All I really hoped for this past weekend was to work like mad getting presentations, projects and homework done for this week and next. I knew that this particular week, full of Holy Week services and such, won't present much time, and this upcoming weekend has plenty, as well...while I'll have time to work this coming weekend, I'll also be fairly exhausted. With all that in mind, I saw this past weekend as essential in taking care of multiple school-related projects.

I went to Stations of the Cross on Friday night -- Stacey didn't, having wiped herself out this past week, she was groggy and asleep on the couch when I stopped hom briefly between work and Stations -- and ran a couple errands afterward, arriving home to find that the electricity was out in the kitchen and our study room. No luck with the fusebox, but we decided to go find more fuses and just replace all of them at once. We drove to the only place open that time of night that could possibly have fuses -- the Evil Empire Mart. We also wanted to get ice to keep in our freezer and refrigerator until we could figure out the next best option for refrigerator power. The checkout clerk asked if we wanted big or small bags of ice. We figured that getting the larger size would be the American thing to do, so we paid for them at the register so we could pick them up on our way out. The ice freezer only held one size of bagged ice. We asked the two elderly women acting as "greeters" for help in finding the largest bag, and one of them (the only one to ever actually talk) flipped out, railing against the store, the checkout clerk, everyone there but us and the Holy Ghost. She said people kept asking about that and the store only had one size. She went and found a manager, who re-rang the order and told me the checkout clerk was new and didn't know what she was doing. I told her that yes, communication issues happen and if she didn't know there was only one size, and all she had to go on was the cheat sheet in front of her, I couldn't blame her for thinking there were two sizes. The manager said that things had just changed and she must be working from an old sheet. I passed this along to the greeter while thanking her for her help, and she exploded again. In her 11 years of working at Evil Empire Mart, she said, they had NEVER EVER offered more than one size of ice, and the manager was lying if she tried to blame it on the new clerk. I don't blame her for being upset...not just over the ice, but in thinking about if, if I were in my late 60s or 70s and had to stand at the doors of a --------Mart at 11pm at night, I probably wouldn't be the most patient person, either...especially after other customers had screamed and cursed at her over the ice situation, which she said they had recently done. Even in our frustrating situation, we found the whole thing more amusing than anything else. Why someone would yell at another human being (who had absolutely nothing to do with it in the first place) over something like bags of ice is really beyond me.

Saturday, then, we spent moving half the house around. My original intent was to simply move the computers and appropriate internet connection equipment into another room where the electricity works. However, moving only those things was going to create spatial issues of other sorts. I'm not the most practical person in the world but was hoping to just get the computers anywhere workable, if only for the weekend, and get things done. Not quite. Before I knew it, we'd spent the entire day moving various things around and no actual school-related work had been accomplished.
Church-related obligations kept me away from home until about 3pm on Sunday and by then, all mental energy had escaped. I did read the entire novel that's due Tuesday night, though. The rest will have to be scraped together over lunch periods and other occasional moments, I suppose. Before the weekend, I'd finally conceded that I just wouldn't be able to attend a concert I'd been looking forward to for months since the weekend before this past one wasn't as fruitful as it should have been...now I'm scrambling just to get things done, much less done well. Graduate school isn't something one should blow off, and I'm frustrated at not being able to apply as much to it as I really should be.

Between the weather changing (as in, getting quite a bit colder after a nice warm snap, then rain most of last week) and all the dust flying around in our house, I'm clogged and dull from allergies and/or a cold. Upgrade.

In our Intro to Lit. Research class, we're giving presentations on our term papers this coming week. The idea is to present us with a conference-like environment so we all must submit brief bio entries for the "host" of each session to share with everyone else. I've never written a bio for myself, other than my resume (or educational CV), just others. As much as I blather on about myself here, one would think I won't have much of a problem writing a 50-100 word bio, though I really have no idea what might actually appear on paper. Maybe I'll just have my press agent contact Chris Estey, he'll do it for a song.

Congratulations to Pope Benedict XVI.
I know he's an avid, dedicated reader of this blog and I'm sure his new position as Pope won't change that.

