Personal Blog/Diary

Here I write about anything and everything.

My Early Childhood Games and Tiger-Kangaroos

First of all, I wanted to note something from the last episode of the latest season of What We Do in the Shadows.  Colin Robinson has the same philosophy of diaries that I do: “Oh, well, the great thing about keeping a detailed diary is, if you ever forget anything about your life, you can look it up.”

Now for my latest childhood memoir:

In kindergarten, we would sit four at a table.  As I sat with Melissa and another girl or two at the beginning of the day, I would make little tigers with my hands.  They actually looked more like the dinosaur-shapes I would later make with my hands.  Then I started making kangaroos.  Then I put them together and made what I called tiger-kangaroos.  They’re formed by curling over your index finger to make the head, putting together your thumb and middle finger to make two arms and hands that are curved around and clasped together, and curving your other two fingers down to make legs.  They would hop all over the table, and Melissa would try to catch them or bonk them on the head.  It was a game for us.

Eventually, I developed a whole world around two tiger-kangaroos, one for my right hand and one for my left.  They were named Sally and Hedreda (HED-jrih-duh), two sisters whose world of tiger-kangaroos had been destroyed, so they came to Earth.  Sally was the silly and mischievous one, also my favorite, and Hedreda was the sensible one that acted as mother.  They went through many adventures, some of which I wrote down.  Sometimes, they even lived in my desk at school, among my books and papers and pencils and a big yellow box, with letters carved in it along with directions for how to make them, that held pencils and crayons and erasers and things.

Sally would “come on” my right hand and “help” me write, and would also run around inside my desk.  This was my favorite of their adventures, capturing my imagination with thoughts of how they’d live in my little desk and come out at night when everyone was gone.  I wrote a story about this, too.  Sally would play with my pink erasers (possibly even use them as pillows or chairs) and pencils on my desktop, and I think she’d play with bees as well.

I had a whole repertoire of hand puppets, and not just the tiger-kangaroos.  There was 8, who was in the shape of an 8, formed by curving four fingers around and then curling my index finger over the top, and plenty of others who, back in 1st and 2nd grade, would act out the song “Convoy.”  Several of them were the simple hand-puppet, four fingers on top and the thumb on the bottom, acting like talking jaws, the common one almost everyone uses at one time or another to imitate someone who won’t stop talking.  One of these was Rubber Duck.

I also had dog-characters, and curled up my first and fourth fingers to make ears.  I thought the other common hand-puppet, the one in which the hand is the head and body and the index and middle fingers are legs, was amusing when I was in my crib, but after I made up the tiger-kangaroos I thought they looked nothing like real people.  I thought my tiger-kangaroos were better representations of people.

Related to the tiger-kangaroos were some time-travelers.  I had gone in my wardrobe, a tall, brown, cardboard thing that a great-grandmother had given or left me, back in time to the days of the dinosaurs.  I would make little dinosaurs with my hands; these were creatures I myself had made, and, after praying that God would animate them (since only God could create life), I put them there.  These little, intelligent creatures lived and breathed and had adventures in the days of the dinosaurs, which I would read about in a Childcraft book on dinosaurs.

While I was very small and had to walk to school, I invented a game that was mostly in my imagination.  Usually my games would involve shuffling my legs like a choo-choo train, skipping like a gallopping horse, or hand puppets, or any of a number of different things that I did to make the long, 8-block trek more enjoyable.  There was also what I called Rocky Alley, an alley full of rocks in which I found a strange, small, cone-shaped rock one day.  To my dismay, I later lost it.  But I had a whole collection of rocks taken from Rocky Alley.  Horror of horrors, one day, in my later childhood or high school years, I walked down that way again and discovered that the rocks had been cleared out of Rocky Alley!

I then made up a game that I may have acted out some of, but mostly it was cartoon images in my mind, and I would say the lines each character had.  These images were better than I could draw myself.  The game was about The Duck of Death.  He looked much like Donald Duck, only with an evil look and a black cape.  He was much like a vampire duck.  There was also a mild-mannered duck with a yellow cape who tried to fight him, but was scared of him.  There was also a carload of teenage kids, boys and one or two girls.  You can imagine my surprise, many years later, in my teen or college years, when a duck very much like my Duck of Death, and with a similar name, showed up in a cartoon!  (Could’ve been DuckTales or Darkwing Duck.)

Why I Hate Football (and a new memoir series for this blog)

This is intended to be the first of many posts taken from my childhood memoirs, which comprise a 25-year-old WordPerfect file I still add to, a few diaries, and countless stories/dream accounts/etc. that fill fireproof vaults in my basement.

Before my baby came along 18 years ago, I was busily working to turn them into a chronological autobiography just as I did with my college memoirs.  Working backwards as I did with college, I had already finished (high school) Junior Year and Senior Year and was ready to do Sophomore Year.

