How do you argue?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teMlv3ripSM

At what cost celebrity?

Jon and Kate Gosselin are divorcing. I wonder, would this be happening if they had never been on television?

How sad.

Experience

Wow. That was something! Three years out and I just attended my first ever college party, complete with very loud, drunk people, a keg of cheap beer, and a decent selection of liquor. Kudos to Mike and John. They would put many Christians to shame with their friendliness and hospitality, even when considering that some of it might have resulted from inebriation. John mixed Captain Morgan with Diet Coke, half and half, and gave it to me. Very generous, in several ways. I drank half of it (definitely my limit on an empty stomach) and stuck around for 15-30 minutes. Now what did I accomplish? No one there knows that I'm a Christian. I didn't tell anyone. I didn't give a persuasive speech to the assembly in order to convince them that getting smashed isn't the best way to spend their Saturday nights. I suppose the best thing that could possibly come out of this is that I might have an "in" for further conversations with Mike and John, should I see them around Millersville in the future. Maybe when they're not drunk I could try to share Christ in some way. But how? It may be only superficial, but it feels to me like we're coming at life from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Waiting

I despise waiting. I'm waiting for people to email me back about apartments in Pittsburgh. I'm waiting for other people to return my phone calls. I'm waiting for this evening to get here. I'm impatiently waiting for specific dates in the future.

The greatest crime and most confounding truth is that I am not enjoying the moment!!

Are you?

Think on these things!

Take a moment to contemplate the word "responsibility." Think about what the word means. To whom are you responsible? What are you responsible for? Do you have "responsibilities"? What are they? How are you at fulfilling them?

To what end do you do what you do?

I recently finished reading Habits of the Mind, by J.W. Sire. Here is a quote that he used within the book:

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that makes us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe." -Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Polak

Troubling: NYT article on our first "Muslim" president

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/09/americas-first-muslim-president/

See also: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2JmNDJlYTBiMGY2MzNkZDg2ZWM4ZTYzNjVhODU3YmI=

On Obama's contempt for truth: http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=OTAyNzFjMmMwOWJjYmFmMTA2ODdjODZmZmQ0MWE1Mzg=

Thinking

I am spending the day reading Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life as a Christian Calling. It is a book about thinking. This use of my day strikes me as far less futile than the time I spent yesterday finishing Gaiman's Good Omens. Sire spends quite a bit of time on the need for unity between knowing and doing. "We only know what we act on. We only believe what we obey." He argues that this is the difference between the secular and the Christian intellectual: the secular intellectual can divorce knowing from doing, while the Christian intellectual must embody "known" truth in action and, in so doing, shows that he or she truly "knows."

Griping!

Happily, I am done with my teaching job!! Unhappily, I am now in what will hopefully be a very brief period of unemployment. The search for an apartment in Pittsburgh continues. As I change my living situation, there are several key things which I am hoping to avoid:
-a toilet that requires me to jiggle the handle after every flush
-a shower head that sprays water only in a very concentrated stream
-a nasty bathroom
-doors that stick and won't close properly
On the positive side, I am hoping that I can find a shower head that produces a wide enough spray of water that it covers my whole back without my having to move under it. I would also like a clean and completely finished bathroom, as well as someone who keeps a clean kitchen. I am hoping for a place with a back porch and a small yard, but I think that this will be a stretch. I am also hoping for a landlord that is pet friendly, but I doubt that this will happen. I like the idea of getting a rabbit within the next year but, like the kayak that I was hoping to get this summer, both may turn into a pleasant fiction...

I am excited for the weekend, a wedding, and Pittsburgh!!

My List

I feel stressed by the things on my to-do list right now. I need to:
-grade 48 notebooks tonight
-bake some sort of a snack for Bible study
-call about apartments in Pittsburgh to try to find a good place to live before they're all gone
-find a job for less than 2 months this summer!!
-do a massive amount of laundry