for what it really is (magical). And so I leave a good story feeling a sense of indescribable, desperate longing for something more exciting, more adventurous, more exotic, more epic, more fantastic, while steadfastly refusing to consider that if I were in one of those other worlds, I would be wishing the exact same thing, and a great bard of that place who told a story of Earth, her creation, the way that life springs from the very ground, and so on, would inspire me to dream great things. So the question becomes: how can we re-enchant this world? How can we de-familiarize ourselves from the radically “magical” events taking place around us always? It is not easy, and that is why we tell stories–to keep that sense alive somehow. But the result is that unfortunately I begin to desire the reality of the stories more than the reality of the real, based on unfair judgements of the real!

Alas, for now, I will keep running off to hear stories of marvelous and far-off worlds just to remind myself that such things are worth holding on to; but I hope that, instead of becoming depressed after hearing a good story and mourning the “death of the miraculous” in modern culture, I would learn to perceive the miraculous more easily all around. Clearly there is a tension here with my deeply-embedded scientific impulse to categorize and define; to resolve it I hope to be able to know both what a thing is and what a thing means. (In other words, the problem is not with any kind of scientific impulse per se, but rather the presumption of saying that knowledge of a thing’s true identity and significance can be adequately captured by scientific experimentation).

Nonetheless, we should re-establish frequent storytelling as a way to convey the deep truths of reality, even and especially if the best way to convey those truths is to speak of things like magical lands and mythical beings. Remember one of the most powerful lines from V for Vendetta: “Artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians cover it up”.

On the storyteller’s end, let us become adept at using such “lies” to tell the truth of a wonderful reality, but on the listener’s end, let us be adept at loving not the “lie” in virtue of its brilliant and captivating colors, but rather the even more brilliant and more captivating truth it (hopefully) conveys. For those like myself who love to live in the imagination, that second part will prove to be the harder of the two… But I personally hope the other side of that coin leads to an increased ability to tell the truth in story (the first part).

Gratuitous picture to get you to read further: Lovedrug’s symbol of the moment

Basically, I discovered that, for every reasonable length of time, there is a corresponding “rock ’n roll quota”, which I am calling the “quota of rock”, that needs to be met. I am here defining “rock” as an experience I have wherein I am able to “rock out” for an extended amount of time to music that I am not playing myself. (There is also a “quota of my rock”, but we’re not talking about that).

To “rock out” means to have an irresistible physical response to certain types of music, involving:

• Motion of the feet (but not so much motion as to be called “dancing”, usually). The traditional motion would be described as a slight raising and lowering of the heel, giving the impression of a runner being restrained to very small movements. Most people perform this motion in time with the basic beat of the song, but I like to get a little more complicated and mirror any further drum work with not just my heels (though they’re the more important part) but also the toes. I’m not sure how this looks to other people, but the great thing about “rocking out” is that, as a very basic method of dancing, no one really cares.
• Motion of the upper torso and head. Many people would call this “head-banging”, but it is in fact somewhat more nuanced (though, to be fair, it probably did evolve, as a more laid-back / adult / shoegazer form, from head-banging). The primary thing here is that the head needs to “bob” in time with the music, and needs to be forward and down on the downbeat. In quieter parts of the song, the head and neck are alone in this motion, but with crescendoes in the phrasing or volume, the upper torso gets involved as well. During particularly loud or violent parts of songs, the whole upper body could be seen to exhibit quite a range of forward-and-back (“rock”-ing) motion.
• If the music calls for it (i.e., if there is a part of the song which is particularly moving or emotional to the rocker), various side-to-side motions might be added. Typically this is done first with the head–but it’s important to note that any swaying is in addition to the forward-and-back rocking, not instead of it.
• In more punk-style crowds, or if there is a piano - fortissimo transition (as when a rock band might suddenly halt all noise on the downbeat of 3 in 4/4 time, providing a silent tension, and then come crashing in on the next 1), you might also come across jumping motions. Again, these are simple up-and-down motions that go along with the base beats of the song. In the punk-style crowds, the jumping is accompanied by certain hand motions, but I mostly stay away from these–I like to keep the feeling of a tense core, taught but fluid.
• In line with the last thought, hands are infrequently used in rocking out. For me, they typically remain in the pockets, or if I’m feeling like a change is needed, they can be brought out and crossed across my chest. Once in a while, if I’m in a more emo mood, the hands can be used as drumsticks on the chest.

Let that suffice for rocking out, in general. For me, however, there is another very important element to rocking out which isn’t necessarily universally shared: singing along. Certain environmental attributes need to be in place for singing along to be valid, but the most important of which is that the music needs to be loud enough so that, when singing at max volume, my voice is still relatively quiet enough not to affect other concert-goers’ experience. I don’t mean that they shouldn’t hear me at all, but rather that my personal rock contribution would mix well with what is coming from the speakers. In fact, I myself like to hear those next to me singing as well–it gives a sense of unity and solidarity…there is nothing quite like rocking out with a group of good friends. There are those, less-initiated perhaps, who go to shows and become indignant when the rest of the crowd participates via singing loudly and/or rocking out around them. I learned long ago that I can’t worry about what such people think about me, because they don’t know what’s going on. As a rule of thumb, if you go to a rock show and don’t want to be involved in the rocking out, sit at a table somewhere in the back.

Rock shows consist of a number of bands (usually 3), so they tend to last for a few hours. Thus to sing and rock out with total abandon for that time period is a tiring proposition. We can formulate a Law of Rock Fatigue, in fact: F = Rl, where F is physical body fatigue, R is a constant denoting the rockingestness of a given band, and l is the length of time the band plays ( tend - tstart). Things become more complicated when you add multiple bands in a row, and we have to define the temporal fatigue quantifier (Q), which has been experimentally determined to be: Q = ((t1 - t0)/10) + 1. Here, t1 - t0 is the time in hours between the time the given band starts and the time the first band started (meaning, for the first band, Q = 1). Thus for any given show, rock fatigue (in units I will call “tireds”) is calculated via the formula (where n is the number of bands playing the show):

F = Q1R1l1 + Q2R2l2 + … + QnRnln

All this is to say that after rocking out, you might expect to have increased in at least a few tireds. That’s ok, though, because the number of tireds gained as a result of rocking out is directly proportional to the increase in the quota of rock, which is what this whole entry is about.

Anyway, over the past year, it has been obvious that my quota of rock has been largely unmet. Thus it was with great relish that I felt the tank of rock being filled up last night at the show. The opening band, Cast of Thousands or something like that, was unimpressive. Their music was good, but their stage presence exuded self-importance, posturing, and over-dramatization. Thankfully Lovedrug was none of the above, and they rocked out like crazy, increasing the heights of rockage to which I myself aspire. There was much Jonathan-esque rocking out, including singing along with the lead singer’s odd, high, crooning voice, which melded perfectly into the wall of strident guitar anthems. Lovedrug plays a kind of dark and beautiful rock (at times heavy, at times not) accompanied by brilliant vocal melodies, reminiscent of Muse, but in my opinion better. Importantly, they completely nailed their set, and what’s more, I could tell they were playing their hearts out; it is rare and awesome when those two events coincide.

The headliner for the evening was Smoking Popes, an old punk-style band from Chicago (I believe it is their reunion tour). I went to the show to hear Lovedrug, but Chuck had given me some Popes stuff beforehand, and I thought it was fair; so I was surprised when their live performance was far better than fair–it was incredible! An hour went by like a minute amidst a happy crowd bouncing and rocking out to catchy and sincerely-delivered melodic indie punk tunes.

The bottom line is that I need such experiences far more often than I remember to go after them. There’s something very satisfying and purifying about rocking out, and I feel very much at home in an indie rock crowd, despite all the pretentiousness that could justifiably be attributed to it. Also, going to shows tends to inspire me to write more music and care more about getting my music around. It is a yet-unfulfilled dream that Splendour Hyaline would have the opportunity to tour as a band in our own right, maybe with awesome folks like Lovedrug. Of course, there are many barriers to pursuing such a dream, but it is fun to be reminded of it nonetheless.

Well, so much for rocking out–now I’m heading out of town for Memorial Day weekend, where I will hopefully be doing another kind of rocking out–on real rocks. And wearing the awesome Lovedrug zipper hoodie that I bought to support such a great band–it’s blue with that sweet Pegasus guy on the front. Cheers.

PS: Check out this music video for Lovedrug’s song Spiders, one of their less-hardcore, more-accessible songs (maybe the single?).

I saw the movie a few days ago, and so I thought I’d make a short list of some important ways that it was different than the book:

• The movie’s plot was less complicated.
• Langdon was more of a spineless religioid. (In the book, he knew about, and believed, the Priory’s story. In the movie, he calls it a “myth”, tacks “according to the Priory myth” on the end of all his statements, and argues unconvincingly about it with Teabing–using much the same arguments as moviegoers would expect frustrated Christians to use). Ultimately he comes across as having gone on a journey of personal discovery, which is not at all the character of the book.
• Bezu Fache was more of a religious fanatic, and a forensic dupe (as opposed to the brilliant, hard-as-nails police captain from the novel).
• Teabing was a much more lively character than I would have assumed from the book.
• The conclusion, especially regarding Sophie’s family, was far less satisfying.

