Fun with News

From time to time I read the Weird News on snopes.com. I highly recommend it. Thought I'd share a couple priceless pieces.

Apparently, we Canadians are so polite we even commit suicide during business hours.

I know this Star Wars hype is getting annoying, but at least it isn't hurting anyone. Oh wait.

Well, Friday night of Memorial Day weekend, and Michelle was in bed before 9. The excitement at the Fuller household never starts. So I'm blogging and playing poker.

I've gotten very into playing poker online in the last year. It's so easy to do while doing something else. When I fold a hand, which is often since I'm so damn conservative (just talking about cards here, you understand), I minimize the window and keep typing. When the next hand starts the window pops up again. This means I don't watch how my opponents play all that much, but whether online or in a real life game I've never really tried to read the other players; I just play the odds. I can understand numbers; people confuse the heck out of me. So I do well, but not ridiculously well. The good players can win even when they're not getting good cards. Me, I need good hands to win. Tonight I'm not getting them, but I had a pretty nice streak last night, so I'll take my lumps.

I've noticed an odd similarity between playing poker and, of all things, driving. Especially when I've done the two in close temporal proximity, I start to ponder how seemingly every one involved in either activity firmly believes that they do it better than anyone else (myself included, of course). To a point, I suppose, this conviction is healthy and advantageous, but knowing where that point is is a discipline requiring keen insight, wisdom and a bunch of other things which are generally precluded by thinking you're better than everyone else. It seems to me that those who get caught up in actually trying to prove it are likely to wind up in significant trouble. Fortunately I've managed to avoid such problems in both areas.

I don't know if the preceding paragraph was more detrimental to my readers' opinions of my blogging or my driving. Shall we move on?

At the Porch we've been reading through the Psalms. Doug talked about how some people don't get a lot out of the Psalms. He was talking about me. The Psalms are poetry. I really tried not to type that sentence, but it's the first thing I think when I go to the Psalms, and I'm really not going to get anywhere else until I just blurt it out. They're poetry, which means a number of things. You don't base doctrine on them. They will say things which, pretty much, aren't true. They can be pretty emotional. So what did I get out of reading through the Psalms?

I don't know, but I think has something to do with not doing what I just did, which is take one verse and focus on it. Poetry is supposed to wash over you, to soak in as a whole, to paint a picture of hope, anger, faith, doubt, of a moment. This moment isn't the whole story, it is a present, intense experience which passes and is replaced by the next one.

I can say all that and it sounds pretty good, but I'm just not wired to read it that way. I've been brainwashed by Bible College to stop when something strikes me and go, Huh. That's interesting. What did he mean by that? And by now I've lost whatever meaning it could have had for me, because I'm taking it in a way that the writer didn't intend. These are songs, for Dave's sake. You don't spend ten minutes thinking about one line of a song.

So I'm starting to think I need to read the whole Bible this way. Let the story speak to me rather than a verse that a monk delimited for his own arbitrary 13th century purposes. I think that's what I'm getting out of the Psalms. That, and there seems to be a huge theme of God being on our side versus their side which I don't quite resonate with. Anybody with thoughts on that, please share. I'm going to bed.