happy halloween!

happy halloween everyone! i hope you have a great day full of spookyness and fun costumes. and candy. don't forget the candy :O)

hope.

more obama

ok, i'm sure you're sick of it, but the election will be over this time next week, and then i'll stop :O) here is a post with pictures from the obama rally in PA today (or yesterday? i forget) it was wicked disgusting out but obama supporters stood in the rain and obama gave his speech in the rain, some amazing pictures.

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/10/meanwhile-on-campaign-trail-with-obama.html

little dude knows what's up

http://yeswecanholdbabies.wordpress.com/

The magic of language

Today in Hebrew we learned about 30 new words. Our Hebrew teacher has a way of telling us stories about the language that makes it come alive. I was terrified of Hebrew before I got to school, and while it's still difficult it's also beautiful. We spent about half of the class reading from Genesis in Hebrew. Now, we could give you the gist, but we don't know what individual words mean, at this point it's just reading and listening. Getting your ears used to hearing the Hebrew and your mouth used to saying it. A few weeks into the semester Carson had us sing a verse from the Psalms in Hebrew, it was probably the coolest moment I've had in seminary. Hearing the language, the language that thousands upon thousands of people have read and sung before me, the connection to the greater world of faith was tangible. Today's experience was just as beautiful but very different. We were going over our vocab words and got to the word "Torah". Now, I imagine we're all familiar with the word, it is what the Jewish faith has as their holy book, we Christians call the Torah the Old Testament. Literally Torah means"law or The Law", this is where Carson makes the language dance. He was talking about how it doesn't mean the law like what you break when you get in trouble, it means the law as in 'the way home'. The things you do to find your way home. Home, naturally, being the Kingdom of Heaven. I know I'm not relating it well, you really have to just be there to absorb his passion for the language and translation and his love for it is just palpable.
Fast forward to 7ish tonight. For one of my classes I have to attend a church and teach some sort of lesson there. I'm going to be attending a lectionary* bible study and then teaching it for my class. So tonight I went and it was the first night and here is the first half of the passage we read (the second half not so important)

34 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35 One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:

36 "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

And I read this passage and immediately thought of Hebrew. And thought of the translation of Torah, and of The Law being the way home, and of the greatest law, the greatest commandment to be loving God, loving yourself and loving your neighbor. It really just hit me how that is the way home. Love is the way home.

update...i emailed something like this to my hebrew prof and here is part of what he replied

"Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law (Torah) of Christ." That is the way home or there is no way and there is no home.



*A lectionary is a book or listing that contains a collection of scripture readings appointed for worship on a given day or occasion. So we're studying the bible passages that will be used on Sunday for the sermon.

i heart david sedaris

“I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked."

- Author David Sedaris, on undecided voters in an article for the new yorker

ellen!

there are many, many, many reasons to love ellen degeneres. her talk show, the beautiful ring she gave portia, the fact that she dances on her show, she's funny, she wears fun shoes, and she makes lovely statements. recently sarah palin stated that she wanted to country to move towards a constitutional ban on gay marriage. and ellen had a little something to say about how she felt that people were all equal and should be equal and at the end she said this:

"people are gonna be who they're gonna be and we need to learn to love them for who they are and let them love who they're gonna love. there. that's that"

to which i say, amen ellen. that everyone could embrace this philosophy and see that the love between consenting adults isn't hurting our community, it's the hate that hurts the community.

new room setup

ok, i think i'm done moving furniture for a while. things are a way i think i like them. a chair might move a little bit, but for the most part, this is how it will stay...

saturday fun

so this morning elizabeth and i went and stood in the 50 degree cloudy weather (i thought it was lovely, she was freezing) for a couple of hours and got our FREE dave matthews and tim reynolds tickets!! i'm so excited! i've never seen dave and tim play before! and it's for free!!!!!! after that i went and got the next pieces for my halloween costume. i might need two more pieces, but i'm not sure. i'll post pictures when i get the whole thing together. now i'm organizing my room and going to hit up the gym during the second half of the psu game. it's on espn which i don't get up here in my room, but they usually have on at the gym. ok. back to the organizing. hope you're all having a lovely weekend!
r

oh here are the words to a lyle lovett song that dave and tim play sometimes that i LOVE

If I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

If I were Roy Rogers
I'd sure enough be single
I couldn't bring myself to marrying old Dale
It'd just be me and trigger
We'd go riding through them movies
Then we'd buy a boat and on the sea we'd sail

And if I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

The mystery masked man was smart
He got himself a Tonto
'Cause Tonto did the dirty work for free
But Tonto he was smarter
And one day said kemo sabe
Kiss my ass I bought a boat
I'm going out to sea

And if I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

And if I were like lightning
I wouldn't need no sneakers
I'd come and go wherever I would please
And I'd scare 'em by the shade tree
And I'd scare 'em by the light pole
But I would not scare my pony on my boat out on the sea

And if I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

Wapo endorses Obama

the washington post endorses obama!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603436.html

Dave and Tim!

wahoo! so if you live in virginia and i just don't know it yet don't miss your chance to go to the FREE Dave and Tim concert for Obama/Biden! i'll be waiting for tickets tomorrow morning with my fingers crossed.

Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds at
Virginia Commonwealth University

Last Chance for Change

A very special acoustic evening with Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds

ALLTEL Pavilion at the Stuart C. Siegel Center
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA

Sunday, October 26, 2008
Media access: 5:30 p.m.
Doors open: 6:00 p.m.
Show starts: 7:00 p.m.

The event is free and open to all Virginia residents and students. Two free tickets per person are available on a first-come, first-served basis at the locations listed below.

Ticket Locations

***Tickets are available starting at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, October 18. Campaign for Change offices are open from 9:00am to 9:00pm daily.***

Richmond Campaign for Change Office
1208 West Marshall Street
Richmond, VA 23220

taking a break

hello my friends! it is fall break here at union-psce and my hebrew teacher told us that our assignment for fall break was "to rest" to take a break and rest up. so i have four days of resting :O) i'm going to update the blog with some actual content (!) and take some pictures around campus and put them up. oh and cleaning organiazing, maybe do some laundry, play my guitar, go to the gym, read my oprah magazine, take some naps. oh i'm so excited! also on saturday i'm going out to the church i'm writing a paper on for their celtic festival. should be a good break!
last night a bunch of us went to cafe gutenberg, they have 'wine away the wednesday' where you can get half price glasses of wine! so i had a glass of organic spanish rose and a warm chocolate croissant. (i'd just come from 50 minutes of intense cardio at the gym. i treated myself) it was super fun. it's a really cute place and it was a great beginning to our break. this is another picture from west virginia. i got a little obsessed with the spiderwebs and the dew. my friend lucy said that it was a very halloween type picture, so here ya go :O) happy thursday everyone!

hello!

i had a fantastic weekend in wv with some friends from my old job. we hung out, cooked together, watched the deer run across the yard, stared at pretty trees and just had a great time. i even managed to get 2 of my 3 history midterm questions done! oh AND my teaching ministry paper! wahoo! so i'm off to finish my last midterm question : "write an essay in which you discuss augustine's views on the interaction of divine grace and human agency in the accomplishment of human salvation as you find these views expressed in the reading." yeah. sigh. so here are my 3 of my pictures from this weekend. enjoy "The Nature" we called it :O)

hola

hello there friends! i hope you all had a lovely week. here it was ok, it's midterm time so i'm pretty stressed out. and i only have one midterm. i have to write three 600 word essays for history, and i have to turn in a rough draft of a huge paper for another class. oh and not forget any hebrew. i'm off to west virginia to hang out with some friends from my old job this weekend, sadly all the aforementioned work is coming with me, but i know we'll still have fun, even if i have to do some schoolwork. maybe i can teach them hebrew :O) so have a great weekend everyone! we have fall break at the end of next week so i'll finish rearranging my room and put up a few new pictures then. hope you're all doing well! hugs.r

the candidates on sacrifice

from the debate tuesday night, it's long, but i think a good representation of what each candidate stands for:

Brokaw: All right, gentlemen, I want to just remind you one more time about time. We're going to have a larger deficit than the federal government does if we don't get this under control here before too long. Sen. McCain, for you, we have our first question from the Internet tonight. A child of the Depression, 78-year-old Fiorra from Chicago: Since World War II, we have never been asked to sacrifice anything to help our country, except the blood of our heroic men and women. As president, what sacrifices -- sacrifices will you ask every American to make to help restore the American dream and to get out of the economic morass that we're now in?

McCain: Well, Fiorra, I'm going to ask the American people to understand that there are some programs that we may have to eliminate.

I first proposed a long time ago that we would have to examine every agency and every bureaucracy of government. And we're going to have to eliminate those that aren't working. I know a lot of them that aren't working. One of them is in defense spending, because I've taken on some of the defense contractors. I saved the taxpayers $6.8 billion in a deal for an Air Force tanker that was done in a corrupt fashion. I believe that we have to eliminate the earmarks. And sometimes those projects, not -- not the overhead projector that Sen. Obama asked for, but some of them that are really good projects, will have -- will have to be eliminated, as well. And they'll have to undergo the same scrutiny that all projects should in competition with others.

So we're going to have to tell the American people that spending is going to have to be cut in America. And I recommend a spending freeze that -- except for defense, Veterans Affairs, and some other vital programs, we'll just have to have across-the-board freeze.

