sweet water journal

camp

2008-06-30T18:14:00.001-07:00

Last week I was walking through the library parking lot and caught a glimpse of a woman I recognized from long, long ago. I haven’t seen this woman for over fifteen years, at which point we were both teenagers, so I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure it was her—my one and only Fellow Camp Dork from Summer Camp for Young Mennonite Social Darwinists, 1989 or thereabouts. We kept in touch, as fellow survivors, for several years after that, but had more or less lost touch by the time we were ready for college. I heard a few months ago that she was in this area, but hadn’t looked her up or anything. And I didn’t accost her in the parking lot and ask if she remembered me, because I’m not programmed to do things like that. I am the sort of person who, when visiting her parents in her old hometown, uses stealth tactics to navigate the grocery store, terrified of running into someone she knows.

Of course, I have nothing whatsoever against this friend I saw in the parking lot, and probably would enjoy catching up with her in the right circumstances. I’m just bad at awkward situations, is all. I don’t know how to explain what I’m “up to.” I just end up feeling insecure and loser-y…sort of like I did at camp.

The first year I went to church camp, on the first day, I slipped on the step to my top bunk and knocked myself out on the concrete floor. Everyone else was off having fun somewhere, so after I came to, I staggered to the nurse’s station on my own. On the second day, I almost drowned in the river during a nature hike. Everyone was taller and stronger than me, so no one noticed I was going under until I was truly in danger, struggling to keep my head above the rapid water, no breath left to scream. A counselor—male and probably cute—noticed my struggle in time, rescuing me and carrying me to the river bank, where I sat, drenched, mud-streaked, and badly shaken, wondering if there was any sort of precedent for calling one’s parents and coming home early from this hellhole. (I never could have gone through with that, though, as the only thing more humiliating than practically drowning would be the premature appearance of my parents.)

As if head-bashing and near-drowning weren’t bad enough, my cabin mates were ruthless preteen bitches who already knew about makeup and had their periods and actual breasts. The bump I sported on my head was bigger than anything growing on my chest, and I had a bad perm and looked about ten and probably weighed about seventy pounds. My cabin mates treated me like a septic rat monster from Planet Zit. That was my first year. In subsequent years, I would get smacked in the face with sporting equipment, enter the wrong cabin while all its inhabitants were still sleeping and not notice my error until I almost squashed the person in the bed I thought was mine, and develop a fear that the crucified Jesus would materialize in the flesh on the wooden cross in the campfire circle.

Campfire was a constant, if not a reassuring one. It was nightly, and always after dark. Unlike the morning, when we sang loud, raucous, clap-punctuated, bubble-gum Jesus songs, at campfire we murmured soft, gentle Jesus songs, accompanied by crickets, locusts and acoustic guitars. The campfire circle was a sort of mini-amphitheater, with a half-circle of terraced stone seating built into a shallow hill slope. At the front was a fire pit, and behind that, there were actually three crosses, a big one in the center for Christ and two smaller ones for the thieves (I assume). It was like having nightly prayer meetings at Golgatha. I knew I was supposed to feel safe and loved by God, and I really tried, but I was too tense to relax into it. The crosses just fucked with me. I had a real crucifixion hangup in those days. I was also afraid of ax murderers, which I assumed were creeping up on us from the back.

I hated it. I just hated it, all of it, until the year I made a friend—this woman I saw in the parking lot. We were assigned to the same cabin, and by the end of the first afternoon we had figured out that we were of the same species. That is, we were bookish, unnoticed by boys, subject to mockery, and allergic to everyone else in the cabin. They, of course, were the usual band of Caboodle-wielding mercenaries, but their tyranny was easier to endure in like-minded company.

I now understand that not everyone who enjoyed church camp is a terminal asshole. The social paradigm that seemed so concrete to me back then—mean popular people vs. victimized unpopular people—doesn’t survive intact into adulthood. And yet, it’s terribly hard to get over that kind of experience, somehow. I really don’t know why I kept going back year after year. I guess it was just what kids in my church who were my age did. I didn’t fear camp quite as much as I feared missing some age-appropriate landmark of normality; I lived in fear of being abnormal. It pains me some to admit that now, as I’d prefer to remember my adolescent self as a rebel, which I manifestly wasn’t. I was just unpopular and weird.

I kind of wish that I’d refused to go to camp, much the same way I wish I’d refused to go to the prom. But at least I got one friend out of the experience—even if it is a friend I just pretended not to recognize in a parking lot.

why i am resorting to another meme

2008-06-25T09:14:00.000-07:00

I am learning to type. Yes, you read that correctly. Due to my seemingly endless struggles with the repetitive strain demons, I have resorted to drastic measures and am learning the Dvorak keyboard, which may or may not help. No, it was not invented by the composer. Yes, it is a big pain in the ass and I am likely crazy. You would not believe how long it is taking me to type this paragraph. I normally type about five thousand words a minute, and while I may have shooting pains and partially numb fingers, at least my fingers can more than keep pace with my brain. Now my brain and fingers feel like they are trying to tango to waltz music.

So a meme is about right for today. I have meatier post ideas but am not proficient enough on this damn keyboard to—well, tango to tango music, as it were. Give me a few days.

And indulge me for a second:

UCJCBI D.NN C ABY. YDCO IREEAMB.E OFOY.M OR UGJTCBI MGJD!!!

(I miss Qwerty.)

This meme is from Suze.

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?

I was living with my folks for a few months while preparing to move to East Lansing, Michigan come August. I was practicing a lot and worrying that grad school would reveal me to be the worst flutist on the planet. Also played at approximately eight hundred weddings that summer. Oh, and traveled to Houston to see Eric, who was doing a summer internship at Baylor that involved watching mice have sex for hours a day—the result of which I cannot to this day hear the word “lordosis” without triggering an array of lewd rodent images.

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today?

Compose e-mail that will take ten times as long as usual thanks to my cold-turkeying on Qwerty.

Do Dvorak typing exercises so that I stop looking at the keys all the time.

Read a few chapters of God, Sex, and Politics: Homosexuality and Everyday Theologies by Dawne Moone. (Awesome book, everything to do with my last post.)

Make pesto.

Clean shitty kitty box.

3) Snacks I enjoy:

Art and Mary’s potato chips, olives/wine/snooty cheese, toasted almonds, dates, pappadums, wasabi peas, Eric's homebrew (very nourishing, counts as food)

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Set up the family farm with wind energy (They may do this anyway, but the initial investment is pretty steep); help other small-scale farmers to do the same thing; buy up lots of land that would otherwise be bought by developers and figure out how to get it to people who would farm it ethically or do prairie restoration; set up a grant program to help people with medical expenses (until we get a real national health care program, dammit); set up myself and Eric with sweet retirement accounts, set aside mucho funds for hypothetical future child, and create college accounts for all my friends’ and family’s kids; travel a wee bit; donate a fecking shiteload to Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, and Partners in Health; then forget about all of it and go back to grad school anyway, albeit minus funding worries.

5) Places I have lived:

Madison, WI; North Newton, KS; Tours, France; Villedomer, France (one church, one bakery, a tabac, and three bars); Nancy, France; East Lansing, MI, Okemos, MI; Ann Arbor, MI; Lawrence, KS

6) Jobs I have had:

Flute teacher, nursing home toilet-scrubber (the summer after high school, and yes, as gruesome as it sounds), publishing assistant for un-air-conditioned living-room-based small publisher, graduate teaching assistant, wedding musician, increasingly bitter wedding musician, food co-op clerk, survey technician/interviewer, asparagus picker, yoga instructor

7) Bloggers I am tagging who I will enjoy getting to know better:

You know, if memes float your boat, be my guest.

what we've lost

2008-06-19T14:51:00.000-07:00

In 1999, when I was twenty-three and living in East Lansing, I had a subscription to The Mennonite, a denominational periodical that I no longer read with any regularity. It came out every two weeks, and every two weeks I would open it and beginning with the “Readers Say” pages, systematically reduce myself to a frenzy of rage at the contents.

I was in a weird place in my own religious life. Less than two years earlier, during my senior year of college, I’d taken a required course entitled Basic Issues of Faith and Life, my final project for which was a paper in which I declared myself an agnostic and explained why Christianity made no sense to me and how art was all the religion I would ever need. Several months after that, I moved to Michigan to start grad school in flute performance. I didn't know a soul in Michigan. A week after moving into my apartment, lonely and overwhelmed, I called the number of someone from the university Mennonite church, a number my mom’s pastor had given her. When Mom passed it on to me she pre-empted my annoyance by assuring me that she didn’t mind if I didn’t call it, that of course I could do whatever I liked. I called the number because after a week of trying to find my bearings in a new city and a university of 50,000 people (my undergrad institution is about 600), nothing sounded more comforting than a room full of Mennonites, who would of course find out my last name, put me on their map, and welcome me into the fold. And they did. It made that first year a lot easier, and some of those people are still my friends.

So in 1999 I was attending that church and was fine with that, but on a national level the Mennonites were moving towards a denominational merger, and thus airing out a lot of dirty laundry. I hadn’t realized how conservative Mennonites really are as a people until that period; I’d never attended a church that wasn’t full of college professors and liberals. There were people calling themselves Mennonite in the back woods of Virginia with whom I had no more in common than I did with Ted Nugent. I hadn’t given their existence any thought until I started reading their letters to the editor. Around this time, it started dawning on me that my membership in the institution of the Mennonite church was in actuality my choice, a choice I could make as an informed adult. I know it sounds silly, but even at my most fevered early-twenties anti-religious peak, I didn’t really take this choice seriously. I assumed Mennonites would always have my back. You tend think that way, when you grow up the way I did.

