Scientists across the world have been dying under mysterious circumstances. 47 deaths since 2001, with more than 20 since January of 2004. This is just weird. People are being hanged, dismembered, dying of undiagnosed pneumonia or unexpected heart failure. Arsenic poisoning, plane crashes, stroke, car explosions, all pretty suspcious.
Okay, I think things have finally settled down for a bit. Here's the deal.
I am taking a leave of absence from my program at Columbia. As the academic year drew to a close, a number of things provoked me to question whether or not the pre-med track is a good fit for me. First of all, my grades - while adequate - are currently not particularly competitive. As this doesn't have anything to do with my ability to master the material, I have to wonder whether this is something I really want to do. Furthermore, after spending a year doing calculus, physics, and chemistry, I've learned that I don't especially enjoy any of them. Sure, it's kind of fun to be able to describe in detail the chemical processes that compose our everyday lives, but the actual task of doing chemistry - be it calculations or lab work - isn't very appealing. And as I'd be looking forward to spending another five-odd years in the classroom before spending the next few decades practicing medicine, it may be time to take a breather, look around, and see where we stand.
The reason the past three weeks have been so crazy is that all of these concerns kind of came crashing down all at once during finals week. The story is a bit long in the tell, but here goes. My last class was on Apr. 28. My first final was to be on May 10, with another on May 12. My girlfriend's college graduation was on May 7, so I spent the week before that studying, went out to see her, got back on the 8th, and planned on having a day and a half to study before my chem final, and then two whole days to study for physics. Well, I checked my email again on Monday evening, the 9th, and saw that the room change email that had been sent out the previous week about the physics exam wasn't just a room change, it was a time change. The final was now on the 10th, which was, at the time, tomorrow. Well, crap. I did what I could, but had really planned on having two more days. I took the chem final, felt I did pretty well (I did), de-stressed for an hour or two, and then hiked back up to take the physics final. Yeah, that wasn't good. I answered a little less than half of the exam.
At that time, I thought I was pretty much done for academically. So I had to start thinking about what I was going to do. As it turns out, I was fine - there must have been a wicked curve on the physics final, because I wound up getting a B+ in the class, which is what I had going into it. I upped my GPA from the previous semester and pulled my cumulative GPA back to where it needed to be. On top of all this, I was in the process of securing an apartment for the next year, and was going to be signing a lease in the immediate near future. Just to give that extra, special touch of stress.
I went home after my last final, so May 13. I had to make a decision about where I was going to be by that Monday, May 16, because that's when the lease was supposed to have been signed. Hello, stressful weekend. I decided that regardless of my academic status, I needed to take some time off, for the reasons listed above. I started moving back to PA on the 15th, and since renting a van would have cost about $300, and I can make it to the City and back on one tank of gas, I decided to make a few trips and do it by car. I wound up making four trips, as I wasn't in any immediate hurry, and needed to take care of things in the City anyway.
I may yet go back and finish the program. My frustrations could have more to do with spending a year essentially by myself - I'd only just started to make real connections with people in the city, and spent most of my time on the phone. It could also be that I'm sick of taking freshman science courses and want to do something more interesting. But if it's an open question as to whether I want to do this, I really don't think that dropping $40k on the problem would be the wisest choice I could make.
So I've moved back to PA. I'll be paying rent to live with my parents for the next year. I've been offered a job teaching a few classes at my brother's classical school, and I'm probably going to take the position. It'd mean taking another job as well, as it's onl two classes, but I think it'd be a good experience. It would also get me back towards the humanities, where I spent all of college. The second job wouldn't have to be anything special - Staples is hiring at the moment - just enough to pay the bills.
But what has made the whole thing really crazy is that last week, my priest told me that All Angels' is hiring, and wondered if I'd be interested in a staff assistant position. So, being 3/4 moved out of my place, having decided to take some time off, there's the possibility of moving back to the city in a week or two. So I can't even really move in to my parents place, because I might be moving right back out.
