I waved it in the air while making incantations, but nothing happened. I pressed it against a piece of paper, and it made a thick black line, but that was all. I used it to draw a picture, and tried to will the picture to life, but the picture sat there just as I had drawn it, so I tried to shake the picture off the paper and into the real world, but with no result. I don't care what this marker says on the side. I think it's just ordinary.
posted 12:52 PM
Tomorrow is Independence Day. It usually means picnics and family and a long weekend for me. It seldom brings any patriotic thoughts to mind, but this year the timing is such that I already had thoughts of patriotism on the brain. I'm wrestling with the "under God" issue. Actually, I'm wrestling with a tangential issue. I'm just trying to figure out what all the fuss is about. I always try and argue from both sides of an issue, but this time I'm stumped. I can't see the other side, but evidently everyone else in the country can. When I heard about the ruling, that the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance rendered the Pledge unconstitutional, my reaction was hardly a reaction at all. Laying aside my usual verbosity, all I had to say was, "Well, duh." The government can't endorse a religion; you start talking about God in a government-run institution, a school, for instance, and you're on shaky ground; you start invoking God in the official ceremonies/documents of the government, and you've just crossed the line. I've known this forever, it seems, which is why I was completely confused when almost everyone starting making a fuss about the ruling. Sometimes, often, I'm on the opposite side of popular opinion, but, as I said, I can usually see both sides of issue. But so far, the best argument I've heard is, "But look at all the other place God shows up in the government: on our coins, in our courts, etcetera." It just sounds too much like, "Jimmy's Mom lets him do it." That didn't work on my mother when I was ten, and I can't believe it seems to be working now. Maybe there's a more logical argument out there, so I'll keep an eye out for it. Until then, that's all the steam I have for my Independence Day rant. I'm not very politically minded, so I can't keep ranting for very long. Enjoy your holiday and remember that you're celebrating your freedoms, including your freedom to have God in your life and to not have God forced on you by your government. Oh, and have some devilled eggs. It's really all about the devilled eggs.
posted 11:37 AM
I did something foolish and probably very inappropriate and it felt good. I was feeling awful, I did this thing, and then I felt so much better that I thought I was on to something. I thought, "That was the wrong thing to do. I should feel awful. But I don't. I feel better than I've felt in weeks. Maybe I should continue to do the wrong thing." I should probably mention, before anyone gets carried away, that "wrong thing" was not evil, illegal, or immoral. I simply told someone how I felt when they probably did not want to know how I felt. Still, my brain tells me it was the wrong thing to do, but the change in my attitude was almost immediate. I had been depressed and unable to concentrate, but now it was as if all my negative feelings had been sent off away from me, so I decided to expand my "doing the wrong thing" philosophy into the rest of my life. I didn't do the dishes because I didn't want to. I ate unhealthy things(even moreso than usual). I spent money that wasn't in my budget to spend. I said, "Aha, I found the secret." But then I found that I had no clean dishes and my kitchen has ants. My stomach is upset. I'm in danger of going over budget before my next paycheck. And I'm less certain than ever that I should have opened up to that person in the way I did. The "wrong thing" approach doesn't seem to be working. I guess the prior method would have been the "right thing" approach, which also was not working. The 40 oz. of King Cobra approach, while producing some comical results, over all did not count as a success. I'm running out of ideas. I'm running out of counter space. I'm running out of deodorant, too, so watch out world, I see a confused, smelly man in your future.
posted 1:04 PM