Ho-sanna-hey-sanna-sanna-sanna-ho

Anyone want a sacriligious practical joke that you'll have to wait a year to play?

Next Easter, find one of those things where a bunch of church people act out Easter. Then follow them around singing the appropriate songs from Jesus Christ Superstar.

Nightingales: the Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale by Gillian Gill

This book tells the story of Florence Nightingale's life and work by providing the background of her family and social circle. While she was from a rather progressive family for the Victorian era, she also had to deal with old-fashioned concepts like entails. The author uses the large corpus of extant family letters to draw a vivid picture of the thoughts, feelings and personalities of everyone involved.

It was all very interesting. Her parents took the time and effort to educate her in an era where general education for women was just beginning, and she took up nursing because she felt she had been sent by God. Although Nightingale could be quite the social butterfly when she put her mind to it, I think she was inherently an introvert and, after living in close quarters with all the other nurses in Crimea, she became a recluse and spent the last several decades of her life at home, living as an invalid with a disease that had not yet been diagnosed, but still working to develop a public health system in Great Britain.

The book is thick (~500 pages) and, because it is an academic biography, slow reading, but it's all terribly interesting and paints a vivid portrait of upper middle class Victorian life. Reading about how hard Florence Nightingale had to work - both in the Crimea and in the crazy social life that her parents organized, temporarily inpsired me to work harder myself.

Ways I humiliated myself today

1. Early this morning, as I was eating breakfast in my bathrobe, I heard a key fumbling in my door. I thought it was mi cielito unexpectedly dropping by, but when I looked through the peephole I saw it was a creepy older man with a beard. Not knowing what to do, I called the supers, slightly freaked out. Turns out this guy had been hired to clean the empty apartment across from me, and he had the wrong door.

2. The security-card-scanner-thing in one of the doors to our office wasn't working. Then I noticed the cleaning lady was in our office. I asked her if she had used her security card to come in (which would mean the door was working again), and she reacted like I was carding her (which does happen around our building for security reasons). I tried to clarify, but it turns out she spoke only Spanish. So I tried to clarify in Spanish, but as I reached into the "foreign language" section of my brain, stuff kept coming out in Polish!!! Which is weird because I don't even know the Polish for what I was trying to say! Luckily a co-worker came over and helped me with the Spanish, or I'd still be there now with this cleaning lady half my size all freaked out because she thinks I'm questioning her security credentials! I'm so embarrassed though that I couldn't speak Spanish! I honestly thought I could!

3. I was walking down the crowded stairs from the Yonge line to the Bloor line in St. George station. I saw my train had just pulled in, so I was focusing on the train instead of where I was going. Suddenly, the lady in front of me spilled some stuff out of her bag onto the stairs. I was still focused on the train, and I accidentally stepped on a container of expensive-looking makeup, breaking the container and spilling makeup everywhere! GAH! I was so embarrassed I didn't even think to help her clean up or anything, I just apologized profusely and ran off.

Today was not such a good day.

Recurring dreams

I keep having this dream where I made some administrative error and didn't finish high school. Like I didn't take all the required courses or forgot to fill out a form or something, and then it's too late to do anything about it. Then as I pass through lucidity into wakefulness, I'm counting OACs and thinking that surely Mr. Foreman would have told me if I was missing something, and hey, haven't I already been accepted into university?

Then I wake up and realize that I did finish high school, and university, and I have a job. Then I feel relieved and get on with my day.

What if...

This idea started with a discussion about Terri Schiavo that quickly ventured off into the absurd...

Suppose that in your living will you designate your spouse to have complete medical, financial, legal etc. power of attorney. You clearly and specifically state that your spouse is to make all decisions on your behalf should you be incapacitated.

Suppose you then become incapacitated.

Suppose your spouse then decides to divorce you.

Could your spouse sign the divorce papers on your behalf?

Religion and self-loathing

I've been reading Going Jesus for a while. I know it seems strange for me to be reading such a blatently xian blog, but Sara really interesting and not at all trying to evangalize and convert, so it's kind of interesting to watch someone for whom there actually is a god.

Recently, she responded to a comment by a reader who said that xianity creates self-loathing. She said:

Actually, I think my particular brand of self-loathing has more to do with the twenty-plus years of messed-up secular life I lived before coming to faith. It's not really rooted in the life I have now, it's more old...stuff

[...]

