vagabond

Well.

It is true that the intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. And my body is no longer forced to stay home, or at least it won't be, a month from now.

Because I'm going to Russia! wow. finally. how? good question.

But I'm keeping another blog dedicated solely to Russia-things, so that I can share it with family/professors/academia more freely.

So. Please check that out if you want to know what I'm thinking about/doing/etc as regards Russia! I'll probably continue to post un-Russia-related things here.

До свидания!

the gag reflex

In light of The Gospel Coalition's recent post* about how we should take advantage of our gag reflex in arguing against same-sex marriage, and the four posts on my blog feed reader in the past six hours responding to it (that's 50% of all of the posts on said feed reader in said time frame)...

I am going to leave it up to all the people who say it better than I could to talk it out. And then I am going to do a perhaps-inconsiderate and un-serious thing and talk about an indisputable application of the gag reflex, one that I saw for myself that time my cat pooped in my sister's lap.

Friends, I have been dying to tell you this story.

When my family went on vacation a few weeks ago, none of us had any ideas about taking the cat with us. So we left him with my grandparents, who live about a half-hour away. Very conveniently, my sister had an end-of-the-summer party near them, the day after we got back from vacation. The plan was:

• Katie drops Kristen off at party
• Katie reads The Idiot at grandparents' house for 5 hours
• Katie packs up the cat and his paraphernalia in the car
• Katie picks up Kristen and takes everybody home

And it was going swimmingly. The plan was very streamlined and fine with everybody involved. Except, apparently, the cat.

Historically, Hummer has been an excellent traveller (along with the darned cutest feline I ever did see). He has always done well on car trips. Sometimes he would even sleep on the dashboard.

But this time, he was not having any of it. Because I have a heart, I couldn't keep him in his crate in the backseat. I let him roam the car, as is his wont.

When I got to Kristen's party and picked her up, Hummer began to wander between the back dashboard, where he had been sitting, and my sister's lap. He would lie down one place for a while, get up, move to the other, lie for a while, migrate back, etc. Kristen and I ignored him, having our merry conversation about her party and whatever else we were discussing.

All of a sudden, I heard from the passenger seat,

Wait, Hummer, what-- what are you do--

OH MY GOSH HE POOPED ON ME.

KATIE PULL OVER. PULL OVER RIGHT NOW.

So, laughing hysterically, I scanned the road for a place to pull over. It was a little after midnight, so the local warehouse parking lot was deserted. We parked there, Kristen hyperventilating and almost throwing up. I went around to the back of the car to get out the roll of paper towels... to discover, of course, that he had also gotten carsick all over the back of the car. Sigh. C'est la vie.

I shoved the little monster in the crate, ignoring his woeful plaints, and proceeded to clean up my car and my sister. Laughing, still. (What kind of cat decides that a person's lap is the best place to do his business?? REALLY.)

After I collected the pile of nasty paper towels, I began to search for a place to dispose of them. Not a trashcan in sight. But as I wandered around the warehouse building at midnight, I guess I triggered something, because next thing I know,

KATIE. We've been caught.

There was the police car pulling in behind my car. Wheeee. I giggled at the absurdity of the situation. Kristen still looked like she was going to throw up.

What's going on? Is everything alright here?

Yes sir. We just pulled over because the cat pooped on my sister.

The cat?

Yes. We're bringing him from my grandparents' to home, and he had an accident.

Ew. Sorry. I just wanted to make sure you all were okay.

Thank you, sir.

I deposited the paper towels in the litter box, which was situated in the trunk (woe! ah, alas!). I got in the car. We drove away. And I laughed. And Kristen spent the next 20 minutes punctuating Hummer's cries from the backseat with exclamations of,

HE POOPED ON ME.

What a day.



...anyway, here are some cute pictures of my kitty, just for fun.

*Warning: the Gospel Coalition article contains some obscene language. I didn't read the whole thing.

wide sargasso sea + racism

Truthfully, I’m getting a little tired of writing reflections on every single book I read this summer. I should probably quit while I’m ahead, because chances are you (whoever ‘you’ are, if ‘you’ haven’t abandoned ship yet) are tired of reading reflections on every single book I read.

But I need to remember to keep thinking while I read, so too bad. Too bad for all of us. Alas.

Anyway, the next book I have to discuss conveniently relates to actual current events (whaaattt). Wide Sargasso Sea is one of those multitudinous and sundry offerings of 20th century British women writers… in this case, of a 20th century Caribbean-born, part-British-part-Creole woman (Jean Rhys).

This is the book about the Madwoman in the Attic. This is the story of Bertha Rochester, before she burns down Thornfield Hall and blinds the man who married her and then locked her away so he could flirt with Jane Eyre. (Spoiler warning, whoops.)

This is the book about the life of a post-William-Wilberforce ‘white negro,’ torn between two cultures and two colors. This is the book about how she is molded, pruned, and otherwise trained into insanity because she lives in neither one world nor the other, and people know that, and people hate that. She isn’t white enough for her husband or black enough for her childhood friends. And people hate that. And people hate her.

Before the verdict, I heard a bajillion different opinions on the Trayvon Martin case. And by ‘bajillion,’ I mean ‘two.’

1. Zimmerman will be acquitted because the jury is 85% white women, and white women are afraid of black men. Therefore they’ll give him the benefit of being so afraid of this black kid with Skittles that he chased him down and put himself in a position where self-defense had been excluded by his own stupidity and prejudice. And this proves that racism is still alive and thriving in the US. Pooh-pooh on you, legal system.
2. Zimmerman will be hung because the jury will not want to look racist, and the verdict must always (politically correctly) favor the black man, regardless of whether the evidence shows that he was being beaten up when he shot. And this proves that racism is still alive and thriving backwards from normal in the US. Like affirmative action, but in the courtroom, which is WRONG.

Well, I think that this is all a bunch of baloney. It doesn’t even deserve a proper spelling of that mysterious meat-product.

Because… whichever way the verdict went, it proves racism.

It proves that we make decisions based on the color of people’s skin.

It proves that we keep associations depending on white and black.

It proves that culture and personality are ascribed to you by virtue of melanin.

WELL OF COURSE. That happens. We know that. And we know that this is wrong. I would say that neither outcome of the case can be definitively proven to be the result of racism… which, I think, is okay, because we already know that racism is a thing that happens. And we know that it is evil. We don’t need a trial to prove it.

The Trayvon Martin case did not have a racist potential ending (evil) and a non-racist potential ending (good). Both were pretty bad.

Because what happened was bad.

And the solution is not to hate the people of another race. It’s not even to hate the personality traits unjustly attributed to that other race. Otherwise, we end up with children like the young Bertha/Antoinette being driven away like a ‘white cockroach.’ We want to separate ourselves from all that is shameful and then shame it, whatever our value system declares that to be. 

And so we mold, prune, and train both ourselves and the people around us into paranoid insanity, incapable of loving or thinking ourselves loved. Because in that sort of world, that’s probably true.


Note: I may have just stuck both feet in my mouth. Or else said nothing at all useful. If so, I apologize.