Not to worry; I’ve been through it before.  Dungeons & Dragons and rock music in the 80s.  The world wide web in the 90s.  Most recently it’s been Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter who have doomed me to the infernal pit.  And now?  Now it’s James Cameron’s Avatar.  That’s right, because I watched – and enjoyed! – the tale of the Na’vi and their Eden-like world of Pandora, because I was wowed by the special effects and thought the story was well-done, because I feel Cameron came up with an interesting world replete with sights and sounds to reinvigorate in me a certain suspension of disbelief that has been slowly eked out of my consciousness by years of television and silver screen desensitization, I’m almost certainly bound for the lake of fire.

Or at least so says Mark Driscoll, pastor of the multisite megachurch Mars Hill.  For those wondering, that’s him, to the left.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that I don’t know Mr. Driscoll.  I’ve never been to his church or read his books or even listened to his sermons, at least not until one was referenced at Fark.com recently.  I’ll admit to having looked over the Wikipedia entry on the guy before starting to make this post, but otherwise have no framework from which to build an opinion, other than what I’ve heard him say today.  Let me start off with the quote that set this ball rolling:

The world tempts you to sin, to use people, to disobey God, to live for your own glory instead of His, to be a consumer instead of generous.  That’s the world system.  And if you don’t believe me, go see Avatar, the most demonic, satanic film I’ve ever seen.  That any Christian could watch that without seeing the overt demonism is beyond me.

He goes on to claim that the movie says the “creation mandate” – by which he means the general technological and intellectual advancement of humanity – is evil, and that we have all lost our way and strayed from Mother Nature.  He insists the movie’s message is that “we shouldn’t develop culture”, and that “we’re not sinners, we’re just disconnected from the divine life-force”.  Classic paganism, he calls it.  Classic.

There’s a certain part of me that balks at the whole treehugger philosophy, that cringes when people talk about homeocentric global warming (or climate change, or whatever it is they’re calling it these days), a portion of my being that sighs, internally, every time I hear how we have to “save the planet”.  I found Disney’s Pocahontas to be laced with New Age references and stark naturalism.  Avatar has some of those elements, to be sure.  The Na’vi interface, using a tendril-like organ that connects directly to their brain stem (I’m making some assumptions about the science behind the race, here) to the greater worldmind of Pandora, their planet.  As such, they’re more in-tune with the nature of their world, and see it as having a completely different value than what we see as humans.

But that’s where the treehuggery really ends.

There is never any sense, in the movie, that the Na’vi way is better than the human way, just that it’s better for their world.  There is, at one point, a tone of distinct regret when the main character notes that there’s no more green left on his former homeworld – by which he means Earth – but it isn’t an overall condemnation of industrialization or technology, just a lament that the nature of another planet was crushed by that industrialization taken to its farthest extreme.

Mr. Driscoll, however, would have us believe the movie sets up the Na’vi as analogs for humanity, or at least for the portion of humanity that rails against the modern world, those who would like to return to a more simple, primitive life, a life unencumbered by iPhones and SUVs and 3D cinema.  It claims, or so he says, that we are all supposed to be part of a greater spiritual connection through which we can better understand our world.  Says Driscoll, “It presents a false mediator with a witch, it presents a false worship of created things rather than the worship of Creator God [...] it has a false incarnation where a man comes in to be among a people group and to assume their identity.  It’s a false Jesus.  We have a false resurrection.  We have a false savior.  We have a false Heaven… the whole thing is New Age, satanic, demonic paganism”.

And to a degree, he’s right.  He’s right, because the characters in the story aren’t Jesus or those who follow him.  He’s right because, as long as you’re willing to find the most evil thing you can find in anything you see, such things are easy to take out of the theater when you go see a movie like Avatar.  Granted, the same could be said of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  The Lewisian world of Narnia is saved not by Christ himself, but by a Christ-anolog, Aslan, a talking lion.  Should we make the same claim of C.S. Lewis and his tales?  But I digress, because this really isn’t about Narnia.

And in truth, it isn’t about Avatar, either.

No, today’s rant is about irony.  Today’s daily recommended dose of irony comes from Mark Driscoll, himself.  Do you remember where he is pastor?  Mars Hill Church, which he founded with two others back in 1996.  Mars Hill Church is named after the Areopagus, literally “the rock of Ares”.  So the first dose of irony comes in the name of his church.  It’s named after Mars, the Roman name for Ares, the Greek god of war.  A Christian church, named after a pagan god.  Imagine that.  The second dose comes from what the Areopagus is most famous for in Christendom.  You see, it’s a landmark in Athens, Greece, a hill upon which there were once shrines to every deity worshiped by the Romans.  Included among the shrines and temples was a single shrine to an unknown god, and upon seeing that shrine, the Apostle Paul declared the unknown god to be the God of Christianity.  Says Paul, “Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.”

