Easter for Everyone

While I seriously enjoyed making my Easter baskets this year, I am generally pretty ambivalent about this holiday. Mostly because it has no meaning for me. I let Max celebrate it because, well, it's almost as though Christians designed this holiday for the wee ones. We haven't really discussed the whole "Jesus rising from the tomb" thing yet. This is Max with his friend Joschka who came up from California to hang out with us. We miss Joschka and his parents who are more like family to us. Joschka and Max certainly are just like brothers the way they seem to be cut from the same cloth and bicker all the time.

Here's Max collecting eggs. Plastic ones full of weird doo-dads, like sticky bunnies you can throw on the ceiling and leave there until they drop and scare the shit out of you because you forgot they were there.

Although no one signed up for my Easter Bonnet decorating class, Maddy really wanted to. Unfortunately she's ten and doesn't have the income to support millinery classes yet. We worked out a deal where she would sweep our store floor for four days to earn the hat and then I would let her play with my decorations and use them to make a cool hat. She brought some of her own stuff too.

Her hair is just killing me! It makes me want to grow my hair out so I can have braids again. I think her hat turned out great, don't you?!

Here are a few random things I'm thinking about right now:

• How it is that people can get so excited about being saved by Jesus, but then completely ignore the fact that the guy was ANTI VIOLENCE? So a lot of people have fought wars in the name of God, but completely spit on his son's entire message to do it, how do people reconcile this in their hearts? Do they think his real message was "turn the other cheek, but only when you feel like it"?

• I'd like to have a bumper sticker that reads: WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? But I couldn't do it because that would mislead people into thinking I was a Christian. While I actually think Jesus' message is one to live my life by*, I think it's completely immaterial whether or not the dude really existed. You know those ten commandments that we're supposed to follow? The ones that read something like: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" and "Thou shalt not steal" and more importantly "THOU SHALT NOT KILL"? I live by those rules. I have never coveted my neighbor's wife.

• I've come to realize, writing this blog, that you can't say anything worth saying without pissing someone off. You can't have an opinion without it being critical of someone, somewhere. I've thought about what it would be like to not be opinionated, about the value of being "non-judgmental" and of just keeping things to myself. It's so much more comfortable to not put your neck out there on the block where every one's got an ax poised above it. But there's one really important fact that people are all too ready to forget when their feelings are sore: if you lead a life devoid of judgment of others, you will have a very short life.

• Our ability to be critical of others is absolutely necessary in order to decide which people might be dangerous to know, which people will bring nothing to us but trouble, and our ability to avoid being sold a paper cricket for our life savings. Anyone who thinks they aren't critical of others, or judgmental, is lying to themselves to feel righteous. Being critical doesn't mean you hate others, or that you are being mean to hurt others, but your survival depends on your ability to assess the choices that you AND others are making and how those choices may reflect on your own life, and to decide whether you would be best off avoiding those same people/choices.

• Kate Beckinsale is beginning to get that processed Hollywood look. It's so disappointing. Pretty soon she will be just as bland and standard looking as Paris Hilton. Pretty soon she's going to be indistinguishable from Joan Rivers. I have been on the fence about her for a few years now. I keep waiting for her to prove that she might become admirable. That she might redeem herself. But I just spied her on the cover of Allure last night and realized the debate is over. She's no longer a British beauty, she's completely Hollywood now. I kind of feel like having a wake for her potential lost.

• We are watching the British series "Ballykissangel" and we've just got past the part where they kill off an integral character. I was so shocked I almost peed my pants. Now I'm not sure I can stand to continue to watch the rest of the series. Because a priest without the love interest of a woman who isn't remotely religious isn't half as interesting. Plus it was a cheap shot. Just as he's about to leave the clergy to be with his true love, they kill her. Now Father Clifford has just gone off into the sunset, implying that he won't be there either. But he's the main character. While the rest of the characters in that show are great too, they really won't stand up well without the main character. So if he comes back, I think he needs to come back as the publican. But I don't know if I can stand to find out. I'm not fond of suspense.

*There are some who will be shocked to hear me say this. Not because they think I'm much too evil to follow the teachings of Christ, but just that I could align myself with any religious figure. But hey, I have always lived by the teaching's of Christ kind of by accident. And the one time I didn't turn the other cheek on my fourth grade oppressor? I felt like total shit. I kicked her when she was down and even though it could be said that she deserved it for the three years of bullying she practiced on me, it wasn't until I literally ceased to care what she could do to me that she stopped trying to push me around. When I stood up tall and figured that if she knocked me down I would just get up and tell her to get it the hell over with and pummel me, that's when she actually respected me. I was following the teachings of Jesus, Buddhism, and Ghandi without really belonging to any of their respective religious groups.