Taking The Lord’s Name In Vain

If it weren’t for the commandment that gives everyone a permanent day off, I think this might be people’s favourite.  After all, “Thou Shalt Not Take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” doesn’t seem too hard to do, does it?   All you have to do is not say “Oh my god!” or use the name of Jesus as an expletive and you’re in the clear.   

Right?  

Lately I’ve seen a lot of what I’d consider to be more closely resembling what this commandment is talking about, though, and it’s coming from people who would NEVER say Jesus as an expletive.   

How many times have you heard someone (perhaps yourself?) justifying a course of action that the _human_ wants to take by saying “it’s God’s Will” or “the Lord has called me to….”      I am quite honestly amazed at how much time the Lord calls people to buy new houses or get new cars.   Living in Nashville I run into a lot of writers and musicianss who claim that it’s God’s Will that they Use Their Gift To Glorify Him! and Gig Full-Time.   They seem to miss the verses that talk about how it’s God’s will that a man provide for his family.    

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1 Timothy 5:8 ESV / 71 helpful votes

But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

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That’ll harsh your mellow, right there.   

Being a woman I know a lot of people who claim it’s God’s Will that they be a stay at home mom.   A lot of times–BUT NOT ALWAYS—this is more code for “my home life is familiar and comfortable and I don’t want to face the unfamiliar world of working outside the home.”   Other times it’s code for “I often feel insecure around people who have careers with fancy titles, but if I can claim that I’m Empowered by God than that puts me on a more level playing field, or perhaps even sets me slightly above, in a position where I can look down on them instead of them looking down on me.”   I also know a lot of people who claim God’s will that they work outside the home, and THAT can sometimes be code for “I am so sick of laundry if I have to do another load or drive another carpool I may knife the cat!”

In my own life I had to make my peace with the fact that it isn’t God’s will that I be a mother to biological children, nor is it God’s will that i be healed right now.   And it took me quite a long time and a great many arguments to make that peace with my own vanity.  Because that’s what these things are.  Vain.  We want what we want–the essence of vanity–and we use God’s name to make it look okay.  

That is the very essence of taking the Lord’s name in vain, and that’s the commandment that we so often break.

 

 

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The Exploitation Of Geek Culture

I started going public with this rant when I was not blogging.  I think maybe it’s part of my return to blogging, because when you put it on your blog you don’t have to deal with the “please shut up now” glares from the people around you.   It’s nice how the internet lets me be crazily annoying in my own little box.   Schroedinger’s Kat:  Is she weirding out or not?

Shroedinger’s Cat is actually the tip of the iceberg, because it’s one of the few geek things that has been distilled through the copper tubes of pop culture and dripped into the waiting cup of the masses.   People who want to sound geeky but don’t want to eat the whole potato can swig off the essence of the joke without committing to the root.    Then of course we get into the conversation about Who Is Geekier and Can You Be A Geek If You Haven’t Seen X or Can You Really Like Y If You Don’t Have A Menacing Tumblr Dedicated To All Things Y ?

That’s not the point.  The point is that the powers that be have decided to exploit the gently naive and often insecure geek panoply in order to sell more stuff.    Let’s take two examples:

1. Cars.  If you want  to sell a car to generic people you have to make a series of ads about the car for print and visual media.  You have to buy ad time and pray that people don’t go to the necessary while you have your thirty-five seconds of paid assault.

If you want to sell a car to geek people you just have to have a cool geek gimmick like the vader kid using the force or the dueling spocks racing to the golf course.   Then you put it on YouTube and let the geeks watch it over and over again and post it to their FBs and make their friends watch it over and over again.

2. Movies.   If you want to sell your movie about anything other than geek culture you have to buy ads and do publicity tours.   But if you want to sell to the geek culture you _charge them for tickets to a “convention”_, give them a peak at 30 seconds of the unfinished movie and let them handle the press for you.   They’ll spend months debating and discussing the footage.  They’ll joke about it on Twitter.  And next year they’ll buy another ticket to  the convention to meet the guy who was in the film for 5 minutes and they’ll pay him $10 to sign a photo of himself.

One of the things I have always loved about being a geek is the passion.  If a geek loves something they LOVE it.  You get their passion and devotion because you become part of their cosmos.    It bothers me, though, how cunning people are mining that passion to their own ends AND causing friction in the geek community.  (“You aren’t A Big Name Fan! You don’t have as much street cred as I!”)

