I saw Billy Eliot last night and I have to tell you what a wonderful movie it is. It's about this boy growing up in a poor blue collar mining town who wanted to be ballet dancer. The kid who played Billy was awesome; it was the best performance I have ever seen from a young actor, and one of the best performances I have ever seen from anyone. It really wasn't his acting that made the performance; it was his dancing. I am no ballet expert, but when he danced in the movie for various reasons you could feel what he was feeling. Some of the dancing scenes were some of the most joyous and wonderful things I have ever seen in a movie. It was just indescribable.
There was also a subplot about his friend who turns out to be gay, has a crush on him, and begins to reveal it when he finds out Billy is doing ballet. He thinks that since Billy like ballet, he must be gay as well (which is untrue). The way the film deals with it is really touching....you have to see it for yourself.
Anyway spring break has been ok, I haven't been nearly as productive as I wanted to be. Being lazy is just too easy.
Everyone, leave comments they make me exciting, plus I put alot of effort into making the comment link and havng it say funny things. POST COMMENTS!!!
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Saturday, March 06, 2004
Halloa all! Miss me? Well the Hell week at BU is over and so begins Spring Break. I'm not doing much exciting though....one of these days I will...I promise. I'll be spending much of my week here at home in good/bad ole Rockland, MA. I always am excited to come home at first, but after a few hours I realize why I was so excited to leave the place my senior year in high school.
Speaking of high school, do any of you look back at the person you were in high school, even your senior year, and just wonder how you were once that way? It's amazing how people change so much in so little time, and how your experiences and friends shape you.
High school was so negative for me in so many ways. Sometimes I was a big neurotic ball of low self confidence, and I constantly questioned whether people really liked me or were just acting like my friends to be nice. Other times I was really just so angry, and had a "fuck you" attitude towards alot of things. When either of those moods didn't prevail I was just generally sad. There was happiness, but it only came in flashes. There was a good day or a good couple of days, but generally contentment was rare and overridden by the malaise that engulfed me in those years.
As my senior year wound down the tide turned, and I began to feel nuetral about things, which was a vast improvement over the preceding few years, when day in and day out i just felt bad about things. In college I think I figured out that life wasn't like high school, much to my relief. People weren't as judgemental and critical. It was then I could feel comfortable about myself and alot more changes fell into place after that.
I think it was in the novel The Elementary Particles where I saw the observation that every few years your body's cells turn over. In other words, the cells you have today in your body are completely different from the cells you had X years ago. To me that brings up all sorts of interesting questions about ourselves that are far too deep to bring up in a single blog entry, but one thing it does highlight really well related to this entry is that we are always changing. Our lives are filled with renewal and change, and we shoudn't resist it. In fact, we should seek it out. If we stagnate too long in one place emotionally intellectually etc. then we run the risk of missing out on what life is really about. I really think that the primary reason that we were put on this Earth, and why we were endowed with so much intelligence is so we could better ourselves, not just intellectually, but emotionally and spiritually.
This is one of the reasons I can't stand conservative Christian people, because they fundamentally miss this point. They believe that everything you need to know about living your life was zapped onto a stone tablet 4000 years ago, and what was was supposedly zapped onto the stone tablet is absolute and cannot be ammended or changed in any way. If this is true then what was the point of Jesus? Yeah I understand the vague theological reasons, tat he had to die for everybody's sins etc and so on. But, if that was the case why didn't he just say "Look, follow this law you've already got, it's all you need" and then just die? I think he had something to tell us that was more than just "be good boys and girls." If you look at what he said there were two maor threads: one was "Love everybody" which is always good advice, but the second was "Go Beyond the Law." Which, again, I don't think means just "be really really good" that would be fairly unprofound for a savior. I think he was saying, "Yeah this law is nice, but you have to focus on bettering yourself (getting to the point where you can 'love your enemy')." Morality isn't about following incomprehensible rules, it's about bettering yourself into a person you didn't think it was possible for you to be.
So, don't be afraid to take that big step forward
Speaking of high school, do any of you look back at the person you were in high school, even your senior year, and just wonder how you were once that way? It's amazing how people change so much in so little time, and how your experiences and friends shape you.
High school was so negative for me in so many ways. Sometimes I was a big neurotic ball of low self confidence, and I constantly questioned whether people really liked me or were just acting like my friends to be nice. Other times I was really just so angry, and had a "fuck you" attitude towards alot of things. When either of those moods didn't prevail I was just generally sad. There was happiness, but it only came in flashes. There was a good day or a good couple of days, but generally contentment was rare and overridden by the malaise that engulfed me in those years.
As my senior year wound down the tide turned, and I began to feel nuetral about things, which was a vast improvement over the preceding few years, when day in and day out i just felt bad about things. In college I think I figured out that life wasn't like high school, much to my relief. People weren't as judgemental and critical. It was then I could feel comfortable about myself and alot more changes fell into place after that.
I think it was in the novel The Elementary Particles where I saw the observation that every few years your body's cells turn over. In other words, the cells you have today in your body are completely different from the cells you had X years ago. To me that brings up all sorts of interesting questions about ourselves that are far too deep to bring up in a single blog entry, but one thing it does highlight really well related to this entry is that we are always changing. Our lives are filled with renewal and change, and we shoudn't resist it. In fact, we should seek it out. If we stagnate too long in one place emotionally intellectually etc. then we run the risk of missing out on what life is really about. I really think that the primary reason that we were put on this Earth, and why we were endowed with so much intelligence is so we could better ourselves, not just intellectually, but emotionally and spiritually.
