Hey Christians: Psalm 109:8-9, Seriously?

If you Christians let one of your own kill my *&&(*ing president - the first one I voted for who made into office, the first one to inspire me at all to care about politics with hope that things might get better someday - I will flip a lid and go from being an evangelical atheist/anti-theist to just driving from house and house and slapping every one of you.

You ARE your brothers keepers! It's not like the extreme religious right are gonna listen to a bisexual, divorced, secular humanist FEMALE like me.



You need to address this in your churches, in your neighborhoods, on your Christian blogs and forums, and everywhere you go. It is not okay to support murder of a legally elected public servant. You can disagree all day: I sure as heck didn't agree with President Churchy McJesus "Let's bomb them all! Tax cuts for the rich; cut services to the poor" Bush. But I never did or would have supported assassination language.

I wrote about this months ago. It's been building. (So have militias and Bible- based cults in America. Hmmm, do you think religion could be behind this?) I'm freaking MAD at this point. Go Psalm yourselves, okay?

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Squinch & Oral Surgery

My first nicknames as a child were "Squinch" and "Nuke". Giggy gave them both to me. She would take our first names and extend them past reason, adding funny sounding morphemes. Then she'd take one of these random extended pieces, and use that as a nickname. For example, a guy we knew named Jared was called "Root", short for "Jaredarooter." A Sara was known as "Sponder", short for "Sarasponder". Nuke came about the same way, (with "nucleosis" added after my given name) but Squinch was a nickname I got for being small.

I remember helping my ballerina aunt move her cigarette-smoke scented scarves and mirors and exotic tropical fish and several persian cats from one apartment to another. I sat in the backseat, over the hump, holding stacks of boxes steady on either side, and a cat carrier on my lap. "Look at her," Giggy commented happily from the driver's seat. "You can just squinch her on in anywhere and she'll fit."

I've been trying to decide when my eating disorders really started. Was it the first time I threw up in 5th grade, when I just wanted to get out of class and wasn't yet concerned with thinness? Was it the first time I specifically took an action - a diet pill, an exercise class, a skipped meal - towards weight control? Or did it start earlier, in my formative years, when I decided the way I was, scabby kneed, tow-headed with bangs I'd cut myself, energetic and smiling, was inherently sinful, evil, and wrong? I think Squinch has something to do with it, but I haven't had the major "click" insight yet that makes it all fall into place neatly in an autobiographical timeline (which would really help make organizing the book easier, if it did.)

I'm about to go have a pudding cup for breakfast, because the thought of chewing after yesterday's dental assault (7 cavities filled and 2 bad teeth extracted - in two hours) makes me want to cry. Plus, I'm not sure if it's a side-effect of the novacaine or the antibiotics, but I woke up puking for about an hour last night. No fun. :( I always feel really odd about throwing up now that I've decided not to be bulimic anymore. For awhile, a few years ago during a prior attempt at health and recovery, I started accidentally-on-purpose giving myself food poisoning, so that I could purge the calories without having to admit to myself that's what I was doing. So now, even though I *really* didn't do a damn thing to make myself throw up, I feel guilty for it. I feel like I benefited from something destructive. Granted, I didn't really eat anything yesterday because my mouth was still bleeding for several hours and the sleeping pills let me knock out for awhile, so it's not like there are any food calories I expelled. I just feel guilty that part of me likes throwing up. (The rest of me is much wiser and recognizes that stomach acid hurts like a mother, and it's what screwed up my teeth in the first place.)

I want to sit down the two overweight women who convinced me I was fat and tell them to fuck off. And I wish I had eggs this morning so I could make soft scrambled eggs with cheese for a gentle-chewing breakfast, instead of jello pudding (yummy though.) I'll try to organize my thoughts for a better post later today. I think the Tylenol PMs are still making my brain all fuzzy. Oh well. I'm going to the doctor's this afternoon to talk about my trouble sleeping. (Boyfriend Dave is concerned I never actually reach REM sleep, with all the trashing about and making funny noises I apparently do in the middle of the night.) Good day, good luck, and I'll do a better post later. Cheers, Anteaters - soon I'll be all better, with healthy teeth, a healthy head, and maybe even 8 hours of sleep in the same night!

