Before I started writing this blog, I used to get up every morning and watch a movie on the computer.

I couldn’t sleep… I wake up every morning at five like clockwork…so to be quiet while everybody else in the house was still in bed, I’d check a couple of the different sites I’d found and pick out a movie to watch.

Most of the movies that were on the site were still in the theaters…some hadn’t come out in America yet..so to get a chance to watch them was kind of strange and exciting.

I learned that there are a lot of different ways someone can bring a movie to the internet early.  There is the “screener” where a copy that was sent out for review is leaked to the internet.  These movies are usually just like watching a dvd…because the source material was a dvd. This is the most desirable way to watch a movie early…the best quality and sound is going to come from a screener.

The other most common format is what they’ll call “cam” on the movie sites.  This is where someone has brought a camcorder into the theater and recorded the movie.  This is usually pretty sketchy in quality…bad sound, shaky camera work, outside noise…lots of weirdness can happen with a cam quality movie.

One of the most entertaining things about the cam movies is the people leaving and coming back to their seats.  People come back with popcorn…big cups of soda…giant pigs heads pickled in some sort of pungent brine (just kidding about the last one….it’s too dark to really tell that much detail)…outlined in silhouette against the grainy movie screen, the cameraman not telling them to get out of the way of the camera because he’d probably go to prison if he got caught filming….so why draw attention to yourself by being too demanding?

It seems like a lot of these cam movies come from foreign countries…Russia, China, maybe some of the Middle Eastern countries.  It’s kind of like a twisted black market National Geographic.  Because all the action off-screen takes place in silhouette, you really have to use your imagination to pick up any cultural nuances.

This is really against the rules.  The MPAA doesn’t condone taping a movie off the screen and then posting it on the internet…no matter what country it happens in.  Next time you go to watch a movie, check out the poster warning of the penalties for taping in the theater…it’s something they take pretty seriously.

Watching a movie recorded in a Chinese theater kind of brings the “social element” back to the movie going experience.  We are so isolated in some ways…Netflix and other streaming (legally streaming) sources take all the social element out of the experience…we don’t have to see anybody and watch what we want, when we want…so to get the impression that other people are in the theater kind of grounds us in our humanity.  Maybe there is a legitimate market for that kind of experience?  I’m sure there are a lot of lonely people in the world who would sacrifice video quality for the feeling that they weren’t alone in watching another movie at home.  It’s kind of like watching a fireplace video on the big television…maybe better than nothing….but not by much.

I wouldn’t mind too much if an Asian man needed some fresh popcorn every once in a while.

We’ve watched a show on TLC a couple of times called “Breaking Amish”.  It’s about these young Amish adults who bust loose from the Amish lifestyle and go to the city to experience the “good life” as some of us know and live it.  What hijinks follow–tattoos, drunken parties, weird food…and even SEX.  Holy Smokes…those Amish kids are GOING OFF!!!

It’s kind of like the dark side of the simple life…they give the impression that burning underneath most of the simple living folk’s psyches is the tremendous need to BUST A MOVE and cause some major havoc in an urban setting…that if it wasn’t for the strict rules they have in their community, we’d have a drunken guy in a dark hat throwing up on our street right now.

Then you read in one of our news magazines like People or Us Weekly that it’s all staged…that somebody was a single mother stripper, or stole cars, sold meth, dated a dolphin, or did any number of sordid things before they temporarily towed the “straight and narrow” so it would look better when they joined the “Amish gone wild” crew. It’s all a setup.

Surely they could have found some photogenic Amish young adults who legitimately wanted to go to the dark side?

I’ve read about a term called rumspringa that they use in the Amish community.  It’s a term that is either used to describe adolescence in general…or a period of “forgivable” disobedience.  These kids aren’t shunned when they experience the world…and most, after baptism, return to the church and the simple ways they’ve grown up with.  It’s not sanctioned crazy…it’s just a period that the adults recognize as maybe a little necessary to produce good adult Amish.  I think the important thing is that most of these kids sow their wild oats…and then come back to the life. What most of us take away from the news reports of rumspringa activities is the feeling that there must be a whole lot of trouble in simple town.

