whirlwind Sunday

Went to brunch at St. Hooligan's in Frelard* with Dancer and her pal S, who's been taking care of her after knee surgery. The food's fantastic, and nobody seems to know they're open for brunch! Not only have I found good brunch in the north end, I can actually get a table! O frabjous day!

There's something I've noticed about Dancer: she's fond of last-minute changes to plans. This tends to cause confusion. Another thing I've noticed is that she often pushes herself too hard physically. Her knee, which had just been operated on a week ago, bothered her so much she was in tears once. I hope she's resting now.

Next: St. Mark's Episcopal, where I needed to spend a couple of hours doing updates to the Microsoft Access (Ptui!) UI for the Lambert House database. I've sternly admonished the volunteer manager to test the damn thing better than I did before the volunteers get their hands on it.

Then a sunny walk down Broadway for Tacos Chukís, Duolingo in Cal Anderson Park, and then a Goth munch at the Unicorn. I only stayed an hour at the Unicorn because while pleasant, it was a bit of a sausage party and not very... munchy. And I had a lot to do at home.

Some of what I had to do at home was on-call stuff. What I didn't realize was that my shift had ended, irregularly, on Friday. Arg! But at least I got the laundry and cooking done at a reasonable hour.



*St. Hooligan's sign says "Balmont". Aw. I like the name Frelard, and I think they're fighting a losing battle to call it anything else.

more biblical speculation

The Gospels are pretty clear that Jesus was against divorce. The one that was likely the first written, Mark, doesn't even offer any circumstances in which it's allowable.

But why was that? Jesus never says, and no one in the Gospels asks. The answer must have been obvious to everyone at the time. I sense an opportunity for unbridled speculation, so I shall seize it.

Jewish divorce laws were among the most liberal in the ancient world; only within the last century or so has the western world caught up to them*. If you were a dude who wanted to trade his wife in for a younger model — and when haven't those been common? — you weren't going to get much grief about it from the powers that were.

And then as now, this phenomenon wasn't gender-symmetric because money. Divorce often if not usually makes women poorer, at least in the short term, today. Imagine how much worse that was in Jesus's time.

So was Jesus trying to keep women out of poverty? That does seem in character. His failure to mention domestic violence or even adultery in Mark suggests a certain... unworldliness, but that's also in character.

Why did Jesus care about this particular issue so much? Well, maybe in his time it was a highly visible problem and he had what's optimistically called common decency. Maybe it happened to someone close to him, but there's that suspicious lack of information about such people, even if the Gospels mention their existence in passing.

I have no idea why this has been kicking around the back of my head, but I had to write about it.



*Don't get me started about the Orthodox men who refuse to sign a get, or divorce decree.