colson bingham ||

words

2011-11-14T22:26:00.000-05:00

all my kids

2011-10-25T23:03:00.000-04:00

got to see yirreth today. she's looking SO HEALTHY. unbelievable improvement.

jasmina and her younger cousin. hard to believe i've known her since she was 3.

all my kids. francesca's up there in the middle, ingrid's there, ana even popped in. such great kids.

my sister sponsors the cutie

2011-10-22T22:56:00.002-04:00

cmyk & rgb

2011-10-18T20:35:00.003-04:00

i just learned about cmyk and rgb. cmyk is subtractive printing where you lay color over color until white light is smothered to the correct reflection. rgb is additive displaying and is the process which governs televisions, basically anything with a backlit screen, and projectors. neither is the 'right' color profile. they're both awesome. and that's your lesson in design for the day.

'the thing' about omitting credit

2011-10-14T09:37:00.000-04:00

i've read a lot of movie reviews about 'the thing', not because i think it's going to be a great movie, but because it's original short story inspiration was one of the finest science fiction novellas to come out of the last century. the novella is actually titled 'who goes there' and was written by john w. campbell jr. under the pen name of don a. stuart.

'who goes there' has been anthologized a ridiculous number of times, and is cited as one of the influential pieces of literature for a good number of science fiction and horror writers alive today.

movie reviews of 'the thing', however, almost never credit the original piece, or the writer by name. i mean go ahead and try it, but the prominent reviews make no mention of the novella. i've read this, this, and this, and seen nothing. then there's npr's in-depth review, which notes that the movie was inspired by a 'short story', but doesn't give the author the courtesy of printing his name. neither usa today's review nor the san fran chronicle even mention the original story.

the best credit i found is on the new york times review, but even there, john campbell's 'who goes there' gets relegated to the notes after the article has ended.

so to set the record straight, the 2011 update of 'the thing' is first and foremost inspired by john w. campbell jr.'s superb novella entitled 'who goes there', which was published in 'Astounding Stories' in 1938, and voted in 1973 one of the best science fiction novellas ever written. it has been awarded and anthologized for years, and has inspired no less than three movies in 1951, 1982, and 2011.

the 2011 'the thing' is not based on john carpenter's 'the thing' anymore than a remake of harry potter would be 'based on' one of the harry potter movies instead of the books themselves. it's plot was taken from the original novella, and adapted by screenwriters Ronald D. Moore, and Eric Heisserer to loosely fit in with carpenter's 1982 adaptation.

saying anything but that is a disservice to the original author.

from nicaragua, most recently

2011-10-12T14:56:00.000-04:00

story arch

2011-10-11T17:26:00.000-04:00

terra nova is disappointing me. big time. it's my last real hope that somebody can follow up lost with an even half-decent science fiction plot. and it just isn't working. neither have any of the other shows recently.

for some reason, they confuse themselves with sitcoms. or the writers just have no idea what they're doing, but that seems like the wrong conclusion to jump to, in my mind. what i'm guessing is that the writers, or the producers, or whoever conceptualized the first part of this show, are under the mistaken impression that 'setting the scene' in a sci-fi drama set in basically a foreign universe, is something that makes good television.

what has proceeded, on the past three episodes (i'm not counting the very first hour of the two-hour season opener, because i think it's good) is total crap. the husband and wife went through the exact same thing for the past two episodes (distance, awkwardness, jealousy, heroics, touching reunion). the teenage daughter is going to be flat probably for most of the season. the child is a total lack of interest (she is, for all intents and purposes, a child). and the boy seems to exist only to cause problems and get a make-out scene in there; he too, basically does the same thing every episode (rebel, be angry at father, be conflicted over girl).

the characters might get into interesting situations if, for example, interesting situations lasted for longer than about 30 minutes. but things like birds coming and nearly killing everyone, and amnesia, make for poor running plotlines. there is NO dominant story arch. there is NO real plot. the plot, in one sentence, is: 'people go into past, and mill around dramatically'. the show would ensue similarly if you dropped the cast of friends into terra nova's plot. it might actually be more entertaining to watch.

i think eventually there will come a plot. it will probably revolve around the sixers and the strange graphics on the rocks that were referenced in episode 1. but for now, the writers are just setting the scene with really repetitive, silly, precocious 10-minute plotlines. nothing lasts.

the thing about lost was that the plot moved forward every episode. something was revealed; a problem was presented; a character exhibited something new; things weren't resolved between the last commercial break and the credit roll. and the characters were not flat. walt didn't simply exist to run away from michael. he existed to draw out the mysterious persona of john locke, and to be stolen by the others and move the mystery forward for an entire season. contrast his character, a child, with the main child in terra nova. no comparison. in the same way, if kate and jack were in a poor relational time period, it lasted for a good number of episodes. if they got mad at each other, you didn't expect them to reunite twenty minutes later. you expected that plotline to last for a realistic period of time. things just don't last in terra nova. that's the mark of a sitcom. a half hour comedy. and terra nova isn't trying to be that (or if they are, their marketing is horrible).

don't get me wrong, that sort of format works well in some shows. house, for example, is super thin on season-long plots (although, if you've noticed, they get better at this each season). but it's okay, because people are willing to watch somebody get sick and get saved for an hour each week. people aren't willing to watch another random plot unfold in 85millionBC. they are willing to do that for crime and medical, but that's about it. and, arguably, the grey's anatomy story arch model is a much better model anyway. it engages a following more. and it's just better writing.

i write all this not because i really care about terra nova, but because i think it highlights the importance of a story arch. highlights the importance of plots that last. the biggest criticism of short stories is that they're too short. the biggest criticism of plots usually is that they're unrealistic. they're usually unrealistic because they're too short. they don't have sufficient time to breathe. (granted, the other big criticism of novels is that they're too long, but that has far less to do with plot, and far more to do with how you populate your plot with exciting landmarks). story arch matters, i suppose, is what i'm saying.

ebooks

2011-10-10T23:18:00.000-04:00

here are my thoughts on ebooks, particularly from amazon:

1. they are NOT overpriced.

2. they are pieces of crap.

3. there is really no choice.

to explain, i should say first and foremost that i don't own a nook, and haven't bought a single barnes and noble ebook, so i can't compare. i do, however, have an enormous cache of kindle books. my biggest take away from all of them is that they are riddled not just with grammaical errors. but wrong words (particularly when 'woman' should be 'women' and small things like that), and even woes, with ridiculously poor formatting

. on books with POV changes or timeshifts via a page

break, the page break is

OFTEN (more than 50% of the time) missing. on books that use extended (multiple paragraphs) quotations, its occasionally difficult to follow, or there are misplaced end quotes". wordsareoften mashed together, and most importantly, the changes AREN'T fixed. i have more mistakes in my ebooks than i do fully correct ebooks.

a few nights ago i received the sons of neptune (hugely popular book, going at #5 on amazon's sight as of yesterday) via a preorder. i have six of rick riordan's books in paperback. NONE of them have any apparent mistakes. this ebook has at least one or two PER CHAPTER. amazon, that's sloppy and ridiculous. i don't know who encodes your ebooks, but as the seller, you have a responsibility to make the ebook text okay. and it just shouldn't be that flipping hard. three days after the book came out, long after i had finished it, i received an email from amazon asking me to reply to their email if i wanted a 'corrected' copy of the text. this is the first book i have EVER seen this for. that's so irresponsible it's not even funny.

i do not, however, think the books are overpriced. amazon hooked folks on convenience. i remember back in the day, about eight months ago, when no books i even looked at had crossed the $10 threshold. now almost every new book out is at least $12. but it doesn't matter. i'm willing to pay that much for a new release, delivered wirelessly to my kindle while i'm doing other things. often i don't even make it to my kindle before the book has been fully read on my iphone. and it's worth it. and it's not just me. it's everyone. the consumer is clearly buying ebooks, at an increasing rate. when have books ever been priced fairly? and there really isn't a choice. barnes and noble will figure out sooner or later that they don't have the hardware capacity to fight the kindle. the only possible kindle death would be apple, and they missed the boat when their books were priced too high.

what i'd like to see? a used ebook marketplace. an easier way to share our books (screw you, publishers, they're BOOKS; everyone for the past five hundred years has grown up being able to loan them or give them to friends, don't you dare change that with talk of digital rights). but really a used ebook marketplace. i'm sure amazon has thought it. i'm not sure it's possible, but i'd very much like it to be.

it's been a while

2011-10-09T00:19:00.002-04:00

you haven't seen me in a while because i've been busy, mostly on other projects. here's a quick rundown of what i've been doing recently:

new character in the story, tentatively named eliza. she's going to end up killing the revolution's leader, but not before she goes through some stuff. some really great stuff.
new photos from chicago (below). the fountain was just too good not to jump in. can you find me in the second pic?
new site. it's titled 'Upppercase; A Portfolio'. it's my online resume/portfolio/whatever you'd like to call it. should be up by the end of the year.
new boots. if you see me this winter, chances are, you'll see them too.
new ya books i've read recently: the 2nd in rick riordan's heroes of olympus. i didn't love it. the second in i am number four (which apparently is now called the much more hokey 'lorien legacies'). liked it a little bit more. enclave. totally forgettable but i vaguely remember that it was good. ship breaker. didn't like it while i read it, but it's haunted me for a while now. speaker for the dead. great book; very thoughtful. delirium. yuk. gone. okay, but the rest? yuk.
new ya books i'm excited for? the death cure.
new site design. like it? hate it? let me know please and thank you.

oct. 1

2011-09-26T18:18:00.001-04:00

i've been on a blogging hiatus for the summer. i'll be back october 1.

2011-06-12T23:37:00.001-04:00

i write because i want to create. i want to be a gardener of new things; a physicist of undiscovered worlds; a painter of landscapes never imagined. i write because words grant me all of those wishes at once and more. i write because i want to populate my creation with people, and because i want to connect those people with other people who will together not only help me understand the real world, but will make the real world bigger than it has ever been. i write because imagination is bigger than any frontier left to explore, save perhaps two.

i write because i want to share. ‘to share’ is one of those few unique words in language that has no good synonym. not one that encompasses everything that can be shared when one writes. the secrets that can be whispered, the joys that can be shouted, the depths of sadness or regret that can only ever be spoken in the privacy and timidity of words. the comedies of my own life and the comedies of lives around me. the details, and the story arcs of day after day after sweet day. think of a word better suited to those things than ‘share’. i dare you. i write because i have things to share, yes, but more so, i write simply because i want to share, even when i have absolutely nothing to share.

i write to keep from punching walls. i write because if i wasn’t writing, i would, on occasion, be angry beyond belief, or sad beyond my ability to cope like a normal person. i write because it is the only way to say exactly what I want to say without ever having to say it. i write, and then i save it to my hard drive, and then i forbid myself from ever sending it to the person it concerns. sometimes i do the same thing on paper. paper can be saved too, in nooks and crannies of journals or books that no one but me would ever pick up. i write because i can hope—even if i never see it fulfilled or don’t have the ability or the desire or the wherewithal to act on it—for a mistake to be undone or a yoke to be unhitched or a child to be fed or a love to be found or a fairytale ending to come true just this one time.

i often write in the face of loss. i write to console myself. i write to express my sadness in a way that doesn’t sound self-pitying to me, even if it sounds self pitying to rest of the world, it’s never meant to be. there’s a lesson in here for the writer: it’s always about what you put into the piece, until you make it about what everyone else thinks you put into the piece. you have the choice to make it one way or the other. never take that choice lightly. never.

i write because i love to write. i write because it is fun. it is just plain enjoyable and when i write, i am happy. i write because some people are born to be people, and other people are born to be writers, and i was born to be a writer. it is not necessarily simple, but i just wrote it out. so, now, i understand a little bit of it. i write. that is why.

summer activities

2011-06-03T17:37:00.003-04:00

more excerpts...

2011-05-22T22:47:00.005-04:00

Maricela’s flip-flopped feet hit the concrete with a smack like overripe mangoes bursting from a ten-foot drop. The choker was a few feet behind her, huffing with exertion. Mari let herself smile. The man’s clothes clung to him with sweat, his belly fat and overlarge thighs didn’t put the odds of catching up in his favor.

But he kept running, carefully planting his feet over the patchwork of gnarled roots along the ground as they ran through a grove of madroños, shoving his way into and out of the tin-shack homes in this part of town when it suited him for a short-cut.

He had been chasing Mari all the way from the lakefront, up through ten or eleven blocks of forest, farmlands, and finally an assortment of metal shacks. Now, they were closing in on the city, running by concrete houses painted an assortment of colors, from lime green, to neon pink, bright orange, and sky blue.

“Hey choker! Yeah, you running after me,” Mari called. The man was so tired he wasn’t even sure whether or not she was talking to him. “You’re not going to catch up. You might as well give up now.”

It would be better for all parties involved, Mari thought, if he did, as she would have to keep running away from her home, at least until she could ditch him. There was no point risking a neighborhood invasion simply because you got lazy.

But he shook his head and picked up his pace, so Mari faced back to the front. She would need to be more careful the closer into the city they got. The chase would end more quickly than she’d like if she ran into another choker from the front. Especially one with a weapon.

She hopped a barbed wire fence that only came up to her knees, and cut through an old lady’s yard. The lady smiled from her rocking chair as Mari ran by her porch, as if to say, another youngster stirring up trouble...give ‘em hell.

“Sorry to disturb you,” she yelled out as she hopped the back fence. But the old lady had already shuffled inside, not wanting to risk the harassment an angry choker could stir up if he decided to stop the chase.

