But I have not yet figured out how to be happy in a world that is torn apart every day by war and hate, by hunger and sickness, by itself. I’ve learned this semester that being a social worker necessarily means knowing that there is more fallenness in this world than we can bear.
Recently, my wife and I watched all six Star Wars movies in preparation for The Force Awakens—a feat I hadn’t done in years—and I remember my vaguely alarmed reaction during the credit-crawl for A New Hope.
Stanton has a massive platform, and he stands on it with poise and humility. In an online world that screeches with hostility and self-aggrandizement, Stanton is the most elusive and vital kind of storyteller.
After the first time we played, Christoph sent me this video of the Qatar Classic 2015 and said, “Whatever it was that we played last week, it wasn’t squash.”
“Can’t you feel that?” Pastor said one Sunday. “Can’t you feel that breeze?” I could. I was pretty sure it was the air conditioning kicking in.
This year I’ll sleep in a guest room, maybe on an air mattress. It will be a normal night of sleep. I won’t be waiting for the rumble of the Polar Express, watching for its headlight to flood the walls of my room in a gold glow.
In a world overwhelmed by possibility, sometimes it sounds really great to have someone else make your choices for you and put them in a neat little box.
Maybe it’s a sign of our times that I was waiting for this genuine and heartwarming scene to turn ironic, but it just didn’t ring true.
Euchre has very little variation. Sentinels of the Multiverse, on the other hand, has somewhere between 14 million to 230 million different game scenarios. That’s cool. Really. But those 230 different scenarios have a price-tag of roughly the same amount of rules.
It seems odd to speak of the limits of human intimacy when anticipating our reunion; to record for the world the untold stories which are themselves just fragments of a billowing moment already passed away, to promise that I will fail again to share them fully.
