fidesquaerens

I'm on research fellowship this upcoming year (meaning I don't have to teach), and my department needed my office for people that were actually teaching. Yesterday I went over to campus and cleaned out my stuff.

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It's a bit depressing, looking at it without my little taped-up comics and books. I left a huge stack of envelopes, file folders, etc. and also a few books that that I'm leaving behind. Also some wine from our semesterly symposia. I'm a bit jealous, actually, that the new people get all those bookcases to fill up and new desks/comfy chairs and a new computer. The new computer came in early May and the office was renovated over the summer, so I barely got a chance to enjoy it all.

I've had good luck in having mostly-absent office mates - people I liked but for whatever reason our schedules jived well enough that we both had the office for about as much as we needed it. Still, I'll miss knowing that other people are around and just hanging out with friends waiting for students to come by. I've taken to working at the local public library. I just wish they'd let me leave a crate of my books behind the desk. I'm tempted to "donate" them just so I can leave them on their shelves, and if I thought they wouldn't be reshelved at other branches I think I would.

(P.S.: I've gotten into a weird sleep schedule and didn't sleep at all Wed/Thur night. So this is me after eight hours of sleep. Those eight hours just started at around 5 PM yesterday evening.)

(Originally posted at LJ.)

 Life mile-stones have a way of making us reflect on where we are and where we'd like to be. In many ways, the fact that I'm facing a milestone just now is pretty inconsequential – it comes down to the fact that humans evolved five fingers on each hand (ergo: base 10 counting) and the way the human psyche thinks round numbers are important. But someone wise once said that the unexamined life is not worth living, so I try to grab those more reflective moments when they come along.

On top of turning thirty, I also was profoundly affected by several things over the last few months. Some of them were political, like the "success" of Proposition 1 in North Carolina – something about that whole political event, the way it was framed and the way I reacted to it, woke up something inside of me. Before that event I had more or less worked myself around to believing the standard picture that Christianity condemned homosexuality was wrong (IMO theologically, but also on general principles as well) – but my reaction to that political event was the first time my gay rights activism felt natural. It was actually a very Aristotelian moment; I was no longer doing things because rationally I thought it was what I was supposed to do, but because deep within myself it seemed like the most natural action given who I was and what I knew to be true and good. There have been other things, too, such as the end of a fannish event I've been involved in for eight years, and other little things in my life. I've just felt more at home in my own skin than I have in years. Some days I'm more at home than others, of course, but even in spite of being exhausted and working too many hours, it feels like I come closer to eudaimonia these days than I have in my adult life.

I'm not saying all of this as a "look at how enlightened I am!" kind of moment. Far from it. What I am trying to say is that part of being self-aware, figuring out what makes me tick and how I can be the best Marta possible, is paying attention to the world around me. That means paying attention to the world around me, and since a lot of how I view the world is through the various news pubs I read (Der Spiegel, the NY Times, and various Al-Jazeera blogs lately, and of course Stewart/Colbert videos), it's news stories that tend to spur on that self-reflection. So perhaps it's not all that surprising that I've been thinking a lot about the Aurora, Col. shootings. Things like this are how I define myself. And James Holmes, the alleged shooter, was a church boy.

I don't know whether he was a Christian or not. I rather suspect that comes down to what you mean by "Christian." The Christian Post bills him as a "'normal Christian boy" (possibly with mental health issues), whereas the Telegraph points to a Match.com profile where he described himself as an agnostic. I've seen some sources describe him as very involved in his local Presbyterian church whereas others just say he came a few times and sat in the back. His family was also a long-standing member of Penasquitos Lutheran Church in San Diego, though that could just mean attending services a few times a year. The safest biography I can come up with is he grew up to some degree involved in a mainline Protestant Church, and then as he grew older, he drifted from it (but probably not entirely). The bits I've read about him remind me of people I know, who grew up in church families but for whatever reason become less involved as he went into adulthood.

