The end of the world as we know it

I thought that with all the accidental traffic to my blog, I should write something important (like the 300th post message to home-wrecking sluts wasn't important enough). So, I've decided to say a bit about a book I recently read about surviving disasters.

Sadly, though I just read the book a month ago, I've already forgotten the name of it.

But, that doesn't matter much, and maybe I'll remember it and add it in later. It was a very general overlook, and if you are worried about a particular kind of disaster, you should get another book (or many books) specifically for that. Cause if you have a plan for surviving a world of mostly blind people that has been overtaken by man-eating triffids, that probably won't be as helpful in surviving nuclear bombs or anything else involving radiation. More than half of this book was about storing emergency food in case something happens, probably something that involves the electricity being cut off.

There was a lot of stuff, even for a very general book. The author made a couple of points that I thought I'd mention. One of them was about having a portable kit with stuff to survive for three days. Most of the book talked about nutrition and calories and make sure you have enough of this and enough of that, etc.... But, for the three day emergency pack, most of that goes out the window (except for obvious things like pack plenty of bottled water). Unless you have an allergy or diabetes or some other medical condition that requires you to eat special food every single day, don't worry about too much sugar and not enough veggies and such. Pack something that you like that you will eat for three days, stuff that needs no refrigeration, stuff that needs no preparation, and maybe stuff that requires little preparation but no electricity (and make sure that you pack whatever is needed for food preparation and maybe some paper plates and plastic sporks.)

In other words, pack peanut M&Ms.

Okay, maybe not just that. Pack energy bars and granola and raisins. Pack cans of tuna and a can opener. Pack a jar of peanut butter. Pack crackers to put the peanut butter on, and maybe some store bought cookies. (Crackers and store bought cookies will go stale, so every couple of months you'll have to eat those and buy new ones to pack.) Pack banana chips and other hydrogenated snacks that you've been told are bad for you. Pack nuts, even if they have salt on them. Maybe pack some canned pineapple (just remember that it isn't as important as important as the canned tuna, so if you haven't got room for both, stick with the tuna). And if you think you can get hot water (remember that you probably won't have electricity), maybe pack a bowl and spoon and some of that instant oatmeal with too much sugar and ramen noodles with too much fat and salt.

With the stuff that's been in the news lately, I wonder if packing for a whole week might be better. Except that I'd never be able to carry a week's supply of water on my back, so I don't guess that I'd be doing that.

The other really good point made by the author was that you probably don't want to buy someone else's prepackaged emergency food. You would probably pay too much for it and/or not like the food. It might be low quality stuff that couldn't be sold for profit at places that you would normally buy food, but after it's been repackaged for "emergency supplies" not only do people buy it, but now they pay extra for it. And the calorie count is probably lower than what you would need in an emergency, so you'd probably have spent all this money and then still not have enough food. So then there's all these tables and charts (most of which I did not read, cause I'm not going to go out tomorrow and buy all of this stuff) suggesting that you might need this much of something and that much of something else, and how to store it, and canned is probably better than dehydrated if you have the space, though you probably want to try a bit of both.

There was a whole chapter about frozen food. I'm not sure why. In most disasters we'd be preparing for, there would be no electricity, the freezer would stop working, and then you'd probably be stuck with a lot of food that would thaw out and then go bad. Have you even seen this type of disaster movie with the electricity and everything still working?

Night of the Comet. Maybe? Flip a few switches at the mall, and the lights came on, music played, and the escalators worked. Maybe a week later, the traffic lights still worked. This never made any sense to me. I'm assuming that when whatever it is comes that without the guys going to work at the power plant the electricity will soon go off, and there will be no traffic lights, no music at the mall, and no working freezers.

Okay, there might be a few working freezers. There might be some rich "green" people who have totally switched to solar and wind power, and they will have working freezers. And there will be a few people who bought gas powered generators for Y2K who will have working freezers and other things until they run out of gas. But for most of us, our freezers probably aren't going to work. Little is said about this in the book, just if you have a bunch of frozen stuff and the power goes off, you'd better have a plan to store the food some other way, like drying and canning. I'm not sure how to can a frozen steak, so I'm probably better off just buying Spam and canned tuna to begin with.

Anyway, you're supposed to store enough food for about two years, and then not everything you want to store will last for two years, so you'll have to store a lot of different things. And then before the two years are up and you're out of food, you'll have to do stuff like learn to plant corn. And so you'll also have to store three years worth of garden seed, cause you're first attempt at gardening might not be what you hoped for, and the second year there might be a drought and/or a late frost, and so forth. You'll always need to store several years worth of extra seed, just in case of one year's crop failure.

I read this book and thought it was all a good idea, though even with all of that it would only work for certain disasters. A few months ago, I read One Second After, about trying to survive following an EM pulse, and I think that it would really help for that (and maybe the world taken over by triffids), but I don't think it would help much in a nuclear attack (unless I knew ahead of time where the attack would be and moved all of my supplies someplace safe). I think that I'm too far inland to worry about tsunamis, but if I were hit by one I guess that my supplies would get all wet and ruined, or at least scattered and/or buried under debris. Also, if terrorists poison the air, I'm not sure what I'd be able to do about that, unless again I knew ahead of time and were able to leave the area being attacked, or maybe do some short-term thing involving gas masks and/or oxygen tanks. And if there's an outbreak of smallpox, I'm unlikely to be in the minority who survive.

Two years supply of food and three years supply of garden seed won't help me survive either poison or plague. In the unlikely event that I survive either of these things while the majority of other people die, I won't need to worry about my own emergency supplies, cause I'll just take stuff that used to belong to the dead people. So again I'm back to thinking that this plan is mainly good for surviving after an EM pulse (or maybe survive hiding in the basement from people infected with Rage, except that I don't have a basement to hide in anyway).

So after reading this book, I'm thinking that I need that three day emergency supply pack for short-term emergencies, and that if I want to prepare for a long-term emergency, I'd better decide which emergency to prepare for, probably the EM pulse.

Only just before I started writing this, I made an attempt to find the name of the book I just read last month, and I came across a website that reminded me of the other emergency I should be planning for.

The Tribulation is coming.

Not that I'd really forgotten about it, just that I wasn't specifically thinking too much about it when I was reading through this book decided what might be useful. So that might be similar to the plan for surviving the EM pulse, except that I'd need seven years of supplies in someplace so remote that I'd never see any other people. So I guess if I win the lottery I'll be buying a bunch of "green" stuff and moving to an underground bunker in someplace like Montana.

I think I'll buy a Spam cookbook.

Something interesting happened on the way to the store

Well, I've been away for most of three weeks, and then this last week I was home, except that I didn't spend much of my time actually at home, and I was busy, and I didn't much of anything useful done around here. And after you have been away for most of three weeks, and then spend little of the fourth week at home and end up eating out, then you have to throw most of the stuff in the refrigerator away and buy groceries.

So I was on my way to do that, except that I wanted to have a look at my luffa plant, and while I was in the backyard I stopped to talk to my neighbor for a bit. And then I waved bye and was headed to my car, and I noticed one of the other neighbors with her baby. She was knocking at my neighbor's front door, and of course no one heard the knocking, because they were all in the backyard. So I said to the lady that they were in back. I don't know this neighbor as well as the one I'd just spoken to, in fact I mainly just wave at her and rarely talk to her other than at the annual meetings, and I don't even remember her name. But I've seen that this neighbor seems friendly enough with the other one, so I thought that she would just go on to the backyard. But either she didn't hear what I'd said, or going around to the backyard was too much for her to do, and she says that she has to run after her escaping dog, and could I hold the baby.

Sure.

