Lent: a rant
So, it’s Lent. The idea being you’re supposed to give something up for
40 days, because god gives a shit whether you eat chocolate or not.
Because let me tell you, god is all up in your grill about what you’re
supposed to eat. Especially in the OT. Dude was hardcore on shellfish. I guess you don’t have to do an eating-related Lent, but you know,
we’re all Americans and if there’s one thing we do to nearly-sinful
excess, it’s eat. Some people also give up like, smoking or drinking
coffee, or booze or something like that. And it’s all pretty ridiculous. I mean theologically, even. Don’t take
my word for it, I’m an atheist or a discordian or at BEST a Jew. But
listen — if you can appease the cosmic flying beard in the sky by not
stuffing your fat face for 40 days, seriously, this is not a very
difficult religion to abide with. Try 613 mitzvot on for size some
time, OK? It’s not that I’m necessarily against self-improvement. I just find it
tedious that people have to turn to the threat of eternal torture, or
the reward of eternal pleasure, to fucking do something positive in
their lives. And I say this as a person who, for a tremendously long
period of time had no motivation to positively change my life. So
yeah, hypocrisy. Totally. But it’s like, if it takes the Bearded
Genocide Dude in Heaven to make you stop eating Micky D’s 4 times a
week, maybe you just want to consider visiting him that much sooner,
cause that shit ain’t gonna stick as a life habit. So listen… believe in god if you want to. I might argue with you for
fun, but I know I’m not going to change your mind. But if you think
that Lent is anything but one more way for the various churches in the
world to get you to become a little healthier, and have a little more
money to throw in the kitty on Sunday, you’re fooling yourself. It’s
all bread and circuses. Unless you gave up bread and circuses for
Lent. In which case it’s um… lentils and televangelism? I don’t
fuckin’ know.
40 days, because god gives a shit whether you eat chocolate or not.
Because let me tell you, god is all up in your grill about what you’re
supposed to eat. Especially in the OT. Dude was hardcore on shellfish. I guess you don’t have to do an eating-related Lent, but you know,
we’re all Americans and if there’s one thing we do to nearly-sinful
excess, it’s eat. Some people also give up like, smoking or drinking
coffee, or booze or something like that. And it’s all pretty ridiculous. I mean theologically, even. Don’t take
my word for it, I’m an atheist or a discordian or at BEST a Jew. But
listen — if you can appease the cosmic flying beard in the sky by not
stuffing your fat face for 40 days, seriously, this is not a very
difficult religion to abide with. Try 613 mitzvot on for size some
time, OK? It’s not that I’m necessarily against self-improvement. I just find it
tedious that people have to turn to the threat of eternal torture, or
the reward of eternal pleasure, to fucking do something positive in
their lives. And I say this as a person who, for a tremendously long
period of time had no motivation to positively change my life. So
yeah, hypocrisy. Totally. But it’s like, if it takes the Bearded
Genocide Dude in Heaven to make you stop eating Micky D’s 4 times a
week, maybe you just want to consider visiting him that much sooner,
cause that shit ain’t gonna stick as a life habit. So listen… believe in god if you want to. I might argue with you for
fun, but I know I’m not going to change your mind. But if you think
that Lent is anything but one more way for the various churches in the
world to get you to become a little healthier, and have a little more
money to throw in the kitty on Sunday, you’re fooling yourself. It’s
all bread and circuses. Unless you gave up bread and circuses for
Lent. In which case it’s um… lentils and televangelism? I don’t
fuckin’ know.
