If I have to put on clothes one more time, I’m going to scream.

I laced up shoes, like, FOUR times yesterday. And I wore flip flops to work!

(went to the Y, in and out of the toddler room twice, getting out of the pool and getting ready in the first place)

What a waste of a day. Putting on SOCKS, SHOES, Zipping up pants, buckling them, buttoning up shirts. Aargh!

Some people hypothesize that the effects of the fall of man were that nakedness became the private domain. Being something of an exhibitionist, I’m not too fond of this explanation.

Others suggest that the fall introduced shame and clothes & nakedness are a good metaphor for this shame. Sure, I can go with them on the clothes part at least – certainly clothes are constantly making us feel inferior.

Some say that the fall alienated us from one another (and God) and that clothes are just an expression of that alienation (which is obviously linked to the other two). Right, right. I certainly feel alienated. Who doesn’t?

I’m thinking that a better explanation than all of these things would be that the punishing implication of the fall was not any of the theoretical domains above, but that we would be pushed by all of *these* sociological phenomena (shame, alienation, privacy) to have the very *embodied* punishment of lacing up corsets and tennis shoes and buttoning shirts and tying ties. All of which, notably are not extensions of these large scale human problems (sh, al, & pr) but are hybrids of their effects when mixed with the hubris of …

Dunh, dunh, dunh,

Fashion.

Aaargh.

(sorry, Elaine, I'll justify fashion in a different blog)

So, you may ask, are you, like, typing this blog while NAKED?!

Well I obviously can’t answer that question without changing the rating on the backburner….

(BTW, I am not now, nor ever have "into" wearing corsets -- I was just trying to describe a historical arc of falleness.)

Feeling free for now~

My student / friend Trena writes about art & meaning . read her tuesday august 26th blog.

My old friend Amy (who may not even remember that I exist on the planet, but I really like my parasocial relationship with her blog/media-self) writes about art and meaning too (her august 29th blog).

I post some updates (half - ready to be posted) about my art. And goshdarnit if the meaning would ever be allowed to emerge from that project (sitting in little tapes in a small room in the basement of the college library...waiting to be *transformed*.

But my new website "look" is up -- and half finished.

i'm going home to be with my family for a few hours before i return to the ugly world of tenure and promotion...

just got an email from my dear old friend erin (aileen anne) o'donnell (whinnery) -- though i'm pretty sure she doesn't parentheticalize those parts of her name....erin, i'm just trying to make you recognizable to all those from the good old days...

*if* there is anyone from the good old days reading.

*AND* if any of you are reading -- the point of this blog is to say -- YES. Lynn and I are trekking back to Cedarville for homecoming this year. It's an odd year to go for us -- but we're sure that we'll bump into all kinds of good friends...

Right?

Anyone else coming? Email us & say so!

(BTW ~ that "YES" was to Erin's as-yet-unidentified query about whether we would indeed be going to Cedarville for homecoming this year...)

1. did you read yesterday's blog? read it before proceeding.

2. water is by far my favorite element. i'm sure David will make fun of me for saying so...but I *am* a pisces & those underwater scenes in _Rushmore_, _The Graduate_ & _BottleRocket (& on...) move me. I *get* it. I do feel ancient longings for Atlantis....

3. This morning. After I got out of the shower (5 a.m.) -- I hear someone splashing around in a tub downstairs. Only there is no tub downstairs.

Water is pouring through the ceiling. Through every light fixture (and there are a bunch of them).

I fill two buckets by wringing towels into the buckets.

The water touching my skin keeps me from feeling distressed or stressed. I'm grateful that Lynn is sleeping still, as a Capricorn water has NO ability to calm her.

4. As I made coffee this morning at the office (something I do every morning), water splashed everywhere. The counter, the burner, the sink even the carpet.

Water is pouring out of my life. CLEARLY a portent of something to come? Any predictors? soothsayers among you?

The bathroom is done! Kudos Toby & Mark.

thinking about:

public parenting.

"testimony."

"Quality stamped all over it."

corporate "image."

mission statements.

bumper stickers.

strategic ambiguity.

the one and the many.

being rhetorical / being authentic.

