A Meeting of the Minds

So today started the second week of school so everyone seemed better acclimated. Something bothers me in my Creative Writing course. Andrew Najberg is cool as hell and an incredible professor but I have an aversion to wanting to cater to people who are either too shy or too passive to engage in the classroom discussions. Now there's three of us who will answer: myself, Clif, and this Hermione Granger-esque girl in the front row. After we answer, generally he will not accept answers from us until the others volunteer which a few will but then he will call on people which is both embarrassing and annoying to watch. Why are you in college and still shy? I hate that. I mean we're all paying for our education unless Daddy Warbucks is funding you so why not take a more proactive approach.

Oh and this girl, Hermione Granger, keeps raising her hand. I mean this is college just answer the question! Then when he finally has to resort to calling on her, she reads the definition right out of the book. Paraphrase, much? It's like I don't know. Maybe I've forgotten what my first two years of college are like but I don't remember being that reserved. In fact, I loved the informalness of the lecture room so I fell right in.

Side note, Adam Binkley, Katie Christie, Ashely Ledford and I met in the Sequoya Review Office in the UC to do some cleaning. We got a lot done. There's so much to do, so many ideas. I'm really excited.

So after I left class I went to the library and I ran into Craig Henry, a guy that I took Nonfiction with back in Spring of 2008. So we're sitting and I had come to the library with the intent of working on my short story Halo but then we got into this very interesting conversation. We started talking about the power of language and it's place in society. We started talking about Grey's Anatomy and how Isaiah Washington was fired for calling T.R. Knight a 'faggot'. Now Washington was top-billed alongside Patrick Dempsey got into an altercation with Knight and the result was Washington calling Knight a 'faggot'. Now this word is very powerful and is not a word I particularly like or use but if Washington and Knight were two men arguing, this would be just another of millions of verbal altercations that take place throughout the country on a daily basis. Now with the two of them being from a high-profile television show, all of a sudden every magazine and rag was on the story of how Isaiah Washington was a homophobe. Washington was immediately villainized especially by the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender group GLADD. If it had been the other way around, I'm pretty sure that the NAACP would have been involved. So the end result was Shonda Rhimes, the show's producer and writer, having to fire Isaiah Washington, not necessarily because she wanted to but because she was pressured to do so. After all, who do you? Do you stick with the one guy who made a mistake or do you alienate thousands of viewers?

Then the conversation shifted towards the issue of Christianity and how it oppresses various groups. I told Craig about the girl I went to high school with who used scriptures from Genesis to justify her belief that all black people are going to Hell. She believes that because of Cain killing Abel, all of Cain's descendants are damned, Cain's descendants being darker-skinned individuals, aka black people. Craig mentioned how his parents are staunch conservatives and Christians and how they believe that homosexuality is an abomination. Craig told me that he began to rethink this belief when he met and befriended gay individuals. His parents refuse to see any differently on the subject. I then told him about my coworker Jessica who told me that this gay guy went to her church. He believes that his being gay is a sin so he abstains from gay relationships. Now I have a friend who told me last semester that he has attraction to males but he being Christian, he believes that his attraction to males is on par with sex outside of marriage, pornography, etc. So he prays to God to remove all sexual thoughts geared towards males away from him. He believes that doing so is God's way of testing him. I personally don't like this notion. I believe in God and I think that he is looking after us, therefore I can't rectify this notion that He is making certain individuals gay as a result of testing them. I mean what are they supposed to do, live life without love?

The conversation then shifted towards the issues of dichotomies. We live in a word defined by labels, these labels usually coming in twos. You're either male or female, black or white, gay or straight, right or wrong, etc. We usually veer away from the gray because they force us to rethink or at least consider that there are other ideas out there. For instance, we talked about zealot Christians and scientists. People have a hard time marrying religion with science, it's either / or. If I'm Christian, am I supposed to just not question anything? If I'm Christian, what if I presented with something contradictory with my faith? Do I allow it to reshape my views or do I become so fervent in my beliefs that I become a zealot? Why is it Creation vs. Evolution? Why can't it be both? What's wrong with these gray areas?

We talked for forty-five minutes and I enjoyed it. It's always nice to talk to someone who is open to what you have to say and vice-versa.