thriftstore27's Xanga

Times They Are A'changing

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:54:22 GMT

So I made the big move to the UK, and now I'm making the big move to a bigger blog. So long xanga and all of your Japanese-ness. Find my new blog at:

harrisonuk.wordpress.com

More on Materialism

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:47:21 GMT

So I am leaving for England for a year, which means that for the last three weeks I have been shopping and packing and living at home. I have had a few more thoughts on materialism that I need to get out of my head - not necessarily a rant against American capitalist consumerism, but more of a personal awakening to what's behind it and away from it.

I parked my Mazda 6 (new to me but not new) in front of Best Buy. It was a cloudy day. The car was a gift from my grandfather who sold his farm and wanted to pass on the bank account to the family. I make no apologies for the car. It is a nice car and it was expensive. I'm not going to say that I got it on sale or that it was really affordable. My grandfather told me to buy a car after I graduated college, and so I stopped resisting the gift. So I parked my new car and went through the sliding doors at best buy, looking for a new digital camera. As I was walking through the cd aisles and as I came up on the teenagers glued to televisions playing guitar hero and Madden 09, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau came into my head. Maybe also some Ralph Waldo. These were the first thinkers who influenced me in high school. They are solely responsible for the counter cultural, stick to your opinions and don't conform sort of attitudes that I have. They also opened my eyes to the ways societies get wrapped up in their materialism and forget that there are other civilizations out there that don't spend billions on consumer goods and electronics every year. And then I balanced these thoughts with Christ, who said to be able to give all you own to the poor if you have to and follow Him. He said to feed the hungry, look after the widow, clothe the clotheless, to love others as you love yourself. When I walked out of best buy with a two hundred dollar camera and a hundred dollars of cds, I asked myself:

Would you spend money on a homeless person the way you just spent money on yourself?

I don't feel convicted about buying those things. It's not wrong to have possessions. What's wrong is the selfish heart behind it. And this is what I think America needs Jesus for - to change our outlook on materialism. For the last three summers I have spent time observing families who host large banquets for people they don't know, who trust strangers with their boats and jet skis, who buy plane tickets or write checks for their friends when they are in need. I have been witness to some amazing selflessness. Additionally, I have spent the last five years at a public university who puts quite a large premium on social justice work - going to Africa or Nicaragua to love on kids and build chicken coops and feed the hungry. At this moment, looking at my receipt and unlocking my new car, thinking about the new clothes that I had bought and the house full of food I was returning to, I felt the farthest I had ever felt from living those sorts of idealogies.

America thinks we are a superior nation because we have a superior culture, superior army, and superior economy. We have the power and freedom to think whatever we want and to buy whatever we want. Our future happiness is in our hands. It's the American Dream. But I often wonder what we are missing out on by not having these things. African and Asian families in poverty have something we do not, I guarantee you that. I often wonder whether all of the "stuff" ever really makes us happier, or if, silently, it is really killing us. I am guilty of this too. When I drive my car around on the interstate, I am instantly comparing it to other new models that I pass. I covet other people's cars, and think "well one day I might be able to afford that BMW." Perhaps that sort of thought life is killing me and I don't even know it.

To me, this doesn't mean I have to go to Africa and live in poverty to justify myself as a consuming American. It just means I need to have a heart change behind my materialism. It's not wrong to have a BMW. It's simply wrong to need one. If only we could see past the money and see people and moments for what they are on the unseen part of life, I think we would find true satisfaction. If I am not able to part with any of these possessions, I have idols in my way. If Christ's teachings do not mean more to me than living this sort of American life, I have idols in my way. If I am not willing to tithe and write checks for friends who are in the mission field, I have idols in my way. I don't think I am going to go pull a Walden Pond or anything, but this sort of moment made me realize that I need to start putting my money where my mouth is. Literally.

I also had this thought lately: Christianity is a pretty Romantic religion (ie, it's not all that down to earth and has a lot of idealistic teachings and utopian values). Christ must have been the ultimate Romantic. But he was at the same time the ultimate Pragmatist. Through his Spirit, he convicts and teaches us how to do and be all the things he says we can be. What a great psychology - completely idealistic, but at the same time completely functional and practical. Off topic, but on my mind.

Singers I Wish I Could Write To

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:24:47 GMT

Throwing the cellophane away
and smelling the gloss of newly printed lyrics
I often wish I could call you,
whichever singer you are this time,
and I would get you on the phone
and from the grids in my bathroom floor
I would tell you where you got it wrong.