There're a lot of people like that, and I'm not sure how much we should hold Christianity accountable for these peoples' actions. That was the whole point of the taxonomy I was trying to work up a while ago; there just seems to me to be a big difference between someone who's really involved with a church (even if it's only socially), and someone who just claims that affiliation without getting particularly involved. That said, it's pretty obvious to me that Holmes was a church-goer, even if not a particularly involved one. It was a Lutheran church youth group he would have bee involved in as a kid, and it was a Presbyterian church that didn't catch him before he went off like he did. I'm not into blaming either of those groups, but if people are ready to blame Islam for the Taliban or atheism for Josef Stalin (as I've heard many Christians do), it's only fair to hold Christianity accountable for the James Holmes of the world.

Which leaves me… I'm honestly not sure where, actually. It's so convenient for me not to want to assign blame, since it's my own group that comes closest to being to blame here. I'm not one of those who claim that if you commit murder you were never a true Christian. ("True Christians" have done as much horrific things as any other group.) But even so, I find myself not seeing what good that blame game does. It doesn't seem like it would prevent the next catastrophe, and I suspecct it would make those already affected by this tragedy feel that much worse. At the end of the day, though, I can't escape (nor am I trying to escape) the stark reality: this carnage was created by someone who looks like me in so many ways.

I think in the end that's the most honest thing I can do. I don't know what made James Holmes do the things he did, or why any God that exists lets things like these happen. Believe me, I've been trying to understand that last puzzle for longer than I've been blogging, or studying philosophy, or even writing fanfic. Wrapping my head (or more properly, my heart) around the effing ineffable plan and the idiocy of theodicy, as I call it in my more light-hearted moments, since I've known what it meant to suffer. And I still don't know. But this seems like precisely the kind of situation where honesty and integrity requires I not fill that void in with cheap certainties.

Fancy words, I know, and they feel like lies as I type this, or at least so much of an over-simplification of things that they can't possibly be true. They're entirely too neatly put-together for situations like this. All I can do is sit with the fact that I have no answers here, and live with that (and maybe some day live beyond that?). That seems poor pittance in light of tragedies like this; but, sadly, it's all I've got.

(Originally written at LJ.)

I've put the ones I've read in bold, the ones I intend to read in the reasonably near future in italics (in my case, this means I now own a copy and it is literally waiting in a pile). Feel free to pass it on, or adjust as needed. Some of these I don't think I would ever read, but who knows? Perhaps.

Novel

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift)
Le Morte d'Arther (Sir Thomas Malory)
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) (pick a Dickens, any Dickens...)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) (never liked this book, but I can say it's been read)

Autobiography, Memoir and Essays

The Confessions (Augustine)
The Complete Essays (Michel de Montaigne)
In Praise of Folly (Desiderius Erasmus) (I love his Enchiridion also)
Letters (Marcus Tullius Cicero) (I would add *any* of Cicero's essays, esp. the one on old age)
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis)
Meditations on First Philosophy (Rene Descartes)
Orthodoxy (Gilbert Keith Chesterton) (this was excellent)
Walden (Henry David Thoreau) (boring and supercilious, but I did read it)

History

The Bible
The Histories (Herodotus)
The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)
The Republic (Plato)
Lives (Plutarch)
City of God (Augustine)
The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli)
Utopia (Sir Thomas More)
The Social Contract (Jean Jaques Rousseau)
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon)
Democracy in America (de Tocqueville)

Drama

Agamemnon (Aeschylus)
Oedipus the King (Sophocles)
Medea (Euripides)
The Birds (Aristophanes)
Poetics (Aristotle) (want to read this one too, but don't have a copy yet)
Richard III (Shakespeare)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)
Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
Tartuffe (Moliere)
The Way of the World (William Congreve)
A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen)
Saint Joan (George Bernard Shaw)
The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
No Exit (Jean Paul Sartre)

Poetry

The Iliad (Homer)
The Odyssey (Homer)
Odes (Horace)
Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri)
The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
Sonnets (William Shakespeare)
Paradise Lost (John Milton)
Idylls of the King (Alfred Lord Tennyson)
Selected Poetry (William Wordsworth)
The Complete Poems (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

(Originally posted at LJ.)

