INTERVIEW GAME

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better ! If I already know you well, expect the questions may be a little more intimate!
3. You WILL update your [online journal] with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions

These question are from my cousin:

1. Do you find yourself gravitating towards/exploring any particular subject matter in your writing lately? Say a little about that...

I wish I was more disciplined in my writing so I could answer this better. I’ve noticed that disappointment—in others (particularly leaders and mentors), in the protagonist’s self—comes up quite a bit. I’m haunted by what the English language means to the rest of the world, but I’m struggling with a way to express my thoughts about it. In my songs, the idea that God is everywhere keeps popping up. In free writing, these ideas of what the blues means to me are brought about three or four times per session. I don’t know how to write about that because everything I could say about it, James Baldwin has already said better in Sonny’s Blues. I’m not really working on a particular piece at the moment, so this question is a bit hard to answer.

2. How do you and your brother relate differently to your parents?

He might disagree, but I always figured Ian could relate better to my mother than I can and that I relate better to my dad. I have a lot more in common with my dad and ha, know how to get what I want out of him. I’ve always been able to put the cute on so he’d run out the door to buy me a pack of skittles. My mom doesn’t operate that way. I’m being silly here… Actually, I think it’s because my personality is more similar to my dad’s. Even though I don’t talk to him as often as I’d like, I find that he pops up all the time in my actions and reactions. For instance, the other day an Indian gentleman tried to sell me something at the market--like a lottery ticket or something--by buttering me up, saying, “Hello Beautiful. Where are you from, Beautiful?” And I looked at him straight in the face and said, “India,” and walked away. That’s the kind of gruff thing my dad pulls on salespeople. Also, when I come up against something that hinders productiveness—people dallying around trying to make decisions, I tend to get overly frustrated and grumpy. Not to say that all that I get from my dad is being gruff and grumpy… we’re both quick to act, looking for ways to be wise, apt take adventures, prone to talking a lot and too loud (something that separates me from most Thais. Ha.), sociable, and uninhibited. I think we usually attack assignments in a similar way and that’s why we can communicate well. My mother is a dear, but we misunderstand and misinterpret each other a lot.

As far as how my brother and I relate to our parents as a contingent, well, I guess that is always changing. He sees them more than me now, but when I lived with my parents, Ian coming was kind of a phenomenon. I think my parents have been trying, for the past few years, to figure out how to relate to me as I am not really living with them, but they still believe I am under their authority (from a Haskell principle I was reminded of many times about a woman being under the authority of her father until she got married…) Ian never had this kind of philosophy to factor into his relationship with them. So, though I’m not sure of the specifics, I know that Ian and I relate to them quite differently.

3. How do you think other people see you; is that something you think much about?

Whoa, what a question. I have had a lot of relationships with people—blame it on years and years of theater friendships, when I’d have three weeks to try to spend enough time with someone to feel comfortable on stage with them, the performance-run time of feeling like I’d gained a new best friend, and then another two weeks of show-friend with drawl. In this context, I am quite used to the fact that people see me as quiet and mousy at first. Maybe even ditzy because I get quite nervous and stammering when I am with people I don’t know. Then, they hear me say something like, “that shit cracks me up!” and they know I am cool and have a naughty sense of humor. As a short person, I will probably always try to compensate size with volume—and I don’t just mean verbal volume.

Those are the generalizations. People who know me well probably all see me quite different. I think at the office they think I’m the loud American who never stops playing around. I’m not sure, but that’s what I think. I’ll always wonder what my Christian brothers and sisters think of me—they are the people I whose opinions I think about the most.

So I think about this stuff a lot. I will admit that people’s opinions of me don’t factor into my actions much. Ha.

4. Your experience of coming to faith seems much different than mine, but I've only heard scraps. Can you talk about that--give your "testimony," in a nutshell? What made you follow?

Coming to Faith. Right. I guess my testimony would be just an account how my faith has grown… It’s all in phases, you know, but I do believe it gets bigger every time. Some people would condemn my story as maybe an account of “roller coaster faith” but get real… resurrection requires dying and being brought back to life. Okay, I’ll try to stay nutshellish.

