Why All These Quizzes?

23 June, 201422 June, 2014Marissa

If you’re like me, you have a Facebook friend or two (or three or four) who posts their results from all those “Which *name of a TV show* character are you?” or “What time period should you live in?” quizzes. Even if you aren’t posting the results yourself, you’ve probably clicked on a few of them to see what your results are. It’s fun, it’s harmless, and it’s ridiculously popular. But why?

Several people are writing articles to answer the question Why Online Quizzes Are Taking Over Your Facebook Feed or discuss The Unstoppable Rise Of The BuzzFeed Quiz. Explanations include: we like to believe life can be chategorized, we’re on a search to answer the question “Who am I?”, we want to fit in with something, we want affirmation of how we see ourselves, and we’re looking for a distraction to combat the sense of information overload.

I like quizzes too. On the more respected/serious side, I’m interested in Myers-Briggs personality tests (I’m an INFJ). On the lighter side, I’m just as guilty of wanting to know which sandwich I am as the rest of you.

Who were you during the Renaissance? William Shakespeare (are you comparing me to one of the greatest writers ever? please, continue)

Which Doctor Who Doctor are you? 10th Doctor (of course — my favorite)

What state do you actually belong in? Minnesota (why?)

Which super power is right for you? Super smarts (you may all feel free to laugh)

Which Disney prince is your true love? Prince Eric (um, no)

One of the articles I linked above said none of your Facebook friends really care whether you’re more like Kirk or Spock (I’m Uhura by the way). In part that’s true — we want to find out what result we’ll get far more than we care about your result. But I’ve also enjoyed finding out that one of my former professors “is” Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory (which surprised none of his students, though he couldn’t understand why because he’s never watched the show).

On the whole, though, any connection from taking a quiz like this is superficial. You can’t maintain a relationship based on Facebook posts, and friendships aren’t deepened by learning what kind of sandwich you are. So maybe the larger issue regarding online quizzes is that they’re another way the internet allows us to kill time while keeping up the appearance of interacting with other people. It’s a poor substitute for real conversation though, as I was reminded by spending this past Sabbath in a place with no cell-phone service and no wi-fi. Instead, there was a wonderful group of people to spend time with while we talked, walked up and down steep hills, and made popcorn over an open fire. And I didn’t miss Facebook or quizzes at all.

The Mystery of the Weigh Stations

16 June, 201415 June, 2014Marissa

I drove over 1,000 miles last weekend on the way to and from visiting a dear friend. On the way, I had ample opportunity to muse about the complexities and mysteries of life, including weigh stations.

You know what I mean — those little places along highways ostensibly built as “a checkpoint along a highway to inspect vehicular weights” (according to Wikipedia). But they’re never open. There’s usually a sign that says “weigh station” and then in glowing letters it says “closed.” I think prior to this trip I’d seen only one that was open and had a truck driving into it. Coming home I did see a weigh station sign with glowing letters that said “open,” but I never saw the weigh station. Very mysterious if you ask me.

And yes, I did do my research on this and found out about the electronic bypass systems with scales embedded in the road so trucks can be weighed without actually entering the weigh station. But the weigh stations are still there, mostly closed from what I’ve seen, and I wonder what they might be used for. Here are my top theories:

They are entrances to secret government facilities, hiding in plain sight like the purloined letter. And being a weigh station, even an out-of-use one, means no one would think it too terribly odd if a truck drove in and delivered secret something or others.
The entire weigh station thing is a cover for an alien invasion. They landed here and set up weigh stations, edited Wikepedia, and no one noticed because everyone assumed the stations were someone else’s jurisdiction.
42. It’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything, so I’m assuming that includes weigh stations.
They actually are what they claim to be, but have now been taken over by some kind of secret organization. I’m picturing men in floor-length cloaks with masks whispering “What’s the password?” and speaking in Latin.

view from my car of a weigh station I passed on the way home — view from my car of a closed weigh station I passed on the way home

Personally, I’m leaning toward number 2. But that might just be because I’m starting to get excited about Falling Skies coming back on the 22nd.

What are your off-the-wall or so-strange-it-just-might-be-real theories? Doesn’t have to be about weigh stations — could be anything that has the potential to be far more interesting than most people assume.

Dreaming With God

28 April, 201428 April, 2014Marissa

Earlier this year, when I was at a youth retreat over President’s Day weekend, something was said in a seminar that has been floating around the back of my mind ever since. He was talking about goals, and said that we should write out goals so big that if we attain them we’ll know we couldn’t have done it on our own. In other words, we should make our dreams so big that when they come true, we’ll know God must have been involved.

