It’s amazing how little I actually knew about the Bible. For some odd reason I’ve always felt vaugely resentful of Christianity – perhaps because I was forced to go to church – and so I never actually learned until very recently what it said.
I’m still worming my way through the new testiment. Who knows how condemned the whole book will say I am.
Sorry. I promise that’s the last religion that will appear in my journal for at least a week. 😉
I’m done beating my head against the problem of what religion I should be. For now, anyway. I have no idea which of the world’s religions are right. I hope that God really does forgive. I hope that love wins.
I’ve been doing some hardcore coding again.. I seem to be doing okay at it so far, although my attention tends to wander more than it used to.
I am trying to grow less selfish and more open. Who knows how successful I may or may not be.
Kayti tells me I was talking in my sleep last night. When she woke me, I had no memory of a dream however.
Trying to get back to a day schedule. Haven’t been too successful yet, but who knows..
So, I’ve come to the conclusion that somehow deep in my mind, religion is twisted around my brainstem in extremely negative ways.
While the bible certainly isn’t all good news [there’s whole bits about how YHWH blew away competing tribes, and cautions against casual and illicet sex which would appear to put me in the ‘Bad Person’ category], it doesn’t contain anything nearly as dark as my mental associations with christianity would appear to indicate.
I don’t understand why I’m so frustrated with God, why I keep fearing the entity is evil, or thinking that it’s far better than the God presented in the bible. It’s the strangest thing.
I do sort of understand why I’m frustrated with the christians of this world, who see the forgiveness of their hero and then go out and lock people up for inhaling the smoke of a plant. For example. Or start wars, for example. But it is not my place to judge them.. I’m trying to get unscrewed in my own mind, not go on about the problems of others. Best to get my own affairs in order.
I’ve been really depressed lately – mostly about religion and spirituality and my inability to make things work in my own head.
I’ve read Indian and Bhuddist texts, as well as the Bible. (I must say, as a side note, should any of you want to slog through religious texts, the Bhagavad Gita as it is and the Message version of the bible are pretty readable. None of the ‘But master, it hath been many days and he doth stinkith’ of the KJV. Whether the message version captures the entire spirit of the original text is impossible to say.
I’ve also been sleeping extremly odd hours.. today i woke up at 8pm, for example. I’ve been having trouble sleeping, which isn’t helping. But really, considering how many of the earth’s inhabitants are worse off than I am, I have zero room to complain.
That’s what’s really upsetting. I should not be depressed. I have a good job that feels like it’s being helpful to humanity, MC has found a possible new drum machine operator to replace Alex [who is moving to San Fran] and he’s really good.. and yet, I’ve been depressed beyond anything I consider normal.
Part of my problem is that I’ve been categorizing my wrongs, and I’ve done a whole lot of bad things. My list of Things I’ve Done Wrong In Relationships is several pages long.. and I’m still thinking of new things. Perhaps if I could forgive myself, I’d be better off. Then again, perhaps if I could forgive myself, I’d be more likely to make the same mistakes again. I don’t know.
It is my goal to become more open and honest always. I fail in this entirely too often.
I can’t decide if I’m improving as a person or not.
I’m not sure if I’m really in this world at all sometimes.. it’s more like I’m part of the network.. you have your routers, your servers, and your Sheers. Heh.
I have been really, really bad about reading my LJ lately.. but I’m trying to be better. Really. Honestly.
I went to update my computer’s RAM.. plain vanilla operation, except afterwords, it no longer was able to find it’s firewire hard disks.
Much flaying about the head and shoulders later, it *still* can’t find said disks even though I took the upgraded RAM out. I tested the disks on another computer and they are fine, so I suspect a interface card.
A very drunk guy just wandered into our house.. without knocking, or any of the usual nicities. I wasn’t wearing anything, as I generally am not when I’m programming, and Kayti was just wearing underwear. Frantic dashes for clothing ensued, followed by a very interesting and mostly incoherent conversation in which the guy first indicated his desire to crash here. [After the Johnnie Beck incident, I’m loathe to let drunk people crash at my home, because they do things like smoking inside (which annoys the landlord), repeatedly coming back whenever they want, and otherwise behaving in undesirable ways.] I told him repeatedly that this wasn’t a option, offered to call him a cab, give him bus fare, etc. Then he asked where he was, and I explained his current location to him. Then he told me that because he had accepted Jesus Christ into his heart, he could visit anywhere. (This wasn’t in the deal I was presented, maybe I should have held out for better terms?). Then he used our bathroom and left.
I’m betting that tomorrow he won’t remember a bit of it.
The only part that I”m annoyed about is his lack of knocking. I generally don’t lock the door – although I will tonight, just in case he returns – as generally I think of me being able to get out as more important than other people not being able to get in. This is because so far as I can tell, there aren’t many scary people trying to obtain entry to my house. Even this guy wasn’t that scary.. just annoying. He decidedly wouldn’t take the hint that it was desired that he leave – and I’m still vaugely worried that he’ll do something stupid. But hopefully not. I’m guessing passing out is going to be his next move.
Has never been a believer in buying things off the shelf when building them would do just as well. A few cases in point:
1) When I was a kid, I used to love Capsella (actually, I still do, and my collection of the stuff now is prodigious, I just never have time to play with it any more). He built me, out of a radio shack kit and some truly ingenous hacks, including drilling appropriate sized holes in screws so that they could be used as terminals for the capsella jumper wires, a remote control for my capsella.
Later, capsella came out with a commercial remote, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as the one he built – it was infrared, for one thing, whereas his was 27Mhz RF..
2) FOr one of the churches we attended, he built a remote mixing console, complete with multiple modes (preset and remote), a box that you could basically wander around the church with ajusting levels, seperate feedback-removing shelving filters for every one of the inputs, and other features that boggle the mind. Not to mention the ‘supress-the-air-conditioning’ button, which may not have been the best idea because I think the chiller tended to freeze up the lines when they didn’t have air flowing over them at the other end – but used a really interesting hack to take advantage of unused bandwidth on the buzzer lines that notified the ushers when it was time to bring people in..
Now, the amazing thing about all this is that *everything* he did there, pretty much, took hours – even tens or hundreds of hours – and in many cases, it was available off the shelf. But, in all of it, he achived a level of craftsmanship I can only aspire to. Whether roll-your-own was the best move or not, you have to admire the quality level he achived in roll-your-own. Once, after getting the power supply for some widget or other put entirely togeather, he realized he had forgotten a fuse. Now, my usual reaction to goofs of this nature is to shrug and figure there’s a circuit breaker in the basement for just that reason, but he actually disassembled the entire mechanical collection o bits, added a fuse, and put it all back togeather – at a cost of some 2 hours, as I recall.
As I said, quality. And no, he doesn’t read my journal. 😉
As a side note, I think he got this from my Uncle Joe, who perhaps I should have had more exposure to.. Uncle Joe was a engineer, and in his 60s undertook to build a retaining wall for the creek below his house. several hundred bags of cement later.. well, let’s just say that the retaining wall will outlast the house – and, possibly, the creek.
It seems like everyone wants to keep their anger.. At every point in a argument, everyone involved has the option to either escalate or deescalate the argument, to either make things worse or make things better. And it always seems like people, once angry, want to stay angry – and being right is more important than being happy any day.
I don’t have any idea what I’m trying to say. I’m not trying to be holier-than-thou, since obviously I do the same things, possibly even for the same reasons as everyone else. I just wish the world had less escalation than it does.