back in blogoland....

hi.

it's been a while, but at last i return to the land of blog. gone is all the black and white and grey; now that we are in the future, we have color (brown is a color, right?). and the option to comment. but an end to the nattering? there will be none! ever!

well, we all know how i am with introductory paragraphs, and for those who don't know (*gasp!*), ...i'll spare you. so here's some actual content: this is going to be about my internship at filoli, as well as my daily thoughts (at least, i make a good effort to have thoughts on a daily basis. sometimes it doesn't work so well) and pictures to accompany both. actually, there probably won't be pictures to accompany my thoughts, but hopefully there will be pictures of my artistic endeavors, which could, i suppose, be described as general reflections of my thoughts...anyway, things and stuff will be posted here, in no particular order, with some other stuff to spice things up.

so.

the first thing i will write about is a conversation i had with...megan (do i use people's actual names or not? how anonymous should this be? does it matter? after all, we all know that the internet is only populated by evil perverts who steal credit card information and stalk twelve year old girls...) while working in the rain on friday. we were cutting back approximately 800 herbaceous peonies in the cutting garden, and even though we are both quiet people, sometimes Conversation shows up, taking both of us a little by surprise. let's see...for some reason, she asked me if i drink, i said no and that i don't like the taste at all, but have no problem with it. she asked if my parents drink (kind of an odd question, but ok), and i told her that my dad and stepmom enjoy having wine in the evening and with meals, but my mom and stepdad don't drink a whole lot. then she made a very interesting connection, one that had never occured to me and that is pretty much irrelevent to what i'm actually going to talk about, but anyway, i'd told her previously about my family, and that my stepmom and her kids had been/are (to varying degrees) mormon, with my stepmom being less-so. she commented that, huh, my stepmom must not be terribly concerned about mormonism if she allowed herself wine on a regular (responsible) basis.

this led to a conversation on religion, which i have not had....ever? with a non-christian. so we talked a bit about our spiritual convictions (or lack thereof, in her case), and then she told me about this program on npr she'd heard about where a guy they were interviewing had decided to go an entire year obeying the bible literally. i was like, whaaaat?? because the bible is obviously not to be taken entirely literall, but then how, she asked, are you to know what is literal and what is not? and we talked a bit about that for a bit, with stoning adulturers (literal?)and cutting off sin-causing limbs (not literal!) as examples. thinking over this some more, to myself, i decided that the individual attempting this endeavor failed even before he began, because we are commanded (i think...) to not follow the letter of the law, but the spirit. the pharisees obeyed every single command, down to the last semi-colon and dot on the 'i' (well, the hebrew equivalents), but they were completely off the mark. so unless this person is truly a christian and also desires to follow the spirit of the law, he's already lost his clever little game. not to mention the fact that humans are imperfect, and it's downright preposterous to think that anyone could follow the bible perfectly (sinlessly) for a day, much less an entire year.

well, i cannot find this interview on npr's website, so...maybe it exists and maybe it doesn't. at any rate, that is my rant.

and now i will post this and start another rant. no...not a rant, that is too angry sounding. more like...fervent internal intellectual inquiry. fiii. hehehe.

ps- is this font and/or size ok? i'm trying to decide if i like it, but legibility is more important than aesthetics (but only slightly. very slightly). i don't know if the font matches the background and color scheme...so maybe i'll think about changing the template. we'll see.