Goings On and On and on

On Religion

God is like my grandpa in Cleveland. I know he's out there, and even though I never hear from him, I am pretty sure he still loves me.

If the God of the Bible is real, he sure doesn't seem to understand people very well. I mean, ok so he sacrificed his perfect son for all of man kind -- two thousand years ago. And I'm supposed to feel the same about it, that the people who actually witnessed this happening did? That's like saying, "Your great great grandpa loved you so much, that he gave his son a car long before you were ever born. Of course you don't get to see the car, or drive it or anything, but I wrote a book all about it. So you should totally understand how much great great grandpa loves you."

I understand the Bible is written by story tellers. Some of them were better than others. But I still have a problem with so many of the stories not making a lick of sense. For instance in Genesis, Jacob is in the middle of this trip, sort of a redemption story, and it's pretty good. But there is one part that throws me. One night when Jacob is walking along the river, he meets an angel and then he wrestles with the angel all night long, and in the morning, the angel pokes his hip and turns it, basically giving Jacob a painful hip and a limp for the rest of his life. I've read this story a bunch of times and I always hope that somehow later on in the story this will all be explained, but it never happens. They even bring it up later in the Bible in Hosea, but they basically just clarify that the crazy wrestling angel was Michael.
So I don't know about you, but let's say I meet an angel when I'm out walking around. I don't think my first instinct would be to tackle him and try to wrestle him into submission. And there are many reasons for this, first of all, I'm pretty sure that most, if not all celestial beings could kick my ass. Second, I think angels probably have a lot of cool stories, and I'd want to hear those stories, which are hard to listen to when you're trying to put a cherub in an arm-bar.
Ok, and they wrestled all night? All night? Really? Because I've wrestled for five minutes before and I was exhausted for the rest of the day, and I think I'm in pretty good shape. And here's the kicker; I was wrestling a person, not one of the heavenly host.
And the coup de grace here is that after the angel gets bored of rolling around in the dirt with Jacob he just pokes him in the hip with his finger "turning it," which I guess means he dislocated it. I've never dislocated my hip before, but I've had patients who have, and that looks painful as hell. What was the angel trying to prove here? Is it like when I used to arm wrestle my dad and he would pretend to struggle for a little while and then just as my confidence was beginning to build, he would slam my arm down? The angel sounds like kind of a dick here.
In the grand scheme of story telling, this seems pretty far fetched and worthless info. Because as near as I can tell, none of this had any real impact on Jacob. After this passage he pretty much goes back to what he was doing. I'm sure he had to limp there though.

Don't even get me started on Moses.

On Medicine

People like to think Doctor's know everything. Doctors do know a lot, but all that schooling is pretty much just to make them better at guessing. Did you know that modern medicine still doesn't know why we need to sleep? They know a lot about what happens when we do sleep, but there isn't a good explanation why those things don't just naturally happen as we go through our day. Right now the way that we explain how muscles work is till considered a "theory," we're not even sure about that! It wasn't that long ago that people actually figured out what germs were. All I'm saying is that the learning curve is pretty steep when it comes to our bodies and doctors are still figuring out things all the time. But try not to be so shocked when you go to the hospital and the doctor gives you a long list of things that might be wrong with you, instead of just telling you what you have. He's just guessing.

On Pets

Pets to me are like homeless people. I'm not mean to them or anything, but I just don't want them in my house touching my stuff.

On Book Titles

The other day I noticed a book Crazy for the Storm. I read the insert and it is indeed a story about a guy was involved in a storm. The book title really bothered me though. Couldn't they have called it Storm Crazy, or Trapped on Storm Mountain, or Crazy because of the Storm? I haven't read this book yet, so maybe it gets clarified somewhere in there, but I doubt it.
I read this other book not that long ago called White Teeth. It was a good book, but nevertheless it had nothing to do with white teeth. In fact I don't think teeth were ever even mentioned in it. It was a story about two families in wartime London. No teeth talk, at all.
So I came up with this theory that maybe all the good book titles have been taken, and since you can't really write a book and call it War and Peace, or Gone with the Wind and hope nobody notices that you've ripped off a classic, authors have been reduced to what horse trainers do with race horses. Since horse's names are registered, and you can't register the same name twice, all the normal names like Jared, and Snowball got used up in like five minutes, so now horse people come up with crazy names like Captain Sunshine of the Forgotten Ape People. Which would be both an awesome book and an awesome horse name.