I wrotes a Retriever editorial. Let's see if they print it.
-----
As a recent alumnus, I'm writing to commend Chris Cook on his excellent editorial about UMBC's proposed name change. However, since both "Maryland State" and "Maryland Institute of Technology" have problems, as mentioned, I'm officially nominating another alternative, "Poe University." As in, Edgar Allan.

Say it with me. "I go to Poe." Fun to say, easy to spell. Much, hopefully, like UMBC, Edgar Allan Poe is THE famous Baltimorean, a local source of pride with international prestige. Yes, dropping "Baltimore County" keeps us from sounding like a community college, but let's stay proud of Baltimore. Our school already has the academics and the athletic caliber, and we're only getting stronger. What we need is pride and identity. "Maryland State," while better than what we've got, is, frankly, a name from Genericopolis. We're a Baltimore landmark, and trying to separate ourselves from a vibrant, unique, and historical city is a missed opportunity for both communities.

Baltimore is already the home of the Ravens, and its slogan was "The City that Reads." UMBC once housed Hillcrest, a 1920's criminal insane asylum turned frat house turned K-9 training facility. The AOK Library is itself pretty eldritch; if you stay there too long at finals time, you'll go insane. What are those spooky monoliths by the Commons garage? Is somebody bricked up in the Dining Hall? Why is the campus laid out in circles, and do they have mystical properties? While we're at it, let's rename the Administration Building to "Freeman Hrabowski's Dark Tower." Such a scary place, with narrow, menacing windows....

I can see it now: "The Pit and the Provost."

This is a silly tangent, but the campaign is serious. Yes, we are a good school. A smart school. But myth is powerful. Myth is what makes a young kid say, "When I graduate from high school, I want to go there." Myth is the unifying force of nostalgia.

Think about it.

"How's your new job?"
Letter to my cousin, February 1st, 2010

HI!! It's been a while since I've talked to you.

My job is okay. In terms of practical matters, the hours are very good, and the office is in an old townhouse, so it feels cozy and not officey at all. There are six people, so it's not huge. I'm glad to have a job in general, which keeps me from dying of boredom, and my parents are happy for me. We can finally eat dinner and have a conversation like normal human beings, instead of it being an interrogation: "When are you getting a job?"..."Have you thought about asking at..?" "I know a certain person who says they could introduce you to...." "Well, X's daughter went to school for Y and now is doing Z..."

When I was in college, I was asked, "Are you getting a job for the summer?" and in high school it was, "Have you applied for college?" and in middle school it was, "Have you done your homework?" and in elementary school, it was, "Stop making so much noise, your mother is tired." So not to be told to do something, which has never occurred for as long as I can remember, is pleasant for a change.

It's nice to make my own money, too. Even though life is less fun, maybe Big Aunt can retire in the next century. Maybe I can buy a house, get married.... In the United States, everybody who is somebody "gets a house." It's part of that same vague, universal dream everybody has for their future. Everyone has the same dream, of a big house with a car and a tree, a nice kitchen for Sunday breakfasts and family dinners... etc. I daydream about it, but now it's a little closer to reality. It's frightening. It seems slightly unreal to me too, so I am taking it day by day, and setting small weekly goals. Last night, when I was lying in bed, in the twilight between wakefulness and sleep, it felt like I had dreamt up the last month, and it was actually Christmastime (there was snow on the ground, which created that feeling), and any minute I'd be waking up and opening my presents.

It's encouraging to be able to have some money to spend. I can donate to charity without having to feel like I'm begging my parents for it. I gave some money to the earthquake relief in Haiti, and that made me genuinely happier than spending it on myself. I go to concerts and shows now. It makes me feel like I'm a "patron of the arts," which was an aspiration of mine as a teenager. When I was young, I always pictured myself as one of those elegant, cultured, and beautiful people. Actually, I've discovered nowadays that only senior citizens and retirees generally go to those things. Oh well. Now as an adult, I'm enjoying myself, but I wonder if I wouldn't be just as happy with less going out, but more free time. It makes me a little fatalistic, like... "I never chose to grow up, it just kind of happened to me. What makes me happy hasn't changed, only the sort of things I'm expected to do about it."

