I got 500-550 words/minute on the first test and 550-600 on the second. Whee!
I'll admit it: I'm a reality-tv junkie. So last night when Amish in the City came on, I was unable to resist its sweet, sweet siren call. Believe it or not, I was less offended than I thought I'd be. A bit annoyed when the "cool" kids started freaking out when the Amish showed up, true, but more amused that this happened just minutes after the arty gay guy said how much he hates people who are intolerant of those who are different. (Cue Nelson Muntz's "Ha-ha" here, please.)
It was really interesting to watch these sheltered farm kids experiencing things like the ocean for the first time. Their difficulty in fitting in and relating to the others was painfully reminiscent of my own life; I can't begin to count the days I felt ignorant and uncool when trying to hang out with my new classmates. And, just when I'd figured out what was "in", we'd move and I'd have to start all over again.
The concept of rumspringa gripped me the most. In their late teens, before they must make the decision whether to be baptized and join the church, the Amish are given time to run wild with no repercussions. That's just such a contrast to the evangelical shelter-your-kids mindset. We seem so afraid that teens will turn their backs on God once they've "had a taste of the world." But 90% of the Amish decide to join the church upon their return from rumspringa. Yes, part of it is probably the desire to maintain ties with family and friends, but I suspect that's not all the story.
32 is fast approaching and, though part of me longs to be "tied down" with a husband and kids, part of me feels like I've missed the chance to really experience life. Silly, huh? But as a teen & in college, I was always trying to be a good girl, first to please my parents and teachers, later to please God. Occasionally I regret that I didn't go to more parties instead of studying all weekend, that I allowed myself to get funneled into a Christian ghetto in college (even though the people there were nice), missed out on good Italian wine in Florence because I thought I shouldn't drink, and was afraid to sleep with my high school boyfriend. (Edited to add that yes, I know I'm probably better off for not having done some of those things. I am more sad that I avoided things out of fear or a false sense of obligation, rather than a true belief that they were wrong.) How freeing it would have been to realize that I would still be loved and accepted, no matter what I did.
I want my rumspringa now, damn it! But I have taken on responsibilities which constrain me. And I don't know what I'd do, anyway. Getting drunk for the sake of getting drunk doesn't sound too fun. Rather than hiding behind dull, conservative clothes I can wear bright colors together and let the girls come out to play (my mental phrase for wearing a low-cut top), but in the end it's just clothes. There's no one to make out with, no matter how appealing it sounds right now.
I wish I'd loved more and worried less. And that I'd known, in the end, that I could always come home to a God who was delighted to have me.
I just read an email from someone who wrote, "Google is god. Do not anger her." After reading it several times, I finally realized why it seemed wrong. Not because of the "god" part, but because, for me, Google is undeniably male.
This started me thinking about the gender of other inanimate objects in my life. My car is named Esmerelda because she has spunk & sass. I've always known she was a she. My previous car was male. My computers are always gender-less. I suspect my house is female, though I haven't pondered it much.
How do we come up with these ideas? Is it at all influenced by the way languages such as German and French assign gender to everything? In German, there are three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Which gender is assigned to a word seems completely random to me. A little girl is neuter. Train station is masculine. And how do we explain words which switch gender according to the language spoken?
Do your possessions have gender? How do you know? Why do you know?
1. I once won "Industrial Arts Student of the Year" in high school. (I was taking an architectural drawing class.) It was one of the most embarassing moments of my life. I really enjoyed the design aspects of architectural design, but had no interest in learning all the math required; I just wanted to make interesting things and then have someone else translate them into reality.
2. Childhood dream jobs included archaeologist, parapsychologist, movie star/singer, mom, and architect. So frequently I'm amazed that my current career didn't even exist when I was a kid. Heck, I didn't know it was a possibility even when I was in college. How much more will things change during my lifetime? How can I even begin to plan what I will do over the years?
3. I am constantly worried that I have uterine cancer or something equally horrible. But because I wouldn't be able to deal with that, I don't want to go to the doctor, even though I'm sure everything is actually fine. Even though my dad was a doctor (and a good one), I don't trust doctors very much; I've had such a terrible time getting them to listen to me over the past 10 years.