We, as believers, don’t do that anymore.  We don’t find parallels within the world and bridge the gap between it and our God.  No, as evangelical believers, it is far easier for us to deride the world and all it has to offer (all while enjoying, like Mr. Driscoll, our “two home theater systems, three TiVos” and more) as being pagan, satanic, evil.  It’s easier, and it grabs the attention of the audience, so we do it.  We are handed opportunity after opportunity, and yet the parallels we find are those which equate to evil, rather than those which point others to good.  You see, the mega-dose of irony here is that, in a church named after the place where Paul bridged that gap, where he took something decidedly pagan and used it as a springboard from which to preach the message of Jesus, Mr. Driscoll – and the church at large – is doing exactly the opposite.

Back in the 1980s, there was a huge scare among the faithful concerning rock music.  Some of you might remember the fear of backmasking – a technique in which something is said backwards, either intentionally or by sheer coincidence – which leading evangelicals feared was able to be unscrambled by the teenage mind.  Many of the suspected messages were supposedly very overtly satanic, though I was never able to actually find one, myself.  Interestingly enough, Christian rock band Petra purposely recorded a blurb, backwards, on one of their albums in the middle of that decade, but when it was played in reverse, the message said “Why are you looking for the devil when you oughta be looking for the Lord?”

I’d like to pose the same question.  Mr. Driscoll, why are you searching for the devil when you should be looking to the Lord?

Not that I’m looking at going a different direction with the site, or even any direction at all, but I’d like to think it would be possible for me to hop back into the swing of things and blog again.  I’ve taken time off before, and I’ve come back, and left again, and come back.  Here I am, wondering if I should bother again, wondering if blogging is a thing of the past and perhaps I should move on to whatever is the latest trend.  Of course, the current big things are Twitter and Facebook, and I’m on both, but neither of them offer the freedom of having your own website, your own domain, your own place that says, “This is me, this is what I think, this is what I know”.

So sure, I’d like to keep on writing here, but I’m tired of making promises, and really won’t.  There are things I need to straighten out in my life, and my online presence – and what I’m going to do with that presence – is one of them, and one that might prove pretty import in the long term.  This site could continue to serve as my personal opinionspace on the net, or it could become the central hub of something bigger, if I can manage to put it all together.  Or maybe it can be both.  Maybe I can change things and keep them the same.  I’m not betting on it, but who knows?

Still, I thought I’d pop in here and let you folks know just what’s going on at bigsimon.com.  School’s going well.  The weight loss hasn’t worked out as well as I had hoped.  People I thought were friends turned out to be fake.  Others who I didn’t realize were friends turned out to be more true than I would have suspected.  The kids are enjoying a sense of freedom they never had before we took them out of school.  Ms. Awesomesauce is just as awesome as ever; we just celebrated seven years together and look forward to plenty more.

Life is good.  I hope it’s as good for you.

Ahem.  Right.  Rapier wit, indeed.

I haven’t been idle, however!  This has just been crunch time at school, and I’ve been studying and writing and taking exams and… it’s all over.  At least for this semester.  Seventeen and a half credit hours, and it looks like I ended up with an A in every class.  I’m pretty stoked about that, especially considering I’ve never been an A student.  I don’t even think I’ve even been a B student, except in grade school.  Not that I didn’t have the capacity, just that I completely and utterly lacked the desire.  Consider the following scenario:

Teacher:  Do this problem.

Me:  Okay.  Done.

Teacher:  Correct.  Do this problem, which is very similar to the last one.

Me:  Ugh.  Okay… done.

Teacher:  Good job.  Now do this problem, which uses the exact same formula as the last one.

Me:  *grinds his teeth* Fine.  Done.

Teacher:  Great.  Homework is in the book, problems one through seventy three.

Me:  *pulls hair out and bangs head against wall*

Maybe there are people who need that kind of repetition, but I never have.  Traditional schooling didn’t work for me; I learn quickly.  And yet every child put through the United States public school system has to endure this very same thing.  Perfect for the some, but everyone learns a little differently, and for me it was tantamount to torture.  Mmhmm… probably could have gotten better grades if they had just waterboarded me for hours on end.

