Had my last shower with/from Albert today, and it was bittersweet.
He’s the person who has been giving me my weekly community showers at Rosewood Manor for the last three months or so, and I like him.
And not just because he’s the first man to touch my naked body in years.
No, it’s because I found him to be quite pleasant company. He told me about his life and his family in Montreal and his life in the Philippines and so on.
At first, he did most of the talking, and I am fine with that. I am happy to listen to someone else talk if they are interesting, and I find most people interesting because I am endlessly curious about other people’s lives. Lives unlike my own.
I’m crazy for hearing people’s perspectives so I can add them to my own internal model of reality. There is nobody alive who doesn’t have something to contribute to my understanding of life and the world.
Anyhow, I am glad to have my new grab bars, shower chair, and detachable shower head (the kind with a hose), and I am looking forward to being able to take a shower for the first time in two and a half years, but I will definitely miss Albert.
Life’s like that, isn’t it? Everything comes at a cost. Nothing is one hundred percent good. We are always weighing cost versus gain.
All we can really hope for is to trade up.
I have not tested my new shower equipment yet, even though it was installed on Wednesday and today is Friday.
To be honest, I was so preoccupied with my anxiety over having the installer dude here that I totally forgot to mentally prepare at all.
And right now I am going through my neophobia phase. When something new comes along, I sometimes need to let it just kinda sit there for a while in order to get used to it before I actually start using it.
It’s very Taurus of me, I know. We are notoriously conservative (in the emotional sense), even wacky freaky free spirits like me, and it can take a long time for us to warm up to anything new, even if it’s something we definitely want.
It’s pretty weird.
That’s why I have pieces of technology lying around that I tried once, did not instantly understand and/or like, and never touched them again.
I have a very cool waterproof bluetooth shower speaker sitting right in front of me that I tried for like five minutes to get to work, couldn’t figure it out, so I gave up and forgot all about it for literal years.
I have a very good, powerful massager with various heads, variable intensity and interval of vibrations, and even little programs of various vibrations that make up a whole session of massage.
Used it for a while. Lost track of the charging cord. Shrugged, forgot about it.
Heck, somewhere in this junk pile of a bedroom of mine is a self thrusting sex toy that I tried once, found the thrusting action kind of creepy, and never touched again.
And the same thing has happened with oh so many video games. I try them out, they don’t instantly grab me, so I return them.
I’m actually quite fickle.
But I am at least learning to cope with things like that. I know that when I get something new, I may have to force myself to use it the first few times in order to get used to it.
And that’s just sad.
More after the break.
Why would you do that to yourself?
Atheists puzzle the faithful.
To them, it seems like atheists voluntarily live in a world that is far colder and harsher and more hopeless than it needs to be.
And all in the name of some abstract sense of what is really “true”.
To the faithful, that does not seem to be a trade worth making at all.
To them, objective truth is not nearly as important as emotional truth. And religion is, ultimately, about people’s unmet emotional needs.
Feeling unloved? God loves you.
Feeling unsafe? God will protect you.
Feeling lonely? Jesus is always there by your side.
Feeling scared by that great big complicated world? God makes it simple again.
This is why faith – the belief in things without proof – is vitally important. It might seem to a chilly intellectual like myself that unfounded belief is lunacy, but to the faithful, belief without the need for evidence or proof is belief that cannot be taken away by the shifting sands of our thoughts and ideas.
And we must always remember that confidence that you can figure out what is real and what is illusion and thus create one’s own understanding of reality is not universal.
The very thought of heading out into those murky waters of doubt and uncertainty terrifies a lot of humanity because they have no faith in their ability to find their way out again and so, to them, that’s a recipe for drowning.
Or worse, getting lost and confused forever, without even knowing which way is up.
So to them, we intellectual liberal types standing out there in the swamps of intellectualism calling for them to come join us are sirens trying to lure them to their doom in a place where we can survive but they cannot.
And all for the chance of being marginally more “right”? Uh, no thanks.
Because to the majority of humanity, the ultimate capital-T Truth is not of paramount importance. What they value is whatever makes it easiest to get through life, whether it’s “really really real” or not.
They intuitively grasp that there are some things that it is better to believe because the benefits of belief are enormous and the costs are, to them, negligible
Now myself, I don’t see religious belief ever being an option for me.
But that does not preclude me from extending my compassion and understanding to the faithful and the pious.
We’re all in this together, folks.
And I would never deny someone whatever helps them make it through the day.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.