Klines in Carolina

Paparazzi

Klines — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:42:01 +0000

Yesterday I spent the morning hiding in some bushes, taking pictures of my friend Matt proposing to my friend Amber. Despite feeling like a stalker army crawling across a field and lying on the ground with my zoom lens peeking through the shrubs, it was so fun to have been a part of such a personal and special moment.

And who can complain when these are the bushes you’re hiding in???

You can see some of the photos I took on my Flickr page. Congratulations to Amber and Matt!!

Dave’s 30th

Klines — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:06:01 +0000

Dave turned 30 on Friday and we celebrated with cake and friends Friday night, then I made him a three course birthday meal on Saturday. For the meal I wanted to incorporate a few of his favorite things into the menu, and he requested lamb. As you can see from the menu, we went with lamb shanks and I must say – they were delicious! One of his favorite things is banana-oriented desserts. Not only was his cake banana flavored, the dessert I made on Saturday was Bananas Foster!

Enjoy some photos from the weekend.

Banana cake with cream cheese frosting and mocha cream.

Braised lamb shank, whipped parmesan potatoes, and garlic roasted asparagus

Wow – this makes me feel full all over again. It was such a fun weekend – Happy 30th to Dave!

Recents

Klines — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:35:01 +0000

All Black Everything

Klines — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:46:40 +0000

I have a knack for being a late-comer to all things fashionable, so of course I have just now discovered Lupe Fiasco, an amazing hip hop artist who I take to be one of the most prophetic artistic voices that you are ever likely to hear on the radio. I’ve been infatuated with this song over the last week, letting it sink in as a theological text of eschatological vision that encapsulates what I take to be the sort of social imagination that Christ makes possible in a world of structural whiteness that positions black life as locked into and determined by a particular ideology of history: one that is articulated through and recycled by the socially embedded and culturally celebrated idea that the West’s progressive trek across land and time–an imperial campaign of terror that claims for its own historical project of bodily and spacial accumulation those (non-) subjects determined as ahistorical or not sufficiently historical–was the way that history necessarily had to turn out. Here Lupe Fiasco is calling for an end, and therefore an apocalyptic reversal, to that history. He is calling for a poetic imagining of the end of the world that is both an end (an apocalypse) and a new beginning (an eschatology) all at once. He is producing through what Anthony Pinn calls “creative disregard”, the questioning and disruption of normative sites of power through artistic and novel imagination, a new history in which black life is no longer determined by the terror of whiteness. “All black Everything” means the end of whiteness, and therefore the end of blackness as determined by whiteness. It means that the world has ended and that an eschatological reality has been inaugurated in Christ’s body–the body that has re-made all bodies so that human existence is no longer defined by the destructive and ontologically forced confines of whiteness, accumulation, and Western imperial reality. Have a listen and imagine the possibility.

“All Black Everything” by Lupe Fiasco

[Hook] You would never know
If you could ever be
If you never try
You would never see
Stayed in Africa
We ain’t never leave
So there were no slaves in our history
Were no slave ships, were no misery, call me crazy, or isn’t he
See I fell asleep and I had a dream, it was all black everything

Uh, and we ain’t get exploited
White man ain’t feared it so he did not destroy it
We ain’t work for free, see they had to employ it
Built it up together so we equally appointed
First 400 years, see we actually enjoyed it
Constitution written by W.E.B. Du Bois
Were no reconstructions, civil war got avoided
Little black sambo grows up to be a lawyer
Extra extra on the news stands
Black woman voted head of Ku Klux Klan
Malcolm Little dies as an old man
Martin Luther King read the eulogy for him
Followed by Bill O’Reilly who read from the Quran
President Bush sends condolences from Iran
Where Fox News reports live
That Ahmadinejad wins Mandela peace prize

Uh, and it ain’t no projects
Keepin it real is not an understood concept
Yea, complexion’s not a contest
Cause racism has no context
Hip-hop ain’t got a section called conscious
Everybody rappin like crack never happened
Crips never occurred nor bloods to attack them
Matter of fact no hood to attack in
Somalia is a great place to relax in
Fred Astaire was the first to do a backspin
The rat pack was cool group of black men
That inspired the five white guys called the Jacksons
Eminem fitted in but then again he inspired a black rapper tryin to mimic him
And thats what really rose up out of Michigan, the sign of white rapper by the name of 50 cent

[Hook]

Uh, and I know it’s just a fantasy
I cordially invite you to ask why can’t it be
Now we can do nothing bout the past
But we can do something about the future that we have
We can make it fast or we can make it last
Every woman queen and every man a king and
When those color lines come we can’t see between
We just close our eyes till its all black everything

Here’s to 3 years.

