In which I lose every scrap of badass to something 1/1000th of my size

(Not for arachnophobes)


My mom, the badass she is, worked very diligently and very carefully to make sure I'd never be afraid of spiders. Since I spend a lot of time cooing over invertebrates, it seems she's succeeded (though after one awful incident involving a black widow and my favorite sweater, there are still some species I kill on sight). I'd rather pet a tarantula than a mouse, for instance, and I'm okay with spiders in the corners of my room, because they thin the mosquito population out come summer (and the fly population if a rat dies in the roof--yeah, I live on a farm. More on that later.). But last night, to my deepest embarrassment, I think I lost my badass invertebrate fan cred.

This being the 21st century, the solution for that is to blog about it. Here goes.

I'm at home. It's well after midnight. I'm getting ready to shower, and being vexed with the bathroom light because it isn't working too well. I go to the long-unused bathtub, and just as I turn the tap on, the biggest spider I've ever seen not out in the wilderness comes scooting out of the bath mat and makes for me. It's huge. It's black. I don't have my glasses on. The next instant, rusty water gushes out of the tap.

Rusty water looks a hell of a lot like blood. At least, it does at 12:30 am without your glasses on and a huge brown recluse/black widow/Shelob look-alike coming at you from the depths of the bathmat, with nothing but a pastel bathrobe between you and arachnid-inflicted eternity.

I uttered a wail of dispair and recoiled back against the toilet. (Spider: 1, Biologist: 0)The water gushed for a few moments, finally running clear. No enraged eight-legged war machine made its way up the edge of the tub to murder me for flooding its home. I waited a moment. Then the biologist took over. Oh no! I just killed a huge spider, and now I'll never find out what it was! So I went back to look.

Spider was still alive, clinging to the middle of the bathmat. I turned off the water. Then the spider and I looked at each other for a bit. I didn't want to get in there with it. I didn't want to kill it, because that would be admitting I was more scared of it than interested. But I didn't want to grab it with toilet paper because I didn't want it biting me through the toilet paper (an utterly unscientific concern, but it's almost one in the morning and I don't have glasses on). So I did the first thing to come to mind.

"MOMCOMESEETHESPIDERINTHETUBHOLYBALLSIT'SFREAKINGHUGE!

Then I ran away.

To get a paper cup to stick it in. Really. I thought I might be able to manage something with that and a bit of paper.

(Yeah, right. Spider: 10, Biologist: 0)

About five minutes later, I found out two things about my mother. Firstly, she is much more badass than I will ever hope to be. Secondly, that she really hates spiders.

She came out with that spider in a clear plastic cup, watching it with the sort of expression reserved for something that's begun to tick. I'm not sure, but I think the spider was cowering. Dad, who'd heard the whole commotion, looked at the spider and said, "Oh, that's not too bad. Remember that one in Florida that was this--" indicating a legspan of about twelve inches diameter "big?" It should be noted he further away from the spider than we did.

"I don't want to think about it," Mom snapped.

(Spider: 100, Biologist, Badass Mom, and Biologist With Doctorate: 0)

The spider turned out to be totally harmless. An inch across, but totally harmless.

So that is how a spider completely destroyed my self-image of a competent, non-squeamish human being. I shall drown my sorrow over the loss of my dignity by blowing virtual things up in a video game.

An important article

I just read this and it is amazing. It should be required reading, I think...

On a lighter note, happy Glorious 25th of May. Truth, Justice, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard Boiled Egg! Never forget the People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road.

Also I am informed that it is Geek Pride day. Happy that, too.

The Avengers (spoiler free)

Or why it's taken me so long to write about seeing the movie.

As it turns out, I saw it twice on the same day, with the end result that I felt I'd spent most of the day in the Marvel universe, and kept expecting to run into Thor or Hawkeye in my dormitory. (The next twenty-four hours were, accordingly, disappointing.) And, since I didn't get back from the second showing until after one in the morning, I spent most of the next day walking into trees and staring off into space, which wasn't conducive to writing a blog post.

And then there was the Week Of Procrastination.

So, I've finally made myself sit down and write about it. No more excuses. Hopefully.

Let's just start by saying Joss Whedon is brilliant. As one friend commented, he's really good at writing ensemble casts, so no one character gets excluded, and Avengers was no exception. Everyone gets character development, even Hawkeye and Black Widow, who didn't even have their own movies to work from. Heck, he even made me like the Hulk, who has always been one of my least favorite superheroes. (Oh, Bruce Banner and Tony Stark. You two are adorable when you're doing science together!) And, of course, there were the strong female characters. There's even a minor strong female character who doesn't die, and saves Fury at at least one point. Unfortunately, it doesn't pass the Bechdel test... but it does treat its female characters in such a way that I'm not going to complain too much about it.

