A question of honor

I've always been kind of annoyed by honors societies. I know I shouldn't complain that someone thinks I am worth honoring, but it really is quite silly. It's like, you do all this hard work throughout the school year (or years, as it may be), and someone thinks that's great, so they put you on some special list based on a numerical representation of your achievements, and then...

Then they start asking for stuff.

Money, usually. You're so darn special they want to take even more moolah from you before they can tell everyone else how special you are. The honors society I was just inducted into said it was for a certificate and that little yellow tassel you get to wear at graduation. Those are durn expensive pieces of paper and string if you ask me. In high school, we also had to do community service and go to all sorts of boring honors students meetings and events that took all the "fun" out of "function."

I say it's a conspiracy! It's really not about you at all. They just call it an honor society so prestigious students will be sucked into it thinking "finally, some reward for the blood sweat and tears that went into my education!" Oh no no no. If they really wanted to honor you, THEY'D be giving YOU money. They would leave you to your studies rather than demanding your presence at those truly awful functions (but then, I just hate that sort of thing - more on that soon when I rant about becoming a recluse).

One of my professors pointed out that the honor of honors societies is being selected as a role model. This makes some sense to me and explains the community service requirement we had in high school. Yet I LOL inside thinking of what the next crop of freshies will look like if they truly follow my lead.

They will paint their nails neon and wear jewelry made of zippers. They will wage Nerf warfare in footie pajamas and wear Pikachu slippers to work. They will stay up all night drinking coffee and watching Disney movies. They will climb buildings. They will occasionally get drunk in the shadow of the castle, and they will find this funny. They will fall asleep in places the administration does not want them to fall asleep. They will befriend kids who put toilets on roofs, or worse yet (in the administration's eyes), they will put toilets on roofs themselves. They will have no idea how to dance but they will do it anyway, and they will do so to songs like "Miami Trick" because they think it's funny.

In short, they'll be pretty much like any normal college student should be, and I have no problem setting that standard for them. There's more to life than sitting in the library all day. In the end it's not a grade point average that makes people valuable; it's the collection of experiences that comprise their lives and the relationships through which they change others and are changed. Those are things you can't quantify, and to reward them with a yellow tassel would be to belittle something grand.

God for sale

Church shows are always selling something, usually a local ministry or a child sponsorship organization, but I've never gotten used to the selling God aspect, which seems to happen every time I set foot in a church for a "concert." Heck, it even happened that time JoAnna and I paid all that extra money to go to that exclusive "interview" with Switchfoot!

I saw this band Seventh Day Slumber sort of by accident the other night (I was there to see the opener, Kiros). Their music wasn't terrible, but between the hard rock hymns and the liquid nitrogen shooters, I got this icky feeling they were trying way too hard to prove that Jesus can be cool. The lead singer then spent about an hour giving his story of faith.

I couldn't not respect the guy after hearing all he went through, but all the same, I didn't drive to Maine for a sermon, and this very behavior is what pushed me away from Christianity in the first place. It felt too much like God camp, where they do their best to make sure everyone cries so that when they tell them they need Jesus, everyone will just fall down weeping like "Yes! Yes, we need Jesus!" Might I remind you that this was at a church, where I suspect most of the congregants were Christians to begin with. Yet hundreds still responded to the altar call at the end.

A similar thing happened at my school a couple weeks ago. Jeremy Camp, a singer who's very popular in the Christian world, played a show in our chapel. It was the first *big* show we've had in a long time, I think since Jars of Clay the year before I came here, but I wasn't going to go because I find his music a) generic and b) too Christian. I think you can sing about God without singing about God, just like you can "witness" without talking about God - it's a sharing of faith through example. Then a friend of mine asked me to go because he had a pair of tickets now that his cousins wouldn't be able to make it, so I decided to go.

The music was good. Sleepy-making, since it was an unplugged show, but good. But in between every. Single. Freaking. Song, the guy had to give a sermon or say an extensive prayer or invite some philanthropic organization on stage to sell themselves to us. The thing was, even if I had never heard of Jeremy Camp and even if he'd never said a word about God on that stage, I would've known he was a Christian, and it would have been a beautiful, inspiring thing. I would have known from the way he talked about his little girls and the death of his first wife and how much he loves his now-wife, who sang an opening set for the show. I would have seen it when his daughters came on stage to dance with him, because he brings them on tour with him so they can see how daddy lives out his faith. It might have changed me.