Not many people in the surrounding district had sided with the chokers, but none were openly against them either. As Maricela ran up an alleyway between two streets of shacks, she noted a lack of any graffiti for or against either side of the war. This district was clearly still playing at being neutral. Mari huffed. She knew that would last about as far as she could spit before the chokers came in and forcibly occupied the neighborhood.

Yes senora, your son has to fight on our side now, you don’t want us to throw your family in jail for supporting the revolutionaries do you? No no, we’ll just take him now, goodbye.

Mari checked behind her. The choker was five or six houses back, running slower and slower.

She slowed down too, looking around. There were children playing soccer just a few houses up. No use leaving the choker and his temper here, where he’d take it out on the kids, like as not.

So she turned and shouted out, “Come on choker, I can see your fat rippling from here.” Insulting the ruling party with quips about their appearance worked wonders. It was like dangling a carrot in front of a horse.

She let him get within a house of her, and then turned and sprinted between two of the shacks, coming out onto a noisy street. Mari looked around again. Just cars. No one the choker could terrorize.

She sprinted quickly in between lanes of traffic, crossed the road, and left the choker on the opposite side of the road with a wave. Shouldn’t have bothered chasing me, Mari thought, a little pro-revolution graffiti surely wasn’t worth that much trouble.

survivor casting call

2011-05-17T20:56:00.002-04:00

june 16th in pennsylvania. OF COURSE I'M THERE. who's in for a road trip?

a few photos i liked from the past couple weeks

2011-05-09T22:45:00.002-04:00

families and miracles

2011-05-03T23:17:00.001-04:00

one of my favorite things about spending a little time in a single community in nicaragua is that it gives me a chance to meet families. in an orphanage setting, this is not possible. but in our communities, one of the most beautiful things i get to do is meet siblings and their parents. in bluefields last summer, i met yonida, and then her sister melania, and their best friend hailey, and then their little sister josseling, and both brothers, and their mom. and it was just a gorgeous family in so many ways.

this past month, i was blessed (and i really do mean it exactly that way) to spend a few days with three little sisters. heidy is the youngest. then that's sharon under the tables, the middle child, and jennifer with the etch-a-sketch, the oldest.

and it's just so darn beautiful spending time with them. one of my most memorable moments of the past many trips to nicaragua is teaching jennifer how to waltz, and then needing to teach heidy how to waltz right afterwards, because of course the little one wants to do everything her older sister does.

i was sharing a seat with jennifer on her first bus-ride ever to the beach. we crested the rolling hills and the ocean came into view, and she turned to me with these huge eyes of wonder, and said 'can you teach me how to swim?' - and jesus, that's just so beautiful, watching her experience something like that.

and then this experience:

i was holding heidy in my arms the first afternoon i was in tipitapa. i was holding her and the pastor's wife comes up and says 'you should talk to her mom about her story'. i ask what the story is, and she just shakes her head and says 'talk to her mother'. and so i held heidy in my arms and went to her mother, and listened to her explain that heidy has fatal kidney and urinary problems. that she has a really tragic flaky white infection that's slowly eating away at the top of her head. and she said the doctors told her that it was alright, she had two other daughters. the doctors were giving up. but heidy's mother shook her head, and told me with all confidence that God would heal her little child.

and so you see, don't you? the beautiful thing about knowing heidy's family and being a part of their story, is that i'm going to get to witness her miraculous healing.

jennifer doesn't eat dinner. her last meal is the lunch at our feeding center each day. but she prays for her sister every night. and maybe the prayers of a nine year old princess with an empty stomach are just faithful enough, just powerful enough, just wise and humble enough to move mountains in her little sister's life. maybe the prayers of her entire family - of little sharon, of jennifer, of wilmer the brother, of the mother and, praise-god, the very present and very faithful father - are powerful and effective. isn't that what our faith tells us our prayers are? powerful and effective. mountain-movers. healing prayers.

i get to cry and i get to pray on heidy's behalf. i get to hound our nicaraguan staff to figure out what medicine she needs. i get to tell the story of a little girl who's dying, and use it to raise money for other kids. but in the end, the personal blessing for me is that i also get to be a part of this gorgeous family of nicaraguans that have a daughter who is dying, and a faith that will heal her. i am exceedingly expectant that there will be miracles in this little one's life. and i am blessed beyond words to simply bear witness to it from afar.

the church is losing artists

2011-04-30T23:33:00.001-04:00

the surviving art of a thousand years ago, most typically, is religious art. frescoes on walls; tapestries in steeples; soaring murals in the domes of a thousand churches. everything about the church was expressed in the most varied mediums.

today’s culture of art in the church is not only tragic because many of the medium’s are lost (stained glass is replaced by youtube clips; marble is replaced by hastily designed swirly banners), but because some of the best and brightest young artists are lost.

fundamentally, the church has lost touch with artists because it has become too much a part of the culture in which it exists.

art seeks to create something new. art seeks to explain something that hasn’t yet been explained. art seeks to illuminate and to imagine and to birth. it seeks to build worlds and plunder territories undiscovered or unexplored. it catalogs what is good, true, and beautiful.

the church is seeking to fit in. the church is seeking to be relevant. the church is seeking ways to connect with what is current. the church wants to network. the church wants in on the web, and in on the mobile. the church is so freaking scared that it’s going to be left behind in a world moving forward exponentially faster than it ever has been before, that it is merely swimming in the stream.

so artists are creating and the church is only looking for things already established and graded. artists are expressing and the church is focused only on what has already resonated. artists are imagining and the church is trying to catch up to what already exists.

somewhere in the past ten to one hundred years, the church decided that being particularly a part of existing human culture was more important than creating and guiding human culture.

the trouble is, existing culture is peculiarly a liar, most of the time. culture diminishes and demeans and lies. youtube videos, most typically, make fun of somebody. facebook and twitter are socially acceptable narcissism. television intimately covers your eyes with an inappropriate glaze of complete crap. etc.

the church trying to be relevant in culture, is most often the church using wwjd-approved crap. it’s like turning your cathedral into a pile of rocks just because people happen to like rocks.

and so besides being dangerously in and of the world, the church has largely lost a great generation of artists who are tapping into what’s good, true, and beautiful about the humanity.

the artists have made a conscious decision that the church is neither good, true, nor beautiful. and largely, i don’t blame them.

i hate leaving

2011-04-25T22:50:00.001-04:00

hilarious series of photos

2011-04-24T11:14:00.001-04:00

i enjoy taking a long series of shots. especially with kids like this, who just crack up through the whole thing. a photo seems more real when you don't get the posed one until at least five or six into the shoot.

for writers

2011-04-13T21:55:00.001-04:00

three things have been helpful to me this week as a writer:

1. paul graham's essay on 'makers vs. managers' applies to most creative professionals, and frankly, to most manager-style professionals too. it explains succinctly why i could produce at least three or four times more material in college than i can now. in college, there were entire weeks where i could skip every other responsibility i had and just write. that's when my good stories were written. that just doesn't happen anymore. the essay verbalizes something i've been feeling for some time, and haven't been able to articulate. i'm lucky enough to be surrounded by a team of folks at orphanetwork that absolutely give me the room i need to do creative things for the mission. the essay helps me think more logically about how i structure my day. i highly recommend this to folks who are about to come out of college and think they can both be obscenely creative AND work at the same time - it'll help you structure your thoughts.

2. jim coudal, michael lopp, and jon gruber (of daring fireball) speak at swsx on writing and while i would preface the fifty minute seminar with the caution that these guys aren't really speakers, i still highly recommend the practice of hearing how successful writers structure their time, overcome obstacles, and write for a living. i listened to this twice over the course of the week.

3. elizabeth gilbert, of the eat pray love phenomenon, is actually a gifted speaker. she gave a ted talk on nurturing creativity that i listened to at least a year ago now. i went back and listened to it yesterday and gleaned a great deal about shrugging off the burden of needing to get your muse onto paper. it's just, relieving to hear sometimes.

other things that have inspired moments of writing this week: 30 seconds to mars 'vox populi', 'incaceron' by catherine fisher (you can't buy this on your kindle), kazuo ishiguro's 'we were orphans', and the abysmal but lovable 'witch and wizard' by james patterson and somebody else who wrote the book for him.

the fallacy of metonymy in poverty alleviation

2011-03-28T23:13:00.002-04:00

i realize that unless you write, or enjoy thinking about words, this post won't mean a thing to you. but i like both of those things a lot...so there.

metonymy, for those who don't know, is the rhetorical device which allows a word to be substituted for a connected word. when you have met up with your friends on the island, saying 'we're moored offshore' isn't technically accurate, because your boat is moored offshore, but you're not. thanks to metonymy however, everyone understands what you mean. it works backwards and forwards (via another handy rhetorical structure called synecdoche) so that a 'suit' (part of a whole) can stand in for a businessman, and 'the law's here' (the whole) can really just mean a few policemen are around.

the difference between metonymy and metaphor is that metaphor is based on an adjectival similarity (implying that the two ideas share an adjective of some sort), whereas metonymy is generally based around a contiguous association (implying the two ideas share a noun) although this isn't always true. the usage is also important, because 'the businessmen were suits' might be a metaphor implying that the businessmen were formal or neat, whereas it could also be the descriptor of metonymy. actually, young adult literature uses metonymy fairly often to establish fantasy. when james dashner calls the company of boys living in the glade, the gladers, he is merely using metonymy as a nomenclature. when jk rowling writes that the owls have arrived, she's using metonymy to signal that the mail has arrived, because the owls are closely associated with the post.

in rhetoric, in literature, in semantics and marketing and everyday conversation, metonymy works. in fact, it often is critical to the success of, say, a YA book, or an ad for stupid electronics. (vizio's 'change your tv, change your life' relies on the metonymic idea that your television is contiguous with your life)

BUT in the non-profit world, using metonymy typically just confuses the issue. for example, i recently ran across a major church-conference website that talks about the plight of orphans. it throws out statistics and numbers and a whole lot of words around orphans. specifically orphans. very specifically, scripturally referenced, statistically-backed, orphan verbage. this would be fantastic, except that of the four organizations endorsed on this website, not one of them does a bit of work on behalf of orphans. one is a micro-finance program. very posh, very hip, and very not related to orphan care. another was a child sponsorship program. very noble, and, to be fair, also very hip. but the children sponsored are not orphans, they're children who have families. i could go on but you get the point. the site functions on the metonymic assumption that aid work and orphan care are contiguous and therefore interchangeable. but when you're talking specifically, they're not. because the 143 million orphans the site mentions are not being directly served by any organization listed on the site. people who donate to the site and think they're saving orphans are actually just being duped. we don't call that good rhetoric, we call it lying.

and that's the fallacy of applying metonymy in poverty alleviation. every 'mouth' (which is synecdochic for a hungry person) is actually a real person. so when you mention the '2 million mouths in nicaragua which need to be fed' you're actually talking about somewhere on the scale 10,000+ unique issues, and your metonymy will always fail.

here's the small scale example:

let's break down the metonymy of the 'teach a man to fish' phrase everyone so loves. first of all, the man who's fishing is, thanks to the culture of this example, metonymy for just about everyone who is poor (it is not metaphor, because the need for fish is symbolically a part of the greater idea of poverty - so the ideas are contiguously linked, not necessarily adjectivally linked). the 'teaching him how to fish' is metonymic for 'development work' (as distinct from giving him fish, which i suppose would be aid work, and distinct from 'a hand up' which is really a metaphor for development work, and just as useless...actually, the whole phrase is much more closely a metalepsis than a metaphor).

anyway, now thanks to metonymy, we have this handy little catchphrase for people to feel good about themselves. we're not giving the man a fish, we're teaching him how to fish. 'we're not doing aid work, we're breaking the cycle of poverty through development' is the metonymic assumption. well gee, great job everyone.

the problem is, the man might learn to fish, but not know how to build a fishing rod. or how to get a boat. usually, he won't have legal access to the pond. he might not have the mapping equipment to know where it's deep enough to find the good fish. he might not understand how to keep the fish fresh once he's caught them, and he almost certainly won't know the marketplace principles of selling the fish. then at the very end of it all, he won't understand strategies of reinvestment into his own fishing business so eventually his fishing equipment will break and leave him strapped for cash, and then, well, we'll have taught the man how to fish, but he probably will come back to us looking for, *gasp*, a fish.

that's because metonymy makes the example sound good, but the practicalities of poverty alleviation just crushed your pretty rhetoric. metaphor is just as stupid in this arena. we could spend more paragraphs dissecting the uselessness of the 'a hand up vs. a hand out' phrase, but we won't, and as i mentioned months ago in a different post, even our current diction is just plain wrong when we talk about the poor.

what we need is clarity, brutal honesty, and involvement with the direct, on-the-ground practicalities of poverty alleviation. you can't directly address orphans with micro-finance no matter how often metonymy uses 'orphan' as a stand-in for 'poverty', but neither can you grow a community out of its poverty (and therefore out of its tendency towards creating orphans) without sustainability goals like micro-financing banks. everything is linked and nothing is linked in poverty alleviation.

that's your semantic lesson for the day.

great book, great series; read it.

2011-03-26T17:55:00.002-04:00

"you starting to feel hope yet?" viola asks, her voice curious.
"no," i say, fuddling my noise. "you?"
her eyebrows are up but she shakes her head. "no, no."
"but we're going anyway."
"oh, yeah," viola says. "hell or high water."
"it'll probably be both," i say.
- patrick ness, the knife of never letting go

struggling through boring things...