The job at church doesn't look like it's going to work out. I need to inform the school of my final decision by the middle of this week, and I'm not going to turn them down unless I have another job. Which means All Angels' would have to call me tomorrow. Even if they do, I'm leaning towards staying here. So I can finally start moving in.
I'm going to take the LSAT this fall. I sat down with a test prep book two weeks ago and was answering 24 out of 25 questions correctly without any study. This would give me at least a 175 on the exam. Which ain't bad. I'll apply to law schools this fall too. And around January/February, I'll decide whether to go back to Columbia and finish the program, or go to law school, or do something else I haven't thought of yet. Either way, I'll be out of here and hopefully back in the City by the middle of next year.
I'm going to miss the city. It was a lonely place for me, but I fell in love with it. And I'll sorely miss my church. All Angels' is what made the past year even possible, and I don't know what I would have done without it. I'll miss being able to get anywhere I need to go without having to drive. I'll miss being able to order any kind of food I want and have it delivered to me within half an hour. I'll miss hanging out around Lincoln Center, especially the Loews theater there. I'll miss knowing that any time a band goes on tour, I'll be able to see them. I'll miss Central Park and the MoMA. I won't miss the rats or the roaches or the block parties right outside my window at 2:00AM or the car alarms, but at least the place had character.
There aren't a whole lot of good church options around here. Yesterday, I attended the OPC church which I frequent when I'm home. It was downright excruciating. For starters, their intern can't preach to save his life, but more than that, the liturgy seemed directionless and disorganized. It was standard, traditional Presbyterian liturgy. But it was weird: in some sense, the Anglicans are a lot more faithful to tenets of Reformational worship than Presbyterians are. In the Anglican tradition, the congregation engages in call and response with the Celebrant at just about every point in the service. There are only two times when the Celebrant speaks for any length of time without the congregation responding: the sermon, and the administration of the sacrament. Everything else - prayers, Scripture readings, greetings, blessings, are either dialogical or have responses. At the OPC, I felt like I was kind of sitting there while the pastor did his thing. For a denomination still plagued by residual anti-Catholic paranoia, this was really bizarre.
There are some good things about being home though. There are people here who care about me, my family and others. That will be a good change. My girlfriend is also in town: always a plus. And I think it will be good to be both working and doing something academic at the same time.
So there you have it. The month of May has been a whirlwind, what with a road trip, finals, and a move, but I made it. Now to put my life back together.
Orson Scott Card has a pretty insightful column about the current political state of affairs.
I'll be trying to get back into a more regular blogging schedule in a bit here; life has been crazy. I've moved - unexpectedly - in the past two weeks, and there's an off chance that I'll be doing it again in a week or so.
So I finally got around to reading a whole issue of Sojourners this week. I've read a bunch of articles already, both through my church and various other blogs that seem to have been completely snowed by the progressive side of the aisle (just kidding! [kind of!). So I took a look to see what was going on.
At first, there are a lot of things to like. It's great to finally hear a Christian voice that isn't completely sold out to the right. There are good and Scriptural reasons to be suspicious about a lot of things our government does, and that includes the current administration. Furthermore, conservative Christians really do demonstrate a marked lack of interest in things that should properly belong to any coherent and complete Christian political stance: concern for the poor in this country and abroad, justice in things like taxation and trade laws, etc.
But after reading the latest issue and perusing some of their back-issues online, I've come up with the following objections to the SoJo project.
1) They are, to a significant degree, parroting the talking-points of the standard, secular Left. This is a problem. First off, it aligns them with people who are, by and large, pretty adamantly opposed to Christ and his church. Any time a Christian starts sounding like those who have publically stated their ambivalence towards God, that Christian needs to stop and consider what's going on. This accusation is as relevant for publications like WORLD (which I can't even bear to read anymore) as it is for Sojourners, but SoJo seems particularly vulnerable, as the secularists they're sounding like support things like abortion, the normalization of homosexuality, restrictions of parental rights, and the absence of anything religious from public life.
