The Golden Idol Milkshake

blogging for academic credit part 2: Madison Ave. Lessons in Faith

2010-10-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

Note: this was originally written for my NYU class about an even that took place on Sept 26.

He was trying to do me a favor. The security guard at the side of the press pen opened the gate as soon as he spotted my notebook. In the chaos of the crowd, I'd ended up standing in the middle of six very tall men, at the beginning of what was to be nearly three hours of speeches after the 25^th annual Muslim Day Parade. I looked at the guard, into the pen, back at the crowd. I said, “No thanks. But thanks.” and he closed the gate and turned away. The parade officials were listing the names of their Board of Trustees. At the back of the shell hung a giant American flag. I walked back through the crowd into the bazaar.

Jabir Choudhry, one of the parade's co-chairs, told me that the purpose of the parade was to bring Muslims in the New York area together, “so that they could learn from each other.” I had seen this in varying degrees of literalness: multiple tents at the post-parade bazaar sold books from around the world. One tent offered sign ups for free Arabic lessons. But I learned something, too: despite what I'd been told in my theology classes, one doesn't really need to read the Qu'ran in Arabic in order to be Muslim. That is, practically speaking. I was asked, “Have you read the Qu'ran?” and replied, “Yes, but in English.” Three times I was asked, and three times, the reply was, “Oh, I don't know Arabic either.” I asked why. One woman, who preferred that I didn't use her name, said that for her it was something to learn as a way of deepening faith, not as a gateway. What was important first, she said, was that I believe, and know what is true. I thought about faith of a mustard seed. I thought about Latin Mass. I thought about Hebrew School and bat mitzvahs. It occurred to me that I had never before been proselytized by a Muslim. I knew some quotes, I knew some politics, but I didn't know the “why.”

I ended up back in the crowd before the bandshell, in a small group of Bosnian women who stood uncomfortably close to me, scolding their teenaged kids (in a small group directly behind us) and, once, pointing to my notebook. Four speeches in, one of the women muttered, “I haven't heard a word about Bosnia yet.” Although many of the speeches were about Muslim unity, standing up for one's self, and the importance of being proud of one's faith, what was being said on the stage at that moment was directed squarely at the journalists and other outsiders in the audience: Muslims must stand up and tell their own American narratives. The current narrative was wrong, and it wasn't going to be fixed by those outside of the faith.

The crowd thinned out by the end of the second hour of post-parade speeches. I was waiting around to hear Nihad Awad, Executive Director of CAIR and one of the two Grand Marshals of the parade. The press pen was nearly empty, and at least half of the men (and one woman) on stage had not yet spoken. I wandered off into the park, still in earshot of the speakers, and listened.

Site-specific martyrdom!

2010-10-04T06:53:00.000-07:00

[I wrote this piece for a j-school workshop, but because the play's been extended, I am happy that I can actually post it and have it be relevant. Go see this show, if you're in the area. And if you're not in the area, you should come anyway. I live around the corner. I'll show you a good bar for a post-wonderfullness drink]

Murder in the Cathedral in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn

T.S. Eliot's work has a way of marking out important moments in my intellectual life: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is the first poem I ever loved; "The Waste Land" the first with which I had a long term relationship. So it's fitting that I christened my move to Brooklyn, and the beginning of grad school, by seeing a site-specific production of Eliot's play "Murder in the Cathedral" – the story of Thomas Becket's assassination – at the Church of St. Joseph in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

The story: Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, returns to England after seven years of exile. He's just barely reconciled with King Henry II, to whom Becket used to be a close confidante. The peace, for whatever reason, doesn't last and four knights go to Canterbury to murder the Archbishop. About three years after his assassination, Becket is canonized. Look it up on Wikipedia.

In Eliot's play, the four knights double as four tempters, each approaching newly returned Becket (played by Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.) and offering a course of action. The first three parallel the temptations of Christ: physical comfort and safety, power, and treachery. Director Alec Duffy had each of the tempters wheeled down the center aisle at breakneck speed, accompanied by lumieres, and dressed in powersuits. Each were able, but it was the fourth tempter (played by Jordan Coughtry), and the temptation offered, that cut the deepest. This tempter offered martyrdom. In other words, exactly what Becket wants. In this scene, Coughtry, dressed as a saint, chases Simmons through the church and into the confessional, where a portion of the scene takes place out of the audience's sight.

The confessional scene was effective, but it is Simmons's delivery of the Christmas Sermon at the pulpit that shifted the production from a good performance to something a little more eerie. The sermon opens the second act of the play, after a brief intermission (during which, by the way, you can purchase and imbibe beer in the church). I have to admit that I wasn't yet paying attention when Simmons began to speak and found myself, not for the first time in the production, looking around the church to find the source of an echoed voice. Simmons's delivery is perfect. At the end of the sermon, audience members crossed themselves at the doxology and, after Simmons' amen, murmured its repetition.

"Murder in the Cathedral" was first performed in the Chapter House of the Canterbury Cathedral. I can see why this production also uses a church as a stage. It's one thing to see actors, dressed as clergy, barring doors against four actors dressed as murderous knights. But in this production, the actors barricade real church doors, locking us in with them, inviting us to feel a tiny bit of collective dread as Becket orders his men to let his assassins inside.

Directed by Alec Duffy with music by Dave Malloy, plays through October 2 [EXTENDED through October 10]. Thursdays – Saturdays at 7:30 PM and Sundays at 2 PM. Admission is a suggested donation of $10, though they say “No one turned away.” And if you go in a group of 4 or more, admission is $5. The Church of St. Joseph is at 856 Pacific Street in Brooklyn, between Vanderbilt and Underhill. Official Website.

Sharing is Caring

2010-05-31T11:04:00.000-07:00

I was rummaging through an old internet account and found the following excerpt of an email from my old Hebrew Bible professor:

One other matter. Below you will find a list of common misspellings and
confusions.

Note the correct spellings of:

Sacrifice, Israel (not Isreal!!), received (i before e except after
c!), circumcise (not circumsize!!), Pharaoh ( almost always the sounded
vowel, o in this case, comes second in the series!), separate, a lot
(not alot).

Facts: there was no apple mentioned in Genesis 3. The fruit is
unknown.

Remember to underline or italicize titles or foreign words.

So, these are the sorts of mistakes that crawl under the skin of religion professors. I wonder what grumpy biology or poli sci professors send to THEIR students to welcome them back from vacation?

hyperlink overdrive

2010-04-20T13:21:00.000-07:00

In the fall, I get to do this. I'll be taking on this concentration.

---

It's all decided now. But here's what happened before: I learned how difficult it is to keep information quiet, even for unimportant people like me. Honestly? it creeped me out a bit.

