Merry Christmas, Everybody!

We got up. We opened presents. The living room is a wreck.

The cats got new toys. They are happy.

Grayson with his new scratching toy.

Artemis with her new brush and catnip mousie.

Time for the humans to kick back and read some new books.

Cheers and Happy New Year!

Reintarnation, or, Coming Back To Life As A Hillbilly.

I found this painting while looking for "images of reincarnation."  Two things
immediately jump out; why are they all men? And why
 is a cow further along than a horse?

I've been a Buddhist for a while now, and while I didn't grow up in that culture and didn't ever go to Buddhist Sunday School, I've come to have my own opinions about things Buddhist-y, and maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong. (And maybe we won't ever know until we get to the other side, and maybe not even then, because what if there is no other side?)  For example, meditation: Meditation is cool.  Meditation is great for your brain, makes you feel good and helps you be nicer to other people, which is also cool.  Furthermore, there is scientific proof that if you meditate an hour a day for a year, your blood pressure will drop, your heart rate will slow, and all kinds of other good things will happen to your body.  So meditation is cool.  That is my opinion, backed up by some science.

And here's my opinion about reincarnation, backed up by nothing in particular: I think Buddhism has the whole notion of reincarnation ever so slightly wrong.

I mean, the standard narrative is that being born a human is lucky, because it gives you a chance to work on your issues and become a better being overall.  (Humans, as far as we know, are among the very few self-aware beings out there; there's some evidence that chimpanzees, some other primates, octopuses and dolphins are self-aware and may even Ask the Big Questions, but it's really impossible to know for sure because we can't communicate with them very well.  For further exploration of this notion, check out Jonathan Livingston Seagull.)  If you're a good human, you're supposed to come back in the next life as a better human (meaning a better rank and position in society, or you'll have an easier life next time, or something like that).  If you're not, you'll come back as a bug, or a snail, or maybe a samurai.  (That's a Japanese take on the subject, anyway; a samurai is maybe the worst thing to be born as, because A. you know that killing a human being is the worst thing you can do, and B. you have to do it for a living.)  I mean, if you need to have a system where the good get rewarded and the bad get punished, and you don't have a hell and a heaven to conveniently provide those things, you have to come up with something. Coming back as a bug/a higher ranking member of society sort of works. Sort of. But I don't think that's the deal.

Recently, because of some of my reading on how brains work and the nature of consciousness generally, I've come to believe that consciousness in general is kind of like soup.  There's a big pot of consciousness percolating somewhere, and every time a living being is born, a ladle of soup gets poured into them, from human babies all the way down to microcelled organisms.  Consciousness, anyway, doesn't seem to be a thing we're born with; it's a thing we receive from somewhere.  Our brains are even filled with tiny receptive structures called microtubules to do this receiving, at least according to some scientists. When you die, your consciousness, and all its memories and dreams and so on, gets poured back into the soup. 

This is why I think the Buddhist view of reincarnation can't be right.  Firstly, Buddhists are not very convinced that that there's an "I" in each person that's transferred smoothly from one body to the next. In fact, a lot of Buddhists believe that the "I" is an illusion, and when we achieve enlightenment, what we realize is that there is no "I". Just "we." So if we're all "we", what's there to be transferred from one body to the next?  Nothing. It's an illusion. 

Secondly, back to the soup.  A lot of people, especially as young children, have memories of past lives. (I do.  You might or might not.)  If there's no "I" going from one body to the next, how can people have memories of past lives?  Well, if consciousness is soup, we're all everybody.  In fact, we're all every being that has ever been, every being that is and every being that will be, because our consciousness all comes from the soup.  Lots of people have claimed that they used to be Napoleon, or some other famous person from the past, in a previous life. If we're all soup, then they're all right.  We have memories from each other, and somebody like Napoleon would necessarily have really vibrant ones (given how many lives he affected, and ended).  So a lot of people would remember them.  Comparatively fewer would remember being a housewife in the 1400s, a journalist in the 1870s or a crafty trilobite in the Pleistocine.  It just wouldn't have been as vibrant, even if you were a darn fine trilobite with sharp black eyes and a penchant for dodging incoming meteorites. 

In case you're wondering, I'm gonna keep my past-life stuff to myself, but I will tell you this; I was usually a guy.  In fact, I'm not sure I've ever been a woman before, which would explain why I suck at it.

If the idea of a collective memory is giving you the heebie jeebies, though, ponder this: Who ladles out the soup?  Yes, the notion of a higher power of some kind still has room to exist in the Soup Theory of Consciousness.  I just don't think it makes sense that we pass fully intact from one living being to the next.  I mean, shouldn't something happen in between?  Shouldn't there be some learning, or something? Like some sort of space to say, "Okay, I really screwed up there, but I did something pretty good right here."  So you might say that being good, in life, means coming up with good things to add to the soup.  The more good things you do for other beings, the better your addition to the soup, and then the whole soup will be slightly better, like if you sprinkled in just a little bit of Penzey's 4S Special Seasoning Salt. 

But regardless of whether I'm right or wrong about reincarnation, we could all stand to be a little nicer to each other.  And in any religion, isn't that the point?

50 + 60 + 20 = A Lot

So before those 10 tornadoes ripped through Dallas and caused a lot of fuss and bother, but after the microburst exploded out of the sky a few days before my birthday, my immediate fam made one of its occasional pilgrimages to town.  Here's Kristen in full Hook Em Horns regalia for the Big Game at the Cotton Bowl:

(Disclaimer: We didn't actually go to the big game at the Cotton Bowl - I think it sold out about five years ago and scalper's tickets probably cost more than a new Lambourghini - but the spirit was there.)

Here is a manatee that we saw at the Dallas World Aquarium:

And my mom and dad, being silly outside of an ice cream store:

All very cool, but guess what else happened. My family threw Joan and I a party at Afrah, our favorite restaurant! The occasion:  Joan's big "zero" birthday, and my big "zero" birthday, had both gone by while we were dealing with traumatic weather events, serious illness, maraudering meerkats and stranger things.  Not to mention it was our twentieth anniversary (!), which had just sort of passed us by.  

 

Yeah, there are those big "zero" numbers. Hey, none of us are immune from the passing of time.

And here we are.  I think we look pretty good for being "zero" years old, don't you?

Card featuring singing cats in space. Because why not.

What I wish I had more pictures of were the people, because that was the best part!  Good friends showed up from around corners and direct from zoo management offices, and brought good cheer and silly cards.  My dad made this great speech, which I tried and failed to upload to this blog (I think it's too big but I'll keep working on it).  Unfortunately I have never been photographically inclined, or rather, I once was but I peaked when I was around 14.  I borrowed all these pics from Kristen.  Anyway, thanks, everybody, for turning out for this event and helping us eat the mountains of food that Afrah served up. They did a great job!  Seriously, I think we sent leftovers home with everybody and there was still cake left.  

Tornado Traffic

My pool has been closed for repairs. This is annoying, because I've just now been starting to feel better.  I always, always go back to the pool at least two days before I actually should.  It's some kind of weird quirk. And here I am, actually feeling healthy enough to go to the pool, and I don't have a pool to go to.  No word on when it'll be opening back up, either, or even what's wrong with it.  This kind of midyear closure is pretty unusual, so it must be something serious.  Sometimes they close up for a week or so to give it a drain and a good scrubdown, but there are always signs up for weeks and the swim team arranges for extra practices and everyone just kind of takes it in stride.  Not so this time. We got a text message on our phones that the pool was closed, and then there's been like one text message a day since then, letting us know that yes, it is still closed.  The mind boggles. Maybe they found an octopus living in there or something.  

