No Baby Yet, With a Little F-bomb Pondering...

Beloved is fully effaced, 4cm dilated and feeling the baby's head moving inexorably downward, but no baby as of yet. I was supposed to go to Detroit Lakes tomorrow morning for a Synod Worship Commission meeting but elected to stay close to home just in case the blessed moment arrives. Ditto my attendance at Luther Seminary's Mid-Winter Convo Wednesday thru Friday; as much as I would have enjoyed it, I envisioned Little Miss would have making her appearance while I was frantically bombing my way up I-94 to Alexandria and elected to cancel my Convo registration.

Granted, people have come out of the woodwork to tell us how long they were dilated this much, and I don't doubt their stories. It's a continuing Advent thing: we wait until the time is right, and then it's glorious. Until then, I jump every time my phone rings.

We watched the movie Thank You For Smoking last night (EXCELLENT, BTW) and I had an interesting experience. There is a fairly high amount of strong profanity in this movie, including a number of occasions where the f-bomb gets dropped (The F-bomb, for those of you who are wondering, looks like a duck and sounds like a duck but isn't). As usual, the wonderful flexibility of this word was in full display: it got used as an adjective, an adverb, an imperative and several times in its most normal habitat, as an exclamatory expletive. None of this really caught my attention; it's not the politest word for conversation, but sometimes you just have to drop the bomb because nothing else will do.

What did catch my attention was the moment when two of the main characters are watching television in bed after having sex. The woman looks at the television, sees a tape of her partner's interview playing on the news, and says, "Let's f%$#. I want to f%$# you while I watch you on television."

That moment in the film really bothered me, and I have no idea why.

Well, I do have an idea. I think I'm averse to using the f-word for making love because it cheapens a beautiful act, a gift of God. As an expletive or an adjective, it is profane and vulgar, sometimes intense, but usually doesn't directly impact God's creation in the same way it does when you substitute "f%$#" for "make love." I've been known to drop the f-bomb myself on occasion among friends or when I'm really worked up, but I've searched my memory and I can't ever remember using it as a verb in that way. EVER. Somehow it just doesn't feel right, which is odd, since the word's origins are of course sexual in nature.

And perhaps it has to do with a Madonna complex, too - it was, after all, the female who said it, which rarely happens outside of pornography (or so I'm told). And perhaps the fact that we are expecting a little girl has something to do with it as well - it certainly is changing everything else in my life, why not my outlook on things I never thought would be affected?

At any rate, it was at the very least an interesting moment and something that's been coming to mind again and again today, so I thought I'd share. What you do with it now is up to you.