Sunday Afternoon Humanist Meeting

First of all, we meet on a Sunday, and I think that's just hilarious.

I had tried to nudge the online conversation toward "Lying" because we'd been talking about "Good" and "Bad" and when they finally bit, I was totally unprepared. So, here's the exchange between Husbob and me:

M: Quick! Who's the Apostolic Father who said lying was always wrong?!
H: Ummm, ummmm, ummmm - would you know it if I said it?
M: Yeah, yeah!
H: [Goes through a quick succession of names I don't recognize as being it.]
M: Maybe it wasn't an Apostolic Father.
H: Was it in Ehrman's book?
M: Yeah, yeah!
H: [Heads off for the bedroom.]
M: Oh, do you have it?
H: [From bedroom] I thought I did. I don't see it. Where is it?
M: [Helplessly watching the chat morph into something else as I start gesticulating in the direction the book should be.]
H: [Gazes dumbly at my wild gesticulations.]
M: AW, SHHHHUGAR! THE INTERNET'S GONE INTERMITTENT ON ME!!! Umm, thataway - Shelves. Counter. Stack of books.
H: [Returns with book.] Oh, this is helpful; you've marked it.
M: Have I?
H: Well, you've marked a lot of things in here.  St. Augustine?
M: That's it! That's it! Starts with an "A"!!!
H: He says it's never, never, ever okay to lie.
M: [Starts typing even though that ship has sailed.]
H: That's not a direct quote ...
M: Close enough!!

Mental Health Day

I was put in mind of something this morning that I thought I could blog about.  It was going to be a really insightful and well-written piece (unlike the posts below, no doubt) and then I got in the car and it all drained out.  "There are," as Phyllis Diller said, "no excuses but there are plenty of reasons."  Apparently, the rickets  hives  rieslings  hanggliders   [damn!]  shingles have odd effects on the brain.  These effects are supposed to disappear along with the rash and I was reassured that it was not dementia.

I don't recall mentioning dementia to the doctor.  Now I wonder what I sounded like to him.  I have had trouble remembering vocabulary for quite a while.  I always have to ask my husband for a word that I'm stuck on.  I started blaming menopause for that after the "I've taken too many foreign languages" excuse wore out.  Could have used this shingles excuse all the past year.

I'm having trouble writing and I've lost interest in reading.  I've been having my husband read to me from some book he's reading, which probably annoys him by slowing him down.  Cats are banned from the bedroom for now.  All of this because I have ... shingles.

I blame my co-worker, Shannon.  We had a lovely day together at the YMCA being ignored by hundreds of children (even the fire truck was being ignored) and chatted about stuff.  Shannon has been struggling with kidney stones.  By Sunday afternoon, I was having back pains.  Husbob and I were on our way to Greenville for dinner and I started to squirm in the seat.  Well, that's typical.  I am never comfortable in that car.  Why I think I can ride in it to Arizona and back is anybody's guess.  I still hurt on Monday, so I went to the chiropractor and got a crunching.   That night it became apparent that the pain was not the usual back pain that you can find a comfortable position to relieve, if temporarily.  It was squeezing and squeezing.  I started counting seconds between squeezes.  It never got higher than 14.

So, Tuesday I went to the doctor and tests determined that I had a kidney infection.  I was given a prescription but blubbed when they tried to give me a shot.  Oh no.  Stab me all over for blood as much as you want, but I had enough of the morphine shots when I had my accident.  Nasty they are, painful.  I was numb in my "hips" for two years after that and still cower at the dentist office.  At least I have stopped crying at the dentist's.  And I turned down the offer of some prescription pain meds because the last ones made me itch all over.  [I called in to say I thought I was having an allergic reaction to the pain meds and they unhelpfully told me to "take some Benadryl."  I slept for a week.]

Wednesday, there were some red bumps on my abdomen.  Husbob thought I was having another allergic reaction.  I thought it might be poison ivy, which takes a few days to crop up and I might have touched something in our yard (Poison Ivy Central), although I had no memory of doing any yard work that weekend.  By Saturday, it had spread seriously and I called the pharmacist to see what she said about it and she thought the likelihood was good that it was a reaction.  So I have to get the doctor-on-call and he phones in a new antibiotic prescription that I picked up 10 minutes before they closed for the weekend.

That was just as well.  The first antibiotic was a nightmare of "don't take at the same time as calcium" and Husbob had to remind me when I could take what.  I'm on extra calcium after losing half my para-thyroids.  Two hours before or six hours after.  This is like math, man.  As the days wore on, and pain seemed to be all over that area and not just the squeezing kind, a new word popped into my head: hinges  shingles.  Damn!  So I looked that up online.  Monday morning I called the doctor and went in again.  And that's what they were: shingles.  So, this is a case of the shingles.  Well, well.  Lalalalalalalalaaa.

There is no way we can drive out west if I can't get in a swimming pool (I'm told the chlorine would be very painful) and the heat (I remember 115 degrees in Phoenix, AZ in May) would make this unbearable.  Also, the antibiotic makes one sun-sensitive.  No point in going 3,000 miles just to sit in a dark motel room.  So,  now our vacation has been put off about a week.  [This is just as well.  We're such slack planners.]

I'm existing on acetaminophen, hydrocortizone, antivirals and I'm doing okay.  There is still discomfort, but this isn't anything like the kidney business, which must have gotten better already.  I have a Get Out of Wateraerobics Free card I've deployed, but I'll have to return to the fitness center with one that says I can go back.

Noted since: Although I thought I was feeling pretty well yesterday, today I am in a lot of pain. Now I need to develop some sort of vest to wear with those frozen gel inserts because it is helping a bit to have a sack of chilly water wrapped in a tea towel on the affected area.   Thanks to everyone for their sympathy!

The Making of an Atheist

The hype over the penultimate Harry Potter movie made me think of the star’s professed atheism and then I imagined asking him what makes him think that at his young age (and this was a while ago, so he was a teen) he could call himself an atheist.  I tried rewording it to sound more polite, “How would you respond to those who might task you if you’re a bit young to profess to atheism.”  It didn’t sound much better, but then it set me thinking about how young I was when I started getting the message.

We were a church-going family.  We said “Grace” at mealtime.  Although my father was a Methodist, my mother was a Stealth Atheist.  That is, she never mentioned it while we were growing up.  She warbled the hymns each Sunday (while my dad boomed a bass line he probably thought was “manly”), prompted me to sing those horrible little tunes they taught us as Sunday school (“Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” is a particularly execrable one), sang little religious ditties to me to comfort me (“Down in the Dumps I’ll Never Go” was amusing), told me when I was hesitant to do the Right Thing (especially things I didn’t want to do) that it would earn me Stars In My Crown (that is, in Heaven).  I was never threatened with Hell.  Who would do such a thing to a small child?  God was a big, friendly daddy in the clouds who watched over me and kept me safe.  I said prayers each night before bed, nervous about that “if I should die before I wake” business which I quickly replaced with the Lord’s Prayer as soon as I learned it.  To please my dad, I even tried to learn it in German.  He was also big on memorizing psalms – and if the boys in his Sunday school class learned the prescribed ones they were allowed to feel his cauliflower ears he earned while wrestling before headgear was required. 

Our family’s religious habits were eclectic.  As I mentioned, my dad was Methodist, so I was baptized Lutheran and confirmed Presbyterian.  Each time we moved, different churches were auditioned and my sister and I had to keep scarves on hand in case we attended a service that called for women’s heads to be covered.  There may even have been times when we went to a service on a day other than a Sunday.  On the last move, my mother fell in love with the Unitarian service but my dad vetoed it – both for the same reason: the absence of the name of God, but that discussion was not for our ears.  In the end, we went Presbyterian because that particular church had a very lovely interior.  Mom scoffed at the tenet of Predestination.  “They don’t mention that because it embarrasses them now,” she said.  I had no idea what she was talking about.  Her sister was unhappy with the service when she attended and when Mom pointed out the lovely and expensive stained glass windows (Mom was an artist), her sister sighed and said that she was missing the Whole Point.