At work, I'm to be helping people prepare their taxes, which in the U.S. are due April 15. That adds to the nature of the place where it feels more like I'm preparing for war. The hours are slowly getting longer and the work is beginning to pile up. (There's a saying that to cook a frog, you stick it in a pot of cold water and slowly warm the water up bit by bit, whereas if you try to throw it in hot water immediately, it hops out. I feel like the cold water frog.) I get the feeling that no matter how fast I learn, I'm not learning fast enough. I'm trying to not let that get to me. I can only do what I can and nothing more.

Another result of this seasonal nature is that I still perceive time like a student. I feel that these next few months are simply yet another semester, and that I'll be cramming for "finals." That's not the case, of course, but I try not to think too hard about the future. If I start to think about things like "am I going to do this for the rest of my life?" and "will this make me happy?" and "is this all there is to life?" then it gets a little overwhelming. I'm looking forward to Lent, actually. It seems like it will bring unifying purpose to my worries.

I had a dream about being in Hong Kong with you and Ming Tak and my Aunt. We were taking the cable car up the side of some green, forested mountains, and there was a garden filled with pavilions, small temples, pathways, and small arched bridges, all of gray polished stone. I asked about it, and somebody said, "Oh, it looks very old, but this place was built only a few years ago," and that's why I'd never been there. Even so, I thought it was quite a pleasant place.

That is what is happening to me. Sorry if it is long. I've been out of practice with writing letters.

Love,
Angie! (xiao bao: small bun)

In response to an essay by Sara Douglass in defense of fantasy: (From my comment on Talvikki's DeviantArt journal)

"Escape from the modern world" is not a defense that fantasy fiction needs right now. Actually, right now, "escapism" is its most severe condemnation. I think with her anti-modernity argument that Sara Douglass has argued for fantasy's appeal, but not for its value. So, this right here is a critique of a fantasy apologetic from someone who is herself an apologetic.

No, modernity, rationality, and science absolutely aren't antithetical to wonder. Diving oceanic depths, reaching into far-flung outer space, smashing infinitesimal particles into clouds of light and heat add more to the imagination, not less. Logic and science only oppress the imaginations of people who weren't very imaginative to begin with. Rapidly changing, highly diverse cultures feed the garden of my soul (as Sara Douglass puts it) more than an idyllic medieval village or pristine wilderness. If you look at medieval illustrations, even classical myths and Biblical stories are given contemporary, provincial settings. Peasants thought Jerusalem was just around the corner and imagined Joseph and Mary as better-looking, bourgeois versions of themselves. They were fundamentally incapable of imagining life drastically different from their own. Sarah Douglass argues that knowing everything makes the world seem safe and lifeless, but science isn't about (and never can be about) knowing everything, it's about finding new things. That's as pretty opposite of the mundane as you're going to get with any philosophy.

Good fantasy doesn't tap into some vast, ancient, unchanging archetype, but acts like a funhouse mirror to everyday life. It takes the ordinariness of our lives and exaggerates it into Other, such that we recognize it as truer than reality. Assume that we run with the supposedly generic, Western medieval fantasy world, which despite my criticisms, I adore. Say, a world where the printing press was the dangerous cutting edge of modernity, or women unchaperoned were risque, or armed men weren't that "noble knight" schmaltz but just as proud, vindictive, and tragic as rival drug lords or CEOs. This is a world where its appeal comes not from somber ancientness, but from chaos, change, modern life run riot, not knowing "how it ends", from making all old things anew. Is that world really different from our own? Tap water is boring until we're confronted with the logistics and sheer beauty of a Roman aqueduct's soaring arches. Never mind light bulbs, or microwavable food. Good fantasy makes us see our own world with new eyes.

For a space of time between September 2007 and May 2008, I was catechized into the Roman Catholic faith in a series of hour-long classes in basic theology taught on Sunday evenings to a group of three or four college-aged catechists. Also, angels were born, God made, bread and wine turned into the Body and Blood. I was baptized and confirmed.

