Reason Breeds Insanity

Today is perfect. Windy. A bit cooler. The leaves are starting to turn. I picture myself walking along an endless, leaf-covered path. I am wearing my favorite jeans, worn-in-worn-out tennis shoes, my 17 year-old, thick, red, wool LL Bean sweater. It has a few moth holes from when I lived in the creepy apartments that have now been condemned, but they give it character. Strange that I would have had one article of clothing for 17 years. The leaves smash and crack beneath my feet. I walk slowly, as always, and I don’t lift my feet very high. I don’t drag them, though, because I can’t stand the continual scrape, scrape, scrape of the gait of feet-draggers. I’d be smoking a clove if I felt better and drinking coffee from my travel cup.

I have this love for fall because it postpones the inevitability of winter with its too cold, too windy days. For now, though, I sit at my computer in a room upstairs that we have designated Andy’s room, and the wind is blowing through the huge pine tree outside my window; it makes a soft whisper that I can’t understand. The curtain occasionally sweeps across my arm and brings with it the scent of autumn. Fall is my favorite season: bonfires, football games, crunching leaves, and lattes. For some reason, it seems like the comforts of fall make up for its unruliness, but when winter comes there is nothing except a continual barrage of snow, ice, and gloom. Don’t get me wrong, today is gloomy as well, but I can look out my window and see brightly colored leaves, and I can walk out the doors and crunch them instead of crunching snow like I am bound to do in a few months. Today is just gloomy enough to be mysterious, intriguing.

Days like today give me confidence. I feel like I can make it. I feel like drinking a beer later with friends will only make it better. Porter, thick and mysterious like the day.

You can’t trust people the way I like to trust them. I am sometimes such a child about how much faith I have in people. I keep thinking they won’t disappoint me, but it never fails that they do. I give people too much credit for being kind, loving, compassionate beings, but it turns out I am always let down. We listen to NPR and I swear I would love to go down stairs just one day and hear a story about someone committing some amazing act of bravery (not related to war), to hear of someone doing a good deed, or to listen to a story of warmth and love. I know NPR has its share of those types of stories, but they aren’t on first thing in the morning. What I get to hear is the voice of George W. Bush, telling us that it was his right as president of the United Stated to veto a bill containing universal health care for children—it was too expensive! Whatever jack ass! And I don’t mean like the movie—it was funny. I just keep thinking that some politician will come along who will restore my faith in the whole process, some colleague will come along who will restore my faith in graduate students ( I am sure there is one grad student who isn’t out for himself/herself), or one customer who isn’t in a hurry. I mean, shit, people just can no longer get along. Everywhere I turn there is someone else in a hurry. Someone else returning something. Someone else getting crappy with a waitress or a customer salesperson who cannot help the fact that they don’t sell fat girl clothes in the store at Old Navy or that the kitchen fucked up the food again. I love people, that is my problem with this whole thing. I think we were made to be here for each other and I am not sure why people insist on treating each other like doormats. Love, people, that is why we are here on this earth together. Love and compassion.

Because I can’t sleep because I drank a cherry soda to stay up to do my project that has been finished for almost two hours, I thought I would just surf the web to see what I could find. So for my second, probably nonsensical, post for the day, I thought I’d see what you thought of these websites.

Know HIV and AIDS

Youth AIDS

And, since I have nothing else to do, I may just go to bed!

Call me crazy, but we had to do a textbook evaluation in my 601 class, and while I think it is an exercise in futility because the book we will be using has been selected for us, I found that writing the actual analysis made me miss teaching. I mean in a heart sick, I miss it way. I am so excited to teach next semester it is not even funny. The only sad part of it is that they picked my least favorite book for us to use next semester. It isn’t a bad book; it is just difficult for me to figure out. It isn’t set out nicely like some of the other ones are. My favorite one isn’t even on BSU’s list of acceptable texts. Go figure.

I am excited, too, because our 605 teacher has asked my friend Jim and I to do a presentation for all of the writing faculty. We are doing our class presentation on gay and lesbian issues in the composition classroom, and she thinks that the whole faculty needs to hear it, so we are set to give it as a workshop sometime in November. We are meeting with her tomorrow at 11AM to discuss it. The whole thing is a ton of work because we were each supposed to have 30 to 40 sources, but since we decided to work together, we are supposed to have 60 to 80 sources. I don’t think 60 to 80 pieces of literature have been written about GLBT? issues in composition, but we’ll see. We start our official work on it tomorrow after the textbook evaluation is due.

This weekend was wacky. Merideth was here all weekend and it was great fun, but I got behind on everything and we didn’t go to my parents house. I don’t think Merideth has been here since she moved and not visited my parents. I have to say that she was a touch wacky, though. It seemed like she didn’t have enough time to spend with everyone she wanted to see—like she was racing the clock the whole time she was here. I am sure it couldn’t have been very relaxing for her and that she didn’t get to see everyone she wanted to. We spent the entire day on Saturday going to cemeteries pretending we were ghost hunters. How grown up! Thank goodness for the week at Christmastime, too!

Now Bec’s parents are here and leaving tomorrow. They’ve been here since Sunday, and Jack tilled a spot for Becky to have a garden next summer. I only hope we don’t have tomatoes growing out our yangs, and that we can give them all away. I feel like I am constantly running, like a little hamster, and getting nowhere fast.

I will say that the time can keep flying, so I can teach. I’m ready. Now I just have to design that syllabus.

Augustine said: The Church is a whore, and she’s my mother.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the church and how it relates society: the church at times has shaped society and at other times has been shaped by society. I think we are in a “being shaped by society” phase right now. When I have a hard time distinguishing between church related activities and those in secular culture, I think the society is shaping the church. I am not an advocate of the church remaining apart from culture like a little island, but I am also a huge advocate of being able to tell the difference between the lives of Christians, or believers, and the lives of those with no religious compass to point their ways. If you know me, you know that when I speak of believers, I really mean adherers to any compassion based, humanity based, love driven religion. I want to be able to tell who we are. By that, I mean, through our actions, we should know each other. I don’t care what you look like, what you wear, if you have pyrotechnics at your concerts, if you say fuck and shit a millions times, or if you are any type of freak, but I do care if you use your resources to help other people. I do care if you are compassionate to your fellow beings, if your life mirrors the life of Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, or whoever is the central figure in your religion, and if you live your life in a non-selfish, charitable way. By living your life in this manner, the rest of things (how you look, what you wear, etc.) become unimportant. I will say one thing for modesty’s sake however: no one’s ass cheeks should hang out of the bottom of their shorts, if I can see your areola, your shirt is cut too low, and if I can guess the size of your package because your pants are so tight, you probably should think about how you are dressing.

John Wesley once said, as it is memorialized in the United Methodist discipline:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.

If as a church our goal is to accomplish this challenge set forth by Wesley, why can we not tell each other. Certainly, the emphasis of our lives is counter-cultural. Our focus is on how much we can do for others, not on how much we can do for ourselves. This, is why I think the church is being shaped by culture right now: look at all of the buildings being built and look at all the money being spent and look at all the people who still have nothing. I would love for a church to refrain from building a new grotesque structure because they have outgrown their old one and move into an abandoned store front just down the block. We need to figure out some ways to conserve our space and to stop simply building things for the sake of building.

All of this to say: the church is a whore, but she is our mother.