Little Church Houses

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Even though I have been going to an Episcopal church with my boyfriend on Sundays that I'm down visiting (and he doesn't have to work) I'm not really feeling any differently towards the whole church experience. I was not raised going to church and so it never became a habit of mine. In fact, the very first time I set foot in a church of any kind was at the behest of my boyfriend. Growing up, my mother would read some stories to us out of the Bible but I always took them as stories, not tales which should be taken seriously. My mother influenced my believing in some kind of higher power but she never forced a particular religious ideology on either my younger sister or myself. I have always been so thankful for having the mother that I do, one who allows their children the freedom to make their own decisions about personal matters like religion. I was always able to grow up in a home and not be afraid to make up my own mind on how I felt about religion, spirituality and the nature of God. I'm very lucky in that way.

Church to me is very unimportant. In the years that I have now visited Baptist, Methodist, AME, Unitarian Universalist and now Episcopalian churches, I have realized how very unnecessary those visits are. If you are truly a spiritual person, then I see no reason that the ultimate declaration and expression of your faith should be confined within the walls of a building. Yes, I am fully aware of those people who do bring their faith into all areas of their life, most religious people I've met though are not like that. The biggest gap between church life and home life that I've ever witnessed would have to be with the Baptists. I cannot tell you how many "good Christian" girls & boys that go to a Baptist church I've seen that are unwed and underaged parents, who go out clubbing and drinking all hours of the night, who sleep with everything that moves, cheat on their significant others, who gossip and speak negatively of others, then go to church on Sundays so that they are even able to look at themselves in the mirror anymore. To people who live their lives selfishly and constantly make poor decisions it seems that church more or less serves as a band-aid for what ails them rather than some kind of deep meaningful relationship with their deity.

I see myself as a good person who makes an attempt to live the best life that I know how. I am polite and try to treat everyone with the same respect that I would expect. I don't cheat on my boyfriend, drink heavily, use drugs, or use people. I want to be able to make the slightest impact on the world in a positive way. I think that I'm a good person with a very strong sense of morality and yet I'm able to accomplish all of that without the presence of religion. I may be spiritual, but I have yet to find an actual religion that I can firmly attach myself to - frankly, I doubt that I ever will. I guess one point that I'm trying to make is that if I can do these things then I find myself wondering why others can't as well. I guess some people just need something else they see as stronger & more powerful than themselves to hold on to. I'm not putting people down for this need, I don't necessarily view them as "weaker" for having it (I'm not that arrogant), but it's not a viewpoint that I can support or ascribe to personally.

Essentially, I view religion and church attendance as being completely unnecessary to living a happy and fulfilled life. You can be happy, have a strong morality, and be a good person without either one of those things. Too often, I find that most people go to church for the social aspect of it; there they have friends, people who they can talk to, where they can make network for their jobs, and a place where they can participate in activities and feel important or at the very least accepted. Church offers many a cushion to fall back onto when bad things happen. In that respect, church can be a good thing as it can serve as a safety net and a source of aid for those in need. I just fail to see the spiritual importance of church when it starts to behave more as a social networking locale rather than a focused spiritual location. I would certainly be a lot more pleased if people would simply admit the real reasons why a number of them attended church in the first place rather than hide behind an image of a deep spiritual nature...


~♥~

Nothing Too Prolific

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Well, there isn't anything too terribly riveting or mind-blowing going on in my life right now. I'm feeling a bit too lazy to really write my dreams down in great detail even ^_^.

Essentially, the biggest change in my life has been my release of a lot of negative energy that I had let build up inside of me. I had been letting my feelings of anger and bitterness effect me in a lot of ways and I finally just sat down and wrote a letter at the individual (that was never sent and wasn't meant to be) and let it all out. Now I see why people so encourage that as a therapeutic tool. I found it really helpful :)... I've also recently decided to focus more on the spiritual aspects of my life as well. It's already helped me feel more focused :).

Otherwise, not much going on...

