SINGLE DIVORCED MALE

SO! I was filling out forms, standing in line (living here in Allentown) a few weeks ago when one of those random questions went through my head that despite my investigations, has so far gone completely unanswered. It’s this: other than potential marketing reasons (and maybe that’s ALL the reason you need in th’ 1st place) why does anyone give a jolly damn about someone’s marital status?

The little boxes for checking off if you’re single, married, divorced or widowed are all OVER the place. I can understand the necessity for it on something like health or life insurance applications (in those ever-rarer cases where 2 people must be married to GET coverage), but why is it on the product registration page for a waffle iron? Why do all of my doctors care, cuz apparently they all do—my primary, the ENT who’s going to remove a nasal polyp, the ophthalmologist who will be looking for diabetic retinopathy, the sleep study clinic, even the lab that drew blood—all wanted to know what my marital status was. Does this information actually get registered anyplace, or has it become the appendix of all information forms; always there, but completely useless??

Is the phlebotomy lab of the local hospital sending this info to some bean counter in a dingy little subterranean office to then sell this info to various marketers and manufacturers to be used in some sort of way? It’s not that they needed my status so they could call Spooky in an emergency—that’s on a completely DIFFERENT line (and depending on your relationship, your spouse may be the LAST person you want at your side in a dire emergency). Who’s USING this info?? And, what’s more, does it really MEAN anything?

Either you’re in a legally recognized relationship or you’re not. No matter who you’re actively, intimately involved with the terms ‘single’, ‘divorced’ and ‘widowed’ mean essentially the same thing. There’s no boxes for “consort” or “mate” or “partnered” or “handfasted” or “common law” or “spousal equivalent” or that term in the Mormon church for being married forever after death and in heaven (someone wanna look that term up for me?) OR anything else. Really, either you’re married or you’re not. You could be a hermit living in a shotgun shack asking yourself, “how do I work this?” with only the wind and an occasional moth for companionship, or else you could be legally married , living in a sorority house getting it oooooon with your wife 3 states away. Who you’re sleeping with, who you love isn’t what the little boxes is asking: what it’s asking for is a legal contract between 2 people, and in 9.5 out of 10 instances where this info is asked, it’s irrelevant.

You know what *I* like to do? I like to write in next to th’ boxes, “I’s gots me a sugah-lurve, do that count?” just to see if anyone will follow-up with me to clarify the info. So far, no one has. Fugg ‘em.

CRANK! PRESENTS: AND HE CREATED MAN IN HIS OWN IMAGE…

It is important to recognize that the Satan here [in Job] is not the fallen angel who has been booted from heaven, the cosmic enemy of god. Here he is portrayed as one of God’s divine council members, a group of divinities who regularly report to God and, evidently, go about the world doing his will. Only at a later stage of Israelite religion does “Satan” become “The Devil,” God’s mortal enemy. The term *the Satan* here in Job does not appear to be a name so much as a description of his office: it literally means “the Adversary” (or the Accuser). But he is not an adversary to God: he is one of the heavenly beings who report to God. He is an adversary in the sense that he plays “devil’s advocate”, as it were, challenging conventional wisdom to try to prove a point...

The overarching view of suffering in this folktale is clear: sometimes suffering comes to the innocent in order to see whether their pious devotion to God is genuine and disinterested…

But serious questions can be raised about this perspective, questions raised by the text of the folktale itself. For one thing, many readers over the years have felt that God is not to be implicated in Job’s sufferings; after all, it is the Satan who causes them. But a close reading of the text shows it is not so simple. It is precisely God who authorizes the Satan to do what he does; he could not do anything without the Lord directing him to do it. Moreover, in a couple of places the text indicates that it is God himself who is ultimately responsible. After the first round of Job’s sufferings, God tells the Satan that Job “persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason.” (Job 2:3). Here it is God who is responsible for Job’s innocent sufferings, at the Satan’s instigation. God also points out there was “no reason” for Job to have to suffer…

God himself has caused the misery, pain, agony and loss that Job experienced. You can’t just blame the Adversary. And it is important to remember what this loss entailed: not just loss of property, which is bad enough, but a ravaging of the body and the savage murder of Job’s ten children. And to what end? For “no reason”—other than to prove to the Satan that Job wouldn’t curse God even if he had every right to do so…. He actually was innocent, as God himself acknowledges. God did this to him in order to win a bet with the Satan. This is obviously a God above, beyond and not subject to human standards. Anyone else who destroyed all your property, physically mauled you, and murdered your children—simply on a whim or bet—would be liable to the most severe punishment that justice could mete out. But God evidently is above justice and can do whatever he pleases if he wants to prove a point.




There are few stories that illustrate that view [that suffering is a test from God] more clearly and more horribly than the “offering of Isaac” recounted in Genesis 22… The god who has promised him [Abraham] a son now wants to destroy that son; the God who commands his people not to murder now has ordered the father of the Jews to murder his own child.

The point of the story, like the point of Job’s story, is that being faithful to God is the most important thing in life: more important that life itself. Whatever God commands must be done, no matter how contradictory to his nature (is he or is he not a God of love?), no matter how contrary to his own law (is he opposed to murder—or human sacrifice—or not?), no matter how contrary to every sense of human decency. There have been may people since Abraham’s day who have murdered the innocent, claiming that God told them to do so. What do we do with such people? We lock them up in prison or execute them. And what do we do with Abraham? We call him a good and faithful servant. I often wonder about this view of suffering.


