Two entirely unconnected things that make me really excited.

#1. Adam

I cannot WAIT to see this (thanks to a glowing review it got in Relevant today). a) It simply looks extraordinary — courageous, funny, not-your-average-love-story, but also not some typical “see the mentally handicapped guy triumph and get a high five” kind of story. (Oh, and b)…I’ve had a thing for Hugh Dancy forever. That’s pretty much b.)

#2. Bird by Bird

To say I love this book simply isn’t enough. Perhaps to say I’ve found a kindred spirit in Anne Lamott is sniffing nearer to the truth. This book is full of all sorts of things that I have always thought and felt, but now, it turns out I wasn’t alone in it this whole time. (And I have to admit…it makes me believe more that I just might be a “real writer.”)

“Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life — wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean. Aren’t you?”

My friend Amanda once told me “I run only so I can eat stupid amounts of pancakes.”

I kind of feel that way about all food (except fish and things with funky textures).

Except I don’t run (unless chased).

I walk.

To the library, to get coffee, just for fun, or in the case of today, Cherry Deli.

To eat enormous sandwiches.

And then go see movies about food, like “Julie and Julia,” which I loved.

I basically just love to eat. Julia Child’s husband, Paul, asks her what she loves when she is trying to figure out what to do as a housewife in Paris — she answers, “Well…EATING.” I totally understand. I just love to eat. I love to smell food and sample it and savor it and talk about it. Even if I have a few wobbly bits that walking can’t walk off. Food is just marvelous.

So in honor of my foodie nerd day, I find joy in sharing recipes that make my toes tingle, like this one. Make the recipe below — I invented it the other night and it’s scrumptious.

Pasta A La Knock Your Socks Off

INGREDIENTS:

• A handful of linguine, boiled, cooked al dente and drained
• A few baby portobello mushrooms
• Most of a small zucchini, sliced in half and then chopped on an angle
• A splash of white wine
• A generous chunk of feta cheese, crumbled
• Garlic salt

Pour some oil into a pan on medium heat (I use soybean oil), and saute the mushrooms and zucchini, along with a generous pinch of garlic salt. Once they get mostly tender, but not mushy, throw in a nice splash of white wine and let it reduce slightly. Mix in cooked pasta, pour into a bowl, and top with feta cheese.

Eat slowly and savor. Makes enough for one hungry gal (or guy).

Bon appetit!

P.S. I have a birthday in two weeks — if anyone is feeling generous, this and this are on my wish list. :p Teehee.

Several things of medium to no importance that I wanted to share anyway:

1. I finally organized all my posts in categories. This took forever, so I hope it proves useful to any and all who visit this blog. Enjoy!

2. I am so excited to see this movie that I practically pee myself with joy every time I watch this trailer. This may be because John Krasinski + beard + glasses = be still my beating heart. (Thanks to my friend Jessica, who initally posted this trailer on her blog, and passed along the giddiness.) Bonus points that they used Alexi Murdoch in the trailer.

3. One more blog shout-out to the ever-amusing Stuff Christians Like. Jon outdid himself yesterday with an extremely hilarious take on being single in the Christian church. Oh it’s good…especially the comments. Some of peoples’ stories make me shudder and thank God that I go to a church where as a mid-20s single, I am not treated like a leper and made to sit outside the church walls, begging for someone to marry me. (I commented twice — bonus points if you find my comments! Not hard seeing as my name is on them.)

4. My friend Hilary pointed me towards this really neat site called Blik that carries really unique and artistic decals for walls. If I lived somewhere where I was allowed to do anything but hang tiny nails in the walls (oh the joys of being a renter!), I would be sticking these babies all over the place.

At the insistence of several good friends, I finally Netflix’d “Doubt” the other day. I had put it off with the assumption that it probably was twisted and depressing, since it seems like every critically acclaimed movie is. (And my movie choices are usually British and sentimental, not twisted and depressing.)

Well, let me say something I hate saying:
I.Was.Wrong.

It wasn’t depressing or twisted. It was more like a mirror…a mirror that was swift to kick me in the pants and point out my own enormous prejudices to me within the first two minutes of the movie. The premise of the movie is at a Catholic school in the 1960s, where two nuns (Meryl Streep and Amy Adams) suspect a priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of molesting a young boy at the school. As I placed the DVD in the tray, pressed a few buttons and curled up on the couch, I realized something uncomfortable and jerky:

I already thought he did it.
The previews hadn’t even started and I was already convinced that Philip Seymour Hoffman a.k.a. Father Flynn was a big, nasty liar and sexual predator to boot.