This is one of the reasons I can't stand conservative Christian people, because they fundamentally miss this point. They believe that everything you need to know about living your life was zapped onto a stone tablet 4000 years ago, and what was was supposedly zapped onto the stone tablet is absolute and cannot be ammended or changed in any way. If this is true then what was the point of Jesus? Yeah I understand the vague theological reasons, tat he had to die for everybody's sins etc and so on. But, if that was the case why didn't he just say "Look, follow this law you've already got, it's all you need" and then just die? I think he had something to tell us that was more than just "be good boys and girls." If you look at what he said there were two maor threads: one was "Love everybody" which is always good advice, but the second was "Go Beyond the Law." Which, again, I don't think means just "be really really good" that would be fairly unprofound for a savior. I think he was saying, "Yeah this law is nice, but you have to focus on bettering yourself (getting to the point where you can 'love your enemy')." Morality isn't about following incomprehensible rules, it's about bettering yourself into a person you didn't think it was possible for you to be.
So, don't be afraid to take that big step forward
Monday, March 01, 2004
Two major things tonight.....
First.....
I was thinking today about how we really live in a results-based society. Managers/coaches are hired and fired largely based on whether they win or not, or whether their moves succeed or fail. We elect politicians, and throw them out largely based on how happy we are with the country at the present moment. Networks pull TV shows when they don't meet a certain ratings level. Everything is results...results...results.
It would be right for you to now say "So what?!" because on face that seems like a logical way to do things. But in practice it is a horrible way of evaluating things. When we put too high of a value on results, we ignore important things like the quality of the decisions made by people given the information they had at the time. A manager could pull a starting pitcher, only to see the relief pitcher lose the game, and it could still have been the right decision. As fans and as people, we forget that many times and simply criticize the manager for "losing the game." There are a whole litany of Presidents who made good decisions during their tenure in office that were good ones, based on solid reasoning with the information given at the time, and they didn't work out. Despite having made good decisions they suffered in the polls, and maybe even were thrown out of office at the next election. There's also a whole other catagory who made bad decisions that by some lucky circumstance worked out, and get praise heaped on them because the country was well off during the time they happened to be in office.
The danger in all of this is that we don't make decisions on who's going to lead our country/manage our baseball team/whatever based on who seems most capable of making the best choices in the future. We make them on who, by luck or whatever, had the most sucess in the past. So I'd just ask you all that when you make a decision about someone/something don't just consider the results, consider the decision making/potential behind those results.
Second....
Refer back to my previous post and you see my anxiousness to change. I think my life is coming to some sort of head where it takes a new direction. At certain moments in our lives we come to realize that the way we are doing things, and the way we think about ourselves is not working out correctly. Things have to change, we have to readjust our goals in life, and how we view our relationships with others. For me, I can really identify this happening twice before in my life:once when I entered high school, and again when I came out.
As for this current bout of personal regime change, I really have begun to feel myself falling into a pattern that I've repeated over my life. I've gotten stuck in a rut, and it's not a rut I'm very happy with. I need to change my way of doing things and start to build new/more quality relationships and a better self image.
First.....
I was thinking today about how we really live in a results-based society. Managers/coaches are hired and fired largely based on whether they win or not, or whether their moves succeed or fail. We elect politicians, and throw them out largely based on how happy we are with the country at the present moment. Networks pull TV shows when they don't meet a certain ratings level. Everything is results...results...results.
It would be right for you to now say "So what?!" because on face that seems like a logical way to do things. But in practice it is a horrible way of evaluating things. When we put too high of a value on results, we ignore important things like the quality of the decisions made by people given the information they had at the time. A manager could pull a starting pitcher, only to see the relief pitcher lose the game, and it could still have been the right decision. As fans and as people, we forget that many times and simply criticize the manager for "losing the game." There are a whole litany of Presidents who made good decisions during their tenure in office that were good ones, based on solid reasoning with the information given at the time, and they didn't work out. Despite having made good decisions they suffered in the polls, and maybe even were thrown out of office at the next election. There's also a whole other catagory who made bad decisions that by some lucky circumstance worked out, and get praise heaped on them because the country was well off during the time they happened to be in office.
The danger in all of this is that we don't make decisions on who's going to lead our country/manage our baseball team/whatever based on who seems most capable of making the best choices in the future. We make them on who, by luck or whatever, had the most sucess in the past. So I'd just ask you all that when you make a decision about someone/something don't just consider the results, consider the decision making/potential behind those results.
Second....
Refer back to my previous post and you see my anxiousness to change. I think my life is coming to some sort of head where it takes a new direction. At certain moments in our lives we come to realize that the way we are doing things, and the way we think about ourselves is not working out correctly. Things have to change, we have to readjust our goals in life, and how we view our relationships with others. For me, I can really identify this happening twice before in my life:once when I entered high school, and again when I came out.
As for this current bout of personal regime change, I really have begun to feel myself falling into a pattern that I've repeated over my life. I've gotten stuck in a rut, and it's not a rut I'm very happy with. I need to change my way of doing things and start to build new/more quality relationships and a better self image.
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