Isqua Istari

Okay, so maybe I’m old and I’m just not down with the finer points of modern music, but songs like this just don’t quite do it for me. The line that inspired me to post on this song was “When you move like a jellyfish rhythm don’t mean nothing you go with the flow, you don’t stop.” Now, I’m a musician, and probably the center of my musical heart is that of a conductor, not a French Horn player or piano player, so any reference to “rhythm don’t mean nothing” automatically rubs me the wrong way. To me just saying it betrays a lack of anything resembling knowledge of musical aesthetics, or just plain bad taste. Even the spastic dancing that modern youth enjoys has rhythm to it. Rhythm is essential in anything musical or poetic, even if it is less conventional.

Then I read the whole song, and while I can see that it was probably meant as a description of this “little girl”‘s surpassing beauty, it really doesn’t come across that way to me. The first verse has a few random sections that don’t appear to make any sense at all in the context of the song, and I don’t think my fiancee, anyhow, would appreciate having her toes called “bubbly,” or take “infested with tarballs” as a complement. Of course, I’ve come to expect senseless randomness from modern music; as a result, I avoid listening to the words if I can, and just listen to the music. What struck me as odd, though, is when I read the comments at the bottom. All these people hailing him as some kind of musical genius… when really, the music isn’t that great at all, and the words are largely just prattle.

Anyways, that’s just something that kinda bothers me about modern society. This sort of thing seems fairly typical: the public at large rallies around an ideal or song or person or what-have-you, but never actually stop to see if it makes sense, and in many cases, don’t even bother to figure out what they’re rallying around. It’s like white people who tell black people they’re wrong when the black person says, “But really, there isn’t that much racism, and I’ve been treated very well and fairly all my life.” I have, on several occasions heard a black person say that to hear the answer, “Shut up, that’s so not true! You black people just have it so bad, we whites are all horrible discriminators! I mean, except for me.”

That’s all for now. Remember kids, before you believe in something, be sure you know what you’re believing in.

Oh, and if your feet are infested with tarballs, please wash before coming in the house.

The end of the world is really cool. First everything blows up, and then the New Jerusalem comes down…sweet dude!
The fire refered to in 1 Peter Seems to occur when God appears in His glory (in Revelation)

In other news, my new website address is going to be www.peripheralarbor.com (see my post about the Tree of Life)
It’s not up yet, but it will be….it will be.

In other news, the government is sort of like a large hairy bum…with nuclear missiles and total air/land/sea superiority.

In other news, the news rules the government, and probably the world.

Which brings us back to the end of the world.

I was thinking about being alone on Sunday afternoon. This was probably because my whole family is gone for the week, and I am at home alone for sixteen hours out of the day. This led me to think about Genesis, and where God says “it is not good for the man to be alone.” I find it interesting that God did NOT say that “it is not good for the man to FEEL alone”. Niether did God say “So I’m going to start to walk with him ALL the time now! Yep Adam, you’ll never be alone again!”
I’m not sure that I have anything else to say, but this seems a bit of an abrupt end. Then again, the world comes to a rather abrupt end…in the end.

I’m proud of my dad. His life isn’t too great these days… my mom has left him for another man, and is pursuing a divorce, his finances are a little tight, and he’s having to raise my twin younger sisters from 15 to adulthood on his own. I’m proud of him, though, because of the composure he’s been keeping all through this, and because of the attitude towards God he’s kept throughout these past few months.

I never used to talk to my dad that much. My mom was easier for me to get a hold of, and she could answer my questions just fine, so I didn’t talk to my dad a whole lot. Since March, however, I’ve been talking to him a lot more, and I’ve been very glad of what I’ve heard. My dad is decidedly not without his weak moments, but even in them, he usually knows best how to gget himself through them: God’s grace. My dad hasn’t expressed anger at God at all since my mom left… to the contrary, he appears to have been relying on God all the more since then, and I can tell that God is with him.

I had the honor of helping my dad to work through things this past Saturday. We had dinner and a drive together, and it was great to see him go from clearly upset and hurting to clearly an awful lot better than he was. Any of you who are Christians, feel free to pray for both of my parents, and remember to sometimes stop and look at your own parents as people, and not just figures of authority.

Recently, I’ve been having quite the urge to write something, either a program or an essay or a story. Anything creative really. Unfortunately, I’m completely bereft of ideas. I can barely even come up with stuff to edit and add to a 57 page long story I’ve already written.

I’ve often wondered: what is writer’s block? Why do we get it? I think about so many things… why is it that when I sit down at a keyboard or pick up a pencil all my thoughts turn into, “So…. what am I going to write…” It’s not just frustrating, it’s… weird. I should start writing down ideas whenever they come to me.

