If you ain’t first, you’re last February 4, 2010
Posted by markgeil in Compassion.add a comment
Well, I wasn’t first, but I was runner-up in a little contest on the Gospel Music Channel for Compassion International. I entered because the winner receives a trip to see their sponsored child, something we would really like to do someday. Having read the winning entry, I’m very glad they get to go visit their “Compassion kid”. Click over to the winner’s entry, and here’s my entry. Better yet, sponsor a child.
Grammy Thoughts February 2, 2010
Posted by markgeil in Music.add a comment
They announced the Oscar nominees today, but I’m still all about the music. Here are a few random thoughts following Sunday night’s Grammy broadcast.
- Overall, good show – always one of my highlights of the year – but not a good balance in the sequencing of the performances. All the over-the-top, jaw-dropping set pieces were right in the beginning. After Gaga and Elton and spinning wet naked Pink and Beyonce’s marching Lego men, everything else felt flat. A better mix of overstated and understated would have fixed that. The exception was Dave Matthews band with a glorious You & Me. No fire or glitter or Robert Downey Jr. Just a rollicking celebration of music.
- Country rules! Zac Brown Band as best new artist shocked me. Coupled with Taylor Swift’s awards, and the fact the Kings of Leon hail from Nashville as well, Music City is living large.
- The rap performance that I was told I will remember “forever” and its performers’ attire made me realize I’m more likely to remember Pants on the Ground than that half-censored bombast by Eminem, Drake, and Lil Wayne.
- I do not like previews of what I’m about to see before each commercial break. It’s live! Let it at least seem spontaneous! In past years they have used that time to scroll lists of other winners not on the telecast, which I much prefer. Some cable networks have a nasty habit of doing that little “preview” thing during movies and they spoil some huge scenes.
- Interesting choices for which awards to broadcast. No male pop vocalist? No rap album? Instead, we got comedy album and rap/sung collaboration. I understand that hundreds of awards are given and only a few can be distributed during a three and a half hour broadcast that’s mostly performances, and I like the idea of picking a few less common categories. But comedy album?
- Green Day was smiling and hugging Broadway people. Weird. I thought they were a punk band.
- I loved the vocals on the Michael Jackson tribute, but I’m regretting my trip to Target Sunday evening to pick up my 3-D glasses. Wow. That set the whole 3D-TV movement back a decade or so.
- Third Day won a Grammy (for a live album… odd) which of course was not telecast, but a local radio station did reach Mac Powell by phone this morning to chat about the award. The cool thing was that he had just dropped his kids off at school (at our church). I like the idea of a recent Grammy winner driving through the carpool line.
On Broken Legs and Personalities January 28, 2010
Posted by markgeil in Awana.add a comment
Last night, Jared broke his leg. Jared is a plucky little boy who attends our Wednesday night Awana program at church. A group of kids likes to play “tag” each week after the program, and Jared was among them. There was a collision, Jared fell, someone fell on top of him, and then he started wailing.
I was in a little sound room, putting away a microphone, when I heard the screams. Now, with a day’s reflection, I’m fascinated by different peoples’ reactions to the calamity. Most of the kids stopped, stared for a moment, and backed away from the heap of sobbing boy in the middle of the floor. Others stepped in for a closer look. There’s personality marker number one: do you back away or get closer? I suspect you can already categorize yourself as one or the other.
The grownups closest to Jared offered what immediate aid they could. Where does it hurt?, Try to be calm, that sort of thing. Our Children’s Director followed the sound of the cries to Jared and took charge. Interesting, I’m thinking in retrospect, that’s usually the role I play. Now I might be reading too much into this, but I’ve pondered why Sonya, the Children’s Director, immediately rushed to Jared’s side while I did not, and I have a theory. Here comes personality marker number two. She’s a mom. Obviously, I am not. Jared is a boy. Sonya has a son, while I am a father of daughters, so I might have developed a double standard along the way. Jared’s a tough boy, I thought, almost subconsciously. He’ll be okay. I’ll help him in a second once I put away this stack of papers. I think if that had been a little girl screaming on the floor I would have hastened to her side. Curious.
Sonya sent me to fetch Jared’s mom and one of our leaders who is a nurse. In the hall I was immediately beset with Awana questions from people who did not know about the nearby trauma. I sent Sarah Kate to find the nurse and answered questions while summoning Jared’s mom. Funny, it never occurred to me to send someone for Jared’s dad, who was in the other building. At that point I was more focused on what we should do with Jared. Maybe that’s a personality marker also. I’m fairly clinical and analytical, even in response to crisis. I’m glad there were others there who were more feeling and thought to send for the poor boy’s mom and dad!