So I've been swimming in the evening, after work, at SMU's amazing pool.  This pool is the size of a small city.  50 meters long, 25 meters across with a 17 foot diving well and the minimum depth is 7 feet.  It's also cold as all get-out (well, it's probably hard to heat that much water).  The first time I was there, I jumped off the side and darn near drowned (that gasp reflex when you jump into cold water).  So now my brain won't let me jump in.  I get to the side and it just goes, "Nope."  I have to climb down the ladder, like a little kid.  But hey, I get to swim.  

And how do I get to the pool, you might ask.  Especially as I have to pick up Joan from work, you might ask.  Well, she comes with me. She sits in the lobby (it's a nice lobby) and does cross stitch while I do battle with cold water and 8 50s in 1 minute 30.  People, I may not have the nicest house, and I may not have the nicest car, but I have the nicest wife on the planet.  Not many people would consent to sitting in the lobby for an hour and a half after a long day at work (and before dinner) just so their significant sweetie can splash around in cold water.  

I was gonna write this cool thing about how your actions influence others even when you don't know it, and so it's important to be nice, but the situation deteriorated before I could finish the blog post again.  On the last day of the American League championship series, which is much more important than the day of the week or even the date of the month, a tornado ripped through Dallas.

Actually, there were ten (!) of them, according to the people that keep track of these things.  They started off over near Love Field and came to their disorganized end somewhere near my office, leaving in their wake mangled road signs, a collapsed Home Depot, lots of downed trees and such, and monks with chainsaws. I'll get back to that in a second.

Joan and I were watching the game, as we're wont to do this time of the year, when a siren went off.  It was not the usual siren, which is to say, the one we're used to hearing when there are tornadoes; this was a high, sharp, annoying buzz like those signals they use on TV as a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.  It was our cell phones.  We both have them set to get emergency alerts, which means every time two drops of water fall in Dallas, they go off (because it might possibly flood, you see).   And of course we get Amber Alerts and such, and so they're kind of handy to have, just in case some kidnapped child passes me on the freeway in a vehicle and I happen to be close enough to read the offending vehicle's license plate. But this was the first time they've ever gone off and said,"Tornado Warning." 

So I asked Joan, "That's the bad one, right? The one we don't like?" (I sometimes get confused between watches and warnings.)  She allowed that it was, and we were both a little puzzled because as far as we knew, there wasn't a cloud in the sky (though we wouldn't know, because it was dark).  We stood there for a second, trying to hear the sirens, and then we pushed the office chairs into the hallway and closed all the interior doors and sat there with our cell phones while confused cats, who couldn't figure out why they were blocked off from part of the house, milled around and looked at us like we were crazy.

One of the beautiful things about the modern age is the ability to immediately see whatever disaster is about to break right over your head with help from GPS and the National Weather Service.  We had this lovely map, with big blops of red and purple on it, mapping out the tornado (es) (which were clearly visible because they were round, and also where they were on the map, there was just nothing there; a black spot, a void).   And the big red and purple spot was, as they often are, headed straight for us.  

This took us a little while to figure out. Joan kept saying, "Is that where we are?", pointing to a section of map, and I'd say, "No, lower than that."  "Well, how about there?"  pointing to a different map. "No, higher than that."  (These maps are great at showing vicious, angry weather but not as good at telling you where the streets are; they sometimes have helpful dots that say things like "Garland" and "Dallas").  Anyway, wherever we looked, there were the big swirly voids.  And yes, they did look like they were headed right for us.  

So we sat there, and we wondered if our 69-year-old sheetrock was strong enough to fend off blown branches and pieces of somebody's fence.  And we wondered if we were going to get sucked off the ground, though really, that hardly ever happens. And we both listened very intently for a freight train, but if there was one, it was drowned out by the tornado sirens, which had finally started to sound. Our phones beat them by a good five minutes, which is a little worrisome. What happens if you don't have a phone in a tornado?

Anyway, after a while the swirly voids on the radar map started to move to the north. They were still, of course, headed right for us, but maybe less right for us.  Now they looked more like they were headed toward my office.  Which wasn't good either, because, you know, having a job is a good thing and if the firm suffered a direct hit from a tornado I'd definitely be unemployed for a while, but I'll take unemployment over a big swirly void parking directly above me on the NWC map, I can tell you.  

Well, obviously we are okay.  The tornado warning was canceled, and we crept out of the hallway to see what had happened.  Answer:  Essentially nothing.  There were no branches down.  There were no roofs lying in the middle of the street.  There were no damaged road signs.  There were no rain puddles, even.  (Well, maybe a few small ones.)  Somehow, our little piece of trendy Gaston Park had completely escaped notice from our local swirly void.  What's more, nobody had been killed, or even badly hurt (I think three people went to the hospital with minor injuries).  That's really not bad for ten tornadoes hitting a major metropolitan area on a Sunday night.  

Well, it wasn't all cheery.  I have a friend who has a restaurant, Arepa, and it took a direct hit from whatever roared up Preston Road at Royal.  She's going to have to close for a couple of months.  One of our favorite bookstores, Interabang, is also out of commission and probably for the same amount of time.  My boss's roof, part of it, is still in his swimming pool, and he didn't have electricity for, like, a week.  (That's got to be fun with three young kids.)  Our friends Kellum and Suzie were right under one of the big swirly voids and they lost a couple of trees.  But no damage to the house.  And again, nobody seriously hurt or killed.

Traffic has been a consummate nightmare since then.  I drop Joan off downtown, then go north to Richardson, which is right where most of the tornado damage was.  Streets are closed at random, emergency personnel are running around with live wires and you don't want to be anywhere near the freeway because it's at a standstill.  Monday it took me an hour and fifteen minutes to make the 20 minute drive. Yesterday it took an hour and ten. Today it took 55 minutes. So there's hope.  And some of this may just be Dallas, not tornado traffic at all.  Hey, we had 100,000 people move here in 2016.  That's a lot of humans and cars to cram onto your average six-lane freeway.  

Oh yeah.  Back to the monks with chainsaws.  The Thai Buddhist temple suffered significant damage, and on one of my sojourns north to my place of employ, I went right by it.  Running around in the yard, cutting trees and moving large pieces of debris, were monks with chainsaws. And not one or two. This was about twenty monks, wearing monks' robes, running around with chainsaws. I mean it was like a mashup of a horror movie and a really weird Broadway musical.  I wish I had a picture, because it's really hard to explain how completely surreal this was.  Monks with chainsaws. Truly, I was amazed.

Anyway, if you want to send a donation to the Buddhist temple, they could really use it right now.  The Buddhist Temple of Dallas, 8484 Stultz Road, Dallas, TX 75243.  I'd direct you to their Web site, but it's in Thai, and I don't know which of the ten major dialects of Thai it's in because I, uh, can't read Thai.  (I did, however, have to find a Thai interpreter once, which is how I know there are ten major dialects.)  Stay safe and avoid tornadoes, kids.  Cheers.

Tweet That Closing Argument!

