**If religion is one of your "hot-button issues", I invite you to stay, but will certainly understand if you choose not to read further. I welcome comments!
I have never been an incredibly religious person. I grew up mostly Catholic but was born, and can't remember being, Baptist, and in middle school I started going to a Presbyterian church; but I have never identified closely with any particular sect. In high school I went through a phase where I was really into Christian rock, but that was about as deep as I got.
For a long time I was just kind of told that there was a God, that He was good and He cared about me, and all those other Sunday school cliches, and I accepted it without question. It didn't really do much to govern my life. I mean, Catholic school kids were just as bad as public school kids, only they got routine forgiveness checks. So even in a school where we started every morning with a prayer (and when we got a new principal, an assembly in the hall to hold hands and sing), God wasn't really as present as everyone tells you He is supposed to be. He just kind of floated in the background, a forgotten fact, but a fact nonetheless, at least to us kids.
I accepted it without question, up to a point in junior year when "some shit went down", as the kids say, and I went through what is routinely termed "a crisis of faith". I don't know that it was much of a crisis, but I asked all the usual questions:
Is there a God?
If there is, why does He let crappy things happen to me?
If God cares about everyone, why does everyone get hurt?
Does he get so caught up in worrying about other people's problems that He has to let some people slip through the cracks?
and one of my own:
Am I happy believing that God exists?
Because that seemed to be the biggest thing, to me. Everyone I knew who believed in God seemed to be really happy about it all the time. It made them more sure of themselves, and they emanated this happy glow when they thought about God, or talked about God. They seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and if they didn't, God would handle it. I'd never felt like that. And there were other people, who I didn't know so well, who I'd really only heard about, who were always angry, and thought that God hated everyone, and were always citing "the wrath of God". Believing in God seemed to only make these people really angry, and that just didn't hold with what I thought I knew, or felt, about God.
Whether they were happy or angry, they were stirred up about it. They were emotional; it rocked them. I never felt rocked. So maybe, by the transitive property or something, I didn't really believe in God.
I went to camp that summer feeling annoyed and disappointed, and my answer ended up finding me, in the form of my favorite camp counselor, David (total coincidence, not the same David). I told him I wasn't sure what to believe in anymore, and that I felt like kind of a faker at services, and he looked at me and said, very simply, "You don't have to believe any of this, you know. You can believe whatever you want, as long as it makes you happy and as long as it makes you a better person."
I left feeling lighter and happier. To this day, it is the best advice I have ever gotten about religion or faith or God.
Here's what I believe, at 22 and having dealt with, well, a lot of things:
1) I believe that there is a God.
2) I believe that it is more important to be a good person, or a happy person, than a godly one or even a remotely religious one; I believe that it is more important to do what is right by your own personal standards than to align yourself with any sort of side or sect or faction.
3) I believe that you should be tolerant and respectful of everyone.
My version of God, because I think everyone who thinks of God thinks of Him differently, is a lot like the Force (or that midichlorian biology BS, if you saw Phantom Menace first); it exists in everyone, if only even a tiny bit.
My views on religion, which are what I really wanted to focus on here, are related to that analogy:
Some people don't believe in the Force. Some do. Jedi and Sith are two sides of the same coin; the Force is strong in both of them and they are both given the same opportunities to use it, yet one turns out good and one turns out evil. It manifests in different ways depending on the person who uses it.
I'm not fantastic at dealing in theology (I am quite acquainted with the Bible, but somehow I never feel all that qualified to use it; not to mention, it always bothers me when people cite things rather than tell you what they're actually getting at), so I'll use another analogy here.
A few years ago, when I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons, my mom was worried. Her only experience with D&D was when my dad and his friends played it, and they got way too into it, to where it [at least looked like it] bordered on obsession.. My mom thought it was some sort of cult or Satan-worship thing, because her only point of reference wasn't a very good one. (My aunt and uncle, for the same exact reason, worried about Kirsten playing.) I talked to Mom about it, and told her it was basically just a bunch of friends sitting around a table to roll dice and eat chips (not to mention, Al's dad would be home the whole time, geez Mom), but she still worried, and didn't really understand, until we finally had a session at my house and she got to see it firsthand.
