Back From Forced Exile

So, I wasn't able to get to the LiveJournal site for about a week. That pissed me off, because it's been a pretty good week, and a rather eventful one at that.

I don't remember anything big happening last Tuesday or Wednesday, other than I felt much better and Tuesday I started feeling actually happy and not in a crazy way. Wednesday we were supposed to have an MRC meeting but it was cancelled because a lot of people had plans for Valentine's Day. Thursday was fun. I skipped Logic lecture for the second time that week. I hung out and did homework in the MRC instead. Later that night I read a chapter of Bio and finished just in time for the Steele Study Break, which happened to be on the other side of the floor. It was pretty interesting. It was a bit awkward for me, because I don't really know that many people in the Steeles other than my dormies and a few other people, most of whom weren't there. It was amusing, though, because the HA on that side of the floor, Darrow, was wearing this bright pink thrift store dress. He had promised cross-dressing... I got a chance to talk to him, and he's a pretty cool person. I'd seen him around campus, seemed nice, and it turns out he is. Talks a lot, but not in an annoying way.

Friday was...long. As my Fridays usually are. I tried to write my Hum paper that night, and I did get started, but I didn't finish it. I went to bed around one o'clock and got up at eight-thirty Saturday morning to finish it. So, I had most of the day Saturday to goof off.

Saturday was a very good day. After the morning especially. Actually the morning itself wasn't so great. I was working on my Hum paper, but then I got a little stuck so I decided to finish editing the articles for the Quest, which I had to do anyway because I get paid for it. So, I'm in the middle of editing articles when I come across this letter. I start reading it, and it's talking about how the MRC is intolerant and anti-Christian simply because we hadn't actually made a decision as a group to co-sponsor John Perkins with the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, henceforth referred to as IV. There was a lot of misinformation in the letter, and it was also very accusatory. And it made conclusions based on the misinformation mentioned in the letter that were wrong and not exactly relevant. I was first shocked, then upset, and then surprised. At our MRC meeting two weeks before, two student members of IV had come to the meeting and at the end of it brought up the possibility of the MRC co-sponsoring John Perkins' appearance here. We ended that meeting by deciding that we would discuss it the next week, because a lot of people had already left the meeting, which had been very long, and we didn't feel we had enough information on which to make a decision. Plus, we wanted it to be a group decision. Several of us had informal discussions about it here and there, but nothing like a group decision. We ultimately decided that, since we hadn't talked about it, we would not be a co-sponsor. So then Saturday morning I come across this letter talking about this, and after the initial shock and anger, it turns out that the authors of the letter were not the people who had been talking with the MRC. They weren't even Reed students. It was the two IV staff members who had written it. They had never talked about anything with us, much less our reasons for not co-sponsoring the John Perkins event. So they wrote this letter with no real information and pretty much bashed and insulted us, accusing the members of the MRC of being anti-Christian. I myself do not have that attitude, nor have I ever observed any evidence of such an attitude coming from any other member of the MRC. I'm still angry about this, even though the IV staff members have now talked to us about it (after the fact) and did apologize at tonight's MRC meeting. But I find that apology hard to accept. Can we say Honor Principle violation?! The Honor Principle states that "a commitment to responsible and honorable conduct means that the members of the community should behave in a way that does not cause unnecessary embarassment, discomfort, or injury to other individuals or to the community as a whole." The IV has stated that they want to partner with the MRC, work with us. And yet when they don't get their way once, they react by sending an insulting letter to the Quest. It takes a lot of forgiveness to be able for both parties to work together after something like that. As a result of that letter, there are people in the Reed community that are very angry at the MRC, without having real reason to, because that letter is erroneous, to say the least. And I know that it has made many members of the MRC uncomfortable, probably all of us. It all just smacks of "unnecessary embarassment, discomfort, or injury to other individuals or to the community as a whole." It's all of that. It was unnecessary, it was an embarassment, it caused discomfort, and it was injurious, and it was for individuals, and, the community. It was completely inappropriate to complain so ignorantly and so publicly. The MRC is going to write a joint letter with IV to clear all this up. We'll write it tomorrow.

But anyway, back to Saturday. After finishing my copy editing and resisting the urge to immediately e-mail the MRC signators about the letter and thus beginning to obsess about my anger, I finished my Hum paper. I then had the rest of the day free of work, as I had planned. I went to the Reed basketball game, because it was the last of the season, and it was against Reed's major rival, Eugene Bible College. Reed won. There was to be a party thrown by the basketball team later that night, but I never made it over there. There was so much going on Saturday night. There was the basketball party, the Masquerade Ball that was part of Reed Arts Weekend, a party on Steele East II, a cocktail party on Steele West I, and the wine & cheese party on my floor. I stayed at the party on my floor the whole time. It was quite fun. I realized that I probably shouldn't drink four glasses of wine inside an hour. We put a bar of Ivory Soap in the microwave to see what would happen. It expands and takes on a foamy appearance, by the way. Also, it wasn't a typical Reed party, which features a whole lot of people just getting drunk and embarassing themselves and sticking together with just people they know. But at our party, we had several of our dormies and people from outside of our dorm who were friends of someone from the dorm, all sitting in a big circle around the social room, all talking together. For a while at the beginning there were separate conversations, and people hovering near the food table eating and talking. But when we had had our fill of focaccia, tortillas, cheese, and chocolate fondue, we all talked together. I ended up going to bed at about three, and I don't think I slept terribly well because I was either too hot or too cold. No relief. I was too hot even with just the bedsheet and no comforter. I then got up at ten in the morning. So, I got less sleep this weekend than normal, because Sunday I probably went to bed at two or something, as usual, and got up at nine-thirty or something. So I'm kind of tired this week. Reminds me of high school, particularly the last two years when I was tired all the damn time. But I've also been on this getting all my work done kick. That kind of broke down today, but I had other issues to deal with. I did do a lot of work on Sunday, though. I read a whole lot, and I worked on my Logic problem set. I started at about eleven-thirty at night, worked on it for about an hour, making truth tables and going crazy. After that hour, I took a break by hanging out in Jean's room and watching Darrow smack himself in the knees with half of a broken ThighMaster. You don't know how amusing that is when you're a little mentally fried from writing out way to many truth tables and thinking of T's and F's and not much else.

