I'm not one of those people who doesn't know how to be quiet!

So it's been over a week since I have last written. Alas.

The combination of general business and a week in California kept me away.

But now I'm back. Hooray?

I have lots of things I'm thinking about, but here's some fun for now...

enjoy until NBC takes it away.

Everything is Hypnotizing in Slow Motion.

This is what you find when you should be asleep...



...what?

A little thing that bugs me...

The words "yea" "yeah" and "yay" are three different words.

All too often, people use these interchangeably. Please stop.

"Yea" rhymes with "hay" and means basically the same thing as "hark," "thus," or "Look at this!" - also means "yes" - as in a parliamentary vote.

"Yeah" rhymes with "baa" (like a sheep's noise) and means basically "sure" or "yes"

"Yay" also rhymes with "hay" but means "Hooray!" or "I'm happy!"

"Yea" and "yay" are not the same word with different spellings. Please stop using them as such.

So far as I know, "yeh" means nothing, and is not a word. Do not use "yeh."

And weird is spelled "weird." It is only spelled "wierd" if you are intentionally spelling it wrong.

Thank you.

Love,
The Grammar King.

Another Open Letter to Addie: Heaven, Faith, & Hope...

Again, more in the ongoing saga of the email conversation between my sister, Addie, and I.

Here is my latest offering, in response to this.

*******************************************

Here's what I would say about Heaven. To start off, let's be clear: we don't know. Anyone who acts like they know doesn't know what "faith" means. That being said, I think that there is a big difference between faith and hope. Hope is something that we all have. I hope that I get to Heaven. I hope that everyone gets to Heaven. I also hope that it doesn't snow tomorrow, and that the Patriots lose the Super Bowl. At a basic level, hope is a desire, a wish. Faith is what we do with that hope. In Greek, "faith" is a verb - "pistis," as in "I faith that." It is living your life based on that hope, based on something greater than mere wishes. To have faith in God isn't just hoping that He exists; it's actually living it out.

My point in making this distinction is that most of us live with lots of hope, but not a lot of faith. If we do have faith, we often put it in the wrong things, thinking that's what will make life a "success," whether it's money, status, stuff, friends, experience, whatever. The difference comes in not living for this life, but living for what's beyond it. Now, obviously, we enjoy this life while we are here, but we don't worry about whether we lead a "full life," whatever that means, but that we lead a life that exhibits our faith in God.

As you said, this is not for our own sake, as there is nothing that we can do to become deserving of salvation. (This becomes hard, too, because we sometimes forget this, and operate as though what we do matters FOR SALVATION. What we do DOES matter, but not for our salvation. For if we could do even a bit towards our salvation, it would be safe to assume that it would be possible for someone who was really good to actually achieve it on their own. If that were the case, then there would be no need for Jesus to have sacrificed himself. But I digress - that's another issue - point is that our actions have nothing to do with our salvation). So instead, our actions, our life of faith is for the benefit of others, and for the glory of God. Our works are a RESPONSE to salvation rather than the cause of it. By loving and serving others, we are loving and serving God.

The main misunderstanding of this, however, is what it means to "love" someone. We have used the words "love" and "tolerance" interchangeably, and they are not even really all that close. To tolerate simply means to not actively try to exclude. To love means to actively try to include. Tolerance is the same as indifference. Love is the opposite of indifference.

Moreover, though, love doesn't just mean being nice. One of the key reasons that we have the image of God as a loving parent is because this is such a good example of what love really is. A parent who spanks their kid doesn't do it out of hate (well, a good parent, at least), but out of love, to correct them when they are doing something that will harm them. The fancy word for this is "admonition," which basically means to hold someone accountable out of love. This is how we are with people that we truly love. We wouldn't let people that we love do drugs or other things that are bad for them - we would confront them because we love them. This is missed in far too many churches, and in far too many people's minds.

