March 2020 archive

19
Mar
2020

What the Catholic church really needs to knock off.

categories: personal; word count: 417 words

Complaints of mine that I’ve managed to come up with during Quarantine and Chill:
· actually “deciding” which religion’s baptisms are valid and which are not
(they seem to have this peculiar thing against Mormon baptisms… like, who died and made you arbiter?)
· deciding whose marriages are “valid”, “that you can only have one”, and their stupid annulments
(how about you stay out of the marriages, or private lives, of people who are not Catholics, for one thing?)
· expecting that non-Catholics, especially non-Christians, adhere to these “marriage rules” to make it valid
(for instance, not going into a marriage “completely open to life” or placing limits… makes it invalid)
· making you go through nearly an entire school year’s worth of preparation if you “really want to get baptized” or come into the church as an adult (or anyone older than the age of… like, seven), which I’ve read the curriculum of and… the personal accounts of from a lot of people who have personally gone through this to completion, found that a lot of the actual classes are superfluous at best and that there could really be improvement for a lot of this, and that there is almost no flexibility in any of it adjusting for life circumstances
· that individuals with Celiac disease or liver problems get the short end of the stick
(the cracker has to have wheat, and the “blood of Christ” has to have alcohol in it, folks, or it’s “not valid”)
· that even in a mixed marriage, the kids have to be baptized Catholic, because Catholicism “has to win out”
(hey, remember how well that went in 2010 when Bub was never baptized Catholic? try that shit again, y’all)

This is just my short list of things that really bother me about the Catholic church, going along with the major problems that I have with it that make me all the more glad that I chose to… out myself in the manner that I did, resulting in me being dropped from the RCIA class roster at the end of the very first class that I took, the first, the last, and the only one. To this day, I still have absolutely no regrets about any of that, and to this day, I still do not want to convert to Catholicism, nor do I want either one of my children to have anything to do with the church such that I will not consent for them to have any involvement with it where it is needed.

18
Mar
2020

Imagine wanting to use Discord so badly…

categories: personal; word count: 357 words

(And this is relevant to this blog, because Discord is frequently used by gamers to text and voice chat.)

…that you come up with some form of fake ID so that you can use it, because your first account got banned when you were reported to Discord administrators for being under the age that you have to be (thirteen years of age or older) to use the chat program, as per COPPA rules. Remember that whole story that I’ve mentioned from time to time? Well, come to find out that the person that I, and one other person, had actually reported to Discord had actually been banned. He had been given fourteen days to prove to Discord that we weren’t lying when we reported him for being twelve years old, and he couldn’t, because… wait for it, he was twelve years old, under the age of thirteen, which you have to be over to legally use Discord because Discord adheres to COPPA. So he gets himself some fake ID, which is going to make reporting him a lot more difficult, and makes himself another account, and comes right back. I’m not even sure if reporting him again is going to be worth it since his birthday is coming up in several months unless he makes an absolute prat out of himself in the chat, because man, y’all, this kid is actually that determined. And I don’t know whether to be impressed, frightened, or both. Were any of us this way when we were pre-teens?

But was the Internet this way when we were this old? No, it wasn’t. Point made. Point absolutely made.

The impression that I get is that this kid’s parents just don’t care what he’s doing online because they seem to… I don’t know, take him at his word that everything he’s doing is okay, no, it’s fine, really. And this makes me want to watch everything that my own kids do online all the more, even though with both of them being autistic, I mean, I do that even more already than I would if both of them were neurotypical, so there’s that…

17
Mar
2020

Coronavirus pandemic and… not chill, much?

categories: personal; word count: 408 words

As of the time that I’m writing this, we have had two positive cases of coronavirus in my county. Both of them appear to be as a result of travelers coming back with it and then testing positive, and as soon as they realized that they might actually have it, they sought medical care and put themselves in quarantine. All of the school districts in this area announced on or around Sunday evening that they would extend their Spring Breaks for another week (for the ones that were on Spring Break from the 9th to the 13th), effectively granting another week of Spring Break from the 16th to the 20th. Some of the districts that are… a bit further away from here have chosen to go one week further out from that. The district that I am currently living in has not released any further word on that. But the state that I live in has suspended the requirement for standardized testing for all students that would normally be required to take it, as that would start to come up in a month or two. I do know that much. But they test the different students at different times depending on their grade levels, what the requirements are for each grade level, and whether or not they need to re-test to successfully “be passed up” to the next grade, so I’m wondering if this is on the heels of a bigger plan to “hunker down”, or if school for the rest of the scholastic year might actually be scrapped in the face of this.

Obviously (or, well, maybe not that obviously?), I’m in a “high risk” group, meaning that I would probably not be able to shrug off the coronavirus if I got it. I’m an asthmatic, and definitely not a mild one at that. I just came off of prednisone and am hoping that I can manage having shortened both the dose and duration of the burst that I finished taking. I may temporarily cease my inhaled steroid if we keep getting positive cases in this county, and especially if we get any in this city. So I need to take extra precautions to ensure that I do not catch this, especially if it does become extremely local, hope that others are prudent enough to do the same to protect individuals like me, and hope that I do not actually catch it. Because that would really suck…

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