There’s a specific article in The Mennonite that still sticks out in my mind as my moment of reckoning. (I can’t access it now, as their online archives don’t go back that far.) It was one in a series of fevered installments in the “dialogue” about “the homosexuality issue.” The author, in a plea for everyone to calm down, tried to come across as a pacifying moderate. He attempted to lay some common ground. Could we all agree that while God’s plan was surely for loving marriage between a man and a woman, we need not vilify gay and lesbian folk as they are “part of the woundedness of God’s creation”? (I remember these exact words.) He also pontificated a bit about the changes the feminist movement had wrought in the church, wondering how the issues might be linked. The women’s movement, he noted, had changed the church irrevocably. Would the “new evidence about homosexuality now have its way with us too?”* (If that’s not word for word what he wrote, I promise it’s close.)

I had never written to The Mennonite before, but I sat down after reading that and composed my letter to “Readers Say.” It was the author’s totalitizing language that led me to do it; here he was presuming to suggest that there was a completely heterosexist premise on which we could all agree upon as home base. Who did he think “we” were? LGBT people clearly weren’t part of it, and neither, I needed to announce, was I. I ranted my way through several drafts before settling on what I thought was a relatively dignified expression of fury, ending something like this: “As a young, disillusioned Mennonite, I need to say this: A church that tolerates this injustice is not a church in which I am happy.” (According to my grandmother, this letter kept her awake for nights.) There, I thought. I’ve showed them. I’ve threatened to leave. How could they possibly want to lose a young member like me? Aren’t I, like, the future?

They published the letter, as I think they do all letters to the editor. There were a few other letters on the article as well, some congratulating the author on his peacemaking, some ranting at him for being too tolerant of “sin,” and one noting that she saw nothing of the “woundedness” he described in her smart, responsible, adult lesbian daughter. It made his idea of common ground seem all the more ludicrous. Clearly, when it came to this subject, Mennonites as a whole agreed on nothing. There was no home base.

Looking back on this incident, what sticks out to me the most is the author’s use of the phrase “have its way with us.” What a clever bit of inverting he did there, as a heterosexual (I assume) male, positioning equality movements as sexual violators of a passive, helpless Mennonite body. As women and sexual minorities gain more rights, we—what? Ravish the helpless patriarchy? I suspect he was appealing to a sense of collective victimhood, never far beneath the surface of Mennonite identity discussions, and bolstered by our relentless dualism: all new ideas come bearing red-hot pokers.

There’s a tendency, prominent in but not limited to Mennonite discourse: to make oppression, injustice, and power abuse things of “the world,” things we are in essence separate from, and therefore things we could not possibly possess within our own communities and our own institutions. The concept of injustice never fully entered into the Mennonite “homosexuality dialogue.” To characterize the marginalization of LGBT people in the church as an unjust system of oppression was too forceful, too uncompromising, not “peace-seeking” enough. So as you can imagine, the righteous fury in my letter didn’t overthrow the status quo in quite the way I’d hoped.

Eric and I have heard from well-meaning elders that we shouldn’t make our church-going decisions based on “this one issue.” I’ve come to hate the word “issue” almost as much as I hate the word “dialogue.” It feels like a betrayal of everyone I love who is queer, to submit to the terms of a discussion that relegates them to outsider status and then casts their existence as a huge problem for the rest of us.

From what I can tell, LGBT people who come from intolerant religious backgrounds and remain invested in those backgrounds often struggle to explain to their non-religious peers why it’s so hard to let that investment go, even as the institutions of faith are rejecting them. I can’t equate my struggle with theirs on any level—no one has ever denied me welcome based on my sexual orientation, nor are they likely to, unless I start frequenting certain gay bars—but I know what it’s like to feel defensive about my inability to completely let go, to just say to hell with these people, and be done with it. And you know, it’s complicated. (Have I mentioned that recently?) I get defensive too for the people I know who stick with church, despite being as heartsick over the injustice as I am—because I know that my choice is not better or more right than theirs. It’s the only choice I feel capable of right now, is all.

What do we lose when we leave? It’s a different answer for every person in this position, of course. Myself, I think of the welcome I got when I was alone in a new city, the sense of family everywhere. I think of the churches I’ve seen come to the rescue when lives fall apart, most recently in my own extended family. I think of the way my tear ducts misbehave on the rare occasions when I go to church with my parents, or attend a Mennonite wedding, knowing that nothing in my current life can quite fill the void that was once filled by weekly four-part singing. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a question: where do I go to regain what I’ve lost?

* During this time, the LGBT-rights movement in the Mennonite Church, insofar as there was one, hedged some of its argument on the assertion that scientific evidence suggested sexual orientation was not a choice.

(And finally, for a startling Mennonite image, check this out.)

i can still read

2008-06-17T13:30:00.000-07:00

I was aiming for a slightly lighter post after all the religious heavy stuff, but the Iowa flooding has taken some wind out of my light 'n' fluffy sails. Eric and I both have family members up there and the news has been awful. Eric’s folks live in a town that wasn’t hit too badly, relatively speaking, and their house is on top of a hill, but they did some heroic sandbagging in hopes of helping those who were less lucky. My cousin John lives in Iowa City and has had to evacuate his apartment with as much of his stuff as he could get in one trip—I don’t know if he managed to get back for a second load, as by the time he got out he was already wading through eighteen inches of water. I wonder if he’ll even have an apartment to go back to. I’m hoping we can get to Iowa sometime this summer and help with cleanup.

Anyway. I’ve been due for a what-I’ve-been-reading-lately post, and I keep putting it off, because I no longer read anything that requires an actual mind. At least, not for recreation. During the day I try to read theory and ethnographies and stuff to make me smarter, but then come five o’clock I go braindead and instead of spending my evenings reading insightful, probing fiction or essays—which I used to do, honestly—I head for whatever’s next in the Netflix queue, or I rewatch episodes of The Vicar of Dibley, or catch up on Battlestar Galactica. Which is not to say that all such entertainment is brainless, but really, I should read more. Lately my wrist/arm/finger injuries have been so bothersome that I’ve been unable to knit, which has made some of the DVD indulgences more difficult to justify. I used to tell myself that so long as I was producing baby sweaters and charity afghan blocks at the same time, my DVD-watching didn’t count as time wasted. But the last time I tried to knit (while re-watching Stardust), I attempted to wear a brace to immobilize and thus protect my wrist, and may as well have tried knitting with my feet. It was impossible, and left me in a shitload of pain. I think it’s time to take up the reading again.

Fortunately, May and June brought me two freshly-published goodies, which blew my book budget for the summer. (I normally stick to the library, but these I couldn’t wait to read, so I succumbed.) The first was the latest installment of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire mystery series, by Charlaine Harris, entitled From Dead to Worse. Yes, I said I was going to start reading, but I didn’t say I was going to get all Garcia Marquez about it. I am not in the mood for great depth or challenge these days; I have escaping to do. Still, I don’t enjoy complete trash, either. Sookie fits the bill perfectly.

I don’t normally go in for mystery series-type stuff, and my Buffy mania has not translated into a love of vampire lit (with the exception of The Historian). However, I love Harris’ books, because I love Sookie Stackhouse’s character. She’s a telepathic barmaid who keeps hooking up with vampires and other supernatural types (like weretigers) because she can’t bear to date humans, seeing as she knows what’s in their heads before she’s even gotten to first base. But novelty aside, the great thing about Sookie is just the way she narrates her life as a twenty-something single woman living in rural Louisiana and barely making ends meet. Something about her voice is incredibly engaging, down to the most mundane details, like bra-shopping at Wal-Mart or worrying about health insurance. Apparently they’re making an HBO series based on the books that’s supposed to come out in September. I hope it’s good. Not that I have HBO or anything. I suppose I’ll have to wait for the DVD…hope I can knit again by then.

And then this month, of course, the new David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. As with every new David Sedaris release, I bought it just about the minute it came out, brought it home, cleared my schedule, and devoured it in two sittings (one long, one short). I just can’t help myself. I don’t really have anything clever to say about it. I loved it, of course. There are a few pieces in there that I probably wouldn’t listen to on audiobook more than maybe five times at most, but that is about the harshest criticism I can deliver to a Sedaris essay. His best writing in this one is about his life with his longtime boyfriend Hugh; it is a lovely ode to long-term monogamy, especially “Old Faithful,” which actually made me cry it was so touching. This is saying something, given that the subject matter is a pus-filled boil on the author’s ass.

So don’t come to me for the latest underground indie anything…I am just feeling lucky that my tastes are so popular I bought these books heavily discounted at Borders. Now that I’m done with them I’m actually rereading the earlier Sookies, which I know is lame, but it’s making me happy. Still, I am open to suggestions, as I’m going to burn through this series again in about a week and then be scouting for the next beach read. (What do we call those in Kansas? Wheat field reads?) What are you all reading these days?

not getting over it

2008-06-12T09:27:00.000-07:00

I have this really corny old book called The Mennonite Starter Kit that is framed as a guide to Mennonite culture for new Mennonites but is actually just a bunch of silly, in-group laughs for people who grew up Mennonite and enjoy self-depreciating humor that makes them feel clever. I am definitely in that category, so I like the book quite a lot. Occasionally it is a little too apt:

Many Mennonites spend a lifetime
a) in service to others
b) working for the church
c) getting over the fact that they’re Mennonite.

I thought of this line the other day when I was finishing up my last blog entry about religion/identity/definitions stuff. I wrote that my reasons for continuing to identify myself as a Mennonite were another post. Apparently I am itching to write that post. Or maybe I’m just, you know, having trouble getting over it, this whole Mennonite thing. Dunno. For a non-church-goer, and, by one account, a “smart-assed Mennonite bash[er],” (I am never going to stop bragging about that one) I sure spend a hell of a lot of time obsessing about this stuff.

