The quotation that I was going to put here was too long, so look for it at the end.

Daniel and I have a little summer routine going. Friday nights, we make dinner with friends. Saturday mornings, we go to distribution at church. And Saturday afternoons, we don't take our environs for granted. This was a particularly beautiful day.



Well, the afternoon gloom at Mission Beach was beautiful in its own way.



And the evening sunset on campus was glorious. This view from the road going down to Young always looks to me like the background of a Renaissance painter, da Vinci maybe, especially in this light.



The best thing about June gloom is that it often gives way to sunsets filled with broken clouds.



And here is us watching the sunset. Why do I love this picture so much? Because of the resemblance to the one below.



This has been a running joke with my sisters and me for a while. Daniel and I were watching the top ten SNL clips of the year in between packing up my things after finals, and my roommate, peeking over our shoulders, said, "Daniel, I hope this doesn't sound weird, but you kind of look like Bill Hader." Hehe.



"[B]ecause we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and thus demonstrate our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form[.]" — Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
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In lieu of a Whose Justice? rehash, a moment.

I had a moment, inside the building behind these flowers actually, and it might have been from the coffee (it was probably from the coffee), but I was flipping through publishing release magazines looking for recent books related to Wesley or holiness theology that we might want to add to the Wesleyan Center collection (that's what they pay me for), and a surge of joy welled up in me at the depth and scope of Christian scholarly work that is being done today. How much broader my world has become at school. If nothing else, college has taught me that there are Christians who are more intelligent and well-read than I will ever be. And this is a comforting and sustaining thought.

Fun with finals week part IV.

In the spirit of doing things that we did the year prior, Daniel and I went to Con Pane for chocolate bread and coffee and then drove out to the cemetery. This year's outing was preceded by distribution at our church and succeeded by a graduation party for a friend, but the middle had pictures, just like last year.





I like to think of this one as an ironic senior high school picture. I hope that's not offensive. I contemplate my own mortality a lot.



Ooh, model face. Too bad my finger marred it.



Strange and beautiful flower. I'm always surprised when I come across a plant or animal that I haven't seen before. I don't know why, at 21 years old, I should feel like I've encountered every living organism on the planet. Angelica was just telling me about these Vietnamese leaf turtles she was working with at the zoo—the females have a special band on their eyes, so the males go around putting their eyes up to the females,' looking for a good time. Who would have thought such things existed?



Oh dear, this is self-indulgent. Good thing no one reads this blog. I just think this is one of the better pictures taken of me, ever. Thanks, Daniel:)



I can't believe I'm living here all summer. I'll never inhabit a more beautiful place.

Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I by Charles Taylor

In an effort to trace the development of Charles Taylor's thought, we read a collection of his earlier essays in philosophy class. It wasn't the most enthralling work, but I found a lot of valuable points in it.

On the myth of individualism that underlies the modern conception of identity and the nation-state:

“The community is not simply an aggregation of individuals; nor is there simply a causal interaction between the two. The community is also constitutive of the individual, in the sense that the self-interpretations which define him are drawn from the interchange which the community carries on. A human being alone is an impossibility[.] . . . Outside of the continuing conversation of a community, which provides the language by which we draw our background distinctions, human agency of the kind I describe above would be not just impossible, but inconceivable. As organisms we are separate from society—although it may be hard in fact to survive as a lone being; but as humans the separation is unthinkable. On our own, as Aristotle says, we would be either beasts or Gods” (8).

Taylor argues that our biological impulses are socially channeled into mitigated forms of expression, a very freeing thought. On this view, we are not controlled by our biology; rather, we have raw biological experiences that can be shaped and ordered according to the communities in which we exist:

“Thus I believe that there are links between the rather groping remarks about identity in this paper and the much more fully developed notion of a ‘cohesive self’ that Kohut and Ernest Wolf have introduced. . . . [S]exual libido is not seen as a constant factor, but rather sexual desire and excitability have a very different impact on a cohesive self than on one which has lost its cohesion” (44).