I was reminded of this when listening to Casting Crown’s new album “Thrive” yesterday. One of my new favorite songs, “Dream For You,” includes these lines.

So come on, let Me dream, let Me dream for you
I am strong when you’re weak and I’ll carry you
So let go of your plan, be caught by My hand
I’ll show you what I can do
When I dream for you
I have a dream for you

Isn’t this a beautiful idea? to think that God has dreams, and hopes, and plans for you that are bigger and better than anything you can imagine, and that He wants to dream with you?

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. (Jer. 29:11)

This is especially encouraging for me right now, two years out of college and still struggling to decide what my next move should be. For as long as I can remember, my dreams have involved doing something creative to earn money while staying at home to raise a family. It might not seem like a very big dream, but it’s important to me and, while I can get excited about an idea that would move in a different direction (such as returning to grad school and focusing on my research about Christianity and gender roles in 18th century literature), I can’t seem to feel at peace with that decision for more than, oh, 36 hours. That’s why I’ll be launching an Etsy store shortly to supplement income from my copywriting and, hopefully, fiction writing. Stay tuned for more news about that in the next couple weeks! As far as I can tell, the marriage and family part of my dream is still quite some way from being realized, but I can work on this working-from-home part of my dream now and trust God for the rest — or trust that He’ll come up with an even more amazing dream for me.

Bigfoot, Nessie, and sundry creatures

21 April, 201421 April, 2014Marissa

Since I’ll be away all weekend, I snagged this topic on Wednesday from Kay’s Best Intentions blogspot and wrote it early. Didn’t want to get so busy I skipped a week again!

I came across Kay’s list of 36 Of The Best Blog Post Ideas.. EVER! on Pinterest a couple weeks after she first published it. This one is #25: “What supernatural things do you believe in or not? (aliens, bigfoot, ghosts, etc.)” I wouldn’t describe what I’m about to write about as “supernatural,” but since she put bigfoot in between those parenthesis I decided to just go with it.

A Budding Cryptid Obsession

I first discovered cryptozoology 14 or 15 years ago on an out-of-the-way bookshelf in Perrycook Memorial Public Library in the tiny town of Johnsville, Ohio. Alan Garinger’s book Water Monsters was thin and black with a brightly colored image on the front depicting a stylized water creature with a purple head shaped like a sharpened pencil. I had to stand on tiptoes to reach the shelf where it was snuggled up beside a cheesy-looking UFO book.

Once I’d read the book at least three times, I sent letters begging for more information to each address listed the back of the book, and received a treasure trove of reading material. I was sent an article on the Alkali Lake Monster, a booklet titled “The Legend of the Silver Lake Sea Serpent,” and a nice letter from a communications manager who had written about the Bear Lake Monster hoax. The city of Kelowna sent articles about Ogopogo, and the Churubusco Chamber of Commerce gave me an information packet on their giant turtle, including turtle shaped pencil-toppers and a bottle opener.

Water Creatures

I’m picky in which cryptids I follow. My favorites are the water creatures, though the “living dinosaurs” are a very close second. I’ll also keep track of research on hairy hominids (bigfoot, yeti, skunk ape, alma, etc.), but they can’t hold my interest for long. I feel like they are less mysterious than the water dwellers, almost too close to being recognized by mainstream science to be intriguing. Other areas of cryptozoology I rarely touch are the creepier cryptids like chupacabra, anything that starts to fringe into alien-hunter territory, and questionably extinct species like Thylacine.

marissabaker.wordpress.com — me at Lake Champlain in 2012

Anything that supposedly lives in the water, though … that I like. The lake monsters: Champ of Lake Champlain, Ogopogo of Lake Okanagan, Nahuelito of Lago Nahuel Huapi, Nessie of Loch Ness. The sea serpents: Caddy typically sighted off the coast of British Columbia, the Valhalla sighting of 1905, the Gloucester Sea Serpent, the tadpole-like Hook Island photos, the enormous crocodilian blown out of the water by the German U-28 submarine in 1915.

The only cryptozoologically famous spot I’ve visited so far is Lake Champlain. We missed the heyday of sightings at Bulwagga Bay by about 40 years, but this commemorative board listing Champ sightings in the area was as close as I’ve come to one of my favorite lake monsters.