Now and then I ask myself why I feel like this Mennonite label is still necessary for me. I have heard disaffected Mennonites, who sometime call themselves “Mennonots,” say that they feel caught between two worlds, alienated by their church but unable to fit into “wider culture.” I don’t feel that way at all. Well, I do feel alienated by the Mennonite church. But I don’t feel like being raised Mennonite made me so irrevocably Other that I don’t fit in anywhere outside of Mennonite communities. (Plus I reject the dualism that underscores this way of thinking, although I acknowledge it may be a more compelling organizing principle for people who grew up more conservatively than I did.) Most of the core values that I associate with Mennonites—peace, simple living, concern for social justice—I can just as easily associate with any number of people and communities that I’ve encountered far outside of Mennonite spaces. I have lots and lots of Mennonite friends, some of whom stayed in the church and some of who didn’t, but I have just as many non-Mennonite friends, and I certainly don’t feel as though the former group is in any sense more “my people” than the latter. I don’t need Mennonite identity to give my life meaning or purpose. And if I ever decide to go back to church, I’m more likely to join a more socially liberal denomination like the UCCs.

For lack of a better explanation, I’ve told people once or twice that being an ethnic Mennonite is a little like being Jewish. Which makes me uncomfortable, because I probably don’t know what I’m talking about. I resort to this explanation in part because I know or know of so many non-practicing Jews who are perfectly comfortable calling themselves Jewish. Among other things, it’s an ethnic category for them. This ethnoreligious identity stuff is way complicated and I’m not going to delve too deeply into it, other than to say that I think Mennoniteness as an ethnic category is probably a lot more problematic than Jewishness as the same. Still, I can’t deny that Mennonites who trace their ancestry back to the original European Anabaptists—a group that includes me—are pretty obsessed with a certain understanding of ethnicity. It involves cheesy dumplings and the question of whether or not your grandmother put beets in her borscht, as well a preoccupation with peoples’ cousins and last names, and a not-terribly-secret superiority complex.

When Eric and I first got together, we were perpetually annoyed with some of my relatives’ inability to get his last name right. His last name is hyphenated—his dad’s name is a German Mennonite name recognizable to any Mennonite in central Kansas, and his non-ethic-Mennonite mom’s last name is probably British. It was as though my relatives were completely tone deaf to half of his last name. No matter how many times we reminded them, they continued to refer to him only by his dad’s name, and even messed up our wedding cards. The weird thing is that hyphenated last names are fairly commonplace among progressive Mennonites these days, and with the exception of my grandmother, my relatives are hardly conservative about such things. I doubt they would have had a problem remembering his name had both halves been Mennonite. It’s just as though the non-Mennonite part of his background didn’t exist, or rather, had been subsumed. Or at least that’s how he understood it, and it bothered him, because that’s certainly not how he experiences his heritage.

Because of this sort of dynamic, and because I’m extremely leery of the notion that I’m in any way privileging the relative rarity of being a white American with a homogenous ethnic identity, I find it a little creepy to say that I call myself a Mennonite because it’s my ethnic background. I do not have Mennonite ethnic pride. (Mennonites have a different name for ethnic pride, anyway—they call it “humility.”) But I don't know that I can claim ethnicity has nothing to do with this. How can I possibly separate ethnicity from just, well, experience? Maybe I keep the Mennonite label because not doing so seems a little bit like denial. My background is so Mennonite it’s sickening. My parents were both born and raised Mennonite. All my relatives are Mennonite. I grew up in a Mennonite stronghold, went regularly to a Mennonite church, and then went to a Mennonite college, even though I spent all four years trying to be as un-Mennonite as possible. I even attended a Mennonite church for most of my grad school years—somewhat patchily, and not always with great conviction, but I stuck it out for a while there. Really the only Mennobullet I dodged was that I didn’t I didn’t do voluntary service with a church organization. Instead I became corrupt and worldly and went to grad school…to study Mennonites.

I have dabbled in Mennoangst (I’m sorry, using “Menno” as a prefix for nouns is beyond obnoxious, I don’t know why I can’t stop), but really, it’s pretty self-indulgent. All around me, I see people who feel Otherness, who feel torn by different allegiances and identities. This is a pretty normal state these days. My own such conflicts are quite trivial compared to those who experience a lot of active oppression and judgment based on their ethnicities, religions, or identity choices. Nothing I decide on this front is going to make or break me—I’m a white American Christian, for God’s sake. Unlike generations of Mennonites before me, I do not have any memories of great persecution to deal with. I worry about getting too precious about identity.

Actually, I don’t generally call myself a Christian—at least, I haven’t been lately. I never really stop struggling with this. It’s probably obvious to anyone who has been reading my last few posts that I eschew any belief-oriented definition of Christianity; I can’t think of any such definition that wouldn’t exclude someone with a potentially authentic claim on the label. My own beliefs about God and Jesus and the nature of things are probably far too nebulous and/or liberal to fit many a Christian definition, but that’s not my concern; Christians are always trying to denounce each other as inauthentic, and I know better than to take that too seriously. And I should also say that I just love Jesus. He’s my guy. I’m not overly concerned with who or what he was and I certainly don’t believe he was the bona fide One and Only Savior of Humankind, etc. I am most certainly not interested in “spreading the gospel”; I’d rather eat bugs. Yet the fact that all the fundy Christians loose in this country have not managed to ruin Jesus for me is something I take as a miracle. When pressed, though, I generally deny Christianity. I try to come off more as, to use Anne Lamott’s words, “a leftist liberation-theology enthusiast,” or “a vaguely Jesusy bon vivant.”

Because I reject any absolute definition of Christianity, and because I know so many wonderful Christians whose faith and practice I have no problems with whatsoever and whose beliefs are as loosey-goosey as my own, and because, as I’ve said, I am so very fond of the Jeez, I occasionally wonder why I have such a problem calling myself a Christian. But I guess I have my reasons. Here are some:

1) Even though I think Jesus was swell, he was a man and therefore, Christianity is one more system centered in male authority, and goddammit, I’m so sick of those. Even if I accept that the Bible is a product of its time, I can barely sit through a church service because it’s impossible to have a church service without reading from the Bible, and halfway through most Bible readings I am ready to pull out my sword and decapitate the fucking patriarchy. Know many awesome feminist Christians working to transform the church, but not sure I have the energy for it. Practicing Christianity is likely to greatly increase the number of sexist assholes I have to deal with on a regular basis.

2) Belief-wise, could just as easily call myself a pagan, in a pantheistic sort of way. (Scored one hundred percent pagan on the Beliefnet Belief-o-matic or whatever it’s called.) Don’t, because I’m not counterculture enough to go whole-hog and join a coven or whatever, plus I’m a Mennonite so most organized rituals make me feel like excusing myself to go bake a pie.

3) Worried fundamentalist Christians will assume that I am a fellow anti-abortion homophobe and share in their joy at having “brought someone to Christ.” Very bad at faking this.

4) Worried non-religious folk will assume that my Christian-ness is a calculated act of aggression against their own beliefs and subsequently assail me with all their Christianity-related trauma.

5) Don’t feel like it.

Here I am getting in hot water, because arguably, the label “Mennonite,” which I’ve just said I use, is unintelligible if not coupled with the label “Christian,” which I’ve just said I don’t. (Not right now, anyway. I could change my mind.) My sixteenth-century ancestors, the original Anabaptists, would no doubt find my idea that I can be Mennonite without being Christian incomprehensible, probably repugnant. But I don’t regard these ancestors as my source. I don’t have any idea what to make of them; I don’t know if they were ideological lunatics, hero rebels against European state church hegemony, or something in between. And of course many contemporary Mennonites would—and sometimes do—find me full of crap as well. I don’t have concrete answers for these people.

I call myself a Mennonite because I want to claim my space in the Mennonite universe. That’s about as concrete as I get. There’s an element of defiance to this: I do feel like there are a lot of Mennonites who try to dismiss people like me—people who inherited the faith and/or know it well, and have a lot to criticize—as marginal. I live to be the horsefly who shits on their smug little picnic. I may not go to church, but I won’t disappear, and I won’t disavow my authority over my own Mennonite experience. But I also claim my Mennoniteness because of many, many good inheritances, too numerous to name. I’m not a faithful Mennonite. What I am is a cranky, critical, and occasionally quite appreciative one.

oh, and it's all so complicated...

2008-06-07T16:05:00.000-07:00

It’s becoming apparent that Animal and I could spend the next couple of weeks having a conversation that goes something like this:

Animal: Rules are important. When you call yourself a Something, it means that you agree to the rules that someone(s) set down as part of being a Something. If you break those rules, you’re cool with me, you’re just not a Something. A religious label is a Something.

Me: Not that simple! Religion is not just about rules. Religion very complicated, identity issues, no one definition, wanting something to be simple doesn’t make it simple, even rules aren’t simple, multiplicity, postmodernism, etc.

Animal: Rules still important! Either follow the rules of your religion or make up your own and call it something else, or just stop already! A thing is a thing, not what you decide is a thing!

(for previous installments, see here and here.)

I’m going to take Animal on again here, (and I’m just going to call him Scott for the time being, because it’s easier for me and anyway his full name is on his blog and not some huge secret) but before I get going I should probably let you know that despite our abiding differences on this stuff, the closest Scott and I could ever get to a slugfest in real life is an affectionately-tossed cube of feta cheese, or perhaps a casually-flung olive. So grab a glass of wine, if that's your poison; pretend we’re at the dinner table—and I’m about to deliver, well, a monologue.

I don’t really fault Scott his position, though I could probably argue against it until my metaphorically-understood hell figuratively freezes over. Strangeite, in a similar vein to Scott, put forth the Monty Python-enhanced argument that anyone can call him/herself anything, but at a certain point it just gets ridiculous. And that’s completely true. When Gwyneth Paltrow did that ad in Vanity Fair for an AIDS relief organization where she had a painted face and a big bead necklace and the words “I AM AFRICAN” plastered across her image, I wanted to reach inside the photo and smack her. But of course, I don’t make my argument about flexible definitions to defend the likes of bland, annoying actresses with massively ignorant paternalistic white savior chips on their shoulders. I think Paltrow’s offense against truth and consistency far surpasses that of Catholics who unapologetically use birth control. If you try to argue to me that Gwyneth’s calling herself African and my Catholic-raised, condom-using friend’s identification of herself as Catholic are in the same realm of screwiness, I’m just going to roll my eyes and tell you your world is a lot more black and white than mine.

