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Below are the 19 most recent journal entries recorded in
amaebi's LiveJournal:
| Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013 | |
| 2:53 pm | |
| Sunday, May 19th, 2013 | |
| 8:33 pm | If you're interested This morning I taught the last of seven sessions on early Christianities, though the class was called Heretics for Armchair Theologians, after the book we worked with and against. If you're interested in seeing notes on the book and some background material, feel free to have a gander at http://wpcheretics.livejournal.com/ |
| 8:27 pm | Thanks to y'all Since they're screened I want to let you all know how valuable I'm finding your answers to my question about "worship"-- I'm delighted to find them so universally intelligent and well-considered, and so helpful as I think on a project I'll tell y'all about shortly. Please consider responding if you haven't yet: http://amaebi.livejournal.com/832110.ht Soon I'm going to ask the same question on fb, and I suspect I'll get more pedestrian answers, by and large. :) And after, I'll tell a bit about what this is about. |
| Saturday, May 18th, 2013 | |
| 7:06 pm | Query: "Worship" This is a question specifically for those who worship. Or if you used to, and stopped, but can channel the self who worshiped: Can you define "worship," or describe what comprehends worship for you-- activities or company or structure or any other such thing--, or describe what you have found you gained from worship? Positive responses not because negative ones aren't legit-- but because this is for a particular purpose I'll be happy to tell about ex post replies. I'll be screening replies-- DV. Thanks! And FWIW, "I have no idea, but I did it" is a swell answer. |
| Tuesday, May 14th, 2013 | |
| 10:01 am | |
| Sunday, May 12th, 2013 | |
| 7:52 pm | How I'm a bad person I am sorry to have accidentally misled  kayre, who is one of my closest friends. And I want to thank all of you who responded, and made me feel cared for, and real to you.You see, about 90% of what overt responses I get, when I indicate what makes me unhappy, dismiss or blame me. And that 90% forms my expectations of silent responses by anyone who may have read but not uttered. This is an answer to adrian_turtle and wcg, and to some extent to hitchhiker, in particular. For adrian_turtle: Oh, my moral decisions are alwayys u for evaluation, as are everyone's. And then one's self-justifications, when one offers them, are also up for evaluation, and not usually as good. :DI posted out of aggravation. I was the Bad One in my family. And since I really, really wanted to be good, I worked hard at it. For at least twenty years of getting gooder, I thought, with distinct effort, and yet being adjudged nastier through it. And eventually I figured out that the moral judgments I'd been hearing represented certain family members and others who wanted to subjugate me just meant, "You aren't doing what I want / you're doing what I don't want, but I'm going to claim the authority of the universe." And after I worked that out, and it was clearly a mode that wasn't going to be abandoned, I stopped having them in my life. Now, I am 52. Nearly 53. What people in general expect and demand from White women that age, especially when they're unemployed, is pretty narrow. In my view, it amounts to "Be a squudgy mommyish cushion and facilitate my fascinating needs." And that's where there aren't demands that one be polite to racists and sexists and so on, not only by smiling with quiet approval, but by falling within the category assigned to me. Part of that is a demand that one give the impression of having no incisiveness, no very particular ability, nothing that contradicts the categories. You know, that's why you so often see women of 50 or so and above being nice to each other. Because we know how few others are. In the context of that narrow window, I am a bad woman, and I am a bad White person, and I am a bad mommy, and I am sticking with it. Though it certainly involves getting dismissed and blamed. A lot. |
| 7:06 pm | Respect for the racists This one's just funny: http://yoisthisracist.com/post/50301552 I've been thinking about the objections my friends have to the rudeness of, and recommended by, the blogger, Andrew Ti. My own spontaneous response has been to find it funny. And on parsing it, I find that that's because I've known decades of politeness being practiced, by me and others, toward those who engage in the rudeness of considering people of colour lesser beings. Sometimes the politeness advocated is because those guys, who generally do demand respect, are socially accorded it. Unlike those people of color, specific and general. Sometimes the politeness advocated is of a smirking sort advocated on the grounds that the racists will die, and we'll just wait for it. I'm not willing to wait, and I disapprove of mock-politeness as deeply disrespectful. In that context, I continue to find the curt responses of yoisthisracist pretty generally funny. Not just the cute entries like this one. |
| Saturday, May 11th, 2013 | |
| 8:50 pm | |
| Friday, May 10th, 2013 | |
| 7:47 am | |
| Thursday, May 9th, 2013 | |
| 7:15 am | |
| Wednesday, May 8th, 2013 | |
