Oh yeah. It’s heck of xmas, yo.
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This is the cold that never ends. It just goes on and on, my friends. Some germs got in my body made me feel filled up with fuzz, I can’t seem to get rid of them and it’s all just because this is the cold that never ends… It’s not a BAD cold, it’s just ANNOYING. Just a sort of general ague that leaves my nose running, though I can still breathe through it, and my throat filled with various goos that I can’t seem to cough up. Plus my earache comes and goes, that’s an added bonus. I managed to fight through it for a Messiah performance yesterday, but that’s mostly because my solos were all in the first part, so I didn’t have to try and save myself for stuff towards the end. All the worrisome bits were done by intermission, which meant I could just stand up and sit down and periodically yell in baroque counterpoint, while stuffing cough drops into my mouth and yawning to drain my eustachian tubes. It was good times for all! Yes, yes it was. The performance went superbly, actually; we had some new soloists this year, a tenor named Ken, and an old acquaintance named Gus singing countertenor. Dude sings like a lady! It’s awesome. The rest of the weekend was spent completely ignoring my self-imposed dietary restrictions in favor of chips, fudge, and alcohol. These are a few of my favorite things, particularly when the chips are Grandma Utz’s, the fudge is handmade by yours truly, and the alcohol is in vast quantities. Plus my wife let me sleep in on Saturday for no good reason at all. If I could have figured out a way to not get called for work all weekend (despite not actually being on call; my job is really great) it would have been very restful. I hope your Christmas shopping is in a better state than mine; my usual effort to make up for being a dick 364 days a year by spending too much money on friends, family, and charities is WAAAAAAY behind. I have some stuff, but need to make an inventory before making any further purchases so I don’t end up with a situation in which I have 17 items for my father and 3 for my mother. (This is hyperbole, you understand, but I’m pretty sure as of now I have 2 or 3 big presents for Dad and not one thing for Mom. Although I think Sarah has stuff for her; I’ll just replace her labels with ones that say “from your loving eldest progeny.” Just like every year!) Usually by this time I’ve already basically completed my purchases and just have to make with the wrapping, but it’s been a busy fall. BTW: people that want good presents make and update their Amazon wishlists. If you leave me to just buy you whatever I think you might like, well, that’s how people end up with CDs like this. I’m still sick, and it’s starting to become a Nuisance. For example, I have to sing in a Messiah on Sunday, and during last night’s rehearsal I developed what felt like an ear infection. Today it seems better, but I’m all clogged up again. Is this God’s punishment for that time I wiped a booger on another chorister? Uh…my bad. More heavenly disdain is being communicated to me by the fact that my /? key is faulty. In order to get it to work I have to push really hard on it; I think there’s a pretzel crumb under there, or a piece of salt, or maybe another chorister’s boogie. I wonder if I could hook a vacuum to my head to relieve all the pressure. A few months back I bought a 16-gallon 6.5HP Wet/Dry Super Industrial Kickass Vacuum/Leaf Blower; the thing could suck the stain out of an Affleck end table (just like your mom! Ha ha!). I bet I could suck mucus out of my sinuses with it. Maybe I’ll try later. Speaking of furniture, my lunch today consisted of a 220-calorie bowl of Kraft Easy Mac, which I got from a machine and heated up, and which tasted like wood glue. I think the Diet Coke I had with it was more nutritious. Dieting straight sucks, lemme tell you; I could’ve also run to the Wendy’s down the street and had 4 Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers, a “Biggie” Fries, and a “Biggie” Diet Coke for like $7 and then just gone back to work and had a nap. It would have been fantastic, and I wouldn’t have the raging headache I have. Yep, it’s bitch bitch bitch bitch, all the time, at matthearn.com! Glad you’re here. Now go forth and sin some more. Let’s chat about humor for a moment. I’d just like to take the time to address a big problem in the world, and that is that a surprising number of people have a misconfigured sense of humor. Oh sure, some things are universally funny:
The laughs never end, when those topics get broken out at parties. Particularly if the party as at my house, and the participants have drunk between 5 and 17 bottles of homemade Continental Pilsner apiece. But certain topics seem to make certain folks laugh, and other folks whine in great dismay. For example: my wife is in the business of assisting the differently-abled. (They used to be called “handicapped,” and before that, “crippled;” by 2015 they’ll be called “Judiciously Improved.”) I fully support this, except that the Political Correctness Brigade has now weaseled its way into my very home. During my adolescence, it was perfectly acceptable, when someone did something stupid, to call him “retarded.” And mirth would result. Now, I have to expend great amounts of brainpower trying to not say that word in front of my wife and her coworkers. (In a similar vein, we were allowed to call anything we disagreed with “gay,” as in “Dude, homework is totally gay,” or “Bobby and Jimmy kissing behind the school was so gay.” No longer. The internet has invented a substitute word, “ghey,” which is totally gay.) As far as I can tell, the word “retarded” is no less funny than it was in 1993. And yet nowadays people get their undergarments in a SEVERE bunch if you break it out anywhere but a hockey team’s locker room. This is a disturbing indicator of the path we’re on, in which I won’t be able to say things like “Dude, your new subwoofer has a totally fat sound” without some overweight ninny saying “What did you say? Fat? How dare you!” and then attempting to kick me in the nards but failing because her thigh-fat precludes any actual upward motion of her legs. (Note: this would actually be HILARIOUS to witness.)