Why am I so quick to want to blame? Before this priest even had time to open his mouth, I had refused him compassion or even a chance. I think I even took delight in it — I was faced with the whole eternal struggle of good and evil, and I was so smug that I was on the good side. In being confronted with a question or in this case, DOUBT, I sought this superior sense of “justice” just to make myself feel better that at least I’m not like that.

But am I? Am I so much better?

Probably not. My only beef with Father Flynn at this point was that he was a privileged, older white guy in a position of authority. (So basically all I have going for me is that I’m not an old white man. Hmmm.) With the distaste of the George W. Bush era still strong in my mouth, I realized my immense predisposition to automatically assume that if you’re one of several things (white, male, old, from Texas, a member of some highly organized religion), you can’t be trusted with power. It was in every history lesson I ever learned in school — who among us can balance the weight of power? Through the lens of centuries of wars, rebel groups, corporate greed, and televangelists, I’ve ceased to see any answers and it’s made me bitter. And poor Philip Seymour Hoffman received the angry brunt of it.

CS Lewis once wrote, “The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristole said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”

I was shocked at my own ugliness in the gall that I had towards this character that I knew nothing about. I have always considered myself a reasonably open and kind person, but apparently, put any kind of authority figure in front of me and unless he’s someone along the lines of Gandhi or Dr. King, I assume that he (and she, sometimes) cannot be trusted. I never thought I was like that until the other night, and now I can’t stop being ashamed.

God tells us to leave judgment up to Him, and it seems that I am of the opinion that God needs my input. Sure, I trust in God’s sense of justice, but I cannot help butting in every time it’s His turn to make a call. I am so inherently trained to see everything and categorize it in black and white that I’ve stopped believing in God’s ability to paint humanity with spots of gray.

Thank God for impartial grace — grace enough for everyone from the perverted priests to me. While it doesn’t justify or confirm all of our choices, grace still doesn’t leave any of us uncovered.

I watched the film “The Pianist” this weekend, which chronicles the true story of a Polish pianist named Wladysaw Szpilman in Warsaw during World War II. To say that this film was like an iron fist in my stomach wouldn’t even be the entire truth. It winded me and even now, days later, I am left shaken.

To see the cold reality of the Jewish ghettos, the blind inhumanity and absolute cruelty — I felt queasy the whole two and a half hours. I can’t hardly imagine how something this gutting could happen only within the last 65 years; that’s not even an entire lifetime ago. Yet it did. The desecration of it was overwhelming. Out of 500,000 people in the Warsaw ghetto, only a handful survived. 500,000 — not just numbers, but people with lives and dreams and homes and families. Even as someone born 40 years after the war ended, I still feel haunted by those voices, and the millions of others that were silenced in those six years. The atrocities of it will never stop shocking me. I cannot imagine stepping out my door to a reality like that; I cannot imagine that actually being my life when it’s not on a movie screen or in a book or museum. How does someone survive something like that?

What I found so amazing about this film in particular was that the director, Roman Polanski, was a survivor of the Jewish ghettos in Krakow, Poland, and of the Holocaust itself. He saw the cattle trains being crammed full of people being sent to the slaughter, like animals; his neighbors, the local grocer, piano teachers, children, even his own family. And yet to still be able to make a film like this and have it end on a note of hope, to be a testament to the strength of the human spirit and not the frailty of it; it’s something truly and humbly beautiful.

The kind of hell on earth that Poland and many other places saw during those years should not be able to exist shoulder-to-shoulder with anything normal, like laughter or wildflowers or even color. I feel like that kind of collision should have made the world implode on itself, because it was just too much. I do not understand what it is in a human being that can fill you with such inhumane rage, with such poisonous hatred for another person. I cannot fathom what it is to take away the dignity of a person until they are closer to an animal than a human being. I can never stand for a way of life or religion that builds itself up on pounding others down. Yet still, in a world where we are so convinced that we can live in black and white, the truth is always painted in strokes of grey. Even those of who hate evil are still susceptible to the disease of being brokenly human.