I find in telling people about it that the recounting differs depending on the audience. I tell atheists or non-Christians something like, “It was the religion I saw in the movies,” or “I graduated and was unemployed for a period of time and wanted to give myself purpose.” These are true, but wholy insufficient. Christian audiences get something like this, emotive and experiential "testimonies." These latter examples are also wholly insufficient because they fail to capture both the friction, humor, and the controntationalism involved in my conversion.

Two years ago I would looked you in the eye and said, “Prove to me the soul exists,” the soul being like phlogiston. Fire burns and people love, but that proves neither the soul nor phlogiston. Among atheists, if you think an invisible entity exists you’ve gone quite mad. For a while when I was learning to pray in a small (kind of weird) praise and worship group, I felt I was babbling into the air, trapped in a room with a bunch of loons. I’m still not used to the waving hands in the air and ritualized glossalalia and the crying. I feel like I’ve deeply failed somehow in not dealing with reality.

I’ve disappointed a good number of people. I told a friend of mine, and she said, “What, Roman Catholic?” and I said, “No. Martian Catholic.” “But nobody converts in!” she replied.

My alternate response: “No, I’m taping your reaction for a modern art project.”
Response: “Oh, thank God!”

Other reactions:
Friend: “A Bible? I’ll piss on a Bible!”
Mom’s coworker: “Your daughter’s Catholic? I thought she was too smart for that.”
My mother: “Why did you become Catholic instead of Christian? It’s not that I’m disappointed in your choice of religion, just that you gave up your freedom.”

My mother’s Buddhist/atheist. She enjoys “subtly” passing me religious pamphlets on how to become Buddhist. Catholicism to her is the religion of White People. She grew up in Macau, a Portuguese colony, and then Hong Kong, a British colony, where her family survived on church handouts. There’s a level of patronization and humiliation to the whole affair that I on some level used to feel, a feeling of loathing and oiliness I used to feel regarding missionaries, who have now (partially) morphed in my mind to heroic explorers and social activists.

I’ve changed political and ethnic identities somewhat. Politically, I used to be “moderate,” but supporting contraceptive use (a stance taken by around 90% of my generation) has suddenly made me an “extremist,” for example. I suddenly feel weird for expressing formerly rather mundane opinions. But I also feel continuity with 2,000 years of history. I feel that Latin is my language, and Augustine and Aquinas are my thinkers. I feel that the Church and all the angels and all the saints are behind me there massed, an invisible winged army.

I feel on some level that this broken, wondrous and imperfect faith is mine.

My religious sentiments cycle now between apathetic and effusive, depending on the time of the ecclesiastical year. During Christmas and Easter I could not love any more, and then I fall into doldrums in the summer. In the depths of sorrow between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, come those agonizing words, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Those two words are probably the root of all antisemitism in the course of human history. This is an ideology that kills people. In the thousands, in the millions, so many bodies that if they were all in one place you wouldn’t have room to pile them and the smell would blister skin and boil lungs and peel paint from walls. This is an ideology that hoovers money and oppresses women and perverts human sexuality such that people feel driven in some blind animal way to molest small children.

O ye terrible arcane obtuse thing that’s in my head, get out! You ancient, ardent mystical frustrating beautiful incomprehensible glorious transcendent tyrant, get out! (Why do I love You?) Don’t say I never sacrificed anything for You! I’ve lost the ability to disbelieve, such that I can no longer even conceptualize the depth of what I’ve lost.

And yet... kissing the cool, dry wood at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, one forgets. One marvels at the greatness of such a gift given to one wholly undeserving. How we have wronged You, Lord. And the rest... for that time of tender sadness, awe and reverence, the rest is irrelevant.

What wondrous love is this, o my soul?

Dear Subway,

Your steak and cheese sandwich made my taste buds cry for justice. Your website claims it contains, "Hot steak, grilled onions and peppers, melted cheese and standard vegetables," but should be corrected to say, "contains failure."

1) "Hot steak" - The meat was taken from a bin and toasted to a lukewarm room temperature. Cheesesteak ingredients should be grilled on a well-oiled griddle, not getting a tan. This is as elementary as saying, "A pizza should be baked in an oven, not a microwave." If you're not going to grill a cheesesteak, don't call it a cheesesteak.