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Moving

I'm moving, possibly on Saturday, and I haven't started packing yet (because I have no car and Boyfriend Dave has worked late the past few nights and I have no boxes yet). But I'm getting boxes now and I expect I'll do very little blogging, twittering, etc. (Gosh, I might even have to plant some long-term crops and give up farming for while!)

Let's just say, once the wireless is set up in the new place, this will be the first place I visit. And if the boredom of packing either inspires me with memories of past moves or causes me to seek distraction, I may visit between now and then.

In the meantime, check out the archives! Seriously, I had only two readers when I started this blog in May (has it only been that long?) so a lot of the older posts will be new for most of you. Bear with me as I despise life utterly for a few days of handerchiefed hair and duct-tape roll bracelets.

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Mixed Tape

You probably know by now how much I like lists. (Check out 100 Questions for Christians, if you haven't already.) Today I'd like to start a playlist for the new Angie the Anti-Theist YouTube channel. Maybe once I get some money together, I'll even get a camera and start doing video posts. For now I'd like to get a couple different playlists I can just post as links in the sidebar, and one of these lists will be for Silly Songs, good godless music that makes you chuckle. It doesn't have to apply to atheism, although bonus points if it does.

First of all, I'm gonna have to have a Mr. Deity playlist. And it would just be wrong to waste all the good standup acts from Blasphemy Day. And obviously there will be Atheist Experience clips (although, since there are so many, I'm going to be picky on these to get the best ones).

So, let me get the ball rolling with these, and I'll let you send me cool links of more good stuff, ok? Stuff like...



Here's a favorite song by John R. Butler, with great clips done by cannibalgourmet.




We like the cheese. We like zeppelins. *snort* It's so stupid it's actually funny. (This is where I feel very much like I'm still the tomboy watching Beavis & Butthead cartoons in Brian's basement. Heh heh.)



Four hundred babies!
Ow. I hurt with laughter. I used to abuse the crap out of energy drinks, like four 16-ounce sugar free Rockstars per day. "Uncomfortably energetic" is right.

And it wouldn't be fun if I didn't have Monty Python. (I had an embarassing crush on John Cleese for awhile in high school. Those silly walks!)



Send me funny things!

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Salvation's Kiss

Michael had long dark hair and shockingly blue eyes, and he looked like a colder version of Jesus. I sat on the bench with him, on the side of the mountain in Tennessee, and I told him everything, without once crying. I was 15 and a half and already the stories I told awed and amazed him. He had no idea life could hurt so much.

I think that naivete was part of what made him so beautiful to me. Originally I approached him because, in the whole lame Bible camp I was gonna be stuck in for the next 5 days, he was the kid that looked the most like my friends. "He looks like he listens to Marilyn Manson" I thought, and approached him. He was my best friend from that day until five years later when his new wife told him he couldn't ever talk to me again. That still hurts, and it was years and years ago.

He told me once that talking to me was like getting hit by a Mac truck - my feelings were just too strong, too negative, too much for him. Too much for everyone, I kept being told. I told him my life's story over four hours the day we met, before sloppy joes off trays in the camp's cafeteria. We went whitewater rafting together, splashed in a swimming hole together, and read the Bible together. Over the course of the week I felt more and more the quickened emotional intensity that I'd come to associate with a moving of the Holy Spirit, during each night's worship service - a three hour mini-concert of talented guitarists, pianists, drummers, and singers; each song glorifying God.

That last night, I broke down completely. Standing in the midst of the music hall - a building with wood floors, roof, stage, and wrap-around benches, but open to the starry expanse and the mountain view on two sides - I was brought to my knees with an overwhelming sense of shame and a desperate need for repentance. I cried my heart out into the floor, as my fellow youth group members - a group of teenagers who had barely tolerated each other a week ago - laid hands on me, to comfort me and pray for me.

I asked Jesus to come back into my heart. It was the last of my series of altar call conversions, on July 28, 1998, and it is still the one I take most seriously. I knew then that I was a Christian in my own right, and not just as the child of Christians. This was when I picked Jesus for myself, when I decided I wanted nothing more in this world than to be close to Him. I had always felt a certain sense of inferiority to other Christians, like Michael, who had two-parent homes. Because so much of Christianity is based on the metaphor of a fatherly god, and because I was 15 and had only met my father a handful of times, I felt like verses about "God the Father" were almost an attack on my bastard child state.

