Ouch (sorta)

I took the day off today so I could have minor laser surgery on my gums. I had nitrous during the procedure, and they numbed me up really good, and honestly, I couldn't feel a thing. About forty-five minutes ago I took a pain med with Demerol and Fenergen, and I'm starting to feel pretty woozy.

I had some pockets between the bone and the gums in the back of my mouth on the upper left hand side. The periodontist use a laser to "reshape" the gums; excising some of the tissue, I guess, so the pocket would go away and I can floss and clean better and stop any further bone erosion. It occurred to me that it would be really nice if the same one-hour outpatient "reshaping" could be done to my gut.

In the last forty-five minutes I have written several comments on The Cultural Hall the new group blog about Mormon stuff I'm doing with John Dehlin and some other people I can't remember right now. Wow, the pain meds must be kicking in better than I thought. I wonder if those comments were coherent?

Pete Dunn, new commenter - who are you? I have read your blog, you link whore, and figure I know you from the DAMU, but I am terrible at connecting aliases with people. So if I know you from NOM or FLAK, PM me there. And nice to meet you. You have a way more interesting life than I do.

Perhaps I should take the periodontist's advice and be horizontal for a little while. It seems a shame to waste such a good buzz on sleeping, though.

Link to this

Belaja told me to link to this site, a project where a starving graduate student will measure the links to his blog and then present a paper on it.

Very cool. If you have a blog, you should like to it, too.

Thankful

I am thankful for my friends. In spite of the fact that I have become something of an introvert over the last few years, I think I have a lot of friends.

After Hurricane Katrina, my blog and e-mail just exploded with people wanting to know how I was. A wonderful essay on NPR compared it to getting to peek at your funeral, and seeing who would come. Sometimes the people you think will be there, aren't. Sometimes, the people who come surprise you.

I have friends of all sorts. I have friends who are tons of fun to hang out with. I have friends who I may not hear from often, but who think of me often enough, and kindly. But the friend that I am most thankful for is the friend who told me something hard, because she wanted to help.

Back when I was going through my really angry phase with the Mormons, I wrote fairly regularly on the Usenet discussion group soc.religion.mormon. My husband is a regular reader and very infrequent writer in the same place. Every once in a while, my cynical, snotty side would come out in something that I wrote. My friend sent me an e-mail after several months of this. She posed a question: "I wonder how it makes your DH feel, reading the harsh things the woman he loves has to say about the church he loves."

At first, I was taken aback. And then, I was a little pissed off. And then, I was embarrassed. And then, I cried.

I don't think I ever said anything to my DH about the letter. I just stopped. Because I knew exactly how he felt. He felt hurt. It wasn't important to say what I was saying. It was important not to hurt my husband.

My friend did not write what she said because she wanted to upset me, or because she thought she knew better than me. She just wanted me to look at what I was doing and think about it. She told me a hard thing, and it made things better.

I know something

I know something sad, and I can't tell.

That's why I haven't been blogging.

I've been not telling.

That was one very short weekend

Two days is really not enough time to recover from working for five. All you people out there pulling six day, sixty hour weeks, please refrain from a fake pity party.

Between GED programming on Saturday, the fun fair at Little Boy's school Saturday evening, and then church stuff and helping a friend with her computer Sunday night, I didn't get a lot of "me" time - time to just veg out and not do anything. I didn't get much housework done either.

Speaking of Little Boy: He is now seven. Seven. I wonder how that happened? He was just born; I remember it very clearly. However, somehow he has arrived at Seven, and he gets miffed when I call him my Little Boy. As a result, Little Boy will no longer do as his blog name.

I've think I like The Kid. It's age appropriate, and has a vague cowboy feel to it that I like.

So, The Kid it is.

Cold

Oh my gosh it is so freaking cold.

It is only 49 degrees outside and it'll be down to 40 tonight. We're only going to get up to 65 tomorrow; hopefully it won't be too windy and the sun will help.

Back in the mid-70's by early next week.

I seem to have turned into a Southerner. And if not, well, I've sure acclimated.

It's the Weekend!

I will be working, but it will be for Extra money. And I don't have to start by 8:30, and I don't have to get in 40 hours.

I am so fried. I was on the phone for about five hours today.

I want to be someplace very, very quiet tonight.

Prophecy

See? I may have been wrong about the election thing, but I told you that with Brittany and Kevin getting divorced, everything would be OK.

Best line: "You're going to wake up tomorrow to a brave new world filled with clones made from stem cells by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where the democratic majority taxes and spends your money on electric cars for NPR and schools teach evolution to illegal immigrants."

I love Colbert...

The REAL News

Yesterday I mentioned someplace else that after today, Americans could go back to worrying about the important stuff, like if Brittany and Kevin are going to make it.

But lo, what do I find today on GFY...Brittany has filed for a divorce.

Here's the article, written in the first person. Doesn't she look terrific? I am not a fan, but hey, maybe now that she's dumping Skeezix (shudder) she'll be able to build herself a life and a career. Here's hoping for a shiny, happy future for the local girl.