2) "Grilled onion and pepper" - The pepper and onion were raw, which is fine if I'm eating a salad, but I'm not. As a result (of that, and the lukewarm toasting), the steak was watery. Certain things are meant to be watery, like aloe, gruel, and the Florida Everglades. Sandwiches, not so much.

3) My friends have been saying, "You should know better than to order a cheesesteak at Subway," which, retrospectively, was good advice. Perhaps I shouldn't have had decent expectations, despite the steak and cheese picture displayed quite prominently on the menu. It still does your company a disservice when low expectations are proven correct. Having a reputation for doing something poorly does not justify doing it poorly.

I am disappointed. Your steak and cheese sandwich brings shame to its ancestors and should commit sandwich seppuku. Only then can its dishonor be atoned for.

(P.S. Much love to the customer service reps, who are the front line infantry against the seething masses of swarming, angry customers. You poor, poor, souls.)

You can be either on fire for Jesus, or off fire. It’s a binary operation. There is no such thing as partially on fire. However, this is not perhaps the best analogy because by natural law, anything on fire must consume fuel. If you are on fire, what is burning? It logically follows that whosoever today is on fire for Jesus, will tomorrow be a burnt out husk for Jesus.

However! Let us assume the fuel is not a physical thing, but something which humans have in plenty and whose loss will not be missed. Assume this metaphysical fire consumes and thereby destroys its fuel, burns on sin, purifying the soul like a self-cleansing oven.

Hm. At what temperature does sin burn? Do mortal and venial sins have the same ignition point? How many joules of energy are produced? At what spectrum frequency glows the flame? I humbly submit these theological questions to the Lord Our God.

(The Lord Our God says I take analogies too seriously.)

So me and my boyfriend were having an argument...

....about the viability of outlawing "loitering". So I looked it up.

From Chicago v. Morales:

"Chicago’s Gang Congregation Ordinance prohibits 'criminal street gang members' from loitering in public places. Under the ordinance, if a police officer observes a person whom he reasonably believes to be a gang member loitering in a public place with one or more persons, he shall order them to disperse. Anyone who does not promptly obey such an order has violated the ordinance. The police department’s General Order 92—4 purports to limit officers’ enforcement discretion by confining arrest authority to designated officers, establishing detailed criteria for defining street gangs and membership therein, and providing for designated, but publicly undisclosed, enforcement areas. Two trial judges upheld the ordinance’s constitutionality, but eleven others ruled it invalid. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed the latter cases and reversed the convictions in the former. The State Supreme Court affirmed, holding that the ordinance violates due process in that it is impermissibly vague on its face and an arbitrary restriction on personal liberties."

So apparently I am of the dissenting opinion and Jeremy is of the majority opinion.

/sigh

Now if only all boyfriend/girlfriend disputes could be settled by Supreme Court verdicts....

I saw the most epic thing today, which restored my faith in humanity.

Jesus Painter (actually his partner) was here again. UMBC's drum circle also happened to be practicing in the same place. I think you can see where this is going.

Now, first for a little background. Jesus Painter is a fundamentalist preacher that comes by on campus, often with his associates. He preaches how Muslims and Hindus are going to Hell (often to their faces), preaches about Evil-lution in front of the Biology building, and- well, never mind the gay students. His church brought in little kids one time to proselytize and tell people about Jesus.

Most of the time people get very upset with him. I've seen a woman crying because of him, and Muslim students screaming at him. Atheists get into shouting matches with him. A good number of people will mock and insult him, and usually there's at least one, "Hail Satan" or "Raptor Jesus, Hallelujah!" or something like that. It gets very ugly and sometimes security has to come.

This is not what happened. By the time I got there, incense was burning, two girls were dancing with hula hoops, and the drummers were pounding one hell of a rhythm and making it difficult to hear the preacher. One of the drummers picked up a reggae tune, his voice carrying over the sermon to the crowd around him.

"Preacher mon, why do you say I'm goin' to hell?"

The preacher carries on, trying to keep the attention on him. The crowd takes the cue. It starts clapping to the drums.

"Heaven is where my heart is, and my heart is here." The drummer begins to dance with one of the hula girls, who doesn't seem the least to mind.

The preacher is petrified. It's the first nice day in September, and people are having fun despite him.

