Changes

I find that writing is something I really enjoy. Over the last year and a half, I have really enjoyed writing this blog on my life and Catholic faith. Because I enjoyed it so much at first, I bought this URL a year ago (which you somehow found to get here) in order to make my writing easier to find and seem a little bit more official. I have had a wonderful time writing about the Catholic faith, life, and about the culture as I have experienced them, because these are things I'm very passionate about.

What is happening now, though, is a transition. As of Saturday, jasonjtheobald.com will no longer be mine. I will still probably write here occasionally, for the time being, but you will have to go to the annoyingly long and hard to remember URL of ignitethedarkandliveitup.blogspot.com to find it. I appreciate all of you who have consistently read what I've written, even though at times it has been less than superb and once or twice hastily thrown together.

Man of Steel

There is a common understanding that superhero movies can only do a certain portion of what other movies can do. A superhero movie is always going to be relatively successful at the box office, and if it is a good superhero movie it has the chance to be incredibly successful. This sort of movie will always contain intense action scenes, the total destruction of a city or two, a villain, a hero's eventual triumph over evil, and a very pretty girl who factors into the plot line somehow.

Man of Steel (the Superman movie which came out last year from Producer Christopher Nolan of Inception and The Dark Knight trilogy fame which you had to live under a rock to not hear about) was no exception. A constant battle between good and evil, this movie had some serious destruction, action scenes galore, plenty of evil characters (and one main villain), and the beautiful Amy Adams playing Lois Lane. If you were looking for a classic superhero movie, Man of Steel delivered.

I realize that I'm writing this review long after the movie came out and most of you saw it, but it's on Redbox now and that's where I get all of my movies so I'm going to write about it now; my apologies if that makes you angry or makes you not want to read this.

Take Off Your Coat

Have you ever known the sort of person who can tell what you're thinking before you even say something? Often we're like this with our closes friends; they don't need to tell us what they're thinking, the way that they respond to a simple hello tells us all we need to know. The response of a friend alerts us to their mood because we know how they usually respond, and when we can hear their tone and see their movements we know if things are different than normal.

Body language and small signs are incredible indicators of the way a person feels. Nervous twitches and awkward laughs tell us that a person is uncomfortable for some reason in that conversation; leaning in and making some sort of physical contact shows the exact opposite. Human beings are physical creatures, and the physical actions of our bodies point to what it is we're feeling or thinking, even if we don't want to portray all of that.

This is my roundabout way to tell you that you should take your coat off when you go to Church.

All Is Lost

For those of you who haven't seen this movie, I'll try not to ruin it too much, but here's a quick synopsis. Robert Redford is the only character in this move; that's not an exaggeration, he's literally it, other than a man's hand and a voice on a radio. Redford is an unnamed character, out at sea by himself, facing immense difficulties and being stranded by storms and all kinds of difficulties.

Since there are no other characters in this movie, there is no dialogue. Apart from one mildly uncomfortably screamed F-Bomb, Redford doesn't even talk to himself. The movie is not silent, though, in so many other ways. From the slow crashing of waves to the intensity of middle of the ocean storms, noise is everywhere.

Fallon, Francis, and Things I Liked and Didn't

The world we live in, with its constant communication, is hard to slow down enough sometimes to figure out what's going on. This past week was no different, with lots of new and exciting things happening, and lots of craziness out there as usual. As a way to hope to comment on it, I want to start presenting my weekly lists of things that happened and what I thought about them. Or, as often happens, maybe this will be the only one I do. Oh well; here's some things I either liked or didn't like, and no I won't tell you which is which.