Most think of love as simply embracing all people all the time - where no one is ever wrong. This doesn't work, and is not showing love of others. In the wealthier neighborhoods that I was in, parents would have drinking parties for their kids at their house because "they were going to do it anyway, and this way they will be safe." That isn't love at all. That is simply love of self, where the parent wants to be the "cool" friend of their kids rather than being a parent. Showing love to that person would be letting them know that this behavior is bad for you, not muddying their understanding of right and wrong.

This is what a lot of the churches are doing, though. We are trying to form a community where we affirm everything about each other, but we don't hold anyone accountable. At the heart of this, it actually has nothing to do with the hot button issue of homosexuality. There is more straight up adultery in the church than anyone would care to mention. No one talks about it because we want to be loving. In the process, we miss the point of what we are called to do.

The flip side of this is that you can't hold someone accountable if you aren't in community with them. This is perhaps an even bigger problem - the church telling people who have nothing to do with the church what they should do with their lives. THIS is the Bullhorn guy. The mission of the church isn't to fix everyone. It is to draw everyone into a loving community. That means bringing them in, as they are - broken. We are ALL broken, and that's okay. Remember, that has no bearing on our salvation.

However, it's the community that we bring people into that fixes us. If we are a community that is truly the Body of Christ, a community where the Holy Spirit is visibly present, a community that is living by faith and not simply on hope, then we are going to be a community that can have mutual accountability based on LOVE. "I want you to get better not for my own benefit or ego, but because this behavior is hurting you, and getting in the way for you to be what God created you to be."

There is a song by Switchfoot called "Meant to Live" that is awesome. Actually, I didn't like Switchfoot much at first until I really listened to this song. It's talking about how God has created us to be so much more than we are currently. We are broken. Christ died so that we could be fixed - not just in Heaven, but here on Earth as well.

Okay... I've strayed from my initial point. Heaven.

Again, none of us know. That to me is the greatest relief. God has promised me that if I have faith in Him, then I'm good - boom, eternal life. More than just hope. John 3:16, the most overused (and misunderstood?) verse in the Bible says "who so ever would believe in him..." In that verse, "believe" is the Greek word "pistis" - faith. Whosoever would faith in him..."

If we live our faith out, that is a sign of our salvation. Remember, salvation happened already - can't earn it, past tense - so anything that we do now is a sign of that salvation. Does that mean that those who live their lives in ways that imitate Christ but don't believe in God outright aren't living out signs of their own salvation? I don't know.

Again, it's not my place to know. I can have confidence in my own salvation because I know that I have faith in God and I am doing my best to live that out and do what God is calling me to do. I put my faith in God to help me to lead other people to that same conviction, to put their faith in God, but that's all that I can do.

Except hope. The Bible doesn't besmirch hope like I kinda did above. While hope may not be the active response that faith is, it's still important. Paul puts it as one of the three most important things we have (1 Corinthians 13:13 - faith, hope, & love). There is a certain limit to what we can do through our faith. God can make us do incredible things, but still there is mystery behind it all. That is where hope comes in. Hope for things that we cannot see or understand.

I wasn't too keen on Calvin before I had to read his big book The Institutes of the Christian Faith for class. Now I love him. The turning point came when he pointed out that if we are to have faith in God, the best place to look is the Bible. If we are to have faith in the Bible, we have to have faith in the whole thing. This means that we have to look at the whole thing. The great thing was that Calvin admits that a lot of the Bible doesn't make sense... and that's okay. We aren't supposed to know everything, not because God likes to keep secrets, but because we aren't able to understand everything. We aren't God, so we can never know what it is like to BE God, or to see the plan.

When you are in the middle of a forest, you have a hard time discerning where you are. You could be only 15 feet from the edge, but you might be lost in there for good. If we were able to stand on a 50 foot ladder, above all of the trees, all of a sudden, we can get a different perspective, and everything would make sense - you can see the whole forest. But when you are stuck in the midst of the trees, you can't understand that.

The Bible leads us to discern God's call in our lives (through the Holy Spirit), and how we should live that call out, but a lot of the time that won't make sense. We can't see the whole of God's plan. We are stuck in the trees. That's when we need HOPE.

I hope that Heath Ledger is in Heaven. Ultimately, though, there is nothing that I can do about that, other than to hope that he is there. Moreover, I hope that everyone gets to Heaven. I would be surprised if everyone did get to Heaven, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen. I know that God wants everyone to go to Heaven.

A friend of mine at school suggested that the only unforgivable sin is turning away from God. It was only unforgivable because you aren't there to be forgiven. That doesn't mean that we can't come back, as the prodigal son clearly shows, but it still seems to be a clear theme throughout Scriptures. A key part of free will is the will to choose to follow God or to deny God.

Essentially turning away from God is actively denying that gift of salvation. Now again, this gets into some things that are hard to understand (i.e. if denying salvation prevents us from getting it, wouldn't accepting salvation mean that we take a part in achieving it, through our acceptance of it? The answer is not really.)

In this sense, I think of it more like a ticket that has been bought and paid for. Your picking up that ticket has nothing to do with the fact that the ticket was already bought and paid for, but your refusal of the ticket is the only thing that can keep you from taking the trip.

So what do you do with this? Try to live out that faith, a faith that will uplift others, bringing them into community, and helping them to get fixed. It's not about US saving people. It's about letting God use us to restore people to Him.

Look at Jonah, probably my favorite book in the Bible. Jonah is this crybaby who doesn't want to do what God is sending him to do, and along the way, God uses him to save all of the sailors on the ship, and then 120,000 people in Nineveh, none of which Jonah intended or even wanted to help. Ultimately, this stuff is up to God.

Augustine, an African monk who lived in the 4th century, put it succinctly: If someone claims to have God completely figured out, that person does not know God at all.

Still that doesn't mean that we can't try to make some sense out of it. Augustine spent his whole life trying to make sense of it (and did a pretty good job). We just need to recognize that some of it will always be beyond our grasp. We are stuck here in the midst of the trees, trying to figure out which direction we should go in. All that we can do is listen for God's direction, and have the faith to follow where He leads us.

Okay, I think I win the prize for longest email.

Let me know your thoughts.

rock,
Tyler

***********************************************

Addie responds thusly.

Super Tuesday

I come from a generation that has been defined by disappointment and lethargy. Indifference and indignation. We don't vote because we are told that it won't matter. Even if we believe it will make a difference, we are not given choices that give us much reason to hope. We are mired in the cycle of not caring because we feel politics do not pay attention to us, when politics in turn have no reason to pay attention to us because we do not care.

Being born within a decade of Watergate, I have never known a culture in which politicians were to be trusted. This has gotten more and more pronounced as I have gotten older.

I have longed for a candidate who I can be excited about all of my life, and now that I have found that candidate, I am filled with a rush of urgency.

In December I got the opportunity to shake Barack Obama's hand twice at a town hall meeting in Iowa. After he came by to shake my hand again, all I could muster was, "Thank you, Senator." A guy behind me implored him to "not make all these promises and then break them after you get into office."

Obama stopped, and made a point to directly address this guy's urging, and as he did it, his gaze floated to the person behind me who made the request, and to a few of us who were in that vicinity. As he did, he caught me right in the eye and said, "I tell you what, if I wasn't going to do everything that I can to make keep these promises, I have no business running for president."

It was a fairly predictable response given for a sharp politician to make, and had I not been there, it would not have had the same meaning that it has for me. Having been there though, having him make this pledge quite literally and directly to my face, I could see the genuine earnestness in his words.

Without trying to sound cliched, I have hope for this election and what it means for our country, something that I have never truly been able to claim in a presidential election. I pray that it can persist, and that we are given the opportunity to see what can come of this hope...

check this.



I hope that this Tuesday means something.

The next best thing to a Steelers Super Bowl win...

