On Our Way To Crazy

Disclaimers: Obviously, I knew it wasn’t going to be great. But I have a high tolerance for cheese, especially in chick flicks, and I still thought it sucked. Also, there are no spoilers in this post, as everyone who has seen the trailer knows exactly what happens.

REASONS WHY BRIDE WARS SUCKED

1. It would never ever never ever never ever never ever happen. Ever. Twilight was more realistic.

2. There is no such thing as ‘blood orange’ colored tanning lotion. Spray tan doesn’t come in colors like that. It comes in intensities. It’s not paint.

3. Blue hair dye would at least have a blue tint in the bowl. The hair guy would have noticed that. Also, just because your hair turns blue doesn’t mean it also falls out. Also also, blue hair is kind of awesome. You should just go with it.

4. A wedding planner like that would not ever set them up for that situation. Nor would she be able to magically produce two June dates at the Plaza on three months notice.

5. Even if all that stuff could happen, they wouldn’t put those two weddings on the same day. They were booked first, and the girl who got the other date would have to switch.

6. Twenty-somethings who teach public school in New York do not live in apartments that look like they came straight out of Domino. Not even in movies.

7. No one would have their bachelorette party on a weeknight when they have a big presentation the next day.

8. Anne Hathaway’s parents don’t show up until she is already dressed and ready to walk down the aisle. That is not how it works. Her mother would have been in there with her all day long, she would have noticed how unhappy she was, and she would have figured the whole thing out, preventing the part where she decides to charge down the aisle and tackle Kate Hudson.

9. Kate Hudson’s outfits were not cute enough for a chick flick lawyer. And Anne Hathaway wore the same outfit twice! That does not happen in young girls in New York movie land.

10. The ending was lame and cheesy, even for a movie as bad as it already was. AND they both had short haircuts. Because we all cut our hair off after we get married.

I love concerts. I have posted about them endlessly on this blog. I will go see anyone once. I will see the same shows over and over and over again.

But very rarely do I find myself sitting in my seat, completely in awe, thinking, “This is the best show I have ever seen.”

Two days removed, I still feel that way about the Punch Brothers show I saw on Tuesday.

The Punch Brothers are the new project of Chris Thile of Nickel Creek. They are a five piece modern bluegrassy kind of thing, and they are fantastic. I love Nickel Creek, and am completely in love with Chris Thile, so when the opportunity presented itself I jumped on the chance to see his new band even though I had no idea what they were all about.

They did some great covers – White Stripes, Wilco, Chuck Berry. But the centerpiece of the show is “The Blind Leaving the Blind”, which is something of a bluegrass symphony in four movements. And y’all? It was incredible. I don’t know how to describe music like that… it’s moving and emotional and stretching and fascinating. I was so sad when it was over.

The band itself was great. The thing about Chris Thile is that everyone is in love with him. Everyone. And he performs like he knows that everyone is in love with him and his adorableness and his talent and his corduroy blazer. So what does he do? He goes out and finds four more equally talented though not necessarily equally adorable guys and puts together this band of young talented adorable guys in suspenders and sneakers and the whole thing is just enchanting.

So there I was, in a big comfy chair at Vanderbilt, watching this fantastic performance of beautiful music with great lighting and adorable musicians, and I’m thinking that it just can’t get any better. The show ended and we went out to the lobby to check out the merch table and wait out the rain.

Then. Then! The band comes out! Apparently everyone else knew that was happening, but we were caught totally by surprise. Especially when the band member closest to where we were standing was my boyfriend and yours, Chris Thile. So I grab my friend Becka and we run over there and commence the babbling portion of the evening, where we talked over each other about how much we love him and how we go to all his shows together and did we mention that we love him and the show was so great we are huge fans and we love him while he smiles and nods before Becka’s husband finally shut us up by pulling out the camera.

If the Punch Brothers are coming anywhere near you, get there. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Go to the show. You will not be disappointed.

