burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

So, after not seeing Michael at the English Dept. reception at Reunion, I emailed him. He replied this afternoon, saying in part:

sorry to have missed you. i was away during reunion weekend so couldn't have caught up then anyway. it's good, tho, to hear that you're thriving, preaching, searching, and all such good things.

I was all asquee.

***

Nancy stopped by this afternoon. (She was one of my favorite HBS profs when I started in this department but is now at MIT -- apparently she was on campus doing an interview.)

She asked what I was up to. Laughingly I said something like, "Running the department." Somberly, she said something like, "That's been quite a job this past year, I understand," and my mind flashed back to last summer and I nodded.

As for what I do outside of this office, I said I've become this person who does church in her free time.
Nancy (kindly and nonjudgmentally): "Do you like being that person?"
I said yes.
She asked for examples and I started off by saying leading worship and then I said writing sermons -- and that I'd gotten to preach a few times, which I was made incredibly nervous by but that it's been good.

She looked really happy listening to me and joked "second career?" and I said people keep asking me if I'm going to seminary or whatever and that for right now at least I'm really happy having this 9-5 job which I'm good at and which pays my bills and doing this other stuff in my free time, especially since right now at least I'm very certain that I'm not called to ordained ministry. She said that was really good, to know that about yourself, for your own happiness.

Then I talked about how my best friend and I had been lamenting the lack of good books on mental illness from a Christian perspective and my non-Christian therapist housemate had said, "Wanna write a book together?" and that I'm not sure how serious any of us are about this, but I've been emailing back and forth with my best friend and hey, summer project.

She said I "inspired" her. (I did not say, "You're on the faculty at MIT!" Okay, she's an "MIT Affiliate" -- whatever.)

Oh, and I also got a hug both at the hello and at the goodbye. ♥

***

I encountered Paul B. (from CHPC) waiting for the T at Harvard after work yesterday.

He asked what I was up to and I said church (because that is always my immediate answer) and he asked about CWM's move and so I talked a little about that and I talked a little about Rest and Bread and then I talked about Art Night (and thought, "Hey, I have something that I do in my free time that's not church and that's easy to talk to people about").

He said, "We miss you." Which was sweet. And I don't much fault people for not staying in touch -- esp. since I still owe Liz C. and Jaja email replies from two months ago.

"At twenty minutes past the hour, poet Michael Thurston will read us a poem or two."

*giggles*

Sorry, him being introduced as a "poet" just amuses me.

(And no, the fact that i got up at 7:30 for this does not make me a groupie. Not at all. Stop looking at me like that.)

I could write theses on the Whedonverse.

"You have enough emotional investment in this topic to carry you through the difficult writing process. You will finish, and it will be important work you do. This is the topic you must write on. Forget all that bad advice. Figure out how to do it. You need to do it."

Wheee, offbalance pimped my entry on this week’s Angel episode. zzrg suggested parallels to Greek mythology and a highly plausible theory for what causes people to see Jasmine’s true form. I *really* want a transcript so i can pull out all the Biblical and Greek myth stuff. (Though given all the “real” work i have to do, it’s probably just as well i can’t obsess over every word of this episode.) offbalance got me thinking hardcore about the Season 5 (Glory, Dawn-as-Key, etc.). I quoted copiously from various episodes and learned that LiveJournal limits comments to 4300 characters.

Apparently offbalance and i live in an alternate universe (which may or may not contain floating markets) in which we are popular. I have been friended by 5 people whom i don’t know in “real life” in the past week. As offbalance says, "Well, they friended you because you rock that much, and the word is spreading like wildfire." The same is true of her, of course.

My mommy is cute. She IMed me around 5. I was playing with small children after a full day of classes, so my away message was "long day". She wrote:

"long day"? so you're sleeping?
hiding under the bed?

I love my mommy. :)

Joe IMed me tonight:

JoeyD341: jinkies Velma, a clue....
VelmasLizard: I'm full of clues dear, is there a mystery in particular?
JoeyD341: not one in particular...
JoeyD341: how have you been wonderful friend?
JoeyD341: I was thinking about you earlier as I was playing "Iowa" on the guitar....

