Continuing on after my Blogspot Narnia-based entry.

I am sick and tired of being the persecuted Left's whipping boy.  I am sick and tired of being accused by wounded ex-Catholics of complicity in everything the Church has ever done, from the Spanish Inquisition to making them feel bad for not helping their mothers enough.  I am sick and tired of it being perfectly okay for Polly Toynbee to talk about "that particular kind of guilt that only Christians know how to inflict" in a mainstream paper, when if somebody makes a comment that could POSSIBLY be read as disparaging towards Jews or Muslims or Blacks or gays or disabled people, they get THOUSANDS of angry letters about it.  I'm sick and tired of my holidays of either being opportunities for Jerry Falwell and Anne Coulter to spill ignorant hateful bile on the one hand or for the ACLU to tell me that it's not okay for me to celebrate my religion on the other hand.  I'm sick and tired of Christian children going to school in December and learning all about Hanukkah and Eid and being told that Christmas is about snowmen and the spirit of giving.  I'm sick and tired of being made to feel bad for the fact that in the name of my God, some pretty horrible people did some pretty horrible things hundreds of years before I was born.  I'm sick and tired of being told that because I believe Christianity is true, I must be some sort of horrible bigot who wants to convert Jews and Muslims by force.  I'm sick and tired of it being automatically assumed that I must believe in an anti-poor and anti-environmental political agenda that anyone who's actually bothered to read the Bible will tell you would have made Jesus puke.

I'm sick and tired of going to Church and being told that because I like to call God "Father" and "Him," I must be betraying the feminist movement and want to take away the vote and make women be obedient little housewives who aren't allowed to talk in Church.  I'm sick and tired of being told that because I want to keep the original words of hymns, I'm some sort of bossy elitist who doesn't care about the feelings of lesbians, gays, women, Blacks, and Hispanics.  I'm sick and tired of being treated as though my belief in theological rigour and the necessity of backing up a doctrinal position are some sort of quaint relic.

I'm sick and tired of people equating "God" with "The Church," in the "I don't like Pastor Jim, so God must not be real" sense.  I'm sick and tired of Catholics walking out of a service after Communion, as if the only reason for going to church was to get the magic wafer that keeps you out of hell, rather than to experience God in community in a way you can't on your own, and to enjoy fellowship with your Brothers and Sisters in Christ.  I'm sick and tired of church music being dumbed down and electrical.  I'm sick and tired of young people not knowing the words to hymns, if they're any more complex than "you are awesome, Father God."

I'm sick and tired of people lumping the Anglican and Episcopal churches together with the Catholic and/or Fundamentalist Churches - you don't like the Pope/Jerry Falwell, so I'm a bad person????  Yeah, there was a guy called Henry VIII, and HE didn't like the Pope either (for a crappy reason, but still), and there were a bunch of guys like Martin Luther who ALSO didn't like the Pope, and that's where PEOPLE LIKE ME COME FROM.

I'm sick and tired of the historical atrocities of everyone who WASN'T Christian being magically erased, while modern Christians are supposed to collectively bear 1500 years' worth of guilt.  I'm sick and tired of the Christian Right playing the persecuted victim oppressed by secular fundamentalism, and I'm sick of secular fundamentalists who dress themselves up in the First Amendment to hide an ignorant and knee-jerk hatred of religion.

I'm sick and tired of academics treating the very concept of religious faith as some sort of backwards redneck joke, as though there WEREN'T 2000 years of rigorous scholarship on the topic, as though St. Augustine and C.S. Lewis and Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther had just been mass delusions.  As though the great educational institutions of Europe and America HADN'T been founded by Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Scottish Presbyterians, and Non-Conformists of various stripes, and as if they HADN'T studied Physics, Astronomy, Philosophy, History, Literature, Politics, and Economics while being believing Christians.

I'm sick and tired of being told by drugged-out Neo-pagans that everything I believe is a rip-off of what they believe, and then their being unable to defend their beliefs in anything resembling Apologetics or Philosophy ("what do we know and how do we know it?" being a good starting point).

I'm sick and tired of scientists acting as though they were on a holy mission to disprove religion, and religious wackos acting as though the idea of evolution was some sort of threat to God's existence, as though it weren't PERFECTLY CLEAR TO ANY RATIONAL HUMAN BEING that Science and Religion are asking FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT QUESTIONS about the nature of the universe - that Science asks "how" and Religion asks "why."

I'm sick and tired of hanging out with well-educated and left-leaning people and feeling as though my faith is a time bomb that will make them hate me when they find out about it, as though the very fact of my believing that some things are true and some things aren't makes me a prejudiced bitch, as though I were some sort of bizarre freak among the liberal intelligentsia, when it's been PERFECTLY CLEAR to me my whole LIFE that the more I learn about Philosophy, Psychology, Literature, Politics, and History the more clear it becomes that Christianity is true, and the more I learn about Christianity, the more clear it is to me that Christ's words are a radical political force that should shake the war-mongering, comfortable, wealthy powerful class to its core.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Double-post from Blogspot - all the gruesome details of the weekend!