And then there was Loki. Loki, who I was throughly prepared to sympathize with. I did. But he acted in such a way that I couldn't wait to see him lose. I still wanted to take him home and feed him cookies, though, despite the whole "I don't get the throne of Asgard so I'm going to have a tantrum and conquer Earth" thing. The nasty gendered insult he throws at Black Widow almost broke the sympathy thing (though I hope that the portrayal of the incident gets people to understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of the objectification and hatred entailed in such a situation. I'm looking at you, mikespamming cretins), but Tom Hiddleston managed to play him in such a way that even I still felt somewhat sympathetic to him. But this Loki is very definitely a different Loki than the one in Thor. The Loki in Thor is sympathetic, an angsty, unhappy teenager. This one has edges and is actually dangerous. You have to wonder what happened to him between the two movies.

The interactions between our heros are wonderful, and I am happy to report that Pepper Potts has recovered from her terrible characterization in Iron Man II (but then again, Joss Whedon). I highly recommend this movie for a bit of fun. I also recommend that you stay through ALL the credits. There's  an absolutely vital scene at the very end...

Procrastination

I am guilty of it. Funny thing is, when I'm procrastinating on one thing, I get lots of others done. For instance, this week I have:
- Declared my minor in History
- Gotten my classes for next quarter sorted
- Called the doctor
- Emailed my boss from last summer to see about jobs
- Various other administrative stuff
- Cleaned and packed my dishes from the house kitchen
- Cleaned my room
- Arranged a date to take my learner's permit test (again)
- Gone to fencing practice
- Admired the fact the bug bite on my knee swelled up to the size of a golf ball. Or maybe a ping pong ball, but you get the point. Procrastination.

Yeah. That list includes no homework. Oops. I have a midterm and a presentation (ohgod, gonna die...)  next week, and a hunk of (uncooperative) novel due, and this blog (erm), and I should probably start worrying about finals and moving out (AAAUUUUGH)... The problem with this method is that the important stuff still doesn't get done. I'm going to go have a temper tantrum in the corner, okay?

Enough of the complaining. Here, have a video of someone rapping about tea. It's about tea, so it almost redeems the entire genre of rap music.

Almost.

For Mother

I was going to avoid this. I know how you are about cards (waste of trees and money) and flowers (the cats eat them) and holidays like Mother's Day and Father's Day and anything that involves vast expenditures on little pieces of paper. And it isn't as if we're so bad at communicating that I have to set a special time of year just to say how much I appreciate you, because I sincerely hope that is clear every time we talk on the phone or come home. But among the myriad tributes to mothers I've seen on the internet today, there was one that galvanized me to write this. It wasn't for a good reason.

The tribute (a facebook status)  in question praised the mother for being a wonderful mother and teaching the girl in question to be a good wife and mother, to cook and clean, and to be a lover not a fighter, among other things.

Mama, this is something you most certainly never did.

And I don't think I can begin to describe exactly how incredibly grateful I am for that. You have never taught me how to be a 'good wife' or a 'good mother'. You taught me how to be a good person. You did not teach me how to cook or clean or say yes to the man I marry or to be a housewife. You taught me to be a fighter and a scholar and a vicious bitch. You taught me to stand up for people who are being picked on, to help people, to defend myself and to do what is right no matter how hard it is. You taught me that there were things more important than I was. You read me stories about tetanus and smallpox and leprosy and taught me how to channel my outrage at the injustice of the world so that I could actually do something about it. You taught me, unlike what that status said, to be a fighter, not just a lover, because that was what you were. You taught me how to deal with my own demons, guilt and self-hatred and blame.

You also taught me most of my dead baby jokes, and how to deal with a sucking chest wound and how to break into the house.

There's a reason I still think of myself as a girl. It's not because of the demeaning cultural norms that seek to disempower women by referring to them by juvenile terminology. It's because you've given me such an idea of what a woman is that I know I am not there yet; I do not have the confidence or the gravitas or the competence, not yet. But thanks to you, I will one day. Regardless of marital status or children. 