Monday I had orchestra rehearsal. It was not a good one, really. In the second half, we worked on the Faure Requiem, particularly the part that has a whole lot of melody for the viola which is, for some crack-inspired reason, written in treble clef in random places. There are places where there are ledger lines underneath on the treble clef staff. There is absolutely no reason for doing that for viola. And I can't read treble clef very well, and I hadn't been practicing, so I couldn't play it very well, and David wasn't too happy, and I felt like such a fuck-up. I did practice Tuesday, though, and before I went to practice I went through the treble clef parts, figuring out what the notes were and writing things down to remind me. I can now play that melody. Also on Monday I had several random conversations with a bunch of people that I either don't know very well or don't particularly like. And I managed to avoid agreeing to work with Robin on the logic problem set. I did work on that with other people, though, but they were good people. And I just had to mosey on over to the social room on the other side of my floor. I didn't finish it that night, though. I got up the next morning to skip Bio lecture in favor of doing those last four questions, which were proofs. Grr. But proofs in logic aren't quite like proofs in math. They're easier for me to handle.

Tuesday seems like it was uneventful, now that I think of it. I had been planning to go over to Schuback's to have my good bow rehaired, but that didn't happen. I did go to the bookstore with Meg and Kate. I discovered that they have old Freshman Funnies there, and the first one I picked up happened to be from the freshman year of most of my friends who are not currently freshmen, i.e. the juniors I know. Or in one case, would be a junior had she not had to take medical leave her first year here.

Today, Wednesday (yeah, technically it's Thursday, but I don't think it's Thursday yet), was quite a day. It started with Hum conference, which was actually pretty good, for my conference. I actually got to speak. More than once, even. Then after Hum conference I went to the MRC to eat lunch and hang out for a while. I left around one to come back to my dorm for a bit, but I went back to the MRC at about two-thirty because I knew James (who oversees the MRC) would be meeting with the IV staff members, and I wanted to be there after a while. There were a couple other students who came in as well. That meeting ended at about three, and James and Patty (a student) and I stuck around talking about various things until about four, when we all had somewhere to go. I went to the intermediate Tai Chi class. That was some work. I've missed that class for about three weeks, so they had covered a lot of stuff since I last went. I picked it up pretty quickly, though. Dave was impressed. But, while I picked up the doing of the motions pretty quickly, I can't really remember the order, or some of the specifics. But that's okay. I have a list of all the motions, and if I actually go over it, that will help a lot. Then I went back to the MRC until it was time to have dinner and sort of talk about this week's lab report with Meg. Then I went to see John Perkins speak. I had planned to go anyway, but my actually going was contingent on how much work I had to do or had actually done. But after reading that letter, I decided that it was imperative for me to go as a member of the MRC. Several of us went, and we all sat together. It was kind of a weird presentation. It started off with a local pastor talking about something and using religion in his talk a lot. Then some of the choir members from his church sang a couple of songs. Both of those things were a surprise to me, because the impression that I had gotten was that it would be just John Perkins speaking. When IV approached MRC about it, they never mentioned these other things, nor were they mentioned in the advertising of the event, even though there was a pretty lenghty blurb in the Quest about it. But then John Perkins talked, and that was pretty cool. I just could not figure out what those other two parts of the program were about or why they were there. John Perkins talked mostly about racial reconciliation, and mentioned religion as either a side note or as something he had originally had reservations about. At the end, he took questions, and in answering the last, he was saying something about "you people have interest, all the while looking right at the row of MRC people. Then he said somehting odd about homosexuality issues being for the rich people to worry about. That was hard to understand. Right after that, we had another good MRC meeting. We tried to limit it to an hour and a half, but it went past the alotted time anyway, and then a bunch of us stuck around to work out a time to meet to write the letter to the Quest. Then once that was worked out, a few of us stuck around talking even longer, and finally left. But even when leaving, Eileen and I kept talking and then stood outside her dorm for a while until I finally decided that maybe I should actually go home. So I got home at about one o'clock. I've noticed that I've been spending a lot more time outside my room, and outside my dorm, even.

Well, I should go to bed now. I need to get up and finish my reading for music, because I've been sitting here writing for over an hour.