After that session I sat her down and kind of talked her through the game, and she got to see how it really worked, and why I had so much fun with it. I explained to her that D&D (like video games, or literature, or faith or religion) wasn't an inherently bad thing; it just depended on who was playing it and how they played it. It should be good, and it should be fun, but some people take it too far.
In other words, my whole piece here boils down to a very simple philosophy when it comes to religion: Hate the player, not the game.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Encyclopedia Kelli and the Problem With Boys
Most of my life I have been what my parents call (and I really hate this term, dear reader, so you better be happy) "boy-crazy".
My mother thinks that this is because my parents got divorced when I was four and my father moved to a different state when I was eight. (She likes to remind me of this particularly when something stupid happens in my love life. Which is all the time.) For the record, I do not agree with her. I think that has more to do with my narcissism than anything else.
But there's definitely a pattern, though I don't know if it's necessarily a "daddy issues" pattern (I suffered a mild form of hate-seizure from typing those words out), that's plagued me since I was first old enough to start liking boys; I start off liking/dating someone I think is a really nice guy, who over the course of our relationship is revealed to be completely screwed up.
This cycle has mercifully (seemingly) been broken by David. (I say "seemingly" because if David's going to turn out to be screwed up, having not known about it for a year is going to make it exponentially larger, like killing gardeners and keeping them in that room in his house with all the Christmas decorations (I'm sorry, sweetie, for the record, I don't think you kill gardeners, but one must be prepared for anything).)
Prior to David, this awful trend had been going on for about nine years. Exactly nine years, actually.
In eighth grade, I got my first boyfriend. He was a boy I met up at the library, which was a popular hangout for kids from my school, and he seemed perfectly nice. He even gave me my first kiss, and this really nice talking picture frame. Then I found out that he was a smoker (at thirteen years old, that's a dealbreaker), that he had failed out of ninth grade, and had an unhealthy fondness for starting fights with people. He also mooned three of the girls from my class.
(Kyle, I don't know if you read these; you're a cool guy, and I'm glad we're sort-of-friends, but you can't deny that all of the above is true.)
This continued into high school. My first high-school boyfriend (which has its own sort of significance, at least for girls) was a creepy goth kid who I didn't realize was creepy until about a month into dating, and may have actually been retarded. The one after that was George, a Korean violin player who punched trees when he was angry, who I "went out with" for a month, and who still, to this day, eight years later, pops up from time to time to ask me "where we went wrong".
After that things went downhill rather quickly.
There was Andrew, who I dated for a year and a half and turned out to be an incredibly aggressive porn addict (and who actuallywent to prison for two years long after we dated, but that's a story for. . . never, at least not on this blog).
Then there was Steve, the disappearing act,
then Ryan, the sociopath with rage issues,
then Steve (same Steve), the disappearing junkie,
then Justin, the emotionally unavailable bodybuilder,
and then Zack.
Zack doesn't need an explanation.
Like I said, this cycle has very recently been broken by a genuinely sweet guy (who turned out to be a genuinely sweet guy), but for the longest time this same story played out in front of me again, and again, and again. It was far past enough to make anyone want to throw up their hands and proclaim, "I'm done. No more dating for me."
And everyone around them would get it. They'd nod, and say, "Sure. I mean, if you don't want to get eaten by alligators, you don't dive into the alligator pit at the zoo. Makes sense."
So why, you might be asking yourself, did I keep trying? Why did I keep steadfastly convincing myself that this time would be better, this guy would be better, even after it turned out he was sleeping with my friends?
One word: normalcy.
Even as a very small child I got along better with boys than girls. I think this was because I spent what seemed like a lot of time at my dad's house, where he lived with his best friend until I was eight. I wore overalls and hung out with boys (well, men) on Tuesdays and the weekends, and even though I didn't understand much of what was going on (because I was six), I could see that maybe other little girls were different than me.
In second grade, before I moved to St. Valentine's, I had two best friends, Michael and Darnell. We had a club, and Michael was the president. He named me Secretary (my mother later told me, when I was much older, that this was because his father had had an affair with his secretary; as you can imagine, this BLEW MY MIND), and Darnell was Vice President. We felt very important, going about our club duties with an air of superiority. It was, after all, very special to have two friends on permanent reserve to help you pass out cupcakes on your birthday.
