should I stay or should I go now?

Took a hike through McKinney State Falls this morning. Hiking is great reflecting time, so I continued my internal interrogative as I wrote about in the previous blog. It was hard to think, as I walked through spiderweb after spiderweb, invisible. Also, getting to the Homestead Trail means crossing through the lower falls area, and wet socks do not a pleasant hike make. Plus I'm not great at following maps. I walked a quarter of a mile only to end at a maintenance area and had to backtrack. Rounding the corner, some big and brown caught my eye and I froze, thinking either bear or Blair witch. It was a buck, about twenty feet away. We looked at each other for a few seconds, then he bounced away. I could hear him walking with me for a while, out of sight.

When I got home, I rented Devil's Playground, a documentary about Amish kids during their rumspringa (German for "running or jumping around") at age 16 where they go buck-wild in the real world and try to decide whether or not they want to go back to the Amish church and be baptized. 90% did, some didn't, but all went through serious angst as they tried to decide, and they have awesome parties too. What ultimately had them by the short and curlies was a pervasive belief that they would or would not go to heaven. One girl left the church a few weeks before her wedding to her Amish boyfriend. She talked to the cameras as she showed her black wedding dress, which she said she always imagined making her feel like a queen, but now covers up the girl inside. One kid started selling crank to support his habit (this is after being a full time factory worker at age 13), informed on other dealers, and went back to the church to save his neck. Members of the church miss their cars. A lot. And the regular clothes, phones, tv, concerts, videogames, etc, all of which older members say detract from the family and the community and loss of individuality is a sacrifice you make. A handful leave the church after rejoining and are shunned for life from their family and friends. These people were teary, alone, and unable to cope with the world as they didn't go to school after 8th grade but claimed things were getting brighter.
The polarity was oppressive--everything was either this or that, right or wrong, heaven or hell, jeans or dresses.

watch this -- Amish lady asks for $50 to let this dude take her picture.


Watching this film after What the Bleep Do We Know? a few days ago on top of a hike might have been a bit taxing. I believe a nap is in order.

what a fine looking question

If your early twenties are about finding yourself and having new experiences, your later twenties are about trying to answer the questions brought up in the last 5 years or so. It's been the theme song of my life lately, between my 8 year old neice's incessant interrogative about the mundane and overheard to a rousing and educational round of twenty questions in the car between Texas and Colorado to the constant question of what I'm going to do when I graduate, and I just don't know. I don't have the answers. I don't make the rules. Even the question of what we really want, how it's going to manifest itself becomes a huge cloud of whothefuckknows. I know some things. I like to think I know more than most people. Trying to make sense of things is a tough job, and I wonder if other people are asking questions too or if they're just floating along a sea of blissful ingnorance.

I just finished a book for class (I know) which poses as one of its central tenets the issue of "authentic questions," and how they really bring out the real life learning you should get in school, rather than the kind of learning you don't get when you try to figure out what the teacher is looking for. Curriculum questions like, "Was Huck Finn a good boy?" and "Why did Hamlet hesitate?" These kinds of questions can draw upon the fact-driven knowledge, the class discussions, but also and more so from opinions, beliefs, interpretations. These are not the questions being asked on standardized, multiple choice tests, fueled by political and economic reasons. That's why the schools are fucked up.

The biggest question is why. Why a lot of things. Anyone who thinks they really know probably is full of shit. But keep asking.

Pics from Colorado, one of my favorite trips so far: