Tapeet by Vicini
Just a shoe
Warning: Very Whiney Post
So we’ve gotten a lot of snow in a short amount of time. This isn’t unusual for my area, but since the local government is so broke, they can’t afford to plow like they usually do. This means that my university was closed most of yesterday and all day today.
This is finals week and students who had exams yesterday or today can choose to accept their current grade in the class or take the final at the beginning of next semester. I would really like the first option for my plant ecology class and the second for my statistics class. Unfortunately, all of my finals are Wednesday and Thursday, when the university will almost certainly be open.
Special snowflakes sure do kill a lot of innocent people
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
The Jews have often been criticized for their belief that they are the Chosen People, but their critics have often been guilty of the same kind of denial that fueled the diatribes against idolatry in biblical times. … Western Christians have been particularly prone to the flattering belief that they are God’s elect. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Crusaders justified their holy wars against Jews & Muslims by calling themselves the new Chosen People … Calvinist theologies of election have been largely instrumental in encouraging Americans to believe that they are God’s own nation. As in Josiah’s Kingdom of Judah, such a belief is likely to flourish at a time of political insecurity when people are haunted by the fear of their destruction. It is for this reason, perhaps, that it has gained a new lease of life in the various forms of fundamentalism that are rife among Jews, Christians and Muslims [today]. A personal God like Yahweh can be manipulated to shore up the beleaguered self in this way, as an impersonal deity like Brahman can not.
What I’ve been listening to
Apart from watching this video over and over and playing so much Christmas music over Thanksgiving break that even I’m sick of it now, these are some of the most awesome songs I’ve listened to in the last few weeks:
Melanie Horsnell – Tomorrow
Ezekial Honig – Slojam
Celebrity crush
Except for a secret crush on Annie Lennox in middle school that played not a small part in the realization that I was a big queer, I’ve never been the type to become infatuated with people I haven’t met. That might have changed.
Just a shoe
Paul Green - Doria
Sleep & migraines
Pressure changes are just one of many things that give me migraines. I went to bed with a migraine at 2pm yesterday and am about to go back to bed now just 30 minutes after waking up since it hasn’t gone away. Here’s what the pressure looks like:
Small, slow changes and almost flat in the several hours before my migraine started – not what I expect to see if my migraine is caused by pressure change.
The migraine I have now is kind of my fault. My migraines are very sensitive to how much sleep I get and how regular it is. Staying up late, whether or not I sleep in, almost guarantees me a migraine. Monday night I stayed up late working on a paper and woke up normally – two and a half hours later.
Unless this migraine goes away in the next hour or so, it looks like I’m going to be staying up late tonight, too. My statistics homework is going to take awhile.
I try to be careful about my sleep schedule. I start assignments early and set aside chunks of time throughout the semester to work on large papers. But when I get lots of migraines from weather changes, it’s difficult not to fall behind. Then I end up staying up late to try to finish things, which gives me more migraines, which puts me more behind.