Our feelings are not opposed to reason; they are intertwined and causally involved with reason, an essential component of what constitutes humanity:

“If we think of this reflexive sense of what matters to us as subjects as being distinctively human—and it is clearly central to our notion of ourselves that we are such reflexive beings; this is what underlies the traditional definition of man as a rational animal—we could say that our subject-referring feelings incorporate a sense of what it is to be human, that is, of what matters to us as human subjects” (60).

Emotion, as with all biological impulses, is again socially ordered and constructed, meaningless without the meaning that is created through culture:

“There is no human emotion which is not embodied in an interpretive language; and yet all interpretations can be judged as more or less adequate, more or less distortive. What a given human life is an interpretation of cannot exist uninterpreted; for human emotion is only what it is refracted as in human language” (75).

Thinking is an embodied phenomenon, not the disembodied experience purported by Cartesian Enlightenment thought:

“[T]he ‘principle of embodiment.’ This is the principle that the subject and all his functions, however ‘spiritual’ they may appear, are inescapably embodied. The embodiment is in two related dimensions: first, as a ‘rational animal,’ that is, as a living being who thinks; and secondly, as an expressive being, that is, a being whose thinking is always and necessarily in a medium” (85).

Art and religion carry truths that are later articulated by philosophy:

“Philosophy does not only build on its own past. For in earlier ages, the truth is more adequately presented in religion (e.g., the early ages of Christianity), or art-religion (at the height of the Greek polis). In coming to its adequate form, philosophy as it were catches up. True speculative philosophy has to say clearly what has been there already in the images of Christian theology” (92).

The heresy of gnosticism is possibly a direct antecedent and certainly an analogous form of the Cartesian disembodiment and modern individualism:

“In both its Greek and Christian roots (albeit a deviation in this latter stream), this has included an aspiration to rise above the merely human, to step outside the prison of the peculiarly human emotions, and to be free of the cares and the demands they make on us. This is of course an aspiration which also has analogous forms in Indian culture, and perhaps, indeed, in all human cultures. My claim is that the ideal of the modern free subject, capable of objectifying the world, and reasoning about it in a detached, instrumental way, is a novel variant of this very old aspiration to spiritual freedom” (113-114).

Our perception of the world is wholly contingent on our biological context. The Cartesian ideal of perception is ultimately impossible:

“In showing the development of intelligence, from its most primitive forms to its most advanced, genetic psychology leads almost inexorably into an attempt to show the link between intelligence and biological function in general. . . . And related with this is a view of mature consciousness as evolved out of lower life forms and out of the processes of life. . . . The mature form is the product of a series of transformations on more primitive forms, and cannot be fully understood without a grasp of these primitive forms. . . . If we see our perception of objects, space, causality, and so on, as skills which we have to acquire, and which we acquire in part through our commerce with objects, as being capable of manipulating things and being affected by them, then the very idea of a basic building block of perception makes no sense. . . . What is immediately seen can no longer be distinguished as something separable from the interpretation a subject brings with him because of his knowledge, understanding, and culture” (145).

The development of language is a continual process of transcendence:

“[T]he potentiality for this kind of transcendence is implicit in linguistic capacity in this sense; it is the fundamental ability to disengage our awareness of things which, whatever the concepts which mediate this disengagement in the first case, allows us to examine these things in such a way that we discover new more adequate modes of description. . . . Something of the same relation that holds between languages, or between ordinary and specialist terminology, also holds between different stages of a child’s vocabulary and conceptual and reasoning capacities as he grows up. Transcendence is, in this sense, a commonplace” (152-153).

Language constitutes community:

“Language creates what one might call a public space, or a common vantage point from which we survey the world together” (259).

Fun with finals week part III.

We'd been planning to rent a kayak from the rec room for ages, and during Wednesday of finals week we finally got a chance to. We launched from La Jolla Shores and tooled around toward the cove before resting in the kelp beds for a while. Sea water lapping through kelp leaves isn't a sound you hear very often. It was fantastic.



The kayak was $15 for one day (uber cheap), but we didn't have to return it until the next day at 6 pm, so after my Thursday final, we drove the five-minute trip to Shelter Island and set off into the bay.



