Today we listen to stories told by strangers from New York, Nashville, and Los Angeles and we tell our stories to the police and psychiatrists.

~Wendell Berry, The Work of Local Culture

• 
  What Are People For?: Essays
  Author: Wendell Berry

Over the past 6 years I have had the good fortune of living in the same suburban neighborhood of Livonia Michigan; some call it Clements Circle, others “the hood”, and to a few its known as “the SuperHood”.

Looking back its hard to measure the value of living in a neighborhood where you can know your neighbors. I am especially fortunate seeing as a good handful of my neighborhood relationships trace their roots back to college, almost 10 years ago now.

Getting to know people takes time. The pace of today’s scattered life activity hardly encourages the slow process of becoming known and knowing your neighbors. Fortunately I have some very hospitable neighbors, and a dog that likes to get around the neighborhood… so I have been able to meet a few over the past 5 years.

Joe Chapp helped me (I watched mostly, note the difference in shirt soiling above) pull out a couple of especially stubborn bushes back in 2005 and since then I have been invited out to a regular evening bonfire complete with pizza and box wine. In these evenings of casual neighborhood discussion and story telling I have learned much about the Chapp family history, struggles, and whimsical life enjoyments. There is a strange sort of comfort that comes from this activity of simply sharing, life just makes a lot of sense when presented in this context.

And aside from the general feelings of comfortableness there are specific encouragements and challenges. I learned that the Chapp family prays for the neighborhood regularly, including the success of my business; what a humbling honor. I also learned that the bus comes at 7:50 and it would mean a lot to the Chapps’ if I would look out for their daughter and make sure she makes it onto the bus without incident. Talk about tangible community responsibility and a reason to get up on time.

People used to practice what they called “sitting till bedtime”, where neighbors used to walk across the fields to sit in someone else’s home until dark and then go home and they would tell stories about themselves and people who had died and the children would hear the stories.

~Ken Myers on “The Work of Local Culture”

• Mars Hill Audio Journal

Categories: Community, Encouragement, Prayer, Relationships, Compliments
No Comments »

Human beings are only capable of keeping track of about 150 people at a time, well 148 to be exact. This is in reference to what I am learning is the famous “Dunbar’s Number“. A new acquaintance of mine recently dropped this reference while engaging in my current pet project of analyzing the impact of social networking technologies on humanity.

From my cursory investigation it looks like Mr. Dunbar studied the social habits of a bunch of primates and wrote up his findings back in 1992. Apparently he did some regression analysis on the size of a primate frontal cortex as compared to that of a human and was able to extrapolate from his data a “mean group size” of about 150. That is to say, the human brain has the limited capacity to track roughly 150 social connections at any given time.


Show me more… »

Categories: Social Networking, Technology, Relationships
No Comments »

Dennis Prager has a regular hour of his radio show dedicated to relationships, male / female in particular. Dennis is one wise Jew in my opinion…

Recently he has been making the case for public humiliation being the worst of all possible offenses in a marriage and believed it to be more detrimental to the integrity of a marriage than even adultery. At first it seems silly… being made a fool of by your partner is worse than having them cheat on you? But the more I thought through the implications of being on the receiving end of either offense (a single incident of adultery or regular public humiliation) the more I sided with his perspective.

In one moment he described the public (or private) verbal humiliation of someone as being fueled by contempt. I was struck with a horrible feeling, I know I have been on both sides of contempt… giving and receiving… it never feels good.

A quick word study reveals the following definitions…

• lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike
• a manner that is generally disrespectful
• open disrespect for a person or thing
• Contempt is an intense feeling or attitude of regarding someone or something as inferior, base, or worthless—it is similar to scorn.

Show me more… »

Categories: Confessions, Introspection, Relationships
No Comments »

People do not like to be reduced to either mean or nice, nice being the worse of the two adjectives.

People are amiable, incorrigible, pompous, religious, ostentatious, fractious, sophomoric, whimsical, arrogant, insipid, vulgar, trite, scornful, repugnant, dignified, sultry, scathing, petulant, pedantic, benevolent, malevolent, ambivalent, pretentious, and otherwise complicated… especially when they are in search of each other.

