The turning of a new leaf

If anyone is still doing so much as glancing back to this page I'm sure you've noticed that this blog is quiet dead. That I haven't written anything since November, and that I haven't written anything really worth reading since August is a definite sign of that.

This blog is dead, but I've been blogging through it's death.
That is to say, I've another blog.
A blog in which I've talked about life as it is.

My life as I've not been willing to discuss it with those who I knew from my past, and how I always discuss it with my friends in the current.

With drastic changes in my life, I end the silence, end this blog, and open up my real blog and talk openly about my real life.
Don't get too offended. :)

http://www.thedivineclouds.blogspot.com

Simply Soulless Science

Well.
Hello everyone.
I've been entirely failing at blogging here this semester.

Why?

I've made an interesting discovery: when one studies something that is entirely lacking in subjective thought one tends to stop thinking in a subjective way.

Take that as you will.

When you've been writing so long that you just can't write a serious lab report anymore

"We then became so distraught at our lack of understanding that we all burst into tears and began to sing songs of mourning over our experiment. We also did ritual dancing to the chemistry gods in hopes that they would understand our pain over the failures that we had thus far been cursed with and divine upon us the knowledge that we needed in order to successfully worship their greatness. We told the gods that should they allow for our experiment to work that we would light up the chemistry heavens for them with our short-lived chemiluminesence and that each of them would be able to work with their organic chemistry sets late into the night without invoking the wrath of the physics gods as the they had longed to do for an inordinate amount of time. The chemistry gods were harsh in their reaction to our pleas and they refused to allow for us to have undue advantage over our neighboring groups. Thus, we continued on as though this had not happened, which, in reality, it had not."

- My tentative lab report, paragraph eight

It's not Maybelline

So I've shelved a surprisingly large amount of fashion, hair, and makeup magazines and books these past few weeks and I must say that they are extremely grabbing. I, the one has been decently against spending copious amounts of time on looks, have stopped and flipped through a few of them.

The Publishers do a fantastic job of making you wonder what the "beauty secrets", etc. are within.

But honestly they market off of the idea that people believe that those on the covers of their magazines/books have only become fabulously good-looking because of their advice. In reality the people on the covers were born looking nearly the same as they do on the cover. Makeup is not magic.

Which reminded me of this excessively long, but excessively awesome, quote by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World Revisited:

"'The cosmetic manufacturers,' one of their number has written, 'are not selling lanolin they are selling hope.' For this hope, this fraudulent implication of a promise that they will be transfigured, women will pay ten to twenty times the value of the emulsion which the propagandists have so skillfully related, by means of misleading symbols to a deep-seated and almost universal feminine wish - the wish to be more attractive to members of the opposite sex. The principles underlying this kind of propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true."

And another thing that I'm lost as to how people who purchase these magazines don't notice is the fact that every single issue of the magazine makes almost exactly the same claim. So, if you have one you have them all?

But before I finish I must say: the sample sprays and such they put in the pop magazines smell so wonderful.

Don't worry: I'm still alive

So I haven't updated in umm.. a while so I thought that I'd mention that my vital signs are still quite excellent.

And while I'm here I would like to comment on my lack of understanding of the point of slips. I'm pretty sure that everyone knows that I have legs above my knees. Slips just make skirts uncomfortable.

That is all.

Forgotten roots

"I am officially Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant."

- AJ Jacobs

The other day when I was putting away books in the library I ran across a copy of "The Book of Mormon Movie." Having heard the reports on the quality of the movie I thought it'd be worth checking out simply because it sounded like one of those movies that was so bad it's funny (ie - Twilight).

As it turns out I was wrong. Entirely. It was so bad it wasn't funny.
It felt like a ward play that one is forced to go to that's written by a college age business major and all of the parts are played by people who have never acted before.

Ouch.

The worst part, however, was the apparent lack of consideration that the characters in the movie were supposed to be Jewish. Whoops? That's quite the mistake. The background looked nothing like Jerusalem. The dialog was painful. Nothing Jewish.

Within the last week I also was able to see a PBS series on Early Christianity. It was excellent although it didn't include all of the things I wanted in it. The series included a lot indirectly related to my qualm above. Namely: Christianity comes from Judaism, but Judaism is lost in the shuffle.

What a bizarre concept. The Jewish history is varied: angry, calm, murderous, barbaric, beautiful, odd, etc. But most importantly for Christianity: the Jews left a scholarly work. What is it called? The Hebrew Bible or, in Christian terms the Old Testament.

This leads me to a question that I really wonder about. That is: Why, if everything about Christianity is supposed to be started with the Jews, don't Christians study about Judaism?

Learning about the scholars putting together the bible in Seminary would've been far more important, useful, and interesting than the typical instances of the pushing of all the stories being literal, and wonderful tales of people being totally moral. Which they aren't.

I might've actually liked the Bible during that year if the class had been about Jewish traditions and the why, when, and how of it. If it had shown how the Jewish culture was changing, how the ideologies were becoming ones that would allow for many people to claim to be Jewish Messiahs (according to history a lot of men made the claim just before and after Jesus).

It seems that over time Christianity has forgotten it's roots. No one mentions the reasons for the Jewish authors of the gospels writing what they did. The influences of the Jewish systems and current events are left out of much of the modern version of Christianity and replaced with a saccharine combination of the gospels that don't really fit together (despite the stickiness of saccharine.)

It's rather odd. I can only see the traces of Judaism through scholarship in one modern religion. That is Catholicism. Catholics are ok with admitting that they were wrong. They can say that the pope merely interprets the bible and can be wrong about social issues. They've apologized for the crusades, etc.

As times have gone on, however, this essential piece of Christianity: the need to understand the history and culture behind the Bible. Has been lost. With each new religion since the early Christians we have lost much of what it really means to be a branch off of Judaism and have replaced Christian heritage with assumptions that Jews today are nothing like those in the past; the ones in the past were just like us. Until we reach today. The day where I sit it takes a TV documentary to remind me of a lost and important part of Christianity: Jewish history.

And then, I realized I was talking to myself

*Before I begin I would like to point out how very aware I am that this is probably close to a Universal complaint. I realize the lack of originality in the post, but I wrote it anyway.*

Sometimes I like to pretend that two people could entirely relate to each other.

Maybe I read too much. You can read whatever you want into books. They always say what you want them to say.
Maybe it's the music. Paul always seems to say things that are relevant to me.

Whatever it is I find myself thinking that someone relates so well to me and I to them. And my mind goes off creating an entirely new life for them. And then the fantasy is shattered when I get to know them.

Ulysses has a commentary on the inability of men to really know each other. Pages upon pages of two men thinking throughout the book of all of the things of their lives the one wanting to get to know the other only to have them run into each other at the end, have a shallow conversation, and go their separate ways.

Perhaps I've been corrupted by what I consider one of the most beautiful lines from one of the most beautiful scenes in literature (which is a slight spoiler for Crime and Punishment by the way and is much better in context, read the book):

"I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity,"

Maybe I just want someone to love that scene and all things like it and relate to them in the same way I do.

That'd probably be enough. But probably not.