Music Videos

I wrote maybe three posts for today, but I didn't really love any of them, so we're just going to do a FunDay Monday post. Here are a bunch of music videos that I think are fabulous:

1. Stupid by Brendan Maclean

I first heard this song and this artist on Welcome to Night Vale, which you should totally check out if you haven't yet, available wherever fine podcasts are hidden. This video is basically a fantastic dance party to the catchiest of songs but it's a dance party with a story, dammit. 

2. Some Nights by Fun.

You know this song from the radio when it was overplayed a couple of summers ago. The video, though, is fantastic and not the story you'd think would go along with this song. This is also the first music video that I'd watched since I was into N*Sync, so it's oddly retroactively formative for me.

3. I Wanna Get Better by Bleachers

Rhetta and many people you love are in this video. I also appreciate how the song is nested in the video's story on this one. 

4a. Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise by The Avett Brothers 

Mesmerizing video for one of my favorite songs.

4b. Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise- Live by The Avett Brothers

Scott Avett's smile at 3:20 is life-giving. 

5. Creep by Radiohead, cover by Post-modern Jukebox

If you haven't listened to the joy and wonder that are Scott Bradlee's covers, listen to this one because it'll make you feel things, and then move on to Stacy's Mom, Bad Romance, and I Want it That Way, and then give him all your money because they're all fantastic. 

Look at the Stars

Let’s keep it colloquial this week. When we’re talking about Science and Religion, what are we talking about, exactly? 

Most of us when asked about science and religion would jump to the controversies created whenever scientific discovery or technology pushes into parts of human experience that religion had previously held ultimate authority over, things like the big bang, evolution or when human life begins. Those are important parts of the discussion, flashpoint topics that make us realize the depth of our beliefs, but I’d rather not use those topics as my entry point for Science and Religion¹. It’s not an empowering place to start from- you’re in a position of listening to existing arguments and picking a side instead of making discoveries for yourself. 

So let’s reframe the discussion. When you look at the night sky, how do you feel? 

The Sunflower Galaxy. Image credit to Bill Synder.

1. You look up and see stars, planets, galaxies, meteors and satellites and stand in awe of what we know. That red dot there, we know that there’s water flowing across its surface. That red dot over there, we know its size, distance, and lifespan. We can study the ground on another planet and measure the ages of the stars and galaxies. There is a whole universe of worlds to discover and systems to study, full of unanswered questions and brilliant possibilities, and we, as tiny insignificant mammals on one middle-sized rock near one middle-sized star, have the ability to understand it. 
2. You look up and see a creation, singing the glory of the One who made it, in awe of the Being who set the stars and the planets in the sky, ordering their courses, leaving them as one last bastion of untouchable beauty in a broken and hurting world. The universe is huge and filled with wonders and we are so small and insignificant in comparison and yet we are loved. The same God who made the galaxies and the nebulas is the one who came to save us from ourselves because He loves us. The night sky is a humbling miracle. 
3. You look up and see the constellations, the patterns of stars with hundreds of stories to tell. You feel connected to people from thousands of years ago who looked up at these same stars and saw heroes and monsters and people and beasts? There’s the Big Dipper, or the Plow, or the Drinking Gourd, but it’s the same seven stars pointing to the north of our sky. And Orion, a hunter or a shepherd or a giant or a drum, but with those three stars anyone can pick out of any northern hemisphere winter or southern hemisphere summer sky around the world. No matter our differences, we’re joined together with everyone around the world, all living and dying under this same sky.
4. You stay inside because you can’t see any stars from where you are anyway, content with the world as seen on the TV or phone or computer screens. Because if you wanted a pretty picture of space, you could just google it without the discomfort of outside. 

What did you pick? None of those choices, right? Nothing fit exactly. Maybe you’ve felt each one of those over course of your life. Maybe you’d like to combine one or two or all of the choices or maybe your choice depends on your mood or the day you’ve had. Maybe one of them hints at a universal truth, or maybe none of them do. But the beauty of human existence in the twenty-first century is that we have this choice. We have options for what we want to believe. We get to set the definitions. 

