This is an idiotic notion.

The conversation eventually got around to somebody eventually asking whether you should expect God to "speak" to you. One person answered, yes, and if He isn't, there's something wrong with you.

This is a supremely idiotic notion. It's about on par with the cultural expectation, in some places, that Christians are supposed to be happy and cannot be depressed. Frankly, I think these people are mostly deluded. There's nothing anywhere in the entire history of Christian thought suggesting what these people believe, and quite large portions of the Bible are devoted to the opposite perspective. Logic and human experience also strongly testify on both counts. You really shouldn't expect anything at all. Ever. Except what has been promised, which only really includes things like, "salvation", "forgiveness of sins", "love", and such. Nothing about happiness or not being depressed, nothing about any sort of revelation. Deus absconditus. Crickets chirp. You're depressed. Don't worry, that doesn't mean you're damned.

It seems people have never read the book of Job. Well, in the end, God comes, but it raises more questions than it answers. Lop off the ending. Really. And that's life for you, right there. You're not necessarily going to prosper. You're not necessarily going to be happy. You may have everything you love taken from you senselessly. And a bunch of idiots may taunt you for not being good and holy enough, because that's the real reason you have such bad fortune. And you'll hear nothing in response. And then you'll die. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Or you can think that being good means things will be good for you and depression, failure, and death are signs that you've done things wrong, messing up both this life and the next! And the silence, the interminable silence, is further confirmation that you've fucked it all up and there is no hope.

More front squats today. I'm closing in on where it "should" be in relation to my back squat if I trained both, which means that progress on them will be slower now. Another common axiom is that, if you're training them, at around my level, if you can front squat it for a triple, you can clean and jerk it. I might be able to clean it, but there is no way I could jerk it. I'm a little behind what I should be, I guess. My elbow isn't protesting much, but I'll give it a couple more weeks to heal and strengthen before I put it in awkward positions or do explosive things with it. Or, hell, I don't know, maybe I'll see what a light set of back squats, like 275 or even just 225, does to it today. I just realized I could do sumo deadlifts as an alternative pulling exercise so I don't overwork my lower back with the added benefit of strengthening my relatively weak adductors.

Whatte the swyve? I just got a "User not authorized for PeopleSoft" error?! I kind of need that to do my job. Like, it's 95% of what I do. So I'll just go to lunch.