So yes, I enjoy Doctor Who and I love Sherlock.  I’m big into Star Wars and Star Trek.  But you won’t be seeing many YouTube videos from me to promote those things because, well, I’m not paid for my time.   I think it’s high time those folks start buying ad space like everyone else who is selling something.

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The Two Types Of Friends I Have

I think I can divide my friends into two batches.

It’s become more blatant in the last two weeks, but it seems more and  more that my friends can be sorted by their chief television program of choice.   There are the Doctor Who people and the Justified people.

The Doctor Who people easily outnumber the Justified people by about five to one.   Which is odd when I remember back to the early 1980s and the time that everyone at Jefferson Middle School mocked me for loving Doctor Who.   Those were the old shows…the first four doctors when they ran on PBS and you had to sit through that schoolmarmy woman telling you that if you wanted to keep Doctor Who on the air you’d send your allowance to Channel 39.    At some point the Doctor quit being a quirky kids’ show with silver-painted thermoses  as props and became a sleekly repackaged brand that sells chaste sex appeal and witty banter.     It’s no wonder that folks love it now.   Watching Doctor Who is like having a crush on the captain of the chess team when you’re in sixth grade.     It’s fun and sweet and has a frisson of danger.  But only just.

So I suppose I admit almost reluctantly that I’m a Justified person now.   I’m still watching the New Doctor Who because it’s fun in that same way that the cartoons before the main feature are fun.  Harmless, innocent, wistful.   But Justified is like Doctor Who  for people who have become slightly jaded yet retained both a sense of humour and a world-weary realisation that there are actually people who treat blow jobs as a form of currency.    All my Justified friends are like the AD&Ders who saw too many of their characters die in campaigns.   We love make-believe but we do know it bites back.     We also don’t mind the occasional use of the expletive when folks are trying to make their point.

I’m trying hard to be fair as I write this because I really don’t wish to slag off either group.  I enjoy both shows.   But if I were totally honest (which is an impossibility; one either is honest or is not honest)  I would have to say that I’ll watch Doctor Who if there’s nothing else on but I’ll watch Justified over and over and over again.

Signs You Are A Doctor Who Person:  You think it’s cute when the hero has a romance.

Signs You Are A Justified Person:  You know that any romance the hero has is going to end him in some hot water.  Probably involving gamecocks.

Signs You Are A Doctor Who Person:  You think the sonic screwdriver is the coolest weapon.

Signs You Are a Justified Person:  You think Raylan Givens is the coolest weapon.

Signs You Are A Doctor Who Person:  You think Weeping Angels are scary when they don’t move

Signs You Are A Justified Person:  You think Boyd Crowder is scary when he starts using sentences with fewer than 15 words.

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The Lordly Adventures Of The Boatswain’s Mate

I’ll start off by admitting that I hadn’t an earthly clue what to title this post.  I usually like for my titles to be poignant, attention grabbing or at the very least annoyingly pun-filled.   But since I sat down here knowing only that I was going to do free-writing and that the free-writing wasn’t going to be the grouchily introspective thing that we ended up with yesterday…well, we are stuck with that up there.

I mentioned last week on Facebook that my stupidest and most lame peeve is when the word “boatswain” is spelled phonetically.  Any more it’s not uncommon to read books where the “bosun” does something.   And every time that word “bosun” comes up I get snooty.  Honestly it’s probably because I know, like, five things about boats, one of those being that “bosun” is spelled b o a t s w a i n.   And I’m such a geek for those spellings that contain whole realms of history crammed into the seemingly extra letters.   Yes, “enough” is spelled strangely to our modern eye, but  when you start to dig into why you learn all kinds of fun facts about the world.   That place where words intersect with history is one of my favourite realms to hang about.

