James Kirk

For those in the UNIX world, there is no debate so bitter, so fiery, so polarizing, as the debate over which text editor reigns supreme: Vi or Emacs. Now, I’ve been a loyal Vi (actually Vim - Vi iMproved) user for many years now, and due to the browbeating and shame I experience at the hands of DD Emacs users, I’ve decided to start using Emacs. I have betrayed my beloved editor and switched sides. You can call me Benedict Arnold.

My first impression is, Emacs sucks. Everything that was quick and efficient in Vim requires, in Emacs, inhuman contortions of the fingers. Plus, it’s like driving a manual transmission car - you need both hands to drive. How am I supposed to sip my coffee or pick my nose in the middle of editing a file now? I am currently of the opinion that Emacs was invented to give its users hubris over their mastery of an occult and arbitrary skill.

Emacs sucks.

Here’s a good poem on love, for you romantics on V-day.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

I’ve been thinking a lot about God’s Will for my life lately. It was funny. Alana was telling me about this exciting series she’d been hearing at Harvest over the summer, and how it totally changed her perspective on what God’s Will really is. The next day, sitting in my living room, was that exact same series on CD. Somehow Mykel had gotten ahold of it, and she was letting Ken borrow it. Maybe it was God’s Will to have me listen to those sermons! Anyway, there’s too much to talk about in a blog entry, but the gist of the sermons is this: God does not necessarily have a specific individual will for every part of our lives - where we will live, what job we will have, who we will marry, etc. Most of the time, He gives us the choice.

So, I think this is pretty evident in my life right now. For a long time, I’ve been trying to plan forward based on what I expect God’s Will is. I thought God wanted me in the effects industry and be in LA, and was giving me a job there. When I didn’t get the job, I thought “God might be teaching me patience, and I’ll be there soon.” Still nothing. Now there’s an exciting opportunity in Virginia, and it’s not even in the effects industry! Would it be wrong to pursue this? I don’t think so. Who’s to say this isn’t a blessing from God? Ultimately, I need to pray and rely on God for guidance, but I really need to quit presuming that I know what God wants for me. To simply trust that He is in control, and to accept whatever He brings, should be good enough for me.

I remember having talks with people, most recently Mykel I think, about the usefulness of irony in speech and entertainment. I, for one, enjoy it a lot. I like to employ it. Anyway, here’s a quote I found to be pretty insightful:

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. - Lewis Hyde.

Thanks, Lewis Hyde, for raining on my parade