What Would Rommel Do?

As someone with a degree in theology, I have a lot of Jesusy books. Most of them are very good, but some of them are quite bad.

A very popular form of Christian Literature is the devotional - books that often provide a text of Scripture and/or some piece of Jesusy wisdom in short snippets that are easy to digest. I have a daily devotional of passages from C.S. Lewis that I absolutely love (and that has also given me a near encylopedic knowledge of much of his more popular work). But I dislike the majority of them. The arbitrarily snipped out Bible verses are a particular peeve of mine, since it runs against the way I think the Bible should be read. But the vast majority of them are not comically bad enough that I would write something about them.

Enter God's Little Devotional Book (for Men)

I received this book a while back as a gift. I'm sure that whoever gave it to me only had the best intentions. But it is not a good book.

First of all, what a horrible title. As if this is the devotional book that God reads every morning. Or maybe since this is God's little devotional book, this is the book that he reads when he's on vacation and didn't want to pack the larger text. God likes to travel light. If at all possible, He always tries to avoid checking any baggage. But He's also careful to respect the other passengers and not try to cram too much into the overhead compartment.

My second problem with the title is that too much of Christian life gets divided into gender categories. I feel like the Church often still operates as if it's Middle School Health Class and we're discussing reproduction. Practically every Bible Study I was ever in during college was a Men's Bible Study. That had a lot of faults. It really narrowed the concerns that we had, and we spent most of the time discussing women and when we would get married, and how to control our out-of-control lustiness. For a culture that places so much emphasis on finding the right person and getting married and having kids and the perfect family, I don't see how it's very helpful to keep both sides of the gender line apart so that they can stew in their own anxieties. Or maybe that's the only way to keep from having a weird Jesusy orgy break out.

This devotional for men also puts a great deal of stress on how to be Jesusy and succeed in the world of business (two things that I don't see as particularly linked and should probably more than often be in opposition). So I shudder at the idea of what the devotional book for women might contain. Although come to think of it, I can get angry at the male gender bias as well. Screw you. Maybe Jesus wants me to be a stay-at-home Dad. I think I could do a lot worse.

Anyways, the jaw-dropping hallmark of this particular book cements my unwillingness to take anything it says seriously. (And I don't mind quoting from it without permission, as it is truly horrible).

On one page there is a pithy statement and a Bible quote:

Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes.

"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men." Colossians 3:23 NIV

And then on the ensuing page it recounts the following:

His teachers considered him to be a lazy student. One said he was convinced he would never amount to anything. Another said, "If Rommel ever hands in a dictation without a mistake we'll hire a band and go off for a day in the country."
That was all the incentive young Rommel needed. He immediately sat up, paid attention, and turned in a dictation without one single error. He obviously could do the work if he wanted to and if there was sufficient enticement to get him to make the effort! When the promised award was not forthcoming, however, Rommel fell back into his old ways.
Later in life Rommel did find a cause he could believe in. It fired his ambition to the extent that he was filled with driving energy, rose above the ranks, and eventually gained a reputation as one of the ablest military men in the world. Marshal Rommel became known as the "Desert Fox", one of Germany's foremost heroes in World War II.
Each person is motivated differently. For most people, the deepest motivation lies in their faith. However, the outcome of motivation is universal: It sparks the actions which will change your dreams into reality.

So...

This particular devotion starts with a quote from Colossians. And frankly, it's probably not the best quote to just yank out of context, because it's a part of one of the "Household Rules" texts - "wives, obey your husbands" and what-not. Considering the patriarchal society in which the Bible was written, this is precisely the sort of text that I think one should only draw from with the utomost care. This is a particular area where it seems that Scripture's guidance should be taken with more than just one grain of salt. I don't think that these texts are without significance, but I do think that they should come with labels saying "Handle with Extreme Care."

This particular quote comes from a handful of verses specifically directed to slaves or servants (the word in Greek can mean either). So, yeah, another sign that this shouldn't be presented to the modern reader without a great deal of context and interpretation.

And then what does this book do with that quote?

