Interesting articles

Ordinary Time 24/Trinity 14 – Saturday

I’ve been like the stereotypical view of a woman today. Spent most of the morning cleaning up the house. Vacuuming, mopping floors, etc. Have the ironing to do this evening when I get back from choir practice.

My bag issue has been sorted. The Crumpler Dreadful Embarassment is now here in my room with me. It is seriously roomy. My backpack will be missed on Monday morning when I head to work. I estimated that the Porter Shoulder Bag would end up setting me back about £160 (about A$300) and wouldn’t end up carrying the crap that I have to lug to and from work each day. Would have got it yesterday at lunchtime but the cute girl (Clo’???) who works at the Crumpler store on Adelaide St sadly advised me that they had none in stock there and that I’d have to go up to the Myer Centre.

Plus I had $60 left on a Coles Myer gift card I got for my birthday this year. So it was off to the Crumpler concession at Myer Brisbane CBD after work yesterday (and Dez was along for the ride before the two of us headed off for a end-of-working-week drink at the Embassy).

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I work with some great people. They make the day go by just that more quickly, which helps out immensely when one spends an entire day working out how a piece of legislation actually applies to an arrangement. I went out for coffee with one of them (“A”) yesterday at morning tea to this funky little espresso bar on Edward St in the CBD. Well, I went for coffee. A went for Italian Hot Chocolate. Their Italian Hot Ciok is utterly divine. $3.50 for a small one is more than enough for me. Any larger and I would need to be sent to the hospital with too much sugar in my system. I learned that for myself on Wednesday when I went to get one of them. Didn’t need to eat anything for the next few hours after drinking mine (which when it cooled sufficiently to drink had become a very thick, rich, custard-like hot ciok).

Anyway, I digress. Ordered a small long black and after I had ordered a rather good looking Asian girl came by and ordered a medium long black. She was too busy listening to her mp3 player that she didn’t hear her order had come up. I had to prompt her that her coffee was ready. When I got back to the office and mentioned to A that the girl was cute, she thought I should have sent in one of those stupid messages to mX Brisbane’s “Here’s looking at you” section. She even composed the message for me:

To the stunning Asian lass who ordered a medium long black at Neat Espresso Bar on Friday morning. I ordered a small long black. How ’bout next time we order a large and share?

Mercifully (and a little bit sadly), I’m too shy to send in something like that. But still, that had me in stitches for the next 15 mins back at the office when I was trying to get my head around section 855-25 of the IT AA 1997. I love my work colleagues.

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Friends should know that I am an avid reader of the New York Times. Even from Down Under. This week’s New York Times Magazine (NYTM)  is gonna have some great articles in it.

The Holy Grail of the Unconscious - by Sara Corbett, on the upcoming publishing of Carl Jung’s “The Red Book”.

The Right Way to Pray? - by Zev Chafets, on how American’s pray. There are some killer lines in this NYTM article. Like these two from Rabbi Marc Gellman of Temple Beth Torah:

Quote 1

“Evangelical Christians, Pentecostals, they go to church to pray,” Gellman went on to say. “Why else would they be there? But Jews are different. People come to temple to identify with other Jews, or socialize. The writer Harry Golden once asked his father, who was an atheist, why he went to services every Saturday. The old man told him, ‘My friend Garfinkle goes to talk to God, and I go to talk to Garfinkle.’ There’s a lot of that.”

“At least they come,” I said.

“Sure. But when you have a large percentage at a religious service who aren’t actually praying, it dilutes the quality of the entire experience.”

“Like subprime mortgages on a bank’s balance sheet,” I said. “Toxic Jews.”

Quote 2

Rabbi Gellman doesn’t get involved in the midnight grappling of his congregation, anonymous or otherwise, and he prefers tried-and-true prayers to exotic new ones. “I think it’s important to use Hebrew, saying the traditional words, even if you don’t exactly know their meaning,” he said.

“Praying in English is like kissing through a veil,” one of the young assistants said.

…

“I’m saying that techniques can make a difference,” Gellman said. “Like wrapping yourself in a prayer shawl if you want to shut out the world. But really, when you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!”

“That’s it?”

“Yep. Wow! are prayers of praise and wonder at the creation. Oops! is asking for forgiveness. Gimme! is a request or a petition. Thanks! is expressing gratitude. That’s the entire Judeo-Christian doxology. That’s what we teach our kids in religious school.”

“What about adults who want to learn to pray?”

“I tell them to start with prayers of Thanks! That’s what Christians call ‘grace.’ Everybody has something to be grateful for.”

“What if the person doesn’t believe in God?”

“Then I tell him to thank who or what seems appropriate,” Gellman said. “Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere. If people say prayer is a crutch, I don’t disagree. Sometimes you need a crutch. But I don’t believe in a God who is a magician and miraculously answers individual prayer. That’s absurd.”

Well worth reading these two articles in full. The first if you are into psychology/psychoanalysis and the second if you have a religious bent in you.

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