unscriptured

Sometimes instincts are no fun.

I’ve had occasion a few times in the last week to note some sort of bad odor. It’s been nothing awful but it’s happened enough that I was able to notice a pattern. I’m going along breathing, minding my own business, when my nose catches a whiff of something noxious. Then, rather then doing the sensible thing and holding my breath for a few moments while the scent goes on to wherever it’s going, my alertness perks up and I quickly breathe in a little deeper, the better to experience and catalog just how bad the badness of the odor is.

God says this is important. God says some odors need to be dealt with quickly, like smoke, or skunk, and that the smells need to be understood in order to react correctly. I, on the other hand, am just tired of divining the nuances of the urine that highlights the streets of San Francisco or that permeates the clothing of the homeless.

I get that the instinct is important; I just wish that it were a little more unconscious.

Not that it matters to anyone else, but to God and me it’s now down to the wire. Tonight I’ll spend my first night in my new house. My bed won’t actually be there until tomorrow, so tonight it’ll sort of be like camping in a really big, really nice cabin with central heating and air. So not roughing it, but not decadent either.

God and I haven’t gotten to talk all that much this last week. She’ll say something and I’ll sort of grunt in response as I hoist another box and carry it out to the car. When I think about it, right about now I could really use some decadence. God says moving my own stuff helps build character. I think that means, helps me to see that I not only should let a lot of this stuff go, but I actually could.

There’s nothing quite like packing all of your stuff into boxes and hauling it around to help you develop a healthy sense of detachment from material things.

Or make you cling to it all that much more. Hmm, I guess I’ve still got a ways to go. Maybe I should practice chanting while moving boxes.

I asked God if anyone noticed that I didn’t post last week. He said they did, but then they got drunk on Labor Day and forgot all about it. I’m not sure if I should take away from that that my readers are a bunch of drunks or that my blog is easily forgotten. Probably both.

So now it’s done. I’ve bought a new (to me) house. I’m not generally prone to buyer’s remorse but I do know that after I’ve moved in there will be an adjustment period. There will be a series of moments when I notice something new (to me) that’s wrong with the house. It may be as simple as a nail sticking out of the fence at an inconvenient place or as big as a hole in the wall that was hidden behind some furniture.

It doesn’t bother me that things will bother me, I just hope they stay on the small side of things. The last time I bought a house I was slightly scammed by the sellers. They detached from the wall, which they’re not allowed to do without having called it out in the paperwork, a set of shelves in one bedroom. I don’t even begrudge them the shelves but they left dozens of small holes in the wall from where the screws had been and that was not cool. Even that though didn’t compare to a section of the concrete wall in the back that they strategically hid behind patio furniture which was not just cracked but precariously and dangerously leaning out over the patio.

God tells me it’s a dance, moving into a new house. Both you and the house feeling each other out, trying to decide how well you fit and where you can agree to just disagree. He says it’ll all work out in the end, and I believe him. After all, I own the place so anything that I really don’t like, I can probably change. And if it can’t be done gracefully? Well, sledgehammers are fairly cheap.

I’m in that twiddling my thumbs stage of the home buying process. I’ve done pretty much everything. I’ve given all the information to the lender and the sellers and the escrow/title company that any of them wants from me. I’ve had the home inspected and appraised and gotten a contractor’s quote on doing the repairs that the sellers are paying for.

But now I have to wait.

The lender has already set all their terms. They’ve guaranteed a rate. We’ve set the amount of the loan and the length of the loan. I’ve arranged for insurance so the loan will be taken care of should the house suddenly burn down.

But still I wait.

I’m sure they’re doing something. We’re actually going through a short closing from their point of view, moving aggressively to finish this deal at least a week faster than they prefer. So there must be something going on within their system. Some checks and cross checks that need to be completed.

While I just wait.

I asked God if this is what Purgatory is like. He said actually this is more like the waiting in line at the supermarket. You’ve already done your shopping, put everything in the cart, but now you have to wait your turn to actually get rung up. This is not like the queue to get into Heaven, it’s more like that period of boredom that the tabloid papers are counting on to pull you in, to entice you with their lurid headlines. Well, I won’t be lured. I’ll patiently wait my turn. Of course it couldn’t hurt to just look at one or two of the articles while I wait. Maybe just chuckle over the table of contents.

I got to do a new thing with my current house purchase that I didn’t do with the last two. I “disputed” the appraisal. I did this, obviously, because the appraiser came up with a value that was lower than what I’m paying for it. Mind you, based on what I’ve seen on the market and the prices that houses I’ve seen have been selling for, I think I’m getting a good deal, but apparently the appraiser doesn’t agree.

I could probably make a bigger stink about this but it would be a lot of work and quite possibly wouldn’t gain me anything. The appraisal didn’t come in so low as to crush the deal, but it means I have to put in more money out of pocket and I was already stretching a bit.

