Cover Band

If I was a high-powered executive making tons of money selling some random product, I would struggle deeply with feeling like my life was worthless. But if I was in a really good 1980s metal cover band, I would genuinely feel like I was doing something of eternal significance. Is that weird?

I don't really care what I do, specifically, with my life. Long-term I don't really care what job I have or where I live. I just want to do something to either inspire people, serve people, reflect God's image, or change the world. And if I can't do any of those things, I'd like to at least use my life to help shelter others (even briefly) from the cold darkness of the world. To be a cozy fire to those who are freezing -- a shade for those dying in the desert.

Cliche

The brilliance of an author doesn't lie in the profundity of her thinking. It lies in her ability to say the profound without using a cliche -- cliches are all most of us have.

Regret

People (including me) sometimes refuse to take risks for fear of regret. But I've never regretted any risk I've taken in my life. Think about the biggest risks you've taken. How many of them do you honestly wish you'd never gone for? When trying to decide whether or not to take a risk, I don't think fear of regret should play as big a part of the discussion as it usually does.

Incidentally, I suspect that for most people, sin is the biggest source of regret in life, maybe followed by missed opportunities.

Roller Coaster II

Life is like riding a badass rollercoaster that crashes a lot -- dangerous, uncontrollable, scary -- but way more fun than the kiddie rides.

Great

Anybody who ever does anything great has to go through tons of tiny steps to get there. At each step, the work feels futile. In fact, the greater the undertaking, the more futile each tiny step feels. And honestly sometimes it is futile. Not every project makes it off the ground. But if you want to do something great, you have to push through the doubts, push through meaninglessness, and be willing to keep putting one foot in front of the other, even when it feels pointless, useless, or hopeless.

7 Things I'm Learning About Sadness

It's been a hard six weeks. A string of three or four really hard things have happened one right after another -- beginning with culture shock hitting me in early November (In discussing this with others I've tried to minimize how bad it was, but the truth is it was intense. For days on end, I was bursting into tears and weeping for hours uncontrollably.), and ending with the death of my grandmother in early December (She had fallen and broken her femur. At 92 years old, she wouldn't have survived surgery, so they had to just pump her full of morphine and let nature take its course. I moved back to Orlando for the week to help take care of her because she only lived 10 minutes from our house. I won't go into detail, but it was rough watching her die. Everything about it was rough.) Combine those events with a significant disappointment in November, and the crumbling of three marriages of couples I care about, and I now feel destroyed. I wake up crying in the middle of the night, and I'm not even sure which thing I'm crying about.

God is using this season of sadness to teach me a lot, and I want to get a few thoughts down. Normally I try to stay away from posting about personal things on this blog, but I've broken that rule once or twice before, and I think I'm going to do it again -- this time in the hope that these thoughts will be helpful to others who might themselves be going through hard times.

1) I am not the only one who is sad. I am surrounded by broken people, in pain. Every day you and I interact with people who, unbeknownst to us, are blinking back tears. The world is dark and twisted, and anybody who grows up in it has his or her heart ripped out and shattered more than once. Given this reality, I should be moved to comfort, love, and invest in others. Many suffering people don't have a voice of gentle compassion in their lives -- and I can be that voice. The more sadness and heartbreak I experience as I walk through life, the more I am able to empathize with people.

2) A corollary principle is that if I don't allow myself to be sad, I am not only damaging myself, but also cutting myself off from others. In previous seasons of heartbreak, I have basically decided that since a piece of my heart hurt, I would cut it off. Sometimes that looked like drowning in an addiction, sometimes it looked like voraciously seeking distraction, and sometimes it simply meant telling myself over and over "I don't care. This can't hurt me because I don't give a ****." Sometimes in extreme circumstances, for periods of time, I think people have to do some of these things for the sake of self-preservation. But these responses do damage of their own, and if they are the only way I know how to react to sadness, I will become bitter, angry, and selfish.

