Tumbling through the internets

Good news: I have a Tumblr now. Bad news: my hipsterdom has just increased. Tumblr will be pretty much random bits of lulz, and in a way I'm hoping to eventually consolidate a lot of ASOIAF stuff over there since, well, that makes sense and all. (There is a large and vibrant ASOIAF Tumblr community, from what I can tell.) I'm andnowitbegins there, after the famous Tower of Joy scene in AGoT. Check things out here.

Also bad news: final at 3pm, technically today I guess. Yup, a final during 10th week. Rather cruel, I agree, but c'est la vie.

So very exhausted right now, and hot, and in need of a shower, and in need of sleep.

UDaR on meeting deux

More substantiative posts coming soon, I swear, but for now all the info is on Una Donna a Roma, my Rome-focused blog, where info about the academics of my time in Rome this fall have gone up.

A presto!

Then whence cometh evil?

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”
--Epicurus

 

I don't know Greek, this comes from the internet, and I don't know how accurate the translation is. It's all over the place in about this form, however. I think some sort of modernization must have happened, as the Greeks were (nominally) polytheist, although I know by some point the strict polytheism did kind of give way into an idea of one overarching and all-powerful deity. Nonetheless, this to me, as it stands, however accurate a translation it may be, definitely stands out as a fairly accurate (if simplistic) account of the pop understanding of a God (or Gods, I suppose) today (and probably for many millennia) in the anthropomorphized, personal-God-who-pays-attention-to-human-concerns-directly sense.

Osama bin Laden, 1957-2011

Rest in peace is not at all the thing to say upon the death of the world's most notorious terrorist. I know of no one in the Western world or, for that matter, most of the rest of the world who will mourn Osama bin Laden, a man who killed at least as many fellow Muslims as he killed non-Muslims, a man who divided the Muslim world, who caused undue hate and pain and stigma for members of his own religion who lived as minorities in Western countries. Osama bin Laden has never struck me as a man who cares all that much for subleties, and yet his masterminding of so many terrorist attacks indicates that he was not at all an unintelligent man. He knew how to plan, how to feel religious fervor and incite it in others, how to drive wedges between social and religious groups. He knew how to make himself heard, how to capture a news cycle--exactly the sort of behavior that will continue to fuel terrorism (a form of violence that takes its very power from being shocking, distressing, and widely reported) of all stripes long after we have stopped talking about his death.

His death will not bring back 3000 American citizens, or the thousands of other people around the world, Muslim and not, "Western" and not, who have died. It will not bring back the thousands of American men and women who have died running around the Mideast looking for him, trying to stop terrorist attacks, trying to democratize Afghanistan and Iraq and now, lately, other countries in the region. It most certainly will not bring back the millions upon millions of average-Joe civilians caught in the crossfire in thousands of various locales around the world, in the power struggles between religions and societies that get reproduced every day, it seems, in the Mideast in particular. Killing one terrorist, even a massive figurehead, even an Osama bin Laden, is not going to make this all go away. It's not going to stop al-Qaeda or other similar groups from continuing their fights. Democracy is going to continue to go toe to toe with Islamic theocracies all over. The success of various democratic movements will depend on the citizens themselves, not on how heavily we throw ourselves into directly fighting on their behalfs; in too many cases we're at least partially responsible for Islamic theocracies (which we preferred to socialist/communist ones in the 1950s and 60s) to begin with.

It's hard, therefore, to say what I'm feeling knowing that Osama bin Laden is dead. If truth may be told, I long ago forgot, in many ways, about him--his elusiveness simply became par for the course. He was dead to my conscious mind years ago, after we bogged ourselves down doing mysteriously uncertain things originally allegedly pertaining to him in Iraq. Right at this moment I am watching hordes of people on TV thronging around the White House, waving American flags, screaming with a combination of righteous anger and joy, climbing into trees, doing cheerleading stunts on the backs of strangers. A few minutes ago there were others here, and my RA spoke what I think so many of us were thinking: "Osama bin Laden was an absolutely despicable person, but I just can't cheer about his death."

Cheering about anyone's death does seem to accomplish exactly nothing. It's just pure energy, in a way, energy that might just as equally be turned to tears when we think about all the horrific crap Osama bin Laden has done in the past decade or two and all the horrific crap we've done trying to stop him. Right now this energy has turned into patriotism for many of these people I'm watching on my TV screen; death and carnage and rage and sorrow become symbolized by waving American flags and chanting USA USA USA. In a way I am indeed feeling some sense of joy and satisfaction knowing that Osama bin Laden's specific plans for destruction cannot hurt any more people, but I know equally well that terrorist attacks will continue and we'll continue thinking of the Muslim world as a block, as if there weren't a million subtleties in each Mideastern country and a million reasons why nothing ever has, does, or will come easily in this world. The part of me that remembers the build-up to the war in Iraq and the rapid disillusionment when it turned out that we were in a quagmire sees waving flags with a touch of fear in this context; flags and joy and overdue and pent-up rage seem to send off alarm bells in my head. Little good seems to come from bravado and trying to simplify emotions, these days. There's also the amazement that Osama bin Laden only died now. What on earth have we been doing spending so much money (billions upon billions of dollars) that could have been spent researching cures for cancer or something to kill one man (and a few million spares) after ten plus years of trying? In a way it feels like the US military has finally done its ridiculously expensive job, and it's hard to give it a hearty congratulations for doing its job.

Osama bin Laden is dead; we won that battle, in that we were the ones who directly killed him. (After all, tempus fugit--time flees, and everyone dies of something or other.) This is indeed a blow to Islamic terrorism. It is indeed a kind of long-overdue justice for the families of people killed on 9/11 and for the families of all the other people around the world dead because of Islamic terrorism. It does not mean the automatic dispersal of al-Qaeda, however. It does not mean that terrorist attacks will stop any time particularly soon. Osama bin Laden was a wealthy, powerful, and well-connected man, and thousands of similarly-minded, similarly-powerful, and similarly-wealthy men just like him are still alive and well across the Mideast, killing their fellow Muslims almost as indiscriminately as they want to kill Americans and other Westerners. He is a bright and shiny link in a heavy and complex chain of power relations, religion, society, education, charisma, and so much more, a chain many many people are trying to destroy, and a chain for which we have killed just as many people as the chain has killed.

Osama bin Laden is dead; we "won" that one, but at a horrific price. I would hope and try my damnedest to ensure that the price does not stay as high in the future, but I know, as surely as I know that the sun will rise tomorrow, that when the next push comes to shove it is going to be like stabbing water trying to fight emotions and flag-waving to remind people of the explicit atrocities and all the nuances of fact and emotion that somehow went ignored in the past and are likely to be ignored in the future.

Things learned from the royal wedding

No, I was not up at 4am central time to witness the beginning of someone's married life. I was up at 6:30 am, however, to go teach about drugs to a bunch of unruly high school freshmen. When I got back to my room at 10, I still had an hour and a half before my first class, so of course I watched choice selections from the wedding on TheRoyalChannel on YouTube (it exists, really.) They had 2-6 minute clips of "highlights" from the wedding and also an hour-long video of the ceremony itself. I watched a bunch of the clips and then skipped around in the ceremony video. Between these videos and some Googling, I feel like I basically got all the royal wedding stuff needed and also some sleep. Win.

I had a lot of thoughts on the royal wedding. Some are encapsulated below:

• Westminster Abbey looks a lot like UChicago--or, should, I say, it's the other way around
• Our Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, however, doesn't have trees (?!?) in it
• Anglican wedding ceremonies are remarkably boring
• That was a very nice-looking dress, but the train was a bit much
• The maid of honor almost looked better than Kate did
• William is not that attractive. Neither is his brother.
• Charles was, is, and will always be old. Just old. (I remember when I was young I used to think that Charles was married to Elizabeth, instead of being her son....)
• Elizabeth also seems eternally old. Professional dress-suits for the win?
• Okay, British, you win when it comes to hats.
• Walking all the way to the altar in Westminster Abbey is probably good exercise
• That music was pretty good, especially the fanfare troop
• Little kid attendants at a royal wedding, lulz
• Royals seriously need shorter names. William Arthur Philip Louis. And then Catherine Elizabeth. Haha name disparity.
• Again, yeah, this Anglican business is kind of boring
• Ring almost didn't go on finger oooooooh almost drama. (According to my male RH: "If you get married, put the finger through the ring, not the ring on the finger." We'll keep that in mind, thanks.)
• Carriage rides and car rides lololololol
• Apparently Today had a "countdown to the kiss" clock onscreen for a few minutes? Crazy.
• Speaking of kisses, that one was kind of lame. Come on, William, give us something to look at!
• Speaking further of kisses--greatest picture ever:

Catherine and Prince William in 2011.

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, many pictures of the kiss from around the web crop out the damsel in distress in the lower left hand corner. I think the human factor of the entire spectacle is drastically improved by having her in the shot, however. But yeah, not such a fan of that kiss. It's not bad at all, just kind of a let down from whatever expectations I think people had. Then again, William's parents had a far more interesting time of it.

Diana Spencer and Prince Charles in 1981

Thirty years ago Charles wasn't old; who'da thunk it? I think Charles looks better than his son does in their respective wedding day photos. But then again, Charles and Diana weren't exactly a paragon of wedded bliss, now, were they? Interesting side note: my only memory of the existence of Diana is the day she died. I was playing with my brand new beanie baby knockoff toy (an orange fish) when I heard that a princess, of sorts, had died. Cheers to being born in 1991?

Congrats to William and Kate--may their marriage be far happier and more successful than his parents' was.

Maundy, maundy, can't trust that day

Note: This is a pretty long post about my personal history with religion, one of the random spurts of introspection I am occasionally prone to.

 Today is, in the Christian world, Maundy Thursday, a commemoration of the Last Supper--or, as one of my very Catholic Facebook friends put this morning as his status, "And so it is that Thursday that changed the world." That makes tomorrow Good Friday (the commemoration of the crucifixion of Jesus), Saturday Easter Vigil, and Sunday itself Easter Sunday, the resurrection.

As my "about me" states, I was raised in a barely-observant mixed Catholic-Protestant (UCC) household. I saw my father in church of any kind but rarely. My mother I guess gets more out of religion than either my father or I, and growing up she was still tied somewhat to Catholicism, even though I know the constant shenanigans that go on with the Catholic Church truly wore her out. Thus I spent about once a week from the age of five or six until the age of eleven in some sort of religious affair, be it religious ed classes at the local Catholic church, actually going to mass, or something similar. Although my mother's connection to Catholicism was rarely overbearing on me as a child, my mother's parents were quite strong Catholics, and so I guess there was some generational pressure to raise the latest kid to grow up in God. Interestingly, my father actually comes from the overtly religious family (his father is a UCC minister), and yet I rarely if ever discussed religion with my paternal grandparents (or my father myself, for that matter) growing up.

Maybe it's just because I'm still quite relatively young, but I do remember my very early thoughts about church and God and whatnot well. I went along with it as a very young kid, the same way any kid in a culturally Christian area goes along with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and similar. Religious ed and my mother made sure that I knew that Christmas and Easter were supposed to be about more than just the presents and the general surprise/excitement (which I truly loved, even more than the presents), but I never read much of the Bible at all in any context, be it religiously, for a literature class, or otherwise. I remember being four or five (maybe a bit older) and asking my mom if God really was an old man who sat in the clouds and looked down at everyone, and if so, how he did it. My mother tried to explain that that wasn't it, that God was more like a force, but I think that only slightly enraged and confused me--I have never liked being lied to, and even the realization that the common childhood conception of God wasn't accurate was upsetting and off-putting. (Besides, the budding storyteller in me kind of liked the idea of there really being a bearded guy up in the sky.)

After that I continued to go along with the God = force idea, although my mental conception could never quite change (all the Father, God, Son, Children language in Christianity does not help). I did first communion and first confession and all that when I was in second grade with the rest of the Catholic kids in town; although I was a tomboy and hated wearing dresses, I really did enjoy the pageantry of communion and the pageantry of church in general. It thrilled with the part of me that did then, and does still now, love world-building and cultures and stories. I had nothing to say for my first confession and, I believe, actively made up some lie about pulling my cat's tail. I learned the prayers for the rosary (which I can still recite) and the Nicene Creed (of which I cannot remember a thing now) and all the rest. My mother would go through spurts of trying to make me say Hail Marys or similar before bed, and when I stayed with her parents, my grandmother led me through the classic "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayers. I suppose they must have made some impression on me at the time, but as I grew older, I began to wonder what it actually felt like to be touched by a god and began to doubt that I had ever actually truly felt my forefathers' religion in my own bones.

I guess it was trying to figure this out, trying to feel this religion, that led me to allow my mother to make me an altar girl, starting when I was 9 or so. This, uncoincidentally, coincided quite closely with the death of my maternal grandmother from lung cancer in 1999, when I was 8, so I went at religion in the new millennium with gusto. In retrospect, it was a juvenile form of fake-it-till-you-make-it; if I wore the white overrobes, and learned the sections of the mass well, and touched holy water and oil and collections baskets and all the rest, the wonderful pageantry was alive and crackling in me, and I did believe then that this was Godly and spiritual and moving and all the rest. At some point in those early 2000s years, at the same time that I finally gave up Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, I tried Catholicism for real, as best as a Biblically-ignorant young girl could do, giving up things for Lent and not eating meat on Fridays during Lent and trying to feel extreme sorrow over Jesus dying by watching the Stations of the Cross and going to Good Friday mass one year. (My mother's hatred of crowds meant that we usually never went to church on actual holidays, but this was an exception.) I vividly remember doodling INRI and crosses in my sixth grade planner at Eastertime, as though the writing out of it could prove to myself that I deeply loved God and Jesus and all the rest.


I have not thought about the depth with which I went at Catholicism in my middle school years for quite some time now, but I think I understand why it has all come rushing back so clearly this past week. Several of my closest friends here in Chicago are actually very religious Catholics, something I did not realize until I already knew and liked them well. It's one thing to go to Catholic school (I know many people who have done this), but the realization that these were people who had gone to Catholic school and actually liked it and actually been made religious because of it was mindblowing to me; all the stories I knew of Catholic school from people my age came from people who had been entirely turned off of religion because of it. Here are people who go to mass every Sunday (something I had never done even as an altar girl), who feel bad if they miss mass, who go to confession fairly regularly, who give up things for Lent with real serious and abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent, who have rosaries and Bibles in their rooms, and all the rest. Here are people who seem to have managed to really take to the spirit of Catholicism far better than I, who loved the pageantry but could never get beyond it, did. At home, in high school, most of my friends were at the very least apathetic to religion, and several were pretty openly agnostic/atheist and scornful of religion. Even those who did go to church with some regularity never really spoke of religion outside of church. Maybe it's just because I never really lived with friends in high school the way I live with friends now in college, maybe it's just because Chicago is a far cry from the hinterlands of New England, but here in college I've met far more openly, seriously religious people than I ever knew even when I went to religious ed with the rest of the Catholic kiddie goobers in elementary school.


Hanging around people who read the Bible and have rosaries and go to mass and confession thus brings back all my own pre-teen attempts at Catholicism with great clarity. I remember Good Friday mass--the interminable length, the veneration of the cross, the prostration before the cross, and all the rest. I remember trying to eat fish instead of meat on Fridays for a few years; I remember spending one Good Friday off from school doing a walk for Habitat for Humanity--learning to be good and charitable. I remember even earlier events, the yearning to try communion and then the inevitable disillusion I had when it turned out that communion wafers tasted bland. Really, that disillusionment with communion is a fairly apt summary of Catholicism and I in general, of childhood in general for so many people--growing up and realizing that the body of Christ tastes a lot like a subpar cracker, realizing that there never was or could be a fat man in a red and white suit who brings presents, realizing that there never was or could be a bearded man in the clouds.


Trying to trace what led to my rejection of Catholicism is difficult. In some ways, I think coming out as a nonbeliever, even to people who are not very religious or who describe themselves as "spiritual" rather than religious, is the religious world's analogy to coming out sexually as something besides ramrod-straight. I did not know anybody, growing up, who did not believe in some sort of God or something out there, just as I knew very few openly gay people. It was not until I myself realized that I was not religious and started telling people this that I realized that some people I had always known were actually in a similar position, faking religiosity while their hearts firmly disbelieved in all the trappings of faith. When you're a young teen in white suburbia telling people that you don't believe in a conception of God that matches Christianity's, no one really believes you; every teen is rebellious, and it's really easy to dismiss it as just another teenage phase, like too-tight jeans or all-black clothes or something. Telling yourself that you don't believe in the Christian God, when you know literally no one else with similar beliefs, is just as hard; maybe it is just a phase, you think, or maybe there's something seriously wrong with you. And yet in many ways the lack of true attraction to church, the lack of emotional connection, has been there for a long time, possibly forever. Does everyone feel that way and simply fake it until they make it? Is all religion, are all religious people just going with the flow in the same way that you've always been? Are you normal, or are you weird, or are you something else?


With all these questions whirling around, it's no great surprise that, like any questioning teen, I turned to experimentation of sorts. If a God in the sky was complete crap, at least the earth was solid and real, and beautiful to boot. Paganism had been around for millennia before Christianity; I felt bad for it for being run over by Christians; there was a certain romance and exhilaration to polytheism for me, thanks to my over-reading of fantasy and Greco-Roman-era books during this period. I think the only remotely-pagan thing I ever actually did was to try to call Halloween "Samhain" and May Day "Beltane" and the like and put out food for the dead on Halloween night since the veil between the worlds is supposed to be at its thinnest then. It was still kind of fulfilling in a pageantry way, and emotionally the vague connection it gave me to the earth and other living things was inspiring in a way that Catholicism had never ever been. It wasn't real religion, however; it ultimately didn't work the way I had always been told that religion should work.


So where do you turn from neo-paganism and rebellious polytheism to active and mature agnosticism and atheism? For me it began with the religious conservative's ultimate conspiracy-theory dream (or second, in any case, only to Harry Potter): Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which I read as an eighth grader. Like with many books, there was a shiver down my spine throughout my reading of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. It was quite well-written. The mental imagery was gorgeous. The idea of my soul in animal form as my greatest lifelong companion was the realization of a dream I'd never realized I'd ever had. And there in its pages was a real person, a real human being, a writer, a published author who did not believe in the Christian God, who called the idea of it and the bureaucracy that fueled it destructive and foul and an antithesis to love itself. The world of Philip Pullman believed in the goodness and beauty of this life, not a future life, believed in actions and love and living every day to the fullest. It believed in stories as synonymous with life. I had never read or heard any philosophy like this before in my life, and this was what made my heart sing, made me feel both profoundly sad for death and yet so happy to be alive, made me feel (ironically) like I had been touched by something eternal and godlike and yet better than godlike because it was human, it was actually within my power to be and do and love.


I have never given up my love of pageantry, of details of dress and hair and rituals and songs and chants; I have never given up my idealistic love of love for everyone, even though I am in many ways the ultimate never-been-kissed, never-loved late teenage nerd girl. Not believing in a personal God, or a power above humans that actually cares at all about what humans do, or an existence beyond our existence now--believing, in essence, in the wonderful primacy and importance of this life, this here and now, this presence--has matured me, and matured in me, since I was the gawky and angsty thirteen-year-old reading His Dark Materials. To me the idea that now is as good as it gets is vestigially frightening, certainly, in the same way that I scream when I bump into someone in the dark; it's automatic to fear the end of self, of ego, of consciousness, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. The endless, lurking sense of death that haunted me last summer when I flirted with depression made me cry like I have not cried in years and froze me, mind and body, like nothing else I have ever experienced. The idea that now is as good as it gets has also, however, forced me to grow and love others with as much strength and confidence as any other human ever has, with no God standing over my shoulder to ensure that I do it. My love of pageantry has left the idea that "It is that Thursday that changed the world," however, behind. In the depths of time and the vast expanse of the universe, there does not seem to be any one day that has changed the world any more than any other day has, even without looking at the logical absurdity of men rising from the dead and using that as proof of a God who loves us and cares about what happens to us. It's the Easter season, but it's also a very lovely day in April in the northern hemisphere, a day in which I and many others are alive and healthy, a day in which the earth continues to tolerate humans, and that matters to me and to many others far more than any Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, or Easter Sunday ever could.

GAME OF THRONES premiere

To my great surprise, I was able to find episode one ("Winter is Coming") of Game of Thrones online last night only a few hours after the premiere time--kudos to whoever did that. No obnoxious and virus-y surveys attached, either. For those of you using the internet, you should be able to find it on any of the usual sites; if you need a recommendation for a site to watch, let me know in the comments and I will find a way to send you the info. I will not list sites here, as I would like to keep specific sites on the down-low.

A word on watching TV online: yes, it is illegal, even if you just watch it streaming and don't download (which is rife with virus problems in any case). It is not my preferred method of watching. If I had a TV, I would be willing to subscribe to HBO for the duration of the run of Game of Thrones in order to watch it legally. I do not have a TV, however, and HBO as yet does not have a way to watch its TV shows online legally/in a sanctioned manner. I found copies of the first episode, only a few hours after the premiere, in no fewer than 5 different places online. I would be willing to bet that in the next few days and weeks, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, most of them my age or similar, will watch Game of Thrones online in such a manner. Watching TV or even feature films on compilation websites is an exceedingly common thing for college students and young professionals, just as listening to music uploaded to YouTube is very common, whether it is sanctioned by record companies or not. The most interesting thing of all is that my watching and listening to media for free, online, does not actually preclude my buying said programming later. If I really enjoy Game of Thrones, I will probably buy the DVDs. Similarly, I have bought several albums on iTunes after listening to different tracks, and really getting to know them, on YouTube. The trend nowadays is simply to only buy things you already know you like--by getting to know them first for free, online.

Now onto my impressions of the premiere. The rest of this post is spoilers--if you do not want to know the plot of either the book or the TV series, do not read any further.

This episode covers the events from, roughly, the prologue to "The things I do for love." I quite liked it, overall. Production value really is gorgeous, and the cast is very talented. There are many added or modified scenes as compared to the book, but I fully understand that television is a different medium from books and that changes in this way are often necessary. Very few of these changes bothered me--the only one that does with any regularity is the change of Cat from book to screen, which seems in many ways more of a whimsical character change than some of the other changes. In the book, Ned is the one who does not want to become Hand, guessing (correctly) that it is a dirty job with no thanks and believing (correctly) that he belongs in the wild north, not playing court games. Cat pushes him to accept, wanting (as always) to raise the position of her family in the eyes of the kingdom and to do her duty; her birth house's motto is "Family, Duty, Honor," and Cat fits that, in many ways, to a tee. It's only after Bran "falls" (read: is hurled from a window after discovering the twincest) that she suddenly understands the danger that the Lannisters pose and tries to convince Ned to stay. In the TV series Cat is, from the first five minutes, dead-set against Bran witnessing the execution and ferociously against Ned traveling south to become Hand.

Most other things were fine. I disliked Peter Dinklage's accent as Tyrion; he's American, and it shows. Just when you get used to it, it comes jarring back, straining the suspension of disbelief a bit. Otherwise, however, Dinklage makes a wonderfully Impish Tyrion, and from what I've read, he only gets better as Tyrion's role expands in later episodes. I do wonder how well newbies can keep up with characters and whatnot; it's quite a lot, in many instances, and I feel like some relationships are not quite fully explained in any sense, or are a bit clumsily explained by Arya in the king-meeting-Starks scene, which does not feel quite natural. These are all relatively small nit-picks, however, and now that some of the messy exposition has gotten out of the way, I will be interested in seeing how the series progresses in relation to the book and if it can remain as gripping and intense as the book is.