I've said it before and I'll say it again - God hates me. A lot.

There once was a girl who was very very good. She went to church faithfully with her mother and her grandmother ever Saturday afternoon at 4:30pm sharp.

(Saturday mass was much preferable to the Sunday masses. Less busy and no one had to worry about waking themselves up too early or wonder who was going to prepare the Sunday meal. Because as everyone knew it wasn't going to be the menfolk, those Godless heathens, who were often too busy nursing themselves through a hangover to be worried about actually preparing the food. Though they were the first ones to bitch if there was no Sunday dinner.

What was I saying?)

She went to a small Catholic elementary school where the other children were also very good. She wore the standard uniform of pressed shirt or modest sweater and a dress or skirt, even in the bitterly cold weather when her knobby knees would bang together like shutters let loose from their hinges in a storm. When she was feeling a bit rebellious she wore green corduroy culottes and she always thanked God for not sending her to the principal's office for pushing the dress code, because sitting in the principal's office was the worst type of punishment. The principal was a scary old nun who had facial hair and a mole. And she might have eaten kittens for breakfast.

She sang in the church choir. She was on milk duty. She folded the American flag every Friday afternoon in perfect triangles and never, ever let it touch the ground. She knew the rosary and the stations of the cross, she wore her cross of ashes proudly on her forehead all day on Ash Wednesday and never ate meat on Fridays during Lent.

She was a very good girl.

Then she got to high school and things changed.

No longer under the thumb of the nuns of her Catholic elementary school and no longer forced to sit in classrooms where all the desks faced a cross with the form of a nearly naked, writhing Jesus hanging from it, the girl started thinking for herself. She questioned the teachings. She no longer wanted to go to church. She fought with her CCD teacher on topics like a woman's right to choose to have an abortion and homosexuality. She even had premarital sex as a teenager.

Her mother was not happy.

Neither was God.

It didn't bother the girl. She renounced her faith, which was really not hers to begin with, and started referring to herself as a Recovering Catholic.

From then on, the girl, who was now a woman, would duck whenever she had to enter a Catholic church to attend weddings or funerals for fear that a lightning bolt would strike her dead. Her favorite curses were a series of Jesus Christs! Goddammit all to hells. And for Christ's sakes. The woman swore she felt a twinge in her neck every time she took the Lord's name in vain, like someone pinching you in that tender spot between the neck and the shoulder, but it didn't stop her. Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick was fun to say, and who was it harming? Fuck a duck is also enjoyable coming off the tongue and water fowl never retaliated.

God may have been busy worrying about wars and famine and baby birds falling out of trees but He would get his revenge.

It would come in the form of a trip that the woman's husband would be awarded through work. The very husband who worked a minimum of 18 hours a day and very much deserved the trip. It was the same conference/boondoggle the husband had been awarded the year before and the couple never thought they'd be asked to go again. That stuff just didn't happen.

Last year's trip was to a lovely resort... In Phoenix, Arizona. A wonderful time was had by all, but the woman had really hoped it would have been somewhere near the ocean. So, last year - Arizona. This year's trip?

Cabo San Lucas.

In Mexico.

Right on the ocean.

The date of the trip? Three weeks before the woman's due date.

She can't go.

She can't go because it's too far away and too long a trip and too close to her due date and she really doesn't want to chance delivering her baby in a Mexican hospital six hours away from home by plane. And with her luck, that is exactly what would happen.

If that's not proof that God is seriously pissed off, I don't know what is.


[On a related note - Is anyone going to that Johnson's thing in NJ at the beginning of April? I could totally make that trip. It's not Mexico but I needs to see mah ladies. Email me if you're going.]