I was proud of our kayak-launching skills. We didn't even flip.



I can count on one hand the number of times I've gone kayaking, but I adore it. It's physical activity that doesn't hurt (at least if you paddle as slowly as I do).



It helped that it was a gorgeous day. We headed along this shoreline to the end of the harbor, by the little-known Kellogg Beach that runs parallel to Rosecrans, waving to our history professor's boat, Boethius, and the little kids we passed.



Two days of non-academic activity. Success!

After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre

This is the first major work by MacIntyre that I mentioned in the Canticle post and the second assigned reading in the class I'm sitting in on right now. I'd read portions of After Virtue a couple of semesters ago and I even used it in a term paper or two, but it was helpful to sit and read it straight through. MacIntyre is a joy to read in part because his prose moves the reader forward with the authority of someone who knows what he is doing, but mostly because the things that he says make deep-down, core-level sense.

On why politics are so aggressive and national issues so irreconcilable:

"It is precisely because there is in our society no established way of deciding between these claims that moral argument appears to be necessarily interminable. From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion. Hence perhaps the slightly shrill tone of so much moral debate" (8).

On the fundamental incoherence of the modern conception of individualism:

"Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles, and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited" (68).

On the existence of human rights without a moral context:

"[T]here are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns. . . . [T]here are no self-evident truths. Twentieth-century moral philosophers have sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions; but one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument" (69).

On what happens when most people try to understand themselves in relation to the world:

"When those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises" (114).

On the ability of narrative to allow us to create a coherent understanding of the world:

"[I]n determining what causal efficacy the agent's intentions had in one or more directions, and how his short-term intentions succeeded or failed to be constitutive of long-term intentions, we ourselves write a further part of these histories. Narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human action" (208).

On seeing what's there, and what isn't.

A couple of weeks ago, I was uploading pictures from my camera and frowning a little at how washed out they were. "You can fix that, you know," Daniel told me. He toggled the contrast and brightness levels in Microsoft Picture Viewer and suddenly my whole perception of the world changed. This is a little bit of an exaggeration. But this does reveal my unfortunate ignorance of the visual arts. Here I was thinking that my pictures always looked dull and unfinished because everyone else had a better camera than mine. Everyone else probably does have a better camera than I do, but I quickly discovered that I could at least make what I've got a lot more enjoyable to look at.

Monday of finals week, a group of friends and I got half-price Frappuccinos (greatest Starbucks promotion ever) and went down to the park in Liberty Station to do some studying. I spent about five minutes reading and then decided that any more effort wasn't going to significantly increase my performance on my test the next day. So I grabbed my camera and started taking pictures of whatever I saw. I heart macro settings a lot.

This is a lamppost, if you were wondering.

To demonstrate the radical difference just a little toggling can do, I have reproduced below two pictures of myself.

Before:

Here we have a nerdy girl taking self-timed pictures of herself in the park.

But with some photo editing, we have a really cool skirt and a magical world. Right? I do love that skirt. Angelica bought it at a thrift store but gave it to me because she thought it was too big on her. I thought it was too small on me until I tried it on again months later and it fit! I had to wear it. I had my Victorian lit final that day anyway. It just had to happen.

And below I am a guinea pig once again.

Before:

The original has a dismal industrial canal vibe, and I look like a seriously lost individual.

But with some contrast, and probably saturation and brightness or something, I can be lost in a technicolor wasteland. It's superb.

Altering my photos has an effect that is not unlike the sensation I had when I first put on my glasses (just about a year ago). Everything is clearer and brighter, and I am rediscovering details and images that I've been missing for so long.

I wondered briefly, after I discovered how this worked, whether changing my photos was on some level unethical, as if I were trying to alter reality. But I soon realized that my perception of cameras as capturing reality was faulty. Many (most) of my pictures don't look like what I see or what I am trying to portray. In a lot of cases, editing the photos actually creates an image that is closer to what I was perceiving and how I was perceiving it.

