I guess if the first one was really all inclusive then there wouldn't be a need for a second one but... well... I'm not perfect. Give me a fucking break. Jesus.
Sleep over at my house tonight. Woot Woot!
I like sleep overs. Not just because I get laid, actually I think I could survive without the sex tonight, I miss the sleeping together part. (Who the fuck am I kidding? I'm GETTING LAID!!! Woohoo! And I'm pretty sure I'm done my period!!!)
This coffee sucks. I stopped at 7 Virtues on my way up to the T's house to get some coffee and it tastes... like ass. At least I remembered the name this time. I've gotten this stuff before but I couldn't remember the name of it so I didn't know to avoid it.
Getting back on track...
- Tidy up my room at Lesley's room.
- Return w4's to work.
- Get gas.
- Make cd of photo's for Nate. (He responded to a photo I sent him... baby steps)
- Go to post-office - Pray ipod is there - Rock out accordingly when it is.
- Make Zucchini Cake with Little T.
- Play cribbage with Little T.
- Enjoy adult time with the T.
- Pay Lane Bryant, At&t, Mah.
- Order more checks.
- Get Oregon License.
Jesus, I just got lost on the DMV website. That thing is intense.
There's more todo but I'm not gonna do it all so who really cares if I actually list it out?
Another reason Obama's proposals make more sense than McCain's. Obama's plan costs roughly the same as McCain's yet will insure 17 million more people than McCain's by 2009 and over 30 million more people by 2018.
From Washington Post:
Americans are struggling to pay medical bills and are accumulating medical debt at an increasing rate, according to a survey released today.
"A perfect storm of negative economic trends is battering working families across the United States," said the survey by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports independent research on health care.
"Health-care costs are climbing much more rapidly than incomes or the growth in the overall economy," said Sara R. Collins, assistant vice president of the foundation and one of the authors of the study. As gas and food prices have soared and real estate values have fallen, the federal minimum wage is now $3 an hour lower, in real terms, than it was 40 years ago, the study said.
"What is notable is how these problems are spreading up the income scale," Collins said.
Two-thirds of the working-age population was uninsured, underinsured, reported a medical bill problem or did not get needed health care because of cost in 2007.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/19/AR2008081902638.html
My brother's pastor has been going through some rough times. His wife recently gave birth to their first child, which had to be in the ICU for a couple of weeks. Life, the child's name, had bleeding in her brain and for a while her parents thought she wasn't going to make it. I'm not close to my brother's pastor, but I have met him a couple of times and I can honestly say he is a nice guy. I can't imagine what him and his wife have being going through. Luckily, it seems that Life is doing much better.
The pastor and his wife have a blog that they update quite frequently. Lately, they have been blogging about Life and the situation they have been going through. I couldn't sleep last night, so I decided to check their blog, which I rarely do. After looking at some pictures, I found a post that was a prime example of what I completely disagree with: the rationalization of suffering and pain. This post was written by the pastor.
He first starts out by saying that God has lead him and his wife down a path the last few weeks. He juxtaposes two paths: the good path, which leads to a health baby, and the bad path, which leads to complications with the baby's health, possibly resulting in the baby's death.
He continues by saying:
Pain is real. I know the other path presents great pain, much greater than we experienced. But I also know that God resurrects pain into something beautiful. When Jesus was resurrected, his resurrected body, which is the prototype for the rest of creation, had nail scars in it. God saw fit to resurrect a disgusting moment of pain into his new creation, making it unspeakably beautiful. If God gave you the other path, believe that God will resurrect your pain. It is real. It hurts. But I believe the degree to which we experience pain is the degree to which we will experience joy when the Day comes (and, my friends, the Day has already dawned).
I think you can already see my objections with his thoughts. First of all, and this is something that I've never really understood, how is it that Jesus, who is supposed to be both fully God and fully human, felt pain during his crucifixion? And if he felt some sort of "pain," I don't think it would exactly equate to human suffering. For some reason, I think God's "suffering" and human suffering are quite different. My main objection to the above excerpt is the rationalization of pain and suffering to some afterlife or future event. The mentality is that all this pain and suffering must to lead to some sort of happiness later on. Instead of trying to accept this pain and suffering now, the notion of some future event or afterlife is used as a beacon of hope, which I find to be false. But, he is only doing what Christianity teaches...
