strangers when we meet
Internets! Did you miss me? I missed you! The Evil Landlord awoke on Saturday morning, decided that this random rebooting thing was interfering unacceptably with his lawful computer gaming, and wandered off with his computer under his arm to get it Seen To. We have consequently spent three quarters of the Easter weekend without even sulky intermittent teen tantrum access to teh internets. I survived this surprisingly well, all things considered.
Worst things about Easter:
1. It seems to inspire Sid the Sinus Headache to new and ever more vicious heights of pain. I woke up on Sunday with him sitting over my left eye, kicking things. Mostly me.
2. Consequently forgetting completely that I was supposed to spend the whole weekend updating my hapless Masters student's thesis on Tolkien. While I plead in extenuation that I didn't have internet access and thus couldn't read her increasingly plaintive reminder emails, basically I am a Bad Supervisor and probably deserved the headache. Someone suggested last night that it was proactive karma, on the same principles as reannual wine. They were right.
Best things about Easter:
1. 4-day weekend. I think I've actually caught up on sleep, for the first time in about three months.
2. Easter chocolates thereafter go on sale. Somewhere in my future is me biting the head off a giant dark chocolate bunny. A cheap giant dark chocolate bunny. (How cool is it that tacky kitch chocolate easter shapes are now in grown-up dark chocolate?) Pre-emptively, I'm going for a dental checkup this afternoon.
Which brings me to the weird topic of Easter symbolism. Bunnies and chicklets and eggses, o my! They make, basically, no sense. They're mad carryovers from the original pagan spring festival, which celebrates life and rebirth and baby creatures and, probably, when you get down to it, screwing. To slap the whole Christian crucified-Christ thing on top of it is extremely incongruous, even given the risen-from-death motif. I remember the Baptist preacher, way back in the days when I was a boring born-again1 schoolgirl, trying desperately to claim that chocolate eggs represent the stone rolled away from Christ's tomb, and even back then I had an embryonic version of the response I now slap into the margins of undergrad essays in bright green ink, viz. "You're stretching the metaphor, read in CONTEXT!"
I actually rather like the way religions nick motifs from each other on an ongoing basis, suggesting that most human spiritual experience runs in well-worn grooves and Jung might have had a point, after all. All religion is postmodern. It's cobbled together from fragments of other religions which appealed to the cobblers as meaningful, powerful and likely to get people to do what the cobblers want. Of course, having engaged in pastiche with the enthusiasm of rutting bunnies, they then attempt to refigure the whole shaky collage (aka load of cobblers) as Absolute Meaning and Totalitarian Discourse, which by all the rules of postmodernism you're not allowed to have, which possibly explains absolutely everything I always hated about religion. It's conceptually inconsistent on the meta level as well as internally. *is pleased with own random insight*
Oh, yes, forgot to add. Best things about Easter:
3. Finished the book.
Last Night I Dreamed: I occupied a rather beautiful modern larney house, all glass and split levels, in a city somewhere, possibly New York, and was hosting a gathering in the giant studio to show off my husband's latest artworks to a select bunch of critics and fellow artists. Said husband was all angsty and paranoid about the arrangements. He may, for at least some moments of the dream, also have been David Bowie, so I guess that fixation isn't dying down as fast as I thought. Sigh.
1 Not, I have to admit, with any real degree of conviction.
Worst things about Easter:
1. It seems to inspire Sid the Sinus Headache to new and ever more vicious heights of pain. I woke up on Sunday with him sitting over my left eye, kicking things. Mostly me.
2. Consequently forgetting completely that I was supposed to spend the whole weekend updating my hapless Masters student's thesis on Tolkien. While I plead in extenuation that I didn't have internet access and thus couldn't read her increasingly plaintive reminder emails, basically I am a Bad Supervisor and probably deserved the headache. Someone suggested last night that it was proactive karma, on the same principles as reannual wine. They were right.
Best things about Easter:
1. 4-day weekend. I think I've actually caught up on sleep, for the first time in about three months.
2. Easter chocolates thereafter go on sale. Somewhere in my future is me biting the head off a giant dark chocolate bunny. A cheap giant dark chocolate bunny. (How cool is it that tacky kitch chocolate easter shapes are now in grown-up dark chocolate?) Pre-emptively, I'm going for a dental checkup this afternoon.
Which brings me to the weird topic of Easter symbolism. Bunnies and chicklets and eggses, o my! They make, basically, no sense. They're mad carryovers from the original pagan spring festival, which celebrates life and rebirth and baby creatures and, probably, when you get down to it, screwing. To slap the whole Christian crucified-Christ thing on top of it is extremely incongruous, even given the risen-from-death motif. I remember the Baptist preacher, way back in the days when I was a boring born-again1 schoolgirl, trying desperately to claim that chocolate eggs represent the stone rolled away from Christ's tomb, and even back then I had an embryonic version of the response I now slap into the margins of undergrad essays in bright green ink, viz. "You're stretching the metaphor, read in CONTEXT!"
I actually rather like the way religions nick motifs from each other on an ongoing basis, suggesting that most human spiritual experience runs in well-worn grooves and Jung might have had a point, after all. All religion is postmodern. It's cobbled together from fragments of other religions which appealed to the cobblers as meaningful, powerful and likely to get people to do what the cobblers want. Of course, having engaged in pastiche with the enthusiasm of rutting bunnies, they then attempt to refigure the whole shaky collage (aka load of cobblers) as Absolute Meaning and Totalitarian Discourse, which by all the rules of postmodernism you're not allowed to have, which possibly explains absolutely everything I always hated about religion. It's conceptually inconsistent on the meta level as well as internally. *is pleased with own random insight*
Oh, yes, forgot to add. Best things about Easter:
3. Finished the book.
Last Night I Dreamed: I occupied a rather beautiful modern larney house, all glass and split levels, in a city somewhere, possibly New York, and was hosting a gathering in the giant studio to show off my husband's latest artworks to a select bunch of critics and fellow artists. Said husband was all angsty and paranoid about the arrangements. He may, for at least some moments of the dream, also have been David Bowie, so I guess that fixation isn't dying down as fast as I thought. Sigh.
1 Not, I have to admit, with any real degree of conviction.