And one more...

I swear I'll let it go, but one more question: The BBC article identifies it as a "Breakfast show".

Does anyone - British or American - actually sit down and watch TV whilst eating breakfast? I'm one of those people who, assuming I have things to do that day, finds the concept of actually sitting down to eat breakfast a collosal waste of time - eat something if you want, but make it a bagel or something on your way to work or class. Do people really do this?

Am I jus too geeky?

In Greek today - a class that just becomes 'more favorite' every day to me - a classmate of mine lamented that we're five weeks into the semester and he apparently hasn't learned anything yet. It was amusing and ran as something of a joke through class, which was amusing as my tutor seemed even more...exuberant than he normally is. I adore the man; he's just a neverending ball of almost-comical energy.

Anyway. I pondered this later, as I rode my bike down to the bank and then the plaza. Nothing like the wind in your hair and deep philosophical quandries, such as: What determines the value of something? Obviously, school ought to be a learning experience, if only because we're all paying eight bajillion dollars a week for the privilage of studying (key word, there) at a microscopic school which offers no electives and the vast majority of the world has never heard of us. Ahem, anyway, beyond school: What ought one take away from an experience? It's easy to say that there's an either/or situation at work here: either you enjoy something - whatever pleasure is, you somehow derive some form of pleasure from it - or, you learn something from it.

Alas, though, life is not that simple, as I find learning things enjoyable. Geeky I may be, but I'm an inherently curious person, and generally am not satisfied without at least attempting to find answers to my questions. Obviously, I don't always succeed - I still can't tell you what much of anything in the Old Testament is about, though I do have theories (hint: control of the masses through fear), but I've made an attempt to understand. I abhor ignorance and it's pretty much a given that I won't just casually wonder about something and then entirely forget about it. I find the process of learning things, figuring things out, inately satisfying and therefore, enjoyable.

This all brings me to the Obligatory Link of the Undefined and Varying Time Period, which is this BBC blurb announcing that Good Morning America will be broadcast a couple live episodes from Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and Holyroodhouse. Apparently, the queen (alternatingly, I suppose) lives at the first two, and the third is...not actually explained in the article, which I find vaguely un-BBC-like. My thoughts in order of importance:

1. The picture midway down the page of the Big Honkin' Palace - with the velvet rope strung up in front? That's just bizarre. Wouldn't most places go for, say, big concrete barriers to keep someone from driving a U-Haul packed with nitro into it?
2. For some reason, 'holyroodhouse' makes me giggle. It looks like an overwhelmingly fake name and is very silly.
3. Why is GMA doing this? To boost British tourism, okay, but the article implies that the show asked permission to do it, which raises the question of what Good Morning America's investment in British tourism is. That sort of makes my head hurt.
4. What's the audience going to get out of it?

On that last item, I grant that I have absolutely no idea what's on the average morning show as A) I don't watch TV pretty much ever and B) if I did want to watch TV, I wouldn't be watching stuff like this, I'd be flipping between CNN, C-Span, and Sci-Fi (ye gods I'm lame), and C) If I did want to watch a show like GMA, I'd be asleep during it anyway. But, still: Is there a big interest in the "throne room" and "white drawing room" of Buckingham Palace? Or in what the Duke of York has to say about tourism? (Random guess: "Come to Britain, it's quite pretty and we swear our beef won't kill you anymore! Also, we have good soccer, which is cool, and cricket, which is impossibly lame but quaintly British!" Um, maybe not that last bit.)

Anyway, I don't get it. If the viewers do learn things, I'm guessing it's going to be something like the net value of the imported silk curtains of the throne room. That may come in handy the next time you're at a cocktail party with the British aristocracy, but I don't think that the average GMA viewer does that often. It's not useful knowledge, but it is still knowledge - but granted, I'm assuming that it's going to be more than panning the camera around and going "Oooh pretties", which might be giving American TV a bit too much credit.

I don't know. We all inhabit a strange world.

"God did it!"

Slate's got a hugely amusing, extremely tongue-in-cheek article about Intelligent Design and how it'll solve all our problems.

Sadly, I bet that there are people out there who'd agree with that. Science? Who needs it when you've got god!

Tom DeLay: Criminal Mastermind?

