It's Greek to Me

So I'm feeling a bit better about my thesis today. I talked to Dr. C after our class tonight and told her that I want her to look over my outline and help me set up some guidelines and hash out some details, and instead of being like, "You're just barely developing an outline?!" she was like, "Sure, we'll go over it," and that makes me feel good. I was afraid that I'd see her and she'd be like, "Let's meet on Monday and look at the chapters you have so far" so I'm pleased she doesn't seem to be implying that I need to have a ton of writing done already (which is good, because I have, um, very little in the way of actual writing).

I'm also feeling pretty good about the class I started tonight, Classical and Renaissance Drama. Lord knows I need brush up on the classical stuff for my comprehensive exam in April (I could only remembre 4 out of 6 of Aristotle's elements of theatre today and considering his Poetics is the most important piece of dramatic theory in western theatre, that is decidedly not good). Plus it's mostly just reading a lot of plays, which I enjoy, and discussion, which I enjoy even more. I made a little bit of a stir today when one of the guys in class was talking about how strange it is that the Greeks were having festivals celebrating gods that were "not real" and how absurd it was to believe that lightning bolts were being thrown by the gods and Dionysus was gestated in Zeus' thigh, and finally I burst out, "How is that any more strange and unbelievable than burning bushes and an immaculate conception?!" And then I followed it up with something along the lines of, "For someone who isn't a Christian, the stories the Greeks believed don't sound any more bizarre than anything you find in the Bible." Fortunately he replied, "Huh. Yeah, I guess you're right," because I really could have gotten into it over that one. For the record, I feel a certain amount of admiration for people that can have such pure faith they believe the words of the Bible as literal truth. I wish I had that sort of unwavering confidence in, well, anything. But I can't help wondering how someone can justify believing a man walked on water and rose from the dead yet belittle people who believed basically the same things, just about a different god(s). In actuality, we haven't evolved so very much at all. Speaking of, Peter sent me a link yesterday talking about how some people in Greece who worship Zeus are pushing to have their religion recognized by the Greek government. I can only hope that eventually this will lead to a renewed interest in the worship of Dionysus as well, because there's nothing I would love more than attending a religious festival devoted solely to drinking, sex, and theatre. I'm trivializing it, but in all seriousness, I don't see why that sort of worship can't be just as valid as anything else. And finally, to finish off this rambling and now very off-topic paragraph, can I just say that I am struggling a lot with my spirituality these days? I'm no longer at a place where I can be satisfied with the teachings and beliefs of the Christianity I grew up with, and I don't think I'll ever be able to get back to that place. There's just too much I cannot possibly make myself believe. At the same time, I haven't found anything else that makes me feel satisfied and makes sense to me other than my vague theories about spiritual energy and I think I kind of made that up, and picking and choosing the parts I like from various traditions seems like cheating somehow. I pray often but don't even know exactly what I think I'm praying to. I feel like I need to do more research into this, though, because I am this odd juxtaposition of someone who really wants to have faith in something (my grandparents are atheists and I definitely know that I am not) but at the same time needs a lot of logic and there's just not a lot of logic when we're talking about the unknowns of gods and creation and purposes. And agnosticism just seems like kind of a cop out, although I'm closest to that at the moment, I suppose. I keep hoping that eventually I'll have the time to really research everything that interests me and that something will jump out at me and make me go "Yes! That's something I can believe in!" but I also don't think it really works like that. I don't even know why I'm talking about this right now, it's not like it's a problem that's going to get solved any time in the near future, or probably any time in my entire life in this form here on Earth.

I need to go do some reading. Oh, but before I go, Richie asked me stage manage his show today! Yay! I get to work with Richie, and have more stage management experience to put on my resume. The show goes up in early March. I'll let you know more about it, as soon as I get the script and figure out what show it actually IS (Richie called to ask me and I agreed right away to do the job and only realized later that I can't remember what show he told me he's directing when he first told me about it last semester, and I felt too embarassed to ask him about it because we've already talked about it before).