Random Thoughts

Tacky is as tacky does…

The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised Rahm Emmanuel used the phrase “f—ing retards” in a White House meeting.

We knew he was a snake when Obama picked him up. He’s probably just echoing what his boss thinks anyway.

His apology is worthless at this point; let the man display better behavior for a year or two and then I’ll believe he’s truly changed his crude speaking ways.

And pigs will fly. Backwards. Through the Oval Office.

Allahpundit over at HotAir points out just how ridiculous Rahm’s apology really is.

The Obama Administration: The epitome of class and dignity. Only really, really not.

And in other news, FLOTUS Michelle publicly humiliates her daughters to authenticate her new pet cause: Childhood obesity.

Nothing like having your mama air your personal health concerns in front of the entire freaking world.

These people redefine classless and tacky on a daily basis.

Just Visiting

Today’s blog is personal, because something’s been on my mind since this morning. I’ve been reading Beyond the Pale’s musings about her own church travails, and thinking about the parallels between her apparently dissimilar situation and mine.

I’ve been attending a very large local church for over a year now. It’s a church that, two years ago, I would never have considered attending. Three years ago I would have laughed in the face of anyone who’d said “You’ll become a regular visitor here.”

It’s the first time in my adult life I’ve been a perpetual church visitor; I’ve always been a member. I like belonging to things, whether they are message boards, school associations, political parties, or churches. I like to contribute, to be a part of things. I don’t like being an outsider.

I’ve been a church outsider since May of 2008. That’s when the elders of the small church I’d belonged to for nearly a decade decided that 50 families just weren’t enough, and that–even though the church’s accounts weren’t in the red (I would know, my husband was a treasurer) the church wasn’t accomplishing its mission. So the logical thing–to them–was to disband.

It hurt. A lot. It felt like I was being handed divorce papers without cause. A “what did I do wrong, can’t we work this out, please don’t do this” feeling.

But so it went. And I and my family spent months visiting other churches. Small, medium, big, mainstream denominational, non-denominational, whacked out fringe denominational (that one was an accident) and at one point I swear I considered Catholicism just to be somewhere. Somewhere solid where I could say “This is home.”

It didn’t happen. Some of the places that might have worked for me didn’t work for MrRandomThoughts (one in particular we visited for over four months). Some didn’t work for Youngest Son. Eventually we ended up at The Mothership — at my former church we called this place “The Mothership” because it’s the largest church in our community. And it kind of looks like it landed on the big grassy lawn it’s perched upon.

Prior to our arrival, this church had gone through hell with a promiscuous pastor, a year of interim pastors, and only now, just as we began attending, had they hired a permanent pastor. He’s a fellow who is the complete opposite of the scoundrel who formerly filled their pulpit–a fresh faced preppy forty something fellow straight out of the Midwest by way of a small town with a big church in Virginia. Three kids, a great wife, and as doctrinally solid as granite rock. It looks like this time the elders got it right.

I do not trust church elders though. They took away my last church, and they screwed over this one when they hired the current pastor’s philandering surfer boy predecessor. But I figure this church is predisastered. It’s safe now, it’s already had the spiritual equivalent of an airplane through the roof.

Still, I just can’t bring myself to consider joining this church.There’s something about it that annoys me. The artificial fog that is pumped onto the stage during the worship songs, the not-quite-hitting-it attempt at a rock band, the dozens of Hummers, Mercedes and Lexus automobiles that fill the parking lot, the auditorium that seats over 2800 people…it’s all so affluent and so theatrically driven…

This Sunday, when they showed a media presentation about the Elders (a new one just was elected) I found myself actually getting angry. I’m still not sure why, except that I don’t want to hear about the middle aged affluent white men who can directly influence my ability to worship at a given place.

Yep, I’ve definitely got issues with elder boards.

And I really don’t fit in here.

I tried; two months after we began visiting, I went to the annual all-church women’s luncheon. The guest speaker happened to be someone I know personally from Youngest Son’s grade school. She’s also a minor celebrity, which is why she was the guest speaker (she happens to be a very authentic, deeply spiritual woman too). I did not get to say hello to her. There were too many women talking to her, too many who wanted her attention, and I felt frankly odd about working my way through the crowd of them. I sat at a table where I knew no one. The other women knew each other. Beyond greeting me with a smile or a nod, they ignored me. I am a rather sociable person, but there has to be some reciprocal effort, and on their part, there wasn’t.

