i have a confession to make that may surprise you: i like hip hop. i’m not talking about the junk that took over in the early part of the century or anything that can be labeled with the word crunk. (side note: punk goes crunk on the other hand was actually pretty entertaining.) true hip hop, in the opinion of an overweight 26-year-old white kid from a redneck suburb who is currently listening to a city and colour radio station on spotify, is a story set to a beat. it’s true poetry. when done well, hip hop can tell a story better than any novel could ever dream of. a few months ago a friend of mine told me i should listen to macklemore. they said he was a great writer and was putting out really good music. my reaction was quick and simple: you mean that dude that wrote…
in some ways you’re just like all your friends
i’m pretty sure that if you could ask google, “who is the most polarizing person in the world right now?” the response would be, “miley cyrus.” i’m completely serious. on one side of it you’ve got teenage girls sticking up for miley and saying everyone shouldn’t be picking on her. they say everyone else just doesn’t understand what she’s going through or they don’t get what it’s like to be hurt from a relationship. on the other side of the coin you have anyone with a brain. two weeks ago there was an article on buzz feed titled, “are people talking more about miley cyrus or syria.” starting on august 25th (the night of the vmas), miley was talked about more than syria every day until august 31. what happened that day? president obama gave a speech on syria. a day later the talk was back to miley. miley is…
looking back on all of that, it’s nice to believe
i’m three weeks too late to really capitalize on the whole post-vma hype but hey, better late than never, right? i’m not going to talk about miley and her obsession with her tongue and twerking. i’m not going to talk about gaga and the g-string. i’m not even going to talk about justin timberlake and how i have a gigantic man crush on him. today’s post was inspired by one sentence by one person who didn’t even perform at the vma. the sentence came from the acceptance speech for the award for best female video. after thanking her fans, the winner smiled and said: i also want to thank the person who inspired this song, and he knows exactly who he is. right there, in the middle of a 31-second acceptance speech, we find a prime example of the gospel according to taylor swift. whether you like her or not,…
i think we grew up past the hang-ups and the evil stares
i’m a pop culture junkie. i love it. i read through the “web culture” board on flipboard every morning while eating breakfast. the buzz feed app is one of my favorite apps. my radio is set to the local pop music station. i dvr, on average, 6-8 tv shows each week throughout the year. i constantly make music and tv references in every day conversation. i ooze pop culture. whether you know it or not, you do too. we’re living in the most connected world of all time. a couple of weeks ago i drove to atlanta and back in a day. when i first started driving ten years ago (yes, i’m still a baby), i either listened to the radio or the cds that i had in my car. there weren’t many choices of what to do to be entertained in the car. on this drive to atlanta, i…
i’ll help you see it through
last february our church unveiled the vision that god had laid before us for the next five years. part of it was the lengthen into other communities by planting churches and off campus video venues. another part of it was the strengthen up our staff and continue to train new leaders. the part that is most visible to most of the people in the church is that we set out to expand our current building to add another worship venue that would house our high school ministry and a weekend venue. we broke ground on the building back in september and we’ve been watching it be built since then. the building is set to open in a few weeks and, before the carpet is put down, we wanted to invite our church out to write their prayers for this new space and any verses that they had for the space…
early morning wake me up
on saturday night, about ten minutes before church started, i was caught off guard by a very welcome surprise. as i was standing in our worship center talking with some friends, i saw a couple walk in that i hadn’t seen in a couple of months and absolutely didn’t expect to see on that night. a few months ago, this couple felt that it was time for them to leave our church. there was no animosity or hurt involved. they felt that they wanted to be part of a smaller church and a smaller community. that’s a completely normal thing for people to experience as churches grow, especially those that were around when it was smaller. they left for their search on good terms with everyone and, while we would miss them, we wanted them to be in the church that was the right church for them right now. we…
word travels fast when you’re on the road
it may or may not come as a surprise to you that my undergraduate degree is in sport management or that i have a minor in coaching. i wrote about how the coaching minor has impacted how i go through day to day things a few weeks ago. when i was in college, somewhere between my junior and senior years, i began to look into possible internships within the sports world. i looked at professional teams in the major sports. i looked at local high schools and their athletic departments. i actually got pretty deep into looking into spending a summer on cape cod interning with the cape cod baseball league. i also looking into espy. for any sports fan, espn is a staple. you can complain about how they do things and how they’ve dumbed down sports and sports journalism to simply being trivial debates about things that they…
nothing i could say could convince you not to sever the ties
i started this blog in march of 2009. it’s now four years later and most of the people reading now had no clue i even existed in 2009. on fridays, from now until i run out of posts, i’m going to be reposting some of my favorite posts from when i started writing until i got to knoxville in 2010. it’s my story of growing up. hopefully you enjoy it. originally posted may 27, 2009 so i’ve been reading a lot lately. last week i knocked out velvet elvis by rob bell and this week i’m reading sex god by him. the thing i like most about rob bell is that he gets me thinking. i don’t agree with everything he says but he mentions something, sometimes even in passing, that gets my mind going and gets me thinking about stuff that i’ve never thought of before or gets me…
i’m somewhere in between who i am and who i want to be
i started this blog in march of 2009. it’s now four years later and most of the people reading now had no clue i even existed in 2009. on fridays, from now until i run out of posts, i’m going to be reposting some of my favorite posts from when i started writing until i got to knoxville in 2010. it’s my story of growing up. hopefully you enjoy it. originally posted may 17, 2009 one of the things i have written about a ton on here is about how much i’ve been changing lately. i was tempted to do a “holy crap i’ve been graduated a year, let’s see how much things have changed” post but figured that would be a bit much so i didn’t. i’m making a conscious effort to spread things around a little bit because even i get bored with that. this whole thing is…
it could have been but never was
one of the things that fascinates me more than anything is the difference in how people view themselves versus how other people view them. the dove real beauty sketches completely captivated me because they showed tangible examples of how most of us see ourselves in a much more negative light than others see us. in case you can’t click that link or haven’t seen the sketches, the idea behind them was the a former fbi sketch artist asked women (that he couldn’t see) to describe different features of their face. he asked about their chins, their cheeks, their hair. then, after sketching their description, he would ask someone else to describe the first person. at the end of the video, he showed the original person both sketches. the reactions were all the same. the women didn’t recognize the person they described. they thought the sketch described by the random person…