Take that, Belichick.



Heh.

The ongoing conversation between my sister and I...

So this is a response that I wrote to my sister, Addie, in the midst of an ever burgeoning email conversation we have had over the past few days. She recently wrote a paper on the "messianic secret" in the Gospel of Mark for one of her classes. The "messianic secret" refers to Jesus' tendency in Mark to forbid people to spread the word that he was the Messiah.

Here is my response to her email, to which she responds here.

**************************

My understanding is pretty close to the third option that you gave, though when I first heard about it (in Na's class in college), the notion that Jesus didn't realize he was the Messiah seemed most likely (and the scariest/most confusing).

Elements of the Messianic Secret, or of it as an idea happen in Matthew and Luke as well (which makes sense, since they likely used Mark as a source), so I wouldn't simply chalk it up to Mark's writing style, though it is most clearly present in Mark.

I would say that Jesus seems to be keeping his identity hidden because people had such a clear idea of what the Messiah was supposed to be (this great warrior who would come in and essentially destroy all of the enemies and rule as a mighty king, like a super David). The entire Old Testament is calling for this Messiah, so the whole Jewish nation is well versed on it, and is really anticipating his coming.

While Jesus does essentially destroy our enemy (death, Satan), and rule on high as a king, he does it in a way that is completely different than what was expected. He doesn't come triumphantly, he comes as a poor baby. He doesn't rule as a mighty monarch, he serves as a servant, proving his love. If people had heard 'Hey, Jesus is the Messiah!' they would have had this preconceived image of what that meant that would have clouded their ability to see what Jesus truly was. He was redefining what it meant to be the 'Messiah,' and he couldn't do that if people expected him to be something else first. That is why people are so incredulous in the Passion. This guy can't be the Messiah, and it is blasphemous to think this is what a Messiah would look and act!

An even scarier (and stupid) interpretation of Mark is that Jesus wasn't God's son until the moment the spirit descends at his baptism, as this is where Mark's gospel starts - that Jesus was just a normal guy before that. This is called 'Adoptionist Theology' and it's whack. It is completely out of line with any of the other Gospels, so there's little reason to give it any credence.

Ironically, where the synoptics (Mark, Matthew, & Luke) present a Jesus who is more secretive about his divinity, John's Jesus is in people's face about it.

Going off of that (long) explanation above, this helps us to make sense of why Jesus gets so mad at Peter when he claims that Jesus is the Christ/Messiah and tries to stop the crucifixion. In saying this, Peter is saying that he knows who Jesus is, that he is this archetype of a Superhero Messiah. The reality is that Peter really doesn't get it anymore than any of the other disciples. Jesus is trying to dispel this image of the Superhero Messiah to make way for the Servant Messiah that he was, and if his own followers don't even get it, that's a big deal. The last thing he needs is his disciples telling everyone that Jesus is the Superhero they are waiting for.

In a lot of ways, Mark is encouraging to me, when I look at how stupid the disciples are in Mark. They just don't get it. It makes them human. Jesus is always trying to tell them what's up, and they keep thinking they have it all understood, but they don't. Jesus keeps trying to help them understand, but admonishes Peter when he thinks he has it all figured out, in such a way that he would be claiming that Jesus is something that he is not.

I think about this when I see things like Acquire the Fire, this really fundamentalist youth rally that uses a lot of military imagery to rope youth into waging 'war' against society. Or the people who carry signs that say 'God hates Fags.' If Jesus was mad at Peter for misunderstanding who he was, how mad must he be at these people, doing things in the name of Christ that have nothing to do with who Christ really was.

Anyway, that was long.

Tell me what you think.

rock.

Happy Groundhog Day!

Continuing my apparent trend of only posting movies,
here are two clips in honor of this great, weird holiday:

First, just the straight forward trailer for the actual movie.
I miss this announcer. Remember when his voice was on everything?


The second is mildly clever. Not quite as good as "Shining" (see previous post), but still interesting.


