My grad-school playground
All i want to do is play with NT texts. I want to dig my hands into their sandbox and stir, sort, sift, build, tear down, laugh. They are so puzzling, complicated, weighty, important. I love thumbing through my Synopsis Quattour Evangeliorum and paying more attention to the Latin notes than to the English. It makes me feel very alive - very alive! - and a little bit alone. I made a terrifically complicated joke on the back of my NT notes and was crushed that nobody laughed quite as hard as I did when I created it. This is hysterical to me. I am stifling SO much expression as i try to sit decently in class and not to offend my classmates. They're just learning this. They're just getting ready to pass ORDs and they don't want to mess with extra things they don't need to mess with. They don't need to be bothered to press the exclamation point key fourteen times after the complaint that form criticism fragments the gospel tradition. Did you hear that? It FRAGMENTS the GOSPEL tradition!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So i'm sitting here like a moron slapping my knee and clenching my teeth in the excitement that Matthew has removed the "εις αφεσιν αμαρτιων" from baptism narratives and placed it in the Lord's supper instead. I want to shout about it, dance about it, MAGNIFY the opinion that THIS IS REALLY FUCKING INTERESTING!!!! but my classmates are just scratching their heads and trying to sort through unimportant vs. important caches of information.
And now, I'm struggling with severe urges to start teaching the class. When my sister was 8 and in love with school, she used to instruct an orderly classroom of stuffed animals in the afternoons. Perhaps I should look for a similar opportunity.
Perhaps I should just declare my undying love and propose to NT scholarship (i.e. add another Master's to the degree I'm already getting). Otherwise, I'll be sitting on my hands trying to keep myself from exacerbating the tension that's already in the classroom (threatening to explode in hostility against the professor, the ORDs, the editors of our textbook). I really am living in another world. It makes me feel weird about the total lack of empathy I seem to have for my classmates. And a little bit like I should just grab these wings and fly away.
So i'm sitting here like a moron slapping my knee and clenching my teeth in the excitement that Matthew has removed the "εις αφεσιν αμαρτιων" from baptism narratives and placed it in the Lord's supper instead. I want to shout about it, dance about it, MAGNIFY the opinion that THIS IS REALLY FUCKING INTERESTING!!!! but my classmates are just scratching their heads and trying to sort through unimportant vs. important caches of information.
And now, I'm struggling with severe urges to start teaching the class. When my sister was 8 and in love with school, she used to instruct an orderly classroom of stuffed animals in the afternoons. Perhaps I should look for a similar opportunity.
Perhaps I should just declare my undying love and propose to NT scholarship (i.e. add another Master's to the degree I'm already getting). Otherwise, I'll be sitting on my hands trying to keep myself from exacerbating the tension that's already in the classroom (threatening to explode in hostility against the professor, the ORDs, the editors of our textbook). I really am living in another world. It makes me feel weird about the total lack of empathy I seem to have for my classmates. And a little bit like I should just grab these wings and fly away.