I’m trying to understand the passion that is clearly behind Scott’s desire to define religion primarily as a set of rules. I suppose I’m equally passionate in my need to assert that religion is not just about rules, because for me, unlike for Scott, religious identity—the need to define it, assert it, investigate it, rework it, struggle with it—has been a pretty huge thing in my life. I grew up in a family and ethnoreligious culture that placed incredible value on participation in organized religion. At the same time, it was an academic religious environment. My parents, the people in my church, and my Mennonite college professors taught me that without dissent and questioning, religion is not merely stagnant, but dangerous. When a religious culture becomes so invested in its own legalisms that it can’t tolerate any challenge from within, really, really bad things start to happen. And at that point, you can forget the idea that religion can do any good in the world. It’s going to be endless infighting, emotional damage, and power plays if you’re lucky—and if you’re not so lucky, people are going to get killed.

For those who are outside of religion, who don’t see any value in religion or have any investment in the vitality of a particular religious culture, this isn’t going to be a very compelling argument. One may think, so what? Quit already. Don’t be that anymore; it should be that simple. But it isn’t that simple, for just absolutely tons of people. (And in passing, I might note that having this level of autonomy in one’s religious affiliation or lack thereof is a relatively new thing for human beings.) Scott claims that by going through baptism or communion you’ve “agreed to the rules” of your religion. But the Catholics baptize babies, who haven’t agreed to anything, as do quite a few other Christian faiths. As a Mennonite, I had a supposed “believer’s baptism,” but I was only fourteen and had no clue what the hell I was doing. As for communion, I’ve come to learn that even within supposedly rigid Catholicism, people understand this incredibly elemental ritual in vastly different ways. For some Christians it’s an act of absolute submission to higher authority. For others, it’s a communal sharing of bread and wine and/or Welsch’s grape juice (bah, fakers), and commits you to nothing. Nothing about baptism and communion is straightforward—if it were, Christian authorities would not have spent the last two thousand years bickering over and constantly reinterpreting these sacraments.

This is something that I find absent from Scott’s arguments about religion: any awareness of the incredibly fraught and complicated history of Christian rule-making. Let’s start with the Bible: there are many loud voices in our culture characterizing the Bible as a set of straightforward rules and literal prophesies that Christians must follow and believe. Often those who don’t know anything about the Bible or Christianity come to just take these peoples’ words for it. The Bible is, of course, a lot more than rules and prophesies, and people lose all sense of reason trying to read it that way because when you do, you realize that it’s the most internally inconsistent document ever. This is why Christian fundamentalists are essentially forced to lose their minds. In order to believe that the Bible is a consistent set of easily interpreted rules you have to be insane. And ignorant of the history of Christianity, or hostile to the idea that this history has anything to teach you about the present. And there are plenty of Christians like that.

The history of Christianity is a history of schisms and divisions. For instance, the Catholics, who due to their top-down structure and theology are frequently cast as a pack of static rule-followers, did not, in fact, set down all their rules at once fixed point in history and then have a cut-and-dry time of it ever after. For most of the fourteenth century the Catholics were so divided they couldn’t even agree on who was pope. Who was a “real Catholic” then? In the early sixties of the last century, the Vatican II reforms were enacted, and within the span of a few short years, Catholicism changed so drastically that people’s everyday lives were irrevocably affected. Meat was allowed on Fridays. Masses were no longer in Latin. At that point, by Scott’s logic as I understand it, we’d have to claim that in order to be a true Catholic, one must believe, implicitly and unquestioningly, that God Himself took audience with the Pope and the cardinals, explained how the rules were to be changed, and then—Snap! Bingo!—it was all over, without any dissent, processing, haggling, or differences of opinion.

And that’s a fine claim, if you’d prefer to define a Catholic as a sheep, a person devoid of the capacity for cultural sophistication or critical thought. That’s fine, if you disregard the field of theology, in which religious scholars thoroughly vested in their religious identities debate and disagree over the nuances of doctrine (Catholic theologians are still debating Vatican II). That’s fine, if you buy into the idea of Catholicism as a religious dictatorship, rather than as a community of people who, like any community of people, are bound to disagree on things, and yet choose to identify collectively in spite of it all.

Here’s something I find revealing in Scott’s last comment: “I’m supposing that with religion, it’s my own bias AGAINST it that keeps me from fully understanding…” I’m not unsympathetic to his bias, but there’s some truth to this statement. Still, I think it’s more accurate, Scott, to say that it’s your absolutism that keeps you from fully understanding. You have a desire for “things to be what they are, and what SOMEONE (whoever or whenever) decided they would be.” How precisely does this shake down? You cannot so handily dismiss the question of whose rules define a thing, nor so easily invoke the unquestioned “someone.” No matter how badly you want it to be so, things like religion are not easily defined. Identity isn’t formed solely by rules, nor even are institutions. If that were consistently the case—if every single time an institution made a rule that people disagreed with, they left and created their own institution rather than enacting dissent and the possibility of change within the existing institution, I don’t think we’d have a cleaner, more discernable set of boundaries, or more easily defined “things.” I think we’d have chaos. (Which is not to say that I’m against the occasional schism.)

Why should non-religious people care whether or not religions are legalistic, rigid and extreme? I’d argue that by taking the stance that Scott has taken, you play into the hands of the religious folk who stand to do the most harm in the world. The idea that intrafaith dissent is itself antithetical to faith is a position taken by people who are trying to use religion to control others. This leads to ideological wars, which I think we have ample evidence often lead to literal wars. Whether or not you participate in a religious faith or believe in God, you should have a vested interest in seeing the religions around you be tolerant, moderate, and open to dissent. You have to live under policies that are informed by religion. You have to live in a world in which your son or daughter or next-door neighbor could be conscripted for the next religious war. Religion isn’t going anywhere. And it evolves, and devolves, and changes, and it can be better or worse, depending.

But beyond all that, an absolutist position grates against my personal life and choices. What am I? A lot of things, sure, but here’s one biggie on the religious front: I’m someone with very powerful ties to my religious heritage. And I’ve left my church. Yet I identify with that heritage; I call myself a Mennonite. The reasons why I still choose to do so are another essay. I’ll just say this: in an absolutist universe, there is no place for a person like me.

my extreme weather wimpiness

2008-06-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

I’m beginning to think that my tornado-phobic friend Mary has the right idea about Kansas: Avoid it. Something’s got it in for us.

I grew up in this fair, flat state of cataclysmic weather, so you’d think I’d be tough enough to take it in stride when I turn on the radio and hear that tonight we will be descended upon by the Four Horsemen of the Meterological Apocalypse, but the fact is, I’m a little antsy. I have never been one of those tough Kansans who swaggers out on the porch to check out of the progress of encroaching storms. The sight of wall clouds makes my stomach go funny. I dislike any sentence containing the phrase “high-pressure system.” When I was a child, the appearance of dark clouds always led me to ask, anxiously, hopefully, “Is it just partly cloudy?”

I would also like to state for the record that weather.com is a conspiracy of exploitive, fear-mongering asshats. What kind of sickos post a “raw video” of a tornado tearing up a house on their home page, with the headline, “Watch tornado in action; this could be your home”?? Do people actually stand to gain anything from this hardcore weather porn? It’s not enough just to predict the weather; they have to make extra-sure they’ve well and truly scared the crap out of us. I guess that’s how they sell…weather forecasts. Bastards.

I have recently made my seasonal office transfer, which means that I drag my laptop, card table, and whatever books I’m involved with to the basement, where I plan to spend the next three months hanging out with the Eric’s homebrew stash and The Che. I have also relaxed the cat rules, and Bonzo is currently napping on the table behind my computer. Whatever is brewing outside is causing me to want the comfort of feline companionship. I enjoy being in this dank hole for many reasons, one of which is that I can’t watch and therefore be made nervous by the evil commencing in the clouds. Unfortunately, I can still hear the wind howling.

I don’t like this. Have I mentioned that? If anything, my dread of severe weather has increased in recent years—which is probably correlated to my relatively new status as a homeowner, now that I think about it.

There was a point, living in Michigan a few years back, when I had it in my head that I actually missed Kansas weather. Michigan is not immune to thunderstorms or tornados, but it didn’t seem like much compared to what I was used to. Living in southcentral and southeast Michigan is like living under God’s postnasal drip. Wet, damp, rainy, drizzly, gray, rainy, damp, blah blah. Wow, I thought, wouldn’t it be great if now and then we got a really nice, violent, passionate, crazy air-clearing like they get in good old Kansas, lightening and huge explosions of thunder and the whole bit? And then afterwards you step out and sun is bright and the air is clear as a bell and life is full of possibility or whatever the hell? I was insane. Tornadoes are awful and tear up people’s houses and farms and occasionally, entire towns. Flooding ruins everything and kills people. I can’t even enjoy a decent showing of thunder and lightening anymore.

On Monday afternoon there was a thunderclap so loud my cats went ballistic and did the whole puffy tail thing, and the lightening looked to be striking about ten yards from our deck. Perhaps I should have found that exciting, but I was on edge. I tried to keep working with the radio on in the background so I could follow the storms, but that made it worse. Our local NPR station was playing the most appalling music: Porgy and Bess arrangements, the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth at a criminally slow tempo (made even slower by the fact that they kept interrupting it with new storm warnings), and a full, orchestral version of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring complete with soaring brass and huge, drawn-out rallentandos. The latter enraged me particularly and caused me to forsake my work in rage and despair, crying, “What’s next?? James Galway and a harpist playing Pachelbel’s Canon?” Storms make me emotionally excitable, and not in a good way. Our severe thunderstorm warning expired right before they started in on Barber’s Adagio, otherwise I might have just gone out onto the lawn and let the lightening do me in.

