I dreamt about a Chinese mall...
It wasn't a very involved dream, but oh well. I started getting just.. hundreds of "post-master delivery failure" messages last night. It started at about eight o'clock, and between then and now I've gotten at least 700 of them. That makes me think that somebody's hijacked my site and put a spambot on it. I don't really know what to do about it, though. Dad says that if it doesn't stop in 24 hours, I should call the company. I kind of want to call the company now, but it's also Sunday, so I might not be able to get through.
I slept for 12 hours last night, and I feel very rejuvenated. But I think it has a lot to do with the wind, because it had kind of worked its way into my dream, so I was just kind of floating along with the wind noise in the background. When I woke up, I just lay in bed for a little while, listening. I like the wind a lot.
I've been in general feeling better since my last post. Today is a good day. I don't really have an intention towards doing anything, but I did want to go get popsicles and chocolate, since I forgot them yesterday. :( Now there are a lot more people in the dorms, because the RAs and SOS leaders have arrived. There are other orgs that have people on campus early. There are theater kids, but most of them are in the apartments. There are Oracle people, and of course all the sports people are here. There aren't a lot of them in Manor either--mostly because the upperclassmen have their own houses, and the underclassmen live in Drew and the Heights. The international students are mostly here, and we were delivering gift packages to them the other day. I deemed them "lovebuckets" because they were in laundry baskets and simply looked like gigantic buckets of love. ^^;
I was doing a geeky thing and reading "conversion stories" on an Islamic website. If figured a lot of them would be pretty slanted because the name of the website was "onetruereligion" or something like that, but there were a couple that I thought were pretty interesting. They were all women's stories, and some of them were ridiculous. Like one woman took the Shahada and then added "but I'll never wear the veil and if my husband takes a second wife, I'll castrate him." Now--I can understand her concern, but I would think that if she had studied Islam enough to convert, she would see some of the larger picture, you know? Pronouncing your faith is not exactly the same as wearing the veil, and for *certain* your faith is not on the same level as you and your husband's private arrangements. That irked me. A lot of the stories from the USA sounded a lot like "born again Christian" stories. Sometimes I wonder if it's not fundamentalist and evangelical Christians that spawn a culture of blind faith, but instead our own culture--you know, if it translates so broadly from one religion to another. I wonder if we aren't so starved for something to believe whole heartedly in, that it just translates itself to anything that makes a big enough change in our outlook. Now, that's not to demean any of these girls' experiences. I just find it kind of interesting that you can have almost the same kind of "born again" experience. These experiences are still very much worth it.
I wonder though--from what I know of Islam, it is not meant to be treated in a passive manor. Despite the fact that it means "submission" I think that it means more like "submission to ijdihad"--submission to the struggle for knowledge. Or submission to guidance in the struggle for knowledge. Of course, I'm not a Muslim, so I don't really know, but in my romanticized view of the religion, that's what it means. Ijdihad is probably one of my favorite concepts in the universe: struggle for knowledge--struggle with faith, for knowledge, so that one may have a better faith, a better submission. It seems so very based on balance, you know, because a "struggle for submission" seems almost oxymoronic. Except that it makes *so. much. sense.*
Anyway, one of the stories was about a secular humanist who converted. That one I found to hit closer to home, because in a way that's closer to my situation. She was intelligent. I'm not entirely sure where I was going when I returned to that part of the story, but oh well. :P
Long story short, I decided to drop my Saint Thomas class, which I said earlier. The registrar says that I need to be in 15 credits or I lose my state grant. I am hoping to do an independent study on something Islamic for two credits. That'll put me at sixteen. If I get in a fix, I could probably do some paperwork and get two credits out of my summer internship. I don't really want to do that, though, because I feel like when I said "I don't think I'll need the credits" then I should stick to that. It would be a very easy way to solve this problem, however.
I'm feeling talkative again. I'll take this as a good sign. I put up some posters yesterday. The room is feeling brighter. :D
I slept for 12 hours last night, and I feel very rejuvenated. But I think it has a lot to do with the wind, because it had kind of worked its way into my dream, so I was just kind of floating along with the wind noise in the background. When I woke up, I just lay in bed for a little while, listening. I like the wind a lot.
I've been in general feeling better since my last post. Today is a good day. I don't really have an intention towards doing anything, but I did want to go get popsicles and chocolate, since I forgot them yesterday. :( Now there are a lot more people in the dorms, because the RAs and SOS leaders have arrived. There are other orgs that have people on campus early. There are theater kids, but most of them are in the apartments. There are Oracle people, and of course all the sports people are here. There aren't a lot of them in Manor either--mostly because the upperclassmen have their own houses, and the underclassmen live in Drew and the Heights. The international students are mostly here, and we were delivering gift packages to them the other day. I deemed them "lovebuckets" because they were in laundry baskets and simply looked like gigantic buckets of love. ^^;
I was doing a geeky thing and reading "conversion stories" on an Islamic website. If figured a lot of them would be pretty slanted because the name of the website was "onetruereligion" or something like that, but there were a couple that I thought were pretty interesting. They were all women's stories, and some of them were ridiculous. Like one woman took the Shahada and then added "but I'll never wear the veil and if my husband takes a second wife, I'll castrate him." Now--I can understand her concern, but I would think that if she had studied Islam enough to convert, she would see some of the larger picture, you know? Pronouncing your faith is not exactly the same as wearing the veil, and for *certain* your faith is not on the same level as you and your husband's private arrangements. That irked me. A lot of the stories from the USA sounded a lot like "born again Christian" stories. Sometimes I wonder if it's not fundamentalist and evangelical Christians that spawn a culture of blind faith, but instead our own culture--you know, if it translates so broadly from one religion to another. I wonder if we aren't so starved for something to believe whole heartedly in, that it just translates itself to anything that makes a big enough change in our outlook. Now, that's not to demean any of these girls' experiences. I just find it kind of interesting that you can have almost the same kind of "born again" experience. These experiences are still very much worth it.
I wonder though--from what I know of Islam, it is not meant to be treated in a passive manor. Despite the fact that it means "submission" I think that it means more like "submission to ijdihad"--submission to the struggle for knowledge. Or submission to guidance in the struggle for knowledge. Of course, I'm not a Muslim, so I don't really know, but in my romanticized view of the religion, that's what it means. Ijdihad is probably one of my favorite concepts in the universe: struggle for knowledge--struggle with faith, for knowledge, so that one may have a better faith, a better submission. It seems so very based on balance, you know, because a "struggle for submission" seems almost oxymoronic. Except that it makes *so. much. sense.*
Anyway, one of the stories was about a secular humanist who converted. That one I found to hit closer to home, because in a way that's closer to my situation. She was intelligent. I'm not entirely sure where I was going when I returned to that part of the story, but oh well. :P
Long story short, I decided to drop my Saint Thomas class, which I said earlier. The registrar says that I need to be in 15 credits or I lose my state grant. I am hoping to do an independent study on something Islamic for two credits. That'll put me at sixteen. If I get in a fix, I could probably do some paperwork and get two credits out of my summer internship. I don't really want to do that, though, because I feel like when I said "I don't think I'll need the credits" then I should stick to that. It would be a very easy way to solve this problem, however.
I'm feeling talkative again. I'll take this as a good sign. I put up some posters yesterday. The room is feeling brighter. :D