I love my boy.

For I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see,
You were a-wandering out on the hills of Iowa, and you were not thinking of me.

Last Friday we were chatting and i asked him about his summer plans and he said:

JoeyD341: I will be back and forth between home and here
JoeyD341: working for advising
VelmasLizard: fun
VelmasLizard: I would say we should hang out sometime, but i know better than to expect that to actually happen.
JoeyD341: aw
JoeyD341: we will I'm sure
JoeyD341: :-)
VelmasLizard: Dude, last summer you had a permanent place of residence and we couldn't swing it.
JoeyD341: yeah - but my permanent place this year will be [his address in our mutual hometown deleted, with the notation for the general public that last summer he had an apartment near UNH -- where he goes to college]

I actually have hope that we’ll hang out sometime during the 6 weeks that i am home. We shall see.

This reminds me. LizardGirl is my default username. I got creative for AIM and LJ, but things like the Jolt and anything else that requires a username gets LizardGirl. This surprises people. Two peers so far in my life have nicknamed me “lizard.” It was my pre-birth name from my parents, though. It stuck, so now i have a collection of charming lizard objects. Why was it my pre-birth name, you ask? Because of this comic. (The fact that i could find this comic online, starting with no knowledge as to when it was first published, in under 10 minutes -- maybe even under 5; i wasn’t counting -- is one of the reasons why i so adore the Internet.)

The Clothesline Project for SAFE was up across from Neilson because this is Sexual Abuse Awareness Week. (This is also the week that part of the AIDS quilt was up in the chapel and the week that included the Day of Silence.) Anyway, as i’m walking by, Doug pulls up and parks his car and we exchange greetings. He looks at the bright shirts on the clotheslines and says, “Coal tar.” He goes on to explain that without the development coal tar, none of the dyes to create these bright colors would exist. “You remind me of my father,” i say. “You know way too much about everything. That much knowledge should be spread over a number of people.” He thanks me and says, “You’re very sweet.” :)

It is also open campus. My room is too small for me to feel appropriate hosting a prospective, and it’s just as well since i’ll be in Boston all day Saturday and into Sunday.

American Lit class today:
J: “Icky.”
M: “For the prospectives, this is a technical term... ultimately derived from the Greek.”

Talking about art and culture, “Literature is at the top -- of course.” Michael put literature above entertainment and then above both, The Simpsons. “Which is neither literature nor entertainment?” -- rawk, Jessica! (We won’t even start on how Buffy is much higher art than The Simpsons.)

On why Pete takes Maggie out to nice places:
“He wants to get some.”
“Liz, would you say that again so I don’t have to?”

We were discussing Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. One chapter opens with the sentence that the baby had died. “Steve... a little pathos.” Because yes, Michael is on a first-name basis with all these authors.

I need to read The Onion more often.

Amusement from traces:

also, know what is so not fair? how in my "public" entries i'm like "la la, ate this, read that, watched this..."

and in my entries reserved solely for the people that i call "friends," it's all "angst and devastation, oh misery, blah blah blah..."

that just seems wrong. one would think that i would be much nicer to my friends.

Yes, we spent the first 10 or 15 minutes of Am. Lit. class yesterday talking about Southern food. I learned that Michael’s a vegetarian, which always endears people to me. He talked about how he doesn’t get along with his family, how he gets along with them better since he moved 1500 miles away. He also did some of that talking about his children are of the devil, though i don’t think he meant it (partly from the kinda “i don’t really mean this” quality of it, but mainly because i’ve seen him with his kids and it’s obvious that he loves them). That bothers me. I was telling Allie that it’s because some people really don’t get along with their families and it’s something very serious that makes me very sad, so i don’t like when people joke about it, but i think actually it’s more of an honesty issue. Like, i buy that he doesn’t get along with his family, but i don’t buy that he doesn’t like his children because i’ve seen evidence to the contrary, so that makes me question the validity of the statements about the family, and then of course the important part is that then it puts the marital griping into more questionable territory, and not only do i like believability and consistency but i’m doing my thesis on his marital status. ;)

He asked whether we wanted to take some time to talk about what’s going on internationally before talking about Birth of a Nation or set aside some time at the end to talk about it or just what. Someone said something about this racist war, and i asked if someone could explain to me just how this war is “racist” since i’ve heard that term thrown around a lot but haven’t heard any explanation, and a bunch of hands shot up, so Michael said we seemed to have agreed on a direction and was everyone okay with that.

