Tagged: women

I Thought I Caused the Formula Shortage…

It’s true. I have been feeling guilty. I thought I caused the formula shortage.

I remember the date, the same as you do. February 25th. It was the day after Russia attacked an area of Russia held by a people called Ukrainians for the past 30+ years.

Can you blame me? I had a baby due in a week or two and, in a moment of weakness, thought, “I remember the toilet paper run of ‘20. I’m not gonna be caught without formula when the results of last night formally play out in six months.”

So I rushed to Walmart and purchased $500 of diapers and formula.

Essentially walk-lunging down the main vein aisle between groceries and large women’s lingerie, I finally made it to the diaper section. I was sweating, not from the exercise, but from fright, as I realized I’d need a cart for six or so huge diaper boxes, sizes ranging from 1-4, and didn’t know whether I could trust leaving them alone whilst I went back to find one.

Cart in hand, diaper boxes crashing to the floor with a volume that drew far too much attention to the supposed clandestine operation, I then thought, “And formula. My wife’s production slowed around the 6 month point with A- and so I should grab some formula.”

When I saw the $50 a can price, I balked and said, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll grab two today and then just casually pick up another each time I visit. Wouldn’t want to do anything crazy.”

Making my way back to the front, I over-waved to the Somalis who looked at me as I struggled to keep the items balanced in the cart. “Hi. Yes. That’s right. Keep your heads covered, ladies. Faces, too. Nothing to see there, just like nothing to see here. I just realized I have a baby coming! Stupid American dad is all! Haha!” I jested.

All the while I knew that, supplies in hand—bird in the bush, you know—my child would be a veritable uberman to their already disadvantaged offspring.

Credit card passed the chip detector test, and I was out the door.

Only one time did a box fall off the cart on the bumpy trip to the car, a fact which none of the passing meth heads seemed to notice, and I eventually made it.

My tiny, but fuel efficient, Nissan Versa Note could barely hold all the goodies. The backseat was certainly employed for the proud duty of transporting size 2 & 3.

Fast forward several weeks, through me declaring we are in WW3, pivoting to the realization that “Ukraine is not a country”, and suddenly, after seeing celebrity gossip unseat war and rumors of war, I began to hear there was a infant formula shortage.

Imagine my guilt.

Scratch that. Imagine my first gasp of guilt.

“Huo! Did I do that?”

Then some more time went by. Nights were filled with either heavy, short-lived sleep or EMS flights toting around ailing patients. (I might point out for your edification that one was a “mums the word” victim of a stabbing in only his underwear, which I took as a friendly reminder to “Be nice to yo’ wife, Pete…”)

But today the headlines got me again. So I googled it. What is causing the shortage, I wondered? Me?

The answer? Trump.

Lol. Or that’s what The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson had to say. (Babylon Bee too.)

Whatever.

The important thing is—still perfect.

I have yet to make a mistake.

One Fruitful (Hear: “Motivational”) Christian Perspective on Hegel’s “The ‘State’ as ‘Rational Life of Self-Conscious Freedom’”

Christians can read Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel fruitfully, if we downgrade slightly Hegel’s “belief” in the State as “self-knowing” to a “for fun, guys, let’s contemplate what religion looks like to the State if the State, itself, was the perfect being. The highest being.” (You may want to bookmark this one. It’s odd enough that you’ll need time to think it through for yourself.)

This downgrade must be made by the Christian, because otherwise Hegel actually competes with Moses, John and the others behind the Bible. And as far as that competition would be concerned, Hegel obviously loses because he does not promise eternal life, like the Bible writer’s do.

But! But, subsequent to the downgrade, Hegel’s conception of the State as a “concrete, self-aware being” is intriguing and can be useful to our Christian labors. How, you ask? Here’s how.

I haven’t been able find a reason to join a church. I haven’t. As most of you know, I grew up in church, left when I left for college, then moved away to the AF and from Christianity, and then ended up at a Christian seminary in a master’s program. While there, and just before there, I joined a black church, but the cultural divide was so great that it really doesn’t count as being a church member. The situation would be more accurately described by saying that both the real church members and I merely filled the role of “safe, outside consultants”.

