TV, bowling, and camping.

It’s an unwritten rule that whoever has the remote control gets to decide what’s playing on the lounge TV. (Unless it’s the RA, who will just stretch a cable to his room TV, which I think is illegal, but as the RA he’s obviously not gonna enforce that rule.) In order to guarantee that you’ll watch what you want, you have to get there early enough to get at the remote first. (Sometimes that involves taking up permanent residence in the lounge, like some guys I know.)

In any case, I wanted to watch Alias tonight, which started at 8. So I stopped by the lounge around 7ish and managed to get the remote from the last TV-watcher, who was just leaving. I killed an hour watching something about submarines on the History Channel… then someone arrived who wanted to watch Smallville.

Apparently there were two other groups on campus planning to watch the season premieres of Smallville and The O.C. Ugh, teenage soap operas. I never could get into ’em. I admit, back when I was in junior high I used to watch one of the daytime soaps, but after two years I began to realize how the writers took a simple, basic little story and stretched it out to insane, unbelievable lengths—and it wasn’t even a good story, either—so I haven’t been able to watch soaps since.

Alias does get a little soap-like, but it makes up for it with a whole lot of ass-kicking, which I like… plus I can’t always guess the ending, which I also like. TV shows are too predictable these days.

The other guy was a little bummed about not watching his program, and went to join one of the viewing parties. But I don’t know of any viewing parties for Alias. (I certainly don’t think anyone was watching Joey.)

After the 8 o’clock shows, I killed some more time watching CSI while people began to dress for the “Clash ’n Bowl” social, in which Bethany students are encouraged to dress funny and go to Santa Cruz to go bowling. Two things I don’t do. I don’t have enough weird things in my wardrobe to clash; and I suck at bowling and really don’t like doing things that I suck at. I decided to be a party pooper for this one. But tomorrow I’m going camping, and that’ll make up for it.

Most summers I go camping. That consists of taking a tent, a sleeping bag, a lounge chair, books, and food, and getting the heck away from civilization. If it’s with family it’s more fun; if it’s surrounded by trees it keeps the temperature down.

But I didn’t get to do that this summer. ’Twas too short, what with summer school and all. So I brought my gear with me to school. At some point, dangit, I was gonna go camping.

This Saturday, when I usually have classes, my professors are off on their faculty retreat. Therefore I am gonna take my camping gear, and Friday night I am going into the woods, mountain lions or no mountain lions.

Prayer... and lousy examples of it.

Sojourners Church has prayer meetings every Wednesday. It’s not widely attended. It should be, since the growth of a church is directly related to how often we talk to the One whose church it is. But people come up with all kinds of excuses to not be there… or they don’t offer any excuse; they just don’t go. (That was me last semester.)

It’s not that they don’t care about the church. It’s that they don't care enough to make this effort. And considering that this is such a little thing, it brings to mind the parable Jesus made about the slaves who were trustworthy in little things; thus their master put them in charge of big things. [Mt 25.14-30] And then there was the slave that wasn’t, but I don’t need to bring him up.

But I can understand some of the reason why they don’t want to attend. It’s the public prayer. Public prayer always makes me uncomfortable. Not because I have any fear of public speaking; it’s because I have a fear of hypocrisy. Public prayer always seems to bring out the hypocrite in me.

I start doing the preaching-described-as-prayer thing. You’ve all seen this behavior—probably so often you don’t think anything of it—where a person is publicly praying, and suddenly a little mini-sermon pops out. Something along the lines of, “We ask you for this because we know that…” and this is followed by something that perhaps everyone didn’t know, and it’s secretly meant to instruct them. Or at least show off the wisdom of the one praying. Or to show sincerity, or to show one’s knowledge of scripture, or to show anything other than what prayer is about: Communion with God. Once it stops becoming that, it’s not prayer.

Then there’s my other bad habit: Hebrew poetry. I’m not the only one who does this: I say something, then I say it again a different way. (I call it Hebrew poetry because read the Psalms—it’s Hebrew poetry.) “Oh Lord, please help us get our work done. Please help us accomplish our goals. Be with us when we do our tasks. Stand by us as we toil. Be with us when we do the things we need to. Strengthen us on our journey. For” (’cause it always sounds good to toss in a quote) “your yoke is easy and your burden is light.” I don’t actually say it to be poetic. I say it to pad the prayer out into something substantial, so that I don’t whip out a thirty-second prayer. And again, it’s hypocrisy.

At least I’m over the “Lord God Lord Jesus Holy Spirit Father God” phase, where I’ve gotta keep saying the name of God over and over again—to remind everyone who I’m praying to, and as a substitute for “uh.” Some of us Christians say the name of God in prayer more often than the Hare Krishnas.

All these bad signs point to one obvious diagnosis: Prayer immaturity. I don’t really pray enough. If I did, I wouldn’t sound like a babbling pagan or a holy hypocrite. I’d sound like I was talking to God.

I sound like I’m talking to God when I’m not praying in public, but it’s different. When I’m praying in private, God prays back. (Yes, that’s exactly the right word for it. He praises me—he’s very encouraging—and has requests of me. He rebukes me too, but in an encouraging way.) It’s not a one-way thing like public prayer is. Maybe that’s why I’m so uncomfortable with it; so much of it is putting on a show for the people around me, and it’s not an accurate show either.

To be fair, it wasn’t an accurate show when Jesus did it either. “Father, thank you for having heard me! …I know, you always hear me. I said this for the sake of this crowd standing here, so they’ll believe you sent me.” [Jn 11.41-42] Maybe that’s what I should do; stay honest by admitting that it’s all a show. ’Cause it is. And so long as we don’t admit it, it’s gonna stay a show that some of us are always gonna feel uncomfortable watching.

Mountain lion mania.

For the past year or two, rumors have been flying around the campus about the existence of mountain lions in the woods.

Ever since California declared mountain lions to be “endangered” a decade ago, it has been against the law to hunt them. The few lions that do get killed by humans are the result of people defending their livestock or pets, which the lions eat because they’re easier to catch than deer—which are not “endangered” but are harder to catch because a six-month-old deer runs faster than a six-month-old puppy. Since humans scare lions (because we are, after all, their only predator) they mostly keep away. But every once in a while we bump into one another.

Anyway, after two years of unofficial sightings (mostly unbelievable rumors, with few exceptions) there has finally been an “official” sighting, and now Bethany University students have an official reason to let their paranoia run amok. I suppose it’s nice that the students will stay indoors at night (particularly the women, who are noisier). But I know from experience that lions are more afraid of us than we are of them, and there’s still nothing to be afraid of.

𝘞𝘪𝘭𝘥 𝘢𝘵 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵 lousy at describing men.

God created men differently from women, true. But he didn’t create all men exactly the same as one another.

