25 February 05
So it’s been a terribly busy month or two or three. Not in the sense that anything tangible really happened, but for me personally it’s been pretty hectic.
Just before the holidays, I decided a couple things. I decided I didn’t believe in any sort of Santa Claus. I decided that I had to stop lying to my family. And I decided that whatever might happen, it’d be the right thing to be honest even if things went bad.
So after dragging my feet about it, I took four hours one February Tuesday night and told my family via email that I was officially opting out of religion. I gave it twenty years of thought, and finally reached a moment of enough-is-enough. The ensuing conversations have gone so quickly through shock, anger, denial, rationalization, and acceptance, that I have a feeling they’ll continue straight on through that list several times more like a Wheel of Fortune spin, eventually settling somewhere between denial and rationalization. [click, click, … click! wa-wah, oh no, I’m morally bankrupt!]
The door to my utility room closes, but doesn’t fully latch. This permits me to shoulder-charge in for any or no reason without having to repair anything. I suggest that every house should have one door with this feature.
On the way to work earlier this week, I started thinking about the five thousand or so dead US soldiers who kicked it in German hospitals or on the way there. It’s a shitty thing to send people to get shot at for a lie. It’s shittier to only tally a subset of their bodies to make the lie easier to ignore. As I got to work and started my day, someone asked me why I looked so down. So without thinking too much, I answered the question. Next time I’ll go with the ol’ standby “Huh? I always look like this.”
I’ve also been thinking about what I’m doing or should be doing with this web log. For about 200 entries, I wrote about inane pointless things and quirky observations. Now something’s different. I’m tempted to rant each night about how evil some people are and how anybody who reads this page ought to change their opinion to match mine - link,link,link - but odds are I’d make the same amount of difference by just typing up the blog entries and filing them in c:\recycle.
Whenever information is presented in some way that isn’t easy to take, there’s always some other source that spins that information differently to soften up its importance or to completely change what conclusions it leads to. This seems to be a basic axiom of media and politics. For a while I was convinced that if you collect enough information about something, regardless of what collection of ’spin’, it’ll all come together and lead to the truth. Now I’m wondering if the presentation of information can be spin-less at all. Maybe truth itself is bullshit.
Great. Now my head hurts like when it did when I was trying to decide if the act of doing presupposes opposition.