The Happy Atheist

Last night since Matt was working, I went to the bookstore for entertainment. I have banned myself from the bookstore for the majority of this semester for the following reason: I spend money in bookstores, and I'm not supposed to spend money, since I am a poor grad student. Last night I browsed the sociology, philosophy, and general science sections for several hours and enjoyed myself immensely.

Among other things, I came upon the following quote from the famous atheist (agnostic?)Bertram Russell, which I shall post after a few comments. If you recall, I posted a while back on an issue that had been bothering me - according to the church, without Christ, there is no peace, purpose, or hope in life. I didn't believe that this was true.

I have also, in various conversations with different people, repeatedly heard them voice the belief that without belief in God, life would be consumed in materialism or hedonistic pursuits. I also didn't believe that this was true. I can think of lots of better things to collect than material possessions if this life is all there is (and even if this life is all there is, it's pretty fantastic, and I have nothing but gratitude for having the experience of living it); I would rather spend my time collecting knowledge or experience or collecting and nurturing a select few relationships.

In short, if I believed there was a God, I would live almost exactly the way I would live if I believed there was no God. With that thought, here's Russell on the subject of life:

WHAT I HAVE LIVED FOR.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what -- at last -- I have found. With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. ---- Bertrand Russell in PROLOGUE. WHAT I HAVE LIVED FOR. .

Fulbright Grants

This year, our university has decided to promote Fulbright grants (which you can find more about here: http://www.iie.org/TemplateFulbright.cfm?section=Fulbright1), since our student population is underrepresented in the numbers of awards given out each year. I am intrigued by the programs available - in particular, I like several of the teaching assistantships described, and I'd like to do a research project comparing either European educational systems (in France or Romania) or Asian educational systems (in Taiwan or Japan) with those in the U.S. However, I remember how painful and expensive living out of the country can be from spending last summer in Costa Rica (and that was only for three months).

Mainly, there's Matt. It was horrible enough not seeing him for three months; I can't imagine not seeing him for six to nine months. He wouldn't be able to go with me - I wouldn't be able to support him, for one thing. Also, how would I react if he told me that he wanted to leave the country for several months and that I couldn't come? People are forced to do that sort of thing if they're in the military, but I think I would be rather upset if he did something like that voluntarily (unless of course I could go, too).

Managing two careers at once (if you can call mine a career) is trickier than I once thought it would be. Inevitably, one person gets the shaft career-wise, and it's logically the one whose career path is either less well-established or less lucrative, or both. As a feminist, I feel a sort of responsibility to have a career, and my feminist self feels a bit guilty for following a man around from state to state.

What it basically comes down to is this: which is more important to you - a relationship or a career? A few years back, I would have said unhesitatingly that a relationship is more important. I still suspect that a good relationship is harder to find than a good career. But a good career (one particularly suited to one's own interests and personal strengths) is also hard to find, and it can be as much or more of a time investment as a relationship. However, I probably have more options within a particular career than I do within a single relationship.

Still mulling over the Fulbright catalog...

Fundamentalists and Unitarians

I just got off the phone with my sister. It all started innocently enough - she had been beside herself with glee when I let slip in an earlier conversation that I have accumulated some fundamentalist Christian friends here in Tulsa. Let me backtrack a bit. I come from an exceedingly religious, fundamentalist Christian family. I tend to avoid religious people as a general rule, because I always have the sneaking suspicion that they're secretly trying to convert me. You know, the fear that I'll go innocently to a barbecue, and it turns out to be a discussion group on "Intelligent Design" or something. Anyway, I have faltered recently because everyone in this town seems to be religious, including most of the people in my graduate program. That means that if I want to have friends, I have limited options. Mostly, I can choose between Presbyterians, Methodists, Pentacostals, and Unitarians (I draw the line at Baptists). Plus, I have a lot in common with the people in my program, and if they happen to be religious, well, maybe I can overlook that and hope for the best. I am weak.

So, back to my phone conversation with my sister, I had recently discovered that one of my "fundamentalist" Christian friends wasn't as fundamentalist as I had initially thought. That is, although she had been raised Southern Baptist, her father had left the Southern Baptist faith and started his own Unitarian church. Now, according to many Christians, including my sister, being a Unitarian makes one not only not fundamentalist, but also not very Christian. Which is a pity, since the Unitarians seem like a rather more forgiving bunch than your average gathering of Christians.

Anyway, we got started on the Unitarians, and I mentioned that C.S. Lewis (one of my sister's idols) has a lot of Unitarian-like themes running through several of his works. For example, in The Last Battle, a book in The Chronicles of Narnia, there's a scene in the afterlife when a character who has been following another god turns out in heaven after all because apparently in seeking the other god, he had, in fact, really been seeking the One God. And so forth. Basically, the principle is that rather more people end up in heaven than you might think, and they come from multiple directions. I've always thought this was kind of a nice concept.

