Friday, June 08, 2007
De profundis clamo ad te Domine
Oddly enough I am not terribly happy about this. I feel like I should gloat, and that justice has been served on a selfish spoiled brat who has the power to make her life into whatever she wanted it to be, and instead used that power not for good but rather turned her life into a tawdry spectacle and her body into a cum-dumpster.
But I am not finding any gloating, I am not feeling the "yeah!" feeling that I guess I should have. What I see in that shot is a foolish young girl who is receiving her first taste of reality, and finding it quite unpalatable.
It's probably too much to hope for that this experience will be the catalyst to change her life into something worth saving, but at the end of the day the fact remains that Jesus loves her as much as he does the rest of us. So I am not going to celebrate her fall, instead I will ask God to open her heart and show her a better way.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Knowledge leaving the world... Pt. 1
Absence. Makes the heart grow fonder, no?
Probably not.
Do you know what concerns me these days? The knowledge that passes from this world. Every day something else is forgotten. Here on the Internet we have more information available to us than ever before in history, and still 90% of the Internet is porn.
How many of you have read Mark Twain? How many of you know about shortwave radio? How many of you have read Dante, or Homer? How many of you can understand the Morse Code? How many of you remember life before FM radio, or better yet, the WWW?
The gentlemanly arts are disappearing as well. I still hold doors for women, whether I know them or not. I still bring flowers on a first date. All this knowledge, now considered arcane by the Starbucks/iPod crowd shaped the world which you youngsters now disdain and take for granted. When I am at table - to this very day - I stand when a woman gets up to leave the table. Tonight, others were puzzled when I did this at dinner, and only myself and the woman understood - she gave me that look, as I stood - a flash of recognition and surprise as I stood as she excused herself to the bathroom. Stranger still was her stance towards me when she returned, which previously had been apathetic to one of genuine warmth. Were I not involved with a woman myself I am confident I could have gotten her number with a minimum of effort, just on the Old World politeness.
But alas, I am a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War. I am older than I appear and I vainly sprinkle my conversations with references that would suggest a younger man, although I occasionally reveal my true age with an ill-placed slip of the keyboard. I have been penalized in the past for not being forthcoming enough, and I expect that trend to continue given my decided lack of candor.
Probably not.
Do you know what concerns me these days? The knowledge that passes from this world. Every day something else is forgotten. Here on the Internet we have more information available to us than ever before in history, and still 90% of the Internet is porn.
How many of you have read Mark Twain? How many of you know about shortwave radio? How many of you have read Dante, or Homer? How many of you can understand the Morse Code? How many of you remember life before FM radio, or better yet, the WWW?
The gentlemanly arts are disappearing as well. I still hold doors for women, whether I know them or not. I still bring flowers on a first date. All this knowledge, now considered arcane by the Starbucks/iPod crowd shaped the world which you youngsters now disdain and take for granted. When I am at table - to this very day - I stand when a woman gets up to leave the table. Tonight, others were puzzled when I did this at dinner, and only myself and the woman understood - she gave me that look, as I stood - a flash of recognition and surprise as I stood as she excused herself to the bathroom. Stranger still was her stance towards me when she returned, which previously had been apathetic to one of genuine warmth. Were I not involved with a woman myself I am confident I could have gotten her number with a minimum of effort, just on the Old World politeness.
But alas, I am a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War. I am older than I appear and I vainly sprinkle my conversations with references that would suggest a younger man, although I occasionally reveal my true age with an ill-placed slip of the keyboard. I have been penalized in the past for not being forthcoming enough, and I expect that trend to continue given my decided lack of candor.
