beer and sex dishes

It is December and that means finals. There are endless facebook updates on the status of one's semester, including pages written, pages to go, tests down, etc. Kari had her last day of classes today and has been writing papers upstairs. And for the first time in six years, I haven't a thing to do with it. I guess you could even say 18 years.

It's a little weird. Somewhat relieving, but at the same time, I miss it.

Well, let me clarify. I don't miss the stress of schoolwork. I do miss having something to do on Sunday afternoons. Do you know how much time I wasted on the internet this weekend? A LOT. At least before I knew I had something else I should be doing.

I miss academic rigor. I miss having a thoughtful debate with someone on a regular basis, even if that someone is speaking through the pages of a book. I miss coming up with original arguments and thinking about it enough to argue persuasively one way or the other. And as nice as it has been, I even miss reading with a pencil in my hand.

My brain needed the break. I needed time to extract myself from academia and now, I realize that I just want to spend my days in a classroom. I suppose that's why I'm aiming to teach middle and high school as opposed to the PreK kids I have now (which I love). They're really great and fun, but maybe I need to be challenged right along with my students. Sorry, but I'm not challenged over the difference between a peach and an apple. Critically analyzing material with a group of people is something I really enjoy, oddly enough.

I also miss writing about film. I suppose I have to figure how to include that stimuli in my future careers. I just need to find time and motivation besides my longing, I suppose.

Today in PreK world: We read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs yesterday. Today I wrote a mad libs about my kids which included food raining from the sky. They liked it, especially when it ends up snowing turkey ears. Tomorrow we're drawing pictures of our stories.

When I asked a girl to name a type of liquid or drink, she said, "Beer."
I rephrased, "What's your favorite thing to drink?"
She thought a second, then said, "Beer."
"Something else," I asked.
"Juice!"

Finally.

I also started assisting in a ESL class at the learning center down the street from the Y. Tuesdays I assist in an intermediate class and Wednesdays I'll be leading a conversation class. More on that later, but today in the intermediate class we talked about food. To the question "How many vegetarian dishes are there on the menu?," one student answered, "sex dishes" (six dishes). Not the usual answer I'd get from my PreK kids, but after the beer this morning .... maybe not.

it's me

Job rejection emails are like the worst "it's not you, it's me" line, but you know it's not true. It has to be something with you, otherwise they would have hired you.

I had a slew of interviews last week, half of which turned out "it's not you, it's me" emails and half of which I have yet to hear from. It's just frustrating to get nice emails from people shooting you down for jobs you'd be great for. On the upside, I got a part time job at a cafe near Lake Harriet. It's really cute, a tad expensive and serves organic, local vegetarian food. They have a fairly small staff and everyone bikes. A match made in heaven? Well, let's try working for awhile before I decide if I'm smitten.

4th of July was fun. Fireworks were fun. Sat by the Guthrie on that big hill, which was perfect. Some friends of mine and I are starting a writing group so I have good motivation to write. It's hard to start writing again, but it gets easier every time.

That is all.

today you will be with me in paradise

This is a reflection I wrote for my Passion of Christ in Literature and Art class this semester:

Today you will be with me in paradise? Are you kidding? I don’t have time for paradise. I have things to do – I have reading; I have homework; I have plans to make and people to call. It just isn’t a good time for paradise right now. How about tomorrow? That looks better for me. Or even this weekend? “This weekend you will be with me in paradise.” So I’ll pencil in paradise for this weekend – say a late breakfast? I’ll be more prepared this weekend… I’ll be ready for Jesus in a few days.

In a world driven by instant gratification and the need for more hours each day, we are pushed and pulled between the now and the I’ll get to it next week and the ask someone else. But at this moment, we’re being told that today, we will be with Jesus in paradise. Today.

But what about tomorrow? I’m all ready for the endless tomorrows; today, I’m a little less certain. I’ve been making plans for after graduation – applying for jobs, finding places to live, imagining a future of summer bike rides, fall leaf raking, winter sledding, and spring gardening for seasons to come. I’ve thought so much about what the future holds that I’m not sure what today holds. Maybe today is that future I’ve been planning for. Maybe there won’t be endless tomorrows.

