Like countless other 13-year-old girls through the centuries, I quickly tore through all of her books. Then I came across the BBC version of Pride & Prejudice. It was wonderful. Six hours of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy*. Did it get any better?

About this time, Hollywood saw the dollar signs in Austen. P&P wasn’t a stranger to film adaptation. There’s a very odd black and white version that takes place in Victorian times. It rewrites the ending so that everyone gets married, including Mary and Kitty. Kitty is only 14 or so in the book.

Clueless came and changed the pop culture of the Millenials. (Maven Mom saw the movie with me and exclaimed, “Teenagers will never have their own cell phones.” Clairvoyant is she not.) How many people realize that it’s an adaptation of Emma (my favorite)? Bridget Jones entered the scene (an adaptation of P&P) and the chic lit genre was born. Helen Fielding became the voice of a generation of women in their 30s who were desperate to get married. (Ok, I read it in high school and still loved Bridget. My klutzy, awkwardness identifies with her). Sense & Sensibility soon won Emma Thompson and Oscar and other adaptations soon followed including a much politicized Mansfield Park, a very young Gwyneth Paltrow version of Emma and several other BBC versions. If there was an Austen adaptation, I searched until I saw it.

More than a decade later, I’m tired of the knock-offs. Just click her to see a basic Amazon search. Bridget Jones and Clueless were original and instantly became pop culture classics. However, the “sequels” to P&P and strange adaptations are wearing thin. Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife is nothing more than a bodice ripper and the series on the Darcy daughters saving the world is just laughable. While this t-shirt is cool and fitting for me, I just can’t take much more. A copy of a copy of a copy is just getting old. Where are the fresh books and movies? I’ve stopped reading chick lit entirely just because it’s gotten so bad. If a book comes in a pink cover, it’s 50% more likely to suck.

Over the weekend, I watched the The Jane Austen Book Club. I read the book a few months ago, and hated it. Actually, loathed would probably be a better word. I read a lot of books. Sometimes a couple a day. (Those who have helped me move can attest to that). Very few elicit strong responses from me. Some I adore and become life-long favorites (Charms for the Easy Life, Anne of Green Gables). Most I sell back to McKays and instantly forget that I ever read them. (I’ve bought a few books two or three times forgetting that I’ve read them already.) There are very few books that I actually hate. The Jane Austen Book Club was one of them.

It was simplistic. The characters were selfish and whiny. I just couldn’t muster any empathy with them. Elizabeth Bennett would have mocked them mercilessly. I knew that I would hate it when the author completely misinterpreted Emma by calling her insipid and spoiled. Sometimes, when I hate the book, I love the movie. It worked with Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Under the Tuscan Sun. The movie was well-cast and the screenplay was very similar to the book. However, I just couldn’t like the characters. They didn’t make me care about them.

I can’t help but wonder when will the Jane madness end? PBS rebranded Masterpiece Theater this year by releasing six new movies based on the novels and a fictionalized movie based on Austen’s life. (I wasn’t able to watch all of them, so I reserve judgment). Is the craziness helping further the Austen name? I fear that more people are just watching the movies and not cracking open the books.

Before I left DC, someone raved about how much they loved Jane Austen. I asked what her favorite book was. “Oh, I’ve never read her books. Just seen the movies.” Is that a fan or a movie-goer?

It strikes me as ironic that Austen would have mocked this type of worship. All of her books contain commentaries on early 19th century society. Every time I pick up a book or see a preview of a movie that relates to Austen, I can’t help but wonder what she would think. Somehow, I doubt that she would be pleased.

*I’ve always preferred Mr. Knightley to Darcy. Although Colin Firth was a perfect Mr. Darcy.

Tonight, the Tower Club met at the Creative Discovery Museum, my old stomping ground. In my absence, Chattanooga suddenly became cool and clubs and networking groups for young professionals started. (I know!! Crazy!Who’d have thunk it?). CDM started a young professional auxillery to help fundraise for free programs and scholarships.