And the lady got in her car and drove down the street, and I took the baby to my other neighbor's backyard.

Well, I don't have a dog, but if I did have a dog and she got out, this would upset me and I would immediately run after her. I don't have a baby either, but I guess if I did I would care a lot about her.

Now, if I had both a dog and a baby, and if for some reason I could only look after one of them, I'm assuming that I would favor the baby over the dog.

Not that I wasn't happy to help out and watch the baby, or at least watch the baby for a while til my other neighbor could watch the baby, as the other neighbor was the first choice for watching the baby instead of me. But I just don't think that I would have given my baby to someone who just waves at me from across the street, someone I rarely speak to, someone whose name I can't remember.

For all she knows I could eat babies for breakfast or be dating someone that Law and Order: SVU modeled one of their bad guys after.

All is well. She very quickly recovered the runaway dog and came back to the other neighbor's backyard, and then we all tried to get the baby to throw a ball to us. (She's very happy picking up the ball, but she hasn't quite got the throwing part figured out.) The lady took her baby home, the other neighbors went back to whatever they had been doing, and I went to the grocery store.

Yesterday was bad

Okay, I guess most of you reading this already know my situation. I feel physically bad sometimes because of it. But you'll notice that I now say sometimes. For about two years it was everyday. Now I'll go days or even a week without really noticing it, and even when it is noticeable it isn't that bad. If the rest of the world wasn't the way it is right now, I probably would have gone out and got a job by now.

But the rest of the world is the way it is now. And of course, when I almost feel normal again (not actually good, I don't think actually feeling good again is in my near future, just not so bad) something else will happen to make me go back to feeling bad again.

Anyway, yesterday we had a bad fight. So despite all my plans of getting up and doing stuff while I didn't feel so bad, all the positive feelings of the past month or so are gone now. But I am determined that I am not going to spend the whole day in bed feeling sorry for myself, even if it is too late to work on the particular project I had thought I would finish today.

My husband goes out of town sometimes on business. This doesn't happen as often as it used to, but it does still happen once in a while. One time he left for a week or so, and while he was gone I misplaced my car key. It was very annoying being stuck in the house all of the time and not even being able to go to the grocery store. And it is not like I go many places anyway, but that weekend I did have plans, and he wasn't going to be home in time for me to get the key from him. I did find the key before the weekend came, but the incident did leave me very frustrated that I didn't have a third key for the car. And unlike all my other vehicles I can't just go to Walmart and pay three dollars to have a duplicate made, because it is one of those two hundred dollar keys with the computer chip. I didn't want to spend that much, and I thought that there is really no reason for my husband to carry around the spare with him all the time. He doesn't drive the car, he just carries the spare for those rare times that I ask him to put something in the car or get something from the car, and he really doesn't need to have the key in his pocket all the time for that, and he especially doesn't need to take the key with him out of town where it does me no good at all. So I meant to ask him for the key when he got back, but I forgot, and I just keep forgetting, except for after he leaves on one of these rare trips. And of course by the time he gets home I forget again, so for about a year or so I have meant to get the key from him, but I forget, but it rarely matters as his trips are so rare now, and most of the time I end up going with him anyway.

So there was a sudden change of plans yesterday, and he was going out of town for three days, and the schedule was such that it would have been inconvenient for me to go with him, even without the fact that I keep saying that I should get some work done, probably in the garden, and I should not use this trip as an excuse to again put off doing the work. So it was decided that I would not go, and I was trying to help him with getting packed and such, and then I remembered to get the key off of his key ring. Only he saw what I was doing, and he took the key away from me. So I tried to take it back, but this time I was physically restrained from getting my key. My arm is still a bit sore from the incident, but I did finally get my key after we had a fight about it. And he has said that he is sorry my arm hurts, and that he didn't realize I would be injured, but this is not even the first time he has said this, and he doesn't seem to get it that he did anything wrong by trying to keep my key in the first place.

And no one could really be that stupid. It can't be that he doesn't get that he was wrong, he just doesn't care. He wants what he wants, even if it is something bad or something that makes no sense, and if I object or get in his way, that is too bad, and he will say it is my fault if I get hurt, whether it is mental or emotional or physical. Like it would only really be his fault if he hit me with something bigger than his thumb.

I really don't know what to do. I wish I had moved back in with my mother, back in that very small period of time that we were getting along. Maybe if I had we would still be getting along, or maybe without his interference I would have gotten the job that I really wanted and would have found some other way to come up with the rest of the money that I needed to take care of myself. But this really is too much, and when he gets back I will have to act as though nothing has happened, or it will be even worse.

A few thoughts on being an adult

I was reading another blog, and I tried to leave a comment, cause I disagreed with the author. Most of the other thought out comments also disagreed with the author, but I didn't think that they went far enough, so I proceeded to write this really long comment.

And then there were technical difficulties, and my comment was eaten.

So rather than have that happen again, I will write some things here, and then maybe later I will go back to copy some of it there.

The author of the blog sometimes gets letters from other readers, asking for advice. This week's letter was from a girl who was twenty-two years old, still living with her parents, and in her last year of college. She complained that her mother treats her like a child and wants to know where she is and what she is doing at all times.

There was no mention of the college student paying rent, just that she still lived with her parents and didn't like that they weren't treating her like an adult.

I don't think the college student is an adult. She has lived a certain number of years, and the law says that she's old enough to know better and follow the rules and such, and that she is old enough to vote and old enough to drink if she chooses. But that is about it. If she has in anyway earned adulthood, it wasn't mentioned.

Our civilization doesn't require an adulthood test, just that we reach a certain age, and if we reach that certain age, that probably isn't something we can take much credit for either. If we didn't die when we were younger, it was probably due to our parents, or some other family member, or maybe a teacher, or maybe a doctor or a cop or someone else in emergency services. But you probably didn't get to the magic age of eighteen or twenty-one because of anything brilliant you did. If left to your own devices, you would have done something really stupid before then, you would be a face on a milk carton, you would have died in a car wreck, you would have drank yourself to death or overdosed on some other drug, ended up in jail with some of your buddies, etc....

In other cultures, it is different. You don't just magically become an adult just because you have lived long enough. You have to do something to earn it. You have to get married or become a good parent. You might be expected to safely bungee jump or dive off of a cliff. You might have to prove that you can hunt for food or kill a dangerous predator. You might have to join the military. You might have to mutilate your body without anesthesia.

But we don't do any of that. We don't even have a test. You don't even have to graduate from high school. You don't even have to prove you can balance a checkbook.

So eighteen year olds and people in college complain when some of us don't treat them like adults, but what have they done to be an adult?

Are they married? Are they good parents? Do they take care of children or elderly people? Do they have jobs and pay their own bills? Or do they spend all their money on going out and having a good time? Did they pay for college or earn a scholarship, or did mommy and daddy pay for that?

The complaining college student probably isn't a bad person, or even a lazy person. She at least is going to college, which is what we want most people her age to do. Other people who think that they are adults didn't even graduate from high school. But she probably is not an adult yet. Probably if she were really even that close to being an adult, she would not be whining about all this stuff, most of which was probably done for her own safety.

At the other end of the spectrum, those of us who have actually been adults for a long time and have done something to be called an adult other than just living to be a certain age might have some life changing thing happen that takes away whatever it was that made us feel like adults. People who had bill paying jobs have lost them. People who were buying cars and houses have lost them. People who choose to cook and clean and otherwise take care of a spouse instead of pursuing a career might not have their spouses anymore. Stay at home parents might not have the child at home anymore or might have to go out and get a job. People who take care of elderly people or invalids eventually have to deal with the death of the person they cared for, and after that they aren't quite sure what to do with their time.