( I'm beginning to think Withnail is right. )

Attempting to attach shelf to wall.  Problems with this include uncooperative screwdrivers that keep slipping out of the groove, screws that insist on launching themselves across the room whenever I come near them, holes that require my sticking an EYELINER PENCIl through them to mark the space on the wall I should screw because they're too small for a normal pencil, a wall that appears to have a LAYER OF BEDROCK in it and cannot be penetrated by ANYTHING, and neighbours who do not own an electric drill.

So I started checking out all my friends' LJs, and morganmuffle  had a list of random thoughts that included some Advent-y stuff, and I've been listening to my CD of carols from Trinity College Cambridge, so I thought I'd put up a list of the Top Ten Best Advent And Christmas Songs Ever.  Add your own.

1. "Wake, Awake," in any of its myriad translations.

2. "Once in Royal David's City" with the ORIGINAL WORDS.

3. The Sussex Mummers' Carol.

4. "Angels from the Realms of Glory," for sentimental Emma-Willard-based reasons.

5. Similarly, "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming."

6. "O Come, All Ye Faithful."  Yes, it's a chestnut, but it has the DAVID WILLCOCKS DESCANT, which is always tons of fun to sing when you're sandwiched between your sisters and covered with wax at the midnight service on Christmas Eve.  Also, the December chapter of Anais' "Doctor Jackson's Diary" is based on it, and December is one of her better chapters, what with homicidal raccoons, pink flamingoes, Smack-My-Bitch-Up Santa, and English Civil War muskets. (To join in the Christmas cheer, go here)

7. "Wondrous Love."  Especially as performed by Jean Ritchie and the Revels.

8. "Silent Night."  Another chestnut that's earned its place.  It's surprising how many times you can hear this and not be sick of it.

9. "O Come, O Come Emmanuel."  The auditory cue that Advent's here.

10. "The Lord of the Dance" or "My Dancing Day."

And how come "anticipatory" isn't one of the choices LJ gives you for your mood?

( If you can find me ... )

An old story, posted here for the first time.

Pairing: SB/RL, JP/RL.

Summary: Remus wants Sirius, James wants to think about his future, and Sirius wants to make bets on it all.  Includes angst, gay werewolves, barely-legal sex, and Sirius swears a lot.

Disclaimer: Characters have wandered from J.K. Rowling's head into mine and taken up residence.  However, they are legally still occupants of the address that created them, and so I cannot take credit for their presence at this one.

Slight change from canon – I give Remus and James the credit for the Animagus charm, not Sirius and James, as Rowling does.

* * *

( As bets go, it was innocent ... )

Pictures of Bonfire Night are now up on the Blogspot Blog, as are pictures of the move from Princeton, narrated as a Mummer's Play.

And now, for your amusement, a list of topics covered during the Great Expat And Englishmen Thanksgiving Dinner yesterday afternoon.

1. The flatmate's sexuality (inadvertently).

2. The fact that the table was arranged with the White People at one end and the oppressed people (Irish and Indian) at the other, leading to a protracted discussion of why they had all the natural resources (i.e. cranberry sauce) and were passing them to us without complaint.

3. Smallpox, imperialism, and commerialism.

4. Musical theatre (briefly).

5. Possibility of turning the novel Grace wrote when she was 11 into a musical.

6. Threats of grievous bodily harm to whomever turned the novel Grace wrote when she was 11 into a musical.

7. Public transport.

8. Slash (briefly).

9. Slash involving giant earthworms (even more briefly).

10. Reading slash involving giant earthworms while on public transport.

11. Why the oppressed people had all the salt.

12. Expanding the "oppressed people" category to include women and gay people - in other words, everyone except Josh.

13. Why the box the turkey came in was labeled "Human Head."

14. The fact that of all the days of the year for the fridge to break, this was probably the worst.

15. The fact that the fridge had broken.

16. Chocolate.

17. The possibility of getting the caretaker in to fix the fridge without making him believe we wanted to have mad passionate monkey sex with him.

18. The possibility of getting the downstairs neighbour to store our turkey and milk in his fridge, and possibly allowing us to have mad passionate monkey sex with him.

19. The lack of religious significance in the celebration of Thanksgiving.

20. The validity of "eat a fuckload of food" as the basis for a national holiday and as a religious experience.

Meanwhile, the little bastards at school have given me another nasty cold.  Send porn and tea.

But instead, I'm filling out this book meme from bironic .

( Procrastination is your friend! )

This owes its existence to copperbadge 's longfic "Cartographer's Craft," in which a sixteen-year-old version of Sirius Black emerges from the Marauders' Map and proceeds to, among other things, embark on an affair with Harry.

