Best of Washington, D.C.: Outdoor Pools and Water Parks - My Article at Yahoo Voices

It's summertime in the city, and if there's one thing Washingtonians know, it's that summers here get hot and humid. But rest assured that the region offers plenty of places to cool off! Whether you swim laps or are just looking for a place to splash around with the kids, here are some of the best outdoor swimming pools and water parks in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

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Gettin' Political: Bill Moyers, DOMA Overturned

 Yesterday's episode of The Colbert Report reminded me why, from the still few things of his I have read, I am a fan of Bill Moyers.

Moyers was on the show to talk about his new Frontline documentary Two American Families, which profiled two struggling families representative of America's shrinking middle class (Stephen Colbert: "Wow, he talked to both of them!").

One of my favorite parts: "The problem is not why so many people fall through the cracks; the problem is why there are so many cracks."

In bigger political news,  the talk of the town was the Supreme Court's over-turning of DOMA. On my facebook feed and on the interwebs themselves, opinions are all over the place.

But I think this article best explains why the SCOTUS decision is a victory.

It doesn't affect people's heterosexual marriages. It certainly doesn't affect the state of the family unit at-large. If anything, the institution of marriage and the family unit are strengthened by granting equal benefits to already existing gay- and lesbian- headed families.

But it does affect people like Kelly Costello and Fabiola Morales, now allowed to apply for permanent residency for the foreign-born spouse.

“This means that gay and lesbian couples across the country and the world can plan for their futures and not have to live with uncertainty month after month,” said  [lawyer] Steve Ralls.

 “Now we will finally have the security and stability we always wanted as a family," said Costello.

Security and stability: things that strengthen all partnerships and families, whether hetero- or homosexual.

So thank you, SCOTUS.

Wordless Wednesday: Messing Around With Muzy.com

 

Christianity isn't a Club

I've been reading some good things lately from Christian bloggers talking about how they struggle to live out their faith and spirituality when they see it reduced to a bunch of superficial precepts designed to easily identify who is in and who is out. Things like this and this. These posts really resonated with my own experience, and they came as a relief after a post I read essentially calling out Christians for treating the faith as a "fandom."

This post, written by an evangelical Christian woman I have followed for years first on livejournal and then on facebook, obviously touched a nerve in me, but I felt it would be defensive and a little presumptuous on my part for me to address it. But then I read those posts that so well expressed the frustrations I had been feeling. And I decided that if this blog is going to be me at my real-est, that I myself need to put into words the frustrations I have with modern Christianity.

My online friend likened some Christians as viewing the religion as a "fandom" where we "pick and choose" the teachings we want to accept and to reject (her analogy actually worked better when she explained it, as much as I was bothered by it...), but in my experience it has been seen more as a club, where people's lives and lifestyles are scrutinized to see if they measure up to how a Christian "should" live.

If Christianity were a club, I would have been long gone. I know I don't fit in to that club, and I gave up trying to years ago. But it's Christ, the living son of God, who keeps calling me back even as I would run from some of His followers...

My faith journey has been a unique one, but that's how I have discerned that it is God calling me on this path, and not me trying to fit in with modern Christendom. I was baptized Catholic but never confirmed, and I attended an Episcopal middle school and Catholic high school. My parents were pretty "lapsed" in their Catholicism by my teenage years, but attended the Episcopal church connected with my middle school on Christmas and Easter. In college, due partly to my feelings of loneliness and isolation, I started attending a charismatic evangelical Christian group on campus after my freshman-year hall mate invited me. While in some ways my spirit was nurtured, I never felt truly comfortable there for multiple reasons.

A major one was feeling like I had to talk, dress, act, believe etc. a certain way in order to fit in; there was a sense that I was always being judged to see if my faith were "bearing the correct fruit." Part of that feeling could have just been my own paranoia and tendency to be a people-pleaser, but apparently I'm not the only one within Christian circles to have felt this way.

I would never have been a "good" evangelical Christian. I think most Christian music is, from a music-lover's standpoint...well, crap, and Christian film is even worse. Four-letter words do come out of my mouth on many-an-occasion, which apparently surprises some of my friends. While I've never been a huge drinker and don't drink to get drunk, I do consume alcohol. I would wear bikinis, if I were more comfortable with my stomach, and I have plenty of shirts that show cleavage. My political beliefs are solidly to the left, especially when it comes to issues of poverty and social and economic equality, but I also firmly support gay equality and think that the decision to abort should be in the hands of the mother and not the government.

