http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jesus/

It makes me very, very nervous that our president believes that he has given his life to Jesus. Almost as nervous as this us/them, good/evil, with-us-or-against-us attitude towards 9-11/Iraq/terrorism.

If you’re old enough to vote this fall, VOTE!

“One day I spent a weekend with Billy Graham.”

-George W. Bush

I’d like to know who’s commenting in (and reading) the blog, so if you comment, can you leave a name of some sort? It doesn’t have to be your name, you don’t have to leave contact info, I just like to associate comments with some sort of person. Anonymous comments drive me crazy because I spend all my time trying to guess who they’re from.

Apparently the Yahoo search engine loves Forbidden Fruit. I’m getting tons of hits from it. Well, tons for me. I don’t get a lot.

I caught a few minutes of 60 Minutes the other night, and there was a piece about one of the original Yahoo guys- I forget his name. Anyway, he’s giga-rich,* owns a basketball team, lives in a mansion, etc. They were talking about how he was just a regular guy, didn’t like really fancy things, etc., etc. As an example, they showed the office of the business he currently owns- a depressing warehouse jammed full of rows and rows of half-height cubicles. 60 Minutes gave the impression that this was an example of his ability to do without the finer things in life and not waste his money on frivolous things. It was ridiculous. He lives in this huge empty mansion and owns a basketball team, while his employees are stuck in terrible working conditions. There is nothing remotely admirable about wasting money on yourself while subjecting your underlings to days of work in a horrible place.

In Spanish today, we had a visit from a Franciscan friar. He graduated form my school a while ago and was coming back to visit my Spanish teacher, Mrs. Derrane. We spent the whole period talking to him, it was awesome. He’s from a very traditional order that wears woolen tunics all the time, with beards and shaved heads. He went to Williams with a Poli Sci major, but one day during the summer after he graduated he woke up and knew he had to be a monk. It’s really not my thing, and I very much doubt it ever will be, but I can really respect that. He felt that he had a real calling, and went right out and did what he wanted to do. He was absolutely certain that that was how he wanted to spend the rest of his life. It was really, really cool.

At work I was playing with this little kid while his father had a meeting with Leon. He was doing “magic tricks” (actually, dancing around and hiding things behind his back while I pretended not to notice) and I was pretending amazement at his skill while despairing my lack thereof. He told me that I just had to put my hands together and pray to God and Jesus to give me the power, and I would get it. Then God and Jesus were in Michael’s office, then they were in the conference room, then they were trapped in the kid’s hands. He was a cool kid.

Religion isn’t really a part of my life, so I sometimes forget how much it matters to other people.

When I was younger, I painted my nails all the time. I used to walk to CVS with my friends and buy bottle after bottle of Wet & Wild nail polish. So many bottles! So pretty! Then, a few years ago, I decided that my hands didn’t look like themselves when my nails were painted, and never did it again. Consequently, I have tons of of old, barely-used nail polish in a drawer in my room. I’m thinking of selling it on ebay.

Same goes for make up. I got a ton one Christmas and used it for a few months before deciding that it wasn’t worth the trouble and I hated not being able to rub my eyes.

I have millions of bottles of lotion and shower gel and that I’ve accumulated over the years, too. My relatives buy them for me for Christmas, or they did. It’s the universal teenage girl gift- don’t know what to buy? Get her a pretty set of glorified soap! And I’ve only ever talked to one person that wanted all that. I was planning to send her all the stuff I got last Christmas, but for once I didn’t get any.

Really, I just wanted an excuse to play around with the digital camera and post pictures.

Did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I added some pages with old layouts from F&J, Synthesis, and Lodenocity.com. I’m in a good mood to work on the site, so I may figure out a calendar for the blog and a way to search entries as well.

I’m happy with this layout, it’s very clean and easy to work with.

Wow, big changes. Flotsam & Jetsam, Synthesis, and Lodenocity.com have been combined into one giga-site. It was pointless to have all my content spread over three different sites, so I moved it all onto this one.

It was much easier and less offensive to my sense of organization to just start a new blog for Lodenocity.com instead of continuing the one of Synthesis. All the material from Synthesis is still present, though half of it is in the old parade layout and half of it is in the ugly Lodenocity.com layout that I had up for a few days. There’s a link to the Synthesis archive over there on the side bar.

There are still little things with the site that need to be fixed, but it’s up and running. Let me know if you run into any problems.