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Archive for November, 2007

November 30th, 2007 No comments

The human body is a strange thing. And not just because the last few days mine has been filled with phlegm and other gross things and has been completely unresponsive to medications. (My throat feels like Rachael Ray has been trying to zest it, which, if you aren’t familiar with basic cooking techniques, is less fun than it sounds.) I’ve been dieting a bit over the last few months, basically just trying to avoid stuffing my face with bacon and Mimolette long enough to maybe fit in a few leaves of romaine. Anyway, because of my moderately freakish size, my weight fluctuations are…out of the ordinary.

The 2 weeks before thanksgiving, I had managed to get down to about 233 pounds, 9 pounds of which I lost in about 7 days due to the magic of water weight. Then, over the break, I gained 11 pounds in about 10 days, back to 244 as of Monday. Today, 4 days later, I weigh 235. It’s all very amusing, except for the part where I still have a big ol’ gut and my ass looks like a pair of basketballs stuffed into cheap khaki. That part, well, that part sucks.

Categories: wtf Tags:

November 28th, 2007 1 comment

Don’t worry, not dead; we have some doings going on at work lately that have me busting my butt. Hard work not being something to which I am accustomed, it’s all I can do not to go home, squirt Cheeze Whiz into my mouth, and pass out in front of the TV. I have a bajillion picture albums I need to go through and get uploaded, so that’ll at least provide some entertainment, something to look forward to, for you, my reader. (I’m pretty sure there’s just the one, at this point.)

I shouldn’t complain, actually; I disappeared all last week for a lengthy Thanksgiving break, went and visited a new baby (Hi, Olivia!), and then crashed at a beach house on the Outer Banks for 5 days with Charles. I’ve been on a major beer-making frenzy for the last couple months, so I had plenty to take with me (and will have something like 3 cases + 3 kegs available for New Year’s); I had something like 2 cases plus a small party keg onhand, so we got our festive drink on for 5 solid days. Thanksgiving morning, I cruised back up to DE so that Charles and I could be on hand for official celebrations with Sarah’s parents. Then we spent the next three days recovering, by which I mean eating and drinking everything in the house. After managing to lose something like 9 pounds in 2 weeks prior to the break, I gained 11 pounds in 10 days. Go me!

In other news, I have acquired a New Car, specifically a 1997 Saab 9000 CSE. It was a gift from My Pops, whom I thank profusely, because driving to North Carolina in a 1998 Mazda Protege would have been uncomfortable and possibly unsafe. The Saab is a year older, and has something like 20,000 more miles, but it’s a Saab, so it’ll last for another 100K miles, and the Mazda was destined to fall apart like the Bluesmobile at any moment. (If I’d thrown a rod somewhere in Virginia, I would not have been surprised.)

That is about the absolute latest and greatest. Not that you care. I’ll try and actually make with the funny with a quickness, since the last month has been apologies, religious war, and pointless diary entries. Yay!

Categories: dear diary Tags:

November 13th, 2007 1 comment

Charles is as bad as I am about posting, but here’s some new pictures to keep things THRILLED TO THE MAX!

Categories: charles Tags:

November 7th, 2007 No comments

Today’s post is in the style of Samuel Pepys.

Tuesday, 6 November, 16672007

Up, and to lessons; much accomplished on Ravel’s Prelude. The nimbleness of my fingers quickens, despite my recent frustrations. All the morning spent at the computational room, that I might improve the notes thereon, but was denied. Submitted necessary forms to be allowed to continue my efforts. Meetings through the afternoon, accomplishing little, and wasting much tyme. To the in-laws to retrieve My Lord and bring him then home; there we made much merry whining. A bath, and then idle. Ate sparingly, and to bed.


Notes:
Lessons: Piano studies.
Frustrations: On Monday, Hearn was so incensed by his inability to play a Brahms waltz that he punched a dent in the adjacent drywall.
Meetings: Technically, conference calls.
Idle: Technically, 3 hours of Flight Simulator.
Ate sparingly: Hearn is on a diet, and hopes to lose about 15 pounds, despite the Holidays.

Categories: wtf Tags:

November 1st, 2007 5 comments

WOW. WHEW boy. THAT woke everybody up, didn’t it? Apparently I need to throw a little more controversy up on here! Stir the pot, I guess. Okay, here goes:

Gay men are better at interior decorating than straight men.

Is that going too far?

