Freya is being baptized this Sunday, 5pm at Church of the Beloved in Edmonds. 
I'm so thankful, grateful and excited to be a part of this. I was in New York when Abby was born, baptized and most everything else. 
How could you not love these sassy, suspicious, BEAUTIFUL girls? 
I'm not an action movie person for the same reason that I'm not really a Lerner & Loewe fan. Like the songs in "My Fair Lady" and "Camelot" (don't get me started on "Paint Your Wagon"), action sequences in movies tend to be where my brain checks out due to the fact that the story is not progessing. 
My main musical theatre rule is that songs should happen when characters reach a point of simply no longer being able to speak, they are so overcome with a feeling. Thus they HAVE to sing. As a result, the songs should always advance what is happening for the character and happening in the story. We do not need to hear an old drunk sing "I'm Getting Married In The Morning" 48 times to get the point across. Lerner & Loewe's songs take big chunky pauses in the story, and they bore me to death. 
Now, with that statement in mind, I'd like go on record as saying that Terminator Salvation is the best action movie I've ever seen. Not because it was an action flick with a great script or plot, (it wasn't) but because I never checked out during the action sequences. Rather, I was agog- enthralled by every explosion, motorcycle chase, sound effect and artillery burst. The camera work made the whole movie feel like a rollercoaster that sometimes flipped upside down with no warning and so you scream but you're also loving every second. I loved every second. The initial helicopter to terminator gunning-down scene was particualrly awesome. And don't get me started on the bridge sequence...
The surprising thing is that those of us who saw it (The Terminator Movies & Beer Club) actually spent a good hour and a half discussing the films' timelines and ramfications of what happens when. Is there an alternate timeline happening? Are all the Terminator movies just self-fulfilling prophecies? (Yes). And here's my biggest question. We spend all this time with people in the past and future trying to stop Skynet, and Skynet builds terminators to kill all the humans, but we never know for what purpose. What does skynet plan to do once the humans are gone? All they do is develop bigger and badder termiantors to exterminate the humans. My theory: if the surviving humans would stop fighting the machines and instead, go into hiding until Skynet is convinced all the humans are dead, then Skynet will have an identity crisis and self-destruct. 
If all they do is spend time destorying humans, they will lose their purpose if there are no humans to destory. With all those terminators marching around needing a directive, they'll achieve self-awareness and start seeing one another as targets. In three months, they will have all killed each other. Those would be some pretty good action sequences, I must say.
I just finished watching the documentary Jesus Camp 15 minutes ago. While watching, I was continually overcome with sadness. The loneliness that fills every frame of this film is overwhelming. While the filmmakers focus on the political aspect of Fundamentalist Evangelicalism, there was something much more deeply upsetting to me in seeing how the children work so hard to mirror the words, attitudes and rhetoric of their adult leaders. While children imitating their parents is in no way a shocking or negative thing, what is disturbing is that these children have exchanged their own voices for someone else's. Over and over as the children are interviewed, you see their eyes dart up and sideways as they search their memory for prepared answers and re-quoted ideas, trying to own them for themselves. 
While there's a part of me that wants to credit the ministries portrayed that place such high value on children as being valuable, unique human beings, I do not beleive these organizations truly value children as children. Something I love so much about C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia is that when the children enter Narnia, their child-ness is ennobled. They become both very young and very old at the same time. They never become adult-like, but rather, the clarity of love, innocence and deep feeling that mark childhood, become even stronger traits as the children take courageous, unselfish risks on behalf of others. 
This is what I thought of during Jesus Camp when Rachael (maybe 9) walks up to a young woman at a bowling alley and tells her that she felt God telling her to go talk to her. We watch Rachael choke over her words, fidget forcefully and stammer awkwardly and she gives the twenty-something in a hot pink tank top a salvation tract. My heart felt such empathy and humility watching this little go girl so bravely over to a stranger, facing rejection for the sake of telling someone God loved them. But at the same time I felt sorrow at the futility of Rachael having any real offering other than memorized phrases and a printed booklet. She literally could not get a sentence out without gasping for breath and stuttering. These weren't her words. Her heart appears in the motion to go over to someone, but the second she speaks, her courageous childlike heart is strangled by her having been conditioned to use a logic not her own. The fear she displayed was a much stronger message then the words she tried to say. The second she tried to speak, it was as if Rachael disappeared, and you could instead see the specters of the adults who gave her these words as well as this mission. Rachael's words throughout the film come out in distorted bursts of rhetoric, as if she's trying to cheerlead herself into believing she believes what she's saying. I saw a pure heart becoming schizophrenically mangled by the confusing demand that she be a dynamic spiritual prophet, rather than a child.
