Grammar for the Gluten-intolerant

Used according to terms by someecards

Is there gluten in this sentence?
Does its subject agree with wheat?
Have I splinched its little nose,
knocked it off its little seat?
Does its infinitive need mending?
Have I verily cut it in two?
Must its dangling preposition
wonder where it's running to?

Grammar ruins the written word
when master not servant it lie.
The nuance of a poem
made an algorithm dry.
Place your commas where God requires them,
but give the initial "and" its beat.
Is there gluten in this sentence?
I can't tolerate the wheat.

More On this: Seven Outdated Grammar Rules by Ecoscribe

Prophylactics for Writers

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Taylor Schlades

Recently, I have suffered from writer's block. This is not a usual problem for me. Although I am both shy and introverted, I am neither quiet nor short on words. I have, in fact, boasted frequently that I will never run out of things to write because there are always things to experience. I merely translate one into the other. I suppose it had not occurred to me that there are simply things one might not want to say: sentences running through one's head, heavy with thought and emotion, that are perhaps not worth chiseling into anything that one might read. Some thoughts are sand paintings and exist only to be blown away. Writing is the act of pressing a copper tool into hard stone. Forever in writing we commit a thought to the world, as if it were anything more than the ash off a blaze, alight for a minute, and later revealed to be grey and dead. People read it full of fire and they wonder. For the writer it has long been something cold.

I have woken full of embers that want to leap into the sky. I watch them to see what path they'll take before they extinguish themselves upon the earth. I am full of things to say. Noisesome, indulgent, wretched things. Things that feel hot and true as they burn into my skin. Up, up they go—past the edge of my consciousness and down again. Fireflies of sorrow in the night. The word is a powerful way to kill your future, if you lend fire to embers that burn too close to where you live.

So, in silence I sit. Nothing, I think. There is nothing. Nothing really to say. Just the exercising of words like muscles to keep them limber, the motion of keeping warm. So much mooing and baying and caterwauling at the screen that receives the noises which turn to letters and to words. Things without meanings, divested of the spirit of my voice.

This is writer's block: a dam against one's saying the things that it is better not to say. Perhaps I should not hate it. The keeping of certain thoughts in treasured boxes reveals them to be the repeated rantings of a lunatic with a pen.

December 4, 2001 There is a zombie in my closet. Last night, I could feel its approach. The cold hand of death was inches from my neck when I awoke. 

May 14, 2007 Tonight as I fell off to sleep, I heard the stumbling of a corpse in the bedroom closet, a thing animated and gruesome. It hid as I turned on the light. I was awake the rest of the night.

September 10, 2012 It seems impossible, but I believe there to be a zombie in my closet. I must think what action I can take.

This is the problem with journaling. You start to know yourself as someone who repeats things, like a fading Alzheimer's patient, as if you were trying to hold certain thoughts carefully in the forefront of your mind lest you accidentally forget. It is critical to remember why I became angry with my cousin in 1991, the reasons I am not a Republican, the fears I have of driving in the dark. The things one can say are finite and limited. We call this "our personality." I am sick of mine. My writings read like the repeated murder and animation of the same poor corpse. I ooonnnnce was lossssst and nowwwww I'm foouuuuuunndddd...was bliiiind, but nowwwww....I suspect I'm still blind. I'm bumping into walls and pretending I can see. This, I suspect, is the state of being human. I am sick to death of it.

Before the invention of existential angst, I am not sure what people got me for Christmas. Probably drear socks and merry bursts of song. What I really like to get is something that allows everyone to look at me, with that bothered skepticism in their eyes, and say,

"What the Hell are you talking about, Tara? I don't know what you mean."

Writer's block. It's like prophylactics for writers to protect against the venereal disease of being misunderstood. In advance of anything, sheathe oneself in latex and be careful you do not let pass the essence of your thought.

It would have been infinitely better to have done so in this case.

Everything Interesting Happens in the Dark

Almost 6:30: Time to hit "publish."

My cell alarm starts its jingle; I shower, already awake. Downstairs is the smell of dark grounds run through with hot water, tropics from a jar. Poured in a cup, it burns my tongue, a wonder in a mouth burned so many times before. Many years ago, it stopped tasting bitter. Now it tastes like morning prayer. Add soy milk, screw the lid and sit. Take vitamins and pills.

It will be dark for two more hours. I have stolen back a piece of night I was too tired to spend the day before. As every morning, I am up by myself. Just me and my computer, the coffee, and my words. I sip, I type, and I wonder when I first forgot how old I am. When did all the twenty-fours starts running together, blurring into streams of never-ending waking and repose? When did habits start to wear the suits of truths and set stubborn lines in my skin?  Is this adulthood, this sense of static time?

When I was younger, I lay in bed, as if there would always be time to write. The morning attacked me, throwing sheets and buffeting pillows against my head. Everything interesting happened at night. Night, when no one wanted anything from me and I could do whatever I pleased. I was dragged with sandpaper eyes from sleep I was not finished with. Clothes were never clean, dishes never washed, and I kept having to go to school or work.

"Three hours," I'd groan to my friend as she drove us both to school.

"Three?" she'd say. "I got two."

"Coffee," we told the barista in the college cafeteria, and got the largest size. We forked over the rest of our meager earnings to buy breakfast potatoes with scoops of salsa and sour cream.

Very little writing got done. A great deal of dancing, though, and sitting at one of any of fourteen cafes in my hometown, also flirting with boys on motorcycles, and a certain amount of working at cafes. Tremendous scholarly work was done. Whatever could be gleaned from leafing untutored through The Joy of Sex, The Bhagavad Gita and The People's History of the United States. I researched and wrote a term paper in a single night and got an A. As my friend pulled up to get me, pages were still printing out. Endlessly, endlessly, I was chased by day. Give me enough time in darkness and I can conquer the world. (Or dance with at least one more boy.)

It's not day chasing you, you idiot. It's Time.

Then here I am, a thousand years later, a million years old, encrusted with lichens and mold. I am up at ridiculous hours, taking vitamins from pill boxes marked with days of the week. My joints ache, and I can't stay awake until ten. I worry about college savings and I continually check my children's grades by use of an online device like a camera in a dressing room. "Power School." Like "X-Ray Vision."  I have divided the days with a protractor into thin slices of flavorless pie. I call this "scheduling."

The part I like best is still this part in the dark, though, stolen away from duty and prescription, hidden away from work. I still research and write my term papers on the fly and publish them as people start to wake. I still live by the skin of my teeth and dance with strangers in the dark. If I wasn't a writer, I suppose I'd have to run away from home.


*Note: I will take a page from Tangled Lou and remind everyone that I like to play with ideas here, so please don't ever take anything I say as some sort of personal statement of my truth. It's more honest to say it's a kind of mental rabbit I followed down a hole. So, I do like my life and I am not running away from home. But I do love the mental world available to me through writing.

Ways of Knowing

Yesterday, instead of doing anything "productive," I pretended that I was at a TED Conference. I had recently figured out that I could stream TED talks on my Roku and that was essentially to be the end of things as they were. I am now hooked. During this particular orgy of ideas, I must have watched twenty talks, and each one of them blew my mind. I want to share this one in particular with you. This speaker, David Tammet, is an autistic savant and writer, describing his linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia—a way of knowing that is starkly different from how the rest of us navigate the world. Numbers for Tammet have colors that exist not in the mind's-eye but in the external world.

This is bizarrely different, and yet I find that I can relate to large parts of what he says. I don't have synesthesia, but I am deeply familiar with the experiences he is describing with the written word. And these things seem not only natural to me, but obvious. So I begin to wonder: to what extent is some version of this the brain of a writer? Do you also have to write in a quiet room so that you can hear the rhythm of the syllables count out upon your brain? Do you, without analysis, understand that "hare" might be a superior choice to "rabbit" in a poem that you write? Or, for some of you, is the meaning itself all that is important, rather than the taste, rhythm, and texture of the word? And, if you are a musician, a scientist, a mathematician, is there something for you in what he says?