Jesus doesn't cause the self-hate; Jesus is a way out of the self-hate, but the only way out is through. Forgiveness is not just a bitch to give, it's a bitch to accept.

Now I have no doubt that this is Sara's reality, but I find it very interesting that her reality is the complete opposite of mine. I'm going to try to explain this by describing how religion created self-loathing in me, and atheism freed me from it.

Let's start with the fact that I have always wanted to "be good", in the sense in which one tells a child to be good. I've always strived for behaviour that would earn me praise, or at least look impeccable and beyond reproach on paper. The problem is that what religion told me was "being good" was, for me, self-contradictory. I firmly believed that to be good I had to do what parents and religion told me, but I could not do some of these things without blatently not doing others.

It all comes down to the fact that, for me, there is no god. There simply is not. No deity has every made itself known to me. I have had people tell me that there is a god, and I know that some people actually have a god and aren't just saying, but none of these higher powers have ever stepped up and made their presence known to me. If we assume that a god is omnipotent (which I think is the basic qualification for being a god), any god that wants me to believe in it should be able to present itself to me in a way that would be convincing to me; none of the many attempts in my lifetime to convince me of the presence of a god have been effective, or have even been enough to think twice.

So when I was as small child, I was told that there was a god. I could accept this, because what grownups tell you is the truth. Say please and thank-you, don't run with scissors, and there is a god. That's fine. However, religion required more than me saying "Yes, there is a god." Religion required me to actually have faith in this god. Where belief can be more passive, faith has to be more active. That's where I started running into trouble. When I started reaching out to god in the stronger way that having faith requires, there was nothing there. I could take the existence of a god as an abstract fact, like there's one proton and one electron in a hydrogen molecule, but I could not have faith, pour love and prayer and spirituality, into this void. It wasn't even a void like a black hole - it was like when you scroll off the edge of a Sims neighbourhood and there's just grey. It wasn't even cold and bleak - there was quite simply nothing there.

Now remember, I wanted to be good. A good girl says her prayers. But I had noticed that saying my prayers didn't work. It's like talking into a telephone that isn't connected to anything. So I felt hypocritical about saying my prayers - I didn't know the word hypocritical yet, but I felt like I was putting on a show so people would tell me I was being good, and I felt in my gut that that was being bad. But if I didn't say my prayers, I would also be being bad.

A good girl says grace. If I didn't say grace, I would be defying my parents and my catechism and being bad. But the fact of the matter was that I wasn't thankful to god for my food. I wasn't thankful to god because god hadn't even come up and said to me "Hi, I'll be your god this lifetime," and, to be perfectly blunt, sometimes I wasn't even thankful for the food. I knew that I was supposed to be thankful, but I wasn't, and saying I was thankful wouldn't make me thankful. So saying grace would be lying, which is bad and wrong. But not saying grace would be defying my parents and religious teachings, which was also bad and wrong.

In Catholicism, you have to go to confession before receiving communion. So I went to confession like I was told because I wanted to be a good girl. However, I couldn't think of anything to confess. The only sin I could even think of having committed was having said grace when I didn't believe what I was saying. But that couldn't possibly have been a sin, because my parents and my religious teachers told me to do it. So I made stuff up. The priest gave me a couple of Hail Marys and Our Fathers. I left feeling dirty and never went to confession again.

However, I still continued to go to church every week because that's what you do to be good. I also continued to take communion because that's what you do to be good. But I knew I wasn't doing it properly so I was inherently being bad, but if I refused to go to church or communion I would also be being bad. It then occurred to me that throughout the mass I was lying. I didn't believe any of the refrains, I did not believe in one god the powerful almighty the creator of heaven and earth of all that is seen and unseen, and I didn't even wish peace upon the random strangers whom I had to shake hands with. Now, as an atheist, I would be able to honestly wish peace upon them, but at that point I simply did not, for whatever reason, care if they had peace or not.

This process of realizing that there is not a god for me began around the age of six, when I started studying catechism. I didn't have the EQ to process what I was feeling or the vocabulary to describe it. All I felt was these constant conflicting messages about how to be good - by obeying my parents and religious leaders, or by being true to myself and not lying? No matter what I did, I could not be good - and I HATED myself for it! I started having recurring dreams of going to hell - I was falling and falling and it was getting hotter and hotter - pretty scary when you're six!

