distract me not

Sitting in Victors Dining Hall, studying/listening to music with my new noise-canceling earphones. I just discovered this band called "FM Static," a Canadian pop-punk band, and listening to a few of their singles takes me back to my really super-emo high school days. (They sound like Dashboard Confessional, if that makes anything clearer. It's really hard not to get emo when you listen to music like that.)

If anyone's curious:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbFlHd1GP1w

Well, anyway, these earphones are incredible. They drown out the din of the two-hundred or so people downstairs having lunch. I can pretend they're not there. No distractions at all.

And that reminds me. Yesterday, I had dinner with one of my friends, and as we were walking down the street to Ben & Jerry's for free cone day, he asked one of those profound "I am not of this world" questions:

"Do you ever wonder how humans decided to put metal and rubber and plastic together to make cars? Or computers?"
(If anyone accuses me of misquoting, he didn't say it exactly like that, but that was the point.)

I think it has something to do with the fact that humans always have to be doing something, making something. And maybe the reason is for a "higher quality" of life, but I thought that if a "higher quality" of life meant that we were gonna be floating around, WALL-E-esque, in techno-bubbles, I would rather be one of the GEICO cavemen.

We always have to be distracted. I think of the times that I sit on my couch and watch TV or play video games and whatnot, and often I rationalize what I'm doing with the excuse that I need to rest. I just end up not sleeping and getting even more tired. God invented sleep for a reason, Chris.

And if I think that God created the Garden of Eden without any computers, TVs, GPAs, sports teams, or anything else that always gets me confused, I just realize that these are all things we have so we can drown out the yells and cries of God.

Jesus is taking my earphones and throwing them out the window so I can hear Him. It was never the sounds of people and relationships, but the things that I was using to block out those sounds that were the distractions. Don't let anything convince you otherwise.

... by the way, I put new meaning into "Free Cone Day." Five steps away from the counter, I took a lick and my ice cream scoop fell to the ground and rolled a few feet. I had a free cone, no free ice cream. :(