But my Church offers a further revelation: We believe that when Jesus Christ returns to earth, He will return, not to Jerusalem, or to Baghdad, but to this great nation—and His first stop will be Jackson County, Missouri. The LDS Church teaches that the Garden of Eden itself was in Missouri! Friends, it is a marvelous vision. Some Christians profess not to like this teaching. But I ask you, where would you rather the Garden of Eden be, in the great state of Missouri or in some hellhole in the Middle East?

Only to return to learn the world wasn’t big enough”

–The OtherSide (the Roots)

I was looking at a map of the Pacific last night.  It was only really half of the Pacific; east of Hawai’i was excluded.  And there was that nice little arc: Australia, New Caldonia, Fiji, Samoa, Hawai’i.  And northwest of that was Indonesia and Asia and Japan.  And far south of that, in the middle of nowhere, is New Zealand.

All I could think about: “If I saved longer, I could’ve stayed for two years and avoided this day-to-day meaninglessness.”

***

This is hard to write because I generally feel uninterested in most everything right now.  I am having a hell of a time finding work.  I can’t save any money, but it is not like my student loans are going anywhere.  I can’t hold out hope for the next thing, much less work for it.

What is the next thing?  That is part of the problem- maybe it is the problem.  I like the idea of working in Australia.  I love the idea of somehow getting back to New Zealand.  I also love the idea of working for this biking trip in Europe I want.  Or maybe grad school.  Or maybe a few years of hard work to pay down my student loans a bit.  Or maybe going back to work on a mountain and learning to snowboard more.  Or putting a lot of effort into running and biking. Or maybe spending some time and really, seriously, working on my writing skill, to see if I have anything.

Compound this lost feeling with most everybody else having a purpose, and I feel more lost.  My friends here are all busy and elsewhere; my friends in NZ tend to be awake as I’m sleeping.  But most everybody has a purpose right now, something they have to deal with daily.  I suspect anybody who has spent time looking for work knows the following feeling – there are days when the utter hopelessness is too overwhelming.

I don’t wish I was back there.  Sometimes, I wish I had not left – because once you do leave, that charm is broken.  Going back and being able to pick up where one left off, is a rarity.  I don’t crave the events I already went through.

But the people I met, and the beauty of the country, and the senses of purpose and excitement, and the sheer freedom of it all – these, I miss.  And I feel disoriented without them.

So I come back and things are different.  I knew it would be hard to deal with when I returned stateside, but I thought grabbing a job and working hard would alleviate it all.  The possibility of that not happening never crossed my mind, and with all my free time I am left to rethink what I’ve already thought, to relive what I went through, and to miss that dream I had, the purpose I felt, and the desire to make the most of my time.

Instead I subsist on hope that I catch a break and can move to the next thing.

Money:

There is another context for that behavior, though — a more contemporary one. As a society, we may be disgusted by seeing U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters, but we remain oddly unfazed by the fact that, presumably, those same Marines just put high-caliber rounds through the fighters’ chests. American troops are not blind to this irony. They are very clear about the fact that society trains them to kill, orders them to kill and then balks at anything that suggests they have dehumanized the enemy they have killed.

I don’t have a feel for the popular anger about what happened.   Well, unless the popular attitude towards this is, “eh,” as that is the overwhelming vibe.  There are much larger issues at stake, though – if this does result in a bout of anger from the American populous, it will be misdirected.

The response from the Taliban: ”This is not the first time we see such brutality,” said spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.  Well, then.  A valid point.

The Junger editorial is absolutely worth five minutes, though.

So is the GSG analysis here.

Except I have the ability to recite nearly any stand-up comedy passage I’ve ever heard and yet can’t remember the goddamn name of the narrator in the Great Gatsby, my favourite novel.

THANKS FOR THIS, BRAIN.

The glacial bed on which Franz Josef glacier used to flow.  This looks away from it.

Big and loud all right, also wildly unstable, searching, inconclusive—everything heroes aren’t. The formal outline, on the surface a conventional sonata form, is turned inside-out: The development section in the middle, usually a point of maximum tension and drama, is the relatively most placid part of the movement; the recap, the return of the opening theme and usually elaborately prepared, erupts out of calm like a scream, with a major chord that somehow sounds hair-raising. (Major keys and harmonies being traditionally nice, hopeful, that sort of thing, minor ones darker, sadder, etc.) At the end there’s a funeral march over a slithering bass. Beethoven wrote funeral marches earlier, one the second movement of the “Eroica” Symphony. There we can imagine who died: the hero, or soldiers in battle. But who died in the first movement of the Ninth? Next comes the scherzo, Beethoven’s trademark skittering, ebullient movement. Here it’s those things ratcheted up to a Dionysian whirlwind, manically contrapuntal, punctuated with timpani crashes. Strange choice, to follow a funeral march. Even stranger: For all the apparent over-the-top gaiety, the movement is in D minor. Gaiety generally means major keys, but not here. Given its surroundings, the third movement is peculiar mainly in its cloudless tranquility. It’s one of those singing, time-stopping adagios that mark Beethoven’s last period. Two themes alternate, and nothing much happens but the themes acquiring delicate filigree and little dance turns in a dreamlike atmosphere of uncanny beauty. The famous finale is weirdest of all. Scholars have never quite agreed on its formal model, though it clearly involves a series of variations on the “Joy” theme. But why does this celebration of joy open with a dissonant shriek that Richard Wagner dubbed the “terror fanfare”? Then the basses start playing stuff that is unmistakably a recitative, the familiar prose patter between arias in opera and oratorio. Here, a recitative with no words. And for the supreme oddity: One at a time, themes from the earlier movements are introduced only to be rebuffed by the basses—opening of the first movement, nope, too grim; second movement, too light; third movement … nice, the basses sigh nostalgically, but no, too sweet.