Well, I’ve got a family now; there’ll be a grand total of three, not two, kids here in a matter of days. And I have a fourth working out her salvation elsewhere. And I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, that I have the Holy Spirit in me, that all should be done for the glory of God, and so I want to continue down the Christian way. But I struggle with the church membership bit. And I know I’m not alone. We all struggle with it, Christians and non-believers. Why join a church?

Well, here’s where Hegel’s modified look at the State comes in. If the State were this perfect being, then necessarily in our belief-in-this-being’s-perfection, we’d naturally agree with his, the State’s, perfect judgement. And on the matter of church membership, the State would encourage it.

Why? Because in the behavior of citizens being members of the local church (no matter the particular denominations etc.) the citizens are essentially “buying into” or “leaning into” or “doubling down on” their belief in the State.

Now, Hegel never mentions what I’m about to, but by my thinking the following runs through his thinking like a vein.

The idea here in this post, the simplified, fruitful version if Hegel’s idea, is not more complicated than to say without strong activity in the small institutions of the State (nation) by citizens, the big or overall institution (the nation) cannot be made as good as it could be made. Of course, underscoring this concept—and hopefully made clear by the post title’s “One Christian Perspective”—is the belief that the church is more than just a “small institution by which to make perfect the State.” What Christian reads the Bible and thinks “Oh! I get it. It’s like what Hegel said!”? But to a man of action like myself, the fact that this type of thinking moves me up from the comfort of the couch is the important part.

Would it move you up from the couch, unchurched Christian? Love of nation as the reason to stick out the undesirable parts of church membership?

If so, don’t tell me in the comments. Instead, look for me and my “bleed on the flag to keep the stripes red” love of country in church this weekend.

Found: A Tale of Unexpected Reunion

“Yeah, housekeepers don’t really keep anything like that. Most people wouldn’t drive back for a sock,” I heard the receptionist reply to me, damningly, over the phone.

“But I’m a regular. It’d be no trouble for me,” I retorted unthinkingly.

“Well, they wouldn’t know that,” she continued, unmoved. Then, to be nice, “So don’t forget your underwear next time either, cause they’ll pitch that too, haha!”

“Haha. That’s a deal,” I replied in kind, though maliciously pouting on the inside. See, I knew all about dirty necrophiliac hotel housekeepers. Throw forgotten socks and underwear away? Right. Sure. If by “throw away” she meant, “sniffed every ounce of man scent out of them while dreaming of someday being friends with George Clooney,” then I could believe they “threw them away.”

I wasn’t about to cry, but I did hold back a torrent of emotion. Frustration and disbelief being the order of the day. How could I—I, Pete Deakon!—forget one of the greatest socks ever assembled on this side of heaven in my hotel room? Phone chargers and loose change, that’s my calling card. Not one of the best socks ever.

Its warmth was unmatched. Its thickness, divine. And when my foot first entered it, I don’t mean each time, I mean I remember the first time I put it on, I swear I saw the face of Jesus.

But now it was gone.

How many times could I look in all the places it could’ve run off to? I triple checked the drawer. I checked both the washer and the dryer at least four times—nothing. I checked my t-shirts. Sometimes, as you know, a sock has been known to get *inside* the garment and I’m not just talking polyester gym wear. Even cotton shirts have been known to swallow a sock or two.

Still nothing.

Days went by.

Every time I passed my suitcase—the offending article—I’d nonchalantly open the lid and double-check what was inside. I mean, surely I wasn’t expecting to find anything, especially after so many days and so much effort.

Late last night, however, a novel angle came to mind. I remembered that my wife, at random, scoops up my clothes from the foot of the bed and unthinkingly—I won’t say with evil intent—puts them in her laundry basket.

“Eureka!” I told myself. “That’s got to be it.”

