25CentLife.com

One post. So much for a post a day…

Saturday-

• First guitar lesson
• First practice
• First time opening the piano in YEARS, and actually practicing
• First Mexican food outing this winter
• Saw Marley and Me

Sunday -

• Went with Jeff to get his first guitar (steel string acoustic, like mine)
• Second guitar practice
• Finished the rest of the oatmeal lace cookies from the other day
• Watched my camera die
• Recharging the camera battery

Nothing too over the top or remotely interesting. And no daily photos for either day, sadly.

A full work week starts tomorrow, so I’d better start on the early bed time again. How many more days till the next holiday season? /sigh/

Instead of writing a really impressive motivational post regarding my plans for 2009, I’ve been spending my time doing a little New Year’s cleaning. I realized what sort of impact my not-writing for two months has done to my virtual housekeeping.

I logged into WordPress a few days ago to write my lead-in post for the New Year. Imagine my horror when I saw I had 6,500+ comments to moderate. Given my lack of posting in Q4 2008, I was pretty sure that all 6,500+ were spam. Yeah, not too keen on having to bulk edit those (which, I’ve found, I can do in either 20 comment or 50 comment chunks). I decided to leave them for whenever I decided to post again.

That ‘whenever’, means today. As a much deserved break from mass-deleting unwanted spam messages — deleting in chunks of 20 is faster than chunks of 50, since I don’t have to scroll through the entire ‘comment’. I’m posting. But not posting the content I’d hoped I’d post.

Lessons learned for today:

• post more
• keep better tabs on my spam count
• don’t procrastinate as much
• finish what I start

That last thing is really my official New Year’s resolution. I’ve got oodles and piles of things that I’ve started in the past, but never really saw them through. (Like my 3 or 4 draft posts on deck, at the moment. Should clear those out after I’m done posting.)

So, I’m going to finish this post. Make a bit more headway on this mass-spam-cleanup. Finish that mass-cleanup sometime this week. And, you know, post about all further progress and finishing of everything else I hope to finish this year.

Funnily enough, I had about 7 long interruptions trying to finish this post.

I thought that maybe I might enjoy the film, supposedly a ‘documentary’, possibly in the same vein as Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine ring a bell?), a few hours ago. Maybe I might have thought that this could be an ‘enlightening’ (for lack of a better word) experience.

Let me just preface the rest of the entry by saying that I identify Roman Catholic.

Having stated that, I’ll state that I found Religulous to be rather disappointing. It did paint most religious folk as largely unintelligent and uninformed sheep (save for the ‘Father of the Human Genome Project’). It (meaning Bill Maher) did focus largely on the irrational conclusions that most religion identifying people came to as a result of their unyielding desire to follow their God to the letter, without ever questioning why some things never made sense. Jonah and the Whale was brought up a few times, as well as the question if Jack and the Beanstalk were considered to be God’s Word, then did that mean that Jack and the Beanstalk were undeniable fact, despite the part where no solid evidence/proof of this beanstalk ever existed?

I don’t deny that a lot of Maher’s questions did point to the truth that most people who believe in some sort of God (I really feel that he (Maher and Larry Charles) placed too much focus on Christianity, and largely ignored other religions) do so blindly and never question what doesn’t make any logical sense. If it doesn’t make sense, they just chalk it up to God’s way. Which isn’t right.

Like that Senator. OMG. Total embarassment to our legislative branch: “You don’t need to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate.” Ugh.

I don’t think I expressed my issues well enough to my boyfriend (who went to see the movie with me) immediately after the film ended. Now that I’ve had several more minutes to gather my thoughts together:

I believe that Maher made the film for entertainment purposes only. If it were to be a true food for thought ‘documentary’ then it really should have delved deeper into its statement/hypothesis. Not just gathered together several clips from various interviews to ‘prove’ a statement that has already been presented to us as ‘truth’. Maher’s ‘truth’ is cobbled together from interviews he’s done with people who do nothing but prove his point, plus snark-laden subtitles, humorous clips, and clips from religious movies. Couldn’t he have also shown us examples of more intelligent people who have successfully balanced their religious beliefs with that of their command of religious thought? Just by answering that with ‘because people like that don’t exist’ is perpetuating the original ‘truth’ set forth in the film.

I suppose my line of thought is best expressed in this post (Docs in Progress) I came across while writing this:

And that may be the point. This film is like the point of a pencil which has run out of lead. My Docs In Progress colleague Adele Schmidt refers to documentaries as being a use of visual storytelling to explore a hypothesis; a documentary which enters production with the answer already in mind is not a documentary. It is an advocacy film. And this, in my mind, is what diminishes the potential of Religulous to either bring in new “believers” in disbelief or “preach to the converted” because we already know where the film will take us. There are no surprises.

The irony of Religulous is that, for a film seeking to critique the simplistic aspects of religious belief, it suffers from its own simplistic storytelling. And yet plods on for nearly two hours without really building the story beyond a one-trick pony of showcasing the extremes of religion. By not exploring faith in any thoughtful way but that which supports a pre-conceived notion, the film becomes a lost opportunity.

Attack, attack, attack, and not giving any opportunity for rebuttal. I think it’s totally possible to be a person who accepts religion and rational thought as equals. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive. (see here for earlier post) But the film didn’t bother attempting to find a person like that. And that’s where the film fails a bit.