Well, first there's an insinuation that it's cool to only really be motivated by people harshing on you. What matters is that you were motivated. And then of course Rommel finds an even better cause (The Nazi Party and Hitler's desire to rule the world and cleanse it of everyone who doesn't look like him) and, yay, he's motivated. And you know what, he's motivated so much that he becomes one of Hitler's top generals! Hurray! So remember that each person is motivated differently, but apparently motivation is some Good in its own right, because at least it means that you're getting something done. So make sure that you're motivated, because only then can your dreams become a reality. Especially if your dream is to kill lots and lots of people.

(sigh)

Apparently, God should find a different devotional.

Pool Fool

In an attempt to make myself slightly more attractive I sometimes head out to my apartment complex's swimming pool. I always do this during the day on weekdays because A) it's no fun hanging out by the pool by yourself in the dark (and it's against pool regulations) and B) it's a lot less crowded than on the weekends.

I don't have a lot of issues about my own body, so it's not that I mind there being other people around to enjoy my comically lanky physique. Instead, for whatever reason, I operate under the assumption that if I take a deck chair immediately next to someone (even if it's the only one left available at a crowded pool) they will immediately assume that I am a perverted lanky person who is out to rape them. This is not a rational thought. I have not polled people on this issue. Nevertheless, it is the basic assumption under which most of my pool etiquette operates when I'm just a lone guy at the pool. Everything I do has to be very kosher and all of my behavior has to be very purposefully antithetical to any kind of behavior that a casual, lanky rapist might conceivably exhibit.

Also, if I sat directly next to someone, they might talk to me, and that would freak me out. Plus, if I had already taken my shirt off, I would be uncomfortable replying to them - BECAUSE THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT A RAPIST WOULD DO!


There's been a weird phenomenon at the pool at the off-peak times at which I frequent it. I've gone 3-4 times, and every single time there has been exactly ONE 20-something woman sunbathing and ONE parent/babysitter with 1-2 children. And these categories have never been filled by the same people twice. So there's always one similarly aged woman that I need to make sure doesn't think i'm a rapist, and one person who is slowly but gradually worn down by the task of watching kids at a pool. It's a surreal kind of deja-vu every time I go.


The last time I went to the pool, I was planning on making a whole afternoon of it. I hadn't gotten a lot of sleep the night before, and it seemed like a really good idea to just fall asleep poolside. That way I'd get a nice nap, and maybe I'd be able to take my shirt off and not have people wonder if I had spent the summer in Reykjavik. So I got myself all covered up with sunscreen to keep myself safe. I made extra-sure to remember to get my feet. I always forget my feet. When you're 6'4'' and not very flexible, it takes a lot of effort to rub something on your feet. You have to really want it.

Nonetheless, I didn't put any sunscreen on my face. For whatever reason, it always seems like my face is the hardest thing to get tanned. And I really like getting sun on my face on account of the fact that it makes me look more appealing to myself. And someday I hope to be wrinkled.

Anyway, I was all onboard with the no-sunscreen-face plan until I got out there, and, as the expression goes, the sun hit the face. It was then that I realized some important things.

1. I like my face.
2. If I had to choose the part of my body I would least like to be burned by the sun, it would probably be my face.
3. If I had to choose the part of my body I would least like to be inflicted with skin cancer, it would probably be my face.

So this left me in kind of a pool pickle, because I had already made the strenuous 50 yard walk to the pool and had stupidly left my sunscreen back in my apartment. So, it was going to take a lot of effort to go back and get that. And, as I mentioned, I had already reached all the way down to my feet just minutes earlier. So I was pretty exhausted. Plus, why would I leave the pool merely minutes after arriving? What would other people think? That I had forgotten my special rapist hat?

I ended up spending an uncomfortable couple of hours wherein I would alternately cover my face to make sure that I wasn't getting my face burned off, but also not cover my face for too long so as not to suggest that I was trying to avoid being recognized as a known rapist.


In conclusion, I am not a rapist and it is very important to me that you realize that. I am, however, a ridiculous person.

Defining the Relationship

Since I've started to enjoy this stupid thing, and I know of two other people who do as well, I figured I'd take a little time to clarify this blog's purpose.

I titled it Jellytown, mostly because that's a silly name that makes me laugh. Also, I have a lot of friends in New York City with whom a blog like this forms what is unfortunately one of the few means of regular interaction (albeit interaction that is really silly). My defining characteristic from the years I spent in NYC with those friends was my propensity to consume significant amounts of jelly, straight from the jar. Thus, it seemed that Jellytown was an appropriate name for my little internet locale.

