I'm a bit worried about pyro. She's hasn't posted a peep since the 20th, and that isn't like her. Like me, yeah, I'm getting quite good at the extended disappearances from the lj scene. Mainly I just lurk, cause I spend so much time with computers at work now.

Speaking of computers, I've started talking to mine. Well, technically, I've been doing that for quite a while now. It's just that now it's gone beyond, "Come *on*, you bloody bastard, work this time, damnit!" to actual sort of semi-conversations. Yes, that's right, I've started imagining what the computer would say back. Today I even caught myself responding to a cd. *Sigh* I didn't realize that schizo-geeky-IT-is was a contagious mental disease. I've even caught myself enjoying Dilbert. *whimper* (...and User Friendly...) I fantasize about this really awesome comic strip I would draw, if I only I could draw people consistently and sans models. It would be basically about the weird little IT group of this rather small company, and all of the stupid users out there who annoy them. And the techies (that's techies, not Trekkies, get it straight, there is a difference. Sometimes.) are all anime and RPG fans too. So there's stuff like one of the girls (yes, there are girl techies) has to be reminded that casual Fridays does NOT extend to cosplay, so just put the Devil Hunter Yohko outfit back. No, NOT the Shampoo costume either, and don't even THINK about Naga, you couldn't pull off the laugh anyway. And that goes for you too Mr. Sailor Venus, don't think I don't see you hiding behind the mainframe!

[If you could just see the pictures in my head, you'd understand. Stupid computers. Can't even manage a proper neural interface.]

Let me see, what else. Oh yes, I was thinking about religion, and credulity. Specifically about the fact that my mother plopped her newest edition of Woman's World in front of me and told me that since I was "always reading stuff" I should read this. "This" was an excerpt from one of the umpteen-million versions of Chicken Soup for the Fill-in-the Blank Soul. It was a story about a little boy who was hit by a car and paralyzed. But then in the middle of the night a pretty nurse named Julia came to him and told him that he was going to walk again so long as he had faith. And so he believed and in the morning when the doctors came they found that he could walk. But, they claimed there was no nurse named Julia on staff. Until....*heavenly choirs* they found records indicating that twenty years previously a nurse there named Julia had been in a car crash that paralyzed her, and ultimately, killed her later that day. **Taaa-daaa!! Proof positive that angels exist and we should always believe!!

Now, the thing is, if I had found that self-same article written up in The Weekly World News (probably with the title "Real Life Touched By An Angel! Ghost Nurse Cures Paralyzed Tot! It's a Miracle, Doctors Exclaim!"), she'd have snorted or laughed or at most shaken her head and said something about how tabloids make everything up. But because it's in Chicken Soup for the ____ Soul, she believes that they carefully looked this up and made sure that the kid was real, and was paralyzed, and did recover, and there was a nurse Julia, and so forth. She doesn't think to herself, hey, you know, maybe the authors couldn't find any more good stories so they made some up, or strestched some, edited it for a television audience. Maybe, even if the facts of the story as presented were true there were some that got left out. Like they didn't have a nurse Julia, but they did have a nurse named Julie, or someone with the middle name of Julia. And, even if it is true, what does it teach me? That if I have faith, miracles can happen? Faith is believing in stuff, when there aren't any miracles. People who have to have continuous stories of people defying death and learning to walk again and seeing big feathery creatures surrounded by beams of light, don't have faith. If they had faith, they wouldn't need to see someone be instantaneously healed of bone cancer. They would know that it was the cancer itself that was a miracle. Who could imagine that something like that could exist in this world? They would look at themselves, and realize that *each* of us, from Hitler to Mother Teresa is a miracle. What are the odds that out of all the galaxies, all the stars, all the planets swinging round, that there would be one, even one place where the sun is not too far away and not too close, where there are no inconvenient asteroids rushing in at just the wrong time and destroying the planet at an inconvenient time, where there is hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and carbon, all managing to come together and form a being that is capable of some of the most soul-crushing evil ever thought of and also of the most spiritually profound good? When you consider the odds that there should ever even be such a thing as a humble little paramecium, and yet we take things like intelligence, and speech, and independence, and thumbs simply for granted....well, you understand why so many of the world's best mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists are convinced that there is a God. Is there any reason why there should be beauty in a fractal curve or mathematics in music? No. They are miracles. Miracles are things that don't need reasons.

God, I'm babbling, aren't I? This is rather embarassing. All I really wanted to say was that I talk to my computer, that my mother does not appreciate my taste in books (Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and Cowboy Bebop manga, currently), and that I miss pyro. Wherever you are.

I'll go to bed now.