2011-03-23T23:12:00.001-04:00

ezekiel 47:1 - then he brought me back to the door of the temple, and behold, water was issuing from below the threshold of temple...the water was flowing down from below the south end...south of the altar...and behold, water was trickling out on the south side.

this is a lengthy description of an image that gets carried from genesis to revelation. the river imagery in the bible spans thousands of years and millions of people and hundreds of cultures, it's one of the most enduring images of biblical writing, and particularly in places like ezekiel, zechariah, joel, amos, and obviously the bookends genesis and revelation, a lot of attention is paid to this river.

but i've got to admit, ezekiel just doesn't get me jazzed about the river. i mean it goes on for verse after verse, going into strict detail about the geographical boundaries of the land and how the river flows into and out of the temple and after reading it, it's just plum boring. it doesn't get me jazzed about anything.

but i know by zechariah 14:8 the excitement picks up a little bit, and then by revelation 22:1 we're talking incredible. we're talking that the eastern and western seas mentioned in joel are completely reformed; that the trickling here in ezekiel is more of a raging river, and it's not flowing through the temple, it's a river on a brand new earth literally flowing from the throne of God himself, and the water isn't just water anymore, it's the water of life, bright as crystal, assumedly because by then the sun isn't its light, God is its light, and all in all, by revelation the image of the river is mind-blowing.

but in genesis i was depressed by the image. and in ezekiel i was bored with the image. and in joel i didn't really understand it. and amos may or may not even be referencing the same idea.

i guess what i'm getting at is that before hitting the blazing truth of revelation 22:1 - i struggled and mucked and stumbled and gagged my way through some really boring, challenging, frustrating verses. but that was completely necessary to my understanding of revelation 22:1.

i think i probably don't struggle through those verses enough, and so i probably don't get the beauty of that final piece all the time. i don't think i love the beauty of what jesus did to the law as much as i could because i've never really properly studied leviticus and deuteronomy. i don't think i love the truth of grace as much as i could because i've never fully embraced what it must have been like for moses to work so hard, and not make it into the promised land. you know?

self explanatory

2011-03-14T22:59:00.005-04:00

on a sidenote, i love emily's poetic reflections on nicaragua.

groups of three

2011-03-09T16:26:00.000-05:00

three beginnings

2011-03-06T15:36:00.001-05:00

often, i start a story, and do not ever finish it. this weekend, i was in a beginnings sort of mood, and started (or, in the case of the first, finally rewrote) 3 stories. they had all been percolating around for some time, and getting them out on paper confirmed my suspicions that i am not at all interested in finishing any of them. but, here are the beginnings, in case you are curious. there are quite a few interesting things to note from the way i begin stories, but that, perhaps, will be another post. happy reading.

while falling

of all things it was a thicker-than-usual balloon which got sucked into the turbine at 15,000 ft, stuck in all the wrong places and ignited a fire in the left wing, because of which an explosion ensued and tore the plane neatly open all along the middle.

the passengers for the most part were terrified, except for one middle aged spanish man who had just that day been gifted a video camera by his granddaughter. while the passengers were all tumbling through the air and he along with them - indeed almost immediately upon deplaning and all the while falling through clouds and air - he switched on his camera, glided to the couple next to him, and asked 'que dices?'

the couple was american but they understood. they looked into one another’s eyes and said without hesitation i love you. and the old man moved on.

‘que dices?’ ‘que dices’ - always the question, and then the response. no one jostled for a turn at the camera. they were falling and they were falling and everyone knew that eventually they would abruptly stop.

some said goodbye to the people who were special to them. others spent meticulous seconds gathering their thoughts, and then shrugged, nothing coming to mind. an old german lady said something that no one understood. many tried to reassure their friends and family that it feels like i’m flying; or, i’ve always wanted to skydive; or, a hell of a way to go out, eh?

many were personal.

‘dearest aurelia, i will love you until the stars blink one by one out of light, until all the world goes dark and then on into our next great adventure.’

or, ‘clyde you son of a bitch, your birthday present - ticket to anywhere! - blows. screw you and your hardware store.’

or, ‘remember that jonathan doesn’t like milk, so he needs to take his calcium pills, and Jess needs a car soon, or she’ll be left out of her friends because you can’t drive them all everywhere by yourself...and...just take care of the kids okay hon? tell them i loved them.’

eventually, all of the bodies fell to the ground.

when the camera was recovered, hours and hours later, once the rescue and forensic teams had arrived in the middle-of-nowhere pennsylvania farmlands, everyone gathered around a pretty young firefighter’s laptop and watched the messages of the recently passed.

when she stared at the sun
johnathan asked to go to bathroom every day at precisely 11:35am, which was occasionally in the middle of P.E., occasionally in the middle of math, and occasionally at the beginning of science or the end of social studies depending on how close mrs. harper was to her schedule on any given morning.

when he was granted permission—which was often, as he was well behaved and polite in class—johnathan would walk out of the 4th grade suite of rooms, down the hall, and into the library bathroom. neither mrs. harper nor the librarian minded that johnathan had a preference for this bathroom. a typical morning for administrators at west reagan elementary school would include a casual exchange with johnathan as he made his way past their offices towards the bathrooms. in fact, some of the receptionists secretly looked forward to a hello from johnathan, receiving very little love throughout their day in the office dealing with angry parents, damaged children, and budget crises.

johnathan would walk past their offices between 11:35 and 11:36am, depending on the speed at which he walked, and say, hello mrs. underhill, hello ms. strait, have a good morning. and the two ladies would secretly melt. when your passion is educating children, there is nothing more fulfilling than to be told to have a good morning by a squeaky-voiced 4th grade boy.

when johnathan got to the bathroom, he would first make sure that nobody else was in it. if somebody was, he would usually pee. he drank enough water to be able to pee, in case others were in the bathroom, but not enough to make him need to go before 11:35am.

once he was sure that nobody else was in the bathroom, johnathan would walk to the far side of the bathroom, and stare out the small window which looked past the wire-fencing of the school, and into the surrounding residential community of everlawn choice.

from his window, he would watch for the next three minutes as a young girl walked out of her house and stared unblinkingly up at the sun. she would stare and stare and stare, directly into the sun. and johnathan knew she was special because when she took her eyes away from the sun, they were the most peculiar shade of amber, and he would swear until his dying day that even from across the street and through a dusty old bathroom window, he could see bright sparkling flecks of gold in each eye.

typically, he watched her stare into the sun, glimpsed her eyes, and walked thoughtfully back to his classroom.

today, he watched her stare into the sun, glimpsed her eyes, and then stared as she collapsed on her driveway, curled herself into a ball, and began to shake uncontrollably.

toxins
on aurelia’s wedding day, her cat ate a dove. the slippery fluids of the dove’s insides were stamped in parallel paw-prints all down her grandmother’s ancient wedding dress. doves, upon being eaten, are apparently a syrupy mess of blood and intestines just like everything else whose insides become outsides in a moment of calamity. effing cats, aurelia thought, don’t give a crap where they step.

who the hell cares anyway. wedding dresses are for brides who are about to get married. i’m not about to get married, because my good-for-nothing fiancé is somewhere on the northern reaches of the nile, researching something idiotic, living out of a four-star hotel in egypt.

in fact, rob was on the southern rapids of the nile, in the backward-desert region of mid-sudan, researching the effect of toxins on headwaters. he had, two months before his wedding day, been awarded an anonymous grant of staggeringly large financial means to investigate whether it was possible for a poison to run upriver, instead of down. the grant, and the toxins given to him in sealed bio-hazard containers by men in dark business suits, and the military transport jet, and the four-star general standing in the airport to welcome him into africa, combined as a sort of neon sign reading: defense spending.

so it was that while aurelia was burning her dress in blind anger, rob was poisoning the nile somewhere in between marawi and al dabbah. in the coming weeks, rob was planning fly back to the united states, marry his fiancé, and postpone the honeymoon for another two or three months to complete the research.

if it hadn’t been for an unfortunate spill of one of the more interesting toxins rob was testing, the plan would have gone exactly like that.

isaiah 65

2011-02-28T21:03:00.002-05:00

on a macro level, there are a number of very tragic evils facing the developing world that the bible addresses. anyone who has ever read isaiah, the psalms, the gospels, revelation, most prophets, the letters...actually, pretty much every book of the bible...knows that the bible addresses hunger, addresses pain, addresses systems of leadership, addresses sickness, etc.

on a macro level, the bible is very clear.

if you pay close enough attention though, the bible addresses fairly principle evils on a micro level too.

for example, i believe one of the most frustrating evils in developing nations right now is the system which births children into terror. twelve year old single mothers who are too malnourished to care for their own child. children given in the first two or three years of their life to the streets. families with no access to food, shelter, education, representation, care, etc. little girls conceived in a relationship where one or both of the parents intend to sell them in a few years for their bodies. little boys conceived as slaves.

isaiah 65:23 says that on the day of the Lord, they shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity.

psalm 10 ends with the absolutely gut-wrenching declaration that man's role in the world is that of the terror (so that man may no longer terrify...is how the psalmist puts it). in isaiah 65, the other translation of calamity is 'sudden terror'. this is God speaking through isaiah, saying 'i know that my children are being born into a world of literal terror, instigated by my beloved creation, and i'm going to tell you right now that IT WILL NOT LAST. this was never how i intended it, this is not the way it should be, and it's going to stop.'

amen that someday, children will not be born into a system of terror. amen that a reconciled world means that the first thing children experience will not be calamity. amen that God very vocally won't stand for the present state of things.

more excerpts

2011-02-23T18:02:00.005-05:00

The cease-fire ended one night before it was supposed to with noise unimaginable even nine days ago.

They say in the mountains you can still go for weeks without any sign of fighting. I wonder what it would sound like? Maria visited once, years ago. The canyon in Somoto, I think, which I would imagine is just as peaceful as the mountains.

She said as far as you could see into the canyon before it twisted around itself, steeples and pine lined the walls. I remember talking to her about it when she came back to the dump. She closed her eyes and for almost five minutes didn’t say anything. We were sitting out on her porch and her eyes were closed like just being there, in our neighborhood, prevented the memories from coming back.

Then she breathed, as if the air was fresh and not filled with the smoke of hundreds of tons of trash, and she said, “Joce can’t you hear it? The streams are all falling down the edges, into the river below.”

So I sat and listened, unwilling to question her memories, even if I didn’t understand the images she painted.

“The air smells like the trees,” she said. “And every now and then a bell will ring in one of the old churches; there must be thousands of them in the canyon Joce. The cicadas are buzzing down the valley. The trees just before the bend in the canyon must be full of them, and the sounds get caught in the wind and when a gust comes your hair blows and you hear it Joce, every bit of the racket that it’s all making. And when it’s calm, you can’t hear a thing. Just the trickle of the one or two streams falling down the sides of the canyon on either side of you.”

I remember going to bed that night and dreaming about the village of a thousand steeples. How the churches with their soaring towers and their fresh coats of yellow and pink and green, and their bells and the singing coming out through their doors—how they must fill the valley every day. How it must look, the endless pine, dotted with the spires of bell towers.

But that was a long time ago, and I’ve never been. The cities now are shattering glass, and the neighborhoods are bullets ripping through tin, and everything is suffused in the warm glow of fires on the horizon so that even at night, you can see the men running lines with shotguns slung over their shoulders.

Tonight had been windy. The smoke from the community was blowing back and forth through the streets.

During dinner, Aunt Reyna and Paul and I sat and watched the front door as smoke wafted halfway in, and then suddenly would get sucked out again by a different gust. We could make out the actual patterns of swirls and eddies the smoke made in the air because the sun was setting just right through the roof, so that it struck our front door and illuminated every torn bit of paper, strand of ash, particle of dust.

Paul was hysterical through the entire episode, running up to the smoke and stopping just before it enveloped him, and then laughing as another gust pulled it back out the door. He repeated the game all dinner long, sometimes overstepping the boundaries and walking back to the table with a head full of ash, other times so perfectly close that he could stick his pudgy little arm out into the smoke, as if breaking through the barrier into a dark new world.

“Can I go see Maria?” I asked Aunt Reyna as dinner was ending.

She frowned at me. Aunt Reyna didn’t like me leaving the house after dark with the war so close around us, but we had argued so often about this, that I knew she would let me go.

“Be back in an hour Joce, no more,” she answered.

I wanted to jump up and run out, but instead took care to bring my dishes out back to the sink, and toss the rag napkins into the crate of dirty clothes I’d wash tomorrow. Then I set off.

The path to Maria’s house zigzagged through the community. Two blocks to the clinic, left and up the hill around the new block of flood victims’ homes. Down and just as you enter into the clearing of actual trash, left again and down an alley to Maria’s house.

I was in the alley when the explosions came.

new beginnings

2011-02-16T22:36:00.004-05:00

The palm trees that had fallen and the gulls hanging upside down, their bright orange feet like piñatas; the flowerbeds littered with doves and the spider webs caught improbably on things like bedroom furniture and charred spatulas; dead dogs in burlap all down the road, stinking worse than rotten fish—everything charred and more black than it should be.

And nothing moved.

For the first time in nearly a year and eight months, nothing exploded; no one ran frantically from house to house; no bullhorns or sirens were warning anyone of anything.

I was trying to knock an iguana off the madroño tree behind my house, enjoying the quiet and trying to remember when we last had a still morning, when Aunt Reyna called from the kitchen.

“10 days!” she yelled, her head poking out from a rift between two of the aluminum sheets that formed our back wall.

“10 days ‘til what?” I yelled back, keeping one eye on the iguana but turning so that I could see her too.

I was ticking off in my head everything that could happen in ten days. Our village could be bombed or invaded; my friends and I could be stolen or shot; or, for all I knew, school could suddenly start up again. All three have been known to happen.

But Aunt Reyna sounded excited. She had walked out our front door—the only door in the house—and around to the back. Her old yellow skirt was flapping, and without an apron, she looked too threadbare to do much more than blow away in the wind.