The part that’s most interesting to me is that this got me to look more closely at the appraisal than I’ve done in the past. This got me to pay more attention to how the appraisals are actually done. The thing that amazes me is how little information actually goes into valuing the property. The main thing is what they call “comps,” which is short for “comparable sales.” They pull information on recent, though not too recent, sales for houses with similar stats. The thing is the stats are only the most basic information. They look at total square feet, both for the house and the land. They look at the number of bedrooms and bath rooms and the number of stories. And that’s really about it. There’s nothing about the quality of the construction. There’s nothing about the style of the architecture. They take the seller’s word, or more accurately their agent’s word, about things like has the kitchen been updated.

This is like taking a writer’s word about how good his book is without actually reading a paragraph to see if he knows how to string two sentences together. So my agent and I disputed the appraisal and provided our own comps to support the price that I’m paying. All the lender did with this information was send it back to the appraiser and ask him to look it over. Like that had any chance of getting a changed number. The appraiser has no incentive to change his mind, human nature is not to admit we’re wrong, and there was no upside to his adjusting the value. At best he’d seem open minded, but at worst he’d seem like he’d been incompetent. And “open minded” wouldn’t get him any more or less work.

I told God that the more I learn about how the world works the more amazed I am that civilization holds together at all. She just grinned.

The old adage is that the three most important things when buying real estate are location, location, and location. That may be true fro find the place you want to buy, but I’m busily finding out that the actual three things are paperwork, paperwork, and paperwork.

One of the first things you do, even before you’ve found a place, is put together a bunch of paperwork to get a pre-approval on a loan. You have to show that you have money, that you have a job, that you have a credit history and that it’s not too bad of a credit history. Then you get to start going through a bunch of paperwork that everyone has put together to convince you to look at their house that’s for sale, to understand that it’s their house you want to come see, because it’s their house you’re going to want to buy. Then having done all of that, having sorted through dozens and dozens of listings, and having actually set foot in dozens of house, you find a place and decide that these particular sellers were right. They do have the house you want to buy.

Then you have to fill out a bunch of paperwork to let them know that you want to buy their place. You have to show them that you really can afford to pay what you’re offering, you have to show them whatever you can to convince them that of all the people proposing to buy their place you are the one they should pick, you are the one that will give them the right price and without giving them too much trouble through the closing process.

And then they pick you.

And then it’s back to the loan company.

Sure you already gave them a bunch of paperwork, but now they need to actually look at it all. They need to verify things. They need to look over what you gave the sellers and make sure that it meets their requirements too. Then they want even more paperwork and there’s a Title company involved making sure that the lender gets everything that they need, making sure that the sellers get everything that they need, and, yeah, also making sure that you get all the paperwork that you need, that you’ll need sometime down the line when you become a seller or in any number of other situations that involve you as the legal owner of the property.

And where is God in all of this? I don’t know. Every time there’s paperwork involved, he just seems to disappear.

I think that maybe God has a lower tolerance for listening to me over-evaluate things than I would have expected. Last week I mentioned that God was complaining about my pickiness in looking at houses, this week I chose one and am now in the massive paperwork and escrow process. The thing is, I probably shouldn’t have really gotten a house this nice in today’s market for the money I had to spend; that’s why I suspect that God just got tired of my endless circular arguments. Does this house have enough space for everything I own? Can I live with the terrible flow patterns of this one? That house is really nice but it is both more than I can probably afford and adds too much time to my daily commute.

It’s not that any of my arguments were wrong, and it’s not that I was despondent or anything, it’s just that I’d keep revisiting the same arguments for the same houses, over and over again, always hoping that I’d discover some redeeming thing that I’d missed but never actually finding one. So I’d move back to the start of the list. Now the list did keep changing, since houses are selling pretty quick right here and now, so houses that I’d almost committed to would drop away and I’d have to take another, harder, look at one that I’d already passed on. Should I really have passed on it? Are my hopes just out of line with my budget and I really need to tone them back and look again? Should I change my mind about my insistence on not needing mortgage insurance? After all, the market is finally rising so I could refinance in a year or two or accelerate payments to get below that magic 80% of loan to value number.

And that’s what I’ve been doing relentlessly for the last week and a half.

So I think God nudged the market a little. I was waiting in my car outside a house that I really wanted to see, but probably couldn’t quite afford, when my agent called to let me know that the house I was at had gone off the market earlier that day. This wasn’t the first time that had happened, and, remember, I’d only been looking less than two weeks. Then he went on. He’d seen another house earlier that day that had just come on the market and he thought it might be what I was looking for.

He was right.

Not only was he right, but the sellers were apparently interested in getting a quick deal, which means they weren’t necessarily going to get the best price, so maybe I could afford it. They were taking offers right away, not waiting to do an open house, not setting a day for comparing all comers. Somebody was already working up an offer and if we wanted to have a shot we needed to get in on the same day. So I made an offer. I made an offer notably lower than what my agent recommended, but only a smidge over my comfort zone. We tweaked some things, we offered some perks that didn’t affect the price but which might make us more attractive, and we made sure that we showed that I was good for what I said.