In retrospect, it occurs to me that normal people probably do not try to cram all 13 required annual CLE hours into their heads in a 2 1/2 day conference. But then, I've never been a normal person. Besides, I had plenty of company; there were over a hundred of us running around, trying to choke down as much information as possible.  Joan came with me, and while she relaxed and visited friends I--choked down information. 

What made it easier was that I had a snazzy new tablet for recording important information. Well, we have a snazzy new tablet; I acknowledge only partial ownership of this tablet.  The rest of it belongs to Joan.  I was forced to buy it (forced, I tell you) because my current tablet would not download the conference app.  And the conference app was important.  It contained all the speakers' PowerPoint presentations and other necessary things.  It also has a nifty cover that looks like the Horsehead Nebula.  If you don't know what the Horsehead Nebula is, you might want to Google it. 

Okay, I confess; the new tablet was actually free, or almost free. The Galaxy Note just came out, so the Galaxy Tab A is passe.  My phone company, evidently wanting to get rid of them as soon as possible, was handing them out to anybody who would pay the requisite taxes and an additional $15 a month for an LTE account.  This means you can use your tablet anywhere you can get a phone signal, which, you must admit, is pretty cool.  I haven't had a chance to use that feature much, since practically everywhere I go has wifi (I live in Dallas, after all, not the far surface of the moon). But it sure came in handy at the conference,  where the hotel wifi just kind of came and went depending on what room you were in.

 Anyway:  I went to seminars on the buying and selling of LLCs and I went to seminars on accounting. I went to seminars on ethics and I went to seminars on the new Texas Supreme Court decision that is spreading confusion and havoc among attorneys for first-party insurance claimants.  And most of it was pretty esoteric and I'm not sure how interested you'd be, but one seminar stood above them all: How To Communicate With Clients, Judges and Insurance Adjusters in the Era of Twitter. 

Because the times, they are a'changin' and you just can't write 8 page long settlement demands anymore (I have done that). Or file 100 page motions (I have done that, too).  Nobody is going to read them.  They will read the first few paragraphs, and if you don't capture their attention by the end of those paragraphs, you're going to lose them.  Nobody's going to listen to a three-hour-long closing argument either.  Back in the days of Lincoln, presidential candidates held six-hour-long debates with each other, several times, in front of a crowd that was just rapt.  Twitter tweets are 280 characters long.  That's about three average sentences.  That's it.  That's all you get. You have to think of communication in terms of tweets.

Now, we can have differences of opinion as to whether this is good or bad, but it's just the way things are and we, the legal professionals, gotta adapt.  You could sort of see the consternation spreading through the room as our speaker explained.  Let's face it, a lot of people got into the legal profession because they like to stand up and talk.  To tell them they have to do a lot less of it in order to get the job done is to make them not very happy.  I can't wait to see how all this will go over when I do my presentation to the law firm in a few weeks. 

(Oh yeah.  I have to give this presentation. Part of the deal.  But I'm okay with that, mostly. I write a mighty PowerPoint slide.)

So our speaker suggests we all get comfortable with the idea of clients having our cell phone numbers.  (Again, consternation spread through the room; one poor lady broke out in hives).  Why? Because clients that are ignoring your calls will, for whatever reason, text right back when you text them. I call the cell phone the secret weapon of the paralegal; if your cient is dodging you, and you call them from another number that isn't the law firm phone number, they will sometimes pick up.  It sounds silly, but it sometimes works when nothing else will. Yes, clients will then call at odd or inconvenient times, but you have voice mail for a reason. Besides, if you don't answer the phone, the client might just text you with whatever it was you needed to know.

And in filing motions, briefs and other pleadings with the Court, our speaker suggested we follow the tripartate Rule of Successful Arguing, which probably has many applications outside the courtroom as well:
1. Tell them what you're going to tell them.
2. Tell them.
3. Tell them what you just told them. 
My friend Tera said it first, but I'm gratified to report that it still works.   Start out your pleading with an introductory paragraph that tells the Judge what all you have to say.  If you can break it down into two or three bullet points, so much the better.  (Actual bullet points. In a pleading.  The pearl clutchers were having histrionics.)  Make your argument after the bullet points.  Then sum up your argument in the same two or three bullet points. Better yet, insert a photo or another illustration to sum up whatever it is you're trying to say.  Yes, you can insert photos and the Judge will still speak to you. 

Finally, the jury.  Consider the plight of the juror here.  He or she is not only going to sit through a two-week trial, he or she is going to do it without a cell phone.  For a lot of people, this is the longest they've been away from their cell phones since they first took them out of the box, and by day three or four they're kind of losing their minds.  Do you suppose the lawyer who uses graphics and videos copiously throughout the trial is going to get more attention than the one who just talks and brings out documents?  Yep, I think so too.

To sum up, the average attention span is getting smaller all the time, and our opportunities to get anybody's attention are getting smaller as well.  And there's no better way to lay all this brevity out than a lengthy blog post.   So, if y'all will excuse me, I gotta go work on my 500-page novel.  Have a nice day, now. 

Hardcore Studying

So I've been bemoaning my lack of a laptop lately.  I'm not sure why, since I seem to be getting along just fine with the tablet, but it is true that my tablet doesn't have a lot of oomph.  It's great for reading books and, uh, writing stuff, but it's slow and it takes ages to connect sometimes--like tonight, for example, as I sit out here in my car, scamming off of Starbucks and their free wifi.  And speaking of free, my phone company has thrown me for a loop.  They want to give me a new tablet for free.

Well, nothing's truly free, especially from a phone company, but this is the next thing to it.  It's a Galaxy Tab A with LTE connectivity, and all I have to do is pay for another line for the tablet.  Given that I've been in the market for a new tablet anyway, and that the Galaxy Tab A was on my mind (since the Note came out and the A plummeted in price), it sounds like a pretty good deal.  The downside is, of course, coming up with yet another x amount of dollars per month to make this happen.  I'd be money ahead to just get a tablet, but then I'd still have to have a line to plug it into, wouldn't I?  And it doesn't help that I have a conference next week where it would totally make sense to have a fast, high-powered tablet on which to take notes.  I hope they can get it to me that quickly.

Speaking of the taking of notes, a new and exciting survey has just come out that proclaims the the taking of notes by hand to be the best way to actually learn a thing.  Plenty of people take notes on a laptop (or a tablet), but apparently that's not the best way.  Using your actual hand is somehow best for getting those facts to hang around in your brain.  It has something to do with making words on the page lighting up some parts of your brain that don't get lit up when all you do is type.

This is particularly interesting to me, because of the way I have always studied for things. Any things.  Actual school subjects for which I'm being graded, certification exams that I need to pass for my job, continuing legal ed.  It's by far the most time-intensive study method I've ever heard of, but it works, and given my remarkably dyslexic makeup, anything that works is to be hugged to the chest with both hands and never turned loose.  Er, except to be shared with somebody, I suppose.  And if you've just started college and you can't figure out how you're going to remember all this stuff, pay attention.  It'll work.  I promise.

Step 1:  Read the material.

Yes, it's easy to skip Step 1.  Why read the material when the professor's going to talk about it in the lecture anyway.  But seriously, read the material.  Even if you read it fast, to the point of skimming it, you're still going to be ahead of a lot of your classmates.  Did you know that 71% of college students don't read the material?  And 85% of statistics are made up.

Step 2:  Read the material again, while taking notes.