Fortunately for you I’m not going to go into the other four things I know about boats.  Because I’m just not really THAT into boats, and I don’t think I could bear writing about them.   I used to be very enthralled by stories set on ships.  I’d like to thank the Whale Ship Essex for changing THAT forever.   Actually it wasn’t the Whaler Essex who was really at fault, but rather Edgar Allen Poe whose fascination with that story led him to write The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket.   I eagerly dove into that story when I was about twelve, which is also when I was most enthralled with stories set on ships AND stories by Edgar Allen Poe.     But I have this thing about cannibalism.   I can’t contemplate it without going into a cold sweat and having nightmares and just generally spending a lot of time troubled.   There’s cannibalism in Pym because it’s based on the story of the Whaler Essex and it’s by Edgar Allen Poe who has a fascination with the horrible things people do.   (On balance I think I generally prefer my fascination with arcane spellings.   It gives me a much happier, much less cousin-boinking life.)   So that was the last book set on a boat that I read eagerly.    Even reading Hunt For Red October after I saw the movie I was just sure the Russians were going to start eating each other out of boredom.

Seventeen years ago I decided to use immersion therapy to get over my cannibalism thing so I read a bunch of books about the Donner Party. It worked enough that I can now blog about Pym without getting all hypervental but it also resulted in my knowing  that the guy who ate the most people ended up opening a restaurant.   Which…yuck.  Who would eat there?   Apparently some people must have.   I guess they had dares in the nineteenth century too.

Wow.  Look at that.  I did my 500 words easily today, and with no maudlin whinging!  Perhaps I’ll be able to return to this without wanting to smack myself after all.    I really do love blogging.   Now if you’ll excuse me I am going to go look up some other things about boats.

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The Cave Scenario

That itch in my wrists and the bouncing restless knee are signs that it’s time for my holiday blog sabbatical to be over.     I didn’t intentionally take one, but the way this November and December bled together in a haze of obligation and insouciance I ended up without a blog post for a month.    I figured that was better than my ultimately-repetitive take on the Duck Dynasty flap.  

Life is moving toward its inevitable conclusion in fits and starts over her in Katherineland.  So is this blog entry, now that it comes to it.  I had ideas when I signed back into wordpress, but now all of those ideas bore me.   

Strange men–men unknown to me previously–are stomping over my head with bandsaws and nailguns, ripping out the 14.5 year old Berber carpet and installing bamboo floor.  We are remodeling our cave.    Husband took the bed down on Sunday afternoon and I spent a good five minutes staring at the carpet.   The patch of carpet that sat under our bed, safely tucked away from the sunlight, looked much darker and a good half-inch thicker.  It was in truth the _right_ carpet in that it was the carpet most like that which we chose, purchased and installed when the house was built in 1999.   But it isn’t the “right” carpet anymore.  It’s too dark.  Too springy.  Too tall.   The carpet to which I’m accustomed is that which we’ve walked over and spilled on and lolled about atop for the last chunk of our lives.   It’s considerably more worn yet it looks _right_ to my eye.  It looks as I feel it should look.    

Of course I’m stretching this ode to stinky Berber into metaphor for aging and personal growth, because how could you not?   I’m not as fresh and springy as I was when I moved in here.  But I’m more relaxed and comfortable with who I am.  And I’ve spent a lot of the last decade and a half getting crapped upon by life in general.  As with the carpet I realise that you just clean it off, sanitize a bit and move on.  You don’t let the poo sit there.  You don’t grind it in.  

I love using my blog to talk sense to myself.   That’s what I just did there.  I’ve been torn enough about life circumstances that I hunted down a handful of trusted advisors and pled for wisdom.   It all boils down to “pick up the crap, clean and move on.”   

This may now sound like I’m changing the subject.  I guess truthfully I’m moving the subject over  bridge and onto a chip and seal byway.   But this talk of defecation reminds me that  I had yet another conversation wherein a talk about clean water ministries devovled into a discussion about what kind of “language” is appropriate for Christians.   Folks would rather talk about how “Shit” makes God sorely aggrieved than talk about how some people in the world have  to drink from the same river they defecate into.    This happens nearly every time I’m involved in a discussion about how we respond to the need for water and agricultural reforms in the developing world.  I’m over it.  If you think God is going to give you a gold star because you didn’t say “shit”, maybe you need to think about the parable of the talents and how God was pretty convincing in the argument that you need to go out into the world and get stuff accomplished.  

What does that have to do with carpet and bamboo?   Nothing.  I’m just faded and trod upon and my patience with some things is wearing thin.   

Welcome back.  Welcome to 2014.  Excelsior! 

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