More Horror...with some refreshments

Well, apparently i have some poetry linked to my name on the web. A literary magazine I edited (and of course used to showcase my own writing) is now on the internet. actually, i was forced to put my own writing in it. strong-armed, threatened, blackmailed...i folded. our advisor always threatened it's existence on the web, but i never believed she'd marshall the manpower to actually do it. one of my poems is rather salacious, though it is a tamer version of the real thing. i know you'll look it up after that disclaimer you filthy-minded reader, you. but i like it. it's metaphoric. you can pretty much say anything as long as you add, "It's a metaphor." It doesn't even have to make sense. anyhow, here is a lovely refreshing poem from one of the alumni: When the First Seed Catalog Comes Judith Taylor Graham All winter we burn trash on the garden accumulating ashes: old magazines, drafts of letters, cereal boxes, packaging. The compost pile gets egg shells, potato peelings, piths and rinds and coffee grounds. One dead squirrel the dogs delivered home. Spring is that simple day we turn things under: soil so rich and brown we forget what makes it sweet and speak of seeds as a beginning

eye contact, more gimics

Lately i have been making an effort to truly look into people's eyes when talking to them. i will notice after saying goodbye to someone that though I thought I was looking in their eyes, I wasn't really making contact. do they notice this too? hmmm. There is a distinct difference between looking into eyes and really peering into them. i don't think this is something to do with everyone, but maybe. Too intimate?

Well, I know none of you read this to hear me blither on about eye contact so here is what i have really been thinking about:

1. How are we supposed to clean our ears? I keep swabbing that little Q-tip around in there, knowing that I am storing up for myself deeply compacted ear wax, but what else do you do? I've heard something about burning candles...

2. i saw "a history of violence" today and would not reccommend it. so, so many strong sexual and violent images. even the flushing of a high-powered toilet in the movie theater bathrooms seemed too violent afterward. bottom line, you need to do some good research on movies before you see them, friends. don't worry about ruining the plot, i guess?

3. what if earth has this horrid smell about it that we don't notice and that's what keeps the aliens away?

4. The Bible is revealed theology; i think it is wise to keep in mind there are still a lot that God has not yet revealed to his little nuggets (us, i mean). Isn't it silly to assume that the bible is the whole story when there is so much that we potentially could not yet understand? think about how god sort of 'scaffolded' knowledge of him - first the Law was given to discern good ways and then Jesus came and then the internal presence of the Spirit was given. historically god does not throw down all his cards at once. sometimes there's advance notice, but i don't think that at the point we are at now that we see the whole hand, and it is good to bear this in mind. really, i think this is a fine point, clothed of course in humble metaphors...

And now, a brief and highly complex fragment from my graduate work:

Piaget and Vygotsky stress the importance of the letter “y” in last names.
Piaget’s work is characterized by his astonishing arrogance over hereditarily
obtaining a last name that does not include a “y” in its composition, while
Vygotsky’s egoism over having the advantage of two “y”s in his last name soared
to unknown heights, eventually allowing him to assert it as being the basis of
his deity. Vygotsky went on to christen “important words” with a
hyphenated y ending (for example, pear-y, smooch-y, scuba-y). Piaget
was violently opposed to this pillaging of the language and selfishly invented a complex form of Pig Latin in order to circumnavigate Vygotsky’s new ownership of specific words.

Sorry, sorry, I just started writing it while writing the Real Thing and really had no idea where to store it but was reluctant to delete it. What I want to do is send it to my TA. maybe I will save it for the grand-finale-Personal-Philosophy-of-Early-Childhood-Education-paper. needless to add piaget was french and vygotsky was russian and never the two did linguistically meet.

Just Shut Up & Listen!

After hanging out with some dear but highly conservative friends I am once again in question/anger/sadness mode. We got to talking and of course they spouted the party line on a particular gray area - blah blah blah. and it was of course the hard realism of the 'gospel' cushioned in loving phrases and furrowed brows. the apologetic, "i wish it weren't but that's what god says.' not quite jesus' approach to communicating his morality. (i'm so bitter right now, admittedly!) but add on to that the closed-eared approach to my (for once coherent) offering of current scientific research and life experience to broaden the conversation a bit. I find myself angry, honestly, and when I think about it more, sad. (Forewarning- oncomes a slightly self-righteous sermonizing featuring honest bewilderment combined with more than a tad of underdog-middle-child syndrome) How is it that after not fearing to expose myself to anything that might endanger my faith, figuring that the truth has absolutely nothing to fear from my questioning of it if it is true, i get branded a worldly thinker? Some of my friends get so irate when I pose anything that conflicts with their delicate christian sensibilities. My reading and education have exposed me to far more than josh macdowell and his cohorts, and i have worked hard to understand ideas on their own terms and not dismiss them as corruptive because 'a ready defense' gives a cheap, superficial paragraph criticism. as a result, i've got some admittedly and proudly creative theology that i think rings far closer to the truth of the gospel than the stiffed-neck approach. if you go after big questions, you eventually get big, juicy, full-bodied answers. i know everyone's style of faith is different, and that's mostly out of our control, but thinking has always been my way (call me crazy). It's like the verse in Romans 12 that talks about not conforming any longer to the patterns of the world but being transformed by the renewing of your mind - this is our spiritual act of worship. Just by growing up you inherit a host of assumptions and when you hit your teens and beyond, I think we begin the work of critically examining which elements of our thinking are byproducts of indoctrination, including our religion we've grown up in. I think a lot of what christians think are right and wrong with gray areas are based on conforming to how the Bible was interpreted in days of older societies, and to the religion they were slammed with in their childhood. we need to free the message from our cultural inheritance and see it clearly. this is honest saddness (and honest anger too, unfortunately). I feel so lucky in the people that i have had around me to challenge and encourage me because i sounded similar to them at one point and obviously i see myself in a more authentic place now. i'm not trying to put myself above them or judge their faith - we are all at the stage we are at for a reason. i guess it's just the human condition to think that 'my way is better than theirs' but their response to my way makes me itch and spew! hopefully i will not get smitted for this... or worse, blacklisted from church functions. hopefully i will not be forced to orate this entry of my blog before the Pearly Gates. oh, i can just picture that...