Philosophy of life encapsulated in Christmas clean-up:
Mom: Oh, would you wrap up all that food we left on the table and put it in the refrigerator?
Twenty minutes later, i had eaten it all…
Personal
… I haven’t really actively listened to Madonna’s “Angel” since i was 13, and that’s a very liberal estimate. I think i might cry now….
God or Godless, the whole point of existence is Respect. Some people need a God to put Respect into perspective, and some others need a God as an excuse for not having any. God is in your Respect of others no matter how you slice it, and a kind and loving atheist is worth more than twenty piously judgmental Catholics.
Speaking of god, today i saw in religion everything i don’t like about it. All of the families in my aunt’s parish flocked to church on Christmas Eve, so much so that the church was holding two simultaneous services at once to accommodate the rush. This alone was telling; on any given Sunday the church is no more than halfway full yet the Christmas season twists everyone’s arm and they all show up to look good in the eyes of their neighbors and god. Secondly, the parish is almost entirely composed of families with children under ten years of age, yet despite this the service was as long and dull as any other church service and made no attempt to accommodate the children in the room that easily outnumbered the adults.
Church has always been a silly and irrelevant thing to me, and that view has always put me at odds with the rest of my entirely catholic family. I just never got the point of doing something every week that you took no pleasure in, and that was so stodgy that it never bent to accommodate the ever-changing crowd that attended. To the church’s credit, at the service today there was a whole gang of people with guitars and basses who accompanied all of the songs, and the long readings of scripture were kept tidy and relevant, but still i don’t feel as though anyone in the room could have possibly been re-affirmed by what went on.
I’ve always been a sucker for small Baptist congregations that welcome you with open arms and clap madly when they sing their hymnals. The way i see it, why not have a smile on your face while you’re in the house of God? Of course, God and I have some issues other than a bit of smiling, but i think after all these year’s she’s managed to respect my avoidance of church service as much as i’ve managed to grudgingly respect those who attend every week with their faces set in stone.
For years i said i didn’t ever want to have children. By my reasoning it wasn’t entirely fair to force another human being into a increasingly depressing world, especially since the world doesn’t really have enough room for them. Furthermore, i was always of the mind that one shouldn’t have children until sure that they could finance the whole ordeal through college and beyond. Of course, such assurances are ridiculous, and what it all comes down to is really the whim of the parents. D o you hear that? Every child brought into this world is brought in because parents are bored, or lonely, or they want to see if they can fuck up children less than their parents did.
I think the view of not wanting children was ultimately a sign of a period of relative depression and disillusionment, as indicated by “it isn’t fair to bring someone into the world when they don’t know what they’re getting into.” In the end, my newfound appreciation for the magical little elves that we call babies isn’t so much a “maternal instinct” as it is my willingness to acknowledge that the world really isn’t as entirely horrible as i made it out to be, and that you can shape it to be what you need. As such, it’s the healthiest whim i’ve ever had. Thank god for small favors.