Apart from the Teabing bit, all of these were disappointments. The one change I really liked about the movie was the part where Robert finds the seal under the sign of the rose in the keystone. It is covered with “mysterious writing” (in reality, just English written reflectedly). In the book, the characters agonize for a long time over its deciphering. But it is quite clearly (there’s a picture in the book) English. In the movie, Robert takes one glance at it and says, “We need a mirror,” as any non-catatonic English-speaker would. So it cleared up one embarrassment.

Now, mostly what I want to talk about is two broader-picture statements which occurred in the movie explicitly but not in the book. As we will see, it’s to Dan Brown’s credit that he didn’t write such laughable dialogue into the novel. (Or if he did, it was done in such a way that I missed it).

First, there is a statement Ian McKellen’s character (Leigh Teabing) makes after the argument over the truth of the Priory myth. He says:

As long as there has been the one true God, there has been killing in his name.

The statement, of course, is true. But it’s only an interesting statement in light of another proposition, which I take here to be necessary and implicit, namely that (a) if we hadn’t “invented” the one true God, there would have been no religious killing. Or, (b) if we “de-invent” God, there will be substantially less killing. Or, what would be most absurd, (c) if we were polytheists, we wouldn’t kill people.

Obviously, none of those statements come anywhere near true. The fact is that, while religion does spawn its fair share of killing, it is only insofar as religion is being used by those with power to kill those they don’t like (for, I’m certain, fundamentally non-religious reasons). In other words, the base motive for religious killings is the same as the base motive for any other type of killing–but the word “God”, like the word “patriotism” or the words “national security”, gets mouthed as a way to spin deaths so that they seem less barbaric, less arbitrary, and less for a certain party’s benefit.

Pay attention: when the wizard behind the machine of war is finally revealed, we will all stare, not into the face of some lie about God’s existence, but into our own hearts, and our own lust for power and control.

So it is strange to me how often I run across people who are saying, in one form or another, that many of the world’s great ills are somehow caused by God (the idea of God, that is, according to them). I feel it is strange not because the data don’t support such a supposition, but because it is so obviously a superficial reading of the data. I can’t believe anyone would put it forward who has taken a serious and hard look at human nature, religious or areligious.

Now to the second quote from the movie. It was a bit longer, so I’m sure I’ll get it wrong and this is more of a paraphrase. But it went something like this (when Teabing is trying to convince Sophie to “reveal herself” as the heir of Christ, in order to bring the secret truth of the Priory to the world–Teabing is talking):

Sophie, you have the power to take thousands of years of bloodshed, and the oppression of women, and racism…with this one act you can make it all go away, put everything to rights at last!

I have a hard time imagining the script writer thinking that such a statement would come across as anything but naive absurdity. Again, the basic fallacy is the same: no doubt Christians have collaborated in all kinds of evil schemes involving bloodshed, the oppression of women, and racism. But that is not to say in the least that ridding the world of Christianity would rid the world of any of those ills. No–unfortunately, evil can transform any system into a guise, a front for its operations. Women were oppressed because evil men wanted power, not because men where Christians. It just so happened, even if the correllation is true (which it’s not, really) that Christian language could be used in the mouths of evil men just as easily as any other kind of talking.

Again my worry is that somehow, after seeing the movie, people will think there is some basis to such a lame duck of an analysis of the history of evil over the past 2000 years. I mean, I can certainly see the appeal of a scapegoat. But we need to be aware that the cause of oppression, racism, and war is not some system that has a name and that we can topple–no, the cause is us. It’s the ones perpetrating the injustices, and the ones letting it go on happening. Of course, we will use whatever is at hand to justify evil action and inaction, even if that is Christianity (as it was apparently used to keep slaves in America from trying for freedom). But were Christianity not around, we would just use something else.

(Side note: maybe that’s where a post-modern, deconstructionist methodology could actually aid us–it is very good at laying bare the hidden motives of people and systems, and the flow of power.)

Anyway, that’s that for my Da Vinci Code kick. I just thought it was a good opportunity to take on some of the more silly things that people think (enough people, apparently, for those philosophical memes to have trickled down into mass media). Also, it was fun to actually write about something besides myself for a while. Hopefully the trend will continue!

Update: found a great review of the movie in the New Yorker…check it out!

First, it’s a fun read. The plot is more or less a movie script–chopped up into small scenes, and everything described seemingly just for the director of photography. In some cases I even had the strange feeling that when I see the movie this weekend (or whenever), I’ll have predicted most of the zooms and fades that will be a part of the cinematography. I guess that’s supposed to make The Da Vinci Code bad literature. I don’t really have any love for the lit snobs, but Shakespeare aside, it was sort of annoying. It felt syncopated, and like I was being coddled or overfed. You just can’t have 100 climaxes in one novel; there needs to be more foreplay. But all that is to say, I think it will be a great movie. The plot itself is certainly fast-paced, and the mysteries are for the most part not inane. Some of the clues were easy to figure out beforehand, but others weren’t. Anyway–a fun read. And quick. Moreover it appealed to the cryptologist in me–I used to study and write ciphers and codes when I was a child, and spend hours reading about their historical uses and such.

Second, it’s easy to see why Christians would protest the book. After all, one thing we know about Christians is that they will protest anything that looks like it could undermine their already-fast-eroding image in popular culture. The fact that this is the subject of The Da Vinci Code just makes people pay less attention. The book’s basically saying, “Christianity acts to silence things it doesn’t like”, so whatever the factual state of the content which drives that polemic vehicle, people will feel it is corroborated by Christians acting to silence it. In “responding”, Christians will unwittingly substantiate the very claims they want to debunk. This is both unfortunate and unfair. I say it is unfair because the situation is set up in such a way so that any “response” will seem hollow from the outset. I say it is unfortunate because, again, things are set up to disincline people on either side from looking beyond the red-herringed, surface issues. What matters at this stage is not, as you might think, whether Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and all the rest. What matters is that such a suggestion will rile Christians up so that any interlocutor will sense a great amount of defensiveness, and feel justified in affirming the book’s central tenet. What is that central tenet? To illustrate, I’ll quote a longish section (from the end of Chapter 82, in a conversation between the main characters):

“There’s an enormous difference between hypothetically discussing an alternate history of Christ, and…” He paused.

“And what?”

“And presenting to the world thousands of ancient documents as scientific evidence that the New Testament is false testimony.”

“But you told me the New Testament is based on fabrications.”

Langdon smiled. “Sophie, every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith–acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors.”

“So you are in favor of the Sangreal documents staying buried forever?”

“I’m a historian. I’m opposed to the destruction of documents, and I would love to see religious scholars have more information to ponder the exceptional life of Jesus Christ.”

“You’re arguing both sides of my question.”

“Am I? The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth.”

“My point exactly,” Langdon said. “Religious allegory has become a part of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people cope and be better people.”

“But it appears their reality is false.”

Langdon chuckled. “No more false than that of a mathematical cryptographer who believes in the imaginary number ’ i’ because it helps her break codes.”

Sophie frowned. “That’s not fair.”

There are many, many things to unpack in this segment. We might begin by pointing out that Sophie’s retort at the end is right on–it is unfair for Langdon to assume the non-reality of i. The non-reality of mathematical entities is by no means a settled (or majority) philosophical opinion. The larger issue is of course The Da Vinci Code’s implicit claim that there are really two “realities” that we exist in. One is the reality of objective truth, where “scientific evidence” belongs. The other is the reality of “fundamental guideposts”, of “religious allegory” that “helps millions of people cope and be better people.” Here Brown reduces to a strident echo of the vox populi of our age, and he fails to adequately respond to Sophie’s insistence that “their reality is false.”

There really is a deep philosophical tension here. Why is it at all appropriate to sidestep questions of truth in favor of a pseudo-reality that somehow “helps people”. Why would we think there is any guarantee that pseudo-realities can “help” people? It seems that in our most primitive of experiences (walking, eating, and so forth), departing from that more “objective reality”–the one where science operates–comes with deadly consequences. Everyone knows there are a million examples, but I’ll give one: it does me no good to declare that, although Drano, scientifically speaking, is not food, in my “spiritual reality” or whatever, I can partake of it for sustenance. Now, it is one thing to talk about partaking of Drano. If, on the other hand, I really engage in the activity, I will soon learn that my self-constructed “spiritual reality” is no match for that other reality. It seems that The Da Vinci Code agrees so far (“The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors.”)

So let’s ask another awkward question: How could it be beneficial to believe in anything that we don’t consider to be a part of that “objective” reality? How could it be beneficial to me to believe that Drano is sustenance if I simultaneously know that Drano is not really sustenance? The imagined response is that the Drano example is nonsensical, whereas if we’re talking about Jesus, the answer is obvious: Jesus inspires people. He was the proto-feminist, he was a liberator, etc. But this dodges the issue, for the issue is why it would be beneficial to continue to speak of things like Jesus’ divinity, his virgin birth, his miracles, and his resurrection, if such things did not happen. The only way out appears to be to say that these things are all symbolic–they remind us and point out to us the things that actually are real in the non-religious sense of “real”, e.g., his proto-feminism, his love of outcasts, and so forth. But does this not seem like some sort of Da Vinci Code itself? Some sort of serpentine path of clues that leads right back–to where we started. My point is this–if you believe certain things about Jesus and not others, you will ultimately only be inspired by the things you believe about him–not the ones you don’t.

