A New Me

Mrs. Blue would prefer that a “new me” somehow involve the sudden emergence of carpentry and/or automotive repair skills; the regrowth of my hair and return of my ponytail; and the development of serious “master of the universe”-style moneymaking ability.

But, for now, this will have to do:

For the record, this is the first time since I started wearing glasses in junior high (back in the 1980s) that I have worn any style other than wire-rimmed glasses.

What say you?

Chic geek?

Or otherwise?

Fire and Pain

Now how’s that for a provocative headline, eh? Probably going to talk about hell and damnation today, right?

Nah…

I don’t know how many of you are into metallurgy, but when you’re putting ores and additives through the process of making some metal or alloy of metals, as I understand it, you end up with something called dross. It’s kind of like the scum you get on top of the soup you’re cooking, except with metal, it’s a lot more important to scoop that crap off unless you want buildings falling down and cars falling apart.

So to refine metal, to get out its impurities, it has to go through the fire.

Nothing new there. Nor is it new to apply that philosophy to life. The bible talks about putting people through the metaphorical fire to make them into something stronger. It’s a philosophy that also exists outside religion: “No pain, no gain” and “You have to pay your dues” are just two examples.

Generations X and Y have been accused of laziness and complacency at times. It’s true and it isn’t. (I’m an X, by the way…nice to meet you). It’s said that we rely too much on our parents and that we aren’t willing to work responsibly or work hard.

The truth is more that the world changed, and X and Y got faced with entirely new economic dynamics and new rules that don’t always respond to the solutions that suited Baby Boomers and their immediate predecessors.

But in there is also some truth in the criticism, and I see it more the older I get. Members of Generations X and Y can be a bit quick to want recognition and reward, before they’ve proven themselves. They can be fabulously self-centered in ways that are distinct from the often self-absorbed and sometimes self-important Baby Boomers.

But one thing about the Baby Boomers is that they were able in many cases to achieve and build nest eggs and help their progeny get going in life. They may have been less religious and less dogmatic than their parents, but they still often saw value in religion and in seeking God.

I wonder, though, if the increasing way that people are distancing themselves from God, especially in the younger generations, has more to do with the way the world is going and the way we X’s and Y’s see the world. And perhaps less about reason and science making religion irrelevant.

You see, too often, we young-ish folks (if I can still call myself that at 41) want results with minimal work. We want answers and solutions now. We don’t want to wait on God. And so when God doesn’t respond to us immediately, and we look back at history and say, “why does he let this crap happen” we decide that He must not exist. Because if He won’t just give us what we want now, how could He?

Too many of us don’t value the notion that we are works in progress. That our time on this planet is less about getting what we want and more about learning lessons. It’s a lesson that even atheists should take to heart more often. Because particularly for those who don’t believe there is anything beyond this life, there is precious little time to grow up and make something useful out of oneself.

For those who are agnostic, or those who, like me, are in a faith walk with God, it’s time for us to realize that we are put through a fire. We are meant to feel pain. It’s terrible when some people have to live with almost nothing but pain and stress and misery, but we humans aren’t alone in that. We like to think we are, but we’re not.

Whether you want to credit evolution (genetic and social both) or God’s will…or a combination of the two…a pristine, trouble-free world isn’t the kind of world that will push us to become something stronger or smarter or more useful to ourselves and others.

Pain is necessary. Whether we like it or not, we must all pass through the fire, some of us more often than others.

We need to pay our dues. We need to see the value in that and make something good out of it in the end. Or at least as good as we can.

If we don’t, we remain children. We don’t grow. Not in this world, and not in God’s plan.

‘Tis the Season…to Consume

Yes, still procrastinating on the novel. Start a new chapter, reveal who’s gonna be taking over for Stavin, reveal her connection to Maree…then leave ya hanging for a couple weeks. Those of you still hangin’, that is. I’m snowed in tomorrow most likely, so might be a good time for some power writing.

In the meantime, I wanted to find out from y’all how you deal with the consumer/consumption aspect of this gift-giving season (Christmas, Hanukkah, Solstice, Festivus, whatever).

