Update for Everyone IV - Hungover

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Just wrote a shamelessly name-droppy paper (it's primarily discussing Kant, Maistre, and Schleiermacher but with references to Hamann, Herder, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Kierkegaard, multiple Rossettis, Pope Leo XIII, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Isaiah Berlin, Kobayashi Yoshinori, and more) for a class with the deeply arresting and alarming title 'Christianity Engaging Modernity'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I accidentally annoyed a professor and her reaction was so over-the-top and unkind that now I'm seriously considering starting to antagonize her on purpose. The subject had to do with Marcan authorship.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I accidentally annoyed a professor and her reaction was so over-the-top and unkind that now I'm seriously considering starting to antagonize her on purpose. The subject had to do with Marcan authorship.

And what is her take on Marcan authorship?

That it's demonstrably post-Jewish-Roman War because it has Jesus describing/predicting the Jewish-Roman War. A very widely held view, but not literally above reasonable criticism in the way that she was or seemed to be claiming--not only are there obvious problems with this logic if you believe in an in any way supernatural Jesus, even if you don't political and religious firebrands predict military disaster all the time. (My way of saying this in the class discussion was 'seriously, just go down to Boston Common'.) That Mark has Jesus doing so in a way that turns out to be accurate in and of itself proves nothing.

What's especially frustrating is that one of our assigned readings holds that this is in fact something the so-called 'Historical Jesus' really said. Apparently Paula Fredriksen is allowed to think this but I'm not.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The other especially frustrating thing is that, although I'm far from alone among my classmates in being unhappy with her, she's insanely popular among the other faculty (including being personally close to my favorite professor) and every class above mine. Either she's trying out a new and dramatically worse teaching style this year or my class is unusual in our reluctance to uncritically accept whatever highly specific subvariant of liberal Protestant biblical scholarship she tells us to. Or she casts some sort of elven glamour effect that only starts taking hold once you've spent a whole semester with her.

Also, she can't pronounce any of the foreign students' names, and every time she tries she does a worse job than before.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm having yet another mental health crisis. I'm really getting sick of this.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's difficult to accept how much of a grown-up I have to be in order to properly love and stick by my girlfriend. I have to accept that she's flawed and I'm flawed and she and I will always have differences. I have to accept that I'm not always going to be her favorite person and she's not always going to be mine in every given moment, that there will be times when we'll need to destress from each other with friends or by ourselves as well as the times when we'll need to destress from the world together, that she and I are flat-out not always going to feel the exact same ways about each other that we feel now. I have to accept that there are going to be things about each other that we can't embrace or rationalize and will simply have to forgive or ignore. I have to accept that when she makes promises to me and when God willing she one day says her vows to me I'll just have to trust her, and she has to accept the same about me. I have to accept that I can't be an entitled jerk like it's my job to her. I have to accept that all either of us will ever be able to do is our best.

I have to be an adult to be with her, and adulthood is scary and difficult to accept. But I think I can face it if she's by my side. Because I also have to accept that we love each other, and that this is what grown-up love is.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Honestly considering getting sleeping pills, my sleeping pattern has been awful lately. Hopefully it will pick up when I go home

Sleeping pills aren't worth the side effects in my experience, but maybe your brain chemistry will handle them better than mine.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Sid Dinerstein, the former PBC GOP Chairman, is on Smerconish right now as a Trump supporter. This is the same asshole who refused to let me meet Trump in 2011 when Trump and Allen West had a rally in Boca despite the fact that I literally used to sit at his table each month during the Republican Club meetings.

For a second I forgot who Michael Smerconish was and thought, confusedly, that you were talking about some county in Washington.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I got my very liberal California-dwelling dad to register as a Republican to vote for Cruz in the primary.

How did you manage that?

My guess would be on #NeverTrump grounds. Same reason I voted for the lavenous one.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Sid Dinerstein, the former PBC GOP Chairman, is on Smerconish right now as a Trump supporter. This is the same asshole who refused to let me meet Trump in 2011 when Trump and Allen West had a rally in Boca despite the fact that I literally used to sit at his table each month during the Republican Club meetings.

For a second I forgot who Michael Smerconish was and thought, confusedly, that you were talking about some county in Washington.

My uncle used to be a regular caller on his radio show, until his call screener and him got into it one day over his pro-Trump comments. Now she won't let him through.

