Random Thoughts Vol 2

1. I'm slowly learning some conversational Spanish. It's really difficult, made even more so by not having any of it written in front of me. It's easier to get a sense of how to pronounce a word when you can see it. But instead I'm using podcasts because I can listen to them in the drive part of my commute and get better at the pronunciation. I can say about 20 words in Spanish now. Although the teacher is Scottish and the Spanish is 'Spain' Spanish, he assures me "it's all pretty much the same, sort of."

2. Whenever someone has a debate about gun control, just replace the word gun with the word alcohol and see where the argument goes. Alcohol and drunk driving can be every bit as deadly as illegal gun usage. But strangely no one ever calls for 'tougher alcohol laws' when a drunk driver kills someone. Incidentally, this is a further great example because they actually did make alcohol illegal once and an entire system of bootlegging sprung up, just like what would happen if you made guns illegal.

3. I don't own a gun but it's just because I'm cheap. It would be like $300 or so, I imagine, to get a decent one and a safe and bullets and I would rather spend that on something immediately useful, such as $300 of peppermint patties.

4. I wish I was creative and talented enough to write a book. It would be fun. But I truly have no story in my head to tell. Lots of interests, but no idea on any kind of plot or story structure or characters that would be even remotely interesting. And for all the reading I do, the styles out there are so wildly different that I would have no idea how much detail would be needed to describe things. I remember reading Victor Hugo in high school and remembering that he could spend an entire chapter describing, like, a chair. "And don't get me started on dialogue," he added, remorsefully.

5. Mostly I can't write a book because I wouldn't be 1/100th as good as Douglas Adams was. And if you can't be the best or even 1/100th as good as the best, then what's the point? The trick would be finding interesting ways of describing things and telling a story that didn't involve 'X is like X.' He did this like a thing doing something else. I think I would use that literary device more frequently than a...than a....

6. I read in a church history book about the "Adam/God" theory, which was supposedly attributed to Brigham Young and proposed that Adam was Heavenly Father, making the Person we know as Heavenly Father actually Heavenly Grandfather. It was a very interesting theory but apparently an apostle somewhere along the line put out a book that refuted it, and the sourcing was apparently unclear to begin with. I brought this up to my friend Tim a few months back and he had a thoughtful response of "I'm totally fine with generations of Gods." I would tend to agree. That of course doesn't mean Adam/God is necessarily correct, but it's something I'll dig into a little further next year or so.

7. Speaking of my friend Tim, he brought up an interesting point a few months ago as well. We were talking about the 'evidences' of God and he mentioned that the feeling of shame is one. There's no 'evolutionary' need for it, and in many cultures (particularly our modern one) it's not learned, especially if someone doesn't grow up in a religious environment. So where do people get shame from? Definitely not from movies or TV. It's something inside us and there's no biological or evolutionary explanation for it. So that feeling you get after singing along to Olivia Newton-John's "Have You Never Been Mellow?" is actually proof that God exists. Neato, huh?