Toolsday

I wonder about sincerity a lot. I wonder what people are like when they're around people they are fully comfortable with. I've always treasured that day in a friendship when my friend starts using silly voices and making funny faces around me. It means I've made it into their sanctum.



Some people are at their most comfortable around their family, I've noticed. I guess if you spent every day of your childhood around the same people you no longer worry about what they think of you. I have a big family. Three brothers and two sisters, all older than me. To be fair, one of those brothers was raised mostly by his mom in Ohio but he was in my life for a couple spans.

My dad, sister, and I picked him up from the airport when he was a late teenager after last seeing him when he was in grade school. He was tall and looked a good bit like us but he was a stranger. He entered the fold cautiously and although him and I talked about lots of things, we never learned much about each other. He's gone again now, last seen homeless and on drugs. The death in life.



In other news:

I've been watching a lot of documentaries lately. We hooked up our VCR to get the internet (okay, it's a BluRay Player but I really like to give the Dear Boy a hard time by calling it "the VCR") so we can watch Netflix Instant from the couch. It's great! There are oodles of documentaries in their library. Recently, I watched Jesus Camp, which is about evangelical christians, and specifically about their aim at America's children.

If you didn't know, evangelicals are the ones that speak in tongues and claim one needs to be "born again" to reach heaven. In the movie, they spoke about how children are easiest to convince of god's importance and of the place they feel Jesus should have in our lives. Children have hardly any reservations about putting their hands in the air and speaking nonsensically to the ceiling or moaning and rolling about on the floor. They are full of spirit! Ha! ha!


Photos by: Yuanling Wang

Last night we watched American Meth which is, of course, about meth. This one was pretty hard for me to sit through. They talked to a lot of addicts and even lived with one meth-addicted couple for a short time. The couple had four young children, the oldest only eight, whom they forgot to feed or care for while on meth benders. What drug addiction does to your lines of thinking is horrifying and familiar. It's hard to watch people lie to themselves and abuse their innocent loved ones. I've been on both sides of that coin and I try to reflect on it as seldom as possible. Moving on!