I would update more if more things changed. By that I mean, if I changed. But that still isn't happening.

but sometimes it seems that God and the universe are conspiring to make me Catholic.

Lord, give me boundless charity.

Just not any time in the near future.

So on my guilty-pleasure blog (by which I mean, a blog that I read and find amusing, but feel guilty for ridiculing), there's a gem of a new post.  I think I mostly love the fact that this blogger has such a unique and tangible 'voice'.  Read a bit, and you might see what I mean.  OK, I can't help but to also recommend this post, if only for the stunningly enigmatic first line.

Often, though, I consider whether or not people at my funeral would say that I made them laugh.  This is worrying now, because some people have completely altered my view of the world, and none of them are the type to have made many people laugh.

So now I might have to choose between comedy and sanctity.  Or just continue to choose apathy.  That works (or doesn't, as the case may be).

The T-shirt would say:

Just Give Up Already

I'm an Introvert

It would say that.

I have, however, started watching a good deal of this television thing that I missed out on for so long (in addition, that is, to no longer starting sentences with 'however').  Well, that means about a half hour a day or so.  Having not had much of a childhood, I'm now busy typing abstracts.  Even the word sounds horrible.

Also, as odd as it sounds, I think that there is something to this whole 'Star of the Sea' thing - at least for me.  Something about the ocean brings the Mother of God closer; now she is quite far away from me.  This is the first thing that must change somehow.

As I've caught up with one of the best bloggers ever, I've realized that 1) he keeps linking to B. Herman's blog - yes, that B. Herman - and 2) he has been thinking about something I haven't been able to get away from lately.  This is a difficult matter.

This morning, I woke up in the midst of dreaming that I was chasing Joe the Plumber around a parking lot in Portland, Maine. This was disconcerting. Also disconcerting was the fact that I then spent about three minutes trying to figure out whether or not I actually do live in Portland, Maine now. I don't.

But I kind of wish that I did. I'm starting to wish more and more that I lived anywhere but here. It's not a bad place in and of itself, but I am feeling more and more guilty about the way that I live. This is because of the professor I work for: On the few days that she's not producing brilliant articles, she apparently spends her time doing something or other with 'the poor.' I'm not sure exactly what it is that she does, but I am pretty sure that she spends the rest of her time either praying or visiting friends with whom she has some deep spiritual connections.  Ora et labora, I think they call it.

I, on the other hand, tend to judge my life based on whether or not I've been keeping up with current events via The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.  This is disconcerting.  Yesterday, as I walked past the main Jesuit residence around here, I ended up thinking about how, were I both Catholic and inclined toward celibacy, I would probably have to, at the very least, become one of them.  Oh well, I should probs check Gawker or something now.

Despite this unalterable fact, yet another dream presented itself early this morning. Resembling a freakishly morbid Graham Greene novel, it featured the slow conquest of an encamped army by plague. In one tent, the more acutely stricken dweller insisted that the other devour the last available piece of bread. A sacrament, it was necessary before death should overtake them all. However, shortly after, the relatively healthy bread-eater was overcome by such thirst that he quickly swallowed the only remaining tablespoon of wine. Drunk with rage and with nothing more, since all the wine was now consumed, the dying man reached out to strangle his healthier fellow tent-dweller. At this point, a lightening strike (or, perhaps, an angel of death) intervened, killing the sick man for murderous intentions and the healthier man for the blasphemy of refusing the sacrament offered to him until his hunger had made it more appear more amenable.

Around this point, I woke up and frantically typed out an outline of a short story to-be.

Also, today, I ventured a few blocks north of where I live, past urban prairie and 70's HUD developments to MLK Park. It is far less populated than the Mexican town a mile and a half south of here. It also looks safe enough to jog through during the daytime, just so long as I am careful not to step on broken bottles or exposed needles. And the squirrels, they are everywhere at MLK Park.

My dreams have been vivid and remembered of late; this is unusual. Last night, I fell asleep thinking about 'place' as a defining characteristic of those three or four dreams that I still remember. It has always been a 'place' set in New England, in the forest, with dirt roads running between homes in a village, homes set under trees with no agriculture in sight, somewhat like a trailer park with traditional houses and built sometime before rural roads were paved.

Two or three nights ago, I dreamt about a slightly different place, which probably entails a foreshortened memory of this particular dream. Well, that probability is enhanced by the fact of my already fading remembrance. Actually, there is some trick about probability and its ephemeral nature, but I haven't figured it out yet - something to do with probability not being influenced by actual events, which very quickly leads one to perceive anew the detachment of such theoretical constructs.

