Ok. I consider you guys my friends and I love you. You give me support and you make life a little bit more bearable.
I've never felt more welcome in this country than when I decided to join the New Zealand comics and Drupal communities. You are some of the most wonderful people I've met and you were the guys who first made me think that, hold on, maybe I can make a life for myself in this country. It was like finally finding an oasis of acceptance and friendship after crawling on my belly in the desert for six years. Like that guy who starts off Monty Python episodes.
But lately, I'm starting to think that it might be a mirage.
I don't want to convert anyone but I don't want to feel that I have to be ashamed of my religion either. I'm cool with you because what's important to me is that you're a good person. I'm married to an Atheist. I have close friends who are Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Free Mason. Someone very important to me is gay. My oldest friend in NZ is studying to be a priest and like me, he thoroughly enjoyed the film 'Dogma.'
I think its really stupid to count someone out just because of a difference of opinion. If you have the same values and if you are a good person, which means learning to respect a difference of opinion and not shitting all over someone's race or creed or sexual orientation, then you're okay in my book.
I usually like to keep my mouth shut, but the only time I speak out is when I encounter bigotry. My second year in NZ, I spent two hours trying to convince someone that homosexuality wasn't a choice but genetic destiny - and I'm still proud of the fact that I changed someone's mind. When I lived in Mt. Roskill I would argue extensively with bible-thumpers who blamed the world's ills on gay people. I got into fights with misogynistic co-workers who believed that women should stay in the kitchen. I will always stand up for my Muslim friends but I will always correct them when they get a little anti-semitic.
Its not my job and its certainly hasn't made my life easier. But I do this, because if there's one thing I learned in Catholic school is that your actions matter, and that evil happens when good men don't speak out. Yes, I am fiercely protective of it because I don't want the good to be damned along with the bad. I don't want the faith and institution that educated me and taught me my values and how to be a citizen (when all the adults just shirked or ignored responsibility, the nuns and teachers at St. Mary's Academy were the only source of stability to me and thousands of other children who came from poor or dysfunctional backgrounds - it was literally the only safe place we knew) to be banished along with the Mr. Hyde version of it that seems to have taken a permanent perch on the front page of the New York Times.
So all I'm asking is for a little consideration and please stop shitting over my religion or anyone else's. No one has a premium on stupidity: if someone wants to use the Bible, or Marxism, or the Torah or the Koran or Ayn Rand to lend legitimacy to their craziness then is it the fault of the philosophy or the person who takes it out of context? Heck, someone shot up the Discovery channel offices because they weren't showing enough environmental programmes. People will find a reason no matter what.
If you want to have a real discussion about people's differences, please approach it with the respect and the openness that has been accorded you. Implying that anyone who practices religion is a moron is probably not the best way to start.
If this note has convinced you that I'm insufferable and have no sense of humour then I suppose that's true. There's always the option to un-friend me. It will sadden me, but sometimes people will have to agree to disagree.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Friday, January 15, 2010
I Love Atheists
I love atheists. I should know, I married one.
And yet I'm a believer, though not the wear it on your sleeve kind, nor the type who thinks that anyone else who doesn't share my beliefs is on the express lane to hell.
I'm the kind who thinks that the ones who should have a toasty little tete a tete with Satan are the ones who say things like "(Disaster-plagued country) deserved what it got because it (swore a pact with the devil to gain independence/harbours homosexuals/some other wildly preposterous reason)," while never knowing what it's like to have the walls come tumbling over your head or watch the flood waters rise and your entire home wash away, or lose a loved one without any warning.
Call me a Cafeteria Catholic and I'll probably say yes - if it means that I sometimes disagree with the Pope, or if I believe that what a person decides to do with their body is their business and not anyone else's. You can also call me that if it means someone who firmly believes in the separation of church and state.
But if by Cafeteria Catholic you mean someone who's only Catholic when it's easy, then I will probably tell you to get lost. Because its not easy, especially when you're always on the defensive, when people continually wonder if you are part of a system that has been responsible for horrible abuse and therefore somehow condone it.
There was a time when I didn't have to worry if I asked people for prayers that it might devolve into an argument, or if I sent someone a greeting card that said, "Merry Christmas!" that I was offending them. Would I be offended if my Hindu friends wished me happy Diwali, or if my Muslim friends wished me a lovely Eid ul-Fitr? Of course not - I'd probably respond with a namaste or salaam.
