I'll admit to not understanding Lent very well. I never noticed the word until I was in Jr. High. "What are you giving up for Lent?" Good question, I thought. What is Lent? I was pretty good at pretending to not have not known things. I was a stupid kid after all. Not a STUPID kid, a stupidkid. The way all kids are stupid... the normal ones anyway. I just had more... shame? Pride maybe. Or the same amount. I guess it's not a fair assessment to think I was good at pretending. I was probably terrible at it. I tried though.
So what is Lent anyway? Where does it come from? I grew up knowing about Jesus and his fast and his temptation, but never seemed to run across Lent. I just looked it up on Wikipedia. It says Lent comes from a Germanic word meaning spring, which comes from the root long. A time when the days are getting longer (thank goodness).
It's a fast. I think I'm getting it a little. A Christian Ramadan of sorts... as Melville might say.
Well I'm a little late. Anna and I decided we need to cut back on a couple things. We're going to take a look at our media consumption. We don't even have a TV but we manage to watch it anyway. Go figure. We decided to cut back. Less surfing, less watching, less facebooking. What a verb. So we'll use the internet with purpose, have an agenda and get it done. And get out. We'll get our brain used to reading. It needs to calm down. It needs to wake up.
I took a media theory class where we had to do an experiment. We would study our media consumption for a week and write our thoughts. Then we would go on a media fast and write about our experience. Part of me didn't like the idea. Part of me knew it was right. The latter part wrote the paper. The former was happy when the paper was done, with it's unhappy experiment. What do you guess I wrote? It's an easy paper to write if you try. Who would want to though?
My discovery--aside from the obvious--was that I use media to turn off my brain. Thinking is hard. Have you ever tried to learn a new language? It's exhausting. Imagine if you could quiet your brain all the time. Ah, the energy you'd save. Plug in.
So for spring I'm unplugging a little more. Not altogether mind you. I'll still turn some stones to bread. But fewer. Gotta watch those carbs.
4 comments:
nice to see you back in the blogosphere. does this mean that you'll be posting even less than you were before? cause i'm not even sure if that's possible...
lol. No. Writing and actually DOING things on the internet counts as being productive. Surfing, not so much. I need to write more. So here I am. How's diggs Tay?
well i'm in california now. crazy, cause i never thought i'd leave hawaii. there's some cool people on my ward though, and a even a few byuh alums. do you know a girl named shinehah? she's one of the fellow byuh-ers i met and she was in concert choir too, so i figured you two might have crossed paths.
how are things with you?
any kids yet?
Very interesting thoughts. I too pretended to know things that I didn't really understand as a kid. I think I still do it some. I'm sure it has to do with pride because I never wanted to look dumb. Ah well, because of that, I have tried to teach my kids that it is always great to ask questions. The more the better. Paul disagrees because he gets tired of hearing them talk.
We thought about having a media fast last week in fact, but nobody wanted to do it and I didn't feel like having to entertain everyone that much. I still want to give it a try for just a week-- after I get caught up on my TIVO. I've only got about 100 more hours of the winter olympics to catch up on. Maybe you will inspire me to go ahead and give it a try. However, the last time we did this experiment in my ward about 10families ended up pregant. There apparently wasn't much else to do. Good luck with your "reading"!
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