Church Hunting (and a small dose of Geography)
If you need any proof that Knoxville is as much in the buckle of the Bible Belt as West or Middle Tennessee, the other day while returning the ladder we rented from Home Depot I was scanning through the FM radio stations from bottom to top (the 80-somethings through 100-somethings) and I found three Christian radio stations. Before I even got out of the 90's. And those weren't the only ones!
Vacationing and Moving
Vacationing and moving. I don't recommend going straight from one into the other, but in our case this month, going from our vacation with Karen's family out to Wyoming just worked out best flowing straight into moving to Knoxville. It can be a little bit of a whirlwind, which is why I now can say that I don't recommend it. I'm still partially living out of a suitcase, and have been for three weeks now.
About Me
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Matt Cook is a brand new graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, studying human geography. He will begin a two year M.S. degree |
| program in the fall semester of 2010, and plans to continue his studies with a Ph.D program. Matt is a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Martin with degrees in Geography and Communications. His primary blogging interests are on geography and life as a student and newlywed. | |
If you need any proof that Knoxville is as much in the buckle of the Bible Belt as West or Middle Tennessee, the other day while returning the ladder we rented from Home Depot I was scanning through the FM radio stations from bottom to top (the 80-somethings through 100-somethings) and I found three Christian radio stations. Before I even got out of the 90′s. And those weren’t the only ones! Now I no longer have an excuse to switch to NPR or classic rock if I’m bored with hearing a song three times in a day (as happened often in Martin while listening to K-LOVE or AIR1). I can just rotate between Love 89.1, K-LOVE on 103.1, and a plethora of gospel stations.
And man, are there are a lot of churches.
Karen and I are starting the church search today at Fountain City UMC at 11. We decided we would see about the services on our first visit, then narrow it down, and then try out some Sunday Schools/Bible studies with the ones we really like. Of course, being musicians, we’ve narrowed the expansive list of churches down to those that are Methodist, Baptist (and one non-denominational church recommended by our pet groomer), have a choir and handbells. This, however, does rule out several churches that are only contemporary (for some reason, choral music and handbells aren’t found in contemporary churches…hmm…), but we’ll probably visit some contemporary churches as well.
So many to choose from, so little time! As we have been driving literally all over town the last several days, Karen and I have seen so many church buildings in so many shapes, sizes, and denominations. If there are any Christians out there in the world who need a place to try to find out what they personally like/need from a church, Knoxville is the place to do so. Within about a 10-15 mile radius from the center of town, that person could probably visit a different church every Sunday and not be done before new ones are started. Seriously.
All of this is very good, of course, and it reminds me of how similar things can be between places if you look for the similarities. Take for example, Martin and Knoxville. You wouldn’t think, on the surface, that the two cities (and I use that term loosely when referring to Martin!) would be all that alike, but you’d be wrong. Both are fairly typical Tennessee cities. Both, with four-year universities but also a strong (and large) conservative Christian demographic, are some of the most interesting places in the country to have intellectual political and moral debates. These isn’t your Boston or New York or LA, where it’s (naively) easy to assume that everyone is a liberal, Democrat, non-church-goer. These are interesting spaces!
Right here in Tennessee, who knew?
Two things that don’t mix all that well.
Vacationing and moving. I don’t recommend going straight from one into the other, but in our case this month, going from our vacation with Karen’s family out to Wyoming just worked out flowing straight into moving to Knoxville. It can be a little bit of a whirlwind, which is why I now can say that I don’t recommend it. I’m still partially living out of a suitcase, and have been for three weeks now. That does get a tad bit old.
However, we are making progress on setting up our home. We have the kitchen pretty much completely done, and everything that is going into storage is already there. The bathroom and bedroom are partially done, but they (like everything else) are waiting for some Ikea furniture to be complete. We hope to go to Ikea in Atlanta soon, but the weather hasn’t cooperated this weekend. As in, we were planning to go yesterday (Friday) but then there was a big chance of rain, and sure enough, we got a pretty good pounding. Then today turned out beautiful. So of course we didn’t plan to go, since there was a chance of rain. Grr. Next week it’s suppose to rain some more, too. Oh joy.
The living room is in the worst shape. It resembles a hall way from the kitchen to the office in that there is basically a 3-foot-wide path from one assortment of boxes on one side to the other collection of boxes through which we can manage to walk around. It needs several things from Ikea to be finished, not to mention the boxes cleared away. The office is taking shape, though probably not in its final form. We’ve pieced together a rough corner of the living room with our two desks forming a square with two walls though Karen tells me this isn’t staying quite like this. At least I’ve found enough of my desk stuff to establish some sort of working area, because it’s surprising all the things that need to be done when one moves!
As for vacation, it was marvelous, despite the many, many hours of driving that were necessary to enjoy it. I think Karen and I will fly next time…More details will be shared in photos.
As I find time, I’ll get some photos up from vacation and the move in/final layout of the flat. I may get move in photos up sooner just so everyone can see how things are going here. Vacation photos have fallen in the queue behind photos from all of last year going back to our honeymoon…. Just too busy to Flickr lately!
Danke!, originally uploaded by archelenon.
I decided today to slightly shift the way I handle sharing my photography.
For years, Flickr has been my default dumping ground for my photos, as the site was one of the leading photography sites on the Web when I signed up for it, seemingly ages ago. (Yeah, OK, so it was only 2006…) Anyway, much has changed since then. For example, my photography has gotten a lot better. More and more photo sharing sites have popped up in the “Web 2.0″ generation. Other sites, such as Facebook, have added photo sharing features that make it really easy to share photos to a mass audience.