2) They assume that care for the poor necessarily equals the standard progressive platform and all of its usual solutions for various problems: more government, bigger welfare state, more taxes, etc. To me, this suggests that they're more interested in promoting their Lefty sentiments with religious language than they are actually interested in caring for the poor, which should, after all, be the point. There are significant factual debates about the best ways of doing that, but Sojourners as a publication doesn't seem to be any more open to this than your typical Democrat.
3) I have serious questions about their committment to the essentials of the Christian faith, and believe that their view of God's plan for salvation and the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven are at odds with Scripture. First off, they seem limited to a few parts of Scripture - Sermon on the Mount, some of the minor prophets, a few Psalms - that deal with what can be construed as social issues, while largely ignoring most of what is said about personal holiness, the nature of the church, the "mechanics" of salvation, and God's ultimate plan for the world.
It seems as if we've got two options here. On one hand we've got WORLD and its ilk. They've got serious problems with their political agenda, and have bought in far too easily to the Republican party. Scratch that. The lines between them and the Republican party are far too blurred. But I have no question as to their belief about salvation or the Kingdom. On the other hand, we've got a group of people, typified by SoJo who have a political agenda that I tend to want to agree with, but find that their theological positions are largely opposed to mine. They don't believe the same things about family, church, salvation, or heaven as I do.
This kind of tension is described in the latest SoJocover story [free registration required]. The author complains that while the Democrats seem to have the better part of the social justice argument (see, there they go conflating progressive politics with programs that actually better the poor; the Democrats haven't had a legitimately good idea in 70 years), the Republicans have completely dominated the issues of faith and belief in a way that has hurt the Left immeasurably.
For starters, I would agree. I have more and more problems with the Republican government, but I voted for them because though they may be wrong about some things, they're "right" about the really important things. It's really hard to be a person of faith and a committed, party-line Democrat, given the planks in their platform.
I would go right back at the author and say that SoJo has done exactly the same thing and have sold the theological farm. Hand-wave proof-texting using the Sermon on the Mount does not constitute a decidedly Christian worldview, and though care for the poor is to be an essential part of any Christian perspective, 1) there's a lot more to it than that, and 2) this does not necessarily mean being progressive.
Okay, quickie review before bed, because it's freaking 3 AM. Does it suck? Eh... No. It doesn't. Is it good? Well, there's no need to be hasty, now is there?
Jar-Jar has no lines, and we finally get the Wookie army we should have seen in Return of the Jedi. But dang if Natalie Portman hasn't been turned completely into eye candy. Not that she's bad at that or anything, but holy crap, that's some bad dialog. Fortunately, for the plot - though not the scenery - there's less of her in this one than in previous episodes.
So, yeah. It's okay. Does it make up for the sins of The Phantom Plot and Attack of the Gay Name? Not entirely, but it helps. As millions of Americans return, codependent, to the man who has aesthetically abused them twice before, we are finally treated right. Or at least decently.
In the past few months I've felt my thoughts on the Middle East become a bit more muted than they were six or eight months ago. The curious can check my archives from October-December 2004. I haven't written a lot about this, as I haven't really had much to say, but I did kind of lay off. I think the end of the election season, with its pathological focus on the Iraq war, had something to do with that.
But then Hitchens comes along and writes this bit, reminding me of just who we're up against.
Saw the new Hitchhiker's Guide over the weekend. It was amusing, but I don't think it works as a movie. Not because it "wasn't as good as/the same as" the books. In fact, divergence from the books would be a delightfully appropriate and consistent thing to happen, as all of the various mediums in which the late Douglas Adams' beloved stories appear conflict with each other. The radio program differs from the books which differ from the TV miniseries which differ from the published scripts of radio dramas, etc. I knew beforehand that Hollywood's attempt was going to be different from any of these, so that didn't bother me much.