- labor day weekend - watched the hours - the threat of the mundane -

celia bought a house, so i watched abby & noah while Lynn, Linda & Jeff helped strip floors, paint ceilings, etc...

we (the kids and i) had a good time. i introduced a new character to them -- a guy by the name of "Fester" -- who, for those of you from *back* in the day, must be related to "Herman." Everybody loved him. They loved the fact that I denied knowledge of his existence and that he only arrived when I left the room, but when Fester accidentally sprinkled water over their heads (he's a clumsy guy) -- Noah freaked. it became clear that Fester's presence and/or my schizophrenia about the whole thing had been nurturing a fabric of fear.

on the way back from celia's house I thought about blogging about feminism -- i've never heard celia use the word -- but lynn and she and i together mourned the cedarville torch that celebrated "God's Plan for Men and Women" and laid out the women's section in pink showing her carrying a laundry basket, pushing a vacuum and caring for kids -- while the men's blue section showed him returning from his white collar job and in another photo fixing the garage door opener.

when i woke up this morning i didn't feel as much like blogging that --

even though I thought that watching _the hours_ last night would make me feel that way. I do recommend the book with two thumbs up. I thought the movie was good, but not the kind of movie that I recommend to all audiences. If you're of the PBS / BBC / Merchant-Ivory persuasion, you should definitely see it.

but it didn't -- the movie didn't convince me to blog about feminism, that is. It convinced me to blog about something else. Which I'll return to in a moment after I go ahead and argue against that torch for a moment.

I've already set up this "issue" in my mass media class -- by suggesting that the traditional structure of the home whereby a woman stays at her home and cares for her children while the husband goes out to a job, works an eight hour day and returns home in the evening is more a product of the industrial revolution than it is of scripture.

(i know that i'm blogging to the choir for many of you)

But these pictures in the Torch just pointed up some of the most egregious "sins" at the cultural level of this system. That a woman's entire day be filled up with "invisible repeatable tasks" (care for the domestic sphere) and that that work be linked somehow to her (own personal and that of those around her's) evaluation of her ability to be "a good mother" -- seems ludicrous and wrong to me.

I do think that good parenting for mothers and fathers does include accessibility. And I'm happy to Prophecy against the cultural narrative that separates parents from children just to maintain a pattern of acquisition and consumption. That's *another* cultural metanarrative that I find myself resistant to -- the endless importance of consumption for purposes of identity formation and leisure pursuit.

But its fathers as much as mothers that need to be *present* in the lives of their children. AND the idea that a woman is responsible *only* for her own family seems another byproduct of this system that is deeply wrong. Women *need* (as much as and in the same way as a man needs) to cultivate their gifts and callings in contexts which allow them to impact some portion of the world.

Whence comes this rant?

Years and years and suburbs upon suburbs of people who use religion to prop up the traditional work-model of the nuclear family? yes, partly. the ongoing exhaustion and frustration of trying to shape a life where both parents make room within their jobs and careers for children WHILE also pushing both careers forward *but in a world with no models* and a world where there is little *systemic support / institutional support* for such choices? yes, partly. the fact that i just heard through the grapevine that one of my bright students, just starting her career is going to quit her new job because she unexpectedly got honeymoon pregnant? yes, partly (I didn't hear any discussion about what her husband would do with his job.) the fact that when i ask (some of) my friends if they've considered paternity leave once their babies are born they look at me like i must surely be joking...

BUt I decided not to blog about feminism, remember?

Because as I watched the hours and watched the torture that each woman felt their life to be -- just because it had been constrained in ways that they did not expect nor want --

I was again focused on how broken the whole world is. How disappointed everyone is. How much we want, and how little we have. How disconnected we all are from the people who mabye could meet us in a *real meeting* way.

I was moved by the way that, in the film, *touch* was the transcendent opportunity that everyone had.

I was thinking that we walk around in our worlds filled with invisible lepers and all of us have hands that heal just a little bit if we can bother to / find a way to / defy conventions of "appropriateness" by *touching* one another.

...but i'll have to leave off in the middle of the sentence because two toddlers are suddenly awake and feeling needy. ah the irony...

~peace.