Fencing Bear at Prayer

I need to write something.  I have so many things that have been jangling around in my head these past couple of weeks that I need to say but have been avoiding saying (or saying only obliquely) by posting quotations instead.  Some I am afraid to write because I am worried that writing will make them go away and they are too precious to me.  Others I am afraid to write because I am angry at certain people in my life and I don't know how to say what I need to say without drawing their anger in return.  There, that's cryptic enough, but does it satisfy?  If only I could just jam my fingers on the keyboard and have all of the resentment and anger and frustration flow out.   Asdfghjkl;--so there!  It's not working.  See, to help myself feel better I need to explain myself to myself, but I can't do that obliquely, so I'm still simmering, angry, feeling got at and unable to protect myself.  I could say something.  Why don't I?  Bec...

My family and I spent the greater part of Christmas day today waiting at the emergency room for the doctor to see...our cat. Who hadn't pooped in over a week and hadn't peed properly in several days. I took her to our local vet on Wednesday, and he gave her some Catlax, but still by this morning, nothing. And she wasn't eating any more. Time to take more serious measures. Who works at the animal hospital on Christmas? I'm not sure about the nurses and techs, but the doctor whom we saw mentioned that he was Jewish.* But we were hardly the only ones there bringing animals to be cared for. There were old dogs and puppies and several cats. Nor was our cat considered to be in the most desperate straits. Part of the reason that we had to wait so long (nearly three hours) before the vet could see her was that the other cases coming in were considered more immediately serious. But when she finally was called in, this is what the vet saw: All the poop from the past wee...

I have been having a curiously difficult time coming up with questions to put to my class on " Animals in the Middle Ages ," and I am trying to figure out why. Typically, almost all of the courses that I teach depend almost exclusively on discussion. I don't like lecturing at all, unless it is to help students read through a particular text (the actual, medieval meaning of "lecture": to read). My students don't need me to tell them stuff; they can get all the answers they want on Wikipedia. What they do need me to do is teach them how to ask the right questions of the answers. E.g. " 42 ." Fine, but what was the question? Most of the time I am teaching more or less exclusively from primary sources, so the questions are relatively straightforward, even if the answers are not. "What does the text say?" This can be tricky if you don't know why it was written. So, "what does the author of the text say about why he or she was ...