~♥~

MTV's Milking of the Juno Franchise

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Okay, so MTV has this show on the air now called "16 and Pregnant" and honestly I don't understand what it is that the network was thinking or what they hope to accomplish from it. I think that it's important that teens are made aware of the consequences of sex, and that pregnancy is always a possibility if the right precautions aren't taken. They should also be made aware of how difficult it is to not just be pregnant while you're going through school, but the difficulties of raising a child while going to school. I think the fact that MTV is addressing a very real issue and showing the realities of those going through it could be a positive thing. There's no reason to sweep teen pregnancies under the rug because that won't get the public educated. If awareness is raised then hopefully there will be more initiative taken to educate groups at risk.

On the other hand, there is something that really concerns me about the show. That is, the glamorization of teen pregnancy. Anyone who has seen the film "Juno" will automatically recognize the animations and fonts used in the program as being nearly identical to those used in the film. There's a distinct hipness that this show is apparently trying to achieve in its presentation copying that of a highly successful and popular indie film. It concerns me, because this is not something that I feel should be dealt with like its trendy, cool, or fun to experience. While the show tries to portray these teen's lives realistically, at the same time it seems to be taking a very lighthearted approach to the matter. This is my other concern which is that this seemingly conflicted approach could confuse some viewers. On the one hand its a serious issue, yet on the other hand there's a distinct hipster edge that's coming through.

Essentially, it appears to me that MTV couldn't decide whether they should take a serious approach to the reality show, or make it just as empty and entertaining as the rest of their programming. I feel that in the long run this has more potential to hurt whatever message MTV was trying to present in the first place. Instead of showing the tough reality that teen mothers experience, all I see is a glossed over one.

~♥~

Sudden Violence and Aural Pleasures

Friday, June 26, 2009

I set out with intents to make this sort of a ranty post about certain aspects of my country's society, but I think I'll save that for a time when I'm less tired.

Last night I dreamt that I was in an apartment complex with my boyfriend. We were upstairs and in a kitchen that had a window view of the rest of this complex. The apartment was situated on the top of a steep hill with lots of concrete stairs leading up to its summit. Inside the apartment he and I were arguing about something. He hadn't told me about someone, some event, he had hidden something from me and I remember feeling betrayed and disgusted. I don't remember what it was though. So I look out the window and can see this girl around my age, with a leg on either railing on the concrete stairs, like skiing/climbing up towards our apartment. She wants to get inside, she wants something of mine, she's jealous/envious, she means me harm and I feel so much negativity towards her. I don't know who she is, but my boyfriend does. He does not care how I feel towards her and treats her presence as no big deal rather than the intrusion she represents. I go outside, I assume to confront her, when she pulls out a gun and shoots me in the head. I fall to the ground, but I do not die even though the bullet went through my head. I wake up and get back up incredibly pissed off. I can't really remember how that all ends, but I remember all the negative emotions I went through as it happened. I felt so betrayed and angry and I'm not even sure entirely what it was about.

An interesting note, however, is that it is now the second violent dream I've had within the past few nights and a second of which that the violence includes head trauma. The first one involved a friend of my sister's getting his head bashed in with a shovel in his sleep by a female dwarf. While it certainly sounds comical, the mental image was most assuredly not.

I'm left to contemplate on the meaning of these dreams. Considering the recurrent theme of violence, anger, and violated trusts it makes me think that I should be wary of the people in my life. I've had themes in my dreams before come back and make sense later. Hopefully this isn't one of them, and I'm certainly not jumping to conclusions, but I'm certainly going to keep my eyes peeled for any warning signs. Perhaps they mean nothing. Who knows. I wonder what tonight will bring me...

Elsewhere in life, I'm currently undertaking a project for a friend/co-worker of mine of compiling recipes of her mother's who passed recently. There are a lot of recipes to say the least :). It feels a bit overwhelming at the moment considering the sheer volume of work that is going to be involved and the pressure I feel to do this properly and in a creative way that is pleasing to my co-worker. I've gotten them all sorted into their various categories, as cook books often are, but I'm still pondering what sort of creative direction it should take. One step at a time I suppose.

...............

Musically I'm really excited over the release of Regina Spektor's new album. I don't yet have the cash to buy it, and I don't want to pirate it, so it might be a bit before such a luxury is feasible. I've heard 3 songs off the album, "Laughing With", "Eet", and "Blue Lips", and I really enjoy all of them. "Eet" is probably the most pop and radio/mainstreamm friendly of the three, but they're all fabulous and very much Regina's unique style. I'm also pleased about Manson's album "The High End of Low." EMDM was rather disappointing for me, but the new songs I've heard sound promising. It seems that more of his old self is back which is a refreshing change for the better I feel. His is another album that I'm planning on purchasing. And Placebo too of course :).