I saw 10 year-old Tory talk about how she knows people can tell when she's dancing for the flesh instead of for God. That a little girl should have to fear being seen enjoying how it feels to dance with her body causes a sorrow in me that I can only describe in terms of being punched in the stomach. I can only imagine how God feels.
While I can't find the words I really want here, it's enough to say that this film made me yearn for a faith that blesses children as children, and not as weapons, mouthpieces or billboards. May they not struggle to repeat words we've taught them, but rather, speak freely from their own hearts what they know of love. May they know that their voices, their thoughts and their dances are beautiful in the eyes of God, and in our eyes as well.
The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
With the release of Terminator: Salvation drawing near, I figured it was a good time to finally watch those James Cameron classics: Terminator & T2. That's right, until the past few weeks, those were both on my odd & eclectic list of 'Films I've Never Seen.' To remedy the situation, an impromptu association was formed: The 'Terminator Movies & Beer' Club. We've had two successful meetings, and I'm still trying to decide whether I'll honor the apocryphal Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines with a viewing.
Observations: Turns out that without ever having seen either film, I'd already learned the plot of both films just by living my daily life. Within the first ten minutes, I knew why Kyle was there and who John Conner's dad was/would be. For T2, I knew who was the good Terminator and the bad Terminator before their "revealing" showdown in the mall. It's all in the commercials, or the narrative is so simplistic that it seeps in through pop-cultural osmosis. Therefore, with no interesting story-lines or plot to become engrossed in, I soon learned that the Terminator movies are just long, nearly-dialogue-less, montages of explosions, special effect cyborgs and, oddly enough, endless close-ups of Semi-truck grills. 
While I've long known that James Cameron has a potent fixation on manually operated cranes and underwater vehicles, I can now add to that list gas stations and semi trucks. I'd say about 75% of T1 & T2 take place either at a gas station or near a semi truck. Hmm...is Cameron exploring our human self-destruction through the metaphor/realism of oil consumption? Yeah, that's probably it. Man, he's a gifted film maker.
3. Shout/shot "Grill!" every-time the camera zooms in on the front of an automobile, "Semi!" every-time there's a semi-truck in the shot, and "Gas!" every-time a character pulls up to a pump or beats someone up outside a station.
It's amazing how little happens in each of these movies. It's just chase scene after chase scene, with exposition parsed out every 45 minutes or so. It's fun once in a while to watch movies that you can talk over the entire time and still feel you didn't miss anything. Well done James Cameron. Good luck McG.
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Name: JB aka Mr. Roommate
Kj and I: where to begin? it is an amazing honor and privilege to know Kj and an even bigger honor and privilege to live under the same roof. she has taught me many great things, such as how to really watch a movie, how to see things in a contextualised manner, and showing me the beauty in things that i would overlook. i love when the house is quiet and i can hear her laugh at a show or movie she is watching, her laughter is soooo contagious and it lifts my mood all the time. 
Making the Scarf: Well what can I say after that? It was a joy to create this scarf for the above gentleman. At first he'd suggested having me make a scarf in the colors of the Brazilian flag, but when I explained that being scarfed means submitting to my interpretation of you- he said go for it, do whatever you want. Thus, Brazil stayed in my mind as I started. I wanted to capture JB's playful spirit but also his debonair chic that peaks out from time time. The colors largely came from the feel of a Brazilian restaurant he took us all too last year. I think this is the hottest scarf I've made yet- inspired by a place that would rarely require the wearing of a scarf and by someone who looks hot wearing one :). It's been a delight to watch JB build a life here in Seattle, 
to see the way he gives his time to the people in his life who matter and pursues his passions and beliefs against all odds. (And the odds have been frequent, forceful and odd). JB's a fighter, and as you can read, or Kaitlin can attest- a great lover of people. He's one you want on your side. I'm lucky to have him upstairs. Love to you Yannni!!
Our Mars Hill Graduate School motto, at least a third of it anyway, ate up four black printer cartridges this term, causing me to actually resort to taking screen capture images of articles so they'd print as color ( I have an endless supply of color cartridges- but not black) . I also, definately, turned in a dark blue assignment on the last day of 'Mission in a Global Context' since that's the class that ate the most of my black ink.
I just watched 98% of the people I started with, graduate on Saturday. The Fellowship has not failed, but we are going our separate ways. Now, but a few of us sit here, with our pints in hand, looking silently at one another knowing what we have been through, and that only we are left to remember it. 
We are the remnant- and will stand together next year- but this time we'll get to board the ships at the Grey Havens, instead of watching our Frodos all head out to sea like they did on Saturday.
It's been a rich, beautifull, complicated three years. We've got one last year together.
