Soul Number

I feel good. However, unlike James Brown, I did not know that I would. I hoped I would, but that's been a far from certain status for me. Right now, today, I'm ALL ABOUT THIS:

My process for writing is pretty haphazard. The rule I use is, "Write like you are drunk, then edit like you're sober." I never knew who said that before, so I just looked it up. The romantic version of it is that Ernest Hemingway (famous drunk) said it, but it seems that it's not:

“Write drunk, edit sober” sounds good, but the problem is that it’s not by Hemingway. The quote is all over the internet being attributed to EH, but no one ever gives a source in Hemingway’s works or conversations. This is because the quote is almost certainly by a novelist called Peter De Vries. He published a novel called “Reuben, Reuben” in 1964, where the main character is based on a famous drunkard poet, Dylan Thomas. On page 242 the character says this: “Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”

I'm not going into the analysis of that explanation, but suffice it to say, I kinda feel drunk, drunk on joy. I hope I never, ever, sober up. And so, this piece may ramble (maybe they all do?). We'll see how long I let it marinate. I really wanna publish this like YESTERDAY.

See if you follow my train of thought here. I often pray, and in so doing so, I often pray for those who are my support, the people I know who are on my side. Reasonable, right? It so happens that I wonder, when praying about friends who are on the feminine end of the gender spectrum like me, but aren't, ya know, CIS females, what name should I be using when asking for God to look over these friends?

I'm very, very shaky on my Faith in general, but I believe what I believe. I respect everyone else's opinions on the matter, but will not debate this kind of thing, because I think it's the worst way to have an argument between people. Right up there with politics. The one thing I ask in reading the rest of this post, even if you believe WAY different than I do, is that you recognize the fact I'm doing my best to acknowledge wonderful people at the same time as recognizing my Faith. And I want to say that I understand those trans people who might be angry at, or not believe in, God, given that they are not in a body that matches how they feel inside. I TOTALLY get it.

Anyway, I usually pray for friends as I know them best. In this blog before, I have named many feminine names of people who are not biologically female. But I wonder if God is okay with me doing it that way. I will say, please look out for Tanya, or thank you for Angie, etc., etc. 

In most cases, I don't know the person's legal name, or "God-given" name. In a couple cases I do. So I waffle on what what I call those people when I pray. Sometimes I say "or whatever their real name is". We could also debate what a "real" name is, but I digress.

Back to my thinking today. I was thinking about how good I feel right now, today, and the blessings I have in the form of friends, my job, and more. And I'm talking to God about it. During this time, I suddenly had this question:

What if God doesn't think of each of us by a "name", as we have them on Earth, at all?

What if there is some other type of way He thinks of us, individually? Does He have a humongous spreadsheet, or does he have us all in His head? That's kind of a joke, I think, the part about a spreadsheet, by the way. I won't go deeper into it, for those who don't believe as I do, but I thought, maybe He knows us as SOULS instead? If we are souls, or in more scientific terms, even, we are separate "bags of chemicals", how does one distinguish one from the other? 

In my work, I often deal with databases. I guess we all do, on some level. But in most databases, entries in tables have a unique identifier. Often referred to a Primary Key. Maybe in the great database of life, our Primary Key is called the Soul Number. I made that name up, but you can use it, too. I wonder what my soul number is. Maybe it's like 53454364363463454343366436. Who the heck knows?

So, in pondering my question about how to refer, while praying, to trans/CD friends that use a different name than on their birth certificate, I guess it's possible that there is no wrong way. God knows who I mean.

This, friends and neighbors, is how my brain works. Hopefully if you made it this far reading this, you are, at minimum, getting a huge chuckle out what a nut Shannyn is. Or maybe it makes you think. Either way, I feel good.

P.S. - There was a lovely baseball game in Anaheim last night. It all centered around the number 45 of recently deceased Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs. I've decided that most likely, 45 is is not his soul number, although it could be. If you are a baseball nerd like me, if you saw or read about it, you may have cried like I did when I woke up today and saw all what transpired.