What I want to do with this blog is to entertain. It's going to be a lot like my old T.J. Monkey's thoughts (see the link to the right), although a little bit more freely structured. I plan on "shooting from the hip" a little bit more than I did with a lot of that writing, especially the later thoughts. So, as we've seen, it's gonna be a lot of my dumb thoughts about what I would do if I was in a band, or my adventures with mold.

It's not gonna be very biographical. I'm looking at this more as "writing exercise" than "online therapy". If I'm in a bad mood, I will not be taking the train to Jellytown. (Although I may drown my sorrows in a nice jar of Smuckers Strawberry Preserves, which, I suppose, could very appropriately be euphemistically referred to as "taking the train to jelly town.") This isn't to say that I don't enjoy your blog that deals mostly about how you've started taking up Brazilian Jujitsu. In that particular instance, I really do enjoy your blog. It's great and fascinating. But that's not this blog.

I have lots of artistic friends who seem to write very deep but very vague things in their blogs. Things like "today I realized that the most important thing you could ever say is "can I get a refill?" I don't doubt my ability to be vague, but I'm not very deep. So, if you don't understand something, please tell me. It means that I screwed up. Again, this is not to say that I don't like those vague and alluringinly deep blogs. But that's not this blog.

Finally, with the advance of youtube and other sites, there are a lot of blogs that do a lot of linking to other interesting stuff on the internet. Also, good bloggers will go the effort of turning words into hyperlinks like this. I probably won't. The reason for that is that I'm lazy, but more specifically, I'm lazy in different ways than a lot of other people. I honestly just don't want to go to the effort of doing the really simple work of linking to other things. I consider it to be over and above the call of duty when I do things like italicize (see the last sentence. I think it really added a necessary punch). But on the other hand, it's also kinda lazy to use your blog simply as a means of pointing to other interesting stuff. I'm more than willing to go through the work to create fully original entries with every post. (Truly creative entries like this one, where I talk about my blog on my blog. It's almost dangerously creative. I hope my aforementioned artistic friends are reading this...) So, this blog is just basically gonna be a lot of writing. Is that more interesting than Spider Solitaire? I leave that to you. Again, to those of you good citizens who work to promote the latest viral video or flash game involving peeing, I'm not trying to condemn your work. I enjoy those blogs a lot. But that's not this blog.

Finally, a lot of blogs are just sad attempts by people who think they are funny to pathetically wring out a little more of their friends' attention, mostly by taking advantage of the desperate boredom that many of them face at their jobs. Well, that is this blog.

Makin' It Classy

I finally got around to cleaning up some of the default blogger settings on this page. For those of you who may have been confused, it was never my intention to provide everyone friendly links to a help page that tells you how to edit the links on your blogspot page.

It should be noted that I put A LOT of thought into which blogs to which I would link. It's a very definitive list. So, for instance, if we're good friends, and you have a blog, and everything is totally cool with us, and we call each other every week to check in, and we have a regular cribbage game on Tuesdays, and I'm the godfather of your child... well, in truth, I actually hate you because clearly I didn't link to your blog.

I'm new at this, so I'm not familar with the nuances of blog etiquette. I tried to make sure to include everyone that has already linked to me. I don't want to be the guy with the jelly store, and the guy from peanutbutter emporium sends a gift package of peanut butter, and then I don't return the favor. Because we all know that guy.

And I also included a sexy little pic, cropped out of an old family Christmas Card. Now the page looks classy, and probably exactly the same as 10 million other dumb blogs.

Please Submit All Show Proposals to Jesus

The benefits and disadvantages of having graduated from Divinity School, from a secretarial perspective.

Benefits:
I can type the following words very quickly. They practically roll off the fingers:
Christian
Catholicism
Soteriology
Catechesis
Apostolic
Ecclesiology
Epistemology
Transubstantiation
Clarinet

Disadvantages:
Whenever I type the name "Chris," there's a 75% chance that out of habit I accidentally continue on and type "Christ".

Anyway, that's the reason that the DSI Artistic Committee now consists of myself, Zach, and Christ.

And that is the reason for the upcoming 6 month run of Salvationprov.

Maybe it's just extra-tangy butter...