The singer gives up his stage for an aspiring freestyle rapper. A middle-aged office worker in a shirt and tie walks out of the admin building, maybe on lunch break, and stands there a while, eying first the preacher, then the revelers, looking confused. Finally, he sits down by a djembe and started tentatively accompanying a punk kid drumming away in a tree. By the time the first singer picks up his song again, joined by a second tenor and an improvised beatboxer, most people have forgotten about hatin'.

I don't care if any of them were philosophy majors or not, it was the most extraordinary theological debate I've ever seen.

The Best Math Problem Ever

(from one of my friends' textbooks):

"Conan the Great has boasted to his hordes of followers that many a notorious villain has fallen to his awe-some sword: his total of 560 villains consists of evil sorcerers, trolls, and orcs. These he has slain with a total of 620 mighty thrusts of his sword; evil socerers and trolls each requiring two thrusts (to the chest) and orcs each requiring one thrust (to the neck). When asked about the number of trolls he has slain, he replies, "I, the mighty Conan, despise trolls five times as much as I despise evil sorcerers. Accordingly, five times as many trolls as evil sorcerers have fallen to my sword!" How many of each type of villain has he slain?"

I think I was blabbing about this constantly earlier to some of you, that I found a Scottish Pirate Power Metal band.

A-yup. Pirate metal. They have accordians and electric gee-tars.

http://www.myspace.com/alestorm

Only my taste in music could be this bad/good.

They're a new band, so show 'em some love.

People like to cite Augustine as a “real” saint, as a “you too could be this” saint. I am of the personal opinion that people who say this have likely never read any Augustine. If they had, they’d never number one of the greatest Latin stylists of all time as an “accessible saint.” By the same logic, it is also technically possible to develop calculus spontaneously. Possible, but not likely nor expected.

Whereas normal people thoughts dwell in the realm of “What’s For Dinner?” and “Why Does Toast Fall Butter-Side Down?”, St. Augustine’s thoughts live in a lofty, crystalline plane of perfectly structured logic. Reading Augustine in Latin is like catching sunlight through a sheet of ice; all illumination and no warmth. (Reading Augustine in translation has been compared to listening to Mozart on a kazoo.)

Augustine’s wretched life of sin and debauchery can be summarized as follows: as an infant, he selfishly fought his siblings for their mother’s attention. As a single man, he was in a long-term relationship with a woman, and sired a child by her. He enjoyed rhetoric and the theater, and longed for a high-ranking civil service position. A book of saints for children declared that Augustine read “bad books,” by which they meant the works of Cicero. (Apparently, children, Cicero is a bad, bad man. Every time a starving African child dies, that is who to blame. Also, your mother issues are Cicero’s fault. Loud music, degenerate teenagers in baggy pants, huffing glue- Cicero.)

If Augustine is the “sinner-saint,” the rest of us are damned, one mortal sin being enough to damn us forever.

This is the paradox of his being, that the same brilliant intellect which drove Augustine to sin with Cicero drove him hence to God. If he were not a great saint, he would have been a great sinner. His weakness was his strength, but how many lesser mortals have both such weakness and such strength? How many lesser mortals are at once both more than human and less than human? How many are cast from that same alloy of supernatural virtue and subhuman emotion- saints made of metal, stone, and ice- fantastic and terrible?

To Love like Christ

Sometime last year, I was watching a documentary on a pair of Siamese twins when my roommate came in. "Oh my God, I don't see how they live," she said, as if it would have been a mercy for them to have died.

I was an atheist then, but still had a little of the lion in me, and replied, "You call yourself a Christian!"

My anger has abated somewhat after upward of six months, realizing with sadness the difficulty with which people comprehend lives different from their own. After all, regarding the Siamese twins, they are otherwise healthy young girls, with a loving, stable family and friends, who excel in school and sports, who do anything any pair of sisters ought. There is a worse thing in life than being physically attached to someone very special to you, and that thing is to not have anyone special at all.

I have tried to love people with no other friends among 6 billion earthly souls, not because they have no friends (for loving someone because they have no friends is as shallow as loving someone because they have many friends) but because they are good. They are fellow suffering pilgrims. If I could love you more I would love you more, if I could give you more, I would give you more. I shall try to love as much and as often as I dare. I want to love the people who no one else loves.

