Poshdeluxe

today has yet to fully click into place (although at the moment i’m trying to remember if the majority of my days do, in fact, “click”).

i had a wonderful, fabulous time in austin, and it was ever so hard to come back to houston and my office. eh. although i am glad to get back to jazzercult, since austin featured visits to kerbey lane, trudy’s AND star seeds. umph (the sarah blimp sound).

last nite at mosaic, a “sister church” to mine, ecclesia, and also the church where seth w. does the music, don (one of the pastors) talked about psalms of disorientation, i.e. people crying out to god in anger or pain or confusion. it was a really challenging message…i have the feeling that it will slowly cycle through my brain all week. to tell you the truth, i hope remnants of it stay in my mind forever.

don talked about how, if you grew up in the church, you probably didn’t learn much about these psalms of disorientation… you learned how to base yr life on the idea of orientation, so if something went wrong or life really sucked, you just told yrself that you were looking at it from the wrong angle, and that “everything happens for a reason”.

when, in reality, a church (any kind) needs to be a place for the DISorientated. people who have had shitty things happen to them, people faced with tragedy or years of frustration. and these people need to know that they *can* question god, they can cry out and yell and scream and demand that things be different.

don mentioned an example: when parents lose a child. and people say, “well, it’s just god’s will.”

to which don replied, “bullshit.”

there isn’t a REASON for everything. there just, isn’t. and when things suck, it’s ok to get fed up or to cry your eyes out and groan about it to god, because he hears us. and he knows just how bad it is.

this message is playing through my head as i walk into the office this morning and find out that nick reinhart, a guy i knew at rice, was killed in a car accident last nite, driving from austin to houston.

which is exactly what i did, last nite.

and it’s just terribly, terribly sad.

ok, one more from “SP” (i can’t resist). this is an excerpt from a letter that tyler’s mom, jasmine, sends to him:

“Our achievements may make us interesting, Tyler, but our darkness makes us loveable.� You will have dark secrets, Tyler, and I will still love you.� Dan has his dark secrets (well, they’re not really secret with him, are they?) and I still love him in my own way.� And yes, Tyler, I have my own dark secrets.� And I hope you’ll love *me* still.� Beauty and sadness are woven together; even Frankenstein gets lonely.� So Tyler, you’ll just have to forgive Dan.� If you do, you’ll beat me to it, but forgiveness is what we have no choice but to work toward, or else we are just animals.� Dark animals.� And *that* is too much to bear.� God likes you less for staying home and doing nothing than he does for you going out and maybe getting into a little trouble.� Risk the trouble of forgiving Dan.� Then forget about him… Stand in light, O product of my heart. Your mother, Jasmine.”

a post from darling ryan from his diaryland about xanga that may provoke discussion:

i have bit of a problem with “xanga”, not because i am enamoured of d-land, but with the manner in which advertising and personal entries are fused into a personal/commercial hybrid. That you can type in what you are currently “listening to” and a link is created that takes you to amazon to purchase that selected recording.

it seems to link the outward construction of self implicit in the keeping of an online journal, with an actual branding or endorsement of a product by that person. that taken to the extreme of logic, the xanga entry constructs a brand identity with that person, linking the person with the means to purchase the cultural object. so not only are you able to read about that person’s life but also to provide yourself with their cultural trappings. textual and cultural construction are fused so that one participates in that person’s life through consumption of idea and product.

it seems suspicious to me. although, it is an extension of all the song and artists business we drop in these diaries, regardless of our choice of venue. so it feeds into the larger problem i have of knowing what really makes me as a person. is it merely cultural objects that i accrue that present something to the world that says “frankohara”? or is there something beyond that that differentiates me from you?

[posh] i will say one thing that is lacking about diaryland is the easy ability to comment and provide feedback… i.e. i wanted to respond to ryan’s post but am not sure how? (is this a cheap shot?)

at any rate, i agree with ryan to some extent (olivia and i have been talking about this too). xanga is obviously powered by a business in search of commercial profit… by using it as a tool for communication, we are supporting these endeavors to some degree. however, we are also using xanga to further our friendships, to share thoughts, to pass on the small or significant beauty that we see everyday… can the two goals be reconciled? probably not. but if you think about it, we don’t “exist” through xanga. each of us is a real person, not an internet persona. in a “real life” friendship, there would be things i would want to absorb from someone, be it their quick wit or their knowledge of indie rock. i guess ryan comes to this conclusion as well when he says “textual and cultural construction are fused so that one participates in that person’s life through consumption of idea and product”.

perhaps the difference lies in the choice of the word “consumer”. we don’t have to be consumers, through xanga or in real life. i would like to think that in a true friendship, people *share* thoughts and feelings rather than consume them. to consume is to use everything up, right? (i’m not english major) wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all learned how to give and take, to give more and take less, with our friends, with the earth…

ok i’ll stop there before this becomes to cliche.