They began the event without prayer. Someone figured out that it might be nice to pray as we started to eat, so they threw that in. For the most part, it seemed to be a chance for the women who knew each other to gossip about their daily lives. There was a psuedo-cooking demonstration, and a sort-of-craft demonstration, and music by the couple who regularly lead Sunday worship. As a duet they’re good, better than they are on Sunday morning when not-quite-hitting-it band surrounds them. And then there was my friend, who gave a very moving and challenging talk. People at my table left during it.

I won’t go to another women’s luncheon at this church. I wish I could have gotten the cost of the ticket back too.

Other events, family things held outside on the massive lawn, can be somewhat better. I can wander around with a cup of coffee in my hand smile and say hello to strangers, and not feel too uncomfortable at being ignored. Mostly I just show up on Sundays and try to get my head and heart into some kind of worship, despite the theatrical staging, and hang on until the sermon.

The pastor’s sermons are always good. He cares a lot about ministry and missions, he’s willing to address the tough stuff too about faith and sin. I wonder if he and his family are happy here. I hope they are, but they’re so different from everyone else in the building, myself included. They remind me of what I was like when I first came to California from Illinois. They aren’t jaded. I hope this place and the faint Hollywood vibe it puts out doesn’t suck the joy out of their lives.

The youth group at The Mothership is really kicking it for Youngest Son though, and MrRandomThoughts is happy in obscurity, his involvement limited to sitting in the fifth row, left center section every Sunday. So I guess we’ll just keep visiting.

I miss my old church so darned much.

Unthinkable

I don’t have the words…

This tragedy just continues to echo around us. The depth and breadth of suffering is unthinkable.

Elsewhere, the Anchoress has a powerful update on Haiti.

And here is an inside scoop from the aid efforts of the USNS Comfort (H/T Confederate Yankee).

Unlikely heroes

Sometimes heroism comes in unlikely packages.

ARLINGTON, Va. – Ray Vivier had been an adventurer, an ex-Marine who explored the country from South Carolina to Alaska, the father of five children.

The 61-year-old also was a man starting to get his life back together after living for years in a shanty beneath a Cleveland bridge. He had struggled with alcoholism, but by November he had a welding job, friends and a place to stay at a boarding house.

He rescued five people from that house when arsonists set it ablaze — but Vivier couldn’t save himself. He and three others died, and two people have been charged in their deaths. Vivier’s body, unclaimed and unidentified for weeks, seemed destined for an anonymous, modest burial.

A soup kitchen volunteer, though, remembered Vivier and heard about his heroism. Jody Fesco and her husband Ernie traveled back to Cleveland from their new home in Pennsylvania to make sure Vivier wasn’t forgotten. They identified his body, found his family and arranged a proper funeral.

On Friday, Vivier’s ashes were inurned at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

“You can see from what he did that he definitely had a good heart,” said Mercedes Cruz, Vivier’s ex-wife of 23 years, who attended the funeral with the couple’s children. “No matter what our difficulties were in our marriage, I’m very proud of what’s happened.”

For his grown children — who now are scattered around the country — Vivier had been gone for about 15 years. They know of his heroism now — but they don’t know much about the man he was trying to become. They remember their dad’s struggles with alcohol and other troubles.

“What I’m trying to get out of this is to have one good, concrete memory that I can have of him for what he did to save those people,” said his oldest daughter, Elisha Vivier. “I’m proud of the man that he was becoming.”

Vivier’s funeral procession                                                     AP Photo/Kevin Wolf

I’m far too quick to label people in my mind with some sort of limiting descriptor, such as “homeless.” That makes it far too easy to fail to see them as complex people, capable of anything, no matter what sort of life they’ve been living.

As C.S. Lewis said in The Weight of Glory,

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations–these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit–immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

Pause, reflect

I am really looking forward to the day when this woman will be out of a job.

It’s one thing to be a hypocrite. It’s one thing to lie. But to be a lying, in your face, serious as a heart attack hypocrite takes some kind of evil skill I can’t even fathom.

“We’re not in a big rush” on health care, Pelosi said. “Pause, reflect.”

I read that, and I almost had an out-of-body experience. Like I was suddenly set down on another planet. Because this is the woman who has been shoving universal health care down America’s collective throat like there is no tomorrow.

August 2009:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed on Wednesday to push through the government-sponsored health care program that the late Ted Kennedy characterized as his life’s work. “Ted Kennedy’s dream of quality health care for all Americans will be made real this year because of his leadership and his inspiration,” Pelosi said in a statement.

October 2009

“Leaders of all political parties starting over a century ago with President Theodore Roosevelt have called and fought for health care reform and health insurance reform,” Pelosi said. “Today we are about to deliver on the promise.”