This is very interesting indeed. Delay's being accused of "crimnal conspiracy" surrounding some campaign financing issues. He's going to step down at least temporarily.

Interesting, indeed.

Oh Canada...

Today, the new Governor General of Canada was sworn in, in a tradition full of "Canadian color" and "British tradition".

Oddly enough, this is one political(ish) changing-of-the-guard that I just can't motivate myself to care about. Other than to fleetingly wonder two things:
1. Why on earth do the British still put up with actually having a monarchy? A brief attempt on my part to come up with a single benefit yields...nothing.
2. Even more: Why does Canada have a such a position as Governor General, when it's apparently essentially obsolete?

Abu Ghraib, and stuff.

Private Lynndie England has been found guilty of six out of seven charges surrounding the Abu Ghraib scandal.

On the one hand, I think that the conviction is just. The defense's argument, from what I've read, was basically that she was too easily impressionable, easy to manipulate, and suffering from depression and other pyschological issues. In which case: What the hell was she doing in the military? They gave her a gun, and she was that "easily led"!? Am I the only one who sees the astounding problem there? The fact that that argument was recieved with anything other than hysterical laughter is just further proof that our military is composed mostly of complete flaming idiots.

SO on the one hand, I think the conviction is a good thing. On the other hand - are we going to see any of the higher-ups punished over this? I mean, a more severe punishment than a "reprimand" and maybe a little note on their Official Military Record? I know it's irrational think that (*gasp*) maybe there might be some serious investigations at the very top, Pentagon-level. But someone, somewhere in between the Pentagon and Pfc. England, had a hand in this, and while they might not have explicitly ordered it, they condoned it by not doing anything to stop it. So - do the officers in charge get a free pass on this, or what?

I love New Zealand.

Their politicians keep their promises. Even if it's a promise to walk naked through Auckland if they lose an election.

The book of Job

Whooo. Big one last night. I've known since last year that one of the biggest (not length, but depth) readings of sophomore year is Job, and I can now heartily say: Yea, but it is.

So, there's this guy Job. And he's "perfect", according to God. He prays, he sacrifices, he has his sons do the same, and he lives in fear of god. Nice guy. Prudent.

Then, one day, God's just sort of chatting with Satan ('The Adversary'). Satan says he's been around, milling about Earth. God asks: Hey, did you notice that Job guy? He's pretty rockin'! Satan says: Yeah, he's all about you, God, but that's just because you've been so great to him. I bet that if you put the smackdown on him, then he'll tell you off. God replies: Hey, you're own. Don't kill him, but go for it. Have fun.

Now, I'm paraphrasing a bit here, but that's the gist of it. So all of Job's animals are killed or stolen, and a house falls down on his seven sons (seriously. A house blows down on them. And they live in Uz.) Job pretty much loses everything, and he's seriously bummed out, writhing about in the dirt and whatnot. Doesn't curse god. God says; Told you so! Satan says: Eh, lemme try again.

So he afflicts Job with boils all over his body; it makes me think leprosy or something. Job's completely freakin' miserable. He's got no family left, no animals, no money, nothing. His wife tells him to curse god, and Job refuses. Then three of his buddies come over, and end up saying that obviously, Job must've screwed up: he's evil, he deserves it, etc. Job moans for god to kill him, but doesn't curse god. Then another friend shows up and tells him that God's just trying to get closer to Job: When God undoes this horrible stuff to Job, Job'll appreciate god more.

Then, God enters and rants about how awesome he is, how mighty, and so on. Job's all: Whoa, you're awesome. God says: Yes. Now that we've cleared that up, those three friends of yours suck. Job: Aw, don't kill them. God: Fine. Make them go make sacrifices to me. Job: Okay! God rocks! God: Yes, I do. Have a whole bunch of she-asses.

Um.

It blows my mind, beacuse to me? This very clearly is A) A cheap-ass cop-out for "why do good things happen to bad people" (So that they love god even more), B) Exploring the very clear possibility that God is, in fact, a jerk who makes cheap and meaningless bets with his angels and doesn't even stop to think in advance about how it'll effect the humans involved, or C) all of the above.

An interesting possibility was raised in seminar last night: Maybe it's impossible to say whether or not God is good, because God created good, and one cannot be something you've created. At this point I want to say that's wrong. Genesis 1:4 "God saw that the light was good." Obviously, God's going to have some sort of concept of good and evil, regardless of whether or not *god* is good or evil.

