Hieronymo's mad againe.

Had a productive meeting with adviser last week She found me money to finish up my Belize project well, and to provide support/make connections for service-learning projects both in a class that she's teaching and a course that's being taught by another professor, who I don't know personally, but would like to (she's brilliant, works on amazing topics, and is incredibly personable and confident/outspoken, particularly given that she's a young PhD and a minority. But I guess if you're brilliant, self-assurance eventually follows?). Adviser is also discouraging me from teaching until I'm done with classes, because it's such a timesink. Absolutely valid, though I have a feeling I'll find myself adjuncting summers when I'm not taking classes (and probably some when I am - need to eat).  Also good conversation about how the areas I focused my masters' work on are productive, growing, and there's interest in them (which is important for me grad...

Maybe the thing that keeps me Anglo-Catholic is that T.S. Eliot is so ingrained in my soul that I hear his words cascading through my thoughts as they begin to converge into something that starts to make sense (Note: that's not the thing that keeps me Anglican- that has more to do with simply being unable to breathe when I step outside of the bounds of the Church of England, as odd and Provincial and Uppermiddleclass and White as that sounds). And in  the end of Little Gidding (itself the ending of his magnificent Four Quartets), Eliot somehow manages to hit one of his most bewildering, obscure, truthful moments: What we call the beginning is often the end And to make and end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, Th...

This article fits somewhere in my musings about beauty, body image, food, and what religious traditions that espouse fasting teach young devotees. It doesn't really provide any answers, just a picture of people living with these issues. And maybe that's enough for now.

I don't yet know what (or how) to think about Greg Mortenson. Nick Kristof's column was thoughtful, at least. And I love his title..."Three cups of tea spilled" sums the whole thing up remarkably well. There are a host of voices out there- those who are wholeheartedly on Mortenson's side, claiming he's been unjustly framed by accusers who should be using their time to focus on corrupt politicians. Those who claim to have known he was a phony the entire time, and that the rest of us are hopelessly naive. These two groups are the loudest, and the people in the middle, except for Kristof, who's voice is powerful enough to be heard (aside: Nick Kristof is possibly the best example I can think of of a privileged individual who uses privilege to empower others) are drowned out, likely because of that uncertainty. And honestly....all the fury in the media and blogosphere makes me more lost and confused. And dumb- how come everyone else is always so convinced...

Two degrees ago I started blogging - as a place to throw half-formed emotional musings I wasn't sure how to process otherwise. Putting things out into a world where you're dying to know you're not crazy, but don't trust the people you know in real life to come to that conclusion. I try not to do that anymore. But right now, this is how it is. Because of the odd mix of devastation,betrayal,suspicion, hope, sympathy, and fear swirling around my head and heart thanks to Greg Mortenson. Or- more accurately, the media storm around Greg Mortenson. Monday AM I logged into Facebook to see Nick Kristof linking to a NYTimes piece . And then there was CBS , and finally, offering some faint hope for redemption, Outsider Online. And maybe it's just a mark of how young I am that I've never been devastated by a public figure before...I was a middleschooler who was raised to despise the Clintons, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammie Faye Bakker were well before my time also....

I'm hesitant to share much about my students in a public forum- mainly out of respect for them. But it seems worth noting that eating disorders and beauty were one of the things they couldn't leave alone. I can't even count the number of response journals I read saying "I never felt beautiful, because I was too thick/skinny/whatever," even from the stereotypically beautiful girls in my class. Which makes me so incredibly sad, because my students? Not only are these girls gorgeous, they're tenacious, insightful, smart. Maybe I'm a little biased because they show up in class on a cold, rainy Monday for a lecture on cancer- but maybe that's precisely my point. I've taken them tough places with this class, and they've been more than willing to go, and to look at how their lives play out surrounded by the tough issues- including how they look at themselves. And...I'm realizing now how responsible we can be for how other people perceive beauty...

So, it's taken some time to manage some quiet moments when I can write about this, and I'm not sure I can pull my thoughts together completely, but still. One of my friends and mentors guest lectured in my class about eating disorders. She showed this video which is pretty terrific, btw. I has response journals due that week, and I got overwhelming responses from students. An athlete who had been pressured by his coach to lose weight. Students who had watched family members struggle with eating disorders, students who always considered themselves too thick or thin to be beautiful. We later watched Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (since the school's copy of Becoming Barbie was too damaged to use). The book was published in the late '90s, and Wolf's thesis is that whenever women achieve major gains in society, the ideal of beauty becomes something almost unattainable, in order to undermine the power of women. Her examples: The right to vote, followed by the Fla...