“One spring I decided to give up evil music for Lent. It meant seven weeks of listening to the radio and wondering which songs were evil and which were just about evil. I decided the Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was okay because it was anti-devil, but the Grateful Dead’s ‘Friend of the Devil’ was soft on Satan. I gave myself permission to keep cranking Jim Carroll’s ‘People Who Died’ because it was so saturated with evil that it amounted to a critique of evil, but not Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, which was just plain evil. I made a specially edited tape of London Calling to omit the bad stuff. These theological judgements made my head hurt, and I was relieved when Lent was over. On Easter morning, I treated myself to ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’”

“I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I’m always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with – nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them all together, and they add up to the story of a life.”

I’m not a book reviewer by any means. (You should be reading Kari’s blog if you want good reviews.) But! I do love reading, and this year I want to do a better job of remembering the books I read and what I liked about them.

So every so often this year, I’m just going to post a few passages from the books that strike me. Hopefully I will be able to look back and remember books and paragraphs that meant something to me, made me laugh, or shifted the way I look at the world.

Last week I finished a book called Sin Boldly: A Field Guide to Grace by Cathleen Falsani. It was fantastic – one of those books that you don’t want to read to quickly for fear of missing something, the kind that you put down after each chapter so it can sit with you for a while. It put words to a lot of thoughts I’ve been having lately, and it came along at the perfect time.

“‘We’re all great creatures of second chances,’ Sech told the congregation. We expend too much energy beating ourselves up for our mistakes, screwups, and shortcomings. Fixating on them can lead to ‘internalized oppression,’ the rabbi said. ‘Let it go!’
Deliver yourself from your narrow, sorrowful place, he said, adding that the word for ‘sorrow’ in Hebrew also means ‘narrow’ and that, seeing as how it was Passover, we might want to think of that spiritual self-imprisonment as something we have to ‘pass through.’
‘Bust out into freedom,’ he said. ‘You wanna be free? Work on it!’”

“I have a favorite t-shirt that reads, “Jesus is my mixtape.” When I bought it, I thought its slogan was charmingly quirky, but over time it has acquired this transcendent quality, a motto that sums up my belief that everything – everything – is spiritual. At the center of that everythingness, as a pastor friend of mine likes to describe it, is a universal rhythm, a song we all play, like a giant, motley orchestra. Sometimes in tune, sometimes off-key. We call it by different names. Still, it remains – if only we have ears to hear it – the eternal soundtrack that plays in the background of our lives.”

THING THE FIRST

Last weekend we saw Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban at the movie theater. It was crazy. They were just hanging out, waiting in line like the rest of us, talking and laughing. Everyone in the lobby was freaking the heck out, but they were mostly leaving them alone. It was hilarious to watch the ripple of whispers and camera phones and people realized what was going on. She is excessively tall and pale and pretty. Since we are already BFFs, I didn’t make a big deal out of them being there. I did text a bunch of people, though.

THING THE SECOND

We keep our trash and recycle bins right by the side door of our house. Yesterday morning when we got up, our recyle bin was at the other end of the driveway, open, and it had two used diapers in it. WHAT IS THIS INSANITY? Who does that? Also, to clarify, they were baby diapers, not adult. We got that question more than once yesterday when we were telling the kids about it.

THING THE THIRD

I have eaten almost an entire box of clementines by myself in less than a week. They are delicious and I am addicted. Somebody stop me.

Ok, people. We need to talk about facebook. Because facebook? Is freaking me out.

It was all fine and good when it was all people I am close to and kids in the youth group. Then the whole world found facebook. People I knew in high school but was not friends with. People I haven’t seen or spoken to in over fifteen years. Siblings of ex-boyfriends. It’s getting insane.

I don’t mind being friends with these people, generally. I am not afraid to unfriend you if you are an annoying facebook user. But I could really do without people who do the following:

- update your status every five minutes with things like “Barney is doing the laundry” and “Barney is watching TV” and “Barney is going to bed”. We all know you do those things. Everyone does those things. It is not interesting.

