Cello, piano, pen-and-ink, watercolor, rubiks, hiking, swimming, languages, writing, ballroom dance, books, books, books...

I'm also getting my schools up and running: Audyth Academy for grades 9-12 and Audyth University for undergraduate and graduate school. The website is audyth.org. It's a correspondence school at the moment because I don't have real estate or a quick web geek.

What irritates the snot out of me:

1. Anti-intellectualism: the idea that it's in any/some way spiritual to be/play stupid, ignorant, or uneducated (there are hundreds of commands in Scripture to know, understand, consider, reason, etc., and Word in John 1 can be well-translated as Logic).

2. The idea that domestic slavery is the highest/only calling for women (Christ himself praised Mary-the-thinker above Martha-the-hausfrau).

Now that I've had my tantrum, let's get on to some other information. I have a Ph.D. in linguistics, focused on spatial information and deixis in fiction (broadly, discourse analysis/pragmatics). I enjoy solo-backpacking: need time alone. I have a chronic illness that I'm always learning to work around--the illness is largely why I don't want children: having them might kill me, or permanently incapacitate me (or give the problem to the children, which, if any kind of maternal instinct kicked in, would kill me), but maybe taking in other people's children would be an option; my website contains information about the illness and pictures from the hike (agatelamp.com).

Yes, in case there were any doubt, I do realize that I violate a lot the expectations of a lot of people a lot of the time, and that some people would like to call that 'offensive'. That's a lousy definition of offensive and a lousy reason to be in any way upset, and I'll stand fast in the liberty with which Christ has made me free.

Also, we should be forewarned that if we do a Google search for me, there is something out there by a person with my same first/last name on a porn site. That person is not me. She wrote a wonderful piece, though (yes, I visited a porn site--but only to check up on someone who shares 2/3 of my name), on how we can't derive morality from nature; I entirely agree with that (hmm: I'll be a praying mantis today: find myself a mate, rip off his head and eat it, mate, and then finish eating him). The other Marla's conclusion is that, because it's not derivable from nature, morality does not and cannot exist, and that's where she distinguishes herself from me. Just so we know. :)

In other news, I've been thinking about various ways in which men and women objectify one another, rather than appreciating one another as fully human, individual images of God. On the male side: women are lawn ornaments--things that stay at home and look nice; women are furniture--always in the house and always ready to be used; women are appliances--in the house, doing things that the male wouldn't stoop to doing; women are arm-candy--mobile accessories to make the male look good. On the female side: men are wallets--holders and dispensers of money; men are status-symbols--the equivalent of arm-candy; men are computers--useful for figuring out things that the female doesn't want to bother exerting her mental energy for; men are security blankets--warm and fuzzy excuses not to deal with reality or take responsibility for themselves. It isn't surprising that so many marriages fail or that it's difficult to find anyone worth making a marriage with when one half is a plastic flamingo and the other half is a piece of flannel.