Oh, and a newer singer/songwriter that I'm really liking right now is Diane Birch. She's got a really unique voice and her songs and vocal stylings remind me a lot more of older 60's folk singers in a way - but still different :).



Well, I think that should do it for this evening. Until next time...

~♥~

Voodoo Queen

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Oh my goodness did I have some strange dreams last night.

#1:
My boyfriend and I are living in a house with a basement. We get into some kind of argument and I go downstairs to sleep away from him. The next morning I wake up and he's gotten over it and has even made me a rather elaborate breakfast involving sweet potatoes, lol. Later on in the day we're out in a public place and he has to use the restroom. It's odd because the bathroom is HUGE and I can sit in a lounge chair inside the restroom while he goes and uses one of the stalls. Then this African American woman with a little boy come out of a stall and he starts throwing some kind of hissy fit. His mom tells him to be quiet and to quit making such a scene because I'm sitting over there, but I just try to ignore them and pretend like it isn't really bothering me. Then the little boy starts hurling insults at me because I'm there, so I stand up and walk over to him and start scolding him for being cruel to his mother and to me and just really laying it on. Then his rather large father walks into the restroom and goes into one of the stalls. I go back to my chair to wait on my boyfriend, but he's disappeared. Because of what I had said to the little boy he went away and there wasn't anyway for him to come back - it was like he was taken from me by some outside force. I was just absolutely devastated...

#2
There's a small run down building, almost like you would see in a B-level horror movie, that looks like its from the 70's and its rather rundown. I can't tell if it's a prison or not, maybe just a jailhouse, and there are only a few guards as it's rather late at night. There are two or three people being held there and one of the guards is watching TV when something comes on about serial killers and people who have evaded the law but committed gruesome crimes. The guard realizes that the people that are being held in the building are some of the ones that have been mentioned on TV and he freaks out because I think they had originally been picked up on some smaller violation. He runs and tells the other guards, but apparently the prisoners have escaped because they are scared out of their minds and trying to leave the prison. The prisoners have run around and blocked off certain exits because now they want to play with the guards before they murder them. Its all rather terrifying to watch as it runs very much like a horror film with the guards running around and each getting caught and minorly brutalized before being brought back to the main center. I don't get to see the finale, as it were, but I'm kind of glad that I didn't.

#3
There was an African American couple, a husband and wife, who had been enlisted to take care of some sort of dire spiritual matter. There was a group of people with them, I think myself as well, and they were brought to a house in order to get rid of some sort of dark entity. I believe they were practitioners of some sort of Voodoo or Santeria tradition because that was the impression that I received. Anyway, the group of people were sitting up in a dimly lit attic room, at night, around a table while at the opposite end of the room was a bed that the couple were sleeping in. The group at the table were all discussing ways to combat this evil force while the couple were having sex. They were making noises, not too terribly loud but loud enough to where you would notice, yet the people around the table were not paying any attention. Then, the man making love to his wife kind of laughed a little and suddenly everyone stopped talking to turn around and look at them. The man or the woman, I can't really remember which, stopped all of a sudden and said something to the effect of how the people had not been paying any attention to the reality of what they were doing until something unrelated to what they were doing caught their ear and made them look. I know that it was a euphamism or metaphor for something else and not the act of sex itself literally, but I'm not entirely sure how to decipher it.

Later on in the same sequence this group of people were all outside in the front yard of my actual house when this long, black "smoke monster" (yes, reminiscent of the one from LOST, but smaller) came pouring out of my front door. They were trying to capture it in some sort of metal container and to banish it, but it was very strong and they were having a very difficult time wrangling it. And even though it looked very much like the "smoke monster", it also seemed to have a certain amount of physical mass as well. It was unusual to say the least.
......

That's all I can remember of my dreams, but last night as I was on the computer I saw a shadowy form pass by the doorwayto the kitchen on two separate occasions. I thought that it was my mother getting up to get a drink or something so I looked up both times but there was no one there. I don't really know how to explain it. It's not the first time that something like that has happened to me in this house, but it's been a very long time since it has. I'll just have to keep an eye out to see if there's any increase in activity.

