overcoming average(?)

I often wonder what would happen if I truly felt free to write the things I feel like I need to.

Alright, I can’t end this week with that one sporadic and depressing thought. Instead, I’ll leave with a thank you to Karl over at guitarforworship.com for his amazingly kind words on his last post. I also have to say thank you to the entire team over at Newsong Church in Irvine for having me be a part of their Easter services and welcoming me and my wife as family. I feel extremely blessed by both of these parties and I honestly haven’t felt so loved by so many people as I have over the past week.

So if it was almost 4am and you’re sitting in the passenger seat of a Dodge Challenger with your Chuck Taylors propped up on the dashboard, what would you write about? Would it be about the relative absurdity of the situation you ended up in? Would it be about getting to see almost every star in the sky above the void surrounding you on either side of your designated ribbon of highway? Would you reflect on the plasticity of time now that it’s actually 5am after crossing the New Mexico border?

Maybe you’d just do like me and ask a bunch of rhetorical questions that are just barely on this side of nonsense.

I do the utterly vain thing that I’m sure almost all bloggers do but none seem to talk about: I check my site stats. I can see how many people have visited my blogs and read my posts. The number is very low. Sometimes I can get a little bummed about that; like my words and thoughts are so valuable and deserve to be read by more than an average of four people a day.

First, I have to remember that I’m not that much of a genius or a writer that I need to be heard by more than a handful of people. Frankly, I don’t know of too many that are. Second, I have to admit that some of my thoughts (and, let’s be honest, ramblings) maybe aren’t good for too many people to read. For example, due to a change in privacy policies or something, some people’s Twitter accounts no longer automatically update their Facebook profiles. This is what’s happened to me, and I’m feeling almost relieved by that. I now feel like I have fewer people to potentially (and probably) offend. Maybe even fewer infuriating comments to sift through.

Here’s hoping that what I write from now on will be more focused and worthwhile to the precious few people who take minutes out of their lives to read this nonsense.

Happy Balentimes everyone!

today i half jokingly posted to twitter a link to an article about the necessity of critiques in the art world saying that i was afraid of critiques. it’s a very well written article by my good friend nate on the proxart site. i was following along on his twitter account and saw where the ideas sprouted from. he had previously posted an article about a piece of public art that the city had purchased at an ungodly price. he didn’t think it was very good at all (neither did i, for the record), and someone had commented to him that basically took the form of “just cause you don’t agree doesn’t give you a right to criticize.”

some of you may have noticed (but probably not) that a couple weeks ago i had posted an extensive (for me) essay on the difference between worship music and Christian music, then made it a private entry, then reposted a revised version a few days ago. there were a couple reasons for that. the first is that i wasn’t completely happy with how i had written it. it felt disjointed and sort of patchy in the flow of logic. the second is that i got a very long comment that rattled my cage a little more than i was comfortable with. it didn’t critique my writing of the subject, but the subject itself. it blindsided me with just how wrecked i felt about it. i dwelt on the “why” of those feelings for a while and talked through it with my wife and i think have since come to at least a minor conclusion about it.

writing is new to me. sort of. i’ve always loved writing, but we seem to have brief passionate romances before it doesn’t do what i want it to do, then we both say things we don’t mean and part ways for months or years at a time. on the other side, music is something that i’ve been doing consistently for the past 13 (holy hell….) years. i’ve been critiqued up and down on that and mostly in the earlier years. i grew from it, but only after i learned how to take the criticism. i had to learn to separate me as a person from the music i was creating. i don’t know if i’d learned to do that with my writing when i posted that. I’m still not sure it’s 100% possible if your art is truly an extension of yourself. anyway, i don’t think I was ready. on some subjects, I might still not be ready. maybe if I had written about something else church related that had nothing to do with music or fatherlessness I wouldn’t have taken it so personal. or if the comment wasn’t so personal, maybe I wouldn’t have taken it so personal.

I actually do want critique on my writing. I’d like to be better at it. I would, however, like the criticism to be about the writing rather than the subject I write about. of course, I’d also like to write another work of fiction and have that critiqued like crazy.

p.s. I typed this whole post trying not to put two spaces after the period before the start of every sentence because I just read an article today that said how incorrect that actually is to do despite what I’d been taught my entire school career

nothing very important, but i feel i should share and it’s going to take more than 140 characters.

1. if you think of lady gaga as a performance artist working in the music medium and NOT as a musical arist, it’ll make you less angry about how she could possibly be famous. for example, listening to “bad romance” as a song can make one’s ears bleed. but, if you look at the big picture of what she’s doing as some sort of subversive critique of the music industry and the idea of fame what she’s doing is downright genius.

2. yes, covering the new iphone’s antenna makes it lose reception. also, covering the camera makes it unable to take pictures, and covering the screen renders the retina display useless. i haven’t dropped a call in the week i’ve owned it. that number is way down from 7+ a day.

3. a day after the new twilight movie opened, “deathly hallows” is the top trending topic on twitter and neither “twilight” nor “eclipse” is on the list. there’s a couple reasons for this, but i think i know what the biggest one is. the twilight series is very literally a fad. the harry potter series has been around since most of the current audience for it was in grade school.

4. soccer will never catch on in the u.s. because of the game clock. if you don’t know how long a regulation FIFA game is to begin with, it’s an unspecified time commitment. most americans just can’t do it. if you don’t know, the game is supposed to last 90 minutes, but the clock doesn’t count down in game segments. so you can be halfway into the second half and watch the clock go from 70 minutes to 71 minutes and then be wondering when exactly this game will be over. that’s without bringing into account the whole “injury time” thing which is a separate monster