If any of you would like to see something written, let me know and I’ll see if it’s something I can and feel like writing.

A note on the word “Isqua“: I did some more looking through the a number of online dictionaries, and isqua is only in a few of them… most of them seem fairly trustworthy, but aren’t the mainstream dictionaries that are easy to find.

I was thinking about the tree of life. It seems to be the only feature other than God that is persistant throughout all of creation, right from the begining to the end. Even more interesting is that the tree of life is large enough to be growing on both sides of the river of life. A river flowed through eden, did the tree of life span it as well? Is it the same river? Although all life was destroyed in the flood, many plants survived (Noah didn’t take plants on board the Ark) which makes you wonder…is it the SAME tree of life as well?

Folks, Ziggy has joined the crew here, and with the addition of another writer we changed the name to Isqua Istari, Elvish meaning “Wise Wizards.” Hopefully, we’ll be able to turn out some stuff worth reading once in a while.

Melinda, a sister of a friend over at erality.com posted a piece on “Pro: General Education,” which included this line:

“College education…is about education for life.”

I have to disagree with that statement. Even if it is revised to “College Education in liberal arts,” I would tend to disagree. While I have absolutely no clue what a liberal arts education really entails, college education in general seems to be good for one thing: a diploma. I’m a third-year senior in Mechanical Engineering. I have 32 or 33 units left to graduate, a total of 152 units taken, and I can honestly say that the vast majority of what I have learned, I learned in the first 2 weeks or less of class. Very little of it will ever help me with “life issues,” either. The only ways that I’ve learned about life through college is by living on my own for 3 years, and I could’ve done that for an awful lot less money someplace other than a college campus.

My frustration with college stems from the feeling that I’m really not learning anything useful. All of my engineering classes could easily be boiled down to 2 week seminars with a book of applications to reference, because the only things in these classes that a), anyone can ever remember a week after the class is over, and b), is actually useful, are the basic concepts. Anyone who can finish the calculus courses required for an engineering class can figure out the application of most of the concepts by simple mathematics. General Ed classes usually can’t be taught in two weeks, but oftentimes, in my experience, the required general education classes amount to either conversation material or pointless exercise to the capable student, and near-impossible hurdles to the incapable student.

If college is meant to train us for life, college should parallel life. In “real life,” the vast majority of people will do one thing during the day, and something they enjoy in the evening and on the weekend, not take their work home with them. They will be responsible for keeping themselves and their potential family fed, clothed, and housed, and they will make all their decisions on their own. Granted, many college students experience that sort of responsibility during their college career, but many do not. For many college students, even on conservative Christian campuses, college is little more than an extension of high school adolescence: our parents (or our loans) pay for the majority of our lives, and thus when we aren’t in class, we are free to misbehave in any way we so desire, and we are always free to phone home and beg for more money if we run out. The majority of what college actually trains us to do is pass classes and remain dependent, both things not likely to continue much past our final semester.

Even thought of as career training, college, or at least my college experience, is remarkably lacking. As an engineer, the number of times that I will be required to do a calculation without a book is rapidly approaching, if not already at, zero. I will have my textbooks handy, just in case I need a formula, but in the industry, I will be (and am being) trained to use the handbooks, rules, codes, and computer programs that my office prefers, something anyone with an analytical mind could do easily, which all supercedes the textbook knowledge I hopefully retain from my classes.

Not only will I rarely need the theoretical knowledge I’m being given, the odds of me remembering it all are pretty lousy. While I can’t think of a good alternative, the fact that at least 90% of college students forget the majority of their coursework before they even start the coursework for their next semester seems evidence enough to me that the system is defunct.

Unfortunately, college has become mandatory in our society. You can’t get a job without a degree, even if you have experience, as my dad has learned in his quest to find a different job. As a result, the providers of education have driven up the price of education and lowered the quality—and thus their production cost—of education, just like any good businessman would do. College generally does not prepare us for life, and the education is often of dubious use in today’s workplace, as most companies completely retrain their employees upon hiring. College is little more these days that a method to obtain a diploma, and line the school officials’ pockets with a few thousand more green slips of paper.

Clearly, that decision to start a blog was worthless. See, I’ve had this horrible curse where I can never remember the profound things I want to say for long enough to say them, in spite of a terrifying urge to write something. Anyways, I have a bit more time to write (sometimes) over the summer, so we’ll see if the creative juices allow for anything interesting. I’ll also be writing summaries of the work week, since the staff member in charge of my COOP 3000 class wants to see a “Work Journal” so he can say I actually worked for my COOP, and this is a convenient place to put them.

I’m going to go dig up and refine an article I wrote in response to an article on General Education.