You are my people. You are my people. You are my people.

Lord, let me love my people like Christ loves us. Let them love Christ like Christ loves us. And let me love you too.

Have mercy on us, Lord.

Let me do your will.

For a little bit I was thinking of being a Druid. For a long time, I thought it was a rather flakey hippie religion, until I was in Hong Kong over the winter, on Lantau island, an island in the South China Sea famous for having a giant bronze Buddha statue on top of a mountain. The Path of Wisdom makes a circuit shaped like the infinity symbol, rising steep and rocky up the scrubby mountainside. Zen proverbs have been charcoal-etched into massive pine columns erected by monks at intervals, striking in their power and simplicity. At the top of the path I look down at the mountain pine forest laid out below me, and across an awesome vista.

Across that unspanned chasm is Phoenix Mountain, a promontory of bare stone that glows when sunlight strikes. All the elements are in harmony. To my right, the mountain drops off into the sea, the sun blazing fire on its liquid surface wreathed in golden mist. Clouds of mist form and unform about the Phoenix peak, transient yet ever-present, undefined yet ever-flowing, against the immutable face of the eternal mountain.

For the first time I hear the voice of a mountain. It is not a voice like one "hears" because it is silent, but a voice one feels. It is not the voice of an individual, and the voice has no words, yet it speaks, and the not-words are. "I AM HERE."

Above and around me the Zen columns rise against a blue mountain sky, cold and pure. I can't read the Chinese characters. According to a broad English translation, they are about the nature of non-existance, and the impermanence of self. I have learned more by not-reading them. This is why they call it the Path of Wisdom.

I used to believe in humanity and in the March of Human Progress. Things would get better; science would let us live lives in glory and splendor unparalleled in times before us, unthinkable to our ancestors. Society would advance, a sort of Darwinian manifest destiny, moving from laborers cowed by the lash of whip and god-priest-king, to feudal warlords ruling self-sufficient serfdoms, to centralized nation-states of Church and King, to democratic republic where all men are equal, to God knows what next, each state marking an improvement in the rights, liberty, and happiness of those involved. In each state we grew to understand a moral truth that our ancestors in all their smallness, brutality and cruelty did not know. One day we would reach utopia and perfection.

We were noble, beautiful, and rational, given our ability to love, reason, and decide our own fates by God, or the Watchmaker, or the Prime Mover, or perhaps mere miraculous chance. Around us the sky and firmament stood strong, and the spheres circled in their celestial orbits. Above us stood God and the angels, below us the beasts of the earth, air, and water, each in its rightful kingdom. I didn't believe in sin or hellfire, but rather that a universal morality and intuitive natural decency resided in all this glorious humanity. Life well spent was self improvement, insatiable curiosity, public virtue, civic duty, and above all, the happiness of self and others. A life well spent was good company for dinner and lively conversation, music, art, a little mischief, a deep regard for natural beauty, and deep compassion for others less fortunate.

Yet I think myself unwise to ignore science. The science which I have so steadfastly endorsed says in shouts and whispers that am wrong. Every objective, impartial scientific study has said that humans are a wretched, dismal species. What am I to think of Stanley Milgram? What am I to think of the Stanford Prison? What am I to think of an idle crowd that time after time in controlled studies will idly allow a woman to be raped on a bus? We are easily warped by habit, culture, and prejudice. Given conditioning and genetic predisposition, we are not so different from Pavlov's dog after all.

I am an irrational atheist, meaning I take my atheism on faith. Unlike many people I did not develop the atheism rash after years of religious infection. :P I kind of just always was. I don't have the sort of self-righteous pride where I declare myself so much smarter than all religious people. I enjoy my irrational, internally inconsistent (and alliterating) beliefs full well knowing how stupid most of them are. I enjoy ghost stories, believe in UFOs and telepathy, play Dungeons and Dragons ("magic missle!"), and daydream about winning the lotto. Most of it is rubbish but if I'm going to be dead within the next century and experiencing the next gabillion years as an icy rock hurling towards the depth of space, I might as well distort my reality so it's irrational and interesting, rather than rational and boring. Does all this show me lacking intellectual rigor and discipline? That I have not the maturity or moral fiber to handle truth and all its attendant responsibilities? I wonder sometimes. The other times, I enjoy myself.

