join the meredith grey haters club

Meredith Grey, of the TV show Grey's Anatomy, is so terrible it is beyond words. How can she be so bad to George? George is the best; she doesn't deserve him! I guess the only good thing that comes of her being so horrible to George is that now he can move on, that it looks like he'll get together with the nice new doctor, Callie Torres, and that he finally cut his hair!

Maybe I'll try to ignore Meredith and join the George fan club. Yea for T.R. Knight!

aaaaaaah, . . . pecan pralines

Our church, (Druid Hills United Methodist Church), is having fourth-Sunday-lunch tomorrow themed around New Orleans (Mardi Gras, remembering Katrina evacuees and issues). People are making all sorts of Cajun foods. I am making my usual corn casserole, but I also decided I would try a new recipe for pecan pralines, "tout de suite pecan pralines." Tout de suite means immediately for you non-frenchies out there. It is a microwave recipe from Lane, a fellow Candlerite of Peter's who is interning at our church. I've made Paula Deen pralines before, but I thought I should try these out for tomorrow. The recipe I made (I tripled it) had 6 cups of sugar in it. mmm good. It was very sticky, I made a huge mess, and licking the bowl and eating as many as I could talk myself into eating, I have such a sugar high. I almost can't type this! Wheeeee. I bet I'll be sick later. I wonder if it will be worth it. aaaaah, pralines. I miss New Orleans.

announcing pet peeves

Lacking Will Heath's idea of muting announcers during athletic events, I've decided to just enjoy making fun of the announcers that make stupid statements. From women's ice skating tonight, we got such gems as "that was a lady skating." Although that one was kind of funny, the highlight of the evening was the "I take this way more seriously than I should" comments by the announcers following Sasha Cohen's program. "Other skaters skate to Romeo and Juliet. Sasha Cohen is Juliet." I laughed at her "being Juliet." Amanda's response was "what, does she have a knife so she can stab herself in the chest?" She has since pointed out that, although it's a lame metaphor, it is an actual metaphor that makes some amount of sense, as opposed to the typical football announcer fare that makes absolutely no sense or is simply wrong.

In other news, Tom Long has the most amazing voice ever. We were sitting in class today, and the presenters had sections of class read different sections of the passage. Dr. Long was on the other side of the room from me, a row in front of me, talking along with 10 other people, and I still heard him distinctly from everyone else and extremely clearly. If you've never heard him talk, you probably think I'm just insane, but the dude has a phenomenal voice.

I had a conversation with Dr. Long last Thursday that helps me claim that I have more random conversations with people chosen as "The Most Effective Preachers in the English Speaking world" than anyone else. I've talked with Bishop Willimon about the whore of Babylon among other things in the past. Thursday, I had a conversation with Dr. Long about Desperate Housewives. In discussing one classmate's sermon, Dr. Long was talking about everyday applications of the concept. "How would this play out on main street, or wisteria lane?" Carolyn replied that "she didn't really know about Wisteria Lane, but I could fill him in." I knew I shouldn't have told her to come the time I preached a sermon using the Desperate Housewives as the primary examples. Now it comes back and bites me in the butt. So now I'm up to 1/6th of the people on this list. Now I'll just have to meet some more and see what random stuff I talk about with them.

uncertainty

I guess the theme for this semester is "uncertainty." We don't know where we'll be going, we don't know exactly what we'll be doing, and we don't know exactly how we're going to handle the transition to being the preacher and preacher's wife. I guess this sort of uncertainty is just part of the process of moving into the "adult world," but it's still kind of scary. From what I've heard, there'll be three "rounds of appointments" in mid-March, early April, and late April. In each of these, I'll get an idea as to one possibility of a place that I could go. It could be the same place through all three rounds, or it could be a different one all three times. I'm kind of looking forward just to get some idea, since then I'll at least have something to focus on. It's just kind of hard knowing that things are completely out of my hands.

What I should focus on is my thesis, which is due to Dr. Runyon and Dr. Erskine a week from today. I've currently got 37 pages, and it's got to be at least 50. I've got a lot of information, but I need to shape it into an actual argument. Hopefully, I'll be able to pull that off in time to not be too stressed out.

NASCAR: the grown up wrasslin'?

So, I watched the Daytona 500 today with Amanda and her parents. It's the first time I've watched a full NASCAR race, and I made a realization: Tony Stewart's a prick. I think NASCAR's trying to pull the same kind of bad guy / good guy stuff that pro wrestling pulls. Like the bad guy that's a complete jerk to everyone, yet gets all the benefits from the organization? That's pretty much Tony Stewart. Dude was clearly on a mission to screw over multiple people, which is bizarre since he won the points championship last year. There were something like 6 wrecks, and Tony Stewart was responsible for at least half of them. He took out Jeff Gordan pretty quickly, then he moved on to Matt Kenseth, then he ran someone else into the grass (I can't remember right now who). And yet, Kenseth got punished more for "not responding quickly enough" when NASCAR told him to calm down after he found out they were basically penalizing Stewart something like .5 a lap, whereas Kenseth had just been knocked out of contention for the day.

Anyway, that's my NASCAR theory - they're trying to become like pro wrestling. I didn't watch wrestling for long enough to be able to make a good analogy, but I think it's there. Anyone who has feel free to comment.

By the way, congrats to George O'Malley of Grey's Anatomy. He'll likely not end up with Meredith, but he got his groove on and said what he'd been trying to say forever. As someone who was always uncomfortable expressing myself to folks I had a crush on (or, rather, I never did until college), I'm happy for ole' George. Good for you.

hello february

Well, it's clearly been a while since I've posted last. Been going to class, trying to eat healthier and exercise more, and actually being somewhat prepared for school, which is kind of bizarre. Me doing reading is probably just compensating for not having done as much on my thesis as I should (since the whole thing's supposed to be ready to give to my advisor on March 1, and let's just say he'd get about 30 pages of random thoughts rather than 60 pages of sustained argument at the moment).

In other news, I got to vote for the first time at the Special Session of the Annual Conference, so that was kind of cool. I was glad that we shrunk the number of districts, since that seems like that'll be a good thing. It's been interesting to see things changing in the conference, and I'm sure that there'll be more changes as things progress. It was kind of funny when people kept getting up and asking about the composition of the "transition team" with questions like "do we have any young people?" "do we have any local pastors?" "do we have any ethnic people?" (to which I responded "I believe everybody up there has an ethnicity, even if it is mainly white). One of my ministerial role models proposed standing up and saying "do we have any gay people?" I would have paid good money to see the look on everyone's face if he'd done that.

I'm working on a letter to my D.S. to tell him about what sort of church I might like and how I'd describe myself as a future minister. It's kind of bizarre, since most of the time I have no clue what I'd like to do or where I'd be most called. I guess God'll be answering those kinds of questions in the coming months. I'm sure it'll be interesting.