| 8:42 am | Categorical imperatives I think conservative Sarah is giving me a feel for people who find use of metric units challenging. Partly the difficulty of learning a new system, of switching a paradigm. (That the paradigm doesn't strike me as central doesn't mean it isn't central to Sarah.) But I think that the difficulty is rooted in reifying the system one knows, and elaborated by it getting all tangled up with one's identity, and the necessity that that identity be righteous, and our tending to think that righteousness means Being Better Than All Other Options, should they foolishly be raised. |
| Sunday, May 5th, 2013 | |
| 2:15 pm | A golden experience This morning was the fifth Sunday of seven on which I taught about early Christianities at Wealthy Presbyterian Church. (The base text is Heretics for Armchair Theologians, but I teach it as early Christianities.) Each Sunday the class has been active and non-deferential and quite cheerful about and well-practiced at disagreeing-- it's been a really good experience. Today, it turned to gold. We talked a bit about practice, as well as theology and maybe more, as vital to lived faith. And then toward the end of the class, a number of class participants began to talk about how We althy Pres works for them specifically as diverse community. And while this is a very White church, it is in a fair few other respects diverse: economically, with regard to theology and belief, and to some extent politically. I think that doing community-- not only human community, but community with the world-- is the key to "God's will be done, as on earth as it is in heaven." And I think that community as a faith practice has fallen horribly out of much church practice. (It's having some comeback in house churches, emerging churches, and such, but I don't know how conscious it is. Consciousness seems to me to be very important in persistence and spread.) I work for this all the time. And lately I've been horribly discouraged, tired, and feeling as if I have so little traction that my life is insufficiently pointful. So I'm glad of a perfectly independent source of hope. :) |
| Saturday, May 4th, 2013 | |
| 2:59 pm | Now I know why, I think Sheeyun came home yesterday from work feeling ill, and physically not in very different shape than I was. (Though he's always hit harder by illness.) So I'm reckoning that my misery and petrifaction yesterday were a byproduct of being a bit ill. A good thing. If I become unable to bear the social conditions imposed by my orthogonality to the societies we're currently inhabiting, and to the result they are shaped to deal out to orthogonality, I don't know what I'll do. Again, thanks for yesterday's kind words, spoken or unspoken. |
| Friday, May 3rd, 2013 | |
| 7:13 pm | |
| 1:01 pm | I don't know I don't know why I'm feeling so lousy today. Somewhat physically lousy-- sluggish and a little sore, and the same nasal congestion as for months. More importantly, physically lousy. Discouraged, all ready to be depressed, bleak-eyed, low on momentum. I have a little now, and every movement helps. ETA: Thanks for all the kind comments. I have gardened and now feel better, though still morose. |
| Wednesday, May 1st, 2013 | |
| 5:13 am | Rabbit rabbit rabbit 1 May. |
| Sunday, April 28th, 2013 | |
| 6:03 pm | Academic fraud The New York Times Magazine published and interesting account of research fraud by a social psychologist. What I'm about to quote doesn't suggest it, but I want to be clear that the man's not excusing or exculpating himself-- rather, describing the systems in which he chose and acted. I'm quoting because I think the fashions in research evaluation described are problematice for a number of reasons. They provide temptation to fraud, obviously. But I think that they both exhibit and promote a worldview that excludes systems thinking. “Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive.… “In his early years of research — when he supposedly collected real experimental data — Stapel wrote papers laying out complicated and messy relationships between multiple variables. He soon realized that journal editors preferred simplicity. `They are actually telling you: ‘”Leave out this stuff. Make it simpler,”’ Stapel told me. Before long, he was striving to write elegant articles.… “`Everybody wants you to be novel and creative, but you also need to be truthful and likely. You need to be able to say that this is completely new and exciting, but it’s very likely given what we know so far.’” |
| Saturday, April 27th, 2013 | |
| 8:31 pm | Gardening Today after hanging out with door and window restorers in Fort Collins and doing Hebrew, Heretics note and Greek translation for a friend, while they worked, I drove back to Arvada and gardened. I mowed the minute front lawn, finished nailing up a wisteria trellis, finished making the strawberry pyramid, and enlisted Chun Woo's help with watering without killing him. (He tends to want to terraform with water. While I sympathize, if he's working on a seeded area, I need him to use shower, not blast-the-soil-away.) And I wrangled the seeded flats with stuff that was out chilling and thawing, chilling and thawing. But the top news is: germination has begun! Tomorrow after teaching early Christianities, fertility dances in the garden. |
| Thursday, April 25th, 2013 | |
| 1:24 pm | |