Serendipity

1. the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident
2. my new favorite word

I once had a significant other who attributed our meeting* to the benevolent hands of fate. He not only told this to me, but also to my grandparents, his mother, and several friends upon recounting the circumstances of our meeting. I occasionally get the urge to call him up to ask if he still believes our meeting was fate, or if he has downgraded it to something less mystical after two successive break-ups. The urge to raise my cynical eyebrows is just barely tempered by my desire to not be a complete bitch.

Actually, the circumstances of my current relationship would weave much better into the story of a meeting destined by fate. How many vegetarian-atheist-humanist-business-oriented-not-mushy-yet-still-affectionate-ambitious-but-not-entirely-serious people can there really be in central Ohio? We met! We’ve been dating for six months! The perfect story of two people destined to be together meeting and beginning a relationship! Sounds pretty, eh?

As you might have guessed, I don’t buy it. (Could you feel the eyebrows going up?) Let’s see... fate or a divine being (or whatever) is going to go to all that trouble to bring together two people who don’t believe in fate or a divine being (or whatever)... so they can further reinforce one another’s lack of belief? Really, this seems like a pretty lousy marketing strategy to me.

Fate is creepy, as far as I’m concerned. Some omnipotent power controlling my life? No thank you! I also cheerfully reject destiny, karma, divine will, and metaphysical predestination. This isn’t to say I believe I entirely control all aspects of my life. When things work out, as they often do, I certainly don’t think it’s because I orchestrated everything perfectly- I’ve had too many moments where everything has come crashing down despite my best intentions to believe this. However, I’ve found that a blend of human action, environmental factors, and random butterfly flapping (see below), can be used to explain whatever happens in my life. Fate, while it sounds prettier, just isn’t necessary.

The world can be entirely logical and yet still seem quite random. The chaos theory is a mathematical concept that explains how it is possible to get seemingly random results from normal equations. A multitude of small occurrences can significantly affect the outcome of seemingly unrelated events. The most commonly used example is of butterflies** flapping their wings causing hurricanes in other continents, but this is fairly misleading (it wasn’t JUST the butterflies) and somewhat misses the point (no, we shouldn’t exterminate butterflies to end hurricanes). The point is, in any one event, there are many difficult-to-sort factors affecting the outcome. So, while whatever nifty or awful event COULD theoretically be entirely explained by logical forces, it's quite likely we may not have the tools/time/energy to trace all of the many causes.*** This doesn’t make the event metaphysical; it just makes it complex.

The only remaining problem: I like pretty words. While I’ve crossed fate off my list, it would be lovely to have something more elegant than “chaos” in my repertoire. Enter serendipity, “the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident”. Serendipity gives me an artistic sounding yet non-metaphysical way of describing what others might call fate. I can pull serendipity out when others instead throw up their hands and call in fate or a divine being (or whatever) to explain their good fortune. In fact, identifying serendipitous events is a even a faculty, meaning each time I discover something new to be excited about, I can attribute it to skill– I do love having skills. The discovery of the word serendipity was serendipitous indeed.****


* On the Internet, no less. I think that there should be a rule specifically prohibiting the attribution of anything that happens online to fate. Computers are all 1s and 0s. Contrary to what some of my more computer-obsessed friends might believe, there is little room for the divine in 1s and 0s.

** ‘cause they’re pretty

*** I apologize to any scientists who feel that I have utterly bastardized the concept of chaos theory. This is certainly a possibility. If this IS the case, I’m still going to apply whatever theory I described to my argument. Should it not already exist, I officially name this new, exciting theory Aviaa’s Theory.

**** Meta-serendipity?

Invisible Horses

I lost a horse yesterday. Yes, a horse. I realize horses are large and therefore seem as if they should be rather hard to lose. To make matters worse, this particular horse was lost in a fenced-in field. Theoretically, said horse could have been hiding behind a barn, also in the field. However, I choose to believe this horse was not hiding, but was instead rendered invisible for the time I spent pacing the field looking for it (trailed by another, visible horse, who was trying to nibble on my hair). In the end, after concluding the horse was gone, putting away the saddle, bridle, brushes, etc., and starting to drive away, whatever force had chosen to hide the horse from me (“tee hee hee,” I'm sure it said) decided to reveal it again. I ended up going to back and riding, grateful all the while that the people I regularly borrow the horse from weren't home to watch me look oh-so-very silly.

