So there is a coffee pot here at work and there is some mysterious nice gentleman that in charge of it. I've been offered to be introduced but have declined. He collects 3 or 4 dollars a month from all the coffee drinkers and that supplies the coffee, sugar, cream and cups. Well, I haven't paid anything in the form of bills because I like the idea of paying by the cup 25 cents. To be a little more accurate, it's more like ....two cups for 25 cents...although somedays I just clunk in odd amounts of change. One day I put in 16 cents. Anyway, so I haven't seen this guy to date, and to date he doesn't know me. Yet every day when I get my first cup and put in some change .... by the time I am ready for my second cup I sneak in there and VOILA! Change is gone. Sometimes there will be a fresh new pot too...I like it when that happens.
The two ladies here tell me that I can just pay the few bucks...but to be honest I rather like this cat and mouse actually paying 25 cents once in a while? Man, I would check it all the time if I knew there might be money in there.
I also use an old McDonald's coffee cup despite the three mugs I have scattered around my desk. What can I say? I like the lid and the stryrofoam -- keeps it toasty a lot longer.
I can't tell you what mi Madre sent me in the mai...no I'll have to take a photo. But seeing as I am work right now, that photo won't come for awhile. j
I went to TKD last night and all we did was cover foot sweeps and skipping kicks + combinations. Not too much of a work out -- more of an instructional class. Good thing I some DDR in earlier in the day. I had a feeling that would happen.
Last night I tried to make asian lettuce rolls....apparently they have a different kind of lettuce though so it turned into more of a salad. But it was still good, I never would have thought of radishs, red pepper, carrots and a green onion combo...drizzled with a soy/ginger/lemon/garlic sauce. Good stuff.
Oh my, I watched The Magdalene Sisters. I was not expecting to see what I saw. I was expecting some heartwarming story about three scrappy girlfriends who band together to survive an awful circumstance. The only thing I had right was the awful circumstance. I just don't understand the catholics -- they were so SO corrupt (and this happened in the 1960's! and the last laundry didn't close until 1996). How can these people feel that they were justified in their cruelty? How can these Men and Women of God believe that they were good and worthy enough to enter heaven? How can you take the mercy of the New Testament and combine it with the harshness of the old testament -- to make up your own cons and scams ... and have so many people believe it? I know I have some catholic friends, but judging from history I can't say I understand why so many choose to belong to or identify with a group of such corrupt, hateful, greedy, cruel, murdering fiends. Oh sure, there are some bad seeds (witch hunts, asylums, sex and that little thing called the inquisition -- oh not to mention the perpetrators of cultural extinction worldwide) but... just LOOK at how bad they are! And then to see all these sexual assault cases come out and people act like they are shocked. Maybe what they are really shocked at, is that this isn't acceptable behavior anymore. Acceptable as in talked about. There answer is repress it, try to forget it happened and shuffle the godly man off to be someone else's problem. Again, that isn't very charitable.
I guess I just haven't seen a movie that made me so disgusted with mankind in quite a while. Everything humans touch eventually becomes twisted, diseased, rotten or destroyed. One of the reasons I like science fiction so much is that it acknowledges mankind's overwhelming fallacies and at the same time tries to focus on the endurance of the human spirit. The little bits of starlight in a black endless sky that try to justify our mean pitiful little existence. I have hope that we will move past these problems and become something better -- but then again, I also hope daily that the end of the world or an apocalypse will happen in the next five minutes so we can get onto that next phase right now.
posted by hadjare @ 8:26 AM
3 Comments:
so...are you saying it was worth seeing? :P
I bet it's an elf and he lives in the cupboard. He watches you pour your coffee through the cracked door and the instant you step out he goes right to work...but if you ever catch him, he'll stop making the coffee! Gah! Can you resist? CAN YOU???
i'd like to say "a lot of the catholics i know..." but members of my immediate family throw this percentage a little off, since both my parents, my younger brother and my sister all still attend church on a regular basis and consider themselves good catholics; it's just my youngest brother and me who are the heathen unbeliever-types.
because i was gonna say that most of the people i know [outside my immediate family, granted] who were raised catholic are totally not practicing catholics any longer. and even the ones who still go through the motions - i don't think any of them are fooled that the church isn't a repressive, outmoded monster; they just keep going out of habit or some goofy belief in the nobility of the ideal or something like that.
i'm not saying i'd still be a good catholic even if it wasn't a corrupt mess - there's a lot of bad history to overcome and a lot of intolerance i've just got no stomach for. and, hell, it's not like i really believe organized religions have much to offer me anyhow.
jimmy breslin, who is a really brilliant writer at times, wrote a real long, rambling collection of essays on his break with the catholic church, "The Churhc That Forgot Christ" - for a few minutes there, i was actually considering buying it for my mom for christmas before i decided that'd be kind of a prick move.
and maybe i already related this story but there's a great sequence in the book [which is a little repetitive and could have used some editing, if you ask me] where breslin is sitting down with a friend who is trying to convince him how he needs to write about all these priest abuses, so people will know and they can't cover it up.
breslin is resistant; he - rightly - believes people don't really want to know, that they're happier with everything being swept under the rug and that things will just get worse if this comes out in the press. the victims probably don't want to relive this garbage, he says and it'll be difficult to find anyone willing to talk about it on the record.
but his friend keeps hammering at him and so finally he does it and outs all these priests and the church heirarchy that just shuffled them around when it knew that they were bad and doing evil things.
so the book closes with breslin running into this woman again and he's thinking, hey: i did what she wanted - here comes my thanks.
and she's all pissed! why do you hate the church? she's screaming at him and he's like, hey, i just did what you told me to do! well, i didn't want you to do it like THAT, she snorts.
and, to me, that sums up the crisis the church is going through right now. people like me, we left long ago and, by and large, we're just not coming back no matter what. yeah, i'll go sit in church on christmas to make my mom happy that the whole family is together once a year but i'm doing it for her, not for anyone else.
so who do you have left? you have the people like breslin, the ones who're finally realizning what kind of shit the church has been getting away with all these years - and they're pissed about it. and then you have the people like his friend, the people who i'm afraid are still the vast majority of the church, who think "well, yeah: there are a couple bad priests and they're evil, what they did is no good. but they're making us all look bad and the church itself is still A Good Thing and something needs to be done to shut up all this negative talk."
Tim had this coworker once who said she was Catholic not for the religion but for the culture. I think that is one of the big reasons there are still so many is because of the Catholic culture. It provides structure, a feeling of belonging and idenity.
I can understand that -- yet at the same time, even when you take the religion out it -- they should be responsible for the actions of their group.
Oh I don't know. At this point I feel rather disturbed by thinking about it too much -- then I start to put in other things that occur to me that are probably really offensive and don't make that much sense. I guess it's like politics. Talking about politics for me is like thinking about money -- it gives me a sick feeling.
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