Exploring, pt 2: flowers

Yeah, I know this reads like a (pretty boring) story. Trust me, it's just a setup for later installments where I actually discuss this stuff.

When we got to the UU church, the first thing we both noticed was the abundance of brochures, pamphlets and posters, all about things like gay marriage, global warming, religious tolerance, feeding the homeless, protesting the war, etc. He was immediately wowed. “This is nothing like my church. It’s not political at all.” I wasn’t as shocked as he was since my church encourages social action and calls us to live and work in love, but I immediately noticed a difference. It wasn’t that they were asking their members to do these things, but that it was presented as the purpose and calling of the church. It’s missing a part, I thought – we do live and work in love and tolerance because we follow the example of Christ and because we’re driven by His love to emulate him. At the UU, it felt instead like there was an attitude of “this is simply what we do, what we’re here for.” They’d sort of skipped a step, I felt. This would become the theme of the day – him seeing it as radically different from his church, me seeing it as very similar to mine, but missing something pretty important.

We looked around at the pamphlets and bulletin boards, where a flyer for a gay men’s beach day prompted another “wow, this is NOT what I’m used to” from him. We found a big poster explaining the tenets of the UU church and I thought, again, “hey, this is exactly what I believe…except plus God.” We left the edges of the lobby for the center, where there was a used cookbook sale and a table of cookies and coffee. There was a sign by the coffee telling you that if you didn’t bring your own mug, you were to use one of the communal mugs available on the table to be eco-friendly and not use a disposable cup. It reminded me of Valley View. We stood around the cookies talking to each other and feeling a little awkward until they rang a big bell, signaling the beginning of the service. We filed in, picking up songbooks and service programs.

The church service started, like most, with announcements. The first one was a call for volunteers to teach the children’s youth group and it was sung (awkwardly and adorably) by a volunteer committee, to the tune of Dancing Queen with the words replaced. Again, he leaned over and said “our announcements are NOT like this.” The rest of the announcements were more ordinary – people at the mike talking about a game night, a feed-the-homeless campaign, etc. Then the service started with a choir song about spring followed by a song from the songbook. It’s a traditional hymn, though there was no mention of God, Jesus, Heaven, salvation, sin, etc. and it was about spring and flowers. Instead of being accompanied by an organist and a choir, though, music was provided by a bluegrass quartet. I was totally into it – it was fun and personable and entertaining, though I thought the faith aspect was kind of missing. It was mostly about being together as a congregation, not “under God” but just with each other, all singing with our fellow humans. He seemed less into it, and I remembered him talking about how much he liked the traditional hymns. I noted how interesting it was, that the person who throws herself into the Christian faith is thrilled to see it re-invented to be more approachable, while the person who doesn’t believe in it seemed disappointed to see it moving away from tradition.

The service was all over the place from there, much like the one other UU service I’ve been to with a friend from home. It was mother’s day, so three adults performed “I Love You The Purplest,” a children’s book about motherhood and siblings. The Reverend, a woman named Claire, read a poem. The bluegrass band led us through a few more songs, all worded and looking like hymns, but with the only religious reference being the phrase “God’s vision growing” as a reference to people and elements of nature. There was a responsively read prayer addressed to the “Infinite Spirit of Life.” A few people spoke (including the Reverend again) about love, motherhood, and spring. Instead of taking communion, there was something called a flower communion (which they apparently don’t do every week) where everyone had been asked to bring a flower to the service and during communion everyone went up and took one that they liked. We hadn’t brought flowers, so we weren’t going to go up, but we were encouraged to, and so we did. Mine were purple, his smelled really bizarre.

After the service we went back out into the lobby and stood by the cookies talking to an older couple (side note: they asked us how we met and so now two elderly Unitarian Universalists from Towson know about HvZ). We hung around for a few more minutes, then left. As soon as we were out the door we were racing to ask each other: “well, thoughts?”