I decided that I wasn't going to lie about it unless I had to. I'd try not to volunteer information. And that I'd tell my employer, officially, when I felt I needed to so that he wouldn't hear it from anyone but me. In all likelihood, I'd tell him early. But I didn't want it to be public knowledge until AFTER it was a certainty that I'd be going.

I didn't talk about my decision to go to grad school on social media. I asked questions, anonymously, on a message board. I talked to certain people over chats and email, and even phone. I told a few people face-to-face, some of whom I probably shouldn't have told. Alcohol may or may not have been involved. Hint: it was. Obviously, I told a good handful of people. I wasn't trying to keep a true secret. It was an attempt to balance an overwhelming need to blab it all out with the need to handle the decision professionally and rationally. And, at all costs, resist the urge to crowdsource my decision, once I had the two offers on the table.

In the end, I learned how quickly news travels through my mother. She told a friend, who told a friend, who happens to be the mother of my intern's boyfriend. Five days after getting my first acceptance, I walked into the office, and my intern said, "Congratulations!" I reacted with the kind of shock and surprise that actually made me take a step backwards, as if to get ready to escape.

Lesson learned: don't tell ANYONE something you need to keep even moderately under the radar. Not even your mother. But you'll probably tell her. And a few other people. So: be prepared for the inevitable, and get ready to deal with the consequences of a confessional culture.

Foucault was right! See here:

We have singularly become a confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday lives, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one's parents, one's educators, one's doctors to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else. The things people write books about. (History of Sexuality)

So maybe the internet is more an enabler, not a catalyst, for this inability to keep secrets.

R. Crumb's Book of Genesis

2010-03-01T06:56:00.000-08:00

I've spent the past two Sundays in a good bookstore. Now, I'm poor. But I finally managed to pick up a copy of R. Crumb's Genesis.

I'm through Chapter 14 - Abram is still Abram, he's childless, and things aren't that great for Lot right now.

It took seven pages of Google results to find any sort of Christian response to the text. Instead: I found many Crumb defenders writing about the controversy based on quotes from reviews in the Telegraph and the Daily Mail (!).

Does anyone know of a long-form Christian response to this book?

I have a short list of Christian bookstores in the area. Maybe now is the time to start visiting them. I'll bring the book.

2010-02-24T04:38:00.000-08:00

I'm in the middle of the wilderness, so to speak, which makes for brief posts. It's not an exciting or dramatic wilderness, sorry. No good story there. It's work, work, work.

-----

In brief moments of downtime, Meghan and I have begun a conversation about time and memory in writing. She's a poet. I'm prose. And, for the record, I'm a terrible poet... unless limericks count. The conversation is in its beginnings. We have established that it functions differently in fiction and nonfiction prose, and that nonfiction has an unknown quantity of similarities to poetry in this sense. Last weekend, the two of us met a poet who wrote a book about the sudden death of her father. She put it aside for years. Then, one day, she wrote a poem. Eventually, she figured out that the poem was THE POEM, the one that bound that book together. And thus, the book was whole.

Once upon a time, I was obsessed with the following: Augustine waited 10 years before being able to write his confessions. I thought so much about post-conversion writing that I started to write as if devout myself. Made for interesting, if perplexing, pieces. I fantasized about wearing the cross I'd been given in ninth grade after my confirmation. I argued the Christian view in my classes. Fetishizing Christianity may not be exactly what I did, but it's how I see it now.

To be clear: I was dreaming of early Christianity - the world in which scholars spent their lives writing about the genitals of pre-fall man, and in which everything was exciting and new. Where Christianity was not the establishment for gentiles.

A Christian told me I'd be Born Again three years from when we met. We met three years ago this coming summer. At the time - this was during a thunder storm - I nearly bought it. She was crying, it was late, I was tired.

She told me I'd call her, or write her, and the time would be right, and I'd KNOW. We've lost touch. I'm sending her a note, already written, from a month ago but it still holds up as true. I can't find her address. Although time is precious, last night I dreamed of hand-delivering the note in the middle of the night, no return address left.

The story of Joan of Arc got distracted

2010-02-15T17:38:00.000-08:00

I came for Dreyer's Joan of Arc, after starting Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (more on that later), but I stayed for "My Syrian Life Friend."

Am I late to the boat in discovering Gloria.tv: "The more Catholic, the better?"

It's kind of amazing. I've been here for the past 15 minutes. I'm going to take a cheap shot here and post two of the funnier videos I've watched. But then? Secretly? I'm totally watching this all the time now.

Seriously. My favorite part is how this guy's voice changes completely when he reads from the Bible.

Here's one more, pretty timely one:

I gave up rocking guitar solos for Lent. Good thing this snuck in just in time.

Follow up question

2010-01-13T15:09:00.000-08:00

If you'd like to donate to help Haiti, text "HAITI" to "90999" and $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross, charged to your cell phone bill. It's legit. I took that right off of the state department's home page. Do it.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Q: Does anyone actually believe Pat Robertson when he says that Haiti made a pact with the Devil?

A: Yes. And I've made them pasta salad.

Years ago, I was in the living room of a trailer interviewing the members of a church as they waited for burgers to cook on the grill. I was just learning how to get people to talk to me about God, and this was one of the moments in which I stumbled on the right question. I asked them to tell me about visible evidence and encounters with the devil. I asked this to a group of men, in their 50s, who considered themselves to be "prayer warriors." I got stories of Haiti. The conversation was, I imagine, very much like listening to a group of former high school football stars retell their greatest moments on the field.

Below is the part of the piece in which I tell their stories as they told them:

Back at Martha’s, I helped Beth make a pasta salad while Martha formed hamburger patties. Don, Peter, and two other men were admiring Don’s new television. Martha leaned over and stage whispered, “See, Ace? Those men, they don’t do nothing.” Don grabbed a folding chair from the stack Martha had leaned up against the couch when she asked him to set up the table and chairs for lunch. “Alright, we’ll do it, OK? Martha, the grill isn’t even on yet.” I added my chopped carrots to the pasta spirals in the salad bowl, and grabbed a tomato.

When the grill was warming up and Beth and I had finished the salad, Martha kicked everyone but Beth out of the kitchen. She was just too crowded to think. I walked to the opposite end of the room – the kitchen and living room were two halves of one space, separated by a large kitchen island -- and sat down on the couch opposite from Peter, Don and two other church members, Bill and Sally.

“So,” I said, wishing I had more delicate way to begin, “Have any of you seen the Devil aside from Peter?”

Peter sighed. Bill looked me straight in the eye. “I want you to understand something. If you start to get involved with spiritual powers and fighting the Devil, and you’re not a Prayer Warrior, then the Devil is gonna have a field day with you.”

“I just want to know about your experiences with Evil. Do you have any stories about fighting the Devil?”

