Complaining with Kay, Episode 23: My confession.

How I went from being a religious Catholic to, well, not being a religious Catholic.  Mentioned in this episode: The Cartoon Bible, the God Helmet, Simple Partial Seizures of a part of the brain I can’t quite recall.

Link.

You don’t need to put on a show. You’re already my friend.

You don’t need to impress me.
You don’t need to make me laugh.
You don’t need to be smarter than me,
You don’t need to know about nuclear physics or Schonberg.
You don’t need to be tall or be good at chess,
You don’t need to be psychic or in touch with God.
You don’t need to be anything but yourself;
You don’t need to put on a show.  You’re already my friend.

Life story

He told his life story to Mrs. Courtly
Who was a widow. 'Let us get married shortly',
He said. 'I am no longer passionate,
But we can have some conversation before it is too late.'
- Stevie Smith

For some reason I feel an urge to tell you who I am.  Why I do not know.

Maybe because in times like these, when the things by which we define ourselves are fragile and prone to falling apart, then, well, it becomes important to state them.

So who am I?

I am a musician: a singer and an actor.  I write poetry and short fiction and a blog.  I am in my late twenties.  I am not all that satisfied with where my career is, but I’m working on making it better and I’m hopeful about it.  I have been married for almost four years and I own two dogs.

I’m time-anxious and usually early or late for things.  I don’t have a driver’s license.  No matter how much I make I never feel like I have enough money.  I make bad decisions.  I count my chickens before they hatch.

I don’t like asking for things.  I don’t like promoting myself.  I have a hard time organizing my own time productively.  I associate the flavour of ginger with illness.  I once ate an entire raw clove of garlic to try to avoid getting  a cold.  (It didn’t work.)  I’m a bit cheap.

I spent the entire month of August in 2005 sleeping on an air mattress in Edmonton, Alberta.  When I was about 17 I stole a manicure set from Eaton’s, and thus feel a little responsible for its collapse.  I own two corsets and a hand-knitted sweater with a dinosaur with glasses on reading a book on it.  I dislike cheese.

I’m sorry I wasn’t a teenager in the 80’s because I naturally have really big hair.  I have never finished a piece of writing longer than about 20 pages to my satisfaction.  I like complaining.  I probably drink more than I should.

I need to buy allergy pills, face cream, and a new toothbrush.  I post videos of my dogs to Youtube.  I spend far too much time on the Internet.  I slept funny and my left shoulder hurts.  I’m a bit lazy.

I do yoga.  I ride a bicycle.  I lost 25-30 pounds this spring.  I have no work for the forseeable future.

I try to be positive and turn setbacks into opportunities.  I envy people who understand manipulation.  I wonder who set this crazy system in motion, if anyone did, and if they’d do it again if they had the chance.

And of course I like lolcats:

Book review: Quiverfull

I finally got my hands on a copy of

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement

by Kathryn Joyce, an investigation into the variety of religious groups who believe that women should a) be subordinate and submissive to men, b) stay out of public life, and c) have as many children as God wants them to.

Curiously enough, God always seems to want them to have one child every 18 months or so from the beginning of their sex lives until menopause or death, whichever comes first.  Now I wonder why that is…

This is a very well-researched, well-written, and sympathetic book.  Joyce doesn’t condemn or mock the women she writes about, but lets them speak for themselves.  Their own words are more than enough to condemn them – Nancy Campbell, for example, of Above Rubies magazine says:

“I don’t dislike the people [Muslims],” she says, but she is worried “since they want to kill all Jews and all Christians and wipe us off the face of the earth, and they want world domination and nothing less…So you see what happens when the Christian church refuses to have children.  That starts filling the earth, instead of what we’re meant to be filling the earth with: a godly seed.”

Putting aside the irony of a Dominionist Christian objecting to anyone wanting world domination, the cluelessness and shallow racism of this passage just jump out.

