fruitfulness

O hai, blog.

In no particular order, these are the factors on which I judge a city:
1) presence of a good co-op
2) reasonably smooth roads
3) fun places to get coffee
4) can be driven out of in 10 minutes or less

Syracuse is a great city by my metric, as far as cities go- although, oddly enough, Richmond is only disqualified by potholes.

One fun thing about Syracuse is that there are so many places to worship. We have Methodists both Free and United, as well as a Unity church if you'd prefer to do without the method. We have a solid smattering of Lutherans, a full selection of Baptists, and a host of homes that have been taken over to house various Pentecostal and Charismatic churches. We have Catholics in at least Italian, Irish, and Polish, and perhaps other flavors as well... and if the Catholics do not fully meet your need for bells, incense, and patriarchy, we have Orthodox churches: Greek, Slavic, Macedonian, Coptic, and Russian, just to name the ones I've seen so far. We have Episcopals all over the city, Presbyterians ranging from the very conservative to the very liberal, and on out further we have a healthy dose of Unitarian Universalists. All this, interspersed with synagogues, mosques, at least one zen center, and I'm sure an even wider variety of religious meetinghouses than I'm able to recognize.

What we do not have, however, is a programmed Friends meeting. Syracuse boasts one Friends meeting, a lovely unprogrammed group that meets in a converted house close to Syracuse University. I've been attending since moving to Syracuse, and the worship there is wonderful. I've appreciated the depth of the Friends I've met there, both in the hour of waiting worship and in the discussions held afterwards.

They are not programmed, however, and do not talk much about Jesus.

Today between worship and discussion, I discovered that I could go upstairs to the First Day room and hear church bells. I sat by the window and listened to the Methodists play:

All the world is God’s own field, fruit unto His praise to yield;
Wheat and tares together sown unto joy or sorrow grown.
First the blade and then the ear, then the full corn shall appear;
Lord of harvest, grant that we wholesome grain and pure may be.

All the world is God's own field. I'm struggling with that, here in Syracuse. I worry sometimes that I'm looking for my field, a place where I feel comfortable, more than I'm focusing on my place in God's field.

Note to self: the goal isn't to find the right patch of dirt. It's to yield fruit to God's praise.

reasons to be a feminist, part eleventy billion

Jill:

We’ve already seen rape survivors being refused emergency contraception, women in the process of miscarriage being refused treatment, and lesbians and unmarried women being refused fertility assistance. So what if a pharmacist wakes up tomorrow and decides that AIDS is your punishment for being gay, or your STI is a punishment for being a big whore, and refuses to fill your prescription for the medication you need? What if a Scientologist decides that he shouldn’t have to leave his moral beliefs at the door, and refuses to write or fill any prescriptions at all? What if an ER doctor or EMT’s religion forbids them from touching someone of the opposite sex and so they refuse to treat half the population, even in emergencies? What if my moral belief is that sanctimonious fuckwits who don’t do their jobs shouldn’t be given medical treatment — if I were a more vengeful person, could I go ahead and let them suffer, like they would do to me?

That's all really bad, no doubt. It sucks to think that I might have to drive around town to get a birth control prescription filled, and it's even worse to think that someone in a more remote or conservative area might not be able to get her prescription filled at all. And it makes me really angry that it's all so clearly about birth control, even though all the rhetoric is about abortion; I'm sure the lies make it more palatable, but they're still lies.

Really, though- I'm mostly just sad for my more conservative Christian friends who think that the Republican party gives a crap about them. Bush II had eight years to screw over American women, and he does it now? When it's going to be undone almost immediately, if not soon enough? I certainly feel disrespected, as a woman who like to make her own decisions about her body, but I also feel like the whole congregation that I grew up in just got disrespected, too. They've been telling each other for 7.75 years now, "Look, he's appointing pro-life justices to the Supreme Court! I'm sure he'd do more, but he's jousting with Congress/saving us from the infidels/whatever." I wonder what it means to them to find out that Bush could have done this all along, and just didn't.

snow!

This is a close up of snow gathering on my windshield wipers.


