Actually, That's Not True and You Know It. Asshole.

He's either stupendously ignorant or he's lying, and I assume this guy has read the Bible, so that leaves out ignorant. What bothers me more than the meanness or power-hunger or whatever it is that makes people want to control how other people live their lives down to its most intimate details, is the contempt for history, for knowledge, for science, for simple common sense.

It's like they're talking about Sasquatch when they repeat their "definition of marriage that has been in place in every culture and society for 5,000 years" mantra. On some level I can understand the ignorance of science and history, if these crackpots were educated in American schools, where they don't really teach that stuff to kids because it offends their parents and so after generations American science and history curricula are just a big swamp of avoidance, denial, and misinformation. So maybe Warren is a little weak on science and history. But how many wives did Moses have? I assume he knows it was more than one.

I'm still practicing patience about this one, but I have to admit it hurts. Surely there must have been a less appalling choice than Warren to participate in this historic inauguration.

Semester 3.

If you were wondering, I finished the semester on Monday with my last two finals. Here's the breakdown: all A's except one B in my geography class, and I got A's on both papers, the one about Native American homosexuality in Texas and the one about the Mike Nichols films and marriage in the late 1960's.

The geography class ("The Modern American City") was a bit frustrating. Overall, it was one of my favorite classes I've taken at UT. The lectures were fascinating, the professor is very funny and opinionated, the reading was interesting. If you gauge the value of a course by how much it illuminates your view of the world, this one would score very high.

But the exams were insane, not so much hard as loopy. They defied any notion you might have about what is important to remember and what is not. Questions were often along the lines of, "What was the pun I made in my lecture about residual spaces?" The class grade was based completely on 3 exams, and I studied hard and couldn't get much above an 85 on any of them. There just didn't seem to be any way to prepare for them, they were so unpredictable. If you didn't write down that pun and memorize it, you were out of luck. (Yes, I know this is essentially about my ego. Whatever. I'm not a B student!)

Inclusive Means Everybody.

The fact that the griping classes in both the Christianist and gay camps are in full indignation mode about this is probably a sign that Obama calibrated his choice perfectly.

My take on this, and on pretty much anything Obama does that at first doesn't sit right with me, is that Obama is a black man who was just elected president of the United States, which must make him like the smartest person in the world, politically speaking, so why don't we just relax and give him the benefit of the doubt instead of jumping all over him about which preacher he picked to say a prayer at the inauguration. Yeah, he could have picked a lesbian Unitarian, and that would have pissed off about 90% of the population. Rick Warren only pisses off about 3%.

I kind of like the notion of a Evangelical bigot being compelled to bless the presidency of Obama, whose election basically says to Warren and his people, "Your time is up."

Middling.

I've been trying to find information about GRE scores (what's good, what's average, etc.) because I got my scores right after I took the test, but I had nothing to compare them to. I should look on Wikipedia first for everything, because that's usually where I find it. According to the entry on the GRE, my verbal score is in the 99th percentile and my math score is right around the 50th percentile. To be honest, I'm surprised that 50% of people who take the GRE are worse at math than I am.

Poor Tinkerbell.

We live with a pig. Our friends -- whose house we're staying in while they're on vacation and for a few months after they return until our new container house, which they are building on their property, is ready -- have a pig named Tinkerbell, and she is turning into a bit of problem child. What does she want?

I can't cook with her in the kitchen (she's huge and unyielding and constantly begs for food or attention or whatever, butting her big wet snout against my legs), so I shoo her out. She just gripes at me and won't move until I push her, sometimes with a chair (gently) because frankly I'm a little afraid of her. The other day, she bit my big toe. She didn't do any damage, but it did hurt a little.

The last couple of mornings, she's been intense and persistent. When I go to the kitchen to make coffee or refill my cup, she scurries over to me and butts my legs . So I've taken to running from her. There's kind of a lap around an island formed by the stove and a table between the kitchen and the big main room, so I run in, fill my cup with coffee, and when she comes at me I walk around the island, she follows me, I grab the 1/2 and 1/2 as I pass by the fridge, pour some in my coffee quickly because she's coming around behind me, return the 1/2 and 1/2 to the fridge and grab my coffee, she's on my tail but I'm out the door before she catches up.

It sounds funny and it is, but I can tell she's unhappy. There are several big pillows on the floor that she sleeps with, and when she gets frustrated because I'm running from her or pushing her out of the way, she throws the pillows around, and yesterday she tore one of them up.

J put up dog gates in the doorways to our half of the house, so Tinkerbell and Bones the boxer can't come back here -- so that Timmy the cat can escape from them when he wants to, but they serve the same purpose for us. Tinkerbell smashed through one of the gates this morning. My friend A told me yesterday about a friend of hers who had a pig who, when it got too big to stay in the house and they put it in the yard, would tear right through the screen door.

The photo is not Tinkerbell, but that's just what she looks like.