How do you know about the world?

Eggs as Proof

Sasquatch, Ninja, and Ostrich examining the camera

Today the hens are still abed, wondering where I am. The kitchen lies in destruction, pie crust scattered on the floor. Everyone is sleeping. Everyone but me. In the hen coops, I will find the eggs the girls are just starting to lay. They will be small and pale, a rosy brown, some speckled, in a carton next to large, dark and perfect from my year-old hen. In my hands they feel like purpose. A wholeness that hums and breathes.

I spent the wee hours in bed with Lois Lowry, preparing to help my son to understand the use of symbolism so the world will open up to him. Blue is not just blue. Nothing is ever just what it is. Even the pie crust underfoot is a civilization obliterated by my heel. I am an alien in my own skin, invading the world of wakers who are stirring all about. I have to feed the dog, the innocent amidst the sinning fray.

I am struck by all this simple beauty. Skies that are blue in a way only southwest skies are blue. Hens that cuddle and cluck and leave breakfast for me in their house. A dog whose mammalian devotion has been the lifeline of  agitated children facing bathroom beasts, who can fight malevolent gods with the power of his fawning glance. Words that sharpen into meaning, making us more than simply human, words that make us mages of the mind.

Eggs that are smooth and warm and weighty. Wholeness and potentiality in my hand. Life means well. Eggs are proof of that.

A Social Language for Introverts: Not Shrink-wrapped and Dusted with Shame

I am especially bad at social gestures.

I don't makes casseroles, but instead bring hummus and crackers from the store. My contribution is shrink-wrapped and dusted with Nabisco shame. I used to bring a melon, when I was younger, and I didn't always have it pre-cut.

It is graver than you think. I don't call when someone has died because I can't think of what to say. I decide to call and then I never do. I didn't really know them all that well. I don't really know people all that well. What if I say something stupid? I hate the phone. After a while, it is too late to call without drawing attention to the fact that I didn't call in the first place. My grandmother, the minister's wife, looks pinch-mouthed at me from ideals I do not meet. Ideals I want to meet.

I don't know most of my neighbors. And if somebody robbed their houses, I probably wouldn't see because I am fixated on my writing or on the contents of the book. I really like a couple of them, but I avoid speaking to them most of the time because I am not sure what to say.

"Hello, have you observed that there is weather outside? Yes, I have observed it, too. Give my regards to your dog."

Instead, I duck into my house, as if under artillery fire, to avoid the unpleasant thought of standing with a forced smile and saying something that I will wish I had not said.

I have tried in earnest to make this social weirdness go away. I have warded against it with Christmas cards and chocolate cupcakes, baked from scratch. I have lead committees, sponsored projects, and one time I even joined the PTA.  I have poured my desire to join the beloved community into confections lovingly blended of eggs and cocoa, sugar, vanilla, flour and butter and other things I cannot eat. I have offered them at the altar of human kinship and waited to feel at home in the merry crowd. But I never have.

So, I bring hummus and crackers.

I wonder, sometimes, what my situation might be if I was encouraged by the world to relate to my community in the way that is natural to me? Would I by now have acquired a language that felt honest for comforting those relative strangers whose loved ones have recently died? Would I know what my place was in the throng of smiling, insistent party-goers that invite me to parties each December? I look at my youngest—anxious and awkward with strangers, alive and alight with a book—and I wonder. How do I convey a language for social gestures that I never really learned? One not shrink-wrapped and dusted with shame?

Maybe the brilliant Susan Cain knows. Here is a TED Talk that I just loved on the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking.

Ragnarokk

I know that these are Egyptian gods, not Norse.  We are equal-opportunity mythologists. Photo credit: chelle at Morguefile

Yesterday, my alarm did not go off. My husband woke me up, and the house was already alive, crawling like ants with humans needing to acquire food. There goes my writing time. (NaBloPoMo, my ass.) My middle child—the one who inherited my sleep disorder—woke under my jostle, a mess of softly breathing blankets, a monster of slumber-stolen, and begged me for more sleep. Finally, I relented, and consented that he miss Language Arts. I went downstairs.

The coffee was made and the house was warm. My teenager was up, glaring hostile at me for my participation in the indentured servitude he knows as high school. But he remembered he had half a left-over Subway sandwich for lunch and this cheered him immeasurably.

"It was nine dollars!" he tells me. "What happened to a five dollar foot-long?"

"This," I told him, "is why you never have any money."

We woke my youngest and stole him out of the bedroom he shares with my middle son.

"Today," I told him, "will be pajama day at school."

Since I am the principal and sole instructor of this school, I can make these last-minute decisions. Everything seemed quite auspicious until Mike got mad at him for not answering a question, for the hundred thousandth time. Then he fell into a sullen sulk and refused to eat his breakfast. He pushed at me with angry hands because I am his mother and therefore I am the force there always is to push. Talking this out did not assist him. We had to have a pillow fight. Afterwards,  he ate some cinnamon toast and practiced his violin.

We embarked on a study of grammar, began to memorize a poem and read the first two chapters of Morning Girl. Everything looked good until we ran into a sheet on urban, suburban and rural communities. Then my headache caught up with me and it turned out I had the patience and teaching talent of a mountain troll. Sometimes, I wish there were cameras in my house to capture the brilliance and commitment of our educational adventures. At other times, I am very glad no one else is here. At any rate, we recovered quickly. That is sometimes all one can hope for, to recover quickly. The rest of the day was lost in Egypt. My littlest became a bookie taking bets on various ancient gods.

"Who would win? Ares or Set?"

"I tend not to think of things in terms of relative destructive power, " I told him. "You might want to ask your older brother."

And later...

"Who would win? Set or Zeus? I definitely think Zeus."

"Set," said Rowan at dinner. "Definitely Set."

Sometimes, I really worry about my oldest son.

"Why did all the Norse gods die?" Mikalh asked wonderingly.

"Odin broke his word. It happened after Loki was punished. Read about it. The book is over by the couch. Ragnarokk, it was called."

Ragnarokk. The day ends in destruction. Torn bodies litter the floor. The villain is vanquished, but honor is destroyed. The hour of death is nigh. Every night, the hour of death is nigh. In the morning, the day dawns new, the gods are born again and cover the earth with their works. Battles are fought, bets are placed and the food of the gods is consumed. Again and again, the arc of the day rises before setting at their doom.

Epic.

Dreams That Never Come True

Not long ago, I was sitting in a church service with my youngest son, like I do on almost every Sunday morning. The light streamed in enormous windows, through which the mountains could be seen. Pines trembled, a piano banged, and the children's choir was performing. These performers are the littles—four year-olds, five year-olds, on up to seven or eight. The older kinds sing out; the younger pull up their skirts and stare. Occasionally, they mouth a word or two. These older, competent singers carry the tune and the younger enthrall us with the spectacle of their innocence and suppleness like dough. The fact is they are watching us, while sweetly pulling on their undergarments. It is we who are on stage.

On this occasion, the children were singing a hopeful song about dreams or wishes and imagination. It has been too long now. The tune and words have got lost in the landfill of extraneous facts that is my head. There were hand motions. Something about having enough imagination and having all one's wishes or dreams come true. It was adorable. I smiled.

Mikalh, my seven year-old, though, turned to me in great consternation and said out loud in tones of irritation,

"I have a huge imagination and my dreams and wishes never come true!"

I shooshed him, smoothed his hair and whispered something in his ear which included the words "audience manners." I am a crotchety old school marm at heart.

He was right, though. And smarter, by far, than I. At twenty-three years of age, I still sat stubbornly circling items in copious catalogs, my intention bent on having these things someday. I remember the agony of my desire for a boot brush shaped like a dragon, the statue of a tree spirit, for a plethora of silken scarves for my toddler to chew upon. I pressed my mind against the problem and let fly my pen and wanted. This was before The Secret was even written, folks. I am a forward-thinking fool.

