wasting time watching the Duggars because my mom doesn't want me going anywhere

My mother is old-fashioned about things like illnesses. I'm not feeling terribly energetic yet after a recent case of pneumonia, but I would have gone to lunch with some friends just to be social. My mother acted like I said I was going to fly to Japan for the day and climb Mount Fuji while I was there. It wasn't worth listening to her manic rantings, so I told my friends I would have lunch with them next weekend. I'd already practiced piano and violin as much as my doctor thinks I should be practicing in a given day (why is it his concern, anyway? I had pneumonia, not stage 4 non-Hodgkin's lymphona), so there wasn't much I could do. My dad turned on a downstairs TV and somehow landed on an On Demand episode of Nineteen and Counting with everyone's favorite litter, the Duggars. My dad had never had the pleasure of viewing Jim Bob, Michelle, and their quiver full of zombie-like spawn.

Jessa, who is daughter number three, four, or five, has begun the courtship phase of her life. Duggars can't just find people they like at school, because they don't go to school. Neither can they date, because the practice of dating is superficial and sinful, or something like that. "Courting" is how Duggars find compatible mates. The Duggars and their courtees have no physical contact. According to the Gothardite courtship model of finding suitable mates, once Duggars or other Gothardites become engaged, they're supposedly permitted to hold hands. They're not allowed to be unchaperoned. (One commenter on a message board observed that Jim Bob and Michelle can hardly say their offspring are resisting temptation if they're never even exposed to temptation.) Then, on their wedding day, the courters apparently go from holding hands to full-scale sexual intercourse in one fell swoop.

My dad found this all somewhat hard to believe. He said that they're maybe one degree less strange than Warren Jeffs' band of merry misfits. He referenced the line, usually applied to Scientology, that Gothardites exist to make Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses appear almost normal by comparison. Then he said that while he didn't necessarily want me to be a complete slut, he'd probably prefer that to my engaging in the backwards courtship process that the Duggars use to find their mates.

I wish I had something more exciting to share, but when a person's mother thinks she'll contract the ebola virus if she walks out the front door or allows any non-family member to enter the house through it, options for entertainment are limited.

Tomorrow I shall be paroled, as I'm going to class and sleeping in my dorm room.