Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: life and living

Not so much the daily grind, as the things that fall outside the scope of academics.

Westboro Baptist is at it Again

life and living, Politics

Apparently Fred Phelps is getting lonely for media attention, as Westboro Baptist announced, mere hours after the VTech shootings, that they were going to protest the funerals of the victims.

Phelps’ daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper, said the Virginia Tech teachers and students who died on Monday brought their fate upon themselves by not being true Christians.

“The evidence is they were not Christian. God does not do that to his servants,” Phelps-Roper said. “You don’t need to look any further for evidence those people are in hell.”

Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech student responsible for the killings who took his own life after the shootings, was sent by God to punish those he killed, and America as a whole, for moral decline, said Phelps-Roper, while adding that she believes Cho is also in hell for violating God’s commandment to not kill.

“He is in hell,” Phelps-Roper said. “But he was also fulfilling the word of God.”

What a charming, charming group of people.

is it safe to come out yet?

life and living

Dip me in teflon, roll me in kevlar, and drop me off at home?

No? Okay…

Alright, seriously, and kind of amusingly, I had no less than eight people contact me today wondering where the hell I was, and was ambushed by another few after class and dragged out for alcohol and confirming I wasn’t a figment of imagination. It would seem that when I don’t post here, or at the AJOBlog, or WoBioBlog, or MedHumanities, it looks like I dropped off the face of the planet and people worry.

…I’m actually touched, so thanks for contacting me.

But, I’m fine. I’m utterly swamped, between work and class, and to be very honest, I’m trying to to do a full semester of schoolwork in half the time – when I’m traveling and in Oregon, I’m spending time with my sick mother, not so much with the philosophy. (And frankly, I think that shows I have my priorities right, but that might just be me.) I’ve kept up on one class (god, I should hope so), fallen miserably behind on the other, and am doing, I think, okay at work.

On top of everything else, I came down with a nastyass sinus infection post-travel last week, so have been knocked on my ass from that. Mmm naproxen is my new favourite painkiller! (And for me, that’s saying something!)

And while I am fine, and coping, I occasionally do flip right the hell out and go major stressball – feel sorry for the people who have to be around me for that, though, not me. I bounce back rather rapidly from those moods, but I worry about the people who have to see them. (And I really do my best to melt in private, but sometimes, I fail.) Well – I worry about most of the people who see ’em. The people who push my buttons in class Weds night can fuck right off.

Oh hey, it’s Wednesday, innit? Humm, go figure.

Anyhow. Rambling. Tired. Going to finish watching American Idol and go to sleep – gotta be awake and perky at o’dark o’clock.

when through water’s thickness

...and everything else, life and living, wisdom and folly

When through the water’s thickness I see the tiling at the bottom of a pool, I do not see is despite the water and the reflections there, I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without this flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is — which is to say, beyond any identical, specific place. I cannot say that the water itself — the aqeous power, the syrupy and shimmering element — is in space; all this is not somewhere else, either, but it is not in the pool. It inhabits it, it materializes itself there, yet it is not contained there; and if I raise my eyes toward the screen of cypresses where the web of reflections is playing, I cannot gainsay the fact that the water visits it, too, or at least sends into it, upon it, its active and living essence.
-Merleau-Ponty

liminal places

life and living

American society has become more lax on the milestones of life. Maybe it’s because we’ve stopped doing things in such set order: become a teenager, get your license, graduate a few times, drink, marry, children, anniversary milestones, eventually death. (Throw in communion, confirmation, or baptism if you’re religion, and divorce for at least half of us, and I think that’s most of the bases.)

But even those are fading – they’re not things done at the same time anymore, no mass ritual of everyone going through it, unless you’ve got the religion side helping along. So the important milestones of our lives pass, often unacknowledged. I think this is a pity; those milestones are important. They’re often liminal places where change is happening at a rapid place, where your identity is thrown open and loose, and you come through the other side a very changed person. The very time we should be most celebrating who you are and are becoming, and we often let it pass with nary a peep.

A friend of mine is in that liminal place right now, a milestone even more foreign to most than the religious ones I mentioned above. He’s separating from the military. He is a combat veteran who has served his country with pride for nearly a decade. He doesn’t agree with much of the crap he’s seen and dealt with these last few years, but is a damn good soldier – and his loyalty to the service and its ideals cannot be questioned, even though his voice could be added to the many who have suffered at the hands of their own medical hospitals and system. He already served his last shift, and today was his final debriefing. Tuesday he turns in ID and other things, and then walks off that base for the last scheduled time.

To the liminal, KM, and the new places that wait.

the hardest thing in this world is to… trust in it?

...and everything else, blog as therapy, life and living

I think that perhaps the hardest thing in this world is not to live in it, is not to be trustworthy, but simply to trust.

To trust is a daily requirement. We trust our milk won’t be contaminated, that our cereal will just contain cereal (or our pet food won’t have pesticides), that the mailman will actually deliver our checks, that the person we opt to confide in over lunch won’t laugh, that our friends have our best interests at heart. We know the laws that require milk to be pasteurized, and our food to be inspected for and created in safety; it’s our trust in people that is so fascinating. Laws, although useful for setting up social contracts, cannot dictate things as minute as trust in an individual. Yet, as Alfonso Lingis notes, everywhere a person turns in the web of human activities, he touches upon solicitations to trust, a field of options of yes and no to be navigated, not in isolated decisions, but as part of a greater whole.

Hmm…I feel the sudden urge to re-read Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Every Day Life.