I am not old yet, but I have seen nothing yet that confirms the notion that if I imagine hard enough, what I wish for or think of will suddenly come to life. This is good news with regard to the closet zombies, certainly, but bad news with regard to the bags of gold.

Here is what I wanted to tell my son, as the song continued and we sat there quite and still, a grumpy look on his face, as we bent our heads during the pastoral prayer and as I watched him run off to children's chapel when the story had been told. Here is what I forget to tell him.

You will not have what you dream of. You will have what you talk about.

If you talk about poverty, I should have told him, you will have it. Your days will be filled with want. You will starve with your nose pressed upon the glass of all you cannot eat or hold or wear. You will starve at a table of plenty if you talk about what you wish you had.

If you talk about anger, I might have said, you will feel angry. Well. There is a way to talk about that is spell-craft designed to cast it off, to murder it with light, to calm it, and then there is speech that stokes its fire, that makes it larger until it can consume the happiness you used to have. Be careful which you do.

If you talk about monsters, you will see monsters. The world will be full of them, hiding in Congress, lurking behind shower curtains, tailgating you on the road. The more you speak about them, the larger and more monstrous they will be. You will soon be outnumbered if you don't watch your words.

I might have told him, if I could have remembered, that his words would make his world, are doing so already, peopling his room with supernaturals and spells of protection. His words are daily casting wide nets of happiness or ire. Just like his mother, he can curdle the family mood with defiance or sweeten it with joy. Just like his mother, he is speaking the world into existence with each word that forms upon his lips, and, just like me, he doesn't know.

 Don't worry about your dreams, my child, I should have said, worry about your tongue.

A Vivisection of Clichés

In the now distant past, my dear friend the ingenious Tangled Lou—audience participation bloggess extraordinaire—invited us to think outside the dead horse. Her challenge was to think about cliche, and then to choose one, to defend it or disprove it, and generally to open that sucker like an chloroformed frog and find out what's inside. I waited to do this because I was supposed to be writing fiction all October, per my own dictate, but I did not forget.

Faith in Ambiguity does not walk away from a chance to vivisect a cliché.

However, in the spirit of my entire life history, I'm going to go about this the wrong way and make a bold attack at the entire human mind with my small scalpel, rather than confining my activitities to the frog (or horse) at hand. You may want to back up. Sorry about the spatter.

I will start with this. Clichés are oft repeated, it is said, because they have a kernel of truth. And that, my friend, is a cliché about clichés—a masterpiece of tortured language and thought. Let me be clear: It doesn't mean that it isn't true. Only that it's a cliché.

Are you confused yet? Me, too. Never mind then.

Here is a phrase oft-repeated, which I loathe infinitely more. This phrase, I believe, is responsible for all of the evil done to things that should be left to lie exactly as they are:

It is: "Think outside the box."

Here's what cheeses me off about this piece of good advice: Who stuck the fracking box in the middle of the conversation to begin with? This advice goes along the lines of:

"Don't step in the vomit."

"Stop thinking of cod pieces."

"Forget about Macedonia for a minute."

There are, I entreat, no boxes in my mind that are not put there by ill-conceived group-think exercises. My mind is box-free. I was just this minute thinking of baking lemon cookies with Christopher Walken in Kenya while singing with him "The Vagina Dance." Now, thanks to you, I am inside a cardboard box and trying to get out. This cliché-avoidance stop sign has landed me smack in the middle of a trap.

Hmmph.

But is my mind really box-free? Here's the real thing about clichés. It is possible to avoid slathering them all over your writing like a thick buttery topping of unpracticed thought. It is even possible to ask oneself to question them. Is this so? Is it true that this child's parents, unknown to me, are snotty, obnoxious, and rude because the apple does not fall far from the tree, or is this perhaps a prejudice of thought—a piece of language onto which I have I have stepped and become adhered, as if to a piece of cast-off gum?

What is not possible is to stop thinking in ways that lend themselves to cliché. Cliché is the oatmeal-raisin to prejudice's chocolate chip. If you think you don't know the taste of those, take a bite of your beliefs, opinions, politics and personal tastes. Such an array of delicious assortments. They are all baked in the same kitchen, that place where passing thoughts become congealed.

A cliché sounds off-key to the practiced ear because it is fixed and immutable, over-used and tired, and no longer touches new truth. But 99% of what we say and think falls into that category. We do almost nothing but make clichés out of bold creation, so that we can pretend we have understood the world.

Why? Life without the protection of this unconscious categorization and prejudging would flummox us. Nothing but sensory information pouring in. Nothing but discovery. Everything like new. Each day through the door walks a new husband. We meet him and begin the process of finding out who he is. Every day in our home wake new children, who might do completely surprising and unexpected things. Set the house on fire, become addicts, valedictorians, strangers.

This is intolerable. So we categorize.

My husband, he is always late. He makes me laugh. He understands politics better than I do, but he never understands subtext.

My eldest son is scientific, logical. He is smart. My middle son is kind and sensitive. My youngest is eccentric, compassionate and full of dreams. 

Is.

In the natural world, there is no "is." This is invented, pretended. Things operate in probabilities. Even matter which seems solid is almost completely empty space. One day my son is logical, the next he has left nick marks all over his arms because he can't remember what not to do with knives. My middle son is kind one moment, cruel the next. My youngest is eccentric and wants nothing more than to fit in. Each of these known humans contains multitudes.

I cannot truly see them because they live inside a box, a box in the conversation, a box called "is."

I am a writer. I have to get good at clichés. I will paint my horses like zebras and set fire to the trite. I will slash and burn the over-used expression until I've laid waste to my writing, a mudslide of un-moored thought.

I will think, think, think outside that box that language has given me, that box called "is."

And I will crawl the devastated forest floor on hand and knee seeking un-burned kernels that can be planted to grow truth.

For all that, I will never be truly free.


Discussion:
Here's the truth: most of my deep thoughts don't really communicate. I often think that 90% of what I write can be easily taken to mean exactly the opposite of what I've meant to say. This is not a good place to be as a writer. And yet there I am. What do you think? Do you buy it? Have I misunderstood cliché? Am I making too much of a fuss? Or do you find any of this provocative? Be honest. (But, you know, be nice.)

Chicken Scratches: Monday Morning Writer's Angst

Monday morning the computer looks at me and says, "Why are you here, exactly?"

Today, I have to answer, "I don't know."

I have been caught out. For what reason did I set my alarm for 5:45 AM? Not to sit here and read emails of comment threads devolving into arguments–howling and spitting pressed onto QWERTY keyboards and sent with a righteous harrumph. Not to check Facebook and discover that still greater numbers of kittens have been imposed on viral memes and are marching like Mongol hordes across a hundred thousand screens. No, I got up to write.

Fine, I will do that. See? I am writing through severe migraine and fibro pain, grasping at the world like the spider encased in an underwater bubble. I must grab my prey and drag it in here where there is oxygen. Everything else looks close by but is separated from me by the inability to breathe water. For a time, I lie on the couch, staring at cats and dogs and gangly chicks in a cage, scratching pine shavings about the living room uselessly and with a terrible sense of purpose. Boredom claws at me. Back to the computer.

Tap tap tap. Backspace. Tap. Backspace. There is a music to this. This getting up too early for the purpose of writing things down is perhaps not unlike the activity of my adolescent chicks. I scratch the substrate, digging deeper and deeper, tossing bedding everywhere, dirtying the house, sure I am about to discover something that will both entertain and sustain me. In practice, I have merely become very good at scratching. For this, I expect my family to shush and leave me alone so I can "hear the words."

"Leave Mom alone. She is scratching."

I plan soon, with the help of my dad and my friend the artist, to scratch words onto a prettier blog. I also plan to finish scratching words into a manuscript so that I can self-publish it and sell to several cousins. In this way is the road to greatness paved.