My first inklings of suspicion came from my earliest recollection of a Lutheran Sunday school where even the tiniest of us had a sort of mini-service that included an offering.  I am only slightly mortified to recall that I did not like handing over my few pennies, even though they had just been given me that morning.  I am, after all, my mother’s daughter, and I cling to my cash, even at age five.  Money was the taboo subject in our house, instead of sex.  I wasn’t allowed to know how much my dad earned, even when time came to fill out college scholarship forms.  I filled in everything else and then my mom completed the financial bit, put it in a sealed envelope, and gave it back to me for delivery.  This must have been a Depression Survivor thing.  Anyway, it is my recollection that they passed the plate and then put it on our miniature altar.  After the offering came some prayer and we were all to bow our heads.  At the end of the prayer, the plate was gone.   Now, I can’t say definitely that I was ever expressly told that God reached down and took that plate, but that was the impression I got … until the day I peeped.  I was scandalized to see one of the teachers remove the plate and silently take it away.  What? My nickel was not going directly to God? 

This, however, did not kill my belief in God or Jesus (although for some reason the latter was keen on us little ones “suffering”).  I still believed in this enough to worry about those angels who were supposed to be watching over me (and this was about age eight or nine), which I thought was incredibly creepy and insisted on extra blankets.  If they could see through the roof into my room, they could probably see through a layer or two of bedclothes and I wasn’t having any of that!

Moving and changing churches involved, sometimes, changes I had trouble with.  I had finally committed the Lord’s Prayer to memory by age eight and now I had to learn a slightly different version.  This was the change from forgiving trespasses to forgiving debts.  Oh, dear!  My mom tried to explain that it was a tiny difference but I knew that “debt” was a bad, bad word in our house.  Later I learned that some churches used the word “sins” – which sounded absolutely horrible. It’s one thing to walk across a neighbor’s yard without asking (what I thought of as “trespassing”) and another to forgive “debtors” – although this was easier to say than “those who have trespassed against us.”  I was interested in words and it seemed odd that there would be such a difference in terminology as well as euphony (and as difficult as learning to say “those who have trespassed against us” was, I enjoyed the meter and poetry of it). 

 Then there was the German version.  Schuld means all sorts of things.  There was a bit of German spoken in the home, as well as sung, and I knew that there were some words that just couldn’t be translated from one language to another.   It hadn’t fully hit me that these words I chanted (or, later, read in the Bible) were not originally written in English. 

I joined the children’s choir at the church in Cincinnati and enjoyed singing to no end.  I still wrestled with the training-tithes, this time in the form of a cute cardboard church you were to fill with pennies and return by a certain date.  I was the sort who filled piggybanks until they literally burst, but that was because I was saving up for something I wanted desperately (which probably had to be a new piggybank after the previous one cracked).  In those days, pennies could actually buy something.  If you had a dollar – omigosh!  I resented having to use my own money (now) to give to what was plainly mission work, but was described as the deserving poor in underdeveloped nations – as if there weren’t poor enough people across town.

We moved again and found another new church, the one with the famous stained glass windows and the downplayed Predestination.  This was in the 1960s and the theme was reaching out to other religions and popular culture.  We visited a synagogue, we studied other religions and tried to find similarities – it was hippie ecumenicalism and Let’s All Feel Good down the line.  Well, except perhaps in the minister’s forgettable sermons.  Mom pointed out that when he really got going, his nose started to run and I paid attention more to how often his big, white hanky came out than what he was orating – and he was Orating.  He was a Doctor of Divinity!  As a daughter of the middle-management middle-class, I was heartily impressed with anything that smacked of the professional class.  This man was smart.  My dad may have gone to college, but this man had a doctorate.  I was easily impressed. 

 The assistant minister was lumbered with the onus of what is now called youth ministry, and he was easy to ignore, but when the head stepped into our classes with what seemed like his tall, imposing physique (I am remembering from a time when I was shorter, of course) and his grand demeanor, we all straightened up.  One time he decided to quiz us on our Christmas story knowledge, asking some difficult questions about the three wise men – such as what they did afterwards.  Okay, that seemed more difficult at the time because I have now read the entire New Testament but at the time we only read pieces in some garbled christospeak.  So, probably wishing to appear knowledgeable about something, I asked about the fourth wise man.  The Great Man smiled condescendingly at me and said that that was a mere fairy story.  Well, I loved fairytales and read them over and over and I thought I knew one when I saw it, and the three wise men was one if ever there was.  But, I had not made that connection until he sneered at the idea of a fourth.

In later, more sophisticated years, I took it upon myself to read some of the Old Testament and was appalled by what I read – mostly in Deuteronomy and Numbers.  Feminism had reached me and it had been hammered into me that rape was not a woman’s fault.  A woman walking around in a short skirt does not give her rapist the “out” of “She was just asking for it!” – but it said in the Old Testament that if it occurred inside the walls of the city where she could have been heard to cry out, she gets a stoning on top of it.  Outside the walls, well, maybe no one could have heard her there.  It hit me that it would be easy for an adulteress-wannabe to meet her lover outside the walls to hedge her bets.  Basically, I could have been Bill Clinton if I’d worked at it.

None of this took away belief in God or in the goodness of Jesus (although that three-gods-in-one mess confused me – fortunately, the Apostle’s Creed that I had to memorize says Jesus sits on the right hand of God, which keeps him nicely separate) and we were still going to church regularly until that one fateful Sunday.  I had been out late (probably not drinking, but just hanging out with my friends) on Saturday and when my mother came in to ask me if I wanted to go to church, I truthfully said “No.”  I had meant, “No, I’d rather not, but I’ll go if you ask me to.”  Mom took this as her out.  “Good,” she said, “I’m sick of this.”  She told Dad we weren’t going anymore.  Dad might have gone on his own for a little while after that, but he stopped as well. 

My dad was from that intensely personal Christian background that needed his own faith only and not the reinforcement of organized religion.  He never lost that faith – despite all the arguments with my mother in future years about the reality of God.  He wondered why she felt she had to argue with him about it.  “It’s Faith,” he would say, “you can’t prove or disprove logically.”  “Yes, well, if I’m going to Hell,” Mom would counter, “I want you with me.”  I suppose that is some sort of deep devotion - or else she was just making a joke.

Religion fell away from me then by degrees.  I found myself being annoyed by other Christians.  There was an annoying habit one had of agreeing by saying, “This is true.”  If you say that once, it rings.  If you keep saying it over and over instead of “Oh, yes!” or a number of other more neutral expressions, it loses all impact and instead becomes a gnat buzzing around your ears.  I winced every time she used it.   

The Late Great Planet Earth was a popular book when I was in college and several of my friends would regale me with the startling coincidences that reveal that the End Times were nigh.  Well, Chariots of the Gods? was also out at that time and I was more inclined to read that one, if not believe it.  At least it had some nice pictures in it of archaeological interest, and I was very interested in archaeology. 

As an adult, I watched the tragedy of a minister’s family breaking up over his adultery.  He lost his vocation and his family in one moment.  I thought it was sad because he was so personable.  His wife, whom I worked with, was so nice also.  In retrospect, I think they should have worked something out.  At the time it just showed me how human ministers were – a real change from that Great Orator with the Evangelical Rhinitis*.  And I think you understand human failings better if you experience them yourself.  I believe he went on to be a counselor/therapist.  I bet he was a good one. 

I love to read, so I went through quite a few books on religious topics.  It was only too plain to me, after years of studying Spanish, German, French, and Latin that it was hard to translate things exactly, and if there are many Bible translations and they are different - well …   I later started to study Koine Greek on my own** and one of the exercises was translating the Ten Commandments.  I slaved through that, amazed by what I was making of it and thrilled by the plasticity of words. Then I turned to the back to see the correct literal translation … and it was just the same as in the Bible. Nothing at all like what I’d created, unlike the other exercises I was able to translate properly.  Hmmmm, I thought.   I subscribed to Biblical Archaeology Review for a while – but eventually I gave up when the letters section was reduced to religious in-fighting.  The problems with the book on Koine Greek reminded me of the infighting that led to Constantine causing the sects to sit down with each other and hammer out a unified belief.  We’re still fighting over what Jesus meant – and I include atheists because we seem to be as vocal about that as anyone else.

I read The Bible as History as well as The Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People's Religion.  I still have the former, as well as a number of historical books on Christianity.  Everyone comes to different conclusions.   I was willing to accept anyone’s beliefs, bow my head out of respect when they prayed, go to their places of worship until I moved back to the south.  I have a German last name, and I’m often asked if I am Jewish.  This gives me a little thrill as I see an opportunity to “punk” them.  But I don’t.  My background is of a people notable for their oppression of Jews and so I take the high road and ask, “Is it important?”  If they say no, then I say I don’t need to tell them.  If they counter with, “Well, yes …” then I refuse to tell them on the grounds that it would change our relationship.  It doesn’t always work, but I usually try it on (I also like Jonathan Miller’s response that he is only Jewish around anti-semites).  There are accusations of Jewish lineage on both sides of my family tree but I can’t document it.  It’s a shame, really, because small towns like where I live now really need more variety in them so they stop taking things for granted.  What things?  Well, things like praying as a group in a work situation.  

