In Honor of the End of the Semester

For the love of my students, who finished their first year of college today, and who I hope have learned a little bit about speaking with conviction:

The Lovely Bones

I am reading a fascinating book right now by Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones. It is, no doubt, a page turner and a delightful procrastination tool as I start finals week next week. I guess I just couldn't wait to start my summer pleasure reading. I'm thoroughly enjoying the story and would recommend the book, but I have some complaints about it.

The premise of the book is of a little girl looking down on her family from heaven. Susie Salmon was murdered by creepster of the year, George Harvey. Susie spends the book watching what happens in the years after her death--her family's grief, her murderer's attempts to cover up his actions, and her community's changes after the tragedy. What I want to challenge is the conception of heaven in the vast majority of the book. While there is no reference to God in Susie's heaven, there is excessive commentary on continual, unfulfilled desire: romantic love, yearning to be with family, a need to be alive. When Susie wants something in heaven, like roses, she just thinks really hard and gets them. Now, I'm not claiming to know what heaven is like, but I think it's a shallow vision of heaven if the preliminary stages of it (Susie's in something like purgatory, but she calls it heaven) are focused entirely on the self. It's materialistic. It's fundamentally human. As a Christian, I believe (and hope) that heaven will not revolve around our desires. Heaven must be bigger than that to be worthwhile. And yet I think that we often think of heaven as a more beautiful version of our lives on Earth, but plus white robes, and bright lights emanating from our heads. Harps play in the background, and we hang out with Jesus, whose light is brighter than ours.

A professor of mine at Westmont once said that we should make it our goal to cultivate a bright, vibrant (and as theologically correct as possible) imagine of heaven. We should use the fullest extent of our imagination to come up with versions of heaven. Great. Alice Sebold does that, but if we believe that heaven was prepared for us by a loving God, it should be the most exciting place we can create mentally. We should want to be there. We should want his kingdom to come.

All that said, read the book, but don't read it at night. You'll have serial killer dreams. My serial killer was a woman who looked exactly like the old lady criminal in The Goonies.

Mother's Day, 909 Style

Things that characterize the 909/Inland Empire:

-raised trucks
-women desperate to look like Pam Anderson
-"ain't"
-house parties
-tricked out Asian cars
-teenage pregnancy
-military enlistment
-obesity
-American flag t-shirts
-Republicanism
-lack of college education (see above)
-preference for 110+ degree summer heat
-'possum hunting

Yes, this Mother's Day, we celebrated by the hunting the stinky, ugly as all get out North American marsupial in my parents' backyard. It started when their boxer dog, Shandy, wanted to celebrate as well. It was her birthday, after all, and she thought she'd bring the party. So, as we're all inside discussing my latest progress in the academy, my mom noticed the dog's conspicuous absence.

We called her name twice, fearing that she had run out into the frightening 909 night. Suddenly, from the doggy door there came a very guilty animal. Tail tucked in, she lay on her back, exposing her submissive, freckled belly. "What have you been doing?" My mom asked in a motherly (read: threatening) tone. Shandy, failing to proffer the appropriate verbal response, popped up and led us all outside. She ran across the yard and brought us a dead baby opossum. Happy Mother's Day.

That would have been uneventful if it had ended the night's hunting. Half an hour later, we heard Shandy barking again outside. We ran out to find her playing squeaker toy with another baby 'possum. When we called Shandy off (good dog), the victimized marsupial lay there for a few moments, then picked up all the dignity she could muster and limped off into the local holly bush. Carlos and my dad came out with flashlights to scan the yard for eyes. With no real intention of murdering God's creation (like the dog, who at least has an excusable instinct), we spent a good 20 minutes wandering around the yard looking in the bushes for more opossum to terrorize, all the while holding our noses high, sipping some fine fume blanc and trying to ignore the fact that the neighbors wanted to come over to play.

The Portable Sewing Machine

My students are currently giving "persuasive" speeches. I put the word "persuasive" in quotes because the speeches may or may not effectively sway opinions. I have heard some excellent ones on recycling and vegetarianism. Yesterday, however, I had two groups bomb in succession. The second was especially abysmal. The clip below comes from The Onion's video news. As most of us know, The Onion is a bogus news source, much like Stephen Colbert or Fox News. It appears from the content of their speech on purchasing domestic products instead of sweatshop produced items, that all five of the boys in this group were ignorant of this fact. They used this clip in all seriousness, fully believing that a portable sewing machine was changing daily life in Bangladesh.