slowed-down

There's always a moment in songs or poems or movies or books or people that move you when the world slows down. Maybe that's what being moved feels like, and we don't really know how to say it except to say that for a moment the world slowed, or stopped, or turned on its axis, or fell in on itself. Most of those sayings are too loud to mean what people should mean when they are trying to say they were moved. Our worlds really only stop a few times during our lives. Most of the time they just slow down. Time takes a deeper breath and exhales more slowly. 

When you think about it, we expect a lot out of life. I don't really know how else to measure people's huge expectations except by the dramatic amount of disappointment that seems to exist not only in our culture but in the people I know. Usually people would say not only in the people I know but in our culture as a whole, but I think the people that we know are more important than the culture that's out there somewhere, and that somewhere is nowhere if you think about it, its just a bunch of groups of people that people know. I guess I've spent a lot of my life disappointed, and I'm trying to get away from that. My friend's dad just posted something about a book his wife bought, and it made me laugh. It's title is "What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage". It made me laugh because whoever wrote that title gets it. They get everything. They get what I wish I had gotten when I was younger. It's strange for you to hear someone who is twenty two talk about things I wish I knew when I was younger, but I don't care. I wish I had asked myself "what did you expect?" when my first girlfriend broke up with me, or when I hurt my knees, or when all my other minor tragedies happened. If I were to write a book about this, it would be called  Of Minor Tragedies and their Prostitute Wives (that's a play on a David Bazan song title. My world slows when I listen to his music, and it slowed when I got to talk to him). Most of the time, when people ask "what did you expect?", they mean that in a it's-one-tragedy-to-the-next kind of way. I don't mean it that way. I mean it in the sense that we live in a world that is a certain way, and our expectations ought to align with that reality. The things that are the most true about the world are the things that are the most quiet, I think. It's not that slogans about living as if today is your last day, blah blah blah, etc, don't necessarily have a tiny piece of truth in them somewhere far out of sight, it's just that they make me want to drown myself in soup. My friend Patrick said something that made me laugh and that was true. I probably laughed because of how true it was, which is why we usually laugh if you think about it. He said that he saw a waitress with a "Save the Dolphins" button on and he wanted so badly to ask her how many dolphins she had saved by wearing that button. Sometimes I want to ask people how many times their slogans have fixed anything. 

I guess that to some extent, we all have buttons that we wear. We all blow on our abortion kazoos or our atheism kazoos or our holiness kazoos or our indie music kazoos or our fashion kazoos or our money kazoos, we all blab about things that make us forget to love each other. My friend Sean said that they older he gets, the more aware he is that there are things that he doesn't know, and he is becoming more and more comfortable saying that he doesn't know. I don't know what Jesus would do about the issue of abortion, but if I had to guess, I think He would be sitting next to the girl in the abortion clinic waiting room telling her that He loves her, and that love would change things. I don't think He would be outside the clinic blowing his abortion kazoo. I don't want to blow my kazoo about button-wearers and kazoo-blowers. I want us all to stop. Just stop. 

There's a movie that I love called "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". I used to blow my kazoo about it, but not anymore, I just love it now. I couldn't describe to you the effect it has on me. One thing I could tell you though is that there's a moment in the movie when the two main characters are in a hallway, I can't remember if they are sitting or standing, but you'll see in a moment that that doesn't matter. The guy(Joel) wants to try fix his relationship with the girl(Clementine) and start over. He says "I can't see anything that I don't like about you" and she responds "But you will! But you will! You know, you will think of things. And I'll get bored with you and feel trapped because that's what happens with me". Joel looks at Clementine and says "Okay" and she, a bit taken aback, hesitates and then says "Okay". 

Maybe we go on having that conversation with everything, with everyone, for our whole lives. Some things, and people, say okay. Some say no. I don't know much more than that, and I don't expect to.