Oooh! more quiz results! I am a Neutral Good Elf Bard Ranger. For a complete description of what that means, go to the quiz results page. To find out what D&D character you are, go here. Link courtesy of the ever gracious Bar Code King, who I think is wrong about the situation in the Middle East -- I don't think you can assign blame to just one side, and even it some assholes say deplorable things, not everyone is an extremist -- but who otherwise has a cool blog. And he links to me! Whoo-hoo!

Speaking of disagreeing with posts, Rich takes issue with my "people suck" post. He's a glass-half-full kind of guy. I, um, well, I'm not, apparently. I tend to get more depressed by the horrible stuff we do than impressed by the great stuff we do. But maybe, now that it's not snowing and the sun is shining, I'll be a little less apocalyptic. Or not. We'll see.

I feel I should emphasize that Zeke doesn't actually believe any of the crap he was saying, about the end of the world and the Mayan calendar and such. He's far too much a hard-headed capitalist pig for that. And I mean that in the nicest of all possible ways. And yes, he will take that as a compliment. Right, Zeke?

I got the following from Zeke in response to me "people suck" post yesterday:

Don't feel too bad about people and the world. People suck. Yes. It will keep getting worse. Yes. But everything will change when the final tick in the Mayan calendar says that the world will end. That's December 21, 2012. Of course, by "end" we probably mean "change to the point that everything is radically different". Much like the Death card in tarot stands for change, not an ending.

Don't know what the change will be, but it'll sure be a doozy. Unless it isn't. You never know with this sort of bunk.

The sad part is, I know what he's talking about. I think it was in Fingerprints of the Gods, which I haven't read yet pretty much because I know it says that the world ends in 2012. And because it's probably bullshit. But no matter how much I like to tell myself I'm a hard-headed, cynical pragmatist, but I get far too easily wigged by things like that.

So I wrote Zeke back and told him how it pissed me off to when I found out that the world would end or go all apocalyptic or shift or whatever when I was only 42. That, apparently, was the wrong thing to say, because it just got Zeke thinking:

I've just figured out why the world will end in 2012. It has everything to do with you. Try this one out: Mayans say world "ends" in 2012. Jersild is 42 in 2012. Douglas Adams says answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42. Tie it together and we get "Jersild causes world to end when she discovers the Ultimate answer to Life the Universe and Everything". Bad news for the world. But great news for Jersild, as she'll finally know what everything was all about before she goes.

Ah. Well that's... I was going to say comforting, but that's a lie. That sucks. Not only will the world end, but it will be my fault? Thanks a hell of a lot, Zeke. We have discussed my guilt issues, haven't we? Harumph.

On the upside, I will be able to put "Sarah Jersild, Probable Destroyer of Worlds" on my business card now.

I'm feeling even more misanthropic than usual at the moment. I don't know how we've avoided killing ourselves entirely thus far. Between news from the Middle East, Afghanistan, the Catholic Church, standard corruption scandals and random peccadillos -- what the hell are we still doing here? We seem intent on getting everything as wrong as reasonably possible.

People pretty much just suck. All of us, not just "those people." We suck. I suck. Because I can't imagine what I could do that would make the world a better -- or at least slightly less sucky -- place.

Harumph.

How's that for a perky post?

By the way, I'm venturing into Amazon.com markets. If anyone wants to buy The Godfather Collection on DVD, let me know.

Still snowing, off and on. Not sticking, but still, it pisses me off.

Rich from work is going to China with his wife and her family, and they're stopping off in hong Kong for a few day. Sigh. I want to go back to Hong Kong. It's not snowing there....

Continuation of the root canal today. He shot me full of so much novocaine that I couldn't even feel my nose for three hours.

It's gone now. Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.

God, I use dashes a lot. Annoying, or stylistic? Or both?

Chicago played its very own April Fools joke on us today, by suckering us with a gorgeous, warm morning then slugging us with snow and sleet in the afternoon and evening. Great.

I had the following IM conversation with Sarah (Jane's Sarah) about yesterday's post:

SDCrawford: good blog
sjerslix: Thanks
SDCrawford: for a minute there I thought you were having all the guilt of a
Catholic
SDCrawford: bad Episcopalian
sjerslix: Hey, my mom was raised Catholic -- it's in the blood
SDCrawford: my fav quote to define Episcopalian from priests:
SDCrawford: you have questions... we have questions!

And if that's not comforting, what is?

I had to take the cats to the vet today. Joy. I decided to snag Mongo first, as he's usually the one who panics more. I swooped him up from the couch as he cried and yowled, then popped him in the carrier with minimal trauma.

Bug, tragically, is not stupid. She saw what was going on and fled. I've determined a few things:

• I need to get doors that you can close -- and keep closed -- from the outside.
  
• To hell with double or queen-size beds
  
• If I keep the double/queen-size beds, they need to be higher off the ground so I can squirrel under them just as well as the cats do.
  
• No matter what happens, I really need to clean under the beds, and other major pieces of furniture, much more often.
  
• If Wendy had not been available to run interference, I would have been toast.

We finally liberated Bug from inside the lining of the box spring in the guest room, but she managed to draw a bit of blood on the way to the carrier. Ow.