That night Michael, and a few others from his North Carolina youth group joined mine to pray for me that I would feel God's love in my life, like a father. I never really did, but less than two years after that my dad took me in when my mom kicked me out, and I got to feel my real dad's love, such as he knew how to give. And how it came about that my mom told me I had to find somewhere else to live, midway through my junior of high school, all ties back to Michael and that night.

That night worship lasted not three hours, but five, and I was still one of the last to be there, sobbing on the wood floor. On the walk back to my cabin with Michael after, I was on the greatest endorphin high of my life. The closest I've felt to it in the years since was the amazing rush of love and joy that came over me at the birth of my son, after four solid days of labor. Michael and I knew we probably wouldn't see each other again - we lived 1200 miles away and were both 15. He had already told me he was going to save his first real kiss for the altar - a kind of supreme premarital celibacy. I was about equal parts impressed and incredulous. I was already having sex.

But that night, standing outside my cabin, my white shoes scuffed with the red clay earth, Michael kissed my cheek. It planted an instaneous and almost insatiable need for him to actually kiss me. It was like a spell, that kiss. and I think some part of me thought that if I could earn the kiss of someone so pure, maybe I wasn't all bad.


... (I'm gonna write stuff here some other day! Thanks for bearing with me, Anteaters. Writing a book is hard.)...


I tortured myself with a false image of Michael for years. He was supposed to be this perfect, passionate, evangelical, beautiful poet, who never sinned or looked at other girls. But of course he wasn't perfect. Although he was a beautiful, passionate, and evangelical poet, he also looked at other girls. He got girlfriends. He kissed a girl named Venus and I felt hollow inside.

Nineteen months after I met him, I hopped in the red '88 Ford Escort hatchback and drove twelve hours to see Michael, and to get him to kiss me. He did, but it wasn't enough to save me. By the time I arrived, my mom had already torn through my phone book and figured out where I was heading. Michael's mom knew I was coming before he did. I didn't understand how my mom knew where I was going, since I hadn't even come up with the idea myself. My ex-boyfriend Ron had suggested it, because I told him I had to get away from my mom and my life, I was going absolutely crazy.

....(on the way back my car broke and i hitch hiked with all my stuff the rest of the way home, including a night spent in a 7-11 bathroom because it was indoors and i could lock it to sleep for a couple hours)...

By the time I made it home, it wasn't home anymore. Mom had gone past livid in the days I'd been gone, and moved on to an almost austere serenity. She was not touched by my plight; it was the consequence of my actions. I had brought this on myself, and she'd now say she never even kicked me out, that I left voluntarily. (Yeah, right.)

---
This is all really rough, y'all. I'll fill it in and smooth it out. Damn, I forgot how "in love" with that boy I really was. Huh. In the end he married a preacher's daughter, one who fell into the "good preacher's kid" model, instead of the bad one I fell into.

I am (really) glad it didn't work out though, because I'd be very surprised if he's not still evangelical, and I love being an atheist. (Love it, you hear?!)

The picture at the top is of the actual swimming hole in Ducktown, Tennessee where I spent a fun afternoon with my youth group. :) I have pictures of all us girls wearing our one-piece bathing suits with shorts over them. Ah, Bible camp.

This was the first time I ever went to camp. My brother and sister both went with our choir before he got sent away and we moved to Iowa, but mom says I was too young to go. Oh, and I originally didn't want to go to camp, because I was pretty much convinced that church and Christians were lame at this point, but Giggy told me that she would pay for it and that there was whitewater rafting. Yes, I got sucked back into Christianity for another ten years over whitewater rafting.

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God of the Gas Tank

I remember the night I Googled "Carol Balizet" and found cults. I read about the Attleboro sect, and this one strange incident where they ran out of gas and spent three days "laying hands" on the car, praying the Lord would fill their tank. This was at the beginning of my process, and I was still in a lot of denial about how bad my grandma's teachings really were. Then a couple weeks ago, during my first bout of "no internet", I read this in her book "Born in Zion":

There was really no gas at all. The needle was way down past the "E" and even with the great milage the van gets, there was no way we could make it to Lakeland. Bertha closed her eyes and put her hand on the dashboard.

