December 5: A New Lamb, Daughter's Birthday, Fairy Tale Birthday

"Springtime," said the old sheep, thoughtfully.  "Another spring."  As she walked away, Wilbur saw a new lamb following her.  It was only a few hours old.

The whole ending of Charlotte's Web is about birth and rebirth.  New lamb.  New goslings.  New spiders.  It's how E. B. White moves past the death of Charlotte to some kind of redemption and hope.  It's the cycle of the seasons.  The circle of life (cue music from The Lion King).

Today, at 7:29 a.m., my daughter turned 14 years old.  That means, in the year 2000, at this time, I was sitting in a hospital room, holding my newborn child.  I felt completely afraid.  And completely in love.

My daughter and her friend are sitting on the floor in front of me right now, watching Catching Fire, eating a hamburger pizza.  My daughter has her iPod in front of her face, texting or Snapchatting or twixting or Snapcracklepopping.  Whatever these youngsters do these days with these newfangled thingamabobs.  I feel old and still completely in love.

We took my daughter and her friend to a movie tonight.  We even sprang for V. I. P. seats.  Nice, leather, reclining sheets with enough leg room for an elephant to walk in front of us without stepping on our toes.  It was a lovely evening.

And now it's girls' night in our living room.  I'm sure, at 2 a.m., they are still going to be giggling and whispering.  I, on the other hand, plan to be long asleep by that time.  With visions of my baby girl dancing in my head.

Once upon a time, a kindly king loved his little princess so much that his heart almost couldn't hold it all.  Every day, the king watched his daughter grow.  Every night, he would watch his daughter sleep, counting each of her breaths like precious gems.

And the days, weeks, and years spun by like fine gold thread.

And the king and Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

Making a wish...

December 6: Goddam Picture, Three Teenage Girls, a Fairy Tale

After the Christmas things were over, the goddam picture started.  It was so putrid I couldn't take my eyes off it...

Holden has a thing against movies.  He doesn't like them.  He goes to them all the time (twice during Catcher), but he can't stand the actors or the stories.  It has something to do with how phonie he thinks they are.  Anything that smacks of  falseness or ego bothers him.

I'm at McDonald's at the moment, waiting to take my daughter and two of her friends to a movie.  That's right.  I'm taking three, 13-year-old girls to see Catching Fire.  It's going to be a long evening.  None of them care about phonie movies.  They're all authentically teenage girls.

This morning, I had a friend describe being a teenage girl as feeling like she was taken over by an alien life form.  She said she eventually took control of her body again after a couple of years.  I'm having visions of seeing an alien burst out of my daughter's chest in the middle of the night.

I'm hoping that the movie is going to use so much of the girls' energy that they will immediately go to sleep when I get them back to my house for the sleepover.  I'm even considering drizzling Benadryl on their pizza, but I think that may be illegal.

Which reminds me of a story.

Once upon a time, a baker named Gregor let his 13-year-old daughter have two of her friends for a birthday sleepover.  The girls stayed up all night, and in the morning, Gregor made them blueberry pancakes.

Moral of the story:  I'm too damn tired to be witty.

And Saint Marty slept happily every after.

Yup, this is what a real teenager looks like...

August 17: Mythology, Syllabus, Working Hard

In between answering phones, scheduling surgeries, filing charts, I've been plugging away on my syllabus for the mythology class I'm teaching this fall.  I spent a few hours just trying to figure out what movies I was going to screen for my students and how to break the chapters up into distinct sections.  (I settled on The Chronicles of Narnia:  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the new version of Clash of the Titans for the movies, and I managed to cut the textbook up into six different subjects.)

This is funny!  I don't care who you are.

The hardest part of piecing together a syllabus for me is coming up with the semester schedule (what's due when and what to read when).  It's the one part of the syllabus to which students actually pay attention.  I usually spend quite a few hours mapping out the entire three months.  It takes a lot of thought and planning.  It's now about three o'clock in the afternoon, and I just finished up a little while ago.  I'm whipped.  I could put my head down on this keyboard and literally fall asleep.  I still have to finish the syllabus for my Good Books class, but that one will be easier.  I taught the class last winter.  I'll probably finish that syllabus on Friday.

As I was working on the course objective for my mythology class this morning, I came up with a couple of paragraphs that were pretty thought-provoking for me:

Please keep in mind that mythology is not just the study of a culture’s stories.  It is the study of a culture’s religion.  In this class, the term “myth” is not synonymous with fiction or fantasy.  It refers to humans’ attempts to understand the mysteries of the cosmos, the heart, and the soul.  Therefore, if I sometimes refer to Christian myth, I am not trying to be pejorative.  The narrative of Jesus Christ, as recorded in the Gospels, has been one of the guiding forces of Western culture.  It has shaped the moral and spiritual codes of many cultures and times for centuries.  All mythology is about truth or the search for truth.

Therefore, the ultimate objective of this course is the pursuit of truth, in the myths of Greece and Rome, Zeus and Jehovah, Isis and the Virgin Mary, Aslan and Jesus Christ.  This will be our quest, our odyssey, for the semester.

I used to get very defensive when someone used the term "myth" in conjunction with Jesus Christ.  I didn't like it when someone called the Gospels the "Jesus narrative."  There seemd to be something devaluing in those two terms--"myth" and "narrative."  Both implied fabrication or outright deception in my mind.  Obviously, I have revised my opinion.  Thinking of mythology as the study of religions is very helpful.  It avoids the whole question of reality versus fantasy.  Instead, it focuses on the fundamental human truths all myths embody, including the Christian myth.  Goodness.  Altruism.  Dignity.  Bravery.  Flaws.  Failure.  Redemption.  They're all there.  For me, this is a kind of revolutionary way of viewing mythology.

I'm a little preoccupied right now with myth.  Sorry.  There are worse things with which I could be preoccupied, however.  Justin Bieber.  Or Twilight.  Or The Hunger Games trilogy.  Oh, wait.  I actually am obsessed with Suzanne Collins' books right now.  In fact, when I'm done typing this post, I'm going to dive back into Catching Fire, which I'm about half-way through.  Actaully, there are a lot of mythological implications in Hunger Games.  The reaping, the games, the victors--it all sort of reminds me of a version of the ancient Olympics.  I believe that many of the Olympic sports in ancient Greece were fatal, to-the-death kinds of competitions.  Correct me if I'm wrong.

So, Saint Marty is signing off.  He's got a date with Katniss Everdeen.