Note: Although in-text links in blogs tend to be either lazy replacements, or unimaginative springboards, for content, I've been including more of them lately. Mostly this is so those of you who want to actually see or experience what I'm referencing, can, without having to Google them yourselves. I try to only link directly, and sparsely, and then only for those who might not have seen something and would like to. That is, you won't see things like "I was reading this today, and I am so mad about cheese now." More like, "I was watching the Dramatic Chipmunk video today, and it reminded me of blah blah blah." So, the goal is that you don't have to go off to a link and read something and then come back to get what I'm talking about. Think of links in this blog as more of bibliographical footnotes, or examples for a richer experience. Let me know if they're intrusive. Or I suppose, if you want more links to things I mention.
I took off Tuesday from work because I had spent the previous six days of work talking with the most uncooperative, anti-listening group of people I'd experienced in the previous 16 months of work. As weary as I was of that, and the fact that I'm working my 3rd Saturday in 6 weeks this week, I figured I'd be out longer than a single day if I didn't get some rest. That day was awesome.
But for some reason, though, I didn't sleep well that Tuesday night, and I spent most of the next day in a stupor, and by Wednesday night at 9, when we left Dragonfly from playing Scrabble at Dragonfly with Dave Weatherford, I was beat. Home by 9:30, in bed, by 9:45, you might think. But in reality, I got to sleep after 11. DUN DUN DUN.
Here's the story.
The fall after I stopped teaching, I was temping at a Perceptive Software. You know, the place with the twirly slide from the second floor to the first, and the free pop machines, and the frequent free leftovers from training classes, and the occasional fancy breakfasts, and occasional fancy lunches, and we went bowling my first week even though I was a temp and got paid for it even. Yeah, that company.
But it was pretty menial work -- entering information from trade show contact cards into a database program and then assigning the contacts to three people to do the follow up. Not much to it. I got good quick, and was buzzing through those things faster than they expected. So to entertain myself, I brought in some of my CDs. After a few dats of that, I started to get a little board. Most of the time I can only listen to a given CD three or four times before I need to put it away for a while. Historically, The Violet Burning has been the most frequent exception to that rule. But even so, and even with my surprisingly high tolerance for repetition of things that I like (my own jokes are an embarrassing example of this, also flash games), there's only so much I can take of the same songs over and over.
I'm not sure if it was from Wil Wheaton's blog that I first heard about it, but this is about the time I first started listening to Pandora stations, which I do pretty frequently these days when I'm in the mood for music, and some of those first stations I made are still in frequent rotation in the QuickMix we play when people are over at our house on Saturday and Sunday nights. But even Pandora got a little dull after a while. I guess I'm not huge music person.
On the way to work every morning, though, I was listening to the radio, and while I listened to the Buzz for music, I've always been more of a 810 sports talk or 980 news talk, or 89.3 pretentious talk kind of person. And sometimes, even though I'm not a big fan of the excessive southern accents of Christian radio voices, I even listen to 92.3 Christan talk (even though as rob Bell says, Christian is a lousy adjective), where it was either Ravi Zacharias or Chuck Swindall, depending on whether I hit the end of the 7-7:30 half-hour, or just the 7:30-8.
So one day, I thought I'd look up Ravi Zacharias, and listen to his stuff at work, because he has a wonderful lilting voice, and is one of those apologist people, who I had always liked, considering how they made me feel so smart. Once I started listening, though, I found that most of his online sermons and lectures were kept in that supremely annoying Christian radio format.
You know the one, where they take a 45 minute sermon, break it into three 24-ish minute sections with large overlaps so it'll fit into their half-hour-a-day programming format. They sandwich the sermon in the middle of some annoying theme music and local commercials with way more investment opportunities than I'm comfortable with, especially on a station that purports to be about the guy who liked to go around and say things like, "Blessed are the poor." But that's indicative of a whole freakin' culture of Christians, and is a whole blog for some other day.
Then towards the end of each day's sermon section, they play sappy music over the speaker as he (or much more rarely, she) talks. You know, like it's ending; so it doesn't sound like they are actually breaking the sermon up into smaller bits, and so it fits in their paradigm of Christian things need crappy music, especially at the end of a sermon; so it's more emotionally stirring. Because if you don't feel something, every time, it's not real, or whatever the bizarre logicemotion is. Because, you know, audience manipulation isn't a huge criticism of Christians these days, or anything.
And then the announcer comes on and reminds you of how great the ministry is, and how you really ought to send them some money if you've been 'blessed' by the ministry, or whatever, and they do such good work. (Ok, seriously, how often does a person who doesn't call themselves a Christian voluntarily listen to a Christian music radio station, let alone a Christian talk at you radio station? Just pull an NPR and ask for donations for the program if you like it. Why disingenuously drag 'ministry' into it?)
And then sometimes they'd do another 5 minutes of the sermon, closing with more sappy music, like it's actually ending (hint: likely it's not), or sometimes the speaker comes on and does a little interview, or explanation of his talk, or announces there's going to be a cruise that you should pay for. I am not making that up. (Nor am I making up the time that I got a brochure from a company advertising a cruise for the whole family!/missions trip to the poor in South America.)
All of this format isn't SO bad if you're listening on the radio. Where you hear part on one day, part on the next, and there's some overlap so you don't forget where you were the day before. But when you're listening to five sermons a day, it gets kind of old. And as much as I liked Ravi, it all started to feel a little excessive. Just gimme the guy's words, and leave the rest.