And some pictures, like this one, don't change too much even when I adjust the settings significantly. If anything, they just become a little more real.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller

So I'm sitting in on a summer class in part because half of the reading list was on my list of books I need to read this summer, and in part because Dr. Wright is teaching it. The title, if you can believe it, is "North Atlantic Philosophy at the Limit of Modernity: The Parallel Projects of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor." MacIntyre, you'll recall, is the philosopher over whom Daniel and I bonded when we were first dating, or pre-dating, if you will. Daniel was reading MacIntyre because Dr. Wright recommended him, and I was reading MacIntyre because my philosophy prof, Dr. Thompson, recommended him, and it was just a joyful little confluence of reading recommendations.

Dr. Wright's first assignment was a 1959 Catholic science fiction novel (quite the genre, I know) that influenced MacIntyre's first major work and that gives valuable imagery for the subsequent course material, pictures upon which to hang the ideas that MacIntyre and Taylor present.

The director of the library walked by while I was reading Canticle and told me he became a librarian in part because of the book. One of the most meaningful functions of fiction is its ability to put into a few short scenes concepts that would takes pages of non-fiction prose to elucidate. With that in mind, I'm just going to catch a couple of the most important passages that I found in Miller's novel.

A fantastic picture of Taylor's concept of enchantment:

"In his own mind, there was no neat straight line separating the Natural from the Supernatural order, but rather, an intermediate twilight zone. There were things that were clearly natural, and there were Things that were clearly supernatural, but between these extremes was a region of confusion (his own)—the preternatural—where things made of mere earth, air, fire, or water tended to behave disturbingly like Things. For Brother Francis, this region included whatever he could see but not understand. And Brother Francis was never 'sure beyond a doubt,' as the abbot was asking him to be, that he properly understood much of anything. Thus, by raising the question at all, Abbot Arkos was unwittingly throwing the novice’s pilgrim into the twilight region, into the same perspective as the old man’s first appearance as a legless black strip that wriggled in the midst of a lake of heat illusion on the trail, into the same perspective as he had occupied momentarily when the novice’s world had contracted until it contained nothing but a hand offering him a particle of food. If some creature more-than-human chose to disguise itself as human, how was he to penetrate its disguise, or suspect there was one?"

The conflict of the secular perception of humans and the Christian view:

"'Look at him!' the scholar persisted. 'No, but it’s too dark now. You can’t see the syphilis outbreak on his neck, the way the bridge of his nose is being eaten away. Paresis. But he was undoubtedly a moron to begin with. Illiterate, superstitious, murderous. He diseases his children. For a few coins he would kill them. He will sell them anyway, when they are old enough to be useful. Look at him, and tell me if you see the progeny of a once-mighty civilization? What do you see?'
'The image of Christ,' grated the monsignor, surprised at his own sudden anger. 'What did you expect me to see?'
The scholar huffed impatiently. 'The incongruity. Men as you can observe them through any window, and men as historians would have us believe men once were. I can’t accept it. How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?'
'Perhaps,' said Apollo, 'by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.'"

An excellent inversion of the anti-intellectualism often associated with Christians:

"A young monk who was studying for the priesthood stood up and was recognized by the thon.
'Sir, I was wondering if you were acquainted with the suggestions of Saint Augustine on the subject?'
'I am not.'
'A fourth century bishop and philosopher. He suggested that in the beginning, God created all things in their germinal causes, including the physiology of man, and that the germinal causes inseminate, as it were, the formless matter—which then gradually evolved into the more complex shapes, and eventually Man. Has this hypothesis been considered?'
The thon’s smile was condescending, although he did not openly brand the proposal childish. 'I’m afraid it has not, but I shall look it up,' he said, in a tone that indicated he would not.
'Thank you,' said the monk, and sat down meekly."

History repeats itself, as the novel so skillfully illustrates. Try to build the kingdom of heaven on earth and it will end only in destruction:

"Too much hope for Earth had led men to try to make it Eden, and of that they might well despair until the time toward the consumption of the world—"

A perceptive acknowledgment of the gnostic heresy:

"Abbot Zerchi smiled thinly. 'You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.'"