To that end, we’ve decided to homeschool our children, largely because they are exhibiting the same patterns of learning I showed when I was in my early teens.  I don’t blame my parents for not making the same choice – the Do-It-Yourself Mom was busy with work and Mr. Fiction was taking care of things at home and trying to repair his own ego after feeling like he’d failed us all – but as I look back at my life, I can see where it would have helped, and how much better off things might have been.

Homeschooling starts this coming semester.  During the next few weeks, while I’m on winter break, Ms. Awesomesauce and I will be cooking up a curriculum for the (not so) little ones, something a bit more broad and a whole lot more off the wall than what you’d find in your average middle or high school.  So far, we’ve decided the bulk of what we’re doing can be covered with in-depth units on specific times and places.  One month we may be studying World War II, and the next feudal Japan.  We’ll cover history, literature, culture, and a number of other aspects of each unit before we move on.  We’re also putting together a creative writing project where the group of us will be reviewing our Wii titles and posting our reviews at our new family blog, Wii Do Something.

Keep an eye here; I’ve got more free time in the next few weeks than I’ve had in a while, so I’ll be posting more, but weigh-ins are going to go on hold until after the first of the year.

In the meantime, enjoy the season for what it is, and don’t try to make it anything it’s not.

Well… I was wrong.  This week offered me some good news.  Yesterday morning, as I stepped on the scale, it read out the announcement that my weight was three pounds less than it was last week, putting me squarely at 445 pounds.  That’s ninety pounds from my highest weight, and sixty two pounds from when I officially started keeping track on here.  Not bad, huh?  Inching along at one pound at a time feels like a plateau.  Three pounds puts me back in the game.

But wait, you might say.  Last time you posted, you were 449, not 448!  And that was last Thursday!  You lost four pounds, Mr. Big Simon, sir!

Well, I suppose an extra pound would make my current smile just a little bit more broad, but it just isn’t the case.  The weight I posted last Thursday was actually my weight from the previous Friday, in other words, from two weeks ago.  It felt weird posting again the next day, so I just didn’t.  Needless to say, my weight was 448 last Friday, three pounds more than it is now.

Oddly enough, I haven’t been back to the gym in a while.  Between them moving to a new, larger facility, and a billing mix-up which has since been resolved, the last couple weeks most of my walking has been done at school.  Still, it seems to be back to working, and I’ll be back in the gym next week.  We’ll see how much it helps.

I get asked often what it is I’m doing to lose weight, and I still point people to the No “S” Diet, though I’m not exactly using that system.  I am, however, using a modified version of it, just removing high-starch foods from my diet plan.  On top of that, I’m still exercising regularly, through everyday activity.  It isn’t nearly as difficult as I convinced myself it would be for so many years, and I’m having a lot of success.  Not that I would complain about it coming off faster, but it looks like I’m still right on target for the end-of-2011 goal I set for myself.

Here’s hoping you achieve your goals, too.

I’ve often answered the question with a simple response:  I’m horrible at plot.  I can write, technically, putting out above-average prose at a respectable pace, but storytelling, I tell my acquaintances, may well be out of the scope of my ability.  Yet I know that not to be true.  For years, I’ve not only written interactive fiction with friends, short stories, and the like, but I’ve played as “game master” for countless role-playing sessions, building stories full of plot twists and loops.  Still, here I am, with a dozen manuscripts started, and none complete.

Why?

My dear and loving wife, Ms. Awesomesauce, described my writing to my children half an hour ago, and as I thought about it, I realized she was right.  “Your dad,” she said, “needs to get every word just right.  He’ll agonize over a paragraph for a week in order to get it just right.”  Wow.  That’s me!  Not here, not writing for a blog, but in writing a story, my attitude can be described with four letters:  OCPD.  That’s right, when it comes to finishing a manuscript, I have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

I am the Adrian Monk of would-be novelists.

To that end, I’ve rewritten the lyrics to the theme song for USA’s series Monk, starring Tony Shaloub.

It’s a Jungle Out There (Writer’s Block Remix)

It’s a jungle out there
Bad grammar and misspellings everywhere
No one seems to care, well, I do.
Who’s your editor?
It’s a jungle out there
What kind of thesaurus do you read?
Do you get the Writer’s Digest every week?
Well, I do!
It’s amazing!
People think I’m crazy, ’cause I rewrite all the time
If you cared about your writing you would too!
Better use that backspace ’cause the words you love so much
Might just cause you
To get a letter
Of pure rejection!
‘Cause it’s a jungle out there
It’s a jungle out there.