Somehow, from Unitarianism and C.S. Lewis, we got on the subject of how she had decided that there was, in fact, a God, and that Christianity was the only way to heaven, and that the Bible is, in fact, entirely correct and infallible. I mentioned that I was rather in the beginning stages of trying to decide the possibility of god actually existing. Having ruled out atheism as being impossible to prove, I lean rather more toward agnosticism. Recently, however, I've been leaning slightly more toward the probability that god does exist; but if god does exist, I'd prefer it if he were a Unitarian, and even more if he were a she.

Anyway, this is the sort of conversation that is exactly a fundamentalist's wet dream, and I could smack myself for allowing myself to become embroiled in it. And worst of all, I invited the whole thing.

P.S. The following joke, besides being funny, should illustrate the general attitude of mainstream Christianity toward Unitarians:

What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian?

Someone who goes around knocking on doors for no particular reason.

What Women Really Want

Last night I was wallowing in my alone-ness in the way a chick does when she's really enjoying her own company (no, this did not involve a vibrator, you pervs). I began with a glass of wine and some episodes of Law and Order alternating with CSI (I kicked over the glass and broke it when the phone rang, but fortunately not before I had finished the wine). Naturally, I couldn't drink without putting something in my stomach, so I heated up some banana bread and melted the butter on top of the slices just so that it was partly absorbed, but you could still bite into a little cold chunk of butter every now and then. When I finished I remembered the leftover half-blender full of strawberry margaritas still in the freezer, so I had a large glass of margarita. Then I started watching What Women Want. Partway through, I realized that I might need to have some more food, so I grated some cheddar onto a paper plate, grabbed some Peeps, and got some more wine, since you can't really eat cheese without wine. So I'd have enough cheese, I sliced some of the elderberry wine-flavored cheese I'd gotten from a winery a few weeks back.

By this time, the movie was in full swing, and getting pretty good. It was your average feel-good chick movie about a guy who only wants sex, is competitive, and by the end of the movie realizes that women are good and he is bad, and he reforms. It had me tearing up by the end and picking off little cheese gratings from my tank top.

After watching the movie, I realized that part of it was nagging me. According to the movie, what women want is companionship. It reinforces the stereotype that men want sex, and women want love. This stereotype is horrrible, since it allows women to feel superior and smug while at the same time giving men an excuse for doing all kinds of horrible things, mostly involving bachelor parties, cheating, and full-service massages, but also for not giving oral sex.

Now, we all know that what women really want is sex, and, more importantly, oral sex. Just like men. And I'm willing to give up my image of superiority to spread that message.

How not to teach

Dude. Okay, there's this class I'm taking this semester - psycholinguistics/sociolinguistics, and I think that from the beginning the teacher decided he didn't really want to have to do much, since he's not getting his contract renewed for the Fall.

In a way, I don't blame him, since he's gotten dicked around by the department: they didn't tell him he wasn't being kept on until everyone already pretty much knew, since they were interviewing other candidates for the position, and they never told him why he wasn't being kept. There are certain things I really like about him - he makes sure his students get involved in professional organizations, provides really good, current supplemental readings for his classes, and is a really good mediator when students have problems with bureaucracy or other issues in the program.

However, last semester, the two classes I took from him were probably 80% group work, which I hate. I don't believe that students should have to teach each other, for reasons which should be obvious, but are being contested in a lot of trendy educational literature (collaborative learning, etc.). This semester is even worse. The first day of class, he passed around a sign-up sheet and told us to sign up for which dates we wanted to teach class. The students are teaching the entire class, which is not really what I'm paying for. I suppose it's teaching experience, but I'd prefer to be teaching people who know less than I do, and I'd like to be taught by someone who knows more than I do. I know, I'm old-fashioned that way.

Even so, that's not what's really irritating me. From the beginning of the semester, the schedule was set for who was teaching when. Naturally, I planned out my April 25th class several weeks ago, complete with an outline and PowerPoint presentation (okay, not PowerPoint, but Word. Still). Today, April 10th, I get an email from the instructor notifying me that I will be team-teaching with someone else, and we should get together so we can figure out how to do it. Well, pardon the slut* out of me, but couldn't I have been told this sooner? Before I did all the work, perhaps?

*note: I haven't read** the rules for posting, so I'm not sure whether or not I'm allowed to use profanity.
**Yes, I'm aware that I probably signed something saying that I did.

A day in the life...