And rather than get out of bed and look right then and there, I savored the thought like only I know how, and slept peaceably until the morning.

“Fart,” I said, hands mingling with bras and who knows what other odd kinds of accoutrements the woman punishes the Maytag man with.

Was there no end to my pain?!

The hour had become late; if I didn’t get going now, I wouldn’t be able to capitalize on a quiet morning that spontaneously bestowed itself on this overworked—an apparently victim of spiritual warfare—father of three, going on four.

I opened the sock drawer to pick out my underwear and socks. There it was—the evidence that I was without. One sock—unmated.

I thought, “I will never again find a sock to replace these.” I was now talking aloud to myself, “These were the best socks Cabelas ever sold. They don’t even have them anymore. Fuck Bass Pro.”

I reached for a pair of underwear.

What is shorter than “instantly”, dear reader?

Seriously. A second is shorter than a minute. A moment is shorter than a second—some lovey-dovey movie taught me that. And I have to believe an instant is shorter than a second. But what I need to describe is an even shorter amount of time.

A spark.

I mean that in the time it takes to feel a spark, I knew something was different about the pair of underwear I was trying to pull up. It had undue thickness and, again, as quick as a spark, I knew it was heavy—too heavy. I mean, I wasn’t grabbing one of my “off-the-hangar-at-Macy’s-one-pair-only-Tommy-Hilfiger-I-think-they-count-as-MAGA-colors” pairs of 100% cotton underwear. I was touching a newer—and nearly ethereal—pair of Hanes—out of a 5 pack.

As gravity worked against me, all in this single spark of time, I squeezed all the harder and noticed that my fingers were kept separate by some material, some seemingly hidden, spongey, like the thickest of wools-

“My sock!!!”

Picture the blur that is the Guatemalan daycare kids’ hands as they open the Christmas gifts that your high school social studies class got them, picture that and amplify it by every color in the rainbow and every shade of glitter.

Then pause.

These moments don’t happen very often, and at my age, they won’t likely happen very many more times. So I thought to myself, “Let’s not rush things, baby. I know you’re in there. Let me just get my camera quick.”

Long story short, I took four pictures, in sequence, as a time capsule, and sent them to my wife. My final text taunted her to try harder next time, if she really wants to hide my sock from me.

As I’ve been writing this, I know she texted me back, but I won’t check yet—not just yet. These moments—bliss—do not last much longer than a spark, so I’m gonna hold onto this one just a little bit longer.

Lemme Tell Ya What’s Stupid

You want to know what’s stupid? Using visual aids or graphics to describe COVID-19.

You want to know what’s stupid? Boosted pro-vaxxers, who finally got it and now say, “This time everyone’s gonna get this s—-!”

You want to know what’s stupid? Self-policing mask usage/fit.

You want to know what’s stupid? Children declaring that they don’t want to get “COVID”.

You want to know what’s stupid? Adults feeling ashamed for getting COVID.

You want to know what’s stupid? Variants.

You want to know what’s stupider? Sub-variants.

You want to know what’s stupid? Saying “He/she/they died of COVID.”

You want to know what’s stupid? Fearing death.

You want to know what’s stupid? Fear.

You want to know what’s stupid? Pandemics.

You want to know what’s stupid? Buying and using a home test whose result you know isn’t going to be definitive in your eyes.

You want to know what’s stupid? Signs above sinks that read, “Wash your hands for 20 secs.”

You want to know what’s stupid? Using your eyes to read a test to discover if you feel sick in your body.

You want to know what’s stupid? Using short animated videos to explain/defend/justify the need to lockdown.

You want to know what’s stupid? Bubbles.

You want to know what’s stupid? Worrying.

You want to know what’s stupid? Telling a child to worry.

You want to know what’s stupid? Mankind testing animals for COVID.

You want to know what’s stupid? Restricting travel during a pandemic.

You want to know what’s stupid? Runs on toilet paper.

You want to know what’s stupid? Emails explaining COVID plans that may change.