Do the chickens believe that there is something at the bottom of those pine shavings or do they scratch just for the joy of scratching–because they are good at it, because they can, because they're made to? If I spend my whole life scratching and bringing up nothing but substrate and no recognition, would that be a good life?

I think the answer to that question cannot be answered yet. I am still too busy looking for a bug.

I Could Break That

Photo Credit: MorgueFile by Sioda

Today's post is a response to the GBE2 prompt: Strength.


"I could break that," the gentleman soon to be known as I-Could-Break-That Jim remarked, gesturing toward the aged wooden railing of a nearby staircase.

"That's great, Jim," said Elizabeth. "You must be very strong."

He nodded humbly. Jim, who was only twenty days out of a treatment facility, had volunteered to assist Elizabeth in putting on the sober dance to take place that evening. Their task of the moment: to buy decorations. They made their way from the packed parking lot to the party store, Elizabeth walking somewhat slowly in the humid chill of California winter, aware of the familiar sensation of migraine beginning to ripple through her head. It was important not to move too quickly.

Jim swaggered. Despite the chill, his sleeves were rolled up over biceps bulky and marked by acne and the tattoo of a shark, jaws open.

"We will need to get streamers, balloons, and confetti," noted Elizabeth as they arrived at the storefront of Party America.

"O.K.," Jim replied gamely. "How about I get the streamers? What colors do we want?"

"For New Year's? Maybe blue and black. Or black and silver. What do you think?"

"I expect you know better than I do," Jim conceded and tipped his cap. "I'll just get black and silver."

"That sounds good. Thanks, Jim. I'll meet you here to check out. We have to pay out of the group bank account."

"Yes, Ma'am," said Jim. "Do you need a cart?"

"Sure. Thanks, Jim, " said Elizabeth.

Jim wheeled a cart over to her and she began to push it in the other direction. The wheels stuck.

"Damn. This one's tweaked," she complained.

"I could break that," Jim replied.

After having gathered and purchased all the necessary adornments and payed with a check from the  sober group's bank account which Elizabeth, its treasurer, carefully shepherded with the officious and dutiful quality of a mother cat, they stopped at a cafe for espresso.

"How long have you been sober?" Jim inquired over his shot-in-the dark, eyes full of vulnerable and envious curiosity.

"Six years now," Elizabeth explained.

"You're just a baby!" he uttered in disbelief. "I'm sorry, Elizabeth. I mean no disrespect. It's just that you're how old...?"

"I'm  twenty-two," she laughed. "Old enough to respectably have a baby. Old enough to graduate college. Old enough to drink legally–were I to able to do so without ending up vomiting all over strange men in drainage tunnels. I got sober when I was sixteen. I went to the high school for kids with substance abuse issues."

"They have a high school for that? It sounds like a mini-series," Jim observed.

"It's just a high school. A high school filled with kids who go to meetings and have sponsors and, often, parole officers," she illuminated. "It was a good thing. I learned enough there to get to junior college anyway. And, more importantly, I stayed sober."

"You're very lucky," said Jim and straightened up in his chair, as if to display the war-won scars of his twenty years of active addiction. Elizabeth looked at him and saw a face marked with lines deeper than suggested by his thirty-six years, eyes reddened, skin vaguely yellowed. She saw a man half a boy still, kicking tree trunks to impress a pretty girl. Her migraine nipped at her consciousness but she ignored it. She sipped her latte and looked at Jim.

"I'm more than lucky," she said seriously. "I have worked hard. I go to six meetings a week. At those meetings, I make coffee, serve as treasurer and clean up cigarette butts. I sponsor three teenage girls. I pray every morning for God to relieve me of my desire to drink and every night I thank him that he has. I am lucky I didn't die out there or fry my brain or have a baby and ruin its life. I am lucky. But I am more than lucky. If you want to stay sober, you will be, too."

Jim sat in silence. For a moment, he looked at Elizabeth and his eyes were pools of sorrow–unmet hopes, dreams he dared not remember, memories he'd much rather forget. Her hope hurt. It hurt because he wanted it so badly. He looked away for a moment.

"Elizabeth?"

"Yes, Jim?"

"See that table over there? I could break that."

Ask Team Ambiguity: Is Christianity Really Pushing Young People Away?

I have this recurring dream. In it, I am in a cozy cafe. I am wearing a shirt that says "Spiritual Atheist." Over in the corner are some smart looking people. They are wearing shirts that say "Humanist" and they look at me with raised eyebrows. Why the choice of verbage, they are wondering. To my left is a woman in flowing skirts. Her shirt is emblazoned "Pagan." Her companion's shirt says simply, "Witch." My closest friends–the ones at my table–are a motley crew. Their shirts say "Catholic," "Christian," "Mormon," "Jew," "Agnostic." Many of them, in a cozy cluster, are labeled as "Unitarian Universalist." Here and there I see "Buddhist." There are more labels here than it is worth devoting key strokes to describe. Everyone has a t-shirt and we are all just drinking coffee–except the Mormons–and talking about our children, our gardens and the weather. Everyone is polite and congenial. Everyone is labeled, and no one says a thing about the labels. We just drink coffee and chat.

This cafe is my life. I love it here. I love the people, but I am driven by the kind of existential angst that would demand that I stand up and start asking questions about Jesus. Everyone else just wants espresso and polite ignorance. I want to have an interfaith group therapy session. I sit on my hands and sip my latte.

I found this article in the Huffington Post Religion section, written by Rui Dai, a student at Duke University. I don't know if it is a good Team Ambiguity article, but I do think it is a good starting place for conversation. I like several things about the article. I like that Dai acknowledges that Christianity can and will survive its evolution toward scientific understanding which it has done time and time again. I like that she questions the existence of an organized anti-religious agenda. I have always felt that if there were such a thing, someone would probably have told me by now, given my associations. I am reminded of Jerry Falwell's denunciation–in the wake of the 9-11 attacks–of pagans, who, among other groups, he blamed for making America vulnerable to attack.

"We aren't even organized enough to get thirteen women together for a circle.," my pagan friend informed me afterward.

Dai's article is smart, articulate and challenging. It even, I suppose, takes my side, if we are taking sides. I am, after all, a Unitarian Universalist atheist liberal. The best articles make me think and this one did. I have some questions to ask about it, some places I want to go. Let's examine the body.

The Left Leg: Is the Christian faith really  any less tolerant than it ever has been? This is an argument not with anything Dai has said specifically, but with where I think some may go with her assertion. People are given to negative superlatives. Every election cycle is the dirtiest we've seen. Racial politics get worse and worse. Sexism doesn't get better, it only hides. Really? As recently as the 18th Century, the church was burning witches at the stake. Go back further and people were stoning adulteress women. How recently were cautions against the miscegenation as serious in tone as the ones against gay marriage now? The continued existence of intolerance doesn't make it as bad as it ever was. In fact, the fact that young people are turned off by the bigotry of certain religious groups that grab the mic is an indication that tolerance is increasing. Our younger generation doesn't want to hear that message anymore. I find that hopeful.

The Right Leg: There is intolerance and there is intolerance. I am going to say the thing that makes me so weird and unpopular with everyone. Secular assholes are just as much assholes as religious assholes. Intolerance doesn't require a religious stamp to be intolerance. Yes, some of the most institutionalized intolerance that currently exists is religious in nature, but you can be a racist, sexist, closed-minded, violent wrong-doer without coming in the door holding a cross or a Koran. (Hitler and Stalin always leap immediately to mind.) In terms of people you may meet in the cafe, the secular jerkwads are the ones who won't listen to anything you have to say, who malign everything done by any person of faith no matter the context and who hope that someday everyone will evolve to be more like them. So, in order to avoid the whole mess Dai describes, you can't become an anti-religionist. You need to just quietly and politely not attend church and avoid religious conversations. By all means, don't go the way of Christopher Hitchens, may he rest in peace.

