For every rule, there is often a corollary special case exception. Thus, despite my usual reluctance to do the memes everyone is doing, here is my play of the interest meme:
LJ Interests meme results
- biking:
When I was in my 20s, I had a black Peugeot bicycle, which I would ride from suburban Mesquite to rural small town Crandall. I loved the place names I would encounter--Scurry, Warsaw, Combine. On the way into Crandall, one coasts down a large hill, amid cowfields which in Spring are filled with tall yellow flowers. It is an exhiliration beyond words. - casual saints:
I meet people who are so intrinsically kind that their goodness just glows from them, and they don't, in their humility, recognize it.
I believe that sainthood is wasted sometimes on big deeds, rather than on the casual glue that binds us all together. - eno:
Ever since I purchased "Before and After Science" when I was a teen,
I've been intrigued with this fellow who helped take a set of ideas,
popularize them as "ambient music", and move them from the theoretical labs of academica into the popular consciousness. I remember my first few listens to "Music for Airports", one of the first Eno ambient albums, and knowing that it was both unfamiliar and redefining. - harry partch:
Partch represents to me the power of the odd and new. Harry Partch invented his own musical scale, his own instruments, and his own
mass theatrical concert productions. His microtonal music works in its own universe--unique, filled with story, ineffable. I have been in love with his music since I saw the Partch documentary in music lecture class in college. - kazoo:
I love the kazoo, although I am profoundly not good at getting the best music from the instrument. The kazoo serves as a giant metaphor for me--a liberation from the image of music as something requiring practice or expertise to play. The kazoo, patented in the US in the 19th Century, rewards those who can hum a tune with exuberance.
I have many kazoos, and wish I had baritone and bass kazoos to complement my tenors. - microscopes:
When I was young, I was permitted to borrow my father's medical school microscope. This ancient microscope in a wooden case seemed the height of science to me, although with the passage of years I realize it was very much a standard if classic student microscope.
I love to watch euglena, rotifers or paramecia in the scope. If you take a broom straw, and let it soak in a glass of water, then you soon have a complete set of microscope-worthy critters ready to view. - paul tillich:
Tillich wrote a number of books of theology, in which he sought to reconfigure the Christian story into language which fit modernity.
He came to occupy this place, as did many other theologians, after serving as a chaplain in the horror that was World War One. That war taught a number of people that the traditional ways of thinking about honor, country and virtue no longer applied. I began to read Tillich in high school, but have read only a few of his key works. In recent years, I have been intrigued by the soap opera quality of his life, as apparently he combined a ready mind for inquiry with a rejection of many of the sexual moral norms of his time. He's an enigma to me,
whose idea of a God is intriguing and yet alien. - rickie lee jones:
My late college and early law school days were frequently enlivened by Rickie Lee Jones' first two albums. To this day, I remember many of the words to many of the songs--and "We Belong Together" remains, to me, the best evocation of hope in a complex world I've heard. - star trek:
I do not make any apologies for liking things other people like. My favorite Star Trek is Deep Space Nine--interpersonal relationships, the intersection of faith and reason, and perhaps the most wonderful villain in the various Star Trek series, the wonderful Weyoun. - universalism:
I have been attracted for years to the idea that there are many paths and many roads. In the universal dilemma of life and death, we all seek out our own ways. I believe that we are saved by the same things, no matter how we label and mislabel those things.
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