One of the great ironies I've experienced is that I was never cussed out for being a Christian when I lived in a predominantly Muslim country. I respected their beliefs even though I disagreed with some of their practices, but all in all we were happy to focus on the things that were common to us. Yet I remember a secular friend of mine - a man who never raised his voice - morphing into the Hulk when I mentioned that I was Catholic. I'd never experienced such venom in my life and so even though he eventually changed back into Bruce Banner, I kinda stayed away after that.
Shouty people always freak me out, even the religious ones. I've had a few people knocking on my door asking me if I found Jesus and stuff and while I understand that they are obliged to do this, I get really angry when I ask them if they could leave because I'd just come in from a downpour and I'd really like to change into some dry clothes and they think that I'm not serious.
I also get angry when they look at me and automatically think I'm an easy target because I'm polite and unassuming and I work at home and aren't I exactly the kind of lonely housewife that they're looking for? And when they see me losing my patience they think they can reel me in by saying, "Don't you agree that God hates fags?" That's when I say, "I've read the Bible twice over and studied theology for half my life. If you want to debate scripture with me, then bring it. But this is my house and I won't tolerate that kind of hate speech."
Or something to that effect. I wonder if my secular or atheist friends assume that just because I am a Christian, that means I have some kind of wacko agenda, that I want to ban the teaching of evolution in schools and that I will believe in any kind of mumbo jumbo. "Are you kidding me?" I'd say before launching into a long defense of my Catholic education where the curriculum included (yes) evolution and a whole heap of other things, like rudimentary sex ed in the second grade.
So I shake my head when I hear about people making a disgrace of their faith (any faith!) by using it to justify their intolerance, their ignorance, their greed and calumny, or to push whatever insane agenda they're trying to push. It astounds me when people who so clearly do not have right on their side would often invoke God as the patron, nay, instigator of their cause.
Yet I also shake my head when people who do not believe in God, those who often invoke Reason as their supreme deity and Intellectual Rigor as their faith, could make the simplistic mistake of blaming all the world's ills on religion. Those who assume that there must be no God if you consider the horrors that are committed in His Name - if He could smite someone, wouldn't He smite them already?
"If there is a God, " my husband once said, "I'd like to have a word with Him." Maybe he imagines that he could intellectually shish-kebob the Almighty with the laser point of his brain. In my inadequate way, I try to explain that the ills of the world are mainly due to Man's doing - our innate ability to turn everything we touch into shit - and that is because we have Free Will. Man has an equal capacity for good and evil, and which way we turn is completely up to us.
"I can't accept that when things are good you thank God, but when things are bad you blame people. If He were responsible for the good, wouldn't He be equally responsible for the bad? If He were omniscient and omnipotent, why didn't He realise that people would become evil? Why doesn't He intervene when disasters happen?" This is when I am at a loss - why indeed? Why didn't God send a well-timed thunderbolt in Hitler's or Stalin's way? Why does He allow innocent people to be hurt everyday? Why? Why? Why?
To tell you the truth, I don't know. If I said God's ways were mysterious, my husband would probably call bullshit.
***
I only recently learned about how children once had to endure corporal punishment in schools (religious and otherwise) in this country. I also learned that an in-law who went to Catholic school was sexually harassed by the principal who was also a priest. And I am shocked. I am shocked because tough as the nuns were who ran my school, if there was even a hint of anyone getting hurt, mistreated or sexually harassed - the person responsible would be found and dealt with immediately. Once a classmate slugged me in the face - the teacher grabbed the kid, hauled him to the principal's office and both our parents were immediately summoned.
To be fair, there were times when it felt more like a gulag than a school, like when I got into trouble when I dared submit an editorial questioning what the real motive was for raising money during Mission Month. But mostly the nuns and teachers of St. Mary's have been figures of rectitude and respect. They did right by me and they taught me to do right even when the people I were supposed to depend on kept failing me.
And to think I used to go around saying I was agnostic. Now I wake up at 7am every Sunday so I can go to church, even if I've only slept at around 4 a.m. Maybe I'm just contrarian, maybe its my way of honouring those nuns, maybe I became even more Catholic just to aggravate my secular friends.
If my resurgent religiosity is due to the influence of those nuns or even if I'm just doing this to tweak my husband, then why should I be dismayed if someone loses their faith because they were caned at Catholic/Anglican/Public school? If the people you'd been taught to respect and look up to all your life suddenly turn around and betray you, then why shouldn't you reject them and everything that they represent?
I'm dismayed because I think people who have experienced these things are being hurt twice: first by the people who committed these crimes and second, by their own disillusionment. When they say they have no faith, they allow their anger and hurt and humiliation blind them to the good things as well - and yes, there ARE good things.