Every once in a while I come across a book so annoying I just have throw it across the room. But I can’t do that with library books… nor books that belong to other people. Actually, I think the last book of mine that I pitched in this way was Left Behind—yes, I do actually own the bloody thing; it was on sale, okay?

I couldn’t pitch Wild at Heart because it belonged to my brother. (That, or he was borrowing it.) We were vacationing in Lake Tahoe at the time, and I had an hour to kill, so I picked up his copy and started reading.

John Eldredge, the writer, has the premise that God created men differently than he created women. (Duh.) The main difference, Eldredge believes, is that men are meant to be wild, free, and adventurous. He didn’t necessarily put it this way, but we men are to be hunter-gatherer camping and hiking types, and occasionally Mel Gibson-like warriors from Braveheart. The reason we aren’t is because… well, it’s not because of the women (because Eldredge doesn’t want to alienate women; they might buy his book for the men in their lives). Not because of the conservative women, anyway. Liberal women, maybe.

What makes a person become a man? On the most basic level, it’s a Y chromosome instead of an X chromosome. That’s all. This garbage about what makes a “real” man is subtle toxic masculinity as a marketing ploy; it gets guys who imagine themselves macho to buy more books, and maybe more camping gear.

• “Real” men are supposed to be adventurous? Buddy, everyone is supposed to be adventurous.
• “Real” men are supposed to pursue the desires of their heart? Depends on the desires—if they’re good, yeah; if they’re sick, no.
• “Real” men are supposed to camp and hike and eat meat? Only if they enjoy it. Otherwise there’s something to be said for electricity, indoor plumbing, comfortable mattresses, and unclogged arteries.

Anyway, it was so much ridiculousness that I had to at least put the book down and announce loudly that it was crap.

My brother-in-law didn’t agree. He likes the book, actually; something about it resonates with him. Okay, I can see how it would resonate with lots of people. But it certainly didn’t resonate with me. I am not a nature freak. I like to look at nature—from the comfort of my tent. I’m not fond of hiking around in it and shooting at things in it. I like civilization. Men built civilization, you know.

As to the desires of my heart… well, that’s why I’m back in school.

By and large, men who feel like they’ve been too domesticated really like reading books about how they should throw off said domestication and become the “real” men they were meant to be. There was that men’s movement thing in the early ’90s; there was the Promise Keepers movement in the mid ’90s (and it’s trying to come back, it seems), and now there’s Eldredge’s book.

Look, if a man feels like there’s something amiss in his life, he should stop blaming other people and look at what he’s doing. Is he not being true to himself? Well, he should first figure out whether that’s a good thing—secretly wanting to be a pop star is one thing; secretly wanting to be a porn star is another—then do something about it. Forget blaming women, or society, or bad parenting, or illegal immigrants—if you’ve created a less than satisfactory life for yourself, you have no one but yourself to blame. If you’re not living up to your potential, it’s your own bloody fault. Do something about it. If it takes Eldredge’s book to spur you on, fine. But I can’t recommend it.

On having stuff named for you.

Christopher Columbus, whose genocidal atrocities many Italian-Americans prefer to ignore.

Sometimes buses don’t come. Friday night, I was stuck at a bus stop and two buses in a row didn’t come.

I know it was the right schedule because the new schedule calls the Scotts Valley Transit Center the “Cavallaro Transit Center.” They changed the name to honor some guy named Cavallaro. They have a new plaque with his name on it outside the transit center, but I haven’t read it so I don’t know who he is. I presume he has something to do with local transit issues, but probably not. Likely he’s just some local schmuck whom some local official felt should have something named for him. So they spent at least $200 on a plaque, and more than that on changing every bus schedule in the county, and now people aren’t gonna know where on earth you're talking about when you tell them you need to catch a bus at the Cavallaro Center. (If they call it that.)

I also presume this guy’s dead but you never know about that. While the U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Treasury won't put you on stamps or coins unless you’re dead, government has no problem naming things after live people. Ronald Reagan was still alive when they renamed National Airport after him; and G.H.W. Bush Airport in Houston is named after the still-living former president. Gov. Schwarzenegger already has a stadium in Austria named for him; and Donald Trump has been naming everything he owns after himself… probably because he knows no one else will do it for him later.

Almost got scammed.

I have three email addresses. There’s the one attached to this page; the one that Bethany University assigned me so I can be contacted through their FirstClass network, and the private Hotmail account that I really only use for family. I used to only check the Hotmail account because of the incredible amount of spam on the FirstClass network (and the rant about that is here) but now I have everything filter to the same box. It manages to get pretty full over the course of a day.

Anyway, I got an email from Amazon saying that someone had been poking around inside my account, so would I please sign on to their server and verify some information. And since I had bought a CD on Amazon while I was using wifi in a coffeehouse, the paranoid side of my brain kicked in and said, “Maybe someone hacked into your signal,” so I clicked on the hyperlink in the mail and went to Amazon’s website.

“Need password.” Okay, I typed in my password.

“Need credit card information.” …Wait a minute. They have that information already; they don’t need it again. And usually when a website needs my credit card information, there’s a little padlock icon in the upper right corner of my browser. (I use Safari.) There’s no little padlock. And what’s with this Amazon tab at the top of the page that reads, “Maureen’s Wish List”?

Fortunately the paranoid side of my brain works both ways. I hopped off the site, went immediately to Amazon, and changed my password. Then I emailed their security office and forwarded the email.

Today they emailed back. Yes, it was a scam. It looked like an Amazon page; the URL even looked like an Amazon URL. It's pretty impressive; it actually won’t work unless you use a legitimate Amazon account name and password. And plenty of people will be oblivious enough to get severely ripped off once they give away their credit card info.

So Amazon thanked me for the tip. (They could have thanked me with a gift certificate, but oh well.) And they reminded me that Amazon won’t ever send emails asking for credit card information. Which I knew already; that’s what tipped me off. Now, as to what they’ll do about the scam artist, I’m not sure… hopefully something involving a taser to the genitals, but that’s just wishful thinking.

Okay, a longer rant on friendship.

“So are we friends?” was the response someone had to my previous entry. Okay, in the case of that individual, yes.

But let me put together a definition so that there’s less confusion about what I mean.

“Acquaintance” is pretty much a catch-all term for anyone I know. Some acquaintances I know fairly well. Others, I honestly don’t even know their names. Obviously they aren’t friends.

Friendships, on the other hand, are intentional relationships. You choose to do stuff together; you don’t have circumstances determine that for you.

I choose to join groups, eat dinner, attend classes, etc. I don’t choose who happens to be there at that particular time. Those people who are there—I’m friendly to them, ’cause I’m a nice guy. We have conversations. Sometimes interesting ones. Sometimes it’s small talk; sometimes not, because I’m a deep guy too. But that’s pretty much that.