If those things are the litmus test for how good a Christian I am, according to today's definition I most certainly fail. But it's Christ who seeks and knows my heart, and it's Christ who will judge me, not "man who looks upon the externals." And as I said, it's Christ who has beckoned me to follow Him and Christ who continually calls me back.

I'm back to attending an Episcopal Church (though I also identify culturally with Catholicism), and I'm thankful to have found a church body that is filled with accepting and non-judgmental people. But I get frustrated when I see Christian culture reduce Christianity to the externals, when only God can judge the heart. I'm not picking and choosing just because I come to a different interpretation than you; I'm merely prayerfully examining scripture through my own experience and understanding.

So, instead of rejecting Christianity-as-fandom, let's reject Christianity as a club, and seek to follow and serve God as we understand Him, rather than expending so much energy judging the lives of others.

Reflections on Becoming a Master of the Arts

Wow, that's a fancy-pants title, isn't it?

But I walked in the Johns Hopkins/KSAS graduation this morning, so I  now officially am/have a Master of Arts in Communication.

It was a much different graduation experience than those I've had before. To start with, it was my first time actually setting foot on the Hopkins Baltimore campus. I used to drive by it all the time when I worked in Baltimore, and I had been to the bookstore, Starbucks and a couple of other shops near Charles Street. But all the classes for my Masters program, minus the one online, were held on the DC campus. So I wasn't really a "traditional" student and didn't feel a part of the campus the way I did when I graduated from UMBC. In fact, it wasn't until recently that I even knew, for example, that the JHU mascot was a blue jay.

I also finished my last class in December of last year, making a spring graduation sort of anti-climactic.

So yeah, grad school was a lot different than undergraduate, but I'm still glad I did the whole ceremonial walk in my cap-and-gown thing. Even if that cap and gown did cost $120. I had briefly considered going to yesterday's campus-wide graduation as well, but then decided that was too much.

It was interesting to line up in the gym (way to early, honestly) and compare similar experiences with people from my program I hadn't met, as well as a few I had. I talked a little to Sheena, with whom I had taken Media Relations, and who also finished the program. There were a few people I had classes with who were listed in the program but didn't show up. Again, with a part-time Master's degree program, a lot of people couldn't take off work or just didn't feel like driving from the DC area up to Baltimore.

It was also the first of all my graduations to be held outdoors, and of course it rained. And was cold (for May). And very windy. I kept wondering if I was going to lose my cap, which was too big and which I didn't think to safety-pin. Thankfully they presented us graduates first and then commenced (har) with the other stuff. People around me started bailing before they everyone even finished walking. I made it until the end, then decided it was too cold and damp to sit around any longer. I heard a few opening remarks (about the sacrifices we made for our education) in introduction of the main speaker, whose name I cannot recall.

It was a lot of pomp-and-circumstance, but I'm glad I went and at least walked. It makes the whole degree seem somehow more official, even if I was a "non-traditional" student.

Thoughts on Baz Luhrmann's Adaptation of The Great Gatsby

I'm not calling this a review, because there's other people, like Ken, who do those better than me, but I just wanted to offer my own however-many cents on Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby. I loved the book when I had to read it in high school (yeah, I'm a nerd), and I was interested in seeing how Luhrmann would bring it to the big screen. Being familiar with Luhrmann's other work,  I had some idea of what to expect. I've heard him critiqued as being "style over substance," but Luhrmann's style imo works for much of the material he's worked with (simple, classic tales like his 1996 Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, which I loved).

In the case of The Great Gatsby, however, many of Luhrmann's characteristic stylistic touches- abrupt camera transitions, musical numbers, cultural anachronism - fall flat, distracting the viewer from the storyline rather than pulling him or her into the characters' world. Add filming the subject matter in 3D and it's all becomes a bit of an overload.


