Like and Love, Ramblings of a Theologian in Progress

It's Easter! Yay! I love Easter. I love the new beginnings that Easter promises. Better beginnings than New Year's holds, largely because it's April and I find projects more easily started in spring when the rest of the world is coming back from the brink of death that is winter. Not to mention that this winter has been aggressively terrible. I kept telling myself that it's just prepping me for Scotland. As promised, some updates on the list and some pictures that I've been taking. I've added a #13 based on Jack's suggestion. I will now attempt to try at least 7 ethnic cuisines I've never had before. Scottish will be an easy one to get. Please help me on this. You'll also notice some missing numbers. I need suggestions! #1- Read the complete works of Jane Austen I'm switching to Pride and Prejudice after being told I'd read through that faster. On the novel side, however, I just finished The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Middles...

If you've been online today and catching snippets of news you may have seen a report that the Pro-Russian government of Eastern Ukraine had been passing out leaflets informing that Jewish citizens were being required to register with the government. At this moment it's not entirely clear if this is a real thing or propaganda against the pro-Russians in charge. It's not good either way, because it's incredibly tragic that the world keeps coming back to the same tactics as it always does as a political ploy. Or actual racism.  I want to believe that we've moved past this, but unfortunately I was a history major. Being a history major is super depressing y'all. The inherent problem with studying history is that you can't ever make the argument that history doesn't repeat itself. Study it long enough and you realize that humankind sucks and we're pretty bad at learning not to screw things up (disclaimer: I studied German history). History is...

I don't tolerate opiates well. Or at least I've recently learned that I don't tolerate them. I was in a car accident on Monday and, while I don't want to get into the details, I've been on a mild painkiller since then. The last time I took an opiate was hydrocodeine for a cough. This time was Tramadol. Both, after about 24-36 hours of being on them, leave me with a strange transcendent feeling. It feels like everything internally is moving too quickly and everything external is moving too slowly. At least no one need ever worry about me becoming addicted to heroin. As terrible as these blurred lines between reality and perception are, for awhile (a very, very, very brief while) it's kinda entertaining. But that's in retrospect. At the time you can't realize how much you are floating between the two states. It's like when I'm falling asleep at night. One minute I'm asleep and the next I'm awake bemoaning my inability to fall asleep. I...

Time changes have boggled my mind since I was young and we would travel to Colorado to visit my paternal grandparents. Suddenly Wheel of Fortune was on an hour earlier. What sorcery was this! Sorcery, being what it usually amounts to, was a human demarcation that Colorado existed in a state precisely one hour earlier than Oklahoma did. To make things even more difficult, Florida and Disney World lived in the future. Being in the central timezone, I was acutely aware that the future was on one side of me and the past on the other. To this day, I still can't help but feel that, while I know "understand" time zones, my present is the actual present and the future has already happened, the world just hasn't spun me into it yet. Which is all to say that I still have difficulty remembering that time zones mean at a certain point in my morning, my dad has already gone to bed- or that waiting on news from a time zone ahead of me is contingent on my time still being within ...