There's Collegiality, and then there's...

"we must stop spending time together before we all fail out of the program, in the interest of being able to stay on for our PhDs and spend more time together."

Yeah, so Kolya had T. and me over for dinner last night. The plan was Dinner, Duffy, and Latin. It turned into a very, very long dinner, followed by a short period of Latin and a long, long conversation until 2:15 in the morning.

Best moment:
Kolya: "So, this is what I'm currently reading..."
T and Yrs. Truly (simultaniously): "Ooooh, Pelikan!

Images from the Weekend: From Duelling to Dancing

* Tea with T. and Kolya, reading them Dafydd ap Gwilym in Welsh.

* Vigil mass at St. Basil's with a free-association homily, and trying very hard not to make Eye Contact with Emilie.

* Watching "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" with other members of the MA class. Never having seen it before, I spent much of the experience writhing in pain.

* The World's Worst Gin & Tonics, at the pub with the MA class.

* (Yrs. Truly and T. simultaneously rub their tired eyes.)
T.: Jinx... it's okay, I release you... I won't constrain you to silence...
K.: What? Are you constraining the woman I love? I'll fight you in a duel for her love. Pistols or swords?

Yrs. Truly: That's it, I'm out of this conversation.
Resident Brit: What's going on? I'll take your place.
Yrs. T: They're fighting a duel for my love.
R.B: Oh, then, you're on your own.

* Anglo-Catholic Service at Smokey Tom's, and singing "Be thou my Vision"... and being the only Soprano-type in a three-pew radius.

* Brunch & Coffee with T. & Kolya: Yrs. Truly: "I can't get the Huevos Rancheros... I'll want them to be just like the Huevos Rancheros at the Med in Hyde Park, and that can only lead to sorrow and heartbreak."
Kolya: "My dear, it is far too early in the morning for heartbreak, and I haven't had enough coffee for it."(1)

* Buying an Oxford Study Bible for $2 at the Trinity College Booksale. I also bought a book in Welsh, but I'm not yet entirely sure what it's about (I think "Wanderings of Carmarthenshire" is the best translation of the title.)

* Affirming that K. doesn't mind if Celticist Roommate and I refer to him as my "Platonic Boyfriend"-- in turn, however, he has threatened to refer to me as his "Platonic Presbytera" (which has the added benefit of alliterating.)

* Reading with Kolya in the Hart House Quad, removing my Sunday heels to walk in the grass, and taking advantage of the floaty Sunday skirt and Collegiate Gothic background to strike a few ballet poses.

* Watching Platonic Boyfriend read the first few pages of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (given to him by T.)... only a few weeks after I introduced him to Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. "It's so much fun to watch you begin to read books I love... it's like watching someone discover a good chocolate!"

* Evensong at Smokey T's (I swear I'm not becoming an Anglican, but it was just what I needed.)

* Red Sox, 11-2.

* Remembering that I have some Latin parsing due tomorrow. Cachu.

I shall have to hold on to these memories this week, because with Latin piling up and a paper on Augustine due, it looks like it's going to be hell.

(1) Note that this was said at approximately 1:20 in the afternoon.

How I Spent My Day

Woke up at 8:30 hating the world having gone to bed at 3-ish, met up with people for a 10:00 am Eamon Duffy reading/discussion group. We dispersed at 12:15, and Kolya convinced T. and me to bring our books and accompany him to the Toronto Islands for a picnic lunch and studying on the beach.

This being Toronto, where the weather will very soon be not-so-nice, and because T. and I have spines of Jell-O when being pressured to procrastinate, we acquiesced.

So we took a ferry out to Ward's Island, settled ourselves on the beach, and spent the afternoon wading, enjoying the sun and air, and reading selections from our history reading to one another.

Then I went home to make dinner and prepare for the evening activity-- movie watching and beer drinking with Celticist Roommate and our PhD friends at Massey College. Movies watched: Anchorman and The Lion in Winter. Yes.

(Imagine a more elegant transition.)

