What I mean by "feeling like a good Christian"

Last entry I made, I said "even odder is the weird flashes of feeling like a good Christian that accompany [me giving change to panhandlers]".  lucki_dog then asked me: "Why "Good Christian"?  Why can't you just feel like a "Good Person" and not get wigged out by it?  Christians are surely not the only good people on the planet, and I would venture a wager that a fair portion of them aren't even 'good'. /mini-rant"  I think the issue (and my response)  deserves an entry of its own.

To begin at the end: I in no way meant to imply that only Christians are/can be good people, nor that all Christians are 'good'.  That would be asinine in the extreme, and would place me on the same level as, say, Pat Robertson.  Y'all know me better than that; my Christianity is somewhat tenuous to begin with, so it wouldn't make much sense to elevate it above all else as a paragon of [chauvinist] virtue.

But that brings me to the first point.  Could I feel like a good person (no religion specified)?  Sure I could, but that's reversing cause and effect.  The whole point is that I didn't feel like a good person, I felt like a good Christian.  I think everybody's mind works similarly to mine (that's what psycholinguistics teaches me, at least), but just in case somebody out there is different, let me explain: I live in a highly allusive world.  Everything I see/hear/touch/whatever brings with it myriad associations, and those associations form the framework upon which my worldview rests.  Most everybody does this; it's what gives multi-level meaning to our words and our actions.  So the thing is, almsgiving doesn't just give me some vague warm fuzzy of a feeling, it brings up not only certain images and emotions but even specific texts.  In this case my mind presented me with Jesus' injunction to "get up and follow me", the assertion that it is harder for a rich man to go to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, and some less specific concepts of monastic vows of poverty.  Do you get it?  I didn't just feel like a good person, tout court, I felt like a good Christian, following in the steps of Jesus.

That's weird for me, it really is.  I was raised Christian, and to a certain extent, I remain one, but the Church is no longer my main referential beacon (hell, I'm not entirely certain it ever was).  In the past 6 years or so, my entire take on religion has become much more broad and ecumenical.  While the figure of Jesus is still a powerful one for me, I also find myself thinking in terms that are more commonly Jewish and neopagan.  My religion doesn't center around a Crucified Savior anymore, it centers more on a less corporeal but more personal God who takes on countless forms.  So I think it quite understandable that I was surprised to be pleased by my actions insofar as they reflected a distinctly Christian ideal, not a broader humanist one.  Not upset, mind you, and not exclusively moral, but definitely surprised.

Mandolines are sharp

Ow.  Ow ow ow.  So... For the longest time, I've been wanting a mandoline slicer, right?  Perfect even slices of all kinds of veggies, so wonderfully wonderful.  So then over Thanksgiving I was sitting in the waiting room at my ophthalmologist's, flipping through a Gourmet magazine (I was surprised to find it there as you are to hear that a practice catering to old people in backwoods East Texas had it), and the editors of the magazine had done a comparison of a number of mandolines on the market, and had ranked OXO's the highest: under "Cons" they put "we can't think of anything to put here."  High praise, especially from a notoriously frou-frou nit-picky mag.

Before I informed my parents of what they could get me for Christmas if they decided I'd been a good little chef, I decided to go on Amazon and read the reviews on the product.  In doing so, I got a little confused.  Half the reviewers seemed about ready to canonize the entirety of the OXO company for their amazing product, and the other half said that the blade was crap and wouldn't cut worth two shits.  Hmm.  I finally decided to go with the OXO product on the basis of the good half of the reviews plus the Gourmet write-up.

Fast-forward to this evening, when I finally had a good reason to break out the maniacal little thing.  Now... I can understand the negative reviewers.  If you try and go slow and gentle, the blade doesn't cut so well.  This... should be logical if you consider some of the physics involved in slicing versus chopping (lateral motion of the blade, basically), but apparently it wasn't to those people.  Whatever.  I can now certify to you that if you slide the object to be sliced briskly down the runway and over the blade, it will glide through a potato like butter.  And if you are doing those first few slices without the handguard because it's a little tall and unwieldly, I can further certify to you that the slicing goes so smoothly that you'll slip down into the danger zone without realizing it and the mandoline will remove the bottom (*checks*) 1/16th of an inch of your index finger without you really feeling anything painful, just a sort of sudden pressure.  And then you'll start to bleed.

You had better be glad that it's hard to take in-focus close-range pictures with your non-dominant hand, because if it weren't so you'd be getting an icky picture right below.

I never did find that bit of my finger... I bet it ended up in the skillet.  *shrug*

On a related note, it's damn hard to type with impaired usage of your dominant index finger.  Also hard to use standard flatware.  Or to clean dishes.  At least I masturbate off-dominantly.  Oops, TMI.