Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

September 29, 2012

New Business Cards!

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 8:10 pm

I’ve recently changed, for the first time in more than 15 years, my personal email address (siyocreo@live.com), and I want to expand the readership of Prevailing Winds.  Also, I have one of those names that requires constant spelling, particularly when someone I meet tells me that, Oh! they have a niece named “Kelly”!  I went the cheap and easy way, VistaPrint.com, and found that the design I chose gave me a few extra lines to have printed.

Thus, a new motto for my blog — but meaningful only if I apply it to myself first:

“Prevailing Winds: A fresh breeze of the Spirit for a dry, dusty, and distracted Church.”

So let’s be clear that I, Keely-not-Kelly, am not the source of that fresh breeze.  It’s when the Holy Spirit stirs my heart that I write; any truth comes from the Spirit, and any errors are wholly mine.  We all need the rushing wind of God’s truth to blow through our lives at times, and I hope to be used by the Lord to help invigorate — and yes, often by rebuke — the Church in Moscow and beyond.  The Spirit will convict me if I get it wrong and soothe me if I manage to get it right, but you might be part of that.  So don’t ever hesitate to make use of the “Comments” section below, and thanks for reading.

On Religious Experts

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 7:55 pm

“Never trust anyone who says he is serving God.  They will use sweet words on you, and sound so educated you will not understand the half of it.  They will try to convince you with arguments that only they know how to spin, until they have seduced your reason and your conscience . . .  Their words are excuses, and their reasoning is of the sort you might use with a child.”

Ildefonso Falcones,  Cathedral of the Sea, New American Library 2006

Imagine that.  Why, I doubt he’s ever even BEEN to Moscow . . .

An Election Season Reminder

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 7:50 pm

There’s no time, really, when the United States isn’t suffused with an overwhelming sense of its own importance, both in world affairs and in the eyes of the God we insist guides them.

We have, over the course of this nation’s history, woven an American biography that insists that the U.S. was birthed from the Bible study of devout evangelical men, grew up as a shining light on the global hill, marched proudly into maturity as an imperialistic messenger of Manifest Destiny, stumbled only just a bit in its nascent maturity with its occasional mishandling of the power it seized and the prestige it was accorded — I’m thinking of the excesses of its foreign “anti-communism” policies and, domestically, its failed “war on drugs” — and continues today, strong and secure in its relative youth, as a beacon of prosperity, Christian morality, righteous economics and Gospel-infused politics.

Which, if true, would be lovely.  Suffice it to say that if we wake up tomorrow and find that we’re in a nation like that, we will not only NOT be in the United States, we will be in the New Jerusalem while wondering how it is that we missed the parousia happening during our slumber. 

Nonetheless, we enter into the last five weeks of our every-four-years national electioneering orgy convinced that we can elect a president — this time, either Obama or Romney — who will somehow “preserve” the glory of America and do so without ever once telling us that not only is that glory greatly diminished in the first dozen years of the 21st century, but has been since this nation’s inception.  We like, for example, to tell ourselves that “only in America” can someone rise from poverty and “make it” — walk the hallowed halls of political, educational, or corporate power as a respected player, or even start their own business and become a key player in local economics.  That’s certainly more true in the United States than in other places, and all Americans should be glad about it.

But this country was birthed in its original sin of racism, classism, and sexism, and we are, a decade or so shy of our 250th birthday, backsliding, and backsliding with a degree of enthusiasm that makes one wonder how suffrage, the Civil Rights movement, workers’ rights movements, and other harbingers of brighter social consciousness could ever have succeeded.  Those gains firmly fixed in our national coda, we have coasted over the last six decades or so, believing that our house is in order, our immature Christian behavior discipled out of us by a faithful remnant we now despise as “sentimental” and “compromising,” and our current troubles troublesome only because they threaten the social divide that’s grown to dizzying, and dizzyingly unequal, widths.  And for those aligned with the Religious Right, any other social and economic problems — hidden to them during the previous Republican administration — are the sole fault of a man they’ve identified as a dark-skinned, foreign usurper unworthy of even basic regard, much less a reasonable chance to undo in four years the horrors their guy unleashed upon us in eight.  If unseating Obama requires a convoluted Gospel that maligns the poor and lavishes honor on the unscrupulous rich, well . . . the greater good must require it.  Or so say our prophets, the pundits who feed us our daily ration of self-soothing, self-aggrandizing pabulum.

