Lake Erie didn't freeze. For the first time in the nearly 20 years I've lived here in Buffalo, there hasn't been a foot of snowfall at least once. And the snow has all melted in a few days. There should be so much more snow right now!

Sympathies and prayers (which I don't think you'll mind), for you and yours, hapax.

Anonymous, I agree with hapax, and am truly sorry you have to experience that. No one should, for any religious belief or lack thereof.

Nathaniel, Mmy has answered your question, here: http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2012/01/the-problem-of-proselytizing.html?cid=6a00d8341c582a53ef016760af8e41970b#comment-6a00d8341c582a53ef016760af8e41970b I am amazed at Mmy's patience.

Literata, thank you for this - I needed the reminder that change can be slow, and painful, and effortful.

http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0659.html Look at your man! Now look at me! It just came up, because I am a few days late reading....

The end of the Return of the King - when Frodo leaves for the Grey Havens, a broken hobbit. And again in the Appendix when Arwen dies. Always. I've probably read the books 5-10 times, and I always cry. I've noticed I cry much more easily since my grandmother died when I was 18. Since I'm in my 30s now, it's not a passing thing.

For those that want/need to talk about their parents/upbringing, may I recommend the Dysfunctional Families Day thread, which can be found on the front page at the moment? http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight

If the employer paid me well enough, I might just accept it as a part of employment. If I remember the story with the Charlottas correctly, the employer was a fluffy headed sweet older lady, and the name thing was an indulgence her maids gave her. Namingwise anecdote: One of the nuns in my high school decided, 2 years after she had me in her class, that my name was Cathy. (It is not Cathy, Catherine, or any variant thereof. It is as far from Cathy as is the name Margaret.) Once I realized that she mean me, I started answering to it on the infrequent occasions that she addressed me by it; it wasn't worth the fight with the deluded woman.

personal protective equipment - anything from latex gloves, to safety glasses, to a full body protection suit with its own air supply.

@Syfr: I'm curious: If you pray for assistance, do you believe God changes you, or changes something else? For example, say you're in school, praying for help on an exam; does God give you a boost to memory and concentration, or make the test easier, or what? Do you ever pray for help on things entirely outside your control (say, a hurricane headed for shore near where you live), and if so, does that work differently? Posted by: Froborr | Jun 30, 2011 at 01:09 PM Frobarr, I've never considered how prayer works. I do what I can, and I pray about the rest. It's a way for me to let go, to stop worry and obsessing over things outside of my control. I generally ask God to "take care" of something, and leave it to God to define what that means.

Okay, now that I am at home, and looking at my notes, I didn't answer some people from yesterday or the day before. Phoenix, on fellowship with non-Christians: I grew up Catholic? Catholics don't place much emphasis on fellowship. As far as I can tell fellowship is, um..., hanging out after church is over? Catholics don't really focus on that the same way Protestants seem to. It takes some getting used to! Also, what Alex Scott said at 3:18 PM yesterday. Ruth, it makes sense to treat stuff that has hurt you before with care. I wish you peace in whatever path you are on.

Leum, Both of those are crappy, crappy answers. They make it a problem with you, when it's not. If it's any consolation, I've never heard God talk to me. (I have a friend who hears God, but ... I don't really know what to say about that. He doesn't walk around proclaiming what God tells him, in fact, in the decades I've known him, has talked about it 2 times, and in terms like, "God talks to me," not what was actually said.) I've had specific responses to 2 prayers. Some of it is my prayers are phrased to leave a lot of room for God - "God, my grandmother is sick. Take care of her, please." Some of it is people find what they look for; in any situation where my prayers were answered, the answer could have been random chance, or traced along back to some event but nowhere along the trace does, "God told me to," exist. Mostly right now I try to remember to say thank you. I have a nice life right now, and my problems appear solvable & survivable, so really, I'm incredibly lucky, and should remember to give thanks. Somehow, I have faith now - it was a gift. Who knows if it will last? Would you be interested in hearing how it started? I should note that I'm headed for bed tonight, and probably won't be able to comment til tomorrow night when I get home from work.

Ruby, yeah. I rather imagine that after we're dead, different rules apply. So God my show up and say, "Hey, John, I exist. Would you like to talk? G'wan and ask all those questions, and I'll answer them. Or should I just leave you alone for a while longer?"

Hee, Phoenix, I was raised Catholic, and when I left the RCC, the two other churches I considered were UCC and Episcopalian. Missed the ritual, so I ended up Episcopalian. I would phrase it, "syfr believes God exists, but understands intellectually that there is no proof." I'm not sure that's really open to the idea that God may not exist; I believe with every fiber of my being that God does. At the same time, I laugh at myself for being a believing agnostic. [0] Either way, I remain a practicing Christian for various reasons, including: -I like the moral framework I have from it. -I feel its easier to be non-judgemental and good to other people if I see everyone else as a sibling, no more and no less. [1] -I made a commitment at 13. (I almost didn't get confirmed, and my religious parents would have supported me not getting confirmed.) This was not a case of getting confirmed because it was time to and to collect the presents. It was done to avoid sitting through the classes again, which is not a good reason, but the Grace came in the years after, so I do not regret it. "God draws straight with crooked lines." -I remade a commitment in a new church last Fall (Episcopalian - female priests - yay!). I've never thought of turning my life over to God as a way of making myself into some kind of puppet with God pulling the strings - that would be weird and wrong. It's more a framework of acceptance that the world is imperfect, that I am imperfect, that other people are imperfect, that whatever suffering I have has some meaning and some value, even if I can't see it when I am in the middle of it. That I can take something that hurts me very much, and there is still some good to be found, somehow, and I may even get to see that good before I die. [0] I seem to be able to split my emotions from my reasoning and deal with them separately, a skill learned in a hard school, and sometimes valuable. [1] I can be a very judgemental person.