Why it's hard for me to like Literary Fiction

In class, we just finished reading a book called The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich, and I did not like it. If I am to be completely honest, I enjoyed the Team Fortress 2 (a supremely plotless, gory video game) fanfiction I read this week more than I did this accoladed work of American Literature (with the capitals, the capitals are necessary). Accordingly, I am somewhat concerned about my taste. Or lack thereof.

I write with the intention of entertaining. This means that I read a lot of speculative fiction, with explosions and monsters and dastardly villains and hopefully a good snog somewhere in there, because biology is important. But I do make an effort to read literature. I love Les Miserables and Shakespeare, because they're compelling works. They have lots of plot and characters I can fall in love with. So I am  prejudiced and perhaps not the best person to write a review of this. But it brought home quite firmly that, given a choice between this sort of literary writing and mean, moneygrubbing entertainment writing, I am better suited to the latter.

Plague of Doves is a series of short pieces (a glance in the back of the book will show them to have been published separately. In my opinion, they should have stayed that way--like doves, they are tolerable on their own or in pairs, but together they are tiresome), united by setting. Our stage is the fictional town of Pluto, North Dakota, and the adjoining reservation. The time is somewhere in the 1960s or 70s, and in 1911, a group of Ojibwe were lynched for the murder of a family (of which, of course, they are innocent). The collection of vignettes deals with the effects of this on the descendants of the victims and the perpetrators.

The problem is it doesn't. We get scraps from lives: some have little to do with the original event, and are little affected. There are other events to keep us interested in the meantime; a kidnapping, a cult, a murder, the theft of a violin. Some of these simply establish characters who step in and have an incidentally huge effect on the plot that we never even see onscreen. Even during the famous sewer tangent in Les Miserables, the plot goes on. One puts up with Hugo's exhaustive descriptions of the sewers of Paris because 1) it is fun to listen to Hugo being catty about Napoleon III and 2) Jean Valjean is in those sewers and you want to see him get out in one piece. In Plague of Doves, we are given new plots with very little to do with the others, and they only connect by the barest thread of coincidence. I found this frustrating.

The other thing is the role of coincidence. The characters all seem to be mind readers. They know what another is thinking just by looking at him or her, and then respond appropriately. Never do we have someone ask someone else who is staring profoundly into space if dinner disagreed with them; we receive plot-relevant statements, great revelations. Stylistically necessary, yes, but not very realistic.

We also have the role of strange reactions and overreactions. Our main character in one arc (Evelina) realizes she's a lesbian, and soon after her lover leaves. Evelina accordingly sinks into a depression and is admitted to the same mental institution as she was working in. It seemed far too much of a reaction to swallow easily, even with her history of falling tragically in love. A young (and I thought initially) incredibly moral judge recounts how he stepped over his lover's gravely bee-stung husband and nibbles at the honey of the broken hive, only being stung twice. I should think a sensible person would get the living hell away from a bee swarm, and that any sensible bee would react with extreme prejudice to something munching at its broken hive. Perhaps I mistake strange reactions for magical realism, of which there is a great deal in the book.

Then there is the sex. Sex is great. Sex is an attention grabber. Here, it is used to advance the plot and establish character development, and is described in such ways that make it seem as compelling as taking a dump. I found myself skipping those bits, because there was a certain limit to my tolerance in listening to the male characters worry that the bed would fall down, as they 'make their way toward bliss'.

The next problem is voice. I cannot stand the voice. It is passive. No, the bits of it that ought to be passive are active, and those that should be active, passive. We do not get to be in the room when the persecuted Marn murders her despicable husband with a syringe of snake venom while having sex. She tells us about it. But we hear every blow of a conversation about stamps between two old ladies.

When the voice discribes, it does it with a real will to poetry. Indeed, nothing but a metaphor will do if it may possibly fit. It is lyrical, sure, but I am somewhat allergic to figurative language, especially if it's in the middle of a important turning in the character's life or in the plot.

In the end, I am left befuddled. I cannot see how people enjoy this, and yet they do. It's prettily written--but there's too much of the prettiness and it seems put on after a while. It's profound, but the profundity seems to focus on how shitty people are, which I already knew and don't like being reminded of. It's a huge tapestry of lives...but I can bring myself to care about none of the characters and there's too little plot to compensate for that. Reading this book, I experienced much the same thing that I do when staring at a stripy canvas in an art museum--confusion and a general feeling that I'm doomed to wander through life a positive barbarian, unable to enjoy anything but the most obvious beauty that walks up and smacks me upside the helmeted head. In short, I don't get it. I suppose it's good in its genre, as it exemplifies every reason I avoid said genre.

