Summer of rapture

With the rapture coming up on Saturday, I think it is time to start making some post-rapture plans.  Obviously, those who are called to heaven will be doing some work for God (He is probably pissed that we finally caught bin Laden so he won’t be able to show us how easy it is when you’re omnipotent, but he probably has some weeding for the chosen ones to do in his garden, given that it has been untended for thousands of years).  Given that I haven’t done anything to get in God’s good graces (and my video game skill level is not particularly high), I am likely to be left below.  This leads to the important question of how the rapture will affect my summer.

Thankfully, given that the spring semester is over, I’ll have plenty of time to devote to looting the homes of the chosen ones, though I doubt that they have many exciting possessions.  After the looting, I plan to tune in to cable news for all of the post-rapture coverage (just imagine how worked up Glenn Beck will get when something actually happens!).  I particularly look forward to Monday night’s episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to see how Jon Stewart skewers coverage of the damned and how Stephen Colbert reacts to being passed over (I expect at least the level of outrage he expresses when getting passed over for an Emmy).

After the tumultuous first few days when we all come to grips with our fate, I expect the summer to be spent like any other, though the research I had planned will probably be dropped in favor of a new rapture-related project (possibly interviewing lifelong churchgoers about their exclusion in order to locate social structural causes of damnation).  My visit to Sin City for ASA in August was already going to be hot as hell, so not much will change there.  The real questions concern what to do when the fall semester rolls around.  Should I prepare a syllabus for the entire semester or just the first half?  Will my students (nearly all of whom I expect will still be around) be more apathetic than ever or will they be enthralled by the connections between structure, agency, and the rapture?  Will college football go on as planned?

Perhaps most importantly, if some of the faculty and staff at my school are taken up to heaven on Saturday, will the administration forgo replacing them since the only candidates left are proven sinners and, if so, will their salaries be redistributed in the form of a raise?

Read Full Post »

Gender is in your jeans

Working at a liberal arts school, I sometimes see my colleagues wearing jeans.  One colleague in particular typically wears a style of jeans that are about ten years out of date.  Of course, the jeans that I wear most frequently are nearly two years old, so I’m sure that I will be out of fashion soon (if I’m not already).  The point of this is that despite their long-standing place in the American wardrobe, jeans come in a wide variety of styles and fits.  Now there is one more.

Levi’s has been selling “501 Boyfriend Jeans” for women for a while now*.  The idea behind them is apparently that they are cut in a way that mimics men’s jeans (but still, somehow, not men’s jeans).  Now, Levi’s has responded to the rise of “skinny jeans” with”Ex-Girlfriend Jeans” for men despite the fact that nearly nobody looks good in them (unless they want to accentuate their differences).  Now men can buy super-tight jeans that were made for them but fit like they were made for their girlfriends (or, I guess, the girls who broke up with them for stealing their jeans).

Memoirs of a SLACer field reporter Stephen Colbert examines this issue further.

 

*It is interesting to note the way the Levi’s website differentiates “normal” men and women – the styles you get by clicking on those labels along the top of the site – from the labels that appear when you hover over these labels.  For men, the only other option is “Big and Tall” while women can be either normal, “Petite,” or “Plus.”

Read Full Post »