hmmm….stuff

Well, I don’t know if I have mono yet because I didn’t get a chance to head to McKill-me yesterday, and today Lauren called me early in the morning (read before 7 am) to come pick her up from the emergency room. She had Liz take her in on her way to work because her throat had swollen to the point that she couldn’t swallow water…so they gave her vicoden for the pain and sent her home…..Have I mentioned that my Mother’s best friend died as a direct result of negligence on the part of that emergency room. Man, I want to move to city with a good hospital….like Chicago or Peoria so I don’t have to worry about stupid doctors in emergency rooms. So, I went to pick her up and then went back to sleep until almost noon. Now I’m up and moving, but not really going, I haven’t showered yet and I think I’m just gonna stick around the house and do homework for a while. I called my Mom and I think she is gonna come up for a couple days and take care of Lauren so that I can focus back on school and resting enough so I don’t get mono too.

It is funny how mono is this feared disease with all sorts of misconceptions surrounding it. So I will clear this up, it is a virus, nothing more, nothing less. It is not easily contracted through the air, despite what this lady at the grocery store said this morning. It is somewhat hard to get, and studies have shown that roommates of people with mono are no more likely to get mono then the general population. The most likely way to contract the virus is to kiss the person according to some studies done, so that is why it gets the nick-name “the kissing disease.” Also, if you contact the disease as a small child you are very unlikely to develop any symptoms, and you get the added plus of gaining immunity to it at a young age. The only downside is that you can have occurrences of symptoms later in life if you are very exhausted and worn out, but it appears that this mainly happens to people who have contracted it as adults. Also, you can have the virus in your body (or saliva for kissing purposes) anywhere from 18 months after you get it, to the rest of your life. This means that the virus is dormant, or it can’t do any harm to you because ur body has figured out how to keep it under raps, but you can become contagious again under similar conditions to developing the symptoms a second time. To this end, I might have given it to her for all we know. Also, mono is confused a lot with other diseases, you can have similar symptoms for a host of reasons, so it is more likely to assume that you have some variant of the flu or a sinus infecting then reoccurring symptoms from mono.

So a thought would be for everyone we know who has small children to take them to Laurens place and to let hem kiss her, so they can be immune to it later in life and have little, if any side effects. But if you don’t want to do that, I could understand why…;)

Finally, I wrote yesterday about Lent which got more of a reaction then I initially expected. Mainly I was venting about how people try to push meaning onto me concerning traditions, and how in general I hate traditions, but of course that bred people explaining why they push traditions at me, which is OK I guess, but all I’m really getting at is that tradition isn’t for everyone. Anyone who would have talked to me two years ago about communion would know that I didn’t take communion, I hated it, for some of the same reasons I hate the traditions surrounding the Lent season. But one day during church I really felt like God said, “go take communion” and I of course asked “why?” and he told me “because I said so just now, and in the Bible” and that was the end of it. Right then and their he placed meaning me into the act of taking communion. Now, if you gain meaning from something because of the tradition behind it, that is great, you have gained something in a way that I can’t. You can follow the tons of people before you just because they saw something in it and then you see the significance of it from that, for me I have to see something in it for me, not just because others have found it important. You can say to me all sorts of stuff trying to persuade me otherwise, but I’m really stubborn about this, and really stubborn about most things of this similar nature. I’m not against trying things to see if God wants to show me something in those acts, I’ve gained a lot of understanding lately about doing some things just because God asks us to. I’m willing to go to the Bible and look for places where God commands us to do things, or where people do certain things to be closer to God or to gain some understanding of him, and try those out. But the thing is that those people were pretty crazy. Fasting for 40 days wasn’t a tradition then and neither was laying on ur side for almost a year, they did it because God told them to. That is how I feel about Lent, and a host of other traditions. If you want to approach me about it, you have to understand that I come from a family that is huge on tradition, in the family and in the church. Just ask my Mother what color the alter cloth is for any given month and she can tell you what it is, why it is that color, and what that color signifies. I’ve tried most of this stuff, just because my folks said it was a good idea, or because the church is doing it, and I found no significance in it. I believe that I am susposed to go new ways, open new doors for people, create new traditions for some people so they don’t feel weighted down with the past. I also believe that God wants to supply new personal meanings to old traditions at some point, like he did with communion. Which means I don’t think he just wants me to blindly follow the past, but instead give me new personal meaning for some things. I still don’t think that will ever happen with Lent, but it might, and I’m open to that.

So, anyway, I could go the rest of my life without hearing why some ancient tradition is supposed to be important to me ever again. So unless you want to pretend that you know better than God about how He wants to speak to my life I could stand to not hear anymore about it. But I understand that people are just trying to help and to make me think, but believe me, I’ve thought about it, I still don’t like it.

OK, I’m late for Lab, Later.