For what its worth, my favourite two minutes of music ever are in the 4^th movement, about 11-13. Chills. CHILLS, I SAY.

But it is introduced in a fashion I always thought interesting: ‘Ode to Joy’ is first played at the start of the 4^th movement (and quietly, as the article notes); then, for the first time, there are vocals. Then everything dies for a pause, and the tenor starts in again with little background only to stop and give way to a twisting roller-coaster of instrumentation. It just twists and turns and dives…and then the full choir comes in and we hear the only full statement of the famous theme.

A leader must emerge from Happy Valley to tie our community together again, and it won’t come from our parents’ generation.

They have failed us, over and over and over again.

I speak not specifically of our parents — I have two loving ones — but of the public leaders our parents’ generation has produced. With the demise of my own community’s two most revered leaders, Sandusky and Joe Paterno, I have decided to continue to respect my elders, but to politely tell them, “Out of my way.”

They have had their time to lead. Time’s up. I’m tired of waiting for them to live up to obligations.

Think of the world our parents’ generation inherited. They inherited a country of boundless economic prosperity and the highest admiration overseas, produced by the hands of their mothers and fathers. They were safe. For most, they were endowed opportunities to succeed, to prosper, and build on their parents’ work.

For those of us in our 20s and early 30s, this is not the world we are inheriting.

We looked to Washington to lead us after September 11th. I remember telling my college roommates, in a spate of emotion, that I was thinking of enlisting in the military in the days after the attacks. I expected legions of us — at the orders of our leader — to do the same. But nobody asked us. Instead we were told to go shopping.

Yep.

But nobody would read with that title.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading and writing today on how we, as a culture, remember things.  World War II is my case study – I read yesterday how the Pearl Harbor survivors association is disbanding because there are too few of them left.  Which is incredibly sad, and brings up the question: “when a generation dies, what happens to their memory?”

Then I stumbled across this.

I don’t think colleges should be on the hook for student aid, but that isn’t the point.  The interesting part was:

This brought up the questions, what exactly does a college education promise and who makes the promise.  I take the position that both society at large and colleges themselves have spend the last 30 or so years convincing the American public that unless you go to college, you are virtually worthless.  Become a plumber? Waiter? Fix cars for a living?  Having been born in 1982, I grew up in a society that looked down on those positions (never mind the fact that a master plumber, good mechanic or waiter at a high end restaurant can make a better living than some doctors or lawyers).  The momentum of society has always been towards higher education.  My generation, the Millennial Generation, has been indoctrinated to believe that if we don’t go to college we’ll all end up janitors and that that is a horrid fate.

This is a perfect way to say it. I’d add another point as well: when you are 18 years old, you don’t know anything.  Really, only a small minority of 18-year olds know what they want to do and who they want to be.  For the rest, you take the advice of those older than you.  And when the myth perpetuated is, “go to college so you don’t end up working at McDonald’s,” you learn two things:

1. College is the next, natural step if I want to get ahead.

2. I’m better than working at McDonald’s.

But, it turns out this isn’t true.  Yes, college may be the next step.  But what college?  With what degree?  And the better the school you go to, the better the degree, right?

Those questions are hard to answer at age 18.

The second myth is the worst.  Nobody is too good to work anywhere, but up to college graduation, your entire life revolved around some part of that myth of not working at McDonald’s.

And then you graduate and you have to work at McDonald’s, or in retail, and you spend months writing cover letters and applying to positions.  And you initially feel bad about the rejection, but that fades and you feel stupid for believing in that myth in the first place.

So whose is at fault?  Is it the 18-year old for going to an expensive university, or going to university at all?  Or is it the generation before us, for mixing this very recent truth – go to college, work professionally right away – as a permanent truth?

It’s always both, but more the latter.  The 18-year old is old enough to take out loans.  He or she is old enough to get a credit card and be an adult.  And the debt accumulated rests on him and her.  That debt isn’t going anywhere, each person is going to have to work hard to pay it off.  So, of course it is the fault of the 18-year old for taking on that debt.  At its core rests the personal decision to do that.

Simultaneously, 18-year olds know nothing about money.  Nobody I knew had a financial education course in high school.   Few people understood how money really works – even those with a job in high school didn’t have the necessity to pay for their housing or their food.  So when a kid arrives at college and is presented with papers to authorize a $10,000 loan…well, hell.  They’re going to graduate and get a good job right?

Somewhere here, I’m on record for thinking that while current generation of decision-makers has not ruined the country, they have set it back decades.  It has been an awful generation for leadership and courage.  That sense of entitlement and lack of desire to make the sacrifices necessary was told to my generation like it was golden truth.  In some respects (that won’t manifest themselves for a few decades, if events work out well), the recession is the perfect slap in the face for my generation – it is happening while we are young enough to recover, and has made us realize that we’re not too good to work at McDonald’s.  In fact, we’re not too good to work anywhere, because if we really want to achieve our dreams, it’s going to require a whole lot more work than we were told.