Smerconish is based in the Philly area so when I was going to high school in the South Jersey suburbs with a very Nixonlandian bus driver (back when he was still unambiguously a figure of the right) I heard a lot of him.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I had kind of a crappy Easter, but I'm still grateful that I was able to make it to church.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm listening to a deeply antisemitic Israel/Palestine Discourse at a community room at my school. The exchange 'He's...he's Jewish.'/'That's unfortunate.' literally happened.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm listening to a deeply antisemitic Israel/Palestine Discourse at a community room at my school. The exchange 'He's...he's Jewish.'/'That's unfortunate.' literally happened.

Somehow I've largely managed to avoid those "debates" in university, both in France in the US.

Are all American Universities like that, or is there something specific about yours (or the area it's in)?

I think it might be specific to the subject matter, actually. Contemporary Christian leftist theology is not proving as welcoming a world as I thought a couple years ago it would.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Work is soooo boring today ...

How come working in a nail-making company is boring for you?

No, I order sports articles and -wear, no nails ...

Kinky.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I can't believe I just heard the term 'sex-negative' get used completely unironically in a theology class.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I can't believe I just heard the term 'sex-negative' get used completely unironically in a theology class.

You should highly recommend the forum to whoever said that.

It was a guest lecture by this guy. I was prepared to like him and then he made a wildly inappropriate rape analogy.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I can't believe I just heard the term 'sex-negative' get used completely unironically in a theology class.

You should highly recommend the forum to whoever said that.

It was a guest lecture by this guy. I was prepared to like him and then he made a wildly inappropriate rape analogy.

What was the analogy? (analogies themselves might sometime be sharp/uncomfortable in order to make them worthwhile analogies)

That conservatives who are uncomfortable with gay marriage but go to gay weddings out of social obligation or as an attempt to broaden their horizons are acting like if he, the speaker, went to the wedding of a known rapist. The entire class--which at my school is a pretty wide political and theological spectrum--was unified in finding the analogy completely uncalled-for, one of the only things we've had a consensus on in this class in weeks. The rest of his part of the lecture, other than the use of 'sex-negative' which in this context honestly came across as a shibboleth more than anything else, was actually fine (some interesting stuff about the role black churches play in fostering homophobia in the black community, and at what point and for what reasons black churches started doing that); it was after he left that the next guest lecturer dragged the discussion down into the lowest circle of hardcore-social-constructivist Foucauldian queer theory hell (did you know that anyone can be queer as long as they feel marginalized because of their sexual practices?! Makes you think!).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I finished my first year of grad school. With a forty-two page, forty-two-source, eighty-nine footnote paper. Go me?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

A crisis with my girlfriend and subsequent prayer have convinced me that I need to return to my roots as a religious, pro-life, vintage-vibe leftist, not the weird embittered quasi-reactionary I've been slowly sliding towards being.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

i don't want to talk about it

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

i don't want to talk about it

...about what?

About the past day of my life. Serious illness of multiple loved ones is only the beginning.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I want to hear more about afleitch's kitten.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I want to hear more about afleitch's kitten.

His name is Finn (we passed through the Finnieston area of Glasgow in the train and it stuck.) He's a 9 week old ginger tom who is nothing but energy. Though he's comfortable being picked up and his paws played with which is something! His nick name is 'puppy'...

This is him with me and a Celtic scarf.

He's adorable. I've never had a kitten that young--my first two cats were adopted from friends at seven and four months respectively, my third from a shelter at three years--and I've long kind of wanted to.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Do I ditch my political principles and take a job with Momentum (the UK equivalent to R/SandersforPresident) over the summer?

Blairites have principles?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Today I learned that the only possible reason a twenty-three-year-old might have difficulty living independently is immaturity, and that if a disabled person needs some form of graduate student housing other than a single-bedroom apartment and can't get it then all that person needs to do is start 'being an adult' and everything will be fine. I learned this from my university's disability services office, when they point-blank refused to lift a finger to help me, after the (dormitory-style) housing that I had last year chose not to renew my housing contract and would not tell me for months (they still officially haven't told me; the only reason I know is that they eventually told my mother off-the-record when she kept pestering them about it). I wonder if they would have said the same to a blind person or someone who uses a wheelchair.

I have never tasted anything better than Smirnoff Ice.

...

I stand with Cathcon on this one.