I don't guess that you stop being an adult after something like that happens, but losing that thing that was a major part of your life is hard, and sometimes you don't feel like an adult afterward. Even when it is something normal, like when you get old enough to retire or when your youngest child grows up and goes to college or moves away, it is still sometimes a difficult adjustment.

Adults have real problems to deal with. If you were really an adult, complaints about your mother wanting to know where you're going wouldn't even make the list.

The argument against becoming an architect

The second time that I went back to school I had to take a speech class. I hadn't taken it the first time around because despite being told that speech was a requirement of all degree plans I found out that it wasn't a requirement of my first choice major. And I really didn't like talking in front of people, so I didn't take it.

Okay, so it's back to school to take a few things. And the class itself turned out to be a lot of fun. It was just those two speeches that we had to give that made me very nervous, and the grades that you got from those two speeches made up like half the grade for the whole class.

The first speech could about anything you wanted. My first speech was about dogs. And it was okay, and I got a good grade, and that made me less nervous about doing the second speech.

The second speech could also be on a variety of subjects, but the second speech had to be an argumentative speech.

Right now, I can't even remember what my second speech was about. I put so much work into it, and now I don't even remember it.

The other students argued for or against abortion, for or against legalizing marijuana, changing the drinking age, etc.... A few of the students had other ideas.

And then this guy stood up to argue against studying to be an architect. And it seemed like the silliest thing to have an argumentative speech about. Except that when he spoke his voice contained somewhat restrained...something. I don't know what to call it. Anger. Venom. Disgust.

I don't know. Something unpleasant anyway.

First he spoke about the initial bit of going to college (which I can't remember if he said he'd done four years or six years), of the time involved, and the money involved, etc... And then he spoke of how it was a very specific course of study good for becoming an architect and pretty much only for becoming an architect. If you study to become an architect and do not actually become an architect, you've wasted many years of your life, while if you pick a different major and end up not getting the job that was your first choice the degree might still be useful for something else.

And then he spoke about being an apprentice. He spoke about having to work for an architect for about minimum wage, and how you are supposed to work for this architect for a year and learn things from him so that you can move on to the next stage.

Only you aren't actually paid to learn stuff about architecture, you are paid to do whatever the architect tells you to do. And the particular architect he got stuck with didn't teach him anything and made him do dumb stuff like make coffee. You expect to do dumb stuff like make coffee, but you expect to do other stuff, and you expect to learn from what you are doing and not just be some guy's slave for minimum wage. So he didn't learn whatever he was supposed to learn from the guy, and he was unable to go on to the next step in becoming an architect.

I suppose there is some process to request a second year to apprentice with a different architect, but he didn't do that. For one thing, there was no guarantee that the second architect would be anymore helpful than the first one. But the main thing for the guy giving this speech was that he had not only run out of money, but he had maxed out all of his credit cards and also needed a new car. He wasn't able to pay his bills that first year with a minimum wage job, and there was no way he could work for minimum wage a second year.

So there he was, like me, back in college taking speech class, cause he hadn't needed speech class to be an architect, but he would probably need it for whatever his major was in his second degree.

At the time I was just really shocked, but I have since heard similar things about other career paths.

Monday Morons--My Husband

No, we're not going to talk about that yet. Not quite.

Anyway, I've already mentioned that my mom's church is doing Judgement House and that my mom is working in it this year. Judgement House is sort of the same idea as Hell House, to do some scary thing to watch around Halloween instead of a traditional haunted house, only Judgement House is more of a play. I can't say for sure, cause I've never been to Hell House, I've just seen stuff about them on TV, but Judgement House seems to have more class, and Judgement House has a lot less gore than Hell House.

So this year Judgement House is called 59 minutes. We meet four people on a Sunday morning, and 59 minutes later they are dead. At the end of the play we see which ones go to heaven and which ones go to hell. I'm guessing that in all of the scripts that we end up with the same three scenes of Judgement, Hell, and Heaven. And I'm guessing that in most of the scripts, someone ends up in Hell for being just a good person and not an actual Christian.

I can't say how good any other Judgement House is, but the one at my mom's church is good, though I think that I liked last year's Collision a little bit better. The only part that really fits in with the whole idea of it being something to do on Halloween is the Hell scene. The music director turns out to be an excellent Satan.

So I had already gone to see it this year, and that must have been two weeks ago. I thought that they were done with it. I thought that either Halloween or the night after that was the last day, but they decided that they'd have it last night too. Seems like last year that they didn't have it that last Sunday. In fact, it seems like last year that they were so tired that there was a Sunday night that they didn't even have Judgement House or regular services either.

But anyway, last night they were still having Judgement House, and my brother called to invite me and my husband. Now, I had already seen it, so the point was to get my husband to go. My husband is not a Christian; he lied about that to get me to marry him, and until all this other stuff happened I really didn't want to get divorced over it. So we were out the first time my brother called and I did not notice that there was a message on the machine. I went out again, and wasn't there when my brother called again. When I came back, my husband tells me to call my brother, that he and my mom want us all to go to to Judgement House and then they were going to buy us dinner afterwards.

Great. Do you want to go?

No.

So I had already gone, and I didn't want to go again without my husband. That was the whole point. So I call my brother and tell him that we aren't going. My brother offers to buy my husband dinner at any place that he wants to go. They weren't just going to buy him an hamburger, they were going to buy him an expensive dinner. So I go and repeat the offer, to make sure he understands. He still doesn't want to go.

My husband isn't even supposed to be living in this house. My husband and I were supposed to get a divorce more than a year ago, and he wanted me to drop it and I wanted to go ahead with it, but I ended up cancelling the divorce because he was acting like he was going to kill himself. So he isn't supposed to be here. I was never supposed to hear from him again, but I made an exception and said that he could call me if he wanted to talk to someone at church. That didn't mean that I would take him back and that we would stay married, just that I would want to try after he became a Christian. If he didn't want that, if he wasn't willing to talk to someone at church, then there was no reason for him to even call me. Calling me that day was just cruel. But I let him come back, because I just couldn't imagine that he would do that to me, that he would call and come back here and not even talk to anyone at church.

So here it is two and a half years later, he has not talked to anyone at church, we have not had counseling, and he has not done anything to make me feel better. And my mom and my brother bribe him with a nice dinner to go to Judgement House, and he still won't go. He's not even supposed to be here if he doesn't want to go to church and such, and we can't even get him to go to special stuff like Judgement House even if they offer to buy him an expensive dinner afterwards.

I just don't get why he wanted to be with me in the first place. This is who we are. He lied to get here in the first place, he's lied several times to stay here, and he acts like we are bothering him. All we have ever done is try to help him, and all he ever does is lie and hurt me. I get that some people don't believe in original sin and all of that, but I really don't get how someone this bad doesn't even get that he has a problem and people are just trying to help him. And if he didn't want to live the life of a Christian and be around other Christians, why lie to be with one?

People who like to argue

My brother likes to argue. I think that he could argue about everything. If we do anything with my brother, at some point his voice will get very loud.

Sometimes he is "preaching to the choir." He hears something that he doesn't like, and he immediately wants to argue about why it is a bad idea. He hasn't even stopped to find out if anyone disagrees with him, he just starts yelling. Last year or the year before he was asking about movies I had seen, and I thought that I would tell him I heard that JJ Abrams was making a Star Trek movie with the characters of the original Star Trek, but using younger actors. He got upset and started yelling about what a bad idea it was. I was the only other person in the room. No one was arguing with him. I wasn't even offering an opinion about anything, I just thought that he'd like to hear what the latest rumor was, and he just started yelling about how wrong it all was.

