Well many of you guys have heard me wax long and long about my grand plans to go to graduate school at Penn and study under Bruce Kucklick. Well this Summer I read a lot of litereature, and went to a lot of flea markets and antique stores. I also bought a lot of vinyl. And through all that, somewhere along the line I decided that grad school wasn't meant to happen next year.
So what is in store for me next year? Well that question has been bothering me for a bit. Things like my looming RA-ship and SIP uncertainties helped distract me from having to think about it. But then I came to a point somewhere last week where I felt the need to start moving in some new direction.
I still want to go to grad school, just not next year. This is for a number of reasons.
1) I don't feel ready to enter the world of graduate study, in terms of time commitment (at least 5 years), emotional maturity, and intellectual adulthood.
2) These reasons are kind of subjective and nebulous and could all be overcome with enough self-flaggelation (sp?). But perhaps more importantly, I don't feel strongly pulled towards any one field of history. Until I get a sense of that somehow, I just can't see myself committing to a grad school and professor.
Well I kind of talked to my parents about all this last Saturday, they were find with that decision, but did want to know what I wanted to do instead. I told them that I wanted to teach, maybe in a foreign country. My parents with an amazing degree of quickness, suggested Uganda. In Uganda there are these early teenage boys out in the bush that need a tutor.
I am afraid of Uganda. My dad has been there twice on business for World Harvest Missions, and each time that he got back, I would sit at his knee and hear about horrible diseases and parasites that infest that land. Needless to say, this didn't sit well with my timid pre-pubescent self.
So when I have romantically dreamt of teaching MK's it has always been in more pastoral settings. Nice happy, clean, wired places like Black Forest Academy in Germany, not the bush of Uganda.
But I really feel led towards Uganda, like God is pulling on a heart string or somethin. Well the process has already been begun with World Harvest, so will see where things go.
In my Sippin adventures of today I came across this great web site. I find it incredibally fascinating to delve into the relationship between objects and ideas. That's what this site is all about, that and religion.
Well some of you may recall this seminar class that I took at UTC last semester, The Problem of Community in American Society. The class was taught by evangelical scholar Wilfred McClay and was really interesting. The big project of the class was to write a 20-50 page paper at the end. I wrote this dandy little piece about the nature of academic community as it's evinced by internal conflict over its own authority structure. It was a really interesting paper to write, and from the beginning I was planning on doing some moderate tweaking to it and turning that product into my SIP.
Well after turning out the McClay paper, I must confess that I was dreading returning to that topic. So I came into this semester where I have to take the dreaded History SIP research class not exactly "stoked."
So I had been mulling all this around in my head for about a month when last Sunday at Rock Creek it hit me. I want to write a SIP about design theory and Christian merchandising! Basically what this means is I want to describe the trend of merchandising in Christian book stores as it relates to several factors: the rise of explicitly consumptive evangelical Christianity in the 50s, the individualistic revivals of the Jesus people and co in the 60s, and the changing idea of ministry going starting with the 50s and taking it into the early 80s.
This topic excites me because it deals with a lot of original sources, material artifacts, and economic data. These are all things that I want to work with more in and effort to better equip myself for grad school.
There's this writer Tom Bissell. I got turned on to him through reading The Believer. He wrote an article there called The Banality of Reality, that unfortunately is not available online. But if that issue ever gets returned to me by Ry-dawg, one is welcome to check it out.
But this article prompted me to search more on the web for his stuff. He hasn't actually ever published a book. But Salon has two great articles (1) (2)from him. Both articles essentially say the same thing, having "high-brow" taste can kind of be a burden. What makes these articles worth-while is the candor and wit Bissell uses in exploring this idea.
1) I bought the latest from this very cool alt-country Swede named Nicolai Dunger, Tranquil Isolation. He is backed on the album by some other Swedes, and the Oldham Brothers of Palace and Bonny Prince Billy fame.
2) On the 9th a cool band named the Essex Green will be playing at Lamar's on MLK. This band kind of sounds like Belle and Sebastian, but more American. They have these songs that have a floral quality about them, but are anchored in very hick rock and roll rythms.
3) The next night, the 10th, a great little group named Songs:Ohia will be playing at Lamar's. Songs:Ohia has been around for a while in the indie-folk/alt-country world. I haven't ever listened to Songs:Ohia in a directed sort of way, but never-the-less, the fact that a band with this much indie-street cred is coming to Lamars makes it a must experience in and of itself. I believe local balladeer Chris Allison will be opening.
Well just thought I'd give a shout out. I don't have any idea when the two shows at Lamars start. Anyone else know?
This story is really surreal. A pizza delivery man named David Wells departs for a delivery to an unknown location only to show up 45 minutes later outside a bank with a bomb strapped to his neck. He is arrested by the police, at that moment Wells tells the police that he is not robbing the bank willingly and that he has a bomb attached to his chest. The police back off, call the bomb squad, and promptly Wells' head blows off the rest of his body.
On an interesting side note, a co-worker of Wells was found dead in his house, apparently of natural causes. Check out a good write up of the story here.
For those of you that were wondering. The meeting with Dean Scott went really well. The situation is basically this. Covenant has always defined the hallways of its residence halls as a public place. This year they have decided to reconcile that fact with the Georgia state law prohbitting nudity in a public place. The process to change this state of affairs is just a matter of getting the student senate to push through a new definition of residence halls, making them private during certain times of the day. Scott seemed very open to this process.