Mine was the third offer, they held up until nine at night to give us time to finish writing it up. I don’t know any of the details of the other offers but they picked mine. The house is, to my tastes anyway, much nicer than ones I’d seen that were listed at higher prices, so life is good. I’m happy and God’s happy, now I just have to make it through escrow.

I’m buying a house. So it follows that you’re going to hear about it, probably a few times, since this isn’t the sort of thing that happens overnight. I don’t yet know what house I’m going to buy, but I know quite a few that I won’t. God tells me that I’m pickier than I need to be. I tell her that she’d be right if I were looking for a place to rent but as I’m buying it’s perfectly appropriate to be picky.

When you rent a home, you find someplace that seems like it will do, that is near enough to where you want to be, and that you can afford, and then you jump in. If it doesn’t work out, no harm, no foul, just find someplace else. But when you buy a place you’re either going to be stuck with it for a long while or you’ll likely be out a lot of money. Money isn’t everything but, well, it’s a lot of things. It does matter. It’s sad what that implies about humanity, but it’s still true.

And also, the place you buy says something about you. Much more so than a place you rent. I’d like it to at least say nice things to my face, even better if it says nice things behind my back. So I’m looking, I’m looking for a place that speaks to me, a place that will whisper sweet nothings into my ears when I go to bed at night. I guess that makes the online real estate sites just another dating service.

God tells me it’s time to make another public service announcement. So without further preamble, here it is: In an elevator, step to the front before the doors open on your floor.

It’s a simple thing but it makes life so much better for those of us waiting to board. What I see all the time is people extending great courtesy when they get in and ride the elevator. They enter and then immediately step to one side or other, and usually to the back as well. At least as soon as they’ve pressed the button for their floor.

That’s great. It makes it easy for people to come in behind them and find an open space in which to stand.

But then everyone is shy when it comes time to leave. No one wants to be the first one to step up to the door, so presumptuous, people might think they feel entitled to get out first, might think that they think their business is more important than everyone else’s. Well cut it out. What you’re doing instead is having the doors open with no one standing there, so those of us waiting to get in see an empty space just waiting for us, an inviting space giving us that come hither look. So we go for it, we start to move forward, so we can all get in before the door starts to buzz. But no. As we start forward someone inside the elevator suddenly steps from one side of the door, sometimes both, ready to get out now, as if they hadn’t known that their floor was due. Now we have to back up, possibly stepping on the toes of the people who moved up behind us and now we’re doing this awkward dance of stepping sideways and looking over shoulders and trying to make sure that we get out of the way of the people coming out but don’t end up completely shuffling the order in which we get in, just in case there won’t be enough room for everyone.

So please, if you’re getting off, stand right up there, front and center. It makes life a little better for everyone. I promise we won’t feel you’re presumptuous.

Last week was a dark week for me. By which I mean that it was time for Frameline, San Francisco’s LGBT film festival, so I spent much of the week sitting in a darkened auditorium, with God ever by my side.

There are a number of things that I like about going to film festivals. I get to see films that may never make it into wide release. I get to see them with an audience of enthusiasts. And, especially at Frameline, I get to sit in on Q&A sessions with the film makers.

One of the themes that God pointed out to me was being repeated in several of the Q&As this year was a form of cowardice being presented as if it were a virtue. I talked about this in the context of fast food back in April, when I complained that the supposed professionals preparing my food wanted me to micromanage the process, in effect making me into the chef. Here’s the film director’s equivalent: “Yeah, I wanted to leave that ambiguous so the audience could make up their own mind.”

Well, screw you, you coward. It’s not my job to decide how your story was supposed to end. You’re the professional storyteller so do your job and make a commitment, make a decision, and just accept that some of us will like it and some won’t. You’ll actually probably please more people, because I can tell you, judging by the number of questions people have about what actually happened, not saying is pissing a lot of us off. Look, don’t be scared to have an unhappy ending, but if you do, make sure it has value and was supported by the rest of the film. Also, don’t be afraid to have a happy ending, but if you do, make sure it isn’t contradictory to where the rest of the film was going.

Oh and God wants me to add, as to that whole “slice of life” thing? That’s what newspapers and magazines are for, fiction should actually tell a story. Stories end. If your film just stops, without actually ending, most of us don’t like that.

So the big gay marriage rulings came down from the United States Supreme Court this week. And they actually got it right.

My first reaction was of course elation. Then cognitive dissonance set in as I overlaid my dissipating fear that they would get it wrong with being appalled that the decisions were five to four. I can give some wiggle room to the Prop 8 case, it was after all an amendment to the California Constitution, and the constitution is the last word in what’s legal. But DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, was merely a law and was so clearly a violation of the principles laid out in the U.S. Constitution, that I don’t see how any justice could rule in favor of it without ignoring the constitution in favor of their own prejudices.

