Tenn county wants to charge homosexuals
All morning I've been annoying myself because I can't remember all four components of Dr. Lou Voskuil's culture box. Let's see on the bottom is beliefs and at the top is artifacts, or something like that. That works. As I recall, in different classes my steps of the box changed slightly.
As a former Covenant history major and a current Christian school history teacher this is bugging me. I've been muttering to myself things like "institutions, that was one, right?" all morning passing students think I'm insane, but maybe that's my pink socks.* Maybe I've got 'da box in some old notebook.
Any of you Covblog history types remember it? Austina? Jeanette?
Help a brother out.
*Did I mention my pink socks before? I have a student who thinks that it is hilarious that I sometimes wear brown pants, shoes and socks all together. She also thinks it's funny when I sport my natty thrift store cardigan.
For months she threatened to get me pink socks and one day she showed up with an absolutely brilliant pair.
I sat next to a 7th grade boy in chapel last week, crossed my leg over my other knee, and he was almost kicked out of chapel for laughing like a hyena. He was trying very hard to stifle his snorting.
The other young boys almost pee themselves with joy when I wear them.
Pink socks rule.
So it's Friday afternoon and I'm hunched over my computer, spending a few hours calculating grades for next week's report cards, so that I can have parent teacher conferences which I really don't care for.
They always seem to end the same way. Everyone just wants the teacher to call them EACH time that there kid doesn't do their homework.
Yesterday, in the middle of my Napoleon lecture to 7th grade World History Sarah-Ginny (my brand new shiny wife) knocked on my classroom door and told me that she had come to get something out of my car, and her tire went flat in the parking lot. So out I went to change it.
The phone rang a few minutes ago here in my classroom and it is Goodyear tires, asking permission to replace two tires in addition to the flat one that I changed on Sarah's car yesterday.
This is what I like to hear. Opportunities to give away more money.
On a lighter note, Ashley Leinbach and Kari Takata are sleeping on the living room floor for the next few days of Spring Break, they came down yesterday. They just called from the beach.
And here I am in the classroom. With florescent lights.
Last week I drove with a few of my students to West Palm Beach for "Brain Bowl", a trivia tournament for Florida Christian schools.
The fact that I'd neither participated in or heard of "Brain Bowl" didn't seem to bother our school's administrator who named me "Brain Bowl Faculty Advisor."
Our team did fine. The only part I really remember (and REALLY wish I could forget) was when an 11th grade student vomited all over the back seat of my car on the way to the tournament.
Foul. Very foul.
I asked him why he didn't roll down the window or something and he insisted that he had never upchucked before and didn't feel it coming.
So we were an hour late to the thing. We had to stop at Sam Walton's to buy some pants that were less puked on, as well as an assortment of upholstery cleaners. None of which worked.
Does anyone have any fabric cleaning suggestions? I've had to drive around with the windows down for a week to keep my eyes from watering from the ungodly funk and I don't know what I'll do when it rains. Have soggy, stinky seats, most likely.
Have you ever heard of the "Holy Land Experience"? I totally went there today. For some reason I offered to chaperone a group of 6th graders on a field trip.
It's a dispensationalist amusement park. A "Six Flags Over Jesus", if you will. I assumed that I'd have all sorts of cynical, snide comments to make throughout the day and to tell everyone about the hokeyness of the bedsheet-wearing actors trying to approximate a middle eastern accent, or at least the fact that the inside of a "replica" of Herod's temple (which, admitedly, looks pretty neat in life size) isn't a mock up of the holy of holies, but is instead a movie theatre that only plays an awfull short film over and over. I mean truely awful.
But as the day wore on, I kind of lost the desire to mock everything around me. Life is too short.
I was surprised at the in-your-face Christianity, I'd assumed they'd try to insert it on the sly or something.
There was a Fabio-esque Jesus with Madonna style head microphone (material girl, not Mary) who... I don't really care. I don't want to make fun. I was too genuinely interested in the scriptorium full of cuneiform tablets, Geneva bibles, Latin Vulgates, original printings of Luther's NT, the actual key to John Bunyan's jail cell (which totally belongs upstairs in the Kresge Library, not Orlando) and all sorts of other truely impressive bits of Christian history.
Make no mistake, the cheese was abundant.
I'm just tired of the Sarah Vowells and P.J. O'Rourkes and David Sedaris and Al Frankens and all of the others with a carefully cultivated detached cynicism.