meaning?

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Good gracious

    we spend so much time fighting to survive and to establish ourselves as being a respectable and high-quality institution of higher learning despite the college's newness

    and then there's our one main biblical and theological studies professor going and writing things like "be justified = be righteousified" on the whiteboard

    i swear

O Romans, your righteousification is not and never will be based on your own deeds of righteousimifisilitudicatiousness, but is a gift through grace yes good amen

cogency is overemphasized, captain

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    At the end of a very long weekend, just now freshman Kiley and I were in the bathroom, I  rinsing my mouth out after brushing my teeth and she washing her face in the sink, when we had a Moment which I think spoke to the nature of dorm life as a whole.

      I raised my head and said, "Why do I smell pesto?"

     Kiley said, "and why did I just hear a flute? Playing music?"

    We were both just tired enough to be nearly crying with laughter even before we figured out that Kiley had been hearing Danielle's singing from the shower ("you were singing?" "no that was actually my shower flute" "Do it again! ....woah flute voice!") and I was smelling Kiley's foaming face wash. ("Can I smell your face? ...yeah that's what it is, some sort of isolated pesto-ish element is wafting away and that's what I smelled." "Haha, pesto-face!")

    Oh my word it's only week 2. We're all gonna die.


    Over break I was looking back over the very few posts I made over the course of last semester and thinking, wow, that does not even begin to approach adequacy as a representative journal of that time. There were so many things I did and thought, so many places I went, so many people I interacted with and ideas I engaged and papers I wrote and everything, that are completely not even hinted at because I just don't blog as much I used to. Like, there almost wasn't a point to writing at all. I can't decide whether to be discouraged from even trying or inspired to try harder, or maybe just rethink the purpose of all writing I ever do for fun. I don't even have time for creative writing, especially not now with 18 credits. I wrote some kinda funny poems for a couple open mic nights last semester, and they were well received and that was basically enough for me. (Open mic nights are way fun in a close-knit community.) Like ok that's enough nonessential writing for now, I'll hold onto the old dream of writing stories in some foggy future day when my life is a different beast but for now it's time to read history books. And meanwhile the way I look at the world and process events/thoughts is changing and I seem to be getting more reserved in some ways and less so in others and it's weird and things are weird and weird is weird and weird weird weird.

man of la rip your heart to bleeding shreds

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    ok so

    i realize i haven't posted in like two months, even before thanksgiving break let alone finals or christmas break (which i am in the last days of)

    but i really wanted to say that it is so awful when one expects a new piece of entertainment to have a certain emotional effect on one

    but then it goes and has the absolute opposite effect in every possible way it could.

    Like when one decides to watch the Man of La Mancha (1972) movie and one doesn't know anything about it except that it is a musical based on a play or something based on the novel Don Quixote by what's-his-face. Ok, musical, those are usually fun and lighthearted right and then one doesn't know anything about Don Quixote except that one thing that one's heard about him going and attacking windmills or whatever which sounds very silly he's like a silly person ok
    musical + silly windmill man = therefore movie must be silly and fun right

    Wrong, the movie is now over and one is standing in the kitchen at 3am silently sobbing one's guts out because that was not a happy movie it was a sad movie, a very sad sad movie

    Ugh I should have known that it would be sad just from the fact that it stars Peter O'Toole.

i think the man just specializes in characters who are falling apart in various ways.

    Anyway um yes what have I done lately that is interesting? Or that I can make interesting? Not much! Just on vacation right now, holed up in a snowy not-place in Idaho, puttering away and getting lots of sleep before the spring semester starts. Oh, I should say something about next semester, that's almost interesting. For classes I am taking:

• HIS 212: American Civilization: 1865 to Present (american history II),
• BTS212: New Testament Studies II: Epistles and Revelation, 
• GRK102: Beginning Greek II, 
• BTS360: Doctrine of God, 
• HIS352: American Revolution and Early Republic, and
• BTS205: Hermeneutics.

    (Hermeneutics used to be counted as a 300-level class but for some reason they changed it to 205 after restructuring the academic program this summer. Dr. S/PME has cheerily assured me, however, that he has no intention of making it any easier just because its listing changed.)
    So I guess that's really all just history and Bible classes except for Greek, which is closely linked to the Bible classes since we're learning biblical Greek/being trained to read and interpret the, uh, New Testament in its original form. So that's good. NT II and American Civ are still core-level, but I'm really starting to move more and more into the two areas of study I've actually chosen for my major. My build-a-bear, mix-and-match major.
    I've got some additional class-like stuff going on this semester but that would take too long to explain so here we go.