Enjoy your Groundhog Day, and avoid your shadows.

Visitors.

This is so true that it's ridiculous.





p.s. Lost is going to be awesome this season...

Some funny movies to pass the time...

I don't have enough time before class to do any real work, and yet it is too early to actually go to the classroom yet.

So here is some fun...

(These should be more or less okay viewing, though there may be a bit of PG-13 language in the third movie down - just check your volume)


Of these next two, watch at least a minute of this one first...


Once you have seen the original one above, check this one out...


I saw this on cable TV like ten years ago, and thought it was forever lost...

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

I have to declare something that will make me feel stupid immediately after I type it:

The new American Gladiators is one of the most entertaining shows on TV.

Yes, it is a dumb show, but it's glorious.

I have also found that it is the perfect show to watch via a DVR. In my mind, this program has no host, as I skip past all of the interview segments. They have about as much to do with the actual show as commercials do. I don't want to hear these people talk about how they have "waited all of their life for this moment... blah, blah..." I just want to see them get picked up and thrown.

I think this must be the genius to the show: people getting thrown. I don't know what it is beyond that. It is admittedly quite silly, about as silly as Pro-Wrestling. And yet, I really have no interest in pro-wrestling, yet I can't get enough of American Gladiators.



I also have a platonic crush on the gladiator that is appropriately named "Crush." By platonic crush, I mean that I simply want to be her friend. She is the only Gladiator that doesn't have some sort of ridiculously cartoonish personal. She's actually quite modest in revelry. And she always wins.

(sigh...) I need the writer's strike to end...

More thoughts on mission...

As I noted before, I took a class this month on "Mission in Context," which took nine of us seminarians into Chicago for 5 days to observe how various churches in the city approach mission in an urban context.

The title of the course, Mission in Context, creates the logical conclusion that the inverse is true, that we can perform mission out of context. As I immersed myself in the culture of the various churches that we visited during our experience, I came to realize that effective mission cannot be done out of context.

Despite this, it would seem that most congregations operate as though this weren’t the case, that in fact mission is something that exists completely out of context, in the form of money sent to starving countries, of short term mission trips that amount to small construction jobs, of patronizing support. These programs pass for the “mission” aspect of the church, while it neglects the mission that is needed in its own community, in its own congregation. Mission out of context, as enacted by actions such as those listed above, while well intended and needed, are little more than outreach – social programs. Yes, people need shelter, food, clothing, and physical care. However, when this is all that mission becomes, we have reduced mission to something that pure meets the physical needs.

In this way, the people of the Gulf Coast become little different to us than the people of Ghana or India. They simply become the “poor and needy,” a nameless “other” that we can help without ever having to recognize. It is akin to placing a dollar in the cup of a homeless person on the street, and continuing on down the sidewalk without a second thought.

The reality of the situation is that the people of the Gulf Coast are completely different from the people of Ghana and India. They share the same physical needs, but their needs do not end there, they merely begin there. When truly undertaken, mission in context in the Gulf Coast will likely look nothing like mission in the context of India. It is this understanding of “context” that can help us to move mission beyond merely outreach to sharing of community. As we begin to recognize the importance of an adaptive mission, one that looks different for each community that we are serving, we begin to realize that the goals of the mission that we are called to is to do more than just meet one’s physical needs, but also to meet and address the personal and spiritual needs.

Jesus gives a prime example in Luke 5, when he forgives the paralyzed man’s sins first, meeting the man’s spiritual needs, restoring him to God before healing his paralysis. In this passage, Jesus is recognizing something that we often miss in modern approaches to missions: that we are called to serve the person’s personal and spiritual needs as much as we are to meet their physical needs. This is why context is so important. Without understanding one’s context, we can’t begin to understand one’s personal needs. I learned this lesson over and over at the sites we visited in our mission immersion.