This is the beef stew I made to warm up with.

short note

Fafblog has new posts!

done!

I'm not a big fan of these sorts of machines. I have to admit, though, that it's a reflexive position for someone who spends a lot of time reading liberal blogs, and I haven't looked into it much myself. This machine didn't give me any trouble, and the poll workers apparently didn't notice or didn't care that I looked like I was trying to call a friend for help while voting.

why Echidne is a feminist

I hear a lot of my friends, particularly female ones, refusing to identify as feminists. That's their right, I suppose. It's a position that I don't really understand, though, since feminism is pretty central to my understanding of building a more just world. I happen to like voting, owning property, safe houses for abused women, the availability of contraception, and so forth. I really liked this (thus far) four-part series at Echidne of the Snakes, in which she explains why she is a feminist:
The Right To Go Out
The Planet Of The Guys
Our Father Who Art In Heaven
The Invisible Women

comparing apples to smushed apples left under the fridge

You know what's worse than picking up sequins spilled onto carpet?

Picking them up with the assistance of a small kitten who thinks she is the heroine of a movie called Sparkle Kitty, Cowgirl Princess of the Sequin Rodeo.

caffeinated tipsyness

I am all in favor of coffee, particularly in concentrated forms. Coffee flavored vodka, though, is just disturbing.

Link.

little signs of wealth

Craig and I have been going on walks through the snooty part of town. The lawns have a distinctly unfriendly feel, but this has been the best example thus far.











PS: Fafblog rocks:
FB: Now, back when your husband was president he cut nine million poor women and children off welfare. But now you're the candidate of women and poor people and poor workin women. So did you approve of what your husband did at the time, and if not are you going to reverse it as president and give all those poor people their money back?
CLINTON: Ha haaa! That's an excellent question, Fafnir, and the only way to answer it is with a hearty chuckle followed by a complete non sequitur!

yet more doodles!

I like having someone to watch the geese with. I also particularly like watching geese use their necks in odd ways, as though they are made of rubber and springs.














Aaarugh! A volcano!
With a cute little explosion!
Is she standing in a forest of seaweed? Talking to her twin sister, the water nymph? Wondering if the volcano is actually her hat? You decide.


















William James envisioned an alternative to the army that was remarkably similar to the Peace Corps, except that he argued that men who served in this army would find that the "women would value the men more highly." This, apparently, would be because they had proved themselves against the temptation toward "a world of clerks and teachers, of coeducation and zo-ophily, [...] feminism unabashed."

Zo-phily. It's fun to say.











This is a peaceful bird, unless you happen to be an olive branch. Then, it's a mindless, sap-thirsty mutilator.










I've had Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog in my head for a week. "Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea."


















Ze ladeez, zay are dancing.




















Now begins the fashion show portion of this blog post.

Continued...

Hats are in this year, I hear.

















These are 'flying eyeballs,' although I'd be happy for someone to come up with a more creative name.

And, just a doodle:

cool phrase

Potemkin village \puh-TEM(P)-kin\, noun:
An impressive facade or display that hides an undesirable fact or state; a false front.

"A Potemkin village is so called after Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, who had elaborate fake villages built in order to impress Catherine the Great on her tours of the Ukraine and the Crimea in the 18th century."

Link. My goal for the second half of today's class is to slide this phrase into the discussion of Carol Gilligan.

I don't want to dislike Sen. Clinton baselessly...

but she makes it so easy!

She also dismissed Democratic nominating rules requiring proportional allocation of delegates from primaries and caucuses, rather than the winner-take-all system used by the Republicans.

“If we had same rules as the Republicans, I would be the nominee right now,” she said.

Whatever the real merits of various plans to reform the Democratic nominating process might be, she ought to be able to give a better reason than 'but the Republicans do it this other way, which is more valid than ours!' Did she completely ignore all the talk about framing after the last election? Or does she just think it's acceptable to use Republican frames to attack Democrats?

More doodles!

Kohlberg!



















For all of my trash taking about Gilligan, she's a lot better than Kohlberg was.


