Paul's blog

Archive for May, 2007

Last Monday morning, around 2am.

“You KNOW God is with you right now, right?” .. whispered she from behind me.

In other circumstances I gladly would have engaged in the discussion by informing her that I, in fact, did not know that, and more specifically, that I was pretty sure he wasn’t, and that if he WAS, he wasn’t doing his job.
But this was neither the place nor the time, so I kinda nodded. After all, she was a very nice girl and meant well.

Just before entering a room she stopped and walked up next to me, turned around, grabbed my hand, gazed me in the eyes and said: “Do you want me to pray with you?”
This is always a bit of an embarassing question to a devout atheist like myself, but in this instance even more unsettling, since a) I found myself in a situation where the LAST thing you want to hear is people praying for you, as it usually means there’s nothing else they can do anymore, and b) I just had several people ‘work’ on me, from hooking me up to an EKG, to taking chest X-rays and stabilizing my blood pressure, heart rate and pain (administering nitroglycerine, lopressor and (yummie!) morphine), and now I was ‘supposed’ to be rushed to have a CT scan to look for blood clots, so I found it a bit disturbing that this, undoubtly well meaning, nurse delayed this process by trying to take out some time for praying to God.

I’m fairly sure (not really, since I don’t believe in God) that if God didn’t want me to have this heart attack, I wouldn’t have been here in the first place.
So I responded with something like “Mwnaah”, with that friendly “Maybe not today” look one uses when someone tries to sell you something for a good cause at your door when you’re watching a Spurs playoff game (Go Spurs!).
“Well”, she smiled at me, “be sure that I certainly WILL pray for you!”. Again, friendly as it may have been meant, I didn’t find it very encouraging for my situation.

Then, when she prepared me for the CT scan she happily informed me that I was going to experience the closest thing to female menopause (something about a warm feeling like I had been peeing all over my self  (apparently induced by the injected dye liquid) .. ? .. Uhm… okay).

The whole procedure made me think of going through a whirring rotating mini-Stargate.
But that was all.

When she enthousiastically enquired about ‘that’ feeling, I had to tell her that I, truthfully, hadn’t experienced anything of the kind.
She was visibly disappointed by this. She didn’t speak a word while she pushed me back to the ER.

No feeling of peeing all over myself, and no prayer sessions, it must have been a disappointing night for her.

Mine wasn’t too great either: Around 4am I was admitted.

I just read this:

President Bush vetoed a $124 billion war-spending bill Tuesday because it included an Iraq pullout timetable which he called setting a date for failure.  

 “setting a date for failure“?

No. It doesn’t.

It sets a date for admitting failure!

The actual failure happened years ago.

I’m currently ‘into’ investing, and re-reading my ‘investment’ books.

Every single one of them mentions the single biggest error one can make: staying in a losing position thinking it will go up soon and that it will erase the losses.

It never does.

In that light .. even if it WAS setting the date of failure… (known in investing-speak as placing a stop-loss order) that would be a good thing.

Support our troops.

Get them outa there!