Nor have I abandoned my quest toward greater health.  I’ve been negligent in posting my weight for the last couple weeks, but with good reason.  It has to do with little words like “tumor” and “cancer” and a big revelation at the end where we discover it really had nothing to do with little words like “tumor” and “cancer” after all.  Sometimes life throws those little scares at you, and there’s not a whole lot you can do except wait for them to sort themselves out, but in the meantime even those of us as laid back as yours truly (and I do tend toward the lethargic!) can pop into worry-mode and start wondering what the outcome is going to be.  Needless to say, the lump in my throat is neither cancer nor is it emotion; it’s just a cyst, and the endocrinologist who did the tests is just going to leave it there for now, since the darn thing doesn’t seem to be hurting me anyway.  I’ll have to go back in April for another series of tests (in which they jab at my neck with a three inch needle, rummaging around inside to pull out some cell samples, all without the benefit of anesthesia), but overall I’ve got a clean bill of health.

This, of course, brings me back into reality wherein I scoff at my waffling (and I did indeed waffle on the whole weight loss thing during said cancer scare – I was a human Eggo™ with a tiny ego, sort of the anti-Beeblebrox, if you will, wondering if I should even bother, a flippity-floppity dance I eventually overcame) and return to a world where I’m still seriously overweight and need to reduce my manly girth to more reasonable proportions.  (Say… we’re carbon-based life-forms.  Does that mean our effective size is our individual “carbon footprint”?  Yes, I’m laughing at that one.  No, it wasn’t funny to you.  I get that.  For some reason it just resonated as hilarious to me.)

To that end, here is last week’s weigh-in.  For those keeping score (and there might be one or two of you left), I’m down two pounds from the previous visit to the scale, putting me at 449 pounds.  That’s right, for the first time in seven years, I’m under 450 pounds.  I figured I’d post it today, since I’ve got another weigh-in tomorrow, and if I gain weight, I at least want this moment to be recorded.  For me, this is a pretty major accomplishment, and means that, all in all, I’ve dropped eighty six pounds since my highest weight.  This calls for celebration.  Someone get me some ice cream.

Or not.

The last couple weeks, my gym has been moving, meaning they’ve packed up their equipment and hauled it across town, not that the building sprouted legs and started dancing.  They’ve got a larger facility with more equipment now, which is great, but I haven’t had access to the place for almost three weeks, which sucks like a puppy on its momma’s teat.  I’ll be back to the gym next Monday, though, now that they’re open again, and glad for that, too.

All in all, no huge tale or inspiration this week, just a post to let you folks know what’s going on.

I’ll be back soon!

Happy Birthday, Weird Al Yankovic.

Thank you for 33 years of laughter and fun…

… and for being the geek you had to be.

]]> http://www.bigsimon.com/2009/10/23/50-years-of-being-white-and-nerdy/feed/ 0 http://www.bigsimon.com/2009/10/23/50-years-of-being-white-and-nerdy/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bigsimon/~3/iD-nPNZmWsc/ http://www.bigsimon.com/2009/10/23/hot-enough-to-burn-books-baby/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:29:26 +0000 simon http://www.bigsimon.com/?p=1319 Right… tell me there’s a Ray Bradbury fan out there who’s looked at the number on the image to the left and gets the joke.  Tell me the title isn’t causing massive coronaries on the part of my book-reading friends.  Tell me you’ve ready Fahrenheit 451.

Yes?  No?  If you have, isn’t it good to be in the know?  And if you haven’t, well, you’re missing out.  It’s a classic work complete with the kind of lesson you don’t find often in modern novels.  Go to the library, check it out, and take a couple hours to experience one of the greatest pieces of speculative fiction of the twentieth century.  You won’t be disappointed.  And on the off chance you are, I offer you a full refund for the cost of this advice.  Either way, I promise I’m not about to put together a modern day book burning.

No, the 451 reference, other than being the temperature at which paper burns, is the weight the scale offered me this morning.  Sure, it’s only a pound less than last time I posted my weight, but the amazing thing is what happened in the interim.  You see, after telling Ms. Awesomesauce I wasn’t going to weigh myself, I ended up flitting over to the local clinic and hopping on the weighticulator.  I was flabbergasted, astonished, and even downright disturbed to find my weight at 471 pounds.  In other words, during my week off, during the time when food in all its most dangerous and delicious forms was once again free game, I gained a whopping 19 pounds.

