1. Good thing #1: So yesterday Sam and I went to Santaland. Please visit Sam's blog. It will tell you all the wonder and joy.
2. Good thing #2: At the Episcopal Church Center's Dessert Bake-Off yesterday, my Mandarin Orange Cake won an honorable mention! Woo-hoo! Especially since it wasn't actually a good cake. Wait until next year. Cardamom bread. YEAH.
3. Good thing #3: Tomorrow I come back to Seattle. I see the loveliest people. Tonight I am cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and doing laundry and packing and singing out loud to songs.
12.20.2006
12.15.2006
It is finished.
All the work I can do is done.
I handed in all my papers. I took my last final exam today.
I thought I would feel like dancing up and down. Mostly I feel like sipping cocoa and watching and movie in my bed and maybe, just maybe, crying.
Much love. I made it. I love you.
I handed in all my papers. I took my last final exam today.
I thought I would feel like dancing up and down. Mostly I feel like sipping cocoa and watching and movie in my bed and maybe, just maybe, crying.
Much love. I made it. I love you.
12.13.2006
Really good news.
I got my Hebrew final back! I got a 100+5! I got my evaluation! I got a Credit with Distinction! (Which is the only way, in the Union Credit/Marginal Credit/Fail system, that one can earn honors). She says she's excited to have me back next semester! Yay!
Also, I passed my Pass/Fail Old Testament contents course. We had the final yesterday, and it was H.A.R.D. There was much murmuring among the Israelites. But I did well on it, according to my prof.
Also, you should all read this. It's about turtles, God's Best Animals: Turtles in the Time of Love and Turtle Cholera. They don't age! They love ice cream! They can be reallllly little or reallllly big. God is great.
Also, I passed my Pass/Fail Old Testament contents course. We had the final yesterday, and it was H.A.R.D. There was much murmuring among the Israelites. But I did well on it, according to my prof.
Also, you should all read this. It's about turtles, God's Best Animals: Turtles in the Time of Love and Turtle Cholera. They don't age! They love ice cream! They can be reallllly little or reallllly big. God is great.
12.08.2006
12.04.2006
This is for Sarah.
My favorite paragraph so far this semester:
From Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, from the essay Woman and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom: A Study of Proverbs 1-9 by Dr Carol Newsom:
“Where [the movie Fatal Attraction] skillfully attempts to naturalize its discourse, to conceal its speaking subject, and mask its interpellation of the viewer, Proverbs 1-9 emphasizes precisely those features. Certainly Proverbs 1-9 also makes its own claims to universality and transcendent authority, but its explicit self-consciousness about the central role of discourses in competition provides an internal basis for questioning its own claims. Having learned from the father how to resist interpellation by hearing the internal contradictions in discourse, one is prepared to resist the patriarchal interpellation of the father as well. For the reader who does not take up the subject position offered by the text, Proverbs 1-9 ceases to be a simple text of initiation and becomes a text about the problematic nature of discourse itself. Not only the dazzling (and defensive) rhetoric of the father but also the pregnant silence of the son and the dissidence that pseaks from the margin in the person of the strange women become matters of significance. Israel’s wisdom tradition never examined its patriarchal assumptions. But its commitment to the centrality of discourse as such and its fascination with the dissident voice in Job and Qoholet made it the locus within Israel for radical challenges to the complacency of the dominant symbolic order.” (159)
Precisely. Best thing ever. I am feeling slightly better today. I am doing good work. I ate proper food. It will all get done. I am not lost. As the secretary to the office of the PB asked me when I was communicating my stress, "WHO'S IN CHARGE?" And I said, of course, "God." I know.
(Not that I believe in an interventionist God like that. I believe in an always accessible, always attractive/attracting, always calling, always urging, always loving, always challenging, always comforting Creator/Redeemer/Sustainer. Who is, in all those accessibilities, in charge, if we ally our hands and hearts with Their Good News.)
From Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, from the essay Woman and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom: A Study of Proverbs 1-9 by Dr Carol Newsom:
“Where [the movie Fatal Attraction] skillfully attempts to naturalize its discourse, to conceal its speaking subject, and mask its interpellation of the viewer, Proverbs 1-9 emphasizes precisely those features. Certainly Proverbs 1-9 also makes its own claims to universality and transcendent authority, but its explicit self-consciousness about the central role of discourses in competition provides an internal basis for questioning its own claims. Having learned from the father how to resist interpellation by hearing the internal contradictions in discourse, one is prepared to resist the patriarchal interpellation of the father as well. For the reader who does not take up the subject position offered by the text, Proverbs 1-9 ceases to be a simple text of initiation and becomes a text about the problematic nature of discourse itself. Not only the dazzling (and defensive) rhetoric of the father but also the pregnant silence of the son and the dissidence that pseaks from the margin in the person of the strange women become matters of significance. Israel’s wisdom tradition never examined its patriarchal assumptions. But its commitment to the centrality of discourse as such and its fascination with the dissident voice in Job and Qoholet made it the locus within Israel for radical challenges to the complacency of the dominant symbolic order.” (159)
Precisely. Best thing ever. I am feeling slightly better today. I am doing good work. I ate proper food. It will all get done. I am not lost. As the secretary to the office of the PB asked me when I was communicating my stress, "WHO'S IN CHARGE?" And I said, of course, "God." I know.
(Not that I believe in an interventionist God like that. I believe in an always accessible, always attractive/attracting, always calling, always urging, always loving, always challenging, always comforting Creator/Redeemer/Sustainer. Who is, in all those accessibilities, in charge, if we ally our hands and hearts with Their Good News.)
12.03.2006
Finals.
Please, please pray for me as I cry and eat Nutella and promise myself finals will be over soon.
I am writing two papers right now. Both are due Thursday. The same day as my Hebrew final. And my Mannheim paper. One paper is 10 pages long, and is (involuntarily) titled: "What is Christianity?" Um. A modest topic, to be sure. And the other, which I like better and wish I had more time for is: "The Inside of her Mouth: Proverbs 1-9, Competitive Discourse, and Gender." If you're in the Judeo-Christian tradition, you should go back and reread Proverbs 1-9. Pretty fascinating. "The strange woman" vs. the female personification of Wisdom. So, we're happy, as good feminists, about Wisdom being figured female, right? Except. Except the text is an instructional one, father to son, about only coloring within the lines, socially and politically and religiously. And for a female reader, what's to be done? Judith Fetterly writes, "What is essentially a simple act of identification when the reader of the story is male becomes a tangle of contradictions when the reader is female. In such fictions the female reader is co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is explicitly excluded; she is asked to identify with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her; she is required to identify against herself." Yeah. How do we do something redemptive with that?
Prayers. Comments. Easing of the deep homesickness. Please?
Also, if you have anything to offer on the topic of "What is Christianity?", please feel free to chime in. You can even write and say "Christianity is a bunch of wacko losers who placate themselves by believing in some kind of stup-o heaven." That's helpful feedback for me. You can write and say, "I would be dead without Christianity." You can say anything. But say something. Help my paper!
I would not be able to do this without your prayers and love. Thank you.
I am writing two papers right now. Both are due Thursday. The same day as my Hebrew final. And my Mannheim paper. One paper is 10 pages long, and is (involuntarily) titled: "What is Christianity?" Um. A modest topic, to be sure. And the other, which I like better and wish I had more time for is: "The Inside of her Mouth: Proverbs 1-9, Competitive Discourse, and Gender." If you're in the Judeo-Christian tradition, you should go back and reread Proverbs 1-9. Pretty fascinating. "The strange woman" vs. the female personification of Wisdom. So, we're happy, as good feminists, about Wisdom being figured female, right? Except. Except the text is an instructional one, father to son, about only coloring within the lines, socially and politically and religiously. And for a female reader, what's to be done? Judith Fetterly writes, "What is essentially a simple act of identification when the reader of the story is male becomes a tangle of contradictions when the reader is female. In such fictions the female reader is co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is explicitly excluded; she is asked to identify with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her; she is required to identify against herself." Yeah. How do we do something redemptive with that?
Prayers. Comments. Easing of the deep homesickness. Please?
Also, if you have anything to offer on the topic of "What is Christianity?", please feel free to chime in. You can even write and say "Christianity is a bunch of wacko losers who placate themselves by believing in some kind of stup-o heaven." That's helpful feedback for me. You can write and say, "I would be dead without Christianity." You can say anything. But say something. Help my paper!
I would not be able to do this without your prayers and love. Thank you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)