Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Yes, today's my birthday, but I'm only now taking the time to begin to realize it.

It's not that I didn't know it was my birthday today, of course. If I'd somehow forgotten that fact, then my mother's uncharacteristic phone call to me this morning (she doesn't often call me, even now that she has unlimited long distance minutes on her cel phone -- old habits of thinking of long distance as expensive and only for emergencies die hard in all of us over 30) and her greeting of "Happy Birthday" would have clued me in.

It's just that -- apart from a brief panic attack last night (which was less brief than the panic attacks I've been getting every night lately) before falling asleep -- I haven't given myself time to think about it much.

For starters, the plumbing in my apartment complex got backed up over the holiday weekend, so that the running of my upstairs neighbors' dishwasher was causing filthy waste water to back up into my kitchen sinks, to the point of overflowing. I got them to stop their dishwasher and avoid putting any more water down their kitchen drains, please, before I had an actual flood on my hands, but two sinks and an empty dishwasher full of dirty water which -- having nowhere else to go -- has followed the path of least resistance to my apartment is still not a pleasant thing to live with.

However, true to his word, the maintenance man replaced a bunch of pipes this morning, allowing my sinks to finally empty (leaving behind a thick coating of grime and a pot-full of noodles which someone had apparently dumped down the drain without even taking the trouble to put them through the garbage disposal first) and my neighbors to finally finish running their dishwasher. Since I didn't know if he'd have to come into my kitchen at some point to deal with the problem, I was furiously cleaning my kitchen and hallway for a couple of hours this morning, so that it would be less pigsty-like and not resemble something that Mr. Nice Maintenance Man would feel honor bound to report to the manager. That kept me busy until noon, one way and another.

And then I spent this afternoon preparing for my evening class (first full class period of the semester), by reviewing my students' comments and questions from last week and carefully crafting a lecture outline that attempted to navigate the minefield of their conflicting expectations and faith perspectives. Maybe it's just me getting older, or maybe I just asked the wrong questions this time around, but it seemed to me that this class included far more confrontational-"This-class-had-better-be-about-teaching-the-Bible-as-God's-own-Truth-and-the-undisputed-only-path-to-salvation!" responses than any other that I've taught here. Of course, this is my first time teaching the full-semester Intro. to the Hebrew Bible course (rather than my usual "Racing-through-the-whole-Christian-Bible-in-one-semester" course), so maybe this course just draws a much more dogmatic and inflexible crowd. But I was really bothered by the vehemence and seeming veiled warning or ultimatum of those few responses to the question "What concerns do you have about this course?".

After all that, of course I had to leave for campus in a hurry and forgot to take the print-out of my lecture notes from the printer -- a fact which I only discovered at the beginning of class, when I looked for them in my bag, and finally remembered that I hadn't actually put them IN the bag in the first place. So, I was reduced to winging it, just as if I hadn't spent all afternoon debating the best way to proceed.

I guess the class period went okay, anyway. I sort of remembered most of the main points I wanted to make. And I got some actual participation out of some of the students, while I was free-associating my way through an introductory lecture/discussion. But nobody laughed at any of my best jokes, and a couple of people looked awfully dour when they left the classroom, so naturally my paranoia is running rampant, thinking I've failed in some way.

And I'm left with that feeling you get when you try to get a group-sing going, but nobody else joins in, and so you end up just singing to yourself and by yourself for all intents and purposes.

Still, if I must sing to myself and by myself tonight, then I guess it might just as well be "Happy Birthday to Me"!