Baby's First Eucharist

When Adam and I have our first (and hopefully ONLY) child in about seven years, guess what I'm going to get? JUST GUESS!

I submit to you: the Wee Believers My Mass Kit. That's right-- it's a tiny kid's version of a priest's tools for the Eucharist.

How perfect is this? Little kids love to imitate their parents, especially their parents' vocations. When I was little I LOVED visiting my dad's lab at the university. I was thrilled when his grad students threw dry ice across the floor to make me laugh, or when my dad let me wash out the beakers, or when he showed me how to run a gel. He even let me wear a lab coat that went all the way down to the floor! It was soooooo cool. If either Adam or I happened to be a doctor, we'd get our kid a stethoscope; if one of us became a truck driver, we'd go out and buy our son or daughter some toy trucks. So this seems perfect. Too perfect.

Wait, what's this I see on the "about" section of the above webpage?

"In speaking with priests and even a well-respected Bishop of the Church, we learned that it was a toy mass kit made in the early 40’s and 50’s that instilled their first calling to become priests. We plan on following up, as quickly as the process will allow, with more products, especially ones that our daughters will enjoy." [Emphasis mine]

Oh, I forgot. This is a Catholic company, so only little boys are supposed to want to be priests. (A pop-up at the site also contains a proclaimation from the Pope calling the Mass Kit an "ideal gift for young boys.")

Well, bah humbug, Wee Believers. If I have a girl, I'm going to buy one of these toy kits for my DAUGHTER. Then I'm going to let her play dress-up in her daddy's cassock and take pictures of her giving toy communion wafers to her stuffer animals (or, knowing her father, her GI Joe action figures). And then I'm going to SEND THOSE PICTURES TO YOU. It might be worth having more than one child just so I can eventually get a girl and pull this off.

The Walker-McCluskeys: using our children to subvert sexist religious ideas since 2017! :P

A Little Light Snarking

If you love snark, but you've already read Cleolinda Jones' Twilight snark eight million times and you've grown weary of waiting for our own brilliant Claire to post a new installment, then have I got the snark for you!

Try Slacktivist's Right Behind snark on the abominable Left Behind series. It's bad writing, bad theology, bad morals, and bad sexual puns all rolled into one!

Oh, dear. However am I going to find time to actually WORK today with such wonderful snark all around me?

Demographic Gift Giving

As I'm not a mother, and as I haven't been a little girl in awhile, I wasn't quite prepared for the experience of toy shopping for Christmas this year. My husband's aunt has seven kids, and the four youngest are very young boys, so we've been looking around for some decent little toys that don't cost an absolute fortune. I've been looking at Toys R Us, K-Mart, and Target, trying to figure out exactly what little kids like these days. (Apparently, most toys now are tie-ins from movies and/or television programs. Who knew?)

But at all three of these online venues, I've been astonished to discover that each toy is assigned an appropriate gender. Toys are tagged as either "for boys" or "for girls," and even if you attempt to eschew gender entirely by narrowing your search to, say, toys for kids of certain ages, or toys in a certain price rage, each toy is still tagged, either in the product description or in the "similar items" box, as a boys' toy or a girls' toy.

Now, I get that boys and girls are different, and that they like different sorts of things. Gender is not necessarily ALL a social construct; when I was little, I really did like Barbies and dress-up clothes and Easy Bake Ovens. (That last one drove my mom nuts; she'd angrily dismiss my pleas for an EBO with the insistence that I "just use the REAL Bake Oven in the kitchen!")

But, see, even though I was a really girly girl, I also would have liked a lot of the toys that are currently listed as "for boys'". Examples:

-Lego Star Wars Separatists' Shuttle (Are you kidding me? Star Wars is AWESOME. And since when are Legos "for boys"?)

-Nerf N-Strike Longshot (I loved gun-like stuff when I was little, mostly because my mom really didn't like me to have that sort of thing. She's pretty nonviolent on the whole.)

-Megatech Radio Controlled Airship (How cool is this thing?)

-Apples to Apples (Wha? I am completely unsure how this game is gendered in any way. In fact, I'm unsure as to how this really qualifies as a child's toy.)

-My First Craftsman ATV Ride-On (Dude, I would have killed other children in this thing.)

These are just a few of the "boys' toys" I would have loved to have as a little girl.

Now, Toys R Us seems to at least attempt to refrain from categorizing toys by gender overtly, though I don't know what to make of the fact that they have an entire category for "Tween Girls" and not for their male tween counterparts.

The entire purpose of this little exercise is not that gender is evil or whatever. I was a little girl who loved pink and sparkles and My Little Ponies, despite my mother's best efforts to help me branch out. (Because my mother was so open about letting me be who I wanted to be, however, I also loved matchbox cars and squirt guns and riding my bike in the dirt, and I never really developed the sense that I had to like or do certain things just because I was a girl.)