Which only makes it more astonishing, and perhaps even mildly confounding, that my weigh in put me squarely at 451 this morning.  But you know what?  I’m not going to argue.  It’s the same scale at the same clinic at the same time on the same day of the week.  I don’t know how I managed to fluctuate in the range of twenty pounds (each way!)  over the course of the past two weeks, but the scale doesn’t lie, under normal circumstances.

You know what they say:  Never look a gift horse in the mouth.  If this isn’t a gift horse, I don’t know what is.

Things are progressing nicely.  By the time October is over, I’ll have achieve the goal I had hoped I would reach in September.  That’s how it goes, of course; better late than never.  (Curses, Kent!  I almost said “Better Nate than lever”!)  My 2009 target weight- 400 pounds – probably won’t be reached in the next two months, especially with Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years Eve, and two birthdays coming up.  Still, I expect to drop at least twenty more pounds – and hopefully thirty! – by the time we ring in 2010.  Still, I’m a whole lot closer than I was just a few months back, and I’m getting closer every day.  The plan is on track for the December 31st, 2011 “final goal” of 225 pounds (or less).

All in all, things are going very well.  Clothes are getting loser, skin is getting a little more baggy (I’m told it will tighten up, eventually), and people are noticing the difference.  I’m certainly not complaining.

For that reason, I decided earlier this week to take a vacation.  No, there wasn’t a trip to Disney World involved (though you wouldn’t have heard a complaint from me), nor did I roadtrip across the Southwest United States, visiting the Grand Canyon, Roswell, and the London Bridge.  In fact, I didn’t go anywhere at all, or at least anywhere out of the ordinary.  That is, except three trips to a local Mexican restaurant, one visit to Applebee’s, and, worst of all, McDonald’s.  None of them were necessary, except perhaps Applebee’s, since I was out of town at my endocrinologist’s office and needed to stop somewhere for lunch, but I had good excuses for each and didn’t make a pig of myself.  Add to that only one chance to pop in to the gym in the past few days (what can I say?  It was a busy week!) and there you have the substance of my break from healthy eating and activity.

I’ll be back, hard at it, tomorrow.

While I’ve got your attention, might as well tell you why I was visiting the endocrinologist.  My doctor found this lump in my throat, on the right side.  Her first thought is that it’s a goiter, a non-cancerous enlargement of the thyroid gland.  According to the tests they ran, my thyroid isn’t acting up, so it’s likely just a benign cyst within the gland.  There is a small chance of the growth actually being a malignant tumor, but my doctor brushed off the possibility, saying that if I had a tumor as large as the lump currently in my neck, I’d probably be dead.  The endocrinologist, apparently, isn’t willing to take the same chance.  I go back in on Friday the 30th for a biopsy, and they’ll be able to give me a more clear picture of what’s wrong and what must be done in order to fix it.

In the meantime, I’m not letting it change who I am and what I do.  After all, it’s just a lump right now.  Sure, it’s more, but I don’t know what it is, and as long as I don’t know, I would be wasting effort and energy worrying.  It’s a lump.  Soon enough, I’ll know if it’s going to hurt me or not.  My faith is in God; I know God’s will is going to be done no matter what.  Either God will keep me safe, or God will be the strength shining through my weakness.

In either case, I will likely have to go through some kind of surgery in order to have it removed.  Until then, I guess you can just call me Lumpy.

It’s been another one of those strange weeks, too, when I haven’t set aside the time to hit the gym and get my walking in, and ended up eating out more than I should have.  The last part is especially true when you consider the size of a plate of nachos supremos at El Pueblito, one of the Mexican restaurants in town.  (Odd side note:  Small town in Kansas, and what do we have here for dining?  Well, the closest thing we had to a “classy” restaurant recently closed, leaving us with a couple greasy spoons (no complaints about that!), fast food, and the choice of three Mexican restaurants and three Chinese restaurants.  There’s that three again!)  Thankfully, the guys at El Pueblito are happy to provide take-home boxes or just whisk your plate away if you can’t (or shouldn’t!) eat any more.

Of course, it’s a difficult thing, saying “Wait, no more of that really good stuff”, especially when we have such a great time going there in the first place.  The wait staff are all from Mexico, I believe, and have been gracious enough to help me with as I learn Spanish.  Not that much of it is sticking, mind you, but if I dine there enough, maybe some of it will rub off.

In the meantime, I’ll at least get some great food.