Myself and Mrs. Blue, we’ve been trying to live a lot leaner, and not just because we’re short on income these days (though I have some hope of see things improve in terms of the size of my clientele soon). We’re also faced with a little girl who always wants, wants, wants. Little Girl Blue is delightful. She’s smart, perceptive, loving, kind, and many other positive things. But she also has some intense personality features that challenge my patience, and her desire to have so many things—which seems a bit more than the usual 4-year-old, Id-fueled level of desire—is one of those traits which drives me up a wall.

So, while I don’t desire to deny her gifts this season, the wife and I do want to accentuate the real reason we’re celebrating toward the end of December, and so I don’t want Christmas to be all about ripping paper off boxes and then forgetting about half the stuff she just opened after an hour has gone by.

What I think we are going to do is have a “9 Days of Christmas” kind of thing, with her opening 1 gift on Christmas Eve and then one each day thereafter, all the way to New Year’s Day. Given her number of gifts, once you factor in the ones from relatives, she may get to open two or three on Christmas Day.

Anyway, it seemed like a good way to make her appreciate the gifts more if she doesn’t have all of them piled around her feet all at once, while also playing up the season and the approach of the new year a bit more.

I don’t know…what do you think of that? And do you have any special plans to de-commercialize or redefine your approach to the holidays?

Bill Orvis White is the Man!

In my continuing quest to procrastinate on my novel, to the point that I’ve probably even lost my most loyal few readers by now (and if I haven’t lost you, bless you for sticking with my very sporadic updates lately), I want to tell you about Bill White.

Please, read Bill White. Read him on his blog (click here), and follow him on Twitter (click here). In fact, I need to make sure I add him into my blogroll here tonight. Bill White is a parody and, often, I find it brilliant parody (I’ve known about him for the better part of a year at least through his occasional comments at the Deus Ex Malcontent blog), though I’m not sure if it’s a white Christian progressive love alone or if it will translate across my readership (Black, female, transgendered and otherwise). But while Bill White may not be “real,” a real person writes his words, and I love “Bill” for all that he reveals about the strange breed of conservative that loves Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

Who knows how much the man or woman behind Bill White actually shares of Bill’s belief system. Maybe none of it, maybe some of it (though probably not most or all of it).

Some of the best fun I’ve had in the past week or so, though, since I started getting Bill White’s tweets has been commenting to Bill White through Twitter, and enjoying the hell out of his responses back to me. Just pretend Bill is real, and respond to him as if he is, or be a bit of a parody yourself. You may get a real kick out of it.

Or not. Maybe this is just a love shared by a few of us SPs (as Bill likes to call secular progressives, even the ones like me that aren’t actually secular).

Balanced, Not Superstitous

I’m sure this post will earn some guffaws and maybe some blow-back from my loyal readers who happen to be atheists or semi-militant agnostics, but here goes…

My belief in God, and Jesus for that matter, is not a sign of any of the following:

• Fear of death
• Insecurity
• Superstition
• Desire to belong to a group
• An aching emptiness inside that I wanted to fill
• Delusion
• Idiocy
• Lack of scientific awareness
• Immaturity

In fact, I see a lot of maturity and balance in my worldview. And that is because I deny neither the scientific nor the spiritual. I’m not saying I have all the answers in life, but what I do have is a lot of internal security and well-being.

I don’t understand when entirely secular folks insist that to be fully mature, I must deny my belief in, and search for, spiritual meaning. Just as I don’t understand religious people who insist on ignoring science and reason.

Humans have sought spiritual discernment for a long time, and for quite a number of centuries (in fact, a couple millennia at least), it hasn’t been about explaining why it rains or how the sun moves across the sky or anything like that. It’s been about a deeper kind of meaning. People who dismiss religion as an artifact of ignorant ancient goat herders is doing a disservice to goat herders (many of whom, I am sure, had deeper thoughts than screwing their herd-stock and picking at their asses) and a disservice to spiritual seekers.

