Tuesday, March 23, 2010
COFFEE ADDICTS UNITE!
Holla to my fellow coffee addicts. I wrote this poem for a friend at college who is equally addicted to coffee as I am and I thought I would share it!
ODE TO COFFEE
ODE TO COFFEE
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Sex, Would You Mind Leaving the Room for Like Ten Seconds?
I just left Border’s Book Store in King of Prussia. I just left the ‘ love’ section of Borders. I left, also, with a feeling of how far off track our society, my generation, and myself have all become with our perceptions of love. Granted, I am not married so I only have so much insight into this crazy phenomena called love, but I have had enough broken hearts and made enough mistakes to feel at least remotely qualified to make a comment or two.
First of all, the love section at this Border’s Express was about a 6 foot wide section; there were many books. I was slightly taken aback to realize that 90% of these books focused entirely on positions, technique, and “The Top 1,000 Places in America to Have Sex”. Maybe 10% of the books had some mention of emotional connection, sharing intimacy without sex, or the actual process of “falling in love”. I had just read a New York Times article on what it means to be a man in a “hypersexualized culture”, an article written by a man with prostate cancer. It came to mind as I realized that there is very little recognition of “manhood” in America outside of the stereotypes. All Christian teaching aside, I couldn’t believe that only a few books had any remote recognition of emotions or feelings (other than pleasure) or even more importantly the feelings of your significant other.
I think intimacy, sex, love, partnership, and marriage are all extremely tricky subjects. I only have experience with a few of those, so I’m not sure how accurate my opinions are. But, in recently talking to someone about the potential benefits of taking sex out of an already established sexual relationship, I thought more and more about what true intimacy is. Sex runs ridiculously rampant in our culture; there is no need for cleavage in a dish-soap commercial (especially, let’s admit it, since women are usually the ones washing the dishes and using the dish-soap), yet it is everywhere we turn. I started thinking about how scary it is to be TRULY vulnerable with someone and that contrary to what church has been telling me since I was about 9, it is often times much easier to be sexually intimate with someone than it is to bear your soul to them and trust that they will be there in the end. For my generation in particular, the generation in which some 65% of girls have had sex by the time they are 17, I wonder what would happen if we slowed down right now and re-trained our brains. What if, regardless of any past “mistakes” we may have made (which, really…who gets to determine if it is a mistake or simply a foolish choice that will later greatly help someone who needs someone who has been in that exact situation) we all decided to focus on TRUE intimacy. And to be honest, I don’t even really know what that would look like. Maybe, instead of trying to placate or fix things with sex, we tried to open up and say with gentle words what is really on our minds. Or, what if instead of falling into bed, two unmarried people spent more time cooking together, or playing video games together, or trying to train a puppy together. It doesn’t seem to me that it has to always be drastic (not everyone has to substitute sex for volunteering at a soup kitchen), but I think starting somewhere would be awesome.
Again, all of this may be crazy or dumb or way off track…I can’t say; afterall, I have no rock on my left hand. But I do have engaged or married friends and I have parents. And I just think it seems like a good idea. Who knows.
New York Times article: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E1DC133AF935A25751C0A9669D8B63
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