4. I started my life in Minnesota, even though I was born in Washington. My mom once pointed out the house where I was conceived, which was a bit more than I needed to know. Because of me, mom dropped out of med school. I've always wondered what would have happened if I'd been conceived a year later, when abortion was legal. Would she have been willing to have her life and plans interrupted?
5. On my 21st birthday I walked on the roof of the cathedral in Milan. What struck me most was the intricate detail on all the statues and carvings up there, far beyond what any person could see from the ground. All that beauty, just for God. What would it look like if I made every place in my life beautiful for God, just because it was beautiful?
Things that annoyed me this week:
People who call and don't tell me who they are. At least say, "Hi Rachel, this is _____" rather than just saying "hi" and making me waste my time playing the guessing game with your voice.
The department head forgot to include me on the email giving the date & time for our design meetings TWICE. And the second time, nobody even thought to come get me, even though I'm all of 5 doors down from the conference room.
Aidan is a messy eater and flings bits of food to the floor with great abandon. This delights the ants, but annoys me. I hate having ants in the kitchen. Fruitflies have also appeared, which is icky.
Things that make me happy this morning:
cranberry white chocolate scones and chai
a cool, crisp summer morning after hot & humid days
anticipating friday dinner group
sleeping in until 7:30
Ivy's site is almost done
I just got my performance review and have a space on the page where I can make comments. My boss says I need to be more proactive at asking people for updated info & reporting policy violations on the web pages. This is what I've written so far: "Regardless of how many times I ask for updated info or point out policy violations, I do not have the ability or authority to make people address these issues."
Can any of you suggest a diplomatic way to say "Perhaps I'd put more effort into hounding people to give me updated info and pointing out policy violations if the college would actually back me up & give me a bit of authority. As it is now, it's just a waste of my time, as I will point out a problem, my boss will have me design new templates, and then they will give the site back to incompetent people who will immediately ignore everything I said and throw out the work I did. Final result: a wasted week of work for me, yet another non-compliant site."
Oooh. "I have pointed out such problems in the past, but the college seems unwilling to back me up. (For example, the X site is non-compliant and unattractive. Marty had me design new templates. I converted the pages to use the new template and showed the grad students how to update the pages. They have since thrown out all the changes and gone back to an ugly and non-compliant site with absolutely no repercussions."
I hate my boss so much. I have lost any respect for him that I might have once had. He visually destroys everything I create. He won't let me do the job I've been TRAINED to do. So by the time he's done with his comments and tweaks, the web sites look like crap.
These people know that the bible is not a self-help book full of easy answers, but a book of stories and wisdom that is meant to lead us into relationship and worship. There are hard and fast truths in it, yes, but they are surrounded by soft truths, and slippery truths, and sometimes truths, and truths that once were true but are no longer true, and truths that are only true if you are in the right state of mind, and truths that are only true if you are not hurting someone, and truths that are true in the moment but not if you are talking about the moment, and truths that can only be lived and should never be spoken, and truths that we cannot hear, and truths that are more than we can bear. - Real Live Preacher
Two nights ago I dreamt that I kept typing words (god, gah-ahd, gooahd) into a little box on a website, trying to get the computer to say God. I couldn't figure out where it was. Then last night when I was dreaming, I dreamed it again, but realized with a jolt that it was the send a talking message from Hilary Duff webpage that I didn't discover until after the first dream. And now, in a moment of synchonicity, Hilary Duff is singing a concert on the news as I am typing. (I have to tell you that I started typing before I had any idea she was going to be on tv, so that didn't inspire this post.)
It always kind of freaks me out when my dreams show me things that don't appear in my waking life until later in time. It seems that time must be a very fluid thing, far different from the simple linear progression we typically envision. I've always believed that God must be somehow outside of time, unconstrained by whatever it is that keeps us humans moving from one second to the next. Is everything that happens - the past, present, & future of human history - constantly present to God? An eternal present seems to me to eliminate some of the "problems" with free will, omniscience, and predestination. In this view, God doesn't control your actions, but at the same time knows the outcomes of every choice you make and everything you do, because for him even your future actions are happening and have happened.
Perhaps precognitive dreams occur when we slip into a bit of this eternal present.
"Q: What is the 'Apostrolypse'?