Tim Kurek (a Christian author I follow over on FB) has a new book coming out. As he describes it:

In January 2009 I entered the closet a straight man and came out to my friends and family as a gay. I lived with the label for an entire year. After my life as I knew it had quickly unraveled into nothing, I began building a new one. I became a barista at a gay café. I played in a LGBT softball league. I protested in New York City with a group of gay activists that I had encountered years before while I studied Liberty University. And I even participated in a marriage equality event with the son on Jim and Tammy Faye, Jay Bakker. For a year I immersed myself, completely and utterly, in the small gay scene of Nashville, Tennessee, and experienced firsthand the agony of being isolated, repressed, and alone.

My book is the result of that year and it tells the story of the men and women that challenged, and ultimately changed my life’s path. It is a book about faith, and a book about doubt. But mostly it is a book about people, and how the men and women I’d always been taught to shun ended up saving my life.

He emphasizes that he is not writing about the gay experience, since (as he's not really gay) that's not a topic he feels competent to address. Rather, it's about a rather extreme exercise in empathy: a Christian trying to exorcise his inner-Pharisee, as it were, and to live with what many LGBT Christians live with "for real."

He's asking the same questions that spurred my own "evolution" on homosexuality, and changed me from someone who thought the Bible taught homosexuality was immoral to being convinced of the opposite. While I didn't go so far as Tim did (not nearly that brave, unfortunately!) I found myself asking questions like the ones that motivated his project. If I was gay, could I come out to my family and friends? Could I still be a Christian? What made any love I felt for another man better or more worthy of support than the love a gay friend of mine felt for his boyfriend? These on top of the obvious political problems of denying equal legal protections to anyone, based on a religious belief. It was this striving for empathy that really changed my position on homosexuality, and though this was private in my case - I lived with "what if's" rather than dealing with peoples' very real reactions to my actually coming out - I can definitely see the appeal of Tim's project.

Tim has a trailer out for the book...

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... and he is accepting donations to help pay for a publicist and final book editing. Even if you decide not to donate (which I plan to, and encourage - this really is an interesting story that needs to be told), I hope you'll check out the trailer and think about the experiences he describes. It'll be four minutes well spent. The book comes out October 11.

(Originally posted at LJ; please comment there.)

I had every intention of blogging about deep thoughts this morning before heading over to campus. A conversation with Dan Fincke over at FB has me thinking about how some atheists characterize religion, plus some reviews of Sam Harris's Free Will have me thinking about the purpose of incarceration - is it to punish or rehabilitate or protect the rest of us, and does that goal make sense in light of the latest neuroscience, etc. Deep thoughts all around; I do want to write about them in more depth.

But I'm feeling thoroughly curmudgeonly this morning. Mostly it's medical (a yeast infection means I feel too sore to move) but also the heat and weird sleep schedule - all of which means I'm in no frame of mind to deal with difficult, complicated topics with grace. :-S

I can, however, post some videos. I'm sorry to report that Doc Watson at eighty-nine has sailed west. Even at that age, it seems too soon; his music was a staple of my childhood. And following my tradition, whenever a musician dies, it's time for some music in memoriam:

First, Doc Watson by himself playing Gershwin's "Summertime":

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And also a truly first-class jam session with Doc Watson, Ricky Scaggs, and Earl Scruggs:

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1. Around here, charmingly dreary can apparently change to cats-and-dogs downpour in the space of a ten minute walk.


2. My jacket is apparently only water-resistant, not water-proof as I originally thought.


3. Jeans, once soaked, don't dry. An hour on the intercampus bus and these are still soaked.


4. There cames a point when it's not worth stepping back from the curb to avoid getting soaked.

Also, apparently there's nothing quite so hilarious to my perverse sense of humor as seeing a baboushka on a walker trying to ford an intersection with six inches and more of water. I should be ashamed, but mainly I was tickled. It's been a long morning.

If you can't tell, apparently we're putting the mon(soon) back in Monday around here today. I'm sure someone somewhere needs all this moisture more than we do. Help yourself!

Tonight North Carolina voted to make it not only illegal but also unconstitutional for two adults to build a legally-recognized family unit, simply because those adults are the same gender. It's a bit odd - I haven't lived in NC since 2006, but I still feel like a Tarheel at heart, and NC news tends to hit me harder than NY news does. For me, this amendment isn't academic, it isn't general - it is a slap in the face to all affected, no matter the remove.