Oh no, I can hear you saying.  Are you kidding me?  I just plodded through three chapters of *The Brothers Karamazov* and you actually want me to go back and read them again?  Yes, I do.  And this time take notes and write your questions in the margins. You're going to have questions.  Everyone has questions.  Even if it's just, "Why was Solshynitzen so depressed?"  you're going to have questions.  So write them down.

Step 3:  Listen to the lecture and take notes.

By the time you get to Step 3, you're going to be way ahead of most of your classmates and well on your way to actually comprehending all this material they're throwing at you.  So listen to the lecture, instead of playing with your cell phone or making little doodles in the margins of your notebook.  You're bound to hear a lot of stuff from the readings that will make more sense now, and get a lot of your questions answered.  The questions you don't get answered, you can ask the speaker about later on.

Step 4:  Type up your notes into an outline.  Yes, this requires actually being able to read and comprehend your notes, so maybe handwritten notes aren't such a good idea after all. (Y'all ain't seen my handwriting.)  But anyway, make an outline.  You know how this works, right?  Category A = Ducks.  Subcategory 1, 2 and 3 are different kinds of ducks.  Under subcategories 1, 2 and 3 are little a, b and c, where you note the anatomical features and calls of said ducks.  Category B = Egrets.  You see what this is forcing you to do?  You're having to *organize the material.*  This task requires actually *thinking* about all the stuff you've written down.  And actually thinking about it is the best way to get your brain to retain it.

Step 5:  Well, I'm not so sure Step 5 is an actual step.  It's more like Step 4 1/2, I guess.  But it is this:  Read the outline, top to bottom, over and over again.  You don't have to actually memorize it, but if you get to the point where you see Category A: Ducks and you immediately think, "Ah, yes.  Mallard.  Mandarin. Masked." (You need a subcategory: Ducks whose names start with M.), then you are on the right track.  By the time the exam rolls around, all you should be doing is reading that outline.  And turning it into a song or a rhyming thing, if you can.  Songs and rhyming things make it easier to remember stuff.

Sound exhausting?  It is. More so in that I had to make it up.  Nobody was around back then to explain to me how to study for things when dyslexia made it hard.  But, it has never failed me.  So guess what I'm going to do.  I'm going to log on to the conference Web site and start downloading speaker papers.  I've got a hell of a lot of reading and notetaking to do before next Wednesday.

General Update, Reporting For Duty.

So my laptop, which is ten years old and should probably be turned into compost anyway, is stuck in something called an "automatic repair loop."  You turn it on and it tells you that it can't open Windows (which you need to do anything, even send a tweet) because of some error and it's executing an automatic repair.  Then this other screen opens and says, "Automatic repair failed.  Please choose an option."  No matter which option you choose (and I've tried them all, several times each),  it fails to open Windows again and takes you back to the automatic repair screen. After which it takes you back to the screen of options and...yeah.

I have tried a number of things to solve this problem, including calling tech support, which I never thought of before.  The only thing I haven't tried out of the many brilliant suggestions I've been handed is downloading Windows onto a flash drive and plunking the flash drive onto one of my USB ports and booting it up that way.  I haven't tried it because a.  it costs money to download Windows onto a flash drive and b. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work anyway.  I think that last Windows 10 update just fried the poor little circuits on Scott.  (My laptop's name is Scott.  Oh, don't laugh.  Everybody calls their laptop something, usually something like, "You stupid son of a--.")  And, frankly, at the age of ten, Scott really needed replacing anyway.

Now, don't you worry about my data.  It's all on Carbonite, so when I do get a new laptop (and it ain't gonna be this month) I can just download the whole shebang and everything will be Just LIke It Was.  And, in a twist of irony, my Work in Progress is on Google Drive, so I can get to it from anywhere.  That wasn't my doing.  I was working on a program called Scrivener, which is from Zimbabwe, I think.  (No, I never knew Africa was a hotbed of clever software programs either.)  Listen, if you write anything of any length, you really owe it to yourself to check out Scrivener.  I won't go into all the nifty features, but there's a lot of them, and they are nifty.  And one of them is that you can work from a tablet, or even a phone, if you want, by uploading your WIP to Google Drive and connecting it to an app called JotterPad.  Which is how I happen to be at the public library, little lines of text appearing on the bottom of my tablet screen as I type away with this cute little Bluetooth keyboard that was probably the best twenty bucks I ever spent.  It even lights up in your choice of green, orange, pink or purple.  

So I am technologically stunted, but I am not technologically bereft.  And you wanna talk about your first world problems?  Imagine striking up a conversation with a guy who, say, just escaped Nicaragua with his life, and all you've got to say is how much it sucks you're reduced to a tablet and a little Bluetooth keyboard.  This actually happened to me once, sort of.  I was in college, studying for an exam, and I made the mistake of lamenting to my neighbor how I was never going to pass this test,.  She proceeded to tell me that she was from Northern Ireland.  Her brother was in the IRA.  Her other brother was a Black and Tan.  Her dad was refusing to speak to either brother, her mother kept trying to get everyone to all get along again, and she left the country and came to the United States to go to college and get away from all the fighting.  And there I sat with my test notes, feeling wholly inadequate.

(I passed the test, by the way.)

So when last we left this sordid saga, I had just turned 50, been without power for three days, and been very very very sick.  You'll be happy to know I'm finally off antibiotics (I took them for just over six weeks).  And since my leg didn't immediately puff up to a huge size, I think I am out of the woods.  I am now wearing compression stockings, and will probably have to wear them forever.   Once I got used to them, I actually kind of liked them, though I don't like the price ($40 per pair on Amazon, the cheapest place I've found them) or the fact that they basically come in two colors, black and white.  While all that was going on, I missed a week of work.  That was better than it could have been; the specialist wanted me to miss three weeks of work.  Anyway, there is still some fallout but I'm sweeping it up and putting it into the little container with the trefoil marking as best I can.

My idiot neighbor, so called because he is an idiot, came over to our place and offered to cut our trees back (the ones along his property line) for a small fee.  I said no.  I have seen this guy with a chainsaw and I would not at all be surprised if he accidentally cut off his own arm or something and then sued me for damages.  I hired an actual tree guy, one with employees and workers comp insurance and son on,  who came to the house, did an assessment and knocked on my neighbor's door to find out when would be a good time for him to come onto the property and cut the trees back.  My neighbor wouldn't let him in and apparently spent the whole of the five-minute conversation complaining about me.  And didn't give him a time to come back and cut the trees.  So there the matter stands. For someone who wnts the trees cut back, he's not doing anything to make it happen faster.

(By the way, in Dallas, as I imagine in most cities, if there are branches of someone else's tree overhanging your property, you are entitled to cut them back, and it's not considered trespassing to do so.  So my idiot neighbor could cut them back any time he wanted to.  Apparently he only wants to if it involves me paying him.  Which I'm not gonna do, see above re insurance and lawsuits.)    

In about two weeks I'm going to Austin for a CLE conference, and Joan is coming with me.  I usually come back from these things all fired up and ready to restructure the entire office according to the guideliens of whomever spoke last at the conference.  So that should be fun, for me as well as my office mates.  My boss took a personal leave and will be gone probably to close to the end of the year, which has been interesting.  A contract attorney is coming in to cover starting next week, which meant I got to write up synopses of all our cases so he would be able to see very quickly what's going on.  I had to write these synopses without being even slightly snarky or telling jokes, which was really annoying.  But anyway, it's done, it's a three-day weekend and so far I've slept through most of it.