To people who claim to be atheist because they can't ever imagine what they might have in common with their religious brethren, I'm sorry, but you can't see the forest for the fundamentalists. I'm dismayed when you assume that people's failings are God's failings and that because you can't make sense of the world, it must be because there is no Higher Being and therefore no Higher Purpose.
I'm dismayed because such thinking leads to cynicism instead of clarity. You'd think that once we'd all figured out that there's no one else here - just us - that we would be more responsible for our actions. That we would do the right thing just because it was the right thing to do instead of - I don't know - because we feared God's wrath or didn't want to be on permanent rotisserie setting in the afterlife.
Perhaps atheists have more faith in human beings than I do, because I think that we would only find other excuses to be stupid and mean to one another. I'm sorry my beloved secularists: wars will still happen in God-less paradise, bombs will still be thrown, people will still be hurt and inexplicably horrible things will still happen - but for other reasons.
And when something good does happens, we won't even feel good about it - we'll just poison it with bile. The LA Times reported the "miraculous" recovery of a mother who apparently died while giving birth to what seemed a stillborn baby on Christmas Eve. The husband prays like crazy - and voila! - the baby starts breathing. And just when they're wheeling the mom away her vital signs return. You'd think that the husband would be flooded with good wishes from commenters. Instead he was called ungrateful for not acknowledging the doctors' hard work - that it was purely Science that made this recovery possible. He was also called a religious idiot. "If there was a God, wouldn't He have made sure that this didn't happen in the first place?"
Well if God was there in that delivery room, or some Angel, then you could well imagine Him telling that troll, "You're welcome. And you know what, next time you're in a clinch let me know, okay?"
It's not that I don't have faith in human beings - if I didn't then why am I still shocked when someone jumps the queue? I'm just not foolish enough to think that as humans, we alone are sufficient. That we've figured it all out. That this body is all there is, that what we see or touch or buy or eat or crap out of our rear ends is the sum of all that's real. If that is the totality of our experience then what the hell kind of a life is that? Furthermore, if faith is irrelevant then why did we invent it?
I believe because despite my own inherent cynicism, even when I was agnostic teetering toward atheist, I was never abandoned. I could list the three specific incidents in my life when I felt so hopelessly lost but then something happened that let me know - without a doubt - that there was a God and boy, did He love me. I could but I won't because I know that someone somewhere out there will miss the point and say, "You moron, it was science that did it. You hear me? Science!" even if science had nothing to do with it.
I'll finish with this excerpt from David Foster Wallace's Kenyon College commencement address:
There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
Like I said, I love atheists.
And yet I'm a believer, though not the wear it on your sleeve kind, nor the type who thinks that anyone else who doesn't share my beliefs is on the express lane to hell.
I'm the kind who thinks that the ones who should have a toasty little tete a tete with Satan are the ones who say things like "(Disaster-plagued country) deserved what it got because it (swore a pact with the devil to gain independence/harbours homosexuals/some other wildly preposterous reason)," while never knowing what it's like to have the walls come tumbling over your head or watch the flood waters rise and your entire home wash away, or lose a loved one without any warning.
Call me a Cafeteria Catholic and I'll probably say yes - if it means that I sometimes disagree with the Pope, or if I believe that what a person decides to do with their body is their business and not anyone else's. You can also call me that if it means someone who firmly believes in the separation of church and state.
But if by Cafeteria Catholic you mean someone who's only Catholic when it's easy, then I will probably tell you to get lost. Because its not easy, especially when you're always on the defensive, when people continually wonder if you are part of a system that has been responsible for horrible abuse and therefore somehow condone it.
There was a time when I didn't have to worry if I asked people for prayers that it might devolve into an argument, or if I sent someone a greeting card that said, "Merry Christmas!" that I was offending them. Would I be offended if my Hindu friends wished me happy Diwali, or if my Muslim friends wished me a lovely Eid ul-Fitr? Of course not - I'd probably respond with a namaste or salaam.
One of the great ironies I've experienced is that I was never cussed out for being a Christian when I lived in a predominantly Muslim country. I respected their beliefs even though I disagreed with some of their practices, but all in all we were happy to focus on the things that were common to us. Yet I remember a secular friend of mine - a man who never raised his voice - morphing into the Hulk when I mentioned that I was Catholic. I'd never experienced such venom in my life and so even though he eventually changed back into Bruce Banner, I kinda stayed away after that.
