Manna

Several somethings happened last week that made me despair for a tiny moment. And then i thought: well, whatever the circumstances, God cares about my character and spiritual formation more than merely circumstance-based happiness, so i should find the balance between disappointment and despair, and between being sad and being dismal to those around me.

That seemed to go okay.

And then i thought: y'know, this kinda marvelous thing that didn't work out, i'd seen it as a last-chance effort. When it didn't work, i thought, well, there's no way it could happen again. This morning though, i remembered manna. God made manna *every day* for almost 40 years for the wandering Israelites. He makes sunsets and sunrises day after day, and holds the universe together year after year, second after second. If he wants something to happen again, he can do it.

And if he doesn't--career, car, life-long love--well, then the poem excerpt below is where i want to make my soul-battle stand:

"Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights."
Habakkuk 3:17-19.

I've written my own little paraphrase of that, but i won't post it here lest it come across as pitiful. ;-)

Fake

I finally hit a red light at a particular intersection with a bus-stop today. An interesting poster is posted there and i'd wanted to read the grey-scale fine print for a while.

It said:

FAKE
Use steroids. Get caught. Become one.

I think the message misses the point. If you use steroids you are a fake whether you get caught or not. The difference being caught makes is that every one else now knows that you are a fake. Maybe this means we've fully made the transition from a guilt culture (not psychological burden guilt, but broke the law guilt) to a shame culture (it only counts if i get caught).

That's a sad place to be. For one thing, we don't have enough police to track down everything, and for another, i don't think any of us would want to live in such a police state. Who would catch the police, to keep them from being evil? The media? Right. That works so well now, doesn't it.

Yup. Much better to do what is right, even when no one is looking, and pay it forward.

Grrr to mere cosmetic changes

I'll be the first to admit that change is not my favorite thing to experience. I'll go new places and try new things, listen to new music, eat new foods, learn new languages, but when i'm in the mood to do it. Other days (at least half) i want what i know i like, in familiar places, where i know how long things will take.

Facebook is not one of my favorite things, although i do waste an inordinate amount of time there. This latest cosmetic change to rearrange the profile is annoying, the missing status bar is confusing (especially when the program itself used to figure out if you were posting a link or a status) and i can't see the point, other than to mix things up for change's sake. Well, what a about making a significant change to content, such as not rearranging our privacy settings every once in a while?

(Which reminds me, since they've changed the profiles, i'd better go check on my privacy settings again. I really am close to quitting.)

My anti-virus software also was updated recently to a new version. I can see a difference, but only visually. It works less efficiently. It wants to reboot every time it gets a definitions update. As far as i can tell, this is a cosmetic change and not a beneficial one.

And last but not least, the impetus to this rant, my word processing software program. When my old laptop died, i got Windows 7 on the new one. The new word was a little tricky to navigate, but fortunately, we'd had it at work for a while so my time learning how to use it was spent there and not while trying to finish my thesis. However, now my toolbars disappear. That means i have to click on them to get them to come back, which is an extra mouse move and click EVERY SINGLE TIME. That's a lot for a designer, or a thesis writer, who has to make a lot of tweaks to font sizes, font colors, line widths, and image placement. When i went to the help (also hard to find: who looks for a tiny blue question mark instead of "HELP"!?) to find out how to lock my toolbars down, this is what i found:

"Learning new things can be stressful, but if you follow the demos, training courses, and of course, some of the advice I dole out, you'll probably begin to see why we made such a radical change in the UI (and you'll be happy we did).....After spending some time using the "interactive command reference guides" (a fancy term for ROAD MAPS), I began to see the beauty of this new UI. See, the commands and features we think you use most are grouped together under tabs so that you don't have to go hunting through the old-style menus to find what you need." -The Crabby Office Lady Column

See, I don't want to spend time watching demos or taking (and paying for!) training courses to use something as simple as a word processor. 'You' apparently did not know which tools i used most. And lastly, this didn't solve any problems for experienced users: I knew where the toolbars were, i knew how to customize my toolbars too, and it didn't take me any time to find the tools...unlike now, thanks to the ever so helpful cosmetic changes.

GRRRRR.

I think i shall go make a squash for dinner.