All right, I'm going to go binge watch season 3 of The Good Place with Joan.   Happy Labor Day, everybody!

Weirdest Birthday Ever

 

This all started a few days before my birthday, actually, on a Sunday, when Dallas was hit with a thing called a microburst.  (See picture, which was in the Washington Post, so it is probably legit.)  Apparently these things sometimes get spun out of thunderstorms, and they're made when air that's rapidly rising (because it's hot) reaches a peak where it can't rise anymore and starts to fall in a hurry.  The resulting downdraft is strong enough to bring down commercial aircraft, and cause all kinds of havoc on the ground.  60-75 mph winds are not uncommon.  (That's just below the level of a small tornado.)  Trees get knocked over, roof tiles get pulled off, huge pieces of hail fall from the sky and can break windows, and anyway, it's not a lot of fun if you're underneath it.

We were underneath it. 

So there it is, two o'clock on a Sunday and we're staring out the window as bushes and trees whip around, telephone wires sway back and forth and look like they're about to snap, and rain pours out of a sky that was perfectly dry about half an hour before.  Thunder, lightning, zapping transformers, the whole nine yards.  Then half an hour later, it was gone.  The sun came back out.  The wind died down to nothing. 

None of our trees were damaged, though the neighbors down the street weren't so lucky.  No hail damage to the car.  No roof tiles missing.  But the power was out. 

Way back in 2010, this sort of thing happened during an ice storm in February.  The power was out for four days.  The ambient temperature in the house never went above 61 degrees, and that was with a fire going the whole time.  So since then, every time the power goes out, I get the heebie jeebies.  Like it might not come back on for days.

Which it didn't. 

After the first day, when our local power company began borrowing trucks and crews from Alabama and Mississippi and it became rather obvious we were in for another long outage, I packed Joan off to stay with friends who had power.  Joan sleeps with a CPAP machine and really likes air conditioning, so this seemed like a good idea.  I stayed at the house with the cats.  Luckily, the weather was not bad; I think the hottest it got was 85 degrees.  And the cats loved it because AAAAAAAALL the windows were open.  Cats love open windows for virtual bird stalking. 

So I went back and forth to work, charged my cell phone at the office, sent a smiling bow to the former homeowner who decided that gas hot water heaters were a good thing, and taught myself how to make coffee with water boiled on a gas stove.  (I really need a French press.  Just for emergencies.)  And every day I'd come home to see if the porch light was on or not.  It was not.

The third day, which was my birthday, the power company finally updated its map to say that our neighborhood should have power back.  I went over to the house at noontime and this wasn't the case.  I called their hotline and told them the power still wasn't back on, and they said "hmmm" a couple of times and told me to give it another hour.

That night, when I went home, the porch light was on.  YAAAAAY!!  So I closed all the windows and turned on the A/C and drove down to Duncanville to pick up Joan, and at 8:00 on my birthday we pulled into the driveway of an air conditioned house with the porch lights on.  And there was much rejoicing.

Then I got sick. 

It started when I got out of the pool one day.  I felt cold and shaky.  The water was a little colder than usual, but I thought a hot shower would fix me right up.  It didn't.  Then I thought maybe my blood glucose was crashing (which happens) and a little Gatorade would fix me right up.  It didn't.  I spent that whole day wrapped in blankets, trying to stay warm.  Joan was convinced I had a fever, but we couldn't find a frick'n thermometer to check.

Oh, and my leg hurt.  Which was odd. 

So the next day I called in sick to work and went to see the doc.  I told her I had a fever of unknown origin and for some reason my leg hurt.  She checked the nose and the ears and the throat (the usual suspects).  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Then she looked at my leg.  She told me I had cellulitis.  (Actually, based on the symptoms, I probably had septicemia by that point, but on with the story.)  She drew on my leg with a Sharpie marker to delineate the infection, which took up most of my right calf.  She  prescribed a lot of antibiotics and told me to stay in bed with the leg elevated.

Which I did, and so went Monday and Tuesday.  During this time I had basically no appetite, which was a problem because these antibiotics have to be taken with food.  Two or three bites was all I could manage, so I ended up going back to my Old Reliable, ice cream.  Which didn't improve my appetite at all, but I could get a few more bites down because it's easy to eat. 

On Tuesday my fever broke, which was good, but by Wednesday, it was becoming apparent that the antibiotic wasn't working, or wasn't working very well, anyway.  So back to the doc we went.  The doc prescribed me another antibiotic to be taken with the first antibiotic.  One of these suckers had to be taken twice a day.  The other one had to be taken three times a day, but not at the same time as the first one.  And they all had to be taken with food.  See above re: no appetite. I ended up having to get up at three in the morning to get in the third dose.  So it was get up, make a piece of toast, eat the toast, or as much of it as I could stomach, sit upright for fifteen minutes per the label on the bottle, then get back into bed, elevate the leg and try to get back to sleep. Fun times.

Oh, and my leg hurt.  Like, a lot.  The only way I could be at all comfortable was to lie on my back with my leg elevated.  Going from lying down to standing up was about an 8 on the pain scale, standing for any length of time was about a 7, and sitting down (unless my leg was braced up on something) was about a 5.  The doc prescribed Meloxicam, which I took with Advil, which you shouldn't do because potential liver damage, but hey, my liver has basically nothing to do most of the time, so I figured why not let it have a little fun. 

By Thursday morning I was convinced I was on my way to the hospital for some IV antibiotics because my calf was still amazingly swollen and looked like raw hamburger.  So convinced was I that I packed a bag.  We went to the doc yet again, and she switched me to a third antibiotic, which fortunately meant I got to stop the other two.  No more three a.m. toast.  And, fortunately, no hospital.  I only dodged that because the infection hadn't spread beyond the Sharpie marker line.  But that was a relief.  Hospitals are no fun on the weekends. 

I missed a week of work and I'm not sure what the situation is with my time off and so on just yet.  I  am back at work now, trying to catch up and at the same time not really having the energy to stay late.  I am still in a fair amount of pain, still limping around and popping Meloxicam and rubbing aloe vera cream into my still red and angry-looking leg.  But the leg has gone back to its regular size, which is good. and it doesn't look like raw hamburger anymore, which is also good.  I am still taking antibiotics and will be for a while yet. 

So how did all this happen, you ask.  Well, according to the doc, it was a "classic spider bite pattern."  In other words, a spider bit me, I didn't notice, the bite got infected and then things got out of hand.  But it could have been anything.  I could have scratched my leg against something that had germs on it.  It could have been a mosquito bite, too, that I scratched open and I had germs on my fingernails (bad news; we all have germs on our fingernails).  So we don't really know.  However, if you get a scratch that breaks the skin, especially if you get it outside, it is always, always a good idea to clean it out with peroxide and maybe put a little bit of antibiotic ointment on it, just in case.  Oh, and if you're out with a spider, and the spider says "Let's stop for a bite," just say no.

Anyway, I turned fifty.  Cheers! 