After getting frustrated with that, I thought I'd listen to some Tim Keel sermons that I'd missed from back before we went to Jacob's Well, because they are not made for radio, and I like listening to Tim Keel, and they go back a full two years, and a Tim Keel sermon does not have commercials (Unless it's for the KU Jayhawks, but we all have our foibles). After I caught up on the year of those I hadn't heard, I went and listened to Rob Bell's sermons from Mars Hill Church (Grand Rapids, not Seattle, srsly) because we'd read his book Velvet Elvis in our small group and it had been pretty paradigm changing for me. But their archives only go back twelve weeks, and I could easily listen to five or six sermons in a day. So I ran out.
Looking for more at-work listening fodder, I did a search for "Tim Keel" and "Rob Bell," looking for other people I could listen to. I found a couple of people that I didn't really get into, but that's where I first heard of Rick McKinley.
Ok, that's not entirely true, Rick is the cool pastor that Don Miller writes about in Blue like Jazz and other books, which I'd read. But I hadn't actually heard him yet. Rick sounds like a stoned-out hippy, and looks like a football player, and his church, Imago Dei, in Portland, has almost all their sermons online, all the way back to the beginning of the church in their archive. So I blazed a trail through through the entire three or four year archive, and by November, having switched to another temp job labeling accounting archive boxes for a conglomerate of industrial building part manufacturers in Lenexa, I even caught up to that week's sermon. So, besides the two weekely sermons from Rob and Rick, I was out of material. I spent the last weeks, before Thanksgiving, listening to the four gospels free from the open source World English Bible project.
Around that time, I listened to the November 16, 2006 message from Imago, where Rick laid out the seeds of what became the Advent Conspiracy, something Jacob's Well participated in this last year. Jill and I were inspired to join in on their relational gift giving and their spending less, making Christmas more Jesus-y. We even shared that sermon with the group we spend our lives with, and a bunch of them hopped on the Give More, Spend Less wagon. The whole thing is hard for me, because I really, really like spending money on people, especially at Christmas, but it's been a good learning experience, trying to break free of the religiously consumerist story we find ourselves living in.
So for that Christmas, we tried making gifts. I spent most of December making hollowed-out books, for example, and we gave some people times for us to go and hang out with them, and we gave Sam laundry facilities for a year. And after a year of seeing Sam a lot (we kinda like the guy), the following Christmas, we gave him another year.
Which brings us to Tuesday night. Our drier had been kind of laming its way through it's supposed job of drying clothes for the past week or so. Taking an extra half-cycle to wring out the water, and so on. Sam needed to do laundry, and we told him we wouldn't be there, but he's one of a number of close friends with keys to our place, so he went over while we were still in Olathe. We get home, ready to sleep at 9:30, and Jill went down to run another load of laundry, because we are trying to keep up with it, rather than let the clothes pile up all over our room like a lumpy patchwork carpet.
But Sam's clothes were wet in the drier, and our clothes from the load Jill had started that morning were wet in a basket, so I figured I'd run the drier longer. Even just air, hot or no should eventually do the trick. But the button didn't work. I checked the door. It was closed. Checked the lint screen. It was clean. Hit the button . . . nothing.
So while Jill and I argued about the state of cleanliness of the basement, and how months ago, to make room for games, I had moved a bunch of stuff into the area she had cleaned, and now there were spiders, and it was too cluttered to be able to vacuum, and she was unhappy about the whole thing, I unhooked the drier, slid it out of the way, moved all of the stuff off of Amanda's drier, walked it over, plugged it in, tested it (it works), spent a long while of sore fingers reconnecting the exhaust tube and it's wire fastener, and went to put Sam's wet stuff into the drier. But it was dusty, so Jill vacuumed it. Then it was uneven, and the feet, which are supposed to be adjustable, were not adjusting, so Jill went upstairs while I was figuring that out. Her suggestion of sticking the one corner of the drier on the carpet worked. So at least it was level and wouldn't walk all over the basement in the process of flinging water out of soppy garments. Then I put our drier back where Amanda's had been.
By then, for whatever reason, I was no longer sleepy, and in one of those rare, late-night cleaning binges, and spurred on by Jill's displeasure on the state of the basement and the need to put things away that we'd moved to get the drier away, began the long process of completely reorganizing the basement so that her laundry area would be clean, and, if I could swing it, we could still play games somewhere in the basement.
I had just finished folding up the table in the game room, so I could use that as a temporary staging area, when Jill came downstairs. She sat on the stairs, and I sat on a chair, and we talked about cleaning and organizing the basement, and about Jesus for President, which she is finishing and I've already read, and how challenging it is, and about our feelings on the basement and the cleaning and organizing. Then we went to bed and because I wasn't sleepy now, read some more of Wizard and Glass, which we've been ignoring for a while.
And I pulled on my stocking cap, and belatedly texted Adam to let him know we couldn't carpool to work because we were going to see Wes and Katy for dinner the next night, and slept.
BONUS LINKS:
1. I've seen some tie-lapse photography in my day, but nothing as beautiful as Eclectic 2.0 by Ross Ching.
2. Lauren Thompson's is my favorite of the whole series. But the whole Youngme - Nowme series makes me love humanity. A lot.
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