With the word “life” in my domain, I think it’s a given that my blog/site would be about my own life. Or life in general. Or general life events. Personal events. Not completely personal, though. That might detract from the appeal… and other personal matters of mine would prefer to stay that way (their words, not my own).

While browsing through my Google reader, I came across this wonderful presentation/video/media thing by Rohit Bhargava.

Presenting (and since I don’t know if I can embed this here… I’m just linking to it… lame… sorry) 25 styles of blogging!

I may try to incorporate one style in a post from now until… end of year? End of 2009? It’s a great way to FORCE myself to blog. Even to get into something I don’t normally post about… like politics. I’m not a fan of heavy politicking.

I am a fan of blogging, and admittedly, I’ve been falling short lately. My bad.

Try it out. Let me know how it goes.

I love when people say you’re wrong when they’re wrong. It’s like the light at the top of a deep hole.

seem to notice when the months change while at work. I know I’m aware of the change outside of work. But while on the job? Not really. I do notice that I rip the last month off the calendar at least a week into the new month.

Maybe it’s because I started this job at the end of a month? Possible.

Mr. Rabbit (converted Catholic, lapsed, and non-believer) told me some time ago that he was a deist.

Definition from Wikipedia (I know how much people love them some Wikipedia)

Deism is the belief that a supreme God exists and created the physical universe, but shall not intervene in its normal operation. It is related to a religious philosophy and movement that claims to derive the existence and nature of God from reason. It takes no position on what God may do outside the universe. That is in contrast to fideism which is found in many forms of Christianity^[1], Islamic and Judaic teachings, which hold that religion relies on revelation in sacred scriptures or the testimony of other people as well as reasoning.

I am born and raised Roman Catholic… but I am open to other ways of thinking about God and his various actions and their impact on the world as we know it. Mr. Rabbit has said on more than one occasion that I’m “not allowed” to think like that — or that I have to choose a definitive position.

I don’t believe that’s the case at all. Sure, religion is a man-made machine, but free will says that I’m allowed to pick and choose what aspects of the religion I was born into I accept, and which ones I have a different view on.

As I’m still picking through the stockpile of issues Catholics normally have on a variety of things, I don’t think that there is a set list that I can post here.

What do you think? Does someone absolutely have to have a particular religious (or lack thereof) stance? And does it have to be predefined? (like deism, which I didn’t know existed or had a definitive name until a few weeks ago)

Discuss.

It’s always awesome when you reach into a pocket of an item of clothing you haven’t worn in a few months (like a light autumn jacket) and you pull your hand out with money.

There was this one time, several years back, when I pulled out $40. I always think that maybe I’ll be that lucky again. Except now, I just pull out loose change.

$40 when you’re 14, seems like such a bigger deal than when you’re 26.

Let’s see. I feel like I haven’t posted in ages. My work days feel like work MONTHS. I’ve only been at the workday, where day=month thing for about a month and a half, which means I should be done with half a year right now.

So in those mental 6 months, I’ve sprained my ankle, fallen in the workplace, filed for workers comp (oh, wait, that’s all one thing), have logged in more overtime hours than I care to count — knowing that I don’t get paid overtime (I do know that for every normal 2 weeks of work I do, there’s at least a bit more than a week of overtime in there), been so swamped with work, that’s all I can see…

Um. All I can remember from the last 6 weeks is work stuff. And I can’t remember why I checked off ‘books’ in the Categories section.

I decided I’ll be taking the GREs in the next 12 months from now. No, I’m not solidly planning on attending grad school, I just think the test taking part of it will be fun.

Yes, I used ‘test-taking’ and ‘fun’ in the same sentence. I’m such a nerd. Sue me. I’ve always been the kid that everyone hated in grade school through high school. I’d barely make an effort in lecture, but come test taking time — I’d breeze through with extra time to spare. It’s an art, I’m telling all of you. It took time to be perfected. New grade, new obstacles to overcome.

It’s like I told my interviewer from a long past interview: I love the idea of a great challenge. And I hate being bored. Taking the GREs later serves both those statements. The GRE seems to cripple most people’s lives. I’d like to give it a go. If I get an awesome score — that’s really great, then I could possibly look at grad school, just for the hell of it — I have no such need of things yet. And prepping for the tests will give me something else to fill up my non-work minutes. Should be interesting.

Along with possibly taking the GREs in my future (without the certainty of attending grad school after that), I’ve also picked up a book on HTML/CSS/beginners SSI and one on “Tagalog for non-native speakers”. Of those two, the latter is posing far greater a challenge. I’m fine with pronunciation, having grown up with it all my life. I know a great deal of the words, again, having grown up in such an environment. I’m completely baffled as to sentence structure and basic grammar. Nearly 26, and the Tagalog comprehension of a 2 year old (possibly less).

I make such an awesome Filipino.

you don’t ever really want to see an automobile accident happen in front of you. you don’t ever really want to have front row seats to these kinds of things. it’s much more horrifying to see it live than it is to see it on the silver screen.

I was one of the first people to call 911.

I still want to smack the people who took the other people out of their cars WITHOUT stabilizing their heads first. Seriously. What better way to invite more injury. Idiots.