I'm finding the various on-line and earshot discussions about this fairly interesting, though a little frustrating. Quite a few people who have very little to do with Roman Catholicism, and even less in common, suddenly find themselves engaged in analyzing this new Pope, who by virtue of being Catholic, is automatically not the right guy for the job, in many minds. I do get the sense that he'll fit into the role differently than he did as the leader of the Vatican group assigned to working directly with theological matters and making sure the Church stays consistent within itself. The very nature of that job is to "enforce" (perhaps a terrible word choice) and make statements that, by their very nature, are going strongly disagree with certain ideas and certain people. A person assigned to that job has to be strong and not afraid of controversy and challenges, because it's his job to face those things. A Pope, however, has a much more embracing, uniting role. I guess we'll all see if he makes the transition well, but from things he's said, it appears that he's at least trying.

Still, many people are acting as if he's a wrong choice because of his positions on certain things.It's really hard for me to expect Catholic leaders to elect someone Pope who doesn't adhere to traditional Catholic teachings, some of which have been clearly defined ever since the beginning. Sure, there's dissent within the RC Church, and particularly in non-theological matters, that's a good thing in some ways. However, being disappointed because Catholic leaders selected someone who adheres to the traditional theology is to vastly misunderstand Christianity as a whole and Roman Catholicism in particular.
I don't particularly agree with certain stances the RC Church takes, but I also understand how those stances came about theologically, why they are what they are, and what it means for them to be in place. The stance on, say, birth control, didn't just come about because they said "Oh geez, people are asking about this, we'd better come up with something!" Rather...they take a stance consistent with theology that's been in place already. The Orthodox Church has the same initial theological beginnings as RC but doesn't take the same positions on, say, birth control or marriage and the priesthood, but one must understand the reasons RC went that direction if one is to declare themselves theologically and spiritually relevant enough to make comments on these things. Many/most people are coming at this from directions where they don't agree with many of the basic tenets of Roman Catholicism in the first place...so why should it matter if they agree with smaller, less specific issues? If you don't line up with theology that the Catholic Church has had for centuries and centuries, why even comment that "well, they chose yet another Pope I don't agree with" when that's been the case all 265 times? That's like me going to the Baptist Church I grew up in and complaining that the new youth pastor is Baptist, and I was really hoping they'd get an Orthodox guy in there, or going to a steakhouse and complaining the whole time that they just don't really have a whole lot of vegetarian choices.

All that said...keep in mind that I'm Orthodox and as a result, I do take issue and disagree with certain aspects of RC theology and practice. I'm not sure I'm at the point where I could expand on that a whole lot, because most of these things are fairly complex topics with roots that wind and wind for a thousand years or more, and while I have a very rudimentary grasp on them and could rattle off a few things, engaging in any kind of detailed discussion about them would probably result in my misrepresenting one or both positions on the matter, at least to a small degree, because they don't exist in a vacuum and many different things influence each basic teaching. In an informal discussion, that's fine...for example, Jeff/Juandelacruz and I talk about these things sometimes...and in a small conversation, we can lovingly correct each other where one of us might misrepresent something -- in a more public format, I could easily mislead readers and affect their thinking through my own inaccuracies, and I really don't wish to do that.

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Jeff, if/when you're reading this, you'll be pleased to know that I DID order the new Van Ronk book and accompanying CD from Amazon.

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After a Tuesday in which I went from work to class, left halfway through class to go to a parish council meeting, and got home around 9, I'm probably not on all cylinders. Luckily tonight's class period doesn't look to be all that strenuous. Maybe I'll just leave a class halfway through 2 days in a row, depending on how the time structure falls. I don't really want to miss the part where we talk about what she wants with our presentations next week. However, the part where we discuss the last part of our textbook, something for which we aren't really accountable, anyway, but I'll read over my lunch hour just in case...I can miss that. Of course, today IS the day Stacey and I decided to carpool because her car doesn't do well the day after night-long rainstorms, so we'll see how it works.