Shouty people always freak me out, even the religious ones. I've had a few people knocking on my door asking me if I found Jesus and stuff and while I understand that they are obliged to do this, I get really angry when I ask them if they could leave because I'd just come in from a downpour and I'd really like to change into some dry clothes and they think that I'm not serious.
I also get angry when they look at me and automatically think I'm an easy target because I'm polite and unassuming and I work at home and aren't I exactly the kind of lonely housewife that they're looking for? And when they see me losing my patience they think they can reel me in by saying, "Don't you agree that God hates fags?" That's when I say, "I've read the Bible twice over and studied theology for half my life. If you want to debate scripture with me, then bring it. But this is my house and I won't tolerate that kind of hate speech."
Or something to that effect. I wonder if my secular or atheist friends assume that just because I am a Christian, that means I have some kind of wacko agenda, that I want to ban the teaching of evolution in schools and that I will believe in any kind of mumbo jumbo. "Are you kidding me?" I'd say before launching into a long defense of my Catholic education where the curriculum included (yes) evolution and a whole heap of other things, like rudimentary sex ed in the second grade.
So I shake my head when I hear about people making a disgrace of their faith (any faith!) by using it to justify their intolerance, their ignorance, their greed and calumny, or to push whatever insane agenda they're trying to push. It astounds me when people who so clearly do not have right on their side would often invoke God as the patron, nay, instigator of their cause.
Yet I also shake my head when people who do not believe in God, those who often invoke Reason as their supreme deity and Intellectual Rigor as their faith, could make the simplistic mistake of blaming all the world's ills on religion. Those who assume that there must be no God if you consider the horrors that are committed in His Name - if He could smite someone, wouldn't He smite them already?
"If there is a God, " my husband once said, "I'd like to have a word with Him." Maybe he imagines that he could intellectually shish-kebob the Almighty with the laser point of his brain. In my inadequate way, I try to explain that the ills of the world are mainly due to Man's doing - our innate ability to turn everything we touch into shit - and that is because we have Free Will. Man has an equal capacity for good and evil, and which way we turn is completely up to us.
"I can't accept that when things are good you thank God, but when things are bad you blame people. If He were responsible for the good, wouldn't He be equally responsible for the bad? If He were omniscient and omnipotent, why didn't He realise that people would become evil? Why doesn't He intervene when disasters happen?" This is when I am at a loss - why indeed? Why didn't God send a well-timed thunderbolt in Hitler's or Stalin's way? Why does He allow innocent people to be hurt everyday? Why? Why? Why?
To tell you the truth, I don't know. If I said God's ways were mysterious, my husband would probably call bullshit.
***
I only recently learned about how children once had to endure corporal punishment in schools (religious and otherwise) in this country. I also learned that an in-law who went to Catholic school was sexually harassed by the principal who was also a priest. And I am shocked. I am shocked because tough as the nuns were who ran my school, if there was even a hint of anyone getting hurt, mistreated or sexually harassed - the person responsible would be found and dealt with immediately. Once a classmate slugged me in the face - the teacher grabbed the kid, hauled him to the principal's office and both our parents were immediately summoned.
To be fair, there were times when it felt more like a gulag than a school, like when I got into trouble when I dared submit an editorial questioning what the real motive was for raising money during Mission Month. But mostly the nuns and teachers of St. Mary's have been figures of rectitude and respect. They did right by me and they taught me to do right even when the people I were supposed to depend on kept failing me.
And to think I used to go around saying I was agnostic. Now I wake up at 7am every Sunday so I can go to church, even if I've only slept at around 4 a.m. Maybe I'm just contrarian, maybe its my way of honouring those nuns, maybe I became even more Catholic just to aggravate my secular friends.
If my resurgent religiosity is due to the influence of those nuns or even if I'm just doing this to tweak my husband, then why should I be dismayed if someone loses their faith because they were caned at Catholic/Anglican/Public school? If the people you'd been taught to respect and look up to all your life suddenly turn around and betray you, then why shouldn't you reject them and everything that they represent?
I'm dismayed because I think people who have experienced these things are being hurt twice: first by the people who committed these crimes and second, by their own disillusionment. When they say they have no faith, they allow their anger and hurt and humiliation blind them to the good things as well - and yes, there ARE good things.
To people who claim to be atheist because they can't ever imagine what they might have in common with their religious brethren, I'm sorry, but you can't see the forest for the fundamentalists. I'm dismayed when you assume that people's failings are God's failings and that because you can't make sense of the world, it must be because there is no Higher Being and therefore no Higher Purpose.
