Deep Sea Fishing?

7-5-14

I felt like I was in an Austen novel this afternoon.

Context: During my internship, I'm staying at the home of these really nice people, lifelong friends of the camp directors from my past three summers. They're really generous to have welcomed me into their home without even really meeting me. I love them and their kids. Suffice it to say, they don't make me feel like I was in an Austen novel. However, the dad's parents have come over to visit--and these are the parents who apparently paid for their son to go to college and graduate debt-free. So, you know, that says something.

Anyway, the gentleman is talking to me about Einstein's theory of relativity and how that might relate to how angels can travel from heaven to Earth in less than an hour, extrapolated from the travel time it apparently takes for Gabriel to get to Daniel from God in Daniel 8 (this discussion started with a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, and no, it doesn't become more clear). Anyway, in the course of listening to him, I responded (apparently) intelligently about triangulation and this gentleman said, "You're smarter than I thought." But then he just goes on to keep talking about whatever it was that he was discoursing on.

And I was like, Wha? Just because I'm studying to be an archivist does not mean I don't have/didn't have other interests. Anyway, the Austen novel feeling came from him talking as if going deep sea fishing was a common activity for people to do regularly. (It's not, by the way.) I was a mix of diverted and confused because the paradigm this man lives in is not the one I grew up with.