Welcome to the rest of your life.

Welcome to the new collaborative blog of Chris John and Justin Betts.  Though we hope you (whoever you are) enjoy this blog, we need to be upfront with you: we're not writing this for anyone besides ourselves.  This blog's purpose is to provide us with an informal forum to communicate our thoughts and feelings on art, be it literature, movies, or music.  Normally this type of informal communication would best take place face-to-face, but that is just not feasible within the circumstances of our lives at this point.  We both feel a need to communicate more frequently about these topics like we used to in our younger days, and we are optimistic this blog will be a success.

All this isn't to say that we don't want others to read this.  We hope that what we blog about will help you in your pursuit of excellent art, if you want to pursue what we deem excellent art, and in the least we hope you'll be entertained.  But that is not the primary reason for the creation of this blog, and both of our original blogs will still be updated as actively as before.

I feel the need to explain the origin of this blog's name, I Take It With Jello.  In the spring of 2006 Justin and I were in Moab, Utah, sitting in a car outside a school, waiting for a volleyball tournament to begin.  We were listening to music to pump ourselves up, and we decided to listen to At The Drive-In, fantastic pump-up music.  There is a song on the band's final album, Relationship of Command, that has a lyric we couldn't quite make out.  Justin said he thought it sounded like "I take it with jello."  We listened more intently, and I thought it sounded like, "I take it with trouble."  We agreed that my conclusion seemed more plausible with the band's general lyrical themes, though ATDI's lyrics are incredibly varied and often seem quite random and/or nonsensical.  Though we both thought it was probably "I take it with trouble," we agreed that "I take it with jello" was more awesome and definitely funnier.  The whole conversation generated a lot of laughter and caused that line to stick around in my brain long enough for me to remember it when trying to come up with a name for this blog.  Justin and I both agreed that it was a natural fit for our collaborative blog, and that brings us to the present.

Anyway, it will take awhile before we have the blog completely set up and running at full steam, but we hope it won't be long before we're rocking the internet and taking it with jello.