I'm dismayed because such thinking leads to cynicism instead of clarity. You'd think that once we'd all figured out that there's no one else here - just us - that we would be more responsible for our actions. That we would do the right thing just because it was the right thing to do instead of - I don't know - because we feared God's wrath or didn't want to be on permanent rotisserie setting in the afterlife.
Perhaps atheists have more faith in human beings than I do, because I think that we would only find other excuses to be stupid and mean to one another. I'm sorry my beloved secularists: wars will still happen in God-less paradise, bombs will still be thrown, people will still be hurt and inexplicably horrible things will still happen - but for other reasons.
And when something good does happens, we won't even feel good about it - we'll just poison it with bile. The LA Times reported the "miraculous" recovery of a mother who apparently died while giving birth to what seemed a stillborn baby on Christmas Eve. The husband prays like crazy - and voila! - the baby starts breathing. And just when they're wheeling the mom away her vital signs return. You'd think that the husband would be flooded with good wishes from commenters. Instead he was called ungrateful for not acknowledging the doctors' hard work - that it was purely Science that made this recovery possible. He was also called a religious idiot. "If there was a God, wouldn't He have made sure that this didn't happen in the first place?"
Well if God was there in that delivery room, or some Angel, then you could well imagine Him telling that troll, "You're welcome. And you know what, next time you're in a clinch let me know, okay?"
It's not that I don't have faith in human beings - if I didn't then why am I still shocked when someone jumps the queue? I'm just not foolish enough to think that as humans, we alone are sufficient. That we've figured it all out. That this body is all there is, that what we see or touch or buy or eat or crap out of our rear ends is the sum of all that's real. If that is the totality of our experience then what the hell kind of a life is that? Furthermore, if faith is irrelevant then why did we invent it?
I believe because despite my own inherent cynicism, even when I was agnostic teetering toward atheist, I was never abandoned. I could list the three specific incidents in my life when I felt so hopelessly lost but then something happened that let me know - without a doubt - that there was a God and boy, did He love me. I could but I won't because I know that someone somewhere out there will miss the point and say, "You moron, it was science that did it. You hear me? Science!" even if science had nothing to do with it.
I'll finish with this excerpt from David Foster Wallace's Kenyon College commencement address:
There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
Like I said, I love atheists.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
A Valentine's Day Letter
hey beautiful :)
makes me think of the rolling stones song that goes, "you can't always get what you want/ you can't always get what you want/ but you get what you need."
funny how one learns to make peace with the stuff one can't have. to be truthful, i had myself a bit of a cry a few nights ago because this wasn't exactly the way i had planned my big day to turn out. for one thing, no one from my family will be attending, in fact i only have one friend who will be showing up. my maid of honour will be gijs' sister instead of one of you girls. it won't be in a church because gijs hasn't been baptised. there won't be a cake, or a reception or any chance of my dad giving me away (i don't think he even knows because it seems he hasn't opened his email and he hasn't called). i haven't been able to talk to my mom either because she had the phone disconnected(!) - though i did get get a valentine's card with "best regards to you and your handsome husband."
i mean, i'm all about making it basic because we're not doing great financially but i wish that at least the bride's side wouldn't be just one person and whatever farm animal chose to wander in from the field that day. it almost makes me think that there will be a similar scene at my funeral, where we would probably have to hire professional mourners just to make it seem that i would be missed. or if the money's still tight we could just fire the dirge singers and play a recording of 'eleanor rigby'.
anyway, i realise that i have only myself to blame for the state of things because (a) i moved to new zealand (b) i suck at making friends here (c) neither i nor gijs earn enough to be able to afford to fly anyone over (d) we did it on such short notice because (e) i decided to go ahead and fall in love with a european which entails all sorts of bureaucratic hassles, like a seven-month wait to just get our marriage license validated for the eu.
it was the last bit that largely determined the when and how of our nuptials. if we didn't marry early enough to give the bureaucratic machine some lead time to start running, it could mean that gijs would turn down every job offer from any country that would not allow me to gain residency. all this during a global financial crisis that's looking bleaker by the minute. the thought that this young man (who's cutting off the circulation in my left arm as i write this) could seriously damage his future because of me, was more than enough persuasion than i needed to put aside my childhood plans of swanning down the aisle in satin and brocade. we would just have to cut costs while creating something memorable.