A lot of people assume that friendships are caused by deep conversations. You have a heart-to-heart talk with someone and that makes you “friends.” Well, not really. You might notice: I can talk about my deepest feelings with the whole world on a freakin’ internet blog. That’s right; total strangers can find out more about me than my family members. (Unless they read my blog too. Some of ’em do. One complains I write too much; another complains I reveal too much. The rest ignore it… at their peril.) But obviously I don’t care who knows this stuff about me. If I share it with you, does it mean I’m your best friend forever? Not at all. It just means I have a much deeper well from which I can pull small talk.

With acquaintances, outside the small talk, you’re not really there for one another. You don’t make time for one another. You don’t make plans around one another’s lives. When you annoy one another you don’t bother to work it out unless you’re forced to spend time together. When you try to speak into one another’s lives there’s no acceptance (unless you already believe what the other person’s trying to tell you). There’s nothing solid in the relationship. There’s nothing, really.

I once lived an entire year with the same roommate and we were never anything more than acquaintances. It’s not that he isn’t a great guy. It’s that we’re two different guys, with different interests, and we hung out with different people, and that was that. I have nothing against him. We just never made our relationship intentional. Once we stopped living together, that was the end of that. There are lots of people I’ve known where that’s been the case. Our lives are full of such people. But friends stick around.

I am very particular about friendships. If it’s going to be a healthy friendship it’s going to involve a lot of work—and interest—on both friends’ parts. We have to make time for one another. We have to put in some effort. It helps to have common interests and goals, but the friendship can’t be based on those things—it has to be based on the person. In fact, some of my friends don’t have any common interests with me anymore. But that doesn’t make any difference.

However, there are lots of people I know who, when it gets down to it, are never going to be anything more than my acquaintances. I don’t necessarily want to be friends with them. It’s not that they aren’t great or good or valuable people; it’s that, most of the time, I recognize that they’re not going to put in the effort. They’re too distracted by life and work and social occasions and all the other friends they have in their lives. Some of them don’t really have time for the friends they do have, so beyond the novelty of being a new friend, I don’t stand much of a chance. And some of them… well, they’re fun to watch and listen to, and that’s all.

It’s actually a lot like dating. Which is why I hate the breakup line, “Let’s still be friends.” We can’t be. Part of the nature of a breakup is that you’re ending the relationship. You’re not exchanging it for another one. You’re choosing to not see one another anymore. No more intentional meetings (or “dates”); no more anything. You’re going from being friends—as every healthy dating relationship is—to being acquaintances. Sometimes friendly acquaintances, but nothing more. (Sometimes there can’t be anything more, when all the emotions are still there. I’ve tried. It just made things more miserable.)

So if you’re asking yourself, “Does Kent consider me a friend?” think about the last time I chose to do something with you. If you can’t think of anything, there’s your answer.

Sorry.

I would invite you to seriously think about the other “friends” you have and whether those relationships are in any way intentional.

And stop trying to guess who Y is. If I wanted you to know I would have given her name. Regardless of how annoying I may find her, I’m also trying to save her from embarrassment and gossip. No one deserves that.

Temper, temper.

Lunch yesterday was disturbing. I’m putting off going to lunch today for that reason. (It wasn’t the Café Bethany food, for once.)

I was sitting with some acquaintances. I don’t have a lot of friends on this campus; that’s a deliberate choice on my part because I’m very particular about who I consider friends. It may surprise a lot of these acquaintances to know that I don’t think of them as friends, but that’s because they have a very superficial idea of what “friend” means. But I don’t mean to get into a mini-Rant.

Anyway. I was trying to eat my lunch—I’m attempting to feed a cold here—when someone I will refer to as Y sat beside me and began flirting with me. She’s done this before, which is a lot more tolerable when it comes from the other side of the table. It’s considerably more annoying when Y is sitting right next to me, because her practice is to do what I call “smack ’em if you like ’em.” I’ve ranted many times about how sad I find a lot of the junior high variety of flirting that I see on this campus. If there’s anything you want to do to make me completely uninterested in you, do what Y did.

She started a little friendly teasing, and then she decided to respond to one of my comments with a smack. I was not expecting to get hit when I’m in the middle of a chicken sandwich. I wound up with Heinz 57 sauce on my shirt.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, when she clearly was more amused than sorry.

“Just don’t do that again,” I said, figuring I could let this slide.

Except, later in the conversation, something I said caused me to get hit again. Fortunately, not while I was eating anything.

Now, she didn’t realize that while she was hitting me, she was pressing one of my more significant buttons. I do NOT appreciate getting hit. I don’t care if you’re teasing, joking, or whatever. I got hit throughout my childhood, and I watched my dad beat my mom unconscious once or twice, so this is not something I consider “fun” or “flirty.” In fact, it provokes me to hit back. Hard. And maybe break a nose. But I swore to myself I would never do that to anyone (any more, I have to admit), so instead of breaking her nose I simply took my unfinished meal, left the table, left the café, and prayed a lot until I was in a better mood.

I didn’t see Y again at dinner. Which is probably best. She has no chance with me, and is quite lucky that I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago. The disturbing part is that this person nearly came out of me.

My temper, which I had assumed was mostly gone, isn’t. There was always that little bit that was just waiting to come back up and surprise me. Guess it’s not dead yet. Great, more introspection.

Under the weather.

Recovering from a cold today.

I’m hesitant to bring this up because it invariably provokes sympathy responses: “Hope you feel better!” and crap like that. Forget that. I will feel better, of course. That’s only a matter of time, and I recover quickly.

But I suppose I’m not that hesitant.

Mainly it’s because I want to rant about this: Somehow or other, men have developed a reputation for being big, whiny babies when we’re sick. So people inevitably expect that I’m gonna turn into a big wimp whenever I catch a virus, and are surprised when I don’t… and are sometimes horrified when I refuse to go home and rest. (I’ve rested already. Why do you think I’m at work?)

When I’m sick, I’m going to sleep a lot more often; but if I’ve got stuff to do, I’d better be physically unable to get out of bed before I stop fulfilling my obligations. The only time I call in sick is when I’m too sick to stand up. (That, fortunately, seldom happens.) I will go home and rest eventually. Until then, bugger off.

What the [bleep] do these people know?

Seriously though: What the bleep?

I finally finished watching What the [Bleep] Do We Know? which is a bizarre little movie.

It’s a documentary, but half of it consists of Marlee Matlin as a manic-depressive photographer. Her unhappy life is occasionally interrupted by philosophers commenting about what the universe consists of and how that affects us. A lot of their statements sound like profundity. Only a lot of the things they say are self-negating statements—like, “I don’t know how to define God, but I have a real sense that he exists.” (So how do you know if you can't define him?) Or, “There is no good and bad; there’s only things that cause us to evolve and things that don’t.” (Which implies evolution is good… yet there’s no such thing as good?)

The philosophers begin with quantum physics. (Many of them claim to actually be quantum physicists.) They are rather fascinated by it, and what it means when we look at how it affects the structure of the universe. Except—and here's their biggest problem—the universe we live in doesn’t work that way.

