Storytelling

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Heads or Tails?

Sometimes there’s no middle ground.

To entertain ourselves in the cafeteria after we finished our corndog and tater tot lunches, my friends and I would have contests to see who could make a quarter spin the longest on the table before it ultimately landed on either heads or tails. Fine amusement for 5th grade boys. But never once did a quarter remain on its side. It always fell on one side or the other. Heads or tails.

Today I spent my lunch break at Border’s. Browsing through the photograph books, I couldn’t help but notice the cover of a book entitled Traffik. It was a simple black-and-white picture of a Southeast Asian woman looking at the camera. She only had one eye.

It saddened me so much I pulled out the book from the shelf and sat down on a stool to read it. The book was a large collection of photographs featuring women trapped in human trafficking (forced prostitution) in Cambodia. They are often lured from the mountains and the countryside by men promising them good work.

Of course this sort of hellishly-inspired activity isn’t only currently happening in Asia. While attending Liberty University, I listened carefully to the reports of guest speaker Kay Warren, the wife of Rick Warren (author of The Purpose Driven Life). She has spent time ministering to AIDS victims in Africa.

She explained (regarding the AIDS epidemic in that continent,) that many men with AIDS commonly believe (as they are instructed by witch doctors) they can be cured if they have sex with someone who is “pure”. That’s one of the reasons many children in Africa have AIDS or HIV.

It is estimated that today there are around 29 million slaves in the world; particularly in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. I only learned that a few months ago- I was under the impression that slavery ended 150 years ago.

 

So many men keep slavery alive today by capturing and selling other people. And so many other men keep slavery alive by buying or renting slaves from these decrepit “businessmen”. And that leaves innocent women and children to suffer.

When some people are given this information, their reaction is, “How could God exist if he lets things like that happen in the world?”

Others react with, “How could God not exist when things like that are happening in the world?” Because they have hope in justice. And hope in a being who is actually qualified to judge the injustice in the history of the world. Not just sit on a cloud.

Yes, we easily agree that human trafficking needs to be stopped and that’s is a horrible thing.  And fortunately, more awareness of the issue is causing groups to form across to help rescue the victims, if nothing else.

Faith can’t be real if it’s not tested and questioned.  And when it comes to God and a tragedy this horrific, even when we’re not directly affected, it still causes us to either draw closer or further away from God at the simple thought of it.

Heads or tails?

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Facebook is a Middle School Talent Show

I put together the top five reasons why facebook seems dull, come lately.

I have been on facebook since April 2005, going on five years now. Back then, in a simpler time, the site was only for college students. No quizzes. No lists. Just the facts. An Atari version of what we now know facebook to be.

And it was fine except for one thing: I could only be friends with people from college. No family. No friends that weren’t currently enrolled in a college. I wanted more “friends”. I wanted to catch up with the cast of characters that made up my entire life. I wanted to collect them.

So as facebook grew from a dorm room project into a million dollar operation and then to a billion dollar business, I got my wish. Plenty of “friends”. Not restricted to colleges.

 

Since 2005, I have watched facebook defeat Myspace in a tortoise versus the hare race, turning Myspace into nothing more than a creepy old house that no one wants to go inside of anymore. Facebook has for all practical purposes become the new e-mail, the new photo album, and the new substitute to actually calling people on the phone.

Facebook is the undisputed champion. Yet a few nights ago one of my actual real life friends asked in a status update on facebook if he was the only person that thought the site seems like it’s getting dull.

I agree with him. But here’s the thing. It’s not really facebook’s fault. Part of it is us and part of it is our “friends”. Sort of like a middle school talent show. I can’t blame the school if the entertainment itself isn’t good. Sometimes there are more baton twirlers than garage rock bands.

I have compiled the top five reasons why facebook seems dull, come lately:

1) Random friends we barely remember from grade school aren’t quite as interesting as we gave them credit for in our nostalgic minds. They grew up. They have families. And we’ve got nothing to say to them. Because everything we would want to know is there on the info tab on their profile.

2) Those same random people tend to be the ones who constantly do those annoying quizzes and games. Yes, I do hide the quizzes and games on my Live Feed. And yes, I could just delete those people altogether. But I don’t. Somehow I would feel guilty. Their only crime was making me look at the new pig they got for their farm.

3) The Status Update option causes many people to think that the rest of the world sees them as a celebrity. There are enough reality shows that we are ashamedly addicted to. We don’t need another one that tells us when our lab partner from our 9th grade science class is making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Or that it made him thirsty. And we definitely don’t need him doing the most cliché thing on facebook status updates: On Monday, saying, “Ugh, I hate Mondays. On Wednesday, “Hey ya’ll, it’s Hump Day!” And Friday, “TGIF”. Sunday night, “Ugh, it’s almost Monday again.” Thanks Sir Idiot, that really added a lot of value to my life.

4) Just like Wikipedia and YouTube, we eventually milk facebook for all its worth. There’s nothing like those first three fascinating months of using facebook. But after reading the profiles and seeing the pictures of everyone we actually care about, the only thing really left to do is come back in a few weeks when they all have new pictures and info.