Exploring, pt. 1: frogs

This isn't fiction, it's straight-up journalism, memoir, whatever you want to call it. This part reads like a narrative, but it's a setup for the later parts where I'll get into more CI-esque stuff, like an analysis of what I thought and all that.

“I swear there’s a frog in there,” I said, leaning over the back of the bench we were sitting on and pointing to the ground, covered in leafy vines and grasses.

“There are no frogs. Trust me, I know this place. Not enough water. If you want to see frogs, sometime I’ll show you where there are frogs at Goucher.”

It didn’t seem at the time like there wasn’t enough water to support amphibian life. We had taken shelter under a gazebo on the Hopkins campus because it was raining, and it was the jerky motions of the leaves under the falling drops that kept catching my eye and convincing me there were frogs. He’d driven us to Hopkins after we had dessert and we’d spent the rest of the evening sitting under the gazebo talking. By midnight we’d been talking for over an hour about faith, with me interrupting multiple times to insist that I’d seen a frog. We swapped stories - mine first, then his, which turned out to be almost the exact opposite of mine, in a mirror-image sort of way rather than an antagonistic one. I was fascinated. It wasn’t a perspective I’d ever encountered before.

He didn’t consider himself a believer, though he didn’t have the angrily exasperated edge that most atheists I know have. He willingly conceded that religion and religious communities have a place in our world and do a lot of people good. The admission that certain people use faith to hurt themselves or others wasn’t followed by the conclusion that faith was therefore wrong all the time or for everyone. There was no adamant rejection of the principles of faith and no refusal to have anything to do with religion. When discussing his transition into a nonbeliever, he said it was the realization that “sitting on a bench is really no different from praying on a bench, except maybe that your eyes are closed,” but there was no value judgment that said praying on a bench was stupid, damaging or inferior to sitting on a bench, just that he didn’t see or feel a difference. It’s hard to summarize here for two reasons – one, it would require me to recall almost completely a conversation that lasted over an hour and two, I don’t know how much was shared in confidence – so I’m presenting the impression that I got, not retelling what he said to me.

A few days later he said he wanted to get brunch on Sunday morning but thought we should “bump into each other” sometime before that. I figured some great plan was being set in motion but I really had no idea what his scheme was. We met up Saturday evening and he asked what I wanted to do. I demanded that he show me where the frogs were, so we walked through the woods to a small pond I didn’t know existed. When we walked up, talking loudly, at least six frogs jumped from the bank into the water. I was thrilled. I spent some time stalking around the bank trying to catch one but gave up because I wasn’t wearing the right shoes and was recovering from pinkeye so I couldn’t see anything in the fading light.

We sat down on two rusted folding chairs overlooking the pond and I asked what, exactly, we were doing out there.

“I thought we ought to talk about what to do tomorrow morning,” he said. “What do you think?”

I was about to say I thought we were just going to brunch, when he pulled some papers from his pocket and said, “because I thought,” he flicked open the folded papers with a flourish, “we could go to church.” I took a few seconds to admire his delivery before what he had said actually registered.

“What?”

He held out the printed papers towards me. He’d researched some churches in the area and had printouts from their websites. “We were talking about it the other night, and we’re both interested, and I figured we’d, you know, just go check one out together.” He suggested one in particular because we’d passed it on our way to the movies the previous week and I’d admired the building. I vetoed it, though, because it was Baptist and in my experience Baptist churches are associated with everything I dislike about interpreted Christianity. That left us with a Unitarian Universalist church and a Methodist one, which he said was just like the church he was raised in and used to.

We talked for a while about our options. He went through the Methodist program and talked about the doxology and hymns and other elements. I’ve been to a few services like that, but at my church at home things are radically different. Instead of hymns we sing contemporary worship and there’s an emphasis on a personal relationship with God, so there’s no recited prayer and things are very casual. He told me that he likes the routine and the tradition because things get comfortable and familiar, and that’s what he enjoyed at church. I said I didn’t understand the appeal.

