FM Radio

I've listened to the FM radio more in the past couple of weeks than I have in many years. My new (used) car doesn't have a CD player (or even a tape player), so for now, I'm scanning my way across the dial and in the process, making myself familiar with some of the new (to me) stations in town.

One of the new stations plays the same songs over and over—thankfully the format is 80's music and I liked most of the music that came out of that era. Now I'm hoping they will expand their selection in the coming months. Another station plays a mixture of everything and I like that too. Most people like many different styles of music and I'm no exception. Another plays new(er) country and I don't mind that format either.

But I'm starting to notice something—no matter which station it is, and no matter what format, they all seem to be trying to do things to improve the community. One country station held a fundraiser last week to raise money for a children's hospital—specifically, they were trying raise money to help children who need heart surgery. They raised $309,000. Another station sponsored a bowling league to help people make new friends. Another station had a contest running to see who could lose the most weight.

When I listened to FM radio fifteen or twenty years ago, I can't remember many stations or personalities doing any of these sorts of things. Instead, I remember radio being all about partying and, in general, being all about the self-absorbed life—a "get all you can, while you can, and if you are struggling or in need, then you must have done something wrong" sort of attitude.

I'm glad to see that some things change. Granted, my experience is limited, but so far, I like what I hear.

Substitute People

The three posts I wrote about Elizabethtown last month are turning out to be quite popular—not because I had anything brilliant to say about the movie, but because people are googling many of the quotable lines from the movie and they are finding this blog.

If you missed the series, here are the links to help you get caught up:

Elizabethtown, Part 1

Elizabethtown, Part 2

Elizabethtown, Part 3

The quote that most people are googling to get here is “substitute people.” Here’s the quote from the movie: “You and I have a special talent,” Claire says to Drew. “And I saw it immediately. We’re the substitute people. I’ve been the substitute person my whole life. I’m not an Ellen [a co-worker Drew was into]. I never wanted to be an Ellen. And I’m not a Cindy either … I like being alone too much. I mean, I’m with a guy who is married to his academic career. I rarely see him and I’m the substitute person there. I like it that way. It’s a lot less pressure.”

Obviously, a lot of people can relate to Claire’s character. I already explored the definition of “substitute people” in my first post in the series, so I won’t get into that again now, but I didn’t talk about how I really don’t believe Claire when she implies that she likes being a substitute person. She tries to convince Drew, and I’m sure herself, that she likes not feeling needed or in demand all the time during a relationship.

But if that were really true, she wouldn’t have spent the entire night on the phone with Drew. She wouldn’t have switched her work schedule so she could be with him as he dealt with his father’s death. She wouldn’t have shared her dreams, and fears, and insecurities with him. She wouldn’t have told him that their first kiss was more intimate than most of the sex she’d had in her life. She wouldn’t have made him the travel kit. And she wouldn’t have been willing to let him go – hoping that he’d choose to be with her at the end of his journey.

Nobody wants to be a substitute person. We just claim that the position is acceptable because we’re afraid that nobody will ever consider us an original. But along with way, most will consider us substitute people and that’s not a knock against them or us. They have an original in mind and for whatever reason – justified or not, we don’t live up to it.

The problem comes when we embrace substitute person status, like Claire did, because embracing it means that we’ll never get to see wonder in the other person’s eyes as we tell him or her about our theories, our beliefs, our hopes, and our dreams. It means we’ll never get that all-knowing, all-understanding hand-squeeze, or look from the person we love that says, “I know exactly what you are thinking or feeling and I want you to know that it means just as much to me as it does to you.”

No matter how much we try to convince ourselves that being a substitute person is better than not being in the game, the seeming cruel and mocking indifference we receive from someone who doesn’t consider us an original slowly crushes our will to live a vibrant life. I’d much rather be out living the life I choose right now because it allows me to save my experiences in an emotional place where one day I hope to invite a person who considers me to be her original.

A Lesson Learned

I dislike the process of backing up my computer documents. Deleting my previously backed up files before copying and pasting all of my original files that I need to back up seems like such a waste of time. This process takes about 30 minutes, but I've been doing it every Friday afternoon for the past couple of years. My laptop crashed a few Fridays ago early in the morning before I backed up my work—which meant that I lost a full week of work and I've been scrambling ever since to try to get caught up.

A few days ago, a friend told me about software that can be set up to automatically back up files to an external hard drive. I loved the idea. And better yet, my friend said that back up software quickly scans files to see if any changes have been made since the last back up and when it finds one, it only backs up that particular file—keeping systems resources more free. This type of software has probably existed for a long time, but I've never heard of it before. After a little research, I downloaded and installed a program called Argentum Backup.

It worked so well I couldn't believe it. After my initial back up (on a new 120 GB external hard drive), I can now back up my work in about one minute at the end of each day—or I can set the program to do it while I sleep. I wish I had taken the time long ago to find and use such a program, but I'm glad that I at least had a back up to turn to. Otherwise I would have been in big trouble because I would have lost the book that I'm currently working on (and is due to the publisher by April 15).