I was halfway through the process of making a grilled cheese sandwich when I realized that I was using moldy bread.

This comes about a week after I was sitting in my living room, eating slices of buttered bread and wondering why they tasted tangy - MOLDY BREAD! It was horrible, because I had definitely already eaten a whole slice of it when I came to this realization, and there was another whole mouthful of moldy tanginess that had to be spat out comically at the conclusion of my very slow realization.

So, admittedly, I should have been more alert on the moldy bread lookout. (Don't worry. It wasn't the same loaf of bread. I'm not a complete moron.) But the problem is that this mold is some kind of freaky stealth mold. Maybe it's just my sheltered upbringing, but I'm used to my mold being blue-green, and growing up and out of the bread, and generally making itself known to the world. But this mold is bread-colored and it operates within the very fabric of the bread itself. It's camo-mold. And it succeeded in its mission to get me to eat what I thought was inexplicably tangy bread and/or butter. And then it presumably died an ignoble death in the acidic depths of my tummy.

What troubles me is that camo/ninja/stealth-mold doesn't really make sense to me on an evolutionary level:
Nobody wants to eat mold, so it seems like it would be to the mold's advantage to come out and be very open about itself. "We're here. We're mold. Get used to it. And please when you dispose of us, place us somewhere moist."

So, I'm not sure what the mold is up to. But if you eat some bread that is tangy, by all means, take the time to ponder and investigate what it is that is making the bread taste tangy. But do NOT continue to eat the tangy, funky bread while you work through that process. I learned that extremely obvious lesson the hard way.

My First Correction

Well, I'm only a handful of posts in and already I've screwed something up. But it's OK, because I learned something that I never knew and I've also been inspired to contemplate the nature of communication in general. It relates to my post concerning how Hardee's commercials make me nauseous.

While away from my apartment, my friend Flynn left me a series of IM messages, which I will distill now into one readable paragraph:

Bret! I am reading your blog and I wanted to point out a common error that you should correct because I respect and like you and don't want others to think you made this error. When you feel the need to vomit, you are nauseated, not nauseous. "Nauseous" is the property of making one nauseated. And you, my friend, make no one want to chum the room in which they are residing. So people making eating noises is, in itself, nauseous, and makes you nauseated. Thank you and goodnight.

First of all, Flynn is clearly very smart. I'm happy to make that known to more people via this blog. So kudos to him, and many thanks for the kind way in which he went about his correction.

Second, I absolutely never knew this! That's kind of amazing, because I am also really smart. And for the most part I generally do a good job at understanding the language in which I speak. But I looked it up, and Flynn's definitions were correct.

However, the misuse of these words is so prevalent, that even the dictionary included a "Usage Note" referencing the fact that the vast majority of people use nauseous to mean nauseated, and nauseating to mean nauseous. That creates an interesting conundrum for a writer wishing to express his nauseated condition. If my goal is to communicate myself to the reader, should I be more concerned with the correct usage of a word, or the way in which that word will be received by the reader. The fact that dictionaries include a secondary definition of "nauseating" for nauseous is a testament to the way in which popular usage can alter the meaning of a word.

So what to do? Stand up for the word's intended meaning, or ride the wave of popular expression?

Well, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna correct people's misusage of "nauseous" at every juncture I can. Because I like feeling smart. And I'm kind of a jackass.

Perseverance

About a week ago, I tried to twist off the top to a 16oz Mt. Dew and I failed completely. I was totally thwarted. I tried wrapping my shirt around it and twisting, drying off my hands, I even knocked the plastic bottle against various surfaces in an effort to loosen it somewhat.

Every day since then, I've pulled it out of the fridge for a couple minutes to see if it was ready to yield its delicious treasure. But there was no such luck. I was legitimately worried that there was some kind of factory error and opening it wouldn't have even been a possibility. In case of such an event I was thinking of ways in which I could try to pierce the bottle and drain it into some kind of waiting receptacle.

Today I finally brought some pliers into the mix and... Success!

After my first swig I looked sincerely at the bottle and said aloud, "I was NEVER going to give up on you."

This is my life.

The first thing I heard when I turned the TV on today:

"Paintball... is like chess with guns."