Our universe is made of matter, and physics analyzes the way that matter interacts. When we deal with things other than matter—namely the quantum particles, i.e. quanta, which matter is made of—we’re no longer dealing with matter. We’re dealing with quanta. Quanta doesn’t follow the same rules as matter, because it’s not matter. So we have a new, largely theoretical science—quantum physics—that studies the way quanta behaves and interacts. And while that’s neat (and a little bizarre) we don't live in a quantum universe. We live in a physical one.

No, it actually doesn’t matter that matter is made of quanta. The only quanta we ever have to deal with is light, electrons, and the neutrinos which harmlessly pass right through us. (And in the physical universe, these particular quanta function predictably by the rules of regular physics). To say that our experiences are based on quantum mechanics is like saying that human behavior is dictated by the proteins produced by our cells.

Which, amusingly, the movie then attempts to prove.

Their conclusions are that we create our own universe based on our personal perceptions of reality. But they don’t mean it in a subjective way, like I do; they mean it in an objective way. Things might literally cease to exist—not just cease to exist from my perspective—when we stop looking at them. Why? Because it’s how quantum physics supposedly works.

It’s a lot like saying that white blood cells kill bacteria… so this is why humans commit murder.

In the end, Matlin’s character chooses to love herself… and chuck her meds. (Apparently she hit the manic part of her manic-depressive cycle, when most bipolar people choose go off their medication because they figure they’re “happy,” and therefore “cured.”)

And in the end, the talking heads’ names are given—and their actual credentials. One of ’em happens to be a 35,000-year-old spirit from Atlantis channeled by a medium. And they’re not talking about their field of expertise. They’re just manipulating the data to fit their theology. Christians (like “creation scientists”) pull this crap all the time. The only difference between one and the other is that this movie is produced by New Agers.

What the bleep do they know? They admit they don’t know very much at all. But that won’t stop them from coming to conclusions, given with absolute certainty, about how we should therefore live our lives.

Ignoring the Emmys.

Last night I watched 60 Minutes and The Simpsons, as usual, and was interrupted regularly by footballaters who wanted to know the scores, and why on earth a red-blooded American male would not be watching one of the several games played that Sunday. You want to know the freakin’ score? Get on the internet. The TV takes too long.

While the men were focused on football, the women were focused on the Emmys. This is not because anyone actually watches the shows that were nominated; who has time? Mainly it’s for the fashions, to make fun of who wore what. I didn’t watch any of it. After The Simpsons I watched a few minutes of The Mummy Returns, then decided I had more than enough TV for one evening. Even though Shaft was on later. (Shaft’s a bad mothershutyourmouth.)

I have no patience for award shows. All of them take too long, and all we really want to know is who won. If we even want to know that. I don’t care who won so much as I care about whether the shows I like are going to stay on the air, and winning awards doesn’t necessarily help or hurt a show’s ratings. And the award shows usually pre-empt the halfway decent shows that are usually on in that time slot; but fortunately this year the Emmys show was on CBS, and only pre-empted another godawful made-for-TV movie, featuring Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen playing married actors who so desperately want to work together that they’ll make godawful made-for-TV movies.

I have no patience for the fashions either. Much too much is made of the fortysomething actresses who are—let’s be honest—actresses, and are too busy acting to know jack squat about fashion. Yet the people who clothe them convince them to push their boobs together, squeeze into unflattering, untelegenic outfits that don’t match their skin tones, yet the designers are convinced that they’re “daring” enough to get the actresses (and thus the designers) noticed; get their hair coifed into something that no sane human being would want to wear since the fall of the French Monarchy; and look like this throughout a widely televised and photographed ceremony. And, as a result, Joan Rivers continues to have a career bad-mouthing the stupid, when she should have been lobotomized during her last facelift.

And then there are the useless shows, which are popularity contests where you vote for your favorite. There are several of them—some even produced by Dick Clark—and while the MTV awards are still the most amusing, they’re still extremely useless. But the celebrities gotta show up for them or they’ll look like self-centered bastards; and to put these pseudo-awards on your resumé makes you look even more pathetic (“Winner, Teen Choice award for ‘Most Bootylicious,’ 2003, 2004”); and even though the shows’ ratings sometimes suck they get enough viewers to break even.

As you can tell, I really don’t like award shows.

But I did enjoy my own awards. Back at Sac State the staff members would have an end-of-the-semester award presentation, where the editors would award their staff for best article, best editorial work, etc. I had a staff of seven, but I didn’t see any of them as standouts, so I replaced the usual stupid awards with the “Dementia Awards.” These were not traditional categories; these were awards for “Biggest whiner,” “Scariest look when unshowered,” “Most reckless driver,” “Biggest pothead,” and so forth. These were all inside jokes, so they were more appreciated than the knock-off versions created by other editors in the following semesters.

I actually had one guy complain when he didn’t win the “Biggest pothead” award, though. True, he was a pretty big stoner, but the winner traded his entire summer job earnings for three Hefty leaf bags full of weed. He’s now a college professor, of all things.

Those awards were fun. The others are just obnoxious.

A poem about the sucky starfish story.

My take on an overdone sermon illustration.

I was listening to a radio show, and it had the stupid starfish illustration, which I’ve heard way too many times. And when I get tired of things, in order to deal with them, I begin to parody them. So now you have to put up with more of my poetry.

Update, 11/23/2024: Well… not here. I ported it to Christ Almighty.

What’s with all the N-words?

MIKE. “Why do they keep saying that word?”

ME. “What word?”

MIKE. “The N-word. The N-bomb. N----r.”

ME. “I don't know. But I’d like to get some angry militant black man into this hall at some point and have him beat the crap out of them every time they say it.”

There is only one black man living in my hall. Most of us are of Mexican ancestry; I’m one of the few exceptions. Yet for some reason, the brown people insist on using the N-word as a form of endearment.

My ancestors fought in the Civil War in order to free the slaves and bring them up from that evil condition; yet for some reason these idiots think it's okay to keep using a word that puts them back down. Because it makes them “cool.” When in fact it makes them look like the biggest racists outside of a Klan meeting.

So if any angry militant pipe-wielding black men wish to volunteer to hang out in my hall for a while and teach these ignorant fools a thing or two about American history, race relations, and the consequences of too much free speech, feel free. I’ll unlock the outside doors for you.

Coffee and me.

You know, I actually don’t remember specifically when I switched to decaf. It was nearing the end of last semester, and I was making about a pot of coffee a day, and determining that if I was going to drink the whole pot it ought to be decaf. And then I started ordering decaf at coffeehouses (and getting annoyed that there’s no such thing as a decaf Frappuccino). And then we ran out of regular coffee and I just wound up buying more decaf. It wasn’t a resolution; I just grew into it over the summer.