Yes, there was a time when religion was all about explaining worldly things. But as people have advanced, so has the depth and maturity of spiritual seeking. Sure, there are plenty of idiots in the world who follow religion and religious leaders blindly and skim only the surface of religious precepts, but most people seem to prefer following someone than thinking for themselves.

Funny thing is, spiritual seeking, while it cannot follow the scientific method, does still follow the same general progression as science. That is, as humans have advanced, so has the study. Science was once a pretty pathetically ignorant, simplistic and sketchy affair, just like religion.

The problem is that the more we figure out about the world, the more full of ourselves and our intelligence we become, and the more we think we don’t need God. We are not slowly disproving God, but simply pushing him aside unnecessarily.

If more believers would be mature about their spiritual seeking, and more non-believers would stop ridiculing those who are trying to find spiritual meaning, maybe religion wouldn’t be the mess it has become these days. Now, both sides, secular and religious, essentially call the other side a bunch of heretics, which solves nothing.

I can already see one retort coming.

But science is rational. Science doesn’t lead to oppression or wars!

Wrong.

Maybe it doesn’t have the same track record right now, but religion had a hell of a head start. People can blindly follow a scientific theory or finding as much as a biblical principle. Science and research can be twisted, skewed and misrepresented.

Hmmmm. Just like religion.

The Nazis based their genocidal campaign in World War II based on “science” that showed Aryans were superior. Noted intellects justified slavery by “proving” that Blacks weren’t as evolved or even as human as Whites. Medical science can downplay the horrors of abortion, even as it can also be used to overplay them. Research shows us that it isn’t cost-effective or “useful” to pay for certain types of medical screening or healthcare, and so insurance companies and hospital executives can oppress us to sickness or even death. Religious groups can call homosexuals deviant because they can point to a  lack of scientific proof that same-sex desires are inherited rather than learned or chosen. Need I go on?

Science is on pace to do everything that religion did and more. It can bring us together in understanding and truth and good guidance. And it can tear us apart.

Science is not the be-all and end-all of human experience, and it never will be. Nor shall religion or any kind of spiritual pursuit. I maintain that both are entirely necessary to being mature humans.

Food for Thought

While I continue to procrastinate on getting the next installment of my novel out (once again, it’s been more than two weeks and I didn’t even notice…I’m bad lately on the novel writing), here is a nice little nugget of sage advice I ran across today to hold you over until tomorrow night:

Knowledge is realizing that the street is one-way, wisdom is looking both directions anyway.

Breast Intentions

So, I try to tread carefully these days on healthcare topics, given that I write on medical and healthcare topics. But as my work in this area is currently limited to pharmaceutical research and pharma business dealings, I think that saying a bit about the recent changes in recommendations to breast cancer screening are pretty safe. Because, I’m not writing about insurance payers and health coverage.

In short, I think the recommendations are questionable at best. In case you’ve missed the news, here’s a rundown:

The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) made recommendations on Nov. 16, 2009 that routine screening mammograms start at age 50 (rather than age 40, which had been the standard) and be done less frequently (every 2 years, not annually as before). Also, the task force advised that physicians no longer teach women how to do breast self-examinations.

I realize that these recommendations are, in large part, based on scientific research. For example, it seems that later mammograms may not really increase rates of mortality or morbidity, and there is concern that when women have suspicious (but ultimately benign) findings, they undergo undue stress as a result.

None of this changes my opinion that the recommendations are totally wrongheaded.

The fact is that even with the chance of finding suspicious things that turn out to be harmless, we should aggressively go for prevention and early detection, particularly with diseases that are high on the list of killers. Breast cancer is a major killer of women. And even though breast self-exams may not be the most reliable thing in the world, it boggles my mind that someone would advise against teaching women to be more aware of their body and to check it.

Furthermore, the recommendations don’t really take into account things like higher rates of breast cancer in certain groups (like black women) and earlier onset of the disease in those same groups.

But, you may say, these are simply guidelines.

I would say, don’t be naive.

