Attended the Renaissance Pleasure Faire today to meet my annual quota for seeing overweight people show off their cleavage. (I guess it's called the "pleasure faire" to differentiate it from all the unpleasurable Renaissance festivals out there.) Check out this photo of my husband and Matt Kaiser dueling over my honor.
Another highlight of the event was the turtle race. I couldn't decide which was more exciting--the turtle racing or the jousting.
For those of you who think my ideas about religion and government are a product of the 70s, I have the following passage from Soren Kierkegaard's Attack Upon 'Christendom', written in the 1850s:
"But when Christianity is served by human fear, by mediocrity, by temporal interests--yes, then it makes a rather different appearance, then it really may seem as if Christianity (which with that sort of service had gradually become spavined, knock-kneed, and lame in the shoulder, a pitiful 'critter') might be exceedingly glad to be protected by the State and thus brought to honor."
To reiterate what I said before, I'm not actively in favor of gay marriage. I think it's a sad state of affairs when people start asking for it. But I'm also not in favor of taking measures like adding an amendment to the Constitution to prevent it. I don't think that its legalization in any way changes or hurts the Christian sacrament of marriage. If the law could alter truth and real faith, Christianity wouldn't have lasted 20 minutes. Christ was crucified as a criminal, after all. It says a lot about the way Christians look our own faith and beliefs that we are dead set upon using a constitutional amendment of dubious legality to prop up Christian doctrine.
Thank you, loyal friends who are still checking my blog after I've neglected it almost completely for the last month. I could blame it on the tendinitis, I suppose. (It did really hurt to type for a few weeks.) But that's kind of a cop-out. Mostly, I've been out of town for the last three weekends, and during the week I've spent most of my evenings at the gym working off the bad food I ate on the weekends and at home doing homework.
"What exciting places did she do and what interesting things did she go?" you ask. Well, the second weekend in May, Josh and I made our way to Hillsdale, Michigan, for my brother's graduation. It was great to see college profs and friends, among them Rachel and Aaron Bulgrien, who have a new house and a new baby on the way. The more friends I have who are pregnant, the more stories I hear, and the more content I think I would be to dote on their children instead of having my own. And they're all having good pregnancies with no complications. Scary.
The third weekend in May, we met up with my brother and my Uncle Lynn in Vegas. It was nice to see them, but I still hate Vegas with a passion and it is still my goal to visit the place as infrequently as possible. If you're not into gambling, getting drunk, or buying hookers, there's not much else to do. I guess that's the point.
Last weekend was my church's fabulous women's retreat in Idyllwild. It's a very small town in the mountains with only one place to buy a sweatshirt if you've forgotten yours. And even the sweatshirts only come in children's sizes and/or grandmother styles. I sported a lovely green sweatshirt with an elk printed on the front all weekend. I don't think elk come anywhere near Idyllwild, but it did say Idyllwild on the back, so I could be wrong.
Anyway, I learned a lot about treating everyone around me with respect. More on that later. On the way home, I got a fabulous view of the valley where we live. I'm surprised I haven't died yet after breathing the air here for almost two years.
I like organic food, but I haven't exactly been a fanatic. I buy most of the organic food we eat when it is convenient and cheap, although I definitely go out of my way to buy organic lettuce in a bag, avocados, or tomatoes. I never knew lettuce had flavor until I tried organic, and I'm still weirded out by the fact that organic lettuce lasts twice as long as the other stuff. You'd think, if anything, that at least all those pesticides and what-not would help the food last longer. Organic salad dressing, on the other hand, tastes pretty much like... any other salad dressing.
Today, however, I may have been pushed over the edge into fanaticism. I tried organic butter for the first time. *sound of choruses of angels singing* The contrast between organic butter and the other stuff is as stark as the difference between margarine and butter. It even melts differently. I used it in my trusty Bisquick shortcake recipe, and it tasted ten times better. Who'd have thought that such a difference in taste could be brought about by not pumping cows with hormones to make them put all the nutrients they eat go into producing twice as much milk, starving them in the process? Amazing.
I'm never buying inorganic butter again.
I don't know. Something screwy happened to the formatting, and I haven't had time to sit down and figure it out. Chances are, I won't have time until next week, since Josh and I leave tomorrow for Hillsdale "It's the People", Michigan for my way cool baby brother's commencement ceremony. Huzzah for Will!
I bought a new cell phone last week. Or, rather, I got a new phone for free when we bought my husband Josh a new phone. Leave it to me to drop it in a toilet within ten days of getting it. I set it on the toilet tank with my sweaty towel at the gym. Having done my duty, I grabbed my towel, and, plunk, there it was in the toilet. Many of the keys stopped working. I couldn't even get to my voice mail or the phone's main menu. I was despondent (although not as despondent as I would have been if I hadn't flushed before dropping the phone).
But I had underestimated my new MIRACLE (TM) phone. With some sort of inexplicable vain hope (now I can't help but call it "faith"), I kept trying to use it every 20 minutes or so, and every time I used it, it had regained some of its powers. First, the voice mail key came back, then the 2, 5, and 8 number keys. Finally, three hours after the fateful accident, it had regained all of its functions. It's like new again. Ah, my amazing, self-healing phone.
I plan to sleep with this amazing miracle phone under my pillow to stave off the effects of old age. (I did just turn 25, after all. I need to start thinking about these things.) All this for the price of 2 for $50 (after the rebate)! Truly, this is a miracle. Thank you, Sprint.
There are few things lamer than getting tendinitis from typing too much. I don't even get to take time off work, except for the time it took me to go to el doctor to get happy drugs. *sigh* At least I can try to dignify the problem a bit by getting sporty hand splints. A co-worker immediately dubbed me "Robocop" when he saw them.
I saw this list of "great books" on Sarah Hempel's blog. You are supposed to highlight the ones you've read. Stars are next to ones I've read in the original language (when it wasn't written in contemporary English). "!" next to works I am currently reading. I like this list. It makes me feel kind of well-read.
Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family (I think I may have read this one in high school, but I guess it doesn't count if I don't remember anything about it.)
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March (no, but I've read three of his other books)
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
*Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
*Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
!Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
*Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary (I'm convinced that this should never be read in English)
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles (no, but I did write my high school senior paper on The Return of the Native)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms -- I HATE Hemingway. Don't get be started.
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
*Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll’s House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
! Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude I actually just bought this last week, based on how much I enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera.
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
*Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac The movie version starring good ole Girard (are there any other French actors?) was one of my favorites in high school, but, of course, the book is much better.
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion (Did you hear about the modern version of the myth, where a man falls in love with a supermodel and asks the gods to maker her human? Haha)
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (So I haven't learned enough Russian to take a stab at reading entire novels, even short ones.)
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
*Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray (hated it)
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse (I wonder why this one's on the list and not A Room of One's Own or Mrs. Dalloway.)
Wright, Richard - Native Son