I can’t remember a time I didn’t pray regularly. I do remember a time when my mother and I prayed for me to receive Jesus. I’ll be damned if I was older than four. As a child, I always talked to God and God got out of all kinds of messes. When I was about seven or eight I told God that I felt pretty comfortable with him but I didn’t know who Jesus was. Around the age of 11 I heard Jesus talking to me around a campout fire and pretty much made a deal with him that if he let me do theater, I’d follow him. Two years later I got baptized and my mother started bringing me to Haskell’s Weds. Night study. I noticed that it spoke to me and that was probably where I learned how to use the Bible—as an opportunity to listen to God. After a break-up and what my HS teacher called me “hitting rock bottom” (I would later find out to be my first major fit of depression) I gave my life to Jesus again, this time no strings attached. That was on my seventeenth birthday, the day I decided to hate the world and find life in Jesus.

Then I went to college and my faith was tested, but it didn’t take me long to find out that God was a living creature and not someone that could just disappear if I decided He didn’t exist. I did decide that a few times, but it didn’t last long. It was as ridiculous as saying Erinn didn’t exist. I’ve known them both for about as long.

Then I got out of depression and had a lovely phase of “no condemnation” that some might call my Zooropa days… Ha, you know, “the greater the fall the greater the grace.” I joke about that, but it actually happened. I’m probably still in that phase but honestly, I know it is necessary and that God is in on it with me. Because of it, I have been able to be more vibrant about the gospel, fall in love (not in a romantic sense) with tons more people then when I was trying to be a careful Christian, and be all together more alive. So, the current phase of my faith is God showing me how to actually live it… you know, Living Hope type stuff. Eternity starts today, type stuff. This is the best phase yet. I have learned how to ward off depression with solid, life-giving truths. I still have a lot to learn, but the best thing about learning to follow Jesus is that there are no deadlines.


5. How have you changed during your travels?

Each travel experience has been it’s own beast and changed me in different ways. I’ve only had three major experiences. Here they are:

a) Traveling around the country basically taught me that I am a human. It’s the kind of stuff I’ve heard most learn after being married for a year or two—all of our own annoying qualities. If you sit in the car with someone (who is not involved with you, romantically) for two months and only spend about 6 hours away from them the entire time, you get the crash course self-horror… and you don’t get the make-up sex to help you deal with it. Ha, I mean, the romantic euphoria.

b) Going to South Africa felt like a major failure. I learned that the world is full of terrible people and most of them are Anglos. You’d think that 13 years in Detroit Public Schools would have taught me that, but visiting Post-Apartheid South Africa was like the icing on that white-guilt cake. That said, I look back at South Africa as being the most beautiful country in the world—the astounding landscape, the misery, and the beauty that has come out of the misery. I’d go back there in a heartbeat. Plus, not a week goes by when I don't think of the wonderful friends I made there.

c) Moving to Thailand has given me a lot of confidence; I have better sense that God is leading me. I feel that everything in my life was necessary so that I might have ended up here … it’s a really solid feeling—all the bad things that led up to me wanting to leave the states, like that horrible van with no heat in the winter, being in debt when it was time to pay taxes, getting bombed with huge medical bills for a misdiagnosed eye--all of that bullshit has just paved my way for this fabulous experience. On the material end of things... From Thailand I've learned so much about globalization, about asian culture, about how to tolerate chili peppers (and how once you start eating them you must apply them to your food, lest you eat a tasteless meal...)

Overall, I've learned how to travel. It's a skill, ya know. You only learn it by doing it. Like Tai Chi.

Kid's Cartoons - Dave Chappelle

something Ben might call hiLARious

Barack Obama

Okay, so most of you know that I have adopted a new form of entertainment: Keeping track of Obama. His words of uniting the American government has helped ease my cynicism that our government is just two sides trying to win some terrible game. I have been informed of a critique that "for all his talk, he comes down liberal on every issue." Though it took me a little while to work through that, I have come to terms with it: Of course he comes down liberal on every issue. The man is a liberal. But that is not his point. He's not asking the American liberals to be more conservative or conservatives to be more liberal; he's asking us to listen to each other, even though we are conservative or liberal.

Okay, so after reasoning that out, I asked myself, "Yeah, but is the man listening to the other side or is he only saying that he's listening?"

