the perfect gift

the other day, as i was doing research on my newest story, the internet brought me the perfect gift:

this is from my (onetime) hometown newspaper, the coquille valley sentinel. in case you're wondering, that's pronounced Ko-Keel (internets gave me that, too). other highlights from this page include "Family Goes North" and "Cookie Press Used" and a disney ad for the movie Castaways. good times!

and yes yes, i uploaded these but copyright to all the peoples said inside the master image above.

faith will play a huge role in the story. though i may not have given my religious past a lot of lip service, believe you me -- it is there in spades. as such, i've got a new picture for ya:

and as further proof, yesterday i put this song in my head, reminiscing about rocking out in the car. told you i used to roll for the big kahuna.

pretty-random

craziness at work makes for a dull blog, and very little creative writing, which makes me a sad monkey. but in the interests of giving YOU fodder, here's a couple highlights from the last week:

• get thee to a punnery
  
• post-rapture help and - my favorite - letters and advice on procuring a post-rapture bible
  
• how to make your AA woman happy
  
• and finally, a new story-related picture:
  
  

is this for the story i'm over 16,000 words into? of course not.

tip: mascara and jesus don't mix

unless you were tammy faye b@kker, who was so obviously *not* catholic. since i have to get to work, i'll let you work out the snark in your own head, courtesy of this lovely bit of papism.

spring at my house

looks thusly, according to my mediocre but still powerful cameraphone:

and in the strange but true department, yesterday on facebook i found a friend who came to our wedding, 11 years ago, because she's a friend of dharma! really this was a friend of min's, and they lost touch after we moved from montana 10 years ago, but still, that was really damn trippy. and cool.

hoping to see my parents today, and hoping my dad's leg is doing better. this infection of his isn't letting go. bleh. think good thoughts, think..

the audacity of faith

me and my faith been gettin reacquainted lately, in a roundabout way. it's mostly through reading [1] [2] [3] [4], of course, but also through discussions with family and friends. for example today, as i was reading a magazine that a coworker gave me because of an article on the relationship between hope and fantasy stories, given because of an earlier discussion on science fiction, creativity and staving off boredom, the latter being a perennial topic of interest round these parts.

coworker euphemistically warned me that the mag was put out by a religious school. naturally this put me in an intrigued but defensive state. was i going to inadvertently read something homophobic? proselytizing? boring?

gilly on the boring count, and the actual article in question was rather tepid. but the featured article was on the author of this. indeed, the whole issue was centered around hope, such that i wished they'd gotten an interview with ob@ma, audaciously hopeful sort that he is. but suffice to say, this mingling of hope, faith and the particular intersection of western christianity with my own noggin has really got me thinking... what do i really believe? why? and why should it really matter?

because let me tell you, i am a hodgepodge of faiths. i'm my own spiritual melting pot. i'm sure i can attribute a lot of that to my parents, but not because forced a variety of sunday schools down my throat the first 11ish years of my life. no, it's because they encouraged me to think for myself. which means that, by the time i got to college, started living a little, taking religious classes, and learned that the bible is not really what i've always thought it is...

well, it put me into a crisis of faith that i've never quite recovered from. but over time i realized, it wasn't my faith in god that was shaken -- it was my faith in religion. and as any thinking person can tell you, religion is a construct of man. spirituality, my perception and relation to the divine as i perceive it -- that's really the only thing i can rely on.

and yes i am perfectly aware of how fluid that is, but it's *mine*, thus i can rely on it with absolute conviction. however, my amalgamated set of beliefs - and you'll note i'm not detailing them here - are starting to skew my view of religious statements to such a degree that i'm feeling a little startled.

for example, reading about a woman feeling confused after reading about gideon and moses, looking for god to give her a sign, trying to obey god's commands. my initial thoughts, in order:

1. ah, i remember being devoted and reading like that.
2. how silly! does she really think god wrote those commands?
3. this sounds a little pretentious.
4. wait, it's ok. she gets to god her way, and i get there through mine.

i suppose there's a term for this kind of uberfaith (other than uberfaith), and while it tends to create cognitive dissonance, ultimately i find it too stimulating, i believe, to proceed in any other way. that said, if any of you feel like sharing your own views on this obviously personal topic, i'd love to hear them.

then again, since i've already admitted to being an amalgam, this really shouldn't surprise you.