Lasting Childhood Memories

I just turned 31. It's a wierd age. I feel simultaneously old and young, kind of like I have ever since I turned 17, but more so. Maybe it's my recent birthday that's making me introspective, or maybe it's the fact that we're finally starting seriously to talk about having kids of our own. Or maybe those are linked somehow. Whatever it is, I'm starting to reflect on what it is (was) to be a kid.

I'm sure I was a highly unusual child. My parents have told me since that I was impulsively introspective and analytical. I don't know if other people have discovered things the way I did, but I thought I'd start a list of childhood traits, discoveries and misconceptions that I can remember from nearly 30 years ago. I'll add to it as stuff comes to mind.

(This may turn into a serial post. And then a book deal, and eventually global renown. Finally! It's taken me so long to figure out how to go about achieving it!)

::I remember the day when I was three or four that I discovered that I could move my eyes independently from my head. I remember intentionally holding my head still with my hands and looking around the room in amazement at this new trick I could perform. I'm pretty proud that I discovered that -- I'd obviously been doing that for years up until that point, but who actually discovered that themselves.

::It was pretty close to that time that I discovered that I swallow pretty regularly, even without putting anything in my mouth. I wondered if other people did that too, and what it was that I was swallowing anyways...

::When my stomach gurgled I used to think it was God talking to me. In the faith tradition I grew up in, it wasn't uncommon for people to talk about God talking to them in their heart, and I thought that's what was happening to me. Unfortunately though, I could never understand the message the first time, and I could never get God to repeat it.

::I remember watching the news on TV, and hiding behind the couch to pick my nose. The newscasters were looking right at me, so I assumed that they could see everything I did, and I was informed that nose-picking is rude. Come to think of it, that probably started a kind of paranoia that existed for at least the first decade-and-a-half of my life. I'm over it now. Honestly. I think big brother is great! [vacant smile, blink, blink]

::I was sitting in church one time, bored out my bracket I'm sure (as any 9-or-so-year-old is apt to be), and I suddenly became aware that if I focussed on something close, the things in the distance doubled, and if I focussed on the things in the distance the out-of-focus stuff in the foreground doubled. That troubled me -- I thought my eyes were broken. It turns out, it's just a natural consequence of having two eyes...

::I had an imaginary friend. His name was Batchi. (I had a very exact spelling for Batchi that I can't for the life of me remember, but that's pretty close. I will also never know where that name originally came from.) He was the persona of my teddy bear that gradually became disassociated with it as I grew out of stuffed animals, and more internalised. I had an imaginary peanut gallery too, and they would mock and scoff if I did something dumb. Come to think of it, they never really very supportive of anything I did. Sometimes Batchi would side with them, and sometimes he would tell them to shut up. He wasn't very predictable. Man, if I start to get loopy in the last chapter of my life...!

::When I first learned the alphabet, I thought the letters l, m, n & o were all one letter. It must be the biggest letter I figured because it has such a long name, but of course saying "elemeno" simply got me positive reinforcement. No-one can see inside my brain. Luckily. For them!

::My Mom told me one day that we can count forever. I was entirely doubtful about that. Doubly so when she tried to prove it by counting to ten. It seemed all to finite for me. (What was I, four?)

Missionary POV: My One Curio

Pentax MZ-6 w/ 18-35mm
Fuji Superia 400 ISO
Natural light (overcast sky)

I didn't bring back anything from Ukraine except pictures. I was told there might be hassles getting things through customs, and what I didn't need at the end of that trip was hassles. Or having to resort to lying. Anyway this image shows a typical display of Ukrainian dolls at an outdoor market. The actual picture is nearly twice the size, but I think this is a pretty good crop to show the pattern (the whole) and detail (the individual) together at blog pic rez.

Missionary POV: Church Staircase

Pentax *ist DL w/18-55mm
ISO 200 (everything is recorded in digital -- duh! [see previous posts])
Natural light through window behind camera

This is the staircase leading up to where the MorningStar Church meets. The shot was on a tripod, and was made with a 6s exposure. I love it for its rustic-yet-ornate character. This is the kind of flair that's hard to find in anything modern in the country, and like just about everything there, seems underappreciated for what it is (whatever it is). If I was a high-end fashion photographer, I would shoot models in buildings like this. What an incredible set of contrasts that would be!

"You Watch Your Phraseology!"

I came across this quotable quote in perusing a website today:

"Mrs. So-and-so (not her real name – Ed.) has recovered to the condition before her last illness began earlier this year."

It is so close to making sense...and then, not.