Other times he will say something, and we tell him that we think he's wrong and why we think he's wrong. And then he wants to argue about what ever it is and convince us all that he's right. And we're like, we don't care. And he has to yell about a few more points. We still don't care. More yelling. Buddy, you don't get it. We really don't care. The subject matter isn't that important to us, and we don't want to talk about it anymore. Even if you end up winning the argument, who cares? Trying to win us over isn't going to do anything for you. Even if we agreed with you on the subject, we are not in a position to do anything about it. So let's talk about something else.

I think that my brother just likes to argue. I think partly this is because he misses Dad. Dad and my brother used to argue about everything, and now my brother doesn't have anyone to argue with. So now he tries to make an argument out of everything.

I get less and less interested in arguing about stuff as I get older. There's the stuff that I don't care about enough to argue about. This year that includes most political stuff. In fact, most years now that includes most political stuff. I just don't know of any candidates that share enough of my views to even bother to vote, so I'm certainly not going to get into an arguments about who is better. My answer to everything on that subject is going to be d--none of the above.

The only arguments that I bother with anymore are things that are only moderately interesting to me. I'll argue which Star Trek movie is better or what I would have done differently on last week's Stargate, but that's about it. And even that isn't fun if you're talking to someone who will make a big deal out of that.

The real important stuff I don't want to argue about either. The serious life and death stuff like religion is all stuff that I decided a long time ago, and I don't need to talk about it anymore. I know what I know, and no one is going to change my mind, and if you seriously try to change my mind it would probably just be an upsetting conversation that would serve no purpose. And while I'm supposed to try to get everyone to see my point of view on that stuff, I rarely bother with it anymore. If it isn't going to end up saving someone's soul or something, I just don't want to get into it.

400th Post--Do I need a gun?

I watch this show called Sunday Morning. You learn odd things on Sunday Morning, like why on Space: Above and Beyond the answer to the password *Bulldog* is the name *Chesty.* Watching Sunday Morning is the one adult thing I try to do every week. The rest of the time I'd happily watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer or something like that. It's been a while since I've even watched Nova on a regular basis.

So one of the stories a while back was that it is supposed to be legal for everyone in all fifty states to be able to own a gun, because the second amendment says so, etc.... Now there's going to be a few lawsuits here and there and we'll see what happens.

Someone who writes a blog (someone that I don't link to) wrote a post about it, wondering if it was a good idea for everyone to have a gun. And as part of what he wrote, he mentioned my dad as an example of a good law abiding citizen who thought it was a good idea for everyone to have a gun, even though he didn't actually own a gun himself. I know that at least one of my readers reads this other blog, so I thought I'd write something about it myself.

For one thing, the person writing the other blog post was wrong. My dad did own a gun. I don't know if he kept it or if my mom has it now or what happened to it. I never saw the gun, I can't imagine that my mom was very happy about it, but I do know that he had a gun at least for a little while. He told me many years later that he went out and bought a gun for self protection, after my uncle threatened to murder us all in our beds or some such thing.

I don't doubt that there are such people out there, who think that in principle having that everyone having a gun would be a great idea, even if they don't actually own guns themselves, but my dad just isn't the greatest example since he did have a gun.

Anyway, my dad did like Heinlein and did think that a well armed society was a polite society and all of that. And he did think that just sometimes a person needed a gun, that there were times when a person was in danger and that there was always someone bigger than you or more skilled at martial arts or knife throwing or whatever, but a gun would work on whoever was after you regardless of size or skill or whatever.

I do like that scene in Predator 2, when this no good punk threatens to kill someone on the subway, and every other person in the car pulls out a gun, including some little old ladies. I'm not sure that I would think it was cool in real life, but it was a funny bit on film. I think in real life the no good punks would still be able to get to their guns before the little old ladies.

Anyway, people are supposed to have the right to own a gun now, because someone wrote that on a piece of paper more than two hundred years ago. Two hundred years ago was a lot different than now. Two hundred years ago, we needed guns to fight the British and the Indians, to defend ourselves against wolves and bears, to shoot hen-stealing foxes, and to kill squirels and rabbits for dinner. Some years after the second amendment was written, Americans needed guns to exterminate the buffalo, to fight more Indians, to fight each other, to defend ourselves against wolves and bears, to shoot hen-stealing foxes, and to kill squirels and rabbits for dinner. Two hundred years later, we're not fighting the British or the Indians, the majority of people we are fighting aren't here, there aren't that many of us needing to defend ourselves against wolves and bears on a regular basis, even if you do have problems with hen-stealing foxes you might have better luck with traps than with guns, and very few people go out and kill squirels and rabbits for dinner.

And if you are trying to exterminate anything other than fire ants, I will shoot you.

There are still things that need to be shot -- kidnappers, pedifiles, rapists, homewrecking-sluts, cheating spouses, Enron executives, etc.... Problem is that by the time you know who to shoot, it's probably too late. You can still shoot them afterwards, but not in self-defense. Still, just in case the kidnapper or rapist comes to your house, you might feel better if you had a gun. And while you may not have hen-stealing foxes to deal with, you might want to shoot someone trying to steal your big-screen TV or your grandmother's pearl necklace.

While I'm all for shooting people who try to steal TVs and jewelry, I more often hear of people accidently shooting family members by mistake. Or a kid gets the gun and shoots accidently shoots himself or a friend, or he takes the gun to school and gets expelled or maybe actually shoots a classmate.

Of course, if you do get to use the gun for its intended purpose and shoot someone trying to steal your TV or your jewelry, and he doesn't die right away, he'll sue you.

So owning a gun isn't the simple choice that it was when the second amendment was written. And that's without getting into stuff like there didn't used to be machine guns and armor piercing bullets and idiot kids in gangs, etc... We just have problems with guns that people just couldn't imagine back then.

Maybe they did have some of our problems, but I just can't picture it. I can't picture teenagers getting shot two hundred years ago by parents who thought they were burglers. I can't imagine little kids in the old west accidentally shooting themselves by playing with real guns. I can't picture too many kids taking guns into Laura Ingalls' classroom and shooting classmates. Not that it couldn't have happened once in a while, but I doubt it was the norm.

I would like to hear a little bit more about why a person needs a gun, instead of a person has a right to have a gun because someone wrote it on a piece of paper two hundred years ago. The Bill of Rights was not written in stone, and it was meant to be added to and changed occasionally. So it might actually be time to change that amendment or even throw it out completely. But instead we are trying to figure out how to write laws that fit in with this idea that everyone who wants a gun should be able to have one, unless he can't afford to buy one or he admits to being a mental patient.

According to one study, one in nine college men had forced someone to have sex, had sex with someone who had said no, or had sex with someone who was drunk or unconscious or otherwise incapable of consenting to have sex. In the study, more than half of these men seemed to be too stupid to know that they had raped someone. Another study found that it was only 1 in 12 men who forced someone to have sex, but 88% of them were to stupid to figure out that they'd raped someone. The studies were on college men, and in theory, the numbers for people not in college would be similar if not higher. So that's a lot of rapists out there, but I rarely hear that women should be carrying guns because the odds are that they'll eventually have to deal with one, just that everyone should be allowed to have guns because the second amendment says so.

Unfortunately, the majority of rape victims were not attacked by strangers, and having a gun probably wouldn't have helped them. I've only ever heard of one woman shooting a man that was going to rape her. I hear about sexual assault a lot, but only this one lucky woman who shot the bastard. There are probably others that I didn't hear about, and probably there are a lot of guys who didn't need to be shot, just threatened, or maybe a couple of guys that were shot at but got away. But still, here is a legitimate reason that someone might need a gun, but hardly anyone mentions it (except maybe a few of the women when they go to buy the guns), and everybody talks about their second amendment right to own a gun even if they don't need it.

