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So I guess it’s fair to say that I’m a Christian.
You might be surprised at how hesitantly I make that claim, and how many caveats go along with it. Though I am (probably too) fond of telling people that I come from a clan of Episcopal priests and am a 3rd-generation, at least, preacher’s kid, for a significant portion of my life I’ve been at best agnostic. I think part of this comes from the adolescent’s natural inclination to piss off her parents in the best way she knows how, part comes from needing very badly to have God make sense to my mind as well as my heart, and a whole lot comes from having been very depressed for a very long time as a child. In case you don’t know, I had severe bouts of depression from about age 6 onward. When I was 8 or 9 I used to pray that they would go away. Needless to say, they didn’t, and it was impossible for me at that point to reconcile the emotional states I was in–let’s just say they were very intense and very bad–with the idea of a just and benevolent God.
Being depression-free for around two years may have helped–I don’t think of “clinically depressed” as a self-definition any more, and I’m certainly feeling more optimistic. But I think believing in God comes mainly from becoming increasingly emotionally and, perhaps even more, intellectually mature. At some point along the line I figured out that I didn’t need to prove God’s existence or non-existence–I just had to figure out which was the more coherent and convincing argument. Being a humanities major and getting used to the idea that few things of importance are ever really proven helped. Having times where I felt as though I was experiencing God’s presence helped.
But to go from being rationally convinced that God is more likely to exist than not to exist to being a straight-up Christian is another huge leap–and here’s where the caveats come in. I call myself a Christian–but depending on your definition, you might not agree with me. For one thing, I don’t believe that Jesus is divine or preexisting. It just doesn’t make sense to me. It seems less likely than the various alternatives. For another, I don’t really know what I think about the whole ethereal structure, by which I mean heaven, hell, angels, Satan, and the afterlife in general. I don’t think that believing in God necessarily implies the existence of an afterlife, except in the sense that someone is living after I am–I’m pretty sure the world won’t end when I die. I believe that liturgical and ritual practice is important, but I think it’s important to us rather than to God, and I have no idea how it’s important–I just know that it is. I believe that the Bible is sacred in some way, but I’ve done too much translation and study to have any illusions that it’s “infallible.” What does “infallible” even mean? For me, its sanctity is kind of analogous to the sanctity of a security blanket to a four-year-old–the kid loves his blanket passionately, takes it everywhere, turns to it in times of crisis and distress, but he doesn’t treat it with kid gloves. He plays with it, tears it by accident or to see what’s inside, gets it dirty. It is sacred through use–and use, for me, involves critical analysis. If I didn’t take the Bible apart to see what’s behind or inside it, it wouldn’t mean anything to me.
So yeah, I’m a Christian. (Next up: Now what?)
From Faith in History and Society by Johann Baptist Metz:
“…the Gospel is already political for the Christian and makes political claims on the Christian just by the fact that it proclaims all men and women being subjects before God, and the price of being a subject in this way is nothing less than fighting against every form of hatred of human beings and every kind of oppression…”
This is one of my favorite meals of all time. I make it and eat it for about 4 days. Also, it is pretty cheap.
First, the bread:
Get a big bowl. Dump in 1/2-1 tbs yeast, 2 1/2 c flour (I use King Arthur bread flour; it’s worth the extra $1.00 for a 5 lb bag), and 2 1/2 c warm water. Stir briskly. Cover with a damp cloth or saran wrap. Leave on the counter for several hours or days.
Return. Add 1/2 tbs salt, 1/2 tbs sugar (optional; sometimes I just squirt in a bit of honey) and a dribble of olive oil if you feel like it. [edit: But don't use olive oil and honey in the same batch--not a winning taste combination, for some reason.] Really all you need is flour and water and salt and yeast. Add 3-4 cups flour, 1/2 c at a time, stirring between each round. Eventually you’ll get to where it’s hard to stir, but still wet enough that you can’t really knead it per se. At this point I usually coat my hands with flour and work the next cup in by hand, a handful at a time. When the dough is dough-y — not too wet, but still relatively easy to work — you knead it. I’ve taken to doing this directly in the bowl, because it’s easier to clean up. Fold it in half, pound it down with a fist or the heel of your hand, 1/2 turn, repeat. Sprinkle with flour whenever it gets sticky. It’s really not hard. After 2-10 minutes of this (I tend to underknead), when the surface of the dough is fairly smooth and elastic, stick it on a clean spot on the countertop while you wash and grease the bowl. Dump the dough in, turn it upside down so the greasy side is on top, cover with a damp cloth and let rise for 1 to 1 1/2 hours. When it’s big and puffy, punch it (really! It’s fun!), knead it a couple of times to get the great big air bubbles out of it, shape it in a big ball (for a round loaf) or two oblongs (for loaf pans) and stick it in/on a greased pan. Cover with a damp cloth and (you guessed it) go away and do other things for an hour or so. Preheat the oven to 400 or 450; stick the dough in the oven and TURN IT DOWN TO 375. Don’t forget to do this part. Set the timer for 1/2 hour or so and check it. It’s done when it’s deep golden brown and sounds hollow when you thump it. Take it out and you’re done! Eat massive quantities straight away with butter. Forget to turn off the oven until you start thinking you’re pre-menopausal. Move on to the french onion soup.
