Author: Joel M.

Happening Happenings!

Well it is now glorious Tuesday! And for those of you who do not have the luxury of reading Oswald Chambers every day (MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST – best daily devotional ever!) here is today’s entry… it’s so good.

THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST

“Come unto Me.”

MATTHEW 11:28

Is it not humiliating to be told that we must come to Jesus! Think of the things we will not come to Jesus Christ about. If you want to know how real you are, test yourself by these words-“Come unto Me.” In every degree in which you are not real, you will dispute rather athan come, you will quibble rather than come, you will go through sorrow rather than come, you will do anything rather than come the last lap of unutterable foolishness-“Just as I am.” As long as you have the tiniest bit of spiritual impertinence, it will always reveal itself in the fact that you are expecting God to tell you to do a big thing, and all He is telling you to do is to “come.”

“Come unto Me.” When you hear those words you will know that something must happen in you before you can come. the Holy Spirit will show you what you have to do, anything at all that will put the axe at the root of the thing which is preventing you from getting through. You will never get further until you are willing to do that one thing. the Holy Spirit will locate the one impregnable thing in you, but He cannot budge it unless you are willing to let Him.

How often have you come to God with your requests and gone away with the feeling-Oh, well, I have done it this time! And yet you go away with nothing, whilst all the time God has stood with outstretched hands not only to take you, but for you to take Him. Think of the invincible, unconquerable, unwearying patience of Jesus-“Come unto Me.”

So yeah that was a good one, wasn’t it?

Today I woke up and worked and had a wonderful time doing it too. Then I went to the co-op office and signed up for a Co-op seminar of sorts. Basically this is an hour long session which explains what I’ll be getting into doing a co-op and what will be expected. After signing up for that I visited the career fair at the Field House… but it was mostly dealing with careers in management, military and finance. There wasn’t very much VCT friendly stuff going down and if there was I missed out on it because the fair ended at 3pm. Well then I hunkered down in my van and drove down some roads that eventually led me back to my house. There was no mail. I petted my dog. I sat down in my room and booted up old faithful (my iBook) and proceeded to log on and check email and AIM for a bit with Lee and Holly and Anthony. Then my stomach got the best of me and I ate some mac and cheese (not the processed Kraft-whizz bilge that so many of my friends adore) no this was hardcore real home made mac and cheese that was heavily seasoned with my all-time favorite spice, Paprika. Now I am blogging and tonight I will have BS with Lee and Becca and Mike et al.

Oh yeah and I surfed the 519 website and found this:



It’s a picture of Tess… I can’t figure out why she doesn’t like having pictures taken of her. It reminds me of a picture of Chad too.

UPDATE: I have now discovered yet another picture of Tess online… hmmm, you decide which one you like more 🙂

Well I’m officially christening tonight the end of a mind-boggling week of sleeplessness, enjoyable inactivity and a hopelessly perfect inability to draw the line at any point or day or time or place.

Actually it is no longer tonight it is today and for gosh’s sake I feel like I’ve lived it up more this week than in the whole stinking past year.

I think that some importantly awesome stuff has transcended this past week… it’s awesome. First of all, I finally decided that Disney World is not for me not now. There is just too much going on here that I’m committed to or becoming committed to and also my major needs to be advanced. Disney wouldn’t facilitate this and I need to get a good VCT co-op for Spring so that I can save up for an awesome computer to do my work on and develop some more clout in my major. I’m feeling especially creative recently and I think that this coming week is going to “rock”. And if any of you have not yet seen The School of Rock then you need to drop whatever you’re doing and go and see it NOW. The movie freaking rocks and it will make you feel so good and you’ll almost cry at how incredibly amazing Jack Black (yes Jack Black) is in this film. Add to the fact that it is directed by one of the most solid film makers I know of, Richard Linklater and written by Mike White, the guy behind The Good Girl and a close friend of Linklater’s.

Soon I plan to post some snippets from my newly developing script idea. This one is shaping up to be pretty cool but there’s no way that I could make it right now… but it still is fun to write. One of these days it might be nice to actually complete a script, and I know that it is just a matter of buckling down and doing it but doing a script in your free time when all you want to do is go hang out with friends instead is difficult. Oh well I’m going to go and faint onto my bed and probably never get up again.

Until daylight…

Lists lists lists!

Well last night the topic of such things as top ten lists came up while Tess, Mike, Jeremy Justin and I (not Dan, I had to take him back to his piddling house and he was still sleeping today at noon according to his mom!) were hanging out. So I got to thinking today because last night I couldn’t think very straight because of all the drugs that Jeremy hooked us up with. Man, that was some crazy stuff, whatever this brown granuled-powder/sand stuff was that he gave us. I think he said that it was Natural Sugar. Man, that stuff had a zing to it! Anyway- back on track. Here’s my list of lists!

Top Most Inflluential Films in My Life

1. Magnolia

2. Waking Life

3. Adaptation.

4. Fight Club

5. Star Wars

6. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

7. O Brother, Where Art Thou?

8. The Mission

9. Memento

10. (a tie between) The Lion King and Sen To Chihiro No Kakimakushi

Honorable Mention:

Pulp Fiction, American History X, Time Bandits, Small Change, Amores Perros, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Braveheart, Gladiator, Annie Hall, Dumb and Dumber, Toy Story, Cidade de Deus, About Schmidt, In The Bedroom, Pirates of the Caribbean, Blade Runner

Top Directors:

1. David Fincher

2. Peter Jackson

3. Terry Gilliam

4. Richard Linklater

5. Joel Coen

6. Hayao Miyazaki

7. Steven Speilberg

8. M. Night Shyamalan

9. Ridley Scott

10. Alejandro Gonz?lez I??rritu

And while I’m at it why don’t I just go ahead and mention the top most influential fiction books in my life!

Top Fiction:

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

2. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

3. Mattimeo by Brian Jacques

4. 1984 by George Orwell

5. The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis

6. MYST: The Book of Ti’Ana by Rand Miller, et al

7. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

8. Star Trek: Federations by Judith and Garfield Reeves Stevens

9. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

10. Enchantment by Orson Scott Card

And while I’m at that I might as well list off the top NON-fiction books in my life!

Top Nonfiction:

1. The Bible (okay I’ll admit it, this was a given) by GOD

2. My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers

3. The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton

4. The Imitation of Christ by Thomas ? Kempis

5. The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis

6. Wild At Heart by John Eldredge

7. Bruchko by Bruce Olson

8. A Talent for Trouble by Jan Herman

9. David Livingstone by Sam Wellman

10. World Religions by Huston Smith

(okay so I admit that I haven’t read very many nonfiction books and so my list is equally stupendous and feeble with the titles that fill it, but it is nonetheless, a list) Also, I admist I haven’t yet finished a few of the titles in the list but they have definitely made a huge impression on me thus far in reading them.

Moving on, I might as well include music in this wonderful bevy of lists too!

Top Albums: (and by this I mean the album experience!)

1. Pink (LP2) by Sunny Day Real Estate

2. Neon Golden by The Notwist

3. Parachutes by Coldplay

4. Much Afraid by Jars of Clay

5. Shrink by The Notwist

6. Control by Pedro the Lion

7. One Part Lullaby by Folk Implosion

8. Endserenading by Mineral

9. Emotion is Dead by The Juliana Theory

10. Weezer by Weezer

Honorable Mention:

Your Majesty by The Anniversary, 12 by The Notwist, Any other Sunny Day Real Estate album, Any album by They Might Be Giants, Goesaroundcomesaround by Fono, Return of the Frog Queen by Jeremy Enigk, Point #1 by Chevelle, Silence by Blindside, Listen Closely by The Smalltown Poets, Hey You I Love Your Soul by Skillet, Any album by dc Talk, A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay, Any album by Reclinerland, North to the Future by Joe Christmas

Well, that about wraps it up for Joel’s Lists!

Here’s some wonderful stuff from that wonderful guy G.K. Chesterton that I’ve been reading lately. It concerns the problem of ‘missing links’ in evollutionary philosophy.

“…those bones are far too few and fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole of the vast void that does in reason and in reality exist between man and his bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors. …the really arresting and remarkable fact is the comparative absence of any such remains recording that connection at that point. The sincerity of Darwin really admitted this, and that is how we came to use such a term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too strong for the agnosticism of Darwin, and men have insensibly fallen into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image. They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a non-sequitor or dining with an undistributed middle.”

– G.K. Chesterton, THE EVERLASTING MAN

Isn’t that wonderful?

Well I have a story to tell you all about my life as it was on Tuesday, September 23rd. This was a momentous day, as you all know, because The Fire Theft came out on CD finally along with Holes on DVD. It should have been a joyous day.

But alas for me, it was a day of woe and turmoil. But I learned a valuable life lesson from it. It happened like this, see:

If you were ever a kid once and your parents saved up some money and took you to Walt Disney World you know that when you got there you nearly peed and pooped your pants while simultaneously bursting your skull because of the immense magic of it all. Mickey and Minnie and Goofy and Donald and all of them, strangely mute and stiff and bulbous, but nonetheless FRICKEN’ REAL AND ALIVE would come up and hug you and you’d get their autographs. I was a religious watcher of Disney cartoons and movies as a child. Now 20 (that’s right… 20! 20… 20), I have the exact same love of those characters and what they represent… fun. I recieved an email detailing the Disney College Experience and I decided to have a look at it. I arrived to the meeting on Monday night and had a magical time with Tiffany and Bobby, the hosts of the meeting. They were both Disney World employees and were generally very jovial. I decided that I liked it so much that I’d sign up for an interview the following morning. I signed up to go in at 10am, a full hour before I had to work at Panera.

To make a long story take painfully longer, I got home that night only to find that my Manager had called and wished that I come in at 8am instead of 11. Well, I said that I had an interview at 10 and asked if I could leave work for an hour or so for it and she said that it’d be no problem. So that’s what I did. I got very little sleep since I stayed up late like I usually do and then I got up bleary-eyed and trudged into work. I had a good time making sandwiches for a little while and then I took my break to have the interview. I drove over to campus with my bike in the back of my van, and with less than 6 minutes before I had to be in the building having my interview. Well, I, uh, couldn’t find a parking space in several parking lots… including this horrible gravel pit one with deep potholes. I was already out of time so I JUST PARKED and got my bike out and rode like the wind across campus to Saddlemire and ran up to the 3rd floor for my interview. I calmly handed over the yellow paper I was supposed to bring to the secretary. “Did you bring your application?” she asked. “Crap.” was all I could think and, “No.” was all I could say. “Oh well, that’s no problem, here, I’ll let you use this computer and see if you can get this application filled out quick.” I breathed a slight inward sigh of relief. I logged on only to find out that the application takes 45 minutes to complete. “Crap.” was all I could think. I filled it out at the speed of light and actually finished the thing in about 10 minutes. I triumphantly printed the application off, smirking to myself that I had beaten the clock. Soon thereafter, Bobby showed his face and said “Hi Joel”, “He remembered my name, oh man, I’m a shoe-in” I thought to myself happily.

About 20 minutes later I was out of the interview, having done a decent job I thought, hopefully enough to woo Bobby’s heart.

–::(to be continued in a bit…)::–

I understand son

You weren’t quite old enough

You weren’t quite strong enough

You weren’t quite ready

For the reckless seas

You got buffeted about in the tempest

You got lost in the waves

You were shipwrecked and jaded

Lost on the inside

Now shriveling from your vantage point

You have a wonderful spark

But it’s hidden in the dark

You can’t see the map I have laid out for you

It’s okay, I understand son

You are forgiven

Though like the fig tree your leaves are many

Your fruit is none

Be sure to take root and take in the soil

Drink in what I have given you

Don’t hold back now

For a time will come when you will be hewn

And unless you bear fruit

You will not be spared.

DEVIL

Are you familiar with the term devil?

CLARK

Yeah man it means a demon, or Satan… or something.

DEVIL

Wrong. It means the dark creature of death who is sent from the fiery pits of hell to torture those of pure souls.

Well if that don’t beat all! Hush Money Embezzlement is nearing its completion in the writing stages and storyboarding has already commenced! And we said we’d start shooting on October 18th! Wooooo! We have a month to prepare and get the word out to the cast about schedules, scripts and makeup!

But did Elisha keep walking down the road- NO!

He stood on a hill and he raised his hands high

and he called out the name of the Lord to the sky

and he rained down curses on the heads of the youth

and two she-bears then came forth from the woods

And they

Mauled forty-two of the youth, they

Mauled forty-two of the youth

and Elisha was vindicated that day

because the bears mauled forty-two

That is just a taste of the song Mike and I shall perform tonight for 519 Ministries. Come on down! It’s at 8:00pm tonight room 315 in the Student Union!