Drinking lots of coffee doesn't harm heart: study

"’We believe this study clearly shows there is no association between filtered coffee consumption and coronary heart disease,’ said Esther Lopez-Garcia, an instructor in the School of Medicine at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain, who worked on the study."

- Original Article

Ha ha! My addiction of choice is exonerated once again!

Fairy Tales and Catcalls

“That fairy tale about gay marriage has sparked a civil rights debate in Massachusetts, the only U.S. state where gays and lesbians can legally wed, after a teacher read the story to a classroom of seven year olds without warning parents first.”

“A parents' rights group said on Monday it may sue the public school in the affluent suburb of Lexington, about 12 miles west of Boston, where a teacher used the book "King & King" in a lesson about different types of weddings.”

“"It's just so heinous and objectionable that they would do this," said Brian Camenker, president of the Parents Rights Coalition, a conservative Massachusetts-based advocacy group.”

- Original Article

The words heinous and objectionable shouldn’t be used in that particular order. Heinous is a word with much stronger connotations than objectionable and should therefore either be used on its own or after a weaker word, in manner of a dramatic build-up. For example: I found the reading of that book objectionable.... heinous, even! Objectionable following heinous is anticlimactic.

Grammatical objections aside, I still have trouble understanding the label of “heinous” (from what I can gather, the princes didn’t even have graphic sex at the end of the fairy tale). Perhaps I missed out on the “having-problems-with-homosexuality” gene along with the religious gene. Oh well.

****

I have a new proposition: instead of banning fairy tales with homosexual themes, we should ban college students from revising fairy tales to fit catcalls.

I have a somewhat misguided sense of distance and thus ended up parking about seven blocks from the milonga (social tango dance) I attended Saturday night. Generally, I’m not terribly concerned about walking around cities late at night. I’ve been lost in Amsterdam’s red light district in the early am hours and actually felt quite safe. This could have been due to the fact that everyone was ogling the half naked women through red-lit windows, rather than the fully-clothed (and not for sale) me. Then again, other cities from Paris to London to Boston have left me similarly undaunted, so perhaps I just lean towards recklessly carefree when it comes to wandering cities at night.

Saturday night, I realized that Columbus feels at least three times as scary as any of those other cities. This is possibly due to a lack of cute foreign or Bostonian accents. More likely, it’s because Columbus actually is scarier than the other cities. Regardless, walking down poorly lit streets in a somewhat saucy skirt and heels late at night likely wasn’t the wisest course of action, but I really hate turning around (it feels defeatist) so I kept going.

In the end, nothing really scary happened, and I now have a reason to bitch about the modification of fairy tales (just like the Parents Rights Coalition guy! I shall be a conservative in no time!). On my way to the milonga, I was whistled at by a car full of college-age boys, one of whom yelled, “hey, I love that Cinderella thing you’ve got going on. Come over here!” I’m going to assume the “Cinderella” comment was in regard to the extra pair of shoes (dance shoes) I was carrying. However, were I attempting to mimic Cinderella, I would have had in my possession only ONE shoe, rather than a total of four shoes. I suppose I could have walked up to their car to explain to them the inherent silliness of their comment, but I decided an explanation probably wasn’t what they were looking for and continued on to the milonga instead.

It seems the quality of pick-up lines is going down the drain. Whatever happened to “if I told you that you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?”, “I like your shirt, but it would look better on my bedroom floor”, or even just a well-timed, drawn-out whistle? Come now, surely you guys can do better than inaccurate fairy-tale references. I find your practices heinous... and objectionable!

Texas college bars students from posing for Playboy

“Baylor University in Waco, Texas, which bills itself as the world's largest Baptist college, has threatened to discipline female students if they pose for Playboy magazine, which is trying to recruit models from the college.”

- original article

At Oberlin, where I spent one semester of my college education, you’d not only be permitted to pose for Playboy, but you could also likely write a paper about doing so for college credit. There was a student led class on S & M offered for credit... unfortunately, the semester before I arrived. We were pretty darn noninterventionist. In fact, the only things that might have been banned at Oberlin were Republicans and Baptists.

According to the article, there was also no dancing allowed at Baylor until 10 years ago. I’m going to guess no S & M classes either.

A New Use for the Bible!