The man hanging next to Jesus didn’t have a tomorrow. He only had today. Condemned to die, the criminal asked Jesus to remember him when he comes into his kingdom. Even dying on the cross, his mortal coil shuffling like hell, the man looks to the future and starts making plans. Jesus says no, seriously, trust me. Today. Today you will be with me in paradise. Not tomorrow. Not next week. No need to call ahead or spend time worrying about it. Now. We’ll be there today.

Woah. Hold up. Today? Like I said earlier, today doesn’t work for me. I have things to do. I thought we were going to meet this weekend. But Jesus is calling. Like fishers by the side of the lake, Jesus is calling and we’re going NOW. Ready or not, here Christ comes.

We have this amazing gift of life, a life filled with joys and struggles and good days and bad. But it’s ours and it’s not going to last forever, maybe not even to tomorrow. God gave us this gift and we’re wasting it. From dust we were formed and to dust we will return. We’re reminded of that at least one day a year, when we walk with the mark of our mortality for all to see, when God’s claim on us is made visible. The rest of the time? We’re untouchable. When we live with immortality in our blood, the truly important things get put aside for tomorrow or next week. That can wait. I’ll get to it later. I’ll call her next week. Oh, we can catch up another time. I have more time to volunteer next month. You know, next year I’ll really start to focus on social justice issues.

We only have so many days before Christ comes to us and says “It’s time. Today’s the day. Today you will be with me in paradise.” So start acting like it.

School's out for ... someone that's not me.

Well, finals week is over so that means that finals are over. Except for people like me, who have papers due much later than everyone else. A blessing and a curse, let me tell you. It's nice that I didn't have to rush to get my paper done this week, but at the same time, having a deadline so far in the future (May 24) makes it hard for me to actually be productive now. I need to be productive now, since I'm flying home in 10 days and I need to pack and move my apartment by then. When I look around my apartment, I'm like "yeah, I don't have that much stuff!" but then I remembered moving here and all of the things I've acquired since then (thank you, YDS bookstore).

As finals end and people are more free to have fun, I'm kind of sad that I won't be around for the summer. I like New Haven and I like all of the people I'm living with next year - plus the current roommates who will be in the catholic house for the summer. I spent this weekend pretending I was done with work, which was nice but now I have to start writing my paper. Friday was Community Dinner, which I'm actually going to be coordinating next year, so I went early and helped set up. It was a ton of fun, mostly because after the dinner, some people still around started dancing and we had an impromptu dance party. True, much of it was fueled by the keg and wine from dinner (not to mention the beer run before the liquor stores closed), but it was so much fun. There were maybe 15 or 20 people still left, and some more came when they heard the music from the common room. I felt like shit the next morning (and afternoon) - but let me tell you, div schoolers know how to dance.

Then yesterday I went out with some friends for Chinese food and then to the bar (a really loud screamo band was playing. yuck). They'll all be around for the summer, working or taking classes or some of my friends are going to Israel for awhile, but they'll all be here having fun. I suppose I'm going to have just as much fun in MSP, but it makes me sad nonetheless. But Andrew's not in New Haven, or Kari or Mom or Amy and Drew. Plus I promised Nat I'd come visit her in Nebraska over the summer and it's a lot shorter drive from MSP than New Haven.

I'm going to go eat some leftover Chinese now... Procrastinate a little more before I get my work done. I'm self-imposing a deadline of Thursday, hopefully Wednesday. Tessa is probably coming down on Friday, so I want to hang out with her and I want to start packing. Bacher out!

I have the caffeine tolerance of a small rodent

Last night at 3 AM I realized just how much caffeine affects me. I had two cups of tea in the morning before my job interview (which went off really well!) at noon, and then two cups of coffee between 4 and 7. I'd say I had stopped drinking the coffee around 6 or 6:30, if anything, having small tastes of my cold coffee by then.

So assuming I stopped drinking my coffee at 6:30, I didn't fall asleep until 3 or 3:30. That's 9 hours. What the heck. I know I can't drink soda after 6 or 7 because it'll keep me up until 2ish, but afternoon coffee? Seriously.

I didn't even get any work done from being up that late. I'm at a point in my paper where I have to take a look at what I've written and I have to figure out how I want to structure the rest of my paper so it fits in the exam guidelines. I didn't want to start that, only to get sleepy and have to stop in the middle. I'm planning on getting this done today so once I finish this post, I'm being productive until I either finish this paper or die of natural causes.

Even crazier, I woke up at 8 this morning without my alarm. I lay in bed with my eyes closed for the next hour trying to sleep until my alarm at 9. What is with that?