“10 days of cease-fire,” she said.

I stood silent, processing the news, and she continued. “For the next 10 days, the leaders of both sides have pledged to stay quiet. No men quietly stealing into our kitchen for the next boundary raid; no explosions on our side or theirs…no fighting.”

“Why?” I asked, more disgust in my voice than I had intended.

Aunt Reyna frowned. “Does it matter? To get aid in the country, to sleep an entire night, to—“

“Wipe blood off the streets,” I muttered. It would never last.

Aunt Reyna ignored me. “I wonder if they’ll start school again,” she mused.

I groaned and kicked at one of the rocks I had stockpiled by my feet. My dinner was climbing too high and deep into the gnarled branches of the tree, and that, along with the prospect of school starting back again, made my stomach hurt.

photos I took with my iPhone this week...

2011-02-14T20:10:00.000-05:00

the cdc tells everyone going through customs at the miami airport to 'declare these'. my favorites include: human remains, turtles, mosquitoes, blood, african rodent products, nonhuman primates, bushmeat, and cultures of microorganisms...just in case you were traveling with any of those things checked in your suitcase...

interestingly, book covers have recently begun to feature birds. i don't understand this trend, but would like to point out that it is occurring.

i can't help but take photographs of drop-dead-gorgeous sunsets while driving. i'm sure it's not a good idea, but i still feel in control of the car, and it beats wasting time pulling over...

whole sight

2011-02-10T23:22:00.001-05:00

this is what i'm currently thinking about...but i don't know how to explain it yet. more to come. from john fowles' 'daniel martin' - applies to so many things, i don't even know where to begin. but i will sometime.

World Changers

2011-02-02T10:45:00.002-05:00

The way of things in a beautiful or desolate land is to increase. Deserts will slowly encroach, as will garbage, as will angry seas, as will suffering. But so too do wildflowers, and rainforests left to their own devices, and hope, and such things as these. This is not a profound statement. Merely that entropy, left to it’s own devices, will grow things, and if those things are beautiful, there will be beauty. If those things are not, there will be more darkness, growing blacker and deeper.

This rule is generally applicable on a macro level. Where there are people, more will come. Where there is wisdom, greater. Entrenched hatred, more well dug-in.

There will be children, and children’s children, and thereafter.

Similarly, poverty usually only begets poverty. Wealth generally does the same. These are the systems. Evils like hunger and abuse. Beauty like love and hope.

World changers are people who step into these systems to change them. World changers take poverty, deeply entrenched, and break the system. Other world changers take hope and suck it out of the marrow of things, so that for generations to come, there is despair, anger, and hatred.

In the church, Jesus did this with Sin. Paul rocked the system of gentiles while Peter upended the entire system of religious practice by establishing the Church.

In general aid work, one breaks a system of poverty by stepping into it and working within it—you will never change abuse unless you work with both the abused and the abusers, and go where the abuse is happening. Disaster relief efforts will not adequately address disasters without being on the ground immediately after the disaster hits.

Maybe it’s easy to say, while I’m on the ground here in Nicaragua, that it takes engagement in a system to break it. But it’s fairly easy to lose sight of that in the US. Fairly easy to think that tossing funds at poverty, or reading books about it, or going to movie screenings on it, is as effective. But that’s not true, is it?

taking portraits...

2011-01-29T16:04:00.001-05:00

assorted kids in nica...

2011-01-26T15:23:00.003-05:00

keats and kings

2011-01-17T22:13:00.001-05:00

"and after a while the brook dried up, because there was no rain in the land...'"

- 1 Kings 17:7

can you imagine Elijah? sitting next to a brook watching it dry up, despairing at the rain he banished from the northern kingdom of israel? watching the water first swirling in eddies and spindrifts, then receding until only small tendrils remained, slowly muddied, and eventually dried into the land. can you smell the rot of the brook as it dried up? the sickening death of it all? can you hear the dirt brush by your ear and the mud crack beneath your thirsty hands?

but then the ravens came to feed him. not to graze carrion or herald the drying up of the land, but to feed and to comfort. and then the fire came, not to burn or destroy but to affirm that God is, and the idols are not. and then a small grey cloud. and then a big one. in the span of just 2 chapters - 1 Kings 17-18.

and what is so unique and beautiful is that Elijah was sitting at a dried up brook just one chapter before the rains came. i'm not saying there are a lot of dried up brooks in my life, but maybe there are. at least one or two...but, "in a little while the heavens grew black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain." 1 Kings 18:45 - it only seems anti-climactic because i gave the story just three paragraphs. really this sentence is describing thousands upon thousands of people rejoicing over the rain, a faithful Elijah soaked to the bone, a brook becoming full again. things restored.

aye, on the shores of darkness there is light,

and precipices show untrodden green,

there is a budding morrow in midnight...

keats

God is good. ravens will feed you when the brook is dry, fires will affirm you and not destroy, and storm clouds will bring not fury but swift rain and a far green country, budding even in midnight.

books your daughters are reading...

2011-01-16T23:03:00.001-05:00

a few thoughts on current trends in young adult fiction right now, if you'll indulge me.

science fiction dystopias are the rage right now. there are remnants of stephanie meyer, even a few of harry potter, but the new wave of successful young adult series' are generally post-apocalyptic dystopia societies centered around the one, two or many 10 - 15 year-olds that are battling for their lives, their communities, their families, their worlds, etc.

i've written about a few of them: the most popular obviously is the hunger games series, but beyond that, notables include dashner's 'the maze runner', westerfield's 'uglies' (and his new one, leviathan), and ryan's 'forest of hands and teeth' (which owes some debt to 'graceling's' more imaginative world, and some debt to 'shiver's' eerie forest).

there exists everything from corrupt governments to zombies to mass fatal diseases to lowry-esque conformity in the books, but here's the interesting trend: in all those books, girls figure really prominently. so prominently, in fact, that girls grace the cover of four out of the six aforementioned books in a genre that less than five years ago was dominated by boys. over seventy percent of the readers of young adult dystopia, sci-fi, and apocalypse (we're talking a huge market here) were boys. today, the best selling few series in the entire young adult genre come from this sub-genre, and the bulk are marketed to girls.

the interesting outcome of this trend, depending on how long it can continue, is that a small generation of girls - your daughters between the ages of 10 and 15 depending on reading level - are being raised not by boxcar children or the beloved winnie of tuck everlasting, but by the pissed-off katniss of the hunger games, the mildly delusional teresa of the scorch trials, and the born-killer katsa of graceling. to put it bluntly, your daughters are reading a whole lot of books about girls who kill their peers.

i should qualify this by saying that I don't think it's a bad thing: by this point in their life, girls (moreso than boys at that age) should be able to delineate easily between the book and the real-world where they can't roam forests unchaperoned, they can't kill each other, period, and they don't have unique places in society. i do not, however, think it is something that won't leave a mark. if one generation of girls was raised on a bridge to terebithia, gathering blue, and watership down, this current one is being raised on a significantly more violent, obviously more dystopic, and frighteningly more blunt cache of literature. just a thought to chew on.

fonts

2011-01-11T22:10:00.001-05:00

excerpting again

2011-01-09T23:18:00.003-05:00

sometimes all i want to do is write. this weekend was one of those weekends. i finally managed the smallest of confrontations with my two characters, which is more draining than you'd think...happy reading for the two or so of you who are curious about the novel's progress.

Joce was steeling herself as she walked to the orphanage. It was time to dig into things. Micah smiled as she walked through the gate. She stopped short and just stood, water pooling at her feet, in the entrance hall. He tossed her a beach towel.

“Micah, we need to talk.”

He was silent for so long that Joce thought he must be angry.

“What are you thinking?” she asked hesitantly. She hadn’t been sure how Micah would feel. They had agreed without ever actually voicing it not to dwell much on their recent experiences.

Joce sighed again, “come on Micah, you know we’ve got to face things sometime; there’s something out there and—”

—“I’m just thinking about who else we should get before we start this conversation,” Micah cut in.

Joce let out a small “Oh,” and then stood quietly, still dripping, the two of them five feet apart in the entrance hall to the orphanage. “I hadn’t thought about anyone else, I guess,” Joce said.

Micah looked at her in a sort of pitying way that made her want to scream. “Of course not Joce; you’ve had it sort of rough for the past few weeks. Of all people you deserve a break from all of this.”

“Stop,” Joce whispered. Then, gaining volume, “I’ve had it rough? You’ve been pelted with bats; left behind—by me—in the middle of a cave; your room looks like animals tore it to shreds, and you have a dying child sleeping on an air mattress next to you at night. Don’t tell me I’ve had it rough.” She was furious by the end. So tired of his protective arm and his pity at her room and her clothes and her food and her family.

Micah just looked appalled though. “Don’t say that,” he whispered. It was the merest sound in such a wide open hall, and it fled quickly, but it with it, too, went all of her anger. Everything that kept her going over the past few weeks burst as she replayed her words.

Ana is dying.

Joce just crouched down onto the balls of her feet, barely noticing the water seeping into her thighs and up the back of her skirt. She couldn’t help herself crying.

Micah made no move forward.

“We’ve both thought it already,” she said to the ground. “Don’t tell me I have to keep thinking it by myself.”

Micah just stood above her, numbly. “It’s them, they’re killing her. Haven’t you noticed Ana gets worse every time they’re out? When the sun goes down—that’s the worst. That’s when it all happens.”

welcome to my average day of design work...

2011-01-06T23:19:00.001-05:00

I had to design two snap pieces today, one for a mass email and one for a gift photo. Here's what my design decisions look like with about 10 minutes per piece - welcome to my average day's design work:

Graphic Number One: The Mass Email Banner

1. Needs to be a landscape photo that is visible and poignant at 650 pixels wide (dimensions of typical email inbox). Needs to have smiling kids (because happy and celebratory is tone of the email). Needs to be vibrant (same reasons). This narrows down photo selection to about five billion. I can pretty much choose whatever the heck I want, but the final quality that makes me settle on the one below is that no one will know the kids, which fits with the message I'm wanting to convey (it's harder than you think to find a photo of nicaraguan kids that no one knows).

2. Needs to convey the success of our gift campaign with specific gifts.

Therefore I use - a large white helvetica neue font outlined (because outlining tends to be vibrant and playful) in the middle girl's shirt-color (to match). The arrows are yellow to bring further color and vividness to the graphic - they're curvy and repetitive to be playful. The black text is a handwriting font to convey a sense of childlike appreciation, and lowercase to emphasize. It should look just slightly like the kids wrote it themselves. Of course, they're smiling to have just received those things - the photo basically writes the email for me. All text and graphics are shadowed. No editing is done on the photo.

Errors: there are 3 dots after the bottom text, for who knows what reason, and the shadows don't match the actual shadows on the photo. Minor details that less than .5% of the readership would notice. Here's the finished product - took exactly 11 minutes.

Graphic Number Two: 60 Appreciation photos to be framed for our volunteers.

1. Photo must be classy, with a well-known kid from one of our orphanages. Black and white seemed to fit the bill, and this little one named Ana is about the most universally beloved little one ever. The photo was taken in B&W and no editing was needed (for pro-printing...on a house printer it would need to be brightened).

2. Text must convey tons of gratitude, and be readable from a long distance off.

These requirements led me to the product below. The opening text is in a classy and elegant curly font, I believe Mistral. Not so cursive as to be unreadable (which is usually true in graphics), but not a typical font either. (Note - never italicize a cursive font, you'll make it look stupid). The following text needed to get smaller, because staying in a large cursive font for more than about three lines looks poor. So I went with trusty old Helvetica Neue, this time kerned at -40 (which is really quite high) to keep the letters tightly packed. After three lines, completely arbitrarily, it looked like the size needed to be made smaller again, so I went slightly smaller but kept the same vertical spacing, to make keep some sense of unity in the text. Also kept the sans-serif font the same, kerned at the same rate.

Of course, the text didn't stand out at all, so after fiddling with shadows, glows, and outlines, I decided to paint in a white stripe, which became two white duplicate stripes. If you look closely, they also have the pleasant effect of covering up the gringo in the blurry background (once I point this out to you, it is glaringly obvious and almost disqualified the photo). However, it seemed so black and white by this point, that color was clearly needed. I went with a fairly standard, but slightly pastel RGBY color pallette, and staggered the stripes so that everything showed. I applied an obvious glow to the 'Thank You So Much' and made sure all text would fit within even the smallest 4x6 frame. I applied a small black edge around the photo to keep a sense of boundary if it gets taken out of a frame. As an afterthought, I branded it with our name.

Errors: Arguably, there should be more punctuation in the text, but in terms of design, it doesn't look great. The afterthought of our brand is pointless and dangerous - I got lucky in that it was completely covered by the 4x6 frame. If it had been slightly higher, it would have been half-covered and therefore totally ruined the photo. See the final product below. Total time spent: 14 minutes.

micah 6:1

2011-01-04T23:28:00.002-05:00

...what are you pleading for in 2011? this is my list for nica:

1. josseling to not get pregnant this year.

2. jahaira to be comforted and loved, daily.

3. luis to get a job and provide for his younger sister so that she doesn't have to.

4. helen to smile like she used to.

5. xochilt to understand that God isn't at all like her father.

6. yonida's family to be blessed, materially and emotionally to overcome the loss of her dad.

7. paola to sleep soundly and be comforted against her nightmares.

8. yahoska to meet her weight target every single month this year.

9. melania and jessica to be kept safe on the streets each morning.

10. milton to be healthy and mothered properly.

11. all three mari's to grow in self-worth and faith in Christ.