“There’s no relationship in that,” I told him. “You’re not connecting. I’m sitting here, with you, and I’m saying whatever comes to my mind, whatever I feel like saying right now. I’m not reading from a book of Things To Say To Boys You’re Sitting By Ponds With.”

He laughed at that. “That’s a great title for a story.” After some deliberation, we picked the UU one, since it would be different for both of us. "Alright, I'll pick you up tomorrow at 10:30."

Going To College Makes Your Siblings Less Tolerable!

When I got to Mink Hollow, my brother greeted me with a “hey” and then almost immediately launched into complaints. He’s failing Spanish because he hates his teacher, and so Mom and Dad won’t let him get his license. “It’s her fault,” he says, that he can’t get his license. “It’s not even a big deal to get it – you turn 16, you get to drive. That’s just how it is. It’s not even a big deal to just get a car – it’s only a big deal to get a new fancy car. If you get an old car, everyone’s like “oh, that sucks.” Mom and Dad just don’t get it.”

The degree of bratty entitlement in those few statements floors me. I’ve been reflecting these last few weeks on whether or not I’ll come home “different,” and I didn’t really feel like college changed me until I had this conversation.

Alex blames his teacher for his failure in the class, insisting that if she wasn’t so nasty, he would have passed. I’ve met people here who really struggle with the traditional educational model, but when they have difficulty, they take responsibility for it. They then take action – giving up a night of sleep, going to tutoring, asking for help. I don’t hear my friends blame the world or other people for giving them something they don’t want to handle.

Alex thinks he’s privileged just by virtue of existing. The world owes him things, he thinks, that he shouldn’t have to earn. Here, a lot of my friends worry about tuition costs and have to really watch the way they spend their money. They work jobs with terrible hours that they hate, but they never say things like “you graduate high school, you get to go to college. That’s just how it is.”

And when it comes to cars, Alex takes for granted that he should be able to drive himself anywhere he wants. Other people don’t. Here, we schedule trips around when other people can take us, we learn to navigate the city buses, and we deal with it when we have to walk somewhere. On the other hand, people with cars recognize that they’re privileged and are humble and generous about it, doing things like driving me to the train station so I can go see my dying grandpa and jumpstarting their car in the rain because I need a doctor.

I should note that, especially when it comes to driving and cars, Phoenix culture is a bit different. It’s tougher on your social life to not have a car or a license than it is in an eastern city – but I didn’t get my license until after graduation and I managed, even though my boyfriend lived 45 minutes away and my best friend more than 15. This ought to be a lesson to Alex in how to choose your friends. If people are giving you a hard time for not having a new, fancy car, you have bigger problems than not being able to drive: you’re spending your time with losers. My friends here recognize elitism, judgment and materialism when they see it, and take action to avoid it.

hiatus time...

http://companionablesniffles.tumblr.com/

Treehouse pt. 2

[Piece removed because it sucked and I am working on it. I left the first half up because it sucks less and don't want to raze this whole blog just because I'm suddenly more self-conscious.]

Treehouse pt. 1

(Was trying to pull off a sort of Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas deal where serious philosophy comes across smoothly in some broken-sage character's dialogue, but it turns out I'm not really Tom Robbins, and this came out a little heavy-handed. Still, I'm proud of the narrative voice. It's a longer piece, so part 2 will come next week.)

Two months after my tenth birthday, my older brother Max was in a car accident. He was driving, but everyone said it wasn’t his fault. His best friend Eli died. Max didn’t. Instead, he climbed a tree and never came down. He took with him a case of Gatorade, his pocketknife, his sleeping bag, and a carton of Ramen noodles.

That night we ate dinner without him. I called him inside, but he wouldn’t come down. My father said he just needed some time. My mother sent me out with a plate of food for Max. He didn’t want it. I was glad because the rope ladder is hard enough to climb without balancing a plate. It’s just a long rope with big knots that my dad tied in it. He glued the leftover rope to a sign for the treehouse that says “Max and Duncan’s Tree.” There was no more rope to make it say “treehouse.” Mom said she’d call a counselor in the morning.