When a man with at least a fairly even shot of unseating the incumbent can rail against nearly half the population, calling them “victims” unworthy of his concern simply because they reap the benefits of a social services system they’ve paid into, the country itself loses moral stature and veers from paths of righteousness.  When, in a country where about one-third of children live in poverty — defined as $22,300 a year for a family of four — and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of formerly middle-class people are tasting unemployment and poverty for the first time as the income inequality gap yaws obscenely before us, pastors and politicos crow that Obamacare is the supreme evil of our time, the nation’s international voice, once proudly deemed prophetic, cracks, stutters, and whimpers.  And when our cities are crumbling, our infrastructure falling apart as a consequence of our unslaked war-thirst, our schools are being degraded by business-model “reforms” that treat children like so many widgets in an assembly line, and women are at risk of losing control over their most intimate healthcare decisions, those with the loudest microphones can still convince us that the love between two women or two men is the greatest threat before us, our country’s reputation as a wide harbor of opportunity and industry, much less courage, is rightly belittled.

This nation, which proudly clings to its “Christian” heritage and insists that the Gospel be celebrated in every area of life — while using it as a sledgehammer to bludgeon justice and righteousness and a megaphone to proclaim cheerful alliance with the false and idiot gods of wealth and power — is as lost as any “pagan” nation it invades.  It doesn’t matter who we elect, although I see more concrete righteousness in the Obama platform than in Romney’s.  I believe he’ll win, although he’ll win with nary a whisper of support from the Bible-believing, the Gospel-proclaiming, and the churchgoing.  Their easy trust of charlatans and crooks, coupled with the ease with which old prejudices and fears have rushed to the forefront in the wake of Obama’s election, has rendered them less of a true movement of Christian disciples than a conservative social club.  They’re powerful, having convinced themselves and the rest of the Church that opposition to healthcare reform is the primary duty of the believer, but the pagans and progressives they abuse outnumber them.  So they wield power in one hand and wave to us with the other so we’ll notice that they’re being persecuted.

The bigotry and ignorance, duplicity and idolatry, of the Religious Right has made the once-benign Republican Party the single most dangerous group in the United States.  It threatens the tremendous goodness our country is capable of, domestically and around the world, and sullies its testimony globally as a “Christian” nation.

And that leads me to ask, in all seriousness, what wondrous possibilities could be realized if the Religious Right ever were truly converted to Christianity.

September 20, 2012

Quick Takes From The Road . . . Rudeness And Rape

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 6:14 am

I always appreciate hearing from Daniel Foucachon, a young man in Moscow who, with his family, is deeply involved in Christ Church, New Saint Andrews, etc.  Unlike virtually everyone else I hear from who’s connected to the Kirk, Daniel uses his name, proving that he has already surpassed many of his elders both in integrity and in courage.  Here, in a comment about my Wilson/Log Cabin Republican debate post, Daniel disagrees with my assessment of the attention I received from the bouncers flanking the dais from which Wilson rhetorically eviscerated R. Clarke Cooper, president of the national gay Republican political action group.  If you’ve not read that post, take a few minutes to look it over so Daniel’s comment will make sense.

“Keely, perhaps you should rewatch the video. I don’t think you’ll find that the hosts or Wilson were nearly as rude as you make them out to be in this post. And no…I don’t think the bouncers were eager to kick you out.”  (Daniel Foucachon, 9/18/12, comment from Prevailing Winds)

My response:

Daniel, I didn’t use the word “rude” in describing the bouncers or Wilson.  As I waited, first in line, for the microphone at the start of the Q and A, I saw a young man sitting next to the timekeeper get up, go over to one of the burly guys in front of the platform, and point me out.  I acknowledged them with a smile and a wave, whereupon, before I had asked my questions, the — what do we call him?  An “oppositional rhetoric security specialist”? — walked over and stood, then sat-crouched, next to the timekeeper just a few feet from me.