The Left Arm: Is leaving the answer? I beg your indulgence because I am playing devil's advocate here. I am not a Christian, and I am not currently attending any church whose stated beliefs make me uncomfortable. I cannot say that leaving a church or faith isn't exactly the right thing to do for many people. It likely is in more cases than not. I just want to ask this question: How much change can take place from within a faith as opposed to from without? This is how my husband and I have chosen to approach our own faith. To do this requires that you love your faith and have an investment in it. It also requires that you have a sense of ownership of its beliefs so that when people argue with you, be they other lay people or clergy, you have a sense not of righteousness but of authority. Our own conviction is that our faith needs to be more active and relevant, less provincial, cozy and sure of itself. We often express disagreement in church, but we do it with love. I wonder what might be possible if more young people leaving Christian faiths would stay and bring their commitment to bear on them. I do not claim to know, only wonder.

The Right Arm: The young don't need church as much as espresso and Prozac. When I was in my twenties, I didn't go to church either. Why bother? I participated in various spiritual groups, but my life was more focused on my own exploration of the outer world and my own ideas about it. I tended to push up against any organizational doctrines as a means of testing my wings. We started going back to a UU church, in which Mike and I were both raised, when we had our third child and the older children were...older, old enough to need what I might call moral instruction. They needed community. We needed community. In our thirties, we suddenly liked dressing up and showing up on Sundays to bring our kids to Sunday school and sit in the sermon. I wonder if the seeming mass exodus of twenty-somethings is as significant as Dai thinks it is. I'd be curious to see the statistics on those kids when they're in their thirties.

The Body: Religion almost never seems religious to me. I think we cloak a lot of things in the guise of religion that are nothing more than the nature of being human. Bigotry may have a religious justification, but it doesn't require one and it will persist with or without that rationale. That is why I always argue that fighting over the semantics of fear and hatred is a waste of time and energy. The answer, we always find is love. I don't mean that in a "stick a sign up at a protest" sort of a way. I mean it in an actual, scientifically verifiable kind of a way. We got to know people of other races and care about them, which made the worst forms of bigotry start to disappear from the mainstream. The Cosby Show or Will and Grace gave us fictional African-Americans and fictional gay people that we could get to know. Gay friends, relatives and co-workers refusing to hide and be ashamed have woken us up to the smell of our own hatred, like a cupped hand close to our mouths. Our society is not done with this process, but it is happening.

Freeing ourselves from religion won't save us from being human and subject to other humans. It is part of our nature to form groups. It is also part of that nature to act without thinking, to choose sides, to attack that which seems "other," and to give attention to just the person that is doing the loudest, stupidest-sounding yelling. If we don't line up and form groups around religious lines, we can still do it around politics, child raising, and soft drink preference. And we will.

Everyone's gonna do what they're gonna do. I don't honestly expect that my three sons will attend church while in their twenties. I don't know that I'm invested that they do at all. Here's what I'm invested in: Come into the cafe. Sit down with me and let's talk about what we believe. I'm not out to convert you, and I hope you're not out to convert me. If it ends up getting heated, we can always get another latte and change the subject. I don't want to spend my life at one table with a bunch of people wearing the same t-shirt I'm wearing and I don't want to leave the cafe. So, come on in and pull up a chair.

Now tell me what you think. This is where it gets interesting. Here are the rules for all Team Ambiguity discussions:

1. Please do not rely solely on the pacifying statement that people just disagree. This is true but obvious. What is interesting is: why? And do these people feel listened to? I don't necessarily mean us; I mean whatever parties are at issue in our discussion.


2. You have to be respectful of one another and of the opinions or thoughts being discussed, even if you think they are are turkey twaddle. Team Ambiguity is characterized by its ability to step back and consider that we may be wrong. That means the turkey twaddle may be right. 


3. Please don't hide because you think everyone else is smarter or more articulate than you, or because no one has said yet what you were going to say and you are waiting for them to, so you can say "Yeah, what SHE said!". You are the smartest damn person on the whole blog. We want your comment because yours is the essential comment.


4. Please realize it's not a fight. Discourse is illuminating. It is what makes people smarter. If we are all following Rule #2, there isn't any fighting. We are just responding with our honest experiences and thoughts and stories. One person adds celery, another adds carrot and soon we have a rich soup of differing flavors.

Bring on the ambiguity!

Offensive.

Recently, it turned out that I was offensive. This was totally by accident. I am normally offensive only due to my tendency to eat my own hands and interrupt suddenly with excitement. This time I had an offensive opinion.

It may mean that I stepped over an arbitrary line. Which might be good. Or it may mean I'm just an ass. Which might be bad. I would like to officially apologize in the second case and stick my fingers in my ears and make raspberries in the first. Whichever applies, please accept that response.

Here's what I find offensive. I will tell you because this is my blog. I own this piece of real estate on the Interwebs, like a troll under a bridge. I have created it to be a nice place–a place for thought and sharing–and invited nice, intelligent people into it. They have been and are lovely. They all, to a one, have either said sweet things or bit their tongue about this offensiveness. Mostly the second. Elsewhere, people are not so sweet. Democracy does not demand either politeness or sweetness. Fair enough.

I digress. Here is what I find offensive: throwing pig's blood. Calling people Nazis. Saying faggot. These things are obviously offensive. Here are some less obviously offensive things: Trying to shut people up by assaulting their character and motives. Saying or implying "Love the sinner, hate the sin." What "Love the sinner, hate the sin" really means, even though it is markedly better than hating the sinner, is that this "sinner" are fundamentally flawed, but I will overlook it. I don't love this attitude when it hails from the faith community toward the gay community. I will tell you where I like it even less. When I hear it from those who preach freedom and equality toward those whose religious views are offensive to them. This seems to me like a rigged request for tolerance. Yours to me, not mine for you. "I grant that you have the right to your religion, but it is crazy and it is bad. Your religion, from top to bottom, end to end, is offensive to me. But, you have a right to it."

Tolerance, I have recently learned is a dirty word. Tolerance must not be tolerated. Nothing will do but total agreement and complete acquiescence.Tolerance, though, had a long and proud history before it met its death in the graveyard of words that can no longer be safely used. It means "a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own." It means "freedom from bigotry." Nasty stuff, that tolerance.

Before I was a laundress of words, pounding out soap suds onto the internet, I was a hippie tree hugging eco-mama. In that capacity, I sat with a group of blue-collar backbone of America beer-drinking gentlemen and a bunch of environmental activists and was given the job to come up with a plan to restore a local creek, for people and for salmon, with community buy-in. My qualifications for this were all expressed in granola and dewy-eyed idealism. I had to learn to sing Kumbayah with the rednecks. Here is what I learned in trying: Listen for the commitment. When drunken community members phoned me to rant and rave about how hippies had stolen their summer dam and they couldn't swim in the creek anymore, I listened to what they were really saying: I love my community. I want it to be a beautiful place. I ignored the vitriole and I answered that commitment. In the end, we restored the creek.

Here is what I hear now:

I want to be honored for who I am and for society to grant that it is OK.

I don't want to be tolerated; I want my rights.

I do not want to see gay children or teenagers harmed by expectations they cannot or should not meet.

I want to protect myself from the possibility of nefarious motives.

I want to know what side I'm on and what side I'm against.


And here is what I here from the other side of the fray:

My beliefs are important and valuable to me.

I have a right to make a choice.

I want to be accepted at face value and not seen as out for something I am not.

My path is valid, too.

No one, on either side of a disagreement or misunderstanding, is likely to one day throw up their hands and denounce their long-held point of view. Even less likely is that an entire institution will do so. Day after day, week after week I read complaints about the increasing divisions of our society, the snarled political system, the deepened racism, classism, and class warfare. Nobody seems to think the answer is for them to listen.

It has always been the only answer. Listen. Listen not for what you can object to. Listen not for what your next point of leverage in the argument will be. Listen for the commitment. Listen deeper and you will hear it echoes your own. There's only one commitment: to love and to be loved.

Something is changing.

