I have a strange religious life. I was raised catholic in a church, that was from what I've surmised from other catholic friends, more protestant than catholic. The Marist priests who ministered at my church were college educated and intelligent, and preached mind boggling, serious half an hour to an hour sermons every Sunday. They sermonized about how to still have faith and believe in God and still live your life. They preached sermons that were complicated, and for people who were well educated. In the Sunday catechism that I attended, we read the bible and played "Bible Hunt", things that my other catholic friends never did in their Sunday schools. My catholic priests stressed that bible reading was important to religious life, and talked every Sunday about we should read the bible every day.

When I stared attending catholic services in my adult life in California, I was shocked at how different the service was from what I remembered as a child and a teenager. The priests either didn't preach, or when they did preach it was awful. They didn't talk about why it was important to have faith and believe in God. They didn't talk about the difficulty of having faith in today's world. Instead, the catholic priests at the churches I attended in San Francisco preached simple sermons like we were all 7 years old and living in third world countries, who didn't have to wrestle with our faiths. It was so disappointing.

When I started to attended protestant churches, I felt more at home. The ministers reminded me of my childhood catholic priests. They emphasized the bible and its importance to christian life. And most importantly, they had long sermons about why have faith and belive in God in today's world, just like my childhood catholic priests.

But now, my protestant church is becoming more catholic. For the Lenten season, they announced that there will be a Thursday class on personal confession. How catholic, personal confession. I'm going to attend the class just to see what they have to say about "personal confession", which I consider a "catholic concept". Then, they're going to suggest that the congregation find a "confessor" during Lenten week, who I assume will be someone you will confess all your sins too. And the minister mentioned a confessor is a "priest, a minister, a therapist, or a friend". I think he was actually suggesting you could go to a priest and confess your sins. What a trip. I'll have to get clarification if he was really suggesting going to a priest.

Many in the congregation are like me, cradle catholics. In fact, my church is made of all people from various denominations. There's definitely a southern baptist group, and I know there's methodists, episcopalians, and I think a few jewish people as well. Is that where theh priest reference came in?

It's weird how I attended a catholic church, which was kind of like a protestant church, and now I'm attending a protestant church, that's now adopting catholic type rituals. They even play catholic monk music and gregorian chants during the Wednesday prayer service. Talk about me feeling right at home.

Busy weekend coming up.

There's an orchid show in town, and I'm so looking forward to going. My mom raised orchids when I was growing up, and our house was surrounded by pots and pots of orchids. My mom is too old to care for her garden and she ended up selling most of her plants, but I still have good memories of spending ours looking at these strange looking flowers.

Orchid collecting can become an obsesssion, and take over your life. Orchids need a lot of care, and you can get into collecting all the different varieties. There's the time you spend trying to diagnose them when they're sick, and the best potting soil for them. Then there's the expense. It's an expensive hobby, with the cost of the plants, the pots, the special potting soil, the fertilizer, etc.

My mom was really into it, and spent hours potting and repotting her orchids, fertilizing and watering them, and then going to orchid shows or friend's houses to look at their collections. When I was little, I used to think that my mother's orchids meant more to her than I did. She spent way more time with them than with me. I used to wonder if she had names for them, but I was afraid to ask her.

I'm sure orchid care was easier for her than child care. At least orchids didn't talk back, do wrong things, disappoint her, or whatever. Orchids were always beautiful and you didn't have to tell them that they looked too fat or freak out that they were wearing the wrong clothes or needed therapy because their problems were just too much for you to handle, because you're the type who's too reserved, too stiff upper lip, too emotionally frozen to ever discuss unseemly things like feelings and emotions.

No, I'm not bitter about my mother. I've resolved her reluctance for motherhood, and now that I've spent thousands of dollars in therapy and growth and development courses, I can understand why orchids were infinitely more appealing to her than her own children. I can go to an orchid show, and have good memories, because orchids are beautiful flowers, but that doesn't mean I don't remember the effect orchids have had on my life.

Then there's a Tulip Festival at Pier 39 that I'm going to attend. The last time I went to the Pier 39 Tulip festival I was with my friend Amy, who died a coupld of years of a brain tumor. We had so much fun that day, although poor Amy was so sick and walked very slowly and was already starting to lose her balance and mind. That day was of the last good times we had, before the illness started to take over her life and eventually take her life. I love tulips, and during tulip season I buy tulips every week. They were the only flowers I could draw when I was little, and I love that what I drew on paper looks the same in real life.

The war comes close to home, sort of. A member of my church congregation saw his 21 year old son off to Iraq last Sunday. He was sitting at my table at a church luncheon, and the poor man burst into tears when he talked about saying goodbye to his son that afternoon. The son is in the marine reserves, and he will be on duty for one year.

At the Wednesday evening prayer service, that same man was there and during the service he started crying again. It's so strange to see a grown man crying in public. The man talked about how his son was so proud to serve his country and be part of the marines. The son was looking forward to going to Iraq, and showing his patriotism.

My heart goes out to the man. It must be the most awful feeling to see your child go off to a war, and knowing he or she may never come back. I cannot even begin to know what that's like. I guess the only consolation I see is the son willingly volunteered, and wasn't drafted. The son goes in to the war, proud to serve his country and knowing full well that death could await him down the road.

I watched the movie "Gettysburg" last night. I'd been trying to track it down at various video stores, and I finally ran across a copy. I wanted to watch it in preparation for the movie, "Gods and Generals".

"Gettysburg" is a long movie, and could have used some judicious editing. The subject is very good, but the movie is just so slow moving. Martin Sheen plays General Robert E. Lee and Tom Berenger plays General Longstreet. The movie shows the famous ill-fated Pickett's charge, and was quite good at showing the decision making process which led to that particular battle. Actually, it wasn't a battle, it was a slaughter.

One of these days, I'd like to go to Gettysburg for the Civil Wargasm or civil war reenanctment that they put on every year. It's probably the kind of thing where you have to make your hotel reservations very far in advance, since it happens on the July 4th weekend.

Pittsburgh has a museum with the largest collection of Andy Warhol paintings, so I could do a combined Gettyburg and Pittsburgh trip. I've been to Pennsylvania before, but I've only ever thought about it as "that long state you have to drive through to get to New York". I've been to Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell, and I had a boyfriend whose grandmother lived there somewhere and we went to visit her once, but that's it.

I'm seriously thinking about buying Shelby Foote's series of books on the Civil War. I really like Shelby Foote, and what he's had to say about the Civil War. For my elf girl stories, I need to understand military strategy so I can write out the battle scenes. I studied a little bit of military history and planning when I wrote my senior thesis in college. My senior thesis was "the effects of Post Traumatic Disorder on Vietnam War Veterans".

I read all of these analyses on how the Vietnam War was not a conventional war, and how the US military was unprepared to fight a guerilla war. I read about US military training techniques at the time, and a history of how wars had been fought in the past.

The research was all very interesting, and I loved it. War is a very fascinating subject. There is so much logic that goes into putting together a military campaign, which is so ironic to me because war is just not a logical thing. War is the most irrational and illogical thing in the world, yet logic governs the fighting of it. Even guerilla warfare has a certain logic to it.

I got into Robert Ludlum's whole "Jason Bourne" series, because the main character was this extremely smart and logical man who put his "smarts" to work for him when he became a violent killer and assasin. I like the dichotomy of a person being that intelligent and at the same time being that violent.