Something Stupid This Way Comes

"Sometimes I do stupid stuff, and I don't even know why - as if my body were being controlled by some demented, sadistic puppet-master."
- Bernard Bernoulli, Day of the Tentacle

I've done some bone-headed things in my time. It usually starts with something small, that wouldn't seem so bad on it's own, but then things start snowballing out of control at an ever escalating pace.

Last week, for example, I went out for a simple night at the movies with my friends. We saw Cursed, a craptacular piece of trash about werewolves that made me question my will to live. After the movie, Nick dropped me off at home. Before he left, he asked if I had my keys. I felt around in my pocket and said "yes."

I got to the door and put my hands in my pockets. Hmm. That rattling noise I heard earlier turned out to be almost four dollars in change, but no keys. Just then, almost violently, an image of my keys sitting on the ledge next to a candle jolted to my head. I left them there when I went out that morning. Crap.

I knocked on the door.

Because of her paper route, Michele has been going to bed early. Usually around eight, but sometimes as early as seven. I looked at the time on my phone. 9:10. Crap.

So I called our home phone. Several times. It was no use. That girl could sleep through the Loudsville Loud Convention, with special performance by Loudy McLoud and the Loudsters. Okay, that might have been the dumbest sentence since "Honey, I just dropped Timmy off at Neverland Ranch," but you get the idea.

Here's where the snowballing comes in. See, we have two phones. One in the living room, and a cordless one that, until recently, was in the kitchen. The cordless phone hasn't worked in months, though. Most of the time, it says "Battery Dead" even though it's been sitting in the base recharging for days. A few weeks ago, the brand new vacuum cleaner stopped for no reason. Later, when it was plugged into another outlet, it worked fine. So it was determined that the outlets on that wall were faulty, so the cordless phone was moved to the bedroom.

So now there was a phone in the bedroom, meaning even though she couldn't hear the living room phone through the closed bedroom door, surely she could hear the one just a few inches from her face, right? Well, yes, if it worked. But it STILL says "Battery Dead" so it didn't ring at all. Crap.

I alternated between calling our home phone and her cell phone for fifteen minutes straight, hoping that maybe she'd hear one of them. But I knew even as I was doing it that there wasn't a chance, because I could hear the cell phone through the door. It sounded like it was on the kitchen table. There was no way she'd be able to hear that from the bedroom, heavy sleeper or not.

Craaaaaap.

I briefly considered tapping on the window, but (another snowball moment) the window is just slightly too high for me to reach, and I almost slipped on a patch of ice while attempting it, further straining my right shoulder that I hurt a few days earlier. Knocking on Brianna's window would have been easier, but you do not want to bang on a six year old's window and wake her up in the middle of the night, unless you have some cash sitting around for the years of therapy it would cause.

In a last ditch effort, I called my parents. I told my mom that I couldn't get into the house and asked if she would please drive over with the spare key. As usual, mom bailed me out. I sat on the steps inside the building, waiting for the keys. I finally got the door open a little after ten o'clock, an hour after I got home.

Another thing I should point out is that my landlord, who lives across the hall, was home and he has a key to my apartment. I could have knocked on his door at any time and got the key, but I didn't because I was too embarrassed. Especially since this was the second time this happened (the first time, Michele and Brianna were at the Laundromat.)

Amazingly, I actually trumped that the other day. But I'm not going to talk about that, because, well, some things are off limits. Instead, I will say this. And it's not directed at anyone in particular, but rather to anyone who found their way onto this page. Taking the time to get to know someone can be a very rewarding experience. The people who frequent this site are perfect examples of that. These are all very talented people with vibrant lives and it's exciting to check that sidebar every day to see what's new. And it really bothers me the way some people would rather just hate someone than try to understand them. It just doesn't make any sense to me, because they're missing out on so much and they'll never even know it. Writing someone off ultimately says more about your character than about theirs.

I hope you take that to heart. Yeah, go ahead and laugh about all the stupid things I've done, and all the stupid things I'm going to do before I die (hopefully in a non-stupid way) but don't let it take any validity away from what I say, because this is really important. And it goes for things as simple as friendships to as big as war. Most, if not all wars are started because the two sides don't understand each other. And again, in most cases, it's people of one faith versus people of another.

Our founding fathers made it clear that there should be a separation of church and state, and rightly so. But that can get difficult sometimes, because people's personal politics are directly related to their beliefs. And that is the key word there, beliefs.

I am a Catholic. That means that I believe in God, and that Jesus is His son. I believe it. See, I even capitalize "His." I probably have more faith in God than most people my age. But I don't hold it to be a fact. No one can. You cannot say, for a fact, that God exists, or that He doesn't, for that matter. And since no one knows for sure, people have developed different beliefs. And so what? What does it matter if someone else believes something else, especially when there isn't any proof that either one of them are right? There's no point in fighting about it. It's just stupid. I can't understand people who go to war in the name of God. Be it Christian or Muslim or whatever.

If you say that you believe man was created in the image of God, and you kill another man, aren't you just killing God? How exactly is that supposed to appease Him?

Religious wars leads to people, like Wah-Kee, saying all the problems in the world are because of religion. And then they go off on these ant-God rants. And that's just as bad. Look, people need their faith. They need to believe in something. But they also need to understand that there are people who have different beliefs that are no more or less valid than their own. Remember what faith means; it's belief in something without proof. I support my faith; my beliefs, but I would never mock or hurt anyone else for supporting theirs.

I guess I kind of got away from my original point, but this stuff has been weighing heavily on me for a long time and I really just couldn't take it anymore. It got to the point where even thinking about it made my chest feel tight and my throat dry up. I'll have some much funnier subject matter Wednesday, I promise. I just thought I'd pass along some things that I've come to realize other the years. Another thing I realized is when someone tells you that they are not a card-carrying member of a political group, what they actually mean is that their card hasn't been mailed to them yet.