The next morning was a Saturday. Mom didn’t call a counselor. She slept late. I watched cartoons until lunchtime because Max wasn’t around to kick me off the TV to play his video games. In the treehouse he was still sleeping in his blue sleeping bag we take on camping trips. In the middle of the night I switched rooms and slept in his bed to see what it felt like.

Mom wanted Max to come down for church the next day, but he didn’t. She took me instead, and we prayed for him. All the time we were in church I wished I was up in the tree with Max, pretending to be a monkey, but when we got home, she wouldn’t let me go up there. I promised I’d come back, but she put in a movie and told me to watch it instead. For dinner Mom made Max’s favorite. Dad climbed the ladder with the plate that time and left it on the platform.

When I woke up the day after that there was a policeman in our backyard. He was talking to Max, but the ladder was pulled up so nobody could get into the tree. “You have to go to school,” the officer said. “It’s the law.” Max looked mad and he didn’t come down. I wanted to stay home with Max and the policeman, but when the bus came I had to go to school.

When I came home Max was still in the treehouse and the policeman had left. I went outside and asked Max if it was really against the law to be in a tree instead of at school. “You know what else is against the law?” Max said. “Drunk driving.” He was right.

One night at dinner Dad said not to bring out any more food, because by then Max should have come down and we weren’t doing him any favors by letting his behavior continue. “He needs to eat,” Mom said. “All he has is Ramen, but no way to heat water. What is he going to do?” I knew, because Max taught me how to make Ramen without water by mashing up the noodles before opening the bag and shaking in the powder. Mom said she’d call a counselor again. Dad said he didn’t think they made house calls. After that nobody said anything, and nobody climbed the rope with food.

Max kept eating Ramen and not coming down. More policemen came to the house but they didn’t do anything except talk to Max, or talk to Mom and Dad. None of them talked to me. “He’ll run out sometime,” my dad said, “and when he comes down, we’ll get him help.” Max wasn’t going to run out, though, because he was already getting help. When I got up to get a drink of water at night I saw him in the pantry taking more stuff.

I never told on him, but they figured it out. Dad wanted to change the locks, but Mom said we were not locking our son out of his own house. Dad said the tree was Max’s house now. We didn’t get new locks, but Dad got a new room. He started sleeping in Max’s bed.

The next time we ate dinner, Mom said we might as well take him a hot meal as long as he was going to keep taking food and staying up there. She made him a plate, only Dad wouldn’t take it and she can’t climb the ladder. “Go outside to your brother,” she told me, “and tell him to come down and get his dinner.”

He wouldn’t let the ladder down, so I brought it back inside. “I never should have built the boys that damn treehouse,” my father said.

Mom threw his dinner out, saying, “I never should have cooked this.”

I didn’t have anything I made to blame Max’s leaving on, so I said, “Max never should have been in that crash.” This made my mother cry.

Sometimes, when Dad was gone, Mom would leave clean clothes, or more ramen, or toothpaste, or other things that moms bring, at the bottom of the rope. I put some of my comic books, but they didn’t disappear overnight like some of the other stuff. I took them back, except for one that had gotten mud on it. That one I left outside so he could remember me. His room was missing some of his big chapter books, though, and blank notebooks that were supposed to be for school. I didn’t know what he was writing in them because he wasn’t going to school anymore.

Wax

(This is a poem. I am not very good at poetry. I will be performing at my school's next poetry slam, and after that, I'll put up the slam poems. But not before.)

She was in his hands

But she was not putty

She was not clay.

Instead, melted wax

Dripping, burning

Sticking, flaking

Malleable for moments

Edges quick to harden

And as she cooled

She held the mark

Of every touch

A reshaped recording

Of every ridged fingerprint.

The Opposite Of True Love Is As Follows: REALITY!