(For the record, it’s a racist war because, duh, it’s being waged against people of darker skin than us, though i forget the elaborate rationale which makes that argument actually make sense, and because so many members of the military – i.e., Americans who are going to die in this – are people of color. I’ll accept that as a legitimate criticism, but really that just says that the military is racially problematic or something; it doesn’t apply solely to this war.)

Since i’ve been back from Spring Break (during which i assiduously avoided war coverage) i’ve been weary. I have continued to avoid reading about the war, just felt very weary of the whole thing, and inclined to be anti-war hearing about the death and destruction and all (plus i oppose a lot of what this administration has done, so it gets difficult to support/defend something they’re doing). But listening to people state reasons why they opposed the war, i jotted the ideas down because i had counters to them. Dealing with specific issues, arguments, logics, this i can do. The amorphous sadness can envelop me, because i can’t do anything about it, but individual points i can deal with. Like light piercing through the enveloping cloud. Argument invigorates me. And in class i actually got to point out some of the problematics of the “We should have just let the inspectors do their jobs” argument (though Michael did in turn point out that as long as the inspectors were there, with the threat of military force if WMDs were discovered or used, if any weapons existed they were rendered unusable).

(Following up on my post about The Birth of a Nation, since we did spend the last half hour or so of class talking about the film, is “Dixiecrats Triumphant: The secret history of Woodrow Wilson” from Reason magazine, sent to me by my Dad.)

I wore my red short-sleeved shirt with the floral cutouts, because it’s pretty and spring-y. I remembered the Wear Red to Oppose the War, but decided that i hadn’t seen anything about that in the publicity for this day, so i would be okay. And i was fine until i went to the Dean Walters teach-in, where there were a couple Radical Cheerleaders in their red shirts and some other people in red shirts and i felt so very aware of the fact that i was being read as anti-war. It made me realize how problematic it is to “read” people, that you may well not be working within the same set of codes.

The Jennifer Walters thing was good. She opened saying she’s a mess, and she said that the flailing keeps her honest, keeps her from being self-righteous, and i liked that. I think that’s one of the ways that messy and wounded places are places where the light can come in (one of the major themes of her talk).

We talked about the used of religious language in the media and so on, and one woman said that she feels like her religion has been co-opted (by the Bush administration) to mean and to justify things she doesn’t agree with, and that it makes it difficult for her to connect to her religion and spirituality, to use them as methods of healing in this time, and how much moreso Muslims have felt that after September 11, and both those ideas really struck me.

I was also interested that two people who seemed to be very definitely anti-war were also advocating complexity and grey area and stuff with their words, though i think they were thinking of it just as an attack on the anti-war side. One person said that it seems like stepping away from extremes, getting into grey areas, is seen as traitorous, and i know she was referring to the “You’re either with us or you’re against us” type rhetoric from the administration, but i thought about how one of the reasons it’s so difficult to have debate within the “liberal” community is because i very much think that (often) if you support the war you are seen as a traitor. The second woman talked about how in our culture we’re very quick to judge, to make everything black and white, that that’s how we deal with things. I know she was talking about the axis of evil rhetoric and so on, but it made me think about how the anti-war stuff is so much about right vs. wrong (Bush is wrong and evil, killing people is wrong, peace is right and good, etc.).

And lastly, one woman talked about how Iraqis surrendering is presented as being because they love the U.S. so much, but that in Islam, jihad is only justified if your religion, your ability to practice your religion, is threatened, and that otherwise you are not supposed to fight, not supposed to hurt people, so if these people are Islamic of course they would surrender. I thought that was interesting food for thought – though it’s problematic in many ways (maybe the U.S. is the lesser of two evils compared to Saddam, maybe it’s more about hating Saddam than loving us, for one, and for a second, even if that is an accurate description of Islamic belief, if people of Islam are anything like Christian, than the degree to which they live their life by their religion varies greatly, and there is much disagreement over just what the religion/holy text says).

