Bill's Notes

Via Francis at Eternity Road comes this link to "things a guy doesn't want to hear on a first date."

The things are:

* "My last boyfriend ..."
* "Do you mind if I take this call ..."
* "So how you feel about abortion ..."
* "And then I found this cute pair of sandals ..."
* "How do you feel about having a family ..."

Of course, these kinds of questions can be true about any gender. Men can mention ex-girlfriends, take cell phone calls, have ideological litmus tests, forget their out with a woman instead of the guys, and try to quickly determine a women's enthusiasm for child-bearing (not just immediate "practice").

Two women I briefly dated did the cell-phone thing to me, and I hated them for it. Someone who frequently takes cell phone calls on a date is saying, "You're just one of several focus points for my attention." Attention is one way we respect and honor other people. If you divide it consistently, you're being rude and disrespectful.

*****

To lighten things up, here are some exceptions to those first-date faux pas.

* "My last boyfriend ..."
When it's appropriate: "... left me a yacht in the breakup and tomorrow's supposed to be a perfect day for sailing. Would you like to go?"

* "Do you mind if I take this call ..."
When it's appropriate: "... it's my friend, Bambi. She said if I thought the mood is right, I should take you home to meet her. We like to share."

* "So how you feel about abortion ..."
When it's appropriate: Um, never.

* "And then I found this cute pair of sandals ..."
When it's appropriate: "... so I put them on the statue of David in Caesar's Palace in Atlantic City as a prank."

* "How do you feel about having a family ..."
When it's appropriate: After you've just fornicated on the first date without using birth control.

*****

At Another Monkey, my friend Harry discusses how he and his co-workers are coping with being laid off. To help cheer him up, I put the following in his comments:

My stages of grief depend on the situation. For job loss, they go like this:

1. You can't fire me — I fire you!

2. Those bastards fired me!

3. I'm still a totally worthy person. I am not what I do. I am a human being, not a human doing.

4. I'd look for a job, but what's the use? The world just turns indifferently to my hopes and dreams, and in the end, we all end up in the grave, to be forgotten.

5. All right, I'll send out some resumes. But not because I need a job to see myself as valuable.

6. Shit, I got hired. And I was just beginning to settle into being unemployed!

I'm sorry. The Pope has addressed a serious topic, which was European colonialism, and here I am making a joke in the title of this post. Terrible of me, I know. So let me get a little more serious.

The Catholic Church holds a wide variety of teachings that inevitably will make anyone uncomfortable, regardless of political affiliation. One of the easiest things to do is enlist a specific Catholic teaching against whoever your opponent of the moment is, while ignoring the Church's teaching against what makes you uncomfortable.

Chesterton said in Orthodoxy something along the lines of this: When people abandon the Church, it's not just the vices that get released, it's the virtues. Thus people grab this or that Christian virtue, and promote it at the expense of others. The result is an imbalance in the culture, which can occasionally become malignant. See the Church's teaching on caring for the poor as an act of mercy versus the totalizing construct of communism*.

Yet, even after the legacy of communism, the Church still teaches that the economy is for man, not man for the economy. It says the legacy of colonialism is a real thing, not a leftist fantasy, and that the church (little c) was implicated in colonialism. The Church shows concern about rich nations exploiting poor ones ... the concern for the poor is still there, but it's rooted in a broad-based morality and concern for the dignity of man, and for bringing individuals and human societies in a right relationship with God.

Those who cheer the Church's virtue of preference for the poor might quickly turn away when that virtue is put among another virtues.

For example, the Catholic Church teaches unequivocally that pre-marital and homosexual sex is always and in all cases a sin, that birth control eventually enervates a culture, that cooperating in the procurement of an abortion is not only a sin, but automatically excommunicates you from the Church (and may cost you your soul), and that civil authorities are obligated to legally ban pornography in order to protect fundamental human dignity. This Pope's first letter diagnosed sex as an essential part of the western "culture of death's" sickness.

By sin the church doesn't mean, "you are naughty and we arbitrarily say so because we are cosmic killjoys." It means, "if you are doing this, you are hurting yourself and your neighbors." It means, "What you're doing doesn't work, it won't satisfy you in the way you seek, and it won't help build a healthy society." Church teaching is always rooted in fundamental moral law and reason, and toward orienting us toward a right relationship with God, ourselves and our neighbors.

FWIW.

* I rewrote this sentence. Initially it contained references to left-liberalism and socialism, but it was unclear that I was referring to a series of progressively more extreme emphases on the virtue. But I took it out because I don't want to compare left-liberalism, which I consider in many forms to be quite reasonable, with something as murderous as communism, which is outside the realm of reason, IMHO.

This is a very old post, but I just discovered it. LOL.

My favorite line:

What: Don't say "I'll love you always and forever" until you can really stand behind your promise for the long haul
Why: Women tend to believe what you say and have airtight memories
When it's appropriate: just after you did a line of coke off your girlfriend's ass.