It was also Free Family Night! Anyone remember that? (Sadly, I can’t find any posts in my archives. I must have deleted them in the move from Blogger to Wordpress.) It was my baby for over a year. I was given a loose idea from our executive director and ran with it. It’s incredible to look at the success of a program that I nervously put together four years ago. That first night, I was a nervous wreck. All I did that day was pray that people would show up. I think we had about 425 people that first night. Now it’s a staple in the community that serves 12,000 people a year. I’m just so proud that my baby program found legs to stand on. I guess that I fulfilled my VISTA goal of creating a sustainable program that serves at-risk or underserved families.

It was wonderful to hear the sounds of my DC coworkers on the phone and get involved in another web site. I’m so comfortable in the uncharted, new media frontier that it’s a good thing I left it. At some point, my brain started thinking in web sites. Now, it needs to think terms of fundraising proposals and grants.

It was also great to visit CDM and return to my job roots. After college, I questioned why the only door that opened was a VISTA position. Now, I’m so thankful. I learned phenomenal nonprofit fundraising and communication skills there. Serving as an AmeriCorps VISTA was a life-changing experience that I heartily recommend to any recent college grad. The DC Roomie and I joke that you never stop thinking like a VISTA. Every time I think about a program now, I question how it will be sustained. Both of my previous jobs provided skills that I’m now drawing upon. The new job is challenging and requiring everything I’ve ever learned. It’s pretty awesome.

• Grassroots Republicans are pissed off at the party.
• We lost majorities in the House and Senate.
• The economy is anemic.
• President Bush’s approval rating is at record lows.
• President Bush hardly enages with the media or the American people.
• 55 members of the House are retiring.
• While the surge is working in Iraq, one must wonder how long it can be sustained and what will happen after we leave.
• I consider myself a Crunchy Conservative rather than a Republican.
• Republican and conservative no longer mean the same thing.
• Hell froze over and John McCain became the GOP nominee.

However, we can always count on the stability of Democrats:

Rush Limbaugh was tampering with the primary,” Kerry said “If it was not for Republicans taking Democratic ballots, he would have won,” he said of Obama.

It’s nice that this little graphic is still relevant. John Kerry, bless you. In these uncertain political times, if the misguided voters of Massachusetts have to keep re-electing you at lease I can count on you to keep whining. Thank you for keeping some things the same.

Rush and Project Chaos tampered with the primary! Wahhhhhhh!

Not full-time, but at least doing one class a semester. I love the academic world and the pursuit of knowledge. Were finances not a problem, I’d be quite content pursuing as many degrees as Buster Bluth.

The only problem is that the more education you have, the harder it is to find the appropriate program. Chattanooga is a wonderful, wonderful city, but lacking in communication PhD programs. Ideally, I’d like to stay in Chattanooga forever. At the very least, I plan on staying here five to seven more years. That eliminates moving anywhere for school since Maryland, UNC and UGA are my top picks. That also postpones the completion of my education for a long time. The longer you’re out, the harder it is to go back. Lastly, I’d be starting a post-graduate program in my thirties. (That’s painful to write!)

UTC provides two alternatives. If anyone knows anything about these two programs, please comment or email.

A certificate in nonprofit management.
After three consecutive jobs at very different nonprofits, I’m starting to see a trend. Getting a certificate wouldn’t take that long and UTC is pretty cheap. One class is equal to the cost of a single credit hour at American. I did 30 hours in 11 months including comprehensive exams, a thesis and working 30 hours a week. An 18 hour program covering topics that I deal with on a day-to-day basis doesn’t sound that bad.

Learning and Leadership Ed.D.
I’ve never considered earning an Ed.D. before, but there aren’t that many post-graduate options around here. This program looks intriguing. On paper it looks like it could mesh with a communications background. From what I’ve read, there’s some organizational theory in the program. Next to communications, I love organizational theory and took about 15 hours as an undergrad in the field. My goal in getting a doctorate is to teach. While I would love to devote three or four years of my life to systematically debunking the Excellence Theory*, eradicating the Grunig name from public relations and researching how the web is altering the way we communicate, that may not be in the cards. (A few people understand and appreciate those thoughts).

