The Parable of the Toads

I don’t believe in God, but if I did, this is the answer I would give to people who wonder why an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity would allow so much pain, suffering, evil, and death to occur in the world:

A woman went out with a weed whip to trim the fence line of a large athletic complex.  There were hundreds of yards of fence line that needed trimming on both sides; it was a big job indeed.  As the woman began to work, she noticed countless tiny toads hopping about in the long grass near the base of the fence.  They were slow-moving and often hopped in circles– if she had waited for them all to move out of the way before trimming, the task would never be completed.  She didn’t want to harm any of them, but they were so tiny and numerous and stupid and she had to get her work done.  She winced each time she saw a squishy little body eviscerated under her thrumming weed whip, but the work progressed smoothly and, ultimately, would be completed in good time.

So, (here’s the part where, if this were a New Testiment parable, Jesus would explain to the less-bright apostles what the hell he was talking about) in this story the woman is God and the toads are humanity.  The job is God’s Will and the weed whip is the instrument of God’s Will at work in the world.  God doesn’t want to harm anybody, but humans just get in the way of the divine plan, and if God were always stopping to wait for us to get out of the way the plan would never progress.  Of course, the obvious flaw is that this weed whipping woman is clearly not omnipotent, or she would just teleport all of the obnoxious amphibians out of the way of her work (believe me, it’s no fun getting the gooey pink insides of miniature toads splattered all over yourself).  Still, if the theists want to pull this one out when the skeptics come a-calling, they’re quite welcome to it

.

The Pros and the Cons

Today was a rain day at work, which means a lot of time to sit and think.  Or, for some, just to sit.  The only thinking I found myself doing was about how much I disliked being where I was.  Hating work isn’t something I think deeply about very often–it’s just a thing I do, like kissing babies or singing in the car.  In the interest of fair representation for all, however, I decided that it was probably worthwhile to isolate the triggers for my negative feelings about my job, and then come up with an equal number of really positive things about it.  Thus, the following (it rained for three hours and all I had to do was clean out the back of the van…I had to do something!):

The Cons

1) Very, very often there is not enough work to keep my gainfully occupied for the full duration of the day.  I find it very unpleasant to have to search for non-existant tasks, and feel horribly guilty driving around doing nothing.

2) A good number of my co-workers and I fail to see eye to eye on, well, a lot of important things.  Things like the environment, gun control, the inappropriateness of racial epithets, and the utter unacceptablility of homophobia.  Sometimes I get so horrified and angry that I can hardly contain myself, but I don’t feel that the environment is one in which it would be a good idea to express my beliefs on said issues.  The intolerant and derisive attitudes toward homosexulaity in particular make me sick.

3) An eensie weensie little issue compared to 1 and 2 (but still way more significant to me than it probably sounds to you…whoever you are…) is that having a job in which I can’t physcially present myself at my best wears down my self-esteem.  It’s not so much that I feel ugly at work–although I do (and, trust me, you would too in blaze orange)–it’s just that going day after day without having a reason to take care of my appearance, and thus without looking in the mirror and thinking “Damn, I’m lookin’ good!” ends up being way more detrimental than might seem possible.  By the time I get home there’s so little of the day left that there’s really no reason to take the time to look nice.  Again, perhaps a lame-o complaint, but I know what bothers me and thus I aver that it is legitimate all the same.

The Pros

1) As much as I say it in a resigned, “I know I should be grateful” voice, I really do appreciate the steady hours and good pay.  I always know when I’ll be working and when I’ll be off, so making plans is easy.  Also, I make rather a lot of money compared to positions in retail and food service and such, and that’s never a bad thing.

2) I do really enjoy break and lunch (and the fact that they are usually double the length they are officially supposed to be).  I just sink into my book and nibble my food and enjoy a little comfort awasis in the middle of my day.  Also, having the news on in the background means I am much better informed about the news and the weather than I would regularly be.

3) Excepting situations described in Con #2, my coworkers are really good hearted people who know how to have fun, work hard when necessary, and care deeply about the people and things that make their lives rich and full.  In short, they are good people and they are kind to me, and, despite our differences in opinion, I think I’m lucky to know them.

So there it is.  The Pros don’t equal out the Cons (if they did, I don’t think I’d have bothered to spend this much time brooding about it on a rainy morning) but they are significant pros, and good things to think about when I’m unattractively searching for something to occupy my time while listening to the group’s “playful” gaybashing.  Sigh.

“Thank you for yesterday night”…personal language quirks

Mowing duty at works gives me lots of time alone in my head with whatever deep or shallow thoughts happen to be passing through.  I use the time to plan things (my day, my future, my stories), to daydream, to ponder useless questions (what would I do with an unlimited supply of money?), and essentially to entertain myself in whatever way possible while my body carries out the tasks that win me my paycheck.  Today I found myself thinking about personal language quirks.  There are some that come of living in my family–for instance, bopper.  Now, a bopper is any sort of device with buttons that are pushed (or “bopped”).  It is most commonly applied to remote controls and to the portable garage door openers that you put in your car.  Now, perhaps outsiders would look at me funny if I were to ask for the bopper (sometimes called a bebopper) to flip through channels, but I think it could find a place in the mainstream English language.  What is more succinct, after all, garage door opener or bopper?