What followed was a continued exercise in personalities, roles, and responses. The nurse struggled to calm Jared and assess his leg. I cleared the room of the gawking kids. Mom offered comfort. Dad cracked jokes to try to distract the boy, and even took some pictures to show him later. Once Jared started declaring that he could not feel his leg, 911 was called. His big sister sat close by, saying little, but clearly feeling his pain in a poignant, emotional way that I did not understand.
It sort of worked out that we all took turns trying to comfort Jared, each in our own way. Some brought cups of water and tissues, attending to physical needs. I seemed to naturally try to attend to Jared’s mental needs. I showed him the brace the EMTs were going to put on his leg. I verified for him that none of the “911’s”, as he called them, had a needle and he would not get a shot. Then a friend of mine named Tom came in and attended to Jared’s spiritual needs. He asked Jared if we could all pray for him, and he said yes. Just then, the EMT’s started trying to roll him over and apply the splint, so Jared started wailing again. The prayers at that point were silent. Once he was supine and calm again, Jared announced, “Why isn’t everyone praying?!” I laughed. We prayed. It helped.
Jared was loaded in the ambulance and we learned later that he had clean breaks through a couple of bones in his leg. Again, a study in contrasts. My immediate response? Must be a tib-fib, shouldn’t affect the growth plates, with thoughts about the most likely treatments. Amy’s immediate response? I wonder if he’s home yet. I want to take him a little care package.
The Bible says that, spiritually, we are different members of one body. Some play metaphorical roles of eyes, others ears, others feet. I think we’re also put together to respond differently to crisis, whether it’s a boy’s broken leg or a massive earthquake in Haiti. Just like we work together well spiritually, I saw Wednesday night how we can work together physically and emotionally as well, and I was once again reminded that God knew what He was doing when he made each of us the way we are.
Oh, and one more response: no more playing “tag” after Awana!
Could I get this thing to lecture for me? January 27, 2010
Posted by markgeil in Music, Things that amuse me.add a comment
I might be having too much fun with a certain website. I might also be the last kid on the block to have discovered it, considering the NPR podcast on which I heard it mentioned yesterday was from back in November, but just in case you’re a late arriver like me, read on.
It’s called Let Them Sing it For You, and the idea is genius. You type in words – anything you want, really – and the site makes a song for you. They’ve sampled thousands of words from songs, and they just string them together to match your text.
I channeled Stevie Wonder on the Cosby Show and typed “Jamming on the one”.
I typed “I can say anything” and laughed out loud. The word “I” was Chris Isaak’s three-syllable version from Wicked Game. “Anything” was sung by Meat Loaf. Clever.
Then I decided maybe this could improve upon the questionable vocals, of say, Bob Dylan. I typed the first few lines of Blowin’ in the Wind. Now this became a game of “I can name that tune in one word”.
“Man” was from When a Man Loves a Woman. “Yes” was from The Great Pretender (brilliant!). Then, irony of ironies, the last word I typed, “sand”, sounded just like Bob Dylan.
Try it. Words from a favorite poem. A message for a friend (you can email the results). In honor of the State of the Union, type an Obamaism. (“Yes we can” is punctuated nicely by the “we” from We Will Rock You.) And, just for me, type “A window in the world”. The soothing voice of Louis Armstrong will make your day.
The Scourge of Pride January 26, 2010
Posted by markgeil in People, Philosophical musings, Posts with titles that sound like a horror movie.add a comment
My dear wife is planning a party. I’m the party guy in our house, but not the planning guy, so sometimes she plans the parties and I simply reap the benefits. It’s not fair. See, there’s an introvert/extrovert thing going on. I am energized by people. I quite enjoy bouncing around a room, chatting with this person, then that person. Amy, on the other hand, while certainly not anti-social, is not big on chatting. The very idea drains her. But she is gifted at planning and I am not. So, she still plans parties for me. It’s love.
This party is different, though. Sure, this party will have music, and snacks, and even chatting, but it will also have saws and drills and possibly even tool belts. This is a drywall hanging party, and though it’s right up my alley, I would not have planned it myself.
