Posts by Deborah
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I read that whole thread at Pandagon. The stories are heartbreaking.
Thanks for the link, Stephen.
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A little schism is a fine Christian tradition.
But I didn't expect we would get to the reformation quite so quickly.
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The little girl is gorgeous, but most little kids are at age 3 or thereabouts, even white ones.
I am of course, including my own lily-white little moppets in that assessment. They were outrageously cute at age three.
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Great to hear from you, Tze Ming.
The little girl is gorgeous, but most little kids are at age 3 or thereabouts, even white ones. I have a sinking feeling of dread about her mother - I so hope that I am wrong.
I think that Jimmy's right - if she had been left at Wellington Railway Station we would be describing her as Asian. Nevertheless, the first I knew of her being a New Zealander of Chinese descent was when I saw her picture. So, a small step forward, maybe.
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Today was my last day at work.
I had coffee with one of our managers, and we swapped stories about Caesar's conquest of Gaul, Josephus' account of the Jewish war against the Romans, and children's culture. I did some filing, and then I had coffee with my husband. I followed that by some more filing, and then lunch with a close work friend. I passed a major project over to a colleague, did yet more filing, cleared my inbox, and deleted all my old documents.
I walked across to the supermarket and picked up a couple of bottles of wine, and we cracked them around 4pm. I continued filing.... and passed my last project back to my manager.
And I finished up with the usual Friday night drinks.
Today was a good day.
I'm going shopping on Monday.
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Rugby widow time again....
Have a nice time folks, and I'll see y'all in a month's time.
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I'm thinking of starting up a social networking site for introverts. You sign up and it sends a message to everyone you know saying "I vahnt to be ahlone, darlink".
This article was written for you, Jeremy Andrew.
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We have lived in Canberra, and it's not so bad, if you know where to go. There's some great bars and cafes, especially around small suburban shopping centres. Which exactly reinforces Craig's point - that all the design features of Canberra don't suit people at all. However the huge roads, the massive spaces around parliament, and the positioning of the parliament as a fortress in a hill, would make crowd control much easier.
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Yes, good luck. This is a great thing to be doing.
It would be good if the All Blacks donated the 'man of the match' prize to Women's Refuge, or Barnadoes, or or another agency that is working directly with families to stop violence, instead of the nice, safe, charities they normally choose.
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I can't get to the Great Blend event tonight - childcare issues. So instead, here is my story of my great leap into godlessness.
Actually, it wasn't so much of a great leap as a slow drift, until the final moment when I decided I could take the Catholic church no longer. I was born and bred a Catholic, went to convent schools, and went through all the rituals - baptism, confession, first communion, confirmation, even a full-scale nuptual mass. During my university years and my early working life I drifted in and out of the church, but I was questioning it more and more. I recall that when my husband and I went on our pre-marriage course (a pre-requisite for getting married in the church), I shocked the gatekeepers by asking if my fiance and I could share a room (we were living together, after all), and then upset them later on in a group discussion by saying that there really was no moral difference between the rhythm method, or Vatican roulette, and other methods of contraception.
A few years after we married, we both threw in our jobs, and started studying again. Sadly, in my first year back at university, we found that we would be unable to have children without medical intervention. At the same time, I was studying Philosophy, and at last, under the twin compulsions of rigorous analytic thinking and infertility, I found that I could simply believe no more.
But I kept on going to church. It was a community I had belonged to all my life, and I thought that I might just find some support there.
What a silly idea. I recall sitting at mass one week, weeping, and not a single person offered me any comfort, not even the priest.
Infertility was, and maybe still is, a problem that is very little talked about in the church, except to condemn all intervention as sinful (against god's will, apparently, not that I actually believed in any god whatsoever anymore).
The weeks before Christmas, known as Advent in the christian dispensation, can be very difficult for infertile people, because in church, the entire focus is on the expected birth of a child. So I decided to do something about getting the congregation to be aware of just how bloody awful it can be to long for a child, to not be able to have a child, and to be constantly reminded of impending birth. I rang up the person who was writing the prayers of intercession that week (that's the prayers where you ask god's intervention). Just about every week, the prayers mentioned a specific group of people who were facing difficulties - the unemployed, the sick, the terminally ill - and asked god's support for them. Naming the group was a way of reminding the wider congregation that as christians, they ought to be supporting them. I thought that it would be a good idea to offer a prayer asking for support for people who weren't able to have children. Surely, I thought, the local parish could at least do that.
Not a hope. There was a specious prayer about 'bearing the burdens that god gives to us', but the word and the concept of infertility were simply not mentioned. Just too damned out there, apparently.
"Well, f..k you," I thought. And I haven't been back since. (Other people's weddings and funerals excepted.)