You would tell me thank you for calling
and be as polite about an insult as you could
but you just don't see it my way,
you aren't wearing the same lenses, you might say.
Yes, and how true that is, I would say,
please, take mine and wear them for a day.
What different colors would appear, I say.

Because I too have descended a dusty gravel trail
and have been barefoot in a creek.
I picked up the same stones as you
and listened for it to speak to me, just the same.
The silence was the same for me as was for you,
but it was a different color, you have to see.
These creeks never play the way you imagine
and that's because your imagination has a broken cord.
When I picked up the stones, I heard my fate
and realized in whom my imagination was stored,
saw how colorful the world is when awake,
and trudged back up to the hill to the car at the gate.
The case with me is that no one is any closer
to any kind of truth in creeks without that wire.
Plug yourself in, or borrow my cord
If you don't mind, you can have my lenses too,
And I'll call you again from my bathroom floor.

A Bell Tower

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:47:14 GMT

    You stand around the door locked with the small padlock. One of you has just said what a terrible idea it would be to kick it in. The door must be locked for a reason, one of you says, and the gatekeeper could return any minute, another says. He would notice the back door of the monastery wide open, and would slap himself for not locking it. He would come sprinting, or huffing depending on age and fitness, up the condemned staircases and would illuminate the third floor with a flashlight. And then he would hear one of you sneeze in the closet you shoved into. Your goose would be cooked, one of you says.

    One of you says this, and then no one speaks. After no one speaks for some time, another of you says this will never happen and then puts her foot through the door waste high. You are surprised it was a girl, but watch as the lock rips out of the frame and lands on the floor and the door sweeps open to reveal a large cloud of dust. You proceed into the secret room filled with cobwebs and peeling wallpaper. As you look around you and kick the lock on the floor, you have become not simply trespassers, but damagers of property, bad, terrible people, the kind you never thought you would be. You see again how easy it is to cross those sorts of lines.

    You turn up the staircase and enter the proverbial dusty attic. There you encounter the old rope and the ladder. You climb the ladder twenty feet up a pitch black enclosure, and when you press your hands against the soot covered trap door, it cracks open to paint a line of blinding white in your eyes. You are at the top of the bell tower. You continue up the ladder and out to the open air where one of you is already balancing off the edge of the tower and another is shooting photos. Enclosed in ten stone columns and gothic arches is the century old bell, dedicated in copper to such and such person, and to the right of you, all sides of you, is the seventy foot drop surrounded by slate enclaves and statues of saints. You get your bearings convince yourself that you must sneak up to the ledge to dangle your feet over death. One of you treats a supporting tower cable like a moneky bar, while another is busy carving his name into the bricks. One of you stares off into the distance to feel deep, and another sits on the ledge, feet curled in, to pray. In a moment of clarity you finally understand that you are in danger. You finally understand why rock climbers or BMX bikers or boxers say so little when they come back to reality, why they never feel the necessity of inserting opinions. You now understand why you are afraid of having your fingers pinched when you feed the ducks and why it is that you always check the lock on your car until it honks. And seeing all of this, you now know, even as a jeep rolls towards the monastery through the dirt road a mile away, that you must throw your full weight on the rope once you are down the ladder. That you will grip to it and grin, laughing sinisterly to yourself, perhaps a little quasimodo in your veins, wanting danger so badly, wanting a story worth telling but only bringing up when requested at dinner parties.

    You do this once everyone is down the stairs and sprinting into the woods. You can see them through the window and now they are looking for you in the trees. You are not there. You are with the rope. You need the rope. You are the rope. You and the rope, you could say, are entangled in each other's fibers for just a moment, as you, the bankrupt soul, feel the thrill of the pull while the ancient bell rings out for the first time in twenty years.

*Based on real events.

William Faulkner, I Used Your Bathroom

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:40:14 GMT

William Faulkner,
I used your bathroom today.
From what I can gather about your personal life,
I have a feeling you would not have liked this.
But I did it anyways.

William Faulkner,
I stared at the grape vines you planted in your pasture,
and I wondered what you wondered
when you took off your gloves and
sat in the shade with a handkerchief to your head.
I wondered this as I took a grape and popped it in my teeth.
From what I can gather -
but I did it anyways.