...who are you pleading for this year?

my thoughts as an advertising director

2011-01-03T17:06:00.002-05:00

dubrovnik, good reads, and new things

2011-01-02T23:51:00.000-05:00

a lot of ground to cover upon returning to a blog after so long.

first of all, new changes: the blog looks different. seriously, tell me if it is too busy, or too slow to load, or too something else. i'm still in the honeymoon stage with it, but i'm sure the boredom with such a designed look will kick in sooner or later. for now, i quite like the feature of tags - thematically labeled 'fill in the blank' on the right side. i believe the 'write' label has the most posts, because, let's face it, that's what i like to do. 'share' comes in second because i can't decide what qualifies itself for that category. 'read' oddly enough, is lacking, so you're about to get my most recent book recommendations. finally, i took away a couple links, and added a couple. also, the profile picture i added to the blog isn't the most pretentious thing in the world, although it probably looks it - actually, jahaira, a little seven year old nicaraguan chica took the photo, and it's by far the best portrait of me i've ever seen. one point for nica.

second, if you are thinking of vacationing, go to dubrovnik. i've been living alone for the past week - my roommate is up in yorktown - so tonight i decided to go grand: i stuck some white crate and barrel candlesticks into old wine bottles that haven't yet been recycled, arranged them neatly on the table, and had a candlelit dinner with brooke fraser singing softly in the background, and this picture gracing my wall:

third, if you need a good book to read, here are my newest recommendations, in no particular order:

1. the maze runner & the scorch trials - by james dashner. these two lovely works owe a heavy debt to the hunger games, and if i'm honest, they're nowhere near as good. but they're still better than most of the sci-fi dystopias that have recently taken over YA literature. (the forest of hands and teeth, and the uglies are other notable exceptions, but i recommend this series first). if you loved the hunger games, you'll appreciate these two as well - and thankfully, the second is far better and less gratuitous than the first. like everything else in YA these days, it's a trilogy, so if you hate waiting around for books, don't read this until october when the 3rd comes out.

2. the magicians - by lev grossman. a good friend told me about this book a LONG time ago, and I'm just now reading it. it's really stellar. if you've ever read harry potter, or narnia (mind you, i'm nearly quoting from the back of the book here), then you should round out your education on all things fantasy with grossman's exceptionally dark, adult, disillusioned work of fantasy. mind you it get's a touch (just a touch) graphic, and i wouldn't recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen an R-rated movie.

3. everything changes - by johnathan tropper. okay okay, i'm back with him again because his prose is just gorgeous, and his metaphors get at the heart of things quicker and more efficiently than i've ever encountered. this book, like 'this is where i leave you', is graphic, littered with swearing, and completely honest in a way most books i like aren't. if you didn't like the most recent one of his i recommended, you won't like this one. i loved it though. (and read it as an e-book)

let's catch up.

2011-01-01T22:34:00.008-05:00

2010 was the year of leaving, and if i’m honest, i’m glad that it’s behind.

i left college in 2010. three and a half years of this beautiful ecosystem of life-long friends living in every room of the house, and every room of the neighboring houses, and across the streets and short walks away; left behind.

i left nicaragua six times this past year. there are children there that i’ve prayed for nightly for almost four years. i leave, and i hear about their successes and their graduations and their growth through others, from afar. i’ve stopped pretending it doesn’t wear me out. if being there was the energy in 2010, then leaving each time knocked me out cold for weeks. take a ziplock bag, inflate it, seal it, and then pop it. leave it lying on the floor or the counter or wherever it fell when it popped. leave it there for a week or two, until it’s covered in dirt and dust. then wash it off under a cold faucet, and reuse it. do that six times. it will have too many holes to hold much.

i left a few other things too. if you know me at all, you know that those are the things that keep me awake at night. the things that make me prop open my computer in twilight to write and delete and rewrite a thousand times. it’s almost comical in the mornings to mull over the previous night’s thoughts: i just reject it all. i used to call it rationality, but 2010 makes me think it’s just a defense mechanism against immobility. the most utterly cynical way to say it is that the people who can’t get out of bed in the morning are probably the people who can’t let go of what they really think and just fake it the entire day. i don’t actually believe that, but 2010 made me feel that way sometimes.

all that is to say it’s funny how things change. i woke up one day some weeks ago to discover that i was in a completely different space than i thought i would be. the landscape is different. i live on a beach. a beach! who would have thought? when i come home from work i park under a tree that sheds cherries onto my car through three seasons. there are little sticker-seed-pods everywhere now; i track them into the house daily but for the life of me, i can’t figure out where i get snared between my car and my front door. and...i’ve grown fond of them.

i have good friends here now. friends with whom i can spend new years eve; with whom i can pray or have nerf wars. friends equally likely to spend a birthday drinking fine wines on the bay, or playing drinking games in their family rooms. friends i’ve toasted to. my home now is like a scented candle. there is a sweet aroma when i cross from the bridge to the shore; a pleasant vanilla scent that would seem to suffuse my days. the cliffnotes of my current existence could probably read approximately that: ‘things change; my life smells like vanilla now.’

i’m laughing to myself while writing this. 2010 taught me how to write about loss and leaving and sorrow and regret. i’m laughing because i’m glad to have had the lesson, and because i feel infinitely excited for 2011.

2010-12-16T19:55:00.001-05:00

this is all i wish to convey right now

2010-09-15T17:55:00.002-04:00

jericho

2010-09-13T22:52:00.007-04:00

the shopkeeper

it was quite a sight, you know, when the walls finally crumbled. because really, everyone knew it was coming. oh they didn't for some time, mind you, but everyone decided it to themselves sooner or later.

the walls are probably falling today, some would say in passing, like it was a joke, like they didn't secretly believe they were destined for ruin. the walls are falling today, and everyone would laugh and walk away in silence because they felt it in their bones.

their tired old bones. bones that shook as joshua's army marched around the city every day. bones that, those first few days, probably laughed. probably laughed and laughed and wondered why no one bothered to tell the israelites that the city was impenetrable. that all of the citizens inside had plenty of food, plenty of water, and would last just fine through all the marching that crazy israelite army wanted to do.

the trouble was, by the middle of the week, everyone was silent. heaven only knows why the israelites didn't make a sound when they weren't marching around the city...well, i suppose heaven does know, but he never clued any of us in. everyone likes to think that jericho was a messy, loud affair, but it wasn't really. sure, seven priests were blowing trumpets way up front, but when they got on the other half of the city, all you could hear were the scuffling feet of the israelites, so silent, so serious.

it wears on you and i guess that's why we knew the walls were coming down. not because the walls looked unstable, or because we thought that sometime our city just clearly had to snuff it, but because of that silence. it was a message to each of us jericho folk: we know those walls are coming down, and we're going to keep walking, dead serious, until they do.

you could hear a newborn's heartbeat in that final day before the march. that, and then the sound of people marching. the distant trumpets blaring and then deafening cheers. screams.

that's why we knew the walls were coming down. it was that the israelites were...faithful. i guess that's the word. and in the face of that faith, well, there's not much truth on this earth that will stand up to that kind of faith. that kind of faith...i remember as the walls crumbled: i wish i had that kind of faith.

the client

it was a prostitute. not many people know that, but i remember it clearly; it was a prostitute that brought our walls down. i was a customer of hers. not very regular, not very nice, but i knew her more than most i think, and there were a few things it's good to remember about her role in all this.

everyone knew they were coming. we had heard about the red sea, how it just clean and dried up for 'em, and then how they fixed those two kings beyond the jordan. they were unstoppable. a force to be reckoned with, only i don't think many of us really paid attention in the weeks before it happened.

but she did. i remember because i remember admiring her, there at the end, with the red cord tied to her door like a waving flag, treason clear as day. i remember admiring that decision she made.

i knew she sold us out, see, and i reckon i didn't care. i was just leaving her favor one night when the spies peeked their heads out her room. i hid behind a corner and heard the whole thing. save my family and i won't tell a soul you were here, she said, like she was making a deal with the devil. only it didn't feel like that, it felt like the most natural thing in the world and i found myself thinking, i wish i had an older sister like that. one who would say: my little brother, make sure he's safe and i'll do whatever you want.

you see i knew she was selling us out and in the face of everything, in the face of the army coming towards us and the land behind them in ruins and their spies lodging in my whore's bedroom - in the face of all of that, i admired her.

i think i'd want to be like that. take my body - every piece of it - take my loyalty and my honor, take the very walls that surround me, as long as it will protect my family, every last one of them. i think i'd want to be like that, or know somebody who was like that for me.

you see because i was taking her body and i think she was letting me so that she could provide for her family; and then they took our city and it was still just because one girl wanted to protect her family.

well i'm old now, older than i look mind you, and she's long since passed away, but i reckon if there were another man or woman on earth who sold themselves of everything they had in order to save the ones they loved...i reckon i'd follow them to the ends of the world and back again.

georgetown with my newly local friends

2010-09-13T08:58:00.003-04:00

did you know that georgetown cupcake has a super secret cupcake of the day (i do not call it this, they do, see below)? well, they do, and i went with my buddies who are now such DC locals that they can get me free cupcakes. we just sauntered right in, said 'chocolate chip please' and got the super secret cupcake of the day, for free. what a deal.

because i rarely talk about the music i like

2010-09-08T21:24:00.003-04:00

i like darlingside a lot. apparently my friends are friends with them. who knew? below is a phrase from one of my favorite songs of theirs...

...and then what i think every time i'm driving in the car and it comes on...

violence

2010-09-08T09:24:00.002-04:00

love his videos...there are three on vimeo that are a particularly great. check him out.

a brief and consolidated history of fantasy

2010-09-07T22:58:00.001-04:00

I think one of the most important contributions that Rowling made to high fantasy—that being, fantasy on an epic scale, involving not a locale or single people group, but worlds, peoples, societies, geographies—is to have located it in the real world. More than Lewis ever did with his Chronicles, certainly more than Tolkien or MacDonald ever did with their own worlds, Rowling ensured that we knew Harry Potter lived in our world, in our time, on our terms.

It’s important, I think, to appreciate the mystery our world still holds. To appreciate the desires to swim in the clouds or the depths of the sea, to pass through volcanoes and plum the misted roots of ancients forests...without looking to science fiction for the answers and adventures. It’s important to encourage imagination on our own terms, not those of middle earth and narnia. Important to dream and create within our own world. Rowling allowed fantasy to go there again.

Did you know that fantasy actually started there? Way back in the day, fantasy wasn’t about anything more or less than taking the known landscape, the known country, the known society, and enlarging it with the fantastic. Locating fairies in the woods nearby, and mermaids in the seas: this is where fantasy began.

Then we shifted into...Stephanie Meyer. No seriously, the next phase of fantasy, historically, was romantic (as distinct from Romanticism, which is different). Realistic fiction dominated for a period of years, during which love stories became typical. Then fantasy reasserted itself in the Gothic movement and adopted the love story for itself. It became not only acceptable, but fashionable to build a romance within the fantasy work. Stephanie Meyer did this with her own mildly gothic work (if you don’t believe it has gothic tendencies, look at the covers and read the middle of the fourth book).

If this accelerated trend continues, the next major player to the scene - by which I mean the next fantasy work to sell millions of copies, is going to be one which is again set in an entirely fantastic world.

I predict, in the next three years, a writer will come along with a world as far removed from our own as was Middle Earth, and will approach the level of sophistication that Tolkien brought to his own world. And I think it will be the next massive literary event. I could be wrong, but that’s my guess, take it or leave it.

shots i took with my iphone while driving...so fun

2010-09-06T20:58:00.004-04:00

the four books that have recently absorbed my life

2010-08-31T21:24:00.007-04:00

if you read nothing else this summer, you have to catch these four books. nothing else i've read recently even comes close to how much i've adored these four:

1. Mockingjay

I honestly don't know how she weaves this entire thing together, but somehow, to me, it works. It's preachy, it's ridiculous, it's dramatic, but my gosh I loved it. It's not the action actually, it's the bitter shock of the first skull her foot kicks in the ashes of her home. It's knowing this is young adult fiction, and knowing exactly how and why she pushes the boundaries. It's recognizing the points she tries to make, and respecting that she's brought her characters along to a level at which it makes sense for the situations to play themselves out. It's not knowing until the bitter end what will happen with the most important plot point of the series. If you don't read another book this summer, read this series, from the beginning, and fall in love with this book.

2. The Passage

I didn't expect it to be good. I didn't even expect to finish it. But by the time he had killed off two or three major characters, I was hooked. This book is all about the prose, and all about the world. The characters can be pointy and a little too lacking in motive for things they do, but what he lacks in overarching character schemas, he makes up for in blindingly insightful moments of relationship, and beautiful new worlds at the drop of a pin. It's not a typical read by any means, and even reading at my fastest, it took me the better part of four days to finish (Mockingjay, by contrast, I finished in six hours). Read it. You'll love it. Then you'll wish you waited two years until the sequel comes out.

3. This is Where I Leave You
This is perhaps the most brilliant commentary I've read on normal life in the past many months. Apart from alot of sex, and good amount of things you won't want your kids to read, this book has blindingly insightful comments on relationships, and a wealth of fantastic one-liners. It's hilarious, it's cynical in a way that doesn't make you gag, and it's usually spot-on. If you like Dave Eggers or David Sedaris, this, I think, is akin to their most insightful moments, while rivaling them step for step on the comedy. And the prose is marvelously snappy. Takes a few chapters to get into.

2. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

To me, this is the adult version of Mockingjay (seriously). It's thankfully light on the painful abuse scenes in the earlier two novels, but full of the same heartache and desperateness for justice. The main characters are at once frustratingly absurd, and so skillfully drawn as to be convincing. And frankly, if you haven't read it, you're missing out on the most important thing to happen to literature in at least a couple years. This is the first author to sell a million e-books (on Amazon, though I doubt he is the first if you aggregate the market), and whatever your thoughts on the e-book market, that's something impressive. If you haven't read the series, read it. If you're squeamish, don't. But you'll be missing out.

tracing metaphors backwards through the Bible

2010-08-22T23:11:00.001-04:00

go through, go through the gates;

prepare the way for the people;

build up, build up the highway;

clear it of stones;

lift up a signal over the peoples.

isaiah 62:10

it’s a beautiful song, isn’t it? this poetry from the lips of isaiah the prophet. we understand intuitively that the way is not yet prepared. that maybe the gates are closed, or the highway isn’t paved, or has been so long abused that it is littered with the ancient ruins of destruction, the crimes committed thereupon. it isn’t clear of stones, and there is no signal over the peoples.

but really let’s be honest. what are these gates? what is the way? where is the highway leading? what signal?

just five chapters prior Isaiah says that it will be said, ‘build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every obstruction from my people’s way’ (57:14). and it’s so interesting to me that this prophet says that it will be said, and then proceeds to say it.

but it makes sense too, because really another 17 chapters before this, Isaiah says ‘in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God’ (40:3).

and before that, David has already hit the subject. psalm 68 tells us to ‘lift up a song to him who rides through the deserts, his name is the Lord’.

and of course before that it says the Lord isn’t really riding on the road, is he? psalm 18 says that ‘he rode on a cherub an flew, he came swiftly on the wings of the wind’. So the Lord is really flying across the desert on the wings of the wind, or the wings of a cherub, or something along those lines.

and this is old news too because before that in 2 samuel 22:11 the prophet samuel has already covered the fact that ‘he rode on a cherub and flew; he was seen on the wings of the wind’.

and samuel at least (because by this point I’m hoping for some explanation) will go on to say that when the Lord gets there—this place that he is going—that the channels of the sea were seen, the foundations of the world were laid bare...at the blast of the breath of his nostrils’ (22:16). but we’re all still waiting anxiously to find out where this is. where we’re building a road to.

and so moving backwards again, in exodus we learn that at the blast of God’s nostrils, ‘the floods stood up in a heap; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea’ (15:8)

and this is of course happened after the Lord had already parted the waters for Moses, after the Lord had laid Jacob bare at the edge of the waters, after the deep had risen up against the wicked and flooded the world for forty days, after the waters flowed out of eden to make fertile all the lands of the earth.

and if you see where I’m going it’s just one more chapter backwards to genesis 1 where ‘darkness was over the face of the deep’ and God stretched forth in glory to part the waters and before he made land and before there was a road to build up, before we walked on dry earth, all the way back in verse 8, he declared in glory that the expanse he created was to be called ‘Heaven’.

and i think that’s why there is all this talk of building up a road in the desert and preparing it and lifting up a signal to all the peoples - because God created the heavens and then everything sort of poured forth from there and if you want to try it, you can start in revelation instead of isaiah and trace this metaphor of building a road all the way back through the bible to the very beginning of everything. creation is parched in the desert and poised upon a highway to return to the heavens and the Father, and if we’re honest with ourselves Jesus is probably the most stunning and beautiful fulfillment of this entire metaphor, a highway to the Father and to this glorious eternity that even the first few verses of Genesis hint at.

and there’s so much more to the metaphor and nearly every major prophet touches on it - it would take pages and pages to try and write through it, but my thought for the night is this: am I building the highway and walking purposefully towards eternity, or am I just a wanderer in the desert feeling a faint breath of wind, listening to a rumor of wings rustling vaguely in the distance?

faithhopelove

2010-08-18T22:13:00.002-04:00

details

2010-08-15T22:21:00.001-04:00

cynical autobiography :)

2010-08-13T22:50:00.006-04:00

i live practically on the beach in the nicest neighborhood of one of the most popular tourist destinations in the mid-atlantic and wear designer jeans to work. business takes me to nicaragua where i stay in a nice hotel, lead teams to water parks, play with children, and surf on weekends. on my upcoming vacation i'm flying to rome and crossing the adriatic to croatia, from which I'll take a eurorail through montenegro and into greece. i compulsively wear aviators and read at least three books a week. due to a thriving black market of dvds in nicaragua, i've seen nearly every new movie out this summer. this is the sum total of my activities for the past and future 3 months.

at least 95% of the people i know therefore think that i’m consistently on vacation.

every week i go to the grocery store to buy things like food. they ask me if i'd like a bag. to this day, i am surprised by the question. even in writing that sentence, i feel as if a dramatic, surprised pause is necessary...

i get gas at one of two gas stations, neither of which i like, and experience deep inner conflict between my desire to squeegee the windshield, and sheer laziness. facebook messages may or may not get returned ever, certainly not within the month, and the only thing particularly interesting in my electronic life is that my blog averages about 30 readers a day.

the first thing i did upon return from nicaragua was to drink two glasses of wine and watch the bachelorette on hulu. my biggest anger in the world vacillates between child abuse and the miami airport. i am clearly conflicted.

the most accurate statement you could make about my emotional state is that i have an emotional state.

living is like dreaming. you think you understand what is going on until, in a moment of epiphany, you realize that nothing makes sense and then promptly forget it all anyway. except the nightmares. the nightmares proliferate like bunny rabbits and wind up encapsulating the sum total of your life, while everything you wish you could remember slips away like blood from head wound.

i crave cheesecake daily but usually end up eating pasta and skipping dessert. i walk on the beach every night in the same direction, always the same direction, with the sun to my left and the ocean to my right. i pay close attention to the shells, but almost never end up taking one. i pick them up, i spin them around, i put them down. if i’m feeling awkward i’ll skip rocks.

i lay in bed questioning my relationships. first acquaintances, then friendships, then ex-girlfriendships. i fall in love with at least two or three people, and then fall asleep. the area of my brain devoted to hopeless romance probably runs for at least half the night on subconscious, but i can’t be sure; i reassess and reject everything in the morning light. starting the day anew is just a crappy way of saying you have no clue what you think about anything. the most scientifically reliable thing you can say about me is that every 12 hours i will be in diametric opposition to myself.

i’m about to write a book without a contract for no fee about an animal i both heartily dislike and am allergic to. the story i actually want to write makes less sense now than it did two years ago, when everyone told me it made no sense.

my life is perhaps most like me singing along to spanish music. i don’t know what i’m singing about and i’m certainly not using real words, but that which can only possibly be classified as a string of random phonemes also has a sweet sweet melody and to me, it is more than enough.

sometimes, this is how i feel

2010-08-11T00:02:00.001-04:00

never think about everything you’re leaving. it’s like trying to read chinese; it will only make your eyes water.

never think about the morning and evening breezes you gave up for air conditioning. never think about the trodden pathways through forests of gnarled madroños you’ll live your life wishing you could walk again.

never think about the photographs of children who will grow up in your absence, you never knowing their name and they never knowing yours, your absence like the white during that millisecond of a camera flash: a child blinks and you will have gone.

never think about the smell of it all, unforgettable like gasoline—unpleasant and then the only thing you could ever hope to taste again. never think about the dirt under your toenails and the spiders who dance across the ceiling like upside down marionettes scuttling to their own gravities and agendas.

never think about the dear princesses on street corners and the young princes tied up on porches with a belt to their back. never think about the ones who didn’t learn to speak from a mother too drunk to teach them. never think about the girls who will this very night huddle in their rooms praying he will find someone younger than they, or the boys who will this very morning walk to the busiest intersection, beg for money, and turn to watch just as the driver barrels into them.

never think about the seven-year-old they found naked, starving, and raped in the alleyway. or the infant under the box, crushed by the weight of a dump truck, his mother wailing and the police lights flashing incandescent red like strands of christmas decorations.

i would swim the farthest sea, crawl to the uttermost on my hands and knees, kill or die, just to bear remembering.

'the colors seem to fade'

2010-08-10T18:57:00.002-04:00

energy

2010-08-09T13:45:00.003-04:00

groups

2010-08-05T12:09:00.002-04:00

mas photos...pretty much whenever i have internet

2010-08-02T11:13:00.001-04:00

chureca on friday

2010-08-01T11:23:00.003-04:00

doorways...from chureca on tuesday

2010-07-30T16:22:00.002-04:00

miami, pt. 4

2010-07-26T11:51:00.005-04:00

so i arrive happily in miami and walk to my gate. being in possession of two sprinkled donuts, i skip the fast food stores and promptly fall asleep at my gate. thirty minutes later, i wake up surrounded by at least thirty asian teenagers, wearing the same bright green shirt with a picture of guatemala on it. this only vaguely worries me. (not because they are teenagers, and certainly not because they are asian; merely because they appear to be going not to nicaragua but to guatemala.) oh miami, i should know you better by now.

i fall back asleep.

twenty minutes later i wake up again surrounded by swedes. i think they are swedes because they speak a language i don't recognize, and they look like my swedish friends. maybe norweigan. something of the sort. these people, too, are wearing shirts depicting guatemala. time for a desk visit. excuse me mam, is the flight to Managua, Nicaragua still departing from this gate? yes sir, the flight to guatemala is running a little late but we'll have it out in plenty of time to board the next flight.

are people at airports told to lie through their teeth, or are they just complete idiots?

forty five minutes later, although the asians have disappeared under mysterious circumstances, the flight to guatemala has not left, and my flight to nicaragua ought to be boarding. i'm eating one of my donuts and wishing I had bought some juice when quite suddenly, a disembodied airline attendant says something in spanish, and about three-fourths of the waiting room stands up, as if in unison, and begins to walk away. apparently, no one who speaks english wants to repeat the instruction so i'm forced to disculpeme senora, que pasa? this phrase, que pasa, is the most ridiculously general phrase I could have possibly used - what's up? like the senora had just come for dinner at my house. like we were old buddies used to seeing each other in bathing suits or dipping our french fries in the same milkshake.

i'm told, in no more than four words, nueva puerta, D quince...great, so we've changed gates. then things get really good.

i'm a quick walker. it's never served me particularly well, but i walk quickly. i mean, if you're going to get there, get there; right? in my case, completely right. i make it to the new gate in about ten minutes (you can imagine the heavyset nicaraguan men sweating their entire 30-minute walk) - and the flight attendants, who have magically appeared there as if by car (they were, in fact, driven gate-to-gate), now make the following announcement:

we regret that our plane has been downgraded and there will be fifty less seats than previously assigned; please line up and tickets will be reissued.

there are three things about this statement that i find absurd:

1. it was first announced, blessedly, in english, so that the bulk of the people screwed were spanish speakers. that's idiotic, but great for me.

2. the flight attendants are regretful. now, this may seem like a trite phrase in the face of fifty pissed off individuals, but i'll take what I can get. when flight attendants aren't just flatline cheery, i'm impressed. except, oh wait, it was just a trite phrase and you don't care a whit. because you're emotionless robots.

3. please line up, is particularly hilarious. like they wanted a mob...if, like i was, you happened to be standing right next to the ticket desk, then well done. I was the second one in line. my ticket was reassigned from 38G to 29F. I can only assume Mr. or Mrs. 29F got screwed. and behind me in line, little children were being trampled as people held aloft their defunct boarding pass and shouted obscenities in at least two, probably ten different languages.

then we board the airplane, and it's a mess, because for some reason, my plane has droves of those individuals with two massive carry-ons. They could have been carrying their entire family in their personal bag. it appears to be a well-documented fact that sometimes airlines really care about carry on size, and other times they don't. this is perhaps the most scientifically accurate statement you can make about airlines.

after the mass chaos of two elderly spanish women attempting to sit in first class, and the amusing process of kicking somebody out of my window seat, the captain comes on. this is always bad news. captains don't speak until we're in the air and they've had time to find out the mundane facts of where we're going, like the temperature, in kelvin, and the airspeed, in knots. so I knew, within two words, we were stuck on the ground. grounded, if you will.

uhhhhhhhh, ladies and gentlemen this is the captain, it looks like when they switched planes, we left behind a headset that communicates with the air traffic controllers...we have maintenance on this problem and should be out the gate in another fifteen minutes.

besides the grammatical issues in his statement, and the completely stereotypical 'uhhhhhh (this is the captain speaking)', what underpinned his statement was something like this: 'i have no freaking clue why they took away our big airplane, I'm tired of talking in two different languages to angry nonpassengers, and I don't have my headset. screw you all, i'm just going to sit here until someone gets me a coffee.'

two hours later, we took off. oh miami; it's always interesting.

exodus 2:1-3

2010-07-21T23:01:00.003-04:00

sometimes i wonder what moses' parents thought about him. exodus tells us that they had him for a grand total of three months.

do you think his parents knew?

do you think when they weaved the papyrus basket and coated it in tar and set him down the river that they had any inkling of who he would grow up to be? that he would change the world? literally shift the course of humanity, topple an empire, perform some of the most stunning narrative miracles in all biblical history? that he would inscribe precisely ten statements to govern the world for thousands of years? that he would release the oppressed on a scale more grand than any other in history save Jesus himself?

three months, and the parents set their child on a course which would build the kingdom of God like the world hadn't seen in years.

who's in your life for three months or less? for a week even, or just a few.

do you believe they'll grow up to change the world?

the last photos I'll post at least for a week or so...

