Once again, “Last Weekend”

Last time, I wrote about the previous weekend soon after it happened, but didn’t get around to putting it on the internet until after the next weekend, which is the weekend I would like to tell you about tonight. The weekend in contemplation is the eleventh and twelfth.

If you count Thursday night as the weekend, you can say that I went to Trinity’s fall play, A Plague of Angels, last weekend. A deep and thought-provoking drama.

Friday night I did nothing of significance, which is remarkable. So I guess that makes it significant.

Saturday I went downtown on my own. It was easy. I drove to Midway, paid two bucks to park, paid two bucks to get on the train, and got a free business card telling me to read The Purpose Driven Life. I also got some free counseling from a rundown man who told me to “Stay in school.”

I attended a lecture on Goya’s art at the Art Institute. Once I was in there, I took advantage of the chance to look at all the art without paying admission.

Then I wandered towards the next lecture I wanted to attend, hoping to find some relatively cheap food on the way. I saw a whole-in-the-wall Szechwan restaurant that looked promising. I walked through under their chintzy awning and past their taped-up menus and into a large, professionally decorated foyer. I was escorted to a tidy, modern dining room and seated at a table with a cloth napkin and a leather-bound menu.

Needless to say, this is not what I expected, and the prices were far more than I wanted to spend. Furthermore, I didn’t really have time for a sit down restaurant. So, I ordered off the appetizer menu, dumped all my ice in my soup so I could eat it faster, burnt my tongue anyway, and ran to the next lecture. But that velvet corn soup was worth it.

The lecture I went to was entitled “Ourselves As Others See Us.” The “others” were an Indian journalist, a Dutch journalist, and an American journalist who had spent a few years in Mexico. The panel was an annual part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, and the auditorium was packed with people who wanted to hear the opinions of those who look at United States’ politics from a different perspective.

Well, what do you know? We found out that the rest of the world agrees with liberals.
I’m sure every organization, every faction, every circle, gathers to itself people who will tell it what it wants to hear.

Conservatives are no different. And neither are Christians.

So should we find people who will tell us what we disagree with? That seems silly. Should the liberally-run, liberally-attended Chicago Humanities Festival have purposefully sought for conservatives to tell them a few benefits of the war in Iraq? They could’ve done what they did for another panel: pick one liberal, one conservative, and one moderate (which made for a good panel because their was actually debate, which makes panelists use logic and reasoning, which is always advantageous). Or they could’ve picked the panelists based on their credentials, and not on their credos. Maybe they did, I don’t know. I don’t really know their credentials.

If we have reasons for believing what we believe, we should not be afraid of hearing people tell us why they don’t believe the same thing. We shouldn’t have to resort to ad hominem arguments (as I saw happen at the panel in which there was debate). We shouldn’t have to count “the ‘others’ agree” as one of our reasons.

Moving on with the weekend:

By this time I had joined two other Trinity women, and we went to a performance in a Jewish synagogue. But we walked out after a few songs because we literally could not see the performers. The stage was kind of below that part of the horribly-designed balcony. It might have been okay if the sound system was either quality or well-run (both would have been good.) So we took the train back to Midway and drove… Home? Is that what this place is? For as much as it feels like home, everyone reserves that term for the place they go on the holidays. Odd.

On Sunday I went to yet another good church with people who shake your hand and don’t even know if you are a member or a lost soul. Or both, or neither.

In the afternoon I went to a guys junior recital and found out that foreign language songs can be done very well and that German is a beautiful language.

Most likely I did nothing of interest that night. I probably went to bed. I should go to bed.