I have my own history with a good friend from my undergrad days who happened to be gay. And I remember the way he was impacted by homophobia he experienced. It breaks my heart to think of the gay, lesbian, whatever kid who's sitting in his college dorm room hearing that his state doesn't think whatever love he might find should be protected by law. The one consolation I have is that this kid, if he's been following the news all along, might have seen that many people in his state didn't feel this way. But I know how news media works. All those clergymen who signed the petition saying they opposed the amendment are dwarfed by ( that shameful Billy Graham ad )

This amendment process is offensive and insensitive to a minority group. It's also harmful to families with heterosexual parents but that aren't bound by parents. As has been pointed out many times, it makes it harder to deal with domestic violence, child welfare and any other range of things that affect stable but unmarried couples. But things like this are really and truly discouraging because they point to how little value we place on rational argument in this society. The bottom line is, in an amendment ratification process like this the best argument doesn't become law. Direct democracy like this doesn't give any weight to how well-considered your reasoning is. Are you voting because you have thought things through and one way or the other decided on a position, or are you voting out of fear or on a whim? The votes add up the same.

Also, it should not need to be said, but in case it does: not everything is up for a vote. I can't speak to legal rights - I heard somewhere that some Supreme Court marriage is a right, but I don't recall the details - but philosophically, the ability to form a family unit and receive legal protection of the same is a right. Sometimes the state has a good reason to keep two people from marrying, like with incest or pedophilia where consent is iffy, but there's just not a reason here. (As a side note, it actually amused me to no end that if we're looking for a biblical definition of marriage, polygamy probably comes closer to the mark than the one man, one woman formula. But that's neither here nor there.)

I know I've quoted this passage here before, but on nights like this, I have to go back to Dr. King. He wrote in the Birmingham letter:

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Laws like this are a kind of segregation. And they make me sick.

One other thing: I know a lot of people will say that this is an instance of religion needing to stay out of politics. One thing I have seen over these last few weeks, though, is that religious people have been among the most active in challenging stereotypes and unchallenged beliefs some people have. The backward pastors encouraging parents to beat their limp-wristed children get all the attention, of course, but then you also have pastors like this guy:

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I'm not convinced that this had much to do with religion, and to the extent it did, I'd suspect it was more religion used as a crutch for hatred and us-vs-them mentality.

Enough of that, though. And enough of these high-brow words. Tonight, I just wanted anyone hurt by this amendment (in any way) to know how sorry I am. It's not right, it's not just, and you don't deserve that pain.

(Originally posted at LJ; please comment there.)

#1. If there's anyway to avoid it, do not ever have a cyst excision. Keep your skin healthy, and catch them early. I'll spare you all the medical gore, but the preferred medical procedure these days is to make a very small excision and squeeze the cyst out as much as you can. It reduces risk of infection and scarring. They give you lidocaine for the actual incision, but there's not much that can be done about what they call "pressure." I've felt pain due to pressure; squeezing a sizeable mass through a small opening in tenderized skin is something else entirely. I started alphebatizing numers to keep my mind off it and got all the way to fifty-seven.

Was going to blog deep thoughts about the role of government this afternoon (roh_wyn, celandineb, you both got me thinking - thanks!) Or work on drafting my Euthyphro lecture. But the pain and general discomfort have me feeling a little loopy, so I think I'll just relax and watch dunk-dunk.

Anyone else who had this cyst excision done, do you have any practical advice? I'm doing the gauze pads and the pharmacy should deliver antibiotics tomorrow morning (standing around for a half-hour was not in the cards earlier). But it's really very tender and makes life awkward. What helps?

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#2. The woman from career services at my university sent out a call for resumes, for a specific full-time receptionist job at an insurance corporation in the area. It wasn't really a mass email; at least, it looked to be addressed to me specifically. This amuses me to no end, and worries me. Am I so behind in my program that they think I need to be looking for entry-level work outside of academia?

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#3. Over at FB, Neil Gaiman posted about this guy who asked Neil Gaiman to write him a poem, which said guy would have tattooed. Gaiman agreed, and the poem was illustrated by David Mack (of Kabuki fame). For folks with a FB account, the pictures are available here, and the poem itself is in the comments.

