“For God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction.”

Genesis 41:52

Cyclical

I’m becoming increasingly overwhelmed. Overwhelm is a familiar feeling to me, probably because I have a tendency to bite off far more than I–or anyone, really–could chew. I am neurotic; I dive very deep into something, then become afraid and distressed and shy from it. As a teenager I was so afraid of this cycle that I would shirk from becoming engaged in things to begin with. As an adult, I’ve begun to give up on my chances of doing anything else other than what I’m doing (something probably familiar to many adults), and so I stick with it, becoming more and more distressed and taking on more and more responsibilities that I don’t desire.

If I look at what I really want to do, it’s to go back to college, study something that challenges me, and go engage in that field. But last time I tried to leave this life, I got so much backlash from my community that I submitted, like a dog innocently showing its belly to a figure of authority, and worked even harder to stay.

The worst thing is that I would lose the one I love. We as humans live collectively, and to leave your community is to leave everything and everyone you know. There is nothing I like about my community anymore, except my soul mate.

It’s the worst feeling when love is a trap, and there’s no one to talk to but God.

Real Amazons

“An Irish law from the year 697 forbids women to be soldiers–which means that women had been soldiers previously. Peoples who over the centuries have recruited female soldiers include Arabs, Berbers, Kurds, Rajputs, Chinese, Filipinos, Maoris, Papuans, Micronesians, and American Indians.

“There is a wealth of legend about fearsome female warriors from ancient Greece. These tales speak of women who were trained in the art of war from childhood–in the use of weapons, and how to cope with physical privation. They lived apart from the men and went to war in their own regiments. The tales tell us that they conquered men on the field of battle. Amazons occur in Greek literature in the Iliad of Homer, for example, in 600 BC.

“It was the Greeks who coined the term ‘Amazon.’ The word literally means ‘without breast.’ It is said that in order to facilitate the drawing of a bow, the female’s right breast was removed, either in early childhood or with a red-hot iron after she became an adult. Even though the Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen are said to have agreed that this operation would enhance the ability to use weapons, it is doubtful whether such operations were actually performed. Herein lies a linguistic riddle–whether the prefix ‘a-‘ in their language does indeed mean ‘without.’ It has been suggested that it means the opposite–that an Amazon was a woman with especially large breasts. Nor is there a single example in any museum of a drawing, amulet, or statue of a woman without her right breast, which should have been a common motif had the legend about breast amputation been based on fact.”

Steig Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

Whoops

Cotton Mather believed that fossilized leg bones and teeth discovered near Albany, New York, in 1705 were the remains of Nephilim who perished in a great flood. However, Paleontologists have identified these as mastodon remains.

The Three Types of Theology

Marcus Terentius Varro established, in his lost Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum, a distinction between three kinds of theology:

• Theologia civilis (civil or political theology), “the people” asking how the gods relate to daily life and the state (including the imperial cult).
• Theologia naturalis (natural or physical theology), the philosophers asking about the nature of the gods.
• Theologia mythica (mythical theology), the poets who craft mythology.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter — MYST meets Benedict Cumberbatch

Storytelling

“A story is time itself, boxed and compressed. It is the briefest entertainment and simulacrum of real life, which is big and messy and requires a strange kind of endurance. The story is stylized for that flash of laughter and pain, thwarted desire and odd consummation, while life waterfalls with it–all of it–every day: prodigious, cloying, in decay. And when the story is finally over–even if the protagonist survives a spray of gunfire and goes on living–it’s over. Meanwhile, life carries on, river-swift.”

Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room