I tried fitting both Ron and Draco in instead of Sirius, but it wasn't happening.

( Scars )

... alternative subject heading, "The Postman Cometh."

At 8:00 this morning, the postman dropped by (he did, in fact, ring twice) with a parcel of Christmas gifties to me and the flatmate, from

bironic , who now officially rocks.

However, this charming little domestic incident would have been much better, all told, if I hadn't been naked at the time.

And the bizarre reverse-time internal muzak system is getting kicked up again; it's almost Advent, so of course I have Holy Week hymns stuck in my head, while the minute I start abstaining from sweets and getting ashes smeared on my forehead I'll start to have Christmas carols running through my mind. It never fails.

Meanwhile, the full moon was something ridiculous like three nights ago, and I still haven't written my drabble for

catilinarian

Update to the ikonostasis.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I'll get around to posting some older fics here, but I've got Block Practice and then eight people are descending on my house for the Expat Thanksgiving Dinner a week from Saturday (hurrah for face time with sister!!), so it may take a while.

In the meantime, prayers and sacrifices and well wishes of all kinds are requested, because I'm being observed at a lesson tomorrow, by no fewer than two people, each of whom will then proceed to rip me to shreds.  And a lot of it is dependant on the capricious and unpredictable behaviour of a marauding horde of five-year-olds.

And while you're at it, go see "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang."  For it is good.

So my initial warning is "read it if you want to have your guts ripped out with a spoon," but that's not exactly the biggest inducement I've ever seen.  So just consider that parts of this come from a pretty dark place.

( The light shines in the darkness. )

There's a discussion going on over at kabal42 's LJ on new anti-obscenity laws being proposed in the US and UK that are really damn scary (for example, equating S&M with bestiality).  Go check it out.

( I'm a slave to your words. )

There's some new stuff hung on the ikonostatis.  Pirate at will.

Ugh, have nasty cold.  Send food and tea.

Pairing: RL/SB.  Rating: PG-13.  Summary: A few pages torn from Remus' notebook during his seventh year at Hogwarts.

Not LJ-cut because that would lose the formatting.  Sorry.

Notebook

by Magdalen-Rose

Pairing: SB/RL

Rating: PG-13

Summary: A few pages torn from Remus Lupin's notebook his seventh year at Hogwarts.

Spoilers: none

Disclaimer: I do not own the copyright to the characters and am not profiting from my use of them.

PROPERTY OF REMUS LUPIN

RETURN IF LOST

GRYFFINDOR TOWER

Remus Lupin.

Remus J. Lupin

R.J. Lupin

Mr. R.J. Lupin

Remus Black.

R.J.L. Black

Remus Lupin-Black

Professor R.J. Lupin-Black

Remus and Sirius Lupin-Black

******

3 December

THINGS I HAVE TO DO TONIGHT:

Charms homework

Get potion prescription refilled

Find sources for lit essay

Do laundry

If time – map North tower!

MUGGLE NOVEL VS. WIZARDING NOVEL

Nineteenth century

            - Muggle novel expanded to mainstream, replacing poetry

            - Often political in nature

            - Wizarding novel more emphasis on magic/metaphysics (Muggle poetry similar, esp. 17^th cent.)

            - Male-dominated authorship (both Mug. and Wiz.)

Essay: 2 rolls of parchment, due Wednesday next: To what extent is literature important in a society based on technical skills such as magic?  Is there a difference in the role of literature in the Wizarding and Muggle worlds?

            - thesis for Part II. – Muggle novels = escapism, not as necessary in world where we have access to magic?

******

Last night was incredible. – S.

Go away.

Twice, Mr. Lupin.  Twice.

I can do better.

Slut.

Go away.

My slut.

You’re offending my notebook’s virgin ears.

Your notebook’s the only thing about you that remains even remotely virgin, Moony.

I should have left you tied up – you’re less trouble that way.

  ß Rolls over and begs.

   You’re bothering me.

******

 - Late nineteenth-century – “gothic” novel, elements of horror and exploration of human nature, including “magic,” such as vampires and “science-fiction” creatures.

- Period of iconoclasm in wizarding world – novels regarded as frivolous and unrealistic, greater demand for technical skills and link of education directly to employability.  “Fantasy” derided as old-fashioned – brief attempt to link Muggle and Wizarding sciences.

******

Did you get #5 in Potions?

Yes.  The mandrakes were immature.

Sexy and brilliant.

Go AWAY.

No.

Go away.

No.

Yes.

No.

Yes.

No.

Yes.

I’m going to recite poetry for you now.

I wish you wouldn’t.

One two three four five, once I caught a fish alive.

Six seven eight nine ten, then I let him go again.

James says that we’re kidnapping you tonight before you can lock yourself in the library.  James wants to map the North tower and I want to have my way with you.