One day on the playground, another little girl in my class ran up to where I was playing under the monkey bars (under, never on: I was afraid of heights), patiently waiting for Michael and Darnell to return from being sternly lectured by a teacher about rubbing dirt on other students, and said, in a very presumptuous way, "You're friends with boys?"
"Yeah!" I said enthusiastically. I mean, we were in second grade. Surely we were all mature enough to be friends with the opposite gender. "Boys are fun."
Her nose wrinkled. "Do you like them?"
"Well, yeah. I guess." I was confused. You were supposed to like your friends, weren't you?
"No no NO," she shouted. "I mean do you want to MARRY one of them? Girls are supposed to want to get married!"
I thought about it for a minute. Marrying someone was a big deal in second grade. Almost all the girls in our class were married. It didn't really mean much except that you held hands sometimes, and gave each other your chocolate milk if you didn't want it. "Sure."
She waggled her finger in my face in a shame-on-you sort of way. "You gotta marry one of them!"
Then she ran away, and I went back to pulling up bunches of grass, thinking about what she'd said. Girls were supposed to get married to boys, and that made sense. Boys were fun. They had the coolest lunchboxes and the funnest toys. I thought very hard about which one of them had the best lunches to trade, and when Michael and Darnell came back to sit with me I said "Hey Darnell, do you want to get married?"
"Okay," he said, rubbing his nose on his sleeve.
It was so simple, so elegant, and it stuck with me when I moved to my next school. Girls were supposed to like boys. Girls were supposed to want to marry boys. As a weird, gawky little girl who preferred reading and Star Wars to makeup and dresses, it was very clear to me that if I wanted other kids to like me, I was going to have to be normal in SOME way. Boys were the obvious answer.
Most of my life, I have been operating under that idea. Even as I got older, and it got more pushed back in my head and became completely subconscious, it sort of governed the way I went about my relationships with people. If you were a girl, boys were supposed to like you; if boys didn't like you, and you didn't like boys ("or girls, or somebody, at least", as it became during high school), there was something wrong with you. You were weird.
So there you have it. It's really stupid, right? Under this cool, quirky facade has always beaten the heart of an eight-year-old girl who just didn't want people to think she was weird.
(If you made it to the end of this exceptionally long and drawn-out post, congratulations: you have won the title of **Bestest Reader Ever**, and you get a prize. Here is a picture of me in fourth grade.)
Nice, right?
**It is worth noting that Steve has cleaned up a lot and remains one of my very good friends.
My mother thinks that this is because my parents got divorced when I was four and my father moved to a different state when I was eight. (She likes to remind me of this particularly when something stupid happens in my love life. Which is all the time.) For the record, I do not agree with her. I think that has more to do with my narcissism than anything else.
But there's definitely a pattern, though I don't know if it's necessarily a "daddy issues" pattern (I suffered a mild form of hate-seizure from typing those words out), that's plagued me since I was first old enough to start liking boys; I start off liking/dating someone I think is a really nice guy, who over the course of our relationship is revealed to be completely screwed up.
This cycle has mercifully (seemingly) been broken by David. (I say "seemingly" because if David's going to turn out to be screwed up, having not known about it for a year is going to make it exponentially larger, like killing gardeners and keeping them in that room in his house with all the Christmas decorations (I'm sorry, sweetie, for the record, I don't think you kill gardeners, but one must be prepared for anything).)
Prior to David, this awful trend had been going on for about nine years. Exactly nine years, actually.
In eighth grade, I got my first boyfriend. He was a boy I met up at the library, which was a popular hangout for kids from my school, and he seemed perfectly nice. He even gave me my first kiss, and this really nice talking picture frame. Then I found out that he was a smoker (at thirteen years old, that's a dealbreaker), that he had failed out of ninth grade, and had an unhealthy fondness for starting fights with people. He also mooned three of the girls from my class.
(Kyle, I don't know if you read these; you're a cool guy, and I'm glad we're sort-of-friends, but you can't deny that all of the above is true.)
This continued into high school. My first high-school boyfriend (which has its own sort of significance, at least for girls) was a creepy goth kid who I didn't realize was creepy until about a month into dating, and may have actually been retarded. The one after that was George, a Korean violin player who punched trees when he was angry, who I "went out with" for a month, and who still, to this day, eight years later, pops up from time to time to ask me "where we went wrong".
After that things went downhill rather quickly.