- update your status every five minutes to make sure we all know how awesome you are. You got up at 4am to workout and it was SO WORTH IT! You work 24 hours a day because that’s the kind of person you are! You love to cook and play guitar because you are an independent woman! No one cares. Also, you are a tool.

- publish notes and comments all over the place stating your opinion on politics/tv/music/religion and how anyone who thinks differently about politics/tv/music/religion is clearly an idiot who has never really thought about anything ever and is obviously going to hell.

Annoying as they may be, those people are easy enough to deal with. Unfriend, ignore, unfriend, ignore, etc etc. But what do you do when someone with a little more… pull from your past shows up? Maybe someone with whom you had a serious relationship, and then never talked again? Someone with whom your last interaction was both really unpleasant and ten years ago? AWKWARD.

It’s one thing to casually be in touch with someone like that. It’s entirely another to allow them access to your entire current life without having any kind of conversation with them first. There’s no way to prepare yourself for that notification that says “SERIOUS AND DRAMATIC EX-BOYFRIEND WANTS TO BE YOUR FRIEND” with no note attached. No discussion of past events. Just an updated picture and the knowledge that they can now get in touch with everyone you know.

I don’t know. I need a bigger buffer zone, facebook. A way to ease into this kind of thing. A way to not click on their profile and see that they’ve been discussing me. Something that forces them to be the one that speaks up first. Something that forces my hand to click DENY and let my desire to live privately win out over my voyeurism.

Facebook is freaking me the heck out, y’all.

What is the reasoning behind these CDs? In what world are they necessary? Why, if you are going to allow your kids to listen to songs about getting down in the club, does it matter who is singing? Is it less inappropriate if little kids are singing? Because let me tell you, it’s a lot creepier.

Who is buying these albums? WHY? Why isn’t the original artist good enough? You’re already buying crappy music for your kids. At least let them hear them the way they were meant to be heard. Which, to be clear, was not in the style of the children of the corn.

WOW, my reading was down this year. Way down. In February, for my ordination class, we started the process of reading a book of the Bible every week and discussing it. And even though I decided over a year ago to cut myself some slack on the procrastinating, I didn’t get much outside reading done this year. I am pretty well-versed in Old Testament history, though.

Because it sucked up a lot of my time this year, I am definitely counting all that Bible reading in my book list. Here it is!

1. Looking For Alaska – John Green
2. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
3. Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris
4. The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
5. Atonement – Ian McEwan
6. Bird By Bird – Anne Lamott
7. Genesis
8. Exodus
9. Bel Canto – Ann Pachett
10. Leviticus
11. Numbers
12. Deutoronomy
13. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter – Kim Edwards
14. Joshua
15. A Long Way Down – Nick Hornby
16. Judges
17. Ruth
18. Illumination Night – Alice Hoffman
19. 1 Samuel
20. 2 Samuel
21. 1 Kings
22. 2 Kings
23. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
24. 1 Chronicles
25. 2 Chronicles
26. Ezra
27. Nehemiah
28. Esther
29. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency – Alexander McCall Smith
30. Job
31. Psalms
32. Proverbs
33. Ecclesiastes
34. Song of Solomon
35. Catching Genius – Kristy Kiernan
36. Isaiah
37. Jeremiah
38. Thank You For All Things – Sandra Kring
39. Lamentations
40. Ezekiel
41. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
42. Daniel
43. Mudhouse Sabbath – Lauren Winner
44. Hosea
45. Joel
46. God Save the Sweet Potato Queens – Jill Connor Browne
47. Amos
48. Royal Harlot – Susan Holloway Scott
49. Twilight – Stephanie Meyer

My last list of the year! The good things list has been a great project this year – it really made me look for good stuff every day, even on th crappy ones. I will definitely do it again in 2009!