I frankly thought it was kind of funny, given that I’m so physically imposing, but I do believe that no bouncer anywhere in the room could protect Doug Wilson from the charges I made.  If my challenge caused damage to him and to his skewed version of the facts by making clear that he is at best inconsistent in his views regarding the marriage of sexual minorities and, at worst, reigns as the most serenely reckless and viscerally hateful public figure I have ever personally known, then my words did as I intended.

I would not consider Wilson’s disingenuous tete-a-tete with Cooper “rude” — although I would not have read my opening and supporting arguments from words I’d written earlier for public consumption — believing, as I do, that the best debaters grasp the subject at hand well enough to anticipate opposing arguments without relying on crib sheets.  He did the same thing during our July 2007 KRFP debate; I used a couple of file cards to keep my points together, but I respected Wilson enough to address the points he would actually make, not the points I simply felt like making myself, and to address them extemporaneously.  He stuck to a script during our debate, which, I think, did not serve him well, and he did so again Thursday.  Rude?  Nope.  But reading from a prepared statement certainly isn’t a valuable tool in the debater’s workshed.  And while I contend that Wilson won the debate, I’m afraid I cannot say that he is or was then a formidable debater.  He’s just slick.

Frankly, Daniel, I believe that any rudeness during the evening might well have been at its very start, when Wilson accolyte and debate moderator Aaron Rench not only read his introduction of Mr. Cooper straight from Wikipedia — without attribution — but couldn’t have been bothered to ask his guest before the debate how to pronounce some of the trickier words peppered through his biography.   Were I a RenchMom, I would have chided my son for holding his guest in such low regard.  Stammering from nerves is entirely understandable; stammering and stumbling because you couldn’t possibly have been bothered to acquaint yourself with Mr. Cooper or his biography isn’t.  And while I’m quite certain that most of the audience felt I was astonishingly rude for speaking as I did to their pastor, teacher, mentor, hero, and shaper of worldviews, I would just say that Mr. Rench’s job that night required him, not me, to be “nice.”

Mine only required that I make Wilson face two very uncomfortable truths.  Invitations to repentance usually don’t feel very warm and fuzzy — but continued sin eventually doesn’t, either.

As always, the beer is on me if you and your wife ever want to get together!

Now, on another note —

A prominent professor at Washington State University, just across the border from Moscow, has been arrested on charges that he raped a young student.  Predictably, and appropriately, the charges have been met with horror.

But comments that suggest things like “Well, I’m not surprised . . . ,” or “Sex offenders always seem so NORMAL!,” or “OMG, I got a ride from him once!,” are not appropriate — because no one but he and the woman knows yet if he’s guilty.  We grant the presumption of innocence to those charged with crimes because it’s a hallowed part of our judicial tradition, as well as how we ourselves would like to be treated if we were ever arrested.  It’s simply not OK — it’s truly lamentable — that some of Moscow’s most progressive voices seem, in this case, to not remember that.

Let’s be outraged about what we KNOW — and right now, we don’t know anything more than the fact that he was charged and the nature of what he’s charged with. He might be innocent, or he might be a perpetrator more foul than anyone could imagine, but for right now, he’s simply a man — a man with a family — who’s been accused of something awful.  I know firsthand the terror and evil of rape, but I also know that the horror of rape isn’t mitigated in the least by a measured and humble approach toward the man accused.  Get angry as hell if he’s convicted, although I hope we would all continue to pray for him, the victim, and his family, but for now, let’s be liberal in our humility and trust in the system that, however imperfectly, is the best one in place to protect us all.

September 17, 2012

Oh, Wow. Let’s Impress The Already-Fawning!