But what God does to Job is not nice. Period. There's no way that it can be construed as such. Malevolent and cruelly-intended? Debatable. But it's not nice. I think it's significant that it's not even God doing these things, per se: God's sitting there idly, watching this all happen, watching as Satan screws Job so completely. Maybe it's a tough-love thing and he knows Job'll learn something and he wants this to happen.

Or maybe it's a 'shit, now I've got to cover my tush and at least give Job some sort of lesson out of this'.

Or maybe it's a 'Huh, I wonder what will happen here.' According to several Psalms, god knows everything that's going on, what you're saying, what you're thinking. But he doesn't nessecarily know what will happen in the future, such as when Job suddenly loses everything (cf. Jonah).

Iraq plundered?

Interesting.

Also interesting that I've seen nothing in the mainstream media about this.

More biblical musings

So, seminar continues, as it tends to (cue dramatic voice: Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet...). The bible continues to bewilder me.

It's interesting, first of all, how many people have a gut reaction of sorts to the bible, how emotional it can be for so many. I personally was surprised by my reaction to it. Obviously to anyone who knows me, this was not a warm fuzzy 'yay god' reaction, more of a 'grrr must kill die die die stupid bible' type reaction. I think it's telling that the vast majority of people have some sort of emotional investment in it, regardless of whether or not they're religious and/or belonging to a judeochristian faith. I know that for me, I've built a significant part of my identity around not buying into anything in the bible, and having extremely little patience for organized religion as a whole. It's still a stretch for me to force that aside, take the bible as a text and nothing more, and I'm certain that there are many other people in the reverse situation.

Yesterday's reading, parts of Jeremiah and all of Jonah, were interesting. Jonah is two pages long in my copy of King James, but, once again, something that they misled us about in Hebrew school. The point is not, I don't think, that Jonah tried to run from God and therefore got swallowed by a very large fish, but that he gave a prophesy that did not come true. According to Jeremiah, he's therefore a false prophet. Frustrating that we don't know exactly what God told him to say.

What bothers me the most Jonah, though, is that he's such a doormat, basically. Here he is, and, as far as we know, he's Average Joe, just minding his own business. Then, Booming Voice From The Sky says: Go to Nineveh. Tell 'em that they're gonna die. Jonah clearly wants no part of that, for any number of reasons. He's scared of God. He's scared of Ninevites. He's scared he'll end up as a false prophet. Whatever - he's terrified, so he bolts. God takes this out on everyone around him as well, nearly killing them. They get Jonah away from him, and he gets swallowed whole by a fish.

Then, he prays to God, saying how compassionate and kind God is. While he's inside a giant fish.

I just don't get it.

The commentary writes itself.

Someone's suing 'Extreme Makeover'.

What is wrong with America?

Wacky High School Stories, part I

At the time, it was amusing or seemingly worthwhile. Everyone was doing it. Now in retrospect, some things about high school make me stop dead in my tracks and ask: "Why?"

For example: Senior biology. It was IB biology, ergo, quite a challenging course. Theoretically, of course, and in reality it was still high school and mostly taught to the test.

We did a lot of study of celluar structure, including the organelles within human cells. Mitochondria and the nucleus and Golgi apparatus and my personal favorite (as shall be explained shortly) endoplasmic reticula.

Our teacher - who I must say was wonderfully dedicated and patient with us young hellions - decided that a good hands-on project would help us learn about these. So we were all assigned an organelle, told to research it, and then build a scale model of it. We would then have an entire scale mockup of a gigantic human cell.

Being obedient little students, we did so. I ended up with a mass of duct-tape tubing, which was the closest thing I could fathom to the smooth endoplasmic reticulum. In reality, it looked like absolutely nothing, just a mass of plasticky tape stuffed into a box to hold it all together. But it took me a decent amount of time to actually construct it, and apparently by high school standards, that meant not only was it good, but I'd learned something. (It wasn't, and I didn't.)

Finally, the day came. We'd all concluded our presentations in class. From somewhere, our teacher produced a massive lump of white plastic sheeting, and I mean truly massive. It would eventually be a cube, and was something like two meters on a side.