You see, guidelines have a nasty habit of becoming policy with regard to insurance companies. And if insurance companies use these guidelines to change their policies and save money (and they likely will…or most of them, anyway), that means physicians will not be doing the exams for many women, unless those women can pay out of their own pocket. They couldn’t afford to absorb the cost to their offices.

And let’s face it. If you support these guidelines as a way to reduce waste and spending, without considering the lives saved in the process, I would ask you: How would you feel if your wife, or sister, or mother, were to die of breast cancer because it wasn’t caught early.

Because some guidelines said it wasn’t worth it.

Deacon’s DVDs: Spoiling It For You

If you haven’t seen the 2008 remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and for some reason you still want to, leave now. I’m going to ruin this sonofabitch for you if you continue.

Of course, it deserves to be ruined. Spoiling the ending is all too necessary for the good of movie-renting humankind, because this movie had no ending.

OK, technically, it has an ending. But it’s such a jaw-droppingly stupid one. Such a “what the hell just happened?” one. A complete, “That’s it?” kind of experience.

We spend a couple hours seeing special effects that are, to be honest, pretty damn good.

We see Keanu Reeves in his usual, expressionless mode, but it works perfect here, because he’s an alien in a body constructed to be human…so he is not used to being a human or feeling like a human. So, Keanu’s typical acting weakness, his lack of ability to emote, is actually a strength here.

Jennifer Connelly does a fantastic job of emoting just perfectly and being expressive in all the right ways.

John Cleese is fantastic in his cameo.

Kathy Bates isn’t given nearly enough to do with her role, but she does it well.

But what we end up with is a movie about a collection of alien races who send Klaatu (played by Reeves) to Earth to make the final decision about us. And that decision is…

…remember, I’m going to spoil this for you…

…last chance…

…I mean it…

OK, you’re still here. He is here to push the button on the human race. To save Earth, the aliens figure humans have to go, so that the planet can heal and other life can go on. The notion is that only a tiny fraction of planets in the universe can support complex life, and so they are not willing to spare one species…that is, us…and lose the planet. Essentially, we are seen as a cancer that needs to be removed so that the patient, the Earth, can live.

Actually, as far as concepts go, that ain’t bad. It’s a decent update for our time, since the original version of the film dealt with aliens being mad that we were pursuing nuclear science, and were too immature for it. That’s probably true, but it would be  a little late for them to complain about that now, so the environmental theme works better now.

Predictably, after making it clear that he thinks we’re unredeemable as a species, and must be wiped out, he decides after starting a nanotech “plague of high tech locusts” end of the world that hey, because one little kid cries and his stepmom hugs him, we must be OK. So then the rush to reverse Armageddon so that we won’t be wiped out, with some queer comment about, “It will come at a cost. You will have to change” or something like that.

And what changes?

Klaatu turns off our power.

Yeah. That’s the end of the movie. Klaatu returns to his vessel, turns of the nanotech bug swarm, and shuts off every powered device in the world, including wristwatches.

And leaves without a single word.

That’s right. Everything’s shut off (including, presumably, life support machines for patients, heat in places where people will die of hypothermia without it, and so on).

Nobody tells the world why. Nobody says, “OK, this is your last chance. Start from scratch.” Nobody tells the people of the world one damn word about why the power was shut off and what step we need to take…or goals we need to meet…to prevent a return to destroy us.

All that work with the special effects, some pretty good acting overall, an interesting take on the robot Gort this time around, a story that had promise for maybe most of the first 2/3 or 3/4 of the affair…all to get a contrived “I understand you humans now” change of personality from Klaatu, and a head-scratching ending that just left me pissed off more than any other crappy movie ending I’ve ever seen.

I mean, I said to my computer screen: “What kind of useless shitting ending is that?”

I never talk to the screen when I watch a movie.

The 1951 movie shouldn’t have been remade to begin with. But if you’re going to remake it, can’t you at least give us an ending that makes at least some small fraction of sense?

(If there are typos galore in this, I’m not surprised. It’s almost 2 a.m. and I’m headed to bed, and I have no plans to go back and edit this.)