One side effect of the time spent on the beach was a conversation about proper names, in which it was revealed that Kolya has a middle name that he finds embarassingly preppy, I have The World's Most WASP Grandmotherly Full Name, and T. was named neither for the character in medieval literature nor for the character in opera, but for the young, gadabout veterinary student in All Creatures Great and Small.

One of my fondest memories of second year is that of spending time in the kitchen cooking with Mary Claire, quoting James Herriot at one another. Do any of you Breckie/Comptonite readers have contact info for Mary Claire H.? I haven't spoken to her in months and months, but I'd love to share that little story with her because I know she'd get a kick out of it.

Another Late-Night Conversation with Dan...

alice: okay
alice: so I just wasted fifteen minutes
alice: browsing my account on LibraryThing to figure out what books I don't want anymore.
d_robes: I find it hard to bring myself to that
d_robes: my bibliomania is too strong
alice: but some of these books I've had since, oh, fourth grade.
d_robes: yeah, in that span of time enough regrettable phases occur in anyone's life to necessitate disposing of some books
alice: like, oh, the Richard Dawkins phase...
d_robes: that's a litttle easier to justify keeping around than some things
alice: what about the "I'm going to teach myself heiroglyphics and read lots of alternative historical interpretations of tutankhamen's death" phase?
d_robes: you never know when you'll need to reference something about Egyptian archaeology
alice: Dan, you are a bad influence both on my ability to lug books to toronto/put them in storage and my pocketbook which might just be fattened by selling some used books.
alice: albeit not by much.
d_robes: I told you, my case of bibliomania is a very strong one
alice: I think I have a book about that...
...

alice: what can one not justify keeping around?
d_robes: duplicates.

Ahem ahem ahem.

For the past few weeks, the following image (from Lackadaisy) has been my desktop background:



But now I should change it, because... as of 7:30 last night, I FINISHED MY DRAFT!

37 pages of Welsh-Saints-Spirituality-Goodness. Prof. Fulton said that it "developed wonderfully."

So now I just need to rewrite it all a la Daniel Gullo in the next five days. Right.

So, what should be my new, non-angfechtung background?

The world's cutest kitten? (From Cute Overload)


The world's cutest puppy? (Also from Cute Overload)


The world's cutest vapidette? (From Larry)


Or...something completely different? (From... Cute Overload)



Decisions, decisions...

Having seen "Dialogues of the Carmelites," I've been thinking about my own past vocations qualms. Here's a news clip about The Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, an order I was very much interested in joining at an earlier time in my life.



Diolch am y Holy Whapping

Good Questions.

...Although one hopes Fr. Orthometer didn't mean to encourage apostasy, but rather the acceptance of church teaching. I may go so far as to say that such an attitude has the opposite effect on me.

Being a good Catholic by definition entails believing all that the Church teaches to be true. Why be a Catholic if you don't believe in what the Church teaches.

A: Because leaving, I fear for my soul. Staying, I fear for my sanity.






ADDENDA: He does continue to amuse me, however. Because it should still be done right. And no, we don't have anything quite that bad in the Calvert House sacristy.

While doing this, I found an artifact of pure liturgical evil. I don't know what it is called. I don't want to know what it is called. All I know is that it was used to inflict folk Masses on innocent people.

YES I SHOULD BE WRITING MY BA THESIS NOT READING CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC BLOGS I AM HERMITING MYSELF AT JAS' DESK WITH TEA, MY BOOKS, AND ST. NICHOLAS THE MIRACLE WORKER OK BYEBYE.

The More I Read, The Less I Understand

Yesterday's conversation with the haberdasher'd one turned to a (I think yiddish) phrase which I can no longer remember, and if I could remember it I wouldn't be able to spell it. The gist of it was that you need enough meat on your ass to be able to sit down and get your work done.

That said:

Ways I have procrastinated on my thesis since giving up a certain stupid social website for lent:
1) Messing with the 'logs (look! tags! SWEET!)
2) Reading/Translating Frederico Garcia Lorca.
3) Messing around on Pandora.com
4) Making mix CDs (Dmitri reports that he does this, too.)
5) Perfecting my bibliography.

Seriously. Working on the bibliography to avoid writing the paper is a new depth of procrastination, even for me.