Apply palm to forehead, forcefully. Utter, "d'oh!"

I love it when people do particularly obvious boneheaded things. It's hilarious. I also love it when the boneheaded thing took years to plan and accomplish and went undetected for decades. Such is the case with a cluster of buildings at the Coronado Naval Base which from the sky, clearly resemble a swastika. Here, take a looksee:

What I love about this is that the Navy claims that no one noticed this for forty years. The buildings were built in the 60s and until the advent of Google Earth, it slipped everyone's notice. I have to think this is bullshit. I worked at an architect's office for about a year and from what I remember about blueprints, you get to see buildings from all angles; top view included. Even if that slipped their purview, it seems like someone would've noticed something on a fly-over. The military loves doing fly-overs in all branches of service. I'm supposed to believe that during some air show, no pilot ever looked down and said, "Holy shit, Bill, look to your left! You won't believe this!"

Frankly, I think the Navy's $600,000 investment in landscape architecture to hide the building shapes isn't going to cut it. I think we'll find eventually they're going to have to do some major remodeling. In any event, it's rather hilarious to me that 20 years after the Holocaust, the same people who fought against the bloody oppressor would have unintentionally paid homage to their evil enemy in a form as permanent as a quad of buildings.

Clean out the attic

In the meantime, enough whining. In the spirit of Three Beautiful Things, here are some little things that have caught my notice as of late:

- a man in a tuxedo standing on the corner of a residential neighborhood, apparently not waiting for a bus or a ride or anything. He's holding a sign that reads: "Audition Today."
- a family on a bike ride along the trail. Hom leads the pack, Dad brings up the tail. Right in front of Dad, little brother, probably no older than 5, pedals like a madman, his knees flying up, furiously.
- tending Honey through food poisoning this weekend. Though it breaks my heart when he's ill, there's something really love-affirming about having that heartbreak. The beautiful agony of true love; of hurting when they suffer.
- seeing an occasional friend from childhood - and cousin of a dear friend from childhood - in the audience of the Emmys; feeling happy that this person's significant other won and that this person made it to the thank you speech.

And now for a scoop of irony ...

Along the lines of faith in God or lack thereof.

I feel like thus far my life has been pretty fortunate. Nonetheless, I've hit some rough waters in my life. Big disappointments. Close calls and trauma. Frankly, I've been on some choppy seas for the last two years; the toll this rough passage has taken on me is greater than I realize, really. The other day I was reading the blog of a woman who has been in similar seas to me, but her ride has been much choppier. She's a Christian and she's going through a crisis in faith right brought on by her struggle. She said she wondered if God was punishing her. And then I can't remember if she specifically said this, implied it, or if this was somewhere in the many, many responses she got: blaming God.

While I haven't wondered if God was punishing me for something since I was a little girl, I went through a phase in my teens where I was angry with God. That seems healthy. (Frankly, I believe in crises of faith.) But I can't ever remember blaming God for anything. I just don't feel it. Not when I've fallen into depression, not when 9/11 struck too close to home and not even in this murky voyage I'm bitterly muddling through. But everyone else does for misfortune that befalls them. So here's my question: Am I wrong? Is there something fundamentally wrong with me that even when I'm angry at God I don't lay blame on him?

There are only two reasons I can think of: One is that I ultimately see God as love, creation and the creative conscience of life, the universe and everything. And I can't blame love. Nor creation. And certainly not the all pervasive creative conscience. And the other is that I have never subscribed to the reward-and-punishment image of God. We weren't guaranteed an easy ride. It's just the nature of being human that tragedy in one or many forms will befall each of us. On top of that: if JESUS can't escape life without being crucified, why the hell do I think I'll get away with a free ride?

But even though my concept of God is more nebulous than the orthodox, I still feel a personal relationship with God. God is a part of my family and daily life. So shouldn't I blame him for things? As I blame other family members on occasion for things, shouldn't I also blame God? Isn't that human?