Where the movie ultimately fails is its attempt at Adams' particular band of humor. A surface reading of Adams' work would lead one to believe that the whole thing us sheer, non-linear, free-associative randomness. This is not the case. First of all, Adams humor is massively subtle and sophisticated, down to the level of grammatical construction. A few examples:
"The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them."
"One of the problems, and it's one that is obviously going to get worse, is that all the people at the party are either the children of the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of the people who wouldn't leave in the first place, and because of all the business abotu selective breeding and recessive genes and so on, it means that all the people now at teh party are either absolutely fanatic partygoers, or gibbering idiots, or, more and more frequently, both."
"The door had to be forced open because of the astonishing accumulation of junk mail on the doormat. It jammed itself stuck on what he would later discover were fourteen identical, personally addressed invitations to apply for a credit card he already had, seventeen identical threatening letters for nonpayment of bills on a credit card he didn't have, thirty-three identical letters saying that he had been specially selected as a man of taste and discrimination who knew what he wanted and where he was going in today's sophisticated jet-setting world and would he therefore like to buy some grotty wallet, and also a dead tabby kitten."
"She sounded, as well she might, extremely skeptical, and Arthur's heart sank. Hardly, he felt, the most conducive setting to try to explain to her as she sat there, suddenly cool and defensive, that in a sort of out-of-body dream he had had a telepathic sense that the mental breakdown she had suffered had been connected with the fact that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the Earth had been demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, something which he alone on Earth knew anything about, having virtually witnessed it from a Vogon spaceship, and that furthermore both his body and soul ached for her unbearably and he needed deeply to go to bed with her as soon as humanly possible.
These monuments to massively drawn out, recursive, run-on sentences serve to create exactly the kind of atmosphere in which Adams' peculiar breed of seeming-randomness is rightly at home. In their very construction, they suggest that the frequent launching-off onto anecdotal tangents that seem utterly unconnected to the main narrative, are, on further analysis, actually quite intimately related.
The film though, due to either the constraints of the medium and the need to be marketable or the lack of skill on the part of the filmmakers, does none of this. It jumps from random event to random event, but with none of the underlying structure of both grammatical genius and calculated vision possessed by Adams. When Adams introduces something utterly ridiculous, it's generally satirical of either the world we live in or the breathless, melodramatic worlds created by the more popular science-fiction authors, and thus funny on a wide number of levels. When the film tries to do the same, it's just random, and much less funny. The one thing you'll hardly ever find in any of Adams' work is a one-liner. His jokes take pages and pages to develop, a style of humor not readily translated to the screen, and which cannot be captured by throwing around a few punchlines. In the attempt to include as many elements and jokes from the books as possible, the filmmakers wind up throwing in a large number of subtle jokes without any of the necessary background or context (narrative or linguistic) to make them coherent, and thus funny.
The movie doesn't work, but not because it fails to meet the standards of the books/televison series/radio dramas, but because it tries to be too like them. The movie would have been a lot better if it had been less faithful to the established "canon" (as conflicted as that canon may be) and stuck with a much smaller slice of Adams' world. A departure from what has gone before would have been entirely appropriate, but the current effort merely hints at Adams' genius while showing just how far the filmmakers fall short of the same. It's amusing. But not genius.
This is just twisted.
I'm not trying to slight anyone who does have a serious mental problem, as I've seen the effects such diseases can have on a life and the lives of others. It's tragic. But seriously, the whole thing reads like a really sick joke. Outside the context of directed, theraputic relationships under the supervision of a qualified health-care provider, I would think that spending a lot of time with other "mental health consumers" would be detrimental to one's mental hygiene. Isn't the point to spend as much time as possible with stable, grounded individuals in the hopes that their influence would provide some kind of positive effect? Or have I missed something?
Be aware: for some reason the site gives a message about requiring popups. I wasn't particularly interested in finding out whether or not they're serious, so YMMV. I didn't see any way of searching their postings without signing up either. Gotta be some interesting profiles there.