Election returns are coming in, and it looks like the main blogger's predictions at the Other Place (see link above) are coming true. A razor thin margin of victory for the Republicans means - Republicans are still in charge and run the committees. Maybe, just maybe, the two independents in the Senate will throw in with the Dems and that will be enough. But I doubt it.

But really, now that Brittany is getting divorced, I'm sure everything is going to be just fine.

Voting?

Everybody's going to vote tomorrow, right?

Louisiana has SEVEN constitutional amendments on the ballot. Every time somebody wants to get a law passed, they put it in the constitution. It's lame. Two years ago, we passed a constitutional amendment that hunting and fishing are part of our cultural heritage and that we have the right to hunt and fish. Oi.

The Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana has published this handy voter guide to the November 6 constitutional amendments. I used their guide two years ago, and found it balanced and thorough then. The only editorializing I could find in this year's guide was:

PAR has recommended for more than 30 years that the seven separate Orleans Parish assessors should be consolidated into a single, parish-wide office.

The Republican representative to the House for our district is a shoe in. We have no Senate races this mid-term.

I have some strong opinions about what's been happening in our country for the last five years. I think we've been lied to and lied to and lied to, and the Powers That Be are preying on our fears to surrender more and more of our constitutional freedoms - the freedom we are supposedly fighting for. Billions of dollars are pouring into the coffers of the crony-profiteers.

I am not optimistic about the outcome of the elections. Never underestimate the ability of the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory! But it would be very, very good if I am wrong.

Progress

I got a lot done, but didn't finish. Soon, soon, soon. Has to be soon; new tests start coming in ten days!

This guy pointed me to this guy's web page, and it's been very interesting reading it the last couple of days. I've found his most recent post, about l'affaire Haggard, absolutely inspiring. What a perplexing development.

It's really weird. For the longest time, I've thought myself agnostic, and suddenly, because some Godbag (Twisty's term; look halfway down the page) slips publicly and dramatically, I'm thinking seriously about Jesus again. All thanks to a middle-aged Baptist living in Kentucky - that's THREE ADJECTIVES that I would normally mock! It must be that he's a Reds fan.

Twisty's most recent post at I Blame the Patriarchy, Feminism and the Feed Bag is a terrific essay on femininity as a tool of the patriarchy. My favorite quote:

...not a “bad feminist” but merely one of countless women for whom the constant struggle against dudely dominion is too exhausting. Women are under attack. Femininity is a survival skill. Use it and delight, lose it and fight. There are arguments to support either position. But let’s not kid ourselves that one is the other.

Gosh, I wish I could write like that.

Procrastination, or money sitting on the table

Every year about this time, I need to do some work for the GED scoring software I wrote for a friend about (mflphrmf) years ago. She pays me. It's nothing spectacular (I'm not going to retire on this or anything) but the extra bucks are nice.

Except I'm falling victim (again) to the terrible vice of procrastination. In theory, I like putting things like this in the past tense. Once they are done, I don't have to do them. While if I dither, they are always in front of me, reproaching me about not doing them.

Today, I finally did some stuff. Now, I'm going to go do some more. My goal is to have this stuff working and billed out by the end of the day tomorrow.

Shannon

Annegb over on one of the MoBlogs posted a cool story about how her friend started to see himself differently (in a good way) when someone threatened to beat the shit out of him. Of course, annegb did not say "shit" on a MoBlog, but I could read underneath the asterisks. Annegb concluded her post asking if any of the readers had anything similar happen to them ever.

Yes, it has.

In the not too distant past, I was fighting a pretty serious depression. Even with therapy and meds, I was not coming out of it as much as I would have liked. In retrospect, I was having a lot of distorted thinking, much of it a direct result of my loss of faith.

Early this summer, I posted over on the New Order Mormons board about how I was tired of being a defective Mormon. I was very eloquent :) Chris Tolworthy (my friend in Scotland) wrote a very empathetic reply.

And then Shannon weighed in. I had never met Shannon in Real Life, but she'd read a lot of my stuff (and I'd read a lot of hers) and so we knew each other in that way that you can only know people you've never met on the internet. Her reply caught me a little off guard: "It's sad that two people as beloved all over the world as Ann and Chris are made to feel like they are defective people because of their religious beliefs or lack thereof."

At first, I kind of blew it off. It certainly was a nice thing to say, but obviously it was just hyperbole.

A few days later, though, I was driving home from water aerobics and making a left hand turn at a traffic light and it hit me: she's right. I AM beloved by people all over the world. Not by millions of them, of course, but probably in the dozens. Lots of people think I'm pretty amazing.

Suddenly, I realized that all of those things I'd been telling myself about myself were wrong. I wasn't defective, I wasn't a loser, and I wasn't a failure. In the blink of an eye, I became someone beloved by people all over the world.

Nothing had changed, except that Shannon had told me so.