My cousin suffered his entire life and died from MD at age 20. I have no idea if he blamed God - if he did, he never ever expressed it. Quite the opposite actually. But I suspect he did. My dad had polio as a child and it has left him with a wobbly gait and a body that's easily 15 years more aged than his peers'. I don't know if he ever blamed God. I assume he must've at some point. I'm facing my own health issue right now and I pray a lot, but I don't find myself blaming God. And I know that lots of other people who face my issue - whether they overcome it or not - blame God. So why can't I?

I don't feel like I'm being punished at all. Not even karma for hooking up with my best friend's boyfriend in high school. I do feel a lot of injustice, but again, it doesn't feel karmic or punitive. It's mostly just jealousy that most people's bodies work properly. But shouldn't I feel punished? If I believe in a God with whom I have a personal relationship, does that mean I'm naive or blind for not blaming God for what's happening?

So there's the scoop of irony: I bitched about some people applying their stereotypes to people who believe in God, and yet I wonder if I'm flawed because I don't fit into the stereotype of a lot of people who believe in God. Man this fence chafes my hide!

If God, Then stupid

This morning, lying in bed, I read an article in Newsweek about scientists who are not godless and the uphill battle they face in some universities and schools. Namely, that because they believe evolution is real, the boards of these schools deny them the right to teach it. Nevermind that the scientists in question are usually devout Christians.

That many institutional Christians reject any academic study of evolution or any other study which might defy their narrow belief system is not surprising. People rather expect it. But something that I've only caught whiffs of in the last few years is the idea that to believe in God, you must be ignorant.

The article didn't directly address that prejudice, but it brushed up against it and moved back toward the predictable bigotry of the fundamentalists. Nonetheless, it got me thinking about it.

A few years ago, my father, a protestant minister, was honored to be chosen to attend an intensive week-long theology course at Oxford. The topic of the study was science. Living in Texas, he's used to fundamentalists blocking enlightened discussion about science, so when he got to Oxford, he said he was all geared up to pick on the fundamentalists who so prejudicely deride science in the public realm. However, his instructor told him that in England, it is he who is derided immensely. His instructor, an Episcopal priest and professor of theology as well as a practicing scientist, is the leader of a group of scientists who are also ordained ministers. He does not question evolution or any other law or established theory. But because he believes, worships and promotes God, he is subject to ridicule by the scientific and academic establishment in England.

About a year ago, I picked up a coworker of mine from the airport and drove her to the office after her honeymoon on safari. As I relished all the details of her adventure, she was telling me about how great their guide was. He was so well educated, so smart, but he was really religious. A lot of the guides on their tour were really religious but they were well-educated. "It was really strange," she told me.

Then one night I was listening to a book talk on C-Span radio. It was Julia Sweeney reading from and talking about her book about her journey from Catholicism to Atheism. It was of course funny and poignant. Then an audience member asked her a question which I forget but to which she answered essentially that her mom was still a Christian because she didn't have the insight and introspection that Julia did. I don't know Julia Sweeney's mom. Maybe she isn't that introspective, but it seemed really presumptuous. Kind of like how I once told a good friend of mine I was going through a crisis in faith and she just shrugged and said I'd some day realize there wasn't a god because all smart people do eventually.

So that's where we are in this society? That if you're a believer, then you must be ignorant? Isn't that just as bigotted as believing an atheist has no soul or nothing to contribute to your own spiritual growth?

What bothers me about this is that this prejudice does not come from traditionally uneducated people. Fundamentalist groups in this country tend to appeal to people who may not have had that broad a formal or life education. They appeal to groups who know others mostly like them and who have not been in broad contact with people whose experiences differ. But the "you can't be smart and faithful" folks tend to come from more ethnically heterogeneous areas or, in the case of critics like Dawkins, places of high education. These tend to be the same folks who are much more socially tolerant. And yet, I can only suspect two things which would contribute to this prejudice:

1) Like my coworker who's Catholic in name only, they've lived in societies that are so secularized that to even talk about faith openly puts you in a weird light (places like Vermont - c'mon Dean; nobody in VT talks about religion, that's why your sudden openness rings hollow in the South). So they only thing they know of open discussion is what they see in the media which only focuses on book-burning scandals. You'd never hear about the church I helped charter in Texas, led by a gay man. Nor of the illegal refugees my church gave shelter to during an emergency. Kind of like how if you live in an all-white area of the country, you may be prone to fear blacks because guess how the media portrays them.