So I, of course, asked God how he felt about the rulings. He told me he didn’t really care. He said that marriage is an institution of mankind, not of his. This completely derailed my railing against the anti-marriage justices; after all, the biggest argument I keep hearing against gay marriage is that marriage should be strictly a religious commitment, that the government should either stay out of relationships entirely or it should only involve itself in civil unions or other contractual constructs. So I pushed for clarification on how something so clearly tied up in religious trappings could be of no particular interest to God.

And what he told me is that religions in their entirety are not products of God, but of man. Religions are just another form of government, just another way to control and direct the populous. They use God but they aren’t from God. He said you could consider religion and government to be like the threads of a screen door, with one of them being the vertical threads and the other the horizontal. When you want to make sure the insects don’t go where you don’t want them to, it’s a lot more effective to have threads going both ways than to have them going just one.

God and I were talking about how some science fiction tries to predict the future and often gets it wrong. We bandied back and forth for a bit about flying cars and industrial robots and things of that ilk. We went on to more soft science and agreed that George Orwell’s 1984 is turning out to be much more prophetic than we like, even if it’s happening some thirty years or so later than George’s arbitrary date. I also pointed out that we’re starting to move towards Asimov’s psychohistory but she wouldn’t tell me how soon we might get there.

Then God gave me some insight about how hard it is to get the details right. She said if you ever want to imagine the difficulty of detailing the future, try to imagine predicting, even years after the invention of refrigeration, how large a market there would be for refrigerator magnets.

And then try to imagine convincing the readers of your book that someone makes a living selling them.

So now I’m a little worried. God tells me not to worry about it. He says this not because he’s hinting that I’ll be happy with the outcome but rather just for the simple reason that my worrying about it won’t change things one way or the other. Like Bobby said, don’t worry, be happy.

So what am I worrying about? The Supreme Court decision on DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act) and California’s Prop 8. Or to make that clearer for those of you that manage to avoid obsessing about this like I do, gay marriage, or rather the right’s of married American homosexuals to have their union given official government recognition, in California (Prop 8.) and in the U.S. Federal government (DOMA).

But why am I worried now, when between the week in which the arguments were made before the court and this week I’ve mostly been waiting patiently, occasionally hoping but mostly not thinking about it? Well, this week the court published its decision that naturally occurring human genes are not patentable. This is such a clear and obvious thing to me but one that I feared the corporate-deferential court would not see. But they did. And overwhelmingly at that, with not a hint of party division.

So my fear is that the court has used up this season’s allotment of sense, so now they’ll have to rule against the fundamental right of two consenting adults to express their love for each other in a legally sanctioned marriage.

Oh bother.

But I must not lose hope. I will not lose hope. After all, if the court can make one good decision, surely they can make another. Maybe they’ll start a trend.

I’ve seen a lot of “internet memes” and other bits of humor that involve showing how punctuation or the lack thereof can change the meaning of sentences. Two classics that come to mind are the book “Eats Shoots and Leaves” and the lifesaving punctuation in “let’s eat, Grandma.” But what I haven’t seen is an equal outpouring against what I consider to be one of the most egregious sins of modern typography.

So let me just say now, can’t we just banish any font in which the lowercase “L” and the uppercase “i” cannot be told apart.

I’m pretty sure we could even automate the process. Wouldn’t it be a public service to write a program which would hunt through your system, find every installed font, render those two characters and if the results are not at least, say, 15% different, delete the font.

Not only have I seen no sign of anyone doing this important work, but there’s actually a documentary about people’s love for Helvetica. People actually love a font that renders two completely different letters with identical glyphs.

Well, I’ve got a message that sums up my opinion if not actually God’s: all you “Helvetica” fans can just go to hell.

Like most Americans, I could stand to lose a few pounds. Okay, a lot of pounds.

But what about God?

If you think about it, we’re all a part of the universe so we’re all a part of God, so in a way we are God’s body. It’s like each person is a cell in his body, and judging by what I see, I think Americans are clustered around his belly and maybe even hanging over his belt. So I asked him why he doesn’t take better care of himself. After he made me explain myself, he pointed out that the obesity epidemic is actually a pretty recent phenomenon; so in a sense we’re more like the few pounds a typical college student puts on in his first year than like the pot belly of a middle-aged man. Given that, he’s confident he can shape up without too much trouble.

Then I got to wondering, if I’m one of God’s fat cells, and he decides to lose a few pounds… Well, let’s just say I decided it wasn’t a train of thought I wanted to dwell on.

Sometimes I wonder about odd little things. And no snickering about that “sometimes” modifier; I do sometimes wonder about perfectly ordinary things, I just don’t usually talk about it when I do.