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.

I had my first piece of writing due today, for my Ruth and Esther class. I think it went well, but I'm excited to get it back from the professor to see her thoughts. It was a book review of a book titled Assertive Biblical Women, and from what I read, I wasn't very impressed at all. It was supposedly a book highlighting different women and their assertiveness (for good or for bad) through the Bible, but what it turned out to be was a narrative retelling of their stories with slight witty quips and commentary added in. First off, the author read WAY too much into these stories, making remarks like, "Man, Ruth was probably relieved to find out she wasn't barren! It had probably crossed her mind!" or "Vashti [the first queen in Esther] probably had a party for the women because she wanted to band together with the harem. Or maybe as a sign of solidarity against the king." I'm sorry, but personal musings on biblical texts should NOT be included in scholarly work. Maybe it was in addition to the narrative structure, but the book wasn't for a scholarly audience as the author had intended, but more for a bible study. Also, the man doesn't know how to integrate commentary. It was ridiculous! He'd write, "So-and-so gives this interesting reading of Esther..." and then quote 6-8 sentences of their work, and then move right on to the next commentator and large block of quotation. Not to mention the word choices he used were unhelpful in helping to rethink the stories in a feminist context. I found several examples of "feminine wiles" or "feminine coyness" or how the Ruth/Boaz story demonstrates a reversal of "traditional gender roles" when Ruth initiates a relationship, sexual or not, and Boaz wants to keep the interlude on the down low until he can integrate Naomi and Ruth into his posse. I'm sorry, you can claim to be a feminist all you want, but when you write in those terms it's not helping at all. It's a retelling of stories of women with sassier language. At least acknowledge it for what it is. And the most surprising part is after I finished, I read a review in a journal and it was all sunshine and flowers out of the guy's ass! I mean, did the reviewer and I even read the same book?

Anyway, I'm excited to get the review back because then I can see where my writing stands compared to grad school expectations. For Hamline, after I finished my FYSEM summer reading paper, I thought it was pretty good. Reynolds, however, disagreed and to this day, it's the only C I've earned on a paper. But it was helpful in making me realize where my writing needed improvement and how to make those changes. Reynolds is really good at setting up guidelines for revising writing and all of the structural and content-based aspects you need to look at. He's probably helped my writing/revision process most of any teacher I've had, with Polk and Thompson from high school (the bastard) coming in second and third for grammatical issues. To this day, Thompson is still one of the biggest jackass teachers I've ever had a class with, but also to this day I cringe and rewrite whenever I use the word "got," "get," or the passive voice.

From what I heard in class, I'm excited to read the book I Am, by Athalya Brenner. The book is set up around the concept of women in the Bible sitting around a table telling their stories, but also acknowledging commentary/literary pieces written about them. For example, Dinah puts her situation in terms we're used to hearing, like date rape. Mom, I think you'd like this book too.

Next week Gloria Steinem is giving a lecture downtown. The only unfortunate part is I've got NT section right until it starts. I'd never make it downtown and find a seat in time if I stayed the whole time. I'm torn between missing section, which I don't want to do, and seeing Gloria Steinem. Uuuuughhhh. There aren't many sections and it's important to go to all of them, but... Gloria Steeeiiiineeeeemmm (that was me whining). There's really only one option here, though. When am I ever going to get a chance to hear Gloria Steinem again if I miss this? Maybe again, but, maybe not. I'm sure sections won't miss me.

Tomorrow I'm going shopping for a dress for the wedding with Olivia (I had to change that from "wedding dress" to "dress for the wedding" ... could have been misleading). I'm excited and annoyed all at the same time. I'll let you know how it goes. I fly home in two weeks from today! I'm excited to see the family and Andrew especially. I've also heard rumor of a lot of people that'll be at the wedding or in town for the weekend. Some high school people (Yang, Christine, Matt Lawton), people from church (the Eberts, Grace), the Lithuanians, ect. And I think Neal is coming into town! Woo! I'm excited. Since Erich and Katie aren't having a reception, I think everyone should go to St. Brendan's Inn on Saturday and celebrate without them. At least, that's what I plan on doing. I'm also psyched to spend some time in St. Paul. I haven't seen my St. Paul family since my going away party (obviously) so I miss them. Plus I get to spend extra time with Andrew! And Kari.

Everyone should check out my brainchild: Overheard at Yale Divinity School.