Walking in the Light

Musings from a son of the Father

It is said that clothes make the man. While that’s not strictly true, I do think that the kind of clothes you wear says a lot about the person in them. I’ve had a weird relationship with clothing and fashion. While I love the idea of dressing sharply all the time, I’m usually seduced by the comfort of casual clothes, and end of rocking jeans and t-shirts, polos, or flannel most of the time.

This has all changed, and it’s all thanks to my obsession with TV on DVD.

Let me back up.

If you have met me, you know that I love TV on DVD. I love vegging out in front of the TV for a while. It’s my catharsis. And regular TV is awkward because you’re forced to watch what they show you, and if it’s a serial TV show, you’re forced to watch it one episode per week, which is frustrating and obnoxious. Alternatively, I could put in a movie, but I usually find movies too long to just pop in and veg out to, and I’m rarely in the mood to get all invested in a long story. This makes TV on DVD perfect for me, as I get to consume 42-minute bites of whatever show I’m interested in, and I can watch as few or as many episodes as I want, and even if I fall asleep watching it, I only have to rewatch about 20 minutes to get back into the story for the episode. I’ve blown through a lot of TV shows on DVD – The Office, Lost, Arrested Development, The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, Buffy – to name a few. But after my most recent journey through Arrested Development, I found myself Jonesing for some more TV on DVD.

Fast forward to the weekend, when my puppy Asher jumped up onto our kitchen counter and knocked over the new Merlot my dad had just bought from Sam’s (we’re classy). This scenario found me driving to Sam’s to replace the spilled wine, and while I was there, I decided to check the electronics section, just to see if anything caught my eye.

Something did.

Gossip Girl.

I saw the first and second seasons on sale for 15 bucks a piece, which is a huge steal in TV on DVD land, and I decided to give it a try. I have no qualms with indulging in stereotypically girly shows, as I usually find them more clever and engrossing than their male-focused counterparts (I’m looking at you, Jackass).

It took about 15 minutes before I was totally hooked.

This post isn’t about Gossip Girl – maybe I’ll write about why the show rocks so hard another time. This post is about one character in Gossip Girl. The Sultan of Style. The Ambassador of Attitude. The King of the Cravat. The President of the Pastels.


He is Chuck Bass. And while he’s a 100% jerk, he knows how to rock a wardrobe. He fearlessly matches clashing patterns and colors and pulls it off like a pro. I mean, check it out:





I’ve fallen so in love with Chuck Bass’s sense of style, and I’m out to create my own Chuck Bass-inspired wardrobe. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I’m super excited. Gone are the days of wearing my CTK hoodie to the office. Bring out the bow ties, boys.




I recently read The Host written by Stephanie Meyer, more widely known for the annoyingly popular (and annoyingly addictive) Twilight Saga. I’m not a huge fan of Meyer’s writing style, but the standalone novel came highly recommended, and with the qualification that it was not at all like Twilight. After hearing good reviews of the book from several people, I decided to give it a try. I picked it up the other day and I thought I would give you guys a heads up.



The Host is a futuristic “apocalyptic” novel working off the premise that an invasion of aliens (who somewhat inexplicably call themselves “Souls”) has resulted in the virtual decimation of the human race – except not really. The souls are centipede-esque parasitic creatures that survive by inserting themselves into the brain of a host creature – in this case, humans. The human in subsequently enslaved by the Soul until, little by little, the consciousness of the person fades away, replaced entirely by the Soul in a human suit. If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you read Animorphs, and the concept is lifted pretty much right off the pages of that series.



I’m always a little ticked by a lack of creativity, but I actually really liked the concept in Animorphs, so I figured I would plow through here.



Anyway, there are, naturally, uninfested survivors living day by day, hiding from the Souls who would capture and infest them. One of them, a woman named Melanie, is caught and infested with a Soul called Wanderer.