But my current case in point: I’ve got this can of, well let’s call it fruit soda, though the manufacturers call it a naturally flavored sparkling juice beverage, and it’s in a slightly atraditionally shaped can. So I was curious about it. I noted that it’s 8.4 ounces. That “point four” is an odd number, so I assumed that it was a can sized in metric and then converted to ounces for the american market. Except that, right next to “8.4 fl oz.” it says 248 mL. And God readily agreed with me that 248 is just as odd of a number as 8.4. Well, technically they’re both even numbers, but you know what I mean.

So then God pointed out the other number just before those two. In type twice as large is the nice round number 90, in a drawn box with the smaller words “calories per can” also enclosed. Now as round numbers go, 90 is pretty good, but 100 is generally better. Except that with calories we’re generally looking for smaller. So did they get a deal on 250mL cans but then only fill them to 248 so they could get a round number of calories? Did they look at 8 ounce cans and reject them because 86 calories was too weird a number for marketing? Would they have had to come up with a new can size, that their supplier didn’t already carry in order to do 100 calories?

God just shook her head and complained that people say she works in mysterious ways.

I noticed something new this week. There seems to be a fashion now of athletic shoes with “neon” colored piping and matching shoelaces. I think I first noticed this a while back, but on my way in to work today I saw at least three different people wearing them, though to be fair there were only two colors. Two people were wearing day-glo orange and one was wearing ultra-brite green. Okay, I don’t know what actual trademarkable names the companies may have given the colors, but those are descriptive enough for my purposes.

I was wondering if this started as a way to make runners and bicyclists more visible at night, or in other conditions of poor lighting, and so is being sold as a safety feature rather than a fashion feature but God told me if I really want to know I could bother to do the research myself, not just ask him. And he’s right, I just don’t care that much.

What I do care about is that it continue.

I’ve been saying for most of my life that we need more flashy men’s clothing. We need styles that are vivid and interesting without just copying something feminine. This piping thing could be a small step in the right direction. Imagine something like the jacket that Patrick McGoohan wore in The Prisoner but with that bright edging in a hot purple, or better yet, electroluminescent wiring. Now that would be nice.

There’s a class of humor that’s built around misreading things. Not in a deliberate way, though I’m sure there are professionals, and even some amateurs, who exaggerate, stimulate, and even fabricate their own misunderstandings, but in a dyslexic or just tired and worn out way. I’m not going to give you any examples right now, because, well, I’d have to fabricate them and I just kind of said that that’s cheating, but you know the type.

People post online, “Am I the only one that read that as…” It’s a two pronged bid, and for most of the people doing the posting, it’s win-win. Either they were the only one, so they’re unique and special, or they weren’t the only one and so they’re part of a group, they belong. God tells me that she’s the only one she knows that never reads anything the wrong way. I’d add, “not that she’s bragging,” but actually, I think she was bragging.

But for the rest of us, reading “am I the only one that read that as” is usually a cue to cringe, because what follows, nine times out of ten, just isn’t as special as the person posting it thinks. It’s often the ultimate “you had to be there” thing, because the “there” where you had to be is actually in the world inside the person’s head; to really appreciate their misreading you not only needed to read it wrong but you needed to read it wrong with all the baggage that their particular life had placed not only on the word that they misread but on the word that they were supposed to have read in the first place. I posed this theory to God, to see if she thought I was on the right track, and she told me that I was kind of right, but also kind of wrong. See, she does get to be there in people’s heads, she does get to experience the moment with all the person’s personal baggage, and she says that most of the time, it’s still not that funny.

I have this tee shirt. Okay, I have a lot of tee shirts but one in particular I’m going to talk about now. The shirt is emblazoned in large characters with the formula “2 + 2 = 5” and then, in considerably smaller print, it adds “for extremely large values of 2.”

God scoffs at my shirt.

God says that “2 + 2 = 4” and will brook now further discussion. So I’m bringing the discussion to you.

I’d actually go further than the shirt, I’d say that “2 + 2 = 5” merely for sufficiently large values of 2, no need to go to extremely, and certainly no need to push both values as far as extreme.

Really, what it comes down to is just a matter of defining your terms. Or I guess my terms, in this case. And I can do that. The first thing to do is to define what is “a value of” everything else flows from that. So here goes, “a value of 2” is any number expressed in base ten whose first character is the digit two and who either has no additional characters or whose second character is a decimal point and whose third and higher characters are all digits. I don’t think this is an outlandish definition. Obviously “5” in the equation can then be understood to be “a value of 5” and the definition of that would be the same as for “a value of 2” but substituting “five” as the first character.

