Job related

I now have a J. O. B. yes, it’s true, i am among the working stiffs. and although this job is merely a cafe job, it’s a paycheck and i am better off than most due entirely to friends and family.

however, today i received one of those ‘you are not a good fit for this company’ type emails.

here it is:

Hi Joel,
Thank you for your application for the Portland site coordinator position. Unfortunately, we are not able to offer you an interview at this time as you are not a good fit for the current needs of Sports4Kids at this time. We encourage you to continue to gain experience working with groups of youth and reapply in the future. Good luck.
Sincerely,
The Team at Sports4Kids

And so i decided to respond in kind (i’ve wanted to do this for oh so long and i applied here like two months ago):

Hi Jonathan,

and while I thank you for your timely reply, I can honestly state that you can’t possibly ascertain my qualifications from an online application and some ostensibly appropriate questions regarding how one might deal with youth. However, if you were to interview me, or even better yet, speak with the past leaders I’ve lead or the dozens of youth who I now consider my friends, you’d most likely think otherwise. But discerning from the fact that this post is still up, your hiring practices have yet to properly evaluate potential candidates.

Best,

Joel Brady

Yes, it felt great!

Thoughts on perception 2, our environment

Recently, a friend of mine gave me a copy of Wendell Berry’s Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community. Thus far it is an excellent read. This same friend took this picture (i think) somewhere along Oregon’s scenic coastline.

I want to quote Berry here, ‘[...] the love of nature that limits itself to the love of places that are ’scenic’ is implicitly dangerous. It is dangerous because it tends to exclude unscenic places from nature and from the respect that we sometimes accord to nature’ (28).

This is highway 84 in southern Idaho. It is arid and profitless lanf.  And yet, this barren stretch where seldom is seen a valley dwelling deer or low lying hawk, hoping for prey to fall victim along this asphalt wonderland, is quite captivating. But despite this captivation, and according to our modern understanding of our general use of the word, scenic it is not.

Creepy robot and hilarious spoof (but you must watch the real one first)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

& now the spoof

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc

trust me, they’re both worth it.

A thought on perception, 1

I think Maurice Merleau-Ponty conveys the intelligibility of history perfectly in his short but sweet The World of Perception as such:

The physics of relativity confirms that absolute and final objectivity is a mere dream by showing how each particular observation is strictly linked to the location of the observer and cannot be abstracted from this particular situation; it also rejects the notion of an absolute observer. We can no longer flatter ourselves with the idea that, in science, the exercise of a pure and unsituated intellect can allow us to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as God would see it.

He goes on, however, to suggest that this doesn’t weaken the veracity of science or even the need for scientific research as much as curtail the dogmatism associated with the notion that only science can obtain ‘absolute and complete knowledge.’

Nada Surf : whose authority

i stumbled upon these guys while borrowing a friends car the other day…nada surf is one of those bands that i’d heard of but never truly listened to; aside from an older hit, ‘popular’. anyway, i am really digging their albums Lucky (from which this song is from) and Let Go.

writing is cathartic, right? or a moment to vent

I got a phone call today that didn’t go as i had expected. In fact, without warning my heart just dropped, lower than it has in quite sometime; then i just closed my phone, set it on the fireplace mantel and just leaned against it…

_________

it’s weird to be in this position: jobless, depressed all the time, walking around kind of listless. Since i’ve been here i’ve submitted over 60 resumes to only receive one interview (last friday). i mean, that’s a lot and not very many, right? as this continues i have become more apparent of my status with others. it’s not that i don’t think people care, but they stop asking. people don’t like to be around negative reminders. it’s weird, but over the last month phone calls and emails have come to a near standstill…

i guess i kind of get it. maybe not.

this is not to discount those who have cared, it just highlights those who have not — fuck, this is hard and people kind of bum me out.

i’m not sure if this is cathartic, but it’s a new post.

And what if i chose X

Adbusters had an article recently that looked into the May ‘68 riots in Paris. The article in and of itself was quite interesting but for me the part that caused me to wonder out loud, was when the author mentioned how striking it was that the individuals in an accompanying photograph really believed in what they were doing. And that’s when it hit me…we are so hungry to be apart of something that to suggest participation signifies belief is a tad bit presumptuous. Or better yet, our longing to participate in anything neither cements our love for or fidelity to any one cause. I have been to several ‘events’ where a collective of discordant youths publicly expressed their philosophical outrage at a system. Does that make me a believer? Did i share a collective belief?

In looking at the above photo, are we to gather that the beliefs of the two individuals in the foreground are the same, or at least similar? For how long? The guy to the left, holding the stick, could’ve had a bad day with his parents; recently found out that his student loans had been denied; or that his boyfriend just broke up with him and therefore decided to go on a rampage — low-and-behold, there happened to be this very convenient paradigmatic riot happening right outside his flat. oh how fortuitous!! let’s go bust up that VW.