You want to know what’s stupid? Feeling like you can (and should) do something to help during a pandemic—like explaining things in emails.

You want to know what’s stupid? Email pronouncements that describe the last two years without using the word “stupid”.

This hasn’t been interesting, strange, complicated, challenging, scary, wild, or any other of the many safe-for-work adjectives.

Lemme tell ya what’s stupid. The last two years—that’s what.

Friday Thoughts

My daughter, A-, not H-, is about 16 months old and as I tried to help the wife by finishing up the infant’s laundry, I saw once again that there were entirely too many articles of clothing in her dresser. By the time I got done sorting out everything that was too small for storage, and re-folding everything that is her size, I had the thought, “I have, on this day, touched every piece of my daughter’s clothing.”

****

My step-son, just now, reheated his chocolate mousse pie slice in the microwave. Just imagine it. Last night he saw the lady pull two chocolate mousse pies, a lemon meringue pie, and a pumpkin pie from the fridge, not to mention we were given the option of taking home an apple pie, a blueberry pie or another pumpkin pie that were over on the counter (room temperature). Yet, today when it came time to finish the second abnormally large, special-for-the-day piece of leftover pie—still topped with whip cream and all—he turned into a mindless robot and acted out, “Food from fridge must be reheated.”

****

Do any other husbands and fathers ever find that they ask a question of their family members and in return receive an answer—a clearly-worded answer—which is ultimately the exact opposite of the answer the son/wife/daughter states that they had in mind after further clarification? “Is the dishwasher clean?” “Yes.” Door opens. “Looks pretty dirty.” “Oh, I meant ‘no’.”

****

My other daughter, H-, was not feeling good enough to FaceTime last night. But she was able to send her Christmas list.

****

And, finally, politics. I finished the guided reading portion of Kant in my Great Books of the Western World set this morning. Next up is John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill is the one who advocated for universal (unqualified) suffrage—the first one. 1861. Let’s us 2021 Americans recall that people—essentially all people ever prior to 1861, and this means many people still alive today who are not us—did not want everyone to vote. In short, for most of human history it’s safe to say that all people feared mob rule. Put another way, let’s recall that the idea that “mob rule is to be feared” is a problem that has not been abated by universal suffrage.

****

Movie news: If you need another nod to get you to sit through 2019’s subtitled, “Parasite,” here it is.

On The Exalted Teaching of Native American Buffalo Carcass Use and Anthropocene Anxieties

In the realm of par exemplar scenes of heavenly and harmonious human life on Earth, hardly any surpass the Native American’s total use of the American Buffalo carcass. Seriously. From grade school through college, no teacher of mine could avoid using this example to illuminate my classmate’s and I’s young, dim minds while lifting up the poor Native Americans as the truly perfect earth-inhabitants, despite simultaneously being the unfortunately (and remarkably) trusting foes of the white man and his futuristic ideas of prosperity.

I mean, the fat from the buffalo was even used exhaustively. And all the bones! Even the organs were put to good use!

(I say the following soberly for affect.) Their total use of the buffalo carcass was amazing, simply amazing.

Here’s my question: Why isn’t the West’s growing and seeming total use of the Earth viewed as just as noteworthy? Isn’t the use of coal and other fossil fuels (and now wind and solar and more) a perfectly matching analogy, down to the quark? If not, then what’s your problem with the analogy? That your own mind lacks the ability to process the scale of “time”?

Maybe you would call my attention to landfills? So we have landfills today. Didn’t the Native American have to set aside some part of the buffalo before attending to it? One thing at a time, like?

Or maybe it’s deeper. For instance, do you, when you imagine these conquered gods besides their bloody victims, picture that they developed this lofty and perfect total use of the buffalo carcass in one post-hunt pow-wow? Or do you give it some time to develop into the behavior that teachers exalt today?

My intention here is to use this comparison to reveal that your problem with life is that you’re afraid that we’re inventing problems too difficult for us to solve, in our quest for prosperity, while acknowledging that on a small scale we perfectly solved our problems.

