So if you haven't discovered the greatness that is Regina Spektor, you need to pick up her album far and listen to it until your ears bleed.
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I've always been fascinated with the secret arts of the far east...Tai Chi, QiGong, Fajin, Kundalini Hatha-Yoga, Feng Shui, that kind of thing. Not only am I intrigued by the medicinal possibilities, but it's always a fun exercise in apologetics to compare things like Taoism and Buddhism to the ultimate source of Truth. I was having a conversation with my dad about how much I admire the level of discipline found among Buddhists. He responded by saying that the problem with the Buddhists is that they are too perfectly balanced. Whaaat? Is there such a thing as too perfectly balanced? Then he said that things like love and passion require an imbalance. An imbalance of priority, of importance, of desire. And it makes total sense. After all, the Buddhists are the ones who first realized that in order to do away with the negatives in life, one must abandon pursuit of the positives.
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I watch my wife's shows because I like spending time with her doing what she likes doing. She watches Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice. In one of these shows (it's still hard for me to tell them apart at times), one of the characters says that she's probably going to hell for trying to force her pregnant teenage daughter to have an abortion. It got me thinking - there are really people out there who assume that the Christian doctrine teaches that committing sins condemn people to hell. If you murder someone, you're going to hell for it. We tell people that no amount of good works can get you into heaven, so why would we make people believe bad works will get you any closer to hell? When thinking in terms of salvation, you must think of 'sin' not as a set of actions, but rather as a state of being. Namely, being dirty. We're all born dirty, and we stay dirty until we let God clean us off. The bible calls this process sanctification. If we die dirty, we go to hell. If we die sanctified, we go to heaven. It's as simple as that.* In my humble opinion, there are just as many Christians who need to learn this as non-believers.
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They say you learn something new every day. They're freaking liars, whoever they are. However, I would say that most people probably learn something new every week. This past week, I learned how to turn a standard household laser pointer into a candle-lighting, paper-burning, pocket-sized sci-fi torture weapon. That's all I'm gonna say about that before I get myself in trouble. Glennda, if you read this, the cat was already missing some fur from his tail before I learned this, and no lasers* were involved in the removal of said fur.
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So a guy I used to work with at the Y is taking an LSAT course where I work. He once made a disrespectful joke about another one of our female co-workers (who is now my wife), and my first instinct was to break his nose. The only reason I didn't was because I didn't want to lose my job (the fact that about 30 kids would've been witnesses didn't even factor into my equation until much later in a moment of guided retrospection). Still, after all these years, the second he walked in our doors this afternoon, the first thing I thought to say was "Hey I remember you - I almost punched your face in. How've you been?" I'm not really the type of guy you'd normally find smacking people around,* but there are just some people you don't disrespect - and my wife is one of them.
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That's really all that's going on in my head at the moment.
Pieces,
-R.
* (insert long, fine print disclosure here)
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