@lovelaurel have you seen the new iPhoto they debuted at the keynote today? It has facial recognition...it makes me think about going back..
about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
This is a promotional clip for Superwow, a teen summer camp in Fort Walton Beach, FL. Jarrod Jones, a professional speaker that I work for, spoke there last year and will be speaking there again next year.
Jarrod is 6′7″. He’s huge. You can also check his blog out at www.jarrodjones.com. He’s a great speaker and writer (and blogger).
Tonight was the season 5 premiere of the “The Office” on NBC. Lyndsay and I were invited to our friend Amanda’s house to watch it with a big group. We had a great time–and of course, the show was great too. During commercial breaks there was an “Office” trivia contest. I only missed one question in the whole 20 question game.
When the score was counted up, I was declared the winner!
Amanda had made an amazing prize for the winner–jello…with a stapler inside it! Just like the prank Jim pulls on Dwight in one episode of the show. It was hilarious. And I beamed with joy to receive such an amazing trophy.
I brought it home and took a picture (though it kinda fell apart in my car, and jello is not easy to photograph).
A week or two ago I started thinking. I started thinking about how TV pretty much rules my life. Even though it was the summer and there isn’t any good TV on the 18 channels of television that Lyndsay and I subscribe to, I realized that I fill all the gaps in my free time with television.
I decided it was time to act. I began an experiment to break my addiction. For one month, I decided that I would not watch TV or play video games.
I started strong. I bought a book on amazon.com, intending to read it when it arrived. I began reading other books and magazines sitting around our house. It was enjoyable. I felt intellectually stimulated. I had more time to read my Bible, and I took advantage of that.
The next day, I did the same. It was nice, but I felt a bit of a pull to watch some television. I ignored it safely.
The next day Lyndsay rented a movie. She was going to watch it. I decided that I would watch it too. Even though I had decided not to watch TV myself, she hadn’t, and I wouldn’t want to neglect her just because she was watching a movie. So I watched the movie. After the movie was over, I read.
The next day, something happened. I broke. I’m not sure how it happened or what triggered it…but I just started watching TV. And a day or two later, I was playing video games too. Complete relapse.
I did take a moment to sit and think about how completely addicted I was, and how bad I was at keeping this committment. It was a good thing to take a moment and observe. I took this moment while I was waiting for my video game to load. And then I was gone…and all of my shame with it.
After all, it was just an experiment, right? It wasn’t like I felt myself careening into sin and I started this seemingly absurd act of self-imposed legalism as a last ditch effort to save myself. I just noticed that as life fell into place, I would fill the gaps by staring at a screen. I chose to instead try filling the gaps by staring at a book. Even though my Bible reading time had expanded, it hadn’t gotten any more sincere, authentic, or frequent…just longer. So…judge me as you will (since I’m sure you already have)–I just marked my experiment as somewhere between “failed” and “impossible” and resumed my normal life.
Then this past weekend one of my roommates from college, Delanie, came to visit and left me a stack of xbox games that he doesn’t play now that he has an xbox 360. I’m still enjoying them…but I see an addiction looming on the horizon. Hopefully I can avoid it.
A couple weeks ago I blogged about running a red light and how the city of Murfreesboro has designed a trap to make dirty money, watching you with big brother and then blackmailing minor traffic offenders into paying them off so they don’t report your crime to the state or your insurance.
I took the blog down. I did it on my own free will. Because I didn’t want people to judge me as a bad driver or a whiner. Since, after all, it would only reflect on me, and I’m too small as an individual to come up against a city government.
Until I looked at Google today and noticed that my blog was number one for “SafeStreet Program” and number 5 for “Safestreet”…for an entry I deleted over a week ago. Pretty amazing.
So…that gives me some hope. I recreated the blog. Maybe it get some additional search engine love.
Back when I was in college I was in a program called LEAD. I learned two very important things about myself.
1) I’m not a leader. All my life I’d been grouped in with the “leaders”…mostly because I was an over-acheiver who didn’t know how to say “no” to any kind of committment, and because I was such a “doer,” I was able to fool people into thinking I was a leader. But alas, I learned I’m not. There are certain skills that I lack that are key to good leaders. These are things like vision, and charisma, among others.
2) Most importantly, I learned to think. We would come to meetings where we would just sit in a dark room for awkwardly long periods of time. At first this was fairly painful to me, as I would spend the time worrying about the other things I could have been doing at that moment. But over the four years I was in school, I got really good at the whole “clearing my mind” and “thinking and observing” process. In fact, by the end of it, I would go to these things and make consistant, bold observations about myself, my life, and my future. Things like “I feel like I’m called to minister, but I know that I’m not called to preach.” Another pretty good one was “I need to leave the country and do short term mission work on some sort of a periodic basis so that I don’t forget what life outside of America is like.”
Nothing I ever wrote down was rocket science, but rather the culmination of time and ideas, with nothing more than a 5 to 10 minute pause to collect the thoughts and write them down.
One thing I’ve learned since graduating is that if I don’t take time from my “busy” life and do this periodically, I will observe my life going nowhere. Why? Because I’m not “realizing” anything and taking action based on it.
(By the way, I put “busy” in quotation marks because if there’s anything I’ve learned in observing my behavior between college and now, it’s that the things that keep me “busy” are far less important than the long term thinking and observing sessions…and that I still use “busy” as an excuse to not take my eyes off the short term…and that is still a completely lame excuse, just like it was then)
But I read an interesting article the other day about taking time to clear your head and think. It was actually more of a conversation between Barack Obama and David Cameron of British Parliment. Regardless of what you think of either of these two people’s political views, you have to admit that they’ve made something of themselves, and taken themselves to a place of power and importance that most people will NEVER get to. And you have to respect that.
Want some help on the “how”? Here’s an interesting video from a lecture given at Google on this topic:
Fair warning…this video is an hour long. And I’ve only made it through the first half. But after the first half I was so motivated I cut him off so I could go and sit and think.
