So I know I'm a bit late, but I gots to say that Punch Drunk Love was a freakin' good movie. A lot better than that study of mediocrity that is known, in the vulgar tongue, as Magnolia. Expecting to be dulled into oblivion by another haphazard film that never meets its promised end or even another in the long sling of comedians-legitimizing-themselves-as-real-honest-to-gosh-actors movies, I was, cliché though it may be, pleasantly surprised. Anyone who pays attention thoughout should note the primary's struggling journey from chaos to order, from anxiety to peace, from cacophany to harmony. And he does so believably though the midst of his entire unbelievablity. Obviously not a film to approach flippantly (I had to explain to both of my roommates why they should appreciate the film and stop thinking, "It sucked"), this is the first Anderson film I really dug. p.s. I haven't seen Boogie Nights.

A couple months ago, I taught the book of Joel at a morning devotional meeting. Unfortunately, because of a single, vibrant naysayer, the whole thing turned into a fiasco. Looking back, the only thing that didn't garner criticism was the locust I drew in the corner of the whiteboard :-) At least some of my efforts were appreciated.

Catharsis
Received in the e-bin from an old friend/acquaintance who is really more of an acquanitance than a friend: a meandering letter hoping to "catch up" and lamenting the fact that life seems to be passing him by. *sigh* I wrote him a kindly note expressing my wish to meet for lunch sometime soon and "catch up." I did so because I only fairly know the guy and didn't think it fair to rage against someone who so little knows me but is seeking friendship. What follows is what I would have written if I were more heartless and perhaps more real.

Dear Ethan [his name's not really Ethan and though I doubt he'd ever read this page, I've had too many close calls to care to ruin one more relationship permanently],

I don't know exactly what kind of crack you have been smoking, but I thought I'd crash land on your trip and bring it down on you like Greg Luganis on a diving platform. Why, do you ask, should I dump on your hit parade? For the sole and simple reason that I have had quite enough of you self-pitying job-o-matic whiners who complain incessantly about life passing you by. Do you honestly think me the type who could swallow, let alone stomach, that kind of tripe?

Life passing you by. Reeeeeally? Here's a dollar numbkis, buy something that resembles a clue.

Do you realize how moronic is the idea that life could pass any living, non-comatose being and not be lived in, thrilled upon, and devoured? Do you realize that life does not pass conscious people by? Do you realize that not having the car you want, the job you want, the wife you want, the kids you want, the religion you want, the fun you want, the freakin' Malibu Barbie Dreamhouse you want is not remotely related to your experience of life or that life's ability to "pas you by."

You, my friend, are a snacker of the highest and most depraved degree.

Lemme lay it out for you in a way that even your damaged psyche should be able to follow:

1. Life cannot and does not pass you by unless you are in a coma or otherwise truly and physically unconscious (none of this psychological/emotional crap please - only real comas need apply).
2. If you feel as if life is passing you by, this simply means that you are not enjoying life to the degree that you feel you should.
3. This is due entirely to internal forces that you have weighed upon yourself - goals and priorities that you, at some point, decided with some arbitrary wave of your priority wand.
4. This feeling does not stem from anything outside of yourself. That means that keeping or ditching your job is not related to your problem and will not affect the problem positively or negatively. Neither will keeping or ditching your wife. Neither will having a second kid. Neither will having an affair. Neither will any earthly force beyond yourself.
5. As stated, this feeling that you are not experiencing life as you would wish, is birthed from you and you alone. You feel this way, not because life is passing you by but simply because you are an awful person.
6. That you are an awful person is clear from the fact that you allow yourself to reject outright the fact that life is freakin' happening all around you and that is a freakin' wonderful thing. Corollary to your personal awfulness is the fact that you blame other things and people for "holding you back" and not allowing you to experience life as you selfishly and arbitrarily desire.
7. Until you stop being the self-serving-yet-worthless human being that you are, "life" will not be experienced to any notable degree.
8. So Mr. Snackypants, remember, life is not contingent upon what you do, who you know, or where you are but simply how you see. Stop being mopey. Stop blaming others for your failing. Stop hoping that a change in circumstances will let you catch up to life. You don't need to go anywhere to catch up to life and the only thing that needs to change is your freakin' attitude.
9. I advise prayer.