(very loosely based on this recipe from epicurious.com.)
Slice up 6 very large onions. Add them and 1/2 to 1 stick of butter to a great big stockpot. Cook over medium heat for friggin’ ever (probably an hour and a half?), stirring pretty much constantly. Watch “The Office” online to pass the time. Eventually the onions will go all soft and brown and start burning on the bottom if you don’t watch out. Continue until your patience runs out. Add the tail end (3/4 cup?) of that bottle of cheap red wine that wasn’t quite good enough to finish. Cook, stirring, for a minute. Add pepper and 2 tbsp flour (I usually don’t bother with the flour, but it makes a surprising difference in the broth texture) and stir. Add 4 cups beef broth. You can do the lower sodium kind, but I find that I don’t like the taste nearly as much. Add 1 1/2 cups water and a chicken boullion cube, or just some more chicken broth. Simmer 1/2 hour or until you’re ready to eat NOW, whichever comes first. Serve up in bowls and top with cheese slices (I’ve seen gruyere, swiss, parmesan, fontina is good…the only one that is definitely a BAD idea is cheddar) and fresh bread soaked in the bowl. Freeze the massive quantities of leftovers for later good eatings. Have some more wine! Never, ever do the dishes.
I’ve always been a comics person. Not a comic books person (though I kind of wish I were, now that that’s suddenly cool), but a color Sundays, Garfield and For Better or For Worse kind of person. If you happened to be in 10th grade Chemistry with me, you may recall that I read the comics and did the crossword every day in that class (I can’t believe Mrs. Habenicht didn’t fail me). These days, though, I read webcomics, for the simple reasons that a) they’re free and b) they’re much, much better. Somehow the fat-cat gags and sob stories of Rex Morgan, MD have given birth to a genre that’s artistically interesting, socially acute, and often full-out hilarious. By all rights, they shouldn’t even be a “guilty pleasure” per se…but I use them as procrastination tools often enough that I think they qualify.
So, here are my top 10 webcomics, in order of how much I like them.
I like “Pictures for Sad Children” because it’s about people like me: mopey, vaguely depressed, wandering around the world with useless humanities degrees and chips on their shoulders. There is a girl who wears a bag on her head and an angry ghost.
“Overcompensating” is a more or less accurate version of Jeffrey Rowland’s real life in the “heartland of America” (aka where the hicks are). It is sometimes a little strange, but a comic that manages to be thoughtful and silly at the same time–not an easy thing to do.
QC is equal parts hipster snark and soap opera. Occasionally not funny, often quite funny, but most memorable for the characters.
7. The Non-Adventures of Wonderella
I have to admit that I just discovered this one the other day, but Luke has been reading it for a while. Wonderella is what I dream of growing up to be: a raging bitch, but with the superpowers to back it up.
6. Girl Genius
Sorry about the teensy text–click on it for a bigger picture. This one is more of a “story” comic, and while I find some of the artwork a little abrasive (specifically the way he draws people), the story is what keeps me coming back. It’s a steampunk strip–kind of like a cross between science fiction, romance, and fantasy, all set against a vaguely Victorian backdrop. Watch out for the archives on this one–I spent 5 hours straight last year working my way through them because I couldn’t stop reading.
I have no words for how much I love this comic. I had about 10 other possible sample choices. It’s co-authored–one person takes the pictures, the other writes the text, and between the two, it’s usually haunting, hilarious, and downright creepy.
4. XKCD
I guess I don’t know enough about computers or science to be TRULY obsessed with xkcd, but the jokes that I get, I really like. (Sorry, I’ve already spent two hours on this post, so you’ll have to go read the archives to understand the true beauty of the strip.)
