Golden.

My classes this semester are all awesome, but a few are slightly morbid... in good ways.

Film and Liturgy (not quite so morbid... but this week we're watching the baptismal scene from The Godfather where they kill everybody)
GLBTQ pastoral care (not very morbid, but a little sad and enlightening for me)
Death in Music, Art and Liturgy (pretty morbid but good. I kind of like showing up in public places reading books titled "The Theology of Death")
The Passion of Christ in Art and Literature (we're basically spending the semester talking about an act of torture and how it's depicted over 2000 years)

Jake's pencil is very loud as he underlines in his book.

I'm going to run a 5k in early March with my friend Rachel. She's actually running one next weekend, but I'm not sure if I could do that now, especially since my legs are still adapting to the increased impact of, you know, running all the time. I should be golden by March, though. I looked at the course online and it's literally running from downtown up to the Div school and back. Literally. Did I mention it's going to be golden?

I hate NWA part 2

Here's the short of my trip back to Connecticut on Sunday: I arrived at the airport in Green Bay at 9:00 AM and left the Hartford airport at 11:20 pm.

Now the long: The plane had mechanical problems so in GB they kept pushing back the anticipated departure time by half hour increments. I went up once and switched my connecting flight (remember?) and then at 2:00, when it was clear I wouldn't be making that one either, went to change my flight time again. We were supposed to fly to Detroit at 10:00 and we ended up sitting there long enough that another flight to Detroit came and left, with us glaring angrily at all the leaving passengers. I ended up getting on a 3:00 flight to Minneapolis and catching a connecting flight out of there to Hartford and landed at 10:30. Since my flight path was all messed up, my bag wasn't on the plane with me, so I had to wait in line for the lost baggage lady, only to have her tell me that it was on the flight from Detroit that landed at 11:00. Fortunately, Josh hit road construction and was late in picking me up, so I was able to wait for my bag and have it right away. But what a gross day.

Now I'm arranging my room at the CHouse and unpacking everything... trying to figure out the best spots for all of my things. I've managed to arrange my desk and bed so they're both by windows. That's my favorite spots for both of them, so it worked out nicely. I'll post pictures once everything comes together... I still have boxes of stuff in my room plus downstairs on the first floor. I need to get a dresser from Becca upstairs and I bought a bookcase, although I'm thinking I'll probably need more space than what I have. Once I get my clothes and books put away, then I can start hanging stuff on the walls. Not too shabby, I have to say. It helps that I'm not doing anything with BTFO and can sit around doing this as opposed to giving sage advice to first-years.

I'm glad to be back, though. I was talking to one of the professors yesterday at the BTFO dinner and I was describing what I want to study, and she said, "Oh, contemporary iconography." I had never thought of that phrase before, but I really like it because it aptly describes the mixture of culture and Jesus images. Plus it sounds good for Ph.D applications...

Time to put books on shelves.

Let me just babble on for awhile about my academic interests

As you must have been wondering, I DID get my paper and annotated bibliography in on the original due date... woo hoo!

My paper was on Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and his use of Catholic iconography - specifically the scene where Jesus pulls his heart of his chest in a morbid mock-up of the Sacred Heart. Then it magically becomes an axe out of no where... It's a messed up scene that's largely ignored by critics, so I wanted to put the history and meaning of the Sacred Heart of Jesus iconography next to the scene and see if/how his alterations change the meaning of the iconography.

Needless to say, it does change the meaning by taking an image representing Christ's divine love for humanity and turning it into a message of violence. The original image acts as a mediator to Christ's humanity, to ponder over Jesus' heart and his love for us. By changing the imagery, Scorsese takes this image of divine love and manipulates it in a way to cut off that access to Christ's humanity. Scorsese wanted his film to explore the humanity of Jesus, but it seems that everything he does stops that - including his manipulation of this Sacred Heart iconography. Scorsese tends to deconstruct himself again and again - what he wants to do is subverted by what he actually does.

Anyway.

