Our Culture Is Very Weird Too

It is official. Don't believe me? Try this.

I was having dinner with the family for a birthday. We were, therefore, eating out. I randomly glanced up at the tv across the room. Something exploding was blazing toward the screen. After a few seconds the name of that new Avatar movie appeared, and so I figured out what it was that I had at first taken for a football preview. We think old legends being dressed up is so dumb, yet we have to make our sports indistinguishable from our action adventure flicks.

Still not convinced? Ok, let's take a look at one from a conversation earlier.

A friend of mine comments that she hates when people call the Twilight series a "saga", and that it makes her skin crawl. My reply: "It makes me wonder how many soap opera serieses were sagas and we never knew." To be honest, I really think the glorious practice of saga-telling those Icelandic peoples had is much better upheld by fictional adventures from Japan than trash that butchers both fantasy and romance at the same time.

And if you know how weird the Japanese are, and consider that we can get sagas more backward than they can, we must be pretty darn hopeless. Now don't you wish you'd just agreed and gotten bored of reading back at the similarity of football tv and exploding fantasy flicks?

Not Exactly Procrastination...

You ever get fed up with something in life and resolve to remake it from scratch if need be first chance you get, only to have the rest of life shove that "first chance" back so far and trip you up so much on your way to it that by the time you have time to deal with fixing things that fed you up you are too fed up, stressed out, worn down and in general in need of a break that you can't currently work on fixing the very things that played into getting you fed up?

Now you know why I haven't tried to blog any of my thoughts in too long. ("Because life has had you bogged down like that or because all your thoughts come out disjointedly rambling like this?" you ask? Why, both, of course.)

Trick Question Math

Some stuff we came up with at dinner tonight (yes, I come from a family of geeks, and I love it), finally perfected by myself.


How many of those asked this question give an incorrect answer?


For starters, if you all were to answer 0% that would make 100% of you correct.

The formula for a correct answer is as follows: Where Sa (for same answer) is the percent of people making the answer and A is their answer, if Sa - A = 100% then A is correct.

Still, bet you can't think of the great formula for best guessing, now, can you?


Here it is... Where T is the total number of people asked and B (for brainy or best) is the number of people you think will hit upon this formula, the accuracy of B will determine whether you guess right if you calculate the answer as 100 - B/T*100.

It's about time.

Finally, everyone else is back on Sane and Normal Time, like I've kept my clocks all along; no more adding an hour mentally to account for the world's silly notion that you gain time by taking it off the other end of the day and pretending our sleep cycles and such don't notice.

Yes, I know I'm weird.

Someday I'd like to have a fantasy world in which exist creatures called withals.

See, then a monster who is a human transformed into one of those would be a werewithal.

Virtually self-evident fact: the Holy Spirit, being God, directs us toward God.

Logically it must then follow that in the case of any spiritual "gift" causing trouble either it is not of God or else we are seriously screwing something up.

Now, I've heard stories of "Charismatic" stuff I wouldn't trust. I've also heard of Saints doing all sorts of miracles. How do we tell the difference so that we can work toward something like this? After all, we are to pray that all are united to the fullness of Truth in the Church even as we maintain that some things cannot be a part of such unity. Given basic knowledge about God's working through us, such as the history of miraculous gifts in the Church's Saints, it's clear there are at least some genuine charisms. Well, the Catechism says that we have to bring seeming spiritual gifts to the Church for evaluation and organization -- that is, the grace of state of the priesthood is our #1 aid in discernment of charisms. Unfortunately, finding priests who even believe God works like that anymore can be difficult. However, they are out there. Fr. Al, for example, would discuss things like whether the gift of tongues is to be used in what situations. (He's the founder of the organization I just linked, btw.) And he was no ungrounded Charismatic; he said Mass in Latin, emphasized altar boys, and pastored a church with a high altar and communion rail (always making use of the latter and making use of the former at special occassions). After priests, one thing we can look to organizations such as Presentation Ministries or the Siena Institute, if there are any in our area; and if there aren't, we should discern whether we are called to found one (almost certainly with priestly help and oversight from the Church hierarchy, of course). Besides that there is, as some insightful readers probably thought of with the earlier mention of Saints, an incredibly vast "library" of sorts in the Saints' writings. St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa de Avila, St. Julian of Norwich, St. Francis de Sales... There are so many, well known and obscure, long ago and fairly recent who wrote on the spiritual life that most of us would be hard-pressed to read it all in our lifetimes.

Don't let our human tendency to stumble discourage you... Through His Church Jesus Christ offers us everything we could possibly need to come to fullness of life in Him. Whether we've never tried to use it, or are trying our hardest but of course still imperfect, or have tried and failed to keep it up once or many times, we should all be seeking to become better instruments of God.

"Do you remember the time / When simple things made you happy?"

I haven't checked Wikipedia, but if my research is correct, this, titled "The Best Is Yet To Come", is apparently the ending theme to Metal Gear Solid, one of the greater literary videogames thus far that I have unfortunately no first-hand experience with due to growing up with Nintendo rather than Playstation. If my research is correct again, what's below the vid is the English version of the lyrics, a solid translation though possibly with just a little filled out. Altogether I think this encapsulates something I've been feeling around for in the back of my mind for a long, long time.

The Best Is Yet To Come

Do you remember the time
when little things made you happy?
Do you remember the time
when simple things made you smile
Life can be wonderful
if you let it be
Life can be simple
if you try

Whatever happened to those days?
Whatever happened to those nights?
Do you remember the time
when little things made you sad?
Do you remember the time
when simple things made you cry?

Is it just me
or
is it just us?
Feeling lost in this world?
Why do we have to hurt each other?
Why do we have to shed tears?
Life can be beautiful
if you try
Life can be joyful
if we try
Tell me
I'm not alone
Tell me
We are not alone in this world
fighting against the wind
Do you remember the time
when simple things made you happy?
Do you remember the time
when little things made you laugh?

You know
life can be simple
You know
life is simple
Because
the best thing in life is yet to come
Because...
the best is yet to come

Looks like I may have been wrong.

The papers are at least consistent. Swine flu is a big issue right now in back-to-school season.

It looks like I'm blogging at a very nice pace now...

...but in reality, the past few weeks I'm composing these in sets of two and three and spacing them out with the scheduling feature.

Is that cheating? Well, it's an improvement on my previous blogging rate habits...

If space aliens abducted all the grownups...

...I'd let them, and even try talking to the aliens just in case they're actually sane.

Consider.

Grownups complain their heads off about what's becoming of the world and how principles are going down the drain.

Now, ever try to stand by your principles? You get called childish, laughed at, and possibly worse depending on the circumstances.

Meanwhile, to distract themselves from this their obvious hypocrisy, grownups wonder to each other why the youth of today are even worse than they were in their own youths (assuming, of course, that they haven't shaded their memories golden out of pride or who knows what else).

I am an adult, or will be as soon as I can get through the freaking system that you previous generations, grownups, set up, in order to get a job and be self-sufficient. I'd appreciate being treated as an adult. However, if I ever fall prey to that idiocy that too many adults call "growing up", God help me, I'm liable to hate myself worse than a fly hates a flyswatter.

It's a fine but invaluable distinction.