Wanderer is sweet, kind, pacifistic, and extremely altruistic, and Melanie is strong enough that she utterly refuses to fade away, so we have an interesting dynamic. Eventually (by which I mean by page like 50), Wanderer is convinced by Melanie to go and find Melanie’s younger brother Jamie and the love of her life, Jared. What follows is an inspiring story of an outsider being accepted by a group of hostile humans and facing a fierce internal struggle between loyalty to her old people and her new people.



Or something like that.



The Good – Meyer’s writing is typically enthralling. I blew through this book pretty quickly, and enjoyed reading it. Her characters are sympathetic if not as realistic as I usually prefer, so you do get caught up in their lives. Her male characters are strong and masculine, which is a nice change from Edward, who might as well go shopping at Victoria’s Secret for a pair of panties to match Bella’s. This is primarily a love story, but there are enough action sequences to keep us guys interested, so props to Meyer for that. I was so engrossed in the story that I actually *had* to cheat and look up the ending – something I’ve never done for a book – but more on that later.



The Bad – Meyer suffers from the same affliction she does in the Twilight books – she’s just not a very talented writer. She touted this book as her big novel for Adults, in direct contrast with the twilight series. This is clearly misleading, as her prose totters around on unsteady legs, no more complex or insightful than the perennial classic Hop on Pop. Furthermore, everything is just too simplistic. Her characters face difficult decisions but they approach them without one iota of complex thought. What you see is what you get here, which makes this good popcorn material but not much else.



The Ugly – Here’s where the nitty gritty comes in. I think this book is ultimately a failure. Meyer brings up an important philosophical debate here and takes an extremely backwards position on it. The entire book – all nearly 700 pages of it – is a chronicle of how Wanderer wins the love of the humans, and, by extension, the reader. She is sweet, sincere, kind, brave, and she is well-loved. The problem? She’s still enslaving a human being. I find it utterly unbelievable that the majority of the human characters – including Melanie’s lover and brother – would even remotely consider choosing for Wanderer to stay in Melanie’s body. Regardless of how wonderful Wanderer is, the fact remains that she had imprisoned a human and stolen her dignity and her freedom in order to experience human life herself. This is something that is so intrinsically unacceptable, ethically speaking, that I couldn’t get around it and let myself like Wanderer. Every time Meyer tried to make me, I just remembered that all of Wanderer’s wonderfulness was at the blatant expense of the human prisoner she kept locked up in her own mind.



SPOILER ALERT!!!!



I had to find out the end of the book before I got there because the idea of Wanderer staying in Melanie’s body until the end infuriated me so utterly that I flat-out refused to read the book if I found out it ended that way. You’ve probably guessed that it doesn’t, as I did read the entire book, but there are still a lot of surprises in store.



END SPOILER!!!!!



Anyway, all that having been said, The Host makes for interesting if not an enlightening read, and I recommend it for a good rainy day.



Final Verdict: 2.5 body-snatching slugs out of 5

When I sit down at my desk, and tune out the noise around me, and focus on the blank lines in front of me, I forget, for that time, that someone will read this letter that I write, seeing and understanding these words that I have written about myself. I’m normally a very reserved person – superficially outgoing, but very hesitant to reveal the person inside of me. And while I’m not writing about any deep or intimate secrets in these letters, I am writing about me. Writing about things that every single person who would read this blog would know, but it feels, unexplainably, intimate, because I am not talking to someone, not looking in someone else’s eyes, not able to gauge when I’ve gone too far, when it’s all become too much, when I need to sit back and stop talking, change the subject, protect myself. I just let myself go, let my pen fill the empty pages with words about my life, my hopes, my complaints. The things that I love and the things in which I find comfort. I let the ink flow like my thoughts, and it’s strange. It’s like looking at a mirror and knowing someone else, someone invisible, is looking at your reflection, too. This is probably the most accurate analogy I can make about the experience. It’s like standing in front of a mirror, clothed, normal, perhaps in the moment before you walk out the door, when it’s just you and your reflection. You evaluate yourself. Notice things that are unusual – perhaps there’s a cowlick, or a button that is undone – things you correct and move on with, never give it a second thought. That moment is very private, and it would be very unnerving to know that someone else is seeing that, seeing that moment of our reflection.

