Beulah Land

By the time I reach Beulah Land perhaps I'll really have a mop of white hair and a scraggly white beard. I've got the scraggly part already.

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I’m talking to a friend on the phone. She’s driving around a mall parking lot complaining about traffic and the fact that all her friends are out of town and always busy. She called because she can’t stand texting. She wants more face-time with people. I say it’s just the time and culture we live in… Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, texts and e-mail…these things have become skills almost as essential to modern life as reading and writing. I’m having this conversation from a table inside a Chili’s in North Carolina. I’m eating chicken again wishing I could eat some home cooked vegetables. There’s an idea in my head that goes something like this, “There’s a lot about modern life that I like to think I don’t like…but really I pretty much like things the way they are.”

I love e-mail. E-mail is easy. I get to be the king of the conversation and there’s no-one to interrupt my train of thought. I interrupt myself quite a little bit though. I’m pretty much addicted to Facebook too. I get a little excited when I have comments on my wall or messages in my inbox. I like being able to share everything that’s happening in “my world” with the world with immediate effect. I don’t own a t.v. and I take pride in the fact that I don’t really miss it. But the reason I don’t miss it is probably because I’m connected to my computer 24 hours a day. I’m ok with that and that’s the scary thing.

Modern life consists of working hard to pay for things that make our lives easier. Living in America it’s especially obvious that people trap themselves in this cycle of working to pay for things that end up forcing them to work more.

I like modern life. I like the conveniences we have. I like watching movies and playing on my computer. I like being able to record songs from my living room. I like the things that I can buy with the money I’ve earned. But I believe with all my heart that modern life is not the way we were intended to live.

Beulah Land is a better place than here. It’s the hereafter. It’s heaven. You may not believe in heaven and if not then you can think of it as a better place in the here and now. This song is one that always resonated with me so I decided to record my own version of it.

The original author of “Beulah Land” is Squire Parsons. He was recently diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia.

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1 Million Views For Christmas

Here are some fun facts for you:
1. There are over 60 million FaceBook users worldwide.
2. In the US alone there are over 100 million YouTube users.
3. Videos go ‘viral’ every day (ok that last one might not be true..I made it up. But I’m sure it happens a lot.)

Given these fun facts I decided to set myself a goal:
I decided to attempt to generate 1 million views on my YouTube video “Close My Eyes” by Christmas. If I succeed I think I will have given myself a wonderful present this year.
So if you’re reading this and you’d like to help then do the following:
1. Watch the video
2. Copy the URL (located on the right hand side of the video if you go to YouTube. I’ve also included it below) and paste it into your status bar on your FaceBook profile. You can also copy the embed code and paste it into your myspace pages and blogs if you have them.
3. Send this message to friends.

Here’s the code: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jfZ5vXjXYs

That Worky Me

So I have a facebook and a MySpace and a website and this blog and several other micro-sites around the internet that I established mainly for the purposes of promoting my music. Lately though I’ve noticed that the internet has started encroaching into my real life and into the lives of the people I meet.
I’m at work talking to a customer and I’m dropping the phrase, “you should check out my website” into the conversation, “I was just writing a blog about that the other day..ha ha ha.”. Now when people casually ask that old party favorite, “so what do you do?” I find myself wondering how I can work an URL into the answer.
I noticed during my years of teaching Biology to high school students that my colleagues had two personalities. They had the “teacher” persona which was strict and stern and conscious of the rules of the school and in very many ways this persona was very much like a jerk. I don’t say this to be derogatory to my colleagues because in general I liked most of them. I liked them a lot. But I knew the other “normal, average-joe or –jane as the case may be, every-day” persona because I hung out in the staff room with them and listened to their jokes and drank coffee with them.
I think that’s a pretty common fact of human life though. People tend to separate their job and their personal life. But it goes deeper than just a division of labor. It affects our personalities. Weekday dad is not weekend dad. Power-suit mom is worlds apart from sweatshirt-n-jeans, soccer mom. One of the reasons I couldn’t be a teacher was that I knew to be a really great teacher I needed to embrace the “teacher” persona and basically be an asshole for 8 hours a day, five days a week. I’m not saying all great teachers are assholes. I think the ones who get it right without being an asshole are amazing people though. I was the ‘nice guy’ teacher. I had a hard time enforcing rules and being strict so for me to do those things I felt like I was being an asshole. In any case I wasn’t being me.
I had a hard time being someone I wasn’t for the sake of the job. I know I can’t be the only one and that brings me back to facebook and other such social networking sites. I wonder how real our profiles actually are and I wonder how much thought people put into the candid pictures and comments they post. I wonder how many companies Google potential candidates to find out what the person is really like. I wonder if what they find out is really worthwhile information or not.
I could be the biggest jerk on the planet and still be good at my job. Would a ‘jerky’ facebook profile cost me a job or a career? I could be a totally different monster at work than I am during my free time. Should it matter either way? More importantly, will it matter and does it already matter? Maybe switching personas is a natural part of humanity and it’s ok. Maybe we should be allowed to be a jerk, or a nice guy when we’re not at work and whoever that ‘work’ persona is should be judged strictly on the merit of their ‘workiness’. Actually I suspect I have it backwards. Perhaps we are in a dangerous place in society when it has become so common to do the personality switcheroo every Monday morning. Maybe we need to be aiming for a more balanced equilibrium between ‘workiness’ and normality.

I’m imagining a time when the facebook profile (or its equivalent) becomes as closely guarded and masked as the work personas we now portray. Maybe this is some kind of golden age where everyone is using social networking as its creators intended, i.e. to connect with people, exchange information and generally show off to the world and be ridiculous in a fairly public but controlled manner. Are social networking profiles doomed to become just another résumé which only tell people what we really want them to know about our achievements and experience and leave the personality at the door?