Easter Doesn’t Have Shopping Days

My husband got asked two of the dumbest questions I’ve ever heard this week at school.  And not from the students either, but from teachers.  They were, in order:  ”Have you done your Easter shopping?”  and  ”Have you put up your Easter decorations yet?”

I never get questions like this.  There’s a good reason for that.  My scorn would probably cause the poor questioner to ignite.

But really?  Shopping?  Decorations?  It’s still Lent!  We still have to go through Good Friday!  While shopping can’t really be avoided, decorating is a little bit of overkill, don’t you think?

Poor Mike was bewildered.  He doesn’t really get into Christmas shopping mania, so transplanting that sort of small talk onto Easter will really get you a blank stare.

The Evil Underbelly of Pantsgate

It’s so unfair. I get sick, so I don’t pay much attention to the internet for 48 hours or so, and this makes me go and miss Pantsgate!

Simcha’s takedown is both effective and hysterically funny, I could never write anything half so funny and cannot add anything to it except my ire (the world doesn’t really need more of that) so I’m not really going to reflect on the substance of Pantsgate, that is, the question of whether or not it is modest to for women to wear pants.

It’s a stupid question anyway. The Vatican dress code lets you in wearing slacks, but not if your skirt is too short. I know, I’ve visited the Vatican. In slacks! Discussion closed.

But while I was *gasp* pulling on my pants this morning, it occurred to me, I’ve heard one of these arguments before. Specifically this argument:

2. Do this for us, the minority of chaste men who merit the gift of enjoying your beauty in such a way as to be grateful to your creator without temptation. Make it so it is good for men to look upon you, rather than requiring us to look away (which is a tragedy).

…well, it is creepily similar to this:

Heck, I have attraction to all kinds of women, many of whom are not my wife. It doesn’t mean I go home—“Honey, I’m in love with another woman, because I felt this attraction.” No! It means I’m recognizing the goodness and the beauty of another person—which I’m supposed to do! That’s who [sic] was going on in that story I told you about—the red hair. [He whistles. Audience giggles.] I saw something genuinely beautiful about this person, and through the eyes of purity this becomes something that lifts our sights to the heavens.

The former is from the silly “women wearing pants are immodest” Pantsgate article. The latter is a quote from Christopher West as filtered through Dawn Eden’s thesis. I can’t work out how her bibliography works, so I can’t cite West directly.

Authors from each end of the traditional–postmodern spectrum have finally found some common ground! It is man’s prerogative to ogle women. They only differ on the particular formalities of how to ogle women without concupiscence. One shifts responsibility for the matter entirely onto the woman and her manner of dress. The other denies that any concupiscence is involved at all, that his ogling is a virtuous appreciation of beauty… regardless of how it might horrify or offend or disgust his object.

But these are just surface differences. Both sides treat the woman as an object. Both sides proclaim that it is right and good that men ogle women, that women ought to meekly submit to such ogling, that our human dignity as women is celebrated by being ogled. But it is unique to Pantsgate, and horrifically so, that it is a woman’s responsibility to wear skirts and dresses to maximize value for the ogler. In the name of modesty.

Modest women everywhere, devotees of skirts AND pants, should be outraged by this attack on their dignity and virtue under the guise of modesty. That list of reasons why women shouldn’t wear pants has nothing to do with modesty at all, and everything to do with trying to demarcate and then toe the line of sin.

Silly Excuses

A while ago, on an old college friend’s blog, I stumbled across a comment that mentioned she didn’t want a second child, and “what would that say to our first child? That she isn’t good enough?”

I call bull.

One could equally argue that if you don’t have more than one child, it tells your child that he was too difficult and naughty for you to ever consider giving him siblings.

If you don’t want another child, that’s fine. Sorrowful, in my opinion, but fine. But don’t try to cast it up as a high and noble consideration for your child’s feelings, because kids just don’t think like that. Either argument is a modern ideology, not born out from experience.

I can’t say for certain I would have stopped either.

(From The Washington Post)

One morning during rush hour, one of the best classical musicians in the world stood in a D.C. Metro arcade and played some of the most beautiful classical music ever composed on a Stradivari violin almost 300 years old worth 3.5 million dollars. Over one thousand people passed him that morning, but under 10 stopped to listen. The violin case lay open on the street like any other street musician. Twenty seven people tossed in some change, most on the go, and he garnered a total of $32.17. One listener who recognized the quality of the performance but not the artist tossed in a ten, the remaining twenty six people gave an average of 85 cents. Some people tossed pennies.

I told this to Christina, who played the violin in high school, and she can’t believe he risked a Stradivarius on the streets like that. She tells me there are only 100 left in the world.

What bothers me so strongly is that I can’t say whether I would have stopped either. In the morning, on my way to work, well, I’m looking I’m not hit by cars on my walk. I’m in my own little world, thinking about the day’s experiments and all the other triffling thing to get done, with my iPod’s volume cranked to overpower the traffic, I very well could have never noticed.

It just makes me feel a triffle ashamed.