Carlin's first half of 2009

My daily desk calendar for the office this year is a George Carlin one. Every day I get to read a new quote/joke/rant of his. Here are some of my favorites after six months:
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You keep hearing that society's greatest tasks are educating people and getting them jobs. That's great. Two things people hate to do: go to school and go to work.

How can it be a spy satellite if they announce on television that it's a spy satellite?

President Bush declared a National Day of Prayer for Peace. This was some time after he had carefully arranged and started the war.

Wouldn't it be interesting if the only way you could die was that suddenly your head blew up? If there were no other causes of death? Everyone died the same way? Sooner or later, without warning, your head simply exploded? You know what I think? I think people would get used to it.

Don't you get tired of celebrities who explain their charity work by saying they feel they have to "give something back". I don't feel that way. I didn't take nothin'. You can search my house; I didn't take a thing. Everything I got, I worked for, and it was given to me freely. I also paid taxes on it. Late! I paid late. But I paid.

No one, repeat, no one is interested in athletes who can sing or play musical instruments. We already have people to perform these tasks. They're called singers and musicians, and, at last count, it would seem we have quite enough of them. The fact that someone with an IQ triple his age has mastered a few simple chords is unimportant and of monumental disinterest. Play ball!

No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

Talk about wrong priorities. We live in a country that has a National Spelling Bee. We actually give prizes for spelling! But when's the last time you heard about a thinking bee? Or a reasoning bee? Maybe an ethics bee? Never.

A deaf-mute carrying two large suitcases has rendered himself speechless.

They try to blame movies and TV for violence in this country. What a load of #$%#. Long before there were movies and television, Americans killed millions of Indians, enslaved millions of blacks, slaughtered 700,000 of each other in a family feud, and attained the highest murder rate in history. Don't blame Sylvester Stallone. We brought these horrifying genes with us from Europe, and then we gave them our own special twist. American know-how!

I grew up in New York City and lived there until I was thirty. At that time, I decided I'd had enough of life in a dynamic, sophisticated city, so I moved to Los Angeles. Actually, I moved there because of the time difference. I was behind in my work, and wanted to pick up the extra three hours. Technically, for the last thirty years I've been living in my own past.

If all our national holidays were observed on Wednesdays, we might conceivably wind up with nine-day weekends.

Church signs and an upcoming zipper-mouth moment

Church Signs


In the previous post I mentioned this church sign I saw while driving through Western Arkansas a few days ago:

"God does not lower his standards to accomodate man's sins"

There are at least two possible ways to interpret this, I guess. Instead of jumping to conclusions about what the church really meant with their sign, I'll explore both interpretations:

1) Maybe they meant that God's standard is perfection, and we all fall short. Therefore, we all need grace. Since this was a Baptist church, perhaps they were trying to spark thoughts of Jesus as the vehicle for us to be seen as perfect by God.

2) Maybe they meant that God is looking at "sinners" disapprovingly, knowing that they are surely lost because they aren't living up to His divine standards. To this possible message, I have some questions:

-- Didn't God create us as fallible? So didn't he know that everyone will constantly fall short of a perfect standard? Why then would he look so disapprovingly upon people for being exactly as imperfect as He made them?

-- Does Jesus project the image that God sits proudly on His perfect standards, with no accomodation? Or did Jesus draw near to everyone, especially those looked on as the least likely to live up to standards of righteousness (foreigners, unbelievers, prostitutes, etc...)? What might this behavior of Jesus teach us about how God sees us?

-- If I assume that even Jesus or even godly grace has its limits, and we still have to be pure... can anyone show me a single person who has lived up to this standard? I sure can't find anybody in the bible who pulled it off.

I find it very sad that some people think God is so ashamed of them. I find it frustrating that some people think God is ashamed of everybody else except their group of the "in" club.

Zipper-Mouth Moment

This weekend members of our church are hosting a July 4th party, and they've set aside an hour for a "political discussion", where they will share their concerns about the direction of our nation, and some tips for how we can get involved in the political process.

I will most definitely have to keep my mouth shut, and keep from making too many assumptions about what they will say.

For now, here are a few nuggets bouncing around in my brain:

-- For a church that prides itself on being based solely on the New Testament text and the 1st Century church, I find it odd that the church is so politically passionate. This type of activism is almost completely absent from Jesus' teachings, his example, and the behavior of the early church.

-- I continue hearing from Christians how concerned they are that America will become "socialist". I find this odd as well, since theoretically socialism is probably more Christian than capitalism is. Welfare, social programs, redistribution of wealth... sounds like the 1st Century church. My guess is that Protestants today see the gospel as the epitome of individualization and free will -- in other words, we each take control of our own salvation and eternal destiny. This spiritual mentality of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps fits in very well with the fiscal mentality of free markets.