And lest you think I’m just some completely irreverent buffoon that would laugh at a baby’s funeral, let me show you the depth of my intellect: I have seen the other side of the coin, albeit for a totally I got to thinking about this, because a few weeks ago I set my Facebook status message to something like “Matt Hearn is wondering how people can confuse ‘they’re’, ‘there’, and ‘their’; is it because they have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome?” Which you have to admit, if you don’t have FAS, is pretty funny. I still got some irritated messages about it. If you do have FAS, it might be perceived as insulting, but 1) if you have FAS and know the difference between those three words, then obviously the joke isn’t directed at you and 2) if you have FAS and don’t know the difference between those three words, then perhaps my little jibe will inspire you to go to school and study hard. It’s win-win! And if you don’t have FAS, but have a problem with sand in your vagina, just go to the bathroom and rinse it out. Stop annoying me because Uncle Gropey took away your girlish laughter. It’s hard to avoid being insulted by certain jokes. I think the secret is not to flip out about it. If you hear a joke that offends you, just laugh along with the rest and tell your own insulting joke right back. Note: this may only work with minorities. 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. 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! Charles is as bad as I am about posting, but here’s some new pictures to keep things THRILLED TO THE MAX! Today’s post is in the style of Samuel Pepys.
Tuesday, 6 November, 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: 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:
Having said that, let me make a few points:
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! In poking around Facebook recently, I came across the True Love Waits group (link only works if you’re, you know, in Facebook). I’m not much a believer in it myself, but I do think that overall it’s a good idea, because the numbers of young people who are too stupid to be having sex before marriage seems to be growing (because they won’t stop having sex, you see, which often results in reproduction). If we could maybe get all these folks in one place and maybe get them to hold off on the nooky as long as possible, or lordy at least until they’re in HIGH SCHOOL for heaven’s sake, the world would be a better place. Unfortunately, of the people that I’ve met who joined the True Love Waits organization, all tended to be people who weren’t going to be having any pre-marital sex even if they weren’t opposed to it, due to significant personality/body mass/acne problems. Upon viewing the group, I noticed the “Recent News” section, and read through it, and it’s a bit terrifying. It starts rather tamely:
Great idea. If someone wants to remain chaste until they get the gold band, I’m all for it (though I have to admit, if I were single, and went on a date with someone who revealed they intended to wait until marriage to give up the punani, well… I probably would not call her back). But scroll down further, and things start to get a bit creepy:
Uh, okay, sure. Unfortunately, the love>justice+wrath prioritization doesn’t seem to hold with what comes next:
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, first of all, congratulations on not having made any intellectual progress since, oh, about 1840. Secondly, looking above, it seems like you’re FAR more interested in the God of Wrath than you are in either the God of Love or the God of Justice. Thirdly, let’s talk about the absolute truth mentioned in the first quote. As I see it, the Bible can be looked at in one of three ways:
How anyone can believe option one is beyond me. And yet a surprising number of people do, even young folks, which astounds me. How can you sit through a basic 5th grade science class and still believe that the world was created in a matter of days? Doesn’t it make more sense that, maybe, JUST maybe, some skeevy priest made that story up in 4000BC because people kept asking him how the world came to be and were getting tired of just hearing “God did it?” The second option I can at least understand; follow the rules, and you go to heaven. Don’t, and you go to hell. Super simple. However, since the Bible contains all those crazy Old Testament minor commandments about keeping kosher and stoning disobedient children, which even hard core conservative Christians seem to ignore these days, folks are just picking and choosing which rules they want to follow. Which leads to the question: what exactly makes you think that the rules you’ve chosen are the ones that really count? For example, the most frequently quoted Anti-Homosexuality Bible provision is Leviticus 20:13:
But in Lev. 11:12:
So crawdads, lobsters, shrimp, crabs, etc. are all abominations too. Not to mention, of course, how pigs are unclean (which I gather is one step below abominable), and yet I don’t see the churchgoers at the Bob Evans on Sunday afternoons asking the servers to make sure the cooks hold the bacon. What fundamentalists are saying is basically “Okay, you only have to obey the IMPORTANT rules, and we get to say what those are.” Sorry, but no; either you obey ALL the rules, or you don’t get to condemn others for saying that the prohibition on homosexuality is no more valid than the prohibition on eating delicious pork chops. What scares me isn’t that some people believe that gay folks are going to hell. You can believe that Jesus appeared to you in a vision and told you to sell all your possessions, buy a used Harley Softail, and ride around Arkansas preaching Rastafarianism for all I care. What terrifies me is that folks that believe this crazy stuff have a tendency to band together and convince the government that they have some kind of True Path, and that True Path involves telling the rest of the world what they may and may not do. Religious fundamentalism is religious fundamentalism; the difference between telling homosexuals they can’t get married or adopt kids and stoning them in the streets is just a matter of degree. And time. Even if fundamentalist Christianity starts to decline, I’m still saddened by the fact that, assuming popular statistics hold true, 10% of them are repressed homosexuals. The likelihood is that they’ll force themselves into marriages, and then get divorced many years later when they can no longer contain their own sexuality; the results of this are never pleasant, particularly if there are kids involved. I was hoping we were moving into a time where we’d see less of it, but I guess not. I apologize for this not being even remotely humorous; I don’t know what came over me. Stupid facebook. |
