My Life is a John Hughes Movie

In honor of my favorite movie writer/director's passing today, I present this repost of previous entry. Rest in peace, John. Sincerely yours, The Breakfast Club.
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Growing up as a child of the '80's

I was born in the late '60's. My grade school years were the '70's, but I define my "growing up" years as the '80's. In the '80's I had my first girlfriend, found out Darth Vader was Luke's father, learned to drive, discovered that I had a favorite music, had my first job, got my first car, had a crush on Molly Ringwald, saw Haley's Comet (sort of), bleached a streak in my hair, watched the space shuttle explode during science class, received the right to vote, registered for Selective Service, bought really stupid looking clothes, went to college, learned to "twist and shout" with Ferris Beuller, met my wife, got married, had my first child.

My generation is kind of the "undefined" generation. We're too young to be Baby Boomers and too old to be Generation X. We started the whole piercing thing, but only our ears (guys usually just one - left meant you were cool right meant you were "gay", girls had multiple piercings, but still just the ears.) We had our own music and started the "alternative" genre (usually defined as something totally bizzare that would have remained unknown if they didn't have a video on MTV.)

With the advent of cable, we were the first generation to be "media connected". While our parents had TV and radio, their main connection to the world was through the local stations. With cable we had access to movies, music, and who knows what else. Fashion trends and fads that used to take weeks and months to filter across the country were now piped into our living rooms. The influence of media allowed trends and tastes to change very rapidly, often resulting in weird and wild combinations that we still can't explain.

Movies and TV shows defined the life of the '80's teenager as metropolitan. Big city, big school, big parties. Growing up in a small town, the fashions and trends
were really out of place, but we didn't care, it was cool. We saw "The Breakfast Club" and "Pretty in Pink" and dressed and talked like they did anyway. We longed to go to the mall because that was the cool place to hang out.

But small town life was different than what we saw in the John Hughes movies. We wanted to "party like it's 1999", but we were poor, isolated, and would get caught because everybody knew who we were. So we settled for our small town parties.

There is much about my "wonder years" that is unpleasant, but for the most part I have fond memories of my school, my friends, my life. I could spend pages and pages describing small town life, and probably will over the life of this blog, but I will spare you the romanticization in this posting. Being 40, I'm sure there is much that I am not remembering correctly and even more that I have assigned more significance to than it actually deserves. That being said, it's probably a good thing I remember things the way I do, dwelling on the bad would just be depressing.

I'm not sure how to wrap this up. While there is much more to my life, my experiences have made me who I am and the '80's are 25% of my life. I thank you for allowing me this road trip into nostalgia.

This explains everything

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Why Won't God Heal Amputees?

I came across that question disguised as a YouTube video called "World's Biggest Illusion" or something like that. It presented itself as one of those optical illusions, but instead was a 10 minute rant. I won't share it with you because it's basically just a series of random pictures of poorly drawn illusions with a guy talking over it the whole time.

At first the question bugged me a bit because it's one of those that really doesn't have an answer. Then I realized that was my issue with it: it really doesn't have an answer. So many anti-Christian/anti-religion/Anti-God "proofs" out there are nothing more than these smoke-and-mirror questions that are designed to "stump" the faithful. Other examples are: "Can God make a rock He can't move?", "If God is good, why does evil exist?", "Can Hitler be in Heaven?" and on and on and on. This was just another in that category.

People who cite these questions as "proof" that God is a fantasy remind me of a bit from one of my favorite books, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the universe the author created there exists a little fish that lives in your ear, called the Babel Fish. The fish allows the host to understand any language anywhere. Here's what the book has to say:

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the NON-existence of God.

The argument goes like this:

`I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.

`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, "Well, That about Wraps It Up for God."

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, page 42. (Seriously, page 42!)

Those who like to argue for the non-existence of God are like that. Even when faced with something they can't deny is unexplainable, they flip it around to prove their point. If God were to open up the sky and stare them in the face, they would claim they were hypnotized, drugged, hallucinating, that Steven Spielberg was making a movie - anything to deny what is staring them in the face.

Now, I'm not saying that the faithful are right and they are wrong. (I believe that, but that's not the point of this blog post.) My point is, if you are going to make an argument, make a real one. Don't base your debate on smoke-and-mirrors. Yes, these questions will stump an inexperienced debater, I've seen them used to stump even so-called experts. And, I've seen them used on both sides.

Let's get past these childish tactics and discuss things on a real level. Let's admit there are things we don't know, that there are things we CAN'T know. Let's acknowledge that there comes a point that you have to take a leap of faith and not everything can (nor should) be proven. Let's stop pretending that we know everything and really, honestly, talk. That goes for one side as well as the other.

OK?

Let's go.