Really, my point here is to critique how and why we shop for gifts based on one small facet of a person's identity. Every year we're given advice on "Great gifts for women" or "What dudes want" or "Twenty-five presents for the teenager in your life" or "Guaranteed gifts for grandmas." And my question is always: who the heck needs these lists? Who is buying gifts for people about whom they seem to know nothing other than their age or gender?

The recent uproar over the New York Times' gift guide for people of color underscores this pretty severely. While it's shocking to imagine that people think this way, it's also the natural extension of a holiday gift industry that assumes all women (or Baby Boomers, or mothers, or Asians) like the same sorts of things. Demographics are a silly way to give gifts, not only because people are inevitably very different within age, gender, or generational or racial groups, but also because it tends to reveal how little the gift-giver knows about the object of his or her attempted generosity.

I'm much more comfortable with the gift lists built around people's actual interests: "Gift ideas for the wine enthusiast," perhaps, or "What to get your football fan for Christmas." This assumes that, while you may not know the intimate details of this person's desires, you are reasonably certain  about at least one of their interests. All wine enthusiasts are not the same, but at least we know that all of them like wine. That's not something you can say for all men, or all black people, or all boys between the ages of seven and ten.

Direct from me to you, here's Philosophy's Christmas Gift Guide...

If you can't think of what to get someone for Christmas:

1. Call and ask one of his/her close family members.

2. Call and ask one of his/her close friends.

3. Call and ask THE RECIPIENT, for goodness sakes. We're all adults here. Or, if there are children involved, you can bet they are just DYING to tell you exactly what they want for Christmas. They may even give you an illustrated list. Not that I ever did that as a child or anything...

See? No assumptions based on gender or age or birthdate or whatever. Now you can move on to the biggest challenge of the holiday season: wrapping these damn things. Can someone tell me how to properly wrap a puppy?

Back to the Blackboard

I'm going back to school!

...well, sort of.

Since I obviously can't go back full-time yet (someone needs to earn that dough), and since it costs a heckuva lot of money to enroll as a part-time student, I'm going to take advantage of the seminary's policy allowing spouses of full-time students to audit one course each semester without cost. Normally it would cost more than $500 to audit a course, but I get it for FREEEEEE!

I'm auditing Introduction to New Testament, and here's the best part: Adam is also taking that class (although he's taking it because, y'know, it's part of his degree and all)! We can sit next to one another and pass notes! We can talk about the readings together! We can study together! (I'm not technically able to have my work graded, since I'm not paying for the privilege of having a learned person critique my efforts, but I can still write the essays on my own, and Adam says that if I ask really nicely, Father Koenig might even let me take the exams and stuff.)

I'm so so so excited to be going to class again!

And yes, I'm aware that this is pathetic.

Archbishop of Blah

My husband has been invited to attend a lecture by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Tuesday. (It's pretty cool-- he had to get security clearance from the UN and everything!) This makes me annoyed, because if I didn't have to go to work, I could accompany him. And then I could tell the Archbishop what I think of him to his face.

See, I have a pretty conflicted view of the dear Archbishop. On the one hand, he has made several wonderful statements on the need to teach evolution in schools, on the irrationality of the Iraq war (and the need for pacifism all over the world), and the incompatibility of purely free-market politics with the Christian ideal. He's fairly liberal as theologians go-- maybe not for the Episcopal Church, but overall, at least. And he has sometimes been criticized for being too "easy" on us Episcopalians when we do things like ordain gay people, which I guess is nice.

But some of his recent statements have perturbed me. Last month, the diocese of L.A. elected a woman as one of their bishops. This woman happened to be a lesbian, although I hardly think her sexual identity is relevant to the discussion of her candidacy for the position. However, the Archbishop seemed to think it was relevant, as he released a statement criticizing this move. However, it did not occur to him to release a statement condemning the bill in Uganda, made public that very same week, which would make homosexuality punishable by death. Nor did he think to condemn the various conservative Anglican churches in Africa that have refused to speak out against the bill.

I am also irritated that the Archbishop feels he has any authority over us whatsoever. I hate to break this to him, but he is the Primate of the Church of ENGLAND. He may be the symbolic head of the worldwide Communion, but he certainly is not the de facto leader of the Episcopal Church. We have our own Primate-- the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church-- and her name is Katherine Schori. The Archbishop doesn't get to whine to us if he doesn't like what we're doing, because guess what? THIS IS NOT HIS CHURCH. What we do here has no bearing on what he does over there. Just because we ordain gay people doesn't mean any other Anglican church must. That's what's so great about the Anglican Communion-- we can all be friends while maintaining separate theological positions on different ideas.