It makes me wonder... would Jesus fight a trend to socialism?

Shortest update ever

I've been on vacation for the past week and out of touch -- not that you'd notice from the blog, since my absence has been far longer than a week!

-- Work is still insane but good. I've never used this much of my life's energy in a job, but it's paying off. And it's helping others.

-- I'm preaching again on July 12th.

-- Our vacation was excellent -- the usual lake trip with extended family. One particular item of note that the readers here might enjoy (are you still here? really? your patience is not logical) is the church signs aplenty as we drive 15 hours through the bible belt.

Here are two of the signs:

1) "This bloods for you", with a picture of Jesus on the cross.

2) "God does not lower his standards to accomodate man's sins"

That last one probably deserves another blog post. No promises, though. Heh.

Conversations that start innocently...

Samantha is six years old and has one week of kindgarten left. It was my turn to put her to bed tonight, so we started to chat:

Samantha: Daddy, look, I cut my hand (she shows me a small scab).
Me: Sorry, sugar. How'd it happen?
Samantha: (Smiling) Well, Kenneth bet me I couldn't jump off the high part of the bench, so I did it. Then I kinda landed like THIS! (puts her hands on the ground)
Me: Did it hurt when you did it?
Samantha: A little, but I didn't cry. I never cry at school.
Me: Never?
Samantha: Nope. I'm brave at school.
Me: Okay. Is Kenneth a good friend?
Samantha: Yeah daddy he's a good friend, but sometimes I can't tell what he's saying.
Me: Why not?
Samantha: Because he's black.
Me: Huh?
Samantha: He has black skin. And sometimes I can't tell what black people are saying. We have black boys and girls in my class, and my teacher is black, and sometimes I don't understand them.
Me: What do you mean? Do they use different words?
Samantha: No, they use the same words as us. They just say 'em different.
Me: Interesting.
Samantha: And a lot times when they're talking, they'll go "YOU KNOW WHAT I'M SAYIN'!" (cocks her head at an angle as she says it).
Me: They all do that?
Samantha: Yep. And sometimes white people say it too. That makes me laugh.
Me: I think it's time for bed now.

Ultra-focus, gradually broadening

For Debby it was cancer that did the job. Illness has a way of doing that.

Lottery winners experience the same phenomenon. So even blessings can do that.

For T.K. Foster and Mike from "If's of Og", two former commenters on this blog... well, we don't know exactly what happened to them.

Diseases, blessings, mysteries -- what common power do they share? All of them can radically change the direction of, and the focus of, our lives.

For over six weeks I've been absent from my blog, and from commenting on the blogs of others, due to my own events that have required focus. It's nothing quite as big as disease or lotteries, though. Simply stated, my job demanded my full attention since late March.

-- In late March, all Directors of my company were brought together by the new company President and asked to develop new business plans. We were in financial crisis.

-- I wasn't actually a Director yet at that point. But I was asked to lead the team in the planning process. I saw it through, and in 30 days we completed a realignment project that would normally take at least 90 days.

-- I was promoted to Director, but at the same time, over one-third of the company was laid off. Including my best friend at the office (James W), who also frequently comments here at the blog.

-- Since the layoff, I've been building a new team and preparing to launch a couple of new company-wide programs. The first is scheduled to go live in one week.

-- In the past week alone, people on my team have experienced the psychotic breakdown of a spouse, a sibling's relapse into drug addiction, an outpatient surgery and the death of a parent. This obviously takes a lot from me as a manager to help them personally, and still somehow makes things work while the employees are absent and project deadlines keep coming closer.

I've never been particularly focused on my career. It's just been something to pay the bills while the majority of my energy -- mental, emotional, physical -- went to other pursuits. For almost two months now I've had to literally rearrange my life to be able to meet the new demands at work.

At first it was overwhelming and I messed up a lot of things. I missed some key family moments. My workouts stopped completely and I got sick (those two are always connected in my health history). I quit writing blogs, reading books, watching movies, playing piano or playing video games.

Now I'm gradually reintroducing those things, one at a time, and figuring out how to define "balance" for myself. It's different every day. It's an exercise of constant adjustment and monitoring.

I don't see any overall good/bad themes emerging from my experiences over the past six weeks -- it's just life. I've gotten a promotion and some of my friends lost their jobs, but who's to say if this is good or bad? Maybe in three months I'll be miserable and they'll land something great! Judging those things is like judging the NFL draft... you can only do it three to five years after it happens.

So in the absence of any ability to discern the master plan, I'm trying to do the things I need to do today, and have fun while doing it.

Because a smart dude once said "each day has enough trouble of its own", and frankly, I've got my hands full with this afternoon's troubles. Tomorrow's are going to have to wait.