Not that there’s anything wrong with caffeine per se, but it neither wakes me up in the morning, nor keeps me awake at night. All it does is make me twitchy; and when I sleep on caffeine I get what the medievals called “waking dreams,” where all my dream-actions would be repetitive things I dislike doing anyway: Raking leaves, grading papers, washing dishes, or even (flashing all the way back to my teen years) delivering newspapers and assembling Whoppers. I realized that caffeine was doing me no good, and this was only after going off the stuff.

It’s strange when you realize you became mature for no good reason.

But the coffee habit is still around. Just everything’s decaf now. I was brewing some Antiguan coffee last night and sampling the stuff—good stuff, by the way; Gevalia sells it—and ranting at Mike about what the big deal was.

I actually grew up disliking coffee. This is not strange considering what Dad considered coffee. When it comes to food, Dad insists on buying the very cheapest. This means that the crap that Dad used for coffee was the two-dollar cans of Canea canephora, otherwise known as robusta coffee, a species of coffee that grows just about anywhere, is dirt-cheap, is full of caffeine, and when brewed tastes like ash and acid. Most cheap coffees are at least 50 percent robusta. Folgers used to make their coffee out of robusta and “flavor crystals,” which I believe was MSG. They don’t do that anymore, but they’re still big on robusta, and since it’s grown in Columbia they can say it’s “100 percent Columbian.” So is Columbian toilet paper, but… nah, nevermind.

Listing books.

“So you’re a reader,” she said. “What have you read this year?”

I have no idea how many books I’ve read this year.

Currently I'm in the middle of another Benjamin Franklin biography, another Sinclair Lewis novel, 12 books on small groups that my pastor lent me, and volume 2 of A Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Hebraica (which is occasionally annoying to read because the writer’s an anti-Semite, so sometimes you gotta ignore his conclusions because of his prejudices). And because of yesterday’s rant I'm now re-reading The Celestial Hierarchy.

That’s this week. That’s apart from scripture and the newspapers and Yahoo news and blogs. And none of them, I should point out, have anything to do with my studies… which really isn’t anything to brag about. I need to get to reading that stuff.

I read very fast and I have a retention level of more than 75 percent. It’s not a photographic memory, despite what Mom tells everyone; it’s just a very good one.

And my reading speed is highly annoying to most people. I think I already mentioned how my sister is annoyed whenever I completely read one of her books before she can get past the introduction. But there are others.

I used to have a roommate who was also a Bible/Theology major and we were both taking most of the same classes. At the beginning of each semester we’d buy our textbooks; and I would read them. He would take them to class, but some wouldn’t ever get read. Others would—if there were test questions from them. I read ’em because I paid for them and I wanted to know if they would be useful at all—and if they weren’t, I could sell them back quickly. Which I sometimes did. Got full price!

So, come midterms or finals, my roommate would finally crack the textbooks and read it in order to find test answers. Meanwhile, I’d be doing something else—reading for fun, or writing obnoxious posts on the Bethany Online system, or putting together the ultimate Monty Python and the Holy Grail homepage (which the school took off its servers once they discovered the Castle Anthrax scene.

“What are the three types of ecclesiastical authority?” he’d ask, or some other ecclesialogical test question.

Without looking up, I’d tell him.

“I hate you,” he’d respond.

“Read the book,” I’d shoot back.

He was reading the book. Right then. But sometimes I forget others don’t have my retention level, and I can be a little too obnoxious or condescending about it. I've been working on that.

Some people say geniuses are snotty. Okay, that’s fair. Some of us mean to be snotty, too; we suck at other things and we feel the need to remind everyone we do excel in some things, just to keep some sort of societal balance. In my case, I didn’t consider that others struggle at things I find easy, and I’d become unrealistically impatient with them. It actually wasn't until I started teaching that I realized I had to cut this evil crap out.

But this is why I can’t put together a booklist. Ask me to list something more realistic, like how many different kinds of coffee I currently own. Simple: Trader Joe’s French Roast, Gevalia’s Antiguan, and Gevalia’s Espresso Roast. There. Easy.

Don't 𝘥𝘰 that!

Some evil bastard emailed me recently, and I’ll cut ’n paste it here:

Dude! I LOVED the poem on your web site. That was pure genius. I e-mailed it to thirty people I know, they’ll totally love it cuz we've all had awful youth pastors like that before.

And I hope those awful youth pastors totally messed you up in advance retaliation for spreading spam on the internet.

I do not write things so that people can clog others’ email boxes. I know Blogger gives you the ability to forward my posts to other people, and one or two I could sorta understand (though you’re more likely to alienate people with my writings than amuse them), but thirty? The poem wasn’t that good.

As a spam-hater myself, do this at least: Tell people, “Hey, I read a poem about youth pastors that might amuse you.” Then give a hotlink. Then write whatever else you were gonna write. Give them the option to read it, or not. Stop raping their mailboxes with crap—especially my crap.

Devilish misinformation.

There are a lot of myths about the devil. What do we actually know from scripture?

Four times this week, I have had to listen to the same old myth that the devil used to be the heavenly choir leader before it fell.

I don’t know where this myth came from. I haven’t yet tracked it down. I’ve heard it a lot since the mid-’90s. I suspect it’s related to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s Celestial Hierarchy, in which he puts angels into nine categories, or “choirs,” grouped into three “hierarchies.” Others since him have rearranged the categories, but they still used that word “choir” for them. And the devil was supposedly one of the cherubs, so it’d be in that choir. But by “choir” Dionysius didn’t necessarily mean “a group of singers.” All angels sing. He spent more time talking about cherubs’ pursuit of wisdom.

Nonetheless, I’ve heard over and over again that Satan’s job in heaven was to be the worship leader. Then it fell. Now it takes advantage of its abilities in its former job by tricking us humans into to corrupting music. (Some have even specifically pointed out rock music as a tool of the devil; Bill Gothard is notorious for preaching that rock’s backbeat is inherently anti-natural because it runs contrary to a heartbeat, and that’s why rock is evil.)

So what’s the scriptural basis for any of this stuff? There isn’t any. All this stuff is Christian mythology and unproven hypotheses.

What was the devil’s heavenly job? For crying out loud, look at its name. Satan means “accuser, opposer, adversary, slanderer.” When it’s referred to by name in scripture, what’s it doing? Accusing.

Obnoxious things on weblogs.

And now, a brief list of things on people’s weblogs that annoy me. If you wonder why I never read your site anymore, even when I have time to kill (which doesn’t happen much anymore), then take note of the following offenses.

