Overheard as I walked home tonight . . .

"We were best friends until that foosball match."

Patience and marshmallows

Intellectual insecurity

"In short, the painful truth we voracious students discover, at twenty, or forty, or sixty, is that what we sometimes call the 'knowledge of explosion' has left us all ignorant of vast fields of knowledge that every educated man and woman ought to have mastered. Is it any wonder that we tend to be defensive in debate, sure that our next class or public lecture will reveal the fatal truth: We are ignoramuses, and since we call ourselves professors, scholars, even doctors, we risk exposure as frauds?"

--Wayne C. Booth, "The Idea of a University--as Seen by a Rhetorician"

Happy National Punctuation Day!

Please celebrate with abundant (but judicious) use of your favorite punctuation marks.

Visit this site to find other excellent suggestions for a beautiful punctuation day—and don't forget to spread the word!

Conundrum II

Thank you for your thoughtful answers to the conundrum below.

Although my thoughts have turned bloody of late as a result of your suggestions and my rising irritation, the offending fly continues to live. I keep missing it with my newspaper. Dang Daily Universe.

I occasionally wonder if there are two flies, but that may just be paranoia.

Perhaps the next step is changing my shampoo to a less appealing scent.

In other news, I now officially have four signatures on my thesis prospectus. (YIPEE!) Four down, two to go.

Conundrum

Here's a moral conundrum for you all to ponder:

What would you do if a) you were being driven crazy by a fly who took up residence in your house two days ago and is especially attracted to the scent of your shampoo (and therefore flies around your head constantly), but b) you are afraid to KILL anything because killing things, even little things like flies, typically leaves you feeling guilty and traumatized for days on end?

And, let's say, you've already attempted to get it to just fly out of your front door.

Of course, this is a purely hypothetical question, not based on a real situation, and meant only to provoke thoughtful discussion. Let me know what you conclude.

A Sunday afternoon with Madeleine L'Engle

Yesterday, I read Madeleine L'Engle's memoir, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage. I've had this book in my collection for nearly ten years, but this is the first time I've read it, and now I know what I've been missing. It's a thoughtful, spiritual book that explores some of the more difficult questions about suffering in this life--the kind of questions I wished we talked about more often in Sunday school. L'Engle's contemplation of marriage in this book reminded me of Stegner's in Crossing to Safety (another great book). My copy of the L'Engle book is now littered with post-it notes marking insights that struck me, like this one:

"As a human parent I have had to allow my children to make their own mistakes, to become free adults. I cannot rush in and correct every error in judgment, fix everything that goes wrong. Parents who attempt to do that usually end up with children who grow into emotional cripples. If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us" (99).

I love this idea that even in the moments when God comes in to rescue or help us, He does so with His eternal purposes in mind. He won't deviate from what is best from us, and the reason for that is so that we can become more mature and more real. Perhaps this is why we sometimes feel like we're not being rescued--that we're being allowed to flounder--because God's goal is not to save us from pain, but to allow the pain to purify us until we're changed, inside and out--until we're more expansive as human beings, and not less so.

We're live!

This is what I have to show for my summer: new.lds.org

It's not a prospectus, but hey.