Ramblings: An Exercise

I'm going to try something new here.  But let's be honest, I have a history of starting many new things only to give up on them rather quickly.  Well, maybe not give up on them, but more like get easily distracted.  Oh, that's just a polite way of saying I give up on them.



So what will this exercise be?  Ramblings.  Short, spontaneous ramblings about whatever is on my mind.  Hopefully these I will be able to write with some consistency, unlike the Daily Quotes.  My struggle with those is they have become so large and time consuming to produce.  Apparently now, I can easily take one panel from a comic book and produce a 9 page scholarly paper about its theological implications, plump with footnotes.  Proper citations, though necessary, are daunting, and I fear the scope of regularly embarking on such a task often stops me.

The solution would be to write less, no?  Easy.  But not so easy.  For if I am going to write Wednesday Theology, I would wish to do it quite well.  But, rather paradoxically, that ambition prevents me from chasing it, and I end up not writing anything at all, for weeks or even months at a time.

This won't do!  So now I will ramble.  Hopefully it won't mean a lack of quality, but it will mean less footnotes.  In fact, for the time being I am abstaining from citations and quotes in these ramblings.  This might prove very difficult, for I often run across fantastic, delightful quotes.  However, the trade off is I won't worry about spending so much time finding such quotes and then formatting the proper bibliographic information so that I may wield the words of others properly and responsibly.

What, I feel, it comes down to, is that what does it matter if I write well if I never write at all?

Really, the only way to become better at writing is to write.  This is my attempt to become a better writer simply by writing.  What a novel concept!

So what format will this take?  Well, that is open to experimentation.  I think it will be quite malleable.  My idea right now is to make the main portion touch on theology and what I've been thinking about God as of late.  But we must not forget the Wednesday of it all.  So I will try to include some musing about pop culture as well, whether it be comics, movies, video games, or what have you.

Since I don't want this to get too long, afford me the grace that the above constitutes the theological matter (though really, it's all about writing, but those are so intertwined for my purposes I think it shall suffice).

And now, on to Wednesday!

X-Men Days of Future Past shouldn't have worked.  But it did work and amazingly well at that. The movie is an odd beast.  It is a direct sequel to First Class, which in turn is a prequel/reboot-kind-of-maybe? to the original X-Men movie series, which at the time was comprised of the trilogy, plus the Origins: Wolverine movie, which itself was a prequel to that trilogy, yet still takes place after First Class.  Further, between First Class and Future Past we also got The Wolverine, which was a sequel to, essentially, all the previous movies. 

So Future Past stands as both a sequel to The Wolverine (in fact the post-credits scene directly sets up Future Past) and all that came before it, as well as a sequel to First Class, which is that weird kind of prequel/reboot to all those other X-Men movies.  Are we confused yet?  Good.  Honestly, though, this is no where as confusing as figuring out the chronology of the actual comic books.

Anyway, despite the weird setup, the movie works quite well.  Part of that is probably because it is just a good movie (and I take the stance that, since it is so Wolverine centric, it is a far better Wolverine movie than the two actual Wolverine standalone films).  However, I have seen all the previous movies multiple times and possess probably a more intimate knowledge of the comic books than the casual movie attendee.  So, I often do wonder how it plays for people unfamiliar with the previous movies?  Does it hold up well as a stand alone movie?  It's probably still entertaining, but I imagine much of the emotional attachment is lost, especially at the end of the movie.  Much of the impact of the ending might not make much sense or have any emotional resonance to someone unfamiliar with the previous movies.

Anyways, that's just some rambling thoughts I've had about the movie since I first walked out of the theater with a stupid grin on my face all those months ago.