Thoughts, Sittin on the Bus.

I love being from Texas. Hang in there for a moment. I hate living in Texas, I'm glad I moved away. But Texas is a fun place to be FROM, for two main reasons. First, because you can make fun of Texas until judgement day, an that's good times. Second, it's an automatic pass to get away with anything. "She just ate a jelly, nutella, honey and jam triple-decker sandwich. That she deep fried. I'm really worried about her." "No, she's from Texas." "Oh, well that's fine." or "She just shot him!" "Born in Texas." "Oh, that explains it, nevermind." I could do ANYTHING! And everyone would just laugh!

Here's the problem with me walking home from the bus stop. My walking path takes me by a Walgreens and a gas station. Normally, I'd just walk on by, but I just got off work, and I'm tired as all get out, and sometimes it's cold. I'll stop in, just to warm up for a bit, and suddenly I'm in a magical wonderland of stuff that I had no idea I needed, until sleepy brain sees it. "Industrial-grade towels? Why have I been using these shitty normal towels?" "A pack of three hundred and sixty dice? This is so handy! What if I have a lot of people who suddenly want to play yatzee? Sure, I have extra cups, but without dice, we'd just end up throwing cups around! This purchase is an investment in keeping my cups safe!" Makes perfect sense, take my money, goodly cashier attendant!

I have to assume people at the bus stop are super tired, all of the time. There's no other excuse for how dumb they act. "Are you waiting for the bus?" Nope, I'm just sitting in the cold under the sign, waiting for a man with a briefcase. And don't use a stupid question to try and start a conversation. You had to ask three times, as I was disentangling myself from my headphones, just so I could give you a look, and say yes. I'm clearly not looking for someone to chat with.

One day, I will have a police box in my yard. You know what I'm talking about. I'll have a police box in my front yard, and there will be a sign, written in Toilken's elvish, Klingon and dark elvish. That sign will say "Inquire inside for information." I may even translate that into English, because I figure if you can recognize the languages, that's good enough. When they come to my door, I will have assorted Enterprise-shaped cookies prepared, and ask if they play DND. Of COURSE they do. And this is how I will recruit for campaigns when I'm a grown-up.

Speaking of lawn decorations, I also want lawn gnomes. Not a little cute lawn gnome or two. Somewhere around a hundred, big, creepy lawn gnomes (Like the ones from Fable, if you know what I'm talking about). And when I get bored, I will move them around in the middle of the night, so the neighbors wake up to see them in different formations. Occasionally, when I'm feeling particularly ornery, I'll put one or two in different places in other people's yards. When they bring them back, possibly with their newly-broken flamingo, I'll peek out the door, and when I see the gnome, I'll jump with a horrified look on my face. I'll speak in whispers and tell them hurriedly to put him anywhere, and then slam the door. Yes, they'll think I'm completely insane, but you know a part of them will always wonder if those things are evil little monsters from hell.

This Blog Is About Religion

Religion always seems to be a topic that riles people up.
As much as I love open forum to discuss and hear multiple viewpoints, it never seems to end up that way, does it? Someone will come in, brandishing their Righteous Fury of Enlightened Wisdom, and somehow the end result is usually name-calling and finger-pointing. So I'd like us all, as a group, to take a deep breath, remind ourselves that this is a post that is absolutely based on my personal opinions, and that there are a million and two differing opinions.
Exhale.
Now, let me give you my personal take on spirituality and religion.

First off, I absolutely make a distinction between religion and spirituality. I do not consider myself religious at all, but I do consider myself spiritual. I totally sound like a hipster-bucket, don't I? Hang in there for me.
For me, religion always seems to get awfully bogged down in semantics. There's entire denominations that have branched off from the same core because of a phrase or chapter or book of the bible alone. There's wars fought over religion. Protests over minor dogmatic differences.
This has never really made any sense to me. It seems to me that these squabbles pull people away from the core values of almost any religion. They turn petty, causing meanness or even cruelty in the name of whatever greater deity is in charge. I generally use the term Sky Daddy, because it makes me giggle, and it's a vague enough term that anyone can substitute their own in it's place. Now, the majority of religions basically tell you to be a good person. That's a cause I can get behind. Don't run around stabbing people, don't make an ass of yourself, use your highly evolved brain to make the best choices you can. In defense of their particular set of rules, however, people will completely disregard everything their Sky Daddy has asked of them, because someone else is Wrong.
I see most religions as multiple sides of a magically poly-sided coin. We have the same general goals, we're all humans, we all bleed red blood (unless you don't, in which case welcome to my blog, other-blooded being!). Our versions of morality are usually quite similar as well. I feel like we could move so far as a unit if we could stop focusing on the phraseology and pay more attention to the deeper meaning.