and yet because its always hard to settle, i find myself standing outside bridal boutiques and staring madly at the designer dresses the way a diabetic stares at frosted chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles on top. i did buy a pretty dress, but an inexpensive one that was one size too big and could used at a hundred other events. then i proceeded to ruin it by stitching ribbons on until it looked like a home economics project gone horribly wrong. in short, i found myself obsessing over the tiniest details when it came to the things that I could control.
in any case i found myself praying, "please lord, i'm going crazy thinking about the things i can't have. could you just flip a switch somewhere so i can just learn to accept things as they are and just enjoy it for what it is - which is already a great gift." i wish i could say that i felt a great peace settle over me after that, but in an hour I was off looking at hair accessories because dammit, they don't have hairdressers in akaroa (or at least ones who answer their phone) and if i'm just going to get a french twist then i want a fascinator or a tiara or something that would make me stand out beside my statuesque maid of honour! but just my luck, all the shops are closed.
it seems that the more i want something, the more it flies out of my reach. and its true - i only found gijs after i'd resigned myself to a long boring spinsterhood where i would eventually expire and be mistaken by dogs for kibble. i look back at all the guys i could have wound up with (all mostly young fathers now :)) and how badly I wanted each of them to be "the one" and how crazy i got when i realised that they weren't. like the dress i butchered, i tried to make them fit me even when it was clear that they didn't. and now i'm thanking the almighty over and over that he didn't give me what i want, because if he did then it would have been an utter disaster.
instead i got someone who was contrary to my idea of what a good boyfriend would be. someone who didn't look good on paper, who didn't share in any of my obsessions and defied all of my expectations. someone whose unabashed lack of religion all but makes my dream of a beautiful catholic ceremony impossible. and yet there's no one else that i would rather spend the rest of my life with (even though a catholic ceremony would have solved the whole lack of guests on the bride's side thing because then we could just hijack people who were attending mass anyway. then i'd line up at the entrance with the padre and thank all the strangers for attending my wedding :) )
but some things apparently can't be compromised. when i said none too convincingly that a plain wedding band would do, gijs put his foot down and said, "no, we're getting the ring you want. i saw your face light up when you found that platinum one with the diamond and that's what we're gonna get. or something like it." so he got me a palladium ring with a diamond custom-made, eventhough at that point his bank account was close to zero. needless to say, i don't think a more beautiful ring was ever made.
i know i won't get the wedding of my dreams, but it will be something more meaningful and memorable. like i said, all the shops were closed today and i was beginning to slide into, "can't i ever get a break?" territory. but as gijs and i were walking we found a nondescript shop that sold old-style ribbons like the hairclips i used to wear as a kid. it turns out that the shop was run by a true-blue artist from korea who makes absolutely gorgeous ribbon flowers by hand. she said she could custom design me a fascinator that would match my dress. and that she would do this for twenty dollars. twenty dollars - that's like five pounds for something really unique and special, and a fraction of what i would have paid at the shops if they had been opened.
seems to me that this whole not getting what you want thing is turning out to be a pretty good deal.
love,
lee-yan
makes me think of the rolling stones song that goes, "you can't always get what you want/ you can't always get what you want/ but you get what you need."
funny how one learns to make peace with the stuff one can't have. to be truthful, i had myself a bit of a cry a few nights ago because this wasn't exactly the way i had planned my big day to turn out. for one thing, no one from my family will be attending, in fact i only have one friend who will be showing up. my maid of honour will be gijs' sister instead of one of you girls. it won't be in a church because gijs hasn't been baptised. there won't be a cake, or a reception or any chance of my dad giving me away (i don't think he even knows because it seems he hasn't opened his email and he hasn't called). i haven't been able to talk to my mom either because she had the phone disconnected(!) - though i did get get a valentine's card with "best regards to you and your handsome husband."
i mean, i'm all about making it basic because we're not doing great financially but i wish that at least the bride's side wouldn't be just one person and whatever farm animal chose to wander in from the field that day. it almost makes me think that there will be a similar scene at my funeral, where we would probably have to hire professional mourners just to make it seem that i would be missed. or if the money's still tight we could just fire the dirge singers and play a recording of 'eleanor rigby'.
anyway, i realise that i have only myself to blame for the state of things because (a) i moved to new zealand (b) i suck at making friends here (c) neither i nor gijs earn enough to be able to afford to fly anyone over (d) we did it on such short notice because (e) i decided to go ahead and fall in love with a european which entails all sorts of bureaucratic hassles, like a seven-month wait to just get our marriage license validated for the eu.
