I'm taking 17 units this quarter which, as it turns out, is kind of a lot. I'm not exactly sure what my rationale behind taking on this amount of work was. Frankly, I probably wasn't thinking clearly, or at all. So at the moment, I'm completely swamped with work, and pretty much certain that I'm going to have a really rough time of it for the next three to four weeks, minimum. In an attempt to dramatize my current state of mind, I present to you a fictionalized conversation between a group of historical figures.

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo: Boy, last quarter was rough.

Gregory VII: You're telling me. And I thought fighting simony was hard! I even ended up taking an incomplete on one of my papers and finishing it over Christmas break.

Augustine: Yeah, last quarter ended on a pretty down note. I mean, the subjugation of the Jews might serve Christian salvation history by bearing witness to the superiority of Christianity, but this work-load is killing me.

Gregory VII: I know what you mean. I definitely am working way too hard. Those, too, who obtain churches by the gift of money must utterly forfeit them, so that no one for the future may be allowed to sell or buy them. Nor may those who are guilty of the crime of fornication celebrate masses or minister at the altar in lesser orders.

Augustine: No kidding. Yet even these privations of things are so ordered in the universe of nature, that to those wisely considering they not unfittingly have their vicissitudes. Ordered or not, these privations are starting to kill me.

Peter Abelard: Get over it. For they had vengeance on me with a most cruel and most shameful punishment, such as astounded the whole world; for they cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow.

Augustine: I take your point, but even though the eternal fire is an evil torture for the damned, to whose sins it is due, it still burns like hell.

Abelard: Seriously, quit your whining. I was overwhelmed by the remembrance that, according to the dread letter of the law, God holds eunuchs in such abomination that men thus maimed are forbidden to enter a church, even as the unclean and filthy; nay, even beasts in such plight were not acceptable as sacrifices. Thus in Leviticus (xxii. 24) is it said: "Ye shall not offer unto the Lord that which hath its stones bruised, or crushed, or broken, or cut." And in Deuteronomy (xxiii. 1), "He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord."

Gregory VII: Ouch.