Bringing me to spirituality. Now, this is a personal definition, but to me, spirituality is simply concerning the spirit. Many use the word soul, some don't, it's all the same general idea. The piece of us that makes us more than the sum of our parts.
We have biological needs to care for our physical selves. Similarly, we have needs for nourishing our mental and spiritual selves. Self-reflection about what we want in life, musing about our place in the scope of the universe, pondering about our purpose in existing. To me, these are spiritual. They concern ourselves and the whole big cloud of energy and matter and weird junk that our reality is made of.
I believe that we have very similar spiritual needs, and that most religions are attempting to address these. We use prayer, or meditation, or whatever it is that you practice, but the end result is generally very much the same. We're integrating ourselves into the whole. We're reminding ourselves that we aren't the center of the universe. We're weighing our own existence, and trying to find understanding and enlightenment.
So maybe, just perhaps, we can all chill out for a while? :p
I shall look forward to interesting and civil discussion on this topic.

A Rant of No Importance

Hello again! Those of you who follow my blog because you know me in real life (so, most of you) probably saw the update I posted yesterday that was the stem of this blog post. For the rest of you, it'll be a surprise!

Dear vegetarians who eat meat-shaped products, and drinkers of decaffeinated coffee, I wish to slap you.

You are a vegetarian, presumably for overly sentimental reasons. The treatment of wittle baby aminals makes you sad, and you will Fight The System by not eating their (delicious) meatfleash. "I'll have a veggie burger, and tofurkey, and meatless ribs." Meatless ribs? Which of your relatives were siblings? "I'm an animal rights activist, I don't eat meat." Oh, I'll bet you don't. You just put bacon in your mouth and then spit it out, right? You don't like meat, you just sometimes hang out late late at night. Do you wonder if meat thinks about you from time to time? You sad, sad, sack of veggies.

And, of course, drinkers of decaffeinated coffee. Why? Just...why? All of the coffee-breath, with none of the benefits of drinking coffee? The point of coffee is that it sends copious amounts of artificial awake into your system. That is why people drink it (To specify, I am talking about coffee, not Starbucks' milkshakes). Decaffeinated coffee is like drinking one of those protein shakes, sans protein. You don't want it for the taste, so why are you drinking it at all? It's like going to a fancy restaurant and ordering a side salad, why are you there? Do you just want to look like you're the kind of person who eats at those places? THERE IS NO LOGIC HERE.

There is never a reason to consume this, ever.

Thank you for reading (if you are, in fact, reading) this rant that does not matter in the slightest. This is just the things I ponder while at work.

Until later,
          Raven

Growing Up- Embracing Your Contradictions

Hey there, audience. It seems like a billion years since I've last written. So, a quick update on your dear blogmistress.
I'm in a good place in my life and in my head. I'm in a new relationship, and having a ton of fun, and I've been exploring a lot of facets of who I am that had, for a while, been subverted.
Which brings me to contradictions.

Many of us are, in our deepest selves, contradictory. We can hold beliefs and feelings that have completely opposite stances.
People love to categorize. We like to be able to slap a label on things, and file them in our brains. This leads us to feel like we have to pick one quality or another, one belief or another. I've recently seen the benefits of accepting these contradictions, instead of trying to make a choice. Maybe I don't have to pick between cynicism and optimism. Maybe I can have both a lack of, and copious amounts of, faith in humanity. Perhaps part of growing up is accepting the parts of ourselves that make no sense.
These are the thoughts that have been scrambling around my head lately, and I thought it was about time to share.
Until next time, my dears!
Raven