The first obstacle was figuring out where to put this two-meter-per-side cube, and we eventually managed to squeeze it in between two lab tables in the back of the room, effectively blocking the second door to the classroom, which I believe is a major fire code violation. Then, we had to figure out how to inflate it, and, after about twenty minutes of trial-and-error, sat someone down with a desk fan in the back of it. There was an door flap cut out there, but if left unsupervised, the actual flap would, well, flap back down over the fan, cutting off it's air intake. The cell would collapse, the fan wouldn't be happy, and we'd all cry. I made up that last part, actually.

So, we get it spread out in the back of the classroom, and we get it inflated. Then we all go and enter the Large Bulbous White Cube Which Represents A Cell, and bring our Grotesquely Large Organelles. I believe that the nucleus was a cut-up basketball. May it never be said that we weren't creative.

And then, we stood there, in our inflatable white room. The fan whirred merrily away. We'd decided that the cell was a no-shoes zone, as we didn't to rip the bottom, and the linoleum was curiously cold and slick beneath our socks and the plastic.

That, basically, was it. We stood around for a few minute in a big inflatable white room, and managed to shorten class by a couple minutes every day in the following week by inflating it. A few weeks later there was some sort of after-school affair. I think it was the official opening of the brand-new school auditorium, the one where when they were constructing it they managed to set the fire alarm off every day for about three weeks. True story.

Anyway, there was this shindig with varous choral groups singing in the hallway, and some student showcases, art and the like. And, of course, our Giant Inflatable White Room. We all went, and stood in it with our organelles for a few more minutes. At some point we'd cut a couple windows out and replaced them with clear plastic, and a few curious people peered into the Giant Inflatable White Room. I think I was one of the first people to leave - I left my organelle there on the floor, and perhaps it was better that way, as everyone knows that there aren't people in Giant White Cells.

Anyway, that was one of the biggest projects we did in senior bio. It was a Higher Level IB class and worth something like 10 credits. Things I learned: Giant cells are about as exciting as they sound.

I'm just sad now

California school-lunch reform. Okay, fine. Americans are fat, so let's try to reduce the amount of fat-inducing food available to kids.

Am I the only one who cringed at this? "Mr Schwarzenegger signed the bills after walking 1km (0.62m) with bicycle racing champion Lance Armstrong and hundreds of schoolchildren."

Wow. One entire kilometer? Which is not even a mile? I'm so impressed.

My opinion: A more effective and less-economically devastating method for keeping kids healthier would be to cut some school buses. Make them walk. Exercise = healthy.

And yeah, it's sad that schools are funded more by, say, Coke than by the actual government.

Why is porn so bad?

According to this USAToday (*snerk*) editorial, and countless ones before it, online ponography is corrupting America's youth and must be stopped.

Problem one: "Avoiding or blocking the X-rated onslaught can be nearly impossible. Internet content moves with no respect for borders and at such slippery speed that tracking it is like trying to grab hold of mercury. Innocuous-looking e-mail titled, say, "Here's the offer you requested" can link to pornography generated in the Ukraine. Much of what's out there makes the "adult content" of the past look quaint."

True, the net is rather clogged with less-than-squeaky-clean sites. It's not as if they're impossible to avoid, though. Switch from Explorer to a better browser (once you try FireFox, you will never go back to IE). Grab a popup blocker - they're cheap, if not free, and if you combine that and FireFox, you'll get minimal if any popups. Email? If you don't know who sent it, don't open it, for the love of god. Use a client with decent spam filtering - I've been thrilled with GMail, but even most free services offer some sort of filter. If you're dubious, play it safe and don't open it. Also, don't click the links, if you not only value your pretty virginal eyes, but also your computer.

Second problem: "A blanket ban is not a useful option because foreign sites are beyond the reach of U.S. law, which is why one fresh approach deserves encouragement."

Hello? What? Let's try this again: A blanket ban is not a useful option because the foundation of this nation provides for freedom of speech and expression, and the federal government is explicitely forbidden from messing with that. Things like that, as written above, scare me. I don't know the author's intent, and I'm willing to give it the slightest bit of ambiguity, but it seems possible that he meant exactly what he wrote: you can't ban all porn because some of it comes from outside the US. Not that there's something fundamentally wrong with telling people they're not allowed to put something entirely legal online for people to check out.