And, of course, the unbelievably incisive ending scenes, with the recognition of the secular need to eliminate suffering and the depiction of the competing allegiances of the state and the church:

"Abbot Zerchi groped for a sharp reply, found one, but swiftly swallowed it. He searched for a blank piece of paper and a pen and pushed them across the desk. 'Just write: "I will not recommend euthanasia to any patient while at this abbey," and sign it. Then you can use the courtyard.'
'And if I refuse?'
'Then I suppose they’ll have to drag themselves two miles down the road.'
'Of all the merciless—'
'On the contrary. I’ve offered you an opportunity to do your work as required by the law you recognize, without overstepping the law I recognize. Whether they go down the road or not is up to you.'"

More fun with finals week.

So about three months prior, Daniel tells me that he's going to a Ben Folds concert in May. "It's during finals week, and the tickets are $35, but I feel like I've earned it," he told me. I asked him if I could go with him. "Well yeah, but I wasn't sure if you'd be interested," he said. Not interested in going with Daniel to his second concert ever and seeing a guy he's listened to for probably a decade? Come on. I'd go even if I didn't like Ben Folds. So we went.



Confession: It was my first "secular" concert, so I was right there in inexperience. And it was actually even better than I expected it to be. We were one or two bodies away from the stage, and a solo Ben Folds is just a genuinely good performance. Daniel's been playing piano for like 15 years, so he could vouch for the skill. I knew when he played second one of my favorites, "Annie Waits," that I was going to enjoy myself. And when he stood up and asked the audience how he looked because he just started wearing jeans this year, I couldn't stop laughing (see Christmas break post on what I gave Daniel). The whole standing for five hours straight thing was totally worth it.

Notes from Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation by John W. Wright

This is quickly becoming a handy, accessible catchall for the quotations from books that I want to keep. The first non-assigned book I picked up after finals week was by my pastor and professor. Daniel had read Telling God's Story during one of our semester breaks, and he said it had deeply contributed to his understanding of Dr. Wright's sermons. I'm also sitting in on a philosophy class with Dr. Wright this summer, so reading something by him was doubly illuminating.

Much of the book is practical instruction for shaping sermons in a manner that follows a tragic arc, rather than the comedic arc that has become the hallmark of evangelical preaching. Wright is also concerned with the formation of the congregation as a group distinct in purpose and meaning from other social bodies: "When the church is no different from the neighborhood watch group in ethos or mission or consequences, it is much easier for a family to stay in bed to watch the neighborhood over the paper before the NFL games begin than to load the kids in the car to attend worship services at a small church, for which they provide the financial backing" (69).

Wright incisively explains the process by which we have arrived at the prevailing church format: "With no ecclesiology committed to the gospel teachings of Jesus or the Pauline or Jamesian ecclesial formation, the covenant of grace, which often begins embracing the poor, tends to become upwardly mobile. Because salvation is solely individual, the church moves toward the wealthy and the powerful within society as the preferred market for the individual narrative of salvation. By reaching the influential, it is hoped that covenant of grace will envelop more and more people through the resources and influence that power and wealth possess. Such a move requires that we leave a specific market niche to a broader, more general demographic market" (72).

Wright's critique of nationalism mirrors that of William Cavanaugh, who spoke at our school this semester. If the nation is the same as the church, we may as well just be active in the nation (73).

Viewing ourselves as Christians and not as, for example, Americans, is a simple and yet devastatingly revolutionary move that completely rewrites the narratives we have of ourselves and our place in our culture: "While the covenant of grace and the federal covenant eclipsed the biblical narrative, the Scriptures still remain to call forth a faithful people through the workings of the Spirit. . . . [This church] would understand that conversion is more than a personal experience of a personal relationship with God; conversion requires the incorporation of an individual into a new people, a new family and developing the necessary virtues to live as aliens and exiles in this new transnational community" (74).

I'm a big fan of subtle feminist readings, and so I appreciated Wright's characterization of North American society as divided into the managerial (gendered male) and therapeutic (gendered female) realms (129-31). On this view, the workplace and the areas of commerce as well as political action are hard, rough, managerial realms that necessitate the therapeutic realm, into which churches often fall.

