Personal Blog/Diary

Here I write about anything and everything.

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.

Purity Culture guy who slut-shamed me was arrested for prostitution

Sometimes, in the years after breaking free of a narcissistic and/or abuser or rapist, you will find out new information that proves you were not to blame.  One ex kept pretending to be something he wasn’t to get girls to date him.  Another has various psychological disorders and sleeps around on his girlfriends.  An ex-friend nearly choked his stepdaughter to death.

In the 1992/3 section of my College Memoirs, you’ll find the story of Shawn, a guy who accused me of separating him from God and not doing enough to stop his advances while he kept pushing and pushing for physical and sexual favors.  I let him do it because I was in love with him and–after growing up with a learning disorder and bullying–didn’t know how to stick up for myself.  I didn’t know how to give myself some self-love by telling him to stop and getting away from that situation.  I was only 18 and 19 years old and kept hoping one day he would say he loved me.  And meantime I kept letting him do whatever he wanted after initially resisting.

He kept saying we were “just friends” and he didn’t want to have an actual “relationship” with me, but he kept coming over to see me and inviting me over.  We both intended to save sex for marriage because of Evangelical Purity Culture, but he kept pushing my boundaries until I stopped wanting to stop him, then he blamed me for giving in.  Then his ultimate slut-shaming of me was saying he couldn’t be my friend anymore because I had given in to him and that made me so repulsive to him.

He severely psychologically damaged me.  I wrote about my realization that his attitudes, the way he shamed me constantly for everything from my introversion to giving in to him to my alleged “imperfections,” came from patriarchal purity culture and his own psychological disorders, here and here.  I wasn’t raised with the idea that I was responsible for stopping him, but HE apparently was, so he blamed me for his own transgressions, while I was left confused, wondering how it could be my fault when he’s the one who kept pushing.  He made me feel like I was forcing myself on HIM when I was actually very passive through the whole thing, letting him take the lead.

He did eventually call me again to try to bury the hatchet.  We connected a few times over the years, briefly.  He finally let me friend him on Facebook a couple of years ago, for a day, but there I discovered he’s a Trumper who listens to far-right con artists like Sean Hannity and Vicki McKenna.  I think he unfriended me again because of my liberal views and disdain for far-right con artists.

Well–I just learned that in June of 2019, Shawn was busted for sex with a prostitute.

WUT

Details are sparse.  But here are the facts:

He’s married and has daughters.

He pled guilty and paid over $1000 in fines.

It was “Prostitution-Nonmmarital Sexual Intercourse.”  He was required to “Provide biological specimen to state crime lab for DNA analysis, and pay DNA analysis surcharge.”

Apparently prostitution rings are common in that part of the state, and they regularly do stings, so maybe he was caught that way, but I have nothing but conjecture to go on.  I know that whether prostitution is “bad” or should be a crime is controversial these days.  But I think most people can agree that a married man with daughters going to a prostitute is disgusting.

UGH

I dodged a bullet!

And I can’t help but wonder at the implications of an Evangelical guy who slut-shamed me, going to a prostitute.

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