Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Apr 17 2002

I have been getting the following message a lot wh…

I have been getting the following message a lot whenever I try to access my yahoo mailbox:

There was a problem accessing your mailbox.

This is most likely a temporary problem that should resolve itself within 10 minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you.

This never happened before. It only started when Yahoo began their “premium” service, i.e., “Let’s see if we can browbeat our gullible users into forking over more money to us”. Are they hoping people will think “Hmmm, my ordinary Yahoo service is fucked up; maybe I should sign up for the premium service!”? Isn’t that like the Far Side cartoon where the window-glass company is throwing bricks with ads attached through people’s windows? Has the average IQ in the US dropped to such a degree that this kind of business policy actually makes sense? No, don’t answer that. It would be too depressing.

A community church near Houston, Texas, wants permission to use some of my photos for a brochure. I wonder which church it is. I spent a few of my childhood years in the area, and my parents’ tendency to switch churches every few months resulted in a familiarity with several churches and many different denominations. We could go to a Baptist church for a few months, and then suddenly switch to a Presbyterian, and then to a Methodist, or Anglican, Episcopal, or whatever. I would go from one Sunday School to another, never really getting to know any of the kids. It was a theme of my childhood, actually, since we moved around so much, just on a smaller time scale. Eventually I became conversant in many different kinds of church ceremonies, i.e., when to kneel, when to sing, when when I could get away with doodling on the program notes for lengthy periods of time during the sermon. I didn’t pay much attention to the sermons because if I had I would just have wanted to respond to the pastor’s claims, but I knew from confirmation class that discussion was frowned upon. We were God’s Flock, dammit. Sheep don’t discuss things. Shut up, TC. Nobody wants to hear your theories on why the Philistines might not have been so bad after all.

At the time I thought it was normal, but when I look back on it, I realize that all of that moving around from church to church was most likely the result of my parents’ inability to get along with normal people. This might explain a bit about my views on life or my distaste for people who are just too damn happy all the time. Discuss.

posted by Poagao at 4:17 am  

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