Why is it that something bad has to happen before we do the things we should have been doing all along? I guess we believe that we're the exception and that the "bad" things will always happen to other people. But then it happens to us and it's hard not to feel a little foolish. I guess if that's what it takes to learn a lesson, then it's worth it.

Old Ideas

In the late 90's, when Amazon.com could hardly buy a customer, they tried. As a token of appreciation, they sent coffee cups to customers one year. Since I was an early customer, I received one such cup and I still use it. Something about the cup though has always rubbed me the wrong way—one of the quotes Amazon.com put on the cup: "I can't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones." –John Cage

I'm assuming that this is John Cage, the music composer, who died in 1992. I know very little about him and I'm not sure about the context of the quote that Amazon.com was so fond of, so all I have to work with is the quote itself. On the surface, I can understand what Cage was trying to say—new ideas are often rejected by people who like the status quo, and certainly some old ideas have proved to be wrong, and sometimes even evil. Maybe that's what Cage meant. I don't know.

But it seems to me that the quote is rooted in arrogance—as if those currently living are much more enlightened than previous generations, as if previous generations have nothing to teach us, as if their ideas should be forgotten or ignored. Does anybody really believe that every generation before our own got it all wrong, that we are so enlightened that real living starts with us, that the ideas of generations past are better off left there?

I hope not. Because if that's true, our ideas will quickly be forgotten by our own children who will embrace the same attitude. And every person who has built a legacy—not because they were concerned about legacy building, but because they went about their daily routines advancing the ideas they believed to be right—would have wasted his or her time.

I, for one, am not frightened of old ideas. In fact, I find great comfort in them. But I'm also not frightened of new ideas. I'm just a little more skeptical of them since they haven't stood the test of time yet.

Things We Couldn't Say

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the relevance of books. It reminded me of a book I read last year called Things We Couldn’t Say written by Diet Eman with James Schaap that greatly challenged my faith. It’s a true story about how Diet, who was a young Dutch woman during WWII, and her fiancé, Hein Sietsma, got involved in the Resistance–hiding Jews and other people that Hitler wanted to exterminate after he overran Holland.

Early in the book, when Diet was 20, she tells the story about when the Gestapo first discovered that Hein was working with the Resistance and how she went looking for places for Hein to hide. See if this excerpt from pages 58 and 59 (of the trade paperback version) moves and challenges you as much as it did me:

"That night I went to many Christian friends and family, and no one would take Hein in. I remember that I was riding (my bike) on main avenue in The Hague, Laan van Meerdervoort, which goes from one end of the city to the other, tears streaming down my cheeks. Nobody wanted to take in my beloved Hein. People would remind me of their little children at home, and they would say, 'We don’t know what the Gestapo might do if they find him here.' And they were all so busy, and they had to have other guests. They were all fake excuses, lame excuses!

"That night, right there on the street in The Hague, I made a vow that if ever people were being persecuted and needed a place to hide or something to eat, I vowed I would help them. What had happened that night to me was horrible. I was so upset with all those so-called Christians."

Do you ever think about how you would respond if God had placed you in another time period? I do. I wasn't even a Christian at the age of 20, but even if I had been, I wouldn't have had the spiritual maturity or the courage to be part of the Resistance like Diet and Hein were. And I wonder if I would have been one of those "so-called Christians" who turned Diet and Hein away that day. It pains me to think about it.

How about you? Would you have joined the Resistance when you were 20? Or if you had been one of those Christians that Diet and Hein approached to hide Hein, would you have turned them away? Diet eventually lost her freedom for her part in the Resistance and Hein lost his life. They were willing pay that price because their cause was just.

I'm so thankful for books like this. They chronicle and preserve history. And they challenge future generations to think about the unthinkable.

The Relevancy of Books

I'm a member of a group called the Christian Author's Network. In February, on our blog, we addressed this question: Are books still relevant?

Here was my response:

In my opinion, books are not only still relevant today, but they are more relevant than in most previous ages. Books have always allowed previous generations to pass on knowledge, and more importantly, wisdom to future generations. But it seems to me that our culture is becoming more aliterate (able to read, but not interested in it) with each passing year and as a result we are becoming more detached from the wisdom of the generations who preceded us.

That's a problem not easily fixed, but I love the fact that no matter what the ebb and flow of any given culture is, books remain on library and bookstore shelves just waiting to be discovered or rediscovered. And when that happens, the joys and challenges that previous generations once experienced from the same books will be experienced by future generations.

Books often become a permanent record of what life looked like when the author wrote them—especially fiction. Jane Austin preserved 19th century British culture for us. Leo Tolstoy preserved 19th century Russian culture. Flannery O'Connor preserved the provocative side of early 20th century American culture in the south. And the list goes on.

Oddly, time isn't so kind to non-fiction books—which are considered "dated" when illustrations are no longer current. But I still love to read old non-fiction books. I recently read Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain. The book was published in 1965, and yes, the illustrations and some of the advice he gave is dated (one of which is to make sure you have a new typewriter ribbon as you begin to work on a project), but it's the best technical book I've ever read about the craft of writing fiction. I'm thankful that he wrote it because forty years later, it's turning me into a better novelist.