Religion

This is part of a community blogging exercise. See details here.

I've been working on this off and on all week, and I wanted it to be more concise and better edited, but I just want it to be done. So here it is, not so perfectly honed as I'd wanted it, but oh well. I have the world's worst headache right now, as well, so just typing this is pain.

I didn't grow up in a religious household. My dad was raised southern Baptist and my mom was raised Catholic, but nobody in my house went to church--maybe because they couldn't agree on a church to go to, maybe because they just couldn't be bothered with going to church. This was mostly fine with me when I was a kid, because I've never been too keen on getting up and dressing for tedious church services on Sunday mornings.

I was a bratty kid, and I got kicked out of numerous preschools for beating up other kids and not minding the adults. My parents put me in a private Christian school for Kindergarten, and I'm not sure if it was because of the behavioral problems or not. Needless to say, the day we went in for our interview with the principal and he told us that they practiced corporal punishment at that school, I knew I was going to experience that corporal punishment sooner or later. Thankfully, first grade found me at a regular public school.


When I was 12, I became friends with Rachel, a super-religious girl in my class who attended an Evangelical church. Her family was so religious that they made their children hum the letter "g" when singing the alphabet because people sometimes substitute the expressions "gee" "gee whiz" or "geez" rather than taking the Lord's name in vain. I started attending church with her family on Sunday mornings and youth group meetings on Wednesday evenings, and went on a campout (one of two times of camping in my life) and to church camp with the youth group. Eventually Rachel persuaded me to accept Jesus into my heart and get baptized with her so that my immortal soul would not burn in Hell for all eternity. And so that we could be smug together about being saved.

Rachel and I eventually had a falling-out and I quit going to that church. I'm sure it was a relief to her, since I was always embarrassing her by asking questions like, "but how do you know God isn't a woman?" The answer to this was always "because the Bible refers to God as 'He.'" I was smart enough not to voice other questions like, "but who wrote the Bible and why should I listen to them?" I would've probably gotten a slap for that.

Sometime in junior high I came to the realization that while I found the stories in the Bible interesting, I doubted whether it was the word of God because I doubted whether there was a God at all. I also realized that Rachel and her family were a bunch of smug a-holes who spent most of their time together discussing how their religion made them superior and making fun of other religions like Christian Science or Mormonism.

I haven't attended church since that time, and I don't plan to at any time in the future. I've never met a convincing argument as to how any book written by humans could possibly be the words of a divine being. And why would a divine being be concerned with the minute details of how humans live our lives? If I were a divine being, I wouldn't care what a bunch of piddly mortals were doing (other than maybe wanting to have sex with some of them). I'm also not convinced that they'd be benign like the God of the New Testament--why wouldn't they be lusty, prideful hedonists like the gods of Greek mythology? Or the cruel and demanding God of the Old Testament? I don't deny that there could exist such things as divine beings, but I just don't know how one could define such a thing.

I think it's more likely that everything that exists is here on this plane where we humans can see it. I don't think there is a Heaven or a Hell, even though I love to explore ideas of the afterlife. I think that when we die, our souls or whatever energy we are made of gets broken down and the pieces are recyled into new souls or new energy or new life like molecules of H2O in the water cycle. How else to explain why we dream about places we've never been? How else to explain the fact that I imagine myself smoking at almost every idle moment and just the thought of it satisfies me, though I have never been a smoker? Perhaps this is what is meant by the collective unconscious.

I'm Turning Into My Parents

(This is part of a group blogging exercise. For more information see here and here).

I think I first realized I was turning into my mom two years ago when I stopped being able to sleep past 8am on weekends. My mom is an early riser, and I mean really early; she gets up at 6 even on her days off. On the maybe three or four occasions she's been sick during my lifetime, she may have slept in until 7am on a day off. The reason she gets up so early is because, as she says, "otherwise the day is wasted!"

I thought this was a crazy notion when I was younger. I mean, how on earth could sleeping in be a waste of time? This was my attitude back when I used to stay up until 5am and sleep until 3pm. But one day, I just realized that even sleeping until 9am is a waste because by that time I never feel like cleaning or doing anything productive. It takes me an hour in the morning to decide what I want to make/eat for breakfast, plus I have to spend a certain amount of time in the morning farting around on the internet. If I get up at 9, it's 10 before I eat, and 11 before I'm done with a cursory internet-farting-around session. After this I have no desire to clean or do anything other than fart around on the internet more. If I get up early, like 7, then for some reason it magically makes me want to clean, which is very important because my apartment seems to be forever messy (I hate cleaning floors, dusting, and putting away clean laundry).

From my dad I've gained a severe hatred of slamming cabinet doors. There is just absolutely NO FUCKING REASON for someone to slam a cabinet door. It doesn't take any more effort to shut it quietly than it does to just let it go and have it smack the board and vibrate until it closes. I thought I was going to go insane when I visited my friend Heather several years ago in Boulder. She lived in an apartment with three or four other roommates, and everyone who lived there would open and then forcefully slam the kitchen cabinets shut. Sometimes I can barely handle my downstairs neighbor, who is an insomniac and goes around slamming stuff in her apartment constantly 24-7: kitchen cabinets, bathroom cabinets, front door, back door, bedroom door, bathroom door, and she opens and slams shut her bedroom windows every few hours at night. Grrr.