1. Whiny entries. But you knew that already. That’s nothing new.
2. Obnoxious background music. When I am on the internet I am usually listening to music on iTunes. If I access a site that has obnoxious background music, in order to turn off the background music I have to turn off the sound… which means no more of my music on iTunes. (Currently I'm getting around that by listening to iTunes on my other computer. Sometimes it’s nice to work on two computers at once.) And because I use Safari as a browser, WMA music files for some reason cause Windows Media Player to open and your page to go blank. So it’s your own fault if I never post comments on your site anymore.
3. Videos. Too much bandwidth for too little substance. Instead of waiting the 20 seconds necessary to wait for the video download, I’ll just visit another site.
4. Giant photos. If your camera can take 5 megapixel pictures, they need reducing before you post them on your blog. And by reducing, I mean actually physically reducing the image into a smaller-size file that doesn’t take minutes to download. I don’t always have broadband, and even then, sometimes I don’t always have patience.
5. Stupid photos. Please, for the love of all that’s holy, stop posting photos of you and all your buds posing together. In these cases, a picture isn’t worth ten thousand words. It’s worth a caption: “I had lunch with Binky, Fredo, Alfalfa, and Hyman at Jamba Juice. We all wore matching sunglasses. It was so amusing. We annoyed unsuspecting passers-by with our girlish giggling, and occasionally we’d look over our shades at people, simultaneously, as if that was cool.” On second thought, keep it and your photo to yourself. Especially the 5 megapixel photos.
6. Obfuscating background images. Your favorite Van Gogh painting is not the easiest backdrop for 10 point dark blue text. I can’t read the damn stuff. So I won’t.
7. When I go to your site to see what you’re thinking, and instead of telling me what you’re thinking you post another frigging quiz result which has determined which Disney princess you are, which O.C. cast member you are, what color goes best with your politics, what your randomly-generated Russian name is, or which demon might be the best one to possess your eternal soul. I would guess on the last one that it would be Tedium, the patron devil of boring blog posts.
8. Entire passages of scripture; whole pop or worship songs; or someone else’s poem. Holy Moses, I know it meant something to you; but chances are I know that chapter/song/poem already and don’t need to see it repeated, no matter how much it made your soul cry out. Tell you what: Try linking to the page of some other sucker who actually printed it out, and spend your time on stuff you composed.
9. Begging for responses, email, Xanga eprops, and crap like that. Get a life.
10. People who post one-liners and think that’ll do. Yeah. It’ll do the job of driving me away. Good job. You didn’t need my sarcasm anyway.
11. People who can’t write in complete words. It’s bad enough that these yammering fools write in sentence fragments, but they can’t even write whole words without sounding like a 13-year-old girl who’s been listening to too much hip-hop. “Yo, wazzup? I luv my nu site! U rock!” Obviously we’re not dealing with a touch-typer.
12. PeOpLe WhO LiKe tO aLtErNaTe CaPiTaLs AnD LoWeRcAsE. Again, not touch-typers.
13. You update your blog once every other month. Then, the instant you update it, you want to know why I haven’t read your latest post. Here's why: I can take my time to read your current one. It’s gonna be there for the next two months, ’cause you won't be adding to it until then. Honestly… if you post any less than weekly, don’t bother with a weblog. You obviously don’t have enough to say.
14. Conversely, you update your blog two to five times a day and want to know why I didn’t read the third post last Friday. Okay, I update my blog a lot. But I never order people to read it. If you read it, great. If you don’t… exactly how are you reading this? …Never mind. If you can’t keep up with my regular ranting, relax. I’m not assigning homework or giving tests on it. In fact, I’m often surprised to discover that some of the people I’d never guess were readers actually read every entry… and sadly, when I discover this, I lose a lot of respect for them. Honestly, who has time to read all my babbling? So because I don’t care if you read every entry, I don’t think much of those who demand I read all their entries. I have a life, thank you.
15. Quotes. I’m not talking about entertaining quips by famous people, like

    “Of course I’m drunk, you idiot. I'm a journalist.” —Hunter S. Thompson

    I’m talking about full-on block quotes from some obscure book that you feel you have to quote in order to make your point. Y’know, if you didn't make your point with your arguments, quoting some other idiot isn’t gonna convince me anything other than that you don’t know what you’re talking about, even if the other idiot does.

Well, so much for a brief list.

Having read 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘢 𝘝𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘪 𝘊𝘰𝘥𝘦...

I hang around with too many literary types. They read pop fiction, then want to know my take on it, and I have to gripe at them that I tend to read history and philosophy and don't have time for pop fiction… and then it leaks out that I just read Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, whereupon they exclaim, “Aha! You do read fiction!“ and then I have to explain the difference between classical and pop, and… sometimes it’s just easier to read the bloody pop.

Fine. Have it your way. I blew four hours of my life reading The Da Vinci Code. Are you happy now?

Unfortunately, when one reads a book of this type, and one happens to also be a Christian, the inevitable is gonna come up: “What’d you think of the premise?”

The premise is that a Harvard professor and a French cryptologist have to solve a murder mystery, which at the same time is wrapped up in the secret of where the Holy Grail is hidden. Yet the Grail, according to the book, is not a cup. “Holy Grail” is a mistranslation of “Holy Blood,” so the Grail is actually written records proving that Jesus has direct descendants, through his wife Mary Magdalene, that exist to this day, descended through the Merovingian kings of France, hidden by the Knights Templar. Supposedly both the book’s murder victim and Leonardo da Vinci were grand masters of an organization holding the Catholic Church hostage with this secret; and now the Church wants it destroyed. And if I say much more I’ll ruin the ending.

A lot of this Jesus/Mary love child stuff can be found in Holy Blood Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, (which I’ve read; which is stupid) and there’s no end to the speculation about what secrets the Templars discovered in Jerusalem during the Crusades. Conspiracy theories about the Templars go way back. This is nothing I haven’t heard before. The only difference between then and now is that the theories are in a popular novel.

There were conspiracy theorists about the Kennedy assassination long before Oliver Stone’s JFK came out; the movie just gave them credibility because it was so well-made. Same deal with The Da Vinci Code. It’s actually a pretty good book. So people might read the book and start taking them seriously, just as people started believing Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy after JFK came out. People don’t bother to sift through the evidence as to what is fact and what is fiction after they see it in pop fiction. They just enjoy the fiction… and in order to enjoy the fiction, they suspend disbelief… and after the fiction’s over, they’ve suspended disbelief just long enough to actually accept the fictional conspiracy theory as plausible.

An ode, in honor of my lousy Youth Pastors.

Sometimes I write poetry. Not often, but sometimes.

(Fictional dad, by the way.)

I was all of eleven when Father sat down

And directed me right to his side,

And the gloom in his eyes had awakened my fear

That I’d sinned—he was after my hide.

“No it’s not that,” he said, “but whatever that was—

Well, we’ll talk about that once again.

No, it’s something more difficult I must discuss

Since you’re now at an age over ten.

In this next year, you’ll go into (gasp) junior high

And the misery found in those grades,

And you’ll look to the church for what comfort you can—

But you’ll only find sports and charades.”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“Well you see,” said my dad,

“In the sixth grade you’re known as a Youth,

Not a child, so no Sunday school class anymore.

And so now I must tell you the truth.