And some of those programs may not grow as much as we would like for them to, but we can establish priorities with full transparency, with full knowledge of the American people, and full consultation, not done behind closed doors and shoving earmarks in the middle of the night into programs that we don't even -- sometimes we don't even know about until months later.

And, by the way, I want to go back a second. Look, we can attack health care and energy at the same time. We're not -- we're not -- we're not rifle shots here. We are Americans. We can, with the participation of all Americans, work together and solve these problems together. Frankly, I'm not going to tell that person without health insurance that, "I'm sorry, you'll have to wait." I'm going to tell you Americans we'll get to work right away, and we'll get to work together, and we can get them all done, because that's what America has been doing.

Brokaw: Sen. McCain, thank you very much. Sen. Obama?

Obama: You know, a lot of you remember the tragedy of 9/11 and where you were on that day and, you know, how all of the country was ready to come together and make enormous changes to make us not only safer, but to make us a better country and a more unified country.

And President Bush did some smart things at the outset, but one of the opportunities that was missed was, when he spoke to the American people, he said, "Go out and shop." That wasn't the kind of call to service that I think the American people were looking for. And so it's important to understand that the -- I think the American people are hungry for the kind of leadership that is going to tackle these problems not just in government, but outside of government.

And let's take the example of energy, which we already spoke about. There is going to be the need for each and every one of us to start thinking about how we use energy. I believe in the need for increased oil production. We're going to have to explore new ways to get more oil, and that includes offshore drilling. It includes telling the oil companies, that currently have 68 million acres that they're not using, that either you use them or you lose them. We're going to have to develop clean coal technology and safe ways to store nuclear energy.

But each and every one of us can start thinking about how can we save energy in our homes, in our buildings. And one of the things I want to do is make sure that we're providing incentives so that you can buy a fuel efficient car that's made right here in the United States of America, not in Japan or South Korea, making sure that you are able to weatherize your home or make your business more fuel efficient. And that's going to require effort from each and every one of us.

And the last point I just want to make. I think the young people of America are especially interested in how they can serve, and that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in doubling the Peace Corps, making sure that we are creating a volunteer corps all across this country that can be involved in their community, involved in military service, so that military families and our troops are not the only ones bearing the burden of renewing America.

That's something that all of us have to be involved with and that requires some leadership from Washington.

debate anyone?

so did you watch? what did you think? is there anyone who reads the blog who is honestly undecided? i (duh) am not undecided.i really really really want obama to win. there are certain issues that i cannot compromise on, it makes it really easy for me to pick a candidate. you don't support roe v wade? you won't agree to get our troops home soon? you want to drill baby drill even though we won't see a drop of it for 10 years? you vote against alternative energy? you want to change our constitution to discriminate against our citizens? i will not vote for you. it's really as easy as about one or two of those things, but they're things that are all important to me. now i'm sure if i looked more carefully at some things i'd probably not vote democratic, i'd probably be more likely to vote libertarian or green party, but for me the only two viable options for a presidentail election are democrat or republican. i have friends and family who are "socially liberal but fiscally conservative". i understand that thought, but i do not EVER find a point where my fiscal conservativeness outweighs my social liberalism. so thoughts? i found my self irritated with mccain (just fyi john, WE are not friends, no matter how many times you say 'my friends') and with obama at times, but for the most part i was irritated by the usual crap, not answering questions with a straight answer, attacking each other for half truths, pulling out records that may or may not really show their opinions. i always am annoyed that mccain (to me) seems to have a snobbish attitude toward obama, seems to see him as uppity and presumptuous. as a recipient of age discrimination (being too young to do my job) i identify with that.sigh. the debate exhausts me. time for bed so that i can be uber productive tomorrow. hope you're all having a lovely week!
r

call me al.

don't forget, second presidential debate tomorrow evening!

Al Gore, August 28, 2008:

Eight years ago, some said there was not much difference between the nominees of the two major parties and it didn’t really matter who became president. Our nation was enjoying peace and prosperity, and some assumed we would continue with both, no matter the outcome. But here we all are in 2008, and I doubt anyone would argue now that election didn’t matter.

Take it from me, if it had ended differently, we would not be bogged down in Iraq, we would have pursued bin Laden until we captured him. We wouldn’t be facing a self-inflicted economic crisis; we’d be fighting for middle-income families. We would not be showing contempt for the Constitution; we’d be protecting the rights of every American regardless of race, religion, disability, gender or sexual orientation. And we would not be denying the climate crisis; we’d be solving the climate crisis.

Today, we face essentially the same choice we faced in 2000, though it may be even more obvious now, because John McCain, a man who has earned our respect on many levels, is now openly endorsing the policies of the Bush-Cheney White House and promising to actually continue them. The same policies, those policies? All over again?

Hey, I believe in recycling, but that’s ridiculous.