Ha ha! A new use for my Bible collection: wasp squashing. Bibles are small enough to be easily maneuverable yet thick enough to not be bendable (for those of you uneducated in the ways of bug squashing, easily bent wasp squashing devices allow wasps to escape and seek revenge upon their would-be murderers). Not to mention that should I get the impromptu urge to hold a funeral service for the wasp, I’ll be well armed (I'm sure that there is something about wasps somewhere in the Bible).

All in all, perfect. These perfect dimensions, the ideal content... coincidence? I think not. Could this be Evidence of Design?

Atheism is good enough for me…

Atheist: One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.

Agnostic: One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God, one who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism.

I’m not advocating fanatical disbelief. Certainly, were I magically summoned in front of a god, I wouldn’t close my eyes, cover my ears, and yell, “I can’t see you!” in manner of a two year old. In fact, were he/she/it to do something conclusive like cure world hunger or turn my house into a pillar of salt, I might actually believe I wasn’t experiencing a caffeine-withdrawal induced hallucination* and was instead viewing the powers of a divine being. See? I’ve left open a door for any god interested in developing in a personal relationship with me (interested gods: please see ad below). However, I’m sure enough that this won’t happen to label myself as an atheist rather than just an agnostic. I’m agnostic about god in the same way as I’m agnostic about unicorns, flying pigs, and faithful men**.

* If you doubt the plausibility of this, then you haven’t experienced the true powers of caffeine, and it would be utterly impossible for me to put the glory of such into words.

**Yes, yes- I was just kidding with that last one.

Personal Ad

I’m searching for a personal god, preferably of the muscular, Greek sort, though all interested parties may apply. Smiting, pointless edicts, and contradictory “holy book” passages are definite turn-offs. I’d also prefer that you not have issues with my using your name in vain, especially in bed (what else are we supposed to yell?).

Me: smart, cute, and somewhat jaded. I must say that after searching for years, I’ve found as little evidence of your existence as that of the elusive “perfect man”. People have tried to tell me that perhaps I’m just looking for you in the wrong places (apparently, gods don’t frequent bars, nightclubs, or street corners), but this becoming a bit ridiculous. Relationships are a two way street. No offense, but I feel like I’m doing all of the work here, so if you’re really interested, you’ve got to be willing to at least show up.

American Atheist Convention

I want to send out a quick rave for the American Atheist convention in San Antonio this last weekend. It was the first such convention I had ever attended and I must say, it was interesting, informative, and generally a blast.

Tuesday Atheism

After a recent conversation with two of my close friends about Sunday Christians, I had a flash of fear that perhaps I was a Tuesday Atheist. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term Sunday Christian, it is usually used to indicate someone who is quite righteous and observant of Christian rituals on Sunday but is significantly less so at all other times of the week. These people are sometimes also referred to as “bad” Christians. Seeing as I certainly wouldn’t want to be a Tuesday, or “bad” Atheist, I quickly compiled a list of the numerous potential theological pits that we atheists could fall into.

Could we be “accidentally religious?” When visiting the Notre Dame a few months ago, I had the almost irrepressible urge to go to confession. However, this urge was entirely born out of the desire to see what the priest would do if I confessed that I didn’t believe in god. I didn’t enter the confessional, as my French isn’t good enough to go much beyond “Je ne crois pas en Dieu.” Actually, I probably wouldn’t have even gotten that far… just the “Je ne…” followed by a few blinks and hopeful looks as I considered the chances that the priest spoke perfect English. Regardless, no attempts at confessing occurred- though as someone who has dated many, many Catholic boys, I likely had much to confess.

A quick scan of the remainder of my list assured me that I have not, luckily, lapsed into Tuesday atheism. Accidental praying in moments of panic? Nope, I tend to swear at the closest object instead (a quick apology to several people and animals that have happened to be nearby at such moments). Blessing people when they sneeze? Nah. See, this is easy!

Another potential concern: my “other-worldy” goods. While it’s true that I have a somewhat large bible collection, almost all were taken from hotel rooms that I did very un-Christian things in. Really, I only still have them because I can’t figure out anything else to do with them (paper hats?). Language? Well, I rarely use the g-word outside of the bed, and the moments in which I do could hardly be mistaken as prayer- though I’m sure I often sound quite grateful.

So, in the end, I think I can safely consider myself a “true” atheist.

Tell your enemies you are praying for them... it increases their post-surgery complications

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2112892,00.html

... and a related, but certainly not included, quote...