2010-07-19T09:11:00.002-04:00

children in pairs

2010-07-14T21:14:00.002-04:00

why i hate leaving

2010-07-13T23:08:00.004-04:00

this is what I wrote the day i left bluefields...

what was your father like? and she didn’t say a word. she looked up at me and she didn’t say a word and she didn’t smile and she didn’t even hint that there were memories. what was your father like? do you remember him? I hear he was a pastor; he must have been a great father – how old were you when he passed away? do you remember anything about him? these questions are okay because for three days all I’ve done is held the girl in my arms and walked her home and prayed with her family, and I know her five sisters and her three brothers and I’ve held them too. i've known her next oldest sister melania for a year now...i've bought tortillas from her when she skips school to make money on the street. all this is to say its okay that i'm pressing yonida about her father.

because everything about this family feels beautiful except that this tiny little girl—not the youngest, not the oldest—she doesn’t know who her father is and it breaks my heart. this one little girl whose hands are chele and whose wrists are just slightly thicker than my thumbs and whose patience while I sit in meetings is more than I’ve ever seen in a child before—this girl doesn’t know anything but the bed she shares with her five sisters and the mom who loves her so much that she lets her go out all day long to the church so that she can have a chance at friends and nourishment and a life outside of waiting for her mom to get home from work. outside of needing everyday to take care of her sisters. outside of losing her childhood. she doesn’t know her father and her mother together and the joy they probably had and the fellowship in his church and the days when food was on the table and the nights when she could curl up in between the two of them and fall asleep to the sound of their breathing and hold her moms hand and her dads hand while they held each other.

what was your father like? and I’m persistent until she finally starts talking. she says he always used to hold my hand and pick me up when we walked up the mountain from loma fresca to the church, and he would sing to my sisters when they cried and we would fall asleep to lullabies. she says he would never eat until she was full or pretended to be full. she says he would never fall asleep without kissing them on the forehead. she says he would bring them to church and dance to the songs along with them and when it was time for the children to go to the children’s program he would walk them to the other building and hug them before he left. when it was time to pick them up from school he would walk them home, and when it was necessary he would make sure they were doing well in their classes. she says he was all about playing games with them. she says he was all about telling them how beautiful they were and how much he loved them.

then she looked at me and said he was like you and there was a heartbreaking hope in her eyes like I wasn’t about to leave.

then I left.

the landscapes

2010-07-11T19:47:00.003-04:00

rama cay

bluefields main dock

the view from verbo

the walk home from loma fresca

the details, in black and white

2010-07-09T23:49:00.003-04:00

mis amores

2010-07-07T21:26:00.004-04:00

the ninos, from left to right: melania, elmer, jocelyn, yonida, isaias

me and my amor yonida, with younger sis jocelyn, and best friend hayley

yonida, jocelyn, hayley

day 2 (sort of) lunch time

2010-07-05T02:21:00.002-04:00

windows

2010-07-04T10:57:00.001-04:00

hmmm

2010-07-02T23:08:00.002-04:00

first few shots from nica

2010-07-01T11:46:00.002-04:00

world ending, people relating, etc.

2010-06-19T01:01:00.006-04:00

it's more interesting than you think, the following question, so give it a chance. what would people do if the world were going to end tomorrow? not rapture-style, but more of a meteor-style. initially thumbs would fly across phones. you'd text loads of people. you meant something to me, you were important in my life, thanks for being xyz while I was going through etc. then the phone calls would start. some people would forget about the lame apologies they'd been trying to word and cut to the 'i miss you' stage. others would go for the necessary i-love-yous.

most of those would happen in the car while trying to get to the real i-love-yous in person. some would skip the awkward what-do-we-do-now stage and get to the just holding each other. communication would finally be more important than the technology because relationships would be more important, or at least more immediate than information. everything would be jammed but I think, if enough advance warning - say, 24 hours or so, was given, then people would be able to get where they needed to be. families would reunite, but i think too that there would be a lot of others involved. because someone would refuse to split between their family and their love and so both of those groups would be together. I think this might just scale enough that entire stadiums were packed with people who, moving out in every direction, were probably known to one another. people would congregate in areas, communities would be more important and more dynamic and more defined than ever before. it'd be comforting, in the end, to know that person or persons or people you're with - they're exactly who you want to be with. who you would move mountains to get to. it'd be nice to have that hammered out, once and for all. and it'd be nice to have it reciprocated, if only for another few hours.

and if i couldn't get to you...if in the end, we had only hours and they were going to be spent apart, i'd buy a book on morse code and learn just those three words and in the dying world in those last few seconds over short wave radio or walkie talkies or landline telephones, when everything else was jammed or shut down, i'd be very sure you heard and understood. at least i think this is what a lot of people would be saying.

there would be people missing, of course, and people lonelier than they've ever been - i hope you wouldn't be one of them. there would be people rejected, and people making personal visits just to say the mean things they've always wanted to say. but i think in the end that it'd be a very few lonely people. a very few angry people. i guess i suppose people would just love more, connect more, commune more, relate more, hold more, savor more, be more, if they were given the chance. maybe that's optimistic, or just my experience bleeding into how i would act. but i think for those few hours, it'd be a freaking blast. of course, i don't want the world to end...i just think some of those consequences would be really fantastic.

people...because they intrigue me

2010-06-17T23:13:00.003-04:00

cough-syrup church

2010-06-14T23:06:00.005-04:00

call me cynical but i'm so darn tired of church-on-cough-syrup. you know the kind?

that service where everyone walks in wide awake and excited to be in church, like everything is alive and vital and the people you're shaking hands with and reuniting with after a week of work are actually, legitimately your brothers and sisters in Christ, the people you get to spend eternity with.

then you walk into the auditorium and it's sort of dark. the lights are low and there's some kind of music playing and it's like you've suddenly swallowed ten mouthfuls of cough syrup. everything starts to go numb.

there's no music playing yet, or there is but it's like elevator music only worse - you vaguely recognize it as ccm or some sinless singer like norah jones or josh rouse. lights are still dim but suddenly twinkling images are popping up on the screen...these are like screen savers from the nineties, only they're in HD so instead of looking like neon swirls they're looking like neon smoke. these will inevitably ensure no epileptic people ever come to church.

the worship starts but there are trippy, over-saturated, over-exposed photos of serene landscapes and people raising their arms for no reason in awkward situations on the screens, and you can't really make out what the words are. they're definitely in a bold typeface like helvetica or arial, but it just doesn't attract as much attention, and anyway there are so many potted plants or corrugated pieces of metal or long flowing ribbons or sheets up on stage that the decoration alone takes you half an hour to sort through and categorize before you can attend to anything else. and of course everything is bathed in some colorful light show that broadway couldn't have produced twenty years ago.

you know the sermon. the pastor will get up and probably tell you a funny story, but you won't remember it. they'll tell you what text they're going to use, but will end up just quoting john ortberg or francis chan or (of course) cs lewis. they'll say something 'relevant' which either makes no sense, no practical difference, or is such a commonly accepted idea that you wonder if your pastor is secretly a five year old. then they'll reference a song you think may or may not have been sung fifteen minutes ago - you're not sure though, you were reading the bulletin that must have taken at least three graphic designers and probably half of the preceeding week's offering to put out. you wonder absentmindedly why they would put so many dreamy photos on a sheet of cardstock when all you really want to know is when the next potluck is. you can't finish the thought though, because the chairs are so comfy. it's taking all you have not to just drift. you cross one leg and then the other and then the other just to do something while somebody on stage gives overly peppy announcements about things that are happening so far into the future you find yourself not caring at all, except that they keep playing the video about it every service, the one with the four or five stellar quotes that make you wonder why your own pastor doesn't get so passionate (this is why you will attend the conference, at which you will wonder where all the fiery speakers went).

the service will end, you'll walk out, and suddenly, in the light of the mid-sunday afternoon, you'll wake up. the entire week is in front of you, and although you can't remember what happened just ten minutes ago, you're ready for lunch out.

...

1. warehouse churches need to find ways to let natural light into a room. when have neon lights and 40watt overhead tubes ever cut it?

2. pastors will only succeed at being relevant if they stop trying to find stupid stories or semi-famous christians to make their points for them. christ isn't best preached through other people's books. he has a pretty famous word already. you know this, so stop quoting john freaking ortberg at me. if you quote more literature than scripture, you've failed. period.

3. if your church uses neon lights that make normal things look like an acid-trip, you're probably only appealing to the small segment of people who like acid trips.

4. if your church is alive and viral outside the sanctuary, and sleeping inside, the problem is not them, it's you.

5. screw your bulletin. show me a church that spends less money on coffee and paper products, and more on the community in which they've invested. the money you save on your brochure for a year could stop a mother from aborting her child. could tutor a young girl who doesn't know how to read. could buy hot chocolate for the people protesting gang violence outside of the courthouse on a rainy day.

6. those over-exposed photos and videos you keep showing us? they suck. and nobody looks/acts/talks like that in real life. girls in lime green sunglasses at the beach don't equal worship background slides. nor do mountaintops or time-lapse cars on roads. what about a plain background and some work put into legitimate worship? and while you're at it, stop your absurd 'mmmmmm god, we just...mmmmmm, just dwell in this moment' crap in the middle of everything. no one believes you, you big faker.

was that too harsh?

i wish i had thought of this...

2010-06-13T23:23:00.003-04:00

it's so true. i do it all the time...my current project: attempting to get better at the photo part of things. and vintage effects are lame. i like over saturation and pictures-on-acid sort of looks.

madeleine l'engle, on us

2010-06-10T23:17:00.006-04:00

so close that your eyes close with my dreams

2010-06-03T16:54:00.002-04:00

my magical accessway to the beach

2010-06-02T22:44:00.001-04:00

ebooks

2010-06-01T22:44:00.004-04:00

'but i didn't grow up reading texts. i grew up reading books.'

that's verlyn klinkenborg, on staff with the new york times, writing about her experiences with e-books. anybody even remotely interested in writing could probably benefit from a look at the piece. it's the most insightful i've read yet, (simple, but well constructed arguments).

she says, in brief, that e-books are ugly, often outdated (think about the best translation of homer you've read - is that the one published? or is it the other, more frustrating one?) and poorly edited. i briefly rented a copy of stephanie meyer's twilight, and compared it to my paperback copy. the ebook averaged about a typo per chapter. i couldn't even find one in the paperback.

hundreds of years of typography, press, and cover design - even studies on paper itself, went into making your beautiful book what it is. can you even name someone truly interested in ebook design? it will be a shame when your children read bibles that look like your term paper. a shame, because, when i was a kid, i had a fantastic picture bible, with paintings and big, childlike serif print, in all kinds of colors.

on a side note - overdrive is in the business of selling libraries copies of ebooks to lend out. i've read a few books this way. they can't be read on an ipad yet. probably in part because apple doesn't want us renting books that we'd otherwise buy from them. what a shame.

hydration is crucial

2010-05-31T22:04:00.003-04:00

i drank seven capri suns today...

graduation, take 2 (in words this time)

2010-05-30T22:29:00.002-04:00

there are a lot of things you give up between college and graduation. it's sort of a slow process, but it certainly happens. everyone is different - some more drastic, some less so. i can only speak to my own experiences.

it begins with small things. you give up homecooked meals...no big deal. weeks pass, and you realize you've given up laundry service. you've given up regular tennis matches with your dad, and being woken up by your mom shaking your shoulder. you begin to buy things for yourself. toothpaste, lightbulbs, gum - the small things first, then the medium things like meals out with your friends instead of your family, separate checks please, and oil changes and plane tickets and hotel rooms when suddenly you're traveling alone.

you give up saturday morning pancakes and non-essential holidays. watching every new vampire movie out. some of these you can get back occasionally. some you can't...like snuggling with your parents while chomping ice with your mouth open. staying home from school sick and watching cartoons from the couch. being driven to school by a sister who was never a morning person.

somewhere along the way and certainly by the end, you've given up big things. you've given up things like feeling at home. where is home? is it where you grew up? where you became an adult? where you live now? if it's where your heart is, then chances are home is in an orphanage in central america, but that's not really true either. home was given up sometime ago, completely unwittingly, completely unnoticed. big things like knowing when you went to sleep that you were safe and healthy because two parents and two sisters just doors outside your room would never let anything happen to you. big things like spending night after night eating dinner together; day after day riding in the car together.

what's so beautiful, is that for everything I can look back on that i've given up, i can also look at myself now and see what i've gained.

there are the small things, like cooking skills, and a current residence with a washer and dryer. walks to the beach or long car rides now include phone calls to your parents, just to check in and see how life is. some things, you will never buy for yourself, like contact solution...you have three or four bottles stockpiled, and will keep stealing more bottles from your parents until they finally cut you off. but you can buy your dad a movie ticket now, because you're actually making money. you can stay up drinking vodka cranberry's until 1am with your parents in a bar.

medium things come a little bit harder, but they do come, catching you completely surprised, completely delighted. you can take your parents on a vacation now - coordinating the details and changing their lives, like they did yours in far-off places. you can gchat your sisters while all of you are working, and joke about how happy or unhappy, or productive or unproductive your day is. joke about how you're saving the world. cataloging languages. healing communities, caring for orphans, teaching people how to talk to one another. you can drive for hours just for a night with your family. fly for days just for a holiday or a vacation.

the big things will come again too, in time. we're certain of that. finding a home and filling it with other people you love. and then visiting each other's homes, and slowly starting to feel like you have a network of these beautiful places of family. it's coming. restless at night unless you're near the children you've grown to care so hard and so deep for - so that they can feel like you did all those years. hugs and greetings that contain so much love and cover so many missed weeks of connection that they could burst. holidays ripping out of their molds when your family is together. oh yes, big things are gained too.

and some things are never lost. never given up or gained back. some things just are. the people who love you, for example. the mom and the dad and the sisters and the brother. the friends and the family friends and some very special people. most, never lost. there isn't much, in the end, that doesn't change a whole lot through the years, but a few very big things, like that love, sure don't change. and having that certainty, in the midst of so much giving up and gaining back, is a particularly magnificent comfort.

excerpting, as usual...the beginning of part two

2010-05-29T23:22:00.005-04:00

...draft.

