Category: rants

Dreams

June 23, 2007 / / 3 Comments

I was sleeping very fitfully this morning because Megan was repeatedly waking me up. This always causes very strange, very short dreams:

  • I was freezing to death in Antarctica with Fry, the Professor, and Zoidberg from Futurama. Except I was Fry, and Zoidberg was a plastic penguin.
  • I bought the Superdome. It was a fixer-upper with police tape cordoning off crumbling sections of concrete.
  • A fairly disturbing sex dream whose details you don’t want to know. Frankly, I’d prefer I didn’t know them either.
  • Four or five others that have already self-destructed.

I do my best not to give too many details about my dreams, because I don’t want other people to give me details on theirs. Don’t give me long, drawn out descriptions of your dreams unless they a.) predict the future, b.) have a good narrative, or c.) are so completely batshit insane that they’ll amuse me. I make no secret of the fact that I have an incredibly short attention span.

We’ve all had people describe far more of their dreams to us than we really care to hear…

“Well, I was in my high school. I was talking with my math teacher, except he was also my dad. Then, I don’t know why, but I was suddenly in a field out in the middle of nowhere, and big birds were circling above me. Then I ate a doughnut, and the world imploded.”

Sound familiar?

Describing dreams in any more than two sentences is a waste of time. No one expects that a hallucination is going to make sense–so why would anyone expect that a dream should be any more lucid?

The Power of the Internet

May 29, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Mike and I were meaninglessly jabbering at each other over IM tonight, as we are wont to do. For lack of anything to say, I jabbered “gerbil tennis.” Then, for no good reason, I googled the same phrase.

And there’s a web page for it. For gerbil tennis. Gerbil tennis has its own fucking web page.

GERBIL TENNIS HAS ITS OWN FUCKING WEB PAGE.

Jesus Camp

March 2, 2007 / / 0 Comments

I’m watching a documentary called Jesus Camp. It’s focused on the radical indoctrination of children into far right-wing Evangelical Christianity, and it’s deeply offensive to me.

In between vignettes, facts are shown onscreen. One of these is “43% of Evangelical Christians become “born-again” before the age of 13.”

I don’t believe that anyone is capable of making that decision at that age. I came to my religious beliefs after years of search, study, and learning. I believe as I do because I carefully examined myself and how I perceive the world. I didn’t become a Buddhist until I was in my twenties. Children simply do not have the capacity for depth of thought necessary to make these sorts of decisions. This is brainwashing, pure and simple.

I firmly believe that the unexamined life is not worth living. There’s none of that in this style of agressively, belligerantly ignorant Christianity. Prior to opening the camp, the pastor, Becky Fischer, prays over the equipment:

“Father, we pray over the electrical systems, we pray over the electricity, that it will not go out, in Jesus’ name… We speak over the Powerpoint presentations, all of the video projectors, and we’ll say devil, we know what you love to do in meetings like this. And we say you will not in Jesus’ name, you will not prevent this message from going out. No microphone problems, in Jesus’s name. In the name of Jesus, we speak that.”

And then SHE BEGINS TO SPEAK IN FUCKING TONGUES.

That’s clearly not rational thought. These people don’t want religious inspiration. They want a supernatural security blanket that will solve all their problems. I have a real problem with anyone who believes without question or examination. That isn’t faith. That’s abandoning the capacity for rational thought in favor of blind, stupid obedience.

The opinions and lack of intelligence expressed would actually be hilarious (“Had it been in the old testament, Harry Potter would have been put to death!” “Creationism is really the only way to explain everything.”), if not for the fact that these people can vote, hold public office, and purchase handguns.