Boring life update

I start my new job on Monday. Pays pretty well, but after shadowing the guy who's quitting yesterday--it's going to be really boring. It looked like he spent most of the day surfing the web and reading books.

I guess...that's fine. They'll be paying me to finish my graduate school applications and rp all day, then. Could be worse, as an interim thing.

Man, I miss people (a couple of them anyway). I'm just lonely. As if responding to my universe, the universe had this dog dart into the road right in front of me. I ran out after her, and this car, and nearly got hit, but I was screaming and waving my arms and it was really storming hard--so I'm lucky the driver saw me.

And the dog just looked at me, completely trusting. ...So I brought her home, toweled her off, and pet her for awhile. She's sleeping in the garage, and I'm going to find her owners tomorrow. I really hope she's just fat and not pregnant. Puppies would be adorable, but bad (I'd so keep one, though).

I'm hoping to turn in immigration forms this week, work up a budget, sign up for a specific date to take my GREs, make sure my three professors are still willing to write me recommendations, get up a working list of graduate programs--all that next week.

I joined the gym (birthday present), starting tomorrow. That'll make working out easier, though I've lost five pounds (bringing me to 123--still not exactly where I want to be).

Other minutiae about my life.

Reconnecting with more high school people. They're tools, I miss intellectual conversation.

Good dancing may be sign of male health, scientists say

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11223473

εἶπεν δὲ αὐτῷ ὁ θεός, Ἄφρων, ταύτῃ τῇ νυκτὶ τὴν ψυχήν σου ἀπαιτοῦσιν ἀπὸ σοῦ: ἃ δὲ ἡτοίμασας, τίνι ἔσται;

 

— Luke 12.19, the Parable of the Rich Fool. Translation from the NRSV: “God said to him, You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” In the Vulgate: “dixit autem illi Deus stulte hac nocte animam tuam repetunt a te quae autem parasti cuius erunt”. My translation of the key phrase: “this very night they are claiming your life back from you.”

Heh

http://dcisgoingtohell.com/?p=638

august 23rd

Not doing so hot.

It’s good I’m not online, and there’s no one in my space. I would punch the first person to whine at me.

Rekindled some old friendships, in that wary ‘oh, yeah, you still kind of look like an asshole but I’m bored, let’s go see a movie, keep your hands where I can see them’ way.

August 5th.

Don’t waste my family’s money by having three hour long conversations with your slag ex-girlfriend. Kthx.

I find it difficult to go into the self-congratulatory whinefest that people get into when they write blog posts. <—oh wait, look, I got it right

So there’ll be no flowery avowals today. I wish I could dissapear with someone for a couple weeks, camp out. I wish there was a handprint sized bruise on my upper arm, and I wish my lip was split.

The end.

So you want to take a pro-free speech stance by drawing a picture of Muhammad, do you? Read this first

Amplify’d from newsweek.washingtonpost.com

Muslim cartoonist on “Draw Muhammad Day”

by G. Willow Wilson

This is the central tragedy of these endless cartoon scandals. No one is looking for a resolution. Drawing insulting depictions of the Prophet Muhammad has become a favorite pastime of hipster racists, whose bulbous-nosed bushy-bearded ‘satire’ resembles the anti-Semitic cartoons of the Third Reich. Thanks in no small part to the vigorous, often violent outcry from hardliners in the Muslim world, these artists are elevated to a kind of freedom-of-speech sainthood whether their work has any real merit or not. Death threats are issued, lives pointlessly imperiled, careers of pundits—never themselves in any danger—made overnight. Noted American Muslim leader Imam Zaid Shakir put it best: this isn’t the clash of civilizations. It’s the clash of the uncivilized.

What Norris failed to understand is that by creating events like “Draw Muhammad Day”, artists hurl rhetorical stones that go straight through their enemies and hit Muslims like me. Al Qaeda isn’t hurt by Draw Muhammad Day. Its entire PR campaign is built on incidents like these. Without the Molly Norrises and Jyllands Postens of the world, Al Qaeda would have to get a lot more creative with its recruitment strategies. Artists who caricature the Prophet inevitably claim, as Norris has done, that they never meant to hurt ordinary Muslims, but ordinary Muslims are the only ones who are hurt. As a Muslim in the comics industry I spend more time than is good for my mental health defending the art and the religion I love from each other. Events like the fallout from Draw Muhammad Day make me think I’m wasting my time—the hate runs too deep on both sides. My conscience won’t let me support the criminalizing of art, but neither will it let me support a parade of cartoons depicting lurid, racist stereotypes of Arab men and passing them off as satire of a holy figure.