Rain fell heavily. The days were chill and full of lazy unhappiness. The downpours never seemed to stop and the sun never seemed to break through the clouds and the rainwater ran down the streets turning everything unbearably to mud. Trash and oil congealed on the surface of ponds; scum seeped through cracks in the walls; everything intolerable.

Ana’s hair had turned yellow and brittle and dead. Yellow hair, Joce knew, was the most visible sign of malnutrition. Despite everything they made her eat, Ana was getting worse.

Micah was still being homeschooled infrequently, at best. His parents had decided months ago that this year was so much of an adjustment that it was as good as school itself. They saw little need to try and suck him into a classroom. Besides, they were busy with the orphanage. Life hadn’t settled down.

Joce and Micah were rarely dry at the same time. Either Micah would walk to Joce’s house and arrive soaked through, or Joce would walk to the orphanage and drip all over the floors. Coats didn’t matter; the water seeped up your legs and through your clothes from the bottom up. Aunt Reyna and the Pratts simply got used to seeing one of the two of them sopping wet.

Chu came by every so often to hang out—Ana would sit on his shoulders and demand rides through the community. She would carry a patch of trash bag and hold it above like an umbrella, somehow coming away from these runs completely dry.

Maria never visited. She stayed closer to her mother than Joce had ever seen. It might have been a good thing, if Joce didn’t know how desperate a situation Maria was in. Francela was turning six in a few weeks and eating more than ever. It would be two or three years before she could fend for herself, and Maria was mature enough to work now. In a matter of weeks, Joce knew she would lose her best friend forever.

So the first days and nights of the rainy season had come. Sunlight hadn’t had a chance for weeks and a dullness festered in the community. Shadows edged outward at corners and recesses of the community. It was the pallor season and everything was darkening.

Volcanoes in Guatemala, Ecuador

2010-05-29T10:49:00.002-04:00

You might be thinking, another volcano? Seriously?

...actually, another two volcanoes; close together. check out the bbc news story.

just an observation on current tween culture

2010-05-28T22:50:00.001-04:00

stop flooding my inbox with social networking emails

2010-05-27T11:29:00.002-04:00

graduation

2010-05-25T23:01:00.003-04:00

twilight - good, with one caveat

2010-05-24T22:26:00.004-04:00

alright alright. i've read all the twilight books. i've taken a week to digest. here's the thing - they're just not as bad as everyone makes them out to be. sure they're terrible writing, when you hold it up to pride and prejudice (or, as the main character often references, wuthering heights) but let's face it, we all knew that. stop moaning already. it's engaging, it's absorbing, it's a bloody happy ending. be real with yourselves: if you read it, and liked it, just say so. i did. if you didn't read it, don't judge.

BUT i say that with one major caveat: what's up with all you people who go on and on about the 'morals' of the book, and talk about how good of a mormon stephanie meyer is? i mean, she probably is a mormon, but i can think of WAY less racy characters than hers.

let's look at the facts (spoiler alert - if you haven't read all these books, and want to, skip the list):

1. bella, from book one, has been completely absorbed by edward. obsessive is absolutely the correct word.

2. from book one, the two love birds have slept in the same bed together, many, many nights. just because they aren't having sex doesn't mean real parents wouldn't cringe if their high school children were in the same situation for years.

3. they make out. a lot.

4. let's go ahead and say it - they have sex ALOT in book four. like, chapters are devoted to it.

compare that to say, harry potter. harry gets maybe two smooches until book six, when, gasp, he has two or three good ones. no sex, ever. no sleeping together. he never even WALKED INTO a girl's dorm. in fact, he was prevented from doing so. but no one goes 'wow what a great person rowling is, eh? did you hear she's a blah blah blah blah blah'

so, hey, stop telling me what a good mormon stephanie meyer is. i don't care. it's completely irrelevant to the plot, and frankly, i don't buy the whole 'this book is full of good choices' thing. it's not.

but it's still really good.

my thoughts on virginia beach roads and drivers

2010-05-24T09:22:00.006-04:00

dear bad drivers, harbor tunnel, and the state of virginia,

i would say i'm furious beyond words, but in fact, i have quite a few words. first you, harbor tunnel. what the heck? every time i drive through you, my trip is stalled for at least half an hour. sometimes in the middle of the night. in fact, for the past two trips, it has been later than 1030pm on a weekend, and you are ridiculously backed up. so backed up that i can put my car in park and cook some eggo waffles in my trunk before we've inched forward one bit. and it's not always for the same reason. i think, really, harbor tunnel, it's because you're a gigantic antiquated piece-of-junk tunnel.

and you, virginia. do you think it's really necessary to be in the three-month long process of replacing light fixtures in the tunnel, on weekends, in the middle of the night? every time i pass by the two-to-five workers you've allocated for the miles and miles of lights, i want to shout obscenities out my window. but it isn't their fault, it's yours. your idea to draw out the process for months by allocating less-than-enough workers to do it quickly. your idea that we'd rather sit in stand-still traffic with the hope of one day having a brightly lit tunnel, instead of just, gasp, USING OUR EFFING HEADLIGHTS!! i don't care if the tunnel is literally spewing out water like the gulf oil well, JUST GET ME THROUGH IT IN LESS THAN AN HOUR!$()#$@(*$%%%

but the real people who make me want to scream are you - you obnoxious, arrogant, pin-headed little punk drivers. did you see the signs for the past TEN MILES SAYING IN BIG BLINKING LETTERS THAT THE RIGHT LANE IS CLOSED?!!?!? Not 'will be closed' not, 'is closed to most people' it literally is illegal to drive where you are driving. Do you think I like waiting in the left lane? do you think we like watching you zoom up the right hand lane, through all those read lights overhead, just because you won't get caught doing it? DO YOU EVEN REALIZE THAT THE ENTIRE BACKUP IS CAUSED BY US HAVING TO SLAM ON OUR BRAKES WHEN YOU JET INTO OUR LANE WITH HALF A FOOT TO SPARE BEFORE THE CONES START?!!??! I hate that you illegally speed by two miles of cars and insert yourself in at the front of the line under the threat of ramming us with your car. LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING, it makes me want to put my car in park, pull off my shoe, and beat you over the head with it. it makes me want to use zig-zag children's scissors on your license. it makes me want to pry off your hubcaps, throw them into the ocean, and cackle as they float away, born on the tide of 2miles worth of trafficky hatred and rage.

all the best,

cole

YA Books - The Red Pyramid, Rick Riordan

2010-05-20T10:35:00.004-04:00

i'm just beginning to read rick riordan's 'The Red Pyramid' in my ongoing quest to read every single one of the library's young adult section of the past five years...

my initial thought is that if you've read any of my novel, you should read this book to benchmark what i'm going for in my narrators (the good and the bad - ie, i don't think rick does it quite as well as he should).

rick uses two points of view, a brother and a sister, to tell the story. each takes a few alternating chapters of the overall 'story' and speaks it first-person, as if talking into a recorder (in fact, rick sets it up this way in a messy but effective short prologue).

what rick does well is the interaction between his two narrators. both inter-story and extra-story, it works. the narrators are family, and their loving-but-sniping comments are effective. what he misses is differentiating the two characters (so far). they just tell the same story. what i love about my novel is that it's really two full stories coming together for a more full picture of what's going on. rick tends to stick to ONE story, told from two very similar people.

he also decides on first-person as his mode of writing, where i'm writing in a limited third and a very limited first. now, percy jackson (same author) is also written in first-person, so it makes sense that potentially, this is just all he can write in. similarly, because his story doesn't much deviate between characters, it makes sense that he'd like their personalities to really shine through and tint things (the difference, I think, is that he's shooting one photo twice, with different filters over the lens...I'm trying to shoot a panoramic shot that brings in twice as much as his story does). so in that sense, we're just different. i think, though, that if you're going to narrate through different characters, things would be more interesting if, along with their personalities (which he doesn't differentiate) you also differentiate your own writing style. come on rick, stretch yourself.

HOWEVER all that criticism aside, it's a fast-paced (his hallmark) engaging read, and actually seems to be a little more creative of a take on the plot than his first go (percy jackson). it's exactly (seriously, exactly) the same plot as the percy jackson series, but instead of greek gods, you've got egyptian gods. i'd be shocked if he hasn't read neil gaiman's 'American Gods' as this seems to be what rick's going for with these characters (he's targeting a younger audience than neil). rick, if you haven't read that book, you should. so I do think there's something to be said for the piece as a mature follow-up to his movie-made series of percy jackson novels. it's a formula that seems to work for him, and i do enjoy the reads, so I can't fault him much. well done rick, on probably another hit series.

if, however, you're looking for a completely different take on archetypal myths (anything involving gods, social legends, etc.) there is much better out there. sam llewellyn, for example, puts out a great YA series (two books out right now) on the king arthur legends - really going into the backdrop of things (in our continuing quest to fall back on the 'prequel' mode of writing, or the 'back-story' form of storytelling).

on the YA note - I recently finished reading through Cornelia Funke's slew of Young Adult literature...I found myself disappointed. I couldn't slog my way through the InkHeart series, and was similarly exasperated with both 'The Thief Lord' and 'The Dragon Rider' (the latter being particularly a let-down). On the flip side, I'm stoked for Suzanne Collins' concluding Hunger Games novel, and just starting to read the Charlie Bone's series (which is, perhaps, a bit old, but along with Funke, a part of the current canon of YA lit).

you're going to think less of me for this...

2010-05-17T22:23:00.002-04:00

i haven't posted recently, and i haven't yet watched the survivor finale, because i am too busy reading the final book in the twilight series.

remember when we loved discovering natural things?

2010-05-13T23:53:00.002-04:00

insatiable curiosity

2010-05-11T22:34:00.001-04:00

outliers/mondial creative labs

2010-05-10T15:08:00.002-04:00

...if you're into zombie or apocalypse flicks, you'll absolutely want to spend 9 minutes on this video.

outliers is by far the best video I've seen yet in the contest, but check out the whole thing: the 48hr film project

threshold fiction

2010-05-09T22:23:00.005-04:00

let me define what i think this encompasses...

threshold fiction: when the paramount material of your novel revolves around a newly accepted or newly common subject.

i've been reading a lot of this sort of fiction recently. example: at some point about five to eight years ago, a few interesting components of science had reached a threshold. genetics and nanophysics had suddenly become commonly understood subjects. michael crichton was free to write about nano particles destroying folks. lee child and james rollins began to have a field day with genetic manipulation.

this sort of fiction - i think - is distinct from pop-fiction. pop-fiction right now is vampires, or secret societies (stephanie meyer & dan brown being the leaders in this class).

the difference is in the social mechanisms which occasion these bursts of novels. on the one hand, thresholds are found outside of literary culture. a fantastic example of threshold fiction is the past decade's slew of anti-church-but-i-love-the-'Church' literature...you know the type; the ones who love Jesus, but have beef with establishment Christianity...the authors that small Christian publishers love to pick up as new poster children (they wear thick glasses, tight jeans, or collared shirts with random embroidered dragon crap all over them). the point is, threshold fiction like that was occasioned because society had become recently accustomed to criticizing the Christian tradition.

pop-fiction on the other hand, is distinct because it is based in literary phenomena. fantasy is, right now, pop-fiction, thanks to Harry Potter. vampires are absolutely pop-fiction...stephanie meyer didn't sit down and say 'hey people are talking a lot about vampires, i should write about that!'

the interesting thing, in my mind, is that pop-fiction is unpredictable. a book simply becomes a phenomenon, and paves the way for five years of copy-cats. threshold fiction, on the other hand, has about an eight-month window. when some new discovery is made and becomes commonly understood - eight months later, you'll see a host of books plotted around the science. it's the same in every arena of society: the books will follow the thresholds of what has newly become common. your job as a writer, if you want to live on the threshold edge, is to make sure you're published before the thousand competitors are.

you see in pop-fiction, the novel was either your idea or you're a second-tier copy-cat. in threshold fiction, it doesn't matter if it isn't your idea, as long as you get there first.

(of course, the third option, by far the most difficult, is to be the phenomenon that creates a new category of pop-fiction)

on genres and reality

2010-05-07T22:26:00.001-04:00

I’ve been writing myself into a lot of impossible situations recently. I think perhaps this is why I so loved fantasy, and why I don’t want to escape into it right now: realistic fiction is just that.

It’s real.

And as I’ve written honestly about kids in poverty, I’ve begun to see my work more and more fitting into a genre that I never thought I would. Can you guess what it is?

You see, one of the problems I’m running into is that my characters are incapable of fighting back. There is plenty of evil. But there is nothing to fight against.

They merely survive. They endure.

There’s no food to eat? That’s not a battle; that’s enduring hardship. There’s no clean water? That’s just going thirsty.

And you see them slowly begin to sink into it, don’t you? At least, in real life you do, and I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be so in fiction. I can’t bring myself to lift my little 12 year-old out of prostitution, because that’s just what she’d do if it were real.

She’d be so steeped in it, that she’d become the very thing that in the beginning was so outrageous.

Have you guessed the genre yet? I’ll give you the hallmarks:

The characters endure. Slowly, they drop.
The characters rage against their situation. Slowly, they give in.
There are no heros.
There are no battles. (Or, everything is a battle.)
The ending rarely resolves the conflict.

You there?

It’s so curious, isn’t it, that one of the least popular genres in America is what the vast majority of our world’s children live in? Horror, that is.

sometimes

2010-05-06T23:55:00.003-04:00