It’s the time of the year when the air begins to smell beautiful. Perhaps you’ve noticed? This is the smell that gives me spring fever like nothing else. It’s not just the freshly cut grass in the evenings; it’s millions of blossoms and leaves and moss… Incidentally, I remember learning in my undergrad microbiology class that actinobacteria are an important component of that fresh nature smell — they’re what you smell after it rains.
Happy bacteria spring.
Wedding invitations are currently kicking my butt. We’ve gone through so many iterations of the design: damask, flower motif, outline, pen and ink, maps, initials, script, serif… and finally ended up with something not bad. Then there was printing… pantone colors, letterpress, offset, laser, inkjet. The options were too expensive, or wrong paper, or couldn’t go borderless.
We settled with a 1000dpi Photoshop file output via inkjet photo printer onto Crane 8.5x11" 100% cotton “Natural White” 300gsm cover stock. We’ll make two cuts of those sheets to generate the different cards.
Anyhow, we’re in the final printing stages now and the invitations aren’t half bad. Like Mykala said, “I just want a piece of paper that lets people know where we are getting married.” That, we have.
From my course eval of Dr. Katz’s Physiology course:
Perhaps I will have instructors who rival Dr. Katz’s wit, knowledge, and personality, but I sincerely doubt I will have the privilege of learning from another professor who is capable of teaching as well as he is. Initially, I couldn’t figure out why physiology came so easily in this course, and then I realized it was because Dr. Katz was teaching the material not presenting it. Normally, I spend my days watching endless parades of powerpoint slides — I am talked at over the slides and then expected to regurgitate the information through rote memory. Some of my peers have expressed a preference for this type of classroom experience, but it drives me crazy. Actually learning and understanding material (as I did due to Dr. Katz’s lectures) made the topics more interesting, relevant, and memorable. Everything Dr. Katz did, from his jokes to his illustrations, was done with one purpose — so his students could learn.
Thanks, Dr. Katz.
Nine years after the first official Mother’s Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become and spent all her inheritance and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration.
Nevertheless, happy Mother’s Day! I’m in the middle of an absolutely splendid one here at home in Woodbury. Life. Is. Great.
Mykala choreographed a great dance to Psapp - Leaving in Coffins. I love how unique the sound of that band is. Really really fun sound. And if Mykala hasn’t won a competition award for that choreography yet, she’ll probably win one soon.
I am now officially a D2. Physiology final grade == A! Now off to taste wedding entrées with my lovely fiancée. Tonight, Legally Blonde the Musical. Tomorrow, more things!
Originally, I said “Tomorrow, the world”, but I’m trying to avoid clichéd language in my writing. Good luck with that. See what I did there?
Some real thunderstorms, maybe‽ We wait with bated breath.
This finals week isn’t as brain-meltingly insane as the one we had before spring break, but I do find my brain a bit mushy these days. Does that mean a ready-to-rock brain is crispy? Sharp, maybe. Hmm.
This low quality post does seem to prove that my gray matter has become gelatinous.
Between my finals in neuroscience, physiology, and prosthodontics, my brain has been working on an interesting, rather troubling exercise: understanding beauty. Lord knows why my mind gets preoccupied with the ideas it does. Nonetheless, here I am: I can’t wrap my head around the concept. I am, in many ways, a prototypical nerd; as such, an unknowable system or domain irks me. Cf. the aforelinked article:
The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the world. He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day.
See where the problems begin for me? Beauty is not a finite system with rules, it is not completely knowable. The idea is so broad. What other adjective conjures very specific imagery on such a wide variety of topics? Math, painting, music, sculpture, landscapes, animals, humans.
To some, a perfectly bored engine block is beautiful. To others, it is a lawn of fresh cut grass on a late summer evening. Still others find their true beauty aurally. And of course, for large swaths of males succumbing to their limbic systems, nothing is more beautiful than the graceful contours of a woman’s torso.
Because beauty is how we describe something else, not something intrinsic in that other thing, maybe it is based on emotion. I would propose that, just as loss, joy, and betrayal produce emotions, there is an emotion for beauty: peaceful satisfaction.
A step on the path toward my understanding, I hope.
God Talk - Stanley Fish Blog - NYTimes.com:
By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”
The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.
And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”
Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world … is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement. Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after something else.
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