How Not To Have A Sore Back at 6 AM

Well, in case you missed it, I bought a mattress.  In retrospect, it wasn't quite the huge cavalcade of ridiculousness that it seemed at the time. It was only a small tsunami of ridiculousness.  But it was still pretty ridiculous.  I think buying a used car was actually easier, and that's not even taking into account the fact that I have incredible luck with buying used cars.  ( Take, for example, the '79 Datsun; purchased at 150k miles, drove it for 100k more, no major repairs apart from replacing the clutch, though the ceiling eventually fell on me.) You might check out Consumer Reports and read a few articles and check a few Web sites to buy a used car.  You can fricking read BOOKS about how to buy mattresses.  And even then, you still don't know everything you need to know, such as how not to end up paying almost twice as much as you set out to do.

See, I wanted a Purple mattress.  If you go to Purple's Web site, you'll find it's nice and informative and explains everything you need to know.  Also, Purple's mattresses are purple.  Purple is my favorite color.  So it would have been totally and completely awesome to have a Purple mattress.  It would have even come with free purple sheets.

But here was the problem, as well as the problem with online mattress purchases generally.  Purple is not a "traditional" mattress.  It's not designed to be placed on a box springs.  It's designed to be placed on a single hard surface, like a flat bed with no box springs.  The kind you get at Ikea.  So in order to get a new mattress, I would have had to get an entirely new bed.

Now, I wasn't really down on that concept.  The current bed I've had for a very long time.  I won it in the divorce, actually, and the divorce was one of those things that happened in the Time Before Joan (TM).  Seeing as Joan and I just celebrated our 20th anniversary, you do the math. I've had this bed for a very long time.  Besides, Ikea beds aren't very expensive.  You can get one delivered and set up for about $400.00.  But this is where the logistics began to get difficult.

See, in order to get a new bed, I would have to get rid of the old bed.  So someone would have to come help me take it apart, carry the pieces outside, and put it out for the bulky trash guys.  Which meant it could only be done during one week of the month, in case nobody adopted it and it was actually still there by the time the bulky trash guys showed up.  (Not likely in our neighborhood; everything even slightly valuable or practical disappears almost as soon as you put it out there, except for that fucking combination printer/scanner/fax that we had for a while, and I can only assume that our neighbors heard me yelling at it.  Hell, they heard me yelling at it in Indonesia.)

Okay, so let's say we got the bed successfully out of the house.  Now, the removal of the bed from the house had to be timed just so, so that the bed from Ikea showed up on the same day or at the very latest, the next day.  And then the guys who were going to put it together would need to show up, and they would have to have no problems whatsoever with their cute little Allen wrenches and the many parts.  If there was a delay of a day or two, I would have to find somewhere else to sleep.  And then, even when all that was done, there was the question of when the new mattress would be delivered.  If it showed up a few days early, where would we put it?  If it showed up a few days late, would I be sleeping on the couch?

Seriously, this was starting to give me a headache.  In desperation I wrote to our friend Suzy, who is much better about logistics than I am.  And true to form, she laid out an exacting, six or seven point plan about how to get the new bed and mattress into the house without having to sleep on the couch and suchlike and so forth.  (Thanks, Suzy!)  The only problem was, I kept putting off the actual doing of the steps.

I think it was Joan who finally suggested maybe I was having trouble letting go of the old bed (it is a nice bed), and that maybe I should consider just getting a traditional mattress and box springs set and just have them delivered and forget about it, already.  And that's what I finally did.  I drove out to Nebraska Furniture Mart (which is a lot like Ikea, only without the Allen wrenches) and picked one of the mattresses that I'd deemed a suitable substitute for the Purple mattress.  It happened to be on sale.  I had it delivered.  The nice folks at NFM hauled away the old mattress and box springs, and suddenly I had a new mattress.

I woke up the next morning at 6 A.M. and lo and behold, my back didn't hurt.  That's the first time that's happened in, oh, about two years.

So I have a new mattress.  I'm not used to it yet.  Oh, it's fine to sleep on, but I sit down on the bed very tentatively so as not to disturb it.  It's a hybrid mattress, part springs and part supportive foam, so I kind of sink down into it, which is actually really nice.  But I'm like almost afraid to put weight on it.  What if it starts to sag?  Oh, it has a nice ten year warranty and all that, but still, you never know...

Braaaaaaaains

So last week I participated in a "sleep study" to find out whether or not I have sleep apnea, which is something you don't want to have.  A "sleep study" is where creepy people file into your bedroom (by way of overhead cameras) and watch you sleep to see what you're doing.  Well, there were no actual people; there was instead an apparatus that I strapped to myself and which measured my heart rate and breathing and things of that nature.  There was a little clampy thing on my finger to take my oxygen saturation, and I presume one of these little gizmos told them how long I was asleep and how often I woke up.  I'm not really complaining, by the way, about the apparatus.  When Joan had a sleep study there actually were people watching, which, again, is pretty creepy.  Having to sleep with an apparatus really wasn't so bad.  Not even the cats seemed to mind.

And what should happen, in the next few days, is my doc will look at the results and tell me if I need a CPAP machine or not.  If I do, Joan and I will be like the CPAP twins or something, dozing away in matching masks and making noises like Darth Vader.  If not, then I'm off the hook, at least for now.  (And what I actually expect to happen?  I expect to be told I have sleep apnea, but it's not bad enough to warrant treatment.  That's how it seems to go with me on any number of issues.)  

For this privilege I am shelling out some $275, which, again, I'm not complaining about.  When actual people watch you it costs more like $400. I guess you have to buy the people watching a pizza, or something?

Anyway.  This whole episode got me to thinking about brains, and how they work, and what happens when they don't work the way they should.  When you're asleep, for example, your brain is off, or it's supposed to be.  If it doesn't shut down the way it's supposed to, it can stay connected enough to your body that you get up and sleepwalk around like a zombie, acting out your dreams.  If you have anxiety disorder, all the fight or flight neurons that should be nice and quiet when everything's fine keep firing anyway, making you feel like the floor is about to collapse or a plane is going to fall on your head or something like that.  (I have anxiety disorder.)  If the parts of your brain that process sound start telling you that somebody's talking to you when no one is, you will hear voices that sound like real voices.  And so on and suchlike.

Also, when people have something truly shitty happen in their lives, like being hit by a car or being in a plane crash (and surviving, obviously) or losing a loved one to a tragic accident, particularly if it happens right in front of them, they can get a thing we call PTSD.  Humans have undoubtedly been suffering from this malady for thousands of years, but we didn't give it a name until World War I, when soldiers began experiencing something they called "shell shock."  The mistaken impression was that the shells exploding all around them caused the disease, instead of the conditions that the soldiers were fighting under during World War I.  (And if you ever want to listen to a truly great podcast about trench warfare during World War I, look no farther than Dan Carlin's "Blueprint for Armageddon," which is available here.)  What they didn't know then was that, when truly shitty things happen to you, you can have actual measurable changes in your brain, which causes it to process information differently and results in hallucinations, flashbacks, unreasonable fear, panic, ritualized behavior and all other manner of unpleasant goings-on.

Brains, by the way, are great things.  When they're working the way they're supposed to, life hums along pretty well.  When they stop working the way they're supposed to, hoo boy.

What I'm wondering, though, is if smaller traumas and goings-on cause smaller versions of PTSD.  I'm wondering, particularly, if excessive stress at work can cause a milder form of PTSD.  I had this one job where stuff happened that I'm still not over, if one does in fact get over these things versus just learning how to live with them, or around them.  