But tonight’s supposed to be way worse. After hearing the dire forecast this morning, I emailed Eric. Our exchange, over the course of several emails, went like this:

Me: i think we should sleep in the basement tonight. we can drag the futon mattress down.
Eric: no way. cat yuck?
Me: i’ll give the litter box a really good cleaning. seriously, I don’t want to be sleeping near any windows tonight if we can help it. it’s gonna be wild.
Eric: what about spiders?
dust bunnies…aerosolized cat litter
bugeyman [sic]
yuuuuck
Me: spiders: all over the house anyway
aerosolized cat litter: “aerosolized”? wazzat?
bugeyman [sic]: we’ll sedate him with beer
Eric: shameful waste of beer

The issue is as yet unresolved. I guess I should go upstairs, get some water, use the bathroom, check the sky.

religious labels, or in which animal and i Get Into It

2008-06-02T15:09:00.000-07:00

Last week Animal wrote a post about the little-known rules in the United States Code pertaining to uses of the US flag. In that post, he wrote this:

I want people to adhere to the rules that are set down, to understand them and then not ignore them, but abide by them. In this, modern American "patriots" are a lot like many modern American "Catholics," who claim to BE that thing, but ignore so many of the rules that it borders on lunacy. If the Pope is the voice of God on Earth, and if the Pope says GOD says you can't use birth control...well, then you can't use birth control.

I responded:

The real flag rules sure do expose the hypocrisy of a lot of flag-wavers, but I think the Catholicism analogy is a little simplistic. Organized religion just doesn’t work quite this way. It’s probably the postmodernist coming out in me, but look: Saying that you’re Catholic can mean any number of things. To some people, it means that you follow the Pope and obey every dictate of the church to the best of your ability. To others, it might mean that you think the Pope is a flawed human being that you disagree with on stuff but you grew up Catholic and going to services nourishes your soul in some way you don’t need to fully understand, so you do it anyway. Is one person more Catholic than the other? By one definition, yes. But if you assert that the only true members of a particular faith are the ones that unerringly follow the rules set down by that faith, and that everyone else who claims that faith is by definition inconsistent and/or a hypocrite, you’re going to get lost, because rules always have hidden ambiguities, particularly in religion. Beyond that, defining religion by the parameters of rules cuts off, oh, about three-fourths of the culture of any given faith. Catholicism, for instance, has an incredible history of intrafaith dissent, as well as a near-infinite number of local interpretations that would probably give the Pope a heart attack.   

The real problem, it seems to me, is when you identify yourself as someone who follows all the rules, exert judgment over other people for not following the rules, support policy that punishes other people for not following these supposedly sacred rules, and then secretly break the rules yourself. But identifying yourself as a follower of a given set of rules is not the same thing as calling yourself a Catholic, or an American.

And back to Animal:

I dunno Steph; I guess (not being a religious person myself, in the standard definition) that in this instance I DO see things as being that simplistic. Fudging the rules of Catholicism so that one can live according to one's personal tastes seems like it would create so many offshoots that the definition of being "Catholic" loses its very meaning. I think a person should be able to go to a Catholic service and be welcomed there in order to receive soul nourishment...but if that person doesn't believe that the Pope is here to deliver God's word and will...well, then, that person ain't really Catholic.   I guess "the rules" are there for reasons, and if enough people no longer follow them, then the rules should be changed; but, to claim that they ARE important, and then not follow them...well, that doesn't seem very ambiguous to me. Either follow the tenets of your faith or change them for ALL...or, create an offshoot faith that uses YOUR rules. But let's not have an infinity (or, infinity minus one, if you will) of different interpretations and then call all those things THE SAME.

I had been struggling my way through a post that addressed the multitudinous nature of religious definitions last week, and this exchange with Animal came along and I realized that between the two of us we frame the conflict I was trying to address so succinctly that I should just use our comments as a springboard to explore my ideas on this subject.

What’s most striking to me in Animal’s comments is this sentence: “Fudging the rules of Catholicism so that one can live according to one’s personal tastes seems like it would create so many offshoots that the definition of being 'Catholic' loses its very meaning.” But what definition? And its very meaning according to whom? And who gets to decide what constitutes “fudging the rules,” or what really and truly are the “tenets of your faith”? I don't mean to pick on Animal, but I think that from outside of a religion the legalistic aspects tend to look more black and white than they are from within. Rules are subject to interpretation, and sometimes people within a faith defy their leaders because they believe their leaders are interpreting things incorrectly. To lump principled dissent in with old-fashioned duplicitous hypocrisy and call it all "fudging" strikes me as both uncharitable and inaccurate.

Relying on the most powerful and rule-obsessed figures in a religion to provide us with the definitions of said religion is only one way of going about it. It’s the most convenient way, of course, but it’s no more real or accurate than any number of other approaches. And this begs the question: Is there quantifiably, measurably a meaning that we can attach to any religious label that can’t be seriously challenged on one front or another? And if there isn't, is this something we need to be overly concerned about?

While I doubt he did so intentionally, the non-religious Animal articulated an anxiety about the boundaries and borders of religious groups that is shared by a lot of religious people who fear the supposedly corrupting influences of “secularism” and “relativism.” And in fact I think it’s shared by a lot of people who are completely hostile to religion as well (not that this is a quality I attribute to Animal), because without legalistic definitions of religion to rely upon, arguments against religion become much more complicated. We want the word “Catholic” to mean something; we want the word “Christian” to mean something. But they don’t mean anything in particular—which is not to say that either of these terms is meaningless.

Ask any number of Benedictine nuns (many of whom are openly pro-choice*), or the Catholic governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius, who is being told by a Kansas archbishop that she should be banned from communion for her support of abortion rights, if a person who doesn’t obey all the dictates of the Pope “ain’t really Catholic.” Ask Stephen Colbert, or the brilliant Catholic novelist Mary Gordon, or members of the Catholic Worker Movement, or Catholic liberation theologians, the same thing. And then try to answer the question: Who decides what is Catholic? Who decides what is Christian? The rule-makers? The power-arbiters? The most legalistic members of a faith? It manifestly is not that simple.

Having an infinity of interpretations under one religious label is only a problem if you have a vested interest in preserving the supremacy of one of those interpretations. One charge against the line of argument I’m pursuing here—which some might describe as a postmodern argument, whatever the hell that means—is that it dilutes religious labels so that they become meaningless. But that is an argument that’s rooted in ideology, not observable reality. When I look at the diversity of beliefs and practices that exist within single religious labels, I don’t observe chaos or meaninglessness. I observe people searching for and creating meaning, using our imperfect language as best they can to describe their beliefs and affiliations.

And I should add that I say this without sentimentality or kumbaya. To me the moniker “Christian” is equally applicable to a bigoted televangelist and to an agnostic, pluralist liberal church-goer who enjoys being part of a Jesus-centered community. I may have distinct opinions about which Christians I think are better people or live more consistently with my own understanding of Jesus’ message, but that’s beside the point at hand.

Legalistic definitions of faith also tend to obscure one of the most fascinating and enduring characteristics of religion: paradox. Again, Catholicism is a wonderful example, perhaps because in terms of sheer numbers and global reach it is unrivaled among Christian denominations. It is arguably the most hierarchical denomination in Christianity, and yet its culture and theology has proven so rich and malleable that it has come to co-exist in syncretic forms with many religions indigenous to the areas or peoples Catholics have missionized. Many practitioners of Haitian Vodou or Cuban Santeria, for instance, would identify themselves as devout Catholics, despite centuries of their practices being maligned by Catholic authorities as devil-worship.**

My own faith of origin, Anabaptist Christianity, contains a paradox rather inverse to the Catholic one I just described. It was founded on countercultural ideals, and many Anabaptists (this includes Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, Amish) set great store in placing themselves in contrast to an entity we persist in referring to as the “wider world.” Yet within Anabaptist communities themselves, conformity is so intensely valued that for much of our history those who violated the rules of the community were punished through means of the ban, which in its most extreme form involves treating the offending individual as though he or she is dead, and insisting even his or her family follow suit. While the practice isn’t completely gone, you won’t find it much outside the Amish anymore. Nonetheless, its emotional fallout is everywhere present in our communities, and the censorious tendencies that brought about the practice in the first place are far from dead.

When I first started writing ethnographically about Mennonites, I was just desperate to make this paradox go away so I could define Mennonites as either conformist or nonconformist and make life easier for myself and for my readers. But I couldn’t do that, because the paradox simply existed. Eventually I came around to writing this in a Mennonite journal last fall:

No one thing unites Mennonites, despite what any denominational publication says: not culture, not ethnicity, not beliefs. That’s not a cynical statement, just a comment on our diversity, the web-like nature of our connections to one another. If you grew up in Kinshasa or Bogotá or even Lancaster County, I have little to no idea what being a Mennonite means to you, or what stories you have been told. Sometimes people fall back on defining a Mennonite as someone who attends a Mennonite church, but that, I’ve realized, is just an opinion on the matter, not a definition I can trust.***

Likewise, the infinite interpretations of religious labels simply exist. If you like one definition more than another, that’s perfectly fine; I don’t believe that it’s wrong to be partial. But when you pretend the other definitions and understandings of the same label aren’t there or aren’t in any way worth considering, you’re missing out on a deeper understanding of one of the most varied, contentious and fascinating aspects of human experience.

* I learned this from the book Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns by Cheryl L. Reed.

** Some examples are in Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown.

***”Joiner, Agent, Storyteller” in Mennonite Life, Fall 2007.

weirdnesses

2008-05-27T13:48:00.000-07:00

Memes are so great. They are nothing but an excuse to talk about yourself, as though you are hot celebrity doing a question and answer session for a public just dying to know what’s on your iPod and what skin care products you prefer.

They are also super for procrastination. This one was going around a while ago but at the time I was not in such dire need of procrastination techniques as I am now.

Five weird things about me:

1. Despite being relatively short (5’ 4”), I always take the stairs two at a time. This is because when I was in high school I read an article in Vogue about how to get good legs. I was very preoccupied with the subject at the time. The author suggested standing on your toes whenever possible and always taking stairs two at a time. I have no idea if either of these practices made any appreciable difference in my degree of leg hotness, but the stairs habit stuck. I can clear staircases faster than a six-foot-plus man. Taking stairs one at a time makes me impatient. But the leg thing doesn’t preoccupy me much anymore. No matter what I do, I’ll never have as good of legs as my husband.