Perhaps it's an acquired taste. Like mushrooms or tomatoes.

Tea

It seems I am incapable of doing a post that doesn't have a specific subject. I suppose it's because my life is really rather boring at the best of times. At the worst of times, I'm too busy to think of posting. (Like when studying for that Herpetology midterm last week. Which it's quite possible I failed.)

Anyway, this post is inspired by a blog post by Gail Carriger, one of my very favorite authors. I only wish I could be as supremely civilized as she, but I am in college and it sometimes seems that civilization and college are contradictory terms. (Yeah, someone was smoking pot in my bathroom. Again. Aiiiiiii....)

I, too, adore tea, though not in a terribly discerning manner. This is partly out of necessity, because I found out quite early on that I'm impressively allergic (or overreactive, not sure which) to something in coffee. It makes me parinoid and short tempered and then I don't sleep for three days afterward. Oh, and I get a migraine. It's Dad's genes--he does exactly the same thing, and so he introduced me to tea and how it ought to be made at a very young age. And since I am living in a situation where a lot of my friends do terrible, terrible things to their tea, I thought this necessary.

Yes. I confess. I'm a tea snob. A moderate unassuming mild-mannered snob, but still a snob. I drink black tea for preference, though sometimes green tea.

Firstly, the water must be filtered. The tap water around here has a ridiculous quantity of solutes in it, and this leads to a nasty white rime around the insides of the kettle, and then you get white bits in your tea, which is many kinds of NOT OKAY. The tap water also gives the tea a bitter flavor. Heating it in the dormitory microwave simply doesn't do the trick, firstly because everyone pops popcorn there and the tea always comes out with a skim of grease on the top and a distinct odor of fake butter, and secondly because telling when it's boiled is very difficult.

 The water must be heated to boiling. I have a friend who only heats the water to the temperature he wants the tea to be--lukewarm!--and then sticks the teabag in. It makes me twitch. I have another friend who sticks the teabag in the cold water in the cup and then microwaves the whole thing, which makes me cry and hide under the bed. It must be boiling when I put it in the cup. I'll use teabags (because looseleaf requires extra prep, and is impossible to use in the college cafeteria for a number of reasons), and I do sweeten the tea (trying to compensate for coffee intolerance here!)

Writing it down, I realize that I'm not nearly as snobbish as I could be about tea. I'll drink iced tea, even the sort from a bottle. But still, my requirements of a good cup of tea are enough to prevent me from getting to drink tea at college very often. The dining commons use tap water and don't always heat it to boiling and the tea provided is simply pathetic. Really, the closest thing I can get to good tea are chai lattes, which simply aren't the same thing at all!

All things considered, I'm really looking forward to moving into my own apartment, where I can heat the correct water to the correct temperature and stick milk and sugar in it to my heart's desire...and have my own tea set.

A Review of Thor (SPOILERS)

So I'm (hopefully) going to go see The Avengers this weekend. In light of this, I gave in and watched Thor last night.  Just so you know, there are going to be general spoilers, so if you're worried about that sort of thing, you have been warned.

I was kind of hesitant, because I'd heard that it was the weakest of the set of movies leading up to Avengers. I heard that the main plot was 'Scientist Chick meets Magic God, gives up Science', which was worrying for obvious reasons. I was expecting the sort of train-wreck that was Iron Man II (seriously, take all the character development from the first movie and throw it down the garbage disposal? And then take moderately-badass Pepper Potts and then render her incapable of running the company that she's basically been running because Tony Stark can't get his sorry steel butt in to work half the time? Puh-leeze!) except with more long-haired screaming men waving large hammers. I expected it to be a case of tough jock beats up treacherous little nerd. Honestly, I was only interested from a sense of obligation (because OHMIGODJOSSWHEDONAVENGERS?OMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD!) and the general sort of interest that any applicably-oriented individual might feel about watching long-haired screaming men waving large hammers.

The plot is simple. A group of scientists in the New Mexican desert are nearly turned into hamburger when the atmospheric anomaly that they are studying turns up on top of them. As if near-death were not enough, a guy falls out of the sky on top of their truck. This is Thor, who's just been booted out of Asgard because he went off and broke a hard-forged peace by going berserk on the Frost Giants' planet when their king called him a princess. His father, Odin, was accordingly unamused, stripped Thor of his powers and his right to the throne, and banished him. In a moment of creative manipulativeness, he chucks Thor's warhammer after him, with the promise that, if he is worthy, he will get both the hammer and his powers back.

