Christmas in July

I really suck at receiving gifts. When I was little, there was no way in earth I would ever be disappointed in a gift. I wanted any toy I saw on TV that was said in a high-pitched half scream after Saturday morning cartoons. No, I NEEDED that super soaker 6000 Swiss army squirt gun with two free liters of SURGE if ordered within 75 seconds!!! If anyone remembers what SURGE was, it was a special drink designed by neuroscientists as the single best method to determine if your child struggled with ADHD. I was a resounding "yes." Surge was banned in my family, or Cassie would get "creative" again. This wasn't the good kind of creative, this was the naked child on the roof screaming like a banshee kind of "creative." Each year I couldn't wait to tear my presents open on Christmas morning, secretly hoping it was that squirt gun that cost about as much as a vacation to Tahiti. 

Our family celebrates Christmas what everyone seems to call the "weird way" (haters). It takes us a solid two hours to go through presents regardless of the number of gifts, because we enjoy drawing our Christmas morning out as much as possible. Each one of us opens a present one by one, taking our sweet time. My little six-year-old self ensured everyone watched me as I tore open the wrapping paper, hoping for a squirt gun. I would usually then subtly put on the inevitable pair of socks I received instead with the same face as Ralphie in his pink bunny costume. But by golly, it was Christmas. This whole one-by-one approach is also how we play miniature golf, and is the sole reason every person most likely hates my family within a 15 kilometer radius of Myrtle Beach after our three hour 18 holer. But back to gifts, the older I have grown, the more I walk away from Christmas feeling guilty. "Dang it, they got you a twenty dollar gift card, why did you only spend fifteen on them?" Somewhere, somehow, someone will spend more than me on a gift, and I that automatically made me a cheap filthy bleep (you're welcome, mom. I'm now editing my posts). And random gifts? Those are the worst. There was a customer in front of me on two separate occasions who paid for my coffee or my fast food. Both times I walked away feeling like absolute scum. 

"I never do that for people. What kind of person am I?"

 "I'm not deserving of this at all. I could afford my latte, it's not even a necessity ."  

The nice gesture automatically turned into a way for me to realize what a terrible person I was. I ended up loathing the gift. 

My parents taught me growing up how to earn and save money, and taught me to buy everything I wanted myself. As a child i had a small allowance I would receive based upon how many chores I completed such as mowing the lawn or vacuuming, and once I hit my teenage years, I was expected to find a job. To the average adult, this is a basic way of life everyone needs to teach their children. To my teenage self, this was utterly ridiculous, as this made me have to do that whole stupid job thing and way less of that whole TV thing. And to think I still had to do chores on top of it! My parents were obviously terrible human beings set out on torturing me by not paying for my basic back-to-school items like "everyone else's parents, I'm telling you." Obviously I was being treated the same way as inmates at Guantanamo bay. How dare them! And to add to it, they had the nerve to lecture me on my spending habits. Of course, they made up lame excuses like "do you know how much your rent would technically cost each month? We provide food and shelter to you, and we're still your parents" (and all that lame stuff), and I would explain to them that they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, as I clearly needed to pierce my daith instead of going to my dentist appointment. "What's a daith?" "Ugh, mom, it's this part of the ear that looks cool when you stick a metal hoop through it. You know nothing about cool!" Now fast forward a few more years into what adults call "reality," and what I call "last week." I just completed my first year of marriage with my husband, and had my car economically totaled the day before our anniversary. Surprise! Happy anniversary! Then I found out the hard way that medical school applications went up another 50 bucks this year, and one school itself cost 175 dollars. Both of us wanted to apply to four. I let myself have it. I should have known better. I should have known Tulsans 128 years after the birth of the automobile still have no idea what a blinker is, and I should have learned in advance how much medical school would cost this year and save up for it, regardless of me expecting to never have to apply again after last year. Most people call this problem "life lessons you learn from." I called this "ways I'm an idiot." It took me a solid four days to admit to my parents I failed at being an adult, and now I owed more money than the United States. I vented and hung up, thinking to myself "why on earth would you tell them that?" It was insanely embarrassing for me to admit I was struggling financially from something I could have all been avoided if I planned accordingly. They must think I suck at being an adult. And do you know what they did? They gave me some money to pay for a week of a rental car. Those bleepholes!* They never give me money, they're obviously rubbing my failure in my face! And back to the whole self guilt trip. If I didn't fail before, I obviously did when my parents felt the need to help me out. 