Rowan Williams seems like a pretty smart guy, and I'd like to tell him how I feel, because I think he would genuinely want to hear me out. But I can't tell him, because I have to work!

Sigh.

Man, I can't wait to go back to school. It'll be so fun to get to talk and write about religion every day! :D

Challenge: Name My Uterine Accessory!

So I'm reading this IUD Livejournal group page, and apparently a lot of women name their IUDs. No, I'm serious. They give them names, since they're going to be spending a lot of time with those devices over the course of the baby-free part of their lives. And unlike many of the women there, I have a Paragard, which means that instead of just five years with this sucker, I've got TWELVE. That's only four years shorter than the time I've known my youngest sister.

So: I need a name for it, I guess.

Suggestions?

I'm leaning towards "Lily", for some reason, but then part of me thinks it ought to have a non-girly name. A man's name. Like... "Earl."

Welcome, 2010!

Ah, the start of a new year! It's kinda weird to write the date without a zero in the front, but it's also pretty cool that we've made it ten years into this millenium! Doesn't it seem like only yesterday that we were all freaked out by Y2K?

Anyways, I shouldn't really be making New Year's resolutions-- they're too difficult to keep. So I'm just making a list of the things I'd LIKE to do in 2010 (no pressure, natch):

-Edit my NaNo novel and add a bajillion things to it;

-Ask my sister to do some cover art for my NaNo novel (better wait until her school year is up, or else she probably won't have time);

-Eat less sugar (I love sugar a little too much-- don't want to end up with diabetes, now do I?);

-Express my appreciation to my husband more often for everything he does (cleaning, cooking, decorating, being my love slave, etc.)

-Use fewer parentheses (have you noticed that, like, every sentence I write contains some sort of aside?);

-Come up with a more concrete grad school plan, via contacting profs at different schools, reconnecting with Vassar profs, deciding what I'd like my academic focus to be, doing more school research, deciding what M.A. night classes to take at the seminary next year, etc.;

-Volunteer at the shelter more often.

Auld Lang Syne

Tonight is New Year's Eve, so a lot of people are thinking back across the past year and taking stock of everything that happened. While it's not the end of the decade, though, it's even cooler to think back, as my friend Maya just did on Livejournal, about what has gone down in the past ten years, and how much we've all grown and changed since then.

Ten years ago, I was fourteen years old, and it was my first year in high school. I had braces, I was the first chair flute in the marching band, and I wanted to be a circuit court judge when I grew up.

Since then, I've:

-left public school for a full scholarship to a private boarding school;

-met people from all around the world;

-took the IB exams;

-graduated from said boarding school;

-been accepted to six colleges;

-attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY;

-had numerous boyfriends;

-gotten drunk;

-fallen in love;

-fallen abruptly out of love;

-gone to Canada, France, Britain, and Ireland;

-learned to speak French passably;

-triple majored until illness forced me to choose just one;

-gone crazy;

-met the man of my dreams (who was in my hometown all along!);

-got married;

-moved to New York City;

-adopted two kitties;

-become a professional writer;

-moonlighted as a secretary;

-learned to drive (mostly);

-learned to cook (somewhat);

-learned to keep my mouth shut (well...);

-taken the GRE;

-applied to graduate schools;

-gotten offers from graduate schools;

-turned down graduate schools;

-decided to become a professor;

-painted a bathroom bright pink;

-gone through a five-minute period wherein I believed my husband to be dead and myself to be widowed at 23 (the worst five minutes of my life--after Adam flipped our truck on the freeway and was rushed to the hospital);

-had sex;

-begun to believe in God;

-become active in the Episcopal Church;

-considered becoming a priest.

Looking at this list, what surprises me the most is how much I've done that I always swore I didn't want to do. At fourteen, I didn't ever want to marry anyone, and I didn't want any kids, and I certainly didn't want to become a professor. I hated religion, too, and I resented my mother's faith. And now, look at me! I'm a priest's wife, I'm considering a PhD in religion or theology, I'm relenting on the baby front, and I'm a devout Episcopalian! Crazy!

Here's what I hope for the next ten years:

-Adam finishes seminary and passes his GOEs with flying colors;

-Adam gets a great job;

-I go back to school and get my MA/PhD;

-I get a great job;

-We have a baby after all our schooling is done (though certainly not before);

-We get to move to one of the places we've always talked about (c'mon, Vermont!);

-We get a dog (Adam really wants one...);

-I publish a book (either a novel or an awesome treatise on the Evangelical movement in America).

Here's hoping for an awesome year-- and an awesome ten years, too!

Dear World: Cookies Are Just Fine

Okay, Western society: we need to sit down and have a serious talk about your perceptions of healthy eating.