I have three papers coming up in the next few weeks - two next week and one on May 24. I'm going to write one on Spike Lee's 25th Hour, based on David Benioff's book The 25th Hour. That's for my Christianity and Culture class, and I really don't know what I'm going to say yet. The paper for my Theology and Cinema class is about Saved! but the paper really is more of a project. We have to write about how we'd use a film in a ministry setting or professional setting (I suppose he really didn't account for people who want to teach film, and thus use film all the time... although maybe it'd be easier that way).

My paper due on the 24th is my Cinematic Spectacle course, and that's 15 pages - my longest so far (not counting the bibliography/pictures from my last paper). I have to give a 10 minute presentation on this tomorrow, so that's what I'm procrastinating from by writing this post. I'm planning on saying that The Ten Commandments invites participation from viewers on several levels - originally through it's widescreen proportions (a novelty when widescreen was released, promoted as engaging viewers) and then through it's yearly showing on TV, becoming a ritual in and of itself. Not only is the viewing a ritual, the film depicts the beginning of ritual - the original Passover. However, the movie isn't made for a Jewish audience, in fact it's often stripped of it's ethnic Jewish markers. It's Christianized (which is why it's shown at Easter) and Americanized in a Cold-War period. I'm still working on this, and I'm planning on starting to write the paper after my other work is done, so this presentation kind of conflicts with that. I wasn't even planning on looking at any of the material until those other papers were done, so that I have to put together this brief presentation is kinda annoying.

Anyway, after those two papers are due on the 7th and 9th, the Spectacle paper isn't due until after I leave for WI so I should have some free time after finals week to pack up my apartment and finish that paper. I have to move my stuff into the Catholic House (where I'm living next year, a intentional community living house) before others move out after graduation, so my stuff will be around the house until I come back at the end of summer. It's a big house and they have three floors, so it shouldn't be a huge problem. If anything, some of my friends are offering to store things in their rooms since they'll be gone for the summer too. Aside from moving and finishing that paper, I just have lots of drinking to do. I mean, spending time with friends. I'm actually really excited about it.

I posted before that I've started writing on a feminist blog Female Impersonators. Lately there have been some commenters who just don't get anything about the pro-choice movement. Their comments have been super frustrating and at times insulting (I stop commenting back when they do that - I'm a lady). Just today someone posted something along the lines of "but you deeply believe that all women should have abortions"... Yeah, because I'm so pro-choice that I think women shouldn't have any choice at all and just vacuum those babies out of their wombs. That's problematic enough, but the fact that someone wrote telling me what I believe? I told them they should come over and tell me what to have for dinner. Anyway, if you want to check some of it out, the particularly heated debates are in the Jessica Rabbit post and the Oklahoma legislature requiring ultrasounds before abortions post. There's also a really interesting link to a report about how scientists have been able to use menstrual blood to make similar tissue to heart tissue. It's really fascinating.

Here's some music I've been listening to these past few days:
Sweet Honey in the Rock - Wanting Memories (****)
Sia - Breathe Me (****)
Yael Naim - New Soul (****)
Tilly and the Wall - Bad Education (****)
Tilly and the Wall - Beat Control (****)
Hem - Half Acre (***)
The Poozies (hehe, Poosie) - Another Train (***)

Erich reminded me I haven't played Risk all year, and I'm jonesin' in a bad way. Riiiiisk. I miss it, especially LOTR Risk. Such an interesting board...

All right. Presentation planning time. I figure I can waste a couple minutes talking about the state of film in theological academia. All right. Bacher out.

Procrastinator away!

Spring is in the air, so of course that means finals! Not only is it finals time, it is high time for procrastination... so another post about how I should be doing work but I'm not.

The work in question this week is my annotated bibliography for my Visual Cultures of American Religion course. I finished the paper for the class over the weekend, spiffied it up with a cover page, bibliography, even pictures. Both of these were originally due on Thursday, so I wanted to finish the paper before I finished the bibliography (since I figured that was more important than the biblio). However, my professor said since she wasn't going to get around to reading things until next week anyway, we have an automatic one week extension. So kinda nice, but then it gives me room in my mind to fuck around.

All of my papers were nicely spaced out and I had time to move from one thing to the other, but with this extension, it's not as necessary to finish my biblio by this week. I still want to get it done by Thursday, but knowing that I don't have to kinda sucks and rocks at the same time.

I finished annotating all the books and articles I used for my paper, now I have to go back and annotate the readings we did over the course of the semester. Of course, if I had been smart, I would have annotated things as I read them - the material would have been fresh in my mind and I'd have had more time back then. But of course, I didn't.

I'm at 12 pages right now, so this is going to be a monster collection when I'm finally done. My paper is about 14 right now, including pictures and cover page and biblio - about 10 pages of actual writing. My mom liked it, so that's good.

I should get back to my annotating. I've only got 20+ books and articles to go so, you know, piece of cake.

Unicorns!

While in Ireland, I had a dream that I was a unicorn!



No, not that unicorn. Just a regular unicorn (as if there is such a thing as a regular unicorn). I was a beautiful unicorn prancing around the countryside, trying to decide what to do. I was in love with Andrew, but he was a human. People didn't like that a unicorn and a human were in love, so they tried to kill us. We ran around the countryside (which was really just like a big yard on a hill) avoiding death traps and then we got pinned down by people shooting guns at us. Then I woke up.

The moral of the unicorn dream story is this: if you don't like Andrew and I being in love, I will unicorn-chop you! With my magical horn!

Ok, so the unicorn-chop part wasn't in my dream, but I feel that's what would have happened next if I had kept sleeping.

I e-mailed my film professor a paper topic idea at the beginning of this week. I wasn't sure if it was a topic he'd get behind, and it took him forever to email me back. So I spent the whole week semi-freaking out that I'd have to think of a new topic. I'm actually interested in the one I have now, so that's making the research a lot easier to do. I was worried I'd end up writing about something I had little to no interest in and that it'd show in my work.

Here's what I e-mailed my professor: " You mentioned widescreen as a participatory practice and some of Sobchack's
thoughts on repetition and the collapsing of temporality (lots of good stuff on
33-36). I'd like to tie these ideas to DeMille's '56 The Ten Commandments and
how the film invites participation through its content and the yearly Easter
showing. It's interesting because through the telling of Passover, it makes
present the past but also relates to seders and the repetition and
story-telling that occurs there. It allows for participation in the film (if
vicariously) along with the holiday - reminds me of the oldest church ever
found that has paintings on the baptistry wall of disciples going to Jesus'
tomb to find him resurrected, as if they are on their way to your baptism to
find you resurrected - another collapsing of past and present. However, it's
also complicated through the yearly television showing around Easter and how
DeMille constructs Moses as a Christ-figure - but at the same time, that
incites participation and ritual, clearly emphasizing the representation of the
event."

Anyway, that's my idea for my paper topic for my film class. I think it'll work out, and so does my professor. Which makes me glad.

In between the preliminary research for this paper and another paper on Scorsese's use of Sacred Heart imagery in The Last Temptation of Christ, I've been hitting the library like mad. I've requested lots of books from other libraries, scoured the divinity library (finding very useful books sitting next to the non-useful book I looked up) and I have a huge stack of books checked out. I barely have the shelf space for all of them. I've started piling books up in front of other books.

I bought some tikka sauce at the grocery store yesterday, and I'm testing it out today. I'm afraid I might have over-tikka'ed my meal tonight, but we'll see how it goes. I'm seasoning my chicken with the sauce and I mixed a small spoonful into the rice I made. I have a big thing of yogurt, so let's hope that balances it if it's too spicy - although for me, it's rare to find something too spicy. Unless Erich cooked it.

Ireland!

Today I bought my plane ticket for Ireland! Whoohoo! I'm leaving March 7 at 8:30 AM (yuck - means I'll have to be up early early to get to the airport) and arriving in Cork at 11:25 PM. Then, on the way home, I'm leaving Cork on March 23 at 4:00 PM and arriving at JFK at 11:00 PM. And then there's another 2 hour drive home. So, apart from the annoying drive to and from the airport and the annoying long flight, it's all very nice. The nice part is the time in between the flights when I'm in Ireland with Andrew. He's my boyfriend. He's nice. So many nice things. Now that I've spent the majority of the money I saved in the fall on my plane ticket, I have to save some money to do things in Ireland, like see castles and drink beer. I'm working more hours this semester, so that should be helpful, at least. Plus it's my birthday soon and it's tax time (rebate! unless I've been screwed by The Man). I have to save lots of money. I put away about $50 every week or two this semester, so it should be easier now that I'm making more. I think once I'm done saving for the trip I'm going to keep up saving at this rate. It's a good habit to have, plus it'll come in handy next time I have to pay over $250 for books for one ONE of my classes.

