I'm Fairly Often Just Completely Happy

DOUGLAS: Oh well, come on, no one's truly happy.

ARTHUR: I'm truly happy!

MARTIN: Oh God.

DOUGLAS: No, Arthur, you are cheery. No one's interested in the secret of true cheeriness.

ARTHUR: No, that's not true. I'm fairly often just completely happy. Like, for instance, when you get into a bath quickly and it's just the right temperature, and you go "ooooh". I mean, no one really gets any happier than that.

MARTIN: What a depressing thought.

ARTHUR: No, no, it's not though! Because those sort of things happen all the time, whereas you're hardly ever, you know, blissfully happy with the love of your life in the moonlight, and when you are, you're too busy worrying about it being over soon, whereas the bath moments, there's loads of those!

***

I'm no Arthur Shappey.

But isn't he adorable? (Source)

Lately, I've been carrying a deep sadness around with me, what with varsity stress and breaking up with my crazy-haired man and the endless rain and my directionless dissertation and the creeping knowledge that my time here is running out. It springs out at me late at night and when I wake up in the mornings, and, for that matter, any time I think about one of the things I've just listed. Especially leaving. I've never been at all good at living in the moment, but I decided when I moved here that I was going to have to try, or I'd spend my whole wonderful, exciting year of adventures and awesome people agonising over how soon it was going to end.

The closer that end gets, the harder it is to ignore.

So, inspired by Chase That Happy, I made a list of the things that make me happy. All simple, practical things that I can do that help me fight the sad.

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We Live on Avenue Q

Last weekend, I joined some G & S friends and Bri and her friend Robert for a trip to Leeds to see Avenue Q.

Doo doo doo ba da baa, doo doo doo ba da baa, waaaaa! (Source)

That may have been the fourth time I'd seen it. I'm not obsessed (yes I am).

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Guest Post: Eugene's Story

I'm excited to announce that I have some guest posts lined up! After I posted my untestimony, one of the things that struck me was how willing people were to share their own stories. It prompted me to invite a few people to tell them publicly.If you would like to tell your story of transition out of or into faith, nonymously or anonymously, I'd love to post it! Just get in touch with me and let me know.

And so, without further rambling from me, I present my very first guest post: Eugene's story!

---

I always get a little bit jealous when I read the untestimonies of people like Ali.  They just figured it all out so quickly and when they did, they they took the next logical step so fearlessly!  Alas my journey took a lot longer with a lot more detours and far less bravery.  I was born in an extremely small town (our high school had about 300 students) and everyone there was a Christian (except for the one Jewish family!).  Sure there were different flavours of Christians and there were bad people and good people but everyone considered themselves Christian.  The only time I ever heard about people who weren't it was when we were being told scary stories about the godless communists in either school or in church.  That someone could not believe for any other reason was just unthinkable.  Christians were the good people, unbelievers were the bad people and besides, deep down they knew they were wrong and just acted that way because they hated goodness!  

With witchcraft and rock music.

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Academic Silliness Makes Me Grumpy

"Gilbert and Mulkay adopted the term 'discourse analysis' to describe the kind of empirical work they were advocating. However, with hindsight, this was perhaps not a wise choice, as at the time there were two other forms of analysis which were known by this title." (Wooffit, 2005, p. 39).

The heading of this section is "Discourse analysis, discourse analysis, and discourse analysis."

OH COME ON, GUYS.

STOP THAT.

Wooffit, R. (2005). Conversation analysis & discourse analysis. London: Sage.

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Be Kind, Have Fun, and Carry a Lemon

In my last post, I spent a little time fangirling about John Finnemore.

In this post, I'm going to spend a lot of time fangirling about John Finnemore. Because this weekend, I travelled down to London to be in the audience for John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, a very wonderful radio comedy sketch show, written by and starring this even more wonderful human.*

(Source)

I can't use the word "wonderful" enough in relation to this man, but I'd rather this be a post I could conceivably mention him in when I link to it on Twitter, so I'll try and find that middle ground between "review" and "ALLCAPS SCREAMING". Of course, this blog being what it is, I'm also going to talk about What I Did On My Holiday (well, Weekend), which probably disqualifies it from being a review anyway.

(But I would like to say that HE IS BRILLIANT AND THE SHOW WAS GREAT AND I TOTALLY GOT AN AUTOGRAPH OMG. Ahem.)

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Ukulele, Banish Evil

So, you remember my ongoing war with the ukulele player upstairs?* Oh, the fun we had! He played at midnight, and I sent him notes, and I complained about him on Facebook, and Henrik and I stood on the hill outside our building just to glare at him, and I wished he wouldn't be so bad at the ukulele. I was not a member of the ukulele fanclub. Or the fanclub of the guy upstairs.**

But between Amanda Palmer and my friend Bri, I've been converted. Not to the fanclub of the guy upstairs, because I still wish he would learn a few more chords, although to be fair to him, he no longer plays at midnight. No, I've learned to love the ukulele.

 

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You Are Very Welcome to Have a Dishwasher

I'm mostly back to this being my life.

But today I've used every excuse from "but I'm hungry" to "but my shoes are wet" to avoid going to the library, so I thought I might as well add "but I have to update my blog" to the list.

Fortunately for my productivity, all I have to do is cross-post something I've already written for Feminists SA. Unfortunately for my procrastination, that means I have to come up with new reasons not to go to the library (to be fair though, my shoes are still wet).

Anyway, there's been a bit of a furore lately over a Standard Bank ad which apparently boils down to "Buy mom a dishwasher! Buy dad a home theatre system!". Way to go, marketing team. Really inventive stuff, there. I haven't seen it myself and I haven't managed to find it online, so I can't really say anything else about the ad itself, but here are my thoughts on the response to the response to the ad. Meta.

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Greater Love Has No One Than This

Wow, you guys.

I'm pretty overwhelmed right now. In the words of the great philosopher Arthur Shappey, "other people are great!"

After my last post, I got inundated by emails, tweets, Facebook messages, wall posts, texts, and even good old face-to-face conversations about my post. Congratulatory, sympathetic, proud, sad, from deconverts, from strong believers, from closeted unbelievers, from family, from close friends, from near-strangers, from people I haven't spoken to in years...

And every single one of them was full of love and support.

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