December 2009

“We would do almost anything if it meant we would pass health care for all Americans (by) the Christmas holidays,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday. “Maybe we can’t,” she said, in which case Congress could deliver “a New Year’s present for the American people.”

6 January 2010

Lawmakers are “very close” to resolving differences between the House and Senate health care bills and sending a final version to President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday.

And now she says “not a big rush,” and “pause, reflect.” I suppose the stunning failure of Democrats to hang on to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat wouldn’t have anything to do with Ms. Pelosi’s dramatic change of attitude. Not that she’s capable of understanding what Massachusetts’ voters decision represents,

“Massachusetts has health care and so the rest of the country would like to have that too,” Pelosi said, referring to the state’s health care program. “So we don’t [think] a state that already has health care should determine whether the rest of the country should.”

It’s not complicated, Ms. Pelosi. Americans simply don’t want to pay for universal health care.

We can only hope that this is an epic fail for what has to be the worst bill in the history of US government.

Right voices thinks it could be the beginning of the end for Pelosi.

Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit calls it a quagmire.

And Instapundit…oh jeeze, it hurts to laugh this hard.

Could we Californians hope for a Barbara Boxer reelection loss? American Power thinks so. Oh, be still my heart.

And in the meantime…

I am brushing off the cyber equivalent of cobwebs here. I ought to be ashamed of myself, for all but abandoning my blog for two months.

My blog email is full of spam, understandably, but why is it written in Russian? What did I post last that issued an invite to Russian spammers?! Nevermind, I’ll just hit “delete” repeatedly.

Nothing bad happened to me in the interval between my last post and this one. My only excuse for dropping out of the blogosphere was the hurricane of life: Committing to writing NaNoWriMo, then having a full court press California state mandated teaching performance assessment followed by holiday craziness. Blog? I have a blog? Does anyone read it? Will they notice if it falls silent for a few weeks, or months?

I did not finish NaNoWriMo, but I did find my creative (fiction) voice again. That’s been fun. I’d forgotten the pleasure of playing with characters, of letting them interact and typing the result. So, for me, NaNoWriMo was a success. And I nailed a major win on the state requirement, with a perfect score and the evaluator’s comment “This is the best TPA 2 I have scored.” It felt really good to kick butt on that one.

The holidays were a success too. Though my family has narrowed down to MrRT and the four RT offspring, three of whom no longer live at home, this meant the holidays really were happy. No ugly scenes, no unpleasant relatives, just good food and good times. Christmas especially, when all six of us were together.

Nothing, and I do mean nothing, makes me happier than watching my kids thoroughly enjoy each other’s company. That is the best part of parenthood, right there.

So, it’s January now–heck, January is half over–and I’m preparing to walk into a 12th grade classroom and teach English to high school seniors who are already half checked out and heading for graduation. I must be out of my mind. Not that I have a choice; it’s the final part of the teacher credentialing process. Since they put me with 6th graders last semester, they (whomever “they” is at my university) apparently figured I needed to experience the other end of the spectrum.

Hey, if I can teach 6th grade (and I can) and 12th grade, then surely I can cover everything in between.

At least in theory.

Meanwhile, life goes on in strange and terrible ways.

One one hand, Massachusetts voters finally grew brains.

Brutally Honest calls this triumph “Obama being spanked.” Brilliant metaphor, and so apt.

Right Voices offers up a gem of humor from Jon Stewart on the election.

And Michelle Malkin calls it a miracle. Yes, they do happen.

On one hand is US politics, sometimes depressing, sometimes wonderful, often surprising.

On the other hand, we have the horrible tragedy in Haiti:

I can not even fathom this.

There are so many ways we can help these devastated people, without even leaving home. First and foremost there’s the financial, through reputable organizations like the Red Cross, Child Hope, World Vision, Compassion International, Samaritan’s Purse, and in Haiti itself, the Real Hope Rescue Center. 

A fairly comprehensive list of charities working in Haiti is available here.

Even five or ten dollars matters in a country so poor they’re beyond desperate on a good day. They haven’t had a good day since January 12. They’re not likely to see another one for a long time.

And you might want to bookmark The Anchoress as you keep Haiti’s people in your thoughts and prayers.

I’m back. I’m writing. And I’ll be posting more on these and other stories very soon.

30 Days and Nights of Utter Madness

I’m taking a break from blogging, obviously, because it’s National Novel Writing Month and I’m just crazy enough to throw that challenge on top of the pile of responsibilities that overflow my life.

Yes, it’s clickable. Don’t laugh at my word count, I got a late start. And I’m juggling three university classes and student teaching and running a household and raising a 13 year old son. I must be out of my mind…