I'm realizing just how often I forget that God is an actual father. I tend to get embarrassed the same way I did with my parents. "No no, I have this!" And I've actually openly lectured Him before when he had the nerve to be all nice to me when other people have it so much worse in the world. "Someone randomly came up and gave me free food when I knew I wouldn't eat today? What kind of crap is that, my hunger could have lasted a day!" Each time He showed his love to me in a tangible way, I would feel guilty. Someone always had it worse. Way worse. And to exacerbate my guilt, I knew I didn't deserve it in any way. Who does He think He is?  It became less about the relationship between father and daughter and way more about me. It wasn't basic Biblical humility, It was all works-based instead of love-based. I was only allowed niceness when I deserved it after painfully proving to God I was worthy enough. I continually saw Him viewing me as a servant, and this "niceness" didn't add up. I'm His child. I forget that God sees me through lenses of love. He sings over me when I sleep. He thinks the sun shines out of my hind quarters (to roughly quote Juno). My parents gave to me because they loved me. Not because they're playing a mind game with my overly competitive self, trying to show my  shortcomings. I didn't fail, I happen to have two loving parents that many others don't have, who continually teach me the nature of God through their actions. I'm allowed to accept a gift as a gift instead of a jab at my ego. I'm their child. It's about time I remember that my Heavenly Father is actually a father figure. The best father figure.

*insult aimed to compare said person to an anus 

"I'm sorry you're sad, here's some kittens"

If you go around the average elementary school and ask "what do you want to be when you grow up?" You'd get a slew of answers. In elementary school i wanted to be a missionary doctor.  My little sister wanted to be a grizzly bear. She ended up making much better grades than I did in school, so there's a sermon right there. We all (maybe I'm making an over generalization here) made thought-out plans growing up of what we wanted to do with our lives.  I assumed by now I would have already have built 20,000 orphanages, learned six languages, and lived for a short period in Uzbekistan for the hell of it. Instead, All I've managed to do is watch every episode of 30 Rock to the point where if my fever is high enough, I will wake up actually believing I'm Liz Lemon in the body of an overly-scrawny blonde chick still waiting for her breasts to arrive.

I've never heard a life story that didn't involve a change of plans, especially in the young adult years. In the day and age of technology, while technology is so wonderful and useful, we see the glorified pictures of everyone else. I fall for it too. We purposely avoid admitting when things didn't go according to plan, and only show the best of ourselves. Maybe you didn't do well in a particular major or you lost a job right after sharing the exciting news that you got one right after college. Maybe you're scared about keeping your marriage intact and everyone else seems so happy in their relationships. In both high school and college, I found out I graduated with honors the day before graduation. Both were rather humorous situations where I was handed a cord/card and stood staring at it in extreme confusion like "wait, I did this?" In college I subsequently hid it from those around me so no one knew I wasn't summa, regardless of me believing just a minute prior that I didn't even make cum laude. In the mind of a perfectionist, one is always stuck in the never-ending category of failure. In so many situations, we feel like we're sitting on the sidelines watching everyone else playing the game when God put us in a completely different game to begin with. In a utopian society where the Broncos and Panthers are the best football teams (shut up. stop laughing), it's like a Panthers player watching a Broncos player on the television and somehow feeling like a failure for not being in it. It's not your game. 

I made plans in high school to go into cosmetology and move to the beach, only to end up in the middle of a landlocked state that has never heard of vinegar-based barbecue sauce to obtain a random degree in premedical biology and a couple sciency minors I can't remember. I also had no plans of ever getting married. Life is weird that way. And it seems like every time some huge life change happens, it comes in clusters, or the "rule of three" as the Bible stated it. Or maybe it was 30 Rock, I can't remember. One of those two. Unfortunately, today my husband and I found out we didn't make it to medical school this year. We both received the same letter with the whole "thank you for spending a year and a half of your life sending in primary applications, secondary applications, an interview date, extra shadowing, harassing your professors for a recommendation, and 200 bucks. We totally loved you, but Bob was better" and the subtle troll meme face watermark. On top of it, Dennis' car broke down last week for good and we've seen no progress in the monoclonal antibody treatment for his chronic autoimmune condition. And after hearing the news, I drove to my job in a "woe is me, my brain and life have failith" attitude, contemplating how I would end up in the same place forever until I was eventually buried with my two new cats and a gravestone that said nothing other than "well....she tried." At work I sat down and immediately corrected ECG mistakes, picked up my immunology book for light reading, corrected a misspelling of the word "tyrosine," looked up "thyrosine" on Wikipedia to see if there was actually some alternate form of tyrosine I didn't know about, then corrected enzyme misspellings on the Wikipedia article about tyrosine. It was around looking up new research on NCBI involving stem cells and a 3D printer that I realized that 1. I'm completely insane and 2. God created me with nerd attaching to my hemoglobin instead of oxygen. I realized that I was taking this as completely my own doing, and chuckled at the thought of me assuming that missing a year somehow made me a failure and meant I should give up on reapplying. I believed that If I didn't make it and the kid who spent half of his time in college giving himself cirrhosis of the liver and the other half picking lint off his nipples in the back of the class made it, that means something is wrong with me and everyone would know it. 

