More on Thinking Styles and Synesthesia

Bear with me! This is me working out how my brain works, ha.

Sometimes I feel the need to belt a song out as loud as I can, and if
I don't my stomach gets all into knots. I think it can be attributed
to me feeling a strong emotion about something.

Today Pastor Mark's sermon was about love. This is a subject I feel
very strongly about. I spent the entire sermon wanting to sing an old
song my mom sang when she was in the choir called 'Only Love.' (I also
really wanted to sing Your Love is Strong, Your Love is a Song, and
Love's Going To Last) But I spent the entire sermon feeling off
because of the response I was having to the subject. I wanted to be
able to express how I felt about the subject be singing any of those
songs at the top of my lungs, then I probably would have felt better.

This leads to a topic I posted about a
long time ago about thinking styles and synesthesia (which is
basically the connection of two unrelated senses in the brain, i.e.
hearing colors). I have come to the conclusion that I think very much
in sights and sounds, never in words (or should I say written words, I
hear the words I'm thinking or I literally see the text of the word in
my head, whereas my brother, AJ, thinks more in terms of information.)
I think that probably the only reason I can write poetry is because of
the rhyming aspect, because I hear the words being spoken in my head.
I've never been very good at writing an eloquent essay unless I have a
sort of writing style in my head to follow. Most of my sentence
structures I use I have stolen from sentence structures I've heard
repeted a lot around that time.

How does this description me myself differ from your thought style?
This subject intrigues me!

A Great Quote

"My friend Anna works at a soup kitchen, a cafe downtown run by Catholics. I volunteered there one day, cutting celery, and there was another woman working who had a son who was autistic. Her son sat in a booth and stared at his hands, flicking his fingers in front of his face, watching them like flames.

The boy's mother said he was autistic and sometimes spaced out, staring at his hands, but because I didn't know what autism was, really, I figured he was more or less mesmerized by his existence. I was romanticizing the situation because the kid was probably distracting himself or daydreaming or something, but I thought maybe he was like Hamlet looking at his hands, thinking sincerely about what it means to have been born.

Back when I got out of high school, I used to think about stuff like that all the time. It was a phase, I think, but I used to suddenly realize I was alive and human. It felt like I was in a movie and had two cameras for eyes, and I'd swivel my head as if I were moving my cameras atop a tripod. I even wrote a poem about it and said we were 'spirit bound by flesh, held up by bone and trapped in time.' Back then I wondered why nobody else realized what a crazy experience we were all having. Back then I'd be lying in bed or walking down a hallway at college, and the realization I was alive would startle me, as though it had come up from behind and slammed two books together. We get robbed of the glory of life because we aren't capable of remembering how we got here. When you are born, you wake slowly to everything. Your brain doesn't stop growing until you're twenty-six, so from birth to twenty-six, God is slowly turning the lights on, and you're groggy and pointing at things saying circle and blue and car and then sex and job and health care. The experience is so slow you could easily come to believe that life isn't that big of a deal, that life isn't staggering. What I'm saying is I think life is staggering and we're just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we're given--it's just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.

[...] When Steve, Ben, and I wrote our characters into the screenplay, I felt the way I hope God feels as he writes the world, sitting over the planets and placing tiny people in tiny wombs. If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.

I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgement. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to more and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims rather than grateful participants.

But I've noticed something. I've never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking all movies are meaningless. I only thought the movie I walked out on was meaningless. I wonder, then, if when people say that life is meaningless, what they really mean is their lives are meaningless. I wonder if they've chosen to believe their whole existance is unremarkable, and are projecting their dreary life on the rest of us."

--Donald Miller from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

You really should give it a read. It's a fantastic book. Very inspiringly anecdotal. He tells stories inside the overall story that are so inspiring, it makes you want to get out and do something important.

seperation anxiety
hidden from society
feelings mean nothing
without some variety
frequent confusion
believing an illusion
time is relative
especially in seclusion
theories aside
trying to abide
this entire thought process
is just an aside...

Lately;

Oh goodness, my mind keeps telling me that it's tomorrow.

I'm so excited for this weekend! Friends I haven't seen in too long! Beautiful weather! (it's supposed to be sunny with a high of 70-75 all weekend in OK) :) Wonderful music! Oh, Jenny & Tyler.

On a non-related note, here's what I've been considering lately:

This is how I've observed life works: First, you aren't old enough to appreciate how wasteful you are, or how blessed you are. Then, at around late high school to college age, you realize that you throw away so much stuff every day, and that there are so many people who don't have on fourth of one half of on eighth of the stuff you have, so you try to fix all that. Then, you become disillusioned sometime after college. Is that how it works? That's the only way I can think of that explains why college people are so activistic, only to be content in 10 years. idk. Maybe I'm being harsh, but I hope that my desires to help others never leave.