3) This is a "rubber meets road" time, when I find out what my faith, hope, and love are really made of. When sad things happen do I run to God or away from Him? When I experience disappointment do I hope for some material thing, or do I find hope in the fact that God is good, the master of the universe, and He loves me with perfect love? And how much do I really love others? Do I care for and invest in them only when times are good for me, and then cocoon in on myself when times are hard? Or do I still seek to love and serve those around me?

4) Anybody can be a missionary; anybody can go to some foreign country and fight injustice, share the Gospel, and care for the needy. What takes strength is calling a friend to see how he's doing when you don't want to talk to anyone, doing the dishes for your roommates even though you're too sad to eat, choosing to watch a movie or go for a long drive when every fiber of your being wants to shut out pain by returning to an old addiction.

5) I have to stay busy and find healthy ways to structure my life. Idleness -- and the accompanying sense of purposelessness -- is a breeding ground for temptation, obsession, depression, and any number of other deeply unhealthy responses to grief. My willpower to fight off these responses is only so strong, and I need to try to limit the time I spend alone with nothing to do. Maybe that means working out, or investing in a hobby, or traveling, or writing. I don't know; I guess it can look different for everybody.

6) I have to be willing to rely on others. Most people, at some level, like being needed. But we hate feeling needy. Part of grief involves being needy. I need the affection, comfort, and encouragement of others, and I have to be OK with asking for it. I have to be OK with hanging out with someone and still being the same mess I was last week. It's got to be OK to cry in front of others. If I'm not willing do do these things, I am cutting myself off from life-giving words of comfort they may have, and also pushing them away by not letting them know the real me.

7) The Psalms are not boring. Every day (well, almost every day), I do the daily readings from the Episcopal lectionary. It's a reading schedule that has you read something from the Old Testament, some Psalms, something from the New Testament, and something from a Gospel every day. Of these four categories, my least favorite has usually been the Psalms. They just seemed boring and not clearly applicable. But now I can't imagine not reading them. The sad Psalms help me articulate my sadness to God in ways I wouldn't otherwise be able to express, and the happy ones help me praise God in the midst of suffering. I imagine David hiding in a cave writing on tear-smudged paper writing songs, not cursing God but praising Him, and my own mild, weak faith in the Lord is strengthened.

That's really all I've got right now. Hopefully someone else might find this list useful, and I may add thoughts later as God continues to teach me.

Rarely

Art, music, entertainment, literature, etc. is either there to tell the truth or to make the world stop hurting. Rarely is an artist able to do both. And the viewer/listener typically already knows he needs one or the other.

Image

Humans are made in God's image, and I think part of what that means is that art made by human hands bears the image of God in some way. The image may be distorted, incomplete, or presented from a strange angle, but it's always there. Doesn't matter if it's a Quentin Tarantino movie, a Judas Priest song, a Duchamp painting, or a Hunter S. Thompson book. And generally, the more brilliant the art, the more clearly God's image shines through.

Which is more powerful and majestic -- Chris Tomlin or Iron Maiden? Which more clearly depicts light in the darkness -- Thomas Kinkade or Rembrandt? Which more viscerally describes the agony of the human condition -- Donald Miller or Kafka? 

Paranormal Activity

Last night I watched a movie called Paranormal Activity (it's Halloween season now and it seemed fitting).  I was expecting to be really scared, even disturbed. The movie is about a demon that slowly attacks a young couple over the course of several weeks. Most things in horror movies aren't real, but I do believe demons exist, so I was ready to be scared -- even stop watching if I needed to.

I was surprised to find that I was not scared. The movie was suspenseful, and there were definitely moments of feeling on-edge with heart racing, but there wasn't fear. I have been trying to figure out why, and here is the conclusion I have come to. (I guess this probably isn't relevant to anybody else, but it's my blog and it was interesting to me so I'm writing it here).