Photo Credit: Morgue File by dieraecharin

I am pondering love. I am thinking about honesty, about choice, about faith and freedom. I am wondering what it means to be happy, what it means to be true to oneself and whether happiness and being true to oneself are as related as I thought. I am thinking about listening and whether we, as human beings–jacked up on ego, opinion and doctrine–can do it. I am feeling hope.

Saturday I sat down to my Google Reader, looking for what goodies I might find sheltered in there, like wildflowers amid the grass. What I found was this. (It is long. Read it anyway. It is much worthier of reading than most things you will come across today and infinitely more worth your time than dusting or running to the store. Also, for the rest of this post I am going to talk about what I read there.)

I am, in case you haven't noticed, a big proponent of gay rights. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Like everyone else, I have gay friends and relatives. Not like everyone else, I belong to a church which hangs a rainbow pride flag outside on its building. Our faith's public position is that we believe that the ability for loving adults to marry is a human rights issue. I am immensely proud of this about my church. I do not, to the core of my being, see a single thing wrong with two men or two women who want to love one another. It is not anything I have to overlook or forgive. But I do not believe in the Old Testament Bible as the word of God. There is no conflict there for me. For many, obviously, this is not the case.

After reading Josh and Lolly Weed's post, I have several thoughts I want to share with you. The first is that I feel an enormous and profound respect for the two of them for how they have conducted themselves. My personal faith, although it looks very different from theirs, demands these things of me:

1) Live consistent with your values, even when to do so is very difficult.
2) Be honest, even when being dishonest would be easier.
3) Make choices based on love.
4) Know that you have a choice, that your choices will have consequences, and choose powerfully.

They have done all these things in a way that had to feel very frightening, time and time again. I have nothing but admiration for them.

The next thought I have is that they seem genuinely happy. I have been reading Josh's blog for maybe two years now and he has always written of Lolly with affection. In the video they put up to follow up their post, their love for one another is immediately obvious. I have to ask myself, after almost almost seven years of marriage to the same man–nine of exclusivity with him–how much, exactly does sexual attraction factor into what makes our day-to-day life work? It is not something I would be happy to give up without a fight, but how much, in the end, does it really matter? The fabric of our marriage is made up of other things: greetings after work, days of labor in the garden, negotiations over schedule, laughter and shared faith and values. I had a dear friend several years ago whose history was this: She was married to a man and that man became a woman. They remained married. What she had to say about this was that her challenges were issues of preference and taste. The person to whom she was married was the same and so she remained with that person.

In ways that no one can anticipate or prepare for, our love for other human beings deeply changes us. It asks us to be something other than who we were. We can falter, like children refusing to put on our shoes and leave the house or we can slip our feet into our Mary Janes and run outside into the world full of lambasting hurts and tender surprises, and try to live.

I think that Josh and Lolly were faced with a choice that few of us would want to make and weathered it, in the way that felt right to each of them. I feel somewhat envious, not of the crushing pressure of that choice itself, but of the clarity that seems to have come with it. Josh says,

"One of the sad truths about being homosexual is that no matter what you decide for your future, you have to sacrifice something. It’s very sad, but it is true. I think this is true of life in general as well. If you decide to be a doctor, you give up any of the myriad of other things you could have chosen."

I think most of us go blithely along our way, failing to recognize the truth of this circumstance of life, pretending that our choices only open doors and shutting our ears to the sound of the ones slamming behind us. When we marry, we obviously are giving up the right to be married to or sexually active with anyone else (at least in most cases), but we also close the doors on a thousand futures we can't yet imagine, limiting ourselves to meals that we both like, houses on which we can both agree, conversations our partner is willing to have. We cannot have anything without giving something up. No gift comes without a drop of our own blood. It is the way of things. Neither, I think, is this especially sad. It is merely true.

When we talk about being true to oneself, it could be asked of us what we mean. Do we mean to be true to our emotions, true to our desires, to our dreams and ambitions, or to what we believe our higher purpose to be? I think the answer to all of these questions should be no. And yes. We can't be any one of these things. We will, in some way inevitably be an assemblage of all of them, with an emphasis on one feature or another. So, I think that it is valid to choose one's values over one's desires. For the Weeds, this has lead to happiness. I think not all of us could do this. I am guided by my values, but I am no more suited to give up my heterosexual sexual orientation for a higher calling than most people are to live as a nun. And yet I can't help but have this thought:

Were this story a tale of an LDS man who, upon realizing he was gay, left the church and lived as an openly gay man, would some liberal people I know feel more comfortable with it, even if the story ended with his sadness at having left his faith community, lost his family, and perhaps never found a happy marriage? That would be the story of a man living "true to himself." This one, I think, rubs a raw spot–the question of where we might sacrifice an individual desire for a need to belong with community. The more liberal one's leaning, the more difficult this seems to be. The most liberal of all denominations, mine sometimes loses church members, it seems, over the color of the carpet.

In the end, I continue to want a world in which gay men and women are not faced with the choice to leave their faith communities or sacrifice living as gay. Even when it works beautifully for some people, it will continue to cost too many too much. I want this demand to fold into our history, like the days when we could not abide interracial marriage. I do not want Josh Weed's story held up as the answer for everyone because I fear it will hurt more than it will help. I want to thank Josh for how he has handled this, in very carefully saying that this is what has worked for him and not making it a prescription for gayness. He also said this:

"If you know and love somebody who is gay and LDS (or Christian), your job is to love and nothing more. Let go of your impulse to correct them or control them or propel them down the path you think is right for them. Do what you need to do to move past that impulse. Do not condemn the choices your loved one makes. Love. Only love. Show your love in word and deed. Embrace them, both literally and figuratively. I promise they need it—and they need to feel like they can figure out this part of themselves in a safe way without ridicule and judgment. It’s what Christ would do. It’s what your loved one needs. Accept them. Love them. Genuinely and totally."

I am full of hope. It seems that the voices of love are drowning out the voices of hate, that open-minded discussion is demanding a place next to grandstanding and yelling. When we can share from our hearts and listen to others, when we can place faith next to reason, when we can wrestle aloud with the quandary of being human, I think we will be O.K.

Something is changing. I hear it in the blogs I read from the Christ-loving writers I respect. I hear it from the comments section when the reader questions herself and her assumptions. I hear it in the affirmation of the atheist, the believer, the gay and the straight that what is right is love and honesty. I hear it, too, in the angry denial, like the smash of a dying tree trunk hitting the ground. Something is changing.

Each day, one at a time, more minds are changing and bringing the world closer to love.

What do you think we can learn from Josh's declaration? How is the faith community changing as it responds to the differing views of its members on homosexuality? Where do you stand?



More Discussion on Christianity and Homosexuality:

Glennon Melton of Momastery: A Mountain I'm Willing to Die On

Glennon Melton of Momastery: I Think Jesus'd Be Gay...or No She DIDN'T.

Dan Pearce of Single Dad Laughing: I'm Christian Unless You're Gay

Dan Pearce of Single Dad Laughing: A Teen's Brave Response to "I'm Christian Unless You're Gay"

As well as the interesting, varied, although largely LDS comments on Josh's blog, these comments on MetaFilter are worth reading, many coming from a gay perspective.

Ask Team Ambiguity: Do Good Things Make Us Bad People?

Photo Credit: Morgue File by Mantasmagorical

For this week's Team Ambiguity post, I'm going to look at what I think is one of the most interesting things I have encountered in the last several weeks: the idea that mere exposure, under controlled circumstances, to images of organic foods, can make people behave more judgmentally and less compassionately immediately afterward. This article by Diane Mapes in Health on Today  discusses a study conducted by the Psych Department of Loyola under the leadership of assistant professor Kendall Eskine. For the study, 60 undergrads were divided into three groups, one of which was exposed to clearly marked images of organic food, one images of unhealthy comfort food and the last (the control group) images of food that were neither particularly unhealthy nor organic. The groups were then asked to make moral judgments on depictions of various moral breaches, which they rated from one to seven. After that, they were asked to volunteer for a bogus study, delineating the amount of time they would be available. The results were that people who had been looking at the organic apples and spinach were more likely to condemn and less willing to help. The nicest people? Brownie viewers. The results, apparently, are due to a phenomenon called "moral licensing."