I’ve wrestled with my newfound antipathy towards Christianity (and other religions and some atheists, but I see mostly Christian bullying in my day-to-day existence) for twenty years now.  On the one hand, I would like to be able to opt out of praying without causing a fuss (thinks back to an office Christmas party) and on the other hand I know that my reaction to the heavy-handed religiosity only makes them react more heavily.  It’s a conundrum.  Here’s only a sample of what happens:

A patron came in one day and I was helpful.  Before she left, she felt obliged to ask me if I were a Christian (without any subjunctive or indefinite verbiage).  I am not forbidden to respond to such questions and either way I answered would cause a problem.  If I said I was, then I would give her the false impression that there were more like-minded people out there and she probably had some follow-up question to trick me into admitting I was the wrong kind.  I knew it would be equal trouble, but I said I wasn’t and this led to a Conversation.  I said, upon being asked why, that I had read and seen too much to believe.  “Oh, yes,” she said, “I’ve seen many people confused by …” and she went on. 

Yes, many of us are confused by historical and scientific facts, but that does not necessarily cause us to stop believing.  We are not confused by our studies because generally we only see the parts we agree with anyway.  We more often are struck by our lack of belief and then go searching for material that bolsters this.  I have tried to look at both sides at first.  I had read Mere Christianity and was with Lewis right up to one little point where I realized his logic fell apart.  After that, it was all over.  The fat lady sang.  This was not an ancient document that was a copy of a long line of copies.  It was not something that an editor interpolated something he thought he heard someone say that he heard someone say that Lewis said once.  It was in Lewis’s attempt to clinch his argument – and not at the very end, but hidden in the last few irrefutable statements where it might go unnoticed.  But I saw it and he failed.  He tried to do the impossible, and I applaud his attempt, but it didn’t work.  In the end, it was Christians who made me an atheist and everyone since that has fired their best shot at me, ordinary or wielding their credentials like clubs, has also failed.  Therefore, I suspect that foisting my beliefs on them would work equally poorly.

The more embellishment you lard on, the less likely I am to accept it as truth.  I know stories and I love them.  Passion stories and the Christmas story can bring me to tears even in their most banal renditions, but not because I see Truth – I just see a wonderfully told tale.   I am willing to leave the question open on whether or not Jesus existed as a man.  It seems likely, but for me there is no God for him to be Son Of.  I have to, as The Life of Pi suggested, go with the Better Story.  I don’t buy the tiger one and I’m sure Martel could have made the other story just as interesting if he’d bothered instead of reducing it to a few dry sentences.  As it was, I was reconstructing it in my mind the same way scholars try to eke out the verifiable in the Bible.

Everyone else is free to find their Better Story, but, as they say, it’s in the way you tell ‘em.   And, even better, is the one you discover for yourself.

*Bob and I discussed the pseudo-scientific naming of this “ailment” (I suffer from Gustatory Rhinitis – or perhaps other people suffer having to watch me dab at my nose at the table) and he came up with all sorts of adjectives, notably: Rhetorical Rhinitis (which, though the alliteration is to die for, makes it sound more theoretical), Proselytizing Rhinitis (which I rejected because that would be orating on street corners), Pulpitary Rhinitis (you can’t keep a good man down when he’s on a roll), Homilary Rhinitis (okay, that one was all mine, but Bob had to think of the word Homily for me), Sermonizing Rhinitis (which didn’t sound “science-y” enough although I tried Sermonial for a while), Eschatological Rhinitis (which sounds so – so final) and Hortatory Rhinitis – but we just descended into silliness.

**I did not begin my study of Greek purposefully to unravel the Bible myself.  It began with reading Aristophanes’ “The Frogs” and laughing so hard that Diet Pepsi came out my nose (and very nearly the bean burrito as well).  I started to wonder if it was as funny in the original Ancient Greek as the translation was.  It is.  Well, that part was anyway.

A Brief History of My Reading

Today I tried to come up with an author's name and it just didn't rise to the surface.  That isn't too surprising, not at my age.  I look at my co-workers, people I work with every day, and can't come up with their names although they are wearing name tags.  But I did sort of remember one of the author's books, which I confused with his name (because they are both singular - you know, like "Cher") and because there is the interweb-thingie I can key what I know in and come up with the bit I don't know.  Love the interwebs.

It is frustrating though, for someone who can't remember the names of the pseudepigraphic Pauline letters from one moment to the next (let's see, there's the pestorals and the ones that start with T ... but what about Effusions, Collations, and Fellations?) despite having heard/read about them time after time, to suddenly remember a book from 1979 and some of its content despite not having read it.  And suddenly I remember that I was on page 263/4 of Nabokov's Ada before I gave up (planning to resume later because I kept track of the page ... which is often how I keep track of where I stopped reading when a bookmark isn't handy: I just remember look at the page number and remember it) at about that same time.  Mind you, I don't remember what I've read.  In order to cope with the book discussion group I lead I have to make a note of each character in the book because I just can't remember names (see above co-workers).

This has put me in mind of what I have read over the years.  I go through fads, but cheezy mysteries and non-fiction tend to resurface.

Grade school: the Alfred Hitchcock collections, Nancy Drew, and Roald Dahl.  I was once handed some realistic fiction by a school librarian when I looked hesitant and regarded her with suspicion ever after.  Why would she think I would enjoy a book about a girl whose father was a janitor and who was feeling ostracized by her peers?  Later one handed me James and the Giant Peach and all was well again - but I have been careful since becoming a children's librarian about what I recommend to kids and how I express it.  "Well, I liked it," I might say or "I hear it's popular."  I will never suggest that they would like a book.

Grade school and what was then called Junior High: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a gift from my sister who knew a little martyr when she saw one.  My sister was the The Secret Garden type: pushy and devious ... but in a good way.  I read this book about once a month and cried and cried and spilled Chicken with Stars soup on it.  It's engraved on my heart.  Wish I could remember that little girl's name though.  Nowadays I read some of the stuff written for "teens" and I just can't take the pain and the angst.  I guess we like it at that age.

High school: Mysteries.  I started with Agatha Christie and never stopped.  Preferred the British and the more gentle, but occasionally branched out into the more gruesome.  And fell in love with P. G. Wodehouse and his unique turn of phrase.  Also, I spent high school summers immersing myself in themes such as Epic Poetry and Greek Drama.  This affectation continued in college.  It's an affectation because I didn't take any courses in them, just read them to be able to say I had and shut down conversations with "Well, you know what Aeschylus says ..."  Oh, and I also read a lot of John Barth and Anthony Burgess.

College: More cheezy mysteries to offset the reading I had to do ... in three different languages.  Oh, yeah - I forgot English.  Four different languages.

Grad school: I don't recall reading anything for pleasure during that time.  I was too busy drinking.  Oh, wait - I seem to remember reading popular books about physics - that must have been during the summers. And I got back into the medieval and ancient.


 The South Carolina Years: I worked at a public library and had all the material there to read: More mysteries (especially the Brother Cadfael ones by Ellis Peters), more Wodehouse, lots of non-fiction.  These were also the Shogun years.  It took me six days to read it and I've picked up used copies of it ever since to give away.  Also read an account of the historic Anjin-san Clavell based the book on.  Amazing. 

The New York Years: Mysteries ... and portable Greek philosophers, branching into ancient history.

The Boston years: Mysteries and I discovered that Charles Dickens was actually a fabulous writer if you weren't being forced to read him for school.  I was tricked into this by seeing that he'd written a book with "mystery" right in the title!  Before long, I was staying up until 4 am to finish Bleak House.  This caused me to read Jane Austen as well.  Well, dang!  And Harvard Square has the best bookshops.  I finally got the David Steinberg joke about the Ludwig Wittgenstein book with the red cover because I was back in the philosophy section again ... revisiting my idea about yet another play about the Athenian legal system.  And I became obsessed with The Iliad.  It made me mad, but I loved it.  And I was reading some Aristophanes one day at lunch downtown when it made  Diet Pepsi* come out my nose and I wondered if it could possibly be that funny in Greek.  And that's when I started signing up for the Ancient Greek course in adult education - again and again until it got enough suckers to make it worth a teacher's while.

