If I Ever Feel Better

Last Saturday was an adventure and a half - trawling the op-shops of inner city Sydney for trash and treasure.  Em and I managed to take away quite a few excellent finds and laughed ourselves stupid over some of the appalling things people once bought unironically.

Best find of the day:  without a doubt, the 1978 edition of Dolly magazine featuring a cover story on Pete Frampton.  Pete may have been earning $50 million p.a. playing wanky talk-box guitar solos and showing his chest hair, but what the poor dear really wanted?  True love, of course.

Most curious experience:  a 60-something shop assistant getting shirty with my assertion to Emma that my company has a higher than average amount of blondes because “everyone’s in sales and marketing”.  Shame her blondeness has been coming out of a bottle since the 80s.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the difficult transition from a Christian upbringing to a mature adult faith.  So many people either ditch the whole show or end up as “God’s grandchildren” - superficial Christians without much of Christ inside, sticking around out of habit and obligation.  There are still others that have got a real faith, but who are so out of touch with the world, they can only live in a Christian clique, never making a difference to the world around them.

Part of the problem is that kids tend to make a Sunday School commitment that they are then expected to follow through with.  This means that the moment they realise the implications of their decision and what they’ve given up (usually around the time they discover the opposite sex), it looks suspiciously like an “all or nothing” choice.  A lot of Christian parents are so afraid of their kids walking away or “going off the rails”, they come down hard on the first signs of rebellion.  This only makes the choice blunter and harder.

So what’s a good kid to do, when they’re doubting the existence of God or even just figuring out which bits of their parent’s faith are really Christian and which are merely cultural?

There’s a tradition in some Amish groups (sensationalised somewhat) that teenage rebellion is permitted and doesn’t impact on the kids’ ability to return to the fold fully on adulthood.  This makes sense in a group as other-wordly as the Amish - you can’t maintain such a counter-cultural ethos with a new generation that is constantly thirsting after the outside world.

Christianity should be different - we shouldn’t be asking people to make a decision to leave the world behind and to live in some kind of super-spiritual isolation.  But there’s still a place for grace and understanding when second-generation Christians want time to work out what they themselves want to do with their lives.

Parents have got a role to play (and Michael Spencer’s excellent article gives some ideas) but I think we’ve all got to work out how we let people make their faith their own.  And maybe then we might have a few less half-assed Christians and a few more people who really mean it.

Working in the health care industry is starting to have an effect on me - mostly because I’m confronted daily with information about diseases and illness. You can’t read report after report on obesity and cardiovascular disease without starting to wonder about your own health and eating habits.

I’m generally a healthy guy, but I get lazy sometimes and eat crap. And what you can get away with at 26 isn’t the same as what you can get away with at 36. At some point I need to start getting into some good habits.

So of course, I cooked heaps of food this week and ate really healthily. And I’ve spent the weekend eating chips and drinking beer. Nice.

Sorry I’ve been a bit light on with blogging lately.  I’ve been focusing on getting a new project up and running - my mp3 blog.

Check it out at http://goodnightbeliever.wordpress.com

The NSW Police’s finest were out in force over the weekend - the kind of numbers you never see outside of law enforcement conventions. All because of the threat of protests and possible incursions by TV pranksters.

I’ve got to admit, that the sight of police officers tends to fill me with a mixture of emotions, none of them positive. Given I’m a painfully law abiding citizen, it seems strange to me that I would have such antipathy to the men and women paid to look out for my security.

My thinking? You never, ever have a positive interaction with a police officer. Guaranteed. They’re either booking you, breath-testing you with weary disdain or - at best - looking round your house to try and work out how the junkies got in and nicked your DVD player. You’re not at your best, they’re not at their best. No one feels good about it.

It must be a pretty thankless job and I’m glad that someone does it. It just doesn’t make me like the rude individuals I’ve come across any more.

I was reading Theodor Adorno’s thoughts on hobbies this morning (no, I don’t normally read cultural theory so early in the day) and I liked his comment that he didn’t have hobbies - he saw all his activities whether paid or unpaid as of a piece.  This resonated with me because my main hobbies are “creative” or “productive” in some way - writing, making music, reading to direct and refine my writing.  They’re not hobbies in a traditional sense.

