Critic Critique

I decided yesterday that if I were given the choice, I would much rather be a film critic than a book critic.  Even though I like reading books more than watching movies, I wouldn't want to ruin my love for books by making them my career.  If I were to read books all day long, I would have to do that alone.  Whereas I could watch movies with friends or my wife someday and be working at the same time.  And I've never been able to read a book in two hours, except for If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Also, I think book critics are uber-scholars with a thick repertoire of literary references used only in an attempt to impress their colleagues.  So there.

Even so, I would like to make an attempt at impressing anyone who reads this dilapidated blog by talking about several books I've been reading lately.

I finished The Red Pony.  A short and simple book by John Steinbeck.  I won't say much about this book except that I believe it might have changed my life.  Why say something in 400 pages that you can say in 90?  Never before has a book made me feel the way this book did.  Have you ever wanted to cry for all that has been lost and all that is yet to be found?

I'm currently reading A Confederacy of Dunces.  And I need to do my laundry, so I'll talk more about this book when I finish reading it.

Signing Up For Eternity

I just added 59 movies to my netflix queue.  Every academy awards best picture winner.  I've only seen 19 so far.

When I was looking for a bookmark to use for a book I was starting today, I came across one that I had picked up at powell's this summer.  It's a list of all the pulitzer prize winners in the fiction category since the award was first given in 1918.  I decided that I'm going to read all of them.  I've only read 4 so far.

Of course, after I finish these two lengthy lists, there are many other lists.  There are the golden globe winners, the sundance winners, AFI's 100 best movies, the Criterion collection, etc.  There are the National Book Award winners, the New York Times bestsellers, Oprah's book club selections, and on and on.  And apart from these notable lists, there are personal goals I would like to accomplish in the form of lists, such as reading every Steinbeck, or Vonnegut, or Hemingway, or watching every Hitchcock, or Allen, or Altman.

And right now, even though I am excited to get started, it worries me that I might not ever finish.  That I don't have enough time!  Even deeper than that, I'm getting worried that I won't enjoy the lists eventually, that my strict adherence to the lists will decrease the amount of spontaneity and increase the predictability in my life.  Whether or not these concerns are superficial, they are closely related to the amount of uncertainty in my life (if I have enough time to accomplish lists that really matter, i.e., things I need to do to start a career, places I would like to visit and/or live, or in other words contained in this one list; what to do before I die).

I would much rather worry about movies and books.

Either way though, it reminds me of a line from a Five Iron Frenzy song:

"It's a little disconcerting, signing up for eternity."

Saying Goodbye To Friends

No, I'm not leaving Oregon yet.  Not until next week.  But I did have to say goodbye to some very dear friends tonight.

Twitch, Katee, Courtney and Joshua, you will be missed.

In case you don't already know, these were the final four dancers for the show So You Think You Can Dance.  The finale was earlier tonight and Joshua took home the title, which was well deserved.

The first episode of this show came on around the time I came home to Oregon City from Idaho.  I knew that this was my last summer at home, even though I didn't know what I would be doing when it ended.  I had no idea what to expect from the few months after college.  I thought I would hate these last three months.  I didn't want to be living in the same house and working at the same job I was before I ever went to college.  There were many times when I felt like I hadn't accomplished anything.  But this summer was different, better than that.

So the summer started off with this show, So You Think You Can Dance.  I wasn't sold on it from the beginning.  No matter what though, I would sit down with my mom every Wednesday night for another episode.  And eventually I was hooked.  Some of the dancing was amazing, but I loved the show for the personalities of the dancers.  One of the dancers, Twitch, was fun to watch perform, but off the stage he was always smiling and encouraging people.  He was the first person to support someone who moved on to the next level or got eliminated.  Everytime. He was there with a hug and a smile.

And in a way, like I so often do, I connected with the people on the show.  They became my friends.  I do this with books all the time.  For the last month of school this year I was slowly making my way through Sometimes A Great Notion, a novel by Ken Kesey.  I finally finished it almost two months after I started.  Now, when I think back to graduation, the moments leading up to it and the weeks after, I think of Hank, Leland, and Joe Ben cutting logs on a hill near the Oregon Coast.  I feel like I was there!  When I had read the last sentence of the book, it took me nearly ten minutes to close the book and put it down.  I didn't want to leave behind the friends that had carried me through Graduation.

And here I find myself, saying goodbye to another group of friends.  I meet them, I grow close to them, and we leave each other.  The friendships I make in books, on TV, in movies, they hardly mean anything to me.  It's when I have to say goodbye to the real friends that I struggle.  And the worst part is, I'm used to it.  Summer after summer, I left Nampa.  I said goodbye and went home.  Never before has it been difficult leaving Oregon to go back to Idaho though.

This summer was better than I could have ever expected it to be.  This was the beginning of life after college!  And I'm leaving it for another beginning.  You don't have to tell me, I already understand that every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.  I just hate all of this goodbye stuff.

And so, in the spirit of life, friendship, and beginnings

I will never read the last sentence,

I will never watch a finale,

I will fall asleep in the last ten minutes,

I will do what I can to make sure that you and I don't have to begin again

Because I never want these friendships to end.