And yet there is a bit of positive insight in the passage we just read as well–people do try to “get at” God, or the “unprocessible” via metaphor. Metaphor is extremely valuable in this sense. And of course, as The Da Vinci Code suggests, to believe literally in these metaphors is to commit a fallacy. But it is not a fallacy to believe literally in the thing the metaphor is attempting to “get at”. Moreover, it goes without saying that Dan Brown pulls a bit of a fast one in that it is presupposed that language of Jesus’ miracles and resurrection are metaphorical. While it is inappropriate to take a metaphor literally, it is not inappropriate to take a literal statement literally. “Jesus Christ is Lord of the Earth” is thus a statement whose metaphoricity, and therefore the appropriateness of its being taken literally, depend on the epistemology of the one uttering the statement. In fact, metaphor always operates this way–so it is curious to see The Da Vinci Code proposing the metaphor as existing somehow objectively. What should be proposed as existing (or not existing) objectively are facts which substantiate the literal form of the statement. If there are none such, those who believe the proposition can be stated literally will eventually find themselves in the proverbial Drano-drinking situation. So it is at this stage that it begins to matter whether Christ resurrected or not.

Anyway, all this is supposed to highlight: The Da Vinci Code seems to propose that it is OK to “believe” things that, strictly speaking, we know to be false (in the “real” reality), as long as we just talk about believing them, or believe them in some vague non-propositional way, or engage in some other as-yet-undiscovered propositional attitude like “believe-as-metaphor” towards claims like “Jesus is divine” or “the Buddha came from a lotus blossom”. The instant we transfer those claims to normal propositional attitudes like “believe-to-be-true”, however, we have transgressed. Why? Because, according to The Da Vinci Code, they are not really true (in the story, remember, there are “thousands of ancient documents” which prove such claims to be false). But there is no good reason given for why anyone should think it is OK to believe things we know to be false, other than that it helps us become better people. Why better people, rather than worse people? It’s unclear, when it’s exactly the thing that needs to be the clearest–something is practical only insofar as it is seen to be useful for a certain, pre-defined end. In this case The Da Vinci Code is supposing that “false religious belief” is practical, but the only end in sight is this one of “becoming better people”. Since such an end requires definition and elucidation, but none is forthcoming in the book, we are left at a dead end.

Ironically (but perhaps sensibly, given what I’ve said), the story’s main characters do not seem to spend a lot of time pondering whether they should adopt some false religious beliefs to better themselves. No–they are enlightened because they have the knowledge that these beliefs are actually false, and so feel no pull towards engaging in belief of them, metaphorically or otherwise. Robert and Sophie spend their time deliberating what to do about “all those poor people who actually really believe these things”, and settle on this strategy of protecting their schizophrenic reality. You definitely get the feeling that they are looking down from the heights of enlightenment and power because they actually know the truth. They’ve chosen to keep that truth hidden, for the psychological safety of the world, but the last thing they’d do is engage in beliefs that contradict that truth.

Thus the book sends an odd message, which if I were to paraphrase it, would be like this: “Seek the truth with all your heart, and when you’ve gotten it, congratulate yourself on being more enlightened than the rest. Go to great lengths not to disturb others with your enlightenment, because the brutes aren’t ready; they might be destroyed. Now contemplate the sacred feminine.” Or something similar. So there is a very devious talking out of both sides of the mouth going on. On one side we have the age-old draw of Gnosticism–come closer, and I will ravage your soul with secret knowledge that will transform you into something greater! It’s no less Gnosticism for the fact that, in The Da Vinci Code, it could be construed as atheistic. And on the other side we have a very un-thought-out religious pluralism, where religious beliefs live in some sort of “personal reality” that, when all is said and done, don’t affect anyone’s lives at all. (“Jesus is divine” just ends up meaning “Jesus was a feminist” or something). In this story, the Gnostic heroes end up being the guardians of the rest of humanity, and their secrecy is reinforced

It seems to me that, once all these issues are on the table, the door is opened to discuss the factual nature of The Da Vinci Code’s claims about Christianity, specifically. As it turns out, most of the more juicy ones are quite historically off, or uncorroborated, or pure speculation spun into a good mystery (but taken by many as true). I won’t go into any of these specifically here. But I will mention that we at Teleios have recently partnered with Alpha in the UK to deliver a video seminar of theirs on The Da Vinci Code, where they do go into some detail. I’d recommend taking a look at it–but only after having read all the foregoing. As I said before, jumping right into defensive debates about the facts can only reinforce that message of the book which says that Christians do have something to fear. To get to the course, just go to http://alpha.org/davinci/. Incidentally, I’ve got a Reddit going trying to promote it–if you find the framework/video valuable, please go to this page and vote for it!

The second part of what I want to say has to do with what I would call The Da Vinci Code’s misconstruing, not now the facts of Christianity, but rather the meaning, or message, or point of it. Here are some key implications from the book:

• The nature of Christianity is such that it is constantly engaged in covering things up, hiding them
• Christianity opposes free thinking
• Christianity subjugates women
• Christianity glorifies masculinity and silences femininity
• The Church, not Jesus, is the source of our understandings of him
• The Church opposed paganism, not because she (curiously, the Church is often thought of as female, something which doesn’t make sense on The Da Vinci Code’s reading of it) thought it was false, but because it was afraid paganism would reveal the Church’s true roots
• Christianity is anti-sexual, and tries to suppress our natural and good longings for sex

…and so on. These are the things that really frustrated me, because it showed a very deep and personal (on the part of Dan Brown) misunderstanding of Christianity and the Church. Let me put it very bluntly: to the extent that those statements describe an actual religion or an actual group of people, that religion and/or that group of people are not Christianity or the Church!. The fact that so many people obviously resonate with The Da Vinci Code’s vision of Christianity shows that these claims have been too often corroborated in people’s experience. That is where our shame (as Christians) should be–not that we have hidden or covered up anything (because we haven’t–not like the The Da Vinci Code says, anyway), but rather that actions or words of ours have been interpreted as substantiating (or, worse, really did substantiate) those claims.

What I want to do is uphold both Christ’s resurrection and Christianity’s reverence for both the male and female roles and purposes and all the rest. There is no need to invent a Christ who married Mary Magdalene to convince me that Christianity promotes equality for women. But the tone of the book is that such is indeed the way of things. Another example: there is a sharp line drawn, in The Da Vinci Code, between a “healthy” sexuality, and Christian practice. While of course I would disagree with many people’s views on what is a “healthy” sexuality, I want to deny that Christianity has anything to do with repressing sexual desire in general, or treating it as unholy, or punishing people for certain thoughts, and so on.

I guess in sum it is just sad that The Da Vinci Code’s accusations have found such a ready reception. It means that they are obviously not baseless, in terms of how Christianity is seen and what some Christians have done in the world. But they are baseless in terms of who Jesus Christ was, and how it was intended that Christians live their lives, even and especially on an orthodox view of Christ, including his divinity and resurrection and all that. It is the pages of the Christian scriptures, not the Gnostic ones, that hold the keys to true freedom, liberation, and happiness–indeed the very kind of freedom, liberation, and happiness that people want! (Not some made-up “church” kind. Actual, real happiness).

Now, let me bring things to a close and restate my thoughts more succinctly: First, the way The Da Vinci Code phrases its claims is somewhat sneaky, in that some ways of responding to it could actually inadvertently substantiate those claims. So in talking about it, some groundwork must be laid. Second, whether or not it is OK to be a Christian actually depends on some facts about the world (like whether or not Christ rose from the dead)–not just on whether I can, in some reality distortion field, make metaphorical claims that sound like Christian tenets. Luckily, The Da Vinci Code doesn’t dig up anything that need cause those central issues to be doubted (though it should be said, of course, that if one held certain non-central issues as central, one might find them eroding). Third, we (Christians) need to do something to re-educate the world about our views on the list above, to show that, really, they have no basis in the life or teachings of the one we supposedly follow.

Well, I’m looking forward to seeing the movie this weekend or soon, and watching the reactions. As always, I will hold my breath more out of fear that the “Christian” response will be inappropriate or stupid, or not nuanced enough to see the questions that are really beneath the surface, and not the ones on top. But that’s just the way it is! Meanwhile, the general spiritual backdrop of our time continues to shift further away from the Christianity of modernism. While that shift will continue to be attended by pockets of popular (but unsubstantiated) speculation, like The Da Vinci Code, it is in my mind a good thing, overall. One has only to visit certain churches in the US to know that, even if there was no cover-up, something, somewhere down the line from Christ, has been lost. Maybe it would be better for us to engage in the search for that Holy Grail than to worry about how Dan Brown is defining his.

Here it is, exactly as I wrote it out over the 10-day adventure (any editorial additions or comments will be italicized and in brackets):

Things that are true

Things that are true, honest, bare, stripped down, inspired. The result of travel, solitude, conversation, thought, pain.

1. I love languages. I love being in places where there are many spoken. I love learning them. I love reading them. I love thinking about words, their histories, their variants.

