I am interning at a middle school over break. The school’s choir is currently in a contest. The video below is their submission:
If you are impressed, vote for KIPP Journey Academy, here . There are a bunch of really awesome students who would appreciate it.
I have a quote hanging on my wall from the awesome Donald Miller. It says:
Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves, but they want to be different with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It’s a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn’t want to be anyone else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him.
I look at it every morning when I wake up. It’s helpful.
It’s pretty interesting to think that if we stopped concentrating on one form of “different” we would be another form of “different.” I wonder what it would be like to live a life without cues where interactions with people aren’t just artful re-imaginings of television shows or movies we’ve seen.
I found this video the other day. It’s a promo for TLC’s new show Virgin Diaries. It follows people who have saved sex for marriage getting married and doing other adult things.
A lot of people find this clip funny, and I guess I do too. But the reason we find it funny is because we think we know what the perfect kiss looks like. Really, though? We know what the perfect kiss should look like? Where’d we get that information? When we kiss, we aren’t watching; we are doing. And so that means our ideas of the perfect kiss come from when we observe kisses. We don’t typically go around watching our friends kiss so that means we learn what kissing looks like from movies and television shows.
All of this just seems really silly. Kissing isn’t about what it looks like to others. It’s about two people enjoying each other. And that’s really nice.
That’s why I think the above clip is probably a purer kiss than I will ever experience (even barring the fact that they were each other’s first kiss). These two people are not trying to live up to an ideal. They are doing what they want. They are different.
Dear Spence,
Some days you aren’t going to feel like writing.
It’s not because you are sad or mad
Or frustrated or too happy or too glad
It’s because some days you just don’t feel like writing.
But those are the days when you need to write the most
Otherwise words will follow you around
And settle into the cracks of your mind like ghosts
And if you don’t let them out, they’ll threaten their host
Which is you on the days you don’t feel like writing.
And so even if those words need to be arranged
Into crappy poetic lines of a twelve-year-old boy, deranged
Get them out, put them down because tomorrow you will be changed
Some days you won’t feel like writing.
But tomorrow you will.
Spencer J Smith 