and now I'm being told that, actually, since March 1st is the 90th day of my employment (what with Feb being a short month), my health insurance won't be able to start until April 1st.

This almost sounds like a programming error. Like they just took your hire date and added 90 to it, when in fact they should add 89. (ie if they're adding 90 they're really counting 90 days beyond your hire date, which would be your 91st day of employment.

eta: one way to see this is to think if the insurance kicked in after your third day of employment. If you take 1 (for the 1st of the month) and add 3 you'd end up with the 4th, which is obviously not your third day of employment.

Jessica, I hope you don't have to keep fighting this, but if you do, don't give up. Please take my word for it, as someone who's been on both sides of this coin, that there is someone at your place, who can call someone at their place, and straighten this out, eventually, even if it means the insurer will need to use some sort of manual work-around.

If I do have a god, it's the God Of Parenthetical Abuse.

Bwah.

Gronklies, everyone.

My only thoughts about gods/religion/churches this morning is to say my parents picked the church we grew up in -- after a little vetting -- mostly because it had a lot of kids in the congregation. They weren't so concerned about whether the church was a congregationalist, methodist, presbyterian, etc., but more concerned with whether they and their children would find a sense of community there. So, all grown up, I have no complaints with religion, I don't particularly believe, but I still like the idea of community.

ION, the DH and I went to the taping of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me..." last night. Peter Sagal is a very funny man, much of what we heard cannot be aired even though Michael Powell is no longer with the FCC, and now I know all the answers for Saturday's broadcast.

ETA: Jessica the insurance thing sucks. Be a thorn in the HR person's side until you're sure she's made every phone call possible to keep her promise to you.

Juliana, my sister in(paren) abuse. Funny you should say it like that, cause CG told me maybe I could start a religion like Ayn Rand, kind of based on"baroque paragraphs and abuse of parentheses" (I knew better than to write an editor all verklempt, but it spilled out before I could gave a crap for composition.)

Oh, Jessica, that just SUCKS! I hope you're able to work something out with them...that's just ridiculous.

Someone, please tell me to stop looking up more info for my big research project. I don't need any more sources! I've got too many as it is. I just can't help myself, though. I find this topic fascinating, and I want to see EVERYTHING that is out there on it.

Belief-wise, I'm not sure. I can't say I absolutely believe in G-d. I can't say I absolutely don't. I am extremely doubtful that I will ever see proof one way or the other. (Well, I'm certain I'll never see "There is no G-d" proof, and, while I'm not ruling out the possibility, I really don't think I'll ever see definitive "There is a G-d" proof.) And in general, I don't really see the point in spending much time on that question.

I think that, if I needed to totally pin down my beliefs, I believe in some kind of unifying force. I don't believe in a G-d that's micromanaging every detail of our lives, but I do believe that there's something binding everything together. Maybe it's close to Spinosa's view of G-d, but not quite.

I want to see EVERYTHING that is out there on it.

If I were your librarian, I'd love you for this. However...

Stop! Looking! Up! More! Sources! You can always go back when the paper is done, set up an independent study, etc., to feed your need to know.

vw, stop researching. You'll drive yourself nuts otherwise.

Jessica, I hope the health insurance situation resolves itself with the utmost haste. There's no excuse for HR not to honor what they originally told you.

Cindy, I look forward to reading your thoughts.

that there is someone at your place, who can call someone at their place, and straighten this out, eventually, even if it means the insurer will need to use some sort of manual work-around.

Oh, no doubt. I just know it's going to be a nightmare because of the size of the two companies involved. The amount of corporate bureaucracy involved is huge. (And that's without all the little quirks that go along with my company's particular brand of insano giant multinational corporate bureaucracy, which comes with its own set of problems.)

To me it makes perfect sense that life evolved on earth over an incredibly long period of time, and that one of the results of evolution is us. I don't see where there needs to be a God to do anything.

This is me, more or less. And I'll add to that that for me, there's no sense of anything being lacking or less meaningful because of it. I know that for a lot of people, it's very important that there be a purpose or a destination to it. That's not a need I feel.

What's that old line about information wanting to be free? That's not a bad summation of my feeling on the matter. Life wants to progress, to become more complex. Information, i.e., complexity in a sense, has it's own internal drive. But I don't see that in any way as a conscious or directed thing, just...the nature of the beast, I guess.

I suppose my beliefs could be summed up with "Gut instinct tells me there's something Higher, and Christianity has a lot of good core concepts."

Oddly enough, I was raised in the church and still have some involvement. I can vividly see the value that some people get from it, and I wouldn't for a moment suggest that it's less than real. To go a step further, I can imagine in myself the comfort it could be if I decided to go that route, the strength that it can bring.

But for me, that gut instinct you mention is not at all there. In fact, my gut tells me the opposite. And so even when I was more involved, and hadn't yet thought these things through, identifying as a Christian or a believer in god never sat easily with me. It felt like willful self-deception, and I've felt much more at ease with myself and the world since I've been able to openly say (to myself not least) that, no, this isn't me.