2. I love being overseas. I love being in a place where I know so little that my goal is to understand. In the States, I criticize. In Greece, I try to understand. This is better. I don’t know the rules of the game, so I can’t judge people or systems. [For example,] I don’t know what faith means here, so I can’t judge. It is a relief.

3. I love foreign women. I love it when we catch eyes. We can’t understand each other, but there is a connection. I want to understand…I want to progress in knowing. Maybe a foreign woman is not necessary for this, but there is some real, obvious symbolism in the juxtaposition of languages and cultures that makes me think: here, there is something in which I can progress in understanding.

4. I really want someone to love. I long and yearn for the possibility of a caress or kiss–these physical realities are central and important to me, and I feel deprived of them. I know they must correspond to emotional and spiritual realities, but I am blessed with friends and companions so much that I do not feel deprived in those areas. Thus right now the daydreams focus on the physical–not meaning sexual–since it is what I lack.

5. I love solitude. I am beginning to realize this again after years of growing in social skill. I love community, but at the root I am an individual, and I need time alone. To think, to play music [without wondering if I am annoying roommates or neighbors, without being afraid to sing loud], to wonder, to be sad, to pray… I think I have been deprived of this lately. What I need is radical, intense community, and radical, intense solitude. Recently, I have had neither. Even when I am married, solitude will be important to me. Separation and union, separation and union–Riddle-maker of Hed style [which won’t make sense to any of you unless you read this book]. Is this healthy? In any case it is new–in relationships I am usually clingy–tending toward perpetual union. But now I taste the desire for solitude and space even in that [most intimate] relationship.

6. I am ashamed of Christian symbols. The Bible on the table, the “I went to Bible school,” the cross necklace, the mentioning of Christian band names, etc… I am afraid when a stranger sees or hears these things on/about me or someone I am with, they will assume I am a certain way–corresponding to an image of a Christian they have in their head. But I am almost certainly nothing like that at all! [Maybe the more general observation is that] I want no one to be able to stereotype me in ways I don’t encourage. Is this possible? Should I care? Is this feeling tantamount to being ashamed of Christ?

7. In social situations, I am a paradox. I have two contradictory drives. One is to avoid notice and attention–to be like everyone else–to fit in. Another is to insist that I am different–to stand out. Maybe the rule of thumb is this: in situations where people would think I am the same as those around me (church, for example), I insist on my difference. And in situations where people would think that I am different (Greece, for example), I do all I can to avoid this attention–to blend in.

8. In general, I am very wary of people making assumptions about me. In fact, I hate it. For example, I am easily annoyed on this trip with my sister partly because I see people assuming that we are dating/engaged/married (she has a promise ring on her wedding ring finger which could be mistaken for something else). It really rubs me raw–not sure if it has anything to do with Rachel or if it would be the same with anyone. [After reflection, I’m thinking the latter…it is just hard to flirt with girls if they think I am with the person who is actually my sister] 9. I love exploring. I love going places other people aren’t, especially if it involves difficulty. I love doing it alone, and finding secret hidden treasures! (Or places, views, moments…)

10. I love moving. I love motion. Whether running, biking, driving, mopedding, sailing, ferrying, flying, swimming…. I love the feel of wind or water against me. I especially love it when I am controlling the motion–I have a natural affinity for driving, flying, boating, piloting anything [and by affinity I don’t mean skill, but rather something more like “joy”]. And, I always want to do these things as fast as possible. It seems beautiful to combine speed and controlled motion. I will always choose such activities over standing still.

11. When I am learning languages, random words that I recently learned tend to pop into my head, and I roll them over and over–I don’t forget these words, but I do forget others.

12. I need someone who is skilled at drawing me gently out of the depths of myself at the right times. Those depths are beautiful, but can be suffocating. In return I will draw her in to that world where there is much wonder to be experienced.

13. I am deeply and irrevocably romantic (though it may only last until I find a girl, or she finds me). Every time I go outside, or ride a bus, or fly on an airplane, or whatever, I believe with a real hope that girl X who sits next to me has been divinely put there so that we can start a beautiful story. Just like how all romantic movies begin.

14. I do not know if my desire to be in love is selfish. [By which I mean, I do not know if it is purely selfish] 15. I am not accurate at guessing girls’ ages. Or guys’, for that matter….

16. Some people inspire me to think great thoughts–they don’t think the thoughts themselves, necessarily, but rather spur me towards an exciting personal intellectual discovery. Some people inspire me to dream great things in areas other than intellectual (say spiritual, social). Some people, on the other hand, frustrate me, and leave me feeling like I’ve gone nowhere, or backwards. Others don’t have either of these effects. Two observations: (1) After being around the inspiring kind of person, it is such an incredible experience that I unavoidably want that in a girlfriend/wife. (2) I can understand the need to be around the frustrating and ambivalent types, but right now I feel that those are the strong majority of people who surround me. This causes unhappiness.

17. I really want a dog.

18. I have an inflated view of my appearance. On the inside I feel dramatic, dark, mysterious, and enticing. I walk around feeling/imagining myself this way. When I see pictures of myself, I am always surprised at how disappointingly not like this image I am. It does not lower my self-esteem, however, because as soon as my eyes leave the photo, I believe I am the image again. Thus my self-esteem is very good, but based on a lie. That’s referring to my facial appearance, hair, mannerisms, etc… i.e., things I can’t easily change. Things I can change via exercise, like being ripped/fast/strong/sexy, I “fix”. But that’s not what I mean when I talk about “image”.

19. When I hear stories of great and heroic deeds or discoveries, or about great leaders or thinkers of the past, there is a deep resonance in my heart and soul. Maybe I have just read too much fantasy, but I believe I have a high and important destiny. Thus when I look around and see that this is in all likelihood an illusion (there are no more real adventures to be had), I am deeply saddened. The progress of humanity has destroyed the possibility for true individual greatness, and so I feel that I was born for another time and place; here and now, greatness is dead.

20. I identify with archetypes and archaic or mythical roles and persons–not real people living here and now.

21. It is much easier for me to flirt with girls in other cultures than in the States.

22. I have a high opinion of how responsible I would be with a lot of power, and the revolutionarily Christian way I would use it for good.

23. I can do everything, but the world is set up for people to do just one thing.

24. Going out for the sake of going out is expensive and often a disappointing waste of time. But it is all some people do.

25. Music is my great companion and comfort, the way that I believe God loves me. I believe another such doorway will open when I fall in love with a girl. For now, it is music.

26. I love logic, symbols, and mathematics.

27. It never occurred to me until recently that I might not become an academic.

28. Of all the cultures I have traveled to, I find that Americans have the worst attitudes and are the least helpful in service roles.

29. I form habits extremely quickly, but discard them much less quickly. (The first part relative to others). Hence I often force myself to switch things up, arbitrarily, in minor issues.

There ended the list from the trip. But in the last few days, I would have added one more (if only to round it out to 30):

30. For me, joy is inextricably linked to hope. If am hopeful, I have joy. If I am hopeless, I do not. For any number of reasons, I have not been hopeful for over 4 months, and that explains why joy has also been absent. This is kind of a problem–hope has to do with the future, but joy is supposed to be concerned with the present. But it explains why I always like to have some trip or something fun on the horizon to look forward to–it ensures that there will always be a minimum of joy in my life.

I was hoping that maybe the process of creating this admittedly random list might help me with my current life dilemma, which is that, given that there are no practical limitations on where I might live and what I might do next year, where should I go, and what should I do? We could make it a binary dilemma: should I stay here and do what I’m doing now, or not? As should now be apparent if you read the list, there does seem to be something in me that wants to live in another country, for example, or devote myself to learning a new language. The problem is that such a choice would come with all kinds of sacrifices…and I don’t know how to navigate them.

In the end I don’t know if the list helped. As I should have expected would be the case, I just feel more confused. Any ideas? Well, I hope the foregoing has been illuminating as regards my personality; I am certainly happy with it as the fruit of my solitude during the trip.

4-2, 8:11 AM, The Aegean

I slept fitfully last night…it didn’t feel like I slept at all, but 5:30 AM eventually did come. Rachel and I were out of the hostel at 6, meeting up with our hostel-mate Victor, who was traveling to Santorini on the same boat as us. We walked the deserted Athens streets and caught the Metro to Peiraias in time to buy a sandwich and board our ferry–a large, cruise-style ferry with first class, cabins, etc… I think it counts as the biggest ship I have ever sailed on. The seats are large and comfortable! When we set sail, I went to the deck and took pictures of the sunrise as we were leaving port. Again, there was a sense of excitement, as well as a sense of deep sadness. Here at this port and in this ocean were spawned the tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Great men and adventurers saw the same hills as they worked their sails in the harbor. Then, leaving was actually meaningful–the weather was fickle, and there was never a sure return. Traveling took adventure and commitment. Now, all it takes is 30 euros. The port was bustling this morning, as it would have been 2,500 years ago, but today it was filled with the noise and smell of cars, and the waiting ships spouted black smoke in the air. What sadness! Are there any adventures left? It doesn’t seem so. The ocean is a sea of calm, barely a ripple as we glide through. But I wish, just a little, that a storm would come and make things more interesting.