So that's it, Ethan m'boy. Now don't let me catch you again whining about something you'll never understand anyway. Peace, Homes.

Two Reviews with One Stone
The Hulk is probably the best comic-book-to-cinema endeavor I have had the pleasure to watch to date. No cheesey superheroics, The Hulk is at all times engaging as plays more dramatically than as an action/adventure slugfest. Eric Bana plays the haunted Banner deftly as the character tries unsuccessfully to elude both the military and his forgotten past. Ang Lee saves what could have been the worst Marvel adaptation yet by playing it straight; The Hulk is a tale of gods and monsters where the biggest monster of all is not the hulking, green giant, but simply man who in the depths of his nature is greedy, hateful, and raging.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix stands a worthy successor to the Potter name and works well as a middle chapter in the final half of the series. While the story is not as rock solid as the third book nor as shocking as the fourth, it does offer its share of thrills and spills (as it were). Ginny, particularly, comes off very well as her character is granted much more exposition and development this time 'round—just in time for Rowling to kill her off (kidding! maybe...). The youngest Weasley is intelligent, witty, adventurous, brave, and mischevous (in fact, she seems to be the conglomeration of all the best Weasley attributes). Harry, on the other hand, reminds me of why I hope my own kids will skip straight from thirteen to twenty years-old. All in all, The Order of the Phoenix begins with a bang, paces well over it's nine hundred pages and ends with a 150-page crescendo nearly as exciting and revelatory as that in book four.

Yeah, so I been on vacation. Five days of fun, forest, and fantasy all rolled into one. The fun, forest, and fantasy were one, not the five days. Anyway, me and Ko drove up to the Santa Cruz Mountains to Big Basin State Park. Yeah, that's where they gots all them redwoods. And mosquitos. Lotsa mosquitos. In June anyway. I got quite et up. Anyway, we mete some friends up there and had a grand ol' time. I took lotsa photos. Unfortunately, due to reasons beyond my imagining, over half of them were corrupted and the disks upon which they once resided are now nothing more than landfill. Fortunately, there are some remaining and these I now present to you with handy explanations. P.s. it's best to read them in order.

Yup. It's still with us. Death. He's still here. Like that one uncle who you would think has better things to do and other places to visit but just keeps sticking around, lounging in the living room, taking up the caouch and leaving empties all over the coffee table. He's still here and he just took Gregory Peck. I just watched one of his films last weekend. Twelve O'Clock High. One of the best films you have never seen. Back before films could rely on amazing effects, they had to be good to be called "good." This was one of those films. And now Uncle Death has claimed Peck's weary bones. I'm not shocked or saddened or questioning or mourning or anything like that. But it does spark in me a "Hmm" and causes me to think about mortality.

Now you think about mortality.

I recently attended the highschool graduation of some homeschooling acquaintances of mine (I say acquaintances because, really, can one ever truly be friends with a homeschooler?). I got them cards and filled the cards with my usually well-wishing lunacies. Wisely, before giving one of the cards to its recipient, I had an ex-homeschooler proofread the card to see if I went overboard somehow or if I would offend in my jolliness.

It was decided that I did and I would.

So, I gave the girl nothing for graduation. Sad, I know, but to cheer you up, the below is the offending card and the attached words (click on it, sonny!).

My Top 5 Cartoons of Adulthood

(in no order beyond alphabetical)

Batman: The Animated Series

Johnny Bravo

Lain: Seriel Experiments

Ren & Stimpy (first season)

Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast

Batman finally introduced a noirish maturity into a medium that had been languishing in TMNT/Captain Planet silliness for decades. The lines, the shadows, and the movement were always elegant and always mysterious (at least in the first couple seasons). Johnny Bravo is probably the only leftover shot of pure machismo extant in cartoons today and excels because of it. Where else to you have blatant glee at the opportunity for online dating. "Woah. All the pixelated, 2-d babes I want." (And yes, this Bravoism figures largely into my belief that all you internet-people don't really exist until I meet you in real life). Lain was simply an incredible experience and demonstrated that the realm of animated fare has only been tapped at the surface and holds vast resevoirs of creative intrigue to be pumped. Ren & Stimpy's first season was probably some of the funniest tv to ever be broadcast. Right behind Space Gohost's phenomenal skills as a talkshow host.