What, then, are we to make of this view of suffering, that suffering sometimes comes as a test of faith?... Are we to imagine a divine being who wants to torment his creatures just to see if he can force them to abandon their trust in him? What exactly are they trusting him to do? Certainly not to do what is best for them: it is hard to believe that God inflicts with cancer, flu or AIDS in order to make sure they praise him in the end. Praise him for what? Mutilation and torture? For his great power to inflict pain and misery on innocent people?... What about Job’s children? Why were they senselessly slaughtered? So that God could prove a point? Does this mean that God is willing—even eager—to take *my* children in order to see how I’ll react?

As satisfying as the book of Job has been to people over the ages, I have to say I find ti supremely dissatisfying. If God tortures, maims and murders people just to see how they will react—to see if they will not blame him, when in fact he is to blame—then this does not seem to be a God worthy of worship.



---Bart D. Ehrman
God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer

TWAS A DREAM I HAD PRESENTS: THAT LITTLE VOICE IN SIDE MY HEAD, REDEUX.

I’m leafing back through my dream diary and came across this lil’ tiddy-bitt from Tues 10/13. That Little Voice, the one that spoke to me about my dad spoke to me again. This time it said

“It is only because of the tightly wound mainspring that the watch is able to tell time.”

If this sort of think keeps up, I could probably get a job writing desk calendars or fortune cookies.

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND IT IS US, NOT OUR FAX MACHINES.

O'erheard in my office several dozen times a day: “didja get my fax?” I don’t know about YOU, but as I work for an insurance company we get faxes all day long to the point we don’t even HAVE a fax machine, they all get put into an electronic queue and are slowly pulled out 1 by 1 by our claims processors. It’s a slow and tedious process that can VERY easily be screwed up and NOT SO VERY easily fixed if someone DOES a cockup, so it may take upwards to 8 days for a fax to actually show up in the system (or as we say, “between 48 to 72 business hours to be logged in.”)

So, an example may be this:

Mr. Smith faxes us at 1:00 PM on Monday.
The fax isn’t logged in until 4:30 PM on Thursday

Meanwhile, Mr. Smith, thinking that there’s just 1 central fax machine with a letter tray under it, calls us on Monday at 1:10 to ask if we’ve rec’d said fax. Of course, of the 12 people on the phones, I think only TWO actually have ACCESS to the fax queue, and so can’t TELL Mr. Smith if it HAS been rec’d. The only thing we can say is “wait n’ see…”

Technology, therefore, is only as good as the people actually USING it. A fax machine is worthless if the person who NEEDS the fax never GETS it. If I’m faxing something to Joe the Supervisor and the fax is first picked up by Sally the Secretary and sits on her desk for a few hours to a few days, Joe never gets it, and meanwhile time marches on.

It’s the “time marches on” part that’s always the problem. Lessay I’ve got a biz meeting on Wed at noon. On Monday at 9 I fax over some documents for everyone to review. The fax machine works fine and I’m also going to mail out the documents as well, which I do at noon. Meanwhile, the fax sits in the bin or on someone else’s desk who’s supposed to scan it or upload it into the database. Here comes Wed. The mail hasn’t arrived yet and the fax isn’t in the system because it’s still in a big pile on someone’s desk. The meeting is delayed, rescheduled or otherwise nothing is accomplished. This is part of the problem when, instead of having too many cooks tinkering with the soup, there’s only TWO and everyone else isn’t even in the kitchen anymore. Try sending something to ONE PERSON in a large organization and good luck with that. Try calling someone back in a call center, for example: “I’m returning a call from Phil…” and Phil ain’t even on the clock. Hell, no one even knows who Phil IS.

Mail a thankee card to Bernice the RN ‘cuz she was so nice to you when you broke your leg playing darts, and first it’s delayed in the mail room, then sits on her supervisors desk, then gets laid on someone elses desk because Bernice doesn’t even HAVE a mailbox, and somewhere between 180 days and 2 years later Bernice MAY finally get the letter if she’s not already left her employer.

This is one of the reasons why, when I see hi-gloss TV adverts for iPhones and all that other stuff I just roll my eyes. It’s not that I wouldn’t love to play with something like that (though the MAIN reason I’m grumpy is that there’s no way in hell I can afford it), it’s that I don’t see how something like that would actually BE USEFUL. Sending a fax from your phone is nice technology, but for the vast, unwashed masses of humanity, it’s pointless. Me rushing to fax you from my car as I’m leaving a remote campground is pointless if that fax is going to sit on your secretary’s desk for 3 days. It doesn’t matter if I can text, phone, fax, email and tweet you all at once if you’re not bothering to turn your phone on (or, like the great unwashed masses, aren’t ALLOWED to turn your phone on while at work). It’s pointless to spend $20 overnighting hardcopy documents if, when it hits the building, it takes 4 days for someone to get around to filing it.

So, for the rest of us, just like we used to say ‘the check’s in the mail”, now we can be all modern and say “the fax is in the queue.”

TAKE WISDOM WHERE YOU FIND IT PRESENTS: THANKS TO KID LIT, I KNOW WHAT NOT TO NAME MY NEW BLOG

CHAPTER 16:
TEN OTHER BABY NAMES THAT SUCK MORE THAN DIGMAN

buttcheeks
Howie
King Mucus the 5th
Madame Lovehandles
Stinky
Rhino Haunch
Puddles
Cutie Pie la Rue
Hairball La Pew
Farty Arty

---Henry Winkler & Lin Oliver
Hank Zipzer, the World’s Greatest Underachiever Book 13: Who Ordered this Baby? Definitely Not Me!

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER...

Whups, almost forgot to post today. Sorry, I wuz out late last nite riding a mechanical bull...

FLOWCHARTS FOR THE REST OF US