Building Peace through Community

Posted on by Alex Weiss

For me it’s always a wonderful sight to see people of the community gather in a peaceful manner. Coming together under the banner of Christ only sweetens the deal. I don’t know why I haven’t attended either the Hope Musical Festival or the Midtown Street Fair before. I’ve lived in New Albany for nearly two years after all. The Midtown Street fair began at 11 in the morning of September 20th, and led into the Hope Music Festival. The former was located on the corner of 13th and Oak, while the latter took place in the adjacent Ritter Park.

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Jamie enjoyed a game of toss the ring on the soda bottle, and then posed for this picture.

While I knew there would be plenty of church representation, I was pleasantly surprised by the other organizations that turned out. Among those that came were the City Library and the Lewis and Clark Historical Society. Needless to say I came away feeling a bit more knowledgeable. Perhaps the thing that most surprised me was just how much fun I had. I don’t think it’s entirely circumstantial either.

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The people of the library know how to have fun.

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John Scott will tell you everything you need to know about the Lewis & Clark expedition.

Let me back up for a second. I planned on using the Street Fair as an excuse to invite some out of town friends to visit. As it were “life happened” the week leading up to the event. One of my friends lost his job, and my out of town mother became sick with cancer. It didn’t seem like much cause for celebration. But I found myself completely enamored by a wonderful sleight of hand artist. I found myself hanging on every word about Lewis & Clark from some wonderful historians. I even enjoyed the musical artists who may have been slightly outside of my musical tastes.

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James was not afraid to bust a move.

In short my takeaway from the weekend was that life happening is a guarantee, but peace takes effort. During events such as the Midtown Street Fair or the Hope Music Festival, you may not know what any given person is experiencing. But you can be a beacon of peace, and share the gifts God gave you, and make someone’s day just a little brighter.

My Immient Return?

Posted on by Alex Weiss

Earlier this year I attended my first ever convention, and while it was good in and of itself I did not think it would be a time of personal growth. Yet I came out of it with a fresh perspective, deepened friendships, and also all of the ideas. One of the biggest ideas was creating my own website. I have had many a blog in the past, but they have lacked focus and were driven by fear more than what I love. So after being out of the blogosphere for a year or so I am returning, kind of. My hopes are that this website will be a hub for all of the work I do around the Internet. I currently write and produce videos for 1MoreCastle.com, and will be starting work with Clean Socks Hope sooner than later. But with the idea of creating that website came the idea of its focus. I came to the realization that when it comes to conversational topics there are only six broad categories I can talk about at length. Along with that I can only write extensively about those six categories. I could try to write about sports, but I don’t know much about them. So I would not be a very good sports columnist. That’s not to say that I am not interested in other subjects, but they would be auxiliary to my main subjects. Enough vagueness though without further ado I would like to present to you these six categories, and thus the backbone of my personal website. Note these are presented in descending order of importance.

 

  1. Photography- I don’t want to be a professional photographer, but I do want to be a really good amateur. I want to learn good manual exposure and manual focus. I love beauty and taking pictures is a great way of capturing that beauty.
  2. Film- I do want to be a good filmmaker, however filmmaking is just a tool to reaching people. If it ever becomes about the money or the process and not the people then I am doing it wrong. I also love watching movies and learning about people, and how I can help them. I love every aspect of filmmaking, but would be lying if I pretended to be good at all of them. My strengths include producing (the vision of a movie), scripting (character arcs), and editing (post production). I’m pretty thorough and self critical about what I create.
  3. Nostalgia- This category was originally entitled “Nintendo”, but I decided that it would be better to lump video games as whole under nostalgia. I do love video games though, but mostly as they relate to nostalgia. There are other things that remind me of my childhood and I like revisiting them. I also like discovering that someone else is nostalgic about the same thing I am.
  4. Weird things- I am (or can be) rather strange. I like weird humor and people, but a “good” weird (like puns!) and not “bad” weird (I don’t want to know if you eat your toe jam, gross). Overall I just like having a good sense of humor and others that do so as well.
  5. Thinking Different- This refers not only to my love of Apple computers (and really only the computers, not so much the mobile platform), but also my outside the box approach to solving issues, and everything!
  6. Jesus-The most important are of my life. Jesus relates to my spiritual beliefs, community, taking things seriously and also thinking deeply. This is also the category is backbone of all other categories.

 

So these are the things I will be covering on this site. In a future post I hope to explain how these things help me relate to people and make friends, but until then its second star on the right and straight on till morning.