Last real class today. I have one tomorrow that we just have an alum panel presentation for, no homework, so its all pretty much writing in isolation now, which means I get to pull out all the tricks I know for that. Ugh. Or my one good trick, which is to yell HELP! That actually worked pretty well last time. I have a real live honest-to-God draft that I have two whole days to whittle. The luxury! Everyone tells me I am overkilling this. Its hard to tell a 25 year-old what it feels like to screw up in isolation for 15 years and finally do something right. It sort of matches the rise and fall of DOMA nicely, here in the U.S. Many bonds loosening at once is dizzying. I stay in the library. One of the readings for my last real class was an interview with a local pastor of a racially-mixed LGBT-inclusive congregation. We divided up into groups to discuss articles that interested us and I ended up in that one, and then our little group was supposed to lead class discussion about our article and I volunteered along with another gal to do the standing up in front of our 40 person class. All of which meant I got to be in front of a class talking about inclusive congregations and it felt good. When I sat down, the other older classmate in our group leaned over and said youve done that before. Yeah. Militant atheist guy for some reason chose our group to be in and also offered to look over my paper after class. This guy gets on my very last nerve, but hes doing me a favor so I am really trying to see the good in him. MA guy prides himself on his assessment ability. This is part of the reason why he wants to read my paper. He thinks he cant figure me out and this will give him some great insight into what makes me tick. My paper is entitled ADHD and Girls: The Case for Improved Visibility. He pushes back from it after a few minutes and says it meets all the criteria for the grade, but I cant see your passion here at all. Understand that this guy is heavily tattooed and into heavy metal music, slasher movies. Not super subtle. But it does make me giggle a little. I told him. He still thinks it needs some pizzazz. Im okay with that. Then he said, out of the blue, what would you do if you had no spirituality? I said I had no idea, that Im a preachers kid, cant conceive of any other existence. Its an easier thing not to have a religious practice than to erase a feeling of being a drop in an ocean. He said someone (probably female, probably the girl hes got his sights set on) asked him what his life would look like if he were Christian. He said he couldnt imagine that either, but he thought if he were Christian, hed be a priest, because when he does something, he does it 200%. I said I could see that in him. I imagined a girl I liked wanting me to feel something I didnt know how to feel. I imagined my tattooed priestly friends around the world. Not a stretch. So I took a chance and said that I remembered he had a pretty tough upbringing and that sometimes people have this grief about loss or trauma that makes them not want to talk to the universe. He laughed when I called it the universe. And then I said I was sort of in the same boat right now, actually. He didnt get mad or tell me not to try to make him believe in God. He actually talked again about his really difficult upbringing and said that hed concluded he was on his own at a pretty early age, and he had to become iron, and he still is, and hes still angry. I nodded. We wound up the conversation and went our separate ways. And Im still thinking about it and about how like him I am.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 03:44:58 +0000
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