Confessions of a Shiftless Mind

I don’t know if I have been this tired since the grad party, 1992.

That night, we stayed up all night. Strangely, today is the first time I have thought about that night in years.

A friend sent me a link from youtube to some idiots with dry ice. It reminded me of that night. We put a pop can in the fire at about 2 am. It blew up at 3am, throwing 2 pound logs 30 feet away from the fire, but miraculously not hitting any of us.

By daylight, I volunteered to drive a couple of my friends home, to the city, about 40 minutes’ drive. After dropping them off, on the highway back home, I literally nodded off about 3 times. It scared the crap out of me.

I am that tired today. Didn’t get to sleep until 2:30am and I was up at 5am for work.

At least I didn’t nod off driving in to work.

Trying to do my job is a challenge when you’re thinking through pudding.

I’m not even hungry I am so tired.

This isn’t good.

I miss books.

I used to read all the time.

I used to read while walking, while riding bikes, buses, while riding in cars, all kinds of hazardous bidness. But it was good to climb mountains, to explore untracked vastness, to ride along unobserved on epic quests and adventures, and escape from life for a while.

Then I had kids. Now I take them on mountain climbs, explore untracked vastness (to them), and make up our own epic quests and adventures.

I still would like to read. Now my books collect dust and the only battle I wage with them is to defend them from my wife who thinks they clutter up the perfection of her decorating taste. She is right, I must admit.

But my books mean so much to me. She can’t ask me to throw away the chronicle of my childhood and youth can she? Can she?

So today I came across bookcrossing.com. They are a website central control for perhaps the largest book club in the world. Based on a premise similar to geocaching and phototag.org, where things are released and shared by strangers, this is about sharing books. Instead of cluttering up shelf space, unread, they can be free to entertain the world.

It seems like a very open source concept. Kind of like file sharing and mp3s. Except it is your book. You aren’t copying it. You are just allowing one other person to enjoy it at a time.

I like it. I have a box of books I was going to take to a 2nd hand store, but maybe I will just free them.

Sounds like fun.

If you go there, refer me. my userid is mrcheevus.

It is seldom that I get really ticked off with a product or service. This company, Tagged.com, has managed to do it.

I had received a few of these invitations recently, from people of casual acquaintance. I ignored them, despite their plea for someone who evidently “needs” friends. Then I received one from someone I have known for a while, and I wanted to get back in touch with. Against my better judgement, I followed the link.

It took some generic contact details from me, then informed me who else in my email list is also a member. I figured, sure, I will add them to the set, since they are already involved. But one thing I did NOT want to do was spam all my friends - I KNOW who my friends are and I don’t need a stupid internet network to tell me who they are. I hit send…

Then I scrolled down as I waited for the next page to load.

And discovered it had not just flagged the people in the system but flagged EVERY SINGLE PERSON I HAVE EVER EMAILED for an invitation to this stupid network!

I had messages going out to customer service departments of a dozen companies, billing companies, former clients, casual acquaintances, my PASTOR, my professors! I tried to cancel it, but it was too late.

For the next two days I spent my email time replying to all my friends who were ticked off at me for sending them this spam. And explaining myself to countless people who hardly knew me, wondering why I was being such a twit as to beg them to call themselves my friend.

Then the 2nd round started.

Tagged.com RE-EMAILED everyone after 3 days! Begging them again! My gosh! How pathetic is this thing?

I logged into my account and scoured it, to find out how to turn off these stupid spam messages. There was no way. I closed my account and told Tagged.com EXACTLY what I thought of this system.

Avoid Tagged.com at all costs. Reply directly to any of your friends who send this to you, telling them yes, you are their friend, but no you will not join any spamming network to prove it.

Sometimes I hate the internet.

My apologies to anyone who reads this blog who received one of these. Now you know the full reason why.

There is so much I really dislike about Catholic theology. Maybe it is simply the gross numbers of them though that give rise to really good, thought-provoking pieces.

Like this one, on cousins, and how important they are, and how dark our future looks as there gets to be fewer and fewer of them. It reads much like an apologetic for large families, but dang, I am sympathetic that way anyway. (And if any of you spout off about overpopulation, get a grip and look at the sobering birthrate statistics around the world today. They are plummeting in ALL countries, EVEN the 3rd World. Western Nations have such low birthrates that the only thing keeping their social systems from shattering right now is MASSIVE immigration, and that will tail off as the source countries are visited by the “modern blessings” of abortion on demand and widespread birth control.)

I can’t say enough about how grateful I am to have a large number of aunts, uncles and cousins in my family. I don’t spend nearly enough time with them in recent years (in my childhood I would see them all at least once a year) but when I do, I feel at home. Family is fantastic, there is nothing like it. I know I can count on them if I ever need them, and I hope they know they can count on me.

And by the way, kids are a blessing. Period. Visit an old folks home some time, go ask those who never had kids if they regret it now. You won’t get a one that says they don’t.

Owtch. Hat tip to Pursuing Holiness.

That is the most powerful contrast between the man seeking Godly purity and the man unabashedly steeped in pornography. The former is my goal. The latter I came all too close to, and am grateful for God’s grace in saving me from. May He preserve you from that fate as well.

Everyone needs to see this film by the BBC. With all the hype going on, all the manipulation, we need to understand that global warming is not nearly as “factual” as we have been told. Last I checked, the BBC is not in the pay of “Big Oil”. Nor are they suckers. Time to think again.

The other day at work, I listened to two hardened leftists, liberals, Vancouverites talk about recent speculation out of the States that Rudy Guiliani’s presidential campaign is going to off the rails after some prominent Evangelicals commented on the circumstances of Mr. Guiliani’s past divorce flies in the face of all that is holy (my words, not theirs, exaggerated for effect). There was talk that the result of this would be that the religious right which saw Bush into the White House for 8 years would abandon perhaps the most electable candidate the GOP has yet fielded.

The two gentlemen both expressed joy at the thought that the Republicans would have a much less chance of winning the next presidential election with such a high profile and popular candidate knocked out. I felt compelled to speak up at this point, and explain to them that the words of a couple of loudmouths are not going to result in a mass exodus of support. Christian supporters of the GOP are not going to abandon the party because Guilani didn’t follow the Biblically prescribed reasons for divorce - heck, the divorce rate amongst Christians is still virtually identical to that of non-Christians! They didn’t believe me.

I was just reading over at Jollyblogger about a link posted by the Internet Monk to an atheist’s comment about what he experienced after having visited 30 some churches. He found that of these churches, all he found was an orientation of confrontation - that there is an “us against the eeevil world” mentality that is pervading in Christian churches. The fact of this trend is a major problem, because the atheist rightly points out that it means the church is turning away from the message of Christ. Jolly makes a good point that yes, the message of love that the atheist does not find but expects is not really the message of Christ, but it is the method of communicating the true message of redemption.

What does this have to do with presidential politics and a couple of my co-workers? It is about perception. The reason my co-workers thought that the Guiliani divorce would sink his chances at the presidency was because they think that the religious right is a monstrous force in American politics, and its sole motivation is to judge and condemn all the unrighteous and force America (and the world by extension) to conform to their onerous morality.

They may be right. Continue Reading »