I was also almost finished writing about my adult life up till then; it was 2003, and I was working on 2002.  That was a distressing year, when my secondary boss had gone crazy after an illness and turned into a rage machine.  It led to 2003, when he yelled at an underwriter constantly, and after a morning of fuming all over the office, quit in a big scene, which kept the manager from having to fire him.  I missed it all, but heard about it when I came in for work.  In 2003, he hadn’t yet driven his red pickup into his own kitchen, or damaged a light at the detention center, after his wife said she’d had enough and was going to leave him.  I was all ready to get the whole year typed up into my “2002” file and properly typed up and arranged with letters, e-mails, etc. in chronological order.  I had a lot to say about that year.

But first I was too morning-sick, and then too busy, to do anything at all with either memoir.  Pregnancy made the computer smell horrible, and then the baby was constantly crying or pooping.  It was all I could do just to keep up with the laundry.  When I had time to write–finally–in his young childhood, it was to work on my novels or to blog about my delving into theology.

When my son got older and needed less attention, now my time was taken up with learning everything I could about narcissism and blogging to heal from an extremely abusive “friendship” that had just blown up.  There was nothing left over for any kind of writing in those days, other than my blog.  Nowadays, I’m so bogged down in household concerns and keeping up with our exploding democracy that the time I have for writing is spent updating my blog or revising my latest novel.

In recent years I’ve started adding to the childhood file again.  Since it’s far from being put in chronological order, I’ll have to grab snippets from it here and there and post them.  I’ll start with snippets that I’ve recently read in Writer’s Club.  This is the first, just in time for football season:

Why I Hate Football

When I was very young, my mom told me one Sunday evening that my Disney special would start after the football game, and I started to cry.  Why?  Every weekend, my dad and brother seemed to watch every football game there was.  All weekend, all afternoon and evening, they’d watch football games.  When you’re too young to understand that the uniforms and channels are different (and we had a black-and-white TV), it looks like One Big Football Game that lasts Forever.  Seriously, it never ends.  It has always existed and always will exist.  There never will be an end to the game.  So my Disney special will NEVER come on.  I will go the rest of my life and that Disney special will never have a chance to begin.  That is why I cried.

As I got older and learned they were different games, they still seemed to drag on forever, going on for hours and hours–and if I wanted to watch anything else, say a cartoon or a movie, I’d be told NO.  Football took preeminence over anything I wanted, even though all the games were the same–no plot, no characters, no story, just people running around after a ball, constantly stopped and replayed, over and over again for HOURS.  Nobody cared what I wanted.

And those constant sounds of the whistle and the grunts and the audience–it gave me a massive headache.  I’d lie on the couch with my head aching.

I HATE FOOTBALL.  This is why I avoid all football talk all season long.  This is why I avoid even the Superbowl.  This is why finding a man who hated football was high up in my list when I was a young adult.

GOARCH archbishop called “woke” while OCA bans individual thought

So two things are going on at once in two different Orthodox jurisdictions in the USA:

First, our GOARCH archbishop is taking fire for daring to baptize the baby of a gay couple.  I am greatly encouraged by signs like these, from him and our local Metropolitan Nathaniel, of an opening of the church to more inclusive ideas.  For example, the Metropolitan told my church at his last visit that we should have altar girls.  Now I don’t think the Archbishop is necessarily advocating for gay marriage, but at the very least he doesn’t seem to feel that the gender/marital arrangement of a baby’s parents should affect whether the baby can be baptized.

Adapt or die–As more and more young people see the vast difference between the regressive ideas of conservative churches and what’s going on with their own friends and science/medicine, we’ll see the steady decline of all but the oldest and most extreme members of such congregations in the future.  I’m pretty sure that most churches don’t preach that the sun revolves around the Earth anymore, and even the Catholic church apparently abandoned the “Evolution is Evilution” mindset years ago.

But of course, we can’t possibly introduce any sort of love or change into our churches, because they’re full of Pharisees (see the essay I wrote on this nearly 20 years ago).  Already Archbishop Elpidophoros is getting pushback, with all sorts of angry blogs and objections from the Greek Church and a Greek Metropolitan (hey, we’re American now, not Greek!).

I strongly suspect that if Jesus were to physically come back and walk among our churches, there would be a lot of yelling going on, right before they took out an AR-15 to execute him for blasphemy for saying that we should ditch the guns and accept people on the queer spectrum and call them whatever they want.

But on the other hand, the OCA has just made a statement that basically bans everyone–even laypeople opining on their own websites–from deviating from the official church position that the queer spectrum is full of deviance and perversion.  Anyone who violates this is subject to excommunication now.  So you have to ignore your own eyes, your own knowledge, your own conscience, and CONFORM to Groupthink lest you be tossed into outer darkness.

RIP Roe v Wade

As a small child, I never heard about abortion, though I and Roe v Wade were born the same year.

As a young child, I heard arguments about abortion that convinced me it wasn’t murder.  Then I read something in a circular in the church bulletin that changed my mind.  These Focus on the Family circulars were a trusted source of Christian wisdom to me.  But there was always the caveat of rape/incest/life of the mother being acceptable reasons for abortion even to Christians.

As a teen, I started watching the 700 Club and listened to Christian music, and became convinced that Operation Rescue was heroic and that abortion was a great evil, a holocaust, that had to be stopped, that most abortions were sociopathic and not for the accepted caveats.

