Anyone?

Yes, my underwear is on backwards. <sighs and shakes head>

Dude! That was the first time I was able to successfully stay with the lucid dream and make it last. (Here is where you can start psychoanalyzing me.) I was the current age I am now, at what I remember being my middle school helping out. I was helping set up lunch tables and stuff. There were also other random things going on like a retail store where me and a friend from my past were buying gifts for his daughter. I had multiple timelines in my life happening at the same time, because I was at my current age but my friend and his daughter were both younger than they are now. I remember being looking around and being able to focus within the dream just like you can focus your eyes when you’re awake. I remember this person needed to run downstairs to get something and was going to be right back. I stood in the bustling hallway leaning my shoulder against the wall with a tilt of my body and just watched everything, marveling at how very real everything felt, but at the same time my sense of touch and physicality was dulled.

I remember a great deal of the dream, and I remember letting the lucidity of the moment go. It was all pretty cool, and I think I may try to gain more control over things next time since I seem to be having these more often.

I was fighting it, but finally just gave in. I hope Edgar and I don’t become too close, or I’ll have to drop him like a bad habit.

No, Seriously.

I loved the way this film unraveled! The storyline revealed itself like a comic book, Batman for instance, but based itself more in reality than the fantastic. No caped crusader in this film; instead a petite woman, Erica, who is transformed by brutal violence into her darker self. After her fiance is beaten to death, and herself nearly so, she is reborn not into the light but into the dark. The same face in the mirror stares back at her as did before; she has not been physically altered, but a completely different person lives behind the same eyes.

The movie takes you through her downfall as she consciously and deliberately lets evil into her heart after defending herself in a convenience store robbery. She becomes a vigilante, consumed by the thrill of doing what she feels is good and right by eliminating evil from her city. The same evil that changed her forever, and killed her fiance. Her clothing through the film changes with her from white to gray and finally to black. We struggle with her as she knows what she is doing is wrong – it is killing; it is illegal. She swings from knowing she is right, to justifying her actions, to almost turning herself into authorities, and back again. At one point in the movie she gives away the crucifix necklace that was once her fiances, and she has been wearing throughout the movie, to a woman whose life she saved a few nights back. (She obviously does not truly understand what this symbol represents.) This done right in front of police officer and right after Erica asked the woman who she saw the night, and the woman replies no one.

I felt the movie struck a lot deeper than its surface appearance. The viewer has a connection to Erica, because in our hearts we want her to exact her revenge. She knows it’s wrong and so do we. What happened to her is horrible, and we want her attackers to be punished for what they did. Erica takes us down a the road where we choose dark. The movie made me feel that the dark is not just out there waiting for you to choose to step into it. The dark wants you. It is not waiting, but wanting. The dark wants us, because we want it. It is so natural in us even when we consciously know better. Choosing the light is so much harder. This was not a story of struggling with forgiveness.

Sadly, in true moral depravity that only Hollywood can produce, Erica not only exacts her revenge, she is justified by the police officer who is on to her throughout the movie and even instructed how to perform her crescendo of violence “legally.” The movie ends with Erica running away from the bloodbath that the officer has covered up, only to later stroll through the same dark tunnel where the story began – toward the light at the end of the tunnel. A better ending would be her walking into an ever darkening tunnel.

Aside from the ending (sigh) the movie is very well done, and is a present comic book story that is, scarily, easy to relate to. The lesson is how easy it is to relate to Erica’s dark desires, how easily they consumed her, and how quickly she fell away into the darkness. There is no light at the end of that tunnel folks. Revenge is not ours. If you found it easy to relate to Erica, you are not alone, but that does not make it just.

I can’t imagine the amount of money that would saved and returned to churches by lowering the barrier to online giving and eliminating the concern about throwing away that money. I understand the fear of churches allowing someone to give to the church via credit card, and I don’t encourage anyone to use that to their own destruction, but I think a reasonable and sound method of electronic giving would be a blessing to many.

If you are linking to this site, please update your links to http://officecurmudgeon.com/ when you can. The links will continue to work indefinitely, simply redirecting to the new domain.

Thanks all.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ministrytech

To the upper right is a shot from my camera phone. This is a projected image on a wall in our training room back in Leawood, KS. Clif is larger than life!

So to sum up – yeah I posted on Clif’s presentation in Oklahoma City before he was even finished, watching from Leawood, KS.

Given even simple technology – you can’t stop nerds from getting creative and participating, even if we don’t get to be there in person.

Great! Now, the first sponsored link looks quite reasonable. There technically is a Mitsubishi Eclipse vehicle. But the link provided takes you to a 2008 Lancer, and “eclipse” is found nowhere on the page. Bad, bad, bad.

Umm … isn’t this almost a black-hat strategy? Maybe Google was on to this pretty quickly, as when I clicked on the link it wouldn’t pull up the site but only refresh the page.