Okay, I just checked the TV guide. It's not Othello. It's The Italian Girl in Algiers by Rossini. How embarrassing! I think I thought it was Othello because I read article about the opera version of Othello in the Pink Section and I just assumed it was now on TV.

Speaking of The SF Chronicle, they had three essays/articles in there today that after I finished reading thought "who the fbombing hell cares!" Honestly, is it any wonder that people in the rest of the country think we're freaks. The three essays were for such stupid issues, not big issues like war or homelessness or poverty, but a stupid dumb issue that honestly only people here care about. Everyone but me that is. It's so not even worth mentioning because it is an issue that I know I have a politically incorect view about and just mentioning it makes me mad and makes me want to move to another city.

There are so many other big events affecting our lives and so many other things the newspaper could be writing about, but they devote three articles/essays to an issue the country and the rest of the world doesn't give a rat's ass about. Didn't these people, who are obviously writing to promote a point of view, take a marketing class? They really need to figure out how their cause better because the way they're doing it, just makes there cause irrelevant and I'm sure that's not their intention. Their good intentions in my humble opinion, do nothing to further their cause but instead harm it by not making it relevant to what is going on with the rest of the country and the world. It's sort of sad really because the cause has merit but not if it's being marketed by complete idiots who should know better.

Othello is everywhere. The opera version of Othello is on TV right now and a few weeks ago, they had the modern BBC version of Othello. The BBC mod Othello was very good although I agree with one reviewer I read, when he said that it was hard to believe that a top notch police detective like Othello could be fooled so easily. The Iago character or Jago was much better in the BBC version and they give him a bigger part to where the veiwer sees him reaping the rewards of his treachery. How very realistic of the Britts.

I saw Othello on stage at ACT a few years ago and it was very good. The Othello actor was very strong and he has to be to make the play work. I saw another version done by a director friend of mine and the woman playing Desdemona was so bad. She played Desdemona like a valley girl air head and spoke that way, all whiney and nasally and so spoiled, that at the end I was so happy that Othello killed her. I don't think that was the right reaction to have at the end of Othello.

I love opera. It's all so dramatic. It's soap opera story lines set to great music. And the costumes and sets are great. I saw a Stravinsky opera a couple of years ago. The famous welsh tenor Brynn Terfel was in it. I don't remember the name of the opera but the story was quite good and the plot reminded me of the dot com failures that were happening at the time. Stravinsky is not the best music for opera, but the costumes were beautiful and the set for one of the scenes was spectacular.

I got so peevish from my last post that I went into my kitchen and cleaned it. There's something energy releasing about cleaning. Sometimes if I get too freaked out, I bake because it takes alot of concentration and I lose my freaky feelings. But baking isn't very good for weight when you're the only one eating your creations. Sometimes if I bake and don't want to eat it, I take it to work. It never fails that every company I've ever been at, if you put free food in the kitchen it's gone in half an hour. What is about free food in the kitchen?

I'll try to post more stories on my ISP webpage today. There are couple of stories I finished for writing classes I've attended. Since they were assignments, the quality is not very good. But I have this new theory, that I have to write about five really bad, country song, Lifetime television or Hallmark movies (which I secretly love because they're so bad), stories before I write a story that's even semi-decent. Maybe it's true whoever said, if you read junk, you write junk. Well, I love Temptation Island 1 and 2, Lifetime television movies, Hallmark movies, Anne Rice, Stephen King and every now and then Danielle Steele (she's the best trashy writer there is), so is it any wonder I write trashy stories. I like these stories because they were good teaching tools for me and I guess I could work on them to make them better, but I want a record of my bad trashy writing so if I ever get really good and famous, which of course may be never, I can look back and see how far I've come.

There's even a story I might post which was my final in one writing class. What a final huh? Write a short story on the given topic. I got an A on that final, so I'll have to post that story. Then there's those other half written stories. One of my writing teachers, Peter at UC Extension, said that not finishing your stories is bad for you psychologically. Well, I guess I can add "not finishing stories" to my long list of what's wrong with me. Some of these story ideas started out as great ideas, but something got so lost in the execution that I'm not sure it's worth raising them from the dead. You know, how you think something is a great idea, then when you actually do it, you're like, "Oh My God, this sucks!" It's like that with some of my half written stories. Does it do anyone any good to finish really bad stories? I just don't so. Better to just chalk these stories up to "Great Idea - Bad Execution" and be done with them, and that's what I've done. These stories will always be there if for whatever reason, I "feel" like I need to finish them, but until then, I let them stay raw, bad and unfinished. Wow, I think that phrase makes for a great title for a story, "Raw Bad and Unfinished."