We’ve been finishing our basement for years, and we even have one room (the bathroom, surely the most important of all) actually finished. The gradual process has been a drag sometimes, but it’s also helped us think through what we want out of every room. Now, the gradual process is accelerating. A new location is needed for the Monday night Bible study that Sarah and I attend, and we’ve been planning the biggest room in the basement for that very purpose. So, as of yesterday, I have two weeks to finish the Bible study room.
Deadlines are very good things for me. I can pack the work in if I know a deadline is looming. So, I’ve packed the work in, and now the room is almost completely ready for drywall, painting, and flooring, the final touches that abruptly make a space of studs and wires look finished. Thus, the party. Come to our house and hang drywall! And possibly even slop the mud and tape on the drywall! I can see the engraved invitations now.
We are fortunate to know lots of folks with lots of experience hanging drywall. They are mostly guys, buddies of mine (or sons of buddies of mine), and I suspect they would all be happy to come over and lend a hand. So why is Amy planning the party and not me? I asked myself that question last night. Part of the answer is my aforementioned aversion to planning. But that’s not all. There’s an unusual hesitancy here that seems different, and I think I’ve just now figured it out. I don’t like to ask for help.
It’s not that I think I’m inconveniencing someone else. I’ve gone to lend a hand at other peoples’ houses plenty of times, and I actually enjoy it. In fact, the idea of going to someone’s basement to hang drywall sounds really fun to me. It’s making measurements and cutting stuff and getting dirty. It’s a few laughs along the way, and some witty teasing of the person who keeps driving the screw through the paper. It’s takeout pizza and the smell of brownies coming out of the oven upstairs. It’s community personified.
That is all well and good if it’s someone else’s house. I just have this hesitancy about asking all these guys to come over to my house and help me. That hesitancy has a name: pride. To ask for help is to declare your dependency on someone else, even for a brief moment. It says, “I can’t do this alone,” and too often that question leads me to wonder why and to puff myself up into a defiant declaration: “Sure I can! I’m good enough, and skilled enough, and I don’t need any help!” Oh, the scourge of pride.
I think that every single sin contains an element of pride. Consequently, I try hard to remind myself of my dependency on God, of my need for grace to “save a wretch like me.” I say prayers that say, “God, I am lost without You; teach me to rely on You completely.” But then I won’t ask for help from a bunch of guys when I need to hang some drywall. I won’t admit when I’ve made a mistake. I spend great effort developing a persona of all encompassing adequacy and ability. I speak of humility to God while the pride still rattles around like a rusty chain in the back of my head.
So, I have decided to join the party planning. I will ask for help and advice and I won’t pretend I’ve got it covered. I will learn about community and humility, and as an added benefit, a room will get finished, and 20 high schoolers will have a place to learn about an all-sufficient God.
How to feel January 25, 2010
Posted by markgeil in The words of others far more wise than I.Tags: Haiti
1 comment so far
Not unexpectedly, Haiti is still on the mind today. I’m listening to my iTunes download of the Hope for Haiti Now telethon and wondering again how to feel.
We had a discussion over dinner the other night about the dilemma facing the Royal Caribbean cruise line, which includes Haiti among its ports-of-call. Should opulent cruise ships continue to dock in Haiti? I think the pros and cons faced by the cruise line – strikes too great a contrast against the suffering, but does pump money into the economy – are less subtle than those faced by the passengers on the boats themselves. We struggled to decide if we would want our cruise to stop in Haiti now. Does that seem terribly petty? Essentially, that’s saying, “While I’m on vacation I don’t want to think about non-vacation stuff, whether it’s my to-do list at work or massive natural disasters.” I’ll never quite comprehend when we should pause from thinking about poverty and suffering. I know we have to. I just don’t know when.
I think we finally decided we would want to stop in Haiti, and we’d want to buy every cheesy little local souvenir we could find. Stimulate the local economic engine in even a small way, as it were.
My conflicted emotions resurfaced during the telethon, with its stories of despair alongside stories of miracles and its brilliant music. Alicia Keys opened and set the tone quite well. The next act was Coldplay. I saw them, then got a little excited because I like the band, then chastised myself for getting excited during an event like that one. Eventually, I gave in to the music and quit doubting my reaction. I swayed with Stevie Wonder and Madonna and wondered why I never knew that Justin Timberlake could play piano and just knew that Jennifer Hudson would flat out wail at the end of Let it Be.
The next day I read an excerpt in Time from a book by Amy Wilentz, a journalist at UC Irvine, and I finally saw eloquent words expressing my exercise in discontent.
