Better

History has proven that it is difficult for me to organize thoughts late at night and that, inevitably, something I wanted to say will be forgotten simply because of the hour but, despite that, here is an attempt to get a few scattered thoughts from the past weeks down. It is Christmas again and, in thinking about the Incarnation, I was reminded of Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity."
I did my Christmas shopping today. It involved a trip to the Hallmark store, where I bought several cards. Every time I shop for a greeting card, I look for a card that's blank inside, allowing me to write exactly what I want to say. I find that cards with pre-printed messages inside ring cliched and insincere. In the worst cases, I am convinced that their carefully worded messages are outright lies. "You were always there for me," "You always encouraged me," "You always...." I can't bring myself to sign my name to a card containing a message for someone that, were I to say it to their face, would be a bald lie. Maybe I'm too cynical and am making too much of this. After all, nobody's perfect.... Right?
Malcolm Gladwell has done it again. He's written a book that will probably do very well and make him lots of money, provided that not too many people read David Brooks' recent review of said monograph. Who really wants to hear that he or she is no more than a victim of circumstances, a product of his or her upbringing and surroundings, whose fate and opportunities throughout life are defined solely by forces completely beyond his or her control?? I don't want to read something like that! I would much rather be encouraged by someone who tells me that I have the ability to fly in the face of both fate and my circumstances in order to create a life of my own as I should like it to be, instead of being threatened with some bleak, deterministic outlook. Bah!
"The purpose of art is to unify through communicating." -Me. I thought this one up while sitting through a concert about 3 weeks ago. It seems to me a decent definition of the purpose of art, which might also provide a criterion for separating "art" from non-art. If a supposed piece of art is so subjective in its orientation that it communicates a completely different "meaning" to each individual observer, then it is not unifying people through a shared meaning or interpretation and cannot truly be called "art."
Two weeks ago, I had to show the attack scenes from the movie Pearl Harbor to a history class I was substitute teaching. I found one part of the movie during this sequence particularly touching. Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett are about to take to the sky in planes and attempt to fight back against the Jap attack. Affleck is ready to go, but his friend Josh needs some encouragement. Turning to Josh, Affleck tells him he'd better start his plane: "You know I'm not much good without a wingman!" It made me think of David and Jonathan. Good, tight friendships like that are a big deal. And nobody is much good without a wingman. Ahhh. The whole movie seems to divide really neatly along gender roles. The guys have a battle to fight and the women fix them up as they do. There may be a really solid counter-example blowing this conclusion out of the water, but I can't think of it.
Today I was pondering possible answers to the common question, "How are you?" One not uncommon reply is "I could be better." I realized today that I am doing better than ever, that I am better than I've ever been and, furthermore, there is a strong possibility that life is going to continue to get even BETTER in the course of the next year.