where are we?

Yeah, it's been a while again. This is all a plan to decrease my active blog readers from 8 to 4, so if you are reading this I guess I haven't worked hard enough. Just kidding!

I've been thinking and learning and questioning a lot over the last few weeks. That would probably be the best time to blog about stuff, cause it's the most fresh and hasn't been cleaned up for public consumption yet. So it's the most honest, but also the hardest to put down on paper, or bytes, or whatever this is. So that's why I haven't written much. I want to find a way to communicate ideas that are raw and wild and odd in a way that allows others to interact with their own raw, wild, and odd thoughts, but that seems to work best around a small table face to face. Actually, that has been a source of HUGE frustration, probably my biggest, with being in CA and not CO, cause I get new ideas and learn fascinating things but can't really talk with anyone about them! GAH! This blog is so one-sided, but it's all I got. So...

Today in class we talked a lot about how technology affects culture. For example, right now I am sitting in my room, on the 2nd floor of an apartment somewhere in Pasadena, at 1:42pm PST. You are reading this from some-where and some-time else. And it won't really be me that you are interacting with, but who I was or how I represented myself. So then you could ask, where and when are we? Are we in my time and place, or yours? And if more than one of you reads this, are we all in 3 places and times? This brings up a bigger question: Where is cyberspace?

Maybe you are thinking this is a little overly dramatic, but think about it like this. When I am writing this, I am more in my blogworld than I am in my room. I may physically be present in Pasadena, but my mind, my concentration, my thoughts, etc, are all in blogworld. It's kinda like when I'm watching football and "talking" to someone else at the same time. Most of me is in that stadium with the Chargers. I'm far more aware of what is happening there than I am of what is happening on the couch. So, where am I? Or if you are at home but are constantly on the phone talking business or thinking about work problems, aren't you still at work? I guess this has probably all been talked about before, but I've never really thought through this. You'd think this would be common among computer geeks, but it wasn't among the students I hung out with in the programming labs. Maybe cause we were lost in another world playing video games...

How does this affect us? We can't escape it. Maybe this is a big part of why so many people feel fragmented and long for a holistic lifestyle. We need to wrestle with how to live a cohesive life even though we are in a very real sense split all over the world. I think having a sabbath where you cut turn everything off and rest is essential, but is that all there is? I've never thought of it before, but isn't it a little warped if the best hope we have is "I'm so overwhelmed and stressed, but if I can just get past this and make it to the weekend..."? That can't really be life to the fullest like Jesus promised. It's almost another form of escaping, and therefore dividing ourselves yet again. So what do we do? The world is chaos all around us, and that's only going to keep increasing. We know it's not good to escape to our protective bubbles, because we can't live split between the sacred and secular. How do we live in a world that pulls at us constantly and live healthy, whole lives? We have to learn a balance. I have no idea what that really looks like in day to day living! Thoughts?

Okay, that was not what I intended to write about. I went off on about four other tangents while writing, and ended up with about 20 paragraphs. I'm not going to post that all right now. You would hate me. More to come later. I promise!