The GirlAlive Blog

My new thing.

I’ve decided to blog about all the books I read. As well as some I have read in the past, since I do not generally finish an entire novel every day. However, I know that many of you don’t give a crap about what what I’m reading, so I’m doing all this over on another blog at tumblr. So here is my new blog:

http://alanaisreading.tumblr.com/

So if you want to read fairly random book reviews and other stuff about authors or reading or whatever, you can go there and follow me if you have a tumblr account. If you don’t have or want a tumblr account, it also automatically posts to Twitter whenever there’s a new post there, so you can follow me on Twitter.

I’m probably not going to generally be mentioning it much from here, so bookmark it now if you care.

Ancient circus tents.

Here’s a conversation I had with my husband while he was asking me trivia questions last night. (Approximated – I didn’t take notes at the time.)

HUSBAND: Where is the largest stone circle in the UK?
GIRLALIVE: I don’t know.
H: Avebury. It’s so big the whole town is inside the circle.
GA: But it might not be so big if the town is all midgets.
H: They’re not midgets.
GA: That would explain the stone circles. They were ancient circus tents.
H: They were not circus tents.
GA: Then how do you explain the midgets?
H: There are no midgets in Avebury!
GA: So you know where all the midgets in the world are? You have a database?
H: No. It’s just that Avebury is not all midgets.
GA: Then why is the whole town inside a giant ancient bigtop?
(HUSBAND glares.)
GA: Doo doo doodle oodle oo doo doo doo. (circus music)
(Husband gives up and asks next trivia question.)

Husband is a great straight man, but not much of an audience.

Mistakes Hiring Managers Make

There are a hundred or more articles out there about all the mistakes that job-seekers make either on their CVs/resumes or in interviews or in cover letters or whatever. But no one talks about the hiring managers who are complete asses.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the people I’ve dealt with in the process of looking for a job have been really great. Most are polite and take their job seriously and are truly trying to find a good match for a position. I have now done three job interviews with the University here, for different positions, and everyone has been nice, and has done a good job interviewing and communicating with applicants. I keep applying at the University because the people I’ve met in these interviews have seemed genuinely nice and professional. But there are a few places I’m not going to be applying again.

I had one job interview in Seattle with an internet company long ago. I don’t remember the name of the company and they probably don’t exist anymore. I dressed up, caught a bus downtown, and went to my interview. The guy was late and seemed to have forgotten that he had an interview to do. Then he proceeded to ask me a series of questions that could all be answered by pointing at my resume that he had in front of him. “What other web sites have you worked on?” “There’s a list of them at the bottom of my resume there.” The whole time I got the clear impression that A) he had never had any intention of hiring me and B) he was completely wasting my time. I was so pissed off that after the interview I sent him a bill for the time I wasted and the bus fare I spent wasting my time in his presence. I never expected any money from him, but I hoped he’d at least think about how he is treating people.

This week I had another encounter with an asshole. I applied for a position I’m completely and incredibly qualified for with an internet company here called Boffer Inc. I spent time writing and editing a custom cover letter and sent off my CV through the job site where I found the listing. A short time later I checked my email. I had the confirmation email from the site I sent the CV through. And, received four minutes before that email, I had a form rejection letter from Tom Mursell, the smug 12-year-old asshole who runs Boffer. So before I even received confirmation of the receipt of my CV, he had the balls to send me a rejection letter beginning with, “After careful consideration…” He couldn’t have even had time to download and open my CV, much less actually read it.

After that I looked him up and found that he fancies himself some sort of job expert. I posted on his blog the following:

As someone looking for a job, the one thing I hate is form rejection letters that are full of obvious lies. Like, I sent off a CV and cover letter to some internet company today, and got the form letter saying I was rejected “after careful consideration” four minutes before I even got confirmation that the CV was sent. So they “carefully considered” it for about 0.04 minutes. How insulting. Let’s see if I remember the name on the bottom of that insulting rejection letter. Um, I think it was Tom Mursell. On the positive side, at least I know what kind of people I’ve avoided working for.

