Filed by Trevor at 1:31 am under Religion, UU

I stopped attending church on a regular basis almost eight years ago, but the various minutiae of my evangelical Christian upbringing have not faded from my memory at all. So when I joined the Unitarian Universalist church about six months ago (think Buddhists who got trapped at a Benny Hinn revival weekend), I was very curious to see how we would handle the traditional church calendar, if at all. For example, our observance of the Christmas season predictably favored the more pagan elements, of which there are more than I thought, and thus was more of a three-week Winter Solstice celebration with a light sprinkling of Baby Jesus and a menorah stashed nonchalantly in a corner. Therefore, I can only assume that Easter — an unimpeachably Christian holiday — will come and go in a flurry of egg hunts and hymns to nature, but as the observance of Lent doesn’t necessarily connote any manner of religious attachment, I’ve wondered whether or not anyone in my congregation finds such a thing personally meaningful.

You see, my best friend gave up beef for Lent. Kind of. Which I think is refreshing, as for the most part he’s never cared much for religion and thus it’s usually me who’s given to unpredictably frantic outbursts of religious fervor, so it’s nice to pass the torch along. The fact that his wife is a lapsed Catholic — very, very lapsed — completes the scenario quite elegantly. As for me, even before I left the Christian church I would use this time of the year to make some flip remark about how I’d given up Lent for Lent. Now I just say that I’ve given up crystal meth, but only until Easter — then West Hollywood, here I come! And to the surprise of exactly no one, this particular brand of antipathy is fairly common among my fellow church members.

So I’ve come to this conclusion: Unitarians don’t do Lent. We do Happy Hour.

Of course, this isn’t to say I’m opposed in any way to treating restraint as a spiritual discipline. Last May I drastically overhauled my eating habits and was able to drop a significant amount of weight, and while I have not necessarily retained the ascetic lifestyle I led for the first two or three months, most of the fundamental changes I intended to make have remained more or less permanent, the most pressing and satisfying of all being switching from drinking soda to water — by the end I was up to more than two liters of Coke a day. Nevertheless, a number of bad habits have crept back into my daily routine, so lately I’ve begun trying to regain my once fanatically health-conscious existence by heading over to the Jamba Juice across the street from where I work, where I buy a two-ounce shot of wheatgrass and a green tea smoothie with a fiber boost. Isn’t that wonderful? I feel cleansed just writing that sentence.

Unfortunately, the healthful (and laxative) effect of this daily ritual is mitigated somewhat by the fact that over the last two days I ate an entire container of brownie mix directly from the bag. Or by my near-daily habit of pilfering fistfuls of pepperoni from the pizza station at work while the cooks are preoccupied with other tasks. Perhaps it’s my late-night propensity for making Egg McMuffins with enough butter to make any Jewish mother proud, or even the fact that on a recent visit to In ‘n Out — a restaurant I’d told people I’ve lost my taste for — my bill was almost 10 bucks.

Which reminds me. If you’re spending more than five dollars and change on a meal at any given fast-food joint, please reassess your life.

Or maybe it’s the fact that at this very moment I have an entire pan of biscuits in the oven from a container of Pillsbury dough left over from the holidays that’s been sitting in the back of my fridge and thus expired three months ago. But they’re going to be delicious. Unfortunately, this sentiment bears a troubling resemblance to something I wrote over two years ago:

This, of course, only serves to reinforce my previous conviction that an overdose of positive circumstances is detrimental to my health and financial well-being. If this keeps up I’ll be dead in a year, poor and hideously obese, surrounded by an ocean of Double-Double wrappers and broken jewel cases.

At least I’m consistent.