Here comes the sun

I'm mildly afraid that the pigeons flapping about outside my windows are going to fly inside (the way a gigantic killer bee did yesterday, by the way...), but it is still too warm outside for me to want to close them! It was legitimately lovely outside today. LOVELY. I walked around without even a jacket on...first time since getting here! It's like early fall in Los Angeles...crisp and clean and warm and beautiful. Went to the library to pick up some required reading on Mary Wollstonecraft, but also got sidetracked and picked up Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban, Beginning Old Testament Study, and Feminist Interpretations of the Bible....y'know...for fun.... :-D

Books

I got two new books from the library today: Seven Theories of Religion (Frazer, Freud, Durkheim, Marx, Eliade, Evans-Prichard, and Geertz, some of which I've read, some of which I haven't) edited by Daniel L. Pais, and The Batttle For God: Fundamentialism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong. I am suuuchhh a dork!

The Library

I mentioned in a previous post that I absolutely love the Jesus College library, and here's why:
It is spacious and airy and beautiful, but still a small and manageable 3-story building.
You can find your books with relative ease, and there are great little nooks and rooms to sit and study in.
Also, the architecture is really cool. This is a view from the second story, looking out over the circular central lobby.
This is definitely my favorite place to study, too bad its not just right outside my door, or I'd be ahead on all of my assignments right now!

Library

I went to the library for the third time (I really like it there!) and I checked out "Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition" and "The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern" for my...can you guess?...Philosophy of Art class. I'm still really not sure about this class. Looks like a really deep dive into aesthetics, which I'm not so interested in. Oh well, I hope to get something out of it, and, it's only for half the semester anyways. I also checked out, for my own pleasure reading, because I am a huge Dork Extraordinaire, "In Whose Image? God and Gender," which, after 3 pages, I already have problems with (which of course I love, because, well, see the previous discussion about challenging one's beliefs and pursuing knowledge!), and "An Introduction to New Testament Christology" because I don't know enough about Jesus or the New Testament yet. In case you were like "wtf is Christology?" my handy-dandy book tells me that it "discusses any evaluation of Jesus in respect to who he was and the role he played in the divine plan." I'm stoked. :-) The library doesn't have return dates, unless your book is called back by another student, so I can just chill with them for a while, which is cool. There's a 10-book limit, though, and I will probably need to swap some out as the term progresses.

That's it for today's random update! Hope all is well back in the states!

These past two days I have had an appetite for the first time in months. Yay!

Also, today both my internship and my only Tuesday class were cancelled, so I had tons of time to get all my work done. On top of that, I also had time to run some errands, relax and watch some TV, take a long walk to go get hot chocolate while listening to good songs on my ipod, enjoy the first day of quasi-fall weather (I could wear a sweater! My room isn't sweltering hot!), go to the library, and was--get this--able to do some pleasure reading for what may have been the first time during college. Woohoo!! What a day. :-)

"We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place, but..."

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

Next Up!

I'm finished with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and while I did enjoy the story thoroughly, my only criticism is that it was incredibly wordy. Sometimes that was nice--I could just get lost in the strikingly precise and detailed descriptions of New York in the 1930s to 1950s and delve into the inner workings of the characters--but sometimes it got to be a little much. Not to say that it is short on plot--the story is engaging and unique, the characters dynamic and easy to care for--but it is quite heavy on the descriptions.

Next up--Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. The fact that this book is a collaborative work between two fabulous authors immediately caught my eye, as did the Washington Post review on the cover: "Something like what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, and Don DeLillo had collaborated...It's a wow," and the Barnes and Noble employee's description of "a sort of hitchhiker's guide to the apocalypse." I don't know about you, but the Religious Studies major/Neil Gaiman and Tom Robbins lover in me was hooked.

Jitterbug Perfume

First things first: if you haven't noticed by now, I love quotes. When I'm reading a book, I usually do it with a pencil in hand, and go through the whole thing underlining and starring passages/words/paragraphs that I love (only if the book belongs to me, of course). Most books I've read in the past couple of years are marked up like this, and some much more than others. One of the most marked up is my copy of Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. I've dog-eared and pencil-marked the hell out of this thing. So, this is something I've wanted to to do for a very long time, but keep procrastinating on: just write down all the bits and pieces of this book that I've marked in one place. So, here goes, my absolute favorite passages from one of my absolute favorite books. No need to keep reading if you don't want, this is really just for my sake.

Firstly, this book has one of my favorite openings, right up there with the opening of The Poisonwood Bible (which is also one of my favorite books of all time, with the most evocative first paragraph). It is too long to reproduce here, but here is part of it:

"The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious....The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip....An old Ukrainian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil." That is a risk we have to take." 1-2

And onward we go....

"On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges" 17

"They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning" 34

"If the world be round, I can scarcely help it" 43

"...they were trading the live wood of the maypole for the dead carpentry of the cross...they were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address." 142

"The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever" 154

"As a point of departure for the psyche, however, a crystal ball has merit, although a mandala, a seashell, or a cigarette pack can be as effectively employed" 157

"Alobar...slipped recklessly out of the shop while the sun's seal was still affixed to the scroll of the horizon" 193

"Like a baby grand in a town without piano movers, Madame had settled firmly into place" 220

"....in Massachusetts it was half past five, a time of night that could lay some legitimate claim to the morning, and a cold crack of oyster light was beginning to separate the sky from the Atlantic" 245

"The universe does not have laws.

It has habits.

And habits can be broken" 251

"Wearing the dawn like silver on their wings" 291

"However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old" 303

"It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed. Except to the extent that it "tints the buds and swells the leaves within," February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui, holding both progress and contentment at bay." 304

"But, then, who could guess the identity of any of the costumed or the masked? And wasn't that--and not the lust and the gluttony--the true beauty of Mardi Gras? A mask has but one expression, frozen and eternal, yet it is always and ever the essential expression....The freedom of the masked is not the vulgar political freedom of the Divine, beyond politics and beyond success. A mask, any mask, whether horned like a beast or feathered like an angel, is the face of immorality." 309

"Live by the heart if you would live forever" 317

Thoughts of the Day

You know what I don't like? When your bagel is so hot that the cream cheese melts on it....drives me crazy.

I got two new pairs of super-cheap dance shorts in the mail the other day, and then proceeded to dance for a couple of hours. Yay!

Also in the mail was my new quilt, ordered online because it was incredibly cheaper there than it was in stores.

Today is so far proving to be a good, relaxing day. It is amazing how motivated I am to read my book when my internet is down for a couple of hours. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is so far proving very entertaining, a fun and exciting read.