"Balance becomes a key virtue for sustaining life within such a cultural arrangement. "[Robert] Bellah argues that contemporary culture isolates the managerial from the therapeutic in ways that did not exist earlier in history" (131). This results in emotivism, moral good residing in the judgment of the individual (132). "Whether the church embraces this context or develops into a peculiar people that discerns where and how to be different makes all the difference in the world" (133).

But the church simply cannot fit into this managerial/therapeutic binary. "The biblical narrative does not tell us how to negotiate between public and private realms, nor how an individual might live a meaningful, self-fulfilled life. These simply are not categories consistent with the biblical narrative. The biblical narrative reveals how individuals might become members of God's elect people in order to witness to God's love, a witness that can—and often does—involve suffering for righteousness's sake" (137).

"Within God's story the church does not aim to provide therapeutic services for disturbed individuals. The church does not exist so that individuals might seek intimacy with others, themselves or God. The church exists as a people, a distinct people, whose witness can bring opposition from the world through the fact of its nonconformity, but whose communal life provides concrete, embodied resources for support amid the resultant suffering" (138).

Fun with finals week.

I always dread finals week and then enjoy it more than most of the semester combined when it finally comes. Last week was no different. The Saturday before, Daniel and I headed to Hillcrest to finally, finally try Hash House, which we'd attempted to do for months. Afterward, we drove around the Banker's Hill area for a while. Turns out there's a fantastic old footbridge hidden in the middle of the neighborhood.



I googled it later. Turns out it's called the Spruce Street Bridge and it was built in 1912.



It was gorgeous.





I was a little unnerved by how high it was.



San Diego can be a magical place sometimes.

Today the ocean looked like a rash of silver ants on piled cobalt dirt. Trust me.

This is my commute—a twelve-minute walk from the dorm on campus closest to the ocean. It's like I'm rediscovering this place all over again.

I realized this afternoon stacking books in the library that I must have been going through caffeine withdrawals because, in between the moving and the starting jobs and whatnot, I hadn't had my cup per meal per usual, and I had a must-get-coffee-so-I-don't-fall-asleep-in-class moment, and then I had a revelation: I don't need to bring my A game to anything. No one's going to lecture me for 75 minutes and expect me to be alert and engaged the entire time; no one's going to make me responsible for arcane information and demand I recite it at arbitrary times; no one's going to assign a letter to my actions. I can be a little sleepy and a little dull.

This is the first summer in three years that I'm not taking classes, and a three-month stretch without homework is breathtakingly spread before me. Time to drop the textbooks and see what's outside my window.

"For some years after this I wrote very little, and nothing regularly, for publication: and great were the advantages which I derived from the intermission. It was of no common importance to me, at this period, to be able to digest and mature my thoughts for my own mind only, without any immediate call for giving them out in print. Had I gone on writing, it would have much disturbed the important transformation in my opinions and character, which took place during those years."

—John Stuart Mill, from Autobiography

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Yes, it was Valentine's Day, but it was my birthday for 21 years first. Daniel valiantly rose to the challenge and devised a day of our favorite spots in San Diego.



We exchanged presents in the cemetery out along the point, which sounds weird, I know, but we have a lot of fond memories there. As college students, we spend so much time with dead people already that it's a natural spot for us (I don't think I've read a word this semester that wasn't written by someone who died before I was born). The limitless horizon to the west and the sparkling city on the bay to the east also makes it one of the most stunning pieces of land, ever.



We drove into La Jolla and stopped for the sunset, just like last year. It was delightfully warm and the temperature just started to drop when the sun went down.





We had a twilight picnic on the grass by the cove and watched the other couples walk by. We ate a lot of chocolate.



We got coffee in downtown La Jolla, right next to this fascinating mirror.





We drove up to Balboa Park, another well-frequented favorite of ours. It's a little bit magical there at night.





This was from the next day, but it was so wonderful that it felt like an extension of my birthday. We saw Catharine MacKinnon, a brilliant legal theorist and women's rights activist, speak at USD on the ethical issues surrounding prostitution. She was passionate, articulate, and fantastically incisive. I'm so all about her it's not even funny.