While Thor rattles around on Earth, gets tased and tranquilized and hit with trucks and arrested, his brother Loki is putting a cunning plan into action. He enlists the Frost Giants to help him take control of Asgard and kill Thor (the rightful heir) and Odin. But Thor's buddies in Asgard come to Earth to get him back to foil Loki's plot. Shenanigans ensue.

It was fun. Despite the rather predictable plot, it was some of the most fun I've had in ages.  For one thing, it passed the Bechdel Test  within the first minute or so, which is not something I usually expect from a superhero movie. (Captain America, as much as I loved it, barely scraped by with one female character giving another a code-phrase. Iron Man, as best as I can recall, failed.) And it continued with this. No, my fellow scientists, our heroine does not renounce the ways of logic in favor of Chris Hemsworth's gleaming abs. Instead, she learns what she can, treats it like science, and incorporates it into her research so she can go looking for him after the movie ends. (He is pining for her in Asgard, she is looking for him--seem like a long-awaited reversal to anyone?) They don't just flop into bed for the sake of some fanservice--their relationship is a very early, tentative one, and mostly just plain sweet. One gets the impression that, if they do have sex in some future movie, it will mean something to the characters rather than just fulfilling the desires of the audience, which is a nice break from the norm. Also, she is far more active in initiating it than is usual, which is also really nice.

Most importantly, I was entranced by the characters. Honestly, I would have been perfectly content to watch the lot of them playing cards for 150 minutes. Loki stole the show, as you've probably heard from another hundred and fifty reviewers. I'm a huge sucker for sympathetic villains who think that they're doing the right thing, and Loki hit all my 'aaaawwwwww!' buttons. And I wound up liking Thor a lot more, too. It wasn't so much that he had a character arc as that the plot put him in new situations that showed the good aspects of his character. His relationship with Loki was wonderful and complicated, and by the end I wanted to take both of them home and feed them cookies and tell them it was all going to be fine.

The heroine, Jane Foster, was smart and ruthless and above all snarky. Sif, the goddess of war and one of Thor's buddies, was incredible fun to watch--I love it when a movie treats a female warrior like one of the guys and doesn't insist on sexualizing or weakening her. The rest of the supporting cast was fun and didn't get in the way too much (the requirements of a good supporting cast, if you think about it).

I am running out of time and must go to dinner, so I will wrap this up quickly. Thor is worth the time to watch. Indeed, I enjoyed it enormously more than the masterpiece of literature that we're reading for class, and I think that it was far more satisfying and less inclined to do things for the shock value than said book is. (Sorry professor!) It left me both happy and wanting more; I can't wait for Saturday now!

Labwork

When working in a laboratory, there are a couple of things one has to look out for, and a few offers you will regret taking up. The first is when someone at a microscope turns around and says, "Hey, wanna see something gross?" The person at the microscope has been there all day, looking at nasty things all day. If they think it's gross, it's really gross. I know. I've been that person. (Last time was a giant beetle with a member half its own body length. Being a biologist has made me appreciate how very simple and comfortable human sex is. Don't believe me? Look up Tasmanian Devils. Or cats.)

The other is cleaning the freezer.

We had a pair of high school students in our lab last summer. They were in a research mentorship program that let them get lab experience and conduct their own projects.  But they had yet to quite sort out the projects, and so the graduate student mentoring them did what any intelligent graduate student would do: set them to working on something that needed to be done, but he really didn't want to do. Which was cleaning the freezer.

The freezer in question was shared by not one, but two laboratories. Directly opposite this freezer was the sole microscope with a functional light in either laboratory.  At that point, I was doing a project that involved identifying a few hundred samples of insects and me and my little glass jars and wafting fumes of insect-infused ethanol had a front seat to the ensuing drama.

It started out normally enough. There were a lot of samples of grasses and seedheads, and these passed without comment.

"Dude! This is full of bugs!"

I looked up. "Oh. Yeah, those are ours."

Silence for a bit longer. Then one of the guys, looking puzzled, walked past me with a styrofoam tray of test tubes, all of which were filled with what looked like frozen pond water and duck weed.

A bit later, "Why is there a dead lizard in here?"

"Uh," I said. "I think it may be one of ours again. We found it in one of the pitfall traps we set for these," with a gesture to the bottled bugs, "and I guess someone decided to keep it."