2) Maybe no matter how heterogeneous one's environs, this actually just goes to show we really only surround ourselves with like-minded people. Though I spent a large chunk of my childhood in the very Baptist Texas Panhandle, my parents encouraged me to seek other points of view and didn't fret when I asked questions. And though the majority of my friends in the past have been white of Christian background, I've always felt very comfortable getting to know people of other faiths and heritages as well as friends who reject the notion of God. If someone can't fathom that a person could be both genuinely faithful and genuinely intelligent and introspective, to me that not only shows a lack of imagination on the part of that person, it shows they've never really stepped outside their tight circle of experience to get to know someone of a differing viewpoint.

I have always been angry at Christians who stand in the way of education. Not only does it paint a negative picture of us with which others can easily (and often rightly) attack us, it shows great distrust in God. It tells me they want to keep God in a box; that they don't believe God could still be speaking to us, that new scientific revelations don't have to be soulless, but rather, can reveal the utter beauty of God's handiwork. Still, the tendency I feel like I have been sniffing - to believe that faith is a sure sign of idiocy - is just as offensive as the prejudice of the fundamentalist. It's essentially the same prejudice in my mind: you are less than desirable; I have nothing to learn from you; I must save you and society from yourself.

How haughty both sides of the fence are. I'm so glad I sit precariously on the top and sneer down at them both! teehee! What is it that pride comes before, again ...? ;)

Blah, blah, blah

Greetings, blogosphere.

Truthbeknown tonight, I have nothing to write. I'm merely writing today for the sake of writing, for the sake of getting myself back into the habit of moving my fingers with the hope that someday, something will come from it.

So, since I have nothing to write, I will just describe what I see around me. or rather what I do not see. My office is dark, lit only by the glow of my laptop. My laptop is sits on an old library table. The table was my family's dining room table until I was about 10 and my parents replaced it with a huge, square antique table from Germany that's very heavy and was missing leaves. my dad made some leaves for the antique table and when we extend it, we cover it with a table cloth so that you can't see the leaves don't match.

This table, the old library table, found its way into my dad's office when I was 12. Then it was handed down to me when I moved from a dorm to a house, in college. I don't recall what happened to it when I moved back into the dorm. But either way, it followed me from college into my post-college life and across the country.

When I was a child, I remember thinking this table was so big. I believe we had 8 ladder-back chairs around it. Three on each side and a chair at each end. I can't imagine that now. Americans are so large these days, seating three to each side seems impossible. It's highly probable that we only sat two to each side and one at each end.

Anyway, these days it is my desk. My very messy desk. And I really love this table. It's probably 3 feet high, blond-ish wood with a veneer that has peeled away slightly on the interior where hot plates have chapped it. It's simple, sturdy and a reminder of simpler times and more hopeful dreams, for me. This table feels like a security blanket for me.

Wow. Look at that. I had nothing to write and now, I've written something!

My thin veil

I don't remember where I had read this, but I recall reading somewhere about the origins of Halloween that the Druids or Celts or erstwhile ancient folks who lived in sun-deprived, rain-soaked northern Atlantic isles believed that the period we now call Halloween was the time when the thin veil separating the living from the dead was lifted, and they could cavort.

This time of year always finds me anxious, irritable and fearful. And I always forget it's coming until I'm steeped in it. Such is the case again, this year. It is all due to the attacks. Labor Day through the 21st or so is time my thin veil is lifted. But this veil doesn't separate life and death so much as the comfort of reliability and abject fear and chaos.

I want nothing more than to draw nearer to my husband during this time of year. As both of our jobs demand a lot of this time of year also, it's difficult. The little time we have together is rarely "quality" time. In the last two or three years, I've managed to bear through the veil days with almost no angst. This year is different. I'm more agitated. I suspect it's all due to the fact that this is the first time sine that dread day that the 11th falls on a Tuesday. I've been re-running my memories of the days leading up to and after the attacks over again and again in my head. There is more a fear of the Groundhog Day effect this year than I have had in years past.

I find myself holding my breath more than usual, this year. I pray the veil closes, soon.