Three Top Tens

Top 10 Christian Recording Artist Rock Albums

10. Blindside - Silence

9. MxPx - Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo

8. Further Seems Forever - The Moon Is Down

7. Switchfoot - New Way To Be Human

6. Audio Adrenaline - Some Kind of Zombie

5. Plankeye - Commonwealth

4. Mae - Destination: Beautiful

3. The Juliana Theory - Emotion Is Dead

2. Jars of Clay - Much Afraid

1. DC Talk - Jesus Freak

Top 10 Local Portland Metropolitan Area Dining Spots

10. Hong Kong 97 (Gladstone)

9. La Provence (Lake Oswego)

8. DaVinci's Ristorante Italiano (Milwaukie)

7. Buster's BBQ (Gladstone)

6. Lil' Cooperstown (West Linn)

5. Hotcakes (Portland)

4. Pizza Schmizza (Portland)

3. Super Torta (Oregon City)

2. Laurelwood (Portland)

1. Montage (Portland)

Top 10 Books I've Read In The Last Year

10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling

9. High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

8. What Is The What - Dave Eggers

7. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut

6. A Man Without A Country - Kurt Vonnegut

5. Rant - Chuck Palahniuk

4. You Shall Know Our Velocity - Dave Eggers

3. Sometimes A Great Notion - Ken Kesey

2. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

1. The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Popcorn Post

-I'm listening to "If Only" by Nouveaux, a contemporary Christian band from the 90s, and thinking to myself about how it's lyrics and four part harmony would be perfect for Covenant to play.  I decide to e-mail it to Marc.

-Katie Wilson calls me while I'm listening to "If Only" by Nouveaux and thinking about Marc and Covenant to see if I can play with her at the Flying M Thursday (which I don't think I can because of work) and she is with Marc.

-I woke up at 5am this morning to work on a homework assignment I'd been putting off.  I set the timer on my coffee maker to go off at five so that I would get up and not be wasteful.  I worked until 12:30pm.  I drank two large mugs of strong coffee, a glass of water, two glasses of cranberry juice, and ate two pieces of toast, a biscotti, and a pack of peanut butter crackers.

-I spent about 9 hours doing that assignment today.  If I hadn't, I wouldn't have graduated.  It was alright though.  I always work better when I wake up early and give the work a new day, rather than staying up late with all that happened during the day.

-I think this is how I'll write someday when it's all I do.  I'll wake up early, let nothing else worry me but the sun rising, the coffee brewing, the jazz jazzin' (I listened to jazz for 6 hours today), and the stories will write themselves.  I'm sure of it.

-I've been telling people lately that I don't let homework get me down.  I haven't been turning it in on a regular basis, but it's been hitting me hard.  When I have late assignments piling up, it drains me.  Every day that goes by takes a little something away from me.  When I do anything other than that assignment with my free time, I can't enjoy it as much as before.  When I sit down to read, I feel guilty.  Food doesn't taste as good.  This could be why I've had a rough semester; I haven't been able to enjoy the things I love.  Homework has been getting me down!

-I'm about halfway through Sometimes A Great Notion.  It's a good book, and I've been reading on a regular basis, almost daily, but it's long.  And not only that, it's more difficult to get through then maybe a... John Grisham book.

-Less than three weeks until graduation.  My family is coming up, it should be fun.  But the point is, that's soon.

-Assignments I have to do in the next three weeks:  write five short stories (good ones too, because I hold myself to unrealistic standards), write two more major papers, and give ten minute presentation.  No biggie.  Just as long as I don't wait and do it late.

-P.S. I made another casserole and it was delicious.  I'm the only one that's eaten any besides Phil, and he only ate it because he was hungry.  He doesn't even like the taste of it.

-Oh and also, here are a few more words for you: uncertainty, graduation, sleep, work, write, eat, laugh, plan, live, apply, deploy, imply, decoy, dirty dishes, messy room, loads of laundry, lava lamp, memories, bible, bird, coffee, music, summer, hockey, and finally, vanilla.

-What I'm lookin' like these days, considering the circumstances:

This Is For Chad

I just finished reading Slaughterhouse 5 last week. I liked it a lot. I have another book by Vonnegut that serves as his memoirs, kind of. It's called A Man Without a Country. Anyways, one thing I've appreciated about him is his respect for the Bible, more so than any other classic American author I have read. Here's a passage from that book.

"How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, "If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?"

But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being."

What Else Is There To Do?

Life is coming around to slap me on the back of the head in two months, and I'm not ready for it.  This is an obvious reaction to the end of college, I know, but who really is ready?  I'm ready to be done with school, to end this section of my life, but I don't know how to start the next.

I imagine walking down the street next week and running into someone who will offer me the perfect job, but I'm sure that when next week rolls around, I'll be in the same situation right now.

By the way, the perfect job, in case you didn't already figure it out, would be to get paid to read books for a ridiculously rich person that doesn't have the time to read.  You would read the classics, maybe some new novels, eventually make your way through all of Shakespeare.  Obviously, rich people are extremely busy being rich, but they must stay on top of the intellectual circle.  Therefore, I would be their surrogate eyes, and simply fill them in on all the important details at an established time once a week.  Perfect.  Conversations with friends would go something like this:

"Have you read any good books lately?"  I ask, sincerely.

"No," he/she replies, "I haven't the time to read for pleasure/leisure anymore."

"Oh, how horrible," I say, truly sympathizing with them.  And then I would add, for good measure, "Would you like me to read for you?"

Obviously, my perfect job scenario extends far into the fantastical depths of my mind.  I've just  always had a desire to continue learning even after I may become a "teacher"; I don't want to become stagnant or cynical as I grow older.  It seems to me that reading books may be one of the few remaining remedies for this.