Put shorter: You believe we can’t solve problems.

In a word, you’re depressed.

It’s not that I’m not wrong for using everything I can get my hands on to gain whatever perceived advantage there is in this life. It’s that you’re simply depressed and hopeless.

Look around you. Focus. Life goes on. You can’t stop it. Neither can I. So chin up. Put your oar in the water. And cut the Henny-Penny crap.

Herd Immunity Defined

In the podcast episode linked here: Uncommon Knowledge, you’ll hear an excellent episode about the pandemic.

Two key points: Herd Immunity is defined as when you spread the virus to one person or less—not some miraculous moment when a community is completely free of the disease.

Secondly, the interviewee preaches harder than any actual sermon I’ve heard in years and years and years—and he doesn’t even raise his voice (nor is he a preacher). He says that all the folks claiming to want to protect the poor, the elderly, and the children in pre-pandemic times had their chance to shine during the pandemic—and blew it. Those groups have all suffered the most because of the lockdowns. (If you’re not seeing the connection, try, the people who were going to stay employed during lockdown were all in favor of it, no matter who said what about how negatively it would effect the poor, the elderly, and the children of the world. Way to go, hypocrites!)

Okay. I feel like this second point may turn-off some possible listeners, so I want to be clear. The doctor guy didn’t rub it in anyone’s faces or anything. He’s compelling throughout. I rub it in their faces because I am under the stress that we all are this week as we see what happens to our co-workers come Nov. 1.

Midwestern, Educated, Guilty Perspective About The Pandemic

I transported a COVID patient last night. Besides the clinicians wearing a bit extra PPE, and a few extra considerations on the transport being in play, the event is now routine. But since my last post describing how the disease couldn’t even have existed, much less been considered as a pandemic, until the tools and understanding to identify—for starters—the element “oxygen” were developed, I had some extra time to consider what I was, in fact, implying. Since taking this time, I want to share my conclusion.

My guilty conclusion is: I don’t want the pandemic to end.

Hear me: as a future Gospel preacher, I want the pandemic to end. I want to go back to elementary language and thought. I want everything to be salt and light, not “sodium chloride” and “electromagnetic radiation within the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is perceived by the human eye”. As a future Gospel preacher, this return to simplicity would make preaching the Gospel simple. Folks would intuitively know that they knew nothing. And with that fact in agreement, we’d be on our way to life-everlasting.

But as a modern man, a man having never come close to “going without”, I have to confess that I don’t want the pandemic to end. Put another way, the pandemic, lethal as it is to some, is only here because of our collective knowledge—just like McDonald’s and Little Caesar’s. Or maybe, powered, heavier than air flight, is a better example of our prowess.

I’m not talking about some “for every good there is a bad” yin-yang nonsense. I’m just stating that anytime “pre-oxygen” would surely be more difficult living than today. We know categorically that anywhere on the globe today that is “pre-oxygen” (there are many, many cultures alive today that have no idea what oxygen is—I’m feeling pretty ignorant myself these days on the subject) is likewise living in conditions that precipitate things like raffles to come to America.

Analogy: Since really beginning to read, I have read some super depressing literature. But I wouldn’t trade literacy for illiteracy.

Keep in mind, no one should have to wear a mask to live, neither should they have to get vaccinated to work. These are crimes against humanity and those in charge will answer for them someday.

But if part of watching Captain Kirk travel the distance from “my mind” to “space” is 728,000 American deaths, then I say so be it. There are worse things than death. And there are better ways of life.

How Would The Bible’s Authors Describe COVID Deaths?

I am so tired of Christians talking about the vaccine and politics and the so-called biblical response to the pandemic and its lunacy. One specific thing that wears me out is the use of the acronym “COVID”.

Did you know the writings that comprise the Bible contain precisely zero acronyms? In meteorological lingo, this mean acronyms are a zero-chance event in the Bible, much like rain on a cloudless afternoon.

