US 1, England 1

Okay, so the game wasn't entirely bad. We were far too often playing on the defensive, though. Not a strong showing in the latter half in particular. I ended up just watching the match in my room at Arkaig house because I was feeling introverted. I'd been too much of an extrovert Friday night-- a friend and I went out for dinner and dancing, and had a grand time but only left the club at 4 am, by which time the sun was already up. Weird.

But enough about that. Right now I'm killing time before the same friend (she is from France and is also visiting Guido this month) and I study downtown at a café *so* hip that it doesn't have a sign out front, and the door isn't marked. You have to "hear" about its location from other people. Hilarious! I will sneak in my camera and take pictures. I find it entirely amusing that there's a coffee joint-- not even a club or restaurant-- that is soooo cool that it can only be found by the most elite of all Aberdeen's hipsters. Ha! Needless to say I have huge expectations.

For now I just wanted to share a little story about Mark, my office mate, who told me where to find this hidden café, and who is fast becoming one of my favorite applied theologians ever. His wife Ellen, who I just met Friday afternoon, is also one of those people you only meet for a moment but you still sense their intrinsic fabulousness. They are both ordained preachers in the Church of Scotland--they met at Union Seminary in NYC, in fact.

Anyway, Mark is in the process of finishing up his dissertation, though he's already got a position as a lecturer at the Uni and also is a chaplin down in Edinburgh once a week, and other things. He rightly complains, "I'm an applied theologian. What's the point of writing an esoteric book when I could be out ministering?" True that. Alas, the powers of the academy being such as they are, he's been coming in to the office to get a certain number of words written on the diss each day. I can empathize with the humdrumness of slogging through certain chapters, boy howdy.

So there we were Friday afternoon; we'd both been quietly working at our respective desks for an hour or so uninterrupted--Mark type type typing and me, well, translating translating translating, and of course talking to myself now and again. After a while I hear Mark stop typing, sigh an enormous Scottish sigh, lean back in his leather office chair and say under his breath, with all composure,
"Ach... what would Jesus type?"

I laughed so hard at this unexpected externalized monologuing that I spat out my coffee AND managed to snort, in that order. We both had a good laugh, because it's true in some sense that Mark does want to write what Jesus would write-- he's doing Christian theology after all. Not so much the same for me, as I'm working on translating a particularly dense, neo-Kantian philosophical treatise on quantum mechanics these days. [Caveat on this: it's fascinating. The essay was written by this woman Grete Hermann, who, because she wasn't in the right social circles in 1930s Germany and she wasn't a MAN-- didn't get very much attention. But now that I've been studying her philosophy of physics I can't believe that this particular thesis got lost until now! It's so good-- so amazingly deep. She GOT stuff, you know, about quantum physics, that many of her contemporaries debated for decades to come. And then she explained what she "got" in a philosophically careful and deep way, which many of the physicists themselves couldn't do-- and that includes Heisenbergy, Dirac, Pauli, and others--because they weren't trained in philosophy (KANTian philosophy, to boot) the way she was. It's both an exhilarating discovery and a tragic historical fact that this amazing woman, who's known (if at all) for work on a few mathematical theorems--was nevertheless ignored by the quantum physicists. Caveat over.]

When Mark left the office for the day ("At last! I've met my quota!" he cried, and then packed up his computer and papers faster than you can say "noggle that niggle"), he stopped over my desk, put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Just think Elise: what would Jesus translate."

A fair question, Mark. A fair question.