To me the most disturbing picture to emerge from Quiverfull wasn’t the huge families.  Some people will always choose to have big broods of children, and this isn’t always bad – my father, for example, is the eleventh of twelve – and even if the Quiverfullers get their way and contraception and abortion are banned, people will still find a way to limit their family sizes just like they’ve always done.  It wasn’t even the soul-crushing vision of submissive wifehood pushed by activists like Martha Peace.  Even though that’s pretty bad, as Joyce writes:

…As a lifestyle, being a submissive wife…involves redefining love so that it is not a feeling but a choice that women make day after day.  Beyond being an immature, lust-based emotion that can never truly be satisfied, the idea of a love based on feelings, romance, and attraction, says Peace, is a secular deceit.  Feelings-based love, Peace writes derisively, is like the proverbial pony children always hope for and never receive on Christmas morning…a biblical love is “unconditional” in the sense that it binds a woman to her husband forever, “even if the other person never changes,” and requires her to continue showing him love as a responsibility to God.

By the way, doesn’t this passage remind you  of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex? I’m thinking specifically of the exploration of bourgeois French arranged marriage.  I don’t have a copy on hand, but I recall her quoting a respectable matron, the mother of many children, as admonishing her daughter who didn’t want to marry a man she didn’t love: “My dear, it’s the MAN who loves, not the woman.”

No, what I find the most chilling is the vision of the world promoted by the patriarchs and their female collaborators: one in which individual humans are reduced to cogs in a machine, where one’s individual happiness is subordinate to the needs of the family, the church, the will of God.  If they get their way, we will all be sacrificed to the made-up desires of an imaginary being.  That human beings are capable of turning their backs on all the joyful things about life, to cut off the development of their natural capacities and mold themselves into automatons, and to demand that everyone else do the same, all over nothing – over a complete mirage – is really depressing when you think about it.  What is the point of life if everyone on earth is miserable?

I like being alive.  I like breathing and sleeping and having sex and eating ice cream and exercising and lying in the sun and reading and writing and crying and feeling.  I don’t want to be turned into a laundry-doing, husband-submitting, baby-making machine.  I want to contribute to the world through music and writing, through being a friend and a dog owner and an entertainer.  When I have children, I want to have only as many as I can responsibly care for and have a close and loving relationship with.  (No matter what you say, I don’t see how this is possible – for purely practical if not emotional reasons – if you have 18 of them.)  While Joyce’s book gave me a new understanding of (and more sympathy for) its proponents, it has made me heartily reject the Quiverfull philosophy.

Anyway, it’s a really good and awfully scary book.  I highly recommend it.

Complaining with Kay, Episode 22.5, Literary Supplement: Soldier.

In this episode:
Soldier
“I lied about my wedding ring…”
Two-page story
Sax solo

Music:
“Egyptian Song” (Rupert Davies, arr. and performed by Benjamin Mueller-Heaslip
My dorky piano rendition of “Dream a little dream of me”

Link.

The return!

I’m back!  We spent the weekend at Ben’s parents’ place on Howe Island.  The dogs had a great time, we ate and drank a lot, went on a long boat ride and got totally burned to a crisp.  (Seriously, I think I’m going to get wrinkles about ten years earlier than I would otherwise.)

Madeline got another chance to practice swimming:

As did Gus:

That’s Morton the Golden Retriever in the water and Howie the super-cute little Jack Russell/Schnauzer/something else puppy frolicking with them after Gus gets out.

Complaining with Kay Literary Supplement coming right up…

Remember that whole “Golden Age” thing?

Complaining with Kay, Episode 22: The Rites of Bacchus.

I discover the optimal level of alcohol consumption for listening to music.  Also, how to save the world’s symphonies and opera companies.

Yes, I know that makes two podcasts in a row about booze.

Direct link.

Soldier

Only a small thing, hardly worth mourning
Your unnoticed fallenness outside my door,
To the world you are nothing, worth less than nothing,
Just one thing, soon replaced by one more.

But to me it is momentously foolish.
A waste and a reason to wonder why.
And I think, who has taken this power to decide
When so minor a thing as a tree should die?

One tree more or less, it doesn’t matter,
But seeing your greenery spread in the road,
In spite of the new tree coming tomorrow,
To me the dark leaves seem to shine like blood.

Complaining with Kay, Episode 21: If you take my alcohol away, I WILL kill.

Let’s make a little list:
- econapocalypse
- construction
- garbage strike
- heat wave
- threatened (but mercifully averted) LCBO strike

I explain why taking peoples’ booze away in this situation is just asking for revolution.  Also, why I’m sort of looking forward to getting old.

Link.