Now we just need to define “sufficiently large values” and I’m afraid this is going to end up sounding a little tautological but so be it. Given that the equation has two values of two (that would be “2” and “2”), and given our somewhat expansive definition of what “2” is, which I’ll point out is actually necessitated by the later reference of them as “values of 2” rather than as “just” two, we can readily guess that for them to be “sufficiently” large they are likely to be values greater than merely two. “Merely two” being the same as “just two” which is the same as “exactly two.” In point of fact, we know by simple addition that if they are both “just” two, they will only add up to four, so at least one of them must have a decimal portion. We likewise know, by simple subtraction of two from five that if even one of them is “just” two, than they are in aggregate insufficiently large, because five minus two yields three and three is not “a value of” two. So now we know that both values must be greater than “just” two, so we know that they are each large enough to require the decimal point and some number of digits to its right.

Given all of that, I’m going to now abandon hard numbers and go into the territory of “thought experiment.” We know, and now my knowledge of math is too weak to tell you “how” we know, but I know I understood it in some class somewhere in my youth for at least a number of seconds greater than two, we know that five minus “a value of 2” is going to yield another “value of 2.” I think I can explain this by telling you that we know that exactly five minus exactly two is exactly three, so if you increase the size of the “two” by any amount small enough to still leave it as “a value of 2” then you’ll end up decreasing the “three” by exactly that amount, which will make it less than “three” but not as low as ” just” two so it will be “a value of 2,” but not the value of two that is “just” two. Got that? Not too tautological?

Back to defining “sufficiently large.” So given any number that is not exactly two but is a value of two, subtracting that number from five will yield another value of two, but not exactly two. So sufficiently large is any two values of two where one value is large enough to require the decimal point in order to express it and the other value is at least as large as the remainder of subtracting the first value from five.

Which is all a very long way of getting to the point that the “weasel” word here is “sufficiently.” “Sufficiently” is not “a value,” it’s not even quantifiable in the absence of saying what it is meant that it is “sufficient” for. All in all, I think it’s a word that Humpty Dumpty would like very much. And “extremely” which the shirt uses, is no better. “Extremely” pushes the undefined further but still fails to define it.

But it does make for a good tee shirt.

Most of the time when I was growing up I didn’t get a formal birthday party. When I did get one, well it was a mixed bag. None of them were bad, but some were definitely better than others. On the other hand, I always got a cake.

Actually that’s not quite true, but back to that in a minute.

I suppose the cakes were a mixed bag as well. Sometimes they were store bought, though that wasn’t the norm. The norm would have been home-baked but from a mix. I think I got about as many made from scratch, though, as I did that were bought ready made. My memory on this is all rather dim.

But about those exceptions… There were a few times when I was asked what kind of cake I wanted, maybe three or four, maybe five or six, again, I really don’t remember. What I do remember is that two of those times I was actually assertive enough to ask for what I wanted. What I wanted was pie. Cake is good enough, I pretty much never turn it down, but pie is so much better. Cream pies, fruit pies, whatever. Even cobblers and tarts and strudels.

This all came up in a conversation with God this week and he mostly just nodded his head. Then he told me that he’d let me in on one of the secrets of the universe. I leaned in close, and he whispered to me that the reason we decorate cakes is to make up for their inherent inferiority to pie.

It’s a good thing to know, but as “secrets of the universe” go, well, I think that one could use a little icing.

If you’ve seen anything newsish this week you know that a couple of bombs went off at the Boston Marathon. Since then we’ve heard all of the standard lines about how senseless and tragic this was, and the lines are all true and it’s just sad that they need to be said. My heart goes out to the victims and their families.

That having been said…

I told God that this firms up my resolve to never run a marathon. She asked me if that meant that I was surrendering, giving in, letting the terrorists win.

Actually, I just hate running. I tell you what though, if some terrorist bombs Disneyland, I’ll do my part to make their gesture meaningless, I’ll get on down to the park just as soon as I can manage and buy the most expensive annual pass I can afford.

Of course, I may do that even if they don’t blow it up.

No answers this week, just a question I find interesting.

In my reading recently I’ve come across the unsourced statistic that we use up to 80% of our brain for visual processing. Ignoring the weasel words “up to” and allowing that the number as it reached me is likely both inflated and broad in it’s definitions… I got to wondering.

Some other things that I’ve been taught all my life are that people without sight compensate by increased sharpness in their other senses, and that when parts of the brain are damaged other parts are able to reeducate themselves to pick up some of the slack. So it seems pretty obvious that that “up to 80%” gets bored when there’s no visual signal coming in and picks up whatever odd jobs it can find. That’s a potent lot of extra processing power, but that’s not where I’m going.

Another area that interests me is the effects of chemical substances on the human mind. Remember that the brain works by a combination of chemical interactions and electric signals and remember also that everything we think we know about the world outside of our bodies is actually filtered through those chemical and electrical signals.

Now you take those last two paragraphs together and you open huge cans of worms taken straight out of Pandora’s box, but, again, I’m going to ignore most of that.