The Gender Mindbender

I recently had a conversation about the feminine-ness of church, and whether that is turning off men. I actually laughed when I first heard the idea: its seems truly ludricrous at first blush. I mean, what a cop-out! But wait-a-sec. It's been a long time trend that church appeals to women more than men, and if we're honest, we need to ask why. Could it really be because church has become so touchy-feely, so emotional that men disconnect? The "buddy Christ", not a man of contentious nature, radical behaviour and righteous rage, but replaced by an eternally calm, soft, sadly-smiling hippie? Actually, that is a turn-off, come to think of it.

Suddenly I've become curious as to what a more masculine church would look like. I'm not talking about paternalism here. While it seems easy to equate masculinity with power, we'd lose the important advances we've made in gender equality. I'm asking (like perhaps 100 billion people have before me) "What does it mean to be a man?" I can think of some excellent examples, and some pretty shoddy ones. Secure, honest and wise make for a good start, but then what? Ach, let's zag a little.

You know, frankly it's flat wierd we're so commonly told to "fall in love with Jesus". That jus' don't do it for me, and I sincerely hope women don't fall for that line either. It's not a matter of neurosis, it's a matter of disappointment. Um, hello? He's God! Let's just say it's not a relationship of equals (like, for example, humans have bodies, and aren't in charge). Generally we're in an era with far too much emphasis on friendship, the humility and coziness of the transendent being, and far too little on the God that would melt your eyeballs if you caught a glimpse of him. We've gotten so comfortable in the fur, we've forgotten it belongs to a lion. Is that what men are missing (out on) in our brave new world?

I could write a lot more, and point to how the gender question has been addressed in our larger cultural context by movies such as Legends of the Fall and Fight Club (and tons of others). I could speculate on how the culture of the church moves a little slower than the greater culture, and that protects us from the hardest of knocks to our human identity, and perhaps gives us a unique perspective to guide our culture through some of the gender minefield. And maybe I could even smugly mention that we follow the truth about what it means to be human (and promptly miss the whole point of the journey!). But instead, I'm just going to mull this over for a while.

The Digital Divide

I just saw it firsthand. You can now get digital camera memory at your average grocery store, often right at the counter beside film and one-time use cameras. That was one of those things I was waiting for to tell me how ubiquitous digital cameras have become. Of course whether someone will be spending $60 for an at-the-counter impulse purchase remains to be seen, but I'm sure that prices will fall quicker now.

On a similar note, I heard from a Studio Lighting podcast that digital storage is getting cheap enough that it is being considered for use as image archiving, the same as film. You take your pictures, and then you store the cards. At $10 for 64MB (about 20 shots with the average camera), it costs a similar amount to film, and is supposed to be better for long-term storage than CDs or DVDs. But is this really an advance?

Who Competes with Apple?

I gotta say this first: I am so not a Mac-head. Have you seen those new Apple ads on TV? If you haven't, I guess you don't watch TV. And I can respect that. But this particular ad campaign makes me wonder who Apple is competing against.

In summary, Apple's ads use a conversation between two characters. One is a stuffy old executive, and he's the PC. The other person is a fresh-faced, "designer-looking" guy. And they banter about who's better, and of course the Mac appears to be far superior. The thing is, the criteria given are fallacies. Even though they're done with a wink and a nod, they're still untrue. I realise that this sounds like sour grapes, but it's a fascinating and frustrating issue for a communications guy. And it's an interesting battle to start -- if any PC company has any marketing brains, this is a battle. The timing is interesting, too. Can I have your permission to briefly examine why?

Apple is the one company left that makes both the hardware and the software. So now they've made this offensive, and the battle they'll be fighting will be one against competitors on all fronts. (One front might be virus coders as part of Apple's claim is that they are immune to them. If I wrote virusses, and liked making headlines, there'd be no better time than now to focus on the Mac.) This campaign may well stoke the fires of competition within the whole computer industry. From all the high-volume PC manufacturers, to the software makers. And interesting timing, because on one hand Microsoft in on the verge of releasing the next Windows version, and on the other Apple has just made their operating system the most Windows-compatible it's ever been. This whole new campaign smells like fear and concession from where I am.

And it forcefully reminds me why I hate Macs: they trade on non-existent mystique. Unquestionably, Apple designers put more flair in their products. How they appear and work physically is more intricate and stylish than any other computer maker. But can design alone sell anything? Well, yes it can -- to designers. To anyone else, the cost of infusing the computer with desirous cool isn't worth the bottom line. They are just computers after all. And, as a creative type myself, I'm more interested in making cool things than looking cool. Sorry, Apple.

The truth is that Macs are no better, and they cost more. The extras are nice when they add. But do they add enough to justify the extra expense? Ummm, nope. I kinda think that this campaign's only strength will be mobilise the Mac-evangelists to upgrade just one more time...