Klines — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 15:03:41 +0000

Dear Milton,

Today marks your third birthday. I can’t believe you’ve been with us since December of 2008, when you were just under 10 weeks old. I remember all of the emails I sent back and forth with the breeder in Texas about all the different options – standard sized, miniature, tri-colored, lemon-colored…I was so overwhelmed! But then she sent me some (pretty cheesy) pictures of the “little guy born on October 5th” and I was in love.

How could anyone not love those leg and belly freckles? (Are beagles even supposed to have freckles??)

I also asked to see pictures of your parents.

Here is Momma beagle:

And Papa

You’ve grown to look just like your dad!

I love you so much. You are one crazy dog, with more quirks than I know what to do with sometimes. But you’ve made all of the many transitions over the last few years a whole lot more bearable. Speaking of, sorry that we drugged you for the 22-hour car journey from Texas. Believe me, it was better for everyone.

Now, we all know that I have always loved you.

But Dave took a little while to warm up to you. Those early days were rough for all of us, but you won him over with your charm and persistence.

And now you guys are best buds.

We love you and your spunk, Miltonias! Happy birthday!

400th Anniversary

Klines — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 02:13:09 +0000

Did you know that 2011 was the 400th anniversary of the King James version of the bible? Yeah, me neither until my lovely father-in-law informed me of the occasion. Not only did he inform me, he asked me to make a cake to celebrate! So, for their visit back at the beginning of August, we ate chocolate cake and took a quiz about the history of the King James bible. It seems that one of Bill’s favorite past-times is celebrating random holidays and occasions that the rest of the world overlooks (such as flag day, for example). But I’m not complaining. Any excuse to make a cake : )

9/11/11

Klines — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 20:54:47 +0000

What a weird day comprised of a mixture of sentimental memory, incoherent media drivel on ‘the proper way to remember’, and this odd inclination to assess the last 10 years of my own life because that seems to be what everyone else is doing. I’m doing everything in my power to resist this virtual ceremony that the forces of an imaginary collective ‘we’ are telling me to participate and remember only in the ‘safe’ way that they want me to. Does a memory wrapped up in the constantly deployed slogans of ‘an attack on freedom’ or ‘those people died for all of us’ really help us to make sense of the last 10 years? Does it really honor the departed to find some way to make death itself (of course only ‘our’ deaths) meaningful?

I’m trying to resist. And I’m trying to remember truthfully. I’m trying to remember that 9/11/01 really changed nothing in a world where state and cultural power function so that enemies necessarily exist and war is a never-ending reality. (Perhaps the only thing it really changed is that these power concentrations were exasperated.) I’m trying to remember that we are all complicit in the conditions that led a group of nihilistic murderers to kill 3000 people on that day. I’m trying to remember that in the wake of that event, thousands of American troops have been meaninglessly killed in wars in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died at the hands of an imperialistic force fueled by the idolatrous and blind support of handing over to Demigods the rights to protect us and our ‘right to shop’ (thanks George W.!) ‘by any means necessary’. I’m trying to remember that 10 years ago today I was already in the thick of guilt.

Perhaps the only way to remember on this day is to, in a sense, not remember, but to look ahead into the future and see it as being opened up by God’s disruptive and surprising action that rips apart the idea that we have the ability to bring God’s Kingdom to ourselves and to others. This is not to forget that horrible day 10 years ago, but to see it in the light of Christ’s future that breaks into the past, that reveals history as residing under his Lordship and uncovers the grace that frees us from being locked into a past that tells us that the way things have turned out is the way things have to be.

As Franz Fanon observes, true freedom resides in the ability to resist the chains of a history that has been written for us: “I am not a prisoner of History. I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction. I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life. In the world I am heading for, I am endlessly creating myself.” The forces that are trying to write our history for us seem to be uncharacteristically visible today (they usually try to remain deceptively hidden). On this day, though it seems almost impossible as I sit here writing, interrupted every few minutes by a stupid inclination to check Facebook in order to see who’s remembering and who’s not, I am trying to remember that my very existence (past, present, and future) is continuously being invented anew by Christ, and that in him we are not prisoners of History but captives set free to live into a future that is gracefully disrupting our efforts to secure history for ourselves and contain it (and remember it) for our own distorted desires and purposes.

Irene and everything inbetween.