While it has had its precious rewards, following Haiti over the past quarter-century has also been an exercise in impotence, like watching a car speeding toward detritus on a highway while you’re at the window of a skyscraper 20 floors above. The car skids over the obstacle and crashes into the median and begins to burn, and you’re up there sipping Perrier in your yoga clothes and thinking you should call 911.
Regardless of our station, we do “call 911”, and it is that small step of action that builds redemption from suffering.
Haiti January 15, 2010
Posted by markgeil in Compassion.Tags: Haiti, Haiti earthquake
1 comment so far
One of those Discovery or History channels had a new show on last month about the 2004 Tsunami. They had gathered an extraordinary amount of home movie camera footage, and were showing much of it for the first time. The footage was arranged chronologically and geographically. Real live images of the first earthquakes. Hand-held camcorders capturing the initial “teaser” waves that brought shock and curiosity, followed by the receding waters that sadly brought out curious onlookers. And then, devastation. Panic. Chaos.
I could not watch the rest of the show. Had the images been part of a movie on a fictional planet, I would have marveled. Even if this was some Mega Disaster show with a scientific account explaining the waves with graphical reconstructions, I would have been fine. But these were camcorders with tapes from people on vacation. The day before, these tapes contained sun-splashed beachfront vistas. The next: people, real people, dying.
I have all sorts of questions following disasters, and those questions are swirling again after the Haiti earthquake. 300,000 people died in the tsunami, and indirectly maybe a million. I did not know a single one of them. One day we will get a death count from Haiti, and it will be terrible. Again, I do not know anyone there. In a strange way I care more about the one person who died in Acworth, Georgia when her car ran off the icy roads a couple of weeks ago than any of these, because she was the wife of a guy with whom I’ve played soccer. I understand that humans do not have the capacity to feel the sorrow associated with every loss on Earth. I understand that our sense of loss is correlated with our proximity to the lost. See, I’m very analytical about these things. But then tragedy of such a massive scale strikes, like the tsunami, like Haiti, and I don’t know how to feel.
The images of Haiti are extraordinary. I’ve seen other earthquake photos showing cracks in ceilings, and even that collapsed freeway in San Fran, but these pictures are different. Here’s just one:
That was a six-story building. It just collapsed upon itself. There are so many images like this, it becomes numbing.
I watched a video on CNN of an 11-year-old girl pinned under part of a building like that one. Just like that, my proximity to the lost and hurting grew. I have little girls a lot like her. I don’t know her, but when she cried out in pain, I hurt too. I wanted to be there, finding a way to cut through that concrete.
Another little girl, Diana, is the child we sponsor through Compassion International. She lives in the Dominican Republic, on the same island as Haiti. I think she’s okay, but Compassion serves more than 65,000 children in Haiti, and at least a third live in areas that were hardest hit. I saw a video of one little girl, and was moved. I cannot comprehend twenty two thousand little children, the poorest of the poor, suffering from this earthquake.
If you are moved to help, you can visit Compassion’s Haiti Earthquake Disaster Relief donation page. For what it’s worth, I know these folks and I trust that they will be good stewards of the funds they receive. If you’re practical and analytical like me, here is a picture of their disaster relief kits. It helps me to see something tangible sometimes.
Top 9 of 2009 January 8, 2010
Posted by markgeil in You did ask - didn't you?.2 comments
Since I like year-end countdowns, here is one of my own: the Top Nine Posts of 2009.
First, a bit of explanation. A post only gets counted if you click on the title. If you visit the blog and just read the post on the homepage, it doesn’t get an official hit. That tends to skew the results. Now, in best Casey Kasem voice, on with the countdown.
9. Flood
The effects of the September flood still resonate in these parts, and are for many a lingering reminder of a very challenging year.
8. Review: Winter Jam Tour 2009
Concerts don’t get reviewed enough. I remember seeing shows as a kid, and then hoping to read a review in the paper the next day. I’d feel strangely validated if they liked it, I’d get angry if they didn’t, but mostly I would relive the experience a little bit.
7. What your favorite U2 song says about you
This is one of my favorite posts. Yes, it’s meaningless if you don’t know the band’s music, but I sure had fun coming up with the list. I’m still happy to take your suggestions in the comments!
6. Review: David Crowder Band – Church Music
The first Crowder reference. For some reason I get hits from Crowder searches every day. This album gets better every time I listen to it, and remains my number one or two from 2009.