He goes on to say that "God entered into the depths of our pain, and He did it in the form of a Jewish peasant. As a matter of fact, He took all the pain of all the world for all time, took it upon his back, bore it's weigh, allowed it to do it's worst to Him. He absorbed it, defeated it, and triumphed over it. God stands beside us in our pain, not above us." Are we not talking about God here? Honestly, isn't God suppose to defeat and triumph over pain and death? I don't see how this is amazing in any way. We are talking about God here!
He ends his post by basically saying the antithesis of what I think: "It is good to feel pain, hate sin, hate death, look to God, hope in His resurrection, long for it, and work for it in the here and now." At least he acknowledges the "here and now." Nevertheless, his belief in rationalizing pain and suffering to God overrides his "here and now" mentality. Because what he is essentially saying is: Work here and now for the benefits after death. This isn't a true "here and now" mentality. It is a "here and now" mentality with the focus on something other than the "here and now."
Death (n.) The state of having your whole life spiraled down the garbage disposal.
My aunt May died at 45.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age.
How do you deliver news of death?
You can't write a letter in such circumstances.
It should be told face to face.
The brunt of total news is too much for one light-weight paper to bear up.
Still, how do you do that??
Do you blurt out one loaded sentence?
or
first roll a long talked mattress, then hit people with the facts, making their fall safer?
I say do the second option because the first ..well, just take it from me.
I tried the first for you. Not so great.
Sometimes things of magnitude settle over us with excruciating slowness.
That's how my dad's mind processes these things.
Being of an unusual bent, he ran around the funeral with a camera and took pictures.
Everybody commented that they'd never seen that before but I understood him.
He needed something to do, something for his mind to fidget with,
and analyzing the play of light and shadow distracted him enough to get through the ceremony.
There really wasn't any ceremony, though.
Nobody in my father's family is religious, most are atheists,
and my aunt hadn't set foot in a church since she got married 10 years ago.
But it annoyed the hell out of the funeral director.
It violated his sense of propriety to have a viewing and then a graveside service
without begging God for some sort of favor.
He pushed a couple prayers on us, and we all mumbled along with a couple words.
The family is so not religious that we don't even know the lord's prayer.
I found that amusing, and had to remind myself not to smirk.
I concentrated on my feet touching down on the hard-caked dirt,
exposed tree roots,
how the earth felt beneath me,
solid,
alive,
ancient,
right there every time my foot came down.
There & there & there, always there.
Exactly like how my aunt's been with everybody.
I've seen dead people before but my aunt was different.
The way she looked, you have to think about multiple car pile-ups.
Imagine two bloodmobiles colliding head on.
Think of spoiled cat food, ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs.
That was how beautiful she looked.
She was so small and light, like she was filled with straw.
A stuffed dummy version of my aunt.
As I was clenching my teeth, trying to keep myself from crying
I remembered something she said a few years earlier.
She'd said she wanted clowns serving at an open bar in her funeral.
"I want all my guests fucked up beyond repair.
Don't fucking cry at my funeral, it should be a fucking party."
I got up and drove my ass back home.
There was no way I could have made it through the whole thing.
To hang on from day to day
& from week to week,
spinning out a present that has no future,
seems an unconquerable instinct,
just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath
as long as there is air available.
I learned to make things not matter,
to put a seal on my hopes
& place them on a high shelf,
out of reach.
And by telling myself
there is nothing inside those hopes anyway,
I avoid the wounds of deep disappointment.
When I wake up
I instantly regret it.
Hangovers I've had,
but never anything on this scale.
Being for the moment unwilling to move
on account of a dull stomping throb
I lay a while and think.
My need to get fucked up has grown exponentially.
It has grown to the point
that it is no longer a thought
& it has grown to the point
that I don't have any thoughts.
Just a base instinct.
A heady,
insuperable longing
to
fall.
My drugs ran out.
Speed's breathtaking high
is followed by a crushing,
suicidal depression.
I once made a girl snort a line off my dick.
It felt like being in a happy dream
It felt like being in heaven.
Fear's dryness burns my throat
and I wonder,
"Wasn't the pain of the past better than this one?"
Cold fingers mark that dying wreck of mine
as my breaths come out as white clouds.
Devious moments,
candlelight snuffed
and emptiness follows by my wake.
No one knows
or understands what I'm thinking of
& all I feel
is that I'm an unknown being
lost in a perfection
that belongs to everyone
and is not owned by a soul.