Chaim Potok, an incredible author who has written prodigiously of Jewish culture, said this in his book The Promise:

The Master of the Universe has so created the world that everything that can be good can also be evil. It is mankind that makes a thing good or evil, Reuven, depending upon how we use the wonders we have been given.

I would think that you’d have to cling to that belief in order for any shred of faith to be left after going through something so traumatic. When you look around you to see that the life you lived and the place you lived it in are leveled to rubble and bones, you’d have to believe that there is something bigger than humanity and our broken decisions. You’d have to believe that evil is a choice and not a punishment from an angry God. Elie Wiesel, who also wrote of the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective, once said, “In a world of absurdity, we must invent reason.”

There is this beautiful moment in “The Pianist,” where Szpilman is discovered hiding in the ruins of the ghetto by a German solider. Gaunt, feathered in rags and starving, he seems to almost welcome the idea of death. After the years of surviving horrors that shouldn’t exist outside of Hell itself, he seems nearly at the end of all hope. His entire posture of being is a lament for what he has lost. When the officer finds out that Szpilman is a pianist, he asks him to play him something. His breath coming out in deep, rattling clouds, Szpilman pulls a chair up to the piano and begins to play. Never in my life have I heard or seen something that spoke more strongly of hope, a strength that may flourish even as it finds itself weak and battered in the midst of absolute destruction. As he played, it was like that one last crumb of faith he had left was sparked on fire, and it poured forth from him like thunder. His music reminds him why he’s fighting to survive. And in those gray shades of truth that we are all so lost in, the German solider takes pity on him and helps him hide, providing him with food and his own coat to keep warm.

Even now, days later, this film is haunting me.

I cannot and will not stop grieving for times such as those. I refuse to forget that things like this happened and continue to happen, because it reminds me that there is always something to fight for. When we find ourselves destroyed with the weight of suffering and pain and inhumanity, we are reminded that it is not what we were made for, nor is it what we are expected to endure without promise of hope. The Jews are a people defined by a Promised Land and a God who is leading them there. Yet Jews or Christians or Muslims or atheists, we are not left without that same promise, by a God that loves us with a power that cannot forsake. God save us from the things we do to each other in His name.

……

We are constantly being astonished these days at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence.
- Mohandas Gandhi

While decking the halls and making merry this past weekend, my sister and my roommate (Johanna and Rachel, just so I can start referring to them by name for all of you unfamiliar with my life) decided to replace the traditional Christmas tunes with Christmas movies. A bold move, it’s true, but we were feeling saucy and nonconformist.

So we put in “The Holiday.”
A movie all of us have seen so many times that we could probably quote along with 80% of the dialogue, if not 85-90% on a good day.

It was about fifteen minutes into the movie that I realized that I tend to take things way too seriously. That I get actually offended when characters are hurtful to each other. For this example, I think it’s because I see so much of myself in the character of Iris, so when that bastard Jasper Bloom breaks her heart repeatedly, I feel it a personal attack on myself. I know what she’s going through, I’ve been that doormat. I want to pound on my chest and shout out something like, “That’s right, sister-friend! Tell him!” And I do. But Iris is not a real person and the story not a real situation, thus the movie continues on as if it didn’t hear me.

This is only one example of how seriously I take life sometimes — to the point where I think I start becoming no fun. And I am fun, I swear…I am bucket loads of it. Sometimes I think too much and this tends to transform me into a nagging killjoy with pursed lips, a tight bun and a ruler in my hand (ok, maybe not the bun and the ruler).

At times, it is for things that matter deeply to me, like social injustice (in which case, I don’t care if it comes off slightly weird or anti-fun…awareness of things like that are more important to me). At other times, it’s silly things like movies and books where I take the slights against “me-like” characters very personally and get too involved in fictional settings (that’s when I need to set down the book and go take a walk, to remind myself that I live in my own, real world, not 19th century England or wherever else my sense of injury and injustice has transported me).

However, to finish my initial story, our frustrations with the ups and downs of “The Holiday” were assuaged, when at the end (surprise, surprise) they all ended up dancing and hugging each other. And then Rachel and I proceeded to speak in British accents for the next two days.

Case and point for all of this: I will try to not make this blog a giant pool of my social and theological concerns that gets so intense that your head will explode. I will try to make it an accurate picture of who I am and how my story is being written, which must remain slightly ridiculous and light-hearted at times.

Remind of that, will you?