Scatterings

Meteorological metaphor. My moods of late are not unlike this weekend's weather. Heavy rain, periods of sun, partly cloudy, etc. As Freud noted, when love and work are in good shape, happiness is not impossible. When they are not, watch out. It rained so hard in the middle of the night that it woke me up. I couldn't tell if it was rain or hail on the windows and I was wondering if they would break.

Dreamt, unfortunately, about the queens in the A-List series. All I need is about thirty seconds of them when I am changing channels and I can feel my blood pressure rising. Put them all in a bag and drown them.

Yesterday, as part of having three dogs visit my kitchen, my coffee carafe fell of the counter and smashed. Down to SOMA on Monday to get a replacements. Been noticing how many small things break or wear out and must be replaced: lightbulbs, shoes, gym clothes. The law of entropy.

The North Koreans have "stunned" the world by revealing a huge nuclear power project. Quel surprise. I wonder what it must be like to have to "negotiate" with people like them, knowing --I hope-- that all they are interested in is winning. I wonder if negotiators actually get themselves to believe that the North Koreans can be negotiated with, just so their own task is not rendered ridiculous in their own minds. I know how easy it is, from working with crazy criminals, to forget what they are really up to and to be taken in when you are face to face with someone.

Nancy Lugosi has made fun of John Boehner because he cries. She doesn't. (I will refrain from wondering if her eye-opening plastic surgery just destroyed her tear ducts, or what). The dark side of feminism: I can make fun of a man for engaging in typically female behavior while I position myself as the real man. But can you imagine the outcry if a male politician made fun of a woman for crying? Sexism. Rank sexism.

A soon-to-be-a-father Jewish lawyer asked Judge Kimba Wood for a day off when his wife gave birth, if it was a boy, so that he could attend the bris. If it was a girl, no bris, no day off asked for. Her Excellency gave the day off for a possible boy but said that if a girls was born, she would fill in the gender gap in Judaism by having a celebration in court, with poetry and readings about how cool it is to be female. Not her damn fucking job. The taxpayers get to fund her feminism? And Miss Girl Power has her own history, including taking another woman's husband; sisterhood is so powerful. And if the lawyer were a Muslim, would she have the metaphorical balls to supplement Islamic sexism? Not her damn fucking job.

A friend triumphantly pointed out the other day that the Bible discusses homosexuality very infrequently, but talks about adultery all the time, so what's the big deal with the churches and gay people? And Jesus never talked about it at all. Sigh. Jesus also never spoke against slavery, abortion, or colonialism. I am a great admirer of unschooled but curious people read, etc. But sometimes a little sophistication helps. (And while I'm at it, let me say that I have heard this kind of stuff from "schooled" people as well.) And I will not go on about sola scriptura.

Societies or groups tend to create rules and restrictions against things that are actual problems for them. Nothing that we know about Hebrew or Jewish society leads us to believe that there was a lot of homosexuality going on. If it was not frequently addressed, the most likely reason is that it was not frequently done. But when it is addressed, it is not addressed in a friendly fashion, shall we say. The most unfriendly treatment is Paul to the Romans, --Greco-Roman culture there--and it's pretty unfriendly. Homosexuality become Exhibit A in what depravity people fall into because of their ungraced idolatry.

So it is not like the lack of real moral outrage among Catholics over gambling or smoking or dancing or bad language, where these activities simply do not register as biggies on the Catholic conscience. In the Old Days, homosexuality was hardly ever spoken of in Catholicism; that does not mean the Church thought it was cool. I recall the only time it was mentioned in the Catechism, and it was so awful that it was mentioned metaphorically. Under the discussion of the kinds of sin, after going through the Seven Capital Sins, there was a question about "sins that cry to heaven for vengeance": wilful murder, the sin of the people of Sodom, oppression of orphans and widows, and defrauding the laborer of his just wages.

So frequency of condemnation usually correlates to frequency of occurrence as well as perceived importance. So if you want to find out what bad behavior is going on in a culture, check out their laws.

Two funny and recondite examples: in the Rule of St Benedict, the venerable text founding Western monasticism, you see that life in a 6th century Italian monastery was a bit more like Dodge City than you'd imagine. Along with lesser sanctions, abbots could take away food or order up a good flogging. And in the 13th century details in the Dominican ritual books, friars are admonished when taking Communion not to make odd noises, or strange faces or flail around. And when they have received, to make sure the holy bread is all gone before they engage in spitting. And there are histories of monastic prisons...

On other things Catholic: a lot of Boomer Catholics are in a huge apocalyptic tizzy over the upcoming re-translation of the Mass which will be put in place a year from now. It replaces the 1970s one with a version much closer to the literal Latin, with its sacred language and formality. I mostly hated the 1970s translations. In a word: banal. The change promotes the resacralization of the liturgy, doesn't mince words about sin and divine grace and leaves behind the egalitarian and feminist concerns of the immediate post-Council translators. I'll probably go to church next year to see what it sounds like.

Thanksgiving is coming up this week and for the first time in many years I am not going back to the family gene pool for it. Nothing wrong with the family. I just hate the plane trip, and in my post-B haze would rather not be around five siblings in happy marriages. I'll get together with friends here and that will be low key and enough.