The problem is that I believed somewhere deep down inside that I controlled the outcome of my entire life and would be rewarded for working hard in the way I wanted. Life doesn't work that way. Very few people get into the first job they apply for or the first graduate/medical school. I would have to admit that there's this Higher Power up there that may actually know more than me about my own life, no matter how much I try to prove to Him that I totally have it handled. And if the worst thing about my week is that I'll have to wait another year to spend 150 grand on higher education just to be later colloquially crapped on by malpractice suits, I'm having a much easier time than 99% of the world. Plus, we have two super cute kittens now, and I'd like to think of it as a cute makeup for a crappy week. Like "Hey Cassie, sorry you're sad, here's some kittens." - God

So here's to the future (I'm making a toast with my hospital coffee that due to the taste may or may not actually be the remnants of a colostomy bag). None of us have complete control over it. Sometimes you end up in a  different place in life than you expect, which makes you similar to approximately everyone else on planet Earth as well as Gallifrey. Instead of comparing ourselves negatively to everyone having "more fun," and being "more successful" according to edited pictures, it's way more important to focus on our own moments in our own game. Luckily we don't get "lol we liked you but not really" slips from heaven. Our purpose in life isn't influenced by other people's expectations of where we should be. I think life is more interesting with detours anyways. 

The "E" word (hint, it rhymes with "Smevolution")

I'm not normally the type to write on this subject, but after seeing tons of pictures online last week of Creationists who were trying to attack evolution using invalid arguments, I decided to use my biology degree for the only purpose it has: writing random blogposts that no one will read. I’m a Christian myself, I promise you. I believe God created the world. And I’m not here in any way to debate creationism or persuade someone to believe exactly what I do. If I’ve learned anything growing up, trying to convince people to have the same worldview as me usually leads nowhere. 

            In an age of technology, everyone is apparently a bleeping expert in everything. Next blogpost I write could be about the best ways to start a business (I’ve never taken a single business class), and somehow that blogpost would go around the internet as “expert” advice while I sit back laughing maniacally. Similarly to how the only marriage posts I saw going around the internet last year were been written by random single people calling me an idiot for getting married. My point here is that it’s okay if you’ve never taken more than the required biology course you were supposed to take in high school or college. I’m not asking you to be some expert in evolution and everything related to biology. However, I do know the problems first hand that people can face growing up in the church their entire life without learning evolution in the first place. I was taught by some people that the mere understanding of it and reading up on it could "lead me away from God," and from others that there's no point in learning about it if we already know "the truth." Because of this, I never so much as picked up a book containing anything related to an understanding of evolution by the time I graduated high school. And if I was able to get by with this in 2009, I know there were a ton of other people out there who also haven’t studied details of evolution, but are still bothering to debate it. So the main reason I’m writing this post is to bring up a few arguments I’ve seen over and over again by creationists that could never work when talking to an evolutionist. And lucky for me, in the process of trying to find examples, I found out that they were already written for me in giant signs after the debate last week. 

The first argument is “if we evolved from monkeys, how come monkeys still exist?” This is one of the most obvious signs someone has not properly studied what evolution is in the first place haha. What evolution teaches is that we share a common ancestor with a bonobo (type of ape). Picture a family tree. Let's say you have a grandmother who was born with blue eyes, and a grandfather with brown eyes. She had a boy with brown eyes and a girl (your mother) with blue eyes. You have blue eyes, but your cousins all have brown eyes. You look at your mother and say “how the heck do brown eyes still exist if we all have blue eyes?” This is what that argument sounds like to someone who has been studying evolution. When you look at a family tree (called a phylogenetic tree when comparing species), one branch goes one way, and another branch goes another way. That’s about as basic as I can possibly put it. Not everything is going to evolve the same way. Taking micro-evolution into consideration, you have tons of domesticated dog breeds that share a common ancestor with a dog 31,000 years ago that most closely resembles a Siberian Husky. Even within a species, some breeds last and others don't. A husky and a golden retriever sharing a common ancestor does not mean that the husky will become extinct and only golden retrievers will last. In the case of macro-evolution, believing species have the capability of evolving does not always mean the original species is eradicated.