A: The 'Apostrolypse' is a term for the cataclysmic and final collapse of our planet brought on by the misuse of apostrophe by illiterate people, viz., death by apostrophe. Think of it as worse than nuclear fallout: suffocation of all living organisim's by the relentles's rain of gratuitou's apostrophe's, swelling up as toxic aerial miasma... Variant theory: "Apostroluge," or global destruction by deluge; all air-breathing terrestrial creatures are inundated by apostrophes and die, reminiscent of Noah's flood except that there's no boat." from here
Other cool stuff
Peepo is a really interesting search engine for the developmentally disabled. I can see it being great for kids, too. I'm especially fond of their recipe for donuts. (Click on the photo to get to the next step.) When you go through the flapjack recipe, it speaks each ingredient as you see the photo. (I must admit they don't look like any flapjacks I've ever seen, though.)
A few minutes ago (at 11:30) I was heading down the hall to fill my mug with hot water for the third time this morning. About 20 steps from my office, I realized that I'd never added a tea bag; I've been drinking plain hot water all morning, but never noticed. Sigh.
A coworker just pointed me to several web jobs with the state. One is only open to internal candidates at the moment & the other closes tomorrow. I'm *mostly* qualified for that one, but don't know if I have the energy to run in circles trying to type up a resume and track down my college GPA and stuff like that. Especially when I'm not very familiar with databases or server admin, and they mention those on their form.
Why I love my church
Where else can I go to a church-organized bridal shower and sit with a table of women joking about sex toys during the gift opening?
Too good
Are you ever around people that seem too good? How does it make you feel? Is that right?
This weekend I visited some college friends. Sometimes the way the guy has chosen to live his life make me feel... inadequate? dirty? And this makes me sad, as I know he's trying to live a godly life. Perhaps the trouble comes when I compare my life to his, rather than recognizing that God calls us all to different actions and levels of behavior.
For example, I don't think that I could wait until I'm engaged to kiss someone or say "I love you," yet my friends did. He only gives women (other than family) one-armed side hugs. The event that sparked this line of thought, though, was when he asked me what I'd been reading in the Word recently. Now in college this would have been a completely natural thing for us to discuss. I'll admit to anonymous readers that I haven't picked up my Bible in probably 9 months (after years of reading it every single day) and don't really miss it. But for some reason I couldn't admit that to him. So I muttered something about how we've been reading through Luke at church and reading along with that, which is true, since I've been reading along on Sundays. But I was totally dodging the issue. And I left wondering whether this is bad. Would I be a better person if I were reading my Bible more right now? How do I explain that the past month has been one of the best in years, when my worst (emotionally & spiritually) came when I was much more "devout"?
I don't know. And I wonder if there's anything I should do, or if that would just be adding another burden to my already overloaded life.
Yesterday a woman in WA posted a question about some medical terminology on a mailing list I read. I forwarded the message to Dad (in Belgium) and got a plain-English translation a few minutes later, which I sent back to her. Very cool.
why I hate the internet
I came to my blog today to find about 1500 spammy comments from lowlife scum clogging up my site. Losers.
It turns out that I don't have to move offices immediately; instead, I can stay where I am until Barbara leaves (at some as-yet-determined point in the future). Possibly August or September, but nobody really knows.
This weekend I started having dreams about the great office switch, most of which involved me yelling at people and waking up feeling angry. I hope this will end. Heck, by September I could have a new job and not have to worry about it at all.
Still tired. Still feeling kind of sick. Still counting the moments until I can go home to bed. This morning, for the first time ever, I heard the cat (Brigit) throwing up and decided I just wasn't going to deal with it until I got home, rather than cleaning it up immediately. I guess Jenell is rubbing off on me. :) But now I am wondering how long I can put off going to the basement, so that I don't have to take care of it tonight.
Just a few links & explanatory notes stemming from Sunday night's conversations:
The term runcible spoon came from the poem "The Owl and the Pussycat". (A runcible spoon is like a spork with a cutting edge. Nifty.)
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon.
Mystery religions have been common throughout history. (No, Doug didn't just make up the term.) And speaking of mystery religions, some history about the masons.
And finally, some links documenting the falsehoods & misrepresentations in Michael Moore's films:
Bowling for Truth - Be sure to read about the bank/gun scene & the NRA speeches.
Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 911
More Distortions From Michael Moore
Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore. By Christopher Hitchens
MooreLies.com
Ok, I have to go get some work done. Have fun reading.