Ah, and here we get to a thorny problem that inevitably comes up in a blog post like this; What I Can Say And What I Can't Say.  I can't tell you much about my current job, for example, because confidentiality and ethics and besides, somebody might figure out it's me and point me out to my boss and they'd find that one blog post that I did about Donald Trump and they'd have to fire me or something.  (Well, probably not over Donald Trump; we are pretty much on the same side where that goes.)  And I'm not sure how much I can tell you about my past jobs.  Because, again, confidentiality and ethics and so on and suchlike.

There is one place in particular that was so bad I'm embarrassed to admit I ever worked there,  So I just don't.  Admit it, I mean.  And I don't mean the working conditions were bad, though they were, and I don't mean the pay wasn't very good either, though it wasn't.  I mean what went on there was bad. Very bad.  Almost the apotheosis of all possible badness.  If you wanted to look up "bad" in the dictionary...

Well, anyway, it was kind of traumatic.  It was quite a few years ago and I still cringe that I didn't turn around and walk out the door five minutes into my first day, when I started figuring out how bad it actually was.  And I did have nightmares and flashbacks and so on, though not really any hallucinations, unless you count the one about the giant purple dinosaur that apparently shilled for a kid's show, and somebody told me that was real, though I still have my doubts.

So I'm wondering: Is there therapy for working people who get badly rattled by something that happened at the office but can't tell anybody about it?  I bet they have this figured out at the CIA.  Of course, the CIA probably has on-call therapists on duty 24/7.  I dunno about you, but when people start yelling at each other and calling each other names, I look for a nice desk to hide under.  I am not a big fan of screaming fights.

I'm also not a big fan of pretending everything's normal and carrying on once it's all over.  I mean, look, I grew up in a Lutheran household, okay?  And when I took my vows to become a Buddhist I solemnly promised that if I ever said "Everything's fine" even one more time, I'd be washing my mouth out with--nag champa incense, or something. 

Is this normal?  I mean, does this sort of thing happen in offices?  I know it sometimes happens in households, though not my household.  And hospitals.  In fact, doctors are kind of known for ranting and raving.  I've worked in law firms for a long time and law firms are pretty volatile places, all in all.  I've seen yelling matches break out before.  In fact, one time I saw a guy throw a Bible at another guy and say--oh, wait.  I can't tell you about that. 

I guess if I just knew that human beings sometimes behave this way in situations that aren't law offices, I'd feel better.  I mean, they say that lawyers are human beings, but I don't know. 

(Update!  I just got the results from my sleep study.  I have mild sleep apnea but not bad enough to warrant treatment.  I'm not making this up.)

Gone But Not Forgotten

Boy, when you miss two whole months of regularly scheduled blog posts, you by God better have something pretty spectacular to make up the gap, or else your ever-patient audience will, I dunno, drive past your house and throw tomatoes at you.  I don't spose I can claim exemption because I have a trial coming up in three weeks, can I?  To say nothing of flying out to Phoenix for my Dad's 80th birthday party and related festivities?

Well, I hope so. Flying, for me, is not easy and not cheap.   When Joan comes with me, it's even more not-easy and not-cheap. But we did it, and at least the flying part was surprisingly smooth.  Going through an airport with a wheelchair assistant is MUCH easier than going through an airport in real time.  I'd have paid a lot for that service but I didn't have to, it was free.  (Minus tips.) In case I haven't said anything on here about how much I love Southwest Airlines, I love Southwest Airlines.  If I had to fly any other airline I don't think I'd ever leave the state.

 And the festivities were good, too. There were something like 40 people there, including my dad's 2 surviving brothers. (Uncle Jonny died some years ago but I'm sure he was there in spirit.)

My dad (left) and his two remaining brothers.

No gifts were requested but people brought some great cards.  Here, blow this one up on your monitor so you can see all the fine print.

And a great time was had by all.  I'm really glad we got to go. Hopefully the next trip to Phoenix will be sooner than later. 

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Methodist Church decided last week to firmly lock down their current ban on gay and lesbian pastors, as well as a ban on affirming same-sex marriages (which are legal in all 50 states).  Which, as they're a religious body, is their business, I guess, but what a slap in the face to ten percent of their potential converts, to say nothing of those who are already hanging out in their buildings.  I'd wager they already have gay pastors, many of whom may even be married to a member of the opposite sex.  And I'm sure those pastors, and maybe others, may have blessed same-sex unions, whether in the church or outside.  My pastor did, when Joan and I got married, before the Lutheran Church had codified its Official Position (and before it was legal, even in California, which should tell you how long ago this was).  And so on this finest of fine days, I bring you the story of Why Jen No Longer Runs With a Lutheran Street Gang.  And you should feel honored.  I don't tell this story to just anybody, you know.

I grew up in the Lutheran Church.  It was a weird way to grow up. I lived in Utah in the early 70s, when it was about 90% Mormon, and that made me an oppressed minority, of a sort.  If we'd have stayed in Utah, I probably would have been fairly devout, except that I didn't believe in God.  When I was a kid I made many attempts to force myself to believe in the Big Guy, and managed only to get myself confused, or wind up with a headache if I tried it long enough. And I eventually figured out that it is not possible to force yourself to believe a thing.  "You can't pray a lie," as Mark Twain famously said.

I had, of course, several Bad Experiences With Religion.  I could give you the details, but they're really not that important.  So when I got to be a teenager, I quit going to church.  This occasioned World War Three, which lasted from approximately the time I turned sixteen until I moved out of the house, by which time all participants were thoroughly tired of it anyway.  (That's the way the next war will end, folks.  He who gets tired and goes home first loses.)   Then I grew the rest of the way up, graduated from college, moved to California, and lived a perfectly fine nontheistic life until I ran into this total stranger in a used bookstore and started what seemed like an innocuous conversation.

Considering it was a pivotal moment, it's amazing that I remember so little about it.  It had something to do with a book, and whether or not I had read it, and a rather astute comment about literature in general that made me raise my eyebrows and pay attention to this guy.  I asked him what he did for a living, thinking he must be a professor or something, and he told me he was a Lutheran pastor.  I mean what are the odds.  A person could almost believe a twist of fate along those lines was occasioned by a Supreme Being.  Almost.  But not if you were me.

Being a sport, however, I thought I'd check out this guy's church, First Lutheran Church in San Diego, California.  As it turned out, they fed meals to the homeless, and they had an acupuncturist come in and treat people for free, and once in a while they were able to do the same with a doctor, and they had a charitable organization that was doing political stuff to address the problem of homelessness in San Diego, and oh yeah, they had this church over there, too, and if you wanted to come in on a Sunday you could hear some good music and maybe learn something.

So I started hanging around with this crowd.  I mean, why not.  I still didn't believe in God, but I think I faked it fairly well. I sang in the choir, joined in the occasional Bible study (and always managed to turn the conversation around to ancient UFOs), became one of those ladies with the clipboards who are in charge of this and that.  (Warning:  If you ever go visit a church, for ANY REASON, do NOT let anyone hand you a clipboard.  Ever.  Not even if they say, "Here, hold onto this for a second.")  And while all this was going on, I met and married Joan, gay marriage became legal in San Francisco for ten minutes, Clinton became President, "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" was back in the charts some 20 years after it came out, the Y2K bug came and went, and it was an interesting time to be alive, okay?  Oh, and the Westboro Babtist Church came and picketed us one day.  Which was kind of cool.  You're nobody until you've been picketed by the Westboro Babtist Church.