My mom has some funny quirks I haven't picked up yet--for instance, she is obsessed with the state of the floors. God forbid her foot ever sense a sticky spot on the floor; if so, you'd better run for your life, motherfucker. If you ever hear her say "This! Floor! Is! STICKY!" you'd better know how to become invisible really fast, because she will go ballistic. Me, I just avoid stepping in the sticky spot on the floor, and it will probably remain there for awhile because I really hate cleaning floors. (Maybe there's a reason for this?) The other thing I remember from when I was a kid was that she'd always always always come into the bathroom when I'd get done with a shower or bath and exclaim, "This place is just swimming in water!" and exasperatedly throw towels down to sop up all the water I'd managed to slosh on the bathroom floor. She has a very particular way of throwing down a towel and swiping it back and forth with her foot that lets you know what an asshole you are if you get water on the bathroom floor.

The thing I wish I hadn't inherited from my mom is a sensitivity to smells. Well, actually, both of my parents are sensitive to smells, but in different ways. My mom can't stand any kind of chemical-based perfumes, and neither can I. Chemical perfumes give us both terrible headaches. I have a hard time dealing with customers sometimes at work, because for some reason the customers at my office tend to be a heavy perfume and cologne wearing bunch. I swear I'd rather smell b.o. than strong perfume. At least b.o. is natural!

My dad, on the other hand, can't stand anything stinky and will go absolutely insane and tear the house apart to find the source of something that is so minorly stinky that he's the only one who smells/imagines it. He has the stupid belief that women all want perfume for presents and periodically insists on buying my mom and I perfume for Christmas or Valentine's Day. That never goes over well. Remember when I said that my office's customers tend to wear a lot of cologne? That's actually about half of them. The other half are heavy smokers and smell of stale, sweaty, pore-secreted smoke. This is perhaps the single most disgusting smell on earth, save for when someone stupidly tries to cover up a dreadful stink with perfume or air freshener.

(On a very slightly related note, I once purchased a mango that had apparently rotted in the middle. As I cut away the flesh, I noticed a very strong smell like feces coming from the center of the mango. It was so nasty I almost vomited. I couldn't help but be reminded of something I read in The Amityville Horror, which is that the smell of feces indicates the presence of Satan. Was Satan in the center of that mango? I didn't stick around to find out).

Last year, after the death of our beloved Ginger Respress, my parents got two Havanese puppies, Coco and Diego, who are sister and brother:
Diego was originally going to be my dog, but he had to live with my parents while I was in school and now they don't really want to separate he and Coco because they do everything together. If I may embark on a tangent for a moment, when I was a child I used to have this OCD tendency to get a blanket or a towel and try to spread it out on the floor without it getting any wrinkles in it. I would grab one side and fling it up into the air and get really frustrated because I could never get it to lay down smooth. (I don't know what I ever intended to do with the blanket once I had it spread out on the floor. That was not as important as the act of getting it to lie down smooth in one go). Oddly enough, Diego has a similar habit. If there's ever a blanket or towel on the floor, he'll pick at it with his teeth and worry it with his paws, attempting to smooth it until he finally flings himself on it in disgust and falls asleep. That's my dog!

Lets Call the Whole Thing Off

When Meggers first posted her blogging topic as "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," I couldn't quite wrap my head around the subject. I had to think about it for several days: I'm not in a relationship and I rarely am, so no material there; my parents bicker and argue a lot; my coworkers and I give each other shit from 8 to 5 every day; my maternal grandmother is very disagreeable (she and my dad once had an argument over how the lawnmower works--she insisted it had "little scissors" under it, and when my dad flipped it over to show her the rotor blade she was not happy).

I checked YouTube, but I couldn't find the hilarious video of Christopher Walken singing "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" in which he pronounces all the words the same, therefore defeating the purpose of the song.

I was reminded of the scene in Monty Python and The Holy Grail in which Michael Palin, as the king of Swamp Castle, tells his son's wedding guests, "Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who!"

I remembered that my dad--who loves to argue--used to say that we would have to rename our family The Bickersons. I looked up The Bickersons on Wikipedia and discovered it was a radio show from the 1940s consisting of (not surprisingly) a married couple who argue constantly. This show inspired television shows such as The Honeymooners and Married...With Children, and like Married...With Children, was said by some to undermine the institution of marriage.

I think it's interesting how much of pop culture is based on the dysfunctional aspects of marriage. Consider how many extremely successful sitcoms have been built on this premise: The Honeymooners, All in the Family, Married...With Children, Everybody Loves Raymond; even less traditional shows like Arrested Development have this sort of marital bickering as a large part of their comedy. And it's nothing new; marital disharmony is played for comedy in Shakespeare, it's present in Greek mythology. I'm not married, but I'm so tired of seeing this every time I turn on my TV or open a book. People need to find something new to get their material from. I won't harp any longer.