Do you think that the founding fathers wrote all this stuff so that two hundred years later you'd have the right to walk around town with a gun, to own a collection of guns, or to go out in your backyard and pretend to be Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, or Arnold Swarchenegger? They wrote all this stuff to deal with the way life was two hundred years ago, and maybe the way that they guessed life might be later, and two hundred years ago almost all of them needed guns. They needed guns, cause they had to kill something on a regular basis. Except for fishing and the occasional hunting trip, most of us law abiding citizens don't kill anything except mice and roaches. Most of us just don't need guns. I need something (an actual working phaser would be nice), but I probably should not buy a gun.

Memory Problems

One of my fellow bloggers is having memory problems. She went into the hospital for a procedure, and while I guess no one really looks forward to going to the hospital, this was not something that her doctors and family talked her into. She knew that she wasn't going to get any better doing nothing, researched her options, and decided that there was no point in putting off the treatment. She was not well, and she was at least looking forward to getting the hospital thing over with and getting better.

She knew that she'd have some problems. She knew that she shouldn't drive for a while and would have to take a cab home, etc.... But she expected to go home and get some rest and feel better afterwards.

Only now she can't remember stuff. She can't remember a lot of stuff from the past year or so. And now she's having trouble making new memories, and she can't remember stuff that she did like an hour ago.

This might be temporary. She's read about stuff like this happening to other people, and then they get better after a few weeks. On the other hand, no one knows for sure, and she's worried that she might spend the rest of her life being like that guy in the movie Memento.

There are other similar memory problems. One is described in the movie Fifty First Dates. When I first heard about this movie, I thought something like that's too bad, cause there are real people out there with this problem, and someone should make a good movie about it instead of this Adam Sandler crap. Only, after about twenty minutes of Adam Sandler crap, this actually turned out to be a good movie. It's mostly funny, but then you do start to see what it might be like for the family of someone who wakes up everyday thinking that it's a certain date on the calendar, only that date has long past for everyone else. She wakes up everyday thinking that it's her dad's birthday, and since they don't know what else to do, her family and friends all go to great lengths trying to pretend that everyday is her dad's birthday. And we see what it might be like for a person with this problem, if things don't go as planned and she has "a bad day." Then she meets Sandler, who isn't in on this, and her family wants him to go away because he's going to mess up their routine and cause problems. But then they realize that she likes him, and on his day off they still pretend that it's dad's birthday, only maybe she should have lunch or something with this nice guy she just met. After a while, Sandler suggests that they tell her the truth. They make video tapes and she writes notes to herself, and every morning she spends about an hour watching the tapes and reading the notes and being a bit upset, but then she realizes it is the truth and everyone tries to get on with the day. And it doesn't always go as one would hope, but things don't always go as one would hope anyway, even if you don't have this odd memory problem.

So if you can get through the first twenty minutes or so of Adam Sandler crap, watch Fifty First Dates, cause it is a good movie. And while Click isn't really supposed to be about a guy with memory problems, he does seem to have a lot of problems in that area. So that's a good movie to watch too, and it has a lot less crap.

I have seen a real-life guy with this memory problem do the talk show circuit. One day he had an accident or something, and he remembers everything up to that point just fine. But since then he can make new memories for one day, and then he goes to sleep and forgets everything again. Everyday he wakes up thinking that it is that day before the accident happened. That day was like twenty years ago. He's aged, his wife has aged, and his little kids have grown up and moved away. He doesn't know what day it is, he doesn't know who is president, he doesn't know about 9/11, etc.... He writes himself a note that he has to read every morning. This guy is somewhat lucky to be a math teacher, and with some help he can still do his job. Math twenty years later is still math. If he had another job, even say a similar job of being a history teacher, he probably couldn't do it. He could be lecture about something that happened many years ago, and that would probably go okay, but then if a student asked him to compare something in the lecture with Iraq, he wouldn't even understand the question.

While we were having this discussion with the fellow blogger about how she must feel, someone brought up the idea being able to selectively remove memories, like in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In the movie, it didn't quite work. Although the main character thought that he wanted to forget things, his mind rebelled against the procedure and tried all kinds of things to save some of the memories. Still, he signed up for erased memories, and that's what he ended up with. But only his memories were erased, not everyone else's, and while people were warned that he had part of his memory erased, people would occasionally mention something that they weren't supposed to, or someone would say something that just didn't make sense, or he would meet someone who didn't get the memo and talk about the very thing that he didn't want to remember. And after a while, wouldn't that all be very annoying, and wouldn't you get curious and go looking for the very thing that you thought you'd be better off not remembering?

I think that it would be very difficult to pick specific things to forget, but I think in the future that it might be possible to forget specific blocks of time. I think that you would have to make the horrible choice of forgetting everything within a certain amount of time and lose the good with the bad. And to really make it work, you might have to go back to a time before the bad thing happened and forget everything that happened since then. If the bad thing happened yesterday, maybe that would work. But if the bad thing happened a month ago, a year ago, or five years ago, that's a problem.

I have actually given this matter some thought.

About two years ago, some really bad stuff happened to me, and I knew that I'd never get over it. I've tried, but some things just can't be fixed, and some of the things that can be made better I can't do by myself and other people involved refuse to help. So I'm stuck. I can't go back and undo what was done. So I said, from this point on, it would be best if...but that didn't happen either. And a bit after that, I made some decisions and tried to get on with things, but someone interfered with those plans. Later, I made other decisions and made more plans, but again there was interference. So just nothing seems to work out that would allow me to get on with my life, and even on my best day I still have this bad stuff hanging over my head.

About a month before the really bad stuff happened, there was another bad thing that happened. And I had a rough couple of weeks, had some physical problems after that, and just about the time that I started to feel like things were getting better, more bad stuff happened. I've had some health problems since then, and while most of it isn't as bad as it was, it is just always lurking in the background on top of the other bad stuff that I can't seem to get over. The really odd thing is that the week before this was a pretty good week, and while it wasn't my favorite week of all time, it was one of those times when I seriously got to thinking about my life, how it wasn't really what I had wanted it to be, but it wasn't that bad either. And that Saturday was a day that I was thinking how I had a good life, but I was wasting it waiting for things to get better, things that I couldn't fix by myself, so maybe while I was waiting for a time when those things might be better I should concentrate on just things that I enjoyed that I could do without anyone else's help.

And then Sunday there was a really bad flood, and more bad stuff happened later. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just go back to that Saturday. Physically, I can't do that. But if I was given a choice to mentally go back to that Saturday and forget everything that happened after that, would that be a good idea? I don't have a career, or even a job right now, so that's not a problem. I don't have children or even pets right now, so that's not a problem. I'd forget more than two years of my life, the good and the bad, but they were the worst two years of my life. On the best day when I'm on a trip and having a good time, I'm never really at peace like I was before, and I probably never will be again.

If the memories of the last two years were gone, and I felt better and had a good life again, what would I lose? Two Halloween parties and two Christmas seasons would be gone. I have taken four college classes of ceramics and sculpture, and three of those were in the last two years. I was just starting to knit, and I'd have to learn some of that over again. I'd forget two years worth of books and movies. I'd forget about trips that I've taken and people I'd met. I'd forget that my friend J died a few months ago. I'd forget my friend from the great white north.

If that were all, then it would probably be okay. Christmas was good, and I especially thought so of Halloween, but they would be better in the future if I were my old self. I like ceramics, but I liked learning them the first time around and I'd probably like to learn it again, and relearning the knitting wouldn't be as much fun, but I might still do it anyway. Getting to see the good movies of the last two years for the first time again would be a good thing, as would reading the books, though that would take time. I liked the trips, but they are places that I could go again, and be in a better mood and maybe enjoy them more. My friend J would still be dead regardless of my memory, and I'd known for a long time that he could just die at any time.