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 4:39 pm

In his typically colorful — which is to say juvenile, puerile, and snotty — manner, Doug Wilson attempts to analyze President Obama’s foreign policy while also commenting on Paul Ryan’s views of American exceptionalism, all in the context of radical Islamic violence against caricatures of Mohammed. It all adds up to this:  Ryan is wrong, but Obama is himself a very paragon of pure, slithering evil.

Nonetheless, Obama cannot be seen as more important than Doug.  And so, because it’s necessary that Wilson be the bride at every wedding, he qualifies his critique by mentioning that he, too, has had a book burned in Jakarta — so he KNOWS wild-eyed craziness first hand, by golly.  And I believe he does.

Boy, do I believe he does.

But because I want people to know that I, too, am important and qualified to offer informed analysis of pretty much any issue at hand, it seems that now is a good time to reveal that my aunt once saw Paul McCartney at a salad bar.  

September 14, 2012

The Debate: Wilson Demolishes Log Cabin Republican Head Cooper

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 6:46 pm

I wish the headline were different.

I wish I could honestly write that R. Clark Cooper, head of the national pro-gay organization Log Cabin Republicans, held up well during last night’s University of Idaho debate against the bloviating Doug Wilson as they argued about the consistency of gay rights with the conservative, later defined in print as the conservative “Christian,” ethos and agenda.  It was the kick-off event of Wilson’s yearly exercise in masturbatory conferencing, this year focusing its male attendees on “Makers” — love makers, peace makers, trouble makers, story makers, and such.  The UI Ballroom was packed with eager young Reformed and very few LGBT allies that I could recognize, and anyone in attendance who wouldn’t agree that Cooper got owned is too blinded by their dislike of Wilson to grant him this rhetorical victory.  It was not an honest victory, mind you, nor a spiritually or culturally significant victory, but that matters little to Wilson, his Beholden Toadies, or the youngsters who revere him as the pater familias of their worldview.

Of course I went.

Having debated Wilson myself, and having fared better against him, and only by God’s grace, than Cooper did last night, I was curious to see how the politically astute, impeccably conservative, highly learned gay former combat soldier and current reservist would perform against the master verbal trickster.  Wilson is a self-proclaimed expert on history, law, politics, Scripture, psychology, logic, culture, epistemology, rhetoric, architecture, choir, and, for all I know, British ska and its late-70s evolution into OI! music.  I did not find him in our debate, nor in other conservations with him, terribly brilliant — but he’s cagey.  Last night, cagey won.

In debating the cultural and political argument against homosexual marriage, he managed to confound Cooper by weaving a tangled tapestry of state’s rights, government intrusion, slippery slopes and polygamy, the Constitution, statism, gun rights, property rights, and, as he put it, “free chocolate milk for everyone.” With remarkably little mention of homosexuality, he drew the resolutely conservative Cooper into a sad, clumsy dance that had an undoubtedly very bright man dancing to a tune played by the Piper of the Palouse while his feet gamely tried to avoid tripping over the underlying rhetorical net. Having gotten Cooper to agree with much of his political argument against big government and other GOP staples, Wilson lured the rhetorical not-adept and overly trusting Cooper into agreement with virtually everything he argued — and when the point of departure, the actuality of gay marriage, arrived, it was too late.  Having conceded virtually all ground to Wilson, Cooper was left trying to defend with one hand what he effectively had shooed away with another.  It was a masterful, if utterly dishonest and slippery, performance by a master manipulator.

I had warned Cooper of Wilson’s rhetorical trickery; I had hoped he’d be better prepared.  But if he wasn’t, I was, and at the heavily regulated Question and Answer time — and having been pointed out by an eager young Kirker to one of the stage bouncers, who immediately crept to within just a few feet of me — I tried to do what I had hoped Cooper would.

I asked Wilson two questions:  The first was how he could privilege over any marriage that Cooper or any of my LGBT friends might desire the June 2011 marriage of a sexual minority, a convicted pedophile — a man who by nature is permanently and unflexibly sexually attracted to children — to a young heterosexual woman in his flock.

