The Song and the Flame

Right. It’s not quite been a year since I blogged here. Yikes. Is anyone still out there?

I’ve been trying to read scholarly sources again. Mikalson’s more readable than Burkert, but I’m just not getting much of anywhere lately and I think I have to admit that it’s time to try something else. (This frustrates me very much, as detailed on my reading blog, but what I didn’t want to get into there was that I also sort of feel like a wannabe. I feel like I just keep quitting reading scholarly sources because it’s too haaaaaaard. Which, tough shit. You picked a religion with homework. And this is why this makes me feel like such a failure.) Then it hit me. DailyLit! Has Greek stuff! Primary sources! It’s a little limited in that I’m not sure what the translations are, and I don’t in most cases have the luxury of choosing which one to follow, but it’s better than nothing, which is what I’m doing currently. So the question now is, to dive into the Iliad again and try to finish it this time, or to move on to drama? It’s been a long time since I’ve read or seen any Greek drama…

I feel as though I may be setting myself up to fail. I know I’m in that kind of phase right now where everything seems terribly important and I’m trying to do too much, and I’m afraid I may wind up dropping back on religious practice again just out of sheer overwhelmedness-with-life. But I have to try, don’t I?

In other news:

I think this blog needs a new design, too.

Everyone at Mom and Dad’s (well, all the adults; not Natalie) got one of these in their stocking. Mine is sitting on top of my binary clock on my desk at work. It’s grey, with a creamy color on the breast and around the eyes. I just meant it to be a fun little toy, but… I can’t help it. Every time I look at it, I see Randall’s sig in my head, which is sufficiently tied to Athena in my head that my brain leaps right over the graphic to the Goddess herself. No direct contact, though. That I’ve recognized. Maybe just my imagination making connections.

Would it be a bad thing, though, to have more things that reminded me of the Gods around at work? Apollo’s got his own little shrine, of course, but I hadn’t necessarily given a lot of thought to the others. Which I haven’t been smited for yet (not a request), but it can’t hurt to pay the others, or at least the other Olympians, a little attention too. Maybe this would be a fun way to get back to a little more religious content in my life — do a little research and figure out what (either already on my desk or that I could add to it) I can do to represent the unrepresented.

I also kind of want to go through this blog and rearrange. Sort things better, maybe stick all the early angsty-me stuff into one big “old stuff” category or something, I don’t know. It feels very disorganized right now.