In my 20s, I had trouble driving past a protest outside a Planned Parenthood clinic that didn’t even do abortions.  As I told a friend, even though I agreed with them, the disgusting signs and the protest itself really bothered me.  I couldn’t put my finger on why.

In my late 20s, I was moving away from conservative politics and religion and into a more moderate camp.  I was influenced by various Evangelical and progressive Christian voices I heard over the years on a variety of political, moral and theological topics.  There were solidly conservative groups who worked with the poor and minorities and talked like liberals on their issues.  I kept taking quizzes that said I would be Democrat except for the abortion issue.  I read in Time-Life history books about reformers in various cultures who would begin to make changes to improve the lives of the people, only to have conservatives come in and roll them all back again.

I was pregnant for the first and only time that I know of for sure, though there were other times I wondered about.  I was so sick that I couldn’t keep anything down and was very weak.  I feared that abortion may be necessary to save me from dying of starvation.  Fortunately, medication got my stomach under control.  I told the doctor that I didn’t want the baby aborted if anything went wrong during pregnancy/labor.  I watched a chart of how babies develop, and wondered how anyone could abort a baby.

But I agreed with George Bush that abortion could not be legislated away.  I helped in the youth group, where the pastor read a poem or lyrics about the trouble with abortion protest signs.  It was okay to question, and I was questioning all sorts of Evangelical controversies, such as Harry Potter and homeschooling.  There were Democrats in the church, even.

In my 30s, with a healthy baby in the family now, we had moved to the PCUSA, and their views on abortion were different from what I was used to in evangelicalism.  They wanted it to be rare, but legal.  I thought their reasoning for this was sound.  I learned that the medical community defined pregnancy differently than I’d always heard it.  I became Orthodox soon after, but never stopped my liberal-moving progression.

In my 40s, I learned that many things I’d heard about abortion and contraception from conservative sources were simply wrong.  I learned that making abortion illegal only leads to the deaths of women/girls, NOT to the end of abortion.  I learned that late-term abortions are done because something goes terribly wrong, NOT because the mother or doctor is a murderous psychopath.  I learned how women in Ireland couldn’t get proper health care even if they weren’t pregnant, because doctors were so frightened of causing an abortion.  I learned that the callous woman I’d always heard about who got an abortion because she wanted to look good in a bathing suit–that this was a strawman.  I learned about the various actual reasons women and girls feel compelled to get an abortion.

I learned that abortions actually go DOWN under Democratic leadership because they address the reasons for abortions instead of just outlawing abortions.  So on every count, the Democrats are the true pro-life party.

I voted in every election instead of playing purity politics; I didn’t stay home just because I wanted Bernie instead of Hillary, while I saw other Dems stay home election after election, apparently trusting that everything would stay exactly as it was.  I knew, after all, that on the conservative end, the big issues were abortion and gay rights, and that they had never given up.

Then just days after I turned 49, abortion became illegal in much of the USA.

All these years we’ve heard from the radical right about loss of freedoms and activist judges; turns out they’ve been projecting this entire time.  The party of freedom and democracy and Life is the Democrats!

Giacomo Sanfilippo of Orthodoxy in Dialogue is being persecuted for defending LGBTQ+

My friend Giacomo runs the site Orthodoxy in Dialogue, which has quickly become the standard bearer for LGBTQ+ people gaining acceptance in the Orthodox Church.  And this has made him a target for a fundamentalist contingent which has a lot in common with MAGAs, many modern white Evangelical/Fundamentalist churches, and a certain anti-Francis segment of the Catholic Church.

We have learned a lot about gender variations over the past 2000 years, things which people just didn’t know back when the Bible was written, just as with human reproduction (people used to think there were little men in sperm) and astronomy.  If the Church truly is not against science, then it has to admit when it’s pushing views that are hopelessly antiquated.  But some people are against any kind of change even when it’s desperately needed.

Many of us want people to be allowed to marry whoever they want and stay in full communion.  This isn’t about allowing licentiousness or promiscuity or pedophilia in the church–homophobic tropes where people just assume if you’re gay, you must be in favor of these things as well.  Society in general has been moving toward acceptance, but some just want to drag us backwards again.

For several years, Giacomo Sanfilippo has been subject to various attacks for trying to change hearts in the Orthodox churches so they can be safe spaces for believers who are LGBTQ+.  He’s been slandered, libeled, sued for defamation, and now he’s been doxxed on Twitter. They’re trying to get him in trouble with his bishop.  It’s being done by a group of people who claim to be “Christian” and call him and his allies “wolves.”

But I’ve seen a sample of their behavior online, and–to paraphrase John Fugelsang–I’ve seen atheists who are better Christians than these people.  They have no idea what Christianity is.  They’re the pack of wolves.  They harass, troll, abuse, and give Christ a black eye with everything they do.  They need to get off the frickin’ Twitter, sit down with the Red Letters of Christ, and come to repentance for the hate that fills their hearts, because right now it’s Satan they’re serving, not God.

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