I've been hit by some pretty intense waves of nostalgia recently, now that I'm about to graduate. Which is weird, because most of the things I'm nostalgic for I've pretty much stopped doing long before The End, and many of the things I'm nostalgic for I wasn't too keen on while I was doing them. Most of this semester has been spent being depressed, anxious, tired and stressed out.

The last time I remember being happy, not merely laid-back or content, was during the last snowfall in February, when we had the whole day off school and I spent the day sledding with friends in pirate regalia, hoisting my skull-and-crossbones flag, broad-rimmed feathered hat, and plastic hook hand. None of us had actual sleds, so others used recycling bin lids, shower curtains, broken pieces of plastic. I took my painted cardboard Roman legion shield ("SOL INVICTVS") on the last joyride of its short life. We spent the night watching Return of the King¹, cocooned by the swirling fury of a blizzard, me shouting joyously at the TV screen during battle scenes and reciting all the lines by heart, thoroughly making a fool of myself and not giving a damn.

Things I'm Nostalgic For

• Taking two hour lunches and sitting around with a mug of coffee knowing I have the whole damn afternoon to eat lunch.

• The big Sunday dinners we used to do with the guys, which Jose constantly missed out on. K, wielding lemon juice and Mrs. Dash, would bust out his Italian cooking skills, pesto pasta with pine nuts and sauteed red peppers and asparagus spears wrapped in prosciutto. There was that one time we baked a pineapple ham with cheesy potatoes, and the time when we did a barbecue and introduced Zaira (the foreign exchange student) to sweet potatoes ("Why is it orange???") and completely destroyed Brian K's free promotional frisbee.

• Studying in the library and falling asleep in their comfy chairs.

• Going out with K and Chris and Jose to every big-budget hack-slash-n-explosion PG-13 comic book movie that came out at Muvico and K insisting afterwards that the movie was "so totally awesome!!!" even though it really, uh, wasn't. I would go bonkers because it's the only opportunity I get to drag guys to the mall. Then we would go to the Olive Garden or somewhere because despite the fact that K is Italian for some reason he doesn't ever get sick of Italian food, and Niall would order some drinks he'd regret in the morning.

• Sitting and reading pulpy fantasy novels on the steps by the UC, surrounded by smokers, punks, lesbians, and smoker-punk-lesbians. I'm nostalgic for lying back on the bricks and staring up through the leafy canopy of the solitary tree, my novel long forgotten.

• Pushing all the tables together in the dining hall into one big uber-table, in freshman year when everyone would converge at the same time so that we didn't have room to fit all the trays on one table, as if some big mama in the sky had rung a college-student dinner bell.

• Flying my rainbow-sailed pirate ship kite in Erickson field and getting the damn thing stuck on the library roof, and the string entangled in the newly budding spring saplings.

• Walking through Erickson and randomly yet consistently finding dropped ballpoint pens, and thinking it was my lucky day.

• Our roleplaying games at Triangle frat house, where I'd wonder how many taps and bottles could possibly be in one apartment, and Curt would microwave hot dogs and ramen, because that's all the food the place has. The hyper demon puppy would slobber all over me, and we'd loaf around rolling ten-sided dice in the basement on comfy, discolored sofas smelling like dog drool and car seats plundered from minivans, complete with intact seat belts.

• Roleplaying Sundays in our apartment, when we'd take turns cooking and throw things at each other (mostly at Jose, who'd fallen asleep). Curt would flirt with Katie and pinch her and give her foot rubs, much to her half-hearted protests. Halfway through, despite the cool white light of the energy-saving bulb, it'd get way too hot and stuffy in the room and we'd have to throw open the front door for a refreshing gust of night wind.

• Walking down the hall of my dorm and seeing every boy in their room with their bigass earphones, playing either Counterstrike or World of Warcraft.

• Sitting around in a lecture hall in class, staring at washed-out slides and paying attention to something genuinely interesting.