Believing in god would have made things so much simpler, but I am unable to just start believing in something on command. Everyone was telling me god was there, but it simply was not. It's like that episode of Star Trek where Captain Picard is being tortured and told there are five lights when there are really four. To be good you must not lie, you must be true to yourself, and you must fervently and passionately believe that there are five lights, base your life around the fact that there are five lights, and, on various appropriate occasions loudly affirm that there are five lights. I wanted to believe there were five lights so that I could be good. I kept counting them over and over and looking closely with a magnifying glass in case there was one I missed, and trying to convince myself that perhaps that speck of dust could be counted as a light, but no matter how hard I tried there were four. And as long as there were four lights, I could not succeed at being good.

Around the age of 10-12, I decided that I would go through the motions of pretending there was a god, pretending there were five lights. I tried to convince myself that I was being a good obedient child by going through the hypocritical motions, but I still felt guilty about it. I knew that sometimes it was appropriate to put on a show of being respectable for the sake of other people, but I also knew that a deity would be able to see through that. Again, I didn't yet have the words for this, but I knew that pretending to believe was disrespectful to the people who did believe, and I felt guilty every time I tried to obey my parents by making a false show of piety.

Around the age of 14 or 15, I saw the movie Schindler's List. Afterwards, I was moved and horrified and frightened that such great evil can exist in the world. I suddenly felt this great need to pray. Every other time I've ever prayed was because I thought I was supposed to. This time I needed to. I prayed and prayed, but nothing happened. It was still like talking into a disconnected phone. It was still like the grey void outside the Sims neighbourhood. It wasn't like talking to someone who's pretending not to listen. It wasn't like talking to someone who can't hear you. It wasn't like talking to an empty room. It was like trying to talk, but you don't make a sound - jumping up and down and waving only to realize that you're invisible.

This led me to realize that I was an atheist.

I announced that I would no longer be going to church or saying grace at dinner. In our house we had a rule that you can't open your xmas presents until you've gone to church, so I flummoxed the grown-ups by saying that if that was the case, I would simply not take any presents. By all appearances I was being bad, but I felt at peace. I knew I was being honest and true, and coming as close as I possibly could to truly being good. The dreams of going to hell stopped. Now that I was no longer caught up in this pattern of self-loathing, I was able to actually become compassionate. I started putting time and money into helping others because I cared, not because I was obligated to put something on the collection tray. I was able to put all the energy I had been spending on hating myself into actually becoming a better person. I can look myself in the eye and respect myself because I am no longer trying to live a lie of someone else's creation.

I'm sure that people who do have a god benefit greatly from it and are able to use whatever it is they get from it towards improving themselves. I'm sure they greatly appreciate having that fifth light to help illuminate things for them. But over here in my corner of the world, I'm proud to announce that I have four lights, and I can see just fine.

Personal space

There has only been one time when I've felt unsafe on the subway, and there's only been one time when I've felt unsafe in my building. Both times have been when someone was invading my personal space.

In the subway, there were fewer than 10 people in the car, several benches with no one sitting in them, but this old man sat down right next to me. Unfortunately I was on a forward-facing bench seat and I was in the window seat, so I couldn't just stand up and move. I pretended that I was getting off on the next stop, then waited for the next train.

The incident in my building happened just today. The elevator showed up with just this one guy standing in it, all thugged out. Thug gear doesn't usually intimidate me in and of itself, but this guy was standing right in the middle of the elevator with a wide stance, like he's trying to look intimidating. I get in and greet him civilly, but he doesn't move! Usually one person stands in one corner and the other person stands in the diagonally opposite corner, but he was standing in the very centre of the elevator and didn't move at all, so wherever I stood in the elevator I would have been in his personal space. He didn't say anything, we just stood there like a normal elevator ride, but he didn't move at all.

I know that in some cultures personal space rules are different, but I can't imagine any culture where the norm is to be as close to another person as possible when there is plenty of empty space. I also know some people with mental/intellectual disabilities don't quite grasp personal space. What I'm wondering now is whether anyone has done a study of inappropriate use of personal space. I can imagine that someone might get in someone else's personal space in an attempt to actively intimidate them, but I don't understand why elevator dude would want to actively intimidate me - most people find me surprisingly non-offensive. Why on earth would someone want to get into some random stranger's personal space for no reason, thus losing some of their own personal space? It reminds me of some petty childish turf war. Is taking up other people's personal space just for the hell of it a sign of a psychopath?