I used to do missionary work overseas, and I remember twice being terrified. The same thing happened both times, and even though I acknowledge all of it could be in my imagination, it didn't feel that way. I was in bed, and simply awoke certain that there was a demon in my room. I can't explain how I knew; there were no flickering lights, no water turning on and off, no chandelier swinging, no weird sounds; but somehow I could just tell there was something powerful and evil in my room; it knew I was there and it wanted to hurt me. I lay frozen under my covers for a long time, too scared even to shift my weight in the bed. Finally, it went away. I don't think I felt it go away, but at some point I just knew it wasn't there anymore. I couldn't fall back to sleep until sunrise.

I know that sounds hokey and unspectacular -- and honestly it really could have been just a weird dream -- but the two occasions it happened to me were literally the most afraid I have ever been. I have friends, most of whom have also been on the mission field, who have had much stranger experiences with demons than that -- physically feeling them, audibly hearing them, and worse. I don't really know where I'm going with that, and I don't want to try to describe anyone else's experience. But regardless, I know I wasn't scared of the movie because I didn't have that feeling. There wasn't a demon around me so I wasn't scared. Same as when you see Jaws you aren't scared because there's not a shark in your room, even though you know sharks exist.

Roller Coaster

If addictions, sins, and distractions numb us to emotional highs and lows, maybe it's normal that as we move away from these things we can feel at times like we are on an emotional roller coaster. The world truly is dark and broken, and if our hearts aren't breaking then we aren't seeing it for what it really is. But it's also freaking awesome, and there should be times (and maybe even seasons) in life where our heads spring off the pillow in the morning because we are so excited to live in this awesome world. The more we see the world as it actually is, without the deadening filter of things like addiction, it should horrify and enchant us.

I think I've spent a lot of my life wanting to be emotionally steady -- never too happy and never too bummed out. But I'm beginning to think that's not the best way to live. Maybe a better goal (or perhaps a more accurate definition of being "emotionally steady") is to try to see the world clearly and strive to make sure my emotions are appropriate to what I see.

Post-Irony

When you look at Katy Perry, or Ke$ha, or any number of pop music stars that have cropped up in the past several years, it can be difficult to know what to make of them. You see their aesthetic and think "surely they aren't serious." But they also don't seem to be ironic. It's not drama, but it's also not tongue-in-cheek.

I think that we are entering a post-irony phase, maybe not in art in general, but at least in pop music. Hipsterdom has reacted against things that "take themselves seriously," and put up irony in their place -- cutoff jeans, nascar shirts, PBR, etc. But irony is not sustainable. We want something to believe in, not just something to mock.

This new crop of pop musicians seem to me to be making music that is genuine and sincere, but intentionally not profound. It is Dionysian (seeking to celebrate) rather than Apollonian (seeking to express).

Also Ke$ha rules btw.

Butt-Simple Chinese Word Segmentation

Word segmentation in Chinese is extremely tricky. There's no spaces between words, and words can vary in length from 1-4 characters (proper names can be even longer). I recently was dealing with a Chinese text for which I wanted to create a glossary that would have every word used in the text listed. So I needed a list of each word used in the text.

There's lots of people out there trying to write programs to segment words, and it can be a fairly involved process. (Here's a how-to I found that will give you an idea what it's like: http://alias-i.com/lingpipe/demos/tutorial/chineseTokens/read-me.html). But since the text I'm dealing with is short and simple, I don't need a perfect word-segmentor, just a mediocre one.

With that in mind I wrote the following script. Basically all it does is take a list of common Chinese words, and search my document for them. If a particular word appears, it will print it out, thus creating a glossary.

WordList.txt is just any list of Chinese words separated by spaces. I used a list of the 3000 most common words. The "chars" mentioned in line 11 is the chinese text you are analyzing, stripped of everything (including punctuation) except actual chinese characters. (See my earlier post, "Character Count" [http://switchbladetongue.blogspot.com/2012/09/character-count.html], if you want to see how to produce "chars").

Right now the script prints out all the multiple-character words, then all the single-character words. It will err on the side of producing false-positives for single-character words, but since I will have to write definitions by hand, it will be easy to get rid of false-positives along the way. To fix false-negatives, I will read through the Chinese text and check any rare words to see if they are already in my glossary. If not I will add them manually. My text is fairly simple, though, and doesn't have a lot of obscure words.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- encoding: utf8 -*-
g = open('WordList.txt')
g_contents = g.read()
g_unicontents = g_contents.decode('utf8')
word_list = []
word_list = g_unicontents.split(' ')
words_in_text = []
one_plus_char = []
one_char = []
for word in word_list:
    word = word.encode('utf8')
if word in chars:
    words_in_text.append(word)
for word in words_in_text:
    if len(word) > 5:
        one_plus_char.append(word)
    else:
        one_char.append(word)
for word in one_plus_char:
print word
for word in one_char:
print word

Crash

On my way to church this morning, I saw a girl about my age wandering standing on the side of the road, looking dazed. I stopped, rolled down my window, and asked "Hey are you OK?"

She answered "Me and my friend were in car accident and our phones don't work. Can you call 911 for us?"

I parked my car, called 911 and told the girl to take me to the accident. She led me back into the woods while I told the dispatcher where we were. I couldn't see the car from the road, and I don't know what I was expecting, but I was not prepared for what I saw. The pile of metal wrapped around a tree didn't look remotely like a car, though an hour ago it had been a Buick Riviera.

"My friend says she can't get up," the girl told me. Her friend was on the other side of the car, and I was really scared to look. It was miraculous this one girl had survived, and I was sure whoever else was in the car was either killed or badly mangled. I've seen corpses before, and I never want to see another one.

I rounded the car and saw the girl's friend laying on her back. "I can't feel my legs," she whispered.

"She keeps saying that, and she won't get up," the first girl told me. Then, turning to her friend insisted, "You have to get up!"

"No don't get up; don't even move," I told her. "Just chill there on the ground till the paramedics come." I asked the first girl, "Is there anybody trapped in the car right now?"

"No."

"Was there anybody else riding with you two?"

"I don't know."

At this point, A sheriff's car showed up and two officers got out. They first attended to the girl on the ground. She was able to move her toes for them, so I think she probably broke both her legs (they both definitely looked broken), but probably wasn't paralyzed. The first girl had a broken arm. Both girls said they didn't know who was driving, or if there had been other people in the car. This meant the police had to search the forest where the wreck had happened. Soon tons of policemen, firemen, and paramedics showed up. I managed to find one of the original officers and he took down my phone number and told me I could leave.

Going to church afterward was weird. I thought I had a pretty strong stomach for this sort of thing, but I was really effected. I had to play bass for both services, and I had to just not think about it cause I had to concentrate on the music. But I felt really shaky. Like I was nauseous and felt like throwing up.

It was just so dark seeing these girls who almost killed themselves. They were really sketchy about everything too, and it made me think they were lying -- either protecting someone else who ran away from the accident, or that one of them was driving drunk and/or without a license and they wouldn't admit it. And on top of everything else, just seeing how messed up they were -- broken arm, broken legs, cuts all over -- was gut-wrenching. It was one of those moments where you feel like you are looking straight into everything dark about the world.

I went rock-climbing this afternoon and calmed down a bit. If you think about it you can be praying for these girls. For their physical injuries, and for redemption in any area of brokenness in their lives that may have been touched by the accident. Pray that the accident would be an instrument of grace and redemption in their lives.

Character Count

Ever wonder how people figure out how many different Chinese characters a book has in it? Like how textbooks can say "use this book and you will learn over 350 characters!" or whatever?

The following is a code I wrote in Python that will take any document containing Chinese text and count the number of different Chinese characters in it. It ignores punctuation, whitespace characters, English, and anything that is not a Chinese character. As written right now, it prints out the vocabulary size and the total length of the document. If you want to see the all the Chinese characters strung together, you can un-comment "print chars" in the 5th line from the bottom.