3. Scarygoround
This one is hard to get from just one strip–its charm really lies in its characters. It’s very sweet, and very silly–slightly ditzy young people in a small town in England take on all the dark forces of the universe.
2. Kate Beaton
Kate Beaton has an incredible knack for faces combined with a skewed and wonderful view of history. She doesn’t update regularly, which makes me cry on the inside, but I console myself by flipping through the archives.
The best comic strip of all is created by a guy who can’t draw anything. Go figure.
We’re just starting Qohelet (otherwise known as Ecclesiastes), which is one of my favorite books in the Hebrew Bible. It’s both deceptively simple and tricky to translate–the vocabulary repeats itself constantly, but there’s lots of interesting syntactical stuff going on, which is always fun in Hebrew. (I think of Greek and Latin as type-A languages–they’re always very clear on what they mean, and if you don’t remember what the 2nd person plural aorist subjunctive passive looks like, it’s your own damn fault. Whereas Hebrew is more of a type-B language–it’s like, “mmm, I don’t FEEL LIKE having more than two main tenses, so I’ll just use word order and vocabulary if I want to say anything complicated and you can just sort of feel your way to a translation. Also, for extra fun, sometimes the tenses will switch places! It’ll be awesome!”) (If anyone who ever taught me Hebrew is reading this, please forgive me. A real linguist would have a conniption at what I just said.)
ANYWAY, it’s fun to read, but I mostly like it for what it says. Qohelet appealed to me a lot as a teenager, because it was bleak and existentialist and addressed the underlying futility of existence. Its speaker, Qohelet, calls himself a king of Jerusalem. He starts off by saying, “Vapour, vapour, everything is vapour.” Yes, I know most versions say “vanity,” but that’s no longer a good English gloss–the word “vanity” used to mean simply “futility, emptiness, uselessness” when the King James Version people were doing their thing, but since then it’s come to take on the primary meaning of “personal pride,” which is not in the Hebrew at all, not even a little bit.
Qohelet presents himself as an eminently successful man: wise, good, rich, successful, with many sons and daughters, a ruler of people and a giver of advice, who has vineyards and pleasure-gardens (the word for which, incidentally, pardes, shares a common source with the root of the word “paradise”), the luxuries that only a few in that society could even dream of. And he discovers that all of it is useless–hevel, literally a puff of steam. All of his riches, and all of the works that he has labored over, will be given to another man when he dies–and who knows whether this man will be wise or foolish?
What I like about this is that it’s the total opposite of the prevailing value system of the Hebrew Bible. By and large in the Tanakh, people get what they deserve. So having wealth, wisdom, vineyards, children, isn’t an accident; it means that you are a good and virtuous person and God has rewarded you for all that. You have, of course, to separate out the greedy and selfish wealthy people that the prophets like to yell at. But the prophets were telling all those greedy and selfish people that God was going to squash them like bugs any day now, so they’d better shape up STAT. The same basic value system, I think, holds: material success corresponds to moral success. Either justice has prevailed, or the Bible’s authors are trying to reassure us that justice will prevail.
Qoheleth acknowledges this basic framework, and then completely undermines it. Everything that the Bible holds out as a carrot for good behavior–everything that it’s just assumed we will think is good in itself–Qohelet says, “nope, that’s pointless too.” He’s undermining the very foundations of Israelite society and religion, questioning everything we’re supposed to think matters.
Interestingly enough, a couple of passages (I’m thinking of the beginning of chapter 8 especially) are so drastically different from the rest of the book–saying basically the opposite (you SHOULD trust the way society works, God WILL ensure that justice happens)–that some scholars believe they are later interpolations by nervous editors who weren’t comfortable with something so scary and bleak.
But I think it’s awesome–not necessarily the sentiment in itself, more the fact of its being in the Hebrew Bible at all. How badass is a canon that says, “well, mostly we’re going to talk about God’s justice, but we’re also going to include a book that calls the whole rest of the Bible into question, and call that sacred too.” How cool is it that self-questioning is an integral part of what the Bible’s trying to do. It’s not saying, “this is the way the world works, period.” It’s saying, “you HAVE to take this other perspective into account. You can conclude that it’s wrong, or outdated, or that it’s saying something other than the surface meaning, or whatever. But it’s there. It’s Scripture. You can’t ignore it because it makes you uncomfortable. You HAVE to deal with it.”