Peter, Bill, and his wife, Sally, had spent two weeks in the Caribbean delivering the possessed from the Devil. In the United States, the Devil knew that he had to hide and work indirectly. I asked them for an example.

Peter replied, “Abortions, and Charles Manson. What makes a person like Charles Manson do what he did? To me the guy was possessed. The Devil opened him up somehow. Of course, drugs is one way to open a person up.”

“In Ted Bundy,’s interview with Dr. Dobson before he was executed – he said he was raised in a Christian home. They said ‘What happened?’ and in his testimony – I’ve watched the video – he said in his testimony when he went into soft porn and hard porn and I guess there’s something called ‘Police porn?’ Cops and murder scenes. When he got possessed, he felt like something emboldened him. He crossed the line and started murdering people.”

In Haiti, the Devil had more open souls. Voodoo and witchcraft were invitations for the Devil to invade a body. Bill and Peter started to tell stories about their time in Haiti. Bill began:

“I remember one time, this guy gave my wife a piece of wood, and we brought it back to the mission with us, to our room. All of a sudden, my wife starts turning against me. I figured there was a demon somewhere. So I applied the Blood of Jesus over the mantle…” A Born Again Christian is “washed in the Blood of Christ”, and “applying the Blood of Christ” is a prayer that is supposed to reveal or expel demonic presences. “Drinking the Blood of Christ” is having the Holy Spirit fill you.

“…And it came down, it was that piece of wood. We burnt it. We prayed over her you know, after. And her attitude changed completely.”

Peter’s face was red as he started his story: “I remember when I was preaching down there, and it was dark, and this guy flew down the aisle and he jumped and wrapped around my ankles.” Peter grabbed the invisible ankles in front of him. “And I was trained never to allow anything to distract you when you’re preaching. And so this guy jumps through and jumps and wraps around my legs, and I just kept preaching the message and he was wrapped around my ankles, and I felt him let go, and he started speaking. He wasn’t speaking English so I didn’t understand him but someone told me later that he was thanking me. The guy was into voodoo, and he had come to the meeting to disrupt the meeting and put a curse on the meeting because we were taking away his business. But then when I started preaching something happened and he jumped forward, and POW! The Spirit come out of him.” Peter leaned back in his chair.

It was Bill’s turn to tell the next story.

“We were in Costa Rica in a Christian home, and this guy’s daughter was handicapped, and we were praying for her, and there was a voodoo doctor next door to her. And the head woman, Betina, from Times Square Church, said to him, ‘In the name of Jesus I command you to flee!’ and BOOM! He was gone. He was putting a curse on the girl.”

Peter and Bill had to go flip the burgers, so I went back to the kitchen with Sally.

While watching that clip of Pat Robertson react to the Haiti Earthquakes, I remembered these interviews. It's not the idea of the Devil in Haiti that's shocking, to me. Maybe it still is to you, and that's OK. It probably should be. Here's what gets me: the nerve of talking about it on (kind of) national television while people are dying, suffering, and mourning. It's a distinct lack of compassion that seems to go hand-in-hand with Evangelical fame addicts.

Via Boingboing, here's an article about the plight of Haiti before the earthquake.

FAQs

2010-01-13T11:01:00.001-08:00

Q: What does Pat Robertson think about the Haiti Earthquake?

(via @slate on twitter)

...aaand we're back, with Saints in Specs.

2010-01-10T08:32:00.000-08:00

So, Friday, I went on the radio to talk about glasses and identity for another bloggy project I co-write and edit. I'd never done that (radio, I mean) before. I can see why Libby over at Whittled Down likes it so much.

I learned that there are headphones for which my head is just too small, adjustable sizing be damned.

I also learned that the saints used to wear glasses. Well, sort of.

David Fleishman, a retired opthamologist who runs this website, joined in the conversation with an enthusiastic dose of glasses history. Because of him, I'm now officially on the "Hey, USPS. Get Benjamin Franklin on a Stamp, Already" bandwagon. No, really.

But the most interesting bit of knowledge, to me, was the practice of painters bespectacling saints who lived before the invention of glasses. Apparently, glasses have been a sign of intelligence and wisdom for a very long time. Painters used glasses as an easy sign of the elite knowledge attributed to these saints.

It seems the most common saint to have a retroactive correction of myopia is Saint Jerome. He's the one who translated the Bible into Latin for the first time. According to Fleischman, who was interviewed on this subject for the Catholic Digest, St Jerome was adopted by the French as the patron Saint of spectacle-makers in addition to his more well-known patronage of scholarly pursuits.

(I spy, with my little eye, a pair of spectacles on the lectern. Image: "St. Jerome in his Study." DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO)

I'm kind of in awe of Fleishman's image captions in the religious section of his website. He guesses the make of the glasses in the paintings, often instead of listing the artist of the work:

"Bow spectacles, probably leather framed, rest on his desk."

"Type 2 Rivet Spectacles."

"Single Wire Nose Spectacles"

"Glasses are absent in this work."

You can view the rest of the slideshow yourself here.

Art + Math = Identity Crisis

2009-11-15T07:29:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite* pieces in the new exhibition at my workplace is a large fan made of combs on the floor by Sonya Clark. It's beautiful, for one thing. It has a lot of very striking resonances, and I find new things to like about it each time. Plus, it's placed next to a giant tapestry made of hair, and who doesn't love clever juxtapositions?

But now, I have a problem. This piece has a feature that I didn't notice until someone brought it to my attention. And now that I see it, I don't know what to do.

At the reception, someone pulled me aside. He was very excited. He said, "That piece on the floor, how many combs are in it?" I said I didn't know. He suggested we have a contest, like a guess the number of jelly beans in the jar type thing, and I said the idea had come up before.

Then, he said this: "You know, it's a beautiful example of a binary tree."

I hate math. When I had to write a press release template, I made it about my hatred of math. I have a who, what, where, why and how much for my math hatred, and an "About Math" section (About Math: I hate it). Got it?

I can pretty much instantly remember the year LIFE magazine was founded (and what was on the cover, and who took the photograph), but math terms tend to be buried deep, probably under the pile of embarrassing moments I acquired during middle school, tucked away in some neglected corner of my brain that I'd rather not visit again. In any case, they're very hard to find, if they're even there at all.

The man must have sensed that binary trees are not exactly in my memory's immediate recall.

He sighed, and I got the feeling that maybe he had brought this up with someone else earlier, with similar results. Maybe he's a math teacher. "Binary trees. You know, each branch doubles. See? it starts with one comb, then it doubles each branch. two combs, four combs..."

"Eight combs! sixteen combs!" I shrieked like a three-year-old who just learned to spell her name. "Er..I hadn't noticed it before. How interesting."