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Last night, coming home late and tired from the aforementioned activities, I pulled up to park on the street and once again, one of the neighbor's dogs was dumping in the yard, with the other one still just thinking about it. My landlord has talked to them (the neighbors, not necessarily the dogs) about not having the dogs running around loose (unleashed) in our yard and not letting them dump on the lawn before, but it's not done much good. Note that both of these are city code infractions. Tired and wanting to cut the guy some slack, I decided not to say anything, but then one of the dogs stood between me and my front door, barking and growling, with the other one did the same, but not directly in my path. The neighbor yelled at them and got them back in his direction, but my phone was already out so I could call the landlord. This isn't the first time it's happened, and there's no reason it should be going on. Next time I'll most likely be calling the city office directly. Our neighbors do a fairly good job epitomizing the Redneck Nation, and I'm not really up for some kind of physical confrontation. We've put up with their parking foibles and other strange things, but there's something somewhat unsteady in the way this guy and his son present themselves. There's a mother and daughter and a few other regulars at the house, as well, but the women stay inside and I don't really know much about them except that they run a daycare in their home (which either isn't licensed, or was licensed by people who never actually see the daycare facilities for themselves), so I can't really comment on them. However, I get the feeling that this guy settles disagreements with blunt objects or firearms, and his behavior hasn't proven itself rational, so any actual physical confrontation isn't going to happen without witnesses. If he'd just keep the dogs in the fenced-in area, we'd all be fine.

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Fair Warning: I'm working on a Summer Reading List. Get your suggestions ready...hopefully I'll be posting the beginnings of it in the next week or so, and I'm soliciting intelligent suggestions.

I don't update my regular blogpage much these days due to painful formatting issues with blogger. I really should just suck it up, I know. Generally, though, I update quite often on my vagrantcafe.com journal (user f*v) and LiveJournal (user=distractedblues).


During this Lent (as I've mentioned here in the past -- I'm Orthodox and therefore we're still in Lent until 1 May), I've been especially reminded and hit over the head time and time again realizing that I struggle constantly to extend grace to others, much more inwardly than outwardly. Given that I often battle with God about whether or not I myself am going to receive grace (He insists I should, whereas I haggle over the conditions and amount), this shouldn't be particularly surprising to me, I suppose -- but I'm realizing more and more lately just how much I'm often far away from the Fruit of the Spirit in my attitudes toward other people.

The biggest thing for me is that I know that no one really "deserves it," I mean, that's an intellectual piece of fact in my head. However, somehow I fabricate "my own grace" and somehow elevate myself, thinking that some people deserve my grace and some people don't, even if no one really deserves God's grace. Of course, all we really do is reflect God's grace rather than sharing our own, and in refusing to reflect God's, the shield ends up going up between myself and His grace, thus cutting myself off from the very grace I pretend I can choose not to share. To get a little "Karamazovian," I suppose...part of receiving grace for myself is to acknowledge that that grace is mine to share, and I'm responsible for that grace's reflection to others.
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The Big One is due tonight. I've still got my lunch hour for a few tweaks. The more I look at the paper, the less I feel great about it, but I learned long ago that objectivity toward one's own work rarely happens once one gets past a certain point in the process. Not that I'm incapable of critiquing and correcting and revising my own material, of course, but that once that's been done a few times, that and the content itself and the style start wearing out their welcome or seem so good it's impossible to really look at them much critically anymore. The key is to be able to accept criticism even once you're past that point yourself, and to get as far as one can before this all starts to happen. It happens to most people, I think, just at different points. I've had people submit writing for the zine or show up in peer review groups and turn in something that struggles just to attain mediocrity, but they're unable to believe that it's anything less than a masterpiece. I'm somewhat selective on where I'll solicit criticism, admittedly, but I thrive on it from the right places. In a couple weeks, we're giving conference type presentations on our papers. That and the paper for my African American Novel class get my attention now. I don't know how it goes for anyone else, but for me, there's a point at which you've done so much work with a book, so much scouring for material and reading (and writing) analysis, and worked within that little world so much that it's become somewhat interlocked with your own life. You find yourself thinking things the way that the author might, and seeing things from the book around you. That's beautiful but scary with a book like Trout Fishing in America.
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I've said this before, but it's still true. I think one of my favorite all-time songs is "California Stars," as done by Billy Bragg & Wilco. That song just plain does it (and more!) for me every time.
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