Tag Archives: life

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Lost Time

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I spent my entire Saturday afternoon and evening watching the last seven or eight episodes of Lost. I love Lost. I would probably write a blog post about it, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone because I think it is that sacred. But anyway, I spent roughly ten hours watching the end of Lost. And I’m not about to say that it was a waste of time because it wasn’t. That television show is part of the reason I began to reconsider my faith, but I have this horrible feeling that my Saturday could have been better spent.

I don’t think I am quite alone in this. I live in a college town. I go to school. Most of my friends are my age and in school and almost everyone has the same problem. We are binge responsible. There’s this lie out there that we can be good stewards of our time only four or five days out of the week, and we will still be successful.

I think this lie comes from years of dishonoring good stewards. People who manage their time well are rare specimen. They don’t come around very often, but when they do, the rest of us try to bring them back into the muck that is the rest of the world. “Why don’t you come out with us?” we ask them. “Why don’t you watch television?” “You don’t take enough time for yourself.” “You should do something fun.” The really good steward of time, though, doesn’t need to go out because she likes the work she does and finds it fun.  But peer pressure is a strong thing. And so instead of admiring and emulating these rare stewards, we make them more like us.

Being a good steward of your time means doing it seven days of the week, 52 weeks a year. The train of life doesn’t stop moving, and every time we jump off after one of our binge responsibility periods, we are missing out on achieving the things we want to do. This doesn’t mean that we all have to be corporately or politically successful or some such thing.

In the nonprofit sector, organizations are advised to pick one mission statement, even if they want to do a lot of other things. Then, if something needs to be cut, they know that they can go after the things that aren’t directly related to their mission statement. I think we should treat our lives similarly. We should pick one, two, maybe three things that we are really passionate about, and then we should pursue them seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. And then we can start using our time, even our free time, in such a way to bring us closer and closer to our goals.

Are you a good steward of time? What’s your secret?

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Gossip Girl here

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While I’ve been working on decreasing or eliminating my time spent complaining, I have realized that another ugly conversation topic has started to show its horribly ugly head. I gossip. It’s funny that I spend so much time talking about other people when the reason that I don’t listen enough is because I’d rather talk about myself than about the person I’m talking to, but that’s the strange truth. You can’t make this stuff up, people.

I’m living alone for the first time in my life. Really living alone. I have a one-bedroom apartment. And I don’t really know any of my neighbors or anyone in my complex. And while that’s probably not the most advisable thing to do, it is helpful for many reasons. For one, it makes getting work done a lot easier when there aren’t a billion people who I want to talk to walking around me all the time. Second, it allows me to have one-person dance parties whenever I want. And three, it means that I spend a large portion of my day being silent.

Being silent for large portions of the day is really helpful to me. It keeps me from saying stupid things, which I tend to do a lot. And it means that I take more time to think about conversation topics when I do get the chance to talk to someone. And all of that is rather nice.

Recently, though I was spending time with a friend and I started gossiping, and I could feel my life get more stressful. My heart started to beat faster, and I started to get anxious, and I started to feel like I didn’t measure up to other people. Because that’s the thing about gossip. It always seems really comfortable and fun at the time, but it always ends up being just a horrible decision. Because gossiping is all about comparing yourself with others, I never come away from a gossip session feeling good about myself or feeling encouraged. Instead, I get worried because the subjects of my gossip either have lives that seem more put together than mine or are living far more interesting lives. So most of the time, after I’m done gossiping, I start to think “Geeze, I am so behind, and I am really uninteresting.” And no one wants to be a slacking and boring person.

The Bible teaches against gossip. I used to not understand that. I thought, what else would I talk about if I didn’t talk about other people? But then I realized these teachings were just as much about me as they were about other people. Sure, we shouldn’t gossip because it’s not very thoughtful to the subjects of our gossip, but we also shouldn’t gossip because it messes with our own heads. And since I’ve been reflecting on that, I’ve started to think that God is infinitely more intelligent than I give him credit for. Because here I am, a twenty-year-old who has lived a rather studious, thoughtful life, and I am just now realizing that gossip is bad. God knew it from the very beginning. That’s cray.

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Extra Extra!

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Sometimes when I’m watching movies or television shows, I find myself wondering what the stories of the extras are. One of my favorite shows is Community. There’s this one episode of Community from Season 2 where pop-culture-obsessed Abed tells universal-cool-guy Jeff Winger about when he got to be an extra in his favorite television show Cougartown. All Abed had to do was walk down the street in the background of this scene, but to do so, he constructed a whole back-story in his head and got so far into character that when the director yelled cut, he had an existential crisis.

I love this scene. I love it because it shows us the absurdity of story-telling. Now don’t get me wrong, I love stories, but stories can never really give a full picture of an event or feeling. Nothing can, really. And the trouble with great story-telling is that when we love a character we often forget about all of the seemingly unimportant people that help the story along. In books, authors can limit the number of characters. There aren’t really extras in books. There are crowds. But these crowds are more amorphous blobs than individuals. But in movies, there are extras. Movies would feel empty without them.

What’s the story behind Army Guy #2 who gets shot and dies? Does he have a family? Did they know that he loves them? Did he know that they loved him? Was he in the army because he needed to support his sickly mother? Was he planning on going to school after his service? We don’t know. We don’t ask. We don’t care.

Everyone has a story, and we do ourselves a disservice when we marginalize all of those everyones to extras. Because if we foster a world where there are extras, then we easily become extras to other people, too.

We have to remember when we consume stories, that no matter how clear we think the lines of right and wrong, or good and evil, or Jedi and Sith are drawn, there exist other stories that will inevitably skew those lines. Darth Vader’s generals probably have similarly heart-wrenching stories of how they came to the dark side. But we don’t care. We cheer when Han Solo kills one or two.

Who have you been treating as an “extra” lately?