(Title taken from "We Are All Accelerated Readers" by Los Campesinos. We were making chocolate-covered Ritz cookies. My brother spilled some peppermint extract on the table, it smelled incredibly strong, and I thought I'd do a character-sketch of a girl who wears some sort of extract instead of perfume. I think Elea is the type of girl who would pose for a Vice photo shoot.)

Her name was Eleanor, but she went by Elea, pronounced “Ella,” and she was very patient with anyone who mis-spelled or mis-pronounced it, which was everyone. Instead of perfume she wore a finger pad’s worth of vanilla extract behind each ear. Her underwear never matched – one day, a red satin bra with green and white polka-dotted panties; the next, a brown sports bra with rainbow striped boy-shorts. All of her shirts had sleeves that were too long and she let them scrunch and slouch at her wrists, looking as soft and comfortable as extra puppy-dog skin.

We met in a coffee shop. I was waiting for my decaf-with-room-for-cream and overheard her gently explaining the spelling of her name. It was a routine I would become very familiar with. When her drink came up, the call was “One medium lemonade for El-ee-uh!” and she sighed, smiled, and took her drink. In her hand was a small cup with a scoop of bright orange sherbet, which she dumped into the lemonade. My coffee was already sitting on the counter, steaming away its heat, while I stood mesmerized by her process. Fingers painted with dull chocolate-colored polish held a straw that stirred the ice and lemonade and sherbet, jangling the ice and plastic and mixing the orange and yellow with smearing swirls like baby dragon flames. She lifted the cup to her lips and drank, following with a catlike sound of pleasure I’d never heard outside the bedroom before.

“I think your coffee is ready.”

“Oh! Yeah.” I grabbed my drink and pointed to the name scribbled in marker under the rim. “Dan. Never have to explain that one. I got lucky, I guess.”

She giggled and took another sip of her drink. “I don’t mind spelling for people. People never really ask others to understand them, which I think is sad. We could all know a little more about someone else.”

“Oh.” I had no response, so I gestured over to the condiment bar. “I, uh, need, some cream.”

She followed me and watched me dilute my coffee into something looking less like a beverage and more like a dusty mud puddle. “Well, since we already know each other’s names, I guess we should introduce ourselves another way. I’m Elea, and I love zombie movies and baby javelinas.” She reached out her hand.

“I’m Dan, and I, uh, love Marvel comics and lemon cake.”

We shook hands. Hers was cold from holding her lemonade. “I think you’re forgetting something,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m Dan,” she prompted me, “and I love Marvel comics, lemon cake, and I’d love to take you out to dinner sometime.”

“Oh! Yes – I’m Dan and I love - I’d love to take you out for dinner,” I repeated.

Elea put a hand, covered halfway by a drooping sleeve, into her purse and pulled out a tiny pencil like the ones used to score mini golf games. She wrote her phone number on my cup, right under my name.

That Saturday we went out for Greek food at a little place by my apartment. Three weeks later I showed up at her place with Dawn of the Dead and an orange-sherbet-lemonade. She answered the door in a robe, untied and hanging open to reveal a black lace bra and turquoise panties with a silver bow. Even the robe had too-long sleeves and only her fingertips peeked out. 

I'm not even going to try go after "douchebag"...

The other day I saw a boy on campus drop his phone, watch it bounce off the sidewalk, and exclaim “balls!” It struck me as weird, because if you think about it, he’s saying “I am comparing an unfortunate circumstance to a part of my anatomy!” Most people have issues when a word that they identify with is used as a negative – “gay,” for example. But there’s a large difference in the attitudes regarding such language across the genders, and I’m not sure why. 

Most girls I know bristle at derogatory phrases that use our gender/sex as an insult – to show ineptitude at sports is to “play like a girl,” to be without courage is to “pussy out,” and we can’t forget the (still very offensive) c-word. We don’t like to see our bodies or our identities used against other people, with the implication that to be us is to be inferior. 

Boys, on the other hand, seem entirely comfortable translating masculine nouns into negatives, like “dick” and “prick” and “balls,” none of which elicit the reaction that different words for female anatomy might produce. Why? 

