Mind Asking Questions

Today I paid off my car. And my credit card. Plus I paid most of my dad's remaining bills. Finally, I sent my insurance company the remaining balance for this period. It sucks having to cut nearly $4000 worth of checks but most of my debt has been relieved and I will save on interest. I was so happy that I went down to Toad Hill to buy lunch for The Caffeinatrix and Jimmy Downtown. Because of a schedule change, Downtown had the day off so it was just me and The Caffeinatrix. A nice treat for one especially stressed-out lady.

Books - I bought books yesterday. Having read a couple of Julie's entries, our discussion out on the boat Friday about various strains of Protestantism, and my general sense of paranoia about he Xtian Right led me over to the religion aisle. I need to know more about this leviathan that is Xtianity. And at Miss Regan's baptism a couple weeks ago, I gained more questions. Since mass was ongoing, we sat in an anteroom where I found a Catholic dictionary. Flip, flip. Baptism. It rids the baptisee of Original Sin and some other lesser ones. However, it does not remove mortality and concupiscence. Oh, that's rich. It removes from a person all the crap the Church made up but leaves the all the real bits of our nature intact. I found the idea that sweet little Miss Regan was this heinous individual despite only being a few months old to be ridiculous and insulting. These feelings were compounded when I read that, for Catholics, people are endowed with this Original Sin hoolie at conception. She was screwed from the get-go. What kind of nonsense was this?

Anyway, I trolled around the aisle until a saleswoman approached me. She turned out to be exceedingly helpful - almost to the point of pushy. She recommended God's Secretaries, an account of the creation of the Knig James Bible. It, being about books, immediately appealed to me and I tucked it under my arm. Next was Elaine Pagel's Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. It's about the early years of Xtianity and how it's doctrines, which changed Western civilization, came about. One thing that really amazed me was the number of books about The Da Vinci Code. It's a fucking cottage industry! I wonder if Dan Brown is getting a piece of the action on this. I don't understand what the big deal is. It's a mediocre novel, at best. The idea behind the story is intruguing enough, but the story itself became hackneyed once those goons started chasing the protagonists. For me, however, the worst sin of all is Brown's writing. It's at the level of comic books. (No offense intended towards those like Alan Moore, et al.) Hey, I can read and understand concepts beyond those of the 4th grade! Ah, lots of people liked it and I can't begrudge them. I guess I just went into it with expectations too high. I was hoping for something akin to Eco but got the literary equivlent of McDonalds.

I went down the next aisle and snagged Ibn Warraq's Why I Am Not a Muslim. Beneath a shelf there was a section on language so I picked up a volume on the history of English as well as Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. From there it was off to the science section where I snagged Paul Davies' About Time and Matt Ridley's book on the human genome. Before leaving, I ordered Pragmatic Liberalism by Charles W. Anderson, an old professor of mine. I'd lent the book to a friend of mine several years ago and never got it back after I switched jobs so I figured I'd get a new copy. Prof. Anderson's class had a tremendous impact on my life so I figured I'd pay him back by buying the hardcover edition of the book.

And so I've got some reading to do. I haven't been doing much lately and I'm hoping this will kickstart the habit. I have so many questions in my mind that require more knowledge for careful consideration. So much to know, so much to clarify. Ya know, I folded laundry a couple days ago and spent the entire time pondering the meaning of life. I fecal matter thee not. I wrote an essay which broached the topic some time ago and I asked myself whether I still agreed with what I had written. While I would write it differently now, I found that I still felt much the same.

I gave some tunes to Jolene yesterday and discovered that she's a big Pavement fan. I found this rather odd as I would never have guessed that she'd be into their music but I knew she liked Primus as well and she doesn't seem the bastardo type either. Go figure. I hope she's in the mood for gospel because one of the CDs had a fair amount of it.

Auto parts store...must find one...