Wilson flinched, and then, in his answer, lied.  The man in question was not guilty of a single act of child abuse, as he said, but had confessed to scores of instances of oral-genital contact with babies, toddlers and preschoolers. I was not given the chance to correct Wilson or rebuke him for his lie.

Then I asked him if he was ready to repent of his consistent, mocking, and erroneous use of the word “sodomite” in describing homosexuals.  He didn’t use the word last night; he ought never use it that way, though, given that the Biblical testimony of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah describes grotesque inhospitality in the form of “penis as weapon” — the battlefield-type humiliating, subduing, and conquering of the vulnerable and foreign “other” that, as I pointed out last night, any Bible teacher and Classical scholar should recognize.  The proposed gang rape of Lot’s visitors is not described in Scripture as a “homosexual” event, but in words that make clear the sin was a gross offense to hospitality — a demonstration of violent, smug, and insolent behavior that, in Ezequiel 16:49, notes “the sin of your sister Sodom:  She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy . . . “

The moderator cut me off and the bouncer was creeping closer before I got the opportunity to tell Wilson that that description had nothing to do with homosexuals and appeared to have everything to do with him — Wilson as “sodomite.”  But I was dismissed, bouncers a-twitching with eagerness.  As the next questioner floundered, I did remark loudly from the audience that Wilson, in asserting that the bisexual person would require two marriage partners — “do the math,” he said — was lamentably ignorant of the ability of people all along the sexual spectrum to love and be faithful to their single partners.  Then I walked to the back so that any Wilsonistas or LGBT defenders could confront me, and then left after about ten minutes, when it became clear that I was best left alone. 

I said most of what I wanted to say, and only God knows the effect.  Still, I’m sorry for Cooper, and I’m more convinced than ever that Douglas Wilson is a less-than-brilliant debater and thinker whose only victories are won by verbal subterfuge and didactic trickery.

It was hardly any of the  men’s best evenings, but those who have eyes to see and ears to hear had Wilson revealed as a prince of verbal hot air and very little else.  Sadly, that’s enough for those who seek not the Spirit, but rejoice in having discovered the scoundrel. 

September 11, 2012

Ahem. My Re-Introduction After A Blogging Break Too Long

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 3:26 pm

The fixing of my problems signing into this platform, Blogger, and thus my intent to plunge right in to a torrent of blogging, unfortunately coincided with my wedding anniversary.  And you don’t make it through 28 years of marriage by spending such weekends hunched over your laptop, no matter how silly the Sunday morning news shows reveal the arguments of the GOP to be.

I am a woman of strong preferences; this weekend, I preferred no more than five minutes of Newt Gingrich, and and every other moment with the love of my life.

But, speaking of preferences, it occurs to me that it’s been awhile since I offered some information about myself — who I am, what I do, what I believe, and what informs and energizes my beliefs, as well as why I feel called to express them in a manner that some find less than they expect from a sweet Christian woman (gender roles are terribly important up here in Moscow, Idaho, and the odious influence of the Tea Party and Religious Right reigns supreme).  If you’ve been a Prevailing Winds reader for awhile, you know what I mean; if you’re new, you’ll see that while I place tremendous value on kindness, I’m far less concerned with being “nice.”

Bigotry, oppression, and injustice flourish when people hold “being nice” more important than being truthful, being courageous, and being committed to righteousness.  Indeed, “niceness” is the scourge of contemporary Christiandom when its concern with not making waves allows cruelty and avarice to gallop unchecked through the pulpit, among the congregants, and onto the streets.  Kindness, on the other hand, means that I hope never to gratuitously attack a fellow believer, and only in extreme cases will I ever level a rebuke against a non-Christian.  It’s the beliefs and actions of the Church that concern me, and given that those who don’t identify as followers of Jesus Christ generally behave better than those who do, they generally escape my judgement.