I started second semester and all of my classes are going well. It's way nicer to have afternoon class as opposed to morning class. Less of an opportunity to sleep through it. Here's my schedule:
M: 1-6 work at the library
Tu: 9:25-11:15 Cinematic Spectacle, my Film class downtown
1-6 work at the library
7-9 Theology and Cinema
W: 1:30-3:20 Christianity and Culture
6-10 work at Holy Grounds
Th: 3:30-5:20 Reading the Visual Culture of American Religion
F: 9-12 work at the library
S: Nothing!
Su: Nothing!

I'm so excited not to have to work Saturday morning. I hate hate hated it last time. But now that Susan, my boss at the library, loves me, I don't have to worry about working crappy shifts anymore. Sunday I even got to train one of my friends and close the library. You know, the high rolling stakes of being a circulation desk employee.

My classes all look great. They're all about stuff I'm very much interested in and potentially classes I hope to teach at some point, so it's nice. Lots of reading for my Visual Culture class... although the "Reading" in the title kinda gave that one away. But I'm reading some pretty cool books, so no worries there. I don't know if I can read the pretty cool books at a rate of 2 per week though.... so I lied about the no worries. There are some worries. Small worries. I'm especially excited about my Christianity and Culture class. The professor is very cool and he's paired some really traditional theology of culture readings with pieces of literature, art and music. It's a pretty interesting way to do it.

I went to bed early last night (10:30 Mom, just like you) and slept until 10... it was great. I woke up a bit and rolled around, but I always got back to sleep right away. I had some crazy dreams, none of which I can really remember. I used to be really good at remembering my dreams. I need to start doing that again. I need to put more importance on writing my dreams down right away once I wake up. I have my journal by my bed, but I need to move it to a more prominent position, I think.

Ok. Goodbye.

We don't know if Jesus ever rode dinosaurs... but He probably did!

Well, I finished my exegesis paper and turned it in - yahoo! Here's a hint - drinking three cups of tea in a row will give you enough caffeine to finish just about anything, all the while talking to yourself out loud, narrating what you're writing. I do suggest rereading later, since it might come out as a bit of jibberish. When I was a kid, my mind worked faster than my mouth (still a problem sometimes, I'm not ashamed to admit), so I'd always stutter and say things like, "Bu-bu-bu-bu-but hey Momma," and skip logical connections in my speech, just assuming everyone makes the thought leaps that I do. Sometimes I feel like my papers turn out that way too, where I'm not thoroughly explaining the thought process behind my reasoning; so I made sure to read over my paper and provide the necessary links between my argument. Here's my basic argument:

By comparing different accounts of parables and miracles in the beginning of Mark, the construction of the disciples’ misunderstanding is teased out. Parables and miracles operate in a pattern: a main parable/miracle occurs in a public sphere and later in a private sphere, Jesus explains the parable or performs another private miracle for the disciples. Even though Jesus gives the disciples privileged information, they still do not understand. The last verse in Mark 6:45-52 demonstrates the inability of the disciples to grasp Jesus’ parables and miracles, only to be repeated in Mark 8:17-21.

There's a lot more I wrote about, but I hope it turns out well. My TA, and my New Testament class in general, is pretty on top of grading so I hope it won't be ages before it's returned. I included this picture of Jesus, hoping to get a bump in my grade. It's based off a photograph of Jesus, so it's pretty historically accurate:

There's nothing like Jesus 'rangling a dinosaur. By the way, I'm a big fan of funny Jesus pictures, so if you have any, send them my way.