Things They Should Invent: an effective pants-alteration system for women

Apparently in some higher-end men's clothing stores, all the pants are originally too long, and an in-store alteration service will hem them to just the right length for the customer.

This should be extended to women - but not just hemming! The most difficult part of finding pants that fit, in my experience and in the experience of the few women to whom I'm close enough to discuss the fit of our pants, is the way they fit around the waist-hips-pelvis-tummy-buttocks region. Every woman's curves wax and wane slightly differently, and it's hard to find pants that adapt perfectly to the finicky details of this area of one's body.

So what they should do is have the top of all the pants (i.e. the non-leg portion) be perfectly cylindrical, the circumference of the widest part of the hips. Then, when the customer finds a pair she likes, she gets fitted by the alteration service, who will insert darts into her pants to make them fit her curves appropriately. No more gapping in the back while pinching in the tummy, no more big pouches of extra fabric on the sides of the hips, no more fitting only the largest part of one's buttocks and being too big everywhere else. Darts aren't that hard to do for someone who is moderately skilled with a needle - my mother has done them for me in about 10 minutes, and I would even venture to do it myself on, say, a pair of thrift-store pants whose fabric wasn't too fussy.

So what do we need to get clothing stores to implement this service?

Pearls in Vinegar: The Pillow Book of Heather Mallick

This was a fun book to read. It's an almost blog-like collection of thoughts and anecdotes by Globe and Mail columnist Heather Mallick. It's a friendly format and quite an enjoyable read. It could have used a bit less name-dropping of foreign cities and brand names of luxury goods, but apart from the name-dropping I really like her writing style - it's what I strive for and fail to achieve here every day.

Rules xianity should have

It varies widely from denomination to denomination, but in general xianity has some people going to heaven because their sins have been forgiven for various reasons, or going to hell because their sins have not been forgiven for various reasons. I know that in any particular denomination the rules are less arbitrary-sounding, but there are so many denominations with so many different rules that this is the most accurate overview that I can give.

They should introduce a rule where, if you are killed by another person, and that person is more of a sinner than you by whatever the standard definition is, you get to go to heaven automatically. Then people don't have to worry about being murdered without receiving the last rites or whatever.

Things that amuse me but really shouldn't

On the TV news, they were talking about that lady who was charged with spreading HIV around CFB Borden.

They showed what appeared to be videos of her wedding.

I'm not entirely certain, but I really do thing she was wearing her tiara upside-down.

I don't know why, but this amuses me greatly. Unfortunately I can't find a picture online.

When TV news anchors are absent

When one of the two TV news anchors is absent, the other one starts the newscast with "Good morning, I'm Anchor One. Anchor Two is off today."

On a one-anchor show when someone is substituting for the usual anchor, they start with "Good morning, I'm Substitute Anchor filling in for Usual Anchor."

(Of course, they use real names in all cases.)

I wonder if there's something in the usual anchors' contracts stipulating that their names must be mentioned on air every day? Or do viewers call in and complain when the usual guy isn't there?

A Public Service Announcement from the Usage Police

Attention world:

In the English language, a woman CANNOT "sire" a child. The verb to sire is a specifically male verb - it means to provide the sperm in the biological act of procreation (at least for mammals - I have no idea what kinds of verbs are used for other animals).

A woman can bear a child. If it's some kind of surrogacy situation, a woman can be the mother of a child or the biological mother of a child or mother a child or raise a child. But, unless science has advanced greatly since I read the morning papers, a woman absolutely cannot sire a child. To sire means to father*. Period.

This has been a public service announcement!

*Aside: I just realized that the verb "to father" means simply to contribute genetic material, without any implication of active involvement in the child's life. However, "to mother" and "to parent" both imply active involvement. Interesting.

Things that scare me about the Terri Schiavo case

1. They disconnect her feeding tube to put her out of her misery. It's rather disgusting that the most humane way they're allowed to end her life is to starve her to death - this in a place where murderers and rapists on death row get a lethal injection!