"A new study involving 1800 patients and six major hospitals failed
to prove the healing power of prayer. They said prayer does not work
in healing. There goes the Republican health care plan." --Jay Leno

Tofu

I'm eating some "home fried" tofu of quality that I can't determine. I was leaning towards the grade of "mediocre" but my last bite seems to have been "pretty darn good." More decisively, the gods of fortune cookies have determined that a lifetime of happiness lies ahead of me. I feel heartened and shall therefore grant the tofu the grade of "pretty darn good."

Newspaper Article Title: French Students Protest, Despite Victory

Why stop when you're on a roll?

Doggy Style

A real sign for a real business that I saw while out running errands:

Doggy Style

Self-Serve Dog Wash.

All you need is a dirty dog.

Walking on Water

"Rare conditions could have conspired to create hard-to-see ice on the Sea of Galilee that a person could have walked on back when Jesus is said to have walked on water, a scientist said today."

"The study, which examines a combination of favorable water and environmental conditions, proposes that Jesus could have walked on an isolated patch of floating ice on what is now known as Lake Kinneret in northern Israel."

- http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060404_jesus_ice.html


Jesus. Can't really walk on water, but his divinity is proven by his keen ability to spot a patch of ice...

Okay, that witticism wasn't even mine. But I did warn the person I stole it from that I was planning on stealing in advance.

Messages in Response to a Guardian Article

Is its possible Signor Bush es very religous mans an likes Il Papa very muches an visits him Vatican.So religous mans as Signor Bush can no be liar no? But we Italia peeps thinks somewhers in USofA bad mens in politicos who mkea the wars in Iraq Iran etc. These very bad for the world but Signor Bushes do nothings.Why these? Excusi my englishes not goods.

- Posted by Guardian readers Clubbo de Milano on April 7, 2006 05:11 PM.

Then, a few posts down...

"Excusi my englishes not goods." -- Guardian readers Clubbo de Milano

*That's okay. Neither is Bush's.

- Posted by Whitt on April 7, 2006 05:18 PM.

Quite true.

Original article can be found at here.

Wine Diverted

I narrowly avoided spilling a glass of red wine on my keyboard just a moment ago. Not even good red wine… but a glass of cheap, $4-per-bottle Crane Lake Cabernet Sauvignon on my not so cheap, less-then-a-year-old laptop.

Had I been doing calculus, I could have joked about the dangers of drinking and deriving. Instead I’ll just give up on the entire homework idea and go to bed. Apparently, homework is dangerous.

Title Needed….

This shall be my last post of the evening, I promise. Give a girl a blog… and next she’ll ask for time to do nothing but write in it!

I need a blog title. My original title was:

Musings on Life & the Pursuit of Political Sanity

However, I’d estimate that postings about politics shall only account for 17.4% of my postings, far too many to allow me to use 65.9% of my title characters for the topic.

Currently, my title is simply Musings. This, alas, is boring. I’m only boring 14.3% of the time and generally only when someone gets me started on a topic that I find extremely interesting (the topics I find extremely interesting often seem to bore other people). Regardless, I certainly don’t feel that I am boring enough to warrant a boring blog title.

So I need title help! I’m sure that someone, somewhere could come up with some terribly witty, accurate, and rock-star-like blog title for my blog. Right???

Self-absorption versus Self-indulgence -or- The Moral Implications of Blogging

I held out on the entire blog idea for quite a while. Certainly, the idea of chronicling every zany idea, random satire, or amusing rant that might pop into my head has been tickling the back of my mind for quite a while. However, I couldn’t help but feel that perhaps random, non-important-cause-or-interesting-subject-related blogging is an occupation of the self-absorbed. As a twenty-something, self-absorption is a stereotype I feel obligated fight against. Really though, many people who I know and would not consider self-absorbed do indeed blog. I therefore find myself convinced there is no direct correlation between blogging and being entirely self-absorbed. However, I suppose still I worried of the less severe label of self-indulgent.

My revelation of the weekend: perhaps I am, indeed, self-indulgent. The evidence? I buy flowers and good wine, even when I have no one to share them with. I take vacations. Lots of ‘em. Not to mention that my bedside stand contains not one, not two, but three devices whose sole purpose could only be described as “self-indulgent.” So alas, self-indulgent I must be and therefore blog starting will only help me remain true to my character. However, I do plan to be gracefully self-indulgent, and promise to at least occasionally write about matters other than my own life. Maybe.

Future rationalizations of my behavior may be shorter, but certainly don’t count on it.