Now that I’ve whetted your appetite, the change in thinking is thus: Flickr is for better and more artistic photography, and as such, will no longer be the dumping ground for all my photos. That doesn’t mean that I won’t upload multiple photos from locations or events that I shoot; I just won’t be uploading, for example, 200+ photos from Germany that I never even get around to naming or describing. The best of my work deserves to be on Flickr where plenty of other amazing photographers display their work. Throwing up 200 photos from every single location and event just waters down what could otherwise be a great collection of photography. Now, along with this change in mindset, I have tried to go through and at least name every photo in my Flickr photostream, and I have cleaned out several boring or mundane or just technically bad shots that weren’t meaningful. More of this will probably be happening over the summer as I have time to get rid of some of the junk. This will make it easier to find the “good stuff.”
The second part of the shift was a difficult decision. It has long been my policy that uploading photos to Facebook was a two-edged sword that I did not want to deal with. For one, you have no idea what Facebook will do with your photos, and in fact for a long time in the past (haven’t checked here lately) Facebook had in their user agreement that they could use your photos for whatever they wanted. I don’t exactly trust Zuckerberg with my photos, and given Facebook’s recent privacy snafus, they’re becoming less trustworthy for just about anything. But I digress. Even given these potential privacy/usage issues, I have come to believe that Facebook is not the location for my best work (those are for Flickr) but for photos for the community’s consumption.
For example, I shot over 200 photos for the BCM Spring 2010 Banquet recently, and uploaded 180 of them of Facebook. The feedback was overwhelming. Tagging people in the photos, to let them know which specific photos are of them, is a great way to get the photo noticed, and works especially well for large group events. Now, for those of you who might be active on Flickr, you are probably saying that Flickr has added the ability to tag other people in your photos. But this feature is limited by the very nature of Flickr itself – that it is primarily geared to photographers and not the general population. Thus, very few of my friends and people that I would be photographing are ON Flickr to see the work.
So, with all those factors weighed in, I think it best for Facebook to become the “dumping ground” for lack of a better term.
This is just a test to see what happens when I post a photo from Flickr and make it post to matt-cook.com. Sweet!
Today was an amazing day.
For starters, I taught Sunday School at FBC Martin for the last time. Ever, I suppose, unless by some miracle Karen ever agrees to move back here! But I’ve learned some important things along the way. This isn’t a “Bible Blog” (so to speak) so I won’t go into detail about the spiritual lessons I’ve learned over the course of the year, but suffice it to say that they have been numerous!
I’ve also learned some valuable lessons applicable to life as a teacher and professor along the way this year. For example, I’m learning just how much time needs to be devoted to prepare for lessons, and Sunday School lessons are usually delivered in about half the time it takes for a normal college lecture (25-30 minutes as opposed to 50-75 minutes). It can be pretty time consuming if you want to be prepared and deliver the message in a coherent way. The time that I personally thought was the “worst” time I taught, I had a busy week and didn’t put in the full time that I should have to prepare. Lesson learned, trust me. Of course there were other lessons along the way as well.
So in a lot of ways, today was bittersweet. For the first time in the whole process of getting ready to start grad school I really stopped to think about what I would miss here. Maybe it was because I’ve been very focused on making sure that I accepted at the absolutely RIGHT school for me, or maybe it’s just because it only recently started to sink in that I’ll be in Knoxville beginning this summer, but I just never stopped to think about what I give up by going. There’s the fact that I’ve lived in Martin for 21 years of my life. I’m not by any means sheltered, of course, and there have been times when I traveled about as far away from home as I could be throughout those 21 years, but I’ve still always considered Martin to be that place in my life. A huge part of me is ready to move on, and I am eagerly anticipating moving on with my education at UTK. But there’s still a little tug of sadness leaving home.
I’m reminded of the Michael Bublé song “Home,” in which Bublé longs to be home with his love while out on the road (presumably touring in his case). In my own version of Home, the ones I will miss are numerous. Fortunately, Karen is ready to undertake this adventure and life experience with me, so that’s not a concern! Yet there are still family, and friends, and coworkers, and professors, and church families… You will all be missed, but it’s not goodbye forever! (And I promise I’ll do a better job of blogging about the adventures so you, my loyal readership, can keep track of us.)
That’s all there is to say about that.
However, the overwhelming feeling that I have had today, and for the last few weeks, is excitement! Yes, grad school will be hard, but I plan to make it as challenging as I can to get the most out of it that I can. Let’s face it, I need a good challenge after a year off from school (at least one that doesn’t involve puppy training or Crohn’s Disease!)
Tweets- Matt_Cook: learned a much-needed (obvious) secret to remembering what is covered in scholarly articles: use a red Pilot G2 pen for underlining & notes.
- Matt_Cook: just got a campus-wide email saying UTK is moving to Banner Self-Service this spring. Welcome to the 21st Century. How long has UTM had it?!
- Matt_Cook: @kevin33040 Ah yes. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with geography for a while. Sometimes I think I still don't!
- Matt_Cook: @kevin33040 Oh great...haha. What'd he say? I wish he offered the Urban Geog class while I was there. I'm in one now @ the undergrad level.
- Matt_Cook: @kevin33040 That's usually my approach, too. And of course, with spam accounts as prevalent as they are we all gain/lose followers quickly!
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