Boo on Hardee's

As much as I enjoy good television advertising (anybody still remember the Bud Ice penguin?), I still hold to the idea that an advertising campaign is more likely to keep me from ever buying something than to convince me to buy something I wouldn't have otherwise wanted. Case in point: my brother still won't buy (or receive as a gift) Duracell batteries on account of their advertising campaign several years ago that featured strange "people as toys" which my brother dubbed "Plastic People."

Anyways, I am forever abstaining from eating at Hardee's on account of their horrible advertising campaign of the last couple of years. My official stance is that I'm protesting their horrible misogynistic and ridiculous conception of masculinity and what is required of someone who would want to eat a large, well-made burger.

But my even bigger problem with the commercials is that they often include a lot of sounds of people eating. And it grosses me out. There's a couple which feature the idea of licking the extra cheese off the wrapper, and seriously I have to change the channel before I become nauseous. It's like when you're flipping through, and you land on the Health channel and you see a quick image of someone's open torso and their spleen separated from their body. Except for that doesn't make me want to boycott necessary surgery.

On the other hand, I really love the Sonic commercials because they're very funny and feature improvisors with whom I am familiar. I intentionally tried to go to a Sonic one time when I was at a wedding, but I got scared off by their drive-in style system. Oh well.

I'm the mayor of Jellytown

I thought of this while I was with my girlfriend, so she gets muse points for this.

Many of my friends in college were nice dudes who didn't get a lot of ladies. In some ways, this was the separating mark between my all-dudes a cappella group and the other one on campus. We made better music and were nicer and very polite. The other dudes were kind of fratty jackasses who were the kind of people that made ladies want to get drunk and make out with them.

As such, my fellow compatriots would often describe how they felt themselves to be stuck in the "Friend Zone." Because, really, we weren't that much better than the fratty jackasses. We still wanted to spend most of our time making out with girls that we hung around and found attractive. It was just that our own courteousness and respect for others got in the way a lot of the time. As such, we usually ended up just being the trusted friends of these girls with whom we really wanted to make out. Thus, we resided in the "Friend Zone". In the very common worst-case-scenario, we would end up being the person to whom the female complained when she grew frustrated with her own tendency to hook up with only fratty assholes. There was a lot of sexual frustration in the Friend Zone.

Anyway, I had one particular friend (and now I refer to that term in its normal usage, and not as someone who was stuck in my Friend Zone) who spent a particularly large amount of his time in the Friend Zone. As such, he took to calling himself the Mayor of the Friend Zone, as a way of distinguishing just how much time he lived in this curious state of sexual frustration. And this particular distinction was not limited to the Friend Zone. If you drank a ton of Pepsi, you'd be the mayor of Pepsitown. If you were really into Pokemon, you'd be the mayor of Pokemonville. In that particular case, you would also hopefully be a child.

I realized recently that I accepted this whole idea of Mayorship, yet in no way does it reflect how mayors of particular cities and towns are chosen. The mayor is not the person who most embodies the characteristic of a particular town. He's just some dude (or dudette!) elected to make sure things are going alright for everybody in that town.

For consistency's sake, one of the two following repercussions should take place:

1. Towns should have to elect their mayors based on the defining attribute of that town. So, the mayor of Milwaukee is the dude (or dudette!) who makes the most beer. And the mayor of Chicago would be the dude (or dudette?) with the biggest moustache. Obviously, to make this even better, some towns should change their name to things like BigEarsville or Funtoplayboccewith City.

2. People who claim to be the mayor of things like the Friend Zone should have to make sure that things are running smoothly in the Friend Zone. Like, they should check with other lame dudes and make sure that they're still sexually frustrated and that Liz is still hooking up with guys who treat her like crap.


Anyway, I'm the mayor of Jellytown, because I created it.

(Although I do LOVE jelly!)

Me and my famous band

For a long time I've wanted to be in a famous band, but for unusual reasons. It's never been so that I could get lots of money or girls or fame. It's for stupid reasons, like the little things that I would want to put in our liner notes, or the respectful way in which I would treat stadium personnel at our shows, or the album that I would release where all of the songs would be about small woodland creatures.

Lately, I've wanted to be in a famous band so that all of our music videos could be shot-for-shot remakes of 80s music videos. The first one would be Journey's "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)".

Famous bands should either be as fun and clever as me or stop hogging all the famous band action.