I’m trying to concentrate.

She’s talking about something called Frankinstein, which sounds like a horrible type of sugary drink.

******

CHRISTMAS GIFTS

Mum: Wisdom For Witches Who Do Too Much, by Henrietta Von Keenle.

Dad: Quidditch tickets.

James: Gryffindor scarf.

Peter: A History of Battle and Warfare in Wizarding, by Harcourt Whisp.

Grandma:

Grandpa:

Sirius: The Complete English Poetry of John Donne. 

REMEMBER PREFECT MEETING TOMORROW!!!!

******

Did Sirius tell you the plan? – J.

Yes, but I’ve got an essay!!

Sod that!  Come play.

This is my only free night this week.

Remus wants to howl at the moon, not sit on his bed with a book.

Remus HAS WORK TO DO.

******

Grandma: Earrings.

Sirius: Black velvet jacket.

******

- Fantasy extended as a genre throughout 20^th century, including children’s literature.

- Wizard novels still considered to be for children, though the increase in Wizard-Muggle marriages has led to many wizards reading Muggle literature.  What are the ramification of this on Wizarding culture?  If there are ramifications, does this suggest the cultural importance of literature?

 ******

 Sirius: Book on motorcycles?

 ******

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I

Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on _______ pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the seven sleepers den?

T'was so; But this, all pleasures ________ be.

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desir'd, and got, t'was but a dream of thee.

                        - John Donne, pretty good Muggle poet.

** Learn more about Muggle religion – he seems to have been fairly keen on it. **

******

He is my earth.

My star.

The darkness before my dawn.

******  

***WHOMP****

You again.

Of course.  We’re discussing the modern Muggle novel.  At great length.  And I think Cornelia Finsbury just used the word “onomotapeia.”  A lad’s got to stay awake.

I’ll keep you awake.

Oh Moony …

Ssshhh.

Do you have any idea what I want to do to you right now?

I could make an educated guess, based on past experience.

My gorgeous delicious sexy rumpled brilliant Moony …

James is staring at you.

Come out with us tonight – I’ll smuggle you in some food and you can work through dinner and then we can go Marauding …

… why do I keep letting myself get talked into this?

Hurrah!

I swear, if we end up dead or transfigured …

I wonder what your Animagus would be, if you had one.

My Patronus is a lion.

… I want to wrap myself in your arms and die there.

Oh God –

The first time I had you, I thought the world was going to end.

Sirius –

Scared out of my mind and unable to resist you – wondering if you’d think I was a total incompetent – whether all the pretense would be ripped away and I’d be exposed for the lovesick fool I was –

You were perfect.

Where do you want to go tonight?

Let’s go to the Astronomy tower.  I’ll push you against the wall by the eastern window and trace the path of the moon on your skin.

You would make love to the moon now.

Translated by white shoulders and black hair.  Yes.

******

In anima et sanguine.

******  

So catilinarian and I watched the premiere of "Jerico" on ITV tonight.  A few thoughts:

1. Robert Lindsey has gotten sexier with age, but it might just be that he has better hair now than in the 70's.

2. "You drive your constables too hard."  Ooh - er - vicar ...

3. There's DEFINITE slashy potential between Jericho and his young eager constable Caldecott.

4. They managed to cram rape, bigamy, racism, class, family loyalty, financial scandals, and about 17 different love affairs into two hours, without it feeling too forced.  That's new for ITV, who can't usually do a higher-than-average-emotional-level CHOCOLATE ADVERT without it feeling too forced.

5. They might, however, want to make the case a little easier to follow next time.  You got the sense that they were throwing in blind leads just for the sake of having blind leads, not because they helped you form theories of the case.

6. Why don't men dress like that any more?  Scarf ... hat ... waistcoat ... yeahhh ...

In other Robert Lindsey/slashy news tonight ...

They're re-showing "A Very Social Secretary" on Thursday night, this time on Channel 4!!!  Terrestrial!!  Starring Robert Lindsey as Tony Blair, which is just a bizarre weird meeting of my FPS and RPS worlds ...

And "Bremner Bird and Fortune" tonight featured a ballroom dancing competition between TonynCherie and SarahnGordon, with Alastair and Peter as the judges - and it ended with TONY DANCING WITH ALASTAIR AND FIGHTING OVER WHO WAS GOING TO LEAD.

Which is actually a scene I *WROTE* two years ago, so I should really sue for copyright infringement.

Only my version was sexier.

My first block practice starts tomorrow, by the way.  I'm with Year 1 ... oh God ...

I've decided to resurrect my LJ experiment, despite my parallel management of a blogspot blog, because I can't post most of my fanfic on blogspot because my mum reads it.

So we're going to start again over here.

( Latest effort: Saved. Probably wins some sort of award for the most rape, incest, and underage sex in a 148-word fic, ever. )