He smiled. "Oh, it's quite obvious."

The thing is, seeing the binary tree in the piece makes it even more beautiful. It adds something (get it?). The man was right to be excited. There's a precision and pattern to Sonya Clark's piece, and he knew exactly why. But it's math. So I should hate it, right?

I don't know. Even the term "Binary tree" is beautiful. Maybe there's something to the beauty of mathematical precision.

*I have about 15 other favorite pieces in this show.

Tolle, Lege

2009-11-07T12:03:00.000-08:00

-----------------------------

"How Long O Lord, to wait

Beside this open gate?

My sheep with many a lamb

Have entered, and I am

Alone, and it is late." -John Banister Tabb, "The Old Pastor."

I pulled an Augustine and opened to a random page of an American poetry anthology. That's what drew my eye first. I wonder if he wrote it before or after going blind.

"Your brain peaks at 18. After that, it starts to deteriorate." God help the person who learns that after turning 19. I think I heard it first in elementary school. God help the teacher who teaches that fact year after year. Mine was 50, at least.

I got the American poetry anthology from my grandparents last night, at my grandmother's 79th birthday party. They're giving stuff away; they think they're dying soon, despite their good health. The anthology is part of a "home education program" in American literature. Poetry, Short Stories, Short Novels, Literary Essays, and the Key. The Key tells you what to read and when. It's the professor, but it's showing its age more than anything else in the collection. After all, according to the Table of Contents, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, and e.e. cummings are all still alive. Damn.

Now, the Key teaches you a canon comprised of dead men, many of whom were still alive and producing when deemed worthy of the course. There are some women in there, but they're almost all dead, even to the Key. I guess the Key liked dead women better than living ones. I bet the Key and Gogol would have been pals.

I'm going to take the course with Professor Key. There are even a list of questions I can answer about each text:

Does Whitman's celebration of himself in "Song of Myself" seem arrogant, egotistical, or a justifiable acceptance of himself and the world he found himself in?"

Masters' poems have a prose quality. Explain.

Crane is an ironic poet. Write an essay (350 to 400 words) on this subject.

Explicate "In a Station of the Metro"

Many of the images in "Preludes" are ugly. Does this mean that they are unpoetic?

Does the play involve the American experience in any clearly recognizable way? Explain.

Are the characters mere types or are some of them, at least, fairly complicated?

Write an essay (600-700 words) entitled The American Short Story Since Crane.

... I don't think I would have been a very good student in this class.

In Bible-related music news

2009-07-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

The Mountain Goats are releasing a new album on Oct 6. Each song is named after A BIBLE VERSE!

They're "12 Hard Lessons The Bible Taught Me, Kind Of."

You can read more and listen to "Genesis 3:23" at listendammit.com

here's the complete listing of songs, with links to the verses:

1 1 S amuel 15:23 (which is one of my favorite verses)
2. Psalms 40:2
3. Genesis 3:23
4. Philippians 3:20-21
5. Hebrews 11:40
6. Genesis 30:3
7. Romans 10:9 (This is #1 for most pointed out to me by Born Again Christians I've interviewed)
8. 1 John 4:16
9. Matthew 25:21 (Which apparently is a favorite of inspirational Christian image makers)
10. Deuteronomy 2:10
11. Isaiah 45:23
12. Ezekiel 7

Christ, Save me!

2009-07-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

I've started to undertake a major overhaul of how I spend money, influenced in no small part by spending a wonderful week with Libby, who runs Whittled Down.

But also, secretly? It's started to make me think about Christian financial theory. That's right. You heard me.

Deut 28:12 - "that you will lend to many nations, but will borrow from none."

Aside from justifying a large portion of Christian society's anti-Semitism, this quote is also one basis of modern Christian finances.

Among the various websites covering such rousing and relevant topics as "Should You Take a Pay Cut for a Ministry Related Position?" (Answer: Yes. Unless it means you can't support your family.) and "Is Insurance Scriptural?" (Answer: Yes, because otherwise you might not be able to support your family.), there's a wealth of information on why going into debt is bad, how credit cards try to fool you into doing it, and how to get yourself out of it responsibly.

I've never been in debt. I pay off my credit card purchases as soon as they post online. My parents supported my college education. I read this book:

But also, I had a two-hour long conversation with a couple fundamentalists about why they only pay fully and in cash for anything they buy. There's no more secure way to become tethered to worldly things than to go into debt for them. Owe someone because they saved the life of your kid? Sure. Owe them because you want a new car? Not really.

...not unless it prevents you from providing for your family.

Since I have no family for whom I need to provide, I've taken a slightly different approach. I *finally* opened an ING Direct savings account, because a promised $25 bonus (which was promptly posted in my account) lured me in. I downloaded a massive spreadsheet to categorize all my spending. I'm waiting at least a week before buying ANYTHING. And I'm using Freecycle and Craigslist (the free section) as my new favorite window-shopping places.

I might even make bread tonight. I'll have to get make some red wine to go with it.

edit: It occurred to me that I really should include something about Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, but I think that deserves a post unto itself.

Appendix:

The spreadsheet I downloaded (which, ahem, I can use with openoffice. Libby is now obsessed with this spreadsheet. Be careful.)

List of Scriptural references to finances (courtesy of crown.com)

Freecycle

a really interesting and useful blog on saving money that maybe doesn't love Christ

ING Direct "electric orange" checking and "orange savings" -- to get the $25, you have to be a new customer, deposit at least $250, use a referral code from someone who already has an account (hint hint. if those don't work, comment).

Bathing Beauties + Reluctant Thawing

2009-06-06T07:58:00.000-07:00

When my job became the internet, I lost interest in spending my free time 'round these parts.

Here's what's going on off the internet:

There are drug busts at the end of my bucolic West End street. If I park at that end of the street and get out of my car in a dress, men yell things at me in Spanish. The road that runs east-west, connecting my street to other streets like mine, isn't safe for me alone at night.

The other end of my block has two large Victorian houses that, until recently, had matching OBAMA and END THE WAR IN IRAQ yard signs. Kids ride bikes down the double-wide street until their parents call them in for bedtime. Neighbors stop to chat with each other while walking their Labrador Retrievers. The most recent eventful moment on that end was the removal of an enormous dead tree.

---------

I missed my two favorite parts of spring while in Santa Fe, visiting Libby (it was worth it): when the leaves on trees are still pale, delicate, and translucent, and when everything finally starts to have smells again after freezing up all winter. I jumped right into the annual springtime problems: should I get an air conditioner for this summer? Why don't I own any summer clothes I actually like? Where's my allergy medication?

And, of course: why don't they make bathing suits for women like they used to in the good old days?
(which are, in my mind, c. 1920)

EDIT: They do, but they're mostly hideous.