In any case, last night, I had a dream which is already evaporating and sinking back into the porous earth. It was something about having written a chapter which was published in a book, combined with something about discovering a non-fiction chapter by T. S. Eliot, combined with something about getting into Notre Dame next year. However, I was much older in this dream than I think of myself as being, just as I am much older at the present time than I typically imagine myself to be.

Perhaps four days ago, though more often than once, it has struck me that this is finally my life, the part where I am under some intense moral scrutiny. It is not as if the effects of my parentage and of my native region and of my childhood religion will ever take flight, but it is as if they no longer bear the brunt of whatever judgment is building up in a divine storm-cloud of sorts. And, perhaps rather than raindrops, opposite charges of the sort conducive to lightening are a fitting metaphor for this judgment that weighs upon the ever-culpable.

I had better make haste to leave this topic alone, though - particularly since I have already addressed both mathematical and scientific matters, in which I have no expertise beyond that of one who can credibly denounce creationism and laud alchemy. So laud alchemy I will and simultaneously condemn the Copernican view of our universe. Long live Aristotle.

Well, the paper went alright.  Not a martyrdom at all.  But I'm a bit depressed about my field, as the call for papers for the "Men's Studies" section at the biggest annual conference features the following sentence:

"We seek also to provide a forum to continue the conversation, begun in 2008, on interrogating Muslim masculinities."

Yes, and how about some enhanced techniques while we are "interrogating" these Muslim masculinities?

Sadly, it doesn't stop there:

"Finally, we seek examples of what it means to 'come out' as heterosexual, how our self-positioning of heterosexual scholars in men’s studies in religion influences perception and analysis."

I am trying to use my mad "critical theory" skillz to figure out what exactly this heterosexual "self-positioning" involves and am failing terribly at doing so.  All this is to say: This part of the world is clearly run by interesting people with peculiar ways of phrasing things.

Well, I can forget about blogspot, now that 1) I realize that globspot.blogspot.com was somehow taken from me due to disuse and turned into a Spanish language something or other, though I still think that thing is f-cking golden and 2) some kid at the ole alma mater has taken guitar4christ, which I really wanted quite badly.  I was going to say not to go to that second site, then I realized that the lighthouse-themed church setup in the most recent post totally kicks sanctified a-s.

Also, tomorrow is my martyrdom, aka the reading of my paper.  Having reread it just now, I don't think that it's all that bad, but it is pretty incoherent in places.  We'll see.  I'll report back here if I'm still alive.

So I was having a mid-life crisis and thinking about doing something meaningful, like writing something for a lot of people.  Naturally, I thought about starting a blog.  By that I mean, one that people actually read. 

Then I remembered that I had had one called globspot.blogspot.com, or something along those lines, a few years ago.  Sadly, even when using The Google, I can't seem to find it, though other people have that one and theglobspot.blogspot.com.  I know I had it, I know I did.  That thing is f-cking golden, and I don't just give it away for nothing.  Even though I wouldn't remember the password, in any case. 

What I did find, though, was my first blog ever.  It was short-lived and so pathetic that I wish I could remember the password so I could log in and delete it.  There was a lot of youth group drama and a lot of Christian band lyrics.  But, seriously, this was back when newspapers were writing stories about this 'blog' phenomenon and how the internets were becoming democratized and what-not, so I was way ahead of the curve, even with my 'I wonder if this will work' first post.

What did shock me, however, was the fact that my last post still only has six or seven spambot comments.  It's kind of like trees growing out of abandoned houses in Detroit - something for European journalists to marvel at and for everyone else to lament.  And I can't seem to remember what passwords I used to use, but I thought they were all the same ones I still use.  You know, slightly-modified names of bands that I liked when I was fourteen.

maybe the whole sanctity thing isn't for me.  I'm far too busy thinking about how great I am.

Yesterday, I was reading Flannery O'Connor's mail and was stricken with guilt.  She wrote that Sarte was wrong when he asserted that 'hell is other people' and that we ought to see Christ present in every other person.  On my way out of the library the other night, I had been almost praying that Sarte quote - that's how fervently I believe in the wickedness of social interaction. 