The Back to SC Years: I moved back here with a Ryder truck full of books in ... several languages (none of which I had learned properly) and immediately got a library card and started reading mysteries again. Although in a book group, I find it really hard to read serious or realistic fiction.  I love satire (Christopher Buckley does a great job coming up with ideas for books, but I don't think he knows how to end them properly) and historical mysteries - but I love popular non-fiction.  I just love learning, even if I don't remember things properly.  But I am assembling a world view from what I have read.

My reviews: http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1711341
My books: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/marfita/yourlibrary

*I come from a Coca-Cola family, but if I was forced to drink a diet beverage (and I never do anymore), I preferred Diet Pepsi.  Actually, I had a Pepsi Light (now apparently called Pepsi Twist) once and became instantly addicted.  I went out the same day and bought a six-pack, drank it, and suddenly realized I could Never Have It Again.

Advice for the Sleepless

Sleeping on concrete during dance rehearsals seems to have done me no harm.

I was one of those people who could sleep anywhere, anywhere, except her own bed at night. I've slept on a pile of coats on a concrete floor with a musical rehearsal going on around me. But just put me in a nice, comfy bed in the dark at night and suddenly my head keeps me awake. All the bad things that happened, that I did, that I didn't prevent, that might happen, all run through my pointy little head and I can be up for hours. I can't take a nap during the day for fear it would keep me up for hours at bedtime.

Middle age has done nothing to soften this effect. I have more responsibilities, more bad things that did, might, will happen (two elderly parents with dementia was not mitigated by their passing - now I have to worry about my brain). I feel guilty about everything, which I can forget about during the day when I'm busy or desperately searching for distraction on the internet - and that's what that is, isn't it? Searching for a distraction from the Guilt Furies in one's head. [Okay, maybe that's just me.]

Now I have to tell you how much my husband loves me. Sitting on a dresser in our bedroom is the device that has saved me. We had already discovered that a car plus an audiobook is like unto a visit from your friendly neighborhood anesthetist for me. Good thing my husband is driving. When my husband is away, I would pull the little boombox out of the kitchen and load it up with Bart Ehrman or, if I needed cheering, Terry Pratchett to keep me company at bedtime. When it suddenly stopped, I would grope for the next cd in the lecture or the audiobook and insert it (this is where my husband, if he reads this, discovers where the scratches on his Ehrman lectures came from) in the dark, then go back to sleep.

No more! This new device is a Bose clock radio/cd player. We can awaken to radio or the cd. We can also listen to the cd for an hour and it slowly. Fades. Away. When I say "listen for an hour" - I exaggerate. I can manage one or two ten minute segments before I start purring. Who can think unhappy thoughts when Granny Weatherwax is excoriating some miscreant? [And, by the way, how come she's Granny Weatherwax if she's had no children? Is this some honorific upon achieving grey hair?] I have to advance the story one increment each night because I barely hear ten minutes before falling into blissful sleep.

You might think that this was hardly so wonderful for my husband to buy me a clock radio/cd player. He enjoys the benefits of it as well, although hardly anything keeps him awake. [Men are so lucky. How do they fall asleep like that?] He even told me that my reading at night didn't keep him awake. What makes him so wonderful is the fact that he hates Bose. My husband is an audiophile for whom sound means everything. If a brand needs to be advertised, it can't be any good. His audio equipment is labeled with obscure branding ... or none at all. The fact that he went to a Bose store and bought a Bose product for my birthday speaks volumes about how much he loves me. "Don't even ask how much it cost," he said, implying that it was more than the thing was worth.

I am entirely satisfied with this product. First of all, it has a remote. I'm so lazy that I want everything to be operated by remote: the lava lamp (it's plugged into a clicker), the fan (it came with one - I was delirious with delight) - very important to women of a Certain Age who get hot suddenly at night, and now the clock radio/cd player. In fact, it can't be operated at all without the remote. There are no buttons on this machine. If I lose the remote, I'm dead. I've had to memorize the button positions to operate it in the dark. Two down, one over from the right to start the cd. On the left, four down to turn down the volume. One more to the right to up the volume in case someone starts purring or the a/c came on.

This works for me. If you lie awake nights with those nagging thoughts, you might try this. If your spousal unit doesn't want to listen, get a library audiobook on your mp3. I always sleep on my right side, so I've just put both buds into my left ear before. I worry that this has become an addiction, but I'm getting so much more sleep! Now if I can just pull myself away from the internet long enough to lie down.

Cross Posting

Grizzy has issued a statement on how she plans to commemorate 9/11 this year in SL, and I thought I would go along with it - I have put this picture and the following statement on my profile:

"To show solidarity with my Islamic brothers and sisters who have had their faith vilified as a result of the actions of extremists, I will be dressing my avatar in the traditional Islamic hijab for Tues - Sat this week."

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor ...

Having just finished reading a blogpost from a competitor, I am reminded of my own dating mishaps. First of all, I didn't date anyone. I was too homely/annoying/smart [pick one ... or two - what the heck, pick your nose!] to get my own dates, but instead ended up date-sitting instead. What is "date-sitting" you ask? It's the act of occupying the time of someone a friend of yours is trying to pry themselves away from. I was telling my husband an old war story recently about the second time I had done this when it occurred to me ... that I had done it more than once. Hence, the "second time." And there was more after that.

This is like that "Always the bridesmaid, never the bride" thingummy. Three and a half decades later and this guy is still hankering after the one that got away instead of the one that had to listen to him sigh on the phone for hours at a time. Another one, in describing his nightmare blind date, deftly describes the woman he spent months with and that I date-sat him for, which only shows what an impression she made on him that he can't let go. He still asks me about her when I see him. I suppose he doesn't have words to describe me because after he got drunk and passed out, I decided it was safe to go home. For all I know, he just thinks I was a pink elephant with a slightly smaller nose.

Like the male equivalent, Mr. Right Now, I was Miss Right Now. No one bothered to ask me if I really wanted to go out with these guys. Well, except the first one. While I was in high school a friend of mine in college tried to palm her boyfriend off on me and ask if I would mind. He was just too needy. "He needs a hamster, or something," she wrote me, "to lavish his affection on." I had little or no dating experience so I agreed to go out with him. We had one date. He was affectionate. It was good experience for me, sort of training wheels for dating, and he probably went back to pestering her. I don't blame him, I loved her too. She wrote the best letters.

Yes, I love my girlfriends and I will do anything for them ... except ... except ...

No more date-sitting (I have my own permanent date now - whee!) and please, please, please stop calling me when you're drunk. And, I just haven't got the nerve to say this to your face - you need to stop drinking, or at least stop drinking so much ... or so often ... and stop going out with or shacking up with unsuitable guys that are so hard to get rid of just because you think you need to have somebody. I have my own problems now - I can't solve yours.

One Morning In the Month of May ...

Me and Poetry.

We're starting a new work learning experience that is already starting to torture me: Poetry. If you know me, you know I like poetry. I did a poetry workshop with children.* Anyway, we had our first meeting at lunchtime yesterday and we were asked what our first experience with Poetry was - and for me it was my dad's recitations at the dinner table. "Gunga Din" was probably interesting the first 2,000 times, but it's a long poem and I wanted to go out an play after dinner. Seeing it done by Mr. Magoo made me understand it better, but it was torture after a while. When my dad was elderly, I could recite "The Incident of the French Camp" with him and help him when he faltered. "You know we French stormed Ratisbone ..." - love that poem because of the punchline, "And smiling the boy fell dead." Despite this, I like poetry that tells a story and some rhyme and the tumty-tumty-tum.

But I also like contemporary Word. As you can tell from the March 19 post, my husband and I - a couple of round, very very white, very very middle-class caricatures - attend poetry nights, making the denizens nervous by our pasty-white presence. In all honesty, we can take the strong language, the political and racial backlash, but the religious stuff makes us wince. We have heard poetry so emotionally evocative, so hair-raising, wry, ironic, sad and funny that we exit stunned and amazed by the power and the talent of local people. How dearly I would love to host a salon of these people each week! How rewarding it would be to provide them a safe and stable place to speak their hearts. Even the religious ones.

Anyway, thinking back to early poetry in my life, I recalled having a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses ... and being unable to relate to it. Here I am, subjected to versification at length ("A bunch of the boys were whooping it up at the Malamute Saloon ..."!) on a regular basis and these gentle poems turn out to be totally unmemorable, except the one about the wooden spoon or shovel and digging in the sand and the sea filling it in - something I could relate to having tried to dig in the sand and having the ocean fill it up and destroy my handiwork.