In which my employer once again attempts “holiday” “festivities”, which are roundly ignored by Yours Truly
So if I weren’t kind of jazzed about the holidays this year (as a side
effect perhaps, of newly rediscovering my ability to actually be
jazzed about things), I’d start with some kind of horrible comment
about the Holiday Season once again crushing forward, running on the
brutal engine of consumerism and political correctness. Luckily, I don’t have to do that, because my employer’s annual
“holiday” party basically takes care of all the cynicism for me.
they call it the “holiday” party, but it’s not. It’s Christmas, all
right? There’s Christmas decorations, Christmas music, a Christmas
“cheap gift exchange/swap game thingie”, and the only thing even close
to multiculturalism is that Adam Sandler’s tedious Hanukkah Song is on
the music rotation(1). And up until this year, the guy running the
thing signed all the emails giving out information on it as “Santa”.
And I mean, I’m some kind of fucking atheist/nihilist/discordian/zen
buddhist/non-practicing Jew. If anyone were going to get upset about
it, it is likely to be me, and I don’t give a shit. Call it a
Christmas party. That’s what it fucking is. The office is probably 99%
Christians and the rest of us don’t fucking care. Second, the party sucks anyway. First, we get to “party” during our
lunch hour. Granted, it’s a little bit relaxed, maybe up to being a
couple hours. But still, come on. How much partying can I do in the
middle of a Tuesday with no alcohol? In previous years they brought in
some ridiculously bizarre assortment of catered food, for an equally
ridiculous price. Like, how does a “holiday party” involve bad
chinese, bad italian, bad american, and if I remember correctly even
some truly awful indian? Who is this caterer anyway? And this year
they’ve even done away with that, in favor of a potluck. Or you can
throw in eight bucks and they’ll use that fund to bring in pizzas and
drinks and such. So I get to spend my lunch hour, with my co-workers, listening to an
endless loop of Christmas music and eating potluck and/or pizza. And the one fun thing they did used to do, a little poker tourney, was
apparently kiboshed this year. Festive!(2) Luckily, for reasons incomprehensible to anyone, they’ve built a new
training room in another building (in which everything is very
expensive and doesn’t work properly) and so rather than sneaking
around to the training room near my desk for leftovers and gawking at
the spectacle, I just got more work done. Call me a scrooge if you will, but I just can’t get that excited about
potluck with my co-workers. It’s just a deeply weird place around
here, and it’s kind of sad that for some people this truly does
represent festive holiday fun. -
1. Which song I find kind of amusing, but when the “Holiday party” was
in the old training room near my desk I got to hear it like 1,000
times and it nearly drove me mad, so now I’m wary of it.
2. Which you might imagine has something to do with the whole
“gambling at work” thing, but today’s there’s a 50/50 raffle to give a
bonus to our cleaning staff, and a well-advertised Superbowl Squares
game is also running, so who the fuck knows?
These kids today…
So, I’m fully willing to admit that possibly my parents were negligent
assholes. I don’t think they were, but I mean I’m pretty biased. So I
totally don’t want to disregard that as a possibility, though I find
it a very remote one. But on my drive in to work every day I pass through a fairly
residential type of area. And on my journey I pass a decent number of
school bus stops. Now, when I was a wee lad, what you would typically
see is a small cluster of children on a street corner, standing around
looking miserable, maybe some horseplay, probably shivering if it was
cold, and that’s it. Which is still what you see, except with one
small addition: a bunch of parents hovering nearby, either on foot or
more often in their cars right near the bus stop.
know this mainly because it’s been the subject of satire on the
Simpsons a couple times (which is how I gain knowledge about
everything, really). But I mean, I don’t understand this bus stop
thing at all. If you have the time to sit there in your car and wait
for the bus with your kid, what the fuck? Can’t you just drive them
in? It can’t be that far, and I find it hard to imagine that there’s
some environmental reason because school buses probably get around 40
rods to the hogshead. So there seems very little reason for it. And
hell, we were all fine when I was a kid, and this was the 80s, when
everyone was under the influence of crack cocaine and bad television
like Family Ties. It just puzzles me is all. Nobody’s going to steal your fucking kid
from the bus stop. Your child is ugly and poorly behaved. And you’re
just teaching them to be afraid of the world. Get over yourself.