4-1, 7:30 PM, Athens

So we arrived OK. After a long, cramped ride from Chicago to London, I settled in at British Airways’ executive lounge, where Rachel arrived shortly after I did. It was good to see her, and she looked all pro with her backpack and whatnot. We had a long layover, and boarded our plane to Athens around 9:45 PM. We’d tried to talk about how things were going with us [our relationship] in Heathrow, but I was very tired and kind of annoyed so it didn’t really go anywhere. It didn’t help that I couldn’t get my mind off of “my troubles”–made worse in public places, where there are hundreds of girls for me to be constantly evaluating–not sexually or anything, just… [hmm, this one is kind of hard to explain sensibly…]. So, the peace of airplane solitude was definitely broken.

On the seat in front of us on the flight, there was a young Greek woman, and I realized again how attracted I am to foreign girls. Something about speaking other languages just makes them infinitely more beautiful…I wonder if that’s something that would wear off, if it’s something I should really care about or look for…I don’t know. Is it true mystery or just surface mystery? Probably depends [just like with women in my own culture] on the girl.

Anyway, our flight got in on time, and Rach and I found the bus to Syntagma square alright–10 minutes later, and we were waking up the receptionist at our hostel! The room was small but we were tired, and it was after 4 AM. The next day we slept until about 2 PM, then braved the ancient Athens streets for the first time. I was pretty amazed by how close our place was to the center of everything–the Acropolis, the temples, etc… Rach and I found a grocery store and got a loaf of bread and some chicken salad for lunch. Not quite gyros, but cheap. Then we proceeded to get ourselves lost until dinner, taking in the maze of old streets, the views of the agora [the ancient agora] and the acropolis which promised an enjoyable morrow. [Even though] tired, we decided to walk across town to the Lykebatos hill, on which was a church and some awesome views of just-past-sunset Athens. Food there being too expensive, we walked all the way back to our hostel and ate at an estiatorio [restaurant] next door around 9 PM–the meal, which was excellent, lasted till 11 or so!

This morning, being Saturday, the 1st, we woke up relatively early to go on our walking tour. It was as you’d expect such tours would be–a lot of walking interspersed with some ancient monuments. Being some of the most important ancient monuments in the world, it was an incredible experience. In the space of 15 minutes I’d stood where Socrates had taught, and sat where Paul had preached in the Areopagus. So much history I was overwhelmed by it–but the hundreds of other tourists there didn’t seem to be–talking, laughing, smoking, littering…on the Areopagus, the stone smelled of cheap beer from a recently-broken bottle. It made me angry at humanity, both specifically for littering there, and more generally for creeping with its ugly modernity over and into places which should have been kept holy as monuments to the more important kinds of progress–philosophical and religious, for example.

In my opinion, to be in ancient Athens and to be anything but in awe is to be disrespectful of our own nature–all that God has given us to be. So in that sense I’m actually quite glad I don’t live here–these monuments can thus stay mysterious and far-away, otherworldly. The chattering tourist mob still kind of ruined it for me, but at least my imagination could still conjure up the sights and smells of a bygone era, when people were probably exactly how they were today, in terms of forgetting how to be in awe. Even then, better to have been the pilgrim from a distant village than a desensitized resident of the Acropolis. Well, I’m rambling–I should get Rachel and find a place to eat dinner. Tonight we pack, for tomorrow we leave very early for the boat to Santorini, where we’ll spend the next 3 days!

Now, I want to preface this whole entry with a bit of history, since to many of you it may come as a shock that for most of my life I have considered myself and been considered by others a “gamer”. If you want to skip the history and get to the point, scroll down to “The Reason for this Entry” below.

A Personal Gaming History

My dad was into computers and hardware since I was a baby, so we always had a computer in the family. I think the first one was an Apple, but when we moved back to the States in 1988 from Papua New Guinea, our home computer became a PC with MS-DOS. Being a technically-minded youngster, my dad and I would spend hours together playing with hardware, installing hard drives and so forth–and he taught me how to use DOS commands like “cd”, “dir”, “md”, and so on; he even taught me how to create .bat scripts! Later on I furthered my own education and learned how to write .com programs in assembly using “copy con”. Anyway, seeing that I took well to these sorts of things, my parents allowed me to play games on the computer, even though we had a no-Nintendo policy. Thus began a long love affair with PC gaming (and not, of course, console gaming).

Games were like books to me–little consumable pieces of fun that would transport me to different worlds, or allow me to be creative and imaginative, or give me a chance to learn more about computers (back in those days, things usually didn’t just “work”–before running many games, you had to edit system startup files to allocate the correct amounts of memory to different parts of the system, or set IRQ settings for multimedia equipment because different games used different ports). I would get games usually via one of four ways. Occasionally my dad would bring home a game he’d borrowed from a friend (like Gunship 2000), or found overseas for cheap (like Prince of Persia). More often I would be messing around on one of the many Dallas-based BBSes, looking through the downloads section for shareware games to get and try out (incidentally, BBS culture and reminiscences are worth their own entry, but I probably won’t ever have the time to write such things out). Otherwise, I’d borrow and install games from my friends Nathan or Sean or Ben. This was before the days of cd-roms and copy protection, of course. Very occasionally, I’d spend what little money I had on a game.

Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to make some lists for posterity’s sake, and also to underscore how much of a gamer I was in earlier years–a world which is probably strange to most of you who spent your time at soccer practice or doing homework or whatever. If anyone wants to analyze the psychological implications of all of this, please do so in the comments. So here are lists of my favorite games:

The Elementary School era (1988 - 1991) During elementary school, we had a computer class every day which was supposed to teach us math or something, and if we finished our lessons early, we could go up to Mrs Mehta and ask for the 7.5" floppy of the game of our choice, which we could put into the Apple IIs and boot. I’d always play one of four games: Conan: Hall of Volta, Moon Patrol, Number Munchers, or of course, the mighty Oregon Trail.

The MS-DOS era (1988 - about 1996) The MS-DOS era overlaps quite a bit with both the Windows 3.1 and the Windows 95 era, since both of these operating systems were more or less pieces of software running on top of DOS, and so games created then were typically written for DOS. That’s why the era extends until 1996, even though I’d been using a graphical OS for quite some time. There are a lot of important games to list here, so I’ll do so by genre, and roughly chronologically within that.

Educational games - the first games I played were educational games my parents had bought for the edification of myself and my siblings. For the most part, they didn’t teach me anything, but they were fun nonetheless and so I spent lots of time with them. For example: Reader Rabbit, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?, Math Rescue, and my favorite, Word Rescue.

Board games / Strategy games - I wasn’t as big a fan of this genre, but a few games did suck up my childhood time: Hexxagon, Battle Chess, The Incredible Machine, and the tank strategy Scorched Earth.

Side-scrollers (top-down scrollers, too) - This was possibly the most popular style of game for this era, since it allowed for exciting action while avoiding the challenges of 3D. All were more or less awesome: Pharaoh’s Tomb, Secret Agent, Dark Ages, Jazz Jackrabbit, Commander Keen 4, Duke Nukem (the infamous), and Raptor: Call of the Shadows. By far the best of the lot was Prince of Persia. Unfortunately, my dad bought the game in Singapore and it came back without a manual. Many of this era’s games used words in the manual as keys to enter the game, to ensure that you had purchased it legally. Thus we could only play the game after successfully guessing the requested keyword (which happened about 1 in 50 times–until we began writing them down).

Sims (space sims, plane sims, jet fighter sims, racing sims, worldbuilding sims) - We had flight sims like F-15 Strike Eagle, MS Flight Simulator 5, Jetfighter II (probably my favorite–I distinctly remember flying at over Mach 1 underneath the Bay and Golden Gate bridges…and then turning south to fly for over an hour down to the LA coast–where there were only 1-color land/sea bitmaps), ATF, Gunship 2000 (the best helicopter sim ever), [Falcon 3.0](http://www.mobygames.com/game/lhx-attack-chopper>LHX: Attack Chopper, and <a href=). We also had space sims like Wing Commander, Wing Commander II, Descent (and Descent 2), Star Wars: X-Wing (the first time I ventured into the Star Wars gaming universe, which has provided endless entertainment since then), Star Wars: Tie Fighter (the best sim experience I’ve ever had), and Terminal Velocity. Notable racing sims included one of my all-time favorites, Stunts, which let you design your own racetrack with jumps, loops, corkscrews. Definitely a plus–and you could even record yourself driving on the tracks and replay them later. Also: SkyRoads. The lone sub sim I played was Silent Hunter. There were two cool mech sims I liked: Ultrabots and Mechwarrior 2. Finally, I already mentioned Sim City and Sim City 2000.

Role-playing games - unlike the MMORPGs of today, the MS-DOS era’s role-playing games were single-person adventures where you typically had to use your brain to figure out puzzles and guide a character through an adventure. My favorite experience in this genre was undoubtedly King’s Quest V, which my friend Nathan and I agonized over together for quite a long time. The most technically wowing game was Return to Zork, which was a first-person adventure utilizing the newly-released cd-rom drives to deliver actual video content as part of the game. Other memorable games included: The Secret of Monkey Island (Guybrush Threepwood is my hero!), King’s Quest VI, Space Quest IV, The Adventures of Willy Beamish, the extremely original, genre-bending It Came from the Desert!, and Solar Winds.

First-person shooters - A fledgling genre, but later to become my favorite, more or less. I played Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom (but only at my friend Michael’s house, since my parents would have banned it).