Monster Art

For my final project in my digital art class at college, I did a series of prints focused on 7 different cryptids and placed them in a book. They were Nessie, Champ, Ogopogo, Caddy, Mokel-mbembe, Ropen, and Bigfoot. I’ll include the first three at the end of this post. Each piece arranged sketches, photos, and sighting informaition around a map of the area each creature is said to inhabit.

I can’t finish this post without touching on the living dinosaurs. The most well-known — mokele-mbembe, emela-ntouka, and kongamato — have been reported on a fairly regular basis in the Congo region of Africa. Mokele-mbembe (consistently described as a small sauropod dinosaur) seems to me like one of the cryptids most likely to be real — the area is difficult to explore well enough to rule out their existence, and the people who actually live there talk about mokele-mbembe as if they are as real as hippos, monkeies, and snakes.

Music In My Mind

17 March, 2014Marissa

When my cousin went to see The Phantom of the Opera, she was disappointed because the Phantom had a lack-luster voice. That was not the case last night at the Ohio Theatre in Columbus. Cooper Grodin turned in an amazing performance, which was well-supported by a talented cast including Grace Morgan as Christine and Ben Jacoby as Raoul.

This was my second time seeing a touring Broadway production in Columbus (the first was Wicked, last July). My sister and I are in serious danger of becoming theater addicts. We love the atmosphere (especially in a theater as lovely and historic as this one in Columbus), the excuse to dress elegantly, the quality of the music, and the set changes. Before going to Wicked, I had no idea set design was so elaborate.

One thing I love about Phantom is that since it is a play about stage actors, the audience switches from being viewers at the play The Phantom of the Opera to being part of the play as an audience for the plays enacted in the Opera Populaire. We became part of the Phantom’s opera house. Sometimes, he seemed to be singing just over my shoulder because of speakers at the back of the theater (which were only used for his character). Then, near the end when Raoul orders the doors bared against the Phantom’s escape, we heard doors shutting behind us.

Christine’s has long been one of my favorite roles to sing, and the English major in me also likes to analyze her character. From reading stage directions (included in the booklet that came with my copy of the CD), it often seems like she’s in a trance — as if the Phantom is a student of Franz Mesmer and has been practicing a form of hypnotism on Christine. She’s not mad — at least insofar that she’s not imagining the Phantom — and she’s not stupid. She, like the entire play and audience, is under the Phantom’s spell.

Outlets

20 January, 201420 January, 2014Marissa

My dad gave a sermon this past weekend where one of the points he made involved an analogy about the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. The Sea of Galilee is a healthy body of water — Israel’s main source of freshwater in fact, according to the Google — because it has an outlet that keeps the water fresh. The Dead Sea, on the other hand, has no outlet so the minerals keep building up to the point that nothing can live there. Out of curiosity, I looked up both these lakes on Google Maps satellite images. There is a striking difference even from this distance.

There’s a spiritual lesson in this, which is what was brought out in the sermon. If we don’t share and use the gifts that God gives us, we will stagnate instead of growing and bearing spiritual fruit.

The other thing I thought about in connection to this idea is how much I need an outlet for my thoughts. Apparently this is something that MBTI types who use Extraverted Feeling as a primary (ESFJs and ENFJs) or secondary function (ISFJs and INFJs) have in common. We need to express our feelings and thoughts in some way in order to process them. I’d been thinking about re-writing my About page for a while, and this idea lead me to a better way of articulating the purpose of this blog. Here’s the update:

The Sea of Galilee in Israel is a thriving, beautiful lake that acts as the main water source for all of Israel. Its outflow is the Jordan River, which flows to the Dead Sea. The water there is brackish — 25% salts — and the minerals continue to build up because there is nowhere for the water to flow out of the sea. The Dead Sea is dead because it has no outlet.

This blog is my outlet for random thoughts that pop in my head (Monday’s posts), recipes I like (Wednesday’s posts), and Bible Studies I want to share (Saturday’s posts). Monday’s posts can be about pretty much anything — MBTI types, yurts, and Doctor Who just to name a few. Cooking is something that makes me feel alive, and so Wednesday’s posts are all about making food. I love to come up with and perfect recipes and watch people enjoying the food I make. The most important outlet, though, are the posts on Saturdays. God has worked amazingly in my life, and if we keep silent about His majesty the rocks will cry out to sing his praises. When He leads my Bible study, I don’t want to keep what I learn confined to the growing stack of notebooks in my closet any more.