I wouldn't mind that hat, either.

metronome beat

2009-03-22T13:18:00.001-07:00

I get to write while a nice boy plays classical guitar in my bedroom. I could get used to this.

2009-03-21T10:43:00.000-07:00

Interesting.

I usually hate spring. I detest bugs, and spring means bugs. My strongest pangs of longing are associated with snow, and falling leaves.

Until now.

This spring, I am having some serious flashbacks to France. I mean, when your first thought upon seeing a new pretty spring day outside is "today would be a perfect day to walk and take photographs in the vineyard fields," how could you not?

My FSA photo. On the way to St. Andre-de-Sagonis
The crucifixion, fields outside of Lagamas

Lived right around this area.

"We gotta make America skinny again, one slap at a time."

2009-02-12T06:23:00.000-08:00

Near full moon = no sleep

2009-02-08T20:06:00.000-08:00

I am pacing around my apartment because there's a baby crying (maybe it has trouble with the full moon too) and all the windows are rattling in the wind. They're old big windows that don't shut all the way. It would be a problem with the cold weather, except my heat is controlled (and paid for) by the landlord and they crank it up to about 80,000000 degrees C.

But there I go, rattling on about windows again.

I have read the beginnings of five books just today. The only thing that has kept my sustained interest is a British show about cars. They move really fast and the segments are all spliced together. I think I watched this show during the last full moon too... just noticed.

I've started (most of these are re-reads):
A Common Faith
Master and Margarita
Beowulf
Twelfth Night
Istanbul

Stores should stay open all night around a full moon for those of us who can't sleep. We'd be like werewolves only instead of turning into a wolf and expressing the Thanatos (maybe a bit Eros) in our Id with abandon, we'd just be really motivated to take care of of all those errands we've been putting off for ages. Unless said errands involved silver bullets.

You Can Leave Your Hat On...

2009-01-13T19:04:00.000-08:00

Living in Hartford, for me, demands an impossible combination of plugging my ears while yelling "LA LA LA LA I CANT HEAR YOU", and a bloodhound's nose, or eagle eye, or whatever animal cliche you want, for fun.

A friend in New York City recently sent me a link to his flickr feed. I browsed through it and now I have pangs in my chest. I had almost forgotten how much I thrive in a place like that. I told him,
"New York is teeming with ... something. Something good and bad at the same time. But the important part is that its cup overfloweth."

Hartford's cup is half empty. Or maybe I'm just a pessimist. And I say this while working at a place where I can walk out of my office into an art gallery, and see this.

When I think about New York City, or Boston, I need to cover my ears and pretend I can't hear about how much better they are. The very act of "making a go" of Hartford reminds you that it ISN'T either of those places, no matter how many cool things you unearth. That's because you have to unearth them in the first place. There are no serendipitous encounters on the subway in Hartford, no street musicians on my way to work, no Ivy Leaguers running around in a clean little bubble of privilege (well, no current ivy leaguers), no hubs of activity, ... you get the picture. You have to dig, and digging is tiring and messy.

I've always liked ruins, and deterioration, and things past their prime. But I never realized how much work it took to live in such a place.

I learned earlier at work that Hartford is a skateboarding mecca of sorts. Do you want to know why? Yes, you do. It's because we have so many abandoned buildings and lots that skaters can have full run of the place without worrying about police, or irritated neighbors, or, say, pedestrians. If that isn't the vines growing up in the cracks of an ancient ruin, then I don't know what is.

Hopefully, there will be more vines soon. Now I'm picturing Hartford as an old abandoned house I stumbled across in southern France, a house completely overtaken with vines. A wave of vines had pushed open the shutters, spilling light and life into the upstairs bedroom. vines cracked the floor, the staircases, and I wasn't sure how long the structure itself would stand. Maybe soon there will be only vines thriving on top of a pile of rubble.

...I have more than just a few doubts on that last bit, but hope is good, isn't it?

(side note: I'm fully aware that I titled this post with the name of a Tom Jones song. Will not be the last time, you lucky dogs you)

Anne Frank Brave Young Kind Great pupil Lots of Friends

2008-12-31T10:51:00.001-08:00

Someone stuck this to my computer monitor. Amazing.

... I like that Anne Frank had cleavage.

An attempt to explain

2008-12-31T08:24:00.001-08:00

This is the view from my apartment window.

More windows

2008-12-30T10:01:00.000-08:00

1 . "It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls." - Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

2.

3. "When Jezebel heard about it, she painted her eyes, arranged her hair and looked out of a window. As Jehu entered the gate, she asked, "Have you come in peace, Zimri, you murderer of your master?" He looked up at the window and called out, "Who is on my side? Who?" Two or three eunuchs looked down at him. "Throw her down!" Jehu said. So they threw her down, and some of her blood spattered the wall and the horses as they trampled her underfoot." - 2 Kings 9:30 - 33

It is perhaps a blessing that I work in a windowless office.

Looking in windows on a car ride

2008-12-28T12:15:00.001-08:00

Someone else mentioned this habit. At that moment, and only at that moment, did I realize that it's not uniquely my game.

The first windows I remember trying to look into were the windows on third floors. I always wanted a room to myself in an attic. My dutch colonial house didn't even have an attic, so I knew this was impossible unless we moved. If I saw a house with a furnished third floor and a "for sale" sign I would take special notice. Some "normal" attics have normal windows, even curtains. I'd, in the split second I could, look for tell-tale signs: yellowed curtains meant it wasn't a livable place. Otherwise, it was fair game.

I moved down to the lower floors on the way back from Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. The lit-up houses often had other families sitting down, and I got very good at taking a mental snapshot of the dining room tables. If I saw an interesting one I'd look away from the car window and play around with the picture in my mind. Sometimes I'd be a little more mentally agile: I'd try to picture myself as part of each household, to the rhythm of the sound of passing the houses. I felt a physical resistance as I left each household and moved to the next one, like I was being dragged with short tugs by a length of rope tied around my waist.

Last Christmas I saw four houses in a row with Christmas trees lit up in the same lower right side windows, a teenager walking an elderly woman to the table, a man alone watching television, and one house lit only with the blue christmas lights on their banister.

How was your weekend?

2008-12-07T15:56:00.000-08:00

Huh? Huh? How was it.
Let me tell you about mine. It involves me not getting raped and murdered, despite the odds:

Somehow, Mr. Jeffrey Paternostro, a friend and fellow former editor of the publication I ran in college, convinced me that we should go to a layout session of said publication, from here on out called The OMEN. Oh wait, I remember how I was convinced: alcohol, which, incidentally, was my motivation for editing the publication for two years. We drove an hour on I-91 up to my old college town. Since we were early, we passed our college and went to the nearby bar, The Moan and Dove, for some delicious beer. This place takes beer seriously, and I had missed being there. This was to be the high point of the evening.