I think that, in 95% of cases, a commitment made to God in those kinds of circumstances is just an emotional response. It won't last. There was a part of me that wanted to go kneel at the altar after the Seventh Day Slumber guy talked, but I felt too much like I was being peer pressured, and that brought me back to the lying to God issue. I wouldn't want to go "re-commit to God" just because I felt awkward staying put when everyone else was kneeling and sobbing and such. I thought of the verse in the bible that says praying in secret is more honoring to God than praying on the streets and in the synagogues for everyone to see. An outward act of inward emptiness. It is better not even to let the left hand know what the right hand is doing.

But this might even be the worst part. The singer for Seventh Day Slumber even said the concert was just a guise to get everyone there so he could tell them about Jesus. They lied to all these little Christians (most of the crowd was younger than us by a lot) so that they could manipulate them into thinking they had a real encounter with God.

Now maybe some of them did. But I know that when I hear a guy talk about overcoming his drug addiction, surviving a suicide attempt, and going on to be a positive influence across the country, I'm going to be inclined to do whatever he says, whether that's to worship God or just about anything else. The million dollar question is, when you wake up in the morning, are you STILL going to be committed to God? Are you going to live the next day righteously? How about the day after that? Ten years from now, are you going to remember crying at a concert where you were gypped out of hearing the music you paid to come see, and are you going to be living any differently than you would have if the band had played music instead? For most people, the answer is a resounding no.

I believe artists like Jeremy Camp and Seventh Day Slumber mean well, but the way they're doing what they're doing is wrong.

Dicks and stones

I got an interesting message on Facebook yesterday. From my ex's brother. (I suppose that, on principle, I am obliged to give him a code name, although I have no concern for his identity or feelings. The only suitable one I can think of is a monosyllabic variation of Richard, so let's go with that.)

So, dick messages me saying that I shouldn't still be Facebook friends with his little sister, Ghostbait (who I actually think is the only member of that family worth staying friends with). According to dick, this continued friendship is some wacky manipulation on my part to get back together with his brother, or something like that. Which it is not. After the initial break up, I was open to the possibility of us getting back together in the distant future. Now I am not. The basis for my continued virtual friendship with your sister, dick, is that I think she's cool beans and I care about what's going on with her. If she has a problem with this, she can delete me.

But it seems your real complaint, dick, is a blog I posted four months ago, on the night that your brother broke up with me (not the other way around, as you seem to assume). Dick seems to think my cathartic emotional vomit was an intentional attack on his brother's character. How a verbally articulated reflection on what I learned about myself and about what I want from a guy, a list of good memories from an ended relationship, and acknowledgment that it was really painful to say goodbye to all those good things, is an ad hominem attack, I'm not entirely sure, but apparently it was. Intentional and malicious. Apparently I've done a lot of intentionally malicious stuff to dick and his family. You know me, how malicious I always am and stuff.

Did I mention that dick has never read said post? No, his friends told him about all the "terrible things I said," and he still refuses to read it now that I've pointed out that he has zero grounds for any of his accusations. (I'm not sure why his friends were reading their friend's brother's ex-girlfriend's blog, but who am I to grudge a reader? They can read if they want. Maybe they can let him know I'm now bashing him instead of his brother.) As a matter of fact, this post is the first malicious thing I've done to dick or any of his kin, because to this point dick is the only one who's deserved it.

You keep saying you don't want to discuss this anymore, yet you're the one still pitching accusations, dick. All the ways I've "intentionally" hurt/wronged/attacked/clung to your family. Your ego must be made of glass for you to even still be talking about it. Clearly you just want to fight. How mature of you. And how mature for you to intentionally misspell my name multiple times per message. Whoa, you really showed me, huh? I've got nothing else to say to you directly, dick; it's like arguing with a bird feeder. Maybe this will get around to you, maybe it won't. I don't care either way. I gave you the benefit of the doubt when I was head over heels for your brother even though my friends said you were an ass, but not anymore. They were right.

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Oh! Update! Now I am a "liar" and I should "fuck off." Wait, who initiated this conversation....? Hahaha it's actually kind of funny. Infuriating. But funny.