What it came down to for me was simply, when a blind person takes a so-called hallucinogenic drug, some sort of psychotropic substance that messes with our visual processing, what does it do for or to them? Does the drug mess with a particular type of brain processing, so that the effect just isn’t there on the blind person, or does it mess with particular areas of the brain, so that it has some effect on the “alternative processing” that goes on in the brains of the sightless?

I tried asking God for insight, but he just told me if I cared all that much I could go to medical school and then become a research scientist and figure it out for myself. Needless to say, I’m interested, but I’m not that interested.

God and I have both often heard it said that the secret to humor is surprise. It’s kind of like special sauce, things can be funny without it but with it they can be a lot funnier with it.

But it’s not enough all on its own. I pointed out to God that surprise is also the secret of horror. Not just in a jump out and shout “boo” kind of way, but in a “wow, it never occurred to me that my safety and complacency could be violated that way” kind of way. So we got to wondering just how many things could surprise be a part of. I’ve already noted humor and horror. It can also be a part of tragedy. It can be a part of romance, in fact it probably needs to be. And, of course, it’s a big part of some of the best of science.

So God decided that in the gamut of human experience, surprise isn’t an experience itself, it’s more like a spice, or maybe a condiment. It’s not generally worthwhile on it’s own, but it makes other things so much better. Or, sometimes, so much worse.

So the Chinese curse may be “may you live in interesting times,” meant to show that “interesting” is not always good, but I’d like to offer up the Unsciptured blessing: “May you have just enough surprise to keep life interesting.”

But not too interesting.

If you read unscriptured and you’re not yet an adult… First, thanks for reading. Second, don’t read today’s post. Third, if you do read today’s post, it’s about chickens.

So I couldn’t help but notice that this week there are two different hot-button political debates raging across the media, gun control and same sex marriage. Naturally I had to ask God what he thought of the issues…

He told me that they’re actually more connected than you might think. One of them is about keeping people from going off half cocked, and the other is about keeping people from getting off double cocked.

I don’t dwell on the past; I live for the moment and the future. This isn’t to say that I don’t let past behaviors and outcomes, either my own or those of others, inform how I live for the moment and how I live for the future, but I don’t let myself be ruled by the past. In somewhat practical terms this also means that I don’t tend to have strong memories of things that happened long ago. Memories work best when they get reinforced and for a fair number of people that reinforcement happens when they go back in their minds, revisit those memories, and in some cases reimagine them, edit them even.

And God tells me we all do that, we all modify our pasts in our minds. Some of us do it consciously, some less so. I know I’m not immune, but I certainly try to not do it consciously.

But none of that’s what I want to talk about today. Today I want to tell you about an incident that happened when I was young, probably in my late teens, as I’m pretty sure it was while I was still in High School. God reminded me about it and told me it was worth sharing, and I suppose she’s right.

Now that I’ve given it all that build-up, let me tear it down some. This isn’t a major incident, it’s has no life changing insight; it’s just one of those little things that all add up to make us who we are.

I was walking down the street one day. I had just crossed the street, stepped up over the curb and gone a few feet further along the sidewalk. Another young man was coming from the other direction and just as we were about to pass each other, he said to me, “Smile.” It was said in a sort of commanding tone but playfully, in a way that suggested he knew he had no right to tell me what to do but that it was good advice that I should take just on face value. And he was right. I did smile. I think I smiled not so much because I was told to as because the telling me to was amusing. I smiled because someone had spoken to me with no apparent motive to get something from me; he was not looking for a handout; he was not asking for directions; he was not even trying to strike up a conversation, as he didn’t pause in passing me by.

I have no idea what my expression had been before he spoke. I had been bullied as a young child and that was (and is to some extent) reflected in my exposed persona. I do not often now, and much less then, do things to draw attention to myself. I close in, I leave my face, I think, relatively expressionless. Certainly I don’t generally grin as I walk down the street, so I find it perfectly ordinary that I wasn’t smiling.

There are many things I’ll never know about that encounter, about why that man said what he said. I don’t know if he was in the habit of saying that all the time, just to try and goad the world into being happier. Perhaps I was lost in thoughts that had left a particularly dour or gloomy expression on my face and he thought that ill-befitting of one as young as I was. Perhaps he had just had some good news and wanted everyone he passed to join in his celebratory feelings. But no matter, no matter to any of that. He succeeded in his quest, I smiled, and whether I smiled because the request amused me or if I smiled in reflexive obedience and the act of smiling caused me to be happy and in turn that amused me, I can’t say, not now nor then, but it doesn’t matter, all that matters is that for a little while I was happier than I would have been without it, and that’s a good thing just all on its own.

So give it a try: Smile!

One of the best things that God has done for me lately was introduce me to the music of Walk the Moon. They have an album titled Walk the Moon, which you want to avoid confusing with the 1987 album Walk the Moon by a different group called Walk the Moon. But confusion aside, what the current group plays is pop, but in my opinion it’s about as perfect as pop gets. The songs are jaunty fun, with bouncy music and enough lyric repetitiveness to hook you but enough variation to keep you.