Mission is not just outreach and service. It is first and foremost relational. Ministry is mission. Discipleship is mission. Mission takes time, energy, and most of all love. You don't love someone by putting up a house anymore than you do by putting a dollar in a cup. To truly show love to someone take more than that. It involves showing someone that you value them enough to get to know them, to get to know what it is that they really need, rather than telling them what they need.

Putting a dollar in a cup is a good start or building a house is a good start, but that's all they are: a start.

Back for Good...

Last week, I went on a "mission immersion" to inner city Chicago as part of a class on Mission in Context. I and 8 other seminary students got to encounter several different churches in the city and reflect on how they addressed their own mission within the context of and urban environment, with quite varying methods.

It was a very eye opening experience, not in how shocking it was, but instead in how accessible it was. It made me reflect on how we do ministry over all, and that we often neglect to see the rural or suburban churches that most people live in as mission fields, but only look to the inner cities. The rural and suburban churches tend to become complacent "social clubs" and any idea of active mission is met in the form of mission trips or aid to the inner cities or Mexico or the Gulf Coast.

This is not to say that these areas are not important areas of need, but rather that we are often neglecting the needs of those in the communities that we serve. One of the pastors that we talked to put it into an interesting perspective: "The poor are everywhere. There are rich people that are poor, there are people on welfare that are poor. You don't have to come to the city to find them."

This made me reflect on how most people tend to live as though they are poor. By that I mean that most of us live for what we don't have rather than what we do have. We are constantly pining or saving for a better house, a better car, a better video game system, a better computer, a better phone - a better life. We don't recognize our blessings, but instead we simply let out lives be ruled by that which we desire. Yet once we attain that stuff, there is always something new to desire, that is just out of our reach.

At any rate, I could go off on that for a while, but I digress. One of the key things that I personally took away from last week, was a personal challenge to adjust my priorities, and to make more time for regular study and reflection. Ironically, I would group this blog in with the goal of "reflection."

In that light, I restate my previously false claim to blog on a regular basis, if even to note something small. It will help me to be more disciplined in my taking time to process things, and hopefully in engaging in some sort of dialog with folks that I don't get to see on a regular basis.

So check back somewhat regularly, and I should be here, leaving thoughts. Comment on them and we can talk about it.

boom,
Tyler

Random thought for today:
I'm much more sad about the death of Heath Ledger than I would have expected.


Here are the congregations that we visited:

The Rock Church
http://circleurban.org/pages/rockchurch.shtml

Lawndale Community Church
http://lawndalechurch.org

The House
http://thahouse.org

First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple
http://www.chicagotemple.org

4th Presbyterian Church of Chicago
http://www.fourthchurch.org

WICKERPARK GRACE
http://www.wickerparkgrace.net

25 Days of Bill Murray

Adrien and I accidentally started a tradition last year. We quite unintentionally ended up watching the movie Scrooged 13 days in a row. This happened as we would be cleaning or something, and just throw something on the TV to have something in the background, and pretty soon, we realized that we were physically incapable of getting tired of the that movie.

This year, we have set out to best that streak by 12. 25 days of Scrooged. Yep. In order to qualify, we just have to have it on at some point in the day. Falling asleep with it on counts. Now, we had a two day streak that was killed on the 4th, as we forgot to watch it, and instead watched The Shining (Merry Christmas!), but we can take this one on into the new year if we have to.

This DiMaggio like streak must happen! Today will make 4 total, but 2 in a row.

here we go...

No More Santana!

Am I the only one who realizes that Santana simply releases albums where he has other people write and sing the songs, and then he plays the same guitar solo over them?

Why are we letting this happen?!?

Someone needs to do something about this! The singer from Nickelback is a lousy singer, but he still shouldn't be booked as "Santana (featuring Chad Kroeger)." He should get full credit for that crap.

What is this world coming to when you can make a career out of playing the same guitar solo for thirty years. I mean, I'll give him "Oye Como Va," but that's where it stops. "In the Summertime" was a great song, but you don't see Mungo Jerry trying to parlay the "ugh che ugh" chorus into a decade spanning travesty.