• Being able to walk around randomly on campus and hearing music, drums from the upper open windows of the Fine Arts building, a man with a guitar and the sounds of laughter from a balcony in the cool evening air of summer, spring, or approaching autumn, a violin and flute duo on a courtyard bench.

One of the things I think sometimes is that if I die, heaven will be like a perfect college campus where bells toll the hour on the quad amidst august buildings and leafy oaks, with none of the sturm und strang of living, and all of the good things memories are made of.

--
¹ BTW, I believe the funnest way to watch Return of the King is to be interactive. For example, when they're thundering on the gates of Minas Tirith with that giant beast of a wolf-headed battering ram, chant "GROND! GROND! GROND!". When Theoden yells, "RIDE NOW! RIDE NOW!", clattering his sword against the Rohirrim's extended line of spears, shout back at him. Bonus points if you also blast on a ram's horn. More bonus points if you have an entire theater's worth of people to do it with you. If not, fuck 'em and do it yourself.

At St. Paul's Cathedral, one of the priests was attending to a service. I was listening to the tranquil, melodious echo of his voice disembodied amid the stone vaults. From the dome there was a shaft of pure white light that was more than simply photons. I will not say that it was God in the Christian sense, but there was something else there, illumination of the soul and a preternatural stillness. It stirred a deep yearning in me, to be close to that something, that deep majesty and peace, and something quite unlike the raw natural power at Phoenix Peak.

I was with other people, Steve, an atheist, and Sandi, a Wiccan. Having not shared my experience with anyone, I heard Steve muse about the wasted resources, devotion, toil, and inspiration for what to him was ultimately a useless phantom superstition. I was startled and asked if anyone had felt what I felt. I pretty much got in response a resounding "no" - both of them had felt absolutely nothing, and Sandi was uncomfortable with the service to boot (which I guess is natural if you're a Wiccan listening to Christian prayer). All of which goes to show the complete subjectiveness of religious experience, but rather dismaying all the same. On the other hand, both of them waxed rapturously (perhaps not religiously) at Stonehenge and Oxford's Blackwell's (what?! why, Steve, why?? :P), while all I saw was a circle of falling rocks.

Happy Ides of March!!

Don't trust the people in front of you.

Someone has been chalking Voltaire quotes around the sidewalk lately. Here is one:

"Someone said to Voltaire, 'Life is hard.'
Voltaire replied, 'Compared to what?' "

From the September 24th Retriever Police Log:

"Trial was held September 26, 2006 in Towson Circuit Court for one of the suspects (Thomas L. Gibson) for the armed robbery that occured on campus earlier this year outside Patapsco Hall. Mr. Gibson pleads guilty on statement of facts, was found guilty and returned to the Baltimore County Detention Center to await his sentencing trial on December 12, 2006. ... A second suspect, Richard Koranteng, was also arrested in connection to this offense and is presently out on $25,000 bail, while awaiting trial."

This pleases me greatly. For those of you unaware, in August or so a student was robbed at gunpoint on the front steps of one of the dorms by a bunch of random dudes who just drove up, robbed him blind, and drove off. (There was also a spate of "the bodies-of-two-men-were-found-in-a-field"'s about this time.)

Now see... if we were living in a city of comparable size (to this campus), we would go, "Oh, that's the risk of living in a city, there are always some bad apples." But what was particularly egregious about this case is that you're not being robbed by your own few bad apples, you're being robbed by them apples from another city who are going out of their way to drive all the way to your city to prey on what they see as easy pickin's. It's concerning when any fucker can just drive into your campus completely at random, hold you up at gunpoint, and then drive off without anyone having a damn clue at IDing.

Well, I don't know how they did it, but I'm glad they caught these asshats. Hats off to you, police department, you actually followed through with something.

Tauren Druid Tauren, the not-very-gentle giants of the Horde, stand out above the rest. Pastoral at heart, they may feel the need to defend their fields - or their honour, if someone were to insult their fuzzy, glossy coat. As a druid, you tend to be relaxed and accepting - though if there is something you don't want to do, then you won't do it - simple as that. You're an easygoing and versatile person. Find out your real-life WoW race and class at QuizGalaxy.com