this weekend we went to visit my mom and sisters down in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. its been a while since i stopped over at my mom's unnecessarily large 5 bedroom house given she's a single mom with an 11 year old that sleeps at her friend's houses more than at home. it was interesting to see how brendan managed to tolerate my mom's amazing ability to draw people in around her like the pied piper to tell spooky stories about divorce, lawyers, husbands, and "Jesus freaks." These are her only topics of conversation and I admit her stories, while funny, still make you grateful for your miniscule problems in comparison.

Since she moved down there two years ago she�s been craving for rewarding human interaction and hasn�t seemed to find many interesting friends. There are three kinds of people in Urbana, according to Mom. �The professorial crowd� who are apparently so singularly focused on their specialty of study and arrogant about it that they lack any social skills. The students, all 39,000 of them, she refers to as �the unconscious crowd� meaning that they are, more often than not, drunk. And finally, the uneducated and highly disillusioned �Jesus freaks� as she likes to call them. These are her friends as of late. Why is such a Goddess loving, educated, highly sophisticated and feminist woman hanging out with people who have been banned from local churches to sit around trying to interpret the Bible�s meaning? She�s bored and it�s the only way she can have a bit of fun because they�re apparently the most �benign group.�
Here�s an example:

Jesus Freaks start to pray out loud: �Our father who art��
Mother: �Is God a man?�
JF: �No, God is neither man nor woman � God has no gender.�
M: �So why do you say �father�? Why don�t you say �mother�?�
JF: �Because that is how he is referred to in the bible � �father.��
M: �He?�
JF: �He, she whatever.�
M: �So if �it� sounds too weird, why not alternate sometimes he sometimes she?�

This goes on and on. It really makes their wheels turn too because they now feel she has much God in her and has much to teach them. [O boy does she.] I�m just waiting for the cult stories. Its nice to see she�s picked up some healthy habits though.

by the way, does anyone have a clue why there's such a recent insurgence in the squirrel population in Champaign-Urbana?