Rachel Olson – a broken mold

Multiflavored enjoyment.

Rachel Olson — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 03:37:13 +0000

Have you ever noticed the multitudinous types of pleasure God has given us?
There’s that full, down to your toes satisfaction that comes from a mouthful of Swedish chocolate made from 70% cocoa. It comes when the choir’s bass section in such good form you can almost see their voices in the room. It comes when you bury your hands in the warm softness of pure alpaca yarn. This is the pleasure just melts over you, rich and heavy.
Then there’s that tingling pleasure that runs all down your spine when the Latin finally makes sense and Virgil’s image leaps into being in full technicolor. It’s the one that gives you goose bumps when the soprano nails her high notes in Handle’s Messiah. It’s the sudden jig your heart performs when you raise the shade one morning to find you’ve awakened in a fairyland of snow. This is the Buck-you-up-o of God’s pleasures. It hits you at mach ten and leaves you surprised, a little numb, and possibly hyperventilating.
Then there’s simple delight. It bubbles up when you pull a flawless loaf of bread from the oven, or when your classmate wears her bright yellow galoshes to school. It’s not powerful, its not sudden, it just steps in for the little things that “make you happy.”
These were just some things I came up with that make me happy, and it is by no means a comprehensive list. The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, and oftentimes it is hard to remember the latter. So, I have a challenge for you. What are the things that make you happy? Sit down and think up a list. And don’t just think about what, think about how. How does this thing affect you? What kind of pleasure is it? And then marvel at the many ways God gives us to glorify and enjoy Him.

How Far Away Is That Galaxy?

Rachel Olson — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:22:23 +0000

Most of my literary science fiction experience has been in the realm of Star Wars novels I am sorry to say. This hasn’t done anything for my copiousness. But it made me aware of a pet peeve I have regarding science fiction. It always annoyed me, when I delved into the Star Wars universe, that nothing was real. Now hold on, you will say, of course nothing is real; this is science fiction. But there is real and then there is verisimilitude, the the likeness of reality, which most of the Star Wars novels didn’t have to some extent. Why? They got too caught up in the gadgets and the cool names for the most basic things. R.A. Salvatore described a common sink as a “refresher” in his novelization of “Attack of the Clones”. Barbara Hambly described hard copy documents as “flimsiplast.” And I cannot count how many times I have read “viewport” where usually one finds “window” or “transparisteel” instead of “glass.” In light of these substitutions, some very probing questions must be asked. What logical reason is there to call a sink, or even a bathroom, a “refresher” if you don’t want to cause your readers a major hiccup? What is wrong with having paper hard copies of documents? If your reasoning is “they destroyed all the trees,” fair enough, but where did the petroleum come from to make all the plastic? Why are normal windows not made of glass? Have they destroyed sand as well? And most important; If you have no good reason behind your terminology besides “it sounds cool” why are you using it? From someone who has slogged through many books littered with these, please stop. Readers are physical beings that live in the real world, and if the story we are reading is too full of unnecessary other-worldliness, we will lose interest.

There are Some Words You Don’t Want to Eat.

Rachel Olson — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:35:46 +0000

I recently watched the movie “Snatch”; a movie about a diamond heist, illegal boxing and British gypsies. If that sounds confusing, it was. But what was even more confusing was the movie’s rating. Though this movie was violent, it was not so much so as to warrant the R rating it received, it was the language that brought the movie into those ranks. Why is it necessary to have such foul language in an otherwise PG-13 movie? Does it make the movie more gritty or realistic?

Proverbs says “Out of the thoughts of the heart the mouth speaks.” Now, I agree that there are people out there whose hearts resemble a soiled diaper and who carry it with them in their speech. When we watch movies in which every other word is an F bomb, we are voluntarily feeding ourselves with the contents of the character’s soiled diapers. Now tell me, what is wrong with this picture?