That, to me, is what Science and Religion is about. It’s about how we choose to view our experience of existence, where we go to find answers about the deep questions of who we are, where we came from, what we should do with our lives. Religion in power used to have the main say on those kinds of questions, but science has opened up the universe and made it knowable, bringing in a whole host of new questions with that opening. The controversies are the growing pains of maturing human thought.

Practically, of course, none of that matters. You can live your life trying to be nice to other people, at least when it’s convenient, and you’ll probably get by just fine. You can find happiness without pondering the existence or lack thereof of God. Probably, actually, you’d find much more immediate happiness by avoiding that question altogether. There is such a wealth of experience found in interactions with other humans, enough to make a full life of it, that we don’t need to look for any other “deeper” meaning. 

But if the night sky or the mountains or the ocean or the laugh of a baby or the impending death of the Sun has ever made you pause and think about the wonder of it all, stick around. We’ve got some fascinating places to go.

---

1 Starting at, say, evolution leaves me with the feeling that I should be talking in a hushed voice because mommy and daddy just had a fight and I don’t want to upset either of them again, like religion is your mother who’s so kind but who is also convinced she knows best and your dad is science who can do so many awesome things but can also be kinda a dick sometimes.^↩

An Away-Day Meditation

On Saturday morning, I woke up to my alarm, hit snooze until I absolutely had to be up, and rushed out the door without my coffee. This is normal. This is something I do when I'm home.

I got on a charter bus with other people from my school and from my program and was ferried along the highway for maybe an hour or so, past fields and hills and livestock. I've stopped counting the number of hours I've spent on tour buses in my life and I don't even want to try to estimate the number of miles I've travelled in a vehicle. Even the twisting and turning roads getting into town felt normal. It felt like home.

We got out of the bus in Comrie, a little town on the edge of the Highlands, and were ushered into a church. Within minutes, I knew where the bathrooms, kitchen, and office were. Despite the hot tea and "biscuits" being served, I'm no stranger to a church. I must have visited at least a hundred on various and sundry trips. This was normal. This felt like home.

We played that get-to-know-you signature bingo. You know, the one where you have a grid with one description per square, like "born outside the US" or "has two dogs", and you have to fill in a name for each square and the first one to get all the names wins? Other than the fact that the descriptions were things like, "born outside the UK" and "has read more than 10 pages of the Quran", this was something I've done many a time. The way the ambient noise in the room increases and one intensely competitive pack forms while everyone else casually searches for someone who plays an instrument is something I've come to anticipate from games like this. It's normal. It feels like home.

There are these rivers that meet in town, two or three, I don't remember, and I don't know their names. But one of them flows right past the back of the church, all white caps and bubbles as it goes over the rocks and around bends, and there's a bench under some trees where you could sit and watch if you'd like.  And there's a waterfall back up in the woods. We went on a hike as a group and took some pictures.

And the woods, they go on, it feels like forever, green as far as the eye can see, moss covering fallen tree trunks and running up living tree trunks and leaves blocking out the grey of the sky. I guess it's the right amount of green for October- I'm not used to noticing until I'm driving up into the mountains. And after some serious climbing, we came up on this view.

And I know, I know that the hills are different, that these are someone else's rocks jutting up from someone else's section of our planet and I know that this grass and these trees and everything around me is different, subtly suited to the climate here as opposed to there and I know they see the stars in different places and I know that no one sounds like me, but when I see these hills and when I see these fields and when I see these trees, it feels... normal. It feels like home. And that bittersweet longing that tugs at your insides when you've found the place that you'd want to rest in until your days are done, I feel that most when I'm out there near the mountains, with peaks and valleys laid out before me, just barely covered in blankets of trees and brush, where the air bites just a bit and the wind catches you in the back like an old friend. It's crushing, having that knowledge of where your soul wants to be and having to leave at the end of the day anyway.

Then again, that leaving, that feels normal too. That also feels like home.

The Tumblr Conundrum

I’ve decided that I’m going to stop pretending that I’m not an adult. Adults are, by the safest definition possible, people who are responsible for themselves and if nothing else, I am that. Oh, and I pay for my own Netflix. So yeah. Adult.  