Any guidance from my wise readers?

*While Excellence Theory may be dead at the graduate level, Grunig wrote most of the undergraduate textbooks. It still runs rampant in many undergrad programs. I truly believe that further research on how the web is changing communications will prove something closer to Relationship Management as a general theory of public relations. (That was the most complex thinking that I’ve written in nine months. My brain hurts now.)

“Eh,” I thought. “I’m not blessed with the gift of being a morning person. I’ll roll in sometime later than that.”

So I arrived fashionably late at 9:00, thinking that there’s no way that Dana and the team arrived that early. Remember that I’ve known his wife, Beka, since the 6th grade. The two of us were always running into homeroom seconds before the tardy bell. She’s usually more late than me.

As soon as I arrived, I was greeted by several griddles and toppings for pancakes. I smacked my forehead and remembered that we were having a pancake breakfast. After a couple of weeks of announcements, emails, meetings, Facebook events, and even a postcard, I had somehow forgotten that we were having a pancake breakfast. To make matters worse, I was recently appointed communications person.* It’s safe to say that I didn’t communicate the message of the pancake breakfast to anyone.

The cooking of pancakes commenced, and we enjoyed the bounty of refined carbs with sugary toppings. We fellowshipped over food and greeted one another. After a little while, the worship team headed towards the front and started the service.

My Sunday job is to run the slides for words to the music. It doesn’t take that much skill. I listen to the band and change the slides. It’s super fancy since we can change the background of the slides to a looping scene. There’s water, clouds, candles, the earth, etc. I like it since I get to play on a shiny MacBook Pro every week. I even try to match the background to the song.

Today, there was a problem with the sound. It was so loud that no one could hear the words above the music. Within a few notes, I was lost. Frantically, I scanned all the slides trying to figure out where we were in the song. That didn’t help. I had never heard the song before. I turned to MC, the girl running the sound and light boards next to me. She was just as lost and was trying to adjust the sound. Then she got a text from a someone in the front row saying, “It’s really loud!”

Somehow, I expected our fearless leader, Dana, to miraculously solve the problem. He is after all the pastor. I waved him over, but he was just as confused. By this point, people in the audience are turning around looking at us and gesturing that the sound was too loud.

After a short eternity of randomly flipping through the slides in an attempt to match the words to the blaring guitar, the song finally ended. The next two weren’t as bad since I was familiar with them. I effortlessly changed the slides and the background to moving clouds and turn around to say something to Dana.

Out of the corner of my eye I see MC start to laugh. I glance at the MacBook. A hand is stretching out of the nice serene clouds like it’s reaching into the audience. MC then started mimicking hand reaching out towards me. Red faced, I change the background to a safe, celtic cross. I need to post videos of the backgrounds. For a program designed to project the words to praise songs for churches, there are some scary background videos.

During the next song, the guitar, keyboard and half the lights randomly go out. The worship band was repeating the chorus, so it sounded like they had purposely gone acoustic. The lights tipped us off that something had gone wrong. The song ended and we took our usual intermission.

A flock of people soon surrounded our table. MC and I were laughing and mimicking the scary hand while several people tried to figure out the sound situation. Turns out, that two wires were crossed on the sound board.

Then Dana took to the stage and started his sermon. A few minutes later, the lights went out again. A smart member of the team, walked over to the wall and unplugged the griddles. It seems that three electric skillets use a lot of power. The pancakes were taking their revenge.

We survived the rest of the service without any glitches. When I arrived home, the first thing Maven Mom asked was how the pancake breakfast went. It helps to write dates down in my planner.

*Actually, I showed up at a meeting and was told that I was now the communications person. Apparently when you constantly talk about social media, people give you that responsibility. Yay for forthcoming Drupal experiments, err greatness!