But then, I came upon a note that O'Connor had apparently run in and out of a church around the corner from her for three years, never stopping to greet anyone, sneaking out the side door.  'Well,' I thought to myself, 'at least we are courageous enough to use the front door, even with the obnoxious greeters, those minions of the devil, standing guard lest any meek soul should try to enter.'  Or lame souls.

In spite of this redemptive experience, she is still going to play an integral role in what may possibly be my most public humiliation yet.  I don't know how horrible it will be, but I am going to read a paper that talks about her.  Not the whole time, but just for a while.  I'm not sure what I was thinking when I wrote it.  It fails to conform to the contemporary American trend of saying something - everything, that is - clearly.  This is the same trend that leads my professors to condemn the writing style of just about everyone we read as inadequate for our enlightened and pragmatic age.  Anyhow, sometimes I like this paper and sometimes I don't.

In the novel Elizabeth Costello (yes, I read them on occasion), the protagonist planed to give a speech at a conference in Belgium which would denounce another novelist for writing too vividly of Nazi horrors.  However, on the night before he was to be betrayed, she discovered that this author was present at the very conference.  This would not do, so she stayed up late the night before rewriting and rewriting, then she stuck with what she had already written.  I wish I knew the Latin for 'What I have written, I have written,' because that would be really quite impressive.

In my case, however, I have a respondent who is even now poring over those possibly terrible pages I wrote.  Well, I know that they are terrible, but I hope that they are terrible in a mysterious and revelatory sense.

Regardless of all this, I have no inclination toward the condemnation of novelists, but much prefer Ms. Costello's animal rights speeches.  Those, I believe, are instructive for us all.  As I cannot remember much about their contents, I will instead tell you about a place.

As you drive along the highway that runs through Delmarva, you will quickly notice a certain kind of building.  It's not the Redeemed Holiness Church of the Lord With the Sign of Tongues; nor is it the occasional Wal Mart or funeral home.  It is a plant - five plants, or maybe even six - where the carcasses of chickens are 'processed.'  It stays lit up all night long like a refinery and is set back from the road, lest passers-by contract the miasmic guilt which it exudes like the fumes of incinerated body parts.  Trucks drive in and trucks drive out, little pieces of a magnificent killing machine.  North to Salisbury and further on to an eagerly carnivorous world.

Perhaps you aren't one to be disturbed by such things.  Countless self-proclaimed vegetarians, after all, eat chicken.  As long as you eat it with a salad, your soul will remain guiltless, I suppose.  But this is the terror within which we are all enmeshed, the real and not imagined terror. 

If the human mind is a factory for idols (Calvin), producing idolatries beyond the reach of feebler imaginations, then the human heart is a factory for murder and for factories for murder, producing 'processes.'  I'm not sure if it's the spirit or the letter or some sort of wicked metal contraption that kills, but I do know with certainty that something does kill.  And even if I won't yet state that publicly, I will never take it back.

So I'm reading this guy's dissertation on hermeneutics something or other, apparently to give him feedback.  Aside from the fact that I probably won't be able to offer much feedback (since I'm not normally one for hermeneutics of any sort), I'm about to die of laughter as a result of the fact that his introduction refers to a certain group of people as 'hermeneuts.'

In addition, he already did something that I once did; he used the phase (is it considered a phrase?) 'always [and] already.'  According to the founding president of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics, that is a German idiom.  You see, I once used it in a paper I wrote for her, since I thought it sounded nice.  She mocked my usage, but that is not the worst fate to have in life.  Nor is being the founding president of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics.

Thing is, I am suddenly acutely conscious of the awkwardness of every moment of my social interactions.  Just had to write something short about it.  That was it and is all.

I'm not sleeping now - but why?  Because there is something else to find?  Yes.  That must be it.  Because there is something else to find.

Over the past week, though, I had been trying to write a song about the mutual misunderstanding(s) that characterize(s) my relationship with my mother.  This morning, while filling out an emergency contact form for my 'employer' (well, it's not like I have a real job, is it?), I was surprised to realize that I didn't know for sure how to spell her name.  This is disheartening, to say the least.  Then, having found out that my paper proposal for a conference (grad student conference, but still) was accepted, I excitedly called her.  Oh, so does that mean you'll be busy over winter break?  That's too bad.  It would be sad, but I really find it amusing.  Here's the thing: We speak different languages (literally) and have difficulties understanding each other (more conceptually than linguistically), yet she's the one who taught me to speak this language that I usually speak in the first place.