This brings us up to 2002, approximately, which was the year of the big Lutheran synod convention.  One of the matters on the agenda was whether gay people could be pastors.  Officially, there wasn't a position on that yet.  There were stipulations that a pastor should be either married, or celibate, but the issue of gayness hadn't been discussed.  The church was already more or less fine having gay members, the pastor officiated at Joan's and my wedding, certain congregations were calling themselves "Reconciled in Christ" and were actively welcoming gay people, and it really didn't seem like that big a deal to go a step farther and say, sure, gay people can be pastors.

Well, you can probably guess what happened.  Roughly the same thing that happened at the Methodist convention, only different. It was a close vote, but that doesn't really matter a whole lot.  And suddenly I was out in the cold; not because I didn't believe in God (again, I was faking it pretty well), but because I didn't have the right gonads to be married to Joan.

I mean, okay.  It was about whether or not a person could be a pastor, and I didn't want to be a pastor, so what was the big deal?  Well, for one thing, I had wanted to be a pastor at one  time. (Probably because my first crush, at the tender age of eleven or so, was a pastor.)  For another, the Church was taking a group of people, arbitrarily selected, and saying, "Nope. You're not good enough."  And when a person looks at the history of the Church, you'll find that they did this very thing over and over again.  I mean, examples abound, and most often they involve, "Can black people be accepted as _____ in the church?  Can women?  Can Nova Scotian emigres who hop backward on one foot under a full moon every January?"  And the answer, while it might eventually become Yes, always started out as No.

 By the way, by the Church I don't just mean the Lutheran Church.  I mean the entire body of Christianity, from the few folks who survived the fall of the Roman Empire to the massive quantity of professed Christians we have today.  And upon looking at this stuff, and the Great Universal No, I realized I just flat out couldn't stand under that banner anymore.  Ever. At all.  For any reason.

I always felt like I more or less got cheated out of Christianity.  After all, the Lutheran Church reversed itself on the issue of gay pastors in 2009, and everything has evidently been chummy since.  But I was gone by then.

There is a happy ending here.  There are twists and turns through Paganism and Unitarian Universalism before I fetched up against a group of Viet Namese Buddhists who cared not one hang if you were gay, straight, black, pink, North, South, Nova Scotian or even ugly as long as you could meditate for twenty minutes at a time.  Or, for that matter, if you believe in God; belief in a supreme being is not a big tenet of Buddhism.  And I like being a Buddhist, but I sort of miss being a Lutheran.  The way you might miss a certain color that's on every wall of your house, and then you move to a new house where the walls are a different color, and you suddenly realize that the first color is gone and you can't get it back.  It was my church too, people.

Well, I guess the Methodists will carry on, or else split up into more than one church. I only know one Methodist pastor (Hi, Charles!) and practically no Methodist devotees, so I don't really know how things are shaking out.  I expect many people will leave.  I expect some people, thanking God (so to speak) that SOMEbody is standing up for "traditional values" (which are neither traditional, nor values), will come back, or join for the first time. But one thing is for sure; the question will keep coming up, because love wins. Maybe not every day and maybe not every time, but love does win.

It didn't win today, though. And that's just sad.

The Contents of a Fed Ex Package

I left work with a Fed Ex package tonight.  I often leave work with a Fed Ex package, or with certified letters, or other things that need to go places.  Sometimes it's because something absolutely, positively has to be someplace overnight.  Other times it's because somebody's been procrastinating and the same letter that could have been sent for a 47-cent stamp is now costing $35.50.  I won't say which was the case this time, but that's because I'm such a nice person that I wouldn't accuse any of my cow orkers of procrastinating.

Anyway, I should probably mind running errands for the office after work, but I don't.  There's something kind of nifty about leaving work with a Fed Ex package.  It's that combination of white, purple and orange that says to the outside world, "Look!  I'm doing something important!  Something so critically important that it calls for a Fed Ex package!"  Which is great for the ego, especially when you've been having a string of days when you feel like you're the least important person on the planet.  Now, the Dalai Lama would argue with me about this, but there are days when I'm convinced nobody would ever miss me if I were to suddenly disappear.  If, however, I were carrying a Fed Ex package at the time I vanished into thin air, a huge multinational corporation would pull out all the stops to find me (even in thin air) and bring me and the package back to terra firma.  To do anything less would just be un-Fed Exy.

One time I had a package to be delivered to a town in Australia, and Fed Ex called me to confirm the address because they couldn't find the one I gave them on a map.  (This was before Google Earth, you understand.)  I called the client to double check.  He started laughing and asked me if I'd ever  been to Little Town, Australia.  I said no.  He said that this town had one north and south road that crossed over one east and west road, and where the two roads crossed each other, was the place the package was going.  They couldn't have missed it if they tried.  But of course they called to confirm.  Of course they did, because that's just what Fed Ex does. Fed Ex packages are important.  

(Incidentally, I'm at Afrah, the World's Greatest Mediterranean Restaurant, eating some of the Best Pita Bread on Earth and typing this.   And darned if two Buddhist monks and a nun didn't just walk in and sit down.  Does anybody know if I'm supposed to go over there and bow?  Or do I get to mind my own business?  Maybe they didn't see me.  I am, after all, hiding behind my 8 inch by 4 inch tablet.  I am practically invisible.)

Anyway, a new year has started up.  We're about 16 days into it here, and it doesn't seem too bad so far.  I started out the year getting a new cell phone after mine became possessed by the Devil and started randomly doing things I had not asked it to do.  Demonic possession of small electronics is not something to be encouraged.  So I got a new cell phone.  And while we were in the cell phone store, picking out the best cheap knockoff  my money could buy, I ran into something that I wish I'd never met, because now I want one.  The Samsung Galaxy Tab S4.

Seriously, have you seen this thing?  It's like a tablet combined with a laptop and a dash of a cell phone thrown in.  It has the Microsoft software suite, the Android applications and more features than you can shake a stick at.  Unlike my current tablet, which you have to have Wi-Fi to operate, it's always on, just like a cell phone.  You can use it at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, if they have cell service there.

I need a new laptop.  I've needed a new laptop for ages.  So, why not just forego the laptop and get the tablet instead?  I mean, the thing has the Microsoft suite, right?  Well, there's the $700 price tag, for one thing.  I can get a good used laptop for around $250.  But a used laptop isn't sleek.  It doesn't have chrome trim and megapixel display and a camera.  This tablet is sleek.  It's like a Ferrari.  A laptop--any laptop--is a Toyota Corolla in comparison.

(Don't get me wrong.  I love my Corolla.  But it's hard to pick up girls driving around in a Corolla.  At least I think that is the problem.)

Oh, I'm probably not going to get the Galaxy Tab S4.  I still need a mattress, for one thing, and once I get one of those (this weekend, back.  I swear,) I won't be able to part with the funds.  But it would be really cool to have one of these suckers.  So if any of y'all made a New Year's resolution to give overpriced gifts to total strangers for no apparent reason, that's Galaxy S4.  Through T-Mobile.

One more piece of news:  My novel writing class is starting up again next Friday.  This is pretty cool, because for a while there the novel writing class was the only thing in my life that was going well.  Matters have since improved, but I'm still excited about the novel writing class.  I seem to need other writers to bounce off of and trade stories of Galaxy S4 lust.  Cheers!