Four languages later, I find I have accumulated some foreign favorites that I can still recite. My mother's cousin used "Du bist wie eine Blume" as a curse: "Ohhhh, dubistwieineblume!" so that resonated with me. I cultivate white roses with José Martí. I used "Venez a ma jubilé" for the invitation to my 50th birthday party. I have The Oxford Book of French Verse all post-it noted and went back this weekend looking for something appropriate for the "Poetry and Pints" meeting in Second Life and amazed myself that I understood any of the poems (much of it 700 year old French) enough to mark them as a favorite.

The first leg of our adventures in "Poultry" (as I relentlessly like to call it, the same way my sister always talked about "Taco Hell" instead of Taco Bell) will be through the Leaves of Grass section called "Song of Myself." I should withhold my applause until the end, I guess, and post it at the appropriate place (the Staffdevelopomendo blog). This particular work of Whitman was probably thrusting, avant-garde stuff when it was first written, both titillating and evocative, but it's an uphill slog for me now. I can mark bits of it I find pithy or expressive, but the totality of it is wearing me down. I hate being oppressed by something I really love. Bring back the stories and the tumty-tumpty-tum!

*Despite the age limitation I put on the sign-up sheet, my workshop contained children who could not read, much less write poetry, because their doting, idiotic, hare-brained parents [puts hand over heart and tries to calm down] insisted that Their Child was Advanced. I have gotten a call about signing up for workshops for this summer already (in April at the time) from a mom who insisted that her five year old was good with scissors and it would be totally appropriate to leave her in a room filled with older children more capable than the child working on some as yet undescribed project of unknown age-appropriateness. I had one of those kids in a program this winter who ended up sobbing her little heart out. Not in my workshop, lady! I want six year olds minimum! These programs are for school-age kids, not for your "Advanced" pre-schooler/toddler. [Looks under desk for bottle of bourbon - none there. Despair!]

By the Footprints In the Jell-O!

Derby Day upcoming, "I am always remember the day I first meet" the parents of a very good friend of mine. He had won me in my first annual "Win A Marf Contest" by submitting many pages of what he would do with me when I got there, letters of recommendation, and an 8" x 10" glossy. My fingers are drumming the keyboard now as I try to remember why my then boyfriend had not won. I think I recall a letter saying, "If you want to come visit, why don't you just say so?" That was not what I was looking for, but says a lot about that relationship.

My friend had me for a week of my vacation from the library. As a house-warming gift, I brought him a glass mug on which I had had etched "I've Been Sacked By" and the name of his employer. To be fair, he'd argued his way back into the job ... for the satisfaction of quitting. The sentiment, though, was appreciated. This was the first time I spent any extended time with this, one of my best friends. It was definitely the first time I stayed over. I hadn't thought much about that, what it entailed. He was renting a part of a house that had two bedrooms (one occupied by a roommate who was even more slovenly), a bath with a tub, and a kitchen. The kitchen was fairly roomy and had a table with chairs, so it was the social point of the ménage.

His bedroom consisted of a mattress on the floor, and a floor covered in loose change. Apparently, when he undressed at night, the change fell out of his pockets and he never bothered to pick it up. I spent each morning lying next to his slippers and desultorily picking up the coins and putting them in the slippers.

I thought it odd that such a young man would have bedroom slippers until I made note of the state of the floors in the place. Each morning he would rise, attempt to put on coin-laden slippers, swear, pour them out, and go on as if nothing unusual had happened. I asked him about it later and he had apparently not been awake enough to register the addition of the coins.

Slippers were a wise choice. Neither of these guys was big on cleaning and the bathroom had dust woofies in it that were about 3 or 4 feet long. Every zephyr that ran through the house and under the door caused these ephemeral caterpillars to ripple. I had this terror of being in the tub and someone opening a door to the outside, causing a woofie to raise its head over the edge of the tub and attach itself to my wet body. Bleagh bleagh bleagh!!!!

I would stay in bed until I ran out of small change to put in the slippers and then get up and cast about for something to do. The kitchen was a disaster. My friend had tried to make rice the week before and lost tract of time. The rice had burned to the bottom of the pan, and about an inch and a half up. He'd scraped out most of it, but just filled it with water and left it in the sink. That pan was the worst of it. I cleaned all the other dishes and worked assiduously on the rice pan.

I was up early one morning, probably a Sunday, when there was a knock at the door. I opened it and saw this very surprised looking middle-aged couple standing outside. They were his parents. They asked to see him. He was still in bed, so I had to let them in and go get him. This was the awkward part for me. I was going to have to wake him up, which was not an easy task. It was embarrassing for me that he was still slug-abed and his parents had come. I didn't realize until a little bit later that they didn't know I was visiting.

Hearing that his parents were there helped to wake him a bit, but not totally. He had to get up, dump the coins out of his slippers, swear, and get dressed. Eventually, we all sat down at the kitchen table for what I expected to be the typical semi-awkward cross-generational conversation.

My insouscience probably made me come across as a shameless Jezebel. This is nice, I thought, I get to meet his parents, who were a bit younger than mine, but I had always gotten on well with older people. I really had totally the wrong attitude and I'm sure they left thinking the worst of me, little realizing the relative innocence of our relationship. If anything embarrassed me, it was my friend using a credit card to wine and dine me ... which his parents apparently paid for him.

Anyway, we had a wonderful time other than the parental visit. I laughed myself sick quite a few times while he told elephant jokes, which he normally would not consider to be funny. It got to the point where he could just say, "Shoehorn!" to set me off again. We would sit at the kitchen table and talk and just enjoy each other.

He was making brownies one night, and almost proudly showing his self-sufficiency in opening the box and handling the whole deal himself. In an unusual fit of tidiness, he not only threw the box away, but decided the trash can was full, closed up the bag, and took it out to the bin. He was quite carefree in the process, and I started wondering if he had made note of the time or how long the box said they needed to cook. No matter, I was a brownie expert.

His roommate came into the kitchen, having smelled the brownies.
"Wow, brownies! When will they be done?"
"I don't know," my friend said.
"How long are they supposed to cook?"
"Dunno."
"When'd you put 'em in?"
"Don't remember."
"Where's the box?"
"Threw it away."
"Oh." Pause.
"I took it out to the bin."
"Ah."

Soon they were both gathered around the oven door, peering inside.
"How do you know when they're done?"
"I think you put a knife in and see if it comes out clean."

His roommate lost interest and wandered off again. My friend returned to the kitchen table where I was biting my lip and my shoulders shaking.

"Wha-at?" he said.
"You know how you can tell if the brownies are done?" I asked.

He paused and considered it. "By the footprints in the Jell-O?" And I lost it. I was laughing so hard and he kept asking, "No, really - how do you tell?" And somehow, "When they pull away from the sides" sounded even funnier. Okay, you had to have been there.

"No, really. Tell me! How can you tell when the brownies are done?"

Ummm ...

Must be some other "marfita" - what do you think? Got this from my Lijit.com stats. If you aren't "lijit" you might want to consider it. It tracks who (only as in-depth at the above example, so don't think I have your name or IP address or nuffink) visits my various websites, how they got there (hmmm ...), and what they search for further after they cam-, ummm, after they ente-, ummm ...
Anyway, if you're interested, subscribe to my blogs for Omssake! Put it on your blogroll. I don't blog so often that I'm a nuisance. Yompin' Yiminy!

Crazy White Girl

Crazy White Boy and I did it again last night: we infiltrated a black poetry stronghold. We've done this before, of course. The first time I was really nervous. I had heard there was a regular poetry night going on (my old one had faded away) at the Coffee and Dessert place in the desanctified church and we waltzed in on what I feared was a black sorority meeting. They were, however, very welcoming to us and in time they encouraged CWB to go back to playing guitar.

The group eventually broke up and we missed meeting with them each week. We missed being their pet white folk.

So when one of our old poetry friends told me that there was another poetry group starting up, we dusted off our poetry ears, turned off our computers, and sallied forth. It didn't have the swank of a coffee shop, being in a barber college, and there wasn't anyone we knew. I had been falling asleep right after dinner and we were planning a discreet retreat early (our source said it ran from 7 to many 9 or 10 pm) so I could be put to bed at a decent hour for a change.

Again, they were welcoming although they didn't know who we were. There was a $5 cover charge each and they tried many times to get us to taste the refreshments, but we'd just eaten a huge meal and were full to bursting.

The emcee seemed a bit nervous about us - warning us about the rap style of someone coming up, but I must admit that we do look like a couple of pasty-white, middle-class nerds. I didn't want to protest, "Oh, no! Go ahead and do your worst. We can take it." We're subversive in our own quiet way.