William Faulkner,
I roamed the edge of your pasture
and listened to the cicada fly in Bailey's woods
while the sun rose to an awful height that afternoon.
I wondered who Bailey was and
why it was his woods, not yours.
I imagine the woods whispered to you most afternoons,
the way they were to me,
calling me into every thicket cave in hopes of discovering
some long lost fort or a post-Victorian tree carving.
I entered the trail and knew I would find nothing,
but I did it anyways.

William Faulkner,
I demand to know your mind;
the catalogs of plot you drew while passing your stable
and smelling the same sweet mix
of grass, mulch and horses that I smelled.
I know you thought of the creator,
or at least the futility of dinner conversation -
maybe even the relentless march of time
and how many evenings you spent
washing off your hands in the oat barn.
I knew it was pointless to guess what you thought,
but I did it anyways.

William Faulkner,
I must confess that your patio was not much of a patio.
Maybe this is the grounds keeper's fault.
Your rose hedges were nice, as were the concentric circles,
and I could understand why you built the East Wall.
But I did not understand why you never smiled,
especially living at a place like this.
Lida said she only saw "amusement" at most.
Stoicism is more of a choice than a reality, I tend to think,
and as I thought this -
I fell into a divit and twisted my ankle in your garden.
Yes, I tried not to admit to the pain.
But I did it anyways.

At Least I Completed The Dive

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:34:03 GMT

Didn't used to think I was injury prone. This year has proved me wrong.

Trying to learn my first gainer the other day, I dove off of the CWR dock and somehow landed on my face while my knee followed shortly after. My two front teeth tore through the bottom of my lip enough to break the skin on my knee. I also lost a tooth. It was sweet - also a bummer. Four stitches. But at least I completed the dive.

Quotes From Campers - 2008

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:08:51 GMT

6/7

"Hey Ben, how was your day today?"
"I saw seven squirrels! And if I'm lucky, I'll see seven more!"

6/ 10

"What did you learn at camp this week?" - Counselor Scott
"Well I have a question" - Sixth Grade Camper
"Okay what is your question?"
"What if holy water evaporated?
"What?"
"Well you know about holy water? If it evaporated, would it be holy rain?"
"Uh, I guess."
"And what if it evaporated in the winter. Would it be holy snow?
"Uh."
"And does that mean I could make a holy snowman?"
"Sure."

6/21

"I shouldn't be reading this comic book I got in the mail."
"Okay, don't read it. Does it have a bad word?"
"Yeah - spiderman told someone to 'Shut Up'."

6/23

"Why are you underlining every line in your bible?" - Counselor
"Because I don't want to miss anything!"

6/24

"You're making us blow bubbles with girls? This is torture!" - Third Grade Camper A
"Well, are they pretty?" - Third Grade Camper B

6/25
"I probably shouldn't go to dinner with my hair so messy like this. But don't tell my mom - I've done it before."

7/8

"Hey did you hear that we own Alaska? I think we own Hawaii too, but I'm not sure."

7/13

"My sensei told me that I need to practice my martial arts form while I am at camp, but I need a quiet place and partner that I can throw."

7/15

"Can you let us back into the cabin early?"
"No."
"But I'm batman!"

7/16

"Excuse me Mrs. Lifeguard."
"Yes? How can I help you?" - female staff member
"Well I think I need some ice. I was riding on the intertube behind the boat when we flipped over, and someone's foot landed, well, it sort of hit, um, ... you know. Down there."
"Down where?"

7/22

"Fresh water fishing is gay. There, I said it."

Runaway Juveniles

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:02:31 GMT

The camp at which I work hosts a week for 80 Juvenile delinquents from the state of north carolina. I don't get much time to use the internet so this will be brief, but we had a very interesting week this week. For one, compared to the gangbanging convicted felons Ive had in the past two years, the five guys I had this week were angels. They did not put up walls to Christianity like the majority of the other juveniles. In fact, they had all experienced some sort of conversion sometime in the last year and were hear at camp ready to change their lives. Their crimes were mostly petty felonies, if there are such things, such as weapons charges, breaking and entering, and drug possession. Instead of getting blank stares and early snorers when I played this Lecrae song late at night so they could listen to the lyrics, they were all intrigued and sincerely connected to the battle of the flesh described in the song. I had 20 min - 1 hour conversations with all of them about their lives back home and their goals for the future. Simply put, it was a week full of hope that these kids are not trapped in their cultural blackholes like I had previously feared.

I am of the opinion, however, that it was God who opened the hearts of these troubled young men. Without that act occuring before they even arrived, my words, like pearls, would have fallen before swine and been trampled. Wisdom is heard by the wise, ignored by the ignorant. This is the work of the LORD, and I was quite privileged to see it in action.