And of course I exercise, and level, judgement against bigotry and stupidity.  You can’t speak out against what you refuse to name.  I am a political progressive, and it’s expected, then, that I would embrace tolerance.  I do.  But nothing in my moral code compels me to tolerate hateful and bullying pronouncements and behavior from people who behave badly in the name of Christ.  On the contrary, my own Christian faith requires that I “expose the deeds of darkness” around me, and especially those committed by other Christians.  I judge words by their meaning and actions by the fruit they produce; I cannot rightly judge anything else.  So, based on the fruit evidenced, I’m not hesitant to call a bigot a bigot, a bully a bully, and a belligerent a belligerent.  As I’ve maintained for the four years I’ve been blogging, when evil is pervasive, silence in its face is assent.

But I’m not always on the rhetorical warpath.  I’m not always on a soapbox, and I’m not always sweeping the horizon in front of me for wrongdoing.  First, I think it’s vital that I clean up my own spiritual house first.  God requires that, and I don’t get to opt out of the Divine command. Second, I’m a certifiably zany woman of diverse interests, many of which might surprise, or dismay, you.

I was born in Tucson, Arizona, and have been on a horse exactly twice.  But I compromise to make up for it: I love dogs and I love Westerns, although Perry has never been forced to wiggle into cowboy PJs.

I’m hooked on “Criminal Minds” and I enjoy Pawn Stars — and I think Charlie Sheen and “Two And A Half Men” and “Toddlers And Tiaras” are indicative of cultural rot, not the marriage of two women or two men.  But gays and lesbians are such easy targets for the frightened and bigoted among us, and their relationships don’t make anyone rich. 

I’m a Second Amendment supporter.  Because of that, I refuse to pollute it by arguing that semi-automatic weapons and such were what the Founders had in mind in drafting it.

I love punk music as much as I love vintage country and bluegrass, but my skin crawls when I hear freeform, modern jazz.  While I don’t believe in eternal conscious torment, if I did, I’d guess that Pandora would feature only Miles Davis’ tunes.

My favorite author is Stephen Lawhead, and then Toni Morrison.  I suspect not very many people consider “Byzantium” and “Song of Solomon” their favorite novels.

I used to be a serious distance cyclist; when I was 21, I thought nothing of a quick 50-mile ride in the morning, and I once rode 135 miles from Tucson to Phoenix.  But that’s not me you saw riding the trail yesterday.

I’m fascinated by caves and would be absolutely thrilled to live in one, as long as it had basic household amenities and floors that wouldn’t get my Birkenstocks all squishy.

Of course I have a teddy bear.  I’m not sure why you don’t.

Since the statute of limitations has undoubtedly expired, I can tell you that in 1981, shortly before I became a Christian, I participated in the vandalizing of several adult bookstores and nude dance halls in Tucson.  Actually, I just vandalized them, pasting “This Establishment Abuses Women” posters on the windows, jamming the locks with wheat paste, and, in a spectacularly misguided, sinful finale, heaving five gallons of paint on the front of a downtown strip joint.  The sentiment was good, but I recognize that it was wrong. My crime wasn’t indicative of feminism; it was indicative of youthful stupidity.

You’ve likely picked up that I’m still a feminist.  My understanding of the Gospel leaves me no other option.  I don’t believe it leaves you any other as well.

I’m a fervent supporter of the legalization of marijuana for anyone over 21.  I believe weed is a good gift from a good God, and it’s obscene that men can deny what God has granted us for our good by fiat — by laws that are ineffective, unjust, cruel, and, not incidentally, utterly racist in their origin.  I don’t use it, although it would help me greatly, but I’d feel entirely OK about it if I did.

A better person would not consider a plate of Southern fried catfish and an icy beer her favorite meal, but I am not, in fact, that better person.  But I also enjoy Thai and Indian food, and the Mexican food my friends cook.  I am not, alas, an organ-meats type of woman.