"We're your servants, Lord, and we want to go where you send us, but we can't make it without a miracle. We ask you to meet our need now. In the name of Jesus, let there be gas," she prayed and the needle on the gas gauge jumped up past the quarter-full mark. Glory! Then she put a paper napkin over the gauge so we couldn't see it, and we started out. We drove all the way, singing and laughing, both of us absolutely positive we'd make it to Lakeland without a problem. We did.

The Attleboro followers were no crazier than my grandma, and in fact they were basing most of their lives on her teachings. I just hadn't realized she'd taught "God will fill your gas tank" so explicitly. She also promises that labor will be painless (throughout the book, she refuses to refer to a laboring woman as in "pain"; she prefers the word "discomfort"), that having a homebirth will strengthen your marriage (despite half the people mentioned in the book going through divorces by the time the second and third editions were printed), and that - as long as you are in a "blessable" position - God will give you absolutely everything you need, right down to gas in your tank.

In many ways, fictional god was the most loving parent I had, or thought I had. My mother was extremely detached during my early childhood, and I barely have any memories of her at all prior to moving away from Gig when I was 9. She swears she was around more, but I don't remember it. I remember her being busy writing her dissertation, and I remember standing outside her bedroom, staring at the closed door.

Gig was insane. She was also a lot of fun, and I enjoyed running errands with her and just sort of basking in her presence. She was so charming and disarming, she could insult you and get you to laugh right along with her.* She would hold me in her rocking chair and sing "Peace, Peace" to me when I had nightmares or was upset. Yet I know she didn't love me, or anyone else. She made a deal with God to kill my mother during her labor with my brother (he reneged). Just as my mom watched me struggle to walk with a limp and a cane, so did she. Just as my mother ignored all my emotional, mental health, and physical needs, so did Gig. The difference was that Gig drank her own Koolaid, but my mother didn't; she just served it to us.

No one made sure my teeth had been brushed, or my homework had been done. I could scarcely get the adults to notice me, but they told me that God loved me, that he was always with me, and that he knew me intimately. The illusion of god was more loving than the reality of either of the women raising me. God was supposed to do everything for me that they didn't - care for me, heal me, comfort me, love me. I can't be the only one that held onto God because he was better than the alternatives I'd been given.

A lot of times people make comments about religion being for the poor, but for me religion was for the poor in spirit.** "A broken heart and a contrite spirit, you have yet to deny" I sang in church and "He's got the whole world in his hands". So I believed and I prayed for the things I needed, instead of finding them some other way. I prayed for money, for a boyfriend, for a better car and better job. I prayed for my hip to get better, for my suicidalism to fade, for god to take my freewill away from me, so I wouldn't offend or disappoint him further. And when god failed to do those things for me, I turned the blame inward and sought out - How am I not blessable? What am I doing wrong that is preventing God from moving in my life?

I thought if I just got right with God, I'd have enough gas to make it home.

* Example: Gig told an African-American nurse she worked with during the 60s "Well, they say black is beautiful but you're kind of brown, so I guess you're just pretty."

**There are atheists in foxholes and below the poverty line.

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Meat, Flesh, Bag of Bones

Excerpt from my book up ahead. It's in a very different writing style, but since it sounds all "present tense" and I'm not presently starving myself, I thought I'd get that clearly stated from the outset.

Warning: This post contains glamorizations of eating disorders (which will be destroyed later in the book). If you believe reading this may trigger unhealthy thoughts or actions in your life, please refrain from reading and enjoy a post from the archives to the right instead. Have a safe and healthy day.

I'm feeling hungry now, but it's a detached thing - far away. I can sit back and clinically observe how the acid makes a pinched feeling here, or how it bubbles there. It doesn't seem natural to me that I should eat something at this point - I can make the bubbles go away without resorting to that. A tums, a teaspoon of toothpaste, or baking soda from the box in the fridge - any one of those will make the bubbles go away if I want them to, but I don't really want them to. On some level, some part of me realizes that I am killing myself. I am eating away at my own flesh, like some kind of masturbatory cannibalism. On another level, I am disassociated from my flesh, my meat, my bag of bones, and the detached, out-of-body, accutely analytical thinking in my head isn't touched by the pain in my belly. The pain is merely a reminder, "Most people eat" not an injunction that I should eat myself (or rather I, myself, should eat. I'm eating myself right now.)