Picking up a 6-pack of Harpoon along the way to campus, we went to the dorm building that housed the publication office, and entered the secure dorm the way we used to as students: find the propped open door, or just wait half a second until someone lets you in.
The current OMEN staff was late, so we opened our beers. Since Jeffery and I both failed to have bottle openers on our keychains (an oversight that I will soon remedy), I opened our beers on a piece of wood attached to the (locked) office door, spilling beer everywhere, but gaining access to delicious delicious alcohol.

The OMEN's two slogans are "We hate so you don't have to" and "the OMEN loves you!" Jeffrey and I put an emphasis on the hate. The current staff, as we already knew, put an emphasis on being straight-edge circus freaks. I mean it: most staffers were also members of the Hampshire College Circus. We were not amused. We did our best to fill the room with vitriol. Once we tired of this futile mission, we met up with another alum for sobering up at a diner, where I filled myself with lots of delicious caffeine. This will be important later.

As we sat in the Whatley Diner, we noticed that it was starting to snow. No problem, right? No. My car doesn't have snow tires on yet. As we drove back to Amherst, each mile became worse. I couldn't see. I was losing control of the car on turns. Jeffrey and I dropped off the third member of our party and headed to the highway.

Jeffrey coached me for about five miles of highway driving (in second gear, going about 20 mph, in and out of control of the car). Every car we saw was either in a ditch or on a tow truck. We saw a sign for lodging and pulled off.

Super 8 motels are essentially for drugs and rape. Holyoke is also essentially for drugs and rape. We had multiplied the odds that this would be our last night alive and rape-free.

When we finally got my car up the steep driveway that led to the motel, we rented the last non-smoking room. The guy who sold us the room conduced all business through a tiny, bullet proof window, like you'd see in a subway station or somewhere else where robbings and stabbings are daily occurrences. As Jeffery was kind enough to point out, he probably thought I was a well-dressed hooker. The sheets in the room had cigarette burns and probably about 8 diseases. the door didn't lock, so we propped an ironing board against it. There was no heat. Even fully dressed, I felt the sheet scum as I tried to get comfortable on the worst bed ever made. I wondered if there were any blood stains on the mattress.

Here's how the night went: I had fever dreams about designing posters for work as I failed to sleep due to a lethal cocktail of adrenaline from imminent death, pain from a terrible bed, and caffeine from the diner. I finally had one dream. It was unspeakably bizarre. Someone kept getting ice from the ice machine near our door. At 10 AM, we got up, and Jeffrey wrote a nasty article promising death to the OMEN staff for all our misfortunes. Seriously, fuck you, OMEN.

"here, have this basket of stuff and come and stay for the weekend"

2008-12-03T18:52:00.001-08:00

Thank you, Meghan, for reminding me that I wanted to post this. I heart it so much.

2008-12-03T16:15:00.000-08:00

Inexplicably, we latch onto death and murder stories and sites and never ever let go. At the end of the street where I grew up there is a tree with a barkless patch about two feet high and one foot wide. The bark was scraped off by a real estate agent: it was still soaked in blood. Two classmates of mine flipped their Volkswagen convertible over the curb, over a driveway, hitting the tree about three feet in the air. The front crushed and their mangled bodies covered the tree and yard with property-value-decreasing blood. I still look for the barkless patch.

The first dead body I saw was in Puerto Rico, but that's not important because I will never see that spot again.

I've been documenting another death spot: outside of where I work. It's one half of a double murder. Two kids tried to rob a drug dealer, so he chased them down. Both were shot execution-style; one died in a church parking lot and the other on the street. It is the second spot that is of interest.

First, both spots were covered in white powder to soak up the blood. You could see the red for awhile. Candles, memorials, photographs, balloons, beer cans all created a shrine to the dead. The street spot became an unofficial no parking zone. Not that you could park: there were often friends of the deceased on the scene, in the street. I'd slow down on my way in to work at night so that I didn't hit someone. The memorial faded, but the spot remained wet. I am not sure if it was a blood stain, constant pouring of libation, or both. Then, it was the deceased's birthday. It all came back for one last hurrah. And it faded again. Soon before the anniversary of the death, I walked by the spot and paused. There was a car parked over the death spot. It was the first time since the death that I had ever seen a car there. I have seen it once more since then. It gives me butterflies in my stomach.

Today, the street cleaners came by the death spot with a huge vacuum truck and a tube that could fit a body to suck up all the street dirt and the leaves. All clean.

Oh Say Can You See?

2008-11-10T18:04:00.000-08:00

My alma mater on election night. Wait for the parade and fireworks.

There's a moment that I find almost touching, when about 50 students begin to sing the national anthem. I don't like sustained patriotism, but moments of patriotism? I don't know...
This would have NEVER happened while I was there. It's really incredible.

At the same time, I kind of wish the college was more like it was in the beginning -- more radical. More driven minds who can see that the election of Obama is, sure, a reason to celebrate, but it's nowhere near the goal.

I was at this college in 2004, when Bush won again. My socialist Lit professor shuffled into class the next day, sat on the desk, and said "Well, I don't really feel like talking. Or living." Or something like that. I do remember that his sweater was red and black, a Cosby sweater.

The college called an "emergency meeting." Most of us were there to discuss what the fuck happened, and what to do next. A lot of the Social Studies department gave speeches about the immanent End Times, my favorite Socialist countered with the Golden Calves of Liberalism. First Calf: If you inform people, they will think like you. Obviously not true, but many of us seem to hold fast to that hope.

Anyway, I'm happy for them. I'm happy that they had a moment of collective euphoria in such an ideal setting. But this time, who's going to ask what it means, and what to do next? The Socialist is gone. The social studies department probably hasn't stopped drinking champagne.

2008-10-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

Very possibly my Halloween costume, if I can find a way to do the hair.

Watch more It"s Always Sunny in Philadelphia videos on AOL Video

I was lost but now I am found

2008-10-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to hack out a fake testimony to bring a bunch of New Yorkers to the Lord, but my heart is hardened towards God.

Here's how a testimony works:

"I was a very bad person. I drank, I smoked, I spat, I swore. I was selfish, and I was an atheist/Catholic/criminal/Jew/New Englander. And then, someone crammed a mustard seed of faith into my skull with a particularly pithy sermon. Later that night, I got down on my knees and prayed to Jesus to save me, because only He can. And now, I am still imperfect, but I am on the path to Heaven, and I hope my story can put you on that path too. Oh, and the Lord helped me quit smoking."