I don't know if I wrote about this yet or not, but a few weeks ago a YDS student died. It was very sad and sudden; as most people have learned to read not only the official words but also the silences and what is officially unsaid, she took her own life. Young-In was in my Ruth and Esther class, my favorite class this semester. It's a smaller class, only 15 or so students (mostly female), so we got to know about each other more so than in the large lecture classes. Even in this more intimate setting I still feel as if I didn't know her very well, but her death affected me more than I thought it would. That same week, a woman from Minneapolis was murdered after answering an ad on Craig's List. While also very sad, it hit home even more when I found out I knew her roommate Matt, a friend of mine at Hamline. It was a rough bit there, but I wanted to share the website Young-In's family and friends set up for her. I like looking through the pictures and seeing another side of someone, a side I hadn't seen and probably would have never seen had it not been for her death. In my Death and Dying class at Hamline last semester (one of my favorite classes I've ever taken), I wrote my final paper about online memorial tributes and the way the internet functioned as a means of informing people about death. It centered mostly around the shooting at Virgina Tech and how social networking sites like Facebook worked to spread information on the survivors, injured and deceased. So the online tributes to Young-In and Katherine are of particular interest, not only because of the connections between these people and myself, but the way other's memories are helping to create and memorialize other individuals in this new medium.

I left Connecticut on Thursday and have been in Minnesota with Andrew since then. The bastard gave me a cold so I have a sore throat and sniffly nose, not to mention I kinda felt like vomiting last night (although I had just eaten Indian food, so who knows). It's cool though; he gives me a cold, I gave him the Clap, everything works out. So far since I've been here, I've went out for sushi with Kari, Becca and Andrew and then we saw a comedy show with Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black (funny!), saw Beowulf in 3D (lots of near naked Angelina Jolie!), went to Underwater World (sharks!), had breakfast with Erich and Kari before then went back to Green Bay (Neighborhood Cafe!), had Indian food and played some Guitar Hero with Drew and Amy and Anna (curry!), and spent lots of time hanging out with Andrew (boyfriend!).

Tomorrow is our one year anniversary! It's pretty exciting. Andrew doesn't have class in the morning, so we're going to go out to eat breakfast, then tomorrow night we're going to Ichiban, a Japanese restaurant. Usually we go for the sushi bar, but we're going to do the whole cook-at-your-table thing. Then, we're going to see American Gangster. I'm really psyched to see it since I love gangster movies. We both picked out Irish rings online, so tomorrow we're giving them to each other and, like, it'll be sooooooooooo vomit inducing cute and, like, everyone will totally know how much we're in looooooove. Like, for serious.

But it will be a fun time.

I've decided to switch my MAR concentration. I'm currently in the Women's, Gender and Sexuality studies concentration and I've decided to focus on Religion and the Visual Arts. I want to do my PhD in Film Studies and focus on how theology is conveyed visually through film, so it would make a lot of sense to study religious art and how people have conveyed theology visually through art. I decided what I wanted to major in by seeing what areas I was taking the most classes in; now that I've been at YDS for a semester and am planning my coursework for next semester, I've looked at what areas I'm taking a lot of classes in, aka my main interests. It only makes sense to 1. take classes that are interesting to me, since I'll do much better in them if I actually like what I'm studying; 2. be in a program that will allow me to take the classes I'm interested in; 3. earn a degree in something that relates to the other areas I want to work in.

Here's what I want to take next semester:
Theology and Cinema
Christianity and Culture
Cinematic Spectacle
(one more I can't remember. Sorry. Maybe religious drama history)

So, makes sense to be in a program that lets me take lots of visual arts classes.

Being at Yale makes me realize how old school they are (no matter what type of progressive face they put on). Not always in terms of politics and worldviews, but mostly academic styles. The Bible classes are still stuck in a socio-historical framework and just recently they're starting to consider different theories such as post-colonial, feminist, queer, Marxist theories for alternative interpretations. I think the religion academia has trouble escaping from the socio-historical viewpoint because for so long the Bible was read as history and literal (two separate camps, at times). Other literature has been open to other theories because they aren't steeped in the tradition of being read as History. So while Yale Div has many great opportunities for me to learn about lots of different things, the interdisciplinary viewpoint I want to study in will probably have a harder time of being accepted in a specifically religious academic field. I think Film Studies will be more open to reading film in a religious light than Religious Studies will be to consider film as a legitimate discourse, not a pseudo-scholarly side project.

Anyway, I have to go pay attention to my biff (bf, boyfriend. He hates the term biff). Have lovely Thanksgivings.