It wasn’t Stein’s discussion intelligent design that made me think. Rather it was the obvious bias that exists in academia. Towards the end of the film, Stein mentions how we fight for every freedom in America except the freedom of inquiry, especially in academia.

It’s this pervasive thought, the one that you must agree with the established secular world view, that bothers me the most about our society. It’s one that I keep butting my head against. When we have so many freedoms in this country, why is it unacceptable to disagree with accepted or politically correct thought? I seem to run into it at every turn.

I’m drawn to the academic world because of the pursuit of ideas. However, my thoughts and perspectives aren’t welcome within these circles. It’s the lack of respect for opposing thought that offends me.

It kills me that we’re no longer allowed to pursue ideas at the academic level. Rather, we must pursue research within a limited paradigm. If you stray from this perspective, you’re fired or your career is ruined. Between Indoctrinate U and Expelled, the case is well stated that there’s an obvious bias against center right thought in our institutes of higher education. For example, within my profession, a lot of time and research dollars have studied the role of women in public relations. In reality 80% of the field is female. However, because gender studies are so popular and well-funded, countless grants have gone into studying the role of women within the field of public relations. I’m still at a loss to what this has accomplished.

Oddly enough, most of my friends are liberals or moderates. I love the discussion and debate of our conservations. These people know me and respect me for my views. In turn, I respect them for their views. We rarely agree, but I love our discussions. Sadly, this is more the exception than the rule. In professional and academic circles, I’m viewed as intellectually inferior or insignificant because of my political and religious perspectives.

Just this week, someone mentioned to me that he/she assumes everyone is liberal until proven otherwise. It’s gotten to the point where I enjoy seeing the faces of people when they discover that I’m a conservative. Sometimes, there’s a night and day difference in the way that they treat me, or it comes up at every turn in conversations that have nothing to do with politics, religion, or philosophy. (”You prefer sausage to pepperoni pizza. Oh yeah, I forget that you’re a conservative.”) The concept of enjoying the presence of a smart, educated, woman who is also conservative, is so foreign that they constantly make remarks like “I keep forgetting you’re conservative. You seem so normal.” I’m an anomaly that those on the left just can’t grasp.

This bias or lack of freedom of thought, was so entrenched in my previous job that higher level management sometimes apologized for their lack of sensitivity towards my views. I’m fairly certain that I’m the only conservative that many people in the District of Columbia know.

This type of thought is at its worst in academia. Actually, I encountered it more as an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee. American University was so liberal that they just didn’t care about the U.S. right/left spectrum. If my professors or fellow students realized that I was right of center, they were shocked but open to the idea of knowing one of those red-staters. I filled a slot as the token conservative and was the subject of many a happy hour conversation (”Well, according to my conservative friend, Adrienne, conservatives feel this way…”) Even when I wrote my thesis on the lack of online activism within politically conservative circles, my professors embraced my topic. They questioned why I cared about Republicans and their lack of support on the web, but supported my research. This is very uncommon in the world of academia.

It disappoints me that our nation has devolved into academic yes-men for the sake of getting an A or tenure. That is so contrary to the original concept of universities. If we ban one train of thought just because it opposes the popular view, aren’t we harming our research? Science is rife with examples of banished researchers who dared to oppose popular thought. Many times, those people were persecuted but eventually proven correct. Aren’t we doing that today with political correctness? By hemming ourselves into one worldview, aren’t we harming the intellectual capacity of students and higher ed?

Is it more important that we stay within circles that confirm our own views than build the academic stamina to defend our positions?*** Isn’t the point of academia to challenge ideas and expand research?Anyone? Anyone?

*I met Ben Stein at the 2004 Inauguration when he showed up in a tuxedo and sneakers. He’s extremely gracious and kind and posed in a picture with us. I’ll always be a devoted fan.

**After nine years of creationism at Berean, I was familiar with most of the arguments and anticipated many of the topics in the film. (Actually, Berean taught creationism by refuting evolution, so I often find myself more familiar with Darwinianism than most of my secular friends.)

