Milestones.

Four days without a blog post? What can I say; it's a hard habit to keep up. Guess I haven't had anything significant to say, if I ever did. I've barely had any time to think the last few days. Finalizing the paperwork for my double major, hunting for apartments, reading shitty books, writing papers on shitty books; all very time consuming.

I was forced to read this book called The Hadj by Michael Wolfe for my Religion class. It was complete, utter, crap. What should have been a deep and thoughtful reflection on a man's personal religious journey turned into an Anthony Bourdain-wannabe travelogue.

In one scene the author recounts his first visit to a mosque in Morocco after converting to Islam and traveling there to learn about the Muslim lifestyle. The mosque has a pole set up about waist high across the entrance. The pole is symbolic; meant to keep non-believers out of the mosque, but has about a 3-foot gap on either side of the pole to let believers into the mosque for prayer. While everybody funnels themselves through the gaps around the pole, the author goes into this really bizarre stream of consciousness you would expect from somebody with the intellect of a middle schooler, in which he "weighs his options" for getting around the pole:

... I weighed my options for getting past it and very nearly made a foolish move. At home I had lived for a time on a cattle ranch. Being used to gates and wooden fences, my first impulse to beat the crowd was simply to duck the pole and take a shortcut. 
No one ducked under. They hugged the sidelines, they shrank to patient groups of two or three, they slipped around the bar at either end, but they took no shortcuts. I managed to pull up in the knick of time, physically pull up and back, saving myself from a serious social blunder. I conformed to the flow of the crowd around the pole.

Wow. Seriously, dude? You have so little respect for the religion you decided to convert  to, and you take it with such a lack of seriousness, that you would even consider that for a split second; going so far as to start to physically duck down and prepare for the jump before you catch yourself? You know, I think I'm going to convert to Christianity. Yep, first thing I'm going to do is go to a church and jump the pews like hurdles in order to get to the front row before everybody else. What a douche.

That's all I've got for you today, my dear little blog.