The last two times I’ve changed out CDs in my car’s player, somehow only five of the six discs have changed, Walk the Moon, just keeps getting better, so it stays.

I found out today that God had an ulterior motive in introducing me to their sound. I listen to a lot of music and even though I’ve got no voice, when I’m alone I sometimes sing along. Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest categories of songs that exist, is love songs, and most of the love songs are guys singing either to or about women. That doesn’t reflect my inner reality though, so when I sing along, I usually change the pronouns. Changing “gal” to “guy” and “she” to “he” is often all that is necessary to completely gender-flip a song. And when it isn’t? Well, those tend to be the songs that I don’t bother singing along with. But Walk the Moon’s music is too infectious for me to ignore and they have this one song, “Jenny,” that couldn’t be flipped without a major rewrite. One of the prominent, repeated, refrains is “She has a body just like an hourglass. I want to be the sand inside that hourglass.” While I suppose I could imagine a guy with a body just like an hourglass, it doesn’t matter because that isn’t what interests me.

So what I found out today was that God wanted to see what I’d do with that song. Would I refuse to sing along? Would I do major surgery on the lyrics? Well, neither. I sing along with it just like it is. I mean it’s great music, but it is just a song.

Sometimes when I’m with God I play this game of trying to guess what Heaven is like. It’s not a game unique to me, as I’ve seen plenty of works of art, from movies to music to paintings, try to present a view into Heaven. I’d’ve hoped that having a chance to bounce my thoughts off of the head honcho herself would have given me some useful feedback, but she really doesn’t tell me anything.

One of the things I was lamenting recently is the “need” to always be looking for new things that make life good. We have an incredible ability to get used to things. A new song comes out and we love it but then listen to it until we’re sick of it. We get a new toy, be it car or computer or a set of rechargeable batteries and we can spend weeks talking about almost nothing else, but eventually, it’s old hat, it’s business as usual, it’s just another thing.

So my idea today is that maybe Heaven is just like life but what’s different is us. Maybe Heaven is just us changed so that we get used to the bad things, become indifferent to them, but we never get tired of the good things. The millionth taste of that new drink is just as good as the first one. The rush we get from mastering a new skill is what we feel from everything we do.

I asked God what she thought of this idea. She told me that she still remembers the first time she made a black hole. She got a kind of far away look in her eyes. Then she changed the subject.

When we work to accomplish something and we fail, we say that we have struggled in vain.

People are always saying we should not use God’s name in vain.

People often pray and have their prayers go unanswered. So those people are praying in vain. So those people, having “asked this in the name of our Lord,” have taken the Lord’s name in vain.

I asked God what he thought of my logic. He told me that it could be taken further and could show how he would be right to never answer anyone’s prayers. See, if God knows that he’s not going to answer someone’s prayer, then he knows when they are praying that they are taking his name in vain, and since that’s a sin, he’s right to not answer their prayer. It’s practically diabolical.

God brought up the subject of politics today. It’s not a subject that he or I like to dwell on too much, but we do have our opinions. Or at least I do; God says he mostly got out of politics when his son got into it. I can see his point, I mean look at how well politics worked out for his son, everyone thinks the boy is on their side but most of the people who do actually act like he’s told them to pretty much stay out of politics. Oh, well.

So the thing that God brought to my attention is that the election has come and gone, and it’s well gone at this point, but the political posts, jibes, and muckraking, have mostly continued. At least on Facebook.

It’s great to see an engaged electorate. And it’s also great to see that many of them are actually making cogent arguments, not just finger pointing and name calling. So at this point you might be expecting me to say something snide, to put down all these people who are keeping the battles going, but I’m not. To all you partisan fighters I just want to say, “you rock. Now keep up the good fight and may the best ideas win.”

It’s a big week for second-string holidays. From last Sunday through to next Monday there’s Chinese (also known as Lunar) New Year, Fat Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, St. Valentine’s Day, Susan B. Anthony Day (celebrated in two states), and President’s Day. Even the most prominent of them, President’s Day, the one that most Americans get off from work, is still not an A-list holiday.

To me, an A-lister is one that has a clearly associated activity. That’s things like Christmas, we give presents; New Year’s, we get drunk; and Halloween, we give/get free candy. I mean even Memorial Day is known for barbecues. President’s Day? Well all the auto dealer’s seem to have sales, but that’s about it. Where are the fireworks, the turkey dinners, or even the flying of flags?

So our two most famous President’s were born a little over a week apart. They both famously wielded axes, though there’s a big difference between upkeep on a log cabin and chopping down a cherry tree. And they were both famous for headwear, George for his wigs and Abe for his Stovepipe hat. So what should we all do this weekend? I mean we can’t all buy new cars. I asked God if she had any ideas, but she just shrugged. Maybe I’ll just sleep in. But not somewhere where Washington might have slept.