Facial Hair And Other Complaints

I should warn my readers that I'm a bit pissy after plucking about 892 hairs out of my face, lest I be seen on TV a proof Bigfoot exists. Thank goodness for bangs because my eyebrow was looking mighty scary. Sadly, my bangs weren't long enough to cover my half of the twin mustaches my husband and I were sporting. Anyhow, I just need to make note of a few things:

1. Equating the word cunt with the idea of someone who is nasty, mean, obnoxious, arrogant, etc. is similar to equating the word 'gay' with stupid. Both are incredibly offensive because they are affixing a negative connotation to words that are anything but. A cunt is a vagina. It might be unkempt, styled or vajazzled, but it most certainly doesn't have an offensive personality. Consider that when you call someone a cunt, you are kind of complimenting them. A vagina is pretty tough and meant to withstand a lot (childbirth?).

2. I'm still unsure of why so many individual rights are determined by the masses. Don't agree with same-sex marriage? Don't get one. Why should your rights to have a lovely, picture perfect heterosexual marriage have anything to do with your neighbors right to have the same thing- hetero or homosexual? I, for one, can not wait to see so many of my loved ones get married and drink far too much wine at their weddings. I don't care what the gender or sex of the person they are marrying is, as long as they are happy and loved. I just can't believe that in 2013 I'm still seeing this archaic debate being played out in a supposedly 'progressive' nation. But really, why am I surprised?

3. In the forty-five minutes it took me to write, delete, and re-write this blog, I'm fairly certain every last one of my eyebrows has grown back in with full force. I don't know how I was ever plagued with this much hair on my head. 

Not Quite The Sexy Librarian

...that I'd hoped to be, but shit happens. Most of that shit is summed up pretty easily:

The GRE's were a bitch

There's not a library anywhere that's seriously hiring and paying anyone at all

I never did master knotting my hair with a pencil

Until reading an article on the relevancy of books in 2013, I didn't even consider why I had wanted to go into library science. I don't just love reading books. I enjoy browsing stacks of books, holding a book in my hand, flipping the pages, falling in love, and then sharing this magic with someone else. So, when this article suggested several ways to keep books alive in an increasingly digital age, I couldn't help but take the author's advice to heart. If we want to keep books alive than we have to read them and promote them. 

For my first book of 2013 we have:

Another Man's Moccasins, Craig Johnson

This is the fourth Walt Longmire book that I've read. It's not the best series, but it's entertaining and different from what I'm used to. The sheriff, Longmire, is your typical modern cowboy: a bit of a luddite who loves his daughter, his job, and his hat. His best friend, Henry Standing Bear, is an Indian (word choice intended) who lives on the local reservation and helps Longmire solve the local murder mysteries when he's not too busy running his bar. In this book, the reader flip-flops between today and the late 60's as a current murder in Wyoming coincides with a part of Longmire's past that he wrongly assumed was left behind in Vietnam. 

What the hell is the 'spiritual but not religious' anyway?

You would think that growing up with a Jewish education and then continuing on to earn a degree in religious studies would make me pretty certain about my religious beliefs. OR, that my adherence to certain Jewish traditions and my potential to turn into Grace Adler was my public affirmation of my sheer Jewishness- hey, I'm not a Dr. or a lawyer, but I am in jewelry sales. The thing is, I don't even have much of an idea what I believe or which corner of this very religiously divided world I fit into.

Growing up, it was an expectation that we all (my three siblings and I) attend religious school which concluded with a party of epic proportions. That's how we rolled, right? Bars supported on ice sculptures, filet mignon, wildly trashy dancers, and an event that I hardly remember ten years later at the ripe old age of twenty-three. In my desperate attempts at calling off the whole bat mitzvah, I'm pretty certain I declared myself an atheist as soon as I knew what the word meant. It's not that I was using the word to get myself out of a situation which I deemed mortifying, but because I truly couldn't understand why I had to go through with something that I dreaded for reasons that meant nothing to me. Alas, I had the bat mitzvah and vowed to never see the inside of a synagogue again with the exception of future family bar/bat mitzvahs. 

It's amazing to me that we are all way past the Jewish rite of passage, but we have never once discussed God. Aside from my 'atheist' outburst at eleven, I'm not sure we have ever sat down as a family, or even mentioned in passing, what we believe in. I suspect my parents believe in a God of some sort, although they don't even visit shul on the two holiest days of the year. My siblings? I'd bet that my sister believes strongly in the power of vodka, my one brother in a future where the Messiah is a robot, and the other brother is too busy with girls and sports to even consider much else. Then, there's me- I'm still an atheist but no longer asking the obnoxious question of how the dinosaurs fit into God's seven day creation.

The goal going forward is to take my own past of a basic childhood religious education, my secular college-level degree, and the resources around me to try and make some sense of this craziness. Is it necessary to believe in God to be religious? What the hell is this uproar about the 'spiritual but not religious' and what does that popular phrase even mean? Most of all, if I don't believe in an omniscient God, then what exactly do I believe in?