Now, the men who preach the Bible today, should, on some level, believe they are called by the LORD to speak his words. On some level, they believe they are speaking divine utterances—not to be added to recorded scripture—but holy/separate speech nonetheless. And so one clear way I use to discern whether the preacher is actually called, or more to the point, whether his sermons contain divine truth, is his use of acronyms.

With this discernment tool, I have found myself stressing to friends and family (in my efforts to test-the-waters of preaching and see how it might look in my future), “People don’t die of COVID. They die because they can’t breathe. We all need to just tell the truth. Do you see how this actually makes you feel different?” I then really rev my engines and continue, “If you say ‘people are dying because they cannot breathe’ then the response at once changes from, ‘we’re in a pandemic,’ or, ‘well, were they vaccinated?’ to, ‘That sounds horrible. Were they in pain?’ And the like. Do you see? There’s an instant humanity-element added. It’s like hopping in a car and heading directly to the room of the diseased person’s grieving family members if we simply lose the acronym. ‘Died of COVID’. Puuh. They died because they couldn’t breathe anymore.”

Okay. So I wanted to likewise sound off this kind of thinking on this blog, but I knew that I was partially talking outta my arse. And so I then took to Chrome with a search of, “how do people die from COVID?” in order to be sure I wasn’t too far off the beaten path.

You should try to find the answer yourself. That’s my first recommendation. It’s actually a tricky “search” to process. Most results are about “how many people die of COVID?” and not our question pertaining to particulars. In any case, see for yourself. Learning facts is important. We’re all altering our entire life over an acronym and we should at least know what the trouble actually is.

Truth be told, before I searched for this question, I searched for “how do people die of AIDS?” The savvy reader may see what my mind was doing. I was taking one acronym and clarifying how “it” (AIDS) was used in our vocabulary and killing people, and then seeing if the answer would help me here.

Short answer: AIDS kills indirectly. Just as we all always have known. You don’t run out of breath from AIDS, you run out of breath from some other disease that was able to take such drastic effect in your defenseless body because AIDS had removed your body’s defenses. And of course with AIDS we’re not just talking breathing problems.

Is COVID the same? In short: no. COVID kills someone by an oxygen problem. Given the many ways the body/blood interact with oxygen and need oxygen, the death may be any number of things. Maybe you can’t breathe, maybe your heart stops, or many any number of other organ failures occur. (This is a very general, but accurate, summary.) So let’s go back to Bible times.

Any available pool of men from which to choose to write the books that became the Bible didn’t know—couldn’t possibly have known—how air is something that can be further subdivided. There was air, there was no air, and then there was probably “bad air”.

(Stick with me. I’m driving it home soon.)

So the authors of our text could not have said, “It’s a lack of oxygen” that killed him. It’s not that the Hebrew/Greek didn’t have a word for oxygen, it’s that that level of knowledge of life on earth and the physical atmosphere was years off from being discovered. Nobody, not in any language, had a word for the particular element we mean by the word oxygen.

I imagine if they were around death a lot, they could tell the difference between what we may call “couldn’t breathe” and “heart attack”, because the obvious symptoms are considerably different. But they certainly couldn’t see (certainly couldn’t communicate) that a “heart attack” driven by lack of “oxygen” was different from a “heart attack” driven by a blockage that a two-thousand year later “cath lab” could’ve cleared right up.

Reader, pay attention here. My post’s question has altered at this point. It’s not, “How would the Bible’s authors describe COVID deaths?” (Answer: they couldn’t do it), it’s now, “Would the Bible’s authors have thought we were in the midst of a pandemic (plague-type situation)?”

And this question need not be answered by me here. My belief is that it need be answered by you, faithful breather.

What to do?

Take away the acronym. It’s certainly uninspired, and it definitely contributes to inhumane living conditions. It may even be obscuring the truth. But that’s for you to decide; that’s for us to decide as oxygen needing people. (Or do we just need air?)

(Let us pray.)