Personally, I doubt I'd ever want a tattoo that large. Really any tattoo - maybe a classy, small and exotic one, something in Mandarin or Arabic that was meaningful to me, but even that just isn't my style. Still, the idea of tattoo inevitably called just_ann_now's Besorg character to mind. Lines like

I will write in words of fire.
I will write them on your skin.
I will write about desire,
Write beginnings, write of sin.

are very inspiring to put it mildly.

(Originally written at LJ; please comment there.)

My laptop is finally back from repair-land and, at the risks of jinxing it, I think it's finally really and truly fixed. The keyboard was worn out so I had to send it in to be replaced, and then when it got back the bottom case was damaged so that the battery would only stay in if I held it on top of something (and not just a desk; something right up against it to hold the battery in.

HP does a good job of repair-work, actually. They have an online chat tool that I can use to report the problem, troubleshoot, verify warranty and authorize repair - all the stuff that I would have to do with a phone agent, but without the wait times, the difficulty of explaining what exactly is going on, etc. They ship you a box and FedEx it overnight, and usually get it from my doorstep to the repair center and back again inside of a week - all at no cost to me. The problem of course is that I have to be around during the day. With teaching and volunteer work there's really just one day a week. Return shipping is the one part of the process I see real room for improvement; they don't do weekend deliveries or let you schedule a day to have the computer shipped back, which is fine when they're just sending you an empty box which can be left outside the door, but obviously not when that box contains a repaired computer! Granted, this is more a shipping problem than an HP problem, but I do think HP could help here. For instance, if I can tell them I'm home all day Thursdays but not any other weekday, they could hold my computer in the warehouse until Wednesday, whenever they get done fixing it. Or they could just offer the option of weekday shipping, even if it's at a premium or a slower shipment.

Anyway, computer is back. feels like a new machine almost, with the very responsive keyboard and the new undercarriage. Who am I to complain? :-)

(Posted to LJ; please comment there.)

Yesterday I mentioned that even back in high school I was a fledgling pacifist. That reminded me of a story I meant to share a while ago, which is only tangentially connected to pacifism. I thought of it when birth control first became a political issue but wanted to check with my friend (who the story concerns) before relating it. Then once she got back to me I forgot about it and never quite got around to relating it.

Anyway. When I was an undergrad at UNC-Greensboro, I had a flatmate who I'll call P. (at her request), who was raised by her grandmother. P.'s grandmother was by all accounts a good guardian but was also Catholic in a rather traditional way. P.'s health insurance was of course through her grandmother, so P. couldn't get any kind of hormonal birth control without her grandmother's consent. Somewhere along the line, P. had also picked up the idea that condoms weren't very effective even when you used them correctly. She had a long-term boyfriend and didn't particularly want to be a virgin but was very scared of getting pregnant.

Around that time, P. was diagnosed with ovarian cysts and was given a prescription for birth control pills. However, P.'s grandmother insists they call them "hormonal therapy" and that she keep the pills in an old standard prescription-pill bottle rather than the distinctive birth control container. Rather than feeling like she was sick, P. treated this diagnosis as great news: she now had the green light to have sex safely. Her grandmother eventually found out, but relying on something her priest had told her decades earlier during the Vietnam War was actually okay with it. I'm talking about the principle of double-effect; essentially, if you predict an action will have two consequences and you're only doing it because of the first result, the second consequence doesn't really count against you. (This is the theory that lets you drop a bomb on a terrorist, even though you know the schoolchildren who are also inside will likely be killed.)

Something about this amused me to no end. Not the sex per se; at that point in time I believed that pretty much all sex outside of marriage was immoral. (I was a bit prudish at the time.) But the mental contortions both P. and her grandmother went through over all this. Ah, theology!

(For the record, both P., her boyfriend, and her grandmother are perfectly nice people. The first two ended up getting married, as it happens, but not until after college and pregnancy had nothing to do with that decision. They are expecting their first child in August, though. Thanks to her for letting me share this story, and I wish them all the happiness in the world.)

(Originally posted to LJ; please comment there.)