There was a low turn-out, but one of them was an old friend whose handle is "Spoken." There were about 5 reader/speakers and a couple of singers. One brought a keyboard. The next gathering is March 31st. Again, the quality of their creations can be stunning. I was brought to the edge of tears twice. Okay, maybe I was just a bit tired, but the writing is compact and moving.

They were again very nice when we left, shaking our hands and expressing the hope that we would return. I wondered if they packed up, hugged us and each other, waited until we were out of the parking lot, sighed, and turned the lights back on. CWB didn't think so.

Here We Go Again

I thought we were past this, but it's raised it's giant head of stupidity again. I was asked "Why do all the new buildings look like mosques?"
Well, there is actually a good answer to that, and it's "Because y'all have mosques on the brain!" You go for decades without seeing a mosque, suddenly parts of the world where these buildings are prevalent are relentlessly in the news, and when you drive down the street, you see something new that doesn't look like a box with a storefront so you immediately connect it with these other "foreign" objects.
Here's a quiz for y'all. Mosque or Not-Mosque?

1.
2.

3.4.

5.

Answers are below. How'd you do?

Gobsmacked

The group was gobsmacked. They had been working on the project for two weeks and it was almost finished. And Farhad had asked to be moved to another group.
"Why?" asked Bev, because she was always the one who had no governor on her mouth and said the first thing that came into her head - the things that other people wanted to say but couldn't.
Farhad raised his head but did not look any of them in the eye. He looked to his side, as if someone was there to give him support. "My father says I cannot be in this group."
Eve became very still. Her eyes searched Farhad, but he wasn't looking at her either.
"But why, why does he say that?" Bev slogged on, crashing all social barriers as she went.
Farhad looked pained. He looked as if he were barely keeping his face from crumbling. His wide brown eyes became even wider and his forehead seemed to be performing some minimalist gymnastics feat.
"Why this group but not another?" Bev continued, and Tony shook his head at her. She glared back at him. "I want to know. I bet everyone wants to know." She wrapped her arms tightly around her chest. "But I'm the only one with the nerve to ask. Why, Farhad?" And she was about to go on when Eve made a hesitant noise that was more a gasp than a throat-clearing.
"It's me, Bev."
All eyes immediately went to her. Eve's arms hung like wooden forks. She didn't dare move for fear she would start shaking. With everyone's eyes elsewhere, Farhad relaxed too soon. The group's eyes shot straight back to him like spectators in a tennis match. Now he looked hunted.
"You ... you mean you two - " Tony began.
"No!" Farhad said, too emphatically. He grimaced and tried his adult voice again. "No, no, it's not like that - "
"We're not - " Eve interrupted.
Net ball.
The group began to breathe. Then Caleb stuttered, "Because she's J-jewish?"
Farhad could not answer him.
"That's just - that's ... silly," said Tiff.
"You don't understand," Farhad began, wanting to defend his father even though he was angry with him. "He is my father. I respect his decisions even if - "
"They're stupid?" Bev added, again with no governor on her mouth.
"No, even if I do not agree. It is called respect."
Tiff shook her head, "Farhad, that's medieval!"
"No, it's not," said Caleb. Then he blushed when they all looked at him. "There's lots I'd like to do but my parents won't let me. They do it for my own good," he added, echoing something he had heard many times.
"Like what?" Bev's inquiring mind never stopped.
"This isn't what group projects are about," groused Tiff. "We're supposed to learn to work together. If it's not sex," and here Farhad looked shellshocked, "I don't see the problem."
Another polite, if strangled cough, came from Eve. "I do." She flapped her wooden arms aimlessly. "My parents ... my parents told me to find another group, too." Farhad's head jerked up.
"What did you tell them?" Tony blurted out.
Eve wriggled a bit under the stares. "I lied." Plucking up some courage she continued. "I told them I was in Anna's group now."
"Great," said Bev, grasping the positive, "problem solved. Farhad, just tell your dad you switched groups and stick with us."
But Tiff was still working on the previous thread. "Let me get this straight - Your parents wanted you out of this group, why? Because of Farhad? Because he's Iranian?"
Eve glared at her. "My uncle is in Iraq, remember." Then she caved. "But, yes. That was it. Farhad's Iranian, he's a Moslem. They say he - " and she stopped. She couldn't bring herself to express it.
"I can't, Bev," Farhad said, breaking the silence. "I have to do what my father tells me to do. I'm not like you. The truth isn't something that's ... " he gestured with his hands trying to find the word, "that's elastic." It came easier now. "I respect my father because he is my father. I also respect you, and I respect Eve. Most importantly, I respect myself."
Eve's face attempted a smile. "So do I. I was angry with my parents and my first thoughts were to defy them. What they wanted me to do wasn't right. Farhad isn't - Farhad is a good student and he brings a lot to this project. We had a chance of getting a really good grade on this." She blushed. "Not that it's all about grades. It was just wrong to label him. And they wouldn't listen to me." She sniffed and started rolling her eyes around. Tears were forming. "It would have been embarrassing to ask Mr. Lynch to move me to another group. I couldn't explain it, I couldn't tell him why." She fixed her eyes on Farhad. "What did you say? What did you tell Lynch?"
Farhad lowered his eyes. "I said that for personal reasons I wanted to be moved to another group."
"What did he say?"
"Nothing. He just looked at me for a long while and then said yes."
Tiff huffed. "He knows."
Caleb agreed. "You bet he knows," said Tony.
Eve nodded. She sniffed again. "Farhad, I'm - "
"It's okay," he said quickly. "I too am sorry. I liked this group. Maybe not at first," he admitted. "But if things were different ..." And he walked away.
Tony shook his head. "He's just ... " but he had no words.
Tiff repeated her "Just medieval, man!" She turned to Eve. "You did the right thing."
"Did I?" Eve said.
Caleb sighed. "Maybe the right thing but the wrong way."
Tiff looked at Caleb in a sidelong way. "What about you, Caleb? How did your parents feel about you being in the same project as Farhad?"
Caleb started at the question and looked at the others. They knew he had lobbied long and hard to go to public school after being homeschooled most of his life. "Yes, well, about that," he began and then faltered.
"Yes?" prompted Tiff.
"Actually, I didn't tell them."

"I'm a Prat and I'm Proud"

There is a person (for lack of a better term) running for Congress in my area who is proud of having invented a new term of abuse and puts it on his campaign mailers as one of his achievements. That this term, when critically dissected, has no intrinsic pejorative connotations, or any more than say, the words "bunny" (so cute!) and "jungle" (connoting luxuriant growth) do when separate, is immaterial. Most people are not familiar with Hedonism and, if they look it up quickly, will equate it with debauchery. Besides, it sounds like "heathenism"! So they will see the terms "secular" (omigosh, that sounds like "sexual"!) and "hedonism" together and picture scandalous orgies, people with no morals (because many seem to believe you can't be moral without a belief in some god) revelling in lascivious wassails instead of living with an ethical code based on rationality ... and revelling in lascivious wassails.
As a Secular Humanist (because there are Humanists who also follow the religion of their choice), I am insulted by this. I don't think that this represents my lifestyle (based on my personal Hippocratic Oath of "First, Do No Harm.") and it hurts my feelings to have my way of life mislabeled and ridiculed in this fashion. My first inclination is to, of course, turn the other cheek. I dunno, heard that somewhere. Recently, though, I have learned that stigmatizing people (say, by giving them an epithet not of their own choosing) is the easiest method of creating solidarity within a group.
This person wants to improve the cohesiveness of his target group by creating a sense of disgust in that group for another group. Now, I know that too many crazy people try to demonize behavior like that by linking it to Nazi Germany, but that is precisely how the Nazis manipulated people. There are more positive ways to rally your troops, but the easiest way is this way: create a scapegoat. Blame them for all the problems. I'm not saying this is the eventual intent of this person. I'm not saying he pictures a Final Solution for all non-Christians. He just wants to get elected. I'm sure he thinks that when he is elected, he will be working for all of his constituents to improve their lives and that his god is behind him 1000%. He means no one any harm, he just thinks he invented something clever.
Let me put this question to him: if that clever epithet was a new one to describe African Americans, Native Americans, North Koreans, Jews, Muslims, investment bankers, or welfare recipients, would he have put it on his campaign literature? "This country is under threat from 'Kimchi Jong-Illers' - a term I invented." Not that he would have to worry about that voter segment in this population, but how would that look?
While it is now too late to take it back, I appeal to this person's profession of Christianity (which is all over his campaign mailer) and his better judgment to drop this name-calling of a segment of his constituency. It is beneath him. And, while it might be efficacious, it's denigrating and hateful and has made him look like a prat.