This is kind of spawned from a debate I was having with a friend on facebook. But anyway.

Also, go listen to the new switchfoot CD! It's streaming on www.myspace.com/switchfoot. I did the 'pop out music player' thing and have been listening to it nonstop. I really love switchfoot.

Anyway, here's a morsel from the album:

"We lock our souls in cages, we hide inside our shells, it's hard to free the ones we love, when you can't forgive yourself!"

Also, you should go read Donald Miller's "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years"

That is all.

Let me tell you about something that happened to me the other day.

I had lunch with a friend, and the subject of politics came up. My friend is admittedly very, very conservative, while I am admittedly more left-leaning.

We somehow got onto the subject of abortion, and this is where things get odd: my friend told me they are pro-choice, while I am whole-heartedly against abortion.

We began to discuss why/how we had come to have our beliefs, and it was really intense. My friend told me that they are pro-choice because when my friend's mother was pregnant, there was something wrong with the baby, so she decided to get an abortion. Well, my friend was conceived in the time between when the first baby was due and the time of the abortion, therefore making it impossible for my friend to have been born if not for the abortion.

Vice versa, when my mother was pregnant with me, I told my friend, the doctor told my mother that she should probably get an abortion because I very likely would have a birth defect. Needless to say, I did not have a defect and my parents did not decide to have me aborted.

It's difficult to think about, isn't it? We didn't continue the conversation any further.

Again, I am against abortion, but it's a weird situation to think about.

This Week...

So, I've had a whole bunch of work lately! And actually, It's great. I really like working at The Container Store. The people all enjoy being there and try to have fun doing what they're doing. On Wednesday, I worked from 9 pm until Thursday at 5 am setting up the middle of the store for the Christmas thing they do called gift wrap wonderland. I must admit I enjoyed getting to see all the patterns of wrapping paper. There were a whole bunch that reminded me of 60s and 70s wallpaper, which was interesting. But I liked them. Like one looked like stylized woodgrain, and some had silhouettes of deer and trees. (Erin, you better not go into the container store anytime soon, because there are a HUGE amount of things that you would love. haha). But yeah, the graphic designer in me was saying "You should probably get all of this because you could use it! Eventually."

Anyway! Oh yes! Mrs. Sherri asked me to do the graphics for Christmas Café! I'm pretty excited. I'm working on a few designs for when I meet with her and Pastor Stu on Monday. One of them is kind of Container Store wrapping paper inspired. haha. But yeah.

The weather is amazing right now! It makes me THAT MUCH MORE excited to go visit Taylor and Marie in Oklahoma with Erin in November! gah! I'm really, really excited! :D

In other news, I'm currently debating in my mind weather or not the new Mac 'Magic Mouse' would be a good investment for me...It's SO COOL! It's like a laptop trackpad on top of a mouse body! I'm leaning towards getting it...

So yeah, there's my life lately. How are you?

This Weekend...

...was wonderful!

Saturday I went up to Belton to visit Molly! It was a lot of fun. On the way there I listened to some indie bands: Grizzly Bear, The Decemberists, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It was tight. I seem to have become an indie fan...haha. I've still got a whole bunch more to listen to...

Anyway, Belton was great! I got to meet Molly's lifegroup leader and her family, they were really nice! Sarah seems awesome for Molly, they're so alike! We watched the end of the OU/UT game and then Molly gave me a tour of Belton and UMHB which was great! There was a market going on in town and we got ice cream at this random place and went to a tiny free museum. It was cute, haha. Also, we went to we this lake and Belton Dam, which was cool. Then Molly gave me a (much shorter) tour of the UMHB campus. It's really nice. The weather was awesome! It was really quiet because it's their fall break.

THEN we went to the concert! After Edmund was really weird. They told us that they were from the future...which was odd. Also, they had one guy whose entire job was to sing into this vocoder. I must admit, that was cool. Also, they came out with glowing shirts, haha.

Tedashii was next, and I must admit that I was impressed. Though Jimmy Needham wasn't as impressive I thought.

Le Crae was really great. Though I don't really care for rap, Le Crae was so into the gospel! I mean, he spent more time preaching than rapping. It was tight. Oh! And Jessie Cook was there!

Then I drove home! haha.

After church today I saw Pippin! It was really good! It was a play about a group of actors performing a play. But yeah, Cy Creek always puts on great plays.

Then I hung out with Becca, Liam, and Renee at iHop, which was great.

Great weekend!