Thoughts of a Twitterless Thinker 4/22/10

My son was rappelling this weekend and got quite a burn on two of his fingers. After school, I took him to the store to buy some more band-aids. He went in by himself and when he came back out, he just had to show me the packaging on the new band-aids. After pointing out tiny Braille bumps on the front of the package he said, “Look, Mom! Band-aids for deaf people!”

We read lots of short stories in my literature classes. On a recent test, one of my students couldn’t remember the author of a story we had just read.
The question was “The Night the Bed Fell” was written by ___________.”

He answered “John Edwards.”

So…I’m lying there at the dentist yesterday with my upper lip anchored somewhere near my nose, some contraption pushing down my lower lip and pulling my mouth wide in a grotesque grin, a block pushing my tongue to one side [and don’t we all know how cute the undersides of our tongues are,] and drool running out of my mouth. 

While I’m trying to avoid listening to a high-pitched drill squeal in my ear, I start thinking.  I’m thinking about how at least two people (my Woody Harrelson look-alike dentist and his assistant) who live in my small community now know what I look like with my face pulled in bizarre directions. Totally not cute. (I learned a long time ago, to never wear lipstick to the dentist or I’d be wearing it on my cheek on the way home.) (Here’s another parenthetical thought—my trip to the dentist meant a huge bowl of chocolate pudding for supper. Nothing else. Isn’t that grand?)

With all that face pulling and drill whining, I started wondering. Is going to the dentist in fact more humiliating than going to That Other Doctor? 

When my dentist meets me on the street and looks at my face, does he really see me with my face all distorted? And no matter how polished I might look that day, is he really remembering how my tongue kept flopping over so he had to restrain it with a dental device? Who would I rather run into downtown, the dentist, or That Other Doctor? A toss-up, for sure.


But on the bright side, having my face contorted and my teeth sandblasted is a lot less painful than moving!  By this time next month I will be cursing like my saintly mother because having moved into my new home, I will not have been able to find anything of importance.

I will be able to find my Iowa library card from 14 years ago (which I will promptly throw away, Janice!  Hee hee!) but not my contact lens case. My cross-stitch project from twelve years ago will be right on top of some box, but my bathrobe will be buried in either the storage unit or the spare room of the new house. Did I ever mention in at least eight or twelve previous posts that I hate moving?  I didn’t?  Well let me tell ya!

I really need to not be so vocal about my distaste for moving because my eleven-year old has begun mimicking me, word for word.  “I hate moving. Why do we have to? The new house is smaller.” 

Whether or not it really is smaller is up for debate. I say it is smaller, my husband says it is bigger. My current landlord’s wife says it is bigger, but my current landlord says it’s smaller. Some friends say, “Oh aren’t you going to be glad to have so much more room?” while others say, “It’s always an adjustment going to someplace smaller, isn’t it?”  

I think the verdict is that inside storage room such as closets and cupboards will be greatly diminished, but outside storage space will be greater. Translate: We’ll have a garage now!  So anytime during the next month if you come to this blog and see nothing but #@#$%$%&^%!!!!!!!!  you will know to quietly sneak back out and come back another day.

I’m going to really stick my neck out and say something daring. I think spring is finally here.  I don’t want to say it too loudly, lest the nature gods try to pull another April Fool’s Day trick.  But today, I looked at our lawn and saw yellow.  Not the normal yellow of Utah grass, but bright dandelion yellow. In addition to seeing yellow, it rained.  Not snowed. Rained. Shhh…

Have you ever had a close friend or relative that you love dearly, but with whom you disagree on almost everything?  I have a loved one like that. We disagree on politics, religion, life outlook, government and pretty much everything else. I think we both love tomatoes.  

The nice thing about having someone like this in my life, is that he causes me to think. Frequently he’ll make a comment that ignites my ire, but when I stop and take a look at what he’s saying, my viewpoint morphs somewhat. I won’t say that I change my views, but my views are tempered.

Last week he said that the more he knows about science, the more he knows there is no God.

That statement threw me, because the more I know about science and mathematics, the more I am convinced that there is a God, and that our universe was not accidentally formed. It only took me a brief layman’s study of Fibonacci numbers in nature and of Pascal’s triangle (and of Fibonacci numbers within Pascal’s triangle!) to know that if I was looking for logic to settle the question of whether or not God existed, I had my proof right there. Of course I had already believed spiritually, so believing logically was just icing.

What do you think? Do science and math lead you to question God’s existence, or to affirm it?

Update: I jinxed myself by mentioning spring! When I woke up this morning, it had snowed!