Yet even though I can feel like I have the Frankfurt School on my side, I’m not entirely satisfied.  So much of my leisure is focused on achieving things and completing things and I have very few activities that I do for their own sake.  Take poetry for an example.  I read very little of it because it’s so open-ended.  I can pick up a novel and it has a beginning and an end.  Once I’ve read it, I can put it down and take onboard whatever its main point was.  I have a feeling of acomplishment.  But a poem - that’s to be savoured and read and re-read and read aloud and shared.  You never reach that point of “Oh, well I think I’ve got that one now - on to the next one!”

Life is short (obviously) and despite my best efforts, I will never achieve everything I hope to.  So I might as well spend some time on rose smelling.

It’s not easy to post about the things that really matter, especially when they’re about you and what is so often hiding underneath the surface.  But I’ll have a crack at it anyway.

The thing that I’ve discovered recently is the sheer depth of hate and anger that I have inside me for other Christians.  Not all, obviously - there are some who are extremely dear to me and who can literally do no wrong in my eyes.  But when someone reminds me of the people from the past who have caused me hurt or confusion or have led me to feel excluded or who have completely failed to understand me, that’s when I find myself feeling and thinking some troubling things.

I stand by my view that there are a lot of things wrong with the modern church and that there are a lot of things in my past experience that were not good.  But realising how judging and critical and angry that I can be - that’s the really worrying thing.  Because I know that if I don’t deal with it, then I will turn around one day and decide that life is easier without other Christians around me and I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t lead anywhere pretty.  And it’s something that I, myself, can do something about.

I’m just not sure what the best way to go about it is.

My flat has recently been buzzing to the sound of helicopters patrolling the airspace around the inner city.  Why?  Because of APEC, of course.

I’ve never paid much attention to APEC before.  To my knowledge it’s never changed anything or done any particular damage.  I found out only the other week that’s its commitments are non-binding.  The only thing notable is the sheer silliness of the final photoshoot in “national dress”.

Being right in the middle of it this time makes it all a little bit more relevant.  Particularly from a practical stand-point.  The security effort and logistics are amazing and some local protesters are planning to be out in force now the President of the USA (not one of the ones eating lots of peaches, natch) is in town.

The protesters themselves look like being a melange of anti- Work Choices, Iraq War and Globalisation protesters and maybe even a smattering of Free Tibet and Falun Dafa interests.  I’m pretty sympathetic to these causes (despite my views on the methods used) but APEC seems a funny forum to be protesting.  A junket for an oddball assortment of developed and developing national leaders, some of whom are lame ducks on the edge of forced retirement?

Maybe my working experience inside the wheels of government has given me a different perspective.  But there are a lot of ways to skin political cats in a liberal democracy - and hurling yourself at the barricades is rarely the most effective.  The road closures and chopper sounds may make us feel like we’re in a police state but when the dignitaries leave town with some lip-service resolutions and a few of Surry Hills’ finest venereal diseases, the poor will still be around, the refugees will still be in camps and the IR laws will still be the same.  And we can think about how best to get the powers-that-be to do something about them.

I was driving home the other day, listening to the soothing sounds of Ghostface Killah when something dawned on me: is this stuff really suitable for the kiddies? Now you may think the answer is really obvious and that bitchez-and-bling crack-dealing rap is best left on the high shelf. You’re probably right, but bear with me here.

A lot of people become a little bit more middle-of-the-road as they get older and there are plenty of acts you grow out of. I mean, I don’t listen to Placebo as much as I did as a moody eighteen year old. You probably listen to a heck of a lot less Hanson than you did in high school. So while some parents may worry that one of the kids at school will tell little Macaulay what “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” is really about, they’re probably less concerned about their little angel chanting the words to “Bitchez Ain’t Shit” around the playground.

But I’m getting to the point where I think my tastes are actually broadening rather than settling into Greatest Hits of the 80s, 90s and Today. It’s certainly not getting any more Tipper Gore-friendly. So it’s pretty unlikely that by the time I’m a dad (whenever that is) I’ll have abandoned all un-kiddie-safe tracks and artists. It’s just not going to happen.

So what’s the deal? Can any punk-as-fuck or hella-ghetto parents fill me in what they do? Do you have the special CD collection that you keep in the study? What happens when your kid hits 13 and decides you’re a dirty hypocrite? Are you one?