An Attempted Athletic Analogy

Posted on September 25, 2012 by awtraughber

IF LIFE IS A RACE, and if we’re going to do well with it in the long run, it would be good to keep two things in mind: track and traction.

We’d like to think that life is a cross-country run, that the scenery changes often.  It’s a nice thought, but life’s nature is often more of a track than a trail.  Round and round, progress can feel like a funny thing.  Choose your lane unwisely, and you might find yourself making smaller circles than you have to.  I think it is easy, after a time, to feel like you’ve “run out of track”: nothing new to do or see, feeling bored and boxed in. Off-road moments can be great, but that’s not where the day-to-day seems to take place.

Traction is also an important thing.  Without it, we slip and slide: we don’t get the momentum we need to move forward, we can’t keep focused or turn quickly well. And while the track has something to do with it, so do our shoes.  You don’t run a relay in boots, just like you wouldn’t run a marathon in slippers.  You choose your shoes wisely, and when they wear down, you get new ones.

Choose your track well.  Not just one that is bearable, mind you, but one on which you can excel.  And find the shoes, the skills, the platform, the vocation, that gives you the traction you need to get to where you know you need to go.

Posted in Teaching, The Long Story | 1 Comment

Be Still. . . and Listen to a Great New Song from The Killers

Posted on September 22, 2012 by awtraughber

I’VE BEEN A FAN OF THE KILLERS since the first time I heard “Mr. Brightside” back when I taught middle school.  Watching them evolve as a band has been interesting, how they have moved to a full sound, one that reflects great rock bands from the 80s.  Every album has some stand out, full-bodied track to love: Hot Fuss with “All These Things”; Sam’s Town with “Why Do I Keep Dancing?”; Day and Age with “Dustland Fairytale.”  All of those songs build well and crescendo in a way that my favorite song from Battle Born does not.

The first track from the album, “Runaways,” will be the song that gets all of the radio airplay.  The song “Be Still” will be the song that gets all of my iPod airplay.  Unlike those great songs that build so well to a full sound, “Be Still” is a wonderfully ruminative piece that captures Brandon Flowers’ voice wonderfully and that uses some turns of familiar phrases to say something true well.  I’d write some of the lyrics here, but I don’t want to give away your discovery of the song.

You can hear the song here and buy it over at the iTunes store.

And if a fuller sound is what you really want, here’s the official video for “Runaways” in all of its old-school glory.

Posted in Internet, Music | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Finding (More Than) Nemo

Posted on September 21, 2012 by awtraughber

“JUST KEEP SWIMMING” is the line most remembered and quoted from Disney/Pixar’s Finding Nemo.  When I saw the movie again in 3-D this past weekend, I knew that would be the moment that all of the kids and many of the adults would join in like it was a movie made for audience participation.

One particular scene really tugged at me this time.  I’ve seen the movie a number of times (not always paying all that much attention to it), but I can’t say that I remembered the moment where Marlin gives up and decides to leave Dory behind.  It goes like this:

A default life is one that gets by without what Marlin offered Dory: someone who didn’t just listen or believe in them.  No, Marlin had become a signpost of something better.  Dory calls it home.  Home is one word for it, a thing that points to a greater reality.  It is the place of love, where fear is absent, work brings creation and where rest brings recreation, where the rules of the world do not apply.  For the Christian it is the kingdom of God, that invasion of eternal living into the world of the walking dead.  Those people are beyond price, their often inadvertent gift beyond compensation.

Who, then, are the Marlins in our lives?  Who reminds us of things vital and true?  What family members and friends and students and teachers bring us back to that good place we so often forget in our default living?

Posted in Faith, Movies | Tagged | Leave a comment

Gandalf, Donald Miller, and Fear

Posted on September 20, 2012 by awtraughber

THERE’S A MOMENT in the newest trailer for The Hobbit where Galadriel asks Gandalf, “Why the halfling?”  Of the many he could call to action, why a hobbit who has never left home should go on such a dangerous adventure? “Maybe it’s because I’m afraid,” he says,  “and because he gives me courage.”

Fear was also on the mind of Donald Miller recently.  At his new website, Storyline.com, Miller posted an entry titled “Who Taught You to Fear?”  The article takes an interesting view on something as old as humanity itself: fear.  Using something that happened to his dog while away on a trip, Miller answers the question “why we fear” like this:

Because somebody got to me, somebody who didn’t have the right, somebody my creator is frustrated with. And to be sure, I’ve wrongfully taught the same fear to others. I am guilty, too.

How strange and how true, that we are gotten to by and get to others, that we teach others to fear.

What, then, does it take to overcome that fear?  Miller draws out the connection with God, the creator.  He draws a good and comforting picture.  But just like Miller and Lucy, God and his children, so can we help one another unlearn fear.  Slowly, patiently, purposefully.  It’s a heavy task, but I think it’s one worth the effort.

You can read more of Miller’s article here.  You can find people struggling with fear and needing encouragement all around you.

Posted in Books, Faith, Internet, Movies | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The New Trailer for The Hobbit

Posted on September 19, 2012 by awtraughber

DON’T HEAD OUT YOUR FRONT DOOR without catching the new trailer for The Hobbit.  The folks over at The Beat posted it this morning.  Here it is below.

I think the tone is spot on: tense but not as dark as LOTR.  Looking forward to this more and more.

Posted in Books, Internet, Movies, Travel | Tagged | 1 Comment

Resting Easy with Andrew Peterson

Posted on September 19, 2012 by awtraughber

THESE ARE GOOD TIMES, MUSICALLY.  New music from the Avett Brothers, The Killers, Mumford & Sons, and Ben Gibbard are dropping almost every week.  The goodness started a few weeks ago with the newest release from Andrew Peterson.  His new album, Light for the Lost Boy, is a quality effort with an album-closing trilogy of songs that put you in an amazingly good place.