(Snack) Chip On My Shoulder

So, I’m in kind of an uninspired period right now. No spiritual topics are really eating at me right now. My novel will continue again soon but I need another day or two on that to sort out what needs to happen next. I haven’t been able to coax the Hummus Idol out of the transdimensional chasm he’s hidden himself in to keep from posting. Miz Pink is off trying to have Jon Stewart’s baby (while still nursing one).

So, I’ve kind of decided that I’m in an “anything goes” mode right now. Just whatever the hell comes to mind, and however long or short it needs to be, even if it’s just a Twitter-sized kind of post.

And right now, I’m just feeling irritated about Cheetos.

Yeah, the orange cheesy snack food.

Today, I noticed in the store bags of BBQ Cheddar Cheetos.

Look, I’m a snack food fan. I love new flavors of chips and such. Exotic ones, even. But certain things do not seem, to me, to go together.

BBQ flavor in a Cheetos bag is one of them. Also, pizza or buffalo wing flavors in Doritos. And I remember some test mystery flavor Doritos had recently that clearly was intended to be a Big Mac flavor or something like it. For pity’s sake, they’re tortilla chips. At least pretend to be following some kind of latino food theme when you pick the flavors.

While I love creativity, there is limited room on the shelves. If you want to clog them up, at least bring back the damn Cajun Spice Ruffles that I’ve been missing for 15 years or more since they were discontinued.

(And no, I don’t have the slightest idea who the woman in the photo is, nor where the photo came from originally. But it does make the mind reel, doesn’t it?)

Random Babble

I’ll have more installments of the novel coming up soon. May write them short to keep a flow going, so that maybe the rule will be only one or two scenes per installment, instead of three or four like I’ve been shooting for a lot of times.

Also have some announcements of a few additions/changes around here to make in the coming days. Nothing drastic; more of an addition to the mix.

Now, with that out of the way, do I have anything to say today? Yeah. I do, and it’s about how the behavior and attitudes of churches (both in their leadership and within their congregations) is so often used these days to decry how broken Christianity is. How messed up it is. How it must not be true, because if it were, then why is there so much hypocrisy? Why don’t people all agree? Why have things strayed so far from the kind of stuff that Jesus focused on (lifting up the poor, healing people, helping people, teaching people and exposing hypocrites)?

I would ask: Why reject Christianity and say it’s bogus, simply because the institutions have messed things up in many cases?

I mean, did Jesus say, “Set up institutions with lots of rules and make people go through hoops?”

No.

In fact, the early apostolic church leaders didn’t do that either. Yes, they had to talk about rules and doctrine, and they had to stamp out heresy that went counter to Jesus’ gospel, but they weren’t trying to make some rigid institution. The early church was small groups, meeting and praying and talking. When there were problems and divisions, people came together and sometimes called in church leaders to sort things out.

The epistles weren’t meant in most cases to set down ironclad rules but to keep things from breaking down into petty divisions and squabbling and incorrect (or even blasephemous) teachings.

Where we got rigidity, and lots of bureaucracy, and tons of rules and levels of access to the sources of knowledge was largely when Christianity turned into Rome’s state religion. When an emperor turned it from Christians churches forming a body of Christ, into A CHURCH, of which each person was going to be a cog. It went from something organic to being a machine.

And machines are known for being soulless.

If people spent more time meditating on the gospels and on Jesus’ words, and seeing how they tie into the Old Testament and how they simplify and elevate those “old time” laws and rules into something more precious and God-connecting, we’d be better off. Instead, we have many church leaders who want to make, spout and enforce rules, and many churchgoers who are all too happy to just nod and say, “OK.”

Jesus railed about following the letter of the law instead of the spirit of it. And yet we go and bind outselves right up in it again. And bind ourselves tighter and tighter. The epistles have a lot to offer in terms of guidance and clarification, but it is to Jesus whom we should look first, as Christians.

Christianity is alive and well, in those who will study the Word and try to be open to the Holy spirit. Among those who simply want to lead or to be led, there is a sickness, but that is a sickness of people, NOT of the gospel of Christ.