Third issue with it: "Parents need all the help they can get in protecting their kids' experience online. They have a variety of constantly improving filters and other tools."

*sigh*

The average 12-year-old is going to be able to get around any sort of parental blocks. Computers are this generations' technology: generally speaking, we know them so much more intuitively than our parents.

Also, am I seriously the only person who sees an unsettling parallel between blocking websites and book-burning? It's all censorship, and it doesn't matter if it's print or digital. For the record: Censorship has never worked out particularly well.

Two things

One: Once again, Massachussetts rocks. More on that when I'm not in the process of getting ready for class.

Second thing: With regards to that BBC article, DietCoupon sez: "I saw that article the other day...did you notice all the pissedh off aAmerican responses? I really do think he has a point though...I mean, what is capitalism really other than an intense for of social darwinism?"

This is very true, I suppose. But still, there's no case for saying that America is more capitalistic than the rest of the civilized world. Is there? For me it's tempting to say that we are, but A) I'm biased having only lived in America, and B) I'm biased having long ago decided (true or not) that my nation is populated and governed largely by complete whackjobs.

Are we more capitalistic than the rest of the world? Hmm.

I pledge allegiance to insanity...

A Federal judge in CA has ruled that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional, due to church-state issues. To Judge Lawrence Karlson, I say: w00t, you go.

Funny, how all those religious rights (not "religious right", though one could argue that they're one and the same) groups always seem to take the stance of "Religious freedom means that Christians get to preach whatever they want, wherever they want. If you're not Christian and feel in any way oppressed, then the obvious solution is to become a Christian."

Blurb:

Truly, Donald Trump is an astoundingly unattractive man. If it weren't for the money, he'd so be single.

Katrina's social effects

Interesting commentary from the BBC. I personally am surprised even that America is (apparently) seen as that immensely socially darwinistic. I think that there are two very different attitudes, coexisting in America, on that topic.

First, there's the government to the people relationship. This, I don't argue, is highly 'socially darwinistic'. Our welfare programs are generally ineffective and corrupt. We have a huge amount of violent crime and refuse to enact legislation that would reduce it (newsflash: if you make it harder to buy guns, it will be harder for people to get shot). People oppose affirmative action, oppose hate-crime legislation, and generally take the attitude that if something happens to you, it's your fault, deal with it. If I may speak from my parents' experience: Even 'middle-class' families have stared down the barrel of not having health insurance, and it's a scary thought.

But in opposition to that, there's the non-governmental, people-to-people America. I at least would like to think that this is a nation where we look after each other. People may not want the government to legislate it, but Americans are going to watch each other's backs. Sure, there's fighting amongst us, but one of the beauties of America is the plethora of subcultures and groups. No one truly exists in a vacuum here, no one is actually alone in their viewpoint, and the more communication (ie, the internet) improves, so does that camraderie. I think it's once again the difference between America the nation and America the people.

Of course, I do still freely say that both as a nation and a people, America is just kinda crazy.

No wonder I shine...

The EPA offers a free online "see how toxic your neighborhood is!" type map, which I believe I've seen before, but I think that was for a school project in junior chem, ergo, I blanked it all out of my head. (true fact: my most vivid memory of high school science is the time a fellow student removed his pants in the middle of class, and then the fire alarm went off.) And, oh, my beloved hometown.

There is a "multi-activity" spot next to my house. By this, I don't mean 'in the general vicinity', I mean literally next door to my house. It's because I lived next to a factory, which is something that most products of suburbia cannot say. (True fact: the owner of said factory once called the police on me. Not me individually, it was more of a "you darn kids!" type thing. But still.)

In the mile or so betwixt my high school and humble abode, there's no less than six "hazardous waste" sites (in pleasant neon green!). This isn't "in the area between the two places", this is "along the roads that I walked home nearly every day for four years." (True fact: I once nearly got hit by a cop car while walking home. He was coming out of the Dunkin Donuts parking lot.)

There is one "hazardous waste" site directly next to my high school. Okay, fine, that one's a hospital, but still, it counts.