We were somewhere near Wildomar, well into the 909, when the truth began to take hold. Our annual caravan to a semi-local pastors' conference in Murrieta was upon us and we had a week of heat, speaking, and Acapulco shirts to look forward to. Murrieta is known as "The Diamond of the Temecula Valley." This is like calling Greenland Greenland instead of "Friggin' Cold Place Completely Bereft of Green." Well, unless you wanna call it a poop-diamond.

Anyway, we were back again pimpin' our wares (I mean that in a good way) to pastors from 9 to 9 all week. See, we had just released our first official release of free Bible study software and thought that pastors would be able to spread the word through their congregations - if only they could be convinced to give our ride a spin. So we set up computer stations and offered live tutorials individually packaged for each bright-shirted fellow who came by (seriously, I don't think I've ever seen so many floral-printed shirts concentrated in one location in my entire life!).

A booth near us housed a musical couple who wanted to make their services available to pastors as an itinerent worship band (similar to the bards of old, I'd imagine). They had a collection of about six songs of theirs playing all day long for three days straight. I went mad and still have yet to regain my insanity entirely. I actually thought they were pretty good songs and easy to listen to. The first eight or so times through. After hearing the cd through eighty-plus times in the space of not that long, I wanted bury small furry animals up to their necks in luscious Murrieta poop-diamonds and film nature take its course as the poor beasts starved to a state resemblant of rescued Auschwitz prisoners. So, no. It didn't really work to build a worshipful atmosphere within my spirit. I mean, gosh, their song turnover rate was worse than KROQ's - if you can believe that.

In other news, a fellow at the booth next to us mentioned Dave "I Think Catholicism Is the Devil and the Pope Is the Antichrist" Hunt and piqued Brandon's ire. You may be familiar with Hunt's latest exercise in frothing at windmills, What Love Is This, a treatment of the abberant teachings of the Calvinists (who are really Roman Catholics though they may not know it). So he and Brandon began trading comments which was, of course, entertaining to watch. I tried to stay out of it, knowing both that we were supposed to be ingratiating ourselves to the pastors (most of whom are anti-calvinistic dispengelicals) and that my boss wouldn't be happy if I were to stir up trouble. But occasionally, I was forced to enter into discussion via direct questioning as I was easily the most staunchly Reformed in my soteriology, not blushing away from reasonable statements like God predestined the reprobate to destruction based on nothing more than His good pleasure and the magnification of His glory. What?! So anyway, this guy at the other booth thought it was real cute to stop George "Weighed and Found Wanting" Bryson right in front of our table where he promptly asked Bryson numerous questions about what Calvinists believe, knowing that I would disagree but could not possibly respond with any authority without causing a row. *sigh*

Brandon and I may be preparing some sort of critique of Hunt book sometime soon. We'll see if I can handle reaading it for that long.

Oh, another pastor, implied that I believed in a God of Evil by stating that he couldn't believe in positive reprobation for that would make God evil and he couldn't worship a God of Evil. I, however, do believe in positive reprobation (though I don't necessarily enjoy the doctrine). For this pastor's sake, I hope he's right, because if God does proactively reprobate those whom He will, then either this pastor will not worship God or he'll be really sad that he called God "evil."

Really, what seminars like this teach me is that dogmatic stands on non-essential issues is a very bad thing. Credo-baptism, limited atonement, speaking in tongues, calvinism, pretribulationalism, theonomic ethics. These are things that should never be divided over. These are not the Gospel. These do not a Christian make. In fact, these do not a good Christian make. These are not the Gospel.

Yeah, so. Because I'm still in the midst of trying to resurrect my home computer from attempted assasination-via-negligence at the hands of a now vacationing roommate, I'm only able to post at the office. Where I am now. I would have posted earlier in this week but I was woefully removed from civilization by a responsibility to the company. I'll spill more on this one later, but due to time constraints, I'll leave you with an easy Top Five list (with which you may now hotly disagree):

My Top 5 Classic Rock Bands (c/o Brandolino)

(in no order beyond alphabetical)

Cream

CCR

Jefferson Airplane

Jethro Tull

Neil Young

Really, the most difficult thing is defining what is and is not "classic rock." I'm certain that Arrow has it wrong. But I couldn't tell you what it is, so I went with mainline groups.