5. Blog Nuggets: tunes and ’80s fashions
Certainly this only made the list because of the picture of Poison. Did I really grow up in that decade? Amazing that any of us are remotely normal.
Some years are remembered for monumental trauma. Anita’s husband Greg is leaving an extraordinary record of her life and how he is handling her passing at http://www.anitaslove.com
I am toying with the idea of building a site just for reviews. This is the third review on the list. With budgets at some of my favorite review sites dwindling to nothing, there are fewer places to turn. This is still a fascinating album, by the way.
2. The Spoken Word, or, A Fist Pump for the Master
This one gets hits because of that famous Tim Tebow speech, but I hope people finish reading it for the profound literature that is the Bible and the profound Person that is Christ.
And finally, at number one, with thousands and thousands of hits this past year:
This certainly was not the most popular post based on its own merits. It’s just a little note about my interviews with a couple of rock stars. David Crowder was one, so maybe some of the Crowder searches landed there. Also, I think a lot has to do with the fact that I used to list only one Top Post on the home page, and being the only Top Post is a self-perpetuating thing. You’re the only one listed, so people click on you, which keeps you at the top. Makes me wish it was better. Now I list four or five Top Posts, for what it’s worth.
Thanks for reading!
Counting January 7, 2010
Posted by markgeil in Family, People, Travel.add a comment
An emerging purple sunrise lit my rearview mirror as I drove west in silence. We like to leave early for our family road trips, and we usually have a rule that no one is allowed to talk until 7 a.m. When the kids were younger, we hoped that decree would encourage them to go back to sleep. Nowadays road trips are so easy it doesn’t really matter if they sleep or not.
Silence is foreign to me. I’m never in the car without the stereo on, and I usually have some sort of background music on at work. Still, I know the quiet is good for me. It makes me thoughtful and reflective. The calm on that morning drive allowed me to marvel at the sunrise and steal a few glances at the sleepy children behind me. We were on our way home after seven days in North Carolina visiting family during Christmas. The combination of fresh Christmas memories, the road home, the sleepy kids, and the silence led me to a do something that’s as trite as a children’s song but so healthy: I counted my blessings.
On the way home, I counted home as a blessing. We looked forward to going back home, even as we drove toward a house full of Christmas decorations that would need to come down (one of which was my massive pre-lit arch that barely fits through any of our doorways), full of fixtures and appliances that are near that 10-to-15-year breaking point, but full of warmth and familiarity and comfort. We have grown our roots here for more than a decade, so they have gotten pretty deep. We laugh a lot here, and we’ve gotten good at establishing a place where the travails of the world can be met with reassurance and love.
Home is a place of “favorites”. My favorite old sweatshirt is here, along with my favorite music and mattress and recliner. I know where the buttons are on the remote control without looking, and I know just how long to microwave the popcorn without burning it.
I counted the blessing of my kids, dozing in my back seat. Rebekah’s blonde tresses were a tangled mess, and I quietly laughed at how poorly she manages mornings. Maybe it’s that bright hair, or that sweetest of smiles, or that endearing lisp; something about her just makes her a ray of sunshine. Hannah sat beside her, her caring confidant. To see Hannah in any state of repose is a tiny bit alarming, but she did look peaceful and beautiful in her reverie. On this trip, as on so many others, Hannah’s joie de vivre had infected a house full of people. I’m glad she’s not gotten too old to go wild. Sarah Kate was not in my rear-view mirror. She rarely is. She spreads herself over the entire back of the minivan, either sleeping or reading, popping her head up occasionally like a gopher surveying the overworld. Sarah adores family time, so seeing 25 cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents on one trip was heartwarming to her. I could tell, because her eyes are so completely revelatory, and on this day they were vivid.
I counted too my wife, not quite asleep in the seat beside me. I am blessed that she will spend all this time with my family in cramped quarters: in twin beds in my first childhood bedroom, around a dining room table made for six or eight but somehow accommodating a dozen or more, on shopping outings during which the itinerary is not her own but must be coordinated among other women and kids and minivans. That’s not what I counted as a blessing that morning, though. I counted the knowledge, no, more than that – the cerebral and emotional and spiritual connection – that we are genuinely made for one another. Somebody stop me before I write a Keith Urban song.