Some doodle people:









This was from back in the Bonhoeffer seminar:










And, evidence of the occasional foray into sap, in part because Craig is away for the weekend:

ahh, intensives

I was impressed today by Piaget's term for his field of study: genetic epistemology. It sounds singularly important, even without knowing anything about his research. My new life goal is to come up with a similarly pretentious label for my doodles. Suggestions will be gladly accepted in the comments.
These doodles are from class.
Thinking about different kinds of hiding...




































and about awareness...












and original sin...












and just sketching - no names, but that's a paper clip on his tie.

things I like this spring:

Guava paste, blueberry incense, spinning seeds, sunshine, red socks, Turkish Delight, fidgeting, conditioner, the Mexican grocery store, walking, Jesus, flower trees, backrubs, baking cakes, Craig, leaning left, mowed grass smell, fancy cheese, glass beads, coffee, more coffee, drinking too much coffee, new leaves, geese, Craig's parents, teaching, sectarianism, sunglasses, Goodwill, lightening, gospel music, beetles.

(Image link.)

but those were MY rules!

Newt Gingrich:

Senate Republicans should mount an ongoing fight (including a filibuster of other activities if necessary) to get the American people to realize that liberals want to block all current judicial appointments in order to maximize the number of left wing radical judges they can appoint if they win the White House. [...] It shows the Democrats are not engaged in fair play.

Translation: I made up a bunch of meany-pants rules to restrict the minority in the legislature when I thought that the Republicans would be in control forever. But now we're not in control anymore, and it just doesn't seem fair that icky Demoncrats get to even approximate my level of unfairness. Waaah.
Question: Why does Gingrich suddenly seem like one of the more sensible Republicans on the public scene?

From the New York Times:

When the Pennsylvania returns rained down Tuesday night, the narrative became clear fast. The Democrats’ exit polls spelled disaster: Some 25 percent of the primary voters said they would defect to Mr. McCain or not vote at all if Barack Obama were the nominee. How could the party possibly survive this bitter, perhaps race-based civil war?

But as the doomsday alarm grew shrill, few noticed that on this same day in Pennsylvania, 27 percent of Republican primary voters didn’t just tell pollsters they would defect from their party’s standard-bearer; they went to the polls, gas prices be damned, to vote against Mr. McCain. Though ignored by every channel I surfed, there actually was a G.O.P. primary on Tuesday, open only to registered Republicans. And while it was superfluous in determining that party’s nominee, 220,000 Pennsylvania Republicans (out of their total turnout of 807,000) were moved to cast ballots for Mike Huckabee or, more numerously, Ron Paul. That’s more voters than the margin (215,000) that separated Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama.

Those antiwar Paul voters are all potential defectors to the Democrats in November. Mr. Huckabee’s religious conservatives, who rejected Mr. McCain throughout the primary season, might also bolt or stay home. Given that the Democratic ticket beat Bush-Cheney in Pennsylvania by 205,000 votes in 2000 and 144,000 votes in 2004, these are 220,000 voters the G.O.P. can ill-afford to lose. Especially since there are now a million more registered Democrats than Republicans in Pennsylvania. (These figures don’t even include independents, who couldn’t vote in either primary on Tuesday and have been migrating toward the Democrats since 2006.)

(hat tip)

I hadn't heard that before, but just today at a polling station I saw a sign out for Ron Paul. He should be expected to do well in Indiana, right?

things I read during history class today

McCain: I Support Women's Rights...As Long As They're Meaningless
McCain the Women's Libber
“Fun Dads”, “Strict Moms”, the myth of male weakness and female anorexia: some further thoughts on Courtney Martin’s book
Crazy English
Wagering with Zeno
The Color of Plants on Other Worlds
Eviction Slip
Reading Herodotus

Hard To Get

"Did You forget about us after You had flown away
Well I memorized every word You said
Still I'm so scared, I'm holding my breath
While You're up there just playing hard to get
You who live in radiance
Hear the prayers of those of us who live in skin
We have a love that's not as patient as Yours was
Still we do love now and then..."
Rich Mullins

I hope it stays back this time.

Fafblog!