Also, on the 15th my mother's fiancee passed away in the hospital. We all cared about him a great deal and there's still a great deal of sadness surrounding his passing. He was a really great guy and we all miss him very much. I just hope that he's in a good place now away from all the pain he was in the last few days. We all love you John :).

~♥~

Summertime

Friday, May 8, 2009

I had a dream the other night where I was a child in a small town. It was warm and there were lots of trees. It felt like I was still in the US, but I'm not sure. I was running around with a few other kids and I ran into a little store on the main street. Apparently, there were Nazis patrolling this little town and they were after me and the other kids. I went all the way into the back of the store where the storage room was and the walls were all made of big grey cinderblocks. I just placed my hands on a few of the cinderblocks and was able to push them out onto the other side with no effort at all, as though they were made of styrofoam or something. Immediately on the other side of this wall was another store with dark, warm woods on the walls. It looked as though it were an antique store/soda fountain combination. There were some people in there who turned and looked at me as though they were confused, but I didn't have time to stop and talk to them because I ran out the front door and kept on running away from the Nazis... I remember running into a couple of the students that I go to school with somewhere out in the woods, but I don't remember much of any reaction that I had with them... And that's pretty much where it ends. There isn't much of an ending, I know :).

In other news, the semester officially ends tomorrow and I'm rather ecstatic. All I have left to do is a paper for my Art History class and then I'm completely through. It will be such a joy knowing that I don't have to worry about meeting any deadlines or getting anything graded for awhile. I'm also really looking forward to getting to spend more time with my boyfriend and my family. My sister came down yesterday to take a load of my stuff back up to the house, so it was fun getting to see her for awhile and hang out. She got to meet a few of my friends who haven't left the campus yet and they all got along really well :). Hopefully she'll be able to visit me more next semester...

~♥~

Where'd You Get Those Eyes?

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Last night I had strange dreams again... The one that's most immediate in my memory is one where I came down this staircase into a large open foyer/living area where there were a lot of children of various ages and heights milling around aimlessly. Most of them were in some form of formal wear and there was an air of malevolence about them. There was one young boy who looked about 6, maybe, who appeared to be the leader. Someone else who I was with walked up to him and removed one of the pairs of glasses he was wearing (I think he may have been wearing two of them) and suddenly he and all the other children started acting confused, as though they couldn't see where they were going and were somehow connected mentally to this one boy. The boy kept on asking for his eyes, he couldn't see, what had happened to his eyes. Then, for some reason, the guy who had removed them gave them back to the boy. These children meant us harm, so I was kind of ticked that he had given them back to the kid, lol.

The other dream I remember is being in a "mall" of sorts that had a display of art from the late 1800s of photography featuring African American subjects, that I think may have also been taken by African Americans. Many of the prints were of a fairly risque nature, and I can remember accidentally stepping on/tripping over one framed photograph... I then walked over and there were photographs of people from the artistic fringe involved in music, film and photography from the 60s and the 80s. A lot of the colors and the film quality reminded me of the 60s, yet the subjects either most definitely were from the 80s. I recall that at one point on the television at home/at the mall (?) a program was coming on VH1 celebrating these characters and having some kind of countdown and they were going to talk about James St. James. I got really excited and ran and found my younger sister and then we both got really excited, like, "Ah!, Yay!", kind of excited ^_^. There was a fellow there with us, I think my boyfriend, who was rather confused and just had to ask who James St. James was, lol. And then I also remember a random shot from the countdown thingy talking to some random fan/guy who went and got a cross between a Boy George and Cyndi Lauper haircut, lol. A little odd...

A few nights ago I had a really random dream where I was with a man who had the power to go and repossess cars who's owners did not make or could not keep up with their payments. It wasn't like that was his job, he just had that privilege. Anyway, he walked up to this dark green newer model Jaguar, got in, and I got in with him. I remember going for the ride and thinking how fabulously the car drove. I could literally feel the way the car rode - it was an incredibly smooth ride and I remember thinking how awesome it was to be riding in a Jaguar. Perhaps a little astral joyriding? Hehe :).

Well, that's all for now folks...

~♥~