For many at risk youth, however, this is not the case. Without the movement of the LORD in the soul, even the most compelling rational arguments against certain lifestyle choices will fall on hard hearts - rocky soil. I witnessed this first hand as well in an early morning meeting when the camp speaker for the week gave the speech attached below. His idea was that he didn't want any of the kids to leave the room being able to say "well no one ever told me" - "no one ever told me what the consequences of my actions would be." So Pastor Skip from Miami Florida beared his soul and made the most compelling argument against gangs I have ever heard. At the end of it, it was literally irrational for these men to choose to stay with their gangs, except for fear of what would happen to them if they left. Yet the response was not what I had pictured.

"Reality. I think sometimes people don't tell you guys what reality is. But here it is.

There is no safe way to stay in the gang and stay alive. The very nature of gang life is not about love or family. It is about war. War within yourself and with others on the streets that live in different parts of town and wear different colors.

Is the neighborhood you live in worth losing a child over? Is the neighborhood you live in worth being in a wheelchair the rest of your life or being in a bed with all kinds of tubes running into you, someone wiping your butt for you, waiting for you to eventually die? Is it worth dying for?

A lot of kids say, "yeah, I'd die for my Nation, my hood, whatever." But they are full of it. When they are laying in the street with their guts hanging out, urinating on themselves, bleeding their life's blood into a gutter that they never owned in the first place, reality hits them then. And they know then that there is no coming back. No second chance. And that rag on their head ends up trying to patch the bleeding hole in their body.

And for all the promises their gang has made to them, about loyalty, love, and brotherhood, that gang cannot raise them from the dead.

Only you can stop the event beforehand. Now is that time. Now is your second chance. I don't know what it would take exactly. But I guarantee you that when you lie dying you will wish that you had done anything to get out. Now is your chance to get out.

We gamble all the time. You gamble that you will not die, living day to day with your gang. But if God came and told you Himself that you are going to die in two days if you don't get away from it, would you listen?

Well I can't give you the exact time, but I would be willing to bet that day is coming.

All that is not to scare you. I am pretty sure living the life you have had to live, not much does scare you. Its not about being scared, its about reality.

Every day I get emails from gang members asking similar things. Most of them, however, are asking how to get out. Some are Surenos / Surenas, some are Bloods, Crips, Gangster Disciples, even MS13. They are afraid to go to their "brothers / sisters" in the gang to tell them these fears. But isn't that the opposite of what a gang is supposed to be for? Some brotherhood huh? Family is supposed to love you no matter what. Not just love you if you wear the same colors. Not just love you as long as you play by their rules. Family loves you for who you are. They want what is in your best interest.

There are others like you. They will never tell you though, because they are afraid that they will pay consequences, even die if they tell the gang they want out of this way of death. That is what it is you know. Not a way of life but of death. Sometimes horrible death. The choice is yours. You can choose death or you can choose life and freedom. "

Don't Talk About The End

Mon, 19 May 2008 19:07:44 GMT

And they ended their years
by walking in song and spilling of song.
With firecrackers in their stomachs,
they left down separate streets
each, one by one, wondering
what it was that made the lamps
glow brighter than usual tonight.

The Sound of A Fifth Year

Fri, 09 May 2008 04:47:26 GMT

The last two weeks of my college career, in no particular order:

Insane no-sleep.
Sixty Five pages, four days.
Late night pancakes.
Ordered 25 cds from Amazon.
Foxfields with Brandon Piner.
Returning to Foxfields after the rain to scavenge for potables.
Getting kicked out of Carter's Mountain.
Almost trespassing Monticello.
Frisbee Golf at Walnut Creek.
Shows with Alex Mejias.
Phi Delt prayer in my room.
Wine event on the roof.
Water ballooning Buddhist Biker Bar.
Water ballooning Hilah in the street.
Water ballooning girl through open driver's side window.
Confessing to Drew Trotter for all of this.

After turning in my last exam today - I made a little shout while standing in the middle of UVA's The Lawn. That is the sound of fifth year about to graduate.

New music worth checking into:
Thrice's "The Alchemy Index, Vols. 1-4"
Vampire Weekend
Jon Foreman's "Winter and Fall"
Robbie Seay's "Give Yourself Away"
Augustana's "Can't Love, Can't Hurt"
Deas Vail's "All The Houses Look The Same"