I will admit that I can't help but view this result with a certain amount of snickering satisfaction. Having lived for years in a place where people acted with regard to iced cookies like they were Fred Phelps at Richard Simmons' funeral, I enjoy a certain amount of Schadenfreude when the moral perfection of Whole Foods shoppers comes into question. I say this, though, as a woman who both purchases a weekly farm box from a local organic farm and is growing her own organic produce. It has often been my observation that the privileged position of being able to buy one's own health food at a store can sometimes produce snobbery and total lack of sympathy for those whose disposable income and priorities do not find them spending $8 a pound for grass-fed beef. But the fact that just looking at pictures of organic food would produce a similar result? That's kind of astounding.

The framework for a Team Ambiguity post is that we (Team Ambiguity) take a deeper look, past shallow assumptions, easy answers and side-taking. In each discourse we consider, there is a body in the living room and all the conversation is about the weather or the wine. Our job is to examine the body, identify it and try to say why it is there. I will throw some ideas out, but the rest is up to you. The magic happens in comments, so you're going to want to make sure and hit "Subscribe by email." Here is my take so far:

The Left Leg: This isn't about organic food. Let's just start from that point, so the conversation can get really interesting right away. Kenneth Eskine, interestingly, already knows this. Organic food is something that we associate with a kind of correctness that we either accede to or rebel against. For some of us, perhaps, pesticides and factory farms are wonderful advances of human technology, but, mostly, we see them as necessary or unnecessary evils. We give in, we stand up or we compromise. Perhaps, we don't care. But the association remains. So what was this Loyola team really testing? Perhaps, in organic food, they found a perfect symbol to access the real question of moral licensing itself. Do our associations with what we think is right automatically predispose us to act like asses? Would we get the same result with exposure of the right demographics to pictures of babies worn in slings or nursing, people praying or meditating, people doing yoga, or eight ounces of fresh water?

The Right Leg: There's right and then there's right. I keep coming back to the thought that there is a profound difference between buying a bundle of organic spinach at Whole Foods and growing your own spinach and an even greater difference between those and teaching people in a desert wasteland to grow their own spinach using permaculture. I can't make out how and if any of this factors into flashcards of organic food and moral ratings, but, when I reflect on the most obnoxious organic foodies I know, what stands out for me is that they are consumers, never farmers. And I'd say this holds true across the line. The religious folk who stand around throwing words of stone are never the same ones in the ghettos not just saving souls but lives. We can't afford judgement when we are placed in the fray. If we have energy to condemn, it is symptom of inaction and apathy, not moral elevation.

The Left Arm: Are we what we see? If we are immediately and objectively influenced by the vision of an apple with an organic sticker, if this sight makes us subtly and temporarily a different human being, what does that say about the rest of our media selections? I find I cannot regularly read anybody without having them show up in my writing. Does Gregory House in some way inform who I am as a human being? And does this mean I have to stop watching True Blood?

The Right Arm: Is sin the best avenue for virtue? The fact that the comfort food viewers were the least judgmental and most helpful has gone largely unremarked in the articles I have read on this subject. But what does that mean? In the presence of those items which we enjoy but which make us feel less than something less than righteous, it seems we become the kindest. Would Christmas be half as much fun if we served beet salads and sprouted quinoa? Apparently not. And doesn't this hold true in life in general? Humility is often the catalyst for giving. Exhibit A: Alcoholics Anonymous. Only a sinner can give of themselves in this particular way and only if they never forget what an utter and complete waste of space they once were. The never-forgetting is essential to the impetus to be there for the next sufferer who drags themselves pitifully in the door.  To forget is to become indifferent. It's the wrongness, not the rightness that breeds love.

The Body: Be very, very wary of your moral associations. How then do we proceed? Whether we are reacting to the inherent virtue of organics or merely the inherent virtue of apples, we need to stop and check ourselves. There is nothing wrong with organic food. In fact, in terms of certain kinds of organic food–locally grown, personally grown, using bio-intensive methods–I would argue that this is the direction we should be looking as a species if we want to preserve our planet and feed the hungry. But what do we think it means about us? Exercise is also good, but it isn't charity. It doesn't buy us any freedom from moral obligation. Mediation and mindfulness practices are ultimately selfish if we aren't using them to make the world a better place.

I think we associate the consumption or personal practice of notions we have labeled as "good" with doing good. You can't purchase morality at the store. At best, you can excuse yourself at times from participation in the worst of a destructive system. You can support a farmer, a businessman. This does not make you a good person. It makes you the owner of a bar of chocolate labeled "fair trade." The work of being a good person is done with others, in the practice of compassion and the gifts of our time and talent to the people and causes that we love. It demands presence, not to oneself, but to others. And you can do it with an apple as well as with a brownie. As long as you remember that the apple is not some sort of moral coupon that buys you out of loving others.

Now I want to know: What do you think? Faith in Ambiguity is open to all view points, especially dissenting ones and those that think they don't matter. The rules of discourse dictate respect at all times. Chime in and share widely.


More Information:
Reason.com by Baylen Linekin: Do Organic Consumers Shop Exclusively at the Jerk Store?

Martin Cizmar at Chubster: An Idiot Walks into a Farmer's Market

Do Good Deeds Make Bad People? by Clot, Grolleau, Ibanez

Images are used according to allowable terms by Morguefile.

Wisdom Teeth, Adulthood and Guilty Pleasure of Hope

Photo Credit: Morgue File by Emmi P.

Today's post is a characteristically bastardized response to the GBE2 prompt on Guilty Pleasures.


Eleven years ago, I was told they were impacted and had to come out. The first time they were scheduled for extraction, on arrival at the surgeon's office, my state insurance had been inexplicably cancelled. Phone calls had to be made, paperwork filled out, everything put back as it should be. We re-scheduled for a second time. But driving to the appointment, somehow we got lost, took five wrong turns and arrived too late for the procedure. This time, I did not re-schedule. So, they stayed in. I would live with them the way they were until–and if–they became so unbearable they forced me to reconsider.

Other teeth shifted forward to accommodate them, overlapping. Gums gaped angrily around their sharp penetration through spaces where they didn't fit. Food collected in pockets and I worked it out. Pus swelled up around them, and I parried it off with hydrogen peroxide and the edge of a fingernail. Sitting in a dentist's chair, five years from the date I had left that surgeon's office, I was told they had come through and that there was no need to remove them.

And so they have become one of my features. Brushing my teeth last night, I got the floss and worked out, as best as I could, the food that wants always to get trapped in my gum line, the bacteria that wants always to form, the blood that seeps out from the area which is still not a healed place, but is always somehow giving birth to these teeth, over and over–these teeth that do not fit.

I am keeping infection at bay. Keeping surgery at bay. Keeping pain at bay. Just far enough away that I can look at it through a pane of glass and see something that is still outside of my house, a few feet away. At just great enough a distance that I can feel safe. A great deal of niggling effort is expended keeping it all just there, a great deal of vigilance.

Had I, eleven years ago, submitted myself to the indignity of a third return to that office, to the embarrassment of being a twenty-five year-old woman who could neither get her Medicaid paperwork together or get herself to an office on time with nursing infant in tow, had I been willing to face the blinding pain of the extraction, these spots would be nothing but healed places in the back of my mouth. I could trace the smooth surface of them with my tongue. Had I paid then with the fortitude of maturity, I could reap now the benefit of having forgotten.

Instead, they stay with me. They assault with threat of infection and I win out, but the fight continues to go on, persisting always on the belief that I will ultimately prevail. Hope is a bloodied space in my mouth that I refuse to let go of. Next week, next month, next year, surely the damn things will be done raping the tissues of my gums and will let things lie. Surely, surely this is part of the transformation to wholeness that I must undergo. Surely I have not chosen, for no reason, to live with pain.