Then trapped in the car with two pitiful cats -- Bug silent and glaring at me, Mongo crying and peeing. So now my car is redolent of cat piss. It's a beautiful thing. Bug checked out fine, but Mongo apparently has hyperthyroidism -- I need to call the vet tomorrow to find out what the hell I can do about that.

Fortunately, my cats have very short attention spans. By the time I got home, they had apparently forgiven me -- Mongo snuggled up as soon as I sat on the couch, and Bug deigned to have her ears scratched. She was freaked when I moved the cedar chest back by the bed, though.

Of course, they could just be lulling me into a false sense of security. I would not be surprised to find poop in my shoes, or a ring of hairballs around the bed, or mysterious claw marks on my face tomorrow morning.

WARNING: THIS POST IS ABOUT RELIGION AND FAITH. IF YOU'RE A PDNER WHO'S HERE FOR LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT AND WHO THINKS RELIGION AND GOD ARE A LOAD OF BOLLOCKS, PERHAPS YOU SHOULD CHECK BACK TOMORROW. I'LL TRY TO BE MORE AMUSING THEN.

ALSO, IF YOU'RE A RANDOM STRANGER WHO WANTS TO BOMBARD ME WITH YOUR MESSAGES ABOUT THE ONE TRUE FAITH -- PLEASE DON'T.

Happy Easter. I actually went to church this morning, for the first time in a very long while. I was raised Episcopalian and educated Quaker, so I swing between two very different traditions: One "Catholicism light" or "All of the pageantry, none of the guilt"; the other no ceremony, no liturgy, no nothing -- hell, it's practically a coincidence you end up sitting in a room with a bunch of other silent people. So yeah, I get a little schizoid about my services.

The place I went this morning was Episcopal, and very, very high church. I was at the less formal of the two services at this church, and it was a sung mass with incense and such. At the more formal, it's a sung mass, incense, full choir and everything is in Latin. that's a little too high-church for me, I think.

Scary part is, I still remember the order of service and what you say when. I couldn't find my place in the prayer book a few times, and it didn't matter -- it all come tripping off my tongue without me having to think about it. Which is actually a little disturbing...

OK, we've established that I can, at times, be melodramatic. But if you think this is bad, you should have seen me when I was young. Lordy. Being "in the grip of [my] hormones", as my dad used to say (chant, actually), was not pretty. Among other things, I managed to have a full-on hysterical crisis of faith -- in the middle of church -- when I was about 17.

What brought that on was (1) reading an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson that basically said "It's not the non-believers who hurt the church, it's the putative believers who are just going through the motions without thought or passion," (2) working weekends and therefore not going to church for a while, (3) going to a church that had just kicked out a minister for moral turpitude, basically, and we were still looking for a replacement, and (4) pretty much taking things entirely too seriously. Anyway, I actually went to church with my folks early one morning before work, and we got to the Nicene creed, which says, in part, "We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church..." and I realized I didn't. I didn't believe that at all, especially not if it meant that my Jewish friends, and later, my Hindu and Buddhist friends from Hong Kong, were less valuable/damned/whatever just because what church they did or didn't go to. So, being the shy, retiring, sober type I am, I burst into hysterics and fled the church to wail in the memorial garden.

Like I said, I was loads of fun growing up.

I haven't been much of a church-goer since. I went to Quaker meeting for a while in Hong Kong, but stopped pretty much because I was dating someone who lived in the back of beyond and getting my ass out of bed early enough on Sunday to make meetings was just too hard. Then I only went to church on holidays. The next time I started going was shortly after my grandmother died -- I was dating someone who lived and worked in a religious community, and when I tried to go to services with him, hysterics ensued, at least in part because I couldn't go without thinking about Grandma Jersild. So that didn't work out too well.

Despite all this, despite a good 10 years of non-churchgoing, it's all still there -- I know this stuff. It's engrained in me. I can go through the motions with the best of them.

When I stopped going to church, the problem was never that I didn't believe; it was more a matter of I didn't feel like I believed enough. Today was an experiment. I was just going to go, see how it felt, see what happened. But for Easter, they did a renewal of baptismal vows, and I read the words with the rest of the congregation and then the priest went around with holy water, flicking it into the crowd. I sort of panicked -- "Wait! I'm not ready for this! I don't know if I mean it!" -- but, refreshingly, did not cry, scream or run. (Apparently the medication works!) But I was freaked when I left, thinking "I don't have perfect faith, I can't guarantee I'm that sort of person, I can't promise to believe and be what I'm supposed to be. "

But hang on, I thought, that's the point. No one has perfect faith, no one knows what they're doing. If they did, it wouldn't be faith or religion, it would be science. The whole point of religion, I think, is in the trying, in the effort to hear God or your conscience or your better nature or whatever. If I didn't worry about it, if I was smug and complacent, then I'd be pulling what Emerson warns against. But being scared and wary of that is actually a good sign. And if I wait to have perfect faith and perfect understanding, I'm never going to get started.

I don't know what I'm starting yet, or if churchgoing is something I'll keep up. I do believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. I don't understand him/her/it, and I don't understand why he/she/it would be interested in me. Maybe God isn't interested. Maybe it's all in my head. But maybe I need to find out.

It's still going to be hard not to sleep in on Sundays, though....