I bought my first pack of cigarettes while living with Born Again Christians -- their stories all ended with the Lord removing them from their nicotine dependency. I was tempted. If they (the Christians) knew that their stories made me start up, they'd probably see it as me reaching out for divine intervention. I thought I was just reaching out for stress relief and a quiet vice after realizing that the quiet intolerance bubbling in the skulls of those in whom I had entrusted my story and my well-being (I was living with them) was not something I could endure. But I never got addicted. I'm still not.

I spent my last year of college with Christians 5 days a week, including nearly every weekend of my Fall semester. I spent the day of my college's Halloween party at a Jesus Day party with a crazy Pentecostal preacher who used a children's karaoke machine (a small, primary-colored tape player with a microphone) as a sound system to lure costumed children off the street so he could explain to them why dressing up as a vampire once a year was inviting the Devil to take their souls. So a cigarette here and there became the beginning and end of a much-delayed adolescent rebellion. There were overtures of getting a nose ring. Instead, I spent the money on moleskine notebooks and another King James Bible. I spilled wine on my first copy while giving a drunken reading of the Song of Solomon.

Anyway, first I was lost, and then I found myself sleeping on the indoor porch of a trailer in Maine four nights a week. And then I was lost, and then I was lost. The only time I've ever gambled in my life was at the Born Again church's Christmas party -- everyone had to bring a scratch ticket. I didn't know where to get one, but I lucked out in a rest stop on the way up. I don't even participate in office pools. Gambling is not the way I take risks. I prefer mortal peril.

Being found is too heavy a lens for me to use. Once found, everything is seen differently. It creates a story where there is none, necessitating the employment of a cliche (or few). But I'm not lost -- I'm just easily distracted.

Even YOU can witness!

2008-10-04T17:25:00.000-07:00

First time I saw a chick tract was in my college's bathroom. It seems that they've diversified their distribution. Chick tracts allow you to share their wonderful comics on the ol' blog:

This one is quite commendable for its double whammy of Born Again witnessing at its worst and blatant racism.

Praise the Lawd!

I have a stack of the chick tracts in the pulp. At a Boston tent revival, I chatted up a preacher. At the end of the conversation, he handed me a chick tract and asked if I was saved. I said no, and he looked alarmed. "Here." he said, and placed his stack of pamphlets in my hand, "these should help."

Chick tracts: take once daily until reason disappears.

For Kira

2008-09-20T16:16:00.001-07:00

Lipstick on a Pig

2008-09-11T19:41:00.000-07:00

Aside from the obvious media circus attraction to these quotes at this moment, I have chosen to share a few lovely short bits on the animals of the hour in celebration of my decision to no longer practice vegetarianism.
...I threw in the Bible quotes to cheer up Palin.

There was a time not so long ago when pigs were afforded no respect, except by other pigs; they lived their whole lives in a cruel and sunless world. In those days pigs believed that the sooner they grew large and fat, the sooner they'd be taken into Pig Paradise, a place so wonderful that no pig had ever thought to come back. (Babe)

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you." (Matthew 7:6)

When He arrived at the other side in the region of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men coming from the tombs met Him. They were so violent that no one could pass that way. 29 “What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?” Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. 31 The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.” He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. (Matthew 8:29-32)

In 1474 the Bishop of Lausanne sentenced a pig to be hanged because it had killed a child. According to his orders, the pig was to be left suspended as a warning to other potential offenders. (135, Merback The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel)

And the swine, because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto you: ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead carcase. (Deut. 14:8)

Pig love is honoring your dead father by clubbing a beloved sow to death on his grave-site and roasting it in an earth oven dug on the spot. Pig love is stuffing fistfuls of cold, salted belly fat into your brother-in-law's mouth to make him loyal and happy. Above all, pig love is the great pig feast held once or twice a generation, when to satisfy the ancestors' craving for pork, assure communal health and secure victory in future wars, most of the adult pigs are killed off and gluttonously devoured. (from Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture by Martin Harris)

Some Pig. (Charlotte)

Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god

2008-08-31T07:41:00.001-07:00

Yes, I read gofugyourself and they are better than me.

Yes, I am kind of happy that the 50's and 60's are back in style. But apparently so are the 80's because...

Fanny packs are in.

And, as you can clearly see, so are denim running shorts.

I used to have a pink and teal fanny pack when I was a kid. I wore it to the Mystic Aquarium. It looked great with my frizzy hair and overbite and tapered acid-washed jeans.

I also used to wear a pink sweatshirt with my name stenciled on the front, decorated by flowers and teddy bears. That would totally be fashionable now too.

Quote thoughts

2008-08-30T18:29:00.000-07:00

They ain't real, I thought as I walked down the hall, nary one. But I knew they were. You come into a strange place, into a town like Mason City, and they don't seem real, but you know they are. You know they went wading in the creek when they were kids, and when they were bigger they used to go out about sunset and lean on the back fence and look across the country at the sky and not know what was happening inside them or whether they were happy or sad, and when they got grown they slept with their wives and tickled their babies to make them laugh and went to work in the morning and didn't know what they wanted but had their reasons for doing things and wanted to do good things, because they always gave good reasons for the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of their harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were. And then they will lie in bed some morning just before day and look up at the ceiling they can scarcely see because the lamp is shaded with a pinned-on newspaper and they don't recognize the faces around the bed any more because the room is full of smoke, or fog, and it makes their eyes burn and gets in the throat. Oh, they are real, all right, and it may be the reason they don't seem real to you is that you aren't very real yourself.

-All the King's Men, 57-58

I've been thinking about Nabokov today, so this passage brings to mind a butterfly pinned to a board. A human's created here, but at a distance with a scientific objectiveness to common experience.

If I explain myself, it will only tell you more about me by reminding you that I'm human. It's not who played with me on the playground as a child that defines me, it's that I played, that a past exists at all. I can think of myself as a set of Matryoshka dolls, with smaller "Mes" nestled inside each new version until one doll is visible. And all the dolls exist in me but for the most part only one matters, the visible one. As a writer of other characters, what's the point of explaining the exact patterns and colors on the smallest doll's dress when you can just open up yourself and look at your own? To get others to do the same.

2008-07-26T11:48:00.001-07:00

Somehow, Go Fug Yourself wrote the best review of the X-Files Movie I have read so far. And it's not even an actual review.

2008-07-22T17:43:00.000-07:00

I went to the bookstore for another Auster book, but really, I went because chain bookstores mess with my head. Cliched as it is, there's something incredible about the juxtaposition of literature with all the trappings of aggressive retail selling. You walk by thousands and thousands of interesting stories packed tightly together but you only see the bargain tables and the stationery island. It's like New York City in there. Multiply that with my 4-month stint as a barista in a chain bookstore and you get one long hard kinky mindfuck.
No luck on the Auster or my backup, the Falling Man by Delillo , based on a photograph that Amazon's unnamed reviewer accurately describes as "electrifying." It's a man, falling from the upper floors of the soon-to-collapse World Trade Center on 9/11. You know the one:

In the book, a performance artist recreates the fall over and over. There's more to the book than that, but you know what I mean.