One of the options to display on the map is "populated places". I'm afraid to click it while looking at a map of New Jersey. Sure, useful if you're trying to find, say, nuclear waste in the middle of New Mexico, but for NJ? That little blip of population maps that glows with the combined fury of millions of soccer moms in Ford Explorers and the wrath of Mother Earth herself, wondering why we've forsaken her, paved over her rippling meadows?

Final fun fact: Apparently, Wal-Mart is not (as I had heard) going to build a Wal-Mart where the Echelon Mall is/was in Vorhees. I refuse to believe that such a mall still exists. It's the Bermuda Triangle of shopping malls.

New Orleans is still a mess

They didn't forcibly evacuate the hospitals? My mind cannot comprehend this.

We're winning the war on terrror!

Yesterday was, of course, the 4-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which basically started this rididculous and obscene "war on terror".

So, as evidence of our success in this global struggle against evil: Three days and counting of rioting and violence in Belfast!

Oh. They look like us, so I guess they don't count as evildoers. Plus, they're all Christians.

Well, how about in Israel? Things are looking up there, right? Um....let's move along now.

What about here at home? We're nice and safe, aren't we? All across the country....yeah. I give up.

One not-overly-negative item: The Governator hasn't yet vetoed the bill in California which will let people get married. But to the critics of the bill, I say: didn't America have this debate fifty years ago? Only instead of a man and a man or woman and woman, it was a man of one race and a woman of another?

Can we please start to grow up, now?

Yaaar, neuroses ahoy!

In music class today, we were going over some exercises based on the writings by Boetheus. It's laying the mathematical foundation for music, basically, talking about the ratios between tones and semitones and diatessarons and other fun intervals. This, as mathematical concepts tend to, require math skills. Not my forte, but this is hardly advanced stuff - adding and subtracting ratios? I should have been at ease with that since, what, fifth grade? Seventh, at the latest.

But, I'm not. And despite the fact that almost every other person who did a problem on the board was uncertain as well, I sat there, counting to where I'd be, silently hoping that everyone would ask lots of questions and we wouldn't get around to me. We did, and I proceeded to almost freak out. I didn't, and more importantly, I think I covered it at least somewhat decently, and didn't look as panicked as I felt.

*sigh* First time this year I've been up to the board. I didn't entirely botch it, though - it wasn't pleasant but I didn't die.

I think it says something about the public school education I got that I still sort of remember calculus, but don't really remember algebra. (Okay, fine. Part of that is because the schools kind of continually used my class as guinea pigs, and so I'm not certain I ever got a cohesive, complete algebra course. Also, my calc teacher in high school was awesome; previous math teachers not so much.)

Other stuff: asking around with a handful of friends from home reveals that it is rather hard to come up with really good things about NJ. One person contributed that the liquor laws aren't quite as evocative of the USSR as PA's are. Seeing how in, like, the other 48 states, you can pickup a sixpack at the nearest Walgreens, I'm not sure that that means anything.

Fine, I'll say it: exit 4.

Sometimes it's tiresome being around so many Texans. This has nothing to do with them, personally (as many of my friends are Texan), but more with the fact that most Texans are so damn proud of being from Texas.

I, on the other hand, am from New Jersey. I challenge anyone to find someone who is from Jersey - suburban Jersey, not a nice shore town - who is truly proud of being a Jerseyan. Yes, we have some decent shore towns. Parts of the Pine Barrens are decent, and we do have a splended mythological state horror story (no Cherry Hill student, for example, got past sixth grade without at least shivering as they huddled about a campfire at Mount Misery, being told in gruesome detail the tale of Mrs. Leeds). Beyond that, Jersey has...uh...Hoboken, traffic circles, toxic waste, the Turnpike, and tollbooths at every exit out of the state. What is there to be proud of? (Anyone who answers Bon Jovi and/or Springsteen will be beaten soundly about the head with a plastic spoon.)

Actually, I think that people may develop more state pride, so to speak, as they get progressively further south and west. I must investigate this further.

In which things occur

The first paper of the year, I believe, is always the hardest. You have to get yourself back into the feel of it, re-find your 'academic style'. I went over my Greek paper today with my tutor, and, well, as he said, there's good news and bad news. According to him, I can write formal sentences well, so that's good. On the other hand, I had a horrid relapse to "High school five-paragraph essay style" at the beginning, and he told me to never, ever do that again. I am ashamed.

