Movies January 2011

Work and rampant volunteerism took all my giveadamn for the last quarter of 2010, so no formal record of movie watching was kept. I probably watched 900 films a month during that period. No one will ever know now.

But this month, I'm trying again!

The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Toy Story 3

Hercules Unchained (MST3K)
These things are less fun watching alone.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Good stuff.

Jab We Met
M and I love it when the local access channel shows clips from Bollywood musicals as music videos. Streets of people dancing, and a guy or a girl singing about chaste love, while moving in a way that is the entire opposite of chastity. delightful! So we looked on Netflix for Bollywood musicals and found this one. Yay!

Closing my eyes

I'm done using the words "see" and "listen" to describe attempts to interact with God. I get mad that God won't participate in the literal, empirical senses of those words, and that Christendom bent them for me through careless overuse.

God doesn't "talk" to me. I suspect God communicates with me, but he's never said a word to me in the common, concrete understanding of what "words" are. So I'm taking time off from that particular metaphor.

I've long been a reader of Real Live Preacher, a pastor at a small Baptist church nearabouts San Antonio, Texas. (His blog link is also in my sidebar.) Very recently, RLP left the pastorate. He's never been an orthodox pastor, but he wrote something that I'm not sure he could say occupying the pulpit. Goes like this:

I’m 48 years old. I have been a Christian since I was 9. I’ve been to seminary. I’ve been a conservative, then a liberal, then kind of a conservative again, then even more of a liberal, and finally I don’t know if there’s a label that even fits me. I’ve been all over the map. I’ve been looking for God in the scriptures, in the heavens, in the world, in my mind, and in thousands of conversations with as many people.
And I don’t know anything about God.
I don’t mean that in the good way, like when people say that someone is wise because he admits that he doesn’t know something. No. Seriously. I just don’t know shit about God. Period.
I don’t know if God exists or not.
I don’t know what the Bible says about God. The more I read and study those books, the more confused I become.
I don’t know how much God cares about how we live our lives.
I don’t know if God answers prayers or what it would even mean for a prayer to be answered.
I don’t know how we should worship God. I don’t know if sticking to ancient traditions is good because they have survived some kind of religious natural selection process, or if we should just sit in silence like the Quakers. Maybe we should get guitars and cookies and sing prayers that 5-year-olds can understand. I don’t know.
I just don’t know.

I've been down a less rigorous road than his, and he's farther along. But I can see him from here. And I mean "see" in a metaphorical sense.

I've recently signed on for a pretty advanced leadership gig in my church, Circle of Hope. I'm on the Compassion Core Team, which is part of the higher leadership function of our whole group. I was chosen because I've been around for a while, and keep showing up, and, at just the right time, demonstrated a bias for action over slacking.

I'm also about to become a cell leader in the next few months. My leader, Brian, picked me because of what he called my "flirtations with atheism." He's done the reading and the thinking and the reasoning and the guesswork just like me. And he says that the thinking is good, but that in spiritual matters, you learn by doing. I think I believe him.

It seems propitious for my investment in my church to crank up as my skepticism waxes. I'm expectantly interested in seeing what happens. In the literal and figurative senses.

Kiva.org microlending

My sister-in-law, Alison, gave me a gift certificate to Kiva last Christmas, and I've enjoyed it a lot. If you haven't heard of Kiva, here's my plug.

Kiva is a charitable microfinance organization. You put, say, $25 into the system, and choose a borrower to lend it to. A bunch of other people throw in some money too, until together you reach the amount the borrower asks for. A few months later, the borrower has invested the money, seen a return, and pays you and your co-lenders back. Sweet!

I've been doing this all year, and it seems to work great. I've already made 3 loans, mostly with the initial gift certificate moolah. In fact, it works so great, that I decided to start a lending team! And you can join!

If I were to send you an email inviting you to join, this is what it would say:

I want to recruit you to my lending team, Quickstart, on Kiva, a non-profit website that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur across the globe. You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay the loan, you get your money back.

If you join my lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty. Once you're a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva "count" towards our team's impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you - but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team's collective portfolio, so our team's overall impact will grow!

I wouldn't try to replace conventional giving with this (some people don't have the wherewithal to pay you back, even though they still need help), but I love being part of it. Join Team Quickstart, and start loaning money today! Like, now!

Interesting article: How to Set Goals When You Have No Idea What You Want.

This is a larger problem than most productivity gurus seem to understand. In my experience, when I know what I'm after, I don't have a problem taking the steps to get it (implicit in those steps is the grail of "goal setting"). Even if it's a multi-step process, even if it's a years-in-the-making multi-step process, I'm cool.

For instance, one of the current things I'm after is a return to full-time work in games, and ideally I'd like to work as a writer at BioWare in Austin. Pretty specific! I know what I want. Goal setting is, therefore, commensurately simple.

The thing that makes me surf the Web all day is a failure to discern what it is that I'm after. I'd like to write comics, but where am I headed with that? I dunno. I've got some ideas, some places I've cast around into, but no real goal yet. I don't know exactly what I'm after yet.

I'd like to be internet famous, but there's a whole lot of unknowns there, so I spend more time dreaming about that than goal setting.

This article is (necessarily) vague, but it's the kind of place wandery people like me need to start. We don't need a roadmap. We need a destination.

Finding that is something that "8 Tips to Organize Your Workspace!" will not help to discover. If you're lucky, that kind of "productivity" junk is just noise. If you're unlucky, you start organizing your workspace and think you're making progress.

Work at Netflix

Great slideshow about Netflix company culture. I've never cared about the inner workings of Netflix before, but suddenly I want to work there just to know what the inside of that box feels like.

The role of grit in becoming

Recent story from the Boston Glob, The Truth About Grit.

Executive Summary: Old man science is beginning to agree that hard work and perseverance are key indicators of success, more than intelligence or talent.

I've been thinking more about how one gets things done, intentionally without being a giant dick. I can think of lots of used car salesman types I've known, people who achieve what they want at the cost of good will. Or more gently, people for whom relationships are not as important as their other goal. Being kind or giving does not help that person achieve his or her goals, so those facets get jettisoned.

Single-mindedness is not a fantastic trait by itself. Accomplishing a well-lived life requires a tuned interplay of a number of important things. Some people seem to be able to tease out that fine tuning, seemingly naturally.

I am none of those people, but this reminds me that I need to get back to my freelance writing, away from blog writing. More later.

In the meantime, to find more about the Grit Study, go here: http://www.gritstudy.com