A brief and likely unnecessary introductory note: these aren't related subjects. They are just the topics of this post.
Now on to the post.
Okay, so I'm in Intro to Philosophy and we have to read a few excerpts from this large textbook throughout the year. However, the book affords a huge variety of passages in addition to what we have assigned, and I sometimes peruse them when I have other schoolwork I'm procrastinating.
The reading today was on one's identity, and so I was reading a number of essays on that subject and there were a lot of interesting ideas and analogies -- but one particular concept stuck out to me that I thought I'd share.
Alright. Everyone basically gets that we are not our bodies -- our arms and legs and torsos and hair. Our sensory perceptions are all just being interpreted through our brains. But for some reason I could never really picture this. The closest I could come was seeing a picture, like reading a textbook, of a cutaway head with a throbbing brain in it, absorbing signals and perceiving.
This didn't do much by way of visualization, so while I had the idea that my eyes and fingers and ears are simply objects communicating with my very complicated brain, I didn't really understand it.
On to the mental exercise!
Disclaimer -- This is too simple to justify my lead-up. All it consists of is this:
Instead of picturing your brain in your cranium, picture it in a tank of life-sustaining fluid on a desk in a lab. Now picture that your brain is wired up with a radio transceiver that is communicating directly with a little radio that is suspended inside of your skull, which is connected to all of your efferent and afferent nerves.
Now instead of being a brain so intimately acquainted with your body that every fluctuation in your blood affects your thinking, you are a brain in a tank receiving signals from the automaton that walks and smells and sees and looks like a normal person.
Somehow, this illustration disengaged the concept of my body as myself for me. It might take a second.
Flex your fingers. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. You're just running reconnaissance for that gray thing in a tank.
I don't know how impressive you'll find this mental exercise. I found it immensely entertaining.
But on to John.
For Intro to the New Testament, we are required to read through the whole New Testament in a quarter. This translates to a book every couple days, and most recently my task was the Gospel of John.
We had previously covered the other three Synoptic Gospels, and those were interesting. We learned about all of the subtle agendas and biases underlying the straightforward stories, and while I'm not sure how much of this talk to buy into, the stories definitely lost a lot of their flair.
At the same time, I learned to read critically and look for the little agendas or messages in the details, and to appreciate things unique to each Gospel.
John was chuck full of these.
John's doing things his own way. He's got the message that Jesus is offering eternal life and he doesn't slip it subtly into allusions Jesus makes, like the Synoptics. Every chapter, Jesus is hitting the Jews (and Gentiles) in the face with this. "I'm not just a miracle worker prophet. I'm not just John the Baptist's buddy. I'm God's Son, and I'm offering eternal life. Eternal life."
That's why John's so cool. He doesn't hide anything or act polite. His writing is so blunt. Part of this might just be my superior New Living Translation, but John is ridiculously direct. The Synoptics leave things up to interpretation. Not John.
I'll end this text-overload post with a quote from the end of John, showing his characteristic no-nonsense approach to Jesus' words.
Jesus replied, "If I want him [the beloved disciple] to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? As for you, follow me." So the rumor spread among the community of believers that the disciple wouldn't die. But that isn't what Jesus said at all.
Oh, John.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Ben Rector and the Amazons
So about a week ago, a few friends and I went to a Matt Wertz concert, which was actually a Ben Rector concert because Ben Rector opened and Danny has been a Ben Rector fan since his youth and Ben Rector actually has a better voice anyway.
Anyway, it was pretty okay. I'm not a big concert-goer, but it was a sort of fun atmosphere.
Because Danny has such a huge mancrush on Ben Rector, we were impelled to arrive right after the doors opened, an hour before the show. That was 6:30. The concert ended around 10:30. That meant for four hours we were out there just standing. Just standing.
Apparently this is nothing unusual for concert-goers. I don't know if this means concert-goers are masochists, or if they just have unnaturally large calves.
Speaking as a regular human being, that was a painful experience. The soles of my feet were destroyed, and my legs were so stiff I walked like a reanimated corpse for a while after we were freed from the prison.
Speaking of prison, this brings me to my next point. There were so many people!
Again, apparently concert-goers have no problem with this. They must learn to reduce their personal space bubbles.
However, as a normal human being, I found this alarming, strange, and ridiculously hot.
In the temperature sense!
It was an indoor venue, House of Blues, with kind of a pit for people to stand in. If you think analogously about peas in a bowl, you'll realize this forces the people within the pit into closer proximity.
When you get these people rocking back and forth and raising their hands, you get a large quantity of body heat generated with no clear dispersion path except the bodies of other people rocking and raising their hands, which leads to ever mounting temperatures and, inevitably, sweat stains.
Oh, sweat stains.
Being surrounded by sweaty strangers rocking and raising their hands would have been bad enough, but in this particular scenario my plight was compounded by the presence of a small colony of Amazons in my proximity -- possibly the last Amazons on Earth!
These women were all the same height as me (six foot two!) and outweighed me by, I would conservatively pose, 50 pounds each. They were an extremely energetic bunch, probably because of their Amazonian descent, and they leaped into every song with emphatic rocking and bouncing.
Thankfully, they were rather poor on rhythm (Amazons were fighters, not dancers) and most of the time their bounces would cancel each other out for a net effect of some small, benign earthquake. But every now and then they would all simultaneously find the beat, and then they'd send the floorboards bouncing.