Luhrmann actually stays very close to the plot-line of Fitzgerald's novel. For those who are unfamiliar, it centers around the mysterious, newly wealthy Jay Gatsby (Leonardo Di Caprio, Romeo + Juliet), who moves to Long Island to be close to lost love Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan, Pride & Prejudice). Gatsby throws lavish parties hoping to catch Daisy's attention, but it is through his next-door neighbor Nick Carraway (Tobey McGuire, Spiderman) that he manages to re-enter her world. However, he soon earns the suspicions of Daisy's infuriated husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton, King Arthur). Tragedy ultimately ensues, and...well, I won't spoil anything, but the great Jay Gatsby is unable to realize his dreams of either Daisy or the life she represents to him.

I understand taking a highly visual approach to The Great Gatsby, a novel heavy on both symbolism and vivid depiction of an opulent, glitzy lifestyle. And I don't think all of Luhrmann's stylistic choices failed. Some of the shots, from the New York skyline to the green light by which Gatsby would watch Daisy's house across the bay, were absolutely gorgeous, as were the costumes. However, many of the early scenes felt disjointed. I thought the film worked better in the second half, when most of the party scenes were over and it finally began to delve into character and plot development.

All of the actors gave strong performances, but British actress Carey Mulligan especially was able to capture both Daisy's superficial charm and her underlying sadness. Tobey McGuire as narrator Nick Carraway was often reminiscent of Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge.

Much has been made of the film's anachronistic soundtrack featuring Jay-Z.  The soundtrack actually shifted between period-appropriate jazz and modern songs from a variety of genres, with hip-hop heavy dance sequences at Gatsby's parties. At one point I caught U2's "Love is Blindness." I love this song, and it actually fit the scene, but that will give you an idea of how all-over-the-place this film's music is.

I actually understand the Jay-Z choice in an odd way. There are a lot of cultural similarities between the Jazz Age and the "bling" and ostentation of modern hip-hop, and Luhrmann is a fan of putting a modern pop-cultural twist on historical tales. However...yeah, the Jay-Z didn't really do it for me.

I did actually enjoy this movie overall. Understandably, though, Baz Luhrmann is not everyone's cup of tea, and Fitzgerald's novel may have been better served with less "style" and more "substance." For those who want a more straightforward film rendition, there's always the 1974 version featuring Robert Redford as Gatsby.

Not rating it 'cause that's not what I do. But there's my take. 

Nobody Makes Good Music Anymore?

Every now and then I hear this claim, and I have often agreed with it. Today's popular music just doesn't compare to that of previous decades. I mean the 1960s had the Beatles; today we have...Justin Beiber. I enjoy all types of music (yes, including boy bands) and hate music snobbery, but it seemed hard to deny that the music industry has gone downhill and become more about image and less about innovation.

But now that I think of it, I wouldn't say that's entirely true. I mean, last year American Idol, a show arguably about manufacturing and spitting out pop stars, crowned Phillip Phillips, a folksy singer-songwriter type with an unconventional voice reminiscent of Dave Matthew, over runner-up Jessica Sanchez, who had an amazing voice but offered nothing musically unique.

And looking at some of my own current favorite artists and bands...yes, people are still creating good, clever, innovative music. And it's even making the pop charts.

This is of course just my own two cents, but here's what I would argue to be proof:

1)  Fun. 

Since 2011's "We Are Young," every single Fun. has released has been high on the pop charts, almost to the point of overplay. There's good reason, though. Fun's songs are just plain fun (see what I did there...) and catchy, but they don't sound like everything else out there. I like "We Are Young"  and their current hit "Carry On" (which has a very Irish feel), but I think "Some Nights" would have to be my favorite; it's imo their most multi-layered and complex song both musically and lyrically.

2) Mumford and Sons 

Mumford and Sons may have actually succeeded in making banjo music cool. And even if they don't get people to explore their bluegrass and folk influences, they've at least broadened rock music.

3) The Lumineers 

The Lumineers are another band bringing a folksy style to the pop charts. Their 2011 single "Ho Hey" has reached #2 on  the US Top 40 charts and has been featured in commercials for the DVD of the film Silver Linings Playbook. Its a good song, but I absolutely love "Stubborn Love," especially the string sections.

4) Gotye

The ubiquitous "Somebody That I Used to Know" made Belgian-Austrian singer-songwriter Gotye famous, but having seen him live, I have to say he's far more than just a one-hit wonder. Gotye's entire catalog is artsy and innovative in its use of instrumentation.

And here's a music video for a song you probably have not heard before. Both the video and song are very typical of Gotye's style.

  
So there you have it. Pop music still contains true artistry, even if it is harder to find.