The tower of confusion
babel
Okay, I'm not gonna lie. I made this felt set in ten minutes. Because the tower of Babel is a weird pre-historic story that doesn't make any sense. Also, I feel fine teaching Harvey that God made the earth in six days but this tower business has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CREATION OF LANGUAGE. And I'm sorry, I just cannot suspend disbelief for something I care about as much as linguistics.
Nevertheless, I found myself using a morel from the Babel story in my discipline of Harvey yesterday. He was yelling "PIE PIE PIIIIIIIIE" while we were already FUCKING SERVING HIM PIE. Does it sound like I'm irritated by this? Because it's very irritating, this thing he does when we're getting him the juice he's all moaning "juuuuuuuuuuuice" like he's just come from wandering in the desert. So I said (after Dan and I both ordered him to SHUT YOUR MOUTH AND YOU'LL GET SOME) "Remember in the Babel story when the people wanted to keep from being scattered all over the earth? So they built a big tower? And then precisely because of the tower they got scattered all over the earth? Maybe that means that if you want something real bad you should STOP TRYING EVERY STUPID THING YOU THINK OF BECAUSE IT PISSES GOD OFF. Now I'm God in this story. And I know you want pie. But your whining makes me mad at you."
I don't know how much he's getting from these nice little chats.
comments
Oddly enough, I was just having a discussion about Babel with Bridget. And by discussion I mean monologue, because I was driving and talking and she was like "uh huh" and I just finished reading Snow Crash which is a sci-fi book that thinks it has ideas about Babel but it mostly has swords and skateboard messengers. But we really should figure out what that story is about.