This semester I keep running into religious boredom from my students. At Religious College, the students are totally entranced by the text we’re reading except when I try to say something about the religious context of the author, whom they far prefer to judge according to the standards of their own beliefs. At Secular College, […]
Archive for the ‘Conversations’ category
Bad Faith
I often get the sense that people are asking me questions they don’t want answers to. It’s a kind of social blindness I have, which is weird because my parents did this all the time. You’d think I’d be used to it, but somehow I never learned to tell when it’s best just to tell […]
Be my guest
A sleeping bag and maybe a towel⎯that’s all we used to need. Crashing at a friend’s place required no great forethought⎯a few days’ notice, maybe. But combine age, bigger incomes, more complicated lives, and greater needs for privacy and independence, and all of a sudden hospitality is a fraught issue. It’s Monday morning as I […]
Obstruction
I wrote two long posts here in the past few hours. They were about something that has been happening to me recently, which is that I find myself limited in my paths through my neighborhood by various social forces—an ex’s children, whom I miss terribly and who hate me because they think I abandoned them, […]
“The same, safe, sexy route”
Dave and I were both pretty sauced when he suggested that I write this post. We were leaving a house party where there had been a serious amount of dancing, mostly to our new pop crush Janelle Monae. I haven’t danced as much as I did that night in years, and, generally, I don’t even […]
Ideal Reader
When teaching an intro course on literature, I often end up teaching my students about the difference between an ideal reader and an actual reader. An ideal reader is someone you can imagine reading a text and getting all the little jokes and references, appreciating the compositional complexity of the text, deriving as much pleasure […]
Influence
I was quite old before I realized that I was the only person at my church who listened to secular music. I must have been in seventh grade, because I clearly remember a Sunday School classmate asking me what my favorite album was at the time, and I said Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Of course. […]
Humorless
I fear that I’m getting a reputation for being not-fun in my old age. Sure, I’m only 30, but it’s clear that a whole landscape of human interactions has closed off to me. My interest in movies and television has waned. And I really don’t enjoy dating as much as I used to. It all […]
Interstitial
In New York for a few days, and as usual, it’s sensory and emotional overload. Friends I think of every day—but see only once or twice a year—are here in the flesh. We go to amazing restaurants and wander around museums. We gossip and catch up and sit in loving companionable silence. The kids are […]
CHD: Short one towel.
I settle down at the computer to write a Whatsit post when four gun shots ring out from the street directly in front of our house. This happens within the hour of my typing these words, the night before my post is due, and the helis only stop buzzing the neighborhood in the last five […]