I had met my friend from the great white north before the bad stuff happened, but we didn't really get to be friends for a while. I think that if I did forget the past two years, he wouldn't, and we would both still like the same things and would end up being friends again. So that wouldn't be so bad. But even if it really meant a choice between having my friend and being a whole person again, I think that I'd have to choose being a whole person again. If it could really work that way, I think it's just too important to get the rest of my life back even if I had to give up parts of life that I like now.

But I don't think that I'd ever get a choice like that. Even if there was a way to safely remove that part of my memory, I don't think that I could do it. I think that without the memories of the last two years, I think that I might do something stupid and maybe end up having things just as bad or maybe worse than they are now.

For one thing, since that Sunday I have had health problems. A lot of little things, but added together they tend to upset things a great deal. I don't want to get into anything too personal, and I don't want to get into the unpleasantness of UTIs and yeast infections and such. So probably the best example I could talk about would be the high blood pressure. That, and a bunch of my little health problems are probably stress related. Like most people, when I started to get older, I started to hear about watching my weight and cholesterol and stuff like that, and I was a bit concerned about becoming a diabetic if I didn't cut back on the junk food, but I was not ever in any danger of anything blood pressure related. I'd always been told how good it was. And then suddenly it was up twenty points, and maybe sometimes it was up thirty points. My own personal theory was that my blood pressure was up temporarily because I was upset about the other problems, and the high blood pressure problem would go away if I could just deal with the other stuff. My doctor at the time did not agree and gave me some meds. She did little to help me with the stuff I was actually worried about. She would upset me by trying to talk me out of tests that I wanted, by asking over and over again why I thought something was a problem and why I needed the tests. The questions were embarrassing enough the first time, and it really upset me to keep having to tell her over and over again. In the end I did not get all of the tests I asked for, I had to go somewhere else and pay extra for some of the tests, and I really didn't feel like I was going to get better under her care. So what happened with the blood pressure is that when I would test it myself at a drugstore or something it wasn't as good as it had been before, but it wasn't really bad either, but it went up when it was taken at a clinic or something, and then it really went up a lot whenever I had to deal with this particular doctor.

I thought that pretty much confirmed my suspicions that it was temporary, that my blood pressure was going up because I was worrying about other health problems, and this doctor was just making my pressure go up even more because she wasn't listening to me. The medicine she gave me for the high blood pressure didn't seem to be doing anything, and I quit taking it. A year later, I still have some health problems, but not as much as I did, and when I had my last checkup my blood pressure was back to the healthy level it was before all this happened.

But I still have to check it once in a while, just to be sure. So what if I forgot the last two years? While a lot of my health problems seem to be stress-related, and those would probably get better, what if some of them didn't get better or got worse cause I didn't know to check something? What if the high blood pressure comes back because of something else and I don't remember that I have to check it and I have a stroke or something?

What if something bad happened to a person and after that the person was paranoid or couldn't do his job or couldn't go on a date or was terrified of going out after dark or couldn't even leave the house. If you could remove the memory of that week or so when the bad thing happened, would the person get better? If something happened to make a person paranoid or terrified of the dark or whatever, and the memory of the thing itself is removed, but they still remember that something happened to make them paranoid or terrified of the dark, do they recover or does it still worry them that something did happen to them even if they don't really remember the thing itself?

We've all had things happen that we wish hadn't happened. And we think that if we had been armed with the right information at the right time, we could have prevented it or at least limited whatever trouble might come after. If you remove your memories of a certain block of time so that you forget something bad, would you just end up getting into that same mess again? And in a way, all knowledge is power, so if you remove your memories of a certain time, might you deprive yourself of something else that you might need in the future? If you are in a terrible car wreck, and you had a painful recovery, maybe you could just forget the time you were in the wreck and the hospital stay and such that followed, and not remember anything until you are well again. What if while you were recovering you watched the news and heard about some scam and saw a drawing of a suspected serial killer, and you forget that period of time, and after you are well you fall for some scam that everyone else knew about, or you went on a date with someone who's picture you should have recognized?

So, for the most part I don't think it is going to work out even after we have the technology to do this. And we have already seen how unsafe some of our current medical treatments are, so we can only imagine that future ones will not always work properly either.

Still, one can't help wishing it could somehow work.

Home again, and, oh....

I came home Sunday morning still feeling a bit anxious. The drive was pleasant enough. We listened to the rest of an audio book by Larry Niven that we had listened to last week on the way to Tyler.

I felt a bit rushed when we were packing. So I thought that maybe my husband had some plans for the day, but apparently not. He just wanted be home for a bit. He has to leave again for a couple of days, but it is no big deal.

One of my fears was that I would come home to find the place flooded. I opened the door, and there was a bit of a smell, but I didn't see anything that couldn't be explained by just the fact that I didn't clean up before I left and that I might have knocked over a few boxes as I walked out with the suitcases and such. The smell wasn't that bad, and if it was due to water coming in the house it should have gotten worse at the back of the house, but the back of the house seems fine. So either the back of the house is fine and a tiny bit of water came in the front of the house, which is highly unlikely, or the bit of smell was due to us forgetting to take out the trash last Saturday or something else that is not flood related. We lit a few candles and such and expect that to be the end of the problem.

While I was away, one of my plants died, but that's alright as it was not a big plant and can be replaced for three or four dollars. Ten of the eleven asparagus plants emerged. So I think that I will call that a success and do a bit of weeding before adding more sand and such. Next year it shouldn't need any work at all, just harvesting and eating. And I have volunteer cilantro plants, and I love cilantro. I need to do a bit of work before getting pepper and tomato plants, but I think that I'm going just going to clear out a few old beds and not do any real work on the gardening this year.

While we were away I had my brother stop by once or twice to check on the mail. There were two packages left from the company my husband works for. One of the packages was his new camera. I'm afraid all the companies are a bit daft like that. They send important packages when they know he won't be home to receive them. It doesn't appear to be rain damaged or anything, but we shall see.

So that is all a bit of a relief. After having a look through the mail we went to lunch, and then my husband took me to see my dying friend in the hospice. He doesn't really know my friend, and he doesn't really want to sit around talking to other friends that he really doesn't know either, much less the friend's family he doesn't know at all. So he said that he would read a book. And I thought that he meant he would take a book inside with him, but no, he meant that he would wait out in the car and read a book. Oh. Okay.

So I went inside and used a code that I was given to get use the side door, and I found the room easy enough. And of course my friend was asleep, which I was told to expect if I went for a visit, and that I would mostly be talking to other friends and family more so than my sick friend. So his wife and parents were there, and another friend I probably haven't seen in ten years. I remember him very well, but he only vaguely remembers me. After a while some people I didn't know who'd come from out of state came to visit. They had been here most of the week I was gone, but were planning to take a plane home later that day.

So my friend wasn't awake much, and I didn't talk to him when I arrived. I took him a silly thing. His wife wanted to decorate his room a certain way, only at this time of year she was having trouble finding the things that she wanted, and I just happened to have one of the things due to one of last semester's art projects. But then after I dropped off the silly thing and everyone had a good laugh about it, I wasn't sure what to do next. I mean, if he had been awake I would have gone in to say hi and then talked to his family a bit before leaving, but since he wasn't awake, how long should I stay? Especially with my husband waiting in the car?

