Keep It Moving

Of all the memes and motifs and themes and in-jokes that have swirled around all things Covid, the one most on the nose for me is those “I’m old enough to remember when…” ones.

Because they’re all jokes about change, and the rapidity of it. This concept must resonate with whatever neurotic heartstrings I have, because I’ve always been in a state of near-panic about how fast things change and shouldn’t someone be writing this down? Explains a lot, maybe.

But we’ve reached our second pandemic September, and this time my wife went back to work. I think she would have preferred teaching at home, and for the first time she’s experienced the joy of speaking all day while wearing a mask. It looks exhausting to me, the whole thing, leaving the house and such.

There’s that, then. I assume I’m not alone, and that people with a tendency toward solitary life have just become more so. I’m no stranger to procrastinating but I’m putting things off because I don’t want to go inside somewhere, I understand that. I need a physical and some blood work, just because I’m 63 and it’s a good idea. I need to get my damn flu shot (and to start my shingles process, because two family members have been suffering and I would rather avoid that). Maybe today.

Anyway, I’m old enough to remember when I enjoyed leaving the house, when I loved heading to the grocery store several times a week just for a couple of things, to mingle with my people. Now I’m not crazy about the mingling.

And you know that’s not going away. If I’m old enough to at least carry around the awareness that my bones may be more brittle, and I should take a little extra care to avoid falling down, I’m old enough to want to avoid catching a virus that can get nasty. Like I’m alone in this, just saying: this isn’t changing back, and now I’m just trying to remember the way it was, just because.

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I don’t like writing about church, because I see assumptions start popping up like crazy and it just wears me down. Mostly I want to mention it because it’s been my main community over the past decade, my family, my social group. These are the homes I go over to on holidays and for weekend social evenings around the fire pit. Jesus doesn’t come up.

You know what I mean. It just gets awkward when I’m really exploring social interaction, not spirituality. I have things to say about spirituality but they’re mine and they’d be boring.

But I don’t like going to church, not anymore. Talk about awkward.

And it’s not black and white. I go. I enjoy myself. I also had a drastically different experience during the first 15 months of the pandemic, in that I was the one trying to produce a semblance of Sunday mornings. The act of worship turned into something else for me, something surprisingly deep and fulfilling and something that has now disappeared, and it doesn’t feel right.

I still like the people. The message, the music. I’m not crazy about us singing together, even masked, although that’s not really logical other than in a best practices kind of way.

And as I’ve mentioned before, it left a big hole in my routine, almost immediately. One week we’re doing our regular virtual church, the next week we’re back. Masks off for a time in July, now back on, but we’re there, 40 or 50 of us. Not me so much, but me too.

I still do video work for them, on a much smaller basis, and then some of it is just for fun. That’s where the animation focus comes from.

For example, when Julie preached a couple of weeks ago, she brought up the church’s symbols. When we celebrated our 50th anniversary back in 2012, a member designed some new graphics for us to use.

I’m trying to avoid the word “logo,” although it’s a logo. Just sounds like branding or marketing, which is not really the point.

But here it is. These four panels all represent a specific (if general) ministry. The green one in the upper left is Creation Care, for example. We are definitely a green people.

Then our senior pastor got in on the act, liking the discussion and where it takes us, and then I just kept looking at those images. There’s a lot there. If you look closely at the green panel, you might notice that some of the shapes are slightly different. Most look like leaves. You can spot an apple and a pear if you look closely, and toward the top is a little bird.

I looked at that bird for a long time. Eventually I had an idea.

I may do more, or just leave it now. I love the idea of these images beginning to move, and pointing out that this is all about movement, about life, about the importance of these concepts we’re trying to illustrate.

That’s fairly simple animation, and really I’m just grateful that I figured out how to do it. I like that even someone with very little sense of artistic or design style can still play around with art.

And I seem obsessed with creating an animated version of myself for some reason, an avatar. I have no clear idea of what I would use this virtual version for, but I’ve been playing with Bitmoji and Snapchat filters to try to get this right. It’s almost always awful, but maybe I’ll get there.

Other that the GIF and my narcissism, I did my usual video work for Andrea, who is essentially in charge of dealing with kids and families. We work smoothly together, and each week she creates a short video that’s nominally for kids but really, I think all ages enjoy them. Sometimes she’s studying and telling us what she’s learned, other times just talking about important concepts, and I do my best to fill in some blanks with funny pictures and words.

This week, she mentioned that she was looking for a good example of a know-it-all, a smartypants person. She found a couple of cartoon graphics but thought the kids might not get the references (one of them was Bullwinkle, e.g.), and I told her I’d think about it.

Didn’t think that long. And I knew this nonsense would come in handy.