There was Andrew, who I dated for a year and a half and turned out to be an incredibly aggressive porn addict (and who actuallywent to prison for two years long after we dated, but that's a story for. . . never, at least not on this blog).
Then there was Steve, the disappearing act,
then Ryan, the sociopath with rage issues,
then Steve (same Steve), the disappearing junkie,
then Justin, the emotionally unavailable bodybuilder,
and then Zack.
Zack doesn't need an explanation.
Like I said, this cycle has very recently been broken by a genuinely sweet guy (who turned out to be a genuinely sweet guy), but for the longest time this same story played out in front of me again, and again, and again. It was far past enough to make anyone want to throw up their hands and proclaim, "I'm done. No more dating for me."
And everyone around them would get it. They'd nod, and say, "Sure. I mean, if you don't want to get eaten by alligators, you don't dive into the alligator pit at the zoo. Makes sense."
So why, you might be asking yourself, did I keep trying? Why did I keep steadfastly convincing myself that this time would be better, this guy would be better, even after it turned out he was sleeping with my friends?
One word: normalcy.
Even as a very small child I got along better with boys than girls. I think this was because I spent what seemed like a lot of time at my dad's house, where he lived with his best friend until I was eight. I wore overalls and hung out with boys (well, men) on Tuesdays and the weekends, and even though I didn't understand much of what was going on (because I was six), I could see that maybe other little girls were different than me.
In second grade, before I moved to St. Valentine's, I had two best friends, Michael and Darnell. We had a club, and Michael was the president. He named me Secretary (my mother later told me, when I was much older, that this was because his father had had an affair with his secretary; as you can imagine, this BLEW MY MIND), and Darnell was Vice President. We felt very important, going about our club duties with an air of superiority. It was, after all, very special to have two friends on permanent reserve to help you pass out cupcakes on your birthday.
One day on the playground, another little girl in my class ran up to where I was playing under the monkey bars (under, never on: I was afraid of heights), patiently waiting for Michael and Darnell to return from being sternly lectured by a teacher about rubbing dirt on other students, and said, in a very presumptuous way, "You're friends with boys?"
"Yeah!" I said enthusiastically. I mean, we were in second grade. Surely we were all mature enough to be friends with the opposite gender. "Boys are fun."
Her nose wrinkled. "Do you like them?"
"Well, yeah. I guess." I was confused. You were supposed to like your friends, weren't you?
"No no NO," she shouted. "I mean do you want to MARRY one of them? Girls are supposed to want to get married!"
I thought about it for a minute. Marrying someone was a big deal in second grade. Almost all the girls in our class were married. It didn't really mean much except that you held hands sometimes, and gave each other your chocolate milk if you didn't want it. "Sure."
She waggled her finger in my face in a shame-on-you sort of way. "You gotta marry one of them!"
Then she ran away, and I went back to pulling up bunches of grass, thinking about what she'd said. Girls were supposed to get married to boys, and that made sense. Boys were fun. They had the coolest lunchboxes and the funnest toys. I thought very hard about which one of them had the best lunches to trade, and when Michael and Darnell came back to sit with me I said "Hey Darnell, do you want to get married?"
"Okay," he said, rubbing his nose on his sleeve.
It was so simple, so elegant, and it stuck with me when I moved to my next school. Girls were supposed to like boys. Girls were supposed to want to marry boys. As a weird, gawky little girl who preferred reading and Star Wars to makeup and dresses, it was very clear to me that if I wanted other kids to like me, I was going to have to be normal in SOME way. Boys were the obvious answer.
Most of my life, I have been operating under that idea. Even as I got older, and it got more pushed back in my head and became completely subconscious, it sort of governed the way I went about my relationships with people. If you were a girl, boys were supposed to like you; if boys didn't like you, and you didn't like boys ("or girls, or somebody, at least", as it became during high school), there was something wrong with you. You were weird.
So there you have it. It's really stupid, right? Under this cool, quirky facade has always beaten the heart of an eight-year-old girl who just didn't want people to think she was weird.
(If you made it to the end of this exceptionally long and drawn-out post, congratulations: you have won the title of **Bestest Reader Ever**, and you get a prize. Here is a picture of me in fourth grade.)
Nice, right?**It is worth noting that Steve has cleaned up a lot and remains one of my very good friends.
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