Right now this is just for my own personal use. Kind of an interesting little script I think.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- encoding: utf8 -*-

import re
import nltk
from nltk.probability import FreqDist

f = open('YOURTEXTHERE.txt')
contents = f.read()
unicontents = contents.decode('utf8')
chinese_only = re.findall(ur'[\u4e00-\u9fff]+', unicontents)
stripped_chinese_only = ''.join(chinese_only)
chars = stripped_chinese_only.encode('utf8')
tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(stripped_chinese_only)
fdist1 = FreqDist(tokens)
#print chars

a = len(fdist1.keys())
b = len(tokens)
print "Vocabulary size:", a, "different characters"
print "Length:", b, "total characters"

Hard Times

Hard times are coming. Will your addiction save you?

When you are dying in a hospital bed, blinded by pain and laying in a pool of your own blood and shit, will you take comfort in the fact that you are a talented musician? When you can't sleep for days because your heart screams at God "Why would you let that happen?", will looking at porn heal your crushed soul? When your marriage shatters, will playing video games help you pick up the pieces? When you are sitting in a darkened room, just you and a razor blade, will being a good athlete stay your hand? When you bury your son, will you wipe away the tears and cling to hope because you know that everyone thinks you tell funny jokes and great stories?

Hard times are coming. How are you preparing your soul for them? What will you do when they get here?

Basketball

Women's basketball should be played on a 9 foot basket. Period. Then you could have legitimate jump-shots, players could shoot while being tightly defended, and of course the dunks would be badass. There is no downside.

Don't even try to argue that this is "lowering the bar" or "compromising the game." They already play with a smaller ball than the men's game. This is a simple matter of optimizing the field of play for the players.

Carmina Burana

So there's a ballet called Carmina Burana by a guy named Carl Orff that tells the story of humanity from creation to apocalypse. It's pretty dark -- I've heard the text is based on the writings of apostate monks from the 13th century who abandoned their faith to live a life of wantonness.

If I was in an instrumental rock band (like Mogwai, Mono, or Explosions in the Sky or something), I would love to do an album and/or a live show that does the same thing, but stays true to the story of humanity the Bible tells. It's a powerful story and it could comfortably be divided into distinct songs -- Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration, for example. Maybe you could even combine it with live painting or at least a trippy video on a projector.

Teachers

Think of the best teacher you ever had in school. Could she successfully teach a class of 200? Or 500? Of course. She might have to figure out how to test/grade that many students, but she could definitely hold their attention and communicate clearly.

Now think of the worst teacher you ever had. Could he successfully teach a class of only 4 students? No. He was incompetent -- didn't matter how few students he had. Schools freak out about student:teacher ratios, but this ratio is not necessarily correlated to how much students actually learn.

Same goes for any kind of leader. A good leader can command an army; a bad leader can't control a boy scout patrol. Organizations (schools, churches, companies, etc.) should divide the people who need to be led by the number of leaders, not divide them into groups and then try to scrounge up people to lead them just for the sake of having convenient groups.

Celebrities

"When I asked Gawker managing editor Choire Sicha whether it was possible to ignore talentless celebrities, he responded with the remorse of a custodian of cultural decline: 'Everyone can, and should, be ignored. We were warned about this situation we find ourselves in by philosophers, and well before it happened. It's just too bad we weren't warned by celebrities, or we would have listened to them.'"
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/things-to-do/why-the-hipster-must-die

Odd Dance

"Punks wear their tattered threads and studded leather jackets with honor, priding themselves on their innovative and cheap methods of self-expression and rebellion. B-boys and b-girls announce themselves to anyone within earshot with baggy gear and boomboxes. But it is rare, if not impossible, to find an individual who will proclaim themself a proud hipster. It's an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaims it."
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html