The random thoughts inside my head

There are a lot of random things floating around inside my head. Some of them are serious, some of them aren’t. So I’ve decided to share them all with you, maybe it will inspire your own set of random thoughts.

The Pursuit of Happyness

Will Smith’s new movie is a good one. I saw it tonight, and was impressed by it. It’s not going to go down as an all-time great movie, but it was good and well worth my time tonight. I kind of felt like the director didn’t know how to play up the emotions in the movie. There are a lot of emotions that could have been elicited, but I felt like the movie moved a bit too fast through the most dramatic parts. A hard balance to find, no doubt, because there was also a time when I felt like the movie wasn’t progressing through the storyline fast enough. If they would have played with my emotions more, if they could have gotten to that tear-jerking moment in the movie, then I might have walked away saying it would be a classic. Still, I think it’s worth a trip to movie theater, especially when the movie theater is in the wealthiest part of DC and is ridiculous (read: 25 rows of stadium seating, with about 40 chairs in each row. Yup, an 800 person movie theater, complete with comfortable seating and a HUGE movie screen. $10 for a movie.$4.50 for a soda, which I opted not to get.)

The Pursuit of Happiness

The movie comes at an interesting point in my life, because I resonated with Will Smith’s character at the end of the movie. Shortly after he, against all odds, gets the job of a lifetime working for a stock brokerage, Smith narrates one final time to the audience about his childhood. How growing up he had done well in school, and shown so much promise, and had been the one who was sure to succeed. And then he wakes up in a homeless shelter one day and realizes he’s managed to fulfill none of those things that were supposed to happen to him. I think that might be my biggest fear right now. And it’s not so much that I feel incapable of succeeding. It’s that I don’t know what it is I want to succeed at. At this point in my life, the rumor is that I’m supposed to know what I want to do and how to get there. That’s what all the successful people do, they pick a dream and they work tirelessly at achieving it, right?

There are days I love the prospect of moving into a church role as an Executive Producer. I mean, I enjoy the process of planning a worship service. I can handle the administrative tasks of making budgets and meeting deadlines and all of those things. But there are days when that sounds like the last thing I want to do. Some mornings I wake up and wish I was flying for a living. Helicopters in the Navy, or commercial jets from airport to airport, or even a seaplane filled with tourists from a small island in the Caribbean. But there are days when that doesn’t sound so great, either. So my question is, how am I supposed to be the passionate, motivated guy working for his dream when I have no idea what my dream is?

Speaking of Dreams

Speaking of dreams, I have a strange record when it comes to them. Typically, I don’t have them all that often, or at least don’t remember them all that often. But when I do have them, they’re generally huge, monstrous dreams, full of vivid detail and outlandish places that are too hard to describe and not similar enough to anything real to draw comparisons. What’s really strange is the fact that often these places I dream of will randomly appear in my dreams again, many years later. A couple of nights ago, one of those places came back.

Again, it’s impossibly hard to describe the places, but this last one is an amusement park of some sort. It doesn’t feel like your typical amusement park–instead of pavement and tall fences herding you in specific directions, it’s very open. Lots of short, white fences seperate the different attractions which are in some sort of large field or meadow. The part I remember specifically has a couple of rollercoasters and a ferris wheel. The rollercoasters aren’t at all typical. One is white, and somewhat like a normal roller coaster except for the fact it does physically impossible things while you’re riding it. The other is inside, and is a mix of a haunted house with a water ride, except it’s neither scary nor wet. It’s unique. Then there’s the ferris wheel, made entirely of plastic. No steel or wood, just a plastic structure which stretches a couple of hundred feet into the sky. Of course it’s more of a ferris wheel on steroids, because it whips you around and around. Your car spins freely, and spends lots of time upside down. And to make sure you stay in, there are small ropes for everyone to hang on to. No harnesses, just ropes. It adds to the fun.

I don’t know who I spent the day there with, but I know she was blond and she was incredible.

Blondes

Today at dinner, I ate with a lesbian family. Okay, I didn’t actually eat with them, but I sat across the restaurant and watched intensely. These two blond ladies quickly struck me as odd, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that it was indeed mommy and mommy taking their children out for dinner. They had a 3 year old boy and a very young baby that I never actually saw long enough to see how old or what gender. But I found myself watching intently at what exactly a family is when it consists of two moms and children. Of course, the boy didn’t really seem to know any better. That’s the way he’s grown up, and he hasn’t gotten to the point where he’s old enough to figure out his family situation isn’t normal. And I just empathized him immensely, realizing the pain he would go through of not only dealing with his peers finding out he has two moms, but also what it means to grow up without a father influence in his life. I had one for half my life, so even I don’t fully realize how terrible it will be, but I just felt awful inside. Those poor kids are doomed from the start–there’s not a chance they will ever grow up to be even remotely close to normal.

So then I began to challenge my world view with a question that I cannot answer. I haven’t decided yet if this is a question the Pharisees would ask Jesus, or Jesus would ask the Pharisees. Suppose said lesbian family begins to get involved in a church. This church doesn’t actually exist, because it would allow them to come and get involved and not push them away for being ‘sinners’. But let’s suppose it happens anyways. So this family comes and gets involved, and slowly the two begin to feel convicted of their homosexual relationship. What happens to this family? Is it better for them to break off their relationship, and splinter their children’s family even further, or is it better for them to remain a family unit and live together despite Biblical precepts which we know to speak against their relationship? It’s probably a pharisee question, which means the answer isn’t A or B, but rather C. But I don’t know what answer C is.

C is the first letter of Christmas

I would just like to go on the record as saying the Christmas holiday has grown to ridiculous proportions. I waited through five light cycles before I got my chance to turn left into the mall to get to the movie theater tonight. FIVE! Once I got into the parking garage, I narrowly avoided no less than 6 accidents from people driving 30 miles an hour through a parking garage and expecting nothing to be in their way. After I made it inside the mall, I walked shoulder to shoulder with 4 million other people who were also in the mall, all of them stopping at the Starbucks on each floor (that’s right–THREE Starbucks in one mall!). Once I got to the movies, I found a movie theater with 16 screens being manned by one person at the ticket counter. Luckily, I’m smart enough to spot the automated ticket center… yay for computers. Christians are waging this enormous war with the media and retail, claiming we’ve all lost our focus about Christmas. And we have. But I wonder if that’s made any Christians cut back on their spending and spend more time focusing on Christ.

Our culture has gotten severely sidetracked.

Sidetracked

The rest of my random thoughts:

– Go Colts! A big win and now we’re right back at the top.

– I have a tv in my room now. I’ve returned to the land of the American.

– I forgot how much I liked geocaching until I went today, after months of hibernation.

– Grape koolaid is the best flavor.

– I’d really like to have a plastic light-up deer in my room. You know, the kind with the moving head.

That’s all for now. More later.