God.

Right now, if you have read almost anything I’ve written, you are probably feeling a little bit uncomfortable.

Not because I mentioned God and maybe you don’t have the type of relationship you really want with Him, but more because you think I spelled the word wrong.

You think I should have spelled it, ‘G-a-w-d’ (capital ‘G’ because, as I have mentioned before, I was in the Catholic youth training program and even though I am a guilt-ridden lapsed Catholic today, I still carry with me vestiges of my upbringing. So I can’t say, “Oh my God!” without feeling guilty. So I use ‘gawd’ instead).

But I capitalize it to ‘Gawd’ because secretly I really know what I mean and I’m taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Just more softly.

And with a Boston accent.

No this time I was actually talking about God, so it isn’t taking His name in vain….

Oh my Gawd, wait!

It just popped into my head that I told you that I was a part of the Catholic youth training program, which is true. But I just realized it was truly, absolutely, I’m not lying, called the C.Y.O.

Catholic Youth Organization.

Seriously. We put on all sorts of community-friendly stuff, all under the creepy name of ‘The Catholic Youth Organization”, now that I think of it.

I remember painting posters announcing church breakfasts “brought to you by the Catholic Youth Organization”… but we always abbreviated it. We said CYO.

“Come to this year’s Halloween Spook Walk with your impressionable young ones! Brought to you by the CYO.”

And this was post World War II people, when ‘youth organizations’ had a very bad connotation.

But we never said, “Catholic Youth Organization” on any of our propaganda… So maybe we always said, ‘CYO’, not because it was three syllables versus eight, but because we wanted to sound friendly, rather than ominous.

Why didn’t we just change the name of the group to something with a little more happy? Like ‘Joyous Little Catholics’?

No, that would have implied we were all ‘little’ and we were know-it-all tweens and teens.  We would have been offended.

Fine Young Catholics!

Wait. No that wouldn’t work because some smart aleck in the group would totally start to call it ‘F. You Catholics’ and Father McCue would have been pissed.

Plus the music group, Fine Young Cannibals would come out with some hit songs a few years later and we would have had to sue them for using our FYC abbreviation.

It just seems like we would have realized that Catholic Youth Organization sounded so… I don’t know…. cult-y.

But I’m wicked old, so I have to give the Church a break because way back then was probably before, like, marketing.

Before Marketing.

B.M.

My whole life could be divided into two big time periods if that were true.

Lisa Dingle, B.M.

Lisa Dingle, A.B.M. (I like ‘After Before Marketing’ better than “After Marketing” because we were talking about the church earlier and they have B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Dominoes, or something. It’s Latin.) but they didn’t do B.C. and A.C. (probably because they had ancient visionaries who realized that later on people might confuse A.C. with battery power.

I dunno. But either way they didn’t do Before Christ and After Christ so I’m not going to do that out of respect…

For the Church.

Because I’m all about that.))

And that, people, is the first time I carried a parentheses through more than one paragraph. (Ta. And. Da. The Pulitzer people should be calling any minute.)

Anyway, So my life is divided into two major sections now: B.M. and A.B.M.

Oh, but wait.

There’s Granny’s and Grampa’s ‘unsayables’ list.

We have to consider that.

No we really do, because I live with two seasoned citizens who still drop their voices and whisper very bad words like (whisper these..) ‘cancer‘… ‘death‘ ……. ‘Nixon‘.

And also they abbreviate or substitute other words and phrases that have to do with personal things… like you never hear them say ‘naked’, or ‘breasts’, or ‘pee’, or ‘poop’. They say, respectively, ‘in the buff’ (or, in a pinch, ‘nude’), ‘chest’, ‘void’ (not kidding, they don’t ‘pee’. They ‘void’.), and B.M. for ‘bowel movement’ (because ‘poo’ sounds, I don’t know, gross-er than ‘bowel movement’?!)

B.M.

I know, right?!

I just divided my whole life into two big time periods.

And one is called B.M.

Granny and Grampa would never be able to comfortably live with that.

They know what they really mean when they say, B.M. and they wouldn’t be able to concentrate if I kept referring to ‘my life, B.M.’

But wouldn’t that be a freakin’ riot?

No. It might be confusing for them and I don’t want them to be uncomfortable (no matter how much the residents of the ManCave would applaud).

Luckily this is not a problem because, as I have mentioned, I was part of the Catholic youth training program.

I can still use ‘Before Marketing’, I’ll just employ catholic marketing tactics!

I’ll just change it to Latin.

Seriously, that’s what the Catholics do, so I can totally do it.

Don’t believe me?

Well, I just looked up ‘Anno Dominoes’ and it translates to ‘After Party’.

Think about it. It makes total sense: “Yay! Jesus is in the house! Let’s keep this party goin’!”

But they wanted it to sound all sorts of solemn.

So they translated it into Latin and, voila…

Reverence!

Told you.

Wait. What?

‘Domini’?

It’s ‘Anno Domin-i?

Not ‘Anno Domin-oes‘?

Oh. Okay. Let me look that up.

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wHoops.

Thanks for readin’.

* As always, you can come on over to Just Ponderin’s facebook page to comment or just hang out.