Now I Lay Me Down

My sister used to enjoy making fun of how prudish I was. My nieces and their children look on me as some prim and proper creature who likes to turn film canisters into rockets but is otherwise dull. If I swear, my friends burst into fits of giggles. Avatars have given up hitting on me in Second Life (not that I'm complaining). How did I get here?

But is there anything wrong with being prudish at 13? Is it possible that their mother's stream of scorchingly blue vocabulary just made my limited use of "Aw, shit!" seem like no swearing at all to my nieces? Do I really swear that infrequently? I don't have a problem with swearing. Just today my husband and I were imagining David Sedaris's brother Paul as a spokesman for some product or another and both of us went through a conjugation of "mother-fuck" worthy of Carlos Fuentes. We chuckled at ourselves, not out of any kind of embarrassment or shock, but just at the juxtaposition of Paul (a person we don't know at all but seem to think we do) and, say, Aunt Ruby's Peanuts.

Okay, my first year of college, I have to admit that I consciously taught myself to say "Shit!" by repeating it over and over in the car on my way to class. And my sister's language did used to make me cringe. When she was dying, and her husband was playing the stereo too loud (or perhaps just the wrong music - she'd taken an unreasonable dislike to Leon Redbone years before), she raised her head up enough to tell me to go "Tell him to fucking turn that shit off!" I think my version of it was something in a hushed voice to the effect of, "She respectfully requests you turn the music down."

And I really do say, "Oh, sugar!" - but because I think it's funny.

I look back now and wonder why I should be the anomaly when I hardly recall our parents swearing. I could get into deep doo-doo for saying someone "crapped out," if my dad hadn't pointed out that it was a perfectly respectable gambling term. When I was eight or nine I clearly remember my mother starting to say "damn" and trying to turn it into "darn" and coming out with strange dipthong that sounded like "Darren." Sewing could even make her hurl out a very unusual "Hot damn!" which was worse, she informed me, than a regular "damn." I don't recall my dad swearing or even raising his voice. During their worst arguments, no matter how shrill my mother got, he remained calm and reasonable, and, boy! did that piss her off! The most I ever heard him say to her was, "Now, Ruth ..." Something like that would send her spinning out of control and lead to her calling him a "Buster" as in, "Look here, Buster! If you think ..."

So, as a young person, I had to resort to being whiny. I had no good vocabulary! I would stretch my sister's ordinarily monosyllabic name into three or four syllables and run it through my sinus passages. And she would call me names. She called me "The Modest Maiden." "You take that back! Mo-o-ommmmm!" I was also some kind of "virgin" as well, but I don't remember the adjective. This was because I liked to have the door closed when I was on the toilet. Silly me. What was that all about? To keep her from coming in, I started locking the bathroom door. It seemed as if she was always wanting to brush her hair when I was in the bathroom. Couldn't she keep a comb in her room? What was that dresser and mirror for? Geyahhhhd, Ayeeeunnn! It turns out she was just part cat. I can't go to the bathroom without a cat being upset if the door is closed.

Is this reaction so unusual? Am I the only person in the world who closes the bathroom door? I was in my family. I was also the only one who didn't scamper naked through the house. When we moved to the beach, we would shower off the salt and sand before entering the house after a swim. My dad would actually totally strip outside. At least my mom shed her suit in the laundry room. I often wondered how the neighbors felt about some seventy-year-old retiree rinsing his less-than beefcake form in the side yard. No one ever said anything to me.

How did I get this way?

The first year we went away for the summer vacation (always the same last two weeks is July like all IBMers and their vendors) without my sister, she went crazy. She had a week-long party. The nosy neighbor next door pumped her for information about it; she was sure there was an orgy going on. There was definitely a great deal of drinking, but that wasn't so unusual because drinking went on all the time in my family. My sister's friends came over and spent the night - and another night, and another and another ... We had three bedrooms in the house and they were all occupied. My sister told me that one of her friend's period started on my bed and that was the least of it.

Later on I went into my room and looked at my twin bed. It creeped me out that it had led a more interesting life than I had. I felt it had betrayed me somehow. How could I sleep on it again? My sister had thought it was a big joke: people having sex on her little sister's bed. I was disturbed, but not at her, which was the weird thing. I was upset with the bed. It didn't last long, though. You can only stay up watch television so long. Eventually, you have to go to bed.

I spent most of my life living down my sister's behavior. She wasn't a scholar, so I had to do well at school. This was something that was easier to achieve when she finally moved out of the house. She never did what she was told, so I was quick to obey. Her language made stevedores cringe; I spoke four languages (three of them badly). She had wild, unprotected sex, had children outside of marriage, died from cervical cancer; I couldn't get a date or even probably wanted one. She did the right thing and finally got married, had two children, and stayed home to be the perfect mom; I ran off to New York City to break into acting.

Now that our parents are gone, I don't have to live a contrary life, but I have done so for so long, I don't know what sort of life I would have wanted. There are things I don't attempt because she was good at them: pottery, mothering, training horses, pies. Okay, I do make pies, but they will never be as good as hers. I had a boyfriend (such a juvenile term!) who was so fascinated by one of her pies that he pried off the pastry layer by layer. "If you don't want that, I'll eat it," I told him. No way, he wasn't giving up that pie. He'd never seen anything like it. No one ever will.

I don't say these things about my sister to be mean. This is my last chance to contrast myself with her. From now on, I will be treading in virgin (so to speak) territory. I am taking the path she never took, going through the menopause she never achieved, getting old without her to forge the path for me. And really, the only thing I can think of to say is, "Oh, shhhhhugar!"

At Last!

Someone must be mellowing in their Old Age. No longer can This Certain Person complain about the Season's Greetings cards I send out. I feel that now, and only now, Peace on Earth is within our grasp. And why is this? What is this magic, is it the Ineffable? Is it Easter?

No, of course not, it's My Birthday and I will thank everyone in the world to set aside their stupid, petty prejudices and join hands for a big lovefest in my name, amen.

Don't make me send you a card!

We Can't Have It Both Ways, Can We?

The opinion on Christmas from B.S., former speech-writer for President N., [I'll just let both of those hang and make of it what you will] is making the rounds of the e-mail in-boxes again, although it's several years old. It seems to work in nicely with a previous post of mine, so I'll complain about it here. Mr. S., although Jewish to the bone, doesn't mind being wished a Merry Christmas because it makes him feel all warm and cozy about his fellow Judeo-Christian [Where's the Islam there? Shouldn't it be Judeo-Christ-Islamist?] believers and that's what I was talking about earlier. That's very broad-minded of him to accept the greeting as kindly meant and good taste of him to enjoy those over-decorated trees.
Where he crosses the line, though, is to expect everyone to feel that way, especially atheists. He describes how Christians probably feel pushed around about showing their religion and equates it to how he doesn't like being pushed around for being Jewish. It seems, though, that he is completely unaware that non-religionists have been pushed around. Atheists are supposed to take it. Sitting in his "beach house" (to separate that from some other house he might have) he feels sorry for Christians, a vast majority, and not for the little people who are starting to push back. I don't like being pushed around for being an atheist, and so for years I just didn't mention it. Even as a child brought up Christian I had trouble with public displays of my religion because I was only too aware that there were people who didn't subscribe and I could see myself in their shoes. Mr. S. seems to think looking at it from his shoes alone is good enough.
I'll grant you that some of our number could stand to shut up, even some intelligent high-profile ones. And Christians are free to complain about political correctivity swinging the wrong way on them, but they've had their day in the sun and their chance to run things better. And there were still hurricanes, floods, famines, and pogroms.
We worry about current events precisely because they are current and we base past experience on our childhood memories of being totally clueless. The 1950s were not the halcyon days of nuclear families and religious devotion. They were years of Cold War and witch hunts, peoples' lives ruined by rumor mongering. Do I remember any of that? Of course not, I was sent to bed before Huntley and Brinkley came on! The 1960s were years of political upheaval over the Vietnam War and Civil Rights. I do remember that, because I was sickened by images of war during the dinner hour. Fortunately, our area of Kentucky was not torn apart by riots ... like those of the white Bostonians rejecting school integration. This means, however, that I put out of my mind what wasn't happening in my happy little galaxy. I remember my home and family.
What is happening, contrary to what Mr. S. believes, is that there is a whole lotta demagoguery going on. People are being whipped up on both sides by individuals who enjoy power. These people scaremonger, but not with anything so blatantly ridiculous as the destruction of Christianity, because only the mentally ill would believe that could possibly happen (and on the other side, only the mentally ill atheists could believe Christianity in particular or religion in general can be toppled), but they start with little things, like the alleged War on that Holiday celebrating the birth of You Know Who. Everybody can get behind Christmas! Christmas is harmless! Why, even that Jewish guy with the beach house likes Christmas! If you can get people to believe the little lies, then the big ones becomes that much easier to swallow. If you believe the atheists are out to ban That Holiday, you can be easily led to believe that all religious holidays are up for the chop. And then you can believe these people are un-American. Then you think your elected officials should take a stand on the issue, and their seasonal greetings should say a certain phrase. And then you start scrutinizing what these officials do about their greeting cards, totally missing what they're up to on matters that do fall within their purview, like fixing the economy, or at least making sure that greed will not be given free rein to create "exotic financial speculations" again.
So what are atheists up to? Hell's bells, even if we were organized it would be impossible to say. There are as many kinds of atheists as there are religions. They all become atheists different ways: some are born into atheist families, some wake up one day and ask themselves whether they really believe all that, some wrestle with their beliefs ... and win, and some have had bad experiences. Some drop their faith suddenly, sometimes faith fades slowly away. Mostly I think these people want the right not to be marginalized. We're all hopping on that civil rights bandwagon that seems to be so handy. You wouldn't fault black people for having been marginalized all those centuries, would you? You wouldn't say, "Look, there are just more white people, so just go with the flow and keep your mouth shut. We're tired of hearing about all we've done wrong or are doing wrong and we aren't going to change anything just to make you happy. 'Majority,' ever hear of it? So stop making us feel bad."
Okay, maybe some of you would say that.