There are also some quirks that are distinctly mine.  The most notable, perhaps, is my use of the phrase yesterday night instead of last night (actually, I use them interchangeably, but yesterday night is probably used more frequently).  I didn’t know that this phrase was nonstandard usage until last year.  People say yesterday afternoon, not last afternoon, so I don’t see why it would be changed with regard to night, but I guess I’m in the minority on this issue.  Oh my god…I hope people say yesterday afternoon…what if I’m wrong on this one, too?!  I’ll have to ask someone.  Anyway, thinking deeper I realized that my nonstandard usage issues referring to the night preceding the current day are more complex than just this one phrase.  As a young child I used to say yesternight, which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense.  Yesternight (sometimes used in its corrupted form, yumpsternight, which I cannot defend as logical in any way) is a rational counterpart to yesterday and much more succinct than either yesterday night or last night. Anyway, looking it up when I got home today, I discovered that yesternight is defined by Merriam-Webster and other online dictionary resources, thus legitimating it as a word choice.  I think I shall use it in the future to avoid the difficulty of choosing between last night and yesterday night.  I wonder if there’s  branch of linquistics that studies personal/family language quirks?

Sitting quietly

Some people never master the art of silence.  People at work are always bugging me about my propensity to listen rather than speak, and my tendency to go about my work quietly (and, may I add, rather more efficiently than if I were a chatty cathy).  It’s not that I have nothing to say; rather, it either comes of my belief that nothing I have to say will interest the present company, or from the fact that the things going on outside my head are fairly dull compared to those going on within.  At work it tends to be a combination of both of these things.

I’ve been good at sitting quietly since I was a very little girl.  As long ago as I can remember, I would tell what I called “sneak stories” (a.k.a. daydreams) with which I could occupy myself for hours.  Unless tormenting my brother became more interesting than the internal narrative, car trips tended to go fairly smoothly as a result.  Now, I spend as much time worrying, planning, pondering, and fretting as I do narrating, but there is still always that mental world into which I can sink when the physical world grows too difficult, dull, or obnoxious.  It seems to me that people who have to be talking all the time are perhaps just afraid of silence because it forces them to start thinking.

Random blues

I’m having one of those days that I’m bumming for no reason. I could blame it on any of a number of things–back to work after a long weekend, didn’t like what the scale told me this morning, almost stepped on a dead baby bird, weed-whipped for 6 hours, smashed my thumb in a door, misplaced my keycard for work, Angel still doesn’t have his soul back, etc.–but I know it wouldn’t be legit. I’m just sad. I cried twice today, once when I hurt myself (but that was more whimpering than crying and I was alone, thank god) and once in the shower at the gym after an awful workout. I can’t let on, though, because a few days ago I was going on and on about how positive and upbeat and normal I am and how Dad can stop trying to “fix” my problems, because I don’t have any problems anymore. Phantom sadness would set off the fatherly lecture and anxiety cycle in a major way. So I’ll just wait it out. I guess that’s what I really mean when I say I’m positive and normal–not that I don’t get down, or even get down for no appreciable reason, but that I’m aware that it will blow over and everything will be peachy once more.

As an addendum to yesterday’s post: I definitely had a moment today when, pulling on my leather work gloves, I imagined how much more badass it would be if it were a falconer’s glove. I didn’t run with that particular fantasy, but it reminded me strongly of D.Q. and the good old days of my sad, strange youth.

Moralizing Impulses in Paratext

After assuring my summer workfellows that yes, I’m still reading, and no, it’s not the same book I was working on at the end of last summer, I was asked to sum up Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon into a short enough statement that it would hold the attention of my utterly uninterested audience. I said, “it’s about a black community in Michigan in the 1940s,” which may possibly be the most inadequate summation of that work ever created. As the conversation moved on to more interesting things (Nascar and dirty jokes) I thought about the people who write the blurbs on the backs or inside flaps of novels in the context of Hayden White’s views about the process of writing history. White suggests that all historical narrative is tainted in its objectivity by the “moralizing impulses” of the authors. These impulses aren’t really things the recorders of history can avoid–they simply can’t write down everything that ever happened, and thus what they choose to record and what they choose to leave out bias the work. It’s sort of like that with the paratext describing novels. If the novel stands in place of the full sequence of historical events, then the paratext is like a historical narrative and the author of the paratext picks and chooses what to include and exclude, baising the resulting blurb. The author of the paratext is really very powerful; he or she can sway a reader’s experience of a text by prefixing expectations to the experience of actually reading a novel. Who writes this stuff, anyway, and how can I get their job?