He has so far refused to publish my comment, or respond to it. I will not only not be applying for any other jobs with his company, but I also will not ever be buying anything from their online stores. If you’re not going to read my CV, that’s your business. But you don’t have to be so freaking rude about it. In fact, if you decided you hate me without even reading my CV, at least tell me what I did wrong. What made you hate me so much and so fast? Give me a reason for your rejection instead of feeding me a bunch of crap about “careful consideration”. I have no respect for liars.

Book Review: The Throne, The Lamb and The Dragon

My computer died. Completely. I blame Windows Vista 100%. It is crap. So I’m working from my tiny netbook for the forseeable future.

A few weeks ago I offered to write whatever anyone wants me to write (and the offer still stands – leave suggestions in the comments). My sister-in-law Jaime requested that I review the book “The Throne, The Lamb & The Dragon” by Paul Spilsbury. Since she even offered to buy the book and have it sent to me, how could I refuse? Free book.

So she sent me the book and I read it. And then I put off writing the review for a long time because it’s tricky. So here I go.

The sub-title of the book is “A Reader’s Guide to the Book of Revelation”. Therein lies the trickiness. The book of Revelation is the Marmite of the Bible. Most Christians either love it or hate it. They either are obsessed with interpreting every word and phrase and trying to apply the prophecies to everything around them, or they pretty much read it when they have to at church and otherwise ignore it, finding it incomprensible. I’m much more the latter group.

I’ve always had problems “getting into” Revelation because I was raised in Baptist churches that had some very definite ideas about what it all meant, and I was always a little skeptical of their interpretations. I never believed that whatever Democrat is popular this week must be the Anti-Christ. I never believed that credit cards were the number of the beast. I just wasn’t buying the paranoid theories. I mean, this book is 2000 years old, and it only started making sense now? I don’t think so.

I get the feeling that the Paul Spilsbury was plagued by the same doubts, but unlike me, he decided to go digging deeper to find out what it all meant. He analyses Revelation in light of the type of literary form used, and in light of similar documents of the time and what he comes up with is quite interesting. If I had to sum up his findings in one sentence, I’d say, “Don’t be so darned literal.”

One of the points that he makes that is likely causing the most havoc among churches is that he doesn’t necessarily believe in the Rapture. The Rapture is the belief among (mostly American) evangelicals that at some point Jesus will return and steal away all of his followers to heaven so that they don’t have to go through some really nasty hard times on earth known as The Tribulation. The way Spilsbury interprets things, there is no Great Tribulation coming because we are already living in it. And he kind of makes sense here. The Tribulation in Revelation is the period of time between the opening of the First Seal and the triumphant return of Christ. The opening of the First Seal in earth time would have been when Jesus ascended to heaven, so that makes the Tribulation now and for the last two thousand years.

I’m not going to try to make any claims about whether Spilsbury is completely right or wrong. But for me, he has made Revelation a lot more useful. It isn’t as much a puzzle about how to survive the end of the world as it is a guide to living in the world now, not much different from the other letters in the New Testament.

I think that this book is worth reading, if only for making you think. The one part that stood out to me was the section on the Mark of the Beast. That’s the whole thing where you’ll be marked with a number and without it you won’t be able to participate in any commerce. What if we stop viewing it as a literal number and a literal mark and look at it as an attitude? The true Mark of the Beast is an attitude of acceptance of evil. In order to participate in commerce in the world today, you have to be okay with accepting a certain amount of cruelty, corruption and greed. And that is far more insidious than credit cards or social security numbers. Who made your shoes? Who grew your sugar? Were they paid for their work? How much does that Wal-Mart price cut cost your soul? Who do you work for? What is their agenda? Are they really making people’s lives better or just making their wallets lighter?

I have to agree with Paul Spilsbury that a less literal interpretation of Revelation is necessary to really understand why it was written and for whom. I haven’t decided if I agree with every interpretation he makes, but I certainly didn’t see anything in this book that conflicts with what I know about who God is.