10.30.14
2:29pm—The university orientation began 29 minutes ago and I
decided to stay at my desk, twiddle my thumbs, spin a few pencils and write
right here. How was your week, then,
sir?
Tomorrow it’s a border crossing we go, a night at the Hilton
and an evening of music at the sand course.
It was at the sand course on 9/11/01 I saw the second tower go
down. Mike Douglas from Gary Indiana and
I had just finished a round of nine and we sat in the empty lounge, save for
two Irish folks, one tending bar, a black and white television had been rolled
out and we watched a scratchy Omani station feed of a reporter on ABC
describing what had happened earlier when the second plane crashed.
This morning we learned one of our students jumped out of a
window at the hostel. Suicide isn’t very
common here. Last night before I gave my
class their weekly quiz, I was reviewing questions for their speaking
assessment next week and this girl pleaded with me to let her go, I don’t know
what the problem was, but I said of course, get out of here, but could you take
this quiz first? She got a 16 out of 20
so I don’t know if it was her who jumped.
God be with her.
I have learned about a university in Belgium that offers an
MA in theological studies for an incredibly low price. I know you’ve talked about going back to
school in the states to study the business of selling photos and the
business of improving your writing, but a school of theology? I was a bit awed to learn the school, in a
city called Leuwen, east of Brussels, once had Erasmus as a lecturer. The father of Christian humanism. What is it
you’d like to accomplish if you were to go there? I would have to explain and persuade and
justify to a publisher the significance of reshuffling and printing a new new
testament. Do you need to back to school
to do that? Only in a university would I have the network of people for and against me and only
in a university would I find the motivation to push myself to produce such a historically
21st century revision of the ancient texts. Mind you, I wouldn’t be removing a single jot and
tittle from the texts. There is nothing heretical about taking all
of Paul’s letters and putting them after Revelation. Of course such a move would need a preface
and a title to the revision would need to explain such a shift. Could I call it, “The Commentaries of St.
Paul, the 13th Apostle” with little controversy? How about “The Sacred Commentaries of St.
Paul, the 13th Apostle”?
Every day I am here I tell myself there is no way I am going
to stay another year. My life in the
desert has been mostly even, a few downs and ups, but I am tired and feel a
need to socialize a little more. I had a
nice chat with a Korean instructor in the cafeteria. Chou
(?) I’ve already forgotten his name, was a CPA in San Jose for eight years and
now he’s been here for four, his wife is home schooling his two young children
because the elementary schools are not designed for anyone in particular. And we shared our love of baseball. It was nice to talk about baseball again and
we took our hats off to the Giants by the Bay, that is something else, isn’t
it Chou? Or is it Orchou?
An Omani colleague comes in.
I don’t feel too bad about not attending the orientation. Two other dissenters talk about what is the
worst beer and they shift to Korean beers.
The label free green bottle pints in Tianjin were pretty good if I remember
correctly.
So, anything else?
The short week was good. Reading
QB VII in the morning was hard to put down.
Students gave me descriptive paragraphs of their home, one said she has a deep
freezer in her bedroom. This kind of
writing is great and I can’t ignore it so I asked the woman what she keeps in
the deep freezer in her bedroom, a dozen chickens, a couple of mutton, a
disgruntled maid, I don’t know but she thought it was pretty funny. On Monday we were discussing the use of ‘wish’
and its subjunctive mood relevance and one student sitting in the front said “I
wish I weren’t a student.” Of course I
can’t leave that alone: so, Aysha, what
do you want to do? Do you want to work
in Lulus? This is a supermarket chain in
almost every Arabic speaking country, and it’s the place to go, but she thought
my suggestion of being a cashier or a bagger was quite funny and we know how
contagious laughter is for soon everyone was laughing with or at the girl who
didn’t want to be a student. What do you
want to do if you don’t want to be a student, Aysha? She didn’t know so I told her she could be
the best cashier in the world if she didn’t want to be a student and they all
just laughed together like that was the craziest idea they’d ever heard.
what to do.
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