I went out to the car and suggested that he go find something to do and then come back for me later. Only with it being Easter he wasn't sure that anything he would want to do in the area was going to be open. He said that he didn't mind, and I could either stay for a while or we could go home and I could drive back in my own car and stay all day if I wanted. Staying the rest of the day seemed a bit much. I don't know. I gave him the code to get in the side door and told him that he should just come and get me whenever he was tired of his book.

About an hour later he woke up for a bit. I don't even think that he opened his eyes, but his wife told him that I was there. A bunch of us just sort of wandered into the room and said hello and then wandered back out again. The doctor wanted to talk to his wife about something that they were planning to do to make him more comfortable. That's really all that they do at this place, try to make people more comfortable. Another couple of people I didn't know wanted to talk to him, so I talked to his wife a bit more and then left. I said that I didn't have school Monday so I could probably stop by then and maybe after school on Tuesday. And she said that would be good and I and went home. The way the emails we worded, I thought that they expected him to die by last Thursday or even sooner, but I guess that it could go on this way for a bit.

This morning there was another email saying that he died very early this morning.

Well, okay. Not really unexpected. But I had mentally started to divide up the week between cleaning and going to school and going to visit my friend. Scratch that. Okay, I still need to clean and go to school, but now I need to get out a suitable black dress and probably go and buy some suitable black shoes, etc.... Do I need to cook something? It seems like people always cook something. When my dad died the church brought us ham and potato salad. Is there a church that's going to bring ham and potato salad? Does the club need to do that instead? Does his wife and family even like ham and potato salad?

I'm the grown up now. I have to do funerals and such now. But I still don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing.

And is the funeral going to be in Dallas? I hate Dallas. Maybe some of us will carpool from Irving if it isn't in Irving?

Are those people who just went back home out of state going to get on a plane and come back for the funeral? I think visiting a person before they die is more important that going to a funeral, but it seems like people judge you if you don't go to the funeral. I think that the out of state people should just send flowers and stay home.

Oh. Flowers. I guess I'm supposed to get flowers too.

I'm not that upset at the moment. I was sort of the new person in the little group, and I wasn't as close to him as some of the others were. But I think that I was close enough that I'm supposed to being doing something, but I'm not sure what.

A friend of mine is dying

Someone I know will probably soon lose a four year battle with cancer. I've have been hearing that he is about to die for two or three years now. But he was in remission for a year, and then it was sort of up and down. Whenever I would see him, he was more up. He can't really be dying if he's up walking around and such, right?

I have not kept up with the details of his illness. At this point, I don't even remember where the cancer started. Between the days that I wasn't really paying attention and the days when I just thought that he shouldn't have to repeat the story for the hundredth time, I haven't heard a lot of the gory details. I saw him several weeks ago, and he was eating and he didn't look too bad. He was thin, and he looked tired, but he was talking and laughing and such. He was mostly himself.

He was talking about some procedure that he was supposed to go into the hospital for, but there was some snafu and it either wasn't going to be done or it was being postponed or something. So he got to spend the weekend with his friends instead. Not like he was really looking forward to another trip to the hospital anyway.

Okay, so a few days after I saw him the doctors got their act together and did the procedure or a similar procedure or whatever. I wasn't really paying attention and I didn't go visit him in the hospital. And it was in Dallas anyway, and I hate Dallas. So that seemed to go okay, and he was home before I even knew what they were doing whatever it was that they did.

Only Saturday he went back to the hospital. He's dehydrated and he couldn't sleep. He'd had the hiccups for like three days solid. He's not eating much. With all that going on he's having trouble talking, and when he talks sometimes it doesn't make a lot of sense.

So Saturday I was going to meet some of my friends and we would usually go to dinner and such, but I was going to leave early because I had to go home and pack and such before going out of town for the week. Only before I tell people that I'm leaving, we find out about our friend being back in the hospital, so we end up going there instead.

I met some of his family. His family is a very religious church going bunch, though not of the same type of church as mine. And then after a while they left and it was just us and the friend's wife. His wife was telling us that she didn't think his family was really dealing with it. They had put him on a prayer list and just expected him to be healed or something. When that didn't happen, they said it was God's plan, and now they are waiting for a miracle.

So the friend's wife is talking about this stuff and she's just rolling her eyes and such.

So that was all a bit weird for me. Especially since one of my friends who has totally different religious beliefs than these people would sit next to them and talk that she was one of them, and what she is really thinking is that these poor people are delusional.

I pretty much know what his family is thinking. They aren't really expecting a miracle, or at least, not in the sense that his body would be healed. They hope for that kind of miracle, and I have seen that happen and probably they have too, but they do see that the odds are against that happening. They just think that this is happening for a reason that they aren't aware of yet. And there are other things that they pray for besides healing his body. Since my friend is no longer in their church, and I'm not sure how young he was when he left, they may in fact be praying for his soul. They might be praying that he gets saved before he dies if he wasn't already saved, or that others would be saved during this time of crisis, or something like that. It would certainly be nice if the cancer could be cured, but at this point I don't think his family really believes that is going to happen.

So the situation of going to visit a dying friend is weird enough, and I never know what to say. But here I really don't know what to say. His wife is talking about his family's religious beliefs and rolling her eyes and almost making fun of them, and everyone else is standing there nodding their heads. So I can't even say the usual stuff that people in my church would say like he'll be in a better place and such. If he isn't saved, he won't be in a better place at all. And I certainly don't want to upset his family by asking if they think he is saved. But I do think that their prayers have more to do with his relationship with God than with his physical health.

This must be the mildest anti-gay tirade I have ever heard

There's this YouTube video with part of an audio recording of Oklahoma Representative Sally Kern, and then there's pictures of people holding up signs that say stuff like "I'm listening", and then there's stuff like "This is what they say when they think we're not listening" But this is pretty much the same old speech I've heard for like thirty years. I guess they haven't been listening. It's not like a secret or anything.

I don't think she even said anything original. It's probably mostly bits taken from one of her husband's sermons. Somebody says this every Sunday. I'm thinking, am I the only one who has been to church in the last three decades? And I haven't gone that much recently, but it still wasn't like news to me or anything.

The only thing that usually isn't in the speech is the bit about "the very fact that I'm talking to you like this here today, puts me in jeopardy." I don't think I've heard that added bit of drama before. I wonder if that was the main reason for the recording being kept.

Like I said, I haven't been in church much recently, and I haven't heard this stuff in a while. I think the Islam reference was added after 911. And as for "studies show, that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades," I have more often heard it said that God will not bless the nation if we continue to allow this. But there's a lot of other things that God won't bless the nation for, like if we're not allies with Israel.

And, "gays are infiltrating city councils" sounds a bit weird to me now. I think that is the way it is usually said, but now I don't think infiltrate is the right term. I'm not sure what word to use instead, but when I hear infiltrate it makes me think of spies. I don't picture gays pretending to be straight so that they can win elections. I think that there just happens to be about 10 percent of them in various elected offices just as in anything else. Possibly they keep their personal business quiet, and possibly in small towns they prefer to keep that a secret, but usually I just don't think the people who voted for them care and that wasn't part of the criteria for choosing who would be good at the job. Perhaps in big cities with a higher percentage of gays they might even make that part of their campaigns. "I'm gay, and you're gay, or you know someone who is, so vote for me, cause I'm gay too." Hardly an infiltration.

Still, I know what she meant, and as the speech is usually given over and over again to people who have already heard it, she's probably used to talking to people who already knew what she meant.

Was this her whole speech? It's less than three minutes. Anyway, it was pretty mild. From the way everyone seemed to react to it, I was expecting something really bad. She was pretty civil. The Bible says you shouldn't do this and so you shouldn't do it, and we need to return to Christian morals and family values, etc.... That was about it. So it's kind of weird that everyone thinks she should resign or something. Isn't this is what she got elected for in the first place?