Klines — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 18:21:44 +0000

This week has been my first week of the fall semester. While I didn’t have too much of a break for the summer, with summer school and my job, there’s just something about June, July, and August that makes life feel slow and carefree. To my surprise, I was ready to get into the swing of things and to tackle everything with full force. My life for the next few months will consist of a whole lot of this:

That’s a head set if you can’t tell. Or a Brittany Spears mic, as I like to call it.

Since becoming an adult, I have learned quite a few things about myself. One of those things is that the more things I have to fit into a day, the more I actually get done. I know that sounds strange, but what it really comes down to is structure. I didn’t always know this about myself, but apparently I need quite a bit of structure. I don’t do very well with a work from home job and online classes (this has been my life for the last year or so). I tend to find things to do around the house instead of working on a project on my laptop. I find myself spending way too much time wandering the internet or playing with miniature beagles when I should be reading for class.

Now some people (my husband, for example) would do anything to have a day where all they do is sit in a chair and read. They are disciplined, hard working, and they thrive in long periods of quiet. The less they have to do in a day, the happier they are. The more they have to read, the happier they are. OK, so maybe I am just describing Dave.

All that to say, while one might think I’m crazy to take on two jobs, school, and an internship, this semester is looking much more attractive because I finally have more structure to my life! I’m still working as a project assistant for the relationship education job, but I’m also nannying for a sweet baby girl named Madeline. Aside from the fact that I love getting to spend a few days a week with such a lovely little girl, it gets me out of the house early in the morning (they live in Raleigh) and allows me to structure my day around her schedule. See – perfect! I then get to work on school work while she sleeps – everyone is happy!

I’m also very excited about the class I’m taking this semester (my last class before I graduate). The class is about complex family issues: families in crisis. We will be talking about divorce and step-parenting, abuse and neglect, addictions, adoption, teen parenthood, and death and illness in the family. I’m excited because these are the types of issues that I will most likely come into contact with in my future work. I’m all about applicability!

Despite all of this praise of strucure and obligation, let me just say that I’m incredably thankful for the flexibility that Dave and I have to be able to hop in the car and drive to the coast for the day so Dave can surf the best waves of his life (thank you Irene). While everyone else was evacuating the town in preparation for Irene’s impending visit, Dave and I were barreling down the high way toward the ocean as fast as our Taurus would go. Dave was like a kid in a candy store once he saw those huge waves. It was a fun day indeed… until his board snapped off into someone’s ankle… but alas, that is a story for him to tell you. For now, enjoy these pics : )

Sermon on “Jesus Christ in Texas”

Klines — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:15:28 +0000

I thought that the sermon/discussion last Sunday went quite well. Here’s the link to the audio (sermon starts around 29 minutes):

http://www.emmausway.net/media.php?pageID=9&itemID=47

Jesus Christ in Texas pt3

Klines — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:23:56 +0000

In ‘Jesus Christ in Texas,’ DuBois shows how we do not recognize Jesus because we fail to ask the one question that really matters as we encounter him: “Who are you?” None of the white characters in the story ever think to ask this question of the peculiar character that walks amongst them. Instead, the question that is asked of the stranger is “how might you fit into our world?” The hostess at the Colonel’s house is concerned with how interesting this stranger will be as a guest at her dinner party (that is, until she discovers the color of his flesh—then the question become “how can I get rid of this stranger?”). The rector asks how it is that the stranger seems so familiar. The wife of the farmer answers here own question of how could she possible give bread to a negro when Jesus’ voice reassures her as that of a white man. All of these characters are operating under the assumption that if Jesus was to visit them, surely he would fit into their world without causing any disturbance; surely Jesus would look, speak, and act like one of us! Surely Jesus would be a good evangelical! Surely Jesus would be against what we are against and fight for our causes! These assumptions always and everywhere keep Christ in the shadows, not allowing him to step out and reveal himself for who he really is. These assumption are what give us the false and poisonous ‘assurance of the voice of a white man.” These assumptions leaves us blind to the fact that Jesus will not be classified under or assimilated into any human program so as to remain in our control. Jesus will speak for himself.

It is only in the question “Who are you?” that we allow Jesus to speak for himself. This as Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, is the question of “dethroned reason.” It is the question that turns our world upside down and moves us to live as the new creation inaugurated by Christ. The “who” question is the question that confesses that we have nothing to give to Jesus but our broken selves. This is the question that relinquishes any claim to knowing what the world ought to look like and gives ourselves over to the surprising and disruptive work of God’s presence in the world. The “who” question allows us to meet Jesus in the face of the other, in the body of the abject who has been ground up beneath the forces of whiteness and other universal systems of ordering the world. The “who” question is the question of prayer, it is the posture of worship.