Son, a Youth is distracted by things of this world;

What is ‘cool,’ what is ‘with it,’ or ‘now.’

So the church needs a specialist to get them back,

And so this was our plan as to how.

“First, we parents abandoned our leadership roles

Because children don’t see us as ‘cool.’

And since that is their standard for leadership, we

Have adopted this ‘cool’ as our rule.

But we learned that they just won’t accept us as cool.

This is odd, and we can’t figure why.

We said all the same slang and we wore the same clothes!

Yet the Youth think it’s odd, or a lie.

So the church sought a person authentically cool—

One the Youth would accept and obey—

So we got a Youth Pastor to shepherd the Youth,

And instruct them to go the right way.

First he tries to determine what’s ‘cool’ with our kids,

Then he tailors himself to the fad.

In this way, he’ll distract them back into the church!

—But my son, his theology’s bad.

See, in order to get someone Youth will accept,

We acquired a Pastor so young

That he’s barely emerged from his own Youth himself,

And he’s lacking in wisdom. And dumb.

His poor brain has been crammed with theology from

All those schools he’s just come from, and so

He’s learned all the historical paths Christians took,

But he hasn’t a clue where to go.

In this state, he is hardly a leader of men—

He’s half heretic, to tell the truth—

There are so many ways he is too immature—

So we put him in charge of the Youth.

“Now my son, you know more than the average kid,

So I must warn you way in advance

Of the sort of Youth Pastor we’ve hired to lead.

He’s a risk, but we’re taking this chance.

See, the first one we had was a bit of a nut—

He drove thirty kids out with his ways!

He said, ‘If you’re halfhearted, you’re going to hell!’

Half the Youth Group was gone in ten days.

Well, the next one we got would take in any freak—

Even kids who came in from the slums!

He was hired to take care of our kids, not them!

Now he's gone, serving meals to those bums.

The Youth Pastor last year was an… int’resting guy.

His defect was that he was too wise.

He got picked as head pastor in some other church.

We can’t hold on to quality guys.

Now the current Youth Pastor is not like the rest.

Sure, his reasoning isn’t quite sound,

But the elders got tir’d of debating the rest,

And this guy—we can push him around!

So sometimes he might tell you you’re going to hell,

Or he’ll frighten you so you’ll obey.

He might frappé the culture with things of the Lord.

Just watch out for the things that he’ll say!

If you have any questions, please go to your mom

Or to me; we will both help you out.

If you don't find us ‘cool’ enough, we understand—

That is why our church hired this lout.”

“I don’t get it,” I told him. “Have you put my Youth

In the hands of a heretic, Dad?

For if he’s as defective as you say he is,

The results can be nothing but bad!”

“It was not my idea," said Father to me.

“But I think I can yet see God’s plan.

Every Youth must determine for him or herself—

In the most honest way that they can—

Whether they’ll remain Christian, or they’ll turn away.

And the thing that provokes them the best

Is the garbage this Youth Pastor feeds them each week.

It’s the ultimate form of a test.

In this way, they can figure out God for themselves

And maturity will have been won!

—Or they’ll chuck the whole system as stupid and weird.

But that’s one fewer hypocrite, son.”

I somehow yet survived the Youth Group in my teens,

As the Youth Pastors came, and moved on,

Though some lessons they taught might send them to the stake

If they’d taught them in 1301.

In the end, it turned out like my Dad has foreseen:

Many Youths walked away from the flock,

And a few realized God is here nonetheless,

And that Jesus is always our rock.

But what always nags at me is one little thing:

Is this really the best Youth can get?

Are Youth doomed to follow each flake, loon, or nut

Who’s not ready to lead adults yet?

There has got to be better than this for our Youth,

For our Youth, after all, are the church.

It’s not will be, but are. This the adults ignore,

And abandon their Youth in the lurch.

Now, to all the exceptions: God bless you. You’re great.

And to all the good leaders: Fight on!

And to everyone else, Please consider this fact:

Why are so many former Youth gone?

Amusing comic strip: Canary flavor.

Garfield, by Jim Davis, 1/31/2005

Theodicy.

What the heck is theodicy? Well, it’s one of those theology vocabulary words that nobody but us theologians use. I used it on my podcast this week because I ranted about it. Theodicy is the debate about how a good, almighty God can co-exist with evil in our universe. If God can do something about evil, why doesn’t he? The usual answers are:

1. He doesn't exist; so that’s why.
2. He’s not almighty, so he can’t stop it.
3. He isn’t motivated to stop it. (Often because that particular evil is part of his grand scheme of things).

Except, when God talks to Job about the problem of the evil things that have been happening to Job, he made three things rather clear:

1. He certainly does exist.
2. He certainly is almighty.
3. He’s not too thrilled with anything Job’s so-called friends had to say about him. What did they say? Mainly that this particular evil is part of God’s grand scheme of things.

The next time you decide to try to comfort someone with a well-worn platitude, I think it might be a good idea to leaf through Job and see what God thinks of your words of comfort… when it came out of the mouths of Job’s buddies.

Don’t got mail.

I buy a lot of stuff through mail-order, as the Bethany University post office well knows. It seems I am always there to pick up one package or another. It’s because I hate shopping; if I want something, I poke around the internet, find the cheapest price possible (including tax and shipping; you always have to include extra expenses) and buy the thing. Why go to K-mart or Borders when you have eBay and Amazon?

I also use Blockbuster’s online service—again, why go to Blockbuster when you don’t have to?

The catch of mail-order is that Bethany’s post office takes an extra day to get me the mail. They get the stuff from the Postal Service, and then they gotta sort it and stick it in everyone’s mailbox, and that takes an extra day. Sometimes two. They don’t have a very big staff, but they have an awfully big job.

This is not a huge hassle, but it’s a little annoying when I want to watch my Blockbuster movies over the weekend (and Blockbuster emailed me to tell me they were coming on time), yet I can’t watch ’em because they arrived Friday and the post office won’t get it sorted until Monday or Tuesday.

Thus I’m in the habit of checking with the post office for packages. If I don’t, it’ll take ’em two days to put a notification in my mailbox, and in the meanwhile my packages are just taking up space in their office. (Plus, I want my stuff.)

The slowness, unfortunately, also means that I’m mentally blaming the post office for delaying my packages when it might actually be the person who’s supposed to send them.

Case in point: I bought the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD. (I’d been waiting a few months for the price to come down, and when it hit $25 I bought.) The person I bought it from had 1.5 stars out of 5, but I saw stars and a low price and bought the DVDs.

It’s now a month later, and I was wondering what happened to my DVDs, so I went onto Amazon’s site and checked out the status of the shipment. And while I was at it, I looked at the seller’s feedback page. And was horrified.

The guy had pissed off 98 percent of his customers. Either the stuff arrived late, or—in more than half the comments—not at all. Some of the comments were unrepeatable. The guy has also apparently ruined a wedding anniversary because the gift never arrived. Here, obviously, was a disreputable bastard, and I had stupidly sent him $25.