It is with great trepidation that I admit, I am reading Jane Austin’s “Pride and Prejudice”… okay, well I am listening to the audio book, but still… I am absorbing into my mind the crown jewel of female narrative; encapsulating all known interpersonal, social, and familial happenings between men and women in search of holy matrimony. …and, I like it. I should say, I am in awe of the social commentary, the plot is nauseating…

• 
  Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics)
  Author: Jane Austen

Show me more… »

Categories: Introspection, Relationships, Books
1 Comment »

By the very act of arguing, you awaken the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention form the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE

I have been wrestling for some time with the effort to put words to my current anxiety. Per usual, I don’t have to; someone much wiser than me has already done so half a century ago. The only thing I think I have to add to this is perhaps some present day context, and the commitment to bring this conversation to the table of my friendships and community.

I believe this is a serious problem, and the sting of the indictment needs to be felt by my generation. I plainly admit that I am chief among sinners in this regard, but it is my sincere hope that such an admission does not detract from the potency of this reproof.

We have been gleefully swallowed up by our technology into a sea of superficial life cataloging endeavors. In this unconscious transaction we have forfeited the depth of our relationships for a paper thin surface of familiarity and before long that familiarity will breed contempt.

They still connect thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.

In 2009, let us pray for the wisdom to unplug in a profound way.

Go deeper with fewer people.

Start with Jesus.

Categories: Challenges, Confessions, Technology, Relationships, Books
No Comments »

>			>
		>

Well, I guess I was about 5, maybe 6, when I first heard “Invisible Touch”. I was at a friends house and we were listing to his tape collection… and I was suddenly grasped by a rapture of drums and vocals like I had never experienced before. I loved the song and I had no idea what it was about. I remember proudly proclaiming to my friends at 6 years old that “Invisible Touch” by Genesis was my favorite song. I bought the tape, I still remember the funky looking graphic design hand on the jacket, and I proceeded to wear it out in my trusty Walkman. Those were the days of complete awesomeness in music… I could just like music… just because; INXS, Bon Jovi, Salt and Pepper, Bruce Springsteen… it did not matter.


Show me more… »

Categories: Relationships, Music
No Comments »

>			>
		>

It does feel good to back in town.

It’s all the little things that happen amongst friends that make life not just bearable… but rather, pretty darn sweet. I know it’s just a concert, but Andy and I have been to three of them now… all of a sudden it’s a tradition. How could you not enjoy an evening of singing along with Paul Revere and getting extra loud when your favorite lyric hits…

The Sun is beating down on my baseball hat

>			>
		>

It’s the haaat part that needs to be especially emphasized. They went ahead and renamed the State Theater to the Fillmore. Someday we will get together and tell stories about seeing concerts there when it was still the State. Europe was a great experience… but regular old life is still pretty grand… (especially when your best friend springs for a set of sold out tickets on e-bay and calls you up)


Show me more… »

Categories: Local Friends, Relationships, Music, General Smatering
No Comments »

>			>
		>

>			>
		>

>			>
		>

>			>
		>

So if you have spent any time on at all on myspace (or I suppose, the internet in general) chances are you have come across one of these ads. The ubiquitous personal profile dating advertisement. I find the “True” ads most appalling on several levels…

• The ads are not true… none of the people featured in them have profiles
• They are borderline soft core pornography
• They are featured on websites frequented by children
• They are encouraging a culture of one night stand gratification
• They are misrepresenting anyone with decent intentions associated with true

So I thought to myself, since they are making a mockery of relationships… someone should make a mockery of them. So I started with my own profile pic and put in a small textual indictment in the same style of true marketing.

Then I thought it would be fun to extract these models and put them in real pictures with real people doing plane silly things… to take the edge off the sex appeal and present them as they should be received… laughable.

Show me more… »

Categories: Experiments, Relationships, Criticisms
No Comments »

Or go to this link…

I finally got around to editing the video from my 10 year class reunion. We really haven’t changed that much… for the most part that is a good thing, but it is also pretty scary. I like to think that I am making all kinds of “progress” in so many areas of my life. Abandoning old ideas that never worked, realizing my faults, owning up to my mistakes and living differently in light of the realization that comes with humility… maturing. 10 years go by, and I still enjoy making videos with my highschool friends… well maybe some things shouldn’t change.

Categories: Vlog, Relationships
No Comments »

No mercy for the distracted…

>			>
		>

I looked away for 2 seconds, but that was just enough time to have my hours of rubixing completely undone. Paul felt terrible once I explained to him how hard I had worked to get it to the point of complete solution except for the top layer.

>			>
		>

But it was too late, the damage had been done…


Show me more… »

Categories: Rubiks Cube, Relationships, Music
No Comments »