Admitting failure means that they will have to be removed, at long last, and the teeth pushed together to accommodate them will still remain crushed like crowds of Christmas shoppers, shoulders overlapped. Admitting failure means highlighting the pointlessness of the exercise of the last eleven years. Admitting failure means submitting to a sharp and overwhelming pain.

On balance, I might rather continue to gain some small satisfaction from being able to direct the pus and food particles, day after day, practicing the illusion of control. On balance, I might rather practice acceptance. They are my teeth. I love them. I chose them. It is too late now to unmake my choice. On balance, I might rather continue to persist in the guilty pleasure of hope, the counting of cars before the one you are waiting for, that lasts for years, the still observation that becomes a life already lived.

How long you can live with what seems must be taken out.

Ask Team Ambiguity: Do Women Really Want to Suffer in Relationships?

Photo Credit: Morgue File by Dave Hamilton

I really like Gina Barreca. Or at least, I really liked listening to her at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop last month. She was the last keynote speaker that I heard, and, among that aggregation of very funny people, she stood out as the funniest of all.

"No man has ever done what women do about this, because we try to fit ourselves into sizes."

"No man has ever said I'm going to be a 42 short by the holidays."

"Men think they're a little fat if they can't fit into a foreign car."

Her talk–and what made it so funny–centered on the disservice women do themselves through our rampant anxiety, the niggling desire to "fit ourselves" into clothes, expectations and circumstances. Men were just the foils within this theater of female psychodrama. The Not-Women. At a glance, Gina Barreca's feminism seemed to be about what women do to themselves and to each other, more than what men and society does to women. Which I kind of liked. And I will tell you: Gina is one smart lady.

And yet there was something I kind of laughed over–or only let out the embarrassed laugh that makes you look out the corner of your eye to see if anyone is looking offended, to check if you should be offended, the uncommitted laugh.

"We're the smart ones."

Resounding applause followed in a room filled, by an enormous ratio, with women. Women are smarter. Women have a more sophisticated sense of humor. Hmmmm...it's funny, and it smells like a kind of truth (or it wouldn't be so damn funny), but, in one fell swoop, it herds all females–lesbian, straight, married, single, young, old, smart and dumb and all men–into opposite corners of the room and calls it truth. Perhaps, that is the essence of humor. It lives in generality. But Gina Barreca is not just a humorist but a thinker. Here is a link to one of her latest pieces Why Do Women Fall For Cruel Men? which appeared in Psychology Today May 7th.

What Barreca is pointing at is that strong women, in her estimation, tend to view strong men as ones that can best them. This besting then plays out as men treating women with a certain callous disregard, a certain cruelty. Or causing a certain emotional grief. She discusses the case of a woman, having waited to find the right man–a man strong enough–who then loses herself entirely in that man. She tells stories of women for whom male anger, when directed against them, shows love. Stories of smart women seeking stupid men. Other women, while perhaps not seeking an actually painful relationship, Barreca says, will look for a man too good for them, a man who will ignore them. Women, as she portrays them, are bound and determined to suffer at the hands of men, but somehow on their own terms.

I find myself amply motivated to argue with all of these statements. In fact, I chose this piece as a link because I thought its broad generalizations worthy of a second, more ambiguous look. But, I cannot, as I re-read this article, completely discount what Barreca has said here. At least not in front of anyone who has known me long enough to be familiar with my entire relationship history, which has included, over and over, men less intelligent than myself with whom I quickly grew bored or smoldering, passionate but physically abusive men or yet more men entirely indifferent to my interest in them. And don't we all know these women? The ones about whom we wonder aloud,

"Why the Hell did she choose him?"

If this phenomenon is specific to the psyche of women, I am not entirely sure it is limited to straight women. It seems to me I have known many lesbians to have made ill-fated choices among their partners as well. But is this argument true at all? Let's examine the body.

The Left Leg: Which woman do you mean, exactly? Is this true of all–or even most–women? Barreca's article rang–in some ways–true for me, but I developed my male-female relationship strategies very young and while navigating issues of depression and addiction. To say that I was looking for someone to "fix me" would be an understatement. So, I have to ask you ladies and the men who know them–those of you who grew up straight rather than bendy, if this stuff is true for you?

The Right Leg: When prevented from committing suicide, Juliet grows up. If women are geared this way, as suggested by Margaret Drabble, due to the portrayal of romance as tragic, don't most of us get the picture later? (If so, I guess this would be an argument for dating quite a bit before committing to marriage.) Someday, don't we finally realize that we want a best pal, a life mate, a trusted friend and then get over the need for grand gestures of male strength? I cannot imagine myself, at thirty-six, having the slightest damn interest in any man's ability to overpower me in any way. Although I will admit that I often said, when younger, that I found it attractive if a man could beat me in an argument, I now find it infinitely more attractive if he does laundry and will watch Grey's Anatomy with me.

The Left Arm: Is every guy you know Eminem? What does this say about men? If women are hot and bothered for all these brooding assholes of men, it would seem there would have to be quite a lot of them to go around. Unless, of course, we all dated the same jackass senior year and he's still making the rounds. But are you married to this guy? Or did you leave him a long time ago and settle down with someone who gently strokes your hand but wears sandals with socks? Or are these men really at fault? Are they made awful by our own weird fixation? That is a chilling thought. Perhaps after you left them for being so wretched, they settled down with someone who treated them like just another human being, and they still treat her like a queen?

The Right Arm: Let's play master and servant. If a lot of us will sheepishly admit to a certain understanding of Barreca's case here, just as many of us seemed to relate to it when Tangled Lou bared the soul of narcissistic love–the kind where you settle, fall in love with the notion that your partner may change, and let that poor soul adore you while you treat him like a dog that has yet to be trained. The love that seems to be compassion but is really falling in love with one's own reflection. I have done this kind of thing as well. So maybe it is just hard to get this right. We are shooting for men who slavishly worship us and for whom we do not return the affection, or we are shooting for men who seem disinterested or uncommitted or unkind. How many shots before we nail it? One high, one low, one waaay on the outside there, then, hopefully BULLSEYE!

The Rest of the Body: It All Comes Down to Power. At the risk of sounding like I am chatting with you from a communist coffee shop in Berkeley while I water hemp with a tincture of my own menstrual blood: my analysis is that patriarchy comes down to systems of power that are wielded (unconsciously and automatically) in subtle ways that keep women from accessing that power to control their own lives. If we are raised all of our lives to believe that certain kinds of power are the province of men, it makes sense that we try to get it from them. So, if men are the avenue to feeling loved or feeling worthy–or men are the avenue to showing us our own strength–then, perhaps, the most daring among us may seek the fiercest dragon to slay and therein prove our own worth. Our lives are shaped by myths and fairy tales told over and over, unconsciously, thoughtlessly, and innocently. The man wins by being brave, smart and strong. The woman wins by being loved. The allegory is stamped on souls.

And, instead of making us better wives, mothers and lovers, I think it makes us angry. Angry with some sort of Meta-Male force that demands our multi-tasking, lactating, libidinous perfection so that we can claim a wholeness that we can never have otherwise. The individual men that fall into our lives, I think, are still just foils–actors in the fairy tales they never liked as well as we did. They mostly just want their coffee brought and to be told they are wonderful. The rest is woven around them like invisible skeins of implication, winding all of us up like cocoons.

But what do you think? Our lives are varied, full of mirrors and polarities. I only know the path my romantic, heterosexual life has taken me. What about you? Are you buying that we have a collective penchant for male punishment? Or something akin but, perhaps more subtle? Or do you think the whole argument is gobbledygook? And it really wouldn't hurt men to comment. They have a unique perspective on this, which I would be fascinated to hear, since they know women, and perhaps have been in romantic relationships with them a time or two.

Remember to follow the rules.