Other news: I really want to go down to the gym today and work out. However, I think that doing so would be best described as "a damn fool idea", since it's one of those fun days in which my knees hurt without me even doing anything. Grumble, grumble, grumble, growl.

I'm not at karate right now because A) my knees hurt, so I should not work out (grumble grumble) and B) I just woke up from a sinfully-beautiful hour-long nap. I'd forgotten how easily one gets tired here. I think I'm going to have to start counting on finishing my seminar reading over the weekend, as there's no way I'm going to be able to avoid dozing in that precious free time I have on Mondays. Greek -> music -> lunch -> math -> reading -> karate -> dinner -> seminar is just not going to happen, not that I expected it to.

I'm developing mixed feelings towards music. My tutor is extremely nice (and hugely qualified, too) and the class dynamic seems pretty decent. However, we're apparently going to spend a decent amount of class time every day reading out loud. Even if it's the stuff we were supposed to read for homework. We also discuss it, of course, but...on the upside, it means that my Monday-night can be lessened slightly. Thank god, because see the previous paragraph for why my brain is generally going to be dead by after seminar.

Speaking of seminar: Exodus is reminding me of why I dislike organized religion (Judaism especially) so much: There are so many freaking rules! Now, I admit, I'm morbidly curious about why it was nessecary to establish a rule forbidding men from "lying with" animals. But there are just so many rules. Everything is specified and outlined exactly how to do it. I understand the need for basic rules and laws of a civilization, but I refuse to accept pointless and/or baseless rules. Ergo, a religion based on "some unprovable, unseeable, and completely intangible being said to live this way, so you must live this way" is not going to sit well with me.

I find it fascinating that there are such hypocrites out there who claim that the bible ought to be taken literally. For one, Exodus has shown me that God is not just a show-off, but something of a manipulative, passive-aggressive bastard. Also: let's see those fundies follow every rule set down in Exodus alone, and then see how much of the Bible they think should be taken literally.

Ah, the scent of home...

I hail from a state where the Army wants to ship their toxic waste to dispose of.

The story speaks for itself.

End of a week, and music

I'm definitely a fan of having one morning class on Fridays and then being done for the week. I think that it will, in fact, work ou fairly well.

Karate started yesterday (actually Monday a kata workout, which I entirely forgot about, alas.) Went pretty well - we've got a handful of new freshmen, hope that they stay. Fresh blood! *ahem* Most of me thought it felt great to finally work out again, even though we just did serious basics (low block, lunge punch, front stance, front kick). My knees weren't overly thrilled with it, but it was tolerable. They'll get my gi when they pry it off my cold, dead body!

Classes, as I mentioned in a previous post, look pretty good for the year. Music should be definitely interesting - there are a number of people in the class who clearly aren't joking when they say that they know nothing about music. I've realized that this, for me, is rather like the Jewish thing: when I first got to St. John's last year was the first time I truly realized that almost nowhere else has the Jewish population that NJ does. Most non-Jews don't grow up knowing about bar/bat mitzvahs, having off school for the high holidays, etc. Similarly (though less odd to me, conceptually), some people simply have never done music. I'd thought that most elementary schools, at least, would have some sort of music requirement, but I could be wrong and/or...elementary school was a long time ago for college students. Obviously, the fact that I literally don't remember not being a musician gives me a different persepctive than most people. I don't remember learning to read music: I just always have.

Further interesting musical realization: I'm actually not very good at reading the treble clef. Why? Because I automatically translate it into violin fingerings - ie, the second line is "third finger, D string", which I then see as "G". I don't initially read it as "G". Interesting peak into how I learn. I wonder if I'd studied theory more formally, if I'd have the same little quirk.

Who needs books?

I don't need to read the bible anymore.

Any religious problems I may have with it can be cast aside carelessly. They no longer have relevance.

I have conclusive proof that there is a god, and god is good and god loves us.

You can buy Tastykakes online.

All hail the badly-spelled pastry goodness.

Note before class:

Yet more reason not to have faith in humanity. Shooting at medical rescue helicopters?

Further proof, of course, that it would truly be a heinous crime to prevent Americans from owning guns.

If they didn't have guns, then they couldn't shoot at medical evacuations, and who would want that?