The other problem was that as Amazons, they were even less accustomed to personal space regions than usual concert-goers.
A couple Amazons were in front of me and every song they would inch back a little farther, their swinging arms threatening to shatter my ribs.
In response, I began to back up into the person behind me, subtly rocking into that person whenever the song's rhythm permitted, begging them to look around and realize the danger I was in.
They didn't.
Eventually my situation was too dire. Any second now, the Amazons would scoot back a little more and I would be destroyed by their legendary elbows and swinging fists.
I did the only thing I could think to do.
I rammed into one.
It was a calculated move, right as the song flowed into the chorus. I left the ever-so-slight potential that it could have been a misstep. But it was a good knock, solid, all my brawn behind it.
In the end, even though my blow failed to get through her armor, the awkwardness of our encounter forced her to take a couple steps forward and I was saved. My failing personal space bubble was resuscitated and I could stop nudging the person behind me.
This was great, because Ben Rector turned out to be a really great guy and his music was alright. Matt Wertz was pretty okay too, largely because Ben Rector stayed on stage playing piano while he did his thing.
The concert ended up being way too long. Matt Wertz had difficulty stopping once he got started. (He took off his shirt midway through, and then he was an untamed animal)
But regardless, it was still a neat experience. Both performers seemed like really honest, down-to-earth kinds of guys, and they really got into their music.
Afterwards Danny ran off with Dani and Kathy (who by the end of the concert had been converted into slathering Ben Rector devotees) to get pictures with Ben, and John and Dan and I hung out and talked about the concert, and then Danny and Dani and Kathy came back with rapturous looks on their faces and tried to find words to articulate their delight but they couldn't, and we left the House of Blues and traveled back into the cold Chicago night.
And went home.
Anyway, it was pretty okay. I'm not a big concert-goer, but it was a sort of fun atmosphere.
Because Danny has such a huge mancrush on Ben Rector, we were impelled to arrive right after the doors opened, an hour before the show. That was 6:30. The concert ended around 10:30. That meant for four hours we were out there just standing. Just standing.
Apparently this is nothing unusual for concert-goers. I don't know if this means concert-goers are masochists, or if they just have unnaturally large calves.
Speaking of prison, this brings me to my next point. There were so many people!
Again, apparently concert-goers have no problem with this. They must learn to reduce their personal space bubbles.
However, as a normal human being, I found this alarming, strange, and ridiculously hot.
In the temperature sense!
It was an indoor venue, House of Blues, with kind of a pit for people to stand in. If you think analogously about peas in a bowl, you'll realize this forces the people within the pit into closer proximity.
When you get these people rocking back and forth and raising their hands, you get a large quantity of body heat generated with no clear dispersion path except the bodies of other people rocking and raising their hands, which leads to ever mounting temperatures and, inevitably, sweat stains.
Oh, sweat stains.
Being surrounded by sweaty strangers rocking and raising their hands would have been bad enough, but in this particular scenario my plight was compounded by the presence of a small colony of Amazons in my proximity -- possibly the last Amazons on Earth!
These women were all the same height as me (six foot two!) and outweighed me by, I would conservatively pose, 50 pounds each. They were an extremely energetic bunch, probably because of their Amazonian descent, and they leaped into every song with emphatic rocking and bouncing.
Thankfully, they were rather poor on rhythm (Amazons were fighters, not dancers) and most of the time their bounces would cancel each other out for a net effect of some small, benign earthquake. But every now and then they would all simultaneously find the beat, and then they'd send the floorboards bouncing.
The other problem was that as Amazons, they were even less accustomed to personal space regions than usual concert-goers.
A couple Amazons were in front of me and every song they would inch back a little farther, their swinging arms threatening to shatter my ribs.
In response, I began to back up into the person behind me, subtly rocking into that person whenever the song's rhythm permitted, begging them to look around and realize the danger I was in.
They didn't.
Eventually my situation was too dire. Any second now, the Amazons would scoot back a little more and I would be destroyed by their legendary elbows and swinging fists.
I did the only thing I could think to do.
I rammed into one.
It was a calculated move, right as the song flowed into the chorus. I left the ever-so-slight potential that it could have been a misstep. But it was a good knock, solid, all my brawn behind it.
In the end, even though my blow failed to get through her armor, the awkwardness of our encounter forced her to take a couple steps forward and I was saved. My failing personal space bubble was resuscitated and I could stop nudging the person behind me.
This was great, because Ben Rector turned out to be a really great guy and his music was alright. Matt Wertz was pretty okay too, largely because Ben Rector stayed on stage playing piano while he did his thing.
The concert ended up being way too long. Matt Wertz had difficulty stopping once he got started. (He took off his shirt midway through, and then he was an untamed animal)
But regardless, it was still a neat experience. Both performers seemed like really honest, down-to-earth kinds of guys, and they really got into their music.
Afterwards Danny ran off with Dani and Kathy (who by the end of the concert had been converted into slathering Ben Rector devotees) to get pictures with Ben, and John and Dan and I hung out and talked about the concert, and then Danny and Dani and Kathy came back with rapturous looks on their faces and tried to find words to articulate their delight but they couldn't, and we left the House of Blues and traveled back into the cold Chicago night.
And went home.
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