So…what’s our fascination with the fall?  Where did that come from? The “I knew it was too good to be true!! Look at those Amish kids go, Flo!” attitude…the cynical expectation that anything good has to be “too good to be true”…why do I enjoy seeing some of that stuff? Maybe enjoy is the wrong word…maybe “watch with disgusted fascination” would be better.  The moral train wreck…black hats and bonnets amongst the wreckage…and me, sitting back in semi-legit moral superiority, thinking, “oh…isn’t that…horrible. Wait…don’t turn the channel…I’ve got to go to the restroom…I’ll be right back!!! The dark-haired one is getting her first piercing in the next segment!!”

I don’t watch the show often.  I will stop on it with the same “mindfulness” that I’ll display when I see a strange infomercial…”those pills will do what to your what?“…and watch it with the same lack of attention. It’s a strange world we live in, sometimes…stranger than I was aware of if everything I see in the media is true…stranger still if I keep watching the lies.

I used to follow a number of survivalist websites.

I guess it’s kind of like saying I used to weigh 600 lbs….or was a longtime crack addict…or stole cars for a living or was a suburban pimp.  It’s a surprising revelation for someone who supposedly is trying to live with a more positive way of looking at the world. Being focused on what is falling down in the world doesn’t help you figure out how to stand up.

Old habits die hard, though.  Last night they featured a story about the documentation of the melting polar ice…juxtaposed with pictures of the flooding in the northeast and other corresponding natural disasters.  I got the impression that they were saying that things were happening faster than they thought…that the ocean was going to rise and the ice was going to disappear.  Cataclysm and disaster…and there was nothing we could do about it. I was riveted to the screen…”SEE!!! SEE!!”, I was thinking to no one.

Powerlessness sucks stinks.

The thing about all those survivalist websites is that after a while you realize that there is always something “that might happen” that these guys can write about.  Paranoia is easily encouraged.  Until it’s proven otherwise, the zombies are coming to get me and coming to get me soon.  I read it in a blog.

But…we have the wonderful privilege now of making the choice to live a simple lifestyle.

Climate change is a pretty heavily politicized issue.  That the environment could be argued about as heatedly (no pun intended) as it is seems pretty crazy.  When I’m burning in the fire, I don’t give a flip who lit it or if someone else tells me it’s not  a real fire…I just know that it hurts.  It doesn’t seem to do any good to obsess over climate change…but some of these people act like it’s not happening at all, and that bothers me.

So…back to the choice of choosing a simple lifestyle.

It’s a necessary and seemingly easy choice to want to lighten our impact on the earth.  It’s doable and teachable…and makes an impact on our family and the world around us that can be seen immediately. What a luxury it is to be able to choose to live a simple lifestyle.  Some of the things that we champion as “simple living icons” would , unfortunately, be pushed to the back of the shelf if there was an easy alternative.  My father talked about how much he liked “store-bought” bread after a lifetime of homemade…liked the texture, etc.  I don’t think it’s debatable which of the two breads would be the “simple” choice…but he really enjoyed the store-bought. Everything hard looks better if you aren’t “kneading the dough”…my grandmother probably liked the store-bought bread every once in a while, too.

I guess that what I’m trying to say in an imprecise way is that we have the ability to choose any kind of lifestyle right now. Our choices aren’t made for us by political or environmental factors…we get to choose. That’s pretty amazing.  To a degree, we really do get to shape our world to make it what we want it to be.  If I were to stay invested in the survivalist mindset, though, I’d say that the great reckoning was coming…somehow it was going to come…and that pretty soon things were going to be a lot simpler than we want them to be.  We don’t control the future…we do control our choices.  One of our important choices is to approach things with the knowledge that we need to be aware of the need to feel gratitude for the chance to choose.  People would be right in saying that economics makes our choices for us in a lot of cases….and it often does define what we can do…but for the most part we really are able to choose.

Coming off the flu…rambling more than usual…trying to say in a blog post about simple living something that could be said more simply in two lines–that it’s good to have choices…and that I hope the choices aren’t taken away when the floodwaters start to rise.

My wife and I were visiting a small town in Georgia once and asked one of the locals “where the thrift stores were?”

She looked at us as if we had something fishy going on…and then said, “You mean where the poor people shop?”.

We are into thrift stores.  There aren’t many that we pass up.  We’ve got to check them out.

Big cities, small towns…we check all their thrift stores out.  There isn’t much that gets the “OK” for a diversion more often than a thrift store we’ve never visited before.

