If you can formulate the question properly, Google will tell you the meaning of life. But

a) if you re-enter the answer into the search engine, the universe will stop and rewrite itself so that your mother died before you were born.
b) the answer will come out having been put through Google translator through nine consecutive languages, none of which you speak, and only then translated back into the language of the query.
c) the answer is ambiguous without the correct punctuation.
d) the answer is in lolcat form.

Math will not save you. But rather the ability to find the misplaced comma in the semiotics of the alien language is what will save the world.

My life is hopefully going to get less complicated in the future, but not this week.

June 1- Paper presentation for Theory in America [time period redacted].*
June 2nd- Presentation and final project due for Relaxed and Happy class*- 8 Pages, little to no quality control
June 4th- Final exam/paper due for Intro theory* class- 5,000-6000 words. On assigned topics, but keep it smart.
June 7th- Start summer internship
June 10-Final paper due for Theory in America

All in all, it's going to be an interesting and somewhat insane few weeks. To accommodate, I has asked to be let off early from one job that was only supposed to last a few months and has lasted almost eight months now. I personally wish I could have been freed from it a while back, seeing as the boss does not really seem to care if I work, and that means I don't get anything done for [pronounredacted]- the complete lack of standards meant that I tended to freak myself out about meeting them. It was not a happy thing for me, really.

There will be little in the way of Boy sightings for this time period as well. This makes me sad- having someone around to feed me and turn me towards the light occasionally really helps my mental process, but he has his own issues to worry about.

*Class names have been changed to make it less likely that people will figure out who I am and try to eat me.

In which our Heroine issues of Brief Missive about the current State of Affairs

For those of your just joining me (or who'm I've recently added to my circle): Hello! Welcome (back) my friends, back to the show that never ends (and never strays from the use of hackneyed cliche).

Recent stuff:
-I just bought plane tickets back to Boston for August 4th- 13th- anyone going to be there around that time and want to meet up?

While buying tickets, I tried to pay, and I kept getting a strange error message: "Name on credit card must be written only with alphabetic characters." The Jet Blue's computers would not accept my legal last name , the one on my passport and birth certificate, as being valid because it contains a hyphen. Who the hell thought that restriction up? Has there been a rash of people spelling their names on credit cards with numbers instead of letters? Like "k1t3w1thf1sh"? What goofy programmer thought that not allowing hyphens was a valid option here?

I doubt it will affect my ticket, since I just ran my two-part last name together so it still looks like one last name, but if it comes up I might get some issues. Crap.

-I am on the last day of the eighth week of a ten week quarter, so I am entering the home stretch and all is well. Reading Tillich comparatively with Hartshorne is kind of amazing and hard, but amazing.

-I am going to be helping plan the 2011 Ministry Conference for the University of Chicago Divinity School, which is several kinds of awesome. I think we picked a great theme, and I am going to be really interested in helping find speakers and plan this shindig.

-I have a summer internship at Faith in Place, which starts very soon and I am very much looking forward to. I miss the rhythm of a working week sometimes. It always felt kind of nice to have time that was just mine to goof off in, rather than an endless parade of books I need to read.

EDIT
-And I might be getting a couch, if the logistics work out.

Some people apparently like horses- these include my maternal grandmother and my aunt on that side, as well as her family. I am of the opinion that there is a fair divide between horse people and myself, and this article, Things Horse People Take for Granted, seems to confirm that.

My own opinion falls in with that of Gen in Megan Whalen Turner'sThe Thief:
I hate horses. I know people who think that they are noble, graceful animals, but regardless of what a horse looks like from a distance, never forget that it is as likely to step on your foot as look at you.

I date my horse hatred to my grandmother perching me atop a restless "blue" behemoth at the tender age of 10 and expecting me to enjoy myself. I did not. I did not fall, and I was not stepped on, but nevertheless I was straddling an animal of uncertain temperament with no direct supervision and I was. not. happy.

This was compounded by my mother, on my grandmother's advice, deciding that I had the makings of "a real horsewoman" and sending me to a riding camp. More there was about mucking out stables and interacting with giant animals at close quarters for several hours than any riding. And I was never very happy about the riding, but asking me to approach the ass-end of a large herbivore and grabbing its foot between my own knees to then stab at it with a small scraping tool, just after telling me to watch out so I don't get kicked? That's not something you should tell to someone as anxious and stress-prone as me. That's just a bad fucking idea, as far as these things go, and I would not thank you now as I did not thank my mother then.

So, while I have nothing against the animals themselves so far as they are sufficiently distant from me, I am not, and shall never be, a horse person.

Real life news! In light of all the recent crap about Facebook being assholes about privacy protection, I have opted to take the following precautions:
1) set every damned thing in my profile, pictures, and posting to Friends Only, as well as limiting the things that my Friends can share after I post them.
2) removed all of my interests and hobbies and whatnot
3)removed almost all of my contact information and my address
4) changed my name, making me easy to identify once I know you and can tell you my Facebook abbreviated name, and very difficult to find based on random cruising.

I'm hoping that will be all I have to do about that, but I am keeping an eye out for other notices of Facebook being haphazard with their information.