I counted other things in that silence, some less profound, like the surprising number of miles on the odometer, and how well the van has held up during all those journeys. I wondered what had become of the inflatable yard decorations I had taken down before we left. They were full of water, and I stashed a couple in the basement and one on the back porch. (Yes, we put out three enormous inflatable yard decorations. That’s how we roll.) Then I remembered my Christmas presents and the kids’, and I looked forward to playing with them.
Even today, a week later, I can’t remember all the fun stuff we did over Christmas and the funny lines that made me laugh so hard. Give me a few months and I’ll struggle to remember just how many people we visited with. But this I know, and this I will remember: I am blessed.
Epics that start with “A” December 18, 2009
Posted by markgeil in Epic Posts.Tags: Australia, Avatar
3 comments
Oh, the bliss of schedules and commitments releasing their relentless grip on life as December draws to a close! Today will mark my last day in the office for 2009 and the girls’ last day of school. I’ll still have some work stuff to do, but no more 5 AM alarm clocks! No more freezing cold office that makes my fingers numb if I type on the keyboard for too long! No more students complaining about their final grade even though they missed half the labs! Christmastime really is here after all.
We’ve marked the occasion with two straight days of epic movies starting with the letter “A”. As you know, “epic” is a synonym for “long”. Remember how you winced in high school when the word “epic” was paired with the word “poem”? I think epic is supposed to have some additional meaning, but mostly for something to be an epic it must be really really long. Our movies fit the definition quite well.
Last night’s epic was Australia. Amy has been on the waiting list at the library for this DVD for 6 months now, and it finally came in. So, we shoved the kids off to bed (bedtime is so easy now that the kids are older, by the way), pushed the popcorn button on the microwave, I cracked open a purple Mountain Dew (if you haven’t tried the Mountain Dew Voltage, you must… oh the bliss of no more work AND purple Mountain Dew!) and started the epic. See what I did there? I wrote an EPIC sentence about an EPIC movie!
Australia started as a cowboy movie, which was cool. The main cowboy was Wolverine from X-Men. Strangely, he never once used his adamanatium claws, though they surely would have come in handy on the ranch. Nicole Kidman was Shannon from that Tom Cruise Ireland movie. She meets Wolverine while he’s punching people, just like Tom Cruise was punching people in that Ireland movie. Wolverine could beat up Tom Cruise, by the way.
The cowboy movie ended, and then two other movies happened, all in the same movie. That’s why it was an EPIC. I kept wanting Keith Urban to show up, and then I wanted Wolverine and Shannon from Ireland and Keith Urban to sing a cowboy song together, but Amy said that would have been weird and it would have messed up the love story with Shannon and Wolverine. It would have also been cool if Tom Cruise showed up and said, “Shannon! Shannon! I love ya’! You step away, Wolverine! I’ve no wish to fight ya’! I’m of Ireland, ya’ know!” and then Wolverine could bust out his claws and growl and go all X-Men on Tom Cruise. They should have let me make this epic.
Today’s “Epic that starts with A” is Avatar. James Cameron no longer makes normal-length movies. After Titanic was such a success, he realized that movie audiences are charged the same whether the movie is 90 minutes or 120 minutes, and movie audiences must want more movie for their money. Consequently, Avatar is 162 minutes long. Seriously, I’m not making that up. ONE HUNDRED SIXTY TWO MINUTES! We’re going to the cool new NCG theater near us that has free refills on all popcorn and drinks. I’m thinking of hiring someone to be my refiller. They could just hang out in the aisle, and when they see I’m running low they would shuffle out and get my refill. Of course, then I would need a catheter as well, so maybe that’s a bad idea.
I am really looking forward to this epic-length epic. I have not seen any of this new generation of 3-D movies, and this one is supposed to be stellar. The last 3-D movie I remember was Jaws 3 in 3-D, which I saw with my brothers and some friends back in 1983. I remember laughing out loud when the half-eaten fish “floated” out toward the audience with the two toothpicks sticking out of the eaten end. Remember the guy who wears the 3-D glasses during the whole movie in Back to the Future? He must have a killer headache. That was bad 3-D. I’m told that Avatar is really good 3-D. Can’t be worse than Jaws 3.
So, yes, I’m probably wasting upwards of 6 hours of my life watching epic cowboy X-Men and Irish-Australian women and blue people in 3-D. And yes, I’m reading this book called Spiritual Leadership that’s all about using your time for constructive book-reading and learning, so I should probably be reading some historical tome, but I don’t care. Christmas is here, vacation is here, bring on the popcorn!
