Brain fog

Some people on Facebook have been unnecessarily argumentative with me recently, and taken offence at what they perceive to be me “putting words in their mouth”, or “not thinking”. This was my response to one of them:

Social Skills 0 – Self Pity 1

This evening I managed to upset somebody I really care about. I made a joke which, it turns out, wasn’t funny. Worse still, I did so publicly. I don’t want to get bogged down with excuses about my mind being wired in a certain way and having relatively low social intelligence for someone of high IQ; at the end of the day I’m 30 years old, and I feel about 13. I don’t understand why I haven’t learnt the lessons of all the previous situations where I’ve made similar mistakes, and I feel like a complete idiot.

Why going back to church is hard

It’s no secret that we’ve hardly been to church for the last year or so. There have been a whole succession of reasons for this, there’s no one single cause. For instance, our car has decided to object to the cold weather. But even if it didn’t, Sally seems to be working most Sundays and it can take both of us to deal with E at church sometimes. And this period of absence began with both of us suffering health problems, which are not yet resolved. When we have been able to join in worship, it’s not always been at our own church, which means that we’ve seen very little of our Christian family.

Not everything wrong should be banned

I unfriended somebody on Facebook the other day. It’s something I’ve only ever done once before, as “friends” lists are just a representation of a network graph, not a way to describe the relative strength of each relationship. But in this case, I have never even met the person and had no mutual friends, and although he did nothing directly against me, I decided I couldn’t see a good reason to retain a connection to him.

What prompted this decision? It was something you could see as a very small thing. I saw in his news feed that he had joined a group calling for Islam4UK to be banned from marching through Wootton Bassett. I fully agree he has the right to not want it to happen. The entire idea of a terrorist front staging a media stunt in what has become a shrine to the fallen must surely be highly offensive to any decent human being, whatever their views on the conflicts.