One theory put forward by some male friends is that boys are socially indoctrinated to see themselves as the less sexualized gender – women are beautiful and desired, while men are not constantly pursued the same way females are. Men are more likely to accept negative comparisons to their sexuality because it is already portrayed in other spheres as less attractive and wanted. 

Another theory, more endorsed by the girls I talked to, is that we are more sensitive to hints of oppression because we more sharply experience it daily. We are easily threatened by sexism because we are accustomed to a world in which we tend to come under attack just for being women, and so we are less inclined to allow any sort of unflattering associations with our gender lest they make us more vulnerable than we already are. This may be comparable to how racist terms for black people are highly offensive, while white people don’t usually respond as strongly to slurs for them. 

It could also be that female-centered language is more specific. To say that someone “is acting like a girl” directly attributes whatever bad behavior they are engaging in to all of womanhood. Conversely, to say that same person is being a “dick” does not as strongly link the penis to bad behavior. It’s only semantics, but it does highlight a difference between the two sets of terms.

What do you guys think? Are girls being hypersensitive, and should we ignore anti-female language with the realization that negative masculine terms don’t seem to be hurting men, and that language only means what we allow it to mean? Or, do we have a responsibility to raise the male sexuality up to the standard of ours, to reframe them as beautiful and admired, and thus to eliminate all negatively gendered (male and female) terms from our vocabulary? Or are things okay the way they are now, with anti-male terms socially accepted by both genders, but anti-female ones less so?

Watching

(Not much to say about this one. Some of you may have seen this already, as it's an older piece, but it hasn't made it onto CI yet. Some of the word repetition I don't like, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. I don't know how I feel about the main character - sympathetically lonely or terrifyingly narcissistic?) 

Everyone around her started turning on their heaters, but she kept wearing her t-shirts, letting the air bite fresh and sharp all down her arms, the crisp cool swishing between the fabric and her warm skin. She felt most alive this way; exposed, chilled. It intensified the experience of existence, a little tug at the peaceful border between her and the air she moved in. She felt it in her movements, a smooth turn opening a door, a quick hand brushing her hair back. It amped up her beautiful moments – the times she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror under perfect light, her gaze just so – found herself a goddess. The moments she wished someone was following her with a camera or a lustful gaze. Wasted, unseen moments of beauty and grace. 

Sometimes, between the moments, when other people caught her looking her worst, human, she wanted to shout and tell everyone that they just missed the moment; that what they had seen wasn’t really her. She knew they would love her, want her, need her, if only they saw those moments. She wished she had a photo album of those moments recorded. Here’s me stepping out of the shower, here’s my reflection in a bus window, here’s me closing my closet door. She would flip the pages and they would see her, intimately, in her perfection, and they would know her and love her and give her what she deserved, for all those moments. The cold jolted those moments, imbued them with a rapid and anxious power, like caffeine. She was a heroine, a goddess of beauty and of war. She was what every man saw in his magazines and wanted. 

In the cold she could feel those moments inside her – her skin was alive, reminding her. Sometimes in the summer it fell asleep under the warm air and she forgot her moments, forgot her value. But the cold kept the sense alert. She never lost a moment in the cold. So while everyone else stayed wrapped in their air and their skin that slept and grew too lazy to find their moments, she lived among hers. Winter brought a deep longing, then, as she ached for an audience. Every kiss of the cold air brushed her with a realization of her perfection but left behind the frustration of loneliness, like the smell of a lover on the bedsheets. 

He would be so lucky, she knew. One day she would turn around after folding a shirt or taking a drink to see him standing there. I saw that, he would say. I watch your fingers when you turn on a light. I see how your hair glows when headlights go by. I’ve seen your ankle sliding gently into those brown shoes. I hear your voice when it hits that note in your favorite song. He would reach out and hold her waist and she would stand in his arms, admired, worshipped, a museum Venus. His eyes like mirrors, she would stare through them back at herself in his gaze. Watch me, she’d whisper, and he would.