Blather 3: Seeing Red
[mood| 
indignant]
[music| Blood - Editors ]
I'm hesitant to complain about what happened in Theo class. (Not file a complaint, just complain in the normal non-confrontational manner of irresponsible blogging.) After all, it's incontrovertible that I was at fault. I did write the damned thing.
It's not the first time I've had a bad run-in with an educator or a school official resulting from something I was unfortunately compelled to write. See, despite my insistence that I simply cannot be trusted to write anything safe on gods without needless bleeding (on my part) and unintended insult (on everyone else's), I still have grades to consider.
I did a 3-page essay answering a question that wasn't the entire question. I rambled on for that length without even noticing I was headed the wrong way. "How does one listen one's god-given vocation?" I say, drop all pretense of looking. It was an honest, though not a well though-out, answer to a question. Not the question but an answer to one nonetheless. It's an honest, unmarred by malice, mistake.
Understand that for all my boldness and crude writing, I never meant to insult Sir Dy-Liacco. I liked the guy. He's a pet orphanage kind of guy, the one that takes in that dying pup/kit and feels for it in the name of honest to goodness good. The sap-happy many adore his Richard Gere aging and cutesy saint-like love of the little beasts, others revel in his amazing tolerance of academic driftwood like myself, and others still admire his ability to see past the blinders of Judeo-Christianity. I have no reason to attack his person.
I never insulted him. He took offense regardless. It threw him into seething rage.
He confronted me after class, all red and trembling, "the spirit [having left] him" so as to be rightly indignant at what was written in my paper. In red ink, he reacted in anger and disgust. He thought me malicious, rude and pretentious enough to assume that those who found meaning were pretentious. He misconstrued my answer with an attack on, and belittling of, meaning found in death and suffering.
I apologized, of course. I was in the wrong. I mistakenly took one question for an incomplete one and in the process, by circumstances of four other papers due on the same day, came out with a rushed, crude piece. All his accusations I never intended to cause. He would not believe that it was unintended due to length and the obvious gravity of the exercise to my final grade (30%). Understandable. I felt ashamed.
To him, I seemed the mean-spirited person out to attack anyone who had a well-meaning bone in one's body. I resented that thought. I resent that kind of person even when Theology was just Christian Living Education, even before gods were such a complicated matter to write about. That's not who I am at all.
I came into his office after regrouping some. The grilling left me dazed, unable to explain myself properly. I needed to apologize properly. And he did accept it this time around. But not without explaining in painful calm how, despite the lack of intent, despite circumstances, belief in any way in what I did write down makes me evil.
I'm an evil person, apparently, acting out of laziness and stupidity. I'm a hopeless case, hopeless as a person. This much, he said.
It hurt. It angered. Normally, I'd find it funny. If I didn't hold this person with any amount of respect I would have laughed it off. But it's Dy-Liacco, and it wounds me to think that he thinks that. I was suddenly disappointed, suddenly very insulted, suddenly feeling stupid for thinking this person was different from the other religion teachers in that other school that, once knowing about the gray area I inhabit, drew me out and attacked me in public as that bad example. They sometimes had a turkey shoot, they sometimes got shot down. But none of them I ever thought highly of. Dy-Liacco, I did.
This is not the whole of it. Not by a long shot. I've run through shame to indignation to anger to plain bug-eyed worry in this unexpected drama. Insult upon insult, visited upon me for one mistake. I didn't deserve that.
I may not find meaning in the things you hold close to your person. That does not make me a hopeless case.
Meaning takes time. I thought saints would at least recognize that one fact.
I thought wrong, assessed wrong, again.
~Don't say it's easy to follow a process
There's nothing harder than keeping a promise
Blood runs through your veins, that's where our similarity ends~
indignant]
[music| Blood - Editors ]
I'm hesitant to complain about what happened in Theo class. (Not file a complaint, just complain in the normal non-confrontational manner of irresponsible blogging.) After all, it's incontrovertible that I was at fault. I did write the damned thing.
It's not the first time I've had a bad run-in with an educator or a school official resulting from something I was unfortunately compelled to write. See, despite my insistence that I simply cannot be trusted to write anything safe on gods without needless bleeding (on my part) and unintended insult (on everyone else's), I still have grades to consider.
I did a 3-page essay answering a question that wasn't the entire question. I rambled on for that length without even noticing I was headed the wrong way. "How does one listen one's god-given vocation?" I say, drop all pretense of looking. It was an honest, though not a well though-out, answer to a question. Not the question but an answer to one nonetheless. It's an honest, unmarred by malice, mistake.
Understand that for all my boldness and crude writing, I never meant to insult Sir Dy-Liacco. I liked the guy. He's a pet orphanage kind of guy, the one that takes in that dying pup/kit and feels for it in the name of honest to goodness good. The sap-happy many adore his Richard Gere aging and cutesy saint-like love of the little beasts, others revel in his amazing tolerance of academic driftwood like myself, and others still admire his ability to see past the blinders of Judeo-Christianity. I have no reason to attack his person.
I never insulted him. He took offense regardless. It threw him into seething rage.
He confronted me after class, all red and trembling, "the spirit [having left] him" so as to be rightly indignant at what was written in my paper. In red ink, he reacted in anger and disgust. He thought me malicious, rude and pretentious enough to assume that those who found meaning were pretentious. He misconstrued my answer with an attack on, and belittling of, meaning found in death and suffering.
I apologized, of course. I was in the wrong. I mistakenly took one question for an incomplete one and in the process, by circumstances of four other papers due on the same day, came out with a rushed, crude piece. All his accusations I never intended to cause. He would not believe that it was unintended due to length and the obvious gravity of the exercise to my final grade (30%). Understandable. I felt ashamed.
To him, I seemed the mean-spirited person out to attack anyone who had a well-meaning bone in one's body. I resented that thought. I resent that kind of person even when Theology was just Christian Living Education, even before gods were such a complicated matter to write about. That's not who I am at all.
I came into his office after regrouping some. The grilling left me dazed, unable to explain myself properly. I needed to apologize properly. And he did accept it this time around. But not without explaining in painful calm how, despite the lack of intent, despite circumstances, belief in any way in what I did write down makes me evil.
I'm an evil person, apparently, acting out of laziness and stupidity. I'm a hopeless case, hopeless as a person. This much, he said.
It hurt. It angered. Normally, I'd find it funny. If I didn't hold this person with any amount of respect I would have laughed it off. But it's Dy-Liacco, and it wounds me to think that he thinks that. I was suddenly disappointed, suddenly very insulted, suddenly feeling stupid for thinking this person was different from the other religion teachers in that other school that, once knowing about the gray area I inhabit, drew me out and attacked me in public as that bad example. They sometimes had a turkey shoot, they sometimes got shot down. But none of them I ever thought highly of. Dy-Liacco, I did.
This is not the whole of it. Not by a long shot. I've run through shame to indignation to anger to plain bug-eyed worry in this unexpected drama. Insult upon insult, visited upon me for one mistake. I didn't deserve that.
I may not find meaning in the things you hold close to your person. That does not make me a hopeless case.
Meaning takes time. I thought saints would at least recognize that one fact.
I thought wrong, assessed wrong, again.
~Don't say it's easy to follow a process
There's nothing harder than keeping a promise
Blood runs through your veins, that's where our similarity ends~