God, Africa, Stress, and Baroque music

I had one of the loveliest dreams I had ever had the other night.

(This may sound blasphemous) but I dreamt that I was God, and that I was calling people by their true names. It was strange, and lovely. I felt like I had so much love for people, and that by naming them, I was calling them by what I had created them to be; to what their best potential was. It was weird, because what had happened in the dream was that God had spoken through somebody else, and then named ME God, and then I had to name everyone. It was like by naming me, I had a large and grand purpose, a reason for existing, and I had to tell people their wonderful reasons for existing in naming them. Like I could see all of the reasons behind everything, and had a deep knowledge, deep heartbreak, and deep love for everything. And I called them all by names of Saints, or names of Angels. I slept in to see the conclusion of the dream, and throughout it, I felt extraordinarily happy, or just peaceful. I really liked it.

I had a great conversation with Isaiah on Tuesday. He works in the cafe at EBC on Tuesdays, so I go in and visit him, and I love talking with him. I often feel like he's far more researched than I am, so his knowledge and insight into that research gives clarity to ideas that I dream about that are still foggy. Plus, he's already thinking about my ideas, so it's great to have someone thinking on the same wavelength as you are. We talked about so many things in the space of a few hours, that are usually gigantic conversations in and of themselves.

We talked about foreign aid. This past summer, when I was at the CSL, Matt Lockhart and I had a terrific conversation with Edmund, a Ghanaian who works for International Needs, and is an accountant. To talk to an accountant from Africa, would be talking to an expert on issues relevant to Africa, so I was very excited. His opinion was that Africa should not receive foreign aid at all, and that this was in fact detrimental to the countries. What they should do instead is unite all of the countries and become the United States of Africa, because with the incredible amount of natural resources the continent boasts, they could become the most powerful country in the world. I wanted Isaiah's opinion on it. Debt is interesting because all countries have debt, and all of it, he said, is unrealistic debt. I'm not sure what the best route is in the whole issue, nor by any stretch of the imagination at all do I have any form of authority to even speak a well-researched opinion into it. Though I did do some research. The United States of Africa concept has been floating around for the past fifty years, and countries are torn on it. The main countries that support it are Ghana, Senegal and Zimbabwe, where apparently South Africa (which is the richest African nation), and Nigeria aren't as interested.

There were so many other things we talked about: relativism, unity, yet not losing the salt and value in the traditions people are so convicted over. It was very good. It felt like a pile of ideas I was thinking of crammed into a two-hour session of awesomeness. :) Which is good, I needed it, though I know I should have been doing other things. It's been a bad semester, all in all. I should never have to look forward to a semester ending; it costs too much money to be in a school when you don't want to be there, but the workload was too big, the schedule was VERY bad, and I haven't had time to get everything all done, though I've done my very best. I also tried to do it while maintaining the same level of connection with my friends. I'm not sure if that's a bad idea. I'm thinking it was, because something that is important to know (and a lesson I've learned these past few weeks) stress levels will most definitely transcend into other facets of life, and that's never fun!

This week was pretty crazy. Last week I remembered that I'm playing piano for the Christmas production at EBC, so I looked at the music for the first time, and realized that it's actually HARD. I should have learned the Hallelujah Chorus at least a month ago. I'm so thankful for headphones. It has meant many nights spent up late playing, and trying to memorize it. I'm pretty impressed at myself; my piano teacher would be so proud. I don't like the Baroque period. Bach was a mathematician more than a musician, though he did love music. But a lot of it was about numerical perfections in the pieces, not to mention the Baroque music is VERY hard to memorize. Romantic music has distinctive tunes, and melodies. Baroque doesn't because Baroque wants to be mathematically correct. This makes it hard to memorize. It's also about fugues, polyphonic melodies that run all over the place, and confuse you, and everything being in the SAME CHORD, because Baroque is also excited about chords, because they just invented chords. It's like the Bronze Age for chording. Of course, we haven't really gone far beyond that because we always play the same chord progressions because they sound theoretically correct and best, and if anybody breaks from that, they either get jazz (which has it's own chording system now) or abstract things that don't make sense. Wow. I just read that last paragraph; it sounds so disjointed because I thought I would take a break from doing the usual run-on sentences I tend to do anyway. I now see why I like run-on sentences so much. I feel like each sentence is chopped into pieces by a knife or something - it's so disjointed!

Uh, anyway...