2. The courts are even considering taking her parents' wishes over her husband's wishes. To me, a large part of the purpose of being married is to make one's spouse one's official legal next-of-kin. If a person wanted their parents to be their next-of-kin, they could simply not get married. The act of marriage is a very deliberate choice to give one's spouse precedence, no matter what. This is an issue about which I feel rather strongly, as my parents and I disagree on some fundamental aspects, while mi cielito's feelings on the matter are closer to my own. Even if my wishes weren't respected, I would not mind that much being kept alive if mi cielito needed me to be, because I love him that much. But, to be perfectly blunt, I don't love my parents that much, and I wouldn't want them to be allowed to override my wishes when I've taken specific measures to avoid allowing them to do so.

I would be interested in seeing a wide-ranging poll with both general results and results broken down into demographic categories, asking the two following questions:

1. If you were in Terri Schiavo's position, would you want to live or die?
2. If you found yourself incapacitated and no one knew what your wishes were, would you rather your spouse or your parents make the decisions?

Things J.K. Rowling should do

Without announcing ahead of time that she is going to do so, J.K. Rowling should award a prize to the fanfic that most accurately predicted any elements of the series that were unknown at the time the fic was written.

Half-formed thought of the day

It occurred to me today that I sub-consciously make many of my personal life decisions in order to become what I shall call my "ideal self". My ideal self is the best possible version of me that I can be. She's the kind of grown-up I thought I was going to be when I was about nine and idolized the idea of being a grown-up. She would be my Mary Sue protagonist if I wrote fanfic. She's everything I want to be able to say when someone says to me "Tell me about yourself."

I became vegetarian because my ideal self is. I became an atheist because my ideal self did not go in for the hypocritical false piety of calling herself a Catholic when she didn't believe in any of it. I started blogging because my ideal self has a website where she write her thoughts and ideas. I attempt to get up early every day to exercise because my ideal self starts every day with a workout.

Obviously, not every decision I make is focused on ideal self, and not every aspect of my life reflects my ideal self because not every decision I make works out, but I just find it interesting that I think this way. I haven't decided yet whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.

Help me make minor life decisions

My original plan was to take the day of my exam off, so I can have a relaxing day, write the exam, then go out for a drink afterwards as is traditional without having to worry about work that day. Turns out my exam is on a weekday, from 7pm to 10pm. So does it make more sense to take the day of my exam off (so I can relax and study, even though I would probably have time to study before the exam even if I went to work), or to take the day after the exam off (so I can write the exam and then go for a drink afterwards)?

Things They Should Invent: centralized repository of questions for advice columnists

There are three main parties with different needs that must be met by advice columns:

1. The columnists' need for material
2. The "askers'" need for advice
3. The readers' need for interesting columns

All three of these needs could be met more effectively by centralizing all the advice columns in the world. Askers would need only to submit their question once to a central database. Then all the columnists in the world (or, if they're big like Dear Abby, their assistants) would go through the database looking for the questions that they are best able to give productive and interesting answers to. Once a columnist accepts a question, it would be removed from the database and the asker would get an automated email that says something like "Your question has been accepted by [columnist name]. It will be answered in their column within x weeks." If a question isn't accepted within a certain period of time, it is automatically deleted from the database.

This way, askers don't have to guess which columnists would be most likely to answer their questions, columnists can pick the most interesting questions and the ones that they are best qualified to answer, and readers get all the above benefits plus avoid the annoyance of seeing the same question asked in several columns.

Cosmetics you never thought you needed

I recently discovered two very lovely products that I'd never even heard of a few days ago. Both products are by Quo: one is called Eye Primer, and the other is called Lip Scrub.

Eye Primer is a tan-coloured cream that goes on your eyelids before you apply eye makeup. I don't know exactly how it works, but it prevents makeup from settling in the creases of my eyelids (which is very ageing) and otherwise straying, and when I use it I'm not nearly so desperate to get out of my makeup at the end of the day.

Lip Scrub looks like a lipstick, except it's silver with gritty brown bits in it. You apply it like a lipstick and rub your lips together, but then you wipe it off and apply your normal lipstick. It exfoliates the dead skin from your lips, so your lip colour looks better and lasts longer. My lips have been much less likely to get stupid-looking since I started using it. I think they're softer and plumper, but I'll have to get mi cielito to test them out just to make sure.

I do know that I look noticeably more attractive and pulled-together since I started using these products!