Now the point I’m trying to make here, in a not so lucid fashion, is how difficult the journey of belief really is. To merely suggest the internal wiring of someone based on collective involvement means shit. And in fact, ones involvement in anything is most likely based on something akin to a contact high (yes, of the drug induced variety). On some level, we yearn to be apart of something, so once we witness a certain happening that fits into this ‘ideal’ situation we have a tendency to mirror the other participants. It’s interesting, because we seem to do this quite often. Instead of looking like the odd man out so to speak, we subsequently become engendered with feelings, affectations, and linguistic assimilation’s that would suggest that we have a greater knowledge of this belief than we actually have. But here’s the kicker, once we’ve ascribed to ourselves a certain belief system complete with affectation, we then seek to understand it and make it our own. It’s like some kid who watched North Shore for the first time in the ’80’s and thus begins to identify with the attributes associated with surf culture only to follow it up with learning how to surf.

But what happens if after investing so much of our time in ‘creating’ our identity, we come to realize that the outward image is far more difficult to believe in after we truly delve into what ever substantive quality lies beneath?

Image of God, a review of sorts

as i got off of the phone with Bryan, i turned to Kate to let her know that it would indeed be the 9am service we’d be attending and not the pillow sensitive 10:30 service we had ventured to weeks prior. She reacted as i figured and then went about her business (of which i have zero recollection).

it was during our familial preparations for church this past sunday morning that rekindled the often heard trope that the hour before church might possibly be the most stressful moment of the week.

hi.

hi.

bryan and i beltched as we dropped our kids off at the registration heavy children’s ministry area. i’m not sure any of the men at the door could have prevailed against a gun toting crazy person, but eliot never mentioned fearing for his life…

lot’s of people mingling around the entrance to an impressive auditorium space that left me longing for my high school theatre days. and yet, i was never in theater (so spell it correctly) in high school, and really only wished i was years later…anecdotal as well as descriptively speaking, of course. imago had greeters that weren’t all that greetery. and throw a curve-ball at my postmegachurch mind, but the greeters didn’t actually handout anything but merely stood menacingly by a stack of bibles. i didn’t take one.

however, as i found a perfect sit with which to familiarize myself with this relatively young community, a woman kindly walked over and offered me a program. i took one of these because left in the wake of our mornings carnage getting ready was my back-pocket perfect, orange Rhodia notebook. i needed something to write on.

once seated the obligatory worship music began. it was fine. it might have been atypical in the fact that it was not ten years behind the times, although more like five or six (and there was this one song whose music had great potential to only find its doomed fate in horribly written and dare i say wordy lyrics). but i didn’t have to shake anyones hand. two points for imago (there will be no more points given or tallied for the rest of this post).

as the worship leader finished up his prayer i felt a bit of excitement welling up inside as i watched Rick Mckinley make his way to the stage. now i know very little of this man, the church’s history, or how he has time for four kids; but i have listened to quite a few podcasts during my biking to work days and his ability to preach is indisputable: he is extremely intelligible, especially with some complex theology, he is unafraid to point out that the mission of the church is to help the less fortunate (this church is service project rich), and in the end, is quite funny (a plus for anyone who longs to preach). but unfortunately, attending imago is as Kate suggested, Inland Hills 2.0.

now, is this a bad thing? to be honest, i’m not sure. it’s just that i haven’t been apart of a more corporate style church in nearly ten years. i’m not entirely sure i have it in me to be a small fish in a big pond. sure you could say that has more to do with me than imago, and that’s most certainly true — it does illuminate certain issues that i have. but i think at the heart of what i’m suggesting is that as the message ran on, i remembered why i started to have a hard time with this style to begin with — someone i didn’t know was trying to teach me something as if it was the gospel. he was looking at me and everyone in there as if what he was saying was indeed the breath of God; and i’m not sue it wasn’t, but was it?

there is more here i need to flesh out. i think i’ll post more, especially regarding the message and the great conversations that i had with my friend bryan afterward, but for right now i need to let this ruminate.

Maybe this is why

Last night the family and I decided to splurge at this Italian Restaurant downtown. The food was okay; eliot behaved for the most part; and Katie and I got some lively conversation in.

The catalyst behind the ‘lively’ convo was what I heard from the table behind us. As is typical in most city centers the business folk get off work, head to a local eatery, and begin the evenings dinning with a moment or two of decompression. I get this. I really do. (and here’s the qualifier that nullifies the previous statement) But when someone uses something, anything as the crux of their argument in a way that highlights exactly how much they don’t know about the subject, they need to stop.

The gentleman behind me said that as we look at the country of Africa then we will surely understand blah, blah, blah. Once corrected, he further digressed by asserting that Africa is a region. Now, i get that Africa is a region of the Earth. But his description could be likened to Napa Valley is a region of the Bay Area. It almost trivializes it.

The problem I’m posing here isn’t that he misspoke and then failed to accurately correct himself as much as trying to point out that marginalization starts in gross generalizations and propagates in our failure to acknowledge how nuanced Africa is (replace your area of interest with Africa).

We can’t possibly understand the plight of the Fur in Sudan by reading about the Tutsis in Rwanda or the Hutus in Burundi.

History is wrought by individuals who have marginalized the voices of the less powerful. This is not news. But unfortunately these voices continue to stay so because most of us deem it more appropriate to acquiesce to the point rather than initiate a didactic moment.

So, how can I listen to someone’s ’solution’ for a variegated people when all they see is black.

maybe I should write more.