Scene: In a darkened academic lecture hall, a short blond SCHOLAR steps into the light, wearing a ringmaster's garb and carrying in her hands a top hat, hole up. She reaches into the hat, and begins to pull out scholarly works with their pages glued end to end like a set of silk scarves.

SCHOLAR: Ladies and Gentlemen and Variations Thereupon! For this evening's entertainment, a work of mental gymnastics spanning the last half-century!
Paul Johannes Tillich wrote a Systematic Theology, and the process theologian Charles Hartshorne read it and made his comments about it.
"I will now, with all fear and trembling, attempt to answer the questions that Hartshorne had about Tillich and a few of my own, and thus attempt to reconcile Tillich's doctrine of God to Hartshorne's or the other way around, so that we shall see that Tillich's christology leads to a highly similar situation as Hartshorne's divine relativity, in which the whole of human experience and nature is brought into unity with God.

"After that, I shall prove that white is black and think my way out of a paper bag without the safety net of dialectical theory!

"Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott hilf mich!"

Secret rule of academic writings: if the author uses a silly or amusing example, it means she is talking down to her critic.

Case in point: snookums.

"[Devotional and affectional terms] are used to indicate the object of certain affections and loyalties. In this latter case the meaning of the word is what elicits, or should rightfully elicit, these reactions of love and devotion.... [T]he word stands for what elicits a certain attitude. When I call an object 'Beloved,' it may be a person, a home or a land. When I call an object 'snookums' it may be a child or a puppy or a bird."* p402

The fact that I'm laughing now? Just means that out there, the ghost of a critic is writhing once more in discomfort as I find his ideas laughable.

*Henry Nelson Wieman "On Using the Word 'God': A Reply" The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 30 No. 15 (July 1933) p. 399. (From JSTOR. or ATLA. Not sure.)

I have been up since six of my own volition, getting things done, and I just... feel remarkably well, ya know? Like I got enough sleep and there's nothing in the world that's big and scary, just large and slightly unwieldy but manageable.

I need to wake up like this more often.

In slightly more prosaic news, I made a random mishmosh of food that turned out very tasty last night for dinner.

EDIT: did one of those "typing while thinking of something else" word substitutions. Fixed it.

Currently Reading:
The Divine Relativity by Charles Hartshorne - Philosophical and theological treatise. Main premise is that the medieval evaluation of God as absolute and uneffected by creation are off- God is "supremely relative" and takes into Himself* relation to all things in existence and is changed by them. So far, the best argument that Hartshorne has made (which is repeated in Schubert Ogden's work, which I read first) is that God's omniscience rules out his being nonrelative. To know absolutely what actually exists means that the knowledge is different than if the existing things were something else. If God knows that X exists, that changes God's knowledge to be something different than if Y existed in the place of X. The main reason I am reading this is to expose myself to more process theology- it has a really convoluted logic to it, but it seems to preserve God's absolute goodness at the expense of omnipotence, and I'm more willing to explore the idea of a "weaker" God than a God that is arbitrary or fickle.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by JKR- I suppose I am technically still reading this, but I personally wonder if I will ever finish it. It just doesn't really move me.

The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin. A murder mystery set in Istanbul in the late days of the Ottoman Empire. The eunuch Yashim is called to investigate the murder of a young lady of the sultan's harem and the disappearance (and presumed murders) of several members of the New Guard, an elite corps in the modern European style, now facing their review. It's an intriguing read, and I honestly have no idea where it will lead.

The Mysterious Affairs at Styles by Agatha Christie. I watched last night an episode of Doctor Who which featured Agatha Christie, and I imagine that it was as full of puns, references, and jokes as the episode featuring Shakespeare. The problem: I've never read an Agatha Christie mystery, and I didn't catch onto anything outside the general marks of the mystery genre. I know some of the characters from BBC productions, but I don't really know anything about her novels as such. I have started reading this one, and the sheer overuse of the term "jolly" and the massive info-dump at the beginning struck me as a kind of amateurish, but I think I should probably read a few of her books as a cultural experience, if nothing else. God knows she wrote enough of them- I'll be able to find at least some of them interesting.

In other news, my personal life has gotten interesting in ways that I am not quite ready to discuss publicly.

Life got a little bit hectic on me this week, mostly due to my own stress levels at realizing that we only have about a month left till the end of the quarter, and there is a lot to get done. But, things are looking good, and I have a lot of stuff that I can start to work on now/this weekend and things don't have to be a giant crush of leaving things to the end.

Of course, it will feel like they are, but that will just be an illusion. Notice the smoke and mirrors!

I've been on my period since Sunday, which might have something to do with my stress levels. My current birth control situation leads to my period happening the week after my roommates, which means I get her hormones piled on top of my hormones. Sometimes I don't notice, but this week it seemed to lead to some sleep issues, caffeine needs, which lead to stomach issues, which lead to stress. But, last night I hung out with my boy, the anti-stressor, and got to sleep in a little this morning after he left, and things are looking up a bit. At least, I don't feel like I have to run right out of the house to get things done.