I went to church today and I feel really bad because I want to start exploring our sister church. It's funny how you always take new members classes when you first want to join a church, but they never teach classes on how to leave a church. I love the people in my church; these people are like second family. But our church has changed, really changed.

The minister who was there when I joined left and went to a church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I don't blame the guy for wanting to leave. He and his wife had three kids and San Francisco is a hard place to have children if you don't make a lot of money. His older daughter never took ballet lessons. Every little girl should have ballet lessons. Even I had ballet lessons and I grew up without that much money.

But pastors don't make that much money and this guy was a rising star in the Presbyterian denomination, well thought of, and he sat on the board of McCormick School of Theology. The guy was bound to go and go whereever he wanted to. It was just a matter of when. After he left, the church had a series of interim pastors for about a couple of years and that's hard when a church loses its leader. And the old minister was a great sermonist. You always felt like he was speaking directly to you and talking about your life. I've come to realize that sermonizing is a gift and this minister definitely has it.

I had stopped going prior to minister's departure and I still feel bad about that. I was starting to get involved in other things and I had my own spiritual routine at home going, so I stopped going to church for community worship.

I started going to church again after 9/11 because I felt such a need to be close to people who were worshipping in community and it made me realize how important corporate worship is. It's fine to do your own practices at home and that works really well, but worshipping in community is such an important part of leading a spiritual life, if only to know that there are other people struggling with their faith like you are.

A couple months after 9/11, the church installed a new pastor and I liked him at first, but he's a little more conservative than the other guy and not the rising star and not a good sermonist. Alot of the people I liked have either left now or are dead. I mean, there's still great people there, people I really,really like but the church has shrunk and all the people my age are gone.

Now at our sister church, it's a whole different story. Their memberships is in the 4,000+ range, while ours is 200+. And they have so many people my age, that I feel very comfortable there. Our sister church has always been a little more conservative than my own church, but with this new pastor, our church is starting to look like it's going to be even more conservative than they are.

Our one associate minister in the church jokingly said christians are persecuted in SF and someone corrected him and said 'ignored not persecuted'. My only thought to this was 'if you don't want to be ignored in our modern 21st century society, you better not be boring, you better have something to offer people other than whining about how the church is losing attendance and therefore that means persecution."

And this is where my biggest problem is. My church is losing relevancy in my life and I don't know if it's because the minister is a boring sermonist or he's just too conservative for my taste. I don't want church to be irrelevant in my life and I feel bad that I have to leave my home church, where I've been a member now for almost 10 years, so I can have relevant church services.

What really bugs me is the new minister never talks about 9/11 and what it meant-what it means now, never talks about the dot gone economy we're experiencing in San Francisco, never talks about the war on terrorism and it's important to us and to the country, never talks about American Taliban and what this issue means for parents everywhere, never talks about the heaps and heaps of homeless people at our church door and on the street, never talks about the rising unemployment where at least 25% of church membership is employed, etc. He never brings up anything relevant to issues that are affecting my life in one of the most biggest cities in the country and certainly one of the most watched cities in the world.

All he talks about is the bible and that's fine but relate the bible back to important issues now, big issues. The head minister from our sister church came to give Thanksgiving service at our church and he talked about 9/11, airport and airline security and what that day meant to all of us. No, all our head minister and associate minister are concerned about are how the christian church is ignored in SF and how they're going to bring "GOD" to San Francisco.

Well duh! He's already here in other christian denominations, other churchs in our own denomination, other religions and those churches have huge memberships. Some people don't get it. If you want to be noticed, be relevant, be interesting but don't be boring and out of context, out of step with the general society.

And after all these complaints, I still feel bad about wanting to explore other churches. How can I leave my church family, people who you've come to know over 10 years? But I will if they make church irrelevant for me, I will. And to me that's the ultimate evil, most un-christian thing anybody can do to me, make church, religion irrelevant.