Somewhere in my past, 18-year-old me is raising her hand so she can ask when we stopped being an adult because she’s convinced that she is one, poor dear. She’ll take ten seconds to evaluate my life and say that yes, empirically, I’ve been an adult this whole time. I’ve been basically financially independent since starting college, I’ve paid for my own heath insurance since I was 19, I’ve done my own taxes for years, I’ve taken care of all of my basic needs on my own, and I had a job, almost a career, for four years straight, that I left of my own accord to pursue an academic field I'm interested in. Plus, dude*, you’re 27. There’s absolutely no way that anyone over the age of 25 can consider themselves as anything other than an adult. Just not possible. 

Then again, I have Batman sheets, a stuffed Sadness from Inside Out and a tumblr, so really, whether I truly qualify as an adult or not is anyone’s guess.

The thing is, I don’t feel immature or irresponsible or childish or incapable. I could have bought taupe sheets and deleted my tumblr and that wouldn’t change the underlying fact that I don’t feel like I’ve grown up any in terms of responsibility since I started college. I had the future-focus and life-planning skills down early on in life and I’ve always had a good head on my shoulders about most things. I like to see myself as an old soul that took a couple of years off to take in the things about life that I missed enjoying when I was busy being serious. I sing and laugh a lot more now than I did in high school. I think the diversion from adulthood was worth it, if it means I get to keep that.

So now, I guess, it’s time for the pendulum to swing back. It’s high time I started taking myself seriously again and regained some focus. To that end, I’ll start being more thoughtful before I speak and more intentional when I write. I think I’ll take Fridays as a chance to start writing a little more concretely about science and religion as a way of solidifying all the new knowledge that I have, with an eye to moving the best of that over to a more professional blog in the future. And though there’s a tired little part of my soul that’s sighing in disgust right now because she doesn’t care to be doing work of any kind, I think we’ve got to listen to the voice of reason here. 

Just maybe not all the time. 

Sadness Selfie! Because everything is improved with Sadness. 

*I don’t think I would have said dude when I was 18. Too busy trying to be pretentious. But I’m going to project some of my current moxie backwards anyway. History is written by the victors. 

But What Do I Know, Anyway

I was walking up from the library stacks the other day and I realized that at some point, we stopped talking about facts. Somewhere, we stopped talking about things that we know because to say that you know something is difficult. To be certain of anything is almost a joke. At this stage, all the ideas we’re talking about are just that- ideas. Some ideas are more supported than others, some ideas logically lead to others, some ideas are more entrenched than others, but none of them make it into the realm of complete and total confident knowledge. 

So that’s great. 

I mean, everything from here on out is going to be reading about someone’s idea and thinking about someone’s idea and critiquing someone’s idea and coming up with an idea to compliment or contradict or build on someone’s idea. And that’s how things are done, which is the striking bit to me. 

I didn’t ever realize how much I liked experimental science until this moment. It’s not just talking around the issue. You see something interesting, you try to explain it, you do experiments, you get results, and in all of the basic experiments, you learn something. Something is explained. Something can be predicted. Something can be known as true or untrue. 

But then I remember how much we lie to children. We say there are five senses to make the idea of senses easier to grasp, when you really have twenty of them at least. We say there are nine eight planets because explaining the nuances of classification of really big rocks or balls of gases and liquids in space isn’t easy and we’re constantly having to re-evaluate it. There are, what, seven continents, but only because Europe wants to feel special. Most of the things I think I know are actually asterisks all the way down.

 And all of that is just about observable things, things we can see and conceptualize. It doesn’t even touch on the things we feel or believe without physical proof. And maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe those two things should stay separate. No one wants science to tell them what to believe, especially when the science we learned in school was a lie an incomplete picture of what could be conceived of to be true. And no one wants any specific religion directing science, especially since we can all get through our daily lives without needing to appeal to science or religion.

We were walking out of the building after class on Tuesday and talking about some of the ideas that popped up during the discussion, like whether which interpretation of quantum mechanics you choose to adhere to has to change what you believe, theologically. The idea that had come up in class was that you can go about your life either way. Quantum indeterminacy doesn’t have to change anything for you, really. Who thinks about that kind of stuff, anyway? 

