Happy Easter

© Matt Nager

For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Hi shall not perish but have eternal life.
- John 3:16

Happy Easter.

Quote of the Day

I sat in McDonald's today drinking a Dr. Pepper, doing homework for school, and watching two girls make out in the corner. While I'm unashamed of my moral convictions that run contrary to what I witnessed, I'm embarrassed by some of the condescending thoughts that ran through my head. I want to be someone whose first instinct is love and grace. My struggle reminded me of this quote I read in East of Eden last night:

"You are one of those rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect."

- Joel

Quote of the Day

© Bryan Schutmaat

Lonesome Dove begins with this epigraph from T.K. Whipple. It seems to sum up my heart for the West, the wilderness, and traveling back in time.

- Joel

"All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream."

- T.K. Whipple, Study Out the Land

MLK

As a Christian, I'm inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr's radical devotion to Jesus. Yet no matter one's religious belief/disbelief, King's message of love and sacrifice are admirable. In honor of MLK Day, here are a few quotes from Dr. King.

- Joel

"Faith is taking the first step even when you can't see the whole staircase.”

“Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

"Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."

Steinbeck on Love

A friend tweeted a link to this letter written by author John Steinbeck (Of Mice And Men, East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath) to his son Thom on the topic of love. I found it to be delicately insightful, especially the last line: "Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away."

- Joel

New York
November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply — of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it — and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa

Quote of the Day

I've been meaning to post this quote for awhile. It comes from Chuck Klosterman's book "The Visible Man." What an interesting take on technological advances.

- Joel

“Everything science gives us immediately becomes normative. To an eighty-year-old man, a computer is this amazing device that creates instantaneous access to limitless information. He can’t get his head around it. But to a twenty-year-old man, the computer is a limited machine that costs too much and always needs to be faster. Because human live finite lives, all technological advances immediately feel banal to whatever generation inherits their benefits. Any advance can be appreciated only by the handful of people who happen to exist within the same time period of that specific technology’s introduction. You follow my meaning? Those are the only people who notice the difference. To a seven-year-old, a computer doesn’t even qualify as technology. It’s like a crowbar. Everything magical is temporary. So the idea that science makes our life ‘better’ is kind of an ephemeral illusion. Take vulcanization, for example. That’s a manifestation of science that seems to improve everything about modernity. Right? Of course it is. We wouldn’t drive without it, or at least not the way we drive now. But if vulcanization wasn’t possible, would we miss it? No. Of course not. We wouldn’t miss it at all. We’d find a way around it, or we’d effortlessly live without it. We wouldn’t even have the capacity to miss it. Vulcanization seems to make life better only because we already know it exists. We wouldn’t miss rubber tires if they had never been invented, in the same way we don’t miss cows that taste like lobster or shoes made out of glass or sexual time machines or anything else that science can’t create. Over time, the net benefit of technology is always going to be zero. Children born into Amish communities don’t miss TV until they discover such contraptions exist, right? There’s just no real evidence that proves people in the fifteenth century were less happy than people are now, just as there’s no reason to think people in the twenty-fifth century will have happier, better lives than you or me. This is a strange notion to accept, but it’s true. And once I accepted that truth, it forced me to reevaluate everything I did as an intellectual.”

Y__, The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman.

Quote of the Day

I watched a documentary about Mike Tyson over the weekend and found myself struck by something his long-time trainer, Cus D'Amato, said. D'Amato was speaking about his passion for identifying the strengths of young boxers. Yet his approach seems like a good disposition of the heart towards people in everyday life.

- Joel

"What I do is discover and uncover."

- Cus D'Amato

Quote of the Day

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
- Albert Einstein

Quote of the Day

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

– Steve Jobs

Quote of the Day

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should street streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.'"

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Western Quotes

I'll admit that old Western films have some pretty cheesy dialogue. However that makes them all the more enjoyable for me. Here are a few memorable quotes from movies I've watched recently.

- Joel

"When ya pull a gun, kill a man!"
-- Old Man Clanton, My Darling Clementine (1946)

"There are only two things more beautiful than a gun: a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere."
--Cherry Valance, Red River (1948)

"Fear not! Their wits are as slow as their blades."
-- Zorro, The Mark of Zorro (1920)

Frenchy: "You'd better mind your own business or you're going to get yourself into trouble."
Destry: "Trouble is my business ma'am."
--Destry Rides Again (1939)

Quote of the Day

"I think you can say that the real star of my Westerns has always been the land."
- John Ford, Director

Quote of the Day

"That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes."
- Kurt Vonnegut

Quote of the Day

"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it."

Quote of the Day

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."

- Mark Twain

Quote of the Day

I have thought a lot about the concept of "cool" in the past year. It seems like being cool is an endless retreat; as soon as others are doing, saying, wearing the same things as you, you've got to retreat to something new and different and "better". There's also an inherent spirit of indifference somewhere within the concept of cool. You aren't cool if you try too hard or care too much. I find David Foster Wallace's take on the concept of cool (or "hip" as he calls it) to be interesting.

- Joel

"What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human … is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic."
- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Quote of the Day

"When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him."

- Don Draper, Mad Men, Episode 408

Quote of the Day

"I'm not sure there's a great leader in my life who didn't spend a season of their life making someone else look great."
- John Bryson, Memphis, Tennessee

I read this quote today. Actually, someone retweeted it, so the original author of the quote is no one famous. That fact doesn't make the words any less profound to me. They may not strike you the way they struck me, a young guy with leadership aspirations who is learning the ropes by watching and serving under others.

- Joel

Quote of the Day

"Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else.”

- Judy Garland

Quote of the Day

"A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle."

- Benjamin Franklin