Shopping Tips and Guidance by Mandy Claire

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," plowing through the old mid-life crisis one freakout at a time! I'm the crisisee, Anne Johnson. No, I did not make the name up. My mom gave it to me (embellished a bit). I'm named after a princess.

For some time I have been considering my options for continuing education. School teachers are expected to seek master's degrees and such, in order to better their practice. I myself am enrolled in a master's class in teaching right now. And the shoe doesn't fit.

Nor am I particularly interested in trying to shove my creaky feet into a master's degree in English literature. And I literally sprayed selzer water across the keyboard ten minutes ago when I opened my email and saw a message for an online master's degree in creative writing. For the love of fruit flies and first drafts! Can anything be taught online these days? Oh, snap. Not for me.

On Sunday I went to an ADF Ritual. I've visited with this Grove for a few years here and there, but they're sort of hard-core, camping and such, and my camping days are behind me. However, the ADF does have a formal program of study. Reading, writing, reflecting, doing Ritual, improving spiritually.

Voila. I'm going back to school! Requesting ADF study materials. Don't mind doing this online, or even penning the work onto vellum. If I am to pursue continuing education, it must warm my soul in the autumn of my life.

This study will not be undertaken to improve my employment opportunities or to inflate my grandeur. Quite the opposite. It's high time to get serious about studying, in an effort to understand myself, the deities, and other people better.

Don't worry. "The Gods Are Bored" won't go all Druid. There are too many other bored deities who need praise and worship! But you gotta pick from what's out there ... and ADF is out there.

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Some of you come here for laughs, so here's a previously unpublished tale from the Annals of Anne.

Back in the previous century, when the Heir was a little girl, I enrolled in a Bible study class, mostly just to get out of the house twice a week. It was part of a large pursuit called "Precepts" that billed itself as being scholarly but, in my observation, was not particularly scholarly in nature. To whit, there was only one correct answer to every question. Nowadays this doesn't even work in math.

The first 90 minutes of "Precepts" was a tedious trudge through a specific book of the Bible. The one I enrolled in was the Book of Daniel, which (thank goodness) is a splendid read. But of course, anything parsed verse by verse in 90 minute trudges is going to get tedious. Can't avoid it.

The final hour of "Precepts" consisted of watching a videotape of some female evangelist. Her name completely escapes me, but she was absolutely fascinating. For one thing, her clothes were to die for, week after week, tape after tape. For another, she was a mesmerizing speaker. It didn't matter that her "one plus one" didn't add up to two (at least in my opinion). She was just dynamic. Didn't convince me, but it was entertaining to watch her try.

Here's the funny part. Sometimes when I'm teaching, and I feel like I'm losing the audience (which is easy to do if they're 15), I tap into the old memory cupboard and bring out that evangelist. She taught with her whole body, lots of gestures. Guess what? It works! Pep is a real asset to a teacher.

Who knows? Maybe I'll be a Druid preacher with lots of pep. I'll ditch that part about only one correct answer, though. Can't build a civilization on that.

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It's exactly time for me to go to my master's degree class. The class begins at 5:15 and ends at 8:15 ... and it's held in a classroom 15 miles from my house. After a long day teaching teenagers, this holds no appeal.

Pick your battles, pick your books. The time of life is short.