Sage > Recent Status Updates

so tedious.

When mortality is not heavy
on us, humanity is—
public meaninglessness
preying on private meaning.

"Was there a lesson there, or was it what Ms. Avery, back at good old Piper, would have called FEAR, false evidence appearing real?"

25% in and this book has already changed my life. :mindblown: #neurodivergent

"It was nonsense, but intoxicating nonsense." Or, how to interrogate the magical healing cock trope in one line.

This book synthesizes nearly all my nonfiction reading of the last few years. 😍

Just finished Ch 26 on women & gender in the Apocrypha and I am entirely 😍😍😍! Sara Parks is brilliant; I have to track down all of her "further reading" list.

Ben Sira pissed me off, so I was especially glad for the analysis that tracked down the contemporaneous patriarchal Greek sources he was drawing on. (Freaking hellenism.) Tobit is next, which I've got to go read. Angels!

Meanwhile it's Ganesha Chaturthi (10 day bday festival) and the cognitive dissonance is jarring. ✡📜📚🐘🕉

❤

It is better to die than be chronically ill.
Be ashamed of leaning on your elbow at meals.
Do not be ashamed of drawing blood from the back of a wicked* slave.

* i.e. bad, as opposed to evil

WTF Jesus ben Sirach? This whole book encapsulates the worst of western culture. Gah!

2 Maccabbees. Fighting the Hellenization of Jerusalem and Judea. Antiochus era. Martyrs get a divine afterlife, contrary to prior beliefs. Dissidents win.

So I Maccabees mentions "God" maybe once. The rest is military and political history. It's important and interesting context for c140 BCE, but it's hard to call it "scripture" in the sense of religious texts.

This one just doesn't hold my interest for more than a few pages at a time. Dunno if it's the book or me.

Finished I Edras. Now in Baruch.

Skipping the Hebrew Bible (OT) and reading the Apocrypha. Currently in 1 Edras while reading Oegema's Handbook to the Apocrypha in tandem.

Why do we consider "apocryphal" to be a synonym of "spurious" in modern English? Because of anti-Catholic 19th century Protestant vitriol in the Bible Society, who bewailed the cost of printing extra (Apocrypha) pages and so slandered millenia-old "less important" scriptures as wholly illegitimate and even harmful.

Freaking capitalism strikes again.

I chose not to skip to the chapter on adult women with adhd, so I could better understand how I could have been diagnosed if a girls' DX had existed then. Now I'm in the adult chapter and need a break because holy crap. Story of my life.

I'm bouncing off fiction, but this collection of articles has grabbed me. It's aimed at clinicians and ppl in a position to do ADHD assessments, but the value to patients and their advocates seems very clear so far.