dream

Maria, 7, and Lupe, 3, are our next-door neighbors. For some reason, they have decided they like coming to our house. I'm not exactly sure why, we have nothing that I would consider appealing to a 3- and 7-year-old, but they come ... almost daily. Because of this, and our history with their family over the past few years, we have gotten to know their story quite intimately.

Hackers. Slow Motion. Snow. Here’s a little round up of links from around the web you may have missed this week:

• Random Hacks of Kindness: a two-day competition of more than 1,000 software engineers solving problems that arise during humanitarian crises.

• Marvel at some of the entries to National Geographic’s photography contest.

• Restaurateur Jean-Gorges Vongerichten’s half-Korean wife, Maria Vongerichten, has a new PBS show called “The Kimchi Chronicles,” in which she eats her way through South Korea.

• What happens when you put a slow-motion camera on a fast moving train? Watch.

• What did people google search in 2010? (Also, in list form.)

• Have you had your first snow of the year yet?

• Jim Wallis says it best: DREAMS should not be illegal.

In this season in which we find ourselves there is an anticipatory feeling in the air. A waiting, a longing, and yearning. This is a time filled with preparations and signs and symbols. Everything leads to this promised future. With our turkey stuffed bellies, we awaken from a tryptophan-induced coma of carbohydrates to the coming of what feels like the end time -- for there will be sales and rumors of sales. So stay awake my brothers and sisters because the doorbusting shopacalypse is upon us. Yet my heart was glad when they said to me, let us go at 5 a. m to the house of the Lord and Taylor. For on that holy mountain, people will stream from east and west, north and south, and all nations will come. They will turn plastic cards into shiny promises of love in the form of bigger plastic and cloth and metal and wire.  They will go down from this mountain to wrap their bits of plastic and cloth and metal and wire. They will wrap it all in paper, to wait for that day. The day of mythical, sentimentalized domesticity when the hopes and dreams of love and family and acceptance and perfect, perfect reciprocity will come to pass. And the children shall believe that they shall be always good and never bad for Santa will come like a thief in the night. No one knows the hour so you better be good for goodness sake.