U.C.C. is a very liberal denomination. Individual congregations may vary.

Phoenix, How do I reconcile having turned my life over to God completely with being responsible for my own life? Well, God doesn't show up and tell me what to do in any given situation, so I'm left trying to figure it out myself. And as someone said above this, I don't think God plans out our lives for us - syfr will get up at 6:30 Wednesday morning, decide not to eat breakfast, go into work, spend a hour doing data entry, and an hour analysing the data, then go run a few tests. She will have leftover pizza for lunch. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I do have some principles I try to follow: -Love your neighbor as yourself. (N.B. This means I have to take care of myself. No self-sacrifice and making myself miserable for the rest of my life to make someone else happy! It also means I should be as kind as possible to other people, even as I maintain my boundaries. This is a tough balancing act, not a simple prescription.) -Don't treat people as things (Granny Weatherwax) This means not screaming at someone I love when I am so hungry I feel hollow and my blood sugar is tanking. This means being generous with letting people into my lane. This means now that I have an actual income (Whoo, job!) I have to budget in for some charities I want to support. This means I do not work for Zippo, helping to make cigarette lighters, when I think smoking is a blight. At the same time as I believe whole-heartedly in God, I fully recognize that God may or may not exist. I made the conscious decision that my life was better for me believing in God. I can believe that there is a reason for all things that happen, and that at some point after I die, I will get an explanation. If there is nothing after I die, my body will feed the worms as it would anyway, and my soul will be non-existent, so it won't care either. And if I have done some good on this earth, made the world a better place, it will not matter what happens to me after. I believe that God is bigger than the Bible, that there are many paths to God, that my path is right for me, but that does not make it the right path for anyone else. I most emphatically don't believe that you have to be a Christian to get into Heaven. I also believe that if you told God to leave you alone, God would abide by your request. I now have an image of a God standing there, anxiously awaiting an atheist saying, [[sigh]], "Okay, God, okay. You can talk to me now...." I don't believe anyone is stuck in Hell for all eternity, and I think that if someone in Heaven misses someone who is not there, it's the kind of missing that has a sure reunion at the end of it - a looking-forward-to-reuniting sort of thing. But that is so temporal, and I don't think Heaven has temporality. So, I guess I think God and Heaven are so far beyond words and beyond our human experience that most of the ideas I have/have absorbed are pale shadows of the amazing awesomeness that is truly there.

(headed out to dinner; will ponder and reply later)

The (Christian) God that I believe in wants us to be happy and joyful and content with our lives. My life is wholly my own, my responsibility, but at the same time, I have turned it over completely, irrevokably, to Him/Her/It/Them... I do not think that God wants us to be unhappy, and in the missionary/teacher example, if being a missionary would make (generic) you unhappy, than I believe you ought not do it. Or only do it if you can be a missionary-teacher, and be happy with the teacher part of it. God wants me to grow and be the best me I can be. Best redheaded engineer I can be. Best friend to my friends I can be. Best knitter I can be. Best at being the unique combination of capabilities, talents, and flaws that make up me - the person that no one else can be because they are not me.

I realized something today; I crashed a bit like this after (one of) my undergraduate graduation(s) too, and I had the same job and same school for the following year after that. It's comforting that this is a common thread, and I'm doing much better today than yesterday, and yesterday than Sunday. Interesting to see...

Lampdevil, your free evenings maybe could be spent in constructive play which makes you happy?

Kit, it was the fear that I made the wrong choice. Both jobs were a reasonably good fit; one is a 40 mile drive away, is very hands-on, and has less pressure to perform. The other is closer (considering the cost of gas....), had more training, but the pressure to add to the company's bottom line was more explicit. Whichever one I chose I would have thought the other was better once I gave an acceptance. I don't like changes, and going from grad school back into the workforce is a big change - so many things can go wrong, so many things can get messed up - and I have a hard time trusting that I can do well, that things may turn out okay, that I made the right decision. All the stress from choosing last week threw off my eating and sleeping cycles; some of this is probably due to that. I've been stable and okay for 3-5 years now; it's hard on me to realize how tenuous that can be.

Thank you, Kit. I'm struggling now with a re-occurence of mine, set off by accepting a job. I've finished grad school, I need to eat, so I need to get a job, and I had to choose between 2 offers. What if I chose wrong? OMG, major life change, which always freaks me out! I can't seem to think anything will turn out okay or even good when I am like this, even as I recognize that I am way out of whack. (It's only been 3 days like this, and I am already medicated and have talk therapy support.) Reading this helped remind me that there are good things in life, that there will be good things in life, that what's going on in my head is not "the truth", that things will change and I get some say in how.

[[Hugs]] for Kristin.

I think of a tobacconist as someone who sells cigars. Small shop; storefront; specialty.