Oops, forgot to post this ages ago!

Just a Quick Kvetch

I was buying a large jar of catnip (I can mention this now that the presents have been handed out) at K-Mart (where I go first before braving the insanity that is Wal-Mart) and was actually being checked out in a timely fashion (!!!) when the clerk asked me what catnip did to cats. "Oh, it gets them all excited and then they go all relaxed," I said, because I don't think anyone has successfully written a government grant to study this. I added, "My grandmother used to drink a cup of catnip tea when she wasn't feeling well."
The woman behind me said, "You know what catnip really is?"
And right there I was glad that I didn't add my grandmother used to meow after taking a sip to tease my mom.
"A phamacist told me," she announced smugly, "that catnip is the bad stuff left over from the marijuana. I used to let my son make tea with it, but I don't anymore. Not after hearing that." [As if there's a "bad" part to marijuana that's thrown away.]
I humphed. "No, it's not. Catnip is a plant from the mint family. I've grown it. It's nothing like marijuana."
"Well that's what the pharmacist told me."

I let that go. I'm still wondering how that information got garbled.
Did she make it up out of whole cloth?
Was the pharmacist pulling her leg thinking she'd be much to intelligent to really fall for that?
Was he suspecting that her son only called the stuff catnip because she'd found some substance in his room and gave it to said pharmacist to check it out?
Did the pharmacist actually mean "It's the equivalent of 'marijuana' for cats"?

For the rest of y'all, be assured that catnip is an herb from the mint family with the familiar square stem of the rest of the mints. You can buy it anywhere, including economically large jars of it at K-Mart. You can grow it in your yard without experiencing any awkward visits from Drug Enforcement (unlike those who grow the harmless and useful hemp plants that look like marijuana, have absolutely no drug effects, but are still illegal because of the resemblance).

Decades ago when the anti-drug programs were being foisted (and, I thought, wasted) on me, I wondered why I needed to know what uppers, downers, LSD, and marijuana looked like. Even as a teen I thought this would only make it easier to make a drug transaction (not falling for the oregano ... OR CATNIP in the baggie). I was a sanctimonious little horror for whom pressing her eyeballs until she saw colors was interesting enough. But now I see it would have been important so that when I became a mother and I chanced upon a ziploc of dried herb while nosing through my child's room I would not fall for the old, "It's just catnip to make tea!" And then, when that child wanted to know how I got so I could tell the difference, I could say, "When I was your age, they showed us what it looked like in special drug-identification classes." And I'd go mix me a margarita and put my feet up.

Yeah, lady, I was a child of the 60s! Don't try to tell me about catnip!

See if you can tell the difference!

Wrestling with Christmas

Kathy contemplates the Meaning of Sensitivity

In Re: Snarky comments from friends.
Comment #1: "For an atheist, you sure know a lot of Christmas songs."
Comment #2: "Funny how many atheists celebrate Christmas."

Snappy (okay, not so snappy, more dilatory) retort to #1: It wasn't my idea to sing Christmas songs all the way back from Spartanburg.
Snappy (ditto) retort to #2: Funny how many Christians are actually celebrating Solstice with a Jesus veneer.

As an atheist, I feel perfectly entitled to put up an evergreen tree in the manner of my Germanic ancestors and celebrate the return of the sun in a dark and gloomy time of year. If I still call this holiday "Christmas," it's out of habit. Without the tree, the decorations, the twinkly lights, the dark would be unbearable.

I was, however, cheered to hear Nina Totenberg singing a Christmas song on NPR this Saturday morning. I remember thinking, Gosh, I thought she was Jewish! And she is, but her mother liked Christmas songs and Christmas trees. And there is much to like about them. When I was growing up, we had a Christmas songbook in the house and although I was unable to read music, I could read the words and had a good memory for a tune. I spent many a December singing Christmas songs. I loved to sing and I prefer old songs to new ones.

So, anyway, if Nina Totenberg can put up a tree or sing Christmas songs, then I can too. But that doesn't mean I think everyone should. I wouldn't call an isolated instance of a Jewish family with a tree and a few songs reason for all Jewish people to start putting up trees and singing "Adeste Fideles." That's up to them. I can only govern my own behavior.


The New Madrigal Voyces Edition of the Blonde Shikseh
The above photo was taken during my madrigal group's Christmas concert in Beaufort, SC in the early 1980s. Didn't have a problem singing the Gaudete then, don't have it now.

As a civilized being, if someone wishes me a Merry Christmas, I will return the greeting, the same as if they wished me Happy Hanukkah or Eid or Kwanzaa or July 4th. I might even thank them. I will not, however, wear the "It's okay to say Merry Christmas" button, because it's okay to say it to some people and not to others, others who perhaps recall a history of persecution by misguided Christians. You wouldn't wish someone a Happy Mother's Day if they'd just lost a child, would you? It pays to know something about the person you're laying a loaded greeting on. I've seen bad reactions from Jewish friends to Christmas songs ("Please don't start singing them until December!" - well, I agree with that) and cards ("Why are you sending me a Christmas card when you know I'm Jewish?" - Did that card say "Christmas" on it anywhere? Don't be such a touchy butthole!).

It would be presumptive of me to think everyone should be open to this ... and a little presumptive of the other side to think I would mean ill by it, but the onus is still on my side of the net because I started it. Because I started it, I get defensive. And that is what I think is happening now. Having gone for decades of their lives wishing people a "Merry Christmas" willy-nilly, people are mystified to discover that occasionally this gesture was unwelcome for one reason or another. In typical human behavior (see my reaction to the holiday card above), we don't apologise. Instead, we blame the victim for being overly-sensitive when it is our own insensitivity that has caused the irritation. By God, they should accept that greeting! We hadn't meant any offense! Besides, they should believe in Jesus anyway! Do 'em some good! Lighten up, infidels! Because the President of a patchwork nation of different peoples puts "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" on the intensely impersonal bulk greeting card, some Christians are up in arms and start blaming ... the atheists. It's the atheists' fault that honest, well-intentioned Christians cannot go around wishing anyone they damn well please a Merry Christmas. And that is because the atheists have declared a War on Christmas. (Gosh! I missed that meeting!) There was an actual abolition of Christmas; it was by the Puritan parliamentarians in 1640, a bunch of Christian kill-joys if ever there were. They claimed (rightly) that Christmas wasn't a holiday mentioned in or commanded by the Bible and felt people were having too much food, drink, shenanigans, and goings-on. Instead, people should fast and think about their past sins. (Thinks about past sins and a dirty little smile sneaks across face.)

So what is my problem? You know what? I don't think I'm the one with the problem. What business is it of anyone else what holidays I celebrate and how? I'm not sacrificing chickens (nothing intrinsically wrong with that, it's just, well, yuck!) or dancing naked (okay, maybe I am, but you don't have to look). You mind your bidness and I'll mind mine. And let's try to live in harmony, which does not mean "all on the same note."