easter
Ladies and Germs, it's that time of year again, when you tune in to hear me bitch about how Easter is another pagan holiday that was stolen by the Christians, who steal everything, sort of like what Microsoft would have done to computers and the internet had there been no way to prosecute them. Well, sorry to burst your bubble but this time I'm not doing it. You want that kind of thing, click the archive. I'm not even going to post links to any dead rabbits with easter baskets by them with little handmade signs that say "happy easter". I'm just ignoring this one. The haircut place is closed along with most other places of business, so I'm going to sit around here shaggy and grouchy about it and maybe hit the Jewish deli later.Last night I worked at the pharmacy again. When I got there my boss told me to go work as far away from the guy I had problems with two weeks ago, as I possibly could. "You don't have to tell me twice", I replied. Also, I thought it was funny and reassuring that he referred to him as "motormouth" and "that son-of-a-bitch."
Our company is very big so we get a lot of weird email we never read from high-ups, usually about charity events we might consider attending, sometimes about picketing guidelines for strikers, so as not to screw up any patient care, stuff like that. Some time this week we got an email from someone about recommendations for Muslims and gelatin-coated capsules. I find religion endlessly entertaining, so I printed it off and started to read it when things slowed down. A couple of Muslims I work with are the high potentates of smalltalk. I don't know how they ever have time to form a thought. They saw what I was reading before I even had time to read three words of it, so before you could snap your fingers, The Big Smalltalk was underway. Now, I like one of these guys a lot. We have worked closely for years now and he has my total respect, not least because a Christian guy we work with told him that he was going to hell for being Muslim, and he didn't do anything to him, like sling his skinny ass across the room into a broken little crumple under the sink. Which one comparative look tells you he could have, easily. (I would love for this to happen.) As it was, he just felt sorry for the peabrain (who wouldn't) and life continued as before, but as is so often the case, with less faith in humanity on all sides.
About the interrupted-while-reading thing. Does that ever happen to you? You don't even have time to read what's on the paper before everyone is quizzing you on it? For people who like to read, being in public is like being in an aviary when the food's about to get passed out. Squawk squawk cheep quibble whatcha readin'! One of these days... "I'm reading about all the guys your mother sucked off at the bar last weekend, you nosy bastard!" Not really, but a healthy fantasy life keeps it all intact.
Muslims have to abide by Shari'a, the Arabic word for Islamic law. Shari'a says no Muslim can eat pork, because of the inherent impurity of pigs. This email stated that because the gelatin of capsules is made from pig tendons, many Muslims are embarassed to take them. A whole bunch of highly respected Islamic mucky-mucks (the guys I work with recognized some of the names) met up and talked it over, and sent out this press release, recommending to Muslims all over the world that it's OK to take those pills, because in the processing of the pig there is a change that takes place, turning the impure into something pure. So they can now take the pills and not imagine they're dirtying up their bodies, and that's good, I guess.
Another thing in Shari'a, necessities outweigh prohibitions. This is quoted and repeated by the Muslim guys. As one of them called it "the old pig in the desert thing", if you're starving, you eat the pig. You wouldn't eat it every day, but if you have to do it to live, like telling a lie when there's a gun pointed at you "Me love America! Mickey Mouse G.I. Joe USA Toby Keith statue of liberty shaking fist!", you have to do it, and it's all right with Shari'a. That, to me, is cool. A system that gives you an out is well-designed. So my question was, if it's already known to be all right to do take the pig-casing pills to survive, why bother to make the recommendation that it's ok to take them? I don't remember the answer and it doesn't matter. What I do remember is that because I told the guy that I haven't known for years that I was atheist, he responded that if I slaughtered a goat he wouldn't eat it, but that if a Christian or Jew slaughtered a goat, he would eat it. I don't have goats and even if I did, odds are he wouldn't be invited to my table in the first place, but who cares? Does that make the goat poisoned? Is there some fundamental change in the quality of goat-meat that occurs when its killer isn't "a believer"? I can pretend to believe as well as most people believe, if it's any help. The other guy, the guy who knows restraint like Wodehouse knows simile, put the kibosh on that line of discussion when I asked the goat guy whether he thought, then, that the Muslims in the hospital would refuse their meds if they knew an atheist had compounded them. Restraint guy was right; this wasn't going to get any better before it got worse. The guy who wouldn't eat my goat, by the way, has seventy or eighty siblings from lots and lots of different mothers, and the same father. When you find out that a guy with eighty (80!) brothers and sisters won't eat your goat, by the end of your work day you've got a lot on your mind. Had there been some strange form of passive aggression at work? Will I ever know!?
When I got home I made myself a burrito. As I was making it, I saw my trusty package of pepperoni slices, so I dipped into it and had a nice big stack of them all at once, because as an atheist, I can, and man, is pepperoni some good stuff.
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