Christmas

Christmas is about potential.  We celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, who grew up to be the Saviour of all men.  We collect as families and close friends to celebrate what will be.  Maybe I'm not making sense.

Before the world was formed, God had a plan.  His spirit children (us) needed a world to come to and experience life in a body and learn how to master bodies.  He knew we would make many mistakes and needed a way fo us to be able to return to Him.  (He is perfect and imperfect people can't come back to stay.)

Jesus Christ volunteered to come to earth as a mortal, like us, and suffer more than any man had ever suffered.  He would experience the entirety of human experience and atone for all pain, lost, sickness, and sin--all imperfections--so we could return to God and live with Him forever.

We had known Jesus for a long time, and knew He was the only spirit sibling we had who could possibly make good on such a promise.  We supported this and looked forward with faith to His life.

On Christmas day (or what we celebrate as Christmas day), Jesus was born to a virgin mother.  Heaven had such trust in Jesus that angels proclaimed his birth across the world.  A new star appeared, telling everyone the Saviour was born.

It is the beginning of His perfect life we celebrate today.  We celebrate the potential of a tiny baby child; born in the muddy, flea-ridden stable; lain in an animal's feed trough for a bassinet to become the perfect example to all mankind of how to live and how to return to God's presence.

Christmas reminds us of our potential.  Each of us can choose to be like Jesus.  We can live following His example, repenting of our mistakes because He atoned for our sins.  His suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and on Calvary's Cross allows us to repent and have our sins, though as scarlet blemishes on our souls become white as driven snow (see Isaiah 1:18).

Jesus allows us to fulfill God's plan, to fulfill our potential as children of the Most High.  We can achieve limitless heights because He performed His mission on earth.  We each must do the same.  We must follow all His commandments and help other do the same.  We must find and fulfill our purpose of life.

Then we, too, through Jesus' atonement that rights every wrong, will realize our potential as we stand before God and are ushered into His loving arms once again.

Home

The phrase apparently goes "Home is where the heart is."  I believe the phrase was meant to be symbolic of where the subject's thoughts and preferences lay.  I don't agree with that interpretation.

For the last 6 years I've lived away from home.  I spent one year at university, two years in Toronto, and returned to university for the past three years.  Although I love visiting my parents (what the symbolic interpretation of the phrase would imply is "home"), I know this isn't where I live.  However, it is home.  But only so far as I am living here for the next 10 days.  Then I will return to the place I normally sleep and where I pay (too much for) rent and live 96% of the year.

But that wasn't always home.  I've been in three different complexes at university this year.  Each of those places was home for the time I lived there.

So what is my home?  It's the place where my physical heart beats.  It is wherever I am.  Wherever my head hits the pillow at night, that is home.  Home is literally where the heart is.  And to make the symbolic statement true, I have to work to love where I am.

Maybe there's a lesson in that...

Love where you are; you never know how much longer you will be there.

Me, the Bari-tenor

So I love to sing.  Not that I'm particularly talented, mind you.  I just love to do it.  For most of my semi-adult life (age 14 on) I've considered myself a bass.  I've got good low range (I bottom out around D2/C2--deep C or "the C below 'low C'") and I can push myself to reach E4 (F4 on a really good day--just above middle C (C4)).

And then one day, singing in my car I realizes there aren't many cool songs for basses.  Thus I must improve my upper range and become a baritone or 2nd tenor.  Boy, that was fun.  So I've been experimenting with singing tenor in church choir.  Lucky for me, I live in an area where tenors are in plentiful supply (usually good tenors are the hardest to find at church).  Thus I have the ability to hear a good tenor in both ear and match where I need to pitch my voice.

Stretching my limits has been very fun.  I sang a song over summer that required a G4 (a step and a half above my normal max) that I had to falsetto, but it has been fun to learn to hear the higher range of notes.  Bass is easy to pick out because it is the lowest note you hear.

So anyway, I can sing bass better than most, and my tenor is coming along, if a little short on the upper end.  Either way I love it.

Twilight

(Originally dated December 2009)

I honestly can't believe I'm blogging about this. Actually, I can't believe I watched Twilight.

I have mixed feelings about it. Yes. It was as bad an awkward as everyone said. The music was cheesy, and the acting seemed poor as well.

But it other ways, I was very impressed. As bad as Rob Pattinson's performance was (I was reminded of Hayden Christensen's Star Wars performances) both he and Kristin Stewart played the awkward high schoolers perfectly. The script could either be labeled as horrible, or as perfectly representative of high school relationships. Add to that the strangeness of an emotionally troubled girl thinking she is in love with an equally emotionally troubled vampire. (Although you'd think that he'd be a little more in control after "living" for 100+ years.)

The strange camera angles can be seen as reflecting Bella's troubled mind as well as Edward's mental instability in regard to Bella (actually it was horribly accurate to how I felt around one particular woman).

(I had more to say at the time, but I found this in my draft box and decided to publish this.)

Less inspiring, no less interesting

When I started this blog, I felt it would be important to monitor where my traffic (visitors) came from--or at least how many visitors I had.  I thought that's what the SiteMeter widget would do.  It doesn't.

However, some time between when I last blogged frequently and now, blogger has added a sweet analytics interface to my admin dashboard.  And what I can see is super cool.  Since this architecture was implemented, I can track my most frequently read posts, and the sources that send people to my blog.  Yay for Google buying blogger and integrating GoogleAnalytics into the blog interface!

That said, why is "Unclog the Flow" my most-read post?  Please comment, I'd love to know your thoughts.  (Although if you do so anonymously (i.e. don't have a gmail account for some odd reason (WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?)), please leave some hint for me to know who you are.