5) The friends we regularly communicate with on facebook are coincidently our real life friends anyway. Sometimes it’s actually easier just to send a facebook message than to send a text or find a convenient time to call. We get distracted by all our facebook friends and their shenanigans but ultimately it comes down to the true core of why we like facebook in the first places. Our actual friends and family.

Like boy bands, social networking websites have an average lifespan of five years. But I see facebook as the exception. After all, facebook gives us the creative control to hide, delete, and regulate the content we see in front of us. For us all to abandon facebook the way we did Myspace, it would take a social networking website that is substantially better than everything facebook currently is and offers.

And I know for me, it took almost five years to get nearly 700 “friends”. I’d hate to start that process all over again.

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The Ball at the Very End of the Credits of a Movie

Do you have what it takes to stay and watch the credits when a movie ends?

There are two kinds of people in the world. 1) Those who leave the movie theatre when the credits start to roll and 2) those who stick around to actually read the credits. Obviously, I’m part of the latter group.

It all started for me circa 1985 when the 1982 comedy The Toy constantly aired during a free trial period of HBO. I loved that movie, without good reason. All I remember about it now is that at the end a kid shoots a guy in the forehead with a suction-cup dart gun. And that’s the end of the movie.

Then the credits roll. At the very end, the last thing to rise up on the screen was the symbol for The Motion Picture Association of America. At that point, I would scream with excitement, “Ball, ball, ball, ball!…”

I think the reason I was so ecstatic was because it reminded me of one of the enemies from an Atari game I played all the time. And that taught me to stay tuned to watch the credits at the end of movies. To see The Ball. At some point, my motivation stopped being to see The Ball and instead to find out actors’ names and the location of filming.

It’s always interesting to see when a movie is filmed somewhere other than Los Angeles or New York.

Plus, there’s always a possibility of a hidden scene after the credits- most perfectly executed in Napoleon Dynamite.

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Disney’s Robin Hoood:Animalspeak Volume 2- The Unspoken Rules of Disney Law- Featuring Robin Hood

 

I have learned to accept the Top Five Unspoken Rules of Disney Animals:

1) Without explanation, animals can speak to each other in English. (Even when they are native Africans: The Lion King).
2) Humans can talk to animals and vice versa.
3) Goofy can walk upright and talk, but Pluto is just a normal dog.
4) When Donald Duck gets out of the shower, he is embarrassed by his nakedness, covering himself up with a towel. However, he never wears pants.
5) As a cartoon, Mickey Mouse is pretty much the size of a real mouse. But at Disney World, he is around 6 feet tall.

It’s all fine as long as these rules are consistent which each other within the Disney Universe. However, I have recently been made aware of a rare exception. A hole in the Disney Theory.

This exception to the rules involves one of my favorite Disney cartoon movies, Robin Hood. I’m referring to the 1973 version where Robin Hood is a fox. It contains an ever-addictive whistling theme which I can’t describe in words and the melancholy ballad “Not in Nottingham”. The movie is full of adventure, action, and romance.
The weird thing about it, though, is that it’s the only animated Disney movie I can think of where there are no humans AND the animals assume the role of humans (in other words the animals are anthropomorphic).

For example, in The Lion King there are no humans, but all the animals act like normal animals (other than the fact they can talk and sing). They live out in the wild and kill and eat other animals. The characters are beasts, not mutants.

 

But in Robin Hood, the animals wear clothes, eat food at a table, and walk upright, to name a few distinguished human traits. While this in no way discredits the greatness of the film, there’s not an animated Disney movie I can think of before or after its release that follows this formula.

 

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School Lunch Pizza

 

School lunches weren’t always awful. In fact, sometimes what they were serving in the lunchroom ended up being the highlight of the school day. I always loved “Chef Salad Day” because that was a larger than average meal, plus it was guaranteed we would get a good dessert to offset the healthiness of the salad. And “Chicken Finger Day” was good because they served the chicken with mashed potatoes which I used as dipping sauce. So good.

But of course, there was one legendary favorite lunch, which has become immortalized along with other fond memories of elementary school like Oregon Trail in the computer lab, or that miraculous loudspeaker announcement that we would be getting out of two hours of class because the local community college was promoting their newest play in the auditorium. I am referring to, of course, the always-satisfying “school lunch pizza”.

A simple 4×6 inch flat pizza consisting of a crust reminiscent of Saltine crackers, brushed with tangy red sauce consisting of one sole herb (oregano), and covered in magical government cheese. Of course, I would do my best to scrounge up enough spare change to afford an extra “slice” of rectangle pizza for a dollar.

 

Every once in a while, I would get lucky because the first 15 minutes of lunch went by and the girl sitting diagonally across from me still hadn’t touched her pizza (or had only taken a small bite out of the corner). At that point, I would softly and nonchalantly ask the famous question, “Do you want your pizza?”

The weird thing is, just recently I realized that our school lunch pizzas didn’t even have any toppings. No meat! How did I just now realize that? As a 9 year-old boy, I would completely devour Burger King’s Double Whopper Combo Meal. Yet I never realized that those pizzas were just dough, sauce, and cheese.

And one more thing… Now that you’ve read my take on this, why not read my perspective on being a dad?  That’s right- parenting from a dad’s point of view.  I have been documenting my thoughts as a dad since the week we found out my wife was pregnant.  I formally invite you now to read my “dad blog” by clicking on the link below:

dad from day one