2. I am really into space. As in, deep space, the expanding universe. It’s not like I sit around reading astrophysics, although I am hacking my way through A Brief History of Time at the moment. It’s just that I find thinking about the vastness of the universe incredibly comforting. I really don’t understand why; I just do. I am completely hypnotized by the night sky and can watch it for hours, something I never get to do, but still, I could. When I was a kid I was obsessed with learning about the different planets and pored over my Skyguide for hours.

(However, this space fixation never really translated into a great love of space-based entertainment, until Firefly and the new Battlestar Galactica came along. I never watched Star Trek or anything.)

3. When there are sharp things sitting on a table or a counter and pointed towards me, I have to move them so they point away. This has been a thing with me for as long as I can remember, and I can’t seem to get over it. If you sit across from me at a table and lay your pencil down so that the tip is pointing in my direction, I will have to literally reach over and turn your pencil forty-five degrees or so to make it not point at me. If I have just met you, I will try to restrain myself, but I will be nervous the whole time.

4. I have a propensity for getting myself into strange and/or unexpected religious/spiritual situations. I am not talking about visiting the places of worship of different religions in the name of self-education and interfaith cooperation, though I do that as well. It’s much weirder than that. Once I am in said situation, I end up wondering what in bloody hell I am doing and how I got there. The trippiest of these adventures landed me in the middle of services at an ashram devoted to an Indian guru, full of transparently mentally unbalanced devotees who spent all their time discussing the conversations they had in their head with said guru, whom they seemed to view as all-powerful and omniscient. What I found particularly disconcerting was everyone’s assertion that I was there because their guru, whom I’d never met, had “sent” me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with a better explanation for my presence. A few years later I found myself in the middle of a Lenten discussion at a retirement home, feeling similarly baffled (though it was more like hanging out with my grandma’s friends and less like hanging out with the people from the cult episode of Strangers with Candy).

Rather than deal with the self-examination that such a tendency should precipitate, I have come to think a bit like the creepy devotees. I imagine huge, God-like beings orchestrating my bizarre adventures. Like, Jesus must have said to the all-powerful guru woman, “Hey, Stephanie’s about due for a total freaking out! She’s already met all your wackos—this time, let’s try my eighty-five-year old Presbyterians!!” Help.

5. I can get both of my legs behind my head. I have always been able to do this. After visiting the circus when I was nine years old I briefly considered a career as a contortionist.

I tag Jenn-Jenn the Mother Hen, Pam, Gade, Strangeite, Animal, and Suze, because it doesn’t count as self-centered if I make bunch of other people do it too.

comparing oppressions: in which i break my own resolution to stop writing about the election

2008-05-21T12:12:00.001-07:00

Hillary Clinton denounced the media and pundits on Sunday for their sexist coverage of the election. I’m sure that, given the way things are playing out in the primaries, her comments will be dismissed, mocked, and cast by many as whiny sour grapes. But she’s right, and anyone who’s been paying thoughtful attention to this campaign knows she’s right. Watching this primary season as a feminist Obama supporter has often left me feeling conflicted. The first time I really listened to an Obama speech, I knew he was my candidate, and he’s rarely disappointed me, whereas Hillary Clinton disappoints me all the time. (I am not, however, one of those Obamites who thinks she is some sort of political antichrist and threatens to sit out the general election if she is nominated. She won’t be nominated, clearly, but if she were, I would campaign for her like a bat out of hell, just as I plan to do for her rival.) But I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t say that her candidacy means something to me.

Obama expressed something of how I feel about her in his speech in Iowa Tuesday night: “Senator Clinton has shattered myths and broken barriers and changed the America in which my daughters and your daughters will come of age. And for that we are grateful to her.” I suspect that, like most politicians, Hillary Clinton is ruthless and opportunistic and willing to crush the weak when necessary and sell out when it’s convenient, but there are things about her I will always respect—such as the fact that she’s cowed by neither paternalistic attempts to dismiss her nor by blatantly misogynist epithets of the sort that are inevitably brandished as blunt weapons against women who have more power than we think they should have.

She is a complicated figure to me. As a woman who’s also on occasion been the target of paternalistic dismissal and misogynist spewing, I find her willingness to call patriarchy on its bullshit practically cathartic. At the same time, I think it’s reductive and sexist to celebrate female power as though it’s purer or less complicated and corruptible than male power. I cannot possibly espouse a simple “go sister!” attitude towards Clinton. Having women in power does not necessarily lead to positive, collective female empowerment; if I believed that were the case I would have been a lot more excited about Condoleezza Rice. It’s also the case, I believe, that positive, collective female empowerment cannot possibly happen without having more women in power. A LOT more women. If I’m ambivalent about the nature of Hillary Clinton’s ascent to power, I’m ambivalent with full awareness that every inch of that ascent has been resented and fought with a brand of vitriol rarely leveled at her male colleagues.

One of the problems I have with Hillary Clinton popped up in her response to a reporter who asked her, after hearing some of her comments on sexism, if she thought that this campaign has been racist. She responded that she didn’t believe it had. She went on to state that “The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable, or at least more accepted [than racism]…” When it comes to blatant smears, I suppose she’s right. Calling Hillary Clinton a bitch barely blinks a media eye; it’s some sort of jocular national sport. (And defended on CNN.) Leveling a public racial epithet against Barack Obama would no doubt raise a bigger furor. But to suggest that the campaign hasn’t been at all racist? What?? I’m better at sniffing out sexism than I am at sniffing out racism because I’m a white female, but that big old honking fracas over Jeremiah Wright—with practically zero attention being paid to McCain’s dubious religious connections—was an absolute parade of racist double standards, and it was hardly the only instance of such a thing to happen in this campaign. (I’m sure we’ll get a reprise come fall, too.) Clinton continued, “there should be equal rejection of the sexism and the racism when it raises its ugly head.” She’s right—there should. (Her grammar—that’s another question.) But she blew it for me with her previous statement. You can’t reject an –ism if you prefer to deny that it’s even present.

But of course, she couldn’t identify the Wright controversy as racist because at the time she was too busy trying to squeeze political gain from it, a fact that sort of sums up my ambivalence about her methods. Which is not to say that I believe Obama is Mr. Purity—he could stand to denounce the sexism against Clinton with a bit less thought to strategy himself. But Obama has demonstrated that he will take political risks in order to speak the truth. I wish Clinton had a similar grace; her candidacy would be even more historic if she did.

In the course of this primary campaign, I’ve been involved in a number of conversations about which might be more radical, the election of a black man or a white woman as President of the United States. I’ve read pages of media speculation on the question. And I’ve come to realize that the very idea such a question could be answered implies a national homogeneity that only exists in the media’s imagination. A few weeks ago I listened to Priscilla Warner, one of the three authors of the excellent book The Faith Club, speak in Lawrence with her co-authors about the process of writing a book on interfaith relationships. Speaking of the Israel-Palestine issue, and of her many conversations with her Palestinian-American co-author, Ranya Idliby, on the subject, she said that she’d come to realize the futility of comparing oppressions, trying to figure out which people has had it the worst. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the audience who immediately thought of the Democratic primary.

I’ve sometimes asked myself if I would have been as willing to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton if he were a white male, being as I am quite weary of the dominance of white men in American politics, despite my high regard for a handful of white male politicians. (Oh Ted Kennedy, please hang in there.) And then I notice that the question is preposterous. Barack Obama can no more be separated from his black maleness than John McCain can be separated from his white maleness than Hillary Clinton can be separated from her white femaleness. If Barack Obama were a white male, he would not be the same candidate. He would not exist. I can no more imagine him as white than I can imagine McCain as a woman. It’s just pointless.

Pretending race and gender aren’t factors in this campaign is a fool’s errand. Race and gender, not to mention discrimination that stems there from, have an awful lot to do with policy. We can’t assess or categorize our candidates based on their races or their genders, but their races and genders unavoidably inform where they started, the trajectory of their careers, the decisions they make—and those things, of course, make them more or less attractive to us. So I still hold out hope that someday there will be a woman in the White House, a woman for whom I’ll feel unambiguously honored to vote.

what not to eat raw from the ditch

2008-05-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

On Sunday morning we were out gardening when our neighbors (the ones who gave us the Obama sign) wandered over to chat about vegetables. Somehow the conversation turned to foraging and edible greens, which Eric and I have been curious about lately. Our neighbors, who have lived in this condo community for over twenty years, assured us that edible greens grow all over the place here, especially out by the woods where we live. They took us over to their shed and pointed out the pokeweed, which grows here in abundance.

“You’re welcome to as much of it as you want,” said Neighbor R. “My mom used to make us gather piles of it and then she’d cook it all up in a big pot, but I don’t like greens so we never eat it now.”

I thanked them, grabbed a big handful, went and made myself a salad. I pulled out some mesclun from the farmer’s market and added it to the torn-up, raw pokeweed, which was pretty tasty, and added some radishes and green olives, olive oil and vinegar. It was a great salad.

After eating I drove out to an alpaca farm twenty minutes east of town, where my weekend knitting group was meeting for a little educational tour. We stood out in the hot sun for about an hour and a half, feeding little food pellets to the alpacas and petting their funny little soft giraffe heads. They were cute, and it was fun, but after hanging out in the hot alpaca pen for a while, I started feeling a little off. Just thirsty, I figured. I’d been out in the hot sun a lot already that day and probably just wasn’t drinking enough water.

Half an hour later, I was sick of feigning interest in the alpacas and wanted nothing more than to get in my car and get out of there before I tossed my cookies right then and there in the farmyard. I wondered if I might be getting heatstroke, which seemed ridiculously unlikely, but nothing else really occurred to me. I drove myself home, a twenty-minute drive that almost ended very badly with a stoplight hurling—but I managed to hold it in. Until I got home.