Dec 1 – Chelsea got a cool new job!
Dec 2 – I bought our Behold the Lamb tickets.
Dec 3 – We had an especially rowdy game of dueling Christmas carols.
Dec 4 – I found the best Christmas gifts ever on Etsy.
Dec 5 – We finalized plans for a great junior high New Year’s Eve event.
Dec 6 – I had delicious Vietnamese pho.
Dec 7 – Super fun Christmas party that showcased both my awesome fireplace DVD and dueling banjo playing hamsters.
Dec 8 – I finally found the last piece of my mom’s Christmas gift.
Dec 9 – I got to meet Danyew and watch them make a cool video.
Dec 10 – Our youth group helped pack over 400,000 meals for hungry children.
Dec 11 – Santa came early and hooked us up for the junior high retreat!
Dec 12 – We made our own Christmas movies and found some budding actresses in our group.
Dec 13 – We went to a seventh grade musical and it was FANTASTIC.
Dec 14 – I took an amazing nap.
Dec 15 – We conquered Atlanta and we won.
Dec 16 – Several baking mishaps resulted in no gifts but a lot of tasty messes.
Dec 17 – We wrapped all the GraceTree gifts in record time.
Dec 18 – We introduced a new set of friends to Andrew Peterson and Behold the Lamb of God.
Dec 19 – I had the coolest gift ever made for my dad.
Dec 20 – We had the most delicious breakfast ever. EVER.
Dec 21 – Aaron took down all the Christmas decorations all by himself.
Dec 22 – We got to Texas for Christmas and I spent the evening with my friends from high school and all their babies. Seriously, babies everywhere.
Dec 23 – Nikki and I had our annual NorthPark shopping extravanganza and I won a copy of Undercover Brother at a dirty Santa exchange.
Dec 24 – Really nice family evening with Aaron’s parents and brother.
Dec 25 – Our first non-breakfast, non-Nanny family Christmas turned out really fun and sweet and LONG.
Dec 26 – We toured Texas Stadium! I caught a touchdown in the endzone! It was amazing!
Dec 27 – Salt Lick for dinner! That is the best food in the world. We also had some good, overdue conversation with Aaron’s brother and his wife.
Dec 28 – My mom and I smoked Aaron and my dad in the family darts and 42 tournament.
Dec 29 – I laughed harder than I have in a long time playing Mad Gab with junior highers.
Dec 30 – Our kids helped pack 2500 food boxes for families in need.
Dec 31 – My terrified kids tore up the stage with their Boogie Wonderland performance and I wrote my last daily entry of 2008.

It’s 5:00 on New Year’s Day.

I have been laying on our new guest bed for the past several hours. I watched Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch and Beyonce’s sister in Bring It On: All or Nothing, and Beauty Shop with Queen Latifah just started, so I’m in for at least another hour and a half. I have Dr. Pepper and the last of the chocolate covered peanut butter crackers my mom sent home with me.

I’m having a great day.

The past ten days have been a complete blur. We spent a whirlwind week in Texas running back and forth between Austin and Dallas. It was a great week – we managed to squeeze in some friend time between all the family action and our families were way too good to us, as usual.

We landed in Nashville on Monday afternoon at 3:30, giving me about 30 minutes to pull stuff out of one bag and throw it into another in time to meet our junior high kids at a hotel to kick off our New Year’s Eve Retreat Extravaganza. I spent the last three days hauling them around in a van that smelled like Axe body spray and beef jerky, packing food boxes, dancing to Boogie Wonderland, enforcing strict energy drink restrictions, stuffing styrofoam peanuts in my mouth (and losing the youth pastor challenge by ONE MARSHMALLOW stuck on my face with honey), scavenging CVS at 2am for Happy New Year gear and having a fantastic time. I love junior high kids.

I am completely exhausted. But I am very, very content. I got to spend the last weeks of 2008 surrounded by people I love and who love me, eating and laughing and cooking and running crazy. And I got to ring in the new year doing the job I love with the coolest kids in the world. If this is a sign of things to come, then bring it on, 2009.