The women I most admire are Gabrielle Giffords, Billie Jean King, Kathryn Joyce, Hillary Clinton, Mimi Haddad, my pastor friend Lupita in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Marian Wright Edelman, Dolores Huerta, and, in history, Mary McLeod Bethune, Catherine Clark Kroger, Katharine Bushnell, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Angela and Sarah Grimke’, Susan B. Anthony, the women of Romans 16 (including the apostle, Junia), and the thousands of women who kept the world together when the world acted to rip them apart.  Truly, they were not worthy of this world and have now received the better reward promised in Scripture.

Finally, with the snows coming in another month or two, I dream of a car that handles it better than my Prius.  If I had $50,000 I absolutely HAD to spend on a car, I’d get an early ’80s Bronco II, rehab it inside, outside, under, and throughout, and paint it a sensuous deep emerald color.  And because I live in Idaho, I’d have to have a Scene Of Three Wolves Howling At The Moon screened on the rear window.  Bliss.  Sheer, high-clearing, stick-shifting bliss . . . with nary a bumpersticker anywhere near it.  And, by the way, if you see my car around town, the guy on the yellow diamond-shaped sticker is NOT carrying a bong, but a banjo.  It was supposed to mean “Bluegrass Is Pedestrian Music,” but I’ve gotten lots of interest from the young, hemp-wearing, and dreadlocked among us.

And if you know anything else about me, you know that that makes me very happy, indeed.  I’d much, much prefer to be in a stadium full of these folks, in my heart, than in a church sanctuary full of Christians.  I think Jesus would be much more likely to be there, too, and I’ve gotten emotionally sucker-punched by the latter way more often than by the former.

OK.  Enough said.  Up next:  Let’s talk about abortion and children born with disabilities, or, more precisely, the viciousness of Republican men who contend that there’s a God-ordained connection.  Reference “nice” above, because I won’t be.

 

September 6, 2012

Why We Shouldn’t Loan Out Our Laptops

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 8:48 pm

The answer?

Because the people whom we love very much and whose computers are broken, and who ask if they can borrow your laptop for a week, then log in to gmail with their own user ID’s and passwords and emails, and you spend the next two weeks desperately trying to wade through Blogger.com hell with its convoluted log-in process, inane questions, and insufficient help options.  You tear your hair out and realize that you’re at risk for an aneurism because there’s so much going on with the Republican and Democratic Conventions and other current events and you can’t comment.  Or, worse, you can only comment on Facebook, which means you compete with “Meatloaf for dinner, LOL” and other fascinating missives thereon.

(OK, my Facebook friends are almost unanimously intelligent, engaged people who require something more than meatloaf to make them laugh out loud.  But a couple of “friends of friends,” or “children of friends,” live lives of such profound excitement that they inform us all about their dinner plans, or who they sat next to in church, with some regularity.  If you’re reading this, you’re not one of them.  In fact, if you’re reading this, you’re displaying remarkable perspicuity and sagacity. . . )

So, because the person to whom I loaned my laptop doesn’t read my blog, I can vent a little, all the while assuring you that Prevailing Winds is back.  And here’s a note on my contact info:

If you want to contact me, or comment apart from the Comments feature on the blog (below each post), please use my current email:  siyocreo@live.com.  The blog will feature keelyemerinemix2008@hotmail.com, but I only had to use that as a Blogger user name; I don’t check it regularly.  Finally, you may still have kjajmix1@msn.com, which I used for the first 16 years of my email experience, but is now the home of dating offers, dire predictions of the ills that will happen to me if I don’t take my stand for Jesus by forwarding an email to ten of my closest friends, or solicitations to enlarge body parts I don’t have.  So — write to me at siyocreo@live.com, and we’ll all be happy.  Even if the email you send me isn’t.

OK, signing off to watch the opening of the final day of the Democratic Convention, after which I’ll try to make up for lost time. 

Laissez les bon temps roulez — but never, I pray, with a GOP laissez-faire economy.  This woman’s voting Obama in November, with the hope that my birthday will bring the continuation of the Obama presidency.

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