After a quite violent losing of my lunch, I was more than reasonably certain that heatstroke was not my problem. I staggered to the computer, where I got online and discovered that only complete idiots eat raw pokeweed. The stuff is really toxic. I was already feeling better after throwing it up, but was frightened by several informative web pages that encouraged me to look forward to a second wave of symptoms: tremors, fever, convulsions, and something beginning with a “d” that I was too scared to look up, followed by respiratory shutdown. And then I freaked out a wee bit. We weren’t sure what to do; if we lived in Europe or Canada or someplace with socialized medicine we might have gone straight to the emergency room, but as it was we weighed the cost of an emergency room co-pay against the relative risk of me falling down dead in the next few hours. I found this conversation less than calming.

Eric called the hospital and explained the situation as I was drained and shaky from explosive hurling and too freaked out to be coherent; they referred us to some sort of national nurse’s hotline, which he called promptly. Upon reaching a human being, he was asked approximately eight hundred questions concerning our address, phone numbers, and the exact spellings of our various hyphenated and/or German last names. Then they put him on hold.

After several minutes of hold music, during which the phone was passed over to me, a nurse answered, asking, “Now, do we have your contact information?”

“YES,” I said. “I NEED to discuss my issue, NOW, PLEASE.”

I explained about the raw pokeweed and the puking and the scary websites.

“Did you eat the berries?” asked the nurse. “Because the berries can kill ya.” She had a southern accent.

“No, just the leaves.”

What followed was an extensive explanation of the proper culinary treatment of pokeweed, which apparently this nurse’s husband adores so much that he gathers it in bulk and cans it in his own kitchen. Upon hearing that I hadn’t ingested the berries or roots, the nurse seemed quite uninterested in the state of my health re: possible poisoning, the subtext being, you’ll get over it, you silly, hysterical Yankee. (Yes, it’s a bit of a stretch to label a Kansan a Yankee, but work with me.) I learned that you’re supposed to cook pokeweed, and cook it hard, and dispose of the cooking water afterwards, preferably in the deep woods while chanting banishing spells. Don’t eat any purple parts, and don’t pick from plants taller than eight inches. Well, check. Once we got past the “you’re not going to die” part, I just feigned interest in the kitchen talk, as I’d rather lick the front step than ever get within twelve feet of pokeweed ever again.

I’m better now. I was concerned I might start associating raw greens with barf and end up having to cook all my lettuce, but last night I ate two gigantic falafel sandwiches stuffed with raw arugula, so clearly I am over it. My enthusiasm for wild greens foraging, however, has been thoroughly extinguished.

buffy in baghdad

2008-05-19T06:29:00.001-07:00

NPR reporter Jaime Tarabay spent two years reporting in Baghdad as their Baghdad Bureau Chief. I always listened to her stories in absolute marvel of her courage, I suppose because she's about my age and because her work is always so smart, humanizing, and honest. Turns out she loves Buffy as much as I do.

life is ick

2008-05-15T19:07:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading and writing about martyrdom again lately. I’m reviewing a book about martyrdom and I’m working on another project related to martyrdom and it’s just martyrs, martyrs, martyrs on the brain, all day long.

God, it’s morbid.

Yesterday, it being my birthday, Eric encouraged me to take the day off from the whole martyr thing. So I did. I went to the library and checked out a book about vampires and spent the whole day reading that. (It was Eric Nuzum’s The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula, in case you’re interested.) The first chapter opens with the author vomiting his own blood all over his bathroom in a botched attempt to experience one of the elementary components of vampirism.

Somehow, this did not clear my head quite the way I was hoping.

I got up this morning and started in on a lengthy account of how the early Christian theologians viewed martyrdom as a second baptism in blood, complete with vivid descriptions of martyrs being torn to bits by lions in Roman amphitheaters. (That is reading, not writing. I don’t write about people being torn to bits by lions in Roman amphitheaters—not if I can help it, anyway.)

Around mid-morning I starting noticing that for every couple pages of martyrdom I read I was taking teensy breaks to surf the internet for increasingly low forms of entertainment, starting innocently enough with gossip about Angelina Jolie’s twin pregnancy and disintegrating progressively into movie premiere photos, livejournal celebrity pages, and finally a YouTube video set to Justin Timberlake’s “(I’m Bringing) Sexy Back.” (Do not ask. It was a hideous accident. Really.)

I decided I needed some fresh air, so I went for a walk. It didn’t really help, because I still had “Sexy Back” stuck in my head. It accompanied several persistent mental images, namely the martyr Felicitas awaiting slaughter by the Roman lions while her breasts dripped with milk, and sa*domasochi*stic Goths performing violent staged sex acts at vampire conventions.

In my next life I am going to write children’s books about bunnies.

urban and rural

2008-05-14T05:59:00.000-07:00

The other morning I was listening to an NPR story on a special congressional election in Misssissippi. It was a big deal because for the first time in something like fourteen years, a Democrat had a real chance at winning this seat. This morning I heard that the Democratic candidate did indeed win, so that’s quite something for Mississippi, I guess. This is, of course, a Democrat who plays it pretty Republican when it comes to guns and abortion, which I suppose is how he pulled it off.

So I was listening to this report on the Mississippi electorate, and how the Republican candidate was trying to smear the Democratic candidate by associating him with the national Democratic party and playing on people’s fears of all these elitist, champagne-swilling, free-loving sodomites that are threatening their way of life or whatever. They played an ad that attempted to link him to Nancy Pelosi, and the voiceover was reading a text that went something like, “That may be GROOOOVY out there in SAN FRANCISCO, but here in Mississippi, we….” I don’t remember what came next. I got really hung up on the groovy San Francisco part.

I don’t know. I could say a lot of things about this report and my reaction to it. I was astounded that there is still a part of the country where it’s considered effective campaign strategy to smear someone this way, and then I sort of smacked myself—of course it’s effective strategy. (Or maybe not--the guy did lose, after all.) How much of our political “discourse” in this country can be reduced to “Don’t trust so-and-so, he/she’s from ____” or “Trust so-and-so, he/she’s from ____”? I don’t want to get too reductionist, but probably a fairly large percentage. It’s just that rural Republicans are the ones who are most direct and shameless about it, because so far as I can tell, personal protectionism tops their list of political values, crowding out any need to appear accepting and non-prejudicial.

I tend to believe the pundits who claim that the most profound divide in the American electorate is between the urban and the rural. And yet I feel like I’m only just beginning to understand this divide. I grew up in a rural part of the country, raised by fairly rural people, but my extended family is a somewhat atypical amalgamation of farmers and college professors, all educated and mostly die-hard Democrats. We discuss Barbara Kingsolver’s latest at family reunions. We recommend Wendell Berry titles to each other. We’re that type. Growing up, I remember being actively torn between rural and urban identity, which was such a joke; I came from a town of 20,000. But my folks and I did things like listen to classical music and eat fancy cheese and go to Europe—I went to Paris before I’d even been to Topeka, our state capital, and I thought that made me pretty smart, as though I was just too cultured to be bothered with Topeka. (It is now the case that I have been to Paris more times than I can count and have yet to visit almost all the major American coastal cities, which these days I regard as pretty lame. I have, however, been to Topeka.)

And yet, my farm-dwelling cousins could reliably rile me by calling me “city slicker.” They just tossed it off to amuse themselves, but to me, it was like being told I couldn’t play on the farm team. And I wanted to be on the farm team. These were my cultural loci: a small Kansas farm run by liberals, and, like, France. No wonder I find the American political landscape so baffling.

There’s no question that these days I identify far more strongly with urban voters.* And frankly, I don’t blame urban voters for finding rural America threatening. Here in Kansas our state legislature is dominated by representatives from rural communities, and a lot of them are just mean, and dumb, and spend all their energy trying to start new coal-fired power plants which they claim are the only way to provide jobs to rural people in Western Kansas. This from politicians from a part of the state that has used up almost all its natural water source, that is already on the verge of a second dust bowl because of shortsighted, environmentally destructive agricultural policies. Now we’re all supposed to be grateful to breathe in their carbon emissions, and if we aren’t, we’re against the people of Western Kansas.

The majority of rural voters seem to actually believe that same-sex marriage poses a bigger threat to their livelihoods than does agribusiness or the destruction of the environment. I don’t know if that’s really true—but that’s sure how it seems, based on the rhetoric I hear and the politicians this demographic supports.

Kathleen Norris writes very eloquently in the book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography about how rural people are being destroyed in part by their own mythologies of self-reliance, mythologies that make them less able to understand their role in an interdependent global economy, and therefore more vulnerable to exploitation by big business. It’s easier to believe that hippies, or environmentalists, or homosexuals from places like San Francisco, are responsible for the dissolution of the things one holds dear than to actually shoulder the task of trying to understand the complicated economic/political/global forces that have created this disastrous rural situation. Geographic isolation breeds this kind of thinking.

Still, acknowledging interdependence means increased responsibility for all of us. I don’t completely blame rural voters for finding urbanites threatening, either. I think there’s a feeling amongst many rural people that urban Americans are oblivious to the slow death of their way of life, or worse, that they see and simply don’t care. When I did my fieldwork in South Dakota, I really had this sense. It’s hard to fault rural people for a sense of protectionism when they are losing so much, struggling so profoundly, and receiving every indication that the rest of the world couldn’t care less. Somewhere in my thesis I quoted a woman who said to me, “We just feel forgotten out here.” Rural people have a very understandable impulse to look out for themselves and their own. Who else will? I don’t think the woman who told me she felt forgotten was wrong.

I think all Americans, urban and rural alike, have bought into theories that pit us against one another. We’re taught that we have to choose between the livelihood of people and protection of the environment; that we have to choose between the interests of farmers and the interests of city dwellers; that we have to choose between the interests of white people and people of color, between the dominance of men and the dominance of women; that we have to choose between protecting America and caring for the rest of the world. Sometimes it seems like the most prevalent mythology is that of scarcity—I think Francis Moore Lappé wrote something about this recently, I can’t remember where—this belief that we’re all doomed to just grab and claw at what’s left, so that our politics become about slamming our neighbors in the hopes that they’ll come off as less deserving. (How else could same-sex marriage be such a threat? It’s as though people are afraid there isn’t enough marriage to go around, that marriage is a diminishing resource.)

It makes me so tired. It makes me tired because I’m convinced the scarcity myth isn’t true. Or at least it needn’t be. We make it true by believing it, that’s what I think. I’m not embracing a dippy alternative that trivializes our differences and naïvely extorts us to all just love each other and share, because nothing that simplistic will work; it’ll just get fascist. But I do think that our myth of scarcity—certainly at work in the idea that people in San Francisco must perforce be taking something from people in Mississippi, and visa versa—is killing our capacity to solve problems without screwing someone or something. It fosters greed and ignorance. And it makes for really annoying political advertising.

(By the way, it’s my birthday. Woohoo!!)

* I recognize there is a lot of danger in assuming “urban” and “rural” have fixed definitions and refer to easily-generalizable populations, and I’m probably going to end up writing this blog entry as though they do. They don’t, of course.

breaking the nostalgia rule

2008-05-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a gorgeous day here in Northeast Kansas, that brand of gorgeousness reserved for the day after a severe thunderstorm. The grass is so green you think you’re in Ireland. (I’ve never been to Ireland, but I gaze longingly at the rolling hills in those Cheddar ads in Gourmet.) By late afternoon the sunlight pours through the branches of our little mini-woods out back and everything in the yard absolutely glistens with this late spring, late afternoon incandescence so lovely you just want to bottle and drink it.

I had a refrigerator full of farmer’s market asparagus, a bottle of pretty sub-par Pinot Grigio, and a yen to make risotto, a dish that always makes me feel like a kitchen goddess because it looks like magic and requires me to dirty no less than three separate large pans. At least it does by my methods. Both Eric and my mother have sworn that I mischievously rewrite recipes for maximum dish dirtying, but I counter-argue that a) most recipes are already written for maximum dish dirtying and b) I live in the moment. The former is true; the latter, as anyone who knows me well can attest, is a lie. But I love cooking complicated, demanding things because this kind of cooking consumes me utterly, like no other activity in my daily life, and I like that. I should add, lest you start to hold me in some sort of awe (and weren’t you about to?), that this journey into the Cuisine Trance Zone is not infrequently aided and abetted by one of Eric’s homebrews (he just made a killer India Pale Ale, and anyone who knows anything about brewing knows that IPAs are, like, the mountain to be scaled) or a glass of wine, and the right music is nonnegotiable. Yesterday it was The Best of Paolo Conte, a recording designed to mix well with alcohol and encourage bad behavior, or at least bad dancing.

Out of nowhere, I got a wave of I-miss-Michigan nostalgia. Nostalgia, I should add, is verboten in this house. We have moved so many times and left so many people behind; it’s just too easy to succumb to this whole, “Oh I wish it were the year___ and we were in ___ ___ with ___and ____ drinking ___ and eating ____” habit. Which is just a way of thinking, I wish things were other than they are, and that never leads to good places. Eric has a saying: “Nostalgia is a disease.” This philosophy steers us clear of most contemporary folk music and saves on booze and moping, but now and then nostalgia just slams me anyway. It hits when I’m on the verge of being really happy—such as when I’m cooking to good music and sunlight’s pouring in through the back door.

And it hits while I’m cooking because so many of my friendships have revolved around food rituals. When we were in school at MSU we had potlucks every Friday night, usually at our apartment, but sometimes at Tess and Animal’s place too. Our potlucks were like church—you missed at the peril of your immortal soul. We had our rituals, such as the Feline Pretzel Communion, whereby our friend Arthur would bring a bag of pretzels, open it and place it on the table, and our scampy cat Bonzo would immediately jump up and steal one, running away with his booty to the tune of Arthur’s swearing. We had our specialities—Tess and Animal did killer Middle Eastern food, and I did bread. I was also known for starting insanely ambitious recipes approximately five minutes before people started showing up and then suckering everyone into helping me finish. We ate like kings and queens. We cooked our way through piles of cookbooks. I mean, the only thing I regret about those times is that they hadn’t come out with the good wine boxes yet. Those friendships will be with us forever, but now we’ve moved to godforsaken Kansas and other members of our Church of Food are outposted in other godforsaken places, such as the Upper Peninsula, and Malaysia (“godforsaken” being a relative term bestowed from a central locus of East Lansing, Michigan). I just miss those potlucks like hell. That’s probably why, when I cook things like risotto, I make enough for a feast. Part of me’s hoping that everyone I’ve ever loved and cooked for is going to pull up and knock on the door.

my obama sign

2008-05-09T07:20:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday night one of our neighbors showed up at our door to give us an extra Obama yard sign she had. She and her husband have had theirs up for over a month now, and she knew I’m an Obama supporter because we ran into each other at the caucus and her husband and I have had the occasional driveway political chat. I had been wanting to festoon our premises anyway and Eric kept saying, come on, just wait and make sure he gets the nomination. But after Monday’s primaries I have adopted the attitude that we might as well behave as though the general election campaign has really started even if Hillary Clinton is still…doing whatever it is she’s doing at this point. So my neighbor’s gift was well-timed. I immediately tacked my liberal political sign to the porch rail right over the bleeding heart plant.

Tuesday night I had a dream that our sign was defaced. In the dream, I drove up to our house—which in true dream fashion, was our house and yet looked nothing like our house—and saw that the sign had been plastered with things like “Terrorist” and “Al-Qaeda Headquarters” and, most inexplicably, plastered over the name “Obama,” the name “Uday.” They meant Uday Hussein, Saddam’s really nasty piece of work son who has been off the radar screen since, like, 2003, when killing him was this amazingly huge, tide-turning U.S. victory…yeah, remember that? My subconscious does, apparently. WTF, thought my dream self. Why would even the stupidest bigoted sign-defacer conflate Barack Obama with Uday Hussein? There is the matter of Obama’s middle name being Hussein, which could certainly be a hangup if one were of the bigoted sign-defacing persuasion, but even then, what’s Saddam, chopped liver?

I was feeling so sad and demoralized at what they’d done to my Obama sign, I stood there wondering if it was wise to clean it off and keep it up—because even more weirdly than the Uday thing, the offensive words were merely printed on white pieces of paper and carefully, almost politely, taped on to the sign—or if doing so would just invite further harassment. Then a voice from waking reality slipped in and gently pointed out that this was looking more and more like the sort of dubious surrealist concoction that could not be trusted to verifiably exist. Look, it said, you’re totally confused. Obama isn’t even the Crypto-Muslim Terrorist anymore anyway. Now he’s the Angry Black Nationalist out to Get Whitey. Wake up! Wake up! And I did.

And sad as it sounds, went straight outside to check on my Obama sign. No white paper. No Uday. We’re all good.

strange encounter

2008-05-05T22:01:00.000-07:00

On Sunday morning Eric and I were walking through the circular drive that winds around our condo complex, returning from a walk to the river. It was a gorgeous day, the sort of day when I feel amiably disposed towards almost everyone who crosses my path. As we rounded the bend of the drive, I noticed a small blonde woman, perhaps in her mid-thirties, wearing a pleasant expression, a long, denim-ish skirt, a plain knit top and earthy-looking shoes. I thought she looked like a completely average citizen of Lawrence, Kansas, a casually classy, catalog-shopping, Volvo-driving sort of look, and perhaps this hasty assessment of her personal appearance and what it might signify caused me an extra dose of shock at the greeting she gave us.

“Hi,” I said as we passed.

“Hi,” she said. Then she added quickly, nervously, almost whispering, “All praise be to the Lord Jesus Christ for this blessed day he has given us.”

I shifted gears immediately, trying to locate that particular set of social skills needed to repel an evangelical conversion attempt without being nasty. I assumed it was her opening line, because in my experience statements like this are always an opening line. But then she ducked—literally ducked—and made a beeline past us, before I even had a chance to react.

My whole concept of who this woman was had changed in the split second before she spoke, when I got close enough to her to notice that social anxiety was pouring off her in waves. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew it was going to be awkward. And it was, super awkward, not only because of her odd statement but because she seemed so anxious to clear off before we could react to it. Perhaps I gave off an “Oh God, please don’t talk to me about Jesus” vibe as swiftly as she gave off her freaked out vibe. Some vibe thing went down, anyway. It was a little bit spooky.

We kept walking silently until she was long out of earshot.

“So,” I said. “Do you get the feeling she was new at that whole Jesus thing?”

“What?” Eric said.

“Didn’t you hear her? She said All praise be to the Lord Jesus Christ for this blessed day he has given us.”

“Whoa. You’re kidding,” Eric said. “I just thought she was mumbling. Yikes.”

Generally, I have a short fuse when it comes to be “witnessed” to. I don’t believe in being a gratuitous jerk in the face of this behavior, but I can’t deny it bugs the hell out of me. Especially when it’s really witless or banal, like that one time a Bible-toting guy on a curbside in Chicago asked me and a few of my friends if we had ever heard of Jesus. If we had ever heard of Jesus. Where does one begin? Afterwards, I contemplated retorts I could have made: “For Christ’s sake, are you a total idiot?” Or, “Yeah, and last time I checked the Bible, he was helping the poor and oppressed, not hanging out on curbsides acting like a self-righteous douchebag.” Or, “No, I’m sorry, I’m from the Pagans’ Republic of Buddhistan. Who is this Jesus fellow?” Instead I sort of gawked and said, “Uh. Yeah. I’ve heard of him.”

This woman was the exact opposite of that. She wasn’t smug. She wasn’t aggressive. She seemed nice, and terribly insecure. I think she wanted to say more than she said, but didn’t know how. I am just intrigued as to what on earth might be going on there, but my intrigue makes me feel sort of slimy. She struck me as needing help. I hope someone with decent intentions has noticed.