Anyway, I suppose I should respond to the responses, but I should post a few disclaimers:

  1. Sunday school is routinely held at the same time as choir practice in all of the churches at which I’ve worshipped. Since I’ve been singing in choirs of one kind or another since I was roughly 12, I haven’t had a lot of theological instruction in almost 2 decades. Any insight I have on the subject is stuff I’ve gathered from Dilbert cartoons.
  2. My theological beliefs are entirely colored by my experiences, not the other way around. I’d like to believe God exists, but so far He hasn’t revealed Himself to me fully. And that’s fine; maybe He will someday. Meanwhile I have to live my daily life in a Schroedinger’s Cat situation of “God exists/God doesn’t exist,” so I hedge my bets (example: instead of donating all my cash to the poor and wandering the earth in sandals and a robe, I toss a few bucks to worthy charities occasionally and spend the bulk of my money on, say, housing, food, diapers, and high-end electronics). What I’m saying is, if God really “hates fags,” then he needs to find a better way to say it than Fred Phelps, ’cause the gay folks I know are pretty much all awesome.

Having said that, let me make a few points:

  • To quote my boy HeavyDluxe:

    Interestingly, the Bible itself really presents you (in numerous places) with an all or nothing proposition. It either is all true, or it’s a complete lie. Doesn’t really give you a middle ground, sadly.

    I’m not sure about that. The fact that the Bible is technically the Word of God as written down by fallible humans means to me that, if we were to assume that God Himself was telling folks what to write down, some things got lost in translation. Genesis, for example, was passed down orally for generations before being put to parchment somewhere between 900 and 450 BCE. The New Testament is obviously different, since theoretically it was written down by people who knew Christ, or at least knew Him second-hand, but it speaks volumes to me that there are numbers of gospels and other documents that were considered for canonicity and discarded. It’d be nice to think that they were excluded because historical documents abounded showing them to be false testaments, but from what I’ve read it seems like often they were thrown out because they showed Jesus in a light that the church leaders didn’t like (as more of a man than the earthly manifestation of the divine, etc.).

    What I’m saying is that there are probably parts of the Bible that are true, parts that are outright false; most is somewhere in between. My view of BELIEF of the Bible, however, is either you believe it wholeheartedly, or other. (Other can be “I believe it’s not a literal account of anything, but shows a greater truth” or “I only believe the New Testament, because it’s clearly intended as a replacement for the Old Testament” or whatever.)

    I do concede the point that the rules outlined in the Old Testament may be there to show that nobody can be perfect, and the New Testament shows the way to heaven despite our imperfections. I had not considered that before. So in theory you CAN believe that the Bible is entirely literal, and still get your bacon on. I’m not sure that I like the implication that God is basically saying “Okay, here are the rules. Now don’t worry about them, break them as much as you want, but MAKE SURE YOU BELIEVE IN MY SON.”

  • The Bible is merely one of many documents, including the Koran, the Vedas and Upanishads, etc. that purport to show some kind of True Way (although they all seem to lead to different places). The only reason most Americans follow Christianity at all is because it’s what they were raised with. It’s like preferring steak and potatoes (Mmmm…steak) over vegetable curry (Mmmm…curry).

    If an alien was flying through space alone, searching for the meaning of life, landed on earth, and decided to pick himself a religion because he wanted to believe in SOMETHING, which one would he pick? They’re all pretty much equally well-documented. If he wanted to pick one based on which had the EARLIEST documentation, it’d probably have to be Hinduism. If he picked the one followed by the most people, it’d probably be a form of Christianity. If he landed in downtown Mecca, he’d probably pick Islam. In the end, he’d have to make a decision based on whichever religion felt right to him. It’s all a matter of faith.

    I guess what I’m saying is that when it comes to religion, you have to choose what FEELS right. To get back to the reason I originally opened this massive ridiculous train of thought (anti-homosexual feelings in the Christian church), a God who makes a person gay, and then denies him the right to be who he is, is not a God who feels right to me.

  • One more HeavyDluxe quote before I get back to my usual thoughts of booze and women:

    God = Holiness + Justice + Love + Wrath Against Sin. God without wrath/justice/holiness is neither God nor loving.

    Which makes sense short term, but not eternally. For example, I love my son. I show this by smothering him with hugs and kisses whenever he gets within reach, and also by disciplining him when he, for example, tries to touch a hot light bulb, because I don’t want him to get hurt. With God, it seems like he wants you to believe in him, and if you don’t, you get eternally damned. Which is similar to Charles refusing to acknowledge me as his father, so I kill him. That’s not an act of love. That’s solely an act of vengeance.

    Of course, that’s projecting human feelings onto an omnipotent being; I obviously can’t know how God thinks. What I do know is that I have a hard time having faith in a God who is reported to be loving and yet supposedly lets people burn in eternity, often for the simple act of growing up in a remote place that hasn’t heard of Jesus yet. I actually have a much easier time believing, for example, that if you are a dick to people you get reincarnated as a tapeworm, but I like celebrating major Christian feast days, so I’ll stick with what I got.

Okay, I’ll shut up now. Remember: I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. Next week: how God demonstrated Himself to me by way of a massive jolt of electricity through a 5-iron!

Categories: wtf Tags: