Going Off-Line for a Bit

The packers and movers are coming tomorrow. I don't know yet when they are delivering; I'll find out tomorrow. Of course this means that as everything gets packed up and I start traveling back and forth again, I'll be off-line for a while, but I'm not sure how long.

Travel Notes

At the beginning of this week I made a two day trip up and back to my new place, to get some things taken care of (like signing the lease and getting keys at some point before I had a moving van at my back.)

On the way up, I stopped in the restroom at the West Virginia welcome center, and found a peculiar little fold-down plastic seat inside the stall, apparently to stow your baby while you're, erm, busy. I'm not saying it's a bad idea (actually it's probably a great idea for someone traveling solo with an infant), but it does sort of tickle me to think of putting a baby in something that strongly reminds me of a cup-holder on the side of the stall. (If the baby remembers any of this, it may require therapy later.)

I was interrupted in my musing by the guy in the stall next to me calling out "No more Wendy's for me!" To my relief, someone else answered him; he apparently had a friend in the restroom he was communicating with, and I was not expected to carry out a through-the-stall discussion of the state of his digestion.

Since it's summer, there is a small portion of the roads in the US which are apparently not under construction at this time. (I didn't seem to find many.) I ended up running a few hours later than I expected, but still had a chance to meet briefly with the Realtor in the afternoon and arrange to finish up in the morning. I got one unpleasant surprise: the apartment doesn't have air conditioning. (The things I don't think to ask.) Granted, for at least 9 months out the year, you'll have no use for it at all, and it turns out most places in the area don't have air conditioning. (Heating bills are estimated to run in the mid 200s a month in the winter in fact. All of this is fairly foreign to the boy who mostly grew up in Texas, even if he did go to school near Cleveland.) But I've never been a fan of the "sweating builds character" school of thought; I'd rather just be comfortable all 365 days, and it probably helps my allergies. I'll be looking into window units I guess.

I opted to head into Erie (the big city) and look for an adventure for dinner. I navigated some fairly run down streets for some time, but eventually found a reasonably nice area and even ran into the Quaker Steak and Lube, which I'd seen recommended. It was cute; it's all automotive themed, and the food was fairly good. I'll be back there again. (And it seemed to work out better for me than Wendy's apparently went for my stall-neighbor earlier in the day.)

The apartment is reasonably nice, although not completely ready yet. I'm a little disappointed that it seems to be creakier than I would have liked (you can hear people moving around in the attached apartments), but I think it will be OK. It's not only across the street from campus, but also a very short walk from downtown, which includes multiple bars and the requisite Chinese take-out place. A bit further walk even gets you some more restaurants and a video rental place.

I made a reasonably good attempt at sleeping, and took the next morning to get my mail held and arrange renter's insurance. (The mail, as it turns out, is actually delivered to a personal mailbox outside the door of my apartment. I didn't think the post office did that anywhere anymore.) I stowed some stuff I didn't want the movers taking in my basement and got the lease finalized. (Yes, the Realtor actually gave me keys and let me stay in the apartment before they had a signed lease. And after they told me it didn't have air-conditioning. They knew not their peril, even if they had a security deposit.)

And then turn right back around and drive another seven hours or so back again. To be repeated at least once next week with the movers this time. Urg.

I don't like roller-coasters

I've mentioned this before. I'm a self-described roller coaster weenie. I have almost no tolerance for "thrill" rides at all. I have a picture my partner took of me on Test Track at Epcot last summer, which is probably pretty mild as far as most thrill rides go (and that's the only reason I agreed to go on this one at all), and while my face looks ok, in the bottom corner of the picture you can see where my hand has an absolute death-grip on the bar in front of me. I think you can make out the white of my knuckles, or could if the resolution were any higher. (That my partner was actually relaxed enough to be taking pictures says that we are very different people. I didn't even notice he was taking pictures; I found out when I was going through the pictures he took and getting a puzzled "Where the heck is that?" feeling.)

Now with that firmly established, I can talk about the feeling I'm getting as I call movers and pack my office and do all these other things that finalize moving. You know that feeling you get when you've gotten on the roller coaster (or something close to it), once you're strapped in and your starting to move? You know, especially if you're now remembering that you're terrified of roller coasters? That internal tensing, where you start thinking "Oh sh*t, what have I gotten myself into?" That's exactly what I was feeling when I started calling movers. I think I could actually feel the coaster starting over the first drop.

One friend (who actually wrote me recommendations for my job search) told me that when she quit one job for another, someone gave her a card that said:

Change is good!
Change is good!
Change is good!

on the outside, and on the inside:

(You go first.)

Someone else gave me a nice framed poster titled "Change". (It's holographic and shows a tree which loses and gains its leaves; very cool.) I told her about the "Change is good!" card and she just laughed. She told me she knows me too well to try to tell me that change is good; she said her poster just says "Change".

Oh well. Let the roller coaster begin.

Jesus and Cooties

A few weekends ago, I spent a few days watching documentaries relating to The Da Vinci Code. Many were marvellously entertaining. For instance, did you know the Templars essentially established a form of international branch banking before the thirteen-hundreds? The movie (and the book) seem to have worked up quite a froth among conservatives because of the claims Brown makes about Jesus and the early church. Now to be fair to those doing the frothing, in addition to the fiction which is the book, Brown seems to be pushing a fair bit of background information for the book as factual which actually ranges anywhere from possible to highly improbable in the eyes of most historians, and some of which falls into the category of wild-eyed conspiracy theories. (Very little seems to be either widely believed or authoritatively disproven.) I suspect he does this deliberately because he thinks (probably correctly) that it will sell more books if he stirs the pot a little.

Should I warn about spoilers? I've not read the book myself (or seen the movie), but since I haven't been in a coma for the past year or so, I'm still aware of most of the points which are causing all the ruckus. One of the big ones seems to be the suggestion that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that they had children, and that the bloodline still exists today. The producers of one documentary spent some time looking into the question of whether Jesus could have been married, and interviewed several scholars on this point, including a priest. The priest looked absolutely furious; he seemed almost too mad to speak, and managed to spit out that suggesting Jesus was married was "libelous."

Now this I have to wonder about. Whether someone was married or not may be true or untrue, and the question may be open or settled, but I've never heard it suggested that claiming someone was married is libel. (I actually looked up the definition of "libel" just to make sure the universe hadn't changed around me.) What in the world?

Two possibilities occur to me here as to why someone would feel such a claim would be so scurrillous. There is of course the obvious point that we have to remember who is doing the speaking here; if it turns out Jesus was married, someone may have been giving up the horizontal mambo his whole life for what turns out to be no good reason. (Remember the joke about the monk who spent his life making copies of copies of manuscripts who discovered upon reading the originals in heaven that the word was celebrate?) Personally, I suspect there's at least some truth to this basis for the anger, but I think there's another reason for much of the church to dislike the suggestion: They think women have cooties, and no one truly holy could possibly have touched one, or even wanted to. (This also explains how churches supposedly following the teachings of someone who spent almost all his time talking about love, caring, compassion, and forgiveness end up spending almost all their time talking about sex and the importance of not having it, or at least making sure no one has any fun at it.)

Which is particularly interesting in light of what some of the other scholars had to say about Mary Magdalene herself and other women connected with Jesus and with the early church. While the evidence seems to be pretty strong that if Jesus was married it wasn't to Mary, it does seem that she was a disciple who traveled with him--and that she wasn't the only one. In what would have been somewhat scandalous at the time, Jesus seems to have interacted with men and women in essentially the same way. In the earliest church, there were apparently a number of women who became teachers and leaders. Which makes sense if you think about the admonishments from some early (male) church leaders for women to be silent; why tell someone to shut up who hasn't been speaking out?

So perhaps some of the anger is the residual "women have cooties" feeling, which (ironically) may have been part of what Jesus himself preached against. Actually, the whole thing leaves me with the odd feeling that Jesus may have been way more progressive on gender issues than most of the contemporary world.

Neat People Never Make the Exciting Discoveries I Do

I used to have a little sign which said that. Every once in a while, I would come across the sign in a pile (see? I told you) and it would verify itself.

And in the course of cleaning, I've just discovered two more pairs of jeans that fit: one hanging in a closet (I vaguely recall the idea possessing me of hanging these up to save room elsewhere) and another I don't even vaguely remember but which I found in the middle of a pile (of course). This effectively doubles the pairs of jeans I own, which is a lovely surprise. It's like being visited by the clothes fairy. Which only seems fair since I had several pairs stolen when I used to wash clothes in a public laundry room.

Office Detritus

I'm rapidly reaching the bottom of the piles that are my office, and finding the odd effluvia of 13 years here (although only about three years since my last office move). I've boxed up most of my books and files that I want to keep, and schlepped many of them home to fill up my apartment, where they will await movers. I'm in the process of attempting to return books I've borrowed. I've been trying to pass off supplies, like a couple of dozen half-empty pads of paper (including one pad of graph paper, which I vaguely recall picking up for an algebra class when I first taught as a GTA about 12 years ago), and a blue-jillion blank note cards in different sizes. (These are the weird little supplies you end up with as a teacher. I already just gave up and threw out most of the red pens I found. And yes, "blue-jillion" is a technical mathematical term for "butt-load".)

So now the desks are starting to appear again (I told you already I'm a piler), and I can see the bits of paper, paper clips, rubber bands, stray markers and pens that escaped my earlier sweeps (how many markers did I own?), a prescription bottle which turned out to have been re-purposed for holding ibuprofen, an actual ibuprofen bottle (is this saying something about my job?), a bottle of Rolaids (no comment), some possibly blank CDs, two spoons (I'm grateful I didn't find more cutlery than that, really), a microwavable cup of soup that languished here since it's more fun to go get lunch with someone out, computer cables, a manual for a cheap calculator I got to loan out for students at tests, staples, a humidifier I brought when my sinuses were killing me, batteries, and probably a ton of other junk.

And paper. I have stacks and stacks of paper sitting on my floor right now, waiting to get taken down to a dumpster: notes that are too scattered to be worth rescuing, extra handouts I was keeping "in case", copies of old notes packs, the used halves of all those pads of paper, phone books, old student papers ("And if you look to your left, you'll see opscan mountain..."), overheads, a huge stack of evaluations I decided I didn't need to keep anymore (I have the yearly summaries, and I kept the ones from the past year or so which had any comments), magazines I didn't read, envelopes, and probably something valuable and important which I didn't notice got tossed into the pile.

Flashback to High School Health

Writing recently about my required high school classes reminded me of the experience that was "Health" in high school. It was a required class, and as I mentioned, there were no "advanced" or honors classes which substituted for it, so I was back amongst the general population of my high school my senior year, and it was an eye-opening experience. And yes, it's not current, but I felt like sharing anyway.

On the first day, my health teacher (also the cheerleading coach) was giving an overview of all the different topics we would be discussing that semester. She started talking about studying the different systems of the body, like the skeletal and muscular systems, and (apparently as segue) asked, "And how do we move our muscles?" Now I had just finished honors biology II the previous year, and aced the AP test, so I remember that I started thinking: "Let's see... there's a sodium and potassium ion exchange, and there's a ratcheting action in the fibers... gosh, I can't quite remember this... wait, is this completely understood? I guess this class is going to be harder than I thought." I'm so dissapointed that I didn't remember enough details to rattle off a quick answer to an (admittedly) hard question, because when no one answered how we moved our muscles, the teacher finished up with: "We EXERCISE them!" At which point I relaxed and thought, "OK, so this will be cake after all."

Which is pretty much the conclusion my health teacher came to after about a week or two, when she drew me and one other student aside after class and basically told us the class wouldn't be challenging for us, and she was sorry, but if we wanted to assume we would have lots of free time during class and bring other things to work on or read, that was fine. But, as she put it, there wasn't much she could do to make the class much more interesting, because she also had to deal with students in the class who couldn't even read. (This is high school, remember?) And mostly it was a fairly boring class, which covered the basics, including the lessons on staying healthy by exercising and eating healthy foods, and the obligatory "Drugs are bad, m'kay" lesson.

But then there was the sex ed unit, which was a lot of fun. For me, anyway. Mostly because our teacher couldn't bring herself to say the word "sex" out loud. (Once she had to bring up the topic, so she hurriedly wrote it on the board, then quickly erased it again.) I was pretty well-versed in the area actually, which is mostly attributable to being both an intellectual bookworm and a horny teenager at the same time: I read everything I could find. By the time I went into the class, I knew quite a bit about the biology, sociology, and psychology relating to sex. (And I had a fair idea which bits I'd like to try out, for that matter. And a long list of guys I'd like to try them with, but I wouldn't have told anyone either of those at that point.)

We saw a fair number of videos during that unit, because the teacher could start a film, turn out the lights, and hide in the back of the room. (Actually, this was frequently a pretty good idea, since a lot of our sex education ended up coming from PBS or Surgeon General Koop, which tended to be pretty good.) But I even managed to ruin a film for her once. When she showed "The Miracle of Life" (which was good, but dated), another student asked "Is this really inside somebody?", to which she answered no. When I explained that the film was controversial exactly because these shots we were seeing were real (and done using laproscopic cameras), she was mortified and actually started hiding her face in her hands on the desk. (Come to think of it, I probably shouldn't have said anything. She probably never showed that film again.)

One day a discussion broke out among the students about things stuck up people's butts, including comments about gay men "gerbiling". I brought in a Cecil Adams column the next day to read to the class in which he concluded that this was an urban legend, because a lengthy review of medical literature couldn't turn up a case. Interviews with nurses or emergency room personnel who claimed to have seen cases also ended up just going in circles and never coming down to an identifiable case. The column did however include a lengthy list of items mentioned in medical literature that had been removed from peoples rectums, including light bulbs, a plantain in a condom, and 72 jewelers saws (!). (These are the items which still stick with me; the full list was several paragraphs long.) While she let me read the article to the class, she also said afterwards that it would be the end of any further discussions of anything in anyone's rectum. (Actually she didn't say anything nearly that explicit of course.)

The time I wish I had read out loud to the class was when we covered birth control. Our teacher passed out a mimeographed table of different birth control methods to the class, including where to get them, how to use them, and what the benefits and drawbacks of each were. She said she wasn't going to read any of this out loud, and that no one else obviously wanted to, so we were to just read each row of the table silently to ourselves. So we spent a little time where she would say "Now read row three," and wait for a while. Then she took all the sheets back up, so we wouldn't go showing people what we talked about in health class. (And of course I can't help but think back to what she said at the beginning of the class about having students who couldn't even read.) I came within a hairsbreadth of volunteering when she said "no one else wants to read it either" and starting in on the table, but I didn't. I really wish I had, particularly since there were probably some people in there who needed the information and couldn't get it from reading the table. Plus, I bet I could have made my teacher climb under the desk.