"Oh," they said, and went back to work. I was rather envious. The most exciting thing that had happened on my project that day was a bright blue, utterly unidentifiable wasp.

Some time later, a sudden stillness behind me made me look up. The students were standing there, looking at something with identical bewildered expressions. I slid down from my stool to go look as well.

There was a snake in the freezer.

Neither lab studied snakes. The lab down the hall did, but that professor was very careful of his specimens and he studied live animals, not dead ones. We hadn't had a snake fall into any of our pitfall traps. Certainly not a snake that big; this one was a milk snake, at least two feet long. In short, there was no reason whatsoever that there should be a snake in the laboratory freezer.

"Yeah, that's...not one of ours," I said after a few moments.

"Let's just make sure it doesn't thaw," said the shorter of the two, and closed the door.

It turned out that one of the professors had found that snake dead on his driveway, and not knowing what else to do with it, had brought it in and popped it into the shared freezer. He took it with him after he saw it, and I don't think I ever found out what he did with it.

A bit later, one of my friends got a position in another lab, this one studying urchins. On her first day, she got to help clean out the freezer. She didn't have anything as interesting; she spent the day digging through frozen urchin gut contents, which is as appetizing as it sounds. What made it exciting was that the freezer was a walk-in one, and she departed that bright, sunny morning in mittens and a scarf.

Faith (eek!)

There are things that mildly cheese me off, like people walking slow in front of me or sudden loud noises, or the rotter across the quad who blasts his tasteless music at obscene levels during finals week or the fact the bathroom smelled like pot earlier this week and made me smell like pot afterwards, or people not doing their dishes or being late.

Then there are the things that make me chew on my keyboard with rage. There are a lot of these. Most are related to politics. If I were to address all of these, I would probably miss my next three classes and bore everyone to pieces, so I will refrain and talk about one thing that is rather central to a lot of the issues in US politics right now: religion. More accurately, my lack of one and the way it is perceived, and why that perception and the way right-wing leaders talk about it really pisses me off.

Firstly, I have really good reasons for being an agnostic. I wasn't always one. I won't go into the details of why exactly I lost my faith, but I did. And it was a loss. I do miss it sometimes, because it would be comforting, and those of my friends who are religious are very happy with it. It was not something I consciously chose to do.

When I say that my lack of faith wasn't a choice, I mean it. At this point in my life, I am completely unable to believe in a higher power. That may change; it changed in the past. But it's not like I woke up one morning and told myself, "I'm going to deny the existence of God because I want to".

Secondly, I'm not an atheist. I may say that when I'm arguing, because it's a shorter word and I'm not thinking straight because I'm mad, but atheism implies certainty; I am a scientist, and the existence of God is a hypothesis that cannot be empirically tested. It would involve just as much faith to say that God didn't exist as it would to believe She did. I'm not an agnostic because I can't make up my mind over whether I want to believe in God or not. It's simply being logical. (Aside: A lot of scientists believe in God, even us horrid biologists with our nasty Theory of Evolution. Darwin believed in God and thought of evolution as the way God had decided to make the world work.)

Thirdly, the fact that I do not belong to a faith does not mean that I am immoral, amoral or otherwise lacking in the conscience department. I have a conscience. It does not carry a big stick so much as it carries a 300 pound battleaxe. It just runs along a set of rules that don't require a central deity, and the lack of said deity does not mean that I am going to go around viciously savaging people with my axe-like wit and a grapefruit.

Not having faith isn't depressing, either. Whenever I need cheering up, I go outside and look at a tree, or a beetle or any other sort of living things. There are a lot of wonderful things in the world that I enjoy. There are a lot of really ugly things, too, but one can ignore them for a little while when looking at the wing of a butterfly or the play of shadows on the grass under a tree.

I'm happy with the way I am now. If I regain faith, it'll be on my own time, in my own way. It'll happen or it won't, and it's something personal to me. I hate people trying to convert me. I hate people telling me that I'm a bad person because I don't believe what they do, or that my lack of belief is an inherently bad thing. I hate people pitying me for that. I hate people trying to force these beliefs on me through religiously-based laws. (Saying 'God' in the Pledge of Allegiance bugged me. It was more or less lying because I was basically saying I thought He existed when I didn't, which I'm pretty sure is wrong whosever standpoint you look at it from.)

If someone does have faith, whatever it is, good. Enjoy it. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone and you're not trying to force it on me, it's none of my business, and I expect people to regard my lack of faith the same way.