OMG(osh)!

(Warning: I am extremely tired as I write this, but subconscious Phil is trying to say something and it is best to let him do his own writing. Conscious Phil is trying to proofread.)

There is nothing more pathetic than an adult trying to act like an adult. A child acting like an adult is cute, and an adult in touch with their inner child is enlightened; but an adult who tries to behave like an adult means they are neither what they are nor what they pretend to be.

- Me

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was hanging out with my friend Andrew. Two desperate post college buds looking for some relatively harmless things to do, we began trying to find stuff to watch. Now, I know what you're thinking, most guys our age watch other things. Things which are as frivilous and putrid as can be comprehended; but somehow, and in someway, we just started watching animation. It is odd that in our day and time animation is regarded as something for children to watch. It is something we adults find beneath us: quaint, provential, but certainly no way to behave.

In our day to day lives,* it is ironic that we forget what it means to be us. Breadwinners and romantics often kill their humanity just to attempt to be human. It is not just pathetic, it is a sickness. We then try and act like children, but we have forgotten what it meant to be a child. We forgot that it meant to have faith, to love without the boundries of our conceptions, to dream stupid dreams and not have them mean utter disgrace and failure. I have entered the world of the false adult on this account, much to my embarrassment and chagrin.

In the end the adult is one who is in touch with what we Christians call the eternal now; and yet is in touch with it in more than just what we know. The Christian knows that the eternal now is a point in which time and space are compressed forever and ever into one, what the physicists would call, singularity. At each moment our lives enter a beautiful crossroads. Here time and space meld like stars into existence. Instead of pulling apart and compartmentalizing, labeling and categorizing our being; the human spirit realizes the happiness of the moment. That person knows time is an illusion of order and is only an utility created to assist in our endevors. That person doesn't reject time, but realizes that time is beneath the human psyche and spirit. There is no force or tool more powerful or important than the tiny unknowable nothingness/everything of one human soul. It is bigger and smaller than the universe, and that its power lies in its incomprehensibility.

It is the forgetting of the wonder we experienced as children that leads us to work jobs of minutia and unfulfillment. We long to laugh at simple joys of imaginary stories and castles and far away lands, to fight wars, to forget ourselves. I am not saying that childhood is perfect and that we should be children forever; but I am saying that to forget what we learned as children is dangerous and, more importantly, unpleasant.

It was in my, to use a cliche term, "an enlightened state" that I began to watch cartoons. A connection with the simpler times of being a child, it made me happy again; the simple kind of happiness that is as necessary as the complex and philosophical ones. Naruto and Deathnote and Avatar are the simple pleasures that our the last refuge of my complexes.

I write this post to say that I am an huge fan of Avatar. I just finished the last episode and am in complete awe of the imaginations that can keep people captivated for three years. I started watching the show in the very middle of the middle (episode 33 to be exact). When I began watching the show with my friend Andrew, we desperately tried to watch as many episodes as we could. We would record them on a DVR and play them back later on that night, drinking wine, and commenting on how great a story it was.

The show, I should mention, is about four peoples. Each people is linked to elements: earth, fire, air, and water. Some individuals in each culture can manipulate the element of their people. There is a unifying reincarnation that appears in a cyclical pattern to each of the peoples called the Avatar. The Avatar, in this generation, is helped by his friends to try and restore balance to an unbalanced world. Corny? Yeah, but who says there is anything wrong with being corny?

The funny thing is that when I talk to kids, I usually mention that I am an huge fan. I have let friend's of the family borrow my dvds or watched a few episodes with my friends who have kids. The result is always the same, they end up becoming as obsessed with the show as I am.

Is there a point to this blog post? It is pretty easy to spot. Usually I am much more structured and rational, but sometimes it is just important to really enjoy the beauty of creativity and the joy of creation. When we were young we would tell stories to parents and draw pictures with friends, when we got older we forgot the simple joy of our imaginations. So, pick up the phone or sit down at the computer and tell a friend a story you have had or share a work of fiction that you have heard/watched/read. Enjoy this simple part of your humanity; if not for me, than for that little child inside you.

*I know I use that phrase a lot, but in the minutia of day to day isn't it odd how we lose ourselves.