Tag Archives: relationships

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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?

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Signs Just Aren’t That Into You

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I caught part of the movie He’s Just Not That Into You on television last night. I’m a sucker for movies like that. Invariably in movies like that, there’s a guy who thinks he’s deromanticized the whole pursuit of love. He thinks that love is just about being with people who you like being around. At this point in the movie, he’s actually correct. Invariably, said guy ends up realizing that there is a huge romantic element to love and begins to think that he was originally wrong. Hilarity and such ensues, and the happy ending comes when he finally conforms to the romantic sign-driven love of popular culture.

The problem with these movies is that they are lies. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a romantic element to love. There is. Just not in a Wuthering Heights sort of way. Movies like HJNTIY teach us to wait for signs and to look for signs where there aren’t any. If there’s anyone guilty of waiting around for signs, though, it’s definitely me. I love “signs.” I love dissecting every little thing that goes on around me, wondering what it means. And I ignored a relationship with God for a long time because I was waiting for a “sign.”

I have a friend who doesn’t buy into the whole sign thing. And he’s great. Instead of sitting around, waiting for an answer to a problem to come to him, he keeps himself busy. He chases all of the paths he’s interested in until it becomes strikingly clear what the right decision is. I asked him once how he discerns God’s will. And like most people, he said he prayed regularly about things that were bugging him, but he also moved. It’s hard to hear a lesson when we aren’t doing something. You can read about math in a book, but if you never actually worked the problems, you would never learn how to use it.

I think that’s how life is. We expect God to divinely inspire us, but the people who are living great lives are also the ones who are risking great mistakes. As time goes on, it becomes easier to figure out what the right, godly decision is. But it is very rarely simply handed to us.

Where are you moving?