[The following was too good snark to pass up.]

Where:
All over the place

Topics:
US and Bush are evil
Saddam is misunderstood
The path to Utopia is blocked by the US and capitalism

Pretty much a typical day at Smith.

Guest name (Guest) wrote:
-------------------------------
OK, I know the jolt isn't the most warm and cuddly place to ask this question, but does anyone know where the teach-ins are going to be tomorrow morning? Any idea what the topics are going to be?

I didn’t do the last section of my Linguistics assignment ‘cause i had no clue and my professor said i should look over the material again ‘cause it’s really not that hard, and i could hand it in at 5 today (we had class at 11 yesterday). That was so wonderful of her, though of course it would have been more wonderful if i didn’t have 5 hours of classes, 2 hours of volunteering, and 3 hours of work in between that class and my extended due date.

So i did that assignment, skimmed and summarized in 2 pages a scholarly article on W. H. Auden (due at noon today) and continued to not do the Romantics reading. (This weekend is gonna be all work, all the time, due in part to all the catch-up i have to do.) At the same time i was feeling ever so popular. Lauri gave me a gold star and Layna said i’m “ADORABLE” and i IMed with near half a dozen people over the course of the night. And i got three and a half hours of sleep but was totally functional throughout the entire day today. I just read for the first hour and half i was at work ‘cause everyone was at a meeting, but i don’t really feel bad about that.

Oh, i went and got my mail for like the first time this week and i got a CD from flamingnik. :) Thanks, babe! Can you send me a tracklist, though? (Just e-mailing it to me is fine, or post it as a comment here.) ‘Cause i definitely don’t know all the songs on it.

Last night i had 4 songs on repeat. So glad i don’t have a roommate to worry about driving insane.

Okay, so i don’t love any of my classes, but i’m definitely loving some of my professors.

Regarding our short assignments, Michael Thurston said we’ll get comments written on our papers but no letter grade; we just get credit for doing the assignment. On Wednesday Pat Skarda quipped that “Break into small groups” is inscribed above the gates of hell. And Kim Lyons is just, well, hysterical.

I am a culture whore. After having posted this, i give you this. “All the world’s a stage, or perhaps a Buffy set,” my father said after i sent him some Buffy quotes -- i forget what real life thing they had related to.

Oh goddess. The world is out to make me fall platonically in love with everyone, isn’t it?

( A dream is a wish your heart makes. This is real life. )

Okay, so this Sunday is World Communion Sunday, and people are gonna bring pieces of bread from all over the world to First Baptist, but i think i’m going to skip and go to the Affirmation Sunday service at Helen Hills-Hills Chapel instead. I saw a flyer in the post office, something about the sermon being “the stone that was cast out will be the corner stone.” Oh, and next weekend is Fall Break so i’ll go to United. And then the next Sunday will be Parent’s Weekend and i’m dragging my mom to First Baptist.

Whedon owns me. I skipped "My Life as a Feminist Pornographer" for Firefly. And because the Sociology video showings are on Friday and Tuesday nights, i am getting Paradise Lost: Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills via MLN to watch over Fall Break.

But yes, Firefly tonight was awesome. Am now totally in love with the characters (and therefore the show as a whole). To keep from boring y’all too much i’ll be making a separate entry gushing about it.

I’m very amused by this thread about Firefly slash with Riley.

Actually, near the end of Russian class today Sasha was talking about Gogol’s problems with women and his repressed homosexuality. Then i walked into Romantics class and Katie was talking about Kevin Quashie and how he thinks everyone’s gay. Dude, i slash everyone. Yet another reason to take a class with him.

Okay, i’m thinking sleep is a good idea.

---

To sum up all the time this past week when i wasn’t posting (as well as any future time when i don’t post):

“I have no life, but I don't see when I'd _have_ one. If I'm not busy, then I'm sleeping or I _should_ be busy and am just stalling. When do people have time to have lives?”
-Rena

"I tell parents I hope their kids will call them and say they really hate the school because they're having to work too hard."
-former Smith President Ruth Simmons