Mile 4, 237

It's been a hard couple weeks--I came pretty close to losing my canvassing job. Quota's a bitch. I got really caught up in the numbers for a while; luckily I met a couple people this week who reminded me why I'm out in the streets doing what I do. I've been talking a lot about the legislation in Utah--the one that can cause a woman who has a miscarriage to be convicted of murder. Scary stuff. The scariest parts are that a) a lot of other states have legislation just like it now in place and b) the lawmakers in Utah claim to have rewritten the bill, replacing "reckless" with "negligent" in the wording as if that changes anything. Only 4 out of 29 Senators in Utah voted against the "miscarriage" amendment. Here's a pretty good timeline of what's been going on in Utah along with a look at the dismal sexual education situation in the state: http://www.alternet.org/story/145956?page=1

This has been my first of four seven-day work-weeks I'm set up for for the rest of the summer and I'm already beyond exhausted. My room's a mess because I get up early and when I come home--late--I'm too exhausted to clean. All that refined sugar and exhaustion means that I'm cranky which isn't a good way to be when you're trying to ask people for money.

As for my other job, my boss has been out of town for a week and I've been running errands all over town, not the least exciting of which led me to start coaching girls' lacrosse. (Long story short, I ended up at a park with one of my boss's colleagues whose daughter was starting lacrosse camp that day; the coach arrived, saw me tossing a ball around with the daughter and asked me to stay.) I ended up working at another camp later that week and I love it.

Last week was the week of independent films. I went and saw "Tambourine Man", "Ondine", and "Agora". "Agora" was my favorite. It was about a female philosopher named Hypatia who lived during the fall of the Roman empire. She believed in the universe and she believed that there was a pattern to the movement of the planets and the stars. The story of her passion for astronomy and discovery is set against a backdrop of the Pagan-Christian transition of the Roman empire in the Roman city of Alexandria. In the beginning, the Pagans are allowing the Christians (who practice a religion once banned in the empire) to exist within their city walls, but soon, with the emperor's approval, the Christians rise up and slaughter the Pagans, and later, the Jews. A huge theme in the movie is Hypatia's unwillingness to commit to any religion and her obsession with understanding the universe (her own religion, in my interpretation). Hypatia is rumored, in history, to have discovered the elliptical movement of the earth around the sun, but since the Christians burned the library at Alexandria (considered the most important stockpiles of human knowledge at the time), the majority of information we have about her studies is lost. The film chooses to show her making this discovery, only to be stoned to death by the Christians. The film poses as a great reminder for the violence and bloodshed that has served as a beginning for many a religion. I wish more people remembered that killing in the name of any god is still killing. I don't know that I have any more than that to say right now.

Time to start a new week. Good night.