In all our thrift store visiting, it hit me that a pretty strong indication of how well an area was doing could be found in their thrift stores.  We live in a land of plenty.  No matter what the media tells us about how the economy is doing, in the area of material goods we really do excel.  The purest example of a consumerist society is on display when you go to a store that sells the “cast offs” at the tail end of a product’s utility.  We go through a lot of product. An area that can support a number of thrift stores is usually doing pretty well financially…or at least is an area that’s pretty good at consuming.

What I’ve found to be true is that thrift stores really do mirror what’s going on in a community.  Places that have a lot of people, consume a lot of material goods, and that have a high turnover in the goods that they do buy tend to have the best thrift stores.  It’s not just the “worn out” that makes it to the thrift stores, either.  It’s often the stuff that has to be “moved out” to make way for the new.  Check out a thrift store around the first of the new year…you’ll probably find some items that were replaced at Christmas.

The lady’s comments about “poor people” is really kind of funny when you dig a little deeper into who is doing a lot of the thrift store purchasing.  Many of the people we see in thrift stores these days are dealers.  People with smart phones scanning the book section to see what might be salable , others checking labels to see what might have potential on Ebay, and all of them seeing how they can use the low end supplier to make a profit.  Prices at the thrift stores have gone up as a result…but like any business the “bottom line” is making sales, not necessarily only selling to the “poor people”.  It is strange to watch all this play out.  Thrift stores are popular with a pretty broad range of people for a lot of reasons…the fact that items can be researched almost instantaneously takes a lot of the “magic” out of shopping like this…but makes it easier for the dealers to run a business.  When it became easy to research and buy and sell, you saw a whole lot of people get into the thrift store market.  When a business that was set up to give the lower income folks an alternative to retail is hit hard by people recognizing that low prices equal a better profit margin you really have to wonder who the business is serving.

I’m a big fan of the second-hand market.  My father once called me a “good scrounger”.  I guess it kind of hurt my feelings a little…never really thought of myself as a scrounger…but I suppose that we are pretty good at supplying our needs with “recycled” items.  There are a lot of ways to be green.   A person can buy the brand new, organic cotton, hand sewn shirt from the fair trade store in the trendiest section of the hippest town…or maybe just buy a used “recycled” flannel shirt from the thrift store.  I guess it all works out in the end.

There’s an old story about a Zen master talking to one of his students.  After offering the student a cup of tea, he starts to pour …but when he reaches the brim of the cup, he continues to fill the cup.  “Stop, master…the cup is full!” the student declares, tea running onto the table and down his leg.

At this point, the teacher tells the student, ” You are like this cup…full of your own opinions and conclusions.  How can you learn until you first empty the cup?”

I am afraid that I might have a second cup handy to handle the overflow.

It is easier to build a new container for the extra than it is to get rid of it.  I’m not sure why it is so hard for me to “empty the cup”…by choice, I seem to want to hold on to a lot of things that get in my way.  I curse the wastebasket I left in the middle of the room…finally moving it and realizing that I didn’t have to trip over it in the dark…realizing how easy it all was when I finally took some action to fix the problem. Until something changes, it’s “the way we’ve always done it”…and I continue to work around an issue that’s “fixable” until I decide or someone else decides to fix it.

There is a story about a holiday ham.  The man in the story loved his hams…prepared the same way every time.  Each time the ham was being prepared, his wife would cut the end off the ham before she put it into the oven.  Finally, one day he said, “Why do you cut the end off the ham?  Seems kind of wasteful…”  His wife replied, “Well…that’s the way my mother always did it…you like my mother’s hams don’t you?”

The man replied, “Well…sure I do..they’re delicious…but that still doesn’t answer the question.”

His wife said, “well…why don’t you call Mom.  Maybe she can give you an answer to your question”.

So he called his mother in law.  When she picked up the phone, he asked her the question about the ham.  She told him that “she didn’t really know…it was just the way it had always been done in her family. Why didn’t he call her mother and ask her why she cut the end off the ham?”.

So, sure he was getting closer to an answer, he called his wife’s grandma. “Hi”, he said, “I have a question for you.  Every time we have a ham, my wife cuts off the end.  Apparently, her mother did the same thing for years.  They say that you taught them to do it.  Why do you do that?  What does it do for the ham?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line…and then Grandma said, “Well…my pan was too short.  I had to cut the end off to make it fit.”

I know how to cook a ham….the same way I’ve always done it…and nobody’s going to tell me different.

My cup is full.