***I realize that there are circles on the right who are just as guilty as liberals, especially within the religious right.

One of the biggest misnomers about VISTAs is that we tutored kids, picked trash of the street or fed homeless people in soup kitchens. That’s one of the best descriptions of indirect service that I’ve ever heard.

Never fear. Life is settling down, so I should be back on my normal blogging schedule shortly. Actually, it kinda feels like I never left Chattanooga. I think that’s a good sign.

Two weeks at home, and I’m strangely busy. It looks like I have two opportunities to build a web presence on Drupal using CivicCRM. Anyone have thoughts/ideas/suggestions? Both groups have a budget of $0, so I’m more drawn to the FREE aspect of Drupal than the lofty aspirations of the open source movement. Any Joomla/Drupal debates?

Today, we had an event. Since I started last Monday, I haven’t been involved in the planning of said event. Yesterday, I came in the office worried that absolutely no press work had been done. I quickly created a media advisory and tried to find out if anyone had been contacted. Turns out, a couple of people had distributed a press release a few weeks ago and pitched. I followed up with a few calls and hoped for the best. It’s Chattanooga, so I don’t have to worry about some governor having a sex scandal. (DC job was launching a campaign in New York when the Spitzer scandal broke. I was literally about to send an alert when the news hit Drudge). Not that the Scenic City doesn’t have its share of scandals, but the local media always needs community stories.

All three TV stations, the Free Press and Chattanoogan showed up. Professor Hayes would be proud.

It’s nice to not check work email at 7 a.m. and realized that since 2 a.m., three or four state legislatures went haywire on your policy issue, and you needed to be in the office 30 minutes ago. It’s nice to be anywhere in the city within 30 minutes. It’s nice to leave work at 5:30 p.m. and not feel like you’re leaving early. It’s nice to go to the grocery store and not wait in line at the check-out for 15 minutes. It’s very nice to smile and wave at people and chitchat with complete strangers.

I heart the South.

The new gig is extremely different. This is the first time that I’ve ventured into fundraising. Thus far, I’ve enjoyed it. I always avoided grantwriting, but after two years of writing persuasive email alerts and websites, it’s an interesting challenge. Rather than convince people in 2.5 seconds to pick up the phone to call their elected official or click on a link to e-mail Congress, I have a few pages to convince a foundation or corporation to give us money.

It’s also a change to switch from policy to a direct-service nonprofit. As much as I enjoy big-picture change, it will be nice to see almost immediate results from my work by successfully funding a program or getting press for an event. There is no decades-long fight or detailed analysis of all 535 members of Congress (or Mondays with seven hours of meetings). Working on policy issues is a much bigger challenge than helping a local nonprofit. Change is extremely slow, and you’re usually very removed from the people that you’re helping. Those are two factors that people need when serving in the nonprofit sector.

It’s also great to be near my family again. DC is a solitary city. Between work and commuting, you spend a lot of time alone. For an introvert like me, who naturally loves being alone, that’s not necessarily a good thing. I’ve appreciated having a family to greet me. The home cooked meals are amazing. I never realized that I didn’t cook–I defrosted. When you work until 6:30 and don’t arrive home until an hour later, you’re too tired to whip up a nutritious meal. No wonder I primarily shopped the frozen food section at Trader Joe’s.

I do miss Ebenezer’s. I need that “third place” that Ebz provided. This is the first week in two years that I’ve gone without coffee. While I still have my daily cup of green tea in the morning, I need my afternoon latte or cafe-au-lait (and Orange Dreamsicle Freezer on the weekends during Hospitality). Chattanooga has no shortage of coffee shops, but they’re just not in any of my direct paths, and parking is an issue.

NCC, I really do miss you. I had no idea that I was attending such an innovative church. For me, it was a friendly place to worship that offered a million ways to get involved. In hindsight, I appreciate you more. Apparently, all the other “young, hip” churches in the country are immolating you, but more on that later.