So, apparently Mondays are also for frantically finishing all the work I didn’t do over the weekend while hacking my lungs out. Who knew?
My friend Scottie and I got the chance to go see “The Pearl Fishers” at the Lyric Opera of Chicago last Friday. For us, this was truly a guilty pleasure, since this was the primary reason we wanted to see this show:
This is Nathan Gunn, baritone and (it must be said) hottie. Scottie and I first encountered him in a very cheesy TV production of Camelot, which we watched mostly because Gabriel Byrne was in it (hm, I’m sensing a pattern). Unfortunately, Gabriel Byrne can’t sing worth a damn (sorry, buddy). But this guy stole the show, being a) head and shoulders a better singer than anyone else there, b) an excellent actor, and c) well, just look at him.
The opera itself was really lovely–an incredibly cheesy and nonsensical plot, but beautiful music sung beautifully by beautiful people beautifully dressed on a beautifully lit stage. Other than some unfortunate staging (I won’t go into it in detail, but let’s just say that the lover’s duet was slightly more suggestive than the director perhaps wanted it to be), I thought it was well done all around. It occurs to me that opera is my natural element. I like sacred music; I like Broadway; isn’t opera like the spoiled love child of the two?
What’s more, Scottie’s friend Jonathan has a friend who works in the box office there, who got us tickets to see the final dress rehearsal–for free! And in the best section of the house!! Which meant that our first taste of opera spoiled us immensely and we are a little sad that any seats we can actually afford to pay for will be in the nosebleed section. Ah, well.
Also, I just found out that he lives in Champaign-Urbana, where Luke goes to school. Yes.
*Photos courtesy of sfopera.com and nathangunn.com (his official website, where you can listen to him sing. It’s awesome.)
I finally finished translating Esther. SPOILER ALERT: the Jews win.
This has been one of my favorite bits of the Bible to read thus far. Maybe it’s just because I spent the last year reading everything with an eye to subtext (desperately trying to keep ahead of the 10th-graders), but I found it incredibly well-written. The structure is interesting–one commentator has noted that the whole thing is structured as a chiasmus (ABCBA, with each letter standing for an event). So we start with King Ahashverosh’s two feasts, and we end with two days of feasting for the Jews. After that we get Haman (the bad guy) raised to a position of power, and right before the Jews’ feast we get Mordecai (the good guy) raised to power.
There are tons of interesting parallels, too–one of the ones I haven’t seen anyone talk about yet (though I’m sure someone has) is the role of Haman’s wife paralleling that of Esther, Mordecai’s ward–Esther is obviously the more important character, but right after the scene where she agrees to plead for the lives of the Jews and takes on a position of real authority in doing so, Haman’s wife urges him to build a scaffold and hang Mordecai on it. Interesting gender/power dynamics there–as the commentator I’ve been reading notes, this is the only book of the Bible explicitly interested in sexual politics. Altogether a satisfying read, with the exception of the two words I just couldn’t find in the lexicon and am hoping I don’t get stuck translating. AND we’re spending most of the actual class time talking about the characteristics of late Biblical Hebrew, and getting into how scholars actually date texts–the nitty-gritty of the thing, rather than the vague “Oh, we know that this is from the third century at the latest” stuff you find in annotated Bibles and undergraduate textbooks.
Also, puppy!
Clementine likes to sleep in my stuff.
She’s taken to chewing on the corners of the woodwork, which is obviously very bad. So I got some of that no-chew-spray, which works okay, but not great. I found that a spray bottle of vinegar works just as well (thanks to Kat in my apartment complex!), and it’s really funny to watch her react to it–she kind of wants to play with it, but it obviously bothers her, so she jumps all around barking at it. This weekend my good friend Scottie and her good friend and roommate Jonathan have VERY kindly agreed to watch her and take her to the Blessing of the Animals service! Yay! I am a little worried that she’ll miss me a lot, or that she’ll destroy something valuable, or that I will miss HER a lot, but I am also kind of excited about being able to sleep in on Saturday morning.
Am off to make oatmeal scones. I make this recipe a lot, and would definitely recommend it. I never put the cream of tartar in, since I a) don’t have any and b) am not even sure what it does. I also don’t put raisins in, because I dislike them. Sometimes I do chocolate chips instead. If you’re looking for a way to make them lower-fat (the recipe does call for a stick of melted butter) there are lots of ideas in the comments. I just go with the butter.
