I don’t claim to know much about the Israeli/Palestinian crisis nor our awkward involvement in it. But for a show that follows a collection of adult cartoons on the Comedy Central network the Daily Show often seems capable of asking some pretty good questions. These two clips are worth watching for sure.
I’ll admit it, I like New Girl. Jess and I watch it on Hulu pretty much every week and generally I think it’s pretty good.
The last episode we watched centered around one of the characters discovering he had a growth on his thyroid. Could it be that he has cancer? All his friends started treating him differently, realizing that he might be dying. In the end he learns his lesson that he’s got to truly live life, he’s got to stop living in fear and start taking some bold steps out of his comfort zone (in this instance… swimming in the ocean). In the end it turns out that he does not have cancer, that it’s just a cyst and that everything is going to be alright. What a surprise?! Hurray!
I just don’t know how I feel about this episode (and I’m fairly certain there are about a dozen other shows that have told the same story). Well, for one, I found it a bit formulaic. There’s just something about it that felt all too simplistic. I get it, it’s a sitcom. Sitcoms should not ever have characters die of cancer unless its a marginal character and is somehow funny (if we can’t laugh at cancer what can we laugh at right?….right?). I sat there watching it, knowing exactly what would happen, knowing exactly what the character and his friends were going to learn, knowing for certain that it would turn out to be nothing.
Hmm…I wish I had a good point. I just felt a need to blog about it because it stirred strange feelings within me as I watched it. Maybe what it all comes down to is that I found the episode…boring. Is that it? Is that all it was? Was my true feeling underneath all this simply the idea that this episode took little to no effort to write? A child could have written this, a novice could have created a storyline where nothing actually happens but the fear of something causes the characters to learn their all too important lesson on life. Yes, maybe that’s it.
And the moral of the story is that I should have been a television writer.
Goodbye my friends, I’ll be leaving you for a week. I hope you survive without me…or more honestly I hope you’re around when I get back. Yes, that’s right, my wife and I are headed to Hawaii for a week! Thanks to Jess’ family we are being flown to Oahu for a full week of kid-free sun, sand, and relaxation. It couldn’t have come at a better time and we couldn’t be more excited.
It’s interesting how being sick (and everything that goes along with it) has both propelled Jessica and I toward each other and has made it more difficult to be close. In some ways we have greater closeness and intimacy now than we’ve ever had before while in other ways we are so consumed with the needs and necessities of life while simultaneously running on empty emotionally and physically that we have very little to give or share with each other. All that to say…Hawaii with my beautiful bride will be glorious and I’m choosing to not let blogging interrupt it (you don’t realize how genuinely hard this will be!).
So while I’m gone I’ll leave you with this glorious video:
If you live in Vancouver you’ve dealt with disappointment. In the last week we saw our first snowfall of the winter come in all of its glory. It was beautiful, it was exciting, schools closed, the roads were covered…and the rain washed it away before a child could even really play in it. It was disappointing.
I’m realizing that disappointment is something that I spend much of my life avoiding. Disappointment hurts. I don’t want to look foolish by hoping for something that I’ll only eventually be let down by. Hope hurts. Hope causes you to raise your expectations, it creates vulnerability, it puts you in a place where you can be sorely hurt and let down. If you don’t hope for something you won’t get disappointed if it doesn’t happen. If you don’t hope for something you’ve placed yourself in a protected position, hedged against hurt, against potential shame, against embarrassment.
I’ve spent much of my life avoiding disappointment…but I think I’m ready to be hurt by hope. I think I’m ready to be disappointed by hope. I think it’s worth it. And I dont’ think I could have come to this place genuinely without the process that took me here.* In my first seven months fighting cancer my faith journey had to take me to a place where death was acceptable. And it still is. Death is unavoidable, death is nothing to be feared because death has been overcome (thanks for that JC), death has no permanent hold on me. I HAD to come to a place where there was hope even in death (not just despite death but even IN death). I had to believe that God could and would tell a story through my life, my sickness, and my death. But God did not is not leaving me there. God is inviting me to risk being disappointed by hoping for healing. Most people jumped straight to this place, their first (and only) prayer was for healing, their only expectation was that God would heal me. But I couldn’t make that jump both because I don’t fully believe it and because I couldn’t fully believe it until I was willing to see God in healing and death.
Today, and for about the last month, I’m ready to hope to be healed. I’m expecting to be healed. I’m planning to be healed. I might be wrong, I may be sorely disappointed, I may get hurt…but that’s the nature of hope isn’t it? Hope hurts. Or in the words of Foy Vance “hope deals the hardest blow, yet I cannot help myself but hope”
* That’s a bit of a redundant sentence…a bit goofy, though I’ll defend it’s truthiness to the end…and, yes, I did just say ‘truthiness’
Love the story behind the story and am intrigued by the movie. Definitely hits close to home! Have you seen it? Should I?