we took the long way around through the mountains. my feet are killing me. i soooo should have brought my hiking boots instead of just sandals. they are a little floppy, and they have no tread. great for city walking, not the best for monsoon season in the mountains. i was totally terrified i was going to slide right off the mountain. i have to assume that, as a professional, the guide has some sort of contingency plan for stupid americans wearing inappropriate footwear.

speaking of... there are a ton of tourists here from other parts on india wearing HIGH HEELED shoes. i have no idea how they are negotiating the hills here in five inch rhinestone thong sandals. i have moderately sensible footwear and every step outside the hotel is a flirtation with death. even where there are stairs, they're like 6 inches deep--clearly not designed with the large american foot in mind.

i'd love to send you pictures but the internet cafe near my hotel has computers from like 1984. i tried to upload pics yesterday, but it just took far too long to load, and i was afraid of crashing out their system.

let's see... what else... oh i'll tell you what else. i had to buy maxi pads and underwear here yesterday! boy was that morifying to buy panties in an open air market. like the stairs, bras and panties are not designed for the robust american physique.

i paid full price for the panties, even though you're supposed to bargain with the vendors. (they generally charge 2x the real price.) that old biddy knew she had me at disadvantage.

buying pads was another adventure. i don't know if people do tampons here, and i couldn't face trying to explain them through hand gestures to a non-native english speaker. something like that could start a war.

on the plus side, this pad is so enormous, that should i have fallen off the mountain, it probably would have broken my fall.

tomorrow, i might go to the japanese peace pagoda, and on tuesday, my guide is taking me to the next city over and to a tea plantation or something.

oh! i almost forgot, i had the most delicious thing: momo. it's like a steamed wonton but better. (yummy!) my guide took me to one of his favourite places, basically a 6 ft-square room with a stove. (delightful!) you know i love that business.

i think Guide was impressed with the amout of hot sauce i put. i built of my tolerance in hyderabad, mostly to spite my frightfully annoying coworkers who insisted the authentic heat of hyderabadi food would be too much for americans. i would not be daunted. i ate a chutney that literally made my cry, and i asked for seconds and thirds. i took on the thai soup that made my hyderabadi friend cough. (take that! annoying sheltered coworkers!) after all that, a little momo sauce ain't no thing.

While I was flossing leftover slow food from my teeth just now, I had all these crazy thoughts for vegan art installations and performances. I hesitate to Google this for fear I will find things far more unsettling than I myself can imagine (ugh... as I did when I Googled "menstrual art". Let's just say depicting a tampon, which I thought was radical, was the tip of the bloody iceberg.) A dinner made entirely from human byproducts that we naturally create. A calf cozy made entirely of omnivores' meat-studded dental floss for calves who have recently been separated from their artificially inseminated mothers. Performance artists self-testing new cosmetics on themselves...

i went to this slow food movement dinner tonight and a presentation last week. i had a great time at both, and the food was awesome.

so, of course, i have to find something to complain about.

at both events, meat, cheese, chocolate, and honey were all featured prominently. tonight i ate fish, lamb, and pork two different ways.

it came as a fleeting thought during the first slow food presentation i went to at yankee clipper library. it really started to gnaw at me tonight as i debauched my way through five animal-product filled courses.

at no point did anyone acknowledge the fact that animals may actually have suffered for our dinner. that, in most cases, they have to be killed before we can eat them. that dairy products require you to impregnate animals and take their babies away. even if you're a local farmer, don't you have to have your animals killed in the same way as factory farmed animals in order to make selling them legal? (vegans, source please??)

i'm obviously ok with eating meat and dairy, and i'm trying to buy it locally. i figure, fuck me for eating so much of it in the first place, i should pay more for it, and i should buy less of it. that said, i try to be realistic about how it the meat gets to my plate.

i feel like when you get a group of people together that are passionate about systemic change in the agrobusiness empire and whathaveyou, couldn't they also be mobilized around the issue of slaughterhouse killing (if that's actually a problem)? could we consider eating cheese seasonally, instead of artifically inseminating animals year-long, the same way we're starting to get used to eating seasonal produce? if we're all so pumped about the fact that Michigan has such great plant diversity, why aren't we eating more of those?

i don't know what the answer is, but for me, it's not sugarcoating the issue that, yes, even local farmers have to kill their animals, and, no, they aren't all doing it according to rabbinical code or centuries-old amish techniques.

i see the temptation in my own life to enter into all kinds of gross consumption with the rationale, "i don't have to limit my insatiable desire for meat/dairy/$30 soy candles bc i'm buying local/organic/artisan! yay!"

sadly, i fear i'm just reformulating the logic that led to messes like agrobusiness, the credit collapse, and the city planning horror that is 28th street. it's part of the reason that i still manage to spend my way through a paycheck without buying fast food, ipod accessories, kindels, or having a costco membership.

reality check for me: i'd TOTALLY shop at the store in the picture above. a quaint little five and dime on a main street in arkansas. it's totally adorable! it reminds me of the art supply store on front street back home.

the store in the picture is the granddaddy of all wal-marts. yes, dear reader, in 1962, wal-mart was a local business too. i'm not saying my favourite local retailers are going to turn into the next big box chain. i am saying that local isn't better indefinitely solely by virtue of being local, and maybe indiscriminate killing isn't better just because it happens within my 100-mile diet radius.