And as we talked, we came around to something that I fundamentally believe to be true. I believe that someone needs to be thinking about this. About all of this. Quantum mechanics helps to explain the smallest things in our world, it has direct influences on the technology that we use, and just because I can’t be bothered to be in a lab doesn’t mean someone else shouldn’t be. And the same thing goes for religion. We have these complex belief systems that have sustained people for centuries, millennia even. Shouldn’t someone be thinking about that, asking questions about what we believe and what that means, especially in an age where science has so fundamentally altered how we see the world and think about reality? 

So that’s a motivating factor, if you like. 

I’ve got this impregnable heart and soul but it exists in this world of discovery, and exploration, and interaction with others and that world is unspeakably complex. You can go about your day loving the people you’re going to love, eating the food you’re going to eat, doing the things you’re going to do inside the closed system of our planet and the social structures we’ve built upon it and you never have to ask why or how. But I think somebody has to. I think those are important questions. 

Questions that might not have answers, but important questions nonetheless. 

Just Your Typical Wednesday

Let’s try some reverse solipsism here. You ever feel like everyone else is more complex than you, like they’re in on some secret, some way of looking at the world that you don’t have access to yet? Like you’re the one in the process of growing and everyone else is already there? Okay, so not technically reverse solipsism, but I can’t pretend that everyone else is real and I’m not. I’m here. Like, I’m right here.

Oh no. 

What if I’m not? How would I know? What am I, even? What does it mean to be me?

Okay, not helpful. Let’s proceed forward under the assumption that I’m real and that I’m here and so are the rest of you, because that’s much more useful. Great. Phew. I feel better already. 

It’s just- and I know this is just a pile of insecurities on my part, but- I feel like I had myself figured out, you know? I felt like I knew my place and my abilities and my strengths and my weaknesses, but it’s like moving to a new city flipped all that around. It’s not particularly helpful that I’m starting a completely new endeavor that requires me to, at least for right now, spend a lot of time laying the mental groundwork for a lot of future study. It’s like somebody tossed me a pile of tangled yarn, told me that I’ll need to make a sweater out of it soon, and said, “Oh, by the way, some of those are sharp,” on the way out the door. Like, what? Why? How? What purpose could any of this be for? Why would anyone sign up for this? 

And that’s an answer for Friday and I promise, I have it together and I’m fine and I’m excited about everything and I’m making friends. No one panic. I went out to the pub with my flatmates for my birthday and I’ve made friends with a girl my program who brought me cake, which was just the best, and I’m getting along just fine. It’s only that I miss the comfort of being good at my job. I miss the ability to get pizza and beer and watch half of a season of a show in one sitting with friends. I miss my friends. I miss the results of all the work I already did finding my place in the world. I forgot how much work I put in to get to that place. 

But hey, you know, everyone’s awkward when you first meet them and everyone says dumb things and makes weird first impressions and all of that. And I’m getting better at coming to the metaphorical table and meeting people and hanging out and stuff. I made new facebook friends. It’s just a slow process for me, you know? I don’t like opening up. I hate silences, so I spew like ten thousand words a minute and at least six thousand of those fall flat and I’m internally dying, but like, none of that is me. At least, it’s not the me that I know. But we’ll figure it out. Life will move past all this eventually. 

Just a blanket apology to everyone waiting on the growth spurt. I’m working on it, I promise. It’s all just a process. And anytime anyone else wants to chat about how they’re still figuring it all out as well, I’m a hundred percent here for you. It’d be a nice confirmation of my existence.

It's My Birthday!

October 5th, 2014:

gif source

And thus began a pretty solid year, if I say so myself. Applying for grad school, getting into grad school, going on adventures up and down and across the country, moving to a new country, living in said new country where there are castles and actual golden-looking coins used for money... it's been good. And other stuff too, but, you know, good.

I'm celebrating this year by spending some quality time with the library, of course, but there's also a pub and a group of friends calling my name post-study, so don't lose hope for me yet! Here's to another fabulous twenty-something year!

gif source