A very loud man at the other end of the bar was, uh, being very loud at the other end of the bar. Three tidbits:

• When a fellow patron mentioned he was loud: “Hey, I’m Southern Baptist.  I can do whatever I want.”
• When his and his friend’s hookers dates arrived: “So do you want lumber or do you want a shrimp?”
• To no one in particular: “Do y’all got money in the stock market? I bet ya’ll on the internet.  That’s high dollar.”  (I thought he said “stock cars,” but my wife insists I misheard.  Her version makes more sense, but he seemed the kind of guy who’d jump from stock cars to the web, however that would work.)

The following comment from discussion thread for a Salon.com advice column is so good that I’m quoting it in full. Discussion thread is here. The original advice column—“Thou revealest too much!”—is here. (Hat tip to Chalice Chick for the link. Emphasis is mine.)  The point, while specifically about teenage sex ed—extends well beyond UUs problem retaining its youth into adulthood.  It applies to any crossing of healthy boundaries in any church: someone—first, whoever is closest—has to put that shit to an end.

I agree with the other letter writers who said that 1) these are probably Unitarians we’re talking about, and 2) the teacher with the poor boundaries may well have a personality disorder. Whereas people in a more conservative sort of church might not hesitate to shut down someone whose behavior is deemed inappropriate, many Unitarian Universalists tend to be more wary about judging the behavior of others–particularly that of fellow Unitarians.

I grew up in the Unitarian church. The *primary* reason I have no desire to attend as an adult is that as a child I was repeatedly subject/witness to inappropriate behavior by adults that was observed by other adults who failed to intervene. I felt unsafe and violated. Kids need and like boundaries (even as they test them). A sex education course for children shouldn’t be pornographic. Those kids are a captive audience for her inappropriate behavior. LW, do whatever you must to stop her. You will have to supply the boundaries for her. If she gets nasty when confronted and subsequently disrupts the class, relieve her of her teaching duties. I urge you to forget about tiptoeing around her in an effort to preserve “religious community.” The kids are more important than her right to exhibitionism.

— Unitarians Anonymous

Here’s another must-do quiz to add to Beliefnet’s excellent Belief-O-Matic quiz: What’s your theological worldview? It’s from a Christian perspective, so if you’re decidely not Christian or don’t have any Christian background (is that even possible in the US?), you’ll scratch your noggin over some of the questions, yet it had plenty of room for screaming liberal post-Christians like me. It’s a thorough one, so grab a fresh cup of coffee. My top three scores: 82% Emergent/Postmodern, 79% Classical Liberal, 68% Modern Liberal. (Hat tip.)

From Atlanta Unitarian: “When reason is forcefully appled to this meaning-making mechanism, the result is violence to the soul. Reason cuts like a knife, separating what in the soul is married. It reduces the soul to a slave, whose worth is no more than what can be objectively measured by the systems of economy or biology.  It is ironic that the great light of reason, liberator of humankind, is also capable of creating a kind of blindness, one that robs us of our deepest insight into ourselves.”

I’m not hating on iTunes, but they just don’t have everything you hear on Album 88 or Sirius Left of Center. eMusic charges $10 a month for 40 downloads a month—a quarter a song! If you buy more downloads, it just gets cheaper. Thirty second previews, just like iTunes. And if you end up not liking the song, it was just a quarter.

I’d been hurting for a couple of weeks. I only really noticed it when I was sitting down at the computer, so I figured it was something about the chair or how I was sitting or a new pair of jeans. Nothing to worry about.

Then my wife noticed that the boys looked bigger than they used to. Then they started to hurt more. Then I noticed one of them was bigger than it used to be, a lot bigger. Then they started to hurt a lot more.

I called to make an appointment that next morning. Could I come in in two weeks? No, I explained again, I think I have nut cancer, and I want to know when I will be coming in today.

My Primary Care was teaching most of the day, so they set me up with Dr. Chucktastic. He felt me up and asked if I’d had kids yet. That didn’t help. He gave me a referral to the radiology lab for a test the next week and mumbled something about how he expected something else would come out positive. That didn’t help either.

I followed him out the door to ask him about pain meds. Just take Advil, for the swelling. Okay then.

That was Monday. Wednesday morning I called in to ask for some pain meds. I had some 800mg Ibuprofen tablets lying around. I’d taken two of them that morning, and it didn’t make much of a dent. The nurse was upset. I’m not supposed to take 1600mg in a single dose. I’m not supposed to take them on an empty stomach. Am I sure I don’t have to go to the emergency room? Click to continue reading “Just practicing medicine, or How I didn’t get the nut cancer”