Other - I used to play one fighting game with my brother: One Must Fall: 2097. Also there was the excellent Nibbles, run as “qbasic nibbles.bas” – I had tons of fun looking at the source code for that one when I was beginning to write my own BASIC programs. Also, this doesn’t count as a DOS game, because it was for the early Macs, but I was absolutely addicted to Bolo in junior high, primarily because it was multiplayer! Also, another fun sim-like game was Coaster, which let you have very fine-control design over coasters, and then ride them, monitoring g-forces, rider experience, etc…

The high school era (1997-2000) Sometime before high school, I discovered Star Wars: Dark Forces - the Star Wars FPS that would spawn the series I’ve completed the most games from. I probably spent more time playing Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight during freshman year of high school than any other game. In multiplayer (by then the internet had become useful for playing games), I was literally unstoppable if I had the rocket launcher. The subsequent games, Jedi Knight II: Outcast, and Jedi Knight III: Jedi Academy were equally fun, with somewhat more of an arcade feel.

But back to high school: Quake and Quake II initiated the era, but soon I discovered a new genre that would prove to be the one that I thought would be my favorite (but in fact wasn’t): the real-time strategy. First there was Command and Conquer, and its flow of unit creation / control / combat was intriguing. I didn’t get very far in the game, though, before I became bored. Later that year, I traded C&C with my friend for Warcraft II, which turned out to be a much more important game in my gaming history. It was the first time I’d heard of Blizzard, but I loved the way they’d set up the game much more than C&C, because it was fantasy-based as opposed to modern. What really got me, however, was the story–Warcraft II came with a manual which had a short book included, telling the story of the game world. The depth of that story, and the clever way it was integrated into the game itself, hooked me a lot more than the actual mechanics of the game, which were good, but which wouldn’t have hooked me otherwise. I had such a fun experience with WC2 that I went back and bought the original Warcraft as well, which was laughably worse, but still fun. Anyway, Warcraft II was impactful in that it caused me to spend hours and hours on the forums for Blizzard’s upcoming RTS Starcraft, discussing all aspects of the game for almost a year before it was released. As it happened, I was way more into the game before it came out, and I didn’t finish any of the campaigns.

While I was waiting for Starcraft, I enjoyed several other strategy games: Riven, Myth: The Fallen Lords (which had the most awesome 3D RTS engine to date–it actually let you move the camera around!), Age of Empires, and a family favorite, Lords of the Realm II.

During and after the move to Florida in 1999, I played Battlezone, The Wheel of Time (an excellent, very much under-appreciated game based on the Robert Jordan book series), Total Annihilation, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms (an unfairly-lampooned RTS with a very original story line), Age of Empires II (a vast improvement over the original), Thief: The Dark Project (an extremely original first-person sneaker), and most importantly, I finally got around to playing through Half-Life, which was without doubt the best game of its time. The summer before Stanford I also attempted to tackle the new breed of adventure/role-playing games by taking on Ultima IX: Ascension, but it proved to be too much of a time sink (a lesson I apparently didn’t learn, given that I later played both Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and World of Warcraft (which readers will remember).

College to Current (2000 - 2006) College was mostly a sad time for my gaming habits, as other parts of my life were fleshed out and took precedence, including but not limited to the newfound athleticism I was cultivating partly to fit in to the more-active Stanford crowd, and partly because it just felt right and healthy. Of course, freshman year would give the lie to that statement, as I would game with my roommate Eric or my whole floor to all hours of the night, playing Counter-Strike. But games were definitely on the downswing as a whole…while I continued to buy games I thought I would like with my bits of disposable income, I rarely had time to finish them. One notable exception (other than the Jedi Knight games), was Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which was the most scary first-person shooter I’d played to date. I would play it with the lights off for a while, but occasionally I’d have to jump out of my chair and run down the hall to get rid of the goosebumps. Needless to say, it was excellent. One summer, I was accepted as a beta tester for the now sadly defunct Savage, a boldly-conceptualized hybrid of FPS and RTS. It was fun to see a game change while I was playing it.

Since I was a Blizzard fan, I also picked up Warcraft III on the day it was released, and finished it over the next couple of years (though I’m still not done with The Frozen Throne. Since college, I’ve really only played two games: the extremely awesome Half-Life 2, which is probably the best FPS game ever, and the ubiquitous World of Warcraft. Oh wait, I did finish Halo for mac, as well.

Anyway, so much for my personal gaming history. I’m not sure what principles we can draw from this, but I will say that most of my best gaming experiences have been ones that have involved other people in some way–I can remember hours of pure, awesome fun playing games with my brother over the LAN, or with my friends. I also formed some friendships online through gaming that, while not particularly long-lasting, were not meaningless. (This would be harder to now, given that most people who play games on the internet are about 10 years of age, or have that mentality).

Essentially, being in communities formed around gaming has made that gaming more meaningful than it otherwise would have been. Which is not to say that these are good or helpful communities, but more the general observation that doing things with people makes you like the things themselves more. That’s why some people have positive connotations of consuming alcohol or tobacco, where others don’t.

The Reason for this Entry Now that it is clear exactly what kind of nerd I am, I wanted to share news of an exciting game that is in the works. It’s called Spore, and it’s being designed by Will Wright, the same guy who designed the SimCity and Sims games. As the Wikipedia article says, he generally designs “software toys” rather than goal-oriented games–essentially, things that you can play with and do what you will with for an indefinite period of time–there is no set beginning or end. Think about SimCity–you could spend your whole life building and running it if you wanted; there is no endpoint, only your own creativity and tolerance. You can watch a video of a talk by Wright at last year’s Game Developers Conference, where he says a lot of interesting things about game design. In the middle of the talk he gives a demo of this upcoming game Spore which is possibly the most amazing piece of interactive software I have seen. If you don’t want to wade through the talk, you can go straight to the gameplay video.

Basically, the game is a world sim of the most epic proportions. You start out controlling a microorganism, and through eating and modifying the organism through various generations of existence using the game’s editor, you propel your creature-line through various stages of evolution: bacteria, small macroorganism, fish-type thing, amphibious walking creature, etc…

The micro stage

At a certain point your creature becomes sentient and the game changes–you’re now controlling a society, which you grow in ways familiar to Civ players. Other asynchronously-user-designed societies exist on your world with which you interact in friendly or hostile manners depending on how you have been training your creatures. At this stage you use the same world editor to “buy” and/or create from scratch various buildings and technologies, which enable creation of vehicles, colonizations, and other possibilities.

The city (“civ”) stage

Eventually, assuming all the previous stages have been successful, you gain off-world transportation power and are able to travel to other planets in the solar system, using terraforming techniques to make them habitable.

View of your planet

With the resources gathered by all your civilizations, interstellar travel becomes possible, and using SETI-like mini-games, discovery of other sentient beings throughout the galaxy becomes only a matter of time. These sentient beings have been designed by other players–though they are copied from a central database and your actions with them do not affect that player’s world. Anyway, peaceful or warlike negotiations are possible here just in the same way as on your home planet, and thusly you can explore the galaxy. And finally, it is even possible to zoom out from the galaxy and fly around at the most macro-scale imaginable, swooshing past countless similar galaxies, each with their own star systems and habitable worlds, populated with procedurally-generated or other-user-generated content.

While the game itself looks like it will probably be the most fun game ever released, the way it has been conceptualized/designed is fascinating and inspiring to me. First, the game is basically an analogue to the Powers of 10 phenomenon which is so breathtaking–only you’re zooming out instead of in. Second, the game behavior actually changes at each step backwards. In other words, you don’t have one game with one set of game mechanics that you play until completion–no, the rules, methods, and goals of the game change depending on what level of detail you are at in your universal evolution. This promises to provide a completely different gameplay experience than most games, which are somewhat statically designed. Third, everything in the game is procedural or algorithmic, which completely fascinates me. Wright explains at the beginning of his talk how in the early 90s the exponential increase in data storage capacities (via the cd-rom) made game designers think almost exclusively in terms of massive content creation, because they now could, instead of thinking in terms of dynamically generating content based on smart and compact algorithms. This part of the game blows my mind–every creature, every building is customizable in thousands of ways, but the software knows how to treat everything so that it works exactly how it’s supposed to in the world.

In the gameplay video, Wright shows off some of the variety you can have in the creature editor, and he made a creature with three legs. We don’t really have any of these on Earth, so in my mind I didn’t even have a good idea of what a three-legged creature should walk and move like. But the game’s engine analyzed the skeleton of the tripod animal and decided that it would have to walk in a certain way, and it looks completely real. The amount of physics research that must have been done to produce such an engine is incredible.

Another inspiring design point Wright made was that, in their research into gameplay patterns, people are almost always happier when they are given tools with which to be creative regarding content. That content might not be as good as content designed by professionals, but given that it belongs to me, I am more invested in it and therefore feel that I am having a more meaningful entertainment experience. I resonate deeply with this mode of thinking, and feel that it might be the thing that saves electronic entertainment from being completely useless. Fundamentally, entertainment needs to be recreation (see weblog title!), by which I mean re-creation, or creating-after. Games that facilitate this creativity will be much more beneficial for people than hack-and-slashers or for most of the crap that Hollywood spews out (the same principle holds true for other forms of media, even if it’s less fundamentally interactive–good films are the ones that require you to creatively generate something in order to correctly experience or understand it–whether that creativity is in the intellectual or emotional sphere). So this is the tie-in to the personal gaming history, because I’m wondering if Spore might have some ability to re-deem and re-integrate gaming into a well-rounded and well-recreated life.