The spiritual and religious go on fasts to feel closer to god, and there are known nuerological reactions to food depirvation. I suppose for me, it's more about what I don't feel than what I do. Numb is a kind of solace after pain. There is a certain muzzy clarity that seems to come after long enough without food. Lines are sharper, lights are brighter, cold is so much colder. Yet all that is part of the meat, the flesh, the bag of bones I carry around with me. None of it touches me, the ephimeral bodiless entity of the brain. I feel as if one strong gust of wind could pick me up and take me far, far, far away from here and all my troubles. If I am weightless, maybe I'll be free.

The granwing sensation in my belly, of acid teeth on weak flesh, ebbs and flows in nearly rhythmic contractions of the stomach lining. I feel it, but it doesn't feel like pain, only like some sharper kind of pleasure. An acid belch rises in my chest, and my heart burns with bile. Maybe I had too many energy drinks today. I'll have to find some toothpaste or a tums, quickly. I scour through my purse, empty soda straw wrappers and a crushed pack of cigarettes, a tin of mints and a water bottle, a diary full of someone else's words. Pieces of gum coming out of their paper robes, sullied by loose tobacco in the lining of my purse. Damn. No tums or toothpaste.

I stand up - I have my body back now, and the meat, the flesh, the bag of bones wants my attention. My cocyx is sore from sitting on the stone bench outside one of my university classes for too long, smoking too many menthol cigarettes and pretending I'm not human. I pull the layers of sweaters I'm wearing closer to my skin, my flesh, my bag of bones. There's a pinprick of pain stabbing right behind my eyes, and for a moment everything swims in my vision, while I wait for my flesh to adjust to the shock of standing up again. I put out my cigarette, pick up the cold metal can of an energy drink, in my cold bony hands, and walk towards my next class. On the way, I stop at a vending machine and buy a Milky Way. I hadn't meant to do that - It just happened. I was only planning to buy some peanuts or crackers or something somewhat healthy, but as if on autopilot, my fingers fumbled the coins into the slot and pushed the code for a rush of sugar. The sloshing acid in my chest is still burning, and I'm shivering against a cold no one else seems to feel.

I'm so unbeleivably tired and yet uncomfortably energetic. No rest for the wicked. There's too much to do, and it's never really safe to sleep. As I approach the social science building, I am winded. I put my hand to my chest and feel the drumbeat pulse of my overworked heart. The tempo is far too fast, but this is not unusual. There are always problems with the meat. The flesh is weak and the bag on these bones is still too large. I have another twenty minutes before class starts. I duck into a computer lab, and log onto my Livejournal. There I enter the safe and welcoming world of my proanorexic sisters and brothers. They're cold, too. Their hearts are burning and beating too fast, just like mine. And they know the rush and high and thrill starvation can bring. Most of them have fasted for longer than I have; some have never fasted at all. Whether they've used diet pills, energy drinks, laxatives, purgatives, exercise, thinspiration or reverse thinspiration, they understand my quest for something pure. A body unmarred by curve or dimple; a plate, white and clean, untouched by something so lowly and mortal as food. They understand why I despise this meat, this flesh, this pathetic bag of bones. They know just what it feels like to have a voice in the back of their head telling them it will never,ever, ever be good enough. They know the release that comes from believing that voice, the letting-go feeling when you stop trying to fight your insecurities and simply embrace them. They feel my pain. Before I met them, I didn't even know how to confess I felt any.
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My grandmother taught that there were worlds or realms - the spirit realm and the flesh realm. Flesh was always bad. I can't help feeling like that has to mean something in the origin of my eating disorder. Starving was a way of making myself less about my body - that evil, human, sinful natured, Adam and Eve descended, recently molested and victimized body - and more about my thoughts, and the voices in my head. After all, that's what I was taught to do.

Fortune cookie I just opened from last night's Chinese take-out:

"You constantly struggle for self-improvement." Heh, coincidence and one-size-fits-all platitudes. In the old days, I would have thought God was communicating with me through deserts.

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