Insight into fundamentalists.

I've been reading Nancy Ammerman's Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World, a qualitative sociological study from 1987 where she observed church life at an unnamed fundamentalist church in the northeast U.S. and did a lot of interviews and then tried to show what the fundamentalist worldview is like. I found this excerpt, from one of Ammerman's interviews with a churchmember "Janet", interesting:

My brother used to be like number one in my life. He was very close with me... We're almost on different ends of the spectrum now, whereas we were very close being brought up. He just doesn't understand now why certain things have to be left out, whereas I don't understand why he has to include certain things... To be able to say 'no' to him, 'No, Ken, I'm not going to go,' is very hard for me, very, very hard. Music in our family was just always there, and jazz, and I was really caught up in it. I was crying when I was breaking my beautiful jazz albums. I was crying. I mean, here I am still calling them beautiful; I can see that I still have a problem. It's something I know is not good in my life. The Lord has show me that, but it's taken concentrated effort to always keep away from it. I have to stay very close to the Lord, and if I falter at all with it, you know, with my walk with the Lord, then I definitely want all of a sudden to play around, or I definitely want to have a drink, or I definitely want to go hear my brother play.

I found it interesting, too, that a lot of churchmembers' family members who weren't in the church would try to push drinks on them at family functions, or joke with them and be like, "Hey, be a dear and make me a drink," and then laugh when they'd refuse to.

Coffee shop happenings.

When I was walking to the coffee shop this morning this middle-aged black lady with like four little kids stepped off the electric train stop in front of me, and between talking on her cell phone and yelling at her four year-old to stop playing near the curb and put his damn hat on, she asked me if I had a lighter.

"Nope," I was like, and since there had seemed to be some expectation that I did, I was a little apologetic and was like, "I don't smoke."

"Good for you," she said.

At the coffee shop, this blonde yuppie woman in a peacoat who was ahead of me in line ordered her cappucino with skim milk, and extra dry. "That's a new parameter for coffee," I was like, and she explained to me that in a coffee drink, 'extra dry' means more foam and less milk.

Went to the movies last night.

I went to the movies last night. I had accidentally left my student ID at home and it's still in the mail, so I told the girl at the counter what happened and asked her to give me the dollar off admission. My friend who I met there was like, "Look, he's carrying books," and so that inspired me to pull out my heavy duty library-bound copy of Hans Frei's The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative and slammed it on the counter in front of her. "Look," I was like, "Would anyone else but a student be reading this bullshit?" She gave me the dollar off.

At the movie theater I ate what I brought along with me, a banana and an orange and a hard-boiled egg. I think people around me liked the smell of the orange when I peeled it, but they hated the hard-boiled egg.

I also picked a crusty from alongside the inner rim of my right nostril and it looked nice and chewy, so I ate it, but I'm not sure if that counts the same as the food I had with me. I've always liked eating boogers and scabs, except the scabs you peel off your legs when they pull out hair with them; the hair you have to pick out of your teeth completely ruins the pleasant tough chewiness, which is almost like fruit bark, only more copper-y and less sweet.

On that note, I've already broken my New Year's resolution for the year, not to pick my nose in public. I'm wondering if I should switch to the other resolution that I had thought of: not to floss when drunk.

Shorts - Coffee - Steps.

Since I'm going to a mini post-holiday part this afternoon, I put on my snowflake boxer shorts this morning to get me in the mood.

Yesterday I had a thermos full of coffee in my bag and forgot about it, so today I'm drinking it cold. Cold, stale coffee has never bothered me, and in fact I like it. When I was home over break, I'd leave a cup or two sitting in my parents' coffee maker overnight so it'd be waiting for me the next morning, but more often than not they were up before me and threw it out.

This morning coming up the library there were all these perfect footprints preserved in ice on the sidewalk; a few people had had heavy enough steps at a point where the snow was very compressable, so their footprints packed it solid and it turned to ice, and now the ice is the only thing left since the snow melted around it.

Starting off 2008...

I ended 2007 with a shit story, but my shit this morning was really unremarkable. I wonder if this is starting out 2008 right, or badly. I guess it depends on your perspective.

My shit this morning

The grapefruit I had yesterday afternoon surfaced in my post-coffee shit this morning. Lots of those little citrus bits were floating on the top of the toilet, and when a few hours later I lifted up the toilet rim to go take a piss, there were a couple brown spatters attached to the underside of the rim, I had shit out that grapefruit with such violence. Mostly, the shit was nothing but grapefruit bits and brown water with little mucky clumps here and there, somehow.

Manilow spiel.

My one Dutch friend who's very good at that sort of thing came up with a good spiel to use on the older women who'll be at the Barry Manilow concert I'm going to next week. He said to say that my girlfriend and I got in an argument, and that I'm here to try to understand her better, and if they ask why, say that she said I didn't understand her and she demanded I go, only I said no, and now I'm going shamefacedly behind her back and she doesn't know I'm there. He then said to say that I think I might know what she means, but then I should say a small criticism of Barry, like I feel like he's a little too smooth, and that way the ladies there will eat it up and be sympathetic to my plight and fall all over themselves to try to help me understand Barry better. He said a certain type of woman loves to insert themselves into relationships and be maternal in a quasi-sexual way, and I just have to bring it out of them.

Sunday School lessons.

This Jewish couple was telling me that when their daughter was five, she kept asking them why she was Jewish, and her mom explained to her that it was because her parents were Jewish and that she would learn about it now when she started going to Sunday school in a few months, and afterwards when she grew up she could decide if she wanted to go on being Jewish or not.

A few months later, their daughter had their first Sunday school lesson, and the teacher taught all about how Abraham came out of Ur of the Chaldees and eventually went to Canaan. When she got home, her parents asked her what she had learned at Sunday school, and she was like, "If I don't want to, I don't have to follow my parents' gods!"