Wake up, people. We are being duped.

I love Halloween.

Enjoy.




Happy Halloween, everybody.

If the vehicle for your procrastination becomes something that you put off doing, what is that?

So, after starting off strong, I took 12 days off. I do plan on more regular bloggin'. Honest.


Adrien and I are knee deep into our annual Halloween Month Long Movie Marathon. Last night we watched Near Dark, an eighties movie that I had heard of many places, but had not been able to see until now. It had been in an article that I read many years back about the "25 Scariest Movies You Have Never Seen," which yielded such greats as Session 9 and The Exorcist III (both of which I highly suggest).

I'm not sure that Near Dark was scary per say, but it was interesting, and it had a young Nathan Petrelli from heroes as the lead character. Essentially it is a vehicle for Bill Paxton to go crazy. This led A and I to conclude that Bill Paxton has two kinds of performances: awesome and craptacular (the kind of crapulance that makes you wonder how he can get any acting job - Nicholas Cage falls flatly into this category).

Near Dark constitutes one of his awesome performances. I wouldn't say that the movie is awesome, but it's interesting.

that's all.

Politics.

Having been a social studies teacher for 4 years, I think that politics are very important, regardless of who you support, you should educate yourself and support something.

After two and a half years in seminary, this clip has resonance on both my prior occupation and my intended one.

The clip is a bit long, so find some time, or simply let it run in the background as you work on other things. But listen to it, and tell me what you think.

It's okay to agree or disagree. Just think.

Baseball is Great

I am a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, which, for the past 15 years has been about the hardest fan in sports history to be.

The Pittsburgh Pirates are a terrible, terrible team.

I love them, but they are terrible. Part of this reason (the easiest one to blame) is the ridiculous financial make up of MLB, which allows teams like the Yankees to have a salary that is over 200 million dollars MORE than Pittsburgh's. But I digress.

My only joys in recent years have therefore come by way of hating the team that represents everything that is keeping the Pirates down: the Yankees.

I hate the Yankees.

I hate the way that Yankee fans moan at a season like this one in which they don't make the ALCS, as though the world is going to end.

The Yankees have made the playoffs for the last 13 years. Guess what, they will probably make it again next year, too.

Guess what hope the Pirates have of making the playoff next year: slightly less than Michael Vick has of playing football next year.

But for now, I can take joy in the simple fact that both the New York teams are out of the playoffs. I believe that I will be rooting for Cleveland, mainly because they haven't won a World Series in nearly 50 years, but when it's all said and done, I've already gotten my victory.

Baseball may have a lot of issues right now, but at least the bad guys won't win this year.



My only other hope is that stupid Joe Buck and Tim McCarver aren't the announcers for the world series this year now that it's on TBS, but I'll take what I can get.




go steelers.

Alas, it begins...

So long as I'm not doing what I should be (homework/reading for homework), I figured I would jot down some virtual thoughts as opposed to simply reorganizing my iTunes folder yet again.

Thus, an official Tyler blog is born - to be updated semi-regularly, as often as I procrastinate, with random thoughts, some with points, others with no substance whatsoever.

Today's Entry:

"Been around the 'World' and I-I-I..."



So I just got back from a week at Walt Disney World, and I already miss it. I feel torn between not having taken enough pictures (a cast member took Adrien and I behind the velvet rope in the lobby of the Tower of Terror and I only took three pictures, none with me or A in it), and having taken so many pictures that I missed out on being there (when it is all said and done, I came away from the week with nearly 3500 pictures - yeah, I know, obsessive).

I am constantly torn between living things and collecting things, in this case, memories. At what point does my cataloging of the events that are happening interfere my participation in the events as they happen? Do the pictures I take at Disney distract from my memories of the experience or enhance them?

Anyway, I had an awesome trip, and I want to go back... and to take more pictures.