3.30.2014

Book Review: Loveology


Hey folks-- so I read a book today, Loveology: God. Love. Marriage. Sex. And the Never-Ending Story of Male and Female by John Mark Comer and I'm going to talk about it. I read it on my Kindle so I don't have page numbers for my quotes. Sorry!

Props:

-The concepts are simple and easy to follow. John Mark did a great job of writing to very broad audience. He explains the context of biblical stories and jargon (for the most part) in a way that almost anyone, regardless of their experience with Christian texts, could follow along.

-The tone was casual and inviting. I felt as if I was hanging out in his living room, drinking tea, and listening to his ideas. His quirky jokes and personal anecdotes enhances his message.

-LeVar Burton would be proud. (don't take my word for it!) Comer encourages his readers to do more research on  a few times on the topics he presented. He even recommended a few books to try out. I thought that was neat.

 -He was thoughtful.  He did a great job acknowledging the negative impact gender roles has on women (mainly) and men. He also stressed an important clarification that gender roles are reserved for marriage only, not society at large. I was glad to see that distinction. 

-He wasn't afraid to call Jesus a feminist. 

Criticisms:

- The book doesn't add anything new to the conversation. He doesn't present new or original ideas about marriage, gender roles, homosexuality etc., according to Christian fundamentalism. The ideas are progressive relative to the cultural standpoint he is writing from, but his opinions don't develop these ideas in any meaningful way. 

-He reads the Bible literally. At least he thinks he does, but look at what he does with the word lead. For a man to lead his wife, he has to sacrifice himself for her/put her above his own needs. (See my definitions below.) He believes that a man literally leads his wife but he takes the literal meaning away from the word lead to explain what it means. (The word lead implies to be in charge/command.) He also does not acknowledge that reading the Bible literally is the reason why some American Christian men think it's right to boss their wives around.  

-What do gender roles look like according to the definition given for men and women? And more importantly, why do we need them?
Comer stresses the importance of gender roles because it is an essential part of our human identity.
 Here are the definitions respectively:

Men: 
1) they have a penis. 
2) God made Adam first. The order in which God created the world is intentional.
"As I read all this evidence, it points to the idea that man was made to be the leader in the marriage relationship." To be a leader requires Christ-like love, "...self-sacrifice, giving away his life on the cross, all in love."
3) "The husband is called to love, give, sacrifice, nourish, and put his wife's needs above his own."

Women:
1) They have a vagina.
2) God knew that it wasn't good for Adam to be alone. 
3) "The wife is called to submit, to yield, to come under the authority of and entrust herself to her husband. But submission is her choice. It is a gift that a wife gives to her husband of her own free will, with not force or coercion."

Back to my question:

This seems too abstract. I don't know what this model looks like on a day to day basis. He makes it clear that the preconceived notions of what men and women are supposed to do in a relationship are void (who cleans, works, cooks, etc.) So what do the roles refer to? Decision making?  The bottom line is: if both the man and the woman are putting the other person's needs before their own, what is the point in having specific gender roles? 

-Homosexual relationships. Comer characterizes homosexual acts as lustful acts. He doesn't think there is an alternative sexual orientation. There is no acknowledgement of the fact that there are healthy, loving, monogamous homosexual relationships. This isn't to say that the Bible has no authority on this issue; it is something the Bible doesn't say anything out. It just doesn't address this type of relationship. 

3.22.2014

Never Change - the Promos

I started taking writing classes at Second City a year ago, and now our show is out in theater. As a promotional thing, we (the writers) had our actors over and filmed some promo videos. (What really happened was Amanda Holland did 100% of the directing, filming, and editing work while the rest of us writers goofed off and generally got in the way.) I enjoyed the whole experience at Second City and I am (just about) in love with my classmates, so I wanted to show you, blog viewer, the vids we came up with.

Urban Living



Roommates



Changes




Hillary



If you would like to see it online ($6, sorry), the link is here: http://gigity.tv/event/48351/

3.19.2014

11/52

mar 12. sunshine! (notice i'm not in the traffic jam)

mar 13. lines

mar 14. trevor! beer!

mar 15. pirrrate katrrrinnna

mar 16. no joke i did not stage this. it's a souper miracle!

mar 17. today was a bad day. i cried a few times. i also said goodbye to my car.

mar 18. crafting it up after state testing's bores and snores.


10/52



mar 05. workin on our fitness

mar 06. truth

mar 07. reading in the mornin

mar 08. sleeping in is hard.

mar 09. bellevue st

mar 10. car woes

mar 11. act v of hamlet! shit gets real.


3.08.2014

I'm an F*ing Genius

The Westovarian approach to problems, especially around the house, is not so much to fix them as it is to work around them. When Annie and I were roommates on Westover, the drain in our shower slowly stopped working. If you've seen Annie's hair, that won't surprise you.
Annie's hair
Instead of buying drano or calling our landlord, we just showered using less and less water.

I am, once again, taking the long way around a problem, and I think I'm being pretty clever. There's a leak on the hose of our kitchen faucet, and it's causing water to run down beneath the sink. It's already caused the lower shelf collapse.


Instead of getting a new faucet (which, admittedly, we should do at some point), I used science to work around this problem.

The surface tension of the water is causing it to run down the side of the metal tube and under the sink rather than just fall out of the leak and go down the drain. I have used a piece of string to reroute the water's path.

If you thought I'd do dishes before taking a picture of the sink, you should realize that this is not that kind of blog.
So far it's kind of working.


3.04.2014

9/52


feb 26. my guilty beer pleasure. it reminds me of beers bee and summer time. 

feb 27. jon cooked.

feb 28. this is nice

mar 01. new albums for the month! and froyo!

mar 02. tyson's laugh

mar 03. hey, it's a flower!

mar 04. alone time.


3.02.2014

One Thought about Blue Jasmine

Being woefully behind in watching Oscar-nominated movies, I went to Redbox and got the only qualifying one in there. Blue Jasmine, if you haven't seen it, is about a posh woman who falls from greatness and has to move in with her not-posh sister. Cate Blanchett plays Jasmine and spends the movie in varying degrees of nervous breakdown. (She never talks to Frodo, not once!)

Her character is isolated from everybody else in the movie. I don't sympathize with her character. The audience is not, generally, going to feel sorry that she cannot be very very rich anymore. Her loss is only vaguely understandable. We watch her in her isolation.

But there's one part in the movie where I felt like she got all of us. She's sitting down across a booth from her sister's two kids. They've heard some things about her; she got picked up in the street, talking to herself. She admits to it, over her Stoli martini, drunk like in the rest of the movie. She tells them she had to have electro-shock therapy to set her brain right. Why? They ask her.

Jasmine: There's only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming.

She speaks for us exactly once, and it's awesome.