Shepherds

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - "Let there be truth between us two forevermore." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Superbowl. I just had to say it. It is on my mind. There isn't a bigger day in sports when you think about it right? I mean as far as I go at least. I love football above all sports and NFL is the highest form. The most important game is the Superbowl, hence this should be a big moment for me. Yet, it always feels like such a let down. Maybe it has to do with none of my favorite teams playing or the fact that it also means the end of the season. I don't know, I'll be watching. Maybe the commercials will be interesting.

Today I got my income tax refund. This is the last I will complain about it. It was so very small, but it is more money than I had yesterday. I should be sending it over to my student loans, but I want to hold it for a bit. Oh and I have a bill to Kays I should get working on as well.

There were two things I thought were super cool when I was a child. The first was that TV chair they had at the airport. You would put a quarter in and you would watch fuzzy black and white TV from your chair for 5-10 mins. Of course you had a real color television set at home you could watch for hours, but the idea of watching it there for a quarter, who cares if it was just soaps and news, was awesome. I would beg for a quarter each time we went to the airport to pick up my Dad returning from his National Guard service.

Then there was the pocket black and white TV I would see at the stores. It had an antenna and you could watch TV anywhere you could carry it. I vowed to buy one for myself once I was an adult and wasn't limited by parents who didn't understand how useful it would be to be able to watch TV from anywhere. I didn't have much experience with those handheld TVs so in my mind they were so awesome, yet I'm sure they rarely got good reception. Oh and a TV watch/phone was something I wanted as soon as the future spy gadgets would start to come out.

It is funny, now I can watch TV in HD on a 46' flatscreen, on my computer, and even on my phone (though I have had to take a break since getting an iphone). I couldn't imagine putting a quarter into one of the machines at the airport. I'm so lying, I would totally put a quarter in and watch that black and white local on air TV anyway. I still love gadgets.

Shopaholism: America's Newest Addiction? At least for now, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- which is known as the D.S.M. and is something like the bible of psychological maladies -- does not list the condition as a technical disease. While shopaholism, as the laymen say, has been recognized by the German psychiatric community as a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder, it still awaits its day in the United States.

I had mentioned how there was this touchscreen hp laptop I had really wanted to buy. I figure after reading this, I'll share more. Completely contrary to this want, I also want a Macbook. Now I know I can only have one laptop, so I have to pick. The main thing from keeping me from getting a Mac is how well I know PCs. I now understand why old people who don't get computers shy away from them. Am I too old to learn a new way of doing thing. I know it is easy and better, but, well...no harm wanting right.

Will Texting Be Our Lexical Undoing?
The truth? Even though the increasing popularity of text-messaging since 2001 has spawned frequent, doomy pronouncements about illiterate teens, desecrated language, overused abbreviations, and crumbling civilization, there's no evidence at all to back up these the-end-is-near-ish views about texting. When you look at the facts, they often say something positive about texting: that frequent texters actually do better in school, or that texting is associated with good things like creativity and political activism. Also, some of the supposedly text-specific features--like abbreviations--are older than dirt and not even that common in texting.

Keep going kids, we need more texting if we want to compete globally.

I have a lot of thoughts on religion and the way I was taught a lot of it. A lot of my problems do not lie in my faith, but in people and the inconsistencies that come out of their mouth when talking about faith. When I was very little I learned two basic prayers that I said constantly, Our Father and The Lord is my Shepherd. The first one is pretty standard, the second, I learned in a different way than laid out in the Bible. It was a scaled down version of the prayer, probably for kids, same points, but a few edits, omissions or maybe even just stylistic changes. At the time I was still in the mindset that the Bible was the final word of God and should be taken literally (no I wasn't a Baptist and I was at an age were Santa was someone I waited for). This of course was long before I learned there were multiple translations of the Bible or its history. So one day I'm at church and I hear The Lord is my Shepherd prayer. I'll include it below: [This might not be the correct version, but it is close enough.]

The Lord's Prayer
The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want

He maketh me to lie down in green pasture,
He leadeth me beside still waters, he restoreth my soul.
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his namesake
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Psalms 23

As I tried to follow along, I found parts that were different from what I had learned and repeated like a student writing lines on a chalkboard. The rhythm I had learned it in was thrown completely off. Words like "maketh", "leadeth," "beside still waters," "mine," "namesake" were all different to me. Small insignificant changes in hindsight, but at the time it was the realization that someone was wrong here and it was probably the way I knew it. I was told that there were different ways to say prayers. I don't know why, but my trust felt betrayed. I was taught something wrong and maybe I just liked being right. I quickly looked up the Our Father Prayer to make sure I had it right and stopped saying Psalm 23 from that point on. Little did I know as a child that such a small difference would be nothing compared to what I would come to learn, but it gave me an reason to question the unquestionable. Silly how my brain worked I think. Funny how I focused on the ritual and the words and not the actual meaning of the words. I knew what they meant, but is a child really going to understand the full meaning of "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies." The moral of the story, I had a short period of "childlike faith."

This entry needed more pictures and videos. I'm real bad about that. So I'll just add this.

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