Another argument involves anything with the phrase “just a theory.” This makes me (or anyone in the field of science) cringe even more than hearing someone pronounce the word “espresso” like “expresso.” A theory is a huge term in science. Please do not ever confuse the words “hypothesis” with “theory.” These two words have completely different meanings. In the field of science, the two highest labels are “law” and “theory.” The word "law" in the field of science pertains to an analytical statement, usually in the form of a mathematical formula. Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, for instance, provides one with the ability to measure the gravitational pull between an object and the earth. A theory, on the other hand, explains why something happens. Gravity could also be considered a theory due to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. This theory has been greatly supported through countless experiments. Even a GPS working properly after scientists accounted for the gravitational time dilation helps support this theory. It’s just common knowledge in the field of science that you can’t ever use the word “proven” when supporting a theory. Not because it isn’t accurate, but because you can’t “prove” something completely that isn’t entirely explained with a formula. Luckily for people in the field of math and physics, mathematics is the only area in the entire planet where we can actually prove something with mathematical proofs (I might be exaggerating a tad, but not really). In the field of science, a theory is practically the same thing as saying “fact,” except you have to always leave the option open to disprove it (falsifiability). The Germ Theory, for instance, will never be "disproven." Bacteria cause diseases. We know that. However, we just can’t prove it with math. Saying the word “just a theory” to a scientist is pretty much saying “but it’s just fact!”

The Theory of Evolution is a much broader term than many people assume. If you believe in micro-evolution, the fact that species change over time (basic knowledge), then you believe in aspects of the Theory of Evolution even if you don’t believe in macro-evolution - the portion of the theory that postulates large scale change between major groups of organisms over large spans of time. However, there are different hypotheses/postulates that contribute to the theory of evolution that have not been supported enough to be considered a theory. If you disagree with one of these, you should argue against these specific hypotheses. Perhaps you don’t think that Haeckel’s famous embryos were an accurate representation of comparing species at their earliest stages of development. But saying “evolution is just a theory” ensures the individual you’re conversing with of your complete lack of understanding in the area of scientific inquiry. This isn’t going to start out the conversation well. Also, there is no "theory of the Bible" as one of the signs being held by an individual in the photo above says. The Bible is a book. I follow the Bible's scriptures, I love the Bible, but it's still a book. 

First of all, the Big Bang is not part of the Theory of Evolution. There are plenty of evolutionists that don't believe the Big Bang ever occurred in the first place. For those that do, dying stars become black holes, they don't form planets. I have no idea where this kid got the idea of a star. The Big Bang did not originate with an exploding star...that's called a nova or a supernova if it's particularly large. The prevailing consensus is that the Big Bang was an explosion that involved an extremely-hot, and infinitely-dense core of energy. And no stars were involved since by definition, stars didn't exist yet, haha. Although I have to say that when I found out there was a giant explosion growing up, I thought "holy crap, that explains Genesis when God said 'Let there be light!'" I thought it actually helped explain the Bible more than just some light bulb going off. From my understanding of God, I think He's a little more powerful than saying "let there be light" and simply *bloop* happened. I would imagine some giant explosion took place. But yes, this kid could have used a similar (and more effective) argument to attack another worldview and say "where did the original matter or energy come from?" just like Creationists have to support the idea that a Creator was always there to begin with. Either way, something had to exist in an eternal state (whether a supernatural God or the universe itself) from the perspective of either worldview. 

Science is not a theory; it is a method of gathering knowledge about the world around us. And a theory IS testable, observable, and repeatable. That's actually practically the definition of a theory. And by saying science instead of "evolution" (which would have made a lot more sense), you're pretty much saying that neither creationism nor the theory of intelligent design can be remotely supported by science because science is inversely related to intelligent design. That's a bad thing. This is probably the most face-palming of all face palms. 

*There 

...and if you're going to explain your view that the gorgeous world that surrounds you supports your idea that a Creator is behind it all, I would highly suggest not making it sound like science hasn't actually figured out what causes sunsets in the first place.