Instead, I bought some Rilke after considering my options in the poetry section. A woman stood next to the section on her cell phone talking about granite countertops for her kitchen. She glared as I walked over as well she should have, because I don't generally read poetry. I was definitely out of my league. As she debated different colors of stone on which she will cut her vegetables, I began to read a random page from the Rilke book with the nice navy blue binding:

...ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a while lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not...simply emotions...they are experiences.

But I was skimming at this point, because the countertop lady was angry. She raised her voice. "I told you before that I didn't want to commit to anything until I bring my friend to look at them with me." pause. "He's a friend. His name is John Reed." pause. "I am not telling you the nature of our relationship but I will tell you that his opinion matters more to me than yours does." It seemed to me that there was a poem somewhere in this scene, but I am definitely not the person to write it.

And so I left the woman to her nosy salesman, bought the Rilke, and nearly lost my train of thought on the car ride home when Sinatra started to sing "Fly Me To the Moon."

2008-07-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

Incredibly sweet musical interlude:

I love Madeline Kahn.

2008-06-25T16:20:00.000-07:00

List of things I found in the Litchfield Historical Society as an intern years ago that I insisted on imbuing with a deep symbolic meaning:
1) A dance card with "Alas, Headache!" written in pretty script across the blank lines for dance partners
2) A trick photograph not unlike the photograph on the cover of this book, of a man wearing a straw hat and stripey suit.
3) A turn of the century doctor's kit. Largest tool: saw.
4) The wedding dress of a woman spurned.
5) A honeymoon photograph. The bride and groom sat on either side of a bench, and the bride's mother sat in the center between them.
6) Daguerreotypes of dead babies.

2008-06-11T15:51:00.000-07:00

Today I was cleaning out the white nightstand I've had since fifth grade, when my parents redid my room in green, pink, and white with a Laura Ashley pink flowered wallpaper. Virginal, girly, plain, and traditional -- just what every little New England girl should be. The walls have since been painted a deep, not-quite-brothel red and the black and white toille curtains are the only concession to my mother's taste. Finally, I have a bookshelf instead of a dollhouse, and my American Girl dolls are safely stored away in the closet for kids who will never be born. I have purged most of the room in the year I've been home, but the nightstand has gone untouched inside. In the top drawer, I found a small pendant. On the back, it says "PRAY FOR US." On the front is a picture of St. Ann. It was a confirmation gift from the minister at my old Congregational church. It reminded me of something I wrote about a year ago and had not yet finished.

Knowledge is Cheap

Our ninth-grade confirmation class met in the old music minister's office, the music minister who left the church when I was in sixth grade after telling a mentally disabled woman he loved her, just as God loved her. Politics trump God's love; a deacon and rival heard of the exchange and launched a full-blown sex scandal investigation. The music minister worked with children. The sides were too entrenched and bitter. What else could he do but resign?
When it was his office, the office where small groups of those of us in the church choir would meet for extra practice, the walls were covered with animal puppets: stuffed snakes winding around the pillars like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, giant plush purple dragon heads mounted on the wall, and lady bug puppets you wore like a glove sitting on the side tables next to our overstuffed armchairs. But now it was Pastor Lee's office and the walls were bare except for his diplomas. We sat in fold out chairs in a circle holding copies of the Bible. I was borrowing a Bible from the bookshelf in the corner. Each week, I told Pastor Lee that I forgot my copy as I sheepishly grabbed one off the shelf. Truth was, I didn't own a Bible.
Congregationalists, the theological descendants of the Puritans, don't like ritual and pomp, and they certainly don't pay much attention to the Catholic obsession with saints. So it came as a surprise when Lee told our class about his latest idea to make confirmation more exciting -- each of us were to be assigned a saint, based on his assessment of our spiritual needs and personalities, and we were to research that saint and find a spiritual connection to their story. We each got a pendant in a white cardboard box, and the Lee explained to each of us -- and the rest of the circle -- his decisions.
Mine was Saint Anne, Grandmother of Jesus, the patron saint of housewives, women in labor, miners and poverty. The pastor said he saw Saint Anne as part of my nature, the part that made me exceptionally strong-willed. I thought, "Is this a joke? housewives, poverty, and labor? I'm going to be a doctor, a pathologist. I'll be neither poor nor pregnant." I just assumed that the "miners" thing was an insulting reference to my Welsh heritage. It was nothing new.
On the pendant, Anne held a book. She wasn't looking at the book. She was staring up to the sky, to God. But somehow, I developed a need to embrace my saint, and that book in her hands became the key. I believed in signs and symbolism, but not a God. This saint was meant for me somehow but the joke would be on Pastor Lee. I'd find an interpretation he hadn't thought of, and I'd go outside of 2,000 years of Catholic tradition to find it. I decided Anne was studious, well-read, and wise. She was the grandmother of Jesus, the holder of precious knowledge beyond her time. Instead of an especially pious carrying vessel, I imagined Anne reading the Book her grandson would pass to the world two generations early. I thought of her as a happily silent prophet, who would treat those close to her with odd bits of information, and revel in their misunderstanding and confusion. Instead of tragically misunderstood Cassandra, Anne was content to be the only one who knew the full meaning behind her eccentricities. Like most artists, I thought, she'd be best understood once she was long dead and the rest of the world caught up.
I, smug in my knowledge, attended class the minimum number of times allowed. I was going through the process at the insistence of my father, who in turn felt pressure from my grandparents, but I already had lost my faith. There is nothing new about a loss of faith. For me the tougher part was lying about it, because I still had a conscience. But St. Anne, praise her, helped me take pleasure in my secret knowledge.
But in the end, a silent prophet was an ill-suited model for being. Anne became tragic, a waste of a great mind. How dare she idle while the world around her turned to shit? How dare she live relatively silently, and use her precious knowledge for nothing beyond manipulation and amusement? I turned away from my saint.

alpha and omega

2008-06-09T13:36:00.000-07:00

Do not believe this blog. It is a lie. The entry dates are deceptive and I am not omniscient. When I'm done with creation, one would think that I've had this blog for ages, when in fact it is today that I begin here.

The dates lie because I learned to write before I discovered the internet. I want to be a responsible archivist.

Although I am a fan of the collective, this is my blog (there are many like it but this one is MINE). I am a religion writer by ambition but I am also an atheist. Non-religion takes up much of my life. Stories take up almost all of my life. I hope to write about people other than myself, as I am quite inconsequential.