But I don't care.
I've become a God.
In a world
where everybody is waiting
for some blind random disaster
or some sudden disease,
I have the comfort of knowing
what will most likely wait for me down the road.
I can go without feeling anything
except
drunk
or
stoned
or
thirsty.
& when I compare this
to other feelings,
to sadness,
anger,
fear,
worry,
despair,
& depression,
well, it no longer looks so bad.
Words can take the air out of my lungs
and all of a sudden
that inspiration
is lying dead on my bedroom floor
What I yearn for vaguely
but with all my might,
is unbounded music,
absolute sound,
a pleasant and a happy,
all-encompassing,
over-powering,
window-rattling din
to engulf,
once and for all,
the pain,
the futility,
the vanity of words....
So used to my niche
as a leech
waiting
and pining
for some warm blood
& a steady breath
to suck the emotions out of life
because what I've become
is not who I really am
& these words
are not an exit
but merely an amplification
of self-indulgence
to try and cast a shadow over the fact
that I've dug this hole for myself
& only I
must acquire the strength
to crawl myself out.
Instead I go further
down
in a slow burn,
to a soft fizzle trailing smoke
in spirals of
anticipation
&
disappointment
but
never
fulfillment....
Updates: she is gone.
No more feeling guilty over her misplaced love.
R.I.P aunt May.
There was a recent study conducted to find out if those exposed to the 1918 pandemic flu still possessed antibodies, even at extreme old age.
Scientists tested the blood of 32 people aged 92 to 102 who were exposed to the 1918 pandemic flu and found antibodies that still roam the body looking to strangle the old flu strain. Researchers manipulated those antibodies into a vaccine and found that it kept alive all the mice they had injected with the killer flu, according to a study published online Sunday in the journal Nature.
Although it seems logical that there would still be antibodies produced by these individuals, what intrigued me was the response of one of the authors of the study:
"It's incredible. The Lord has blessed us with antibodies our whole lifetime," said study co-author Dr. Eric Altschuler at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey. "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger."
The Lord. Interesting.
Interesting how those who survived the pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide are some how blessed by the Lord. I guess the poor saps who didn't live up to evolutionary standards of the day were some how cursed by the Lord?
I always find this sort of logic vexing. It is like the athletes who win a game and thank God because he some how granted them the power for victory. It is as if God didn't want the other team to have any happiness. Maybe he should have just given them a cold instead to prove their unworthiness...
So if God is everything... Then he gave us the Spanish flu of 1918. Killed millions. And those he spared -- well -- they were blessed. And his presence, in the form of IgG, still blesses today.
What nonsense.
Kierkegaard and the later existentialists and theologians who have followed in his steps direct our attention to the limits of reason. But they overlook the crucial difference between responsible and irresponsible decisions. There are situations in our lives when all the reasoning of the world cannot tell us what to do. We reason one way and another, and we weigh the interests of all the people who are likely to be affected by this decision or that, and we still do not know what to do. Should we conclude then that all deliberation is a waste of time, and always beside the point, and that it would be just as well to throw a coin, to count our buttons, or to act on impulse? The person who does that acts irresponsibly, even if by sheer luck he should do something that turns out well. The person, on the other hand, who does reflect on the probable effects of his decisions on the people who are likely to be affected, who relies on reason and on evidence, if only to eliminate some choices, acts responsibly even if he later finds that he has done the wrong thing.
The whole point of an education, and not only of philosophy, is to make people more responsible. One cannot teach one's students, nor even oneself, always to do what is best; but one can try to teach oneself and others to become a little less impulsive and irrational and more conscientious and responsible. Nobody favors always acting with an utter disregard for evidence and reason; but some people admonish us to throw both to the winds when it comes to the most important choices which is rather like being very careful when walking, but shutting both eyes firmly when one drives at high speeds; or like choosing one's dinner guests carefully, while picking the name of one's bride-to-be out of a hat; or like playing cards with great care but also being addicted to playing Chinese roulette a new game that consists of pointing a revolver now in this direction and now in that, spinning the chamber and pulling the trigger, knowing that there is one dud in the chamber and hoping for the best.
-Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic
While reading the first hundred pages of The Faith of Heretic, I came upon Kaufmann's criticism of Kierkegaard. Kaufmann highly respects Kierkegaard but finds that Kierkegaard's disregard for philosophy and reason are nonsensical. Kaufmann claims that this perspective leads Kierkegaard to say that philosophy and reason should "take nothing away and least of all should fool people out of something as if it were nothing" (Fear and Trembling, 44). In contradiction with Kierkegaard, Kaufmann thinks that the function of philosophy is "to fool people out of something
as if it were nothing."
Kaufmann goes on to say:
Kaufmann essentially concludes that Kierkegaard's philosophy leads to fantasicism: "the attitude ofThough the majority of those who during their student days have been exposed briefly to philosophy have never felt its bite and therefore do not take it very seriously, Kierkegaard was not one of those. To him, philosophy appeared as a great threat, critical thinking as insubordination, and reason as the enemy. Objections to Christianity, he says, do not issue from doubt, as many people think. "Objections against Christianity come from insubordination, unwillingness to obey, rebellion against all authority" (Journals 630). What is wanted is blind obedience, acceptance of what seems absurd to our reason, and belief without any chance of comprehension. "The misfortune of our age in the political as well as in the religious sphere, and in all things is disobedience, unwillingness to obey. And one deceives oneself and others by wishing to make us imagine that it is doubt. No, it is insubordination."
those who willingly suffer everything for their unquestioned faith, and who obediently commit atrocities for it, too."
This is definitely a different type of take on Kierkegaard, at least for me. I'm used to people telling me what is great about Kierkegaard: his individualism, his passion towards life, and his love of experience. Nevertheless, like any philosopher, he has his flaws, which I have never been exposed to. I think Kaufmann makes some excellent points, one if which I particuarly enjoy.
It is known that Kierkegaard stresses the subjective over the objective. Philosophy and reason seem to get in the way of the subjective, thus Kierkegaard despised, according to Kaufmann, philosophy and reason. I have a problem when one finds subjective truth that one can live and die for in something that couldn't be further from being objective. This isn't to say that we should all have the same exact truth, but I think it is imperative that objectivity plays an important role in what one finds as subjective truth. If objectivity does not play a role in subjective truth, then the quote of Kierkegaard at the beginning of this blog post can look very, very dangerous. The roles of philosophy and reason are not only to prevent us from have fanatical mentalities, but also to determine truth that is not worth living or dying for. As Kaufmann puts it: "What he, like millions of others, over looked is a very simple but important point: reason and philosophy may well safeguard a man against ideas for which he might better not live or die. Indeed, if reason and philosophy had no other function whatsoever, this alone would make them overwhelmingly important. But Kierkegaard, and by no means only he, defiantly abandons reason in his eager search for a commitment, and sanctions atrocities beyond his own imagination."
It's been fucking insanely hot this week. Okay so not really that hot but hot for this area. I like the heat, it's nice and good and wonderful as long as I don't have to actually do anything. If I can sit around all day doing nothing or just go to the beach then it's a wonderful thing.
Unfortunately life isn't like that, so more often than not when it's hot it's just uncomfortable.
Today, is rainy.
According to the Radio it's going to be rainy and stormy all week. Thundershowers type stormy.
I can't say I'm bothered by this.
I fucking love thundershowers. They're one of the greatest weather things ever. Rainy days are good for being lazy. The best thing to do on a rainy day is cuddle up in bed with that special someone and just veg all day. That sounds glorious. Though, totally not going to happen but I could wake the kid up and make him go watch movies with me in the magical bed. Somehow, it's not quite the same. :-)
Speaking of Little T. What the fuck? He's still passed out. He's NEVER slept this late. I was actually a little bit worried about him because of this I thought about checking to see if he was breathing but he's moved a bit so I wont go in there armed with a mirror to hold under his nose. It's very weird though.
I totally forgot my cds. I got a spindle of CD-R's so I could make some more work cd's and I could burn all the pictures from Nates vacation to cd for him. (Still haven't heard from him.) But I fucking forgot the fuckers on my ironing board. Oh well, I can at least get shit ready to burn that way when I have them tomorrow I wont have to fuck around with that.
Ohh shit. I should go google home made claydough while I'm thinking of it.
Little T is awake. I can see him sitting up in bed looking out the window. I used to do that when I was a kid on rainy days wake up and just stare out the window before admitting to the world I was awake. I also used to do it here when the T would get up before me. But that was usually to shoot very mean glares to the construction workers who were being so fucking loud they woke me up. Bastards.
Show us what gets you up in the morning.
