23/10/2002 - 4:09 p.m.

Beseligt wird mein traum

So, we have King Henry IV (as in the Roman nuemeral four, not a royal type of needle), and we have Pope Gregory VII. Pope tells King to keep his hands out of religion and King says, OK, but I don't like it. Pope gets pissed and gets all the German nobility on his side. King gets pissed and tells Pope so. Pope excommunicates him. They decide to have a meeting to "discuss this". At the meeting King stands in the snow for three days in bare feet begging Pope for forgiveness.

My question here is why? Apparently because he'd been excommunicated. If King had the guts to get on the church's bad side in the first place, why was excommunication such a big deal to him? And then again, why was Pope even considering that to be an option? That's so much power it's scary.

That's my analysis of Humanities for today, now on to Psychology. There are probably some of the more delicate people in the audience going to want to stop now.

We literally watched the "miracle" of birth. Well, not so much birth as the creation of life. They fixed up some guy with a little itty bitty camera that would follow the same course his sperm took. Yes, folks, a roller coaster ride version of that poster that was explained to you in fourth grade health class.

I'm not sure if my fallopian tubes are so attractively lit, but I don't really think I want to find out either. It was not something I really wanted to be aware of in the first place. It's nice that all of that works and everything, but like I've said before, I don't want to have to think about it too hard, and some of those visuals aren't going to be going away for a while.

Then of course came the whole "in-womb" footage of the development of a foetus and finally birth itself, accompanied with all the girls in the room (minus me) ohhing and awwing at the rather turdy looking baby. It was not a pretty baby, it was wrinkly and blobby and screaming. I'd rather have a puppy.

Other than that, I'm looking foreward to tomorrow evening, and I'm avoiding doing my Oral Comm paper. I intend to do it tonight and tomorrow after the crew meeting for Equus, which is at 8. I'm doing the only thing anyone's convinced me to do recently, which was No Shame, and Q didn't so much convince as simply suggest I might want to go. Except that I wouldn't have gone if I'd just seen the posters, so it counts.

By the way, the entry title is from Cabaret, and I hope it means what I think it means (gotten from a little bit of cognate and word root work on my part) because otherwise, I'm not sure what it means.