Peterson held a contest for fan-made videos to go with the first single from the album.  Below is the winner.  The song is “Rest Easy,” and the storyline of the video works quite well.  Words and music and pictures.  A potent mix.

You can check out more from Andrew Peterson at The Rabbit Room.

Posted in Faith, Internet, Music | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Life from LOST to The Walking Dead (100th Post!)

Posted on September 18, 2012 by awtraughber

GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY,  I’d choose a time-traveling island over the zombie apocalypse any day.

Comparing life to fictional television shows is a questionable practice at best, but it’s kind of the way that I think.  And while many have compared LOST and The Walking Dead on a technical or story-telling level, I thought I’d add some worldview talk into the mix.  For all it’s faults, I think LOST is a better model for processing life.  The Walking Dead, I fear, is the model to which an unintentional life defaults.

First, LOST is rooted in mystery: mysterious location, mysterious circumstances, mysterious people.  While that mystery often leads to a sense of fear, a sense of wonder is also present.  TWD, on the other hand, has an initial mystery (how did this zombie apocalypse happen?), but then leaves the mystery behind for episode after episode of misery (really, how mysterious can that farm be?).

Second, LOST assumes that the past and people matter.  Many of the show’s best episodes were “flashbacks” that revealed simple character archetypes to be truly complicated.  And as those stories were revealed, a passenger manifest became a working community.  On the TWD, the best of characters remain shallow, mostly forgettable, and often frustrating.  Maybe that makes them more real?  I’m not sure.  Perhaps it simply makes them more disposable.

Most importantly, though, LOST has a strong sense of purpose, of a purpose, behind things.  True, as the series progressed, that purpose developed in ways that frustrated some viewers.  But there was always a sense that something was up, that things were going somewhere.  There was a sense of hope and the promise of redemption.  While those things may glimmer for a moment in TWD, they are too often eclipsed by survival.  With TWD, survival is all there really is.  As it begins its third season, with everyone infected with whatever makes you a zombie, TWD has become a show about waiting for your time to come.

A Walking Dead kind of life is dangerous: limited mystery and wonder, disconnection from people disconnected from a sense of story, a lagging or forgotten sense of purpose.  It might make for a great video game, but not for much of a life.  I’d take a LOST kind of life any day.

Posted in Television, The Long Story | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Revisiting the Temple of Doom

Posted on September 4, 2012 by awtraughber

SEQUELS LIKE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK set us up for a fall, I’m afraid.  Empire is a classic example of second-movie-is-brilliant syndrome.  Taken part-to-whole, one might think that most sequels (especially #2 in a series) are as good or better than the first.  Some say it of Aliens.  Other say it of Toy Story 2.

You don’t hear that said of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  I only hear about the movie these days in the context of the heart-rending scene and the stereotypical sidekick.

Turns out that Spielberg and Lucas also have issues with the second Indy movie.  Now that the flick is about to come out on Blu-Ray, people are thinking about the series again.  In a world where movies can seem like extensions of long-term intellectual properties devoid of personal influence, it’s strange to hear about how the personal situations of the two great movie-makers influenced such a major production.

You can check out more on the story behind the movie in this article from last week at Grantland.  It’s a fascinating read: not enough to make me want to watch the movie again, mind you, but fascinating enough to help fill in some of the subtext of one of the most important film series of my childhood.

Posted in Internet, Movies | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Doctor Who Now?

Posted on September 1, 2012 by awtraughber

IT’S DOCTOR WHO DAY in Great Britain.  Twitter is abuzz with comments from those eagerly awaiting the beginning of Doctor Who series seven tonight (which is almost now in Hawaii time).  It’s been a good while since the end of the last series, which saw the mystery of River Song solved and the Doctor all but dead in the eyes of the universe.  Steven Moffat, series runner extraordinaire, has promised that this season will have a more cinematic feel, as evidenced by the episode “one-sheets” you can find here.  The BBC has also produced a series of “shorts” that have aired all week on the internet.  “Pond Life” features some vignettes of how the Doctor and the Ponds have missed connections.  Best moment: Ood on the Loo.  Saddest moment: the final entry’s sobering set-up for tonight’s episode.

Here’s the first installment of “Pond Life.”

You can check out the rest on YouTube or the BBC America site.

And you can read a great, quick interview with Moffat about things Who and Sherlock here.

Doctor Who definitely makes Labor Day Weekend better.

Posted in Internet, Television | Leave a comment

Donald Miller and Revisiting Your Storyline

Posted on August 28, 2012 by awtraughber

THE MISSION OF DONALD MILLER has definitely evolved over the last ten years, yet the seeds of “telling a good story with your life” can be found at least as far back as Blue Like Jazz.  Starting next week, Miller will continue that evolution with his newest “book,” Storyline.  I use quotes because it is a book and much more.  It’s also an audio series and a cloud-based interactive system.  And it’s something that I think is an interesting take on understanding your life.

So a couple of things.

First, Miller is in the process of recreating his online presence by discontinuing his old site and prepping a new one.  In the meantime, he’s posting quote from his Storyline book as the lead-in to the site.  You can check those quotes out here.

The book, when it releases, will only be available through Amazon.com, which is an interesting arrangement to me.  Turns out that Miller will be using Amazon.com receipts for something beyond the book.  Miller has posted a video about the whole thing on vimeo.  I don’t think Miller has “officially” posted the video yet (waiting for his new website?), but you can check it out below.

I hope you give Storyline a chance.  I think Miller has a lot of good things to say, things a good step beyond self-help.  Storyline is available September 6.

Posted in Books, Faith, Internet, The Long Story | Tagged , | Leave a comment