I have been thinking about Facebook a lot this past semester. Perhaps part of this is because for the first time in my history, my proximity to a computer during the day has allowed me to log in to Facebook several times a day. (Prior to this last semester, I checked in once every 6 months, and at the time I considered that to be almost too frequent.) I have been thinking a lot about the nature of communication lately, and whether or not the medium we use in which to communicate actually affects the content of our communication (that [...] Read more »
Merry Christmas to All!
Merry Christmas, everyone! I thought I would post the lyrics for a favorite Christmas song today and let the text speak for itself in lieu of a regular blog entry. But this decision has been causing me lots of problems; I dearly love Christmas music, and there is a lot of Christmas music out there that I really adore. I was eventually able to eliminate at least some options from the list. Since I am such a class act all the way (umm….yeah, right!), I determined that as much as I might be personally fixated on “I Want a Hippopotamus [...] Read more »
On Waiting and Advent
I am not fond of waiting. In my internal dictionary, the word “waiting” is located in the same subsection as four-letter words. And it’s interesting for me to see what people often assume about you once you tell them about your personal dislike toward waiting. They might assume, for example, that you must be quite an impatient person—after all, doesn’t a dislike of waiting equal impatience? Or perhaps they decide that you must indeed be self-centered—doesn’t waiting often involve letting others go in front of you, and so if you dislike waiting, you must dislike thinking of others before yourself? [...] Read more »
On Books and Reading
All right. So this is going to be a diatribe about books and reading. If you do not 1) like books, and if you do not 2) like reading, it might be best for you to stop reading this now and go watch some TV. For the rest of you, feel free to stay tuned while I go off about this matter. I read the results of a study not long ago that concluded many of us lie on those survey/interest forms asking for things like the titles of our favorite books. We apparently put down not the titles we [...] Read more »
You know you’re from a large family when…
Those of you from large families, you know what I’m talking about. As you begin getting out of a family vehicle, perfect strangers stop mid-stride, mouths hanging slack, and begin counting you and your siblings as their fingers swoop through the air, audibly pointing out each one of you in turn. People turn to you in grocery stores, faces dripping with sympathy and a vague form of censure, and they say, “Your pooooooooor mother” in the sepulchral tones people use in discussing a nuclear detonation somewhere that just killed over 1000 people. And of course, one of my all-time favorites: [...] Read more »
Very interesting article…
With the end of the semester, the beginning of the holiday season, and life itself colliding as they so often do at this time of year, I lack the time to post a more typical blog entry today. Instead, I am linking to this fascinating article (thanks to my grad-school friend James Darlack for posting it originally and bringing it to my attention). The article is titled “Screw Jesus, What Would *I* Do?” It’s a fascinating take regarding recent research on how humans assume that their particular religious, political, or other viewpoints are indeed shared by their deity of choice. [...] Read more »
Forgiveness: the Ultimate Proof of the Existence of a Divine Power in the World
Recently a friend asked me to go with her to an event called the Rwanda Gala, where various people from the D.C. area who are actively involved in the rebuilding and reconciliation process in Rwanda get together on a yearly basis for fund-raising and awareness. Listening to the stories of survivors and the work of humanitarians, I was moved, shaken, enraged, and frightened. I was moved beyond words by the otherworldly capacity of the Rwandans to forgive one another and move on with the process of rebuilding their lives. I was strongly shaken by the ability of humans to be [...] Read more »