Then, after the letter is finished, signed, sealed, addressed, stamped, I leave to mail it away. And then, standing before the mailbox, I remember – truly remember, in my heart, that someone else WILL read these words, and suddenly it’s like standing before not a simple mailbox but a precipice, surrounded by clouds, far from the ground, my heart pounding and my stomach tight. When I drop this letter in the mailbox, it will be decided. Someone will read these secrets that are not secrets, know these common, ordinary truths about me, and I have to either back away from the edge and retreat to safety amd write a new letter filled with light words, airy words, nothing words – or jump.

Inspired by the courage and honesty of one of my great friends, I’m going to write a post that’s very personal too. This is something that I consider to be one of my greatest personal challenges to overcome, one of my most grievous flaws.

I am an incredibly difficult judge of character. I am extraordinarily critical of everyone I meet. One of my most difficult challenges is to meet someone and accept that they have flaws, are human, and overcome it and like them anyway. Instead, I meet someone, find a flaw, and associate that flaw with that person. This one is irresponsible. That one’s too haughty and self-important. This one thinks he knows everything. That one is too immature. The list goes on and on. It’s not that I can’t see the good in people, it’s that I see the bad and that almost always outweighs the good to me. And I stamp these people with these judgments, and I dismiss them because of them. I think this is a defense mechanism from when I was younger – I had a lot of trouble making friends and finding people who enjoyed me and my company, and in response I looked for and found shortcomings in the people who rejected me. These situations were very frequent, and I think it became less responsive and more impulsive. I just do it now, with everyone.

I do it still with those by whom I feel rejected. I remember vividly one particular person from school, with whom I truly wanted to be friends. When this person rejected me, I turned around and was immediately able to identify and target his shortcomings, and I used those to villainize (spell check tells me this is not right, but I can’t find the right spelling for it) him to myself and, I’m ashamed to say, to others as well. I know how hypocritical this is, as I am sure that I carry a distinguished number of flaws myself (though I say truthfully but with shame that I am mostly unable to see them).

Rarely, I meet people for whom I can either find no flaws or are willing to overlook the flaws. These people I consider my friends. But they actually have it worse than anyone else.

With few exceptions, I hold my friends to impossibly high standards. To clarify, this means that I hold expect them to “perform” as friends at a level that is actually impossible for a rational human being. I wish this were a joke, but it’s not. I expect them to be there for me, always, with a near superhuman capacity, ready at any moment to answer the phone or respond to a text should a situation arise in which I need a friend. I expect them to keep plans regardless of any new development, however pressing that development is. I expect them to put me first, which is the worst of it. It’s absurd, I know, and when I stop to think of it, I realize my expectations are irrational. Venomously, though, I become impulsively upset at the slightest breech of my friendship code, and while I quickly identify that this irrationality has occurred and work to assuage my emotions, it bothers me to no end that this happens. I’ll be the first to admit that there are certain undefined guidelines that good friends should follow, but those guidelines are broad and reasonable, unlike my imaginary Robert’s Rules of Order for Friendship.

The good news is that these hurt feelings almost never linger for more than like an hour at the most before I realize I’m being a huge idiot. Most of the time I can just work through it and forget about it and no one is any the wiser. Occasionally I am a TREMENDOUS idiot and blow up about it to the person before I realize how wrong I am, and by then I’m afraid I’ve already wounded a perfectly good friendship.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’m really working to overcome it. I say the words “I don’t really like (insert random acquaintance’s name here)” WAY too much of the time, and I spend too much of my time being angry at the people I care about, too.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re a friend and you’ve been the brunt of this before. If so, I’m very sorry. Please accept my apology. And know that I’m working on making sure we can have a smooth, drama free friendship. It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of prayer, but I’m on my way.

Stay strong, guys.

Kori

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