When Black Friday comes.

[Photo illustration by Reddit user kencrema.]

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Days before Thanksgiving, I picked up Mom’s head cold, so the day of, I was boiling cranberries and sweet potatoes (no, not together; separate pots) and coughing away from the food. I felt like Typhoid Mary. But much of the rest of the family has already suffered from one virus or another recently, and everything I cooked was pretty well sterile by the time it got to everyone’s plate. I think. I hope.

That morning we got the big-ass Thanskgiving edition of The Reporter, which contained all the Black Friday ads. And of course, half the stores weren’t gonna bother to wait till Black Friday: Their doors were either open already, or were opening at 6 or 8 p.m. Which means their employees had to be there even earlier, and cut short their Thanksgiving dinners, or move them to a different day.

I call this “the War on Thanksgiving.” Never mind the War on Christmas; that’s all hype. The War on Thanksgiving is bound to be a lot more successful because it’s based on Mammonism: Businesses wanna make more money, certain employees wanna make more overtime (assuming their employers even offer them overtime pay for working Thanksgiving; Walmart doesn’t). Plenty of Christians who will object, at the drop of a hat, to anyone wishing them a Happy Holidays, quickly turn libertarian when it comes to working Thanksgiving. Or even Christmas. ’Cause it’s money. And nothing should interfere with Americans’ God-given right to make a buck… and drag their employees in, holidays be damned, in order to help them make those bucks.

On getting friend-zoned.

To me, the “friend zone” is an easy concept. It basically means someone isn’t attracted to you. They like you—if they didn’t, you wouldn’t be considered friends—but they’ve ruled you out as a prospective romantic partner.

Either you were never attractive to begin with, or you were superficially attractive, and once they got to know you, they changed their mind. I, fr'instance, am attracted to brains. Beauty may get my attention, but intelligence holds my attention. So when I meet a woman, I might be attracted up to the minute she opens her mouth. Then I find out her character, and that determines which category she goes into.

Sometimes she’s a fool, meaning she doesn’t think things through, or invests all her thinking into silly things, like fashion or gossip or popular culture or sports. Sometimes she’s evil: She spends a lot of time manipulating her “friends,” or plotting against her “enemies,” or otherwise trying to transform her life into a bad soap opera. Sometimes she’s spiritually immature: She’s uncommitted to her religion, and lacks balance, self-control, emotional control, generosity, patience, peace, or love—and I don’t see her changing anytime soon, and I certainly don’t want her to change for my sake, but Jesus’s. And sometimes she has other habits and beliefs which I find irritating. I won’t get into a laundry list, but there are certain things which kill my attraction like someone shooting out a lightbulb with a pellet gun.

Getting in trouble at Bethany College.

Bethany College was the first Christian school I ever attended. I grew up in public schools. (For you Brits, that means government schools.) I went to a state community college and a state university. My parents didn’t have the money for private instruction, and even if they did, Dad wouldn’t care to spend it.

Having taught at Christian schools since, I will say I wasn’t necessarily deprived. It all comes down to the teacher. Some teachers at Christian schools are outstanding; some teachers are awful. Same with public schools. Some are there to teach critical thinking skills; some are there purely to indoctrinate. Bethany was full of awesome teachers. So I lucked out there: I went to Bethany because it was a Christian school in my denomination, not because I’d heard great things about its teachers. I have since: After I graduated and taught school, once people found out I was a Bethany grad, they leapt to the conclusion I went through their teacher ed program, and started gushing about how great that program was. I kept correcting them: “No no; I studied bible and theology.” But it did help prod me into going back for that program.

But I digress. The teachers were excellent. Student Life, on the other hand… The deans of students were stand-out people. The campus pastors as well. But the resident advisers were fellow college kids, and some were brand-new Christians, more earnest than wise.

So I blame them for my getting in trouble. The deans, whenever they found out about my shenanigans, laughed it off. The RAs, however, were outraged. How dare I? What kind of Christian was I? What sort of heretic would do such things?

Meh. I will say the guys who supervised the halls I lived in… well, they meant well.

Back to the future?

Someone keeps photoshopping today’s date onto a photo from Back to the Future Part II, and claiming today is when Marty McFly returns to the future. I photoshopped this—but no, I didn’t change the date; get the DVD and check it yourself. Still, it’s nuts how people who are so skeptical about all sorts of things, just mindlessly accept some internet meme. [Posted on Facebook, 1 May.]

University anniversary this weekend.

Bethany’s globe; located variously at the chapel and the library. [Photo: John Pilge.]

I went to Bethany College in the late ’90s, and did some graduate work there briefly in the mid ’00s, at which time it became Bethany University. It shut down two years ago, after decades of financial instability and non-management. Regardless, this weekend some alumni are throwing a celebration of its founding at Glad Tidings Church in San Francisco—the church which founded Glad Tidings Bible Institute in 1919, which became Bethany Bible College when it moved to Santa Cruz in the ’50s.

The posters all say “100 years of fire” on them. That’s actually referring to Glad Tidings’ 100th year, ’cause it was founded in 1913. But because they stuck that on everything, it sounds like Bethany is a century old, and that the organizers suck at math. Bethany is only a year younger than Billy Graham. Hey, I didn’t organize the event. I’m just telling you what they put on the posters.