It’s the last day of finals week here at UMM, and lucky me, I have two exams scheduled back-to-back today…so I’m about to go into the classroom and proctor away (the most boring task in all of teaching), and I don’t emerge again until at least 3:30. But then the semester is done!
Except for the grading.
The awful, horrible, daunting stacks of papers that must all be graded before I can live again.
If you don’t see me again, it means the grues got me.
This will be an anxious week. It’s the last week of classes, I have piles of stuff to finish grading and get back to the students, and the students themselves are looking more than a little stressed. The last labs in my development course are falling apart thanks to animal intransigence and the incompetence of shippers. We have two job candidates visiting this week, and I’m on the search committee. And the end of my book writing project is in sight, with just the last little bits of polish and duct tape needed to make it all hang together. As usual, the universe has converged on this one little moment of time to maximize my personal tension.
So expect long periods of silence here, punctuated by brief eruptions of tooth-grindiness and fury. Trolls, lie low if persistence is a goal. Outbreaks of drama in the threads will be met with a combination of neglect and exasperation (oh, so nothing will change there, at least). Goats may spontaneously combust.
I am seriously looking forward to finals week when my tasks will be reduced to administering the last few bits of classes that got off to a bad start, and nothing else. But first I have to make it through this one.
You probably already heard that Christie Wilcox won the $10K blogging scholarship — I helped by plugging her most excellent blog as a worthy entry.
Now she has very nicely returned the favor by sending me a large care package from Hawaii with many tropical delectables. Unfortunately, some of them, like the boxes of chocolates, are not on my diet, so I can’t eat them…but there’s something else I can do, and that is offer them to any of my students who drop by during my office hours today, from 9-10 and 11:30-2. What a deal: bug the prof, get a piece of candy.
And thank you, Christie!
At last, I am safely home after an excessively long and annoying trip back from Skepticon. One of the pleasures of these trips, at least, is meeting ferocious Pharyngulistas who are otherwise just fierce pseudonyms on a page, and who usually turn out to be fun and interesting human beings. Here’s one nice photo of some familiar people:
From left to right, that’s:
Mattir, Tone of Death
cicely, Death’s Imaginary Friend
Reality Enforcer, Spawn of Death
The Floating Cheerful Head of PZ
Blake Stacey
KOPD, Death’s Chia Pet supplier
Jules, Bride of Death
Rey Fox, He who has nothing to do with Death
Now it’s almost noon here, and I’ve got a frantic quantity of work to catch up on, and a whole long evening of administrative duties.
Jebus, it’s only the first night. Rebecca Watson, Bailey’s, Amanda Marcotte, Red Stag, Vic Stenger, some random ale. I seem to have outlasted everyone else tonight, but I can’t keep this up the next couple of nights.
This. Is. SKEPTICON.
I confess. It was pretty funny watching Vic Stenger trying to stagger out of the party room. And it was a wild conversation about the role of chance in physics and biology. You ought to be here.
I think I better curl up and get some sleep now. Let’s see when I regain consciousness tomorrow. I might have to stand toe-to-toe with Richard Carrier and Rebecca Watson tomorrow night, and that will be rough.
So, yay, my plane arrived safely in Minneapolis last night at 1am, and then we had to drive to Morris for three hours, in the snow. Guess how much sleep I got last night? And now I have to scurry off to teach a class about something or other, I don’t know what. I’ve spent the last few hazy hours getting ready to teach.
You don’t really expect a new post here yet, do you? I haven’t even bothered with breakfast yet.
Later.
Yesterday, among many other wanderings around Mexico City, I made a pilgrimage to the Lady of Guadalupe, the sacred Catholic heart of Mexico. It was not what I expected.
We left the subway station to join a trudging, milling mob on a hike to the basilica, which wended its way through a narrow tunnel lined with ramshackle booths where people tried to sell us all kinds of iconographic kitsch. That, I expected.
The surprise came when a horde dressed as Aztecs, half-naked with giant elaborate feathered headdresses, painted or wearing fierce masks of skulls or leopards, came charging through, forcing everyone to move off to the side to allow them to pass. They were chanting and pounding drums and waving censers about, so the whole group was wreathed in a fog of incense.
When we finally got to the plaza in front of the three basilicas (an original one, a later, larger one, and the newest, which is a huge modern building designed to accommodate the crowds), it was filled with Aztecs dancing, and all you could hear were these loud, throbbing drums. I captured a few minutes of my struggle through the mob of pilgrims, surrounded by circular spaces taken over by whirling Aztec dancers; the sound capabilities of my recorder were overwhelmed by the noise, so the roaring you hear below is the sound of the drums. You’ll just have to imagine this rhythmic cacaophony that you could feel vibrating up through your bones.
The modern basilic itself is completely open along the sides facing the plaza, so we had the pleasure of hearing a loudly amplified Catholic mass with pagan drums pounding throughout. And yes, you could see Aztec headdresses scattered throughout the crowd.
In the smaller, oldest church, they also carry out the Mass, and here’s a mother and child in Mexican Catholic formal wear, on their knees. We saw several other people making a slow crawl across the plaza on their knees, including a couple of young children with their parents hovering about (on their feet, though), as the kids made the painful trudge. I guess it makes your prayers more potent if you do them on bleeding knees.
The syncretism is fascinating, and so far Mexico has been a delight, rich in character and history, and I’ve got to come back and spend more time here. But that religion is so fluid and flexible and complex doesn’t make it right, and the obsessive, fanatical weirdness of this unique version of Catholicism is the product of its unfamiliarity; if you step back and look at it with eyes unfilmed by tradition, every religious ceremony looks this bizarre, and every religion thrives on hope built on despair…and some try to maximize the suffering to reinforce devotion. At least the modern Aztecs draw the line before raising obsidian knives and chopping out hearts nowadays; they seemed to be having more fun than the bloody kneed Catholics.
I’m going to be in Springfield, Missouri next weekend. The weirdness bar has been raised pretty high right now, and the Assemblies of God are looking rather drab and colorless in comparison.
I have arrived after a long, long series of flights, and have already experienced wonderful Mexican hospitality and Negro Modelo, many thanks to the gang from Masa Critica, so all is right in the world. It’s not too late to show up, you can register at the door, just come on out to the Hotel Fiesta Inn Centro Histórico and join us at 8 tomorrow morning for Primer Coloquio Mexicano de Ateísmo. There will be live internet streaming of some of the talks, so let’s hope more of the Spanish-speaking world takes advantage of this event, too.
La fe NO mueve montañas, la ciencia sí!
And I’ll be meeting some of them tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll see a few people from Ateísmo desde México at Coloquio Mexicano de Ateísmo, and more…I actually get to spend a few days in Mexico City. I hope they’ll forgive the fact that I don’t have a lick of Spanish, which is a bit embarrassing nowadays…I should probably sign up for a few classes here at UMM sometime.
It’s not too late to get yourself to the big city for a great meeting.
Oh, and look: there’s a poll! I can guess what it’s saying.
Vas a asistir al Coloquio: ¿Cómo te identificas?
Librepensador(a)
17%
Creyente
4%
Deista
2%
Panteista
1%
Raeliano(a), Cientólogo(a), New Age…
6%
Agnóstico(a)
13%
Ateo(a)
58%
I have no idea who you are, but I know your wife likes you enough to go around asking strange men to give you birthday greetings, so you must be doing something right.
