Weddings

I have taken the past two Fridays off. It has been nice -- I've had a cough, and that always seems to make me tired, so the extra day of "rest" has been beneficial. Well, at least it was beneficial when I was able to rest... but the reason I got these days off was because of weddings.

Weddings are a funny thing. I have never been a lover of ceremony, and they are almost pure ceremony. The only consolation is that my friends tend to be people who do not like ceremony very much. Last week, for example, the wedding ceremony itself only lasted about 15 or 20 minutes... and that was only because the bride's father stalled in giving her away. Then, there was a good meal, and then we were done, which was nice. Long, drawn-out parties are another thing I have never liked much.

When I was married, the reception was too big and too expensive for my tastes, but I wasn't paying, and I wanted to make my in-laws (and lovely wifey) happy, so I did not oppose the extravagance and long evening all that vigorously. Still, it could have made a decent down payment on a house...

My older brother officiated at the wedding last week, and in his message, he managed to condense all the good Christian theology I have ever heard at weddings into a message that lasted about five minutes. That is something I admire about him: he has much better summative powers than I do. He got the whole bit in: marriage is a sacred ordinance, it was honored by Christ's first miracle at Cana, it is a beautiful metaphor for Christ's relationship with the church, and it predates government and even the Church catholic. It was much better than many wedding messages I have heard, especially this one that was essentially a 45-minute exegesis of the entire chapter of I Corinthians 13.

Ultimately, I am not sure what to think about weddings. I think they tend toward unhealthy excess and brideolatry. In short, they fetishize -- and are fetishized by -- the participants in some ways that can be very damaging, I think. What's more, they are often more or less meaningless. Four months after my wedding, for instance, my brother-in-law got married, and the reverend at their wedding said as many nice things about marriage as our officiant did. If anything, she was more religious about the whole thing than our elder was. And recently, that marriage melted down and is now over in the eyes of the state.

So I'm not necessarily sure that weddings are all that great. But they certainly do provide an excellent chance to escape from my daily task of feeding myself into the horrible customer service machine as is my wont. That, at least, is worth something.

(Sorry about the disjointedness of this post -- I am tired and slightly sick still. At least it's a post!)

Busy with work...

And helping Schumms move, which was delightful! :-)

Until I can post something substantial, here's a survey:

What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Literature Nerd   Does sitting by a nice cozy fire, with a cup of hot tea/chocolate, and a book you can read for hours even when your eyes grow red and dry and you look sort of scary sitting there with your insomniac appearance? Then you fit this category perfectly! You love the power of the written word and its (NOT "it's"!!!! Stupid Survey!!!) eloquence; and you may like to read/write poetry or novels. You contribute to the smart people of today's society, however you can probably be overly-critical of works. It's okay. I understand.
Drama Nerd
Science/Math Nerd
Gamer/Computer Nerd
Musician
Social Nerd
Anime Nerd
Artistic Nerd
What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace

Sick Day

I vomited at work today. Twice. Consequently, my gracious supervisor granted me half a day's unpaid leave, and I have been squandering said leave for four and a half glorious hours.

I suppose I should take a little bit of time to explain what I do so that you will know what exactly I am getting a break from. I am part of a company that does Service Operations Outsourcing in the insurance and financial industries. In simpler terms, that means I work at a service center that takes phone calls and processes customer requests. Mostly, I throw energy and patience at problems that are ultimately the fault of our monstrously inadequate computer systems. For instance, when we mistakenly draft someone's bank account for four times the actual premium, I get to clean up the mess. It's delightful work.

I have been struck of late by the importance of simplicity. I have also been struck by my seeming inability to do anything simply. For instance, at work, when I could be doing the bare minimum and sending the necessary form letters without considering my audience, I often let empathy prevent me from doing so. They hired me to be part of a machine, not an emotionally complicated person.

I suspect that my sickness today may have had as much to do with momentary dis-ease at work as it did with any disease. I must become better at detaching, or there might be more of these unfortunate experiences in the future.

As another result of my sick day, I have decided to delete a couple of other, smaller blogs that never get updated anymore. I figure that if I can't update one, I certainly can't update three. And the Internet needs less information on it, anyway. I also made a couple of changes to this blog -- hopefully, ones that are indicative of where it will go in the future. I am becoming increasingly interested in what it means to be part of a large organization, and "Noises From the Machine" seems like an apt title for where I want to experiment in the coming months in this space.

Of course, it's possible that everything in this post is a mere product of delirium and that tomorrow I will regret the changes I have made and the posts I have deleted on my other blogs. But the wonderful thing about this medium is that I can make them again if I want, but better. :-)

Sleep for now...

Hiatus

You have surely noticed my hiatus from this blog. I don't know how soon, or even whether, I will take up my position in the blogosphere again. There is much to do and little time, and we must work the works of him who sent us as long as it is day. (HARR.)

I will say that I have been recently struck once more by the enormous value of friends and interaction between humans. Perhaps my position as a tooth on the cog of a highly automated, relatively impersonal industrial machine has led me to notice this, or perhaps it's just the time I have had to step back and take a look at my life and my experiences; I'm not sure.

I want to write... but I'm also not sure whether I should bother, sometimes. We'll have to see how my time allotments shape up.

E. B. White on Faith in Government

I've never been one to take part in the Blogging Against Things meme, but some of E. B. White's essay, "Bedfellows," reminded me today of some ideas put forth by my esteemed friends Evil Bender and The Lizard Queen. I decided to shamelessly copy some of my favorite essayist's words on President Eisenhower's declaration that prayer was a fundamental part of democracy:

A President should pray whenever and wherever he feels like it (most Presidents have prayed hard and long, and some of them in desperation and agony), but I don't think a President should advertise prayer. That is a different thing. Democracy, if I understand it at all, is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only half a dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy, their tranquility would be its proof. The repeated suggestion by the present administration that religious faith is a precondition of the American way of life is disturbing to me and, I am willing to bet, to a good many other citizens. President Eisenhower spoke of the tremendous favorable mail he received in response to his inaugural prayer in 1953. What he perhaps did not realize is that the persons who felt fidgety or disquieted about the matter were not likely to write in about it, lest they appear irreverent, irreligious, unfaithful, or even un-American. [...]

I hope that belief never is made to appear mandatory. One of our founders, in 1787, said, "Even the diseases of the people should be represented." Those were strange, noble words, and they have endured. They were on television yesterday. I distrust the slightest hint of a standard for political rectitude, knowing that it will open the way for persons in authority to set arbitrary standards of human behavior.

While I don't agree with White on everything, I think he hits the nail on the head in this essay. As a person who holds firmly to the Christian faith, I obviously see value in religious conviction. But I also see how perverted and twisted religion inevitably becomes when it is tangled with politics, and that makes me a strong opponent of any sort of theocracy, regardless of how well-intentioned it may be.

If you've got some extra time, I'd heartily recommend reading the rest of this essay, "Bedfellows." Its main topic is is the ghost of Fred, White's dead dachsund, who haunts the writer's sickbed. Also, Democrats. :-) Good stuff.