Why I will not be voting, again

***Before I get started on this post, I thought that I'd remind everyone that New Amsterdam starts tonight at 8pm on Fox, and Jericho will be on at 9pm on CBS.***


It all started when I was seventeen and wanted to vote to re-elect Ronald Reagan. Everyone of voting age in my family did that. I wanted to vote too, only I wasn't quite old enough. That I would be eighteen long before the winner of the election would take office apparently didn't matter. I wasn't eighteen on the day of the election. But he won without my vote. No problem.

So after that I voted in a lot of local elections, mostly to keep out alcohol. We made a lot of jokes about "Quality Restaurants." At some point there was one of these elections that we didn't hear about, and the alcohol got voted in. The "Quality Restaurants" did not immediately make an appearance, but there are some here now. Funny that when the other side wanted to vote the alcohol in they wouldn't take no for an answer, and we had to re-vote on it again and again. Now that the alcohol is here we don't get the same opportunity to vote it back out.

There were other elections for Congress and such. Maybe I voted for a Senator or Governor, but I can't say for sure. I think that I must have voted for George Bush senior when I was twenty-one.

Okay, so when I was eighteen and getting over how it sucked that I didn't get to vote for Ronald Reagan, I started going to college full-time and signed up for Government class. I had previously taken American History and found it so boring and time consuming that I took the second half on TV. I figured that if I was going to do a lot of work in a boring class and only end up with a C, I might as well get a C by a less time consuming TV course. So I went into this Government Class expecting a repeat of the previous boring American History class.

Turns out that Government class was kind of fun. It was still a lot of work, but at the time it seemed more interesting, and I ended up with an A. At some point in the class, the professor was discussing the two party system, and how important it was to pick one of our major political parties.

He went on to say how that religion and income seemed to influence a person's party choice, and that often people changed parties if they lost a job or if their income changed just a little bit or if they changed religions, etc... At the beginning of the discussion, he asked for a show of hands how many of us were Republican, Democrat, involved in one of the other parties, or just considered ourselves independent. And most of us considered ourselves independent and planned to vote for different people without really having the parties be a major part of the decision. And there were a few Republicans and fewer Democrats, and if there were any third party people I don't remember them. And our professor was a Democrat. So he proceeded to explain the two party system and how it was really important that we pick one of the major parties and always vote for that party's candidate no matter how much we might like someone in the other party better.

So after he got done with his lecture he asked for another show of hands, and there were maybe one or two people who still considered themselves independent, and a few Democrats, and the rest of us were all Republicans.

Okay, so back when all of this was going on, Texas got the names for potential jurors from the voter registration cards. This made perfect sense. The same information that was used to determine where a person could vote would also determine where a person could be a juror. And you don't really want non-voters on juries anyway, do you? If a person can't spend an hour or so to exercise his or her own right to vote, that person probably could care less about seeing that you get a fair trial that will probably last several days at least.

Then I got married. My family and I always voted Republican. His family were Democrats. If we continued to vote as we had, our votes would cancel each other out anyway. We agreed that neither of us would vote, at least for the next four years or so. Maybe if one of us decided to change parties, then we would both vote. But for the first few years neither of us would even register to vote.

Enter my mother-in-law. For the first few years that we were married we were still receiving the odd piece of mail at our parents' houses. My mother-in-law decided to fill out the vote registration card for my husband and sent it in. There was no getting the damned thing back. He didn't want to register, and he didn't sign anything, but now he was registered. So now he was on the list as a potential juror. And it never made any sense why this woman took it upon herself to register her children to vote, since she did not at the same time register herself to vote and had not actually voted herself in more than a decade.

My husband was called in for jury service. Apparently, financial need is not an excuse for getting out of jury duty. They don't care that your employer doesn't pay you if you don't show up for work. Your employer is legally required to let you skip work to be a juror, but no one has to pay your for your time or for whatever money you are out for being a juror. A lot of companies do pay, but my husband's did not.

Also, the fact that you normally work at night and will not actually be awake for much of the trial doesn't count as an excuse either. Everyday for a week my husband went to the courthouse and filled out forms. Is there any reason why you could not serve as a juror in this trial? Yes, I work nights and will probably fall asleep during the trial. This kept him from being selected on juries, but did not get him out of the jury pool, which just meant that he had to sit around and wait to maybe be selected for another jury. This would usually last until lunch, at which time he would be told to come back the next day and do it again.

We promised each other that we would never even touch a voter registration card ever again, and told his mom that she tried to register for him again we would stop speaking to her.

At some point we were about to change our minds and vote for Ross Perot. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

After the terrible week of my husband being half asleep in the jury pool room, the state of Texas decided that there were not enough names from the voter registration cards. Names for jury service are now obtained from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Since neither of us were in position to give up having a driver's license, we are both now on the list of potential jurors.

But now we are both in the habit of not voting. And so far I haven't heard about anyone that I particularly want to vote for anyway. Like the classroom discussion, I do think that my lower income and decrease in church attendance has made me a bit less of a Republican. But I don't think that the Democrats really represent me either. I'm not sure that anyone would really represent me and vote for the stuff I would care about.

I worry about Health-care. I never worried about that before I got married. Before I got married, I had something called insurance, which could be a hassle sometimes, but if I ever needed it I had it. I've spent most of my married life without it. I have it now, but it is even more of a hassle than I remember. And I won't always have this insurance. If my husband dies, I won't have it. If a were to get a divorce, I would't have it. And if my husband changes jobs, I won't have it. My husband doesn't seem to get that would be an added expense if he changed jobs. He would probably have to wait six months before he could get insurance at the new job, if there even is insurance available at the new job, and many companies he's worked for just haven't had any. For the six months we are waiting for the new insurance, we would either not have insurance or have to pay for it ourselves, which last time I looked was about three hundred a month for each of us. And neither of us are getting any younger, and in the last two years I've had some problems. So I think about Health-care.

My second main concern right now is people who don't speak English. It used to be just a little annoying, but now it's really causing some serious problems. I'm not even sure that it's safe having all these people here who can't speak English. In Texas there are signs in Spanish and grocery ads in Spanish and coupons in Spanish. There are annoying phone solicitors who call and speak Spanish. There are IHOP menus in Spanish. There is tourist info in Spanish. I'm sure all that is nice, if you speak Spanish. I don't speak Spanish. And despite our last names, my husband doesn't speak Spanish either. So we are surrounded by annoying Spanish stuff that we can't read. And while everyone is doing back-flips trying to make sure the Spanish-speaking people are taken care of, the English-speaking people are being left out. When I was at McDonald's last week a woman got very upset because her number wasn't called and her food got cold while she was waiting. The kid who called her number read it in Spanish, so most of us didn't know what had been said or even that a number had been called. A couple of years ago my mother and I went to get a flu shot. You have to fill out a consent form that says you know that there are side-effects and that you're not allergic to eggs, etc.... But they ran out of English forms. They had boxes and boxes of Spanish forms, so they decided to use those instead. Only no one waiting in line could read Spanish, so one of the nurses had to stop giving flu shots and read the consent forms to everyone. And of course I'll never get the job at the library I would like, because "bilingual is preferred."

So I would like to vote for someone who will fix the whole Health-care situation and make everyone who lives here have to speak English. I don't think that there's anyone like that. All the Democrats seem to think that Health-care is a major issue. I don't know that any of them could actually fix things, but at least that is a major issue in their campaigns. But I doubt that any of them share my concerns about people who don't speak English.

So that's it. I think that my concerns do not match with either major party or any particular candidate. So I probably won't be voting. And I probably won't be voting for a long time.