Moving on to another theme: as someone who essentially designs interfaces for a living (but who is beginning to realize this is neither always nor typically enjoyable), the way the interfaces are designed in Spore is dazzling. Everything is simple, clean, and organic. What is necessary is at hand, and what is not is hidden away. I’m not sure if this good design was easy given the organic nature of the game itself, but regardless, someone is doing something right, and I am excited to get my hands on a copy just to see how they solve all the UI problems that must exist in a game with as large a scope as this one. (Incidentally, I couldn’t find a release date anywhere…hopefully 2006 sometime!)

Lastly, given recent thoughts about evolution, in biological, sociological, cosmological, and theological terms, the bare premise of the game is philosophically interesting. I want to see how the story of evolution is told, what explanations are given, and so forth. I mean, what we have here is basically a model of “theistic” (rather, “guided”) evolution, where the player is actually making cognitive decisions for how to affect the physical or cultural aspects of a creature or society. Given that this is an interesting model in general, I really want to play around with it and see how deep the “procedurality” of the game goes, and how much of it is hard-coded AI.

If anyone has made it this far: what do you think? Did you watch either of the videos? Why am I so excited about this? Is it just my Five-wing expressing itself?

• Read Reality by McGrath
• Work on a song / play guitar
• Play Half-Life 2 on my newly reconstructed PC
• Go next door and watch the Olympics
• Watch a movie
• Sleep early
• Clean up / organize my bedroom
• Work on my constructed language Enaselvai
• Keep working on my modern Greek lessons (in preparation for trip to Athens)
• Write overdue e-mails
• Taxes
• Put my new budget into Quicken
• Drink alcohol
• Get my old reconstruction of English letters out and re-learn it so I can write in “code” again
• Write a weblog entry on the relationship between physical and spiritual training
• Test the current e4 client
• Get my piano (keyboard) out and play beautiful droning melodies until I am lulled to sleep
• Listen to the new Paste sampler

…and I could keep going. You can see I have literally dozens of options. Unfortunately, I’ve sat here in front of my computer for over 30 minutes just thinking about what to do–and so drain the sands from the hourglass of opportunity. All of these possibilities range from work-related to completely fun/useless, from productive to escapist, but I’m finding it impossible to settle on one thing. Maybe it’s the pain of not being able to do others that keeps me from doing one? I’m not sure. Anyway, I thought that while I was sitting here experiencing that pain I might as well chronicle it, so that the absurdity will be made known to the world.

Well, it looks like salvation has come in the form of a phone call–turns out ski jumping is on the Olympics now, and I’ve been saying all week how I want to watch it, so my choice has been made. But we can make this entry fun yet–out of the list of options I listed, which one would you have picked? Don’t be shy now!

As the time approached, it became clear that much more work would be required than I thought. Building an online store is pretty rough, particularly when the API is complicated, uses lots of tools, any of which could break making it very hard to debug, and one is given no specifications at all for how it should work or what it should look like or what will even be in it. Moreover, since I don’t have a working PC at the moment, I was unable to test the design for IE as I was going along (and I didn’t want to in any case). I realized one night at about 1am that IE doesn’t support transparent PNG files (picture files), so all the cool little black-and-white auto-generated buttons you see in Firefox and Safari…well those were not-so-cool little black-and-white-and-neon-green buttons in IE. I tried a million hacks to get it to work, but to no avail with PHP-generated image code. And that was about 4 unplanned and unnecessary hours of wasted time.

So here’s the point: as soon as I realized that I would need to spend a lot of time on this, I went in to what I will call “consumed” mode. In other words, I decided that I would eat, drink, and not sleep coding this site until I was done. Of course, along with that decision came the loss of all vestiges of a healthy lifestyle…I was awake from 9 or 10 am until 5 am, sitting at my computer, not eating anything, like a little hunchback gnome typing away at keys. My right hand was and is completely fried–either tendonitis or something else render it a continual mass of dull pain. I switched over a year ago to using my mouse with my left hand, but it hasn’t really helped.

I realized throughout that, in consumed mode, I actually get a lot of stuff done! I mean, I didn’t read, go outside, make or play music, hang out with people, spend time thinking about life or real issues, or do any of the things that makes mine a well-rounded and satisfying existence…but I was a coding fiend. My work efficiency increased tenfold. It occurred to me how it must feel to be one of those people who really focuses on one single thing in life, and it was kind of cool. It made me wonder if that’s not a way I’m supposed to be…you see there’s something about my personality which makes it very easy to enter consumed mode when I first discover something new that I want to create or excel in. A sport, a class, a song, a book, a hobby, a writing project, anything… The initial moments are intense and productive, but then I quickly get bored or realize that it will actually take a lot of work, and I lose interest and move on to other things.

This habit has meant that I have had an extremely wide range of experiences, have tried many new things, and have the gear/paraphernalia for more hobbies/pursuits than anyone I know or have heard of. What it also means is that I tend not to (a) excel at things to the extend that I have the ability, and/or (b) finish projects that I start. On my computer right now are probably failed attempts at at least 5 novels, and twice as many sets of song lyrics. If it doesn’t happen in the first day, it doesn’t seem to happen at all. That’s typically the way my music writing goes–a blast of creativity, and then, if that spark doesn’t carry me through to completion…the song usually never gets fully written and I forget about it.

So, I have been trying to think differently and grow in my creativity by actually setting aside time to work diligently on songs or writings. I’m working on a song now, for instance, where for the first time I sat down with paper and pen, drew out staves, and worked on a melody line in standard musical nutation, over the course of a whole week. It’s giving me a lot of frustrations and when I sit down with a guitar to work on more of it, I’m always tempted to try something else that holds the promise of being a quick project. However, I’m trying to believe that by actually working on this song, it will be better, not worse, for the amount of time I put into it. We shall see.

I’m very wary, of course, about committing too much to one thing (i.e., being in consumed mode all the time). I mean, I very much feel the pain of not being able to say that I am passionate about one and only one thing. In fact, I felt that pain tonight very strongly, as I went climbing with a group of people who are all vastly more committed to the pursuit than I am. I felt like I very much wanted to commit myself to climbing to the same degree, so that I could do the things they were doing and have the ability to climb so many more routes and types of routes than I can now. But, I knew that if I made that decision, I would have to give up so many more things…and I just can’t bring myself to do that.

Ultimately, I’m not sure what is the most healthy for me. Some people are in consumed mode for work all the time, and others for a sport or a hobby. I can’t seem to want to live there for very long. What surprised me most of all, to tell the truth, was that I was able to force myself into it these last few days at all! It must say something about the type of work that I have that, when my paycheck is neither on the line (that I know of) nor overlarge, I’m still willing and able to pull 4 all-nighters in a row for a project. I wouldn’t have thought it possible in general, but especially for that length of time. Now the task is to re-enter life and to try and find a healthy balance. Finding this balance will be more on the forefront of my mind now, however, as I’ll maybe start to think if there any things I should let go in order to excel in other things I love more deeply. Honestly, I think the problem is that I love so many things to such a deep degree that that would be a nonsensical venture. I’ll be thinking about it, though, especially now that I know that spending a lot of time on something actually produces results–it’s an alien concept to my personality.

I took BART underneath the bay and to Walnut Creek, walked out of the turnstiles, handed over the cash, got an iPod, and got back on a return train within 2 minutes of having departed the last one. I walked straight to the Apple store in SF and exchanged my newly-purchased iPod for one from the store (I wanted a black one), sans receipt. All in all, an incredible experience. The next day, I used craigslist to sell my old iPod for a price not too far from the one at which I had purchased my new player! Brilliant.

This experience spawned two discussions I wanted to share. First, I realized how easy it is for me to become fixated on some material goal, to the extent that I am willing to spend hours and hours monitoring websites, e-mailing people, and taking trains all around the bay for it. I am one who forms habits fairly quickly, and after a few days of constantly checking craigslist, I noticed something changing in me–the iPod which was the object of my desire had passed from being a toy which I thought it would be fun to have, into something that subconsciously I truly believed I needed. I was Frodo, but instead of a burning wheel of fire in front of my eyes, there was a slick Apple-designed piece of obsidian, thumping with seductive media possibilities. Luckily, this scared me enough that I was able to take a step back and evaluate whether such a new toy was really healthy. Under the circumstances, which were that the purchase would involve little to no financial sacrifice, I decided it was OK to upgrade. My hope is that if in the future I become fixated with something less benign (say an expensive car, or a new bike, a new snowboard, or any of a million things it could occur to me to want), I will likewise feel the sort of uneasiness I experienced last week while there is still time to evaluate in a level-headed manner.

Secondly, I had ample time to think more deeply about “iPod culture” in general. It seems clear that an iPod exists to serve consumers in two ways. To begin with, it lets you control the what of your media consumption/experience. It allows you to listen to your tunes, or watch your videos. No more listening to the radio, to the clatter of the train, to the conversation of those people over there, to the sound of the birds, to the dumb thump of the rap music in that car. With the advent of video content, you are now no longer forced to watch whatever is on TV, or whatever your friend is watching, or whatever your family is watching. You have complete control over the what of your media.