So, I've been totally busy lately since it's the last month of the semester. Yesterday I got up early, researched the school catalog for information on graduate minors, and found nothing other than the info that each department has its own guidelines. So I called the graduate college, who knew nothing and directed me to the Education department, who knew nothing and directed me to two specific people, who knew nothing. So, I'm waiting for them to get back to me. I think I have my plan of study filed, but I have to call the graduate college again to verify, and maybe I should give it a few more days. I swear you can never just call the graduate college about anything without it turning into a musical phone ordeal. I make a list of people I have to email about various things - a cousin's wedding, an instructor's class in China (verify that she has my passport), arrangements for summer graduate assistantship (no one can tell me what the hours are for this), etc.

Anyway, then I go into work. I have three students to tutor this afternoon; these will be one-hour appointments. One of them comes in with a reaction paper to a movie (what I learned from this type of paper) which she has been asked to revise and resubmit. It is written very informally, the way someone might speak, and with simple sentences that are often repetitive. The second comes in late for her 1:00 appointment. She comes in at 1:15 with a paper which is due at 1:40. I try to stick to the basics, mostly things like writing topic sentences to create transitions between different paragraphs, which currently have no clear logical connection. We don't have time for much. She prints out the paper and leaves.

My last student is writing her first APA mini-research paper on a nursing topic and has no idea how to use the APA manual (not that I can blame her). She's also really uncertain about what constitutes a literature review. However, this is not the main problem; I discover midway through the paper that she is completely confused about the difference between paraphrasing and quoting, and the in-text citation methods for each. In fact, she has no idea how to paraphrase. She is changing maybe four words out of a three-line sentence. This has the effect of adding grammatical errors to an otherwise almost completely plagiarized sentence. I refer to a handbook, showing her some examples of unacceptable paraphrases and good paraphrases of the same text. I copy the pages for her, and she experiments, trying this with her own paper. She wants to make an appointment for Friday, but I have none available.

I go to my three-hour adult education class in the evening, where we discuss Sternberg's theories of intelligence, postmodernism, feminism, and critical theory.

I go home and have the last seven fish sticks, a large glass of cabernet, and some Peeps. I had intended to work on one of my papers, but the wine has made me feel a bit unfocused and sleepy, so I watch TV instead. There is nothing on. I shuffle between celebrity gossip channels for a while until I find a show called "Libido" on the Discovery channel. Howard Stern comes on, so I watch that for a bit and lose interest when there are no naked chicks.

By now it is after 11:00, so I sit down at the computer and bang out about a third of my paper before calling it a night. I have to be in early tomorrow to administer a CLEP exam.

Bus Guilt and TESOL Conference 2005

I'm back from the TESOL conference (http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/sec_document.asp?CID=23&DID=2136), which was fabulous. Sunny, mid-eighties, breezy, pool, river, margaritas, champagne, free dictionaries (I got 3 new ones!)... I got tons of really cool books on academic writing for ESL students. Among the programs I went to were: a murder mystery simulation, using blogs in the college writing classrooms, a high school chess program pairing native speakers with non-native speakers. I skipped a two-hour session on the TESOL acronym, since I figured I could explain it in 15 seconds or less.

Anyway, I took the bus from Dallas to San Antonio, and once again encountered that familiar emotion known as bus guilt. I was in an almost constant state of bus guilt last summer when I was living in Costa Rica and was at the mercy of public transportation. You get on the bus, stake out your window seat, splay out your legs, recline your chair, arrange your luggage and pillow around you, and you are totally comfortable for about 15 minutes, when the bus makes its first stop. You look out the window from your reclined position, and to your horror, there's a HUGE line of people waiting to get on your bus. The suspense!! Will someone sit next to you? If so, who will it be? A serial killer? A really talkative type who reeks of cigarettes and is intent on planning your future together? A really talkative serial killer? Or worse - a mother with a crying baby?? What's the best way to ensure that no one sits in the seat next to you? That thoughtless cad across the aisle from you has his luggage spread all over the place, is dangling his feet in the aisle, and shows no signs of moving. Maybe you should move your luggage in case someone needs the seat. You really, really don't want to move it, but you are torn with guilt. Bus guilt.

For some reason, people always sit next to me on the bus, even if there are thousands of other seats open. I think that women like to sit next to me because I look safe, quiet, thin (don't take up much room, which is always a consideration), and don't smell objectionable. Men like to sit next to me (I know this because they tell me) because I'm female and cute. Either way, I lose. True to form, I sat next to a man on the way down and a woman on the way back. The man was in his early fifties, a roofer, an enthusiastic smoker, a drifter type moving to Austin to find work. Apparently, roofers have a rather romantic, nomadic lifestyle, following news of hail storms across the country. He had a certain charm - several pieces of Double Bubble (http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blgum.htm) gum dropped out of his backpack before he dropped the backpack on the woman behind me; however, we did reach a few dreaded awkward moments when he assured me that he could take good care of someone like me. On the way home, I feigned sleep.