it was the last bit that largely determined the when and how of our nuptials. if we didn't marry early enough to give the bureaucratic machine some lead time to start running, it could mean that gijs would turn down every job offer from any country that would not allow me to gain residency. all this during a global financial crisis that's looking bleaker by the minute. the thought that this young man (who's cutting off the circulation in my left arm as i write this) could seriously damage his future because of me, was more than enough persuasion than i needed to put aside my childhood plans of swanning down the aisle in satin and brocade. we would just have to cut costs while creating something memorable.
and yet because its always hard to settle, i find myself standing outside bridal boutiques and staring madly at the designer dresses the way a diabetic stares at frosted chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles on top. i did buy a pretty dress, but an inexpensive one that was one size too big and could used at a hundred other events. then i proceeded to ruin it by stitching ribbons on until it looked like a home economics project gone horribly wrong. in short, i found myself obsessing over the tiniest details when it came to the things that I could control.
in any case i found myself praying, "please lord, i'm going crazy thinking about the things i can't have. could you just flip a switch somewhere so i can just learn to accept things as they are and just enjoy it for what it is - which is already a great gift." i wish i could say that i felt a great peace settle over me after that, but in an hour I was off looking at hair accessories because dammit, they don't have hairdressers in akaroa (or at least ones who answer their phone) and if i'm just going to get a french twist then i want a fascinator or a tiara or something that would make me stand out beside my statuesque maid of honour! but just my luck, all the shops are closed.
it seems that the more i want something, the more it flies out of my reach. and its true - i only found gijs after i'd resigned myself to a long boring spinsterhood where i would eventually expire and be mistaken by dogs for kibble. i look back at all the guys i could have wound up with (all mostly young fathers now :)) and how badly I wanted each of them to be "the one" and how crazy i got when i realised that they weren't. like the dress i butchered, i tried to make them fit me even when it was clear that they didn't. and now i'm thanking the almighty over and over that he didn't give me what i want, because if he did then it would have been an utter disaster.
instead i got someone who was contrary to my idea of what a good boyfriend would be. someone who didn't look good on paper, who didn't share in any of my obsessions and defied all of my expectations. someone whose unabashed lack of religion all but makes my dream of a beautiful catholic ceremony impossible. and yet there's no one else that i would rather spend the rest of my life with (even though a catholic ceremony would have solved the whole lack of guests on the bride's side thing because then we could just hijack people who were attending mass anyway. then i'd line up at the entrance with the padre and thank all the strangers for attending my wedding :) )
but some things apparently can't be compromised. when i said none too convincingly that a plain wedding band would do, gijs put his foot down and said, "no, we're getting the ring you want. i saw your face light up when you found that platinum one with the diamond and that's what we're gonna get. or something like it." so he got me a palladium ring with a diamond custom-made, eventhough at that point his bank account was close to zero. needless to say, i don't think a more beautiful ring was ever made.
i know i won't get the wedding of my dreams, but it will be something more meaningful and memorable. like i said, all the shops were closed today and i was beginning to slide into, "can't i ever get a break?" territory. but as gijs and i were walking we found a nondescript shop that sold old-style ribbons like the hairclips i used to wear as a kid. it turns out that the shop was run by a true-blue artist from korea who makes absolutely gorgeous ribbon flowers by hand. she said she could custom design me a fascinator that would match my dress. and that she would do this for twenty dollars. twenty dollars - that's like five pounds for something really unique and special, and a fraction of what i would have paid at the shops if they had been opened.
seems to me that this whole not getting what you want thing is turning out to be a pretty good deal.
love,
lee-yan
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Who throws a shoe, honestly?
Well apparently this guy does. Apart from testing George Bush's reflexes, the Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi earned wide-spread praise in the Arab world and basically just made my morning if not the rest of my week. Al-Zaidi reportedly shouted, “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” while he hurled his footwear at the soon-to-be-former U.S. President during a press event.
Of course this is really embarrassing if you think about it. It raises all sorts of questions about the security at press conferences attended by outgoing heads of state, particularly one that was supposed to highlight recent security gains. And of course, throwing your shoe at someone goes against deeply-held Iraqi values of hospitality - hospitality I might add, that is accorded even to sworn enemies.
And yet the act is also unfailingly eloquent on so many levels. First, consider the metaphorical possibilities - from these boots are made for walking to handing someone their walking papers shoes. And then, there's the inherent drama of the act itself - which recalled anecdotes of guests, lovers or spouses who had overstayed their welcome and found themselves and their belongings thrown out on the curb. But mainly, there's the comedic aspect - the surrealism of it all. Reading the account, I felt as though I were watching a Fellini film, with W. as the kid who had exasperated his father's patience to the point that he was going to get his ass summarily handed to him.