I managed to get out of bed this morning and go to Church of the Servant for Easter service with friends. I pried my sleepy ass out from between my snuggly sheets, got dressed, and had a quick breakfast (chocolate chip cookie, crackers, and cheese), only to find that my car was dead. For the sixty-fifth time this month, I'd left my lights on.

But I wasn't about to let the Devil steal my joy. No, sirree! And that's how my atheist neighbour - who, like myself and apparently all the dudes I know, doesn't have jumper cables - ended up driving me to Easter service.

The service was OK. Barefoot women in white dresses and brightly coloured scarves did liturgical dance and Passion dramatization against a backdrop of drapery and live flowers. Made the whole thing feel a bit pagan, actually. I really liked the communion vessels. There was a lot of singing. I'm too tired to recount the message.

In fact, I'm tired of this whole thing. I wish I was one of those people who could just take the Bible at face value, read the Purpose Driven Life, and just bloody believe. I'm exhausted worrying about why I'm the only one who doesn't have certainty yet. It's kind of like when everyone else gets their period before you. (Hmm... then you get it, and it sucks...)

At this point, I'm not sure I even believe in belief. Epistemology attempts to explain how we know what we know. What explains how we believe? Is belief constructed in the same way as knowledge: do we have an experience that impresses a sense of knowing on us? Or does it just click one day?

I get into arguments with my mother where I say, "I'm sorry. I just don't believe that." She'll counter with, "Sally! I just don't understand how you can not believe it! It's right there in the Word!" Is seeing it in print believing? Is it knowing?

I hate the term "non-believer". It smacks of such arrogant certainty. It's the ultimate Christian epithet. I hate that it's used interchangeably with unsaved, non-Christian, and atheist. As if believing was something that you can self-initiate by "accepting Jesus Christ as your Personal Lord and Saviour" (a completely non-Biblical phrase, by the way) through the sheer force of your own will.

I'm waging my own little Easter vigil via blog tonight. It's kept me up so late that it's entirely possible that I won't go to Easter service tomorrow morning.

I'll be honest. I was really hoping that after a little Lenten reflection, I'd have this faith thing sorted. I would have justified my politics and lifestyle with some semblance of Christianity that allows me to continue supporting gay marriage and enjoying a cocktail from time to time. I would have true certainty about my faith and the indubitable value of Christianity to our existence. But none of the rules I don't like.

Sadly, on the morning of our Lord's resurrection, my worst fears have been confirmed: the Bible doesn't make sense, the Virgin birth isn't unique to Christianity (Krishna. Who knew?), and I am not sure I believe in the resurrection.

Why would God create logical beings with free will, give us a book that reads like a series of fables and myths, and then expect us to deduce that this book is inerrant? I'm starting to feel like God, if and when he created us, gave us all the tools we need to do away with him.

Last week I visited Park Congregational Church, across the street from the Grand Rapids Public Library. The church is part of the United Church of Christ, a really liberal denomination. The building is beautiful, with lots of stained glass and a huge organ. (How do organs even work?)

The sermon followed a theme in The Shack, which I have yet to read. I'm a little dubious of using popular religious writing as a point of departure for sermons, but I found the message quite refreshing nonetheless.

The title of the morning message came from a line in The Shack where a character describes a garden he visits as having a "blatant disregard for certainty." The minister went to champion uncertainty and doubt as a central tenet of Christian faith.

"Doubt is not the opposite of faith," he said. "Certainty is."

This was very timely for me. I've been getting frustrated at work. Not so much because of people's beliefs, but because they seem so sure about them. I feel like I'm the only one that has questions about anything. The only one that's not absolutely sure all the time. It's really... isolating.

Rev. Petty next described the logic chain that confirmants go through when asked "Who is God to you?" Most agree that God is good, all powerful, and all knowing. Someone inevitably asks the question. "Hey, wait a sec. If God is all powerful and all knowing, why does he choose to do nothing about so many problems?" Ah... the Problem of Evil strikes again.

Another problem is God's apparent contradiction. Especially in the Old Testament - which I don't even dare read anymore - God is implacable in his wrath, yet occasionally can be swayed by the intercession of humans. If I recall correctly, Moses got God to change his mind with a clever argument. God is sometimes slow to anger; other times he's vengeful. (I feel like there's a case for God being a woman with a wicked case of PMS in here somewhere, but I'll let that lie...)

God's bi-polarity is usually explained away with "My ways are not your ways" (Isaiah 55:8) or "We see through a glass darkly" (1 Corinthians 13:12). By turns I find these verses poetic and mystical or downright annoying. At 1:00 AM on Easter Sunday I'm going with downright annoying.

On the plus side, Rev. Petty didn't use them as a stopping point/argument winner, as I've heard people do in the past. (How are those verses even a satisfactory answer for people? "Oh! God's ways aren't my ways! That clears it all right up! Now I don't have to worry about why God didn't prevent the Holocaust or Ugandan children being forced to perpetrate crimes of genocide against their countrymen anymore! Phew! Dodged that bullet! Thanks, Illogical Christian Friend!")

Instead, he uses them to support the position that the unclear, contradictory picture of God presented in the Bible demands a struggle. We are to wrestle with that foggy image until, through a series of progressive revelations, a piece here, a piece there comes into sharper focus.

I guess my question at this point is, apart from wanting to avoid eternal damnation, why would anyone want to bother attempting such a Sisyphean task?