I put the question aside and then got my answer in this article:

No Music to Their Ears
By: David Yepsen February 13, 2007 07:58 AM EST
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., smiles with his wife Michelle at a rally on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
url:

Barack Obama is a different sort of presidential candidate.
Yes, we all know he's the first African American with a realistic chance of winning the presidency. But he is also downsizing the pandering.
In appearances, he often tells Democrats things many don't care to hear.
For example, at his rally in Cedar Rapids on Saturday, he was asked about cutting military spending to free up money for other priorities, something liberal Democrats have been after for decades.
But Obama said "in terms of the overall military budget, I will tell you that we are going to have problems making immediate cuts, because one of the untold stories about this war is the way it has depleted our military.
"The fact of the matter is, we are going to need more troops than we currently possess" because of the pressures Iraq has placed on the National Guard and reserves, he said. "We're going to have to build up the size of our active regular forces. We're going to have to replace the equipment that has been depleted ... There's probably going to be a bump in initial military spending just to get back to where we were."
After that, the United States can reprioritize some military spending. "If we do those things, potentially, over time, we can see some savings. That doesn't mean, by the way, that we're still not going to have to have some of the conventional military forces that we need to protect ourselves from more potential attacks or threats." He cited North Korea as an example.
Obama got virtually no applause to that answer.
Later, he took a question from a teacher about the No Child Left Behind Act. That law is hugely unpopular with many teachers and their unions. Bashing it is popular with Democratic politicians. (No applause line is left behind in attacking it.)
Obama didn't disappoint: "No Child Left Behind left the money behind," he pandered.
But then he talked about "the things that were good about No Child Left Behind," like high standards for students because American children will have to compete for jobs with students from countries with more rigorous schools. The act also identified groups of students who need extra help in school, such as minority students, he said.
Obama told one teacher questioner that teachers deserve more pay to attract people to the profession, a line that drew whoops and applause. "I have to say though, there's got to be a bargain with teachers in terms of more pay," he said.
"They've got to get more pay, but there's also going to be more accountability." (There was audible rustling and mumbling in the seats at that.)
"Now, the accountability can't just be based on standardized test performance only, but that has to be part of the mix, and there has to be assessment tools that are developed in concert with teachers," Obama said.
"If teachers are underperforming, we're going to get them the help they need. But we're not going to pretend they are not underperforming, and that is something we're going to have to make happen," the senator said.
Such candor is refreshing, and it may contribute to his initial success in attracting voters looking for something new in a politician. He said in an interview later it's one way to end voter cynicism about politicians.
But can a candidate win if he tells Democratic constituency groups things they don't want to hear?
"We'll find out," he said. "If you go down that path of trying to tell everybody exactly what they want to hear, you can't actually build a consensus to govern. And I'm not just trying to win an office. I'm trying to figure out: Can we build a consensus to actually solve these problems that are complicated? I've got to make sure that I'm taking the voters through a process whereby when they vote for me, they know, 'Here's how he thinks.' "

David Yepsen is a columnist for the Des Moines Register. The Register and politico.com are sharing content for the 2008 presidential campaign.
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Some final words about this and then I'll give it a rest. I have really been blessed by his mentioning that teachers will be held accountable. I am discovering that my politics are really based on the education system. I am not a one issue voter, but as some people are drawn to abortion politics and some others are drawn to the environment politics, I find that it's education stuff that really hits me the most. This is based on my upbringing, no doubt, and the anger instilled in me about DPS. I joke about how little funding we got at DSA, or how awful some of the teachers were, but seriously, Obama is the first person(I've noticed) to really hone that problem down into productive and reasonable ideas.

Tom Waits- Letterman interview 2002

another great combo

Latest song

I wrote this when I couldn't sleep the other night because of my backpain. It might go on the gospel album, if the others like it:

No title yet, but if I was held at gunpoint about it, I'd probably say it was called "You Are Alive."--it has a slow, traditionalish gospel tune.

If every moment is a renewed blessing
If every choice is a chance to progress
Then Lord, take this day, this very hour
Teach us to live out your righteousness

You are alive. Our hands are open wide
You are alive-- and faithfully dwelling inside
You are alive. Our hands our open wide
You are alive. You are alive.

We give you our plans. Our every idea
We think that we have as direction from you.
We give you our longings, our lacks and our fears.
All the lies that we cling to, we exchange them for truth.

And we believe-- our hands are open wide.
We believe-- you are faithfully dwelling inside
We believe-- our hands are open wide
We believe. We believe.

There is nothing we could do
To be worthy of this gift from you
Beautiful giver of life
You desire mercy, not sacrifice.

If every instant is a renewed blessing
If every choice is a chance to progress
Then Lord take this day, this very hour
Teach us to live out your righteousness.

We believe. Our hands are open wide.
We believe you are faithfully dwelling inside.
You are alive. Our hands are open wide.
You are alive. You are alive.