Click ahead to 3:30.
The whole shoe-throwing thing got everybody's attention and united Iraqis across ethnic and religious lines. It didn't matter where you came from or what you believed - Iraq had had enough. And then I thought, if militant extremists really wanted to get their message across, why not throw shoes instead of bombs?
But while I alternated between mirth and dismay (because the last episode of the Daily Show for this year had just aired and I would have given anything to see Jon Stewart's take on this) I couldn't help but also feel a little sorry for W. I mean, ever since Obama was elected, he's been going through the motions - he can't even hold his head up anymore. It must have been the worst day of W.'s life, to be confronted like that. Back home, if someone had been disgraced as he had been, we would just lay off and avoid eye contact until they got the message. But to have someone throw their shoe at you while you've nothing to look forward to but a lifetime of ignominy? Well, that's just like kicking the dog when he's down.
Oops.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The Seat Perilous
One of the things that never cease to surprise me here in New Zealand is how much the 6 degrees to Kevin Bacon rule applies. For the uninitiated, its a game where you try to link the actor Kevin Bacon to anyone else in Hollywood within six degrees - the entertainment value comes from how discovering how easy it is. I know I shouldn't be surprised because (A) I live in Auckland - which is about one-fifth of the population of Manila, and (B) there are absolutely no ghettos here - folks who want to cluster together and form various (insert ethnicity here)-towns simply don't meet with much success.
So unlike back home where high walls, barbed wire and round-the-clock security guards pretty much ensure that even the mildly affluent will never have to interact with the hoi polloi except in a strictly service-based capacity - here in New Zealand you get thrown right into the jumble of humanity. One minute you may find yourself picking up the pace to avoid the resident foul-mouthed-crazy-guy-in-a-Santa-hat (whose aggressive demeanor topped by festive headgear is an essay in holiday irony all by itself) and the next you realise that you had spent three months working with the Kiwi equivalent of David Axelrod. Okay, maybe not David Axelrod but I shall henceforth refer to him as "the Dude".
It all started innocently enough. The first time I came into the Dude's office was so we could suss out some logistics related to getting our project done on time. He offered to let me sit in the gnarly, high-backed chair that occupied one corner of his office in a converted villa on Symonds Street. It was the sort of chair where you imagine a man in a smoking jacket would retire to ponder whether he should hunt stag or pheasant in the morning - all the while taking long, luxurious puffs on his pipe. However it was also in such a state of wear - upholstery cracked everywhere, yellow foam showing through in so many places - that it took on an aura of malevolence; it was the only unabashedly dirty thing in this fastidiously-kept room.
He must have sensed my discomfort because he started laughing and told me how this office used to belong to former Prime Minister Helen Clark when she was still a professor at Auckland University. He described how the one thing that hadn't changed through the years was that chair and how probably dozens of blissfully unaware students had plopped themselves down on it nary the wiser of its particular history. "Maybe if you sit on it," he said with a sly twinkle, "You'll feel unearthly powers start to take hold of you." Or something to that effect. Considering that I have a special terror for Faustian bargains, I steered clear of that chair - though it did serve once or twice as a convenient place for me to fling my messenger bag - and we got down to business.
To cut the story short, the project was (largely) finished recently and I wrote the Dude a message on his Facebook wall wishing him kudos for his presentation. I couldn't help but see other messages wishing him well on his upcoming trip to Wellington. I just assumed that he was getting an award or honour - it never crossed my mind that he was moving there for work because, after all he was the driver of the project and we still had some work to do. Or maybe I was just in denial. Today, I was forwarded an email saying that the Dude had handed in his resignation and that he been appointed Senior Ministerial Advisor.
My thoughts returned to the chair and the irrational feelings it provoked in me two months ago. In my recollection, each rip and tear had taken on a more sinister aspect - they weren't just rips anymore, they were gashes. The yellow foam that had burst through the cracked upholstery now resembled pus bubbling from a cankered sore. The space between the back and the seat - the innocent repository for breadcrumbs, lost change and all the missing socks that you thought had vanished into thin air - was now a vortex that consumed anything that dared get close to its gravitational field. I suddenly remembered making a nervous joke about being swallowed up by it and never making it out alive.
With these thoughts running through my head, I wrote the Dude another note - this time conveying my congratulations as well as stating the obvious accusation, "YOU SAT IN THE CHAIR, DIDN"T YOU???"
Saturday, December 06, 2008
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