What was he doing with 1.5 stars? Well… Amazon doesn’t let you leave zero stars. You have to at least leave one. I never considered this because I am usually quite happy with my purchases and rate them 4 or 5. So I figured one star would mean you're not great, but at least you send the customers their stuff within a month. Guess not.

On the up side, Amazon will refund the $25, and the Star Wars DVDs are now available for $18. Score.

Charities and evangelism.

Unlike many ministries, the Salvation Army realizes that charity is evangelism.

Why do I plug the Salvation Army and not any of the other wonderful Christian charities out there?

It’s a fair question; one I got from someone recently because my school is donating to Convoy of Hope, an Assemblies of God charity that does much the same that the Salvation Army does. So why not contribute to Convoy of Hope?

Well, I never said don’t contribute to Convoy of Hope. They’re a good group; donate to them if you like. I tend to push the bigger charities because—and I said this before, after the 2004 tsunami—they’re more effective than the little ones, and you want to go with the ones that can help the most people the most effectively.

And they actually help people, instead of trying to disguise evangelism as a charity. This is a major peeve of mine: Some Christian charities forget that the purpose of a charity is to help people. Instead, they start evangelizing. Now, before you misunderstand me, the last thing I want to say is that there’s something wrong with evangelization. Christians are required to tell other people about Jesus. But Christian organizations are in the terrible habit of disguising their evangelization groups as charitable groups. As a result, they do neither well. They suck at charity, and they suck at evangelism.

Fr’instance.

Paying for stuff.

Getting my financial aid this week has been sorta annoying. Not that annoying; the people in the Financial Aid and Student Payments office are very nice people, so the annoyances have nothing to do with them at all. Mainly, it’s how one little thing on my application for financial aid managed to stretch out my application process until next Tuesday.

Okay, I’ll begin at the beginning. I’m in the Teacher Education Program. I’ve been in it since last fall. I’m doing a sort-of package deal where I do the TEP, then take another semester and end up with a Master of Arts. Back when I applied to get into the program, I indicated that this was what I wanted to do: get an M.A. So, when they accepted me into the program, they didn’t actually accept me into the TEP; they accepted me into the M.A. program. But I’m in the TEP. Confusing? Sorta.

When I applied for financial aid last year, I indicated that I was going for an M.A. When I applied this year, I indicated that I was currently in the TEP. It’s a small difference, but it has obnoxious repercussions, the main one being that I have never formally been accepted into the TEP. I’ve been taking all the classes; I’ve been working on the paperwork; the head of the program is my faculty adviser… but I’m not actually in the program. I’m in another program.

So, in order to get financial aid, I needed a letter of acceptance from the TEP in my file, which I don’t have because I wasn’t actually accepted by them. (Even though, as I said, I’m doing the program.)

You’d think it would be an easy thing to get this letter, but apparently it isn’t, so I decided to do the simpler thing and change my application. Except that took five days to process. And since the end of the five days is Tuesday, and the last day to pay for classes (or they get dropped) was today, I decided to bite the bullet and pay for classes. With money I don’t have.

Fortunately, the school has a payment program. The first payment is due on Sep. 28. By the time I have to make the first payment (which, sadly, is the only payment I could actually afford) the financial aid will be approved, and I can joyfully take out another future-hobbling student loan, and pay it. (Which the state says it will pay back if I teach in the state, but that all depends on whether there will be any money left after our idiot governor and idiot legislature get over their fights and special elections.)

By the way: There is next to no scholarship money or grants for graduate-level work. There is some; you can scrape it together from private organizations who will fund you because they like you personally. I don’t happen to personally know too many billionaires so I’m kinda stuck paying for all this myself. It is, of course, my own bloody fault for goofing off in high school when I could have been getting Cal Grant-worthy grades.

So I’m sorta paid up, even though no money has actually been transferred yet. In the meanwhile I can post blogs over the college’s internet service, then go to bed because of that 8 a.m. Saturday class I just (sorta) paid for.

New nephew.

So, I’m an uncle again.

Gideon Joseph Chagnon was born last night, Sep. 1, 2005, weighing 3.46 kilos.

I’ll post photos when I get ’em.

Programming pages.

Because I have a Macintosh, I tend to use Safari as a web browser. It’s a handy little program, and locks up a lot less than Microsoft Internet Explorer. (I don’t know what it is with those Microsoft people and their lock-ups. Supposedly they’re interested in selling stuff to Apple’s consumers, and they own a nice batch of Apple stock, but sometimes I suspect they only want Apple around so they can have a convenient place to steal ideas from.)

The catch with using Safari all the time is that sometimes I forget that the rest of the planet uses Internet Explorer. (Except for the small batch of die-hards that use other browsers that don’t lock up so often.) So when I program a page to do neat things, I check to see if it works in Safari. If it does, I’m fine with it. Not that I’m deliberately trying to screw over Windows users or Internet Explorer users; I just wasn’t thinking about them.

So, after getting frustrated with my own pages on someone else’s computer, I apologize. I’ll do what I can to clean up the code.

Bear in mind that Microsoft has its own bastardized versions of the code I use. Everyone else sticks to the standards—Netscape’s version of JavaScript and the international conventions of HTML and stylesheets—yet Microsoft feels free to tweak these standards for their convenience because, after all, they have a near-monopoly on the world’s computers.

And Microsoft does make great software; but like I said before, I wish it wouldn’t lock up so often. I’ve been too spoiled by Macintosh OS X.

Human nature.

So when I finally got a chance to watch some TV news about Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, MSNBC was interviewing Harry Connick Jr. (I would hope this is because they ran out of officials, but considering America’s over-fascination with celebrities, it’s more likely because it was Harry Connick Jr.)

The newsreader was asking him what he thought of the looting. He replied that he was in no condition to judge. He stated that if he had been desperately poor, and had seen his opportunity, he’d be stealing plasma TVs along with them.

So I guess it's a good thing Harry has a career. Otherwise he'd be looting in New Orleans.

It’s pretty to figure out what the deal is: The respectable people left town in the disaster, and the only people who stayed behind are the gang members and hoodlums who figured this was a great opportunity to go Visigoth. So they’ll be looting, sacking, raping, pillaging, and murdering until the National Guard swarms in and shoots them.

The rest of the country will look on in horror because “civilized” people don’t do this—forgetting how the Romans, Germans, and every so-called civilization indulged in this sort of behavior at least once in their history. Those of us who know our history understand: This is human nature. Not the noble self-sacrifice that we've seen after other hurricanes or terrorist attacks. That’s how we’d prefer to see human nature, and that is what we must aspire to. We can be that way when we put effort into it. But when we don’t—well, if you want to see human nature at its most grasping, thieving, and self-centered—as history testifies to, time and again—there it is, in Louisiana, stealing plasma TVs.