You also have complete control over the when of your media consumption. The iPod fits in your pocket. You can listen to it now. You can watch videos on it now. This is probably obvious, but maybe it’s worth saying that having control over the when of your media consumption means an increase in media consumption. No one buys an iPod to listen to music less! So you can listen to music or watch videos whenever you want, and whenever that is, it is more than you listened to or watched before.

It should already be clear that the creation of such an environment is incredibly good for business. The individualization of music and video tastes leads to greater sales–we no longer need to sell to an entire household; we can sell to each member of the house! Dad likes different movies and music than daughter, so they each buy their own preferred set. The time-ubiquity of music and video also straightforwardly lends itself to business–more time spent listening to tunes means that more tunes are required and therefore purchased. Apple and the other digital content providers are well situated to make a killing off of us (and they have been doing so).

So far everything that I’ve said has been value-neutral…but is there anything to seriously praise and/or criticize about this digital media lifestyle? On the one hand, I am extremely glad to be able to control what sorts of media I consume. My tastes in music have not usually been particularly mainstream, and so having the option to listen to music I like instead of what is on the radio is quite nice. Likewise, my appetite for new music, for efficiently searching and finding new artists and sounds, is greatly helped by being able to listen to music for just about 100% of my waking day. I can rise from my bed and throw iTunes into a party shuffle that lasts for the full 8 hours of the workday. If I drive anywhere, I can plug my iPod into the audio-in jack in my car stereo. If I walk or run anywhere, I can do it while listening to a randomly-generated set of songs chosen from any of my scores of smart playlists. Moreover, I could rinse/wash/repeat every day for 4 months without hearing the same song twice. In sum, it is quite easy to become a music consumption machine–pop in a song, manufacture a feeling or memory, and output a time-dependent value judgment. Art literally flows through my body more often than not!

On the other hand, one wonders if there are any unhealthy side effects to all of this. In fact, it seems like both the what and when aspects of the iPod lifestyle can have negative results. Let’s tackle the when aspect first–it’s simpler. Basically, when you are listening to music or watching a movie on your iPod, you are eo ipso not listening to or watching something else, namely what is going on around you. Perhaps human senses were designed to be continually titillated by manufactured and produced sights and sounds. But perhaps they were not. What are we missing while consuming media? For some people, maybe not much–in truth, maybe it helps some escape from otherwise dreary family situations. But one thing is certain, which is that it precludes silence. It therefore precludes the kind of silence that our culture studiously avoids, which is the kind wherein you cannot get away from the questions you haven’t been asking yourself (but need to). For many of us, the constant presence of music might be nothing more than a numbing agent designed to frighten away an insistent silence that we have been putting off for so long we’re embarrassed even to recognize its existence.

Beyond silence, headphones also shut out other kinds of music, not produced in studios by important men in ties while watching 18-year old company-made superstars gyrating in front of unimpressed microphones. I am, of course, referring to the noises found outside of our iPod-induced isolations. Birds, wind, rain, the voices of a crowd, footsteps, and all the rest. Headphones function both ways, too: they don’t just keep other things away from you; in addition, they keep you away from those other things. They can be effectively a wall, which is precisely why so many people wear them so visibly.

Now, to the what. iPods allow me to listen to what I want, alone. I don’t have to consult anyone else to see if she is OK with my choice of song or video. To see why this is important, I need to introduce the concept of responsibility for consumption. Humans are made to consume certain things in certain ways. Food is an obvious example–humans need to consume food, and it is good that they do so. However, as various eating disorders show us, there are healthy and not-so-healthy ways to engage in this project of food consumption. To the extent that our own (and only our own) choices lead to health or illness, it seems right to say that we have a responsibility for those choices. In the case of food, this responsibility is cashed out in terms of responsibility to our body. Exercise is also a responsibility we have in the same area. None of this is surprising.

What I want to claim is that media consumption (and here I would distinguish “media” from “art” ) bears similar responsibilities to food consumption, in that these are all things which we take into our bodies (or minds), and which affect us in certain ways according to their particularities. Hot dogs are different than apples. Handel is different than Britney Spears. More than that bare difference, I want to argue a value difference in media, analogous to a health difference in food. I wish it were the case that there were no “bad media”, but unfortunately there is. In the same way that some foods are unhealthy and/or addictive, some media can affect us negatively or engender addictive behavior (pornography being the classic example, and new forms of it joining the audio realm–the addictiveness proven by a trip to Odeo’s Top 40).

So, every time we decide to consume a piece of media, we have a certain responsibility to ourselves, just like when we are eating. For the most part, this responsibility stays hidden in the background, and we don’t have to worry about it–our natural inclinations take care of us just fine. But in unique situations, such a responsibility can become a very palpable burden. With the proliferation of media via the internet, and the classic gatekeepers of media art (the record labels, the video studios) not being able to staunch the flow of new independent artists willing to self-promote, we are completely surrounded on all sides by songs and movies clamoring for our attention, screaming for the privilege of being on our iPods. Since in iPod culture we make all our own media choices, this means that we are left all alone to deal with this onslaught. The responsibility to consume healthily now becomes harder, as we have to choose hundreds of times a day whether this is good music or bad, whether I like it or not, whether I should watch it or not, and so on. Eventually, these choices paralyze us, and we are left looking at a device which promised to give us just what we want, but no longer having the ability even to know what that is! I can’t count the times I’ve spent upwards of 10 minutes scrolling through my iTunes library because every time I see an album I’d like to listen to, I can’t be sure that it’s really the “best” to hear at the moment.

Ultimately, this is just another facet of the modern, consumeristic, capitalist lifestyle where the market is flooded with dozens of basically-identical products, the marketing behind each of which aims to convince us just how different they really are. We go to the grocery store and see a hundred different kinds of cereal, and we are immediately besieged; which of these cereals is the best? Which is the best value? Which is healthiest? Which tastes best? Sometimes you feel like leaving the store because you just can’t handle that kind of pressure. And it is exactly that pressure which threatens to hover over us as we carry our iPods to work and on our afternoon jogs.

None of that is to say that the personal media player is evil or even slightly bad. I merely want to emphasize how, in our current cultural context, an iPod comes with more than a $400 price tag–it actually comes with a surprisingly large set of responsibilities, both to oneself and to the world. Or maybe it’s not so surprising–with any technical or economic advance comes an increase in power and possibility, along with a concomitant increase in responsibility. Apple’s marketing is really great at portraying the possibilities their media players can grant us, but we cannot trust them to know, or to tell us, what sorts of responsibilities might go hand in hand with the power they provide–the power of instant, on-demand, and infinitely customizable media. I hope I’ve been able to illuminate both edges of that sword.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go watch a few episodes of Firefly on my new video iPod. Or wait…should I watch Arrested Development?

Recently, I have become aware that community is much like this. One might think that a community is just an aggregate of particles (individuals), and so it should behave like an aggregate of individuals. Another might think that a community is like a wave–it behaves like a single extended entity. These people will treat community differently; the first person will place ultimate foundation in each individual, and will argue that their motions (i.e., the influence of God’s will in their life, and their response) qua individuals define the epiphenomenal motions of the community at large. Those of the wave persuasion will argue conversely that God directs the community as a whole according to his will, and the motions of individual members follow like crests and troughs in a wave–all very connected.

It is hard to know within which paradigm I should be viewing community right now. Are we fundamentally separated, and therefore at the end of the day we must discern our calling from God as pertaining to ourselves alone? Or are we fundamentally connected, and must therefore all collectively submit our motions to the movement of the larger group?

Right now, it seems appropriate to view the motions of some as following the particle paradigm, and others as following the wave paradigm. Are we therefore separate entities (i.e., in separate communities)? Or are we exhibiting the true essence of community and just failing to describe it in classical sociological terms, exactly the same as physicists failed to describe quantum phenomena using Newtonian language?

We have been gathering data for a while now, but I think we still need some more. Anyone else have any data worth sharing?

Today I walked in to Starbucks in San Francisco to use the restroom, and noticed that everything inside was red and green, with white spinning snowflakey thingies. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was playing, and all sorts of “seasonal favorites” were available for purchase. Mention was made in the various wall advertisements of some “spirit” of the season which is supposedly upon us, whether we like it or not.

Well, I don’t like it! Not yet, anyway. What is everyone trying to pull? Is nothing sacred? I’m actually very angry at our culture right now for trying to tell me that the “holiday season” is here (and not for any spiritual reasons). The earlier in the year we put up Christmas decorations, or decorations for any holiday, for that matter, the less meaningful they become. Yes, I want to experience the festivity of the various holidays that are soon to arrive. But I don’t want to be so bombarded with incessant greed-driven reminders that they are going to be here that I lose all sense of excitement over them.

I can’t think of any more effective way to take the excitement and meaning out of Christmas (or any date-based holiday) than by prepping consumers for it two months in advance. Is there a clearer way to say, “We don’t care about the holiday” than by implying, “What we really care about is the money you spend for it. So spend it now and often…there’s only two months left to give us all your cash! Hurry before time is up!” ??

Ugh, it’s disgusting.