Call me crazy, but you're sending an awful lot of mixed messages, and many of those messages are being sent to kids. Take, for example, the way you talk about kids and vegetables. "Let's teach our kids healthy eating habits!" we chant enthusiastically. And then I find a print advertisement for Ragu pasta sauce on the back of my Time magazine featuring a young man and his trusty dog; the boy is eating pasta happily, and the dog is clearly pining for some of the meal. The print below says, "Veggies your kid won't want to share. Even with his best friend." Then this proclamation is subtitled thus: "With all-natural Ragu (r), your kids get more than a full serving of veggies tucked into a sauce they'll actually love to eat. What a surprise."

The message here seems to be, "Teach your kids healthy eating habits by pretending as though vegetables are nasty, horrible medicinal doses that have to be hidden in more delicious foods that 'they'll actually love to eat.'" Way to go!

Or take the way we talk to kids about cookies. COOKIES, PEOPLE. When I was little, I liked cookies, and I ate cookies. Hell, I STILL like cookies, and I STILL eat cookies. I made a yummy batch of peanut butter blossoms yesterday. And guess what? I'm pretty physically healthy. Because guess what? Eating sugar will NOT DAMN YOU TO HELL.

In 2007, Cookie Monster, appearing on Martha Stewart's TV show, declared that cookies are a "sometimes food." Well, okay. The "C is for Cookie" song was one of my favorites when I was little, and it didn't turn me into a relentless cookie junkie shooting chocolate chips into my veins with a needle, but whatever, I guess he's right. Cookies are not for breakfast or lunch or dinner (although on special occasions they can be— I'm reminded of the times, one every few years or so, when my mom would let my sisters and I have M&Ms for dinner, and we'd eat so many that we wouldn't want any candy again for weeks at a time). Cookies are for dessert, not for every meal. I guess you're okay, Mr. C.

But then we have these proclamations from the Pennsylvania Medical Society saying you should follow the "Santa Snack Plan" by leaving carrots and celery sticks out for Santa instead of Christmas cookies.

I simply do not understand how anyone thinks this is a healthy message to send to children. "No no, kids, cookies are a sometimes food. Except that if you EVER eat them, even on Christmas, you'll get fat and no one will love you and you'll DIE." Apparently, "sometimes" here is a euphemism for "never."

What exactly do we WANT to teach our kids? We seem to want to teach them that veggies can be delicious and make you feel good, except then we feel like we have to hide them from children or trick our kids into eating them. ("Ha! See, you didn't even know you were eating veggies! Isn't deception delicious?") We want our kids to know how to consume sugar and fat responsibly, except when an opportunity is presented for that to happen (a holiday, a party, an occasional celebration) we slam the cookie jar shut and scream "NEVERRRRRR!"

When I was growing up, my parents made it very clear that soda and candy and cookies were treats, not meals. Soda was something you could have at a friend's birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese, not with your lunch at school. Candy was cool on Halloween, but not every single day. Cookies were for after-dinner dessert, not for a late-night snack. But while we had these rules, we weren't barred from eating sweets entirely. My mom made dozens and dozens of Christmas cookies. She bought five different kinds of soda for our annual Christmas party. Sugar was something to be consumed sparingly, but that didn't mean it wasn't ever to be consumed. Forbidding sugar was impossible; my parents knew that they couldn't control their kids completely, couldn't always be there to make decisions for them, and so they tried to show us how to make choices ourselves. And indeed, when I went off to college, my parents COULDN'T make my food choices for me, and I ended up eating mostly pizza for my entire freshman year. But then, when I started to notice that I felt sick a lot and I had no energy and all I wanted to do was sleep, I was able to make the connection between my ill health and my eating habits, and I started balancing my diet out. And I never would have been able to make those connections if my parents hadn't taught me how.

Honestly, sending mixed signals here is just going to confuse kids, and that confusion isn't going to help make them discerning adults. A kid who learns that cookies are both a "sometimes food" and a disgusting menace is going to end up eating cookies sometimes but feeling horrible about it when they do.

And as we all know, shaming people and making them hate themselves REALLY helps people lose weight and become healthier. REALLY.

[Side note: in regards to the above article on fatness and Santa, I am highly skeptical about the accuracy of their "1.4 pounds per year" data. Yes, people— clearly, this is why I only weigh 33.6 pounds. They probably mean "the average adult over thirty" or something like that, but what they said was "the average person," which would even seem to encompass childhood, a time when ONLY gaining that much weight is dangerous, indeed.]

Philosophy: By The Numbers

GPA: 3.6
IQ: 159
Height: 5'2''
Weight: 98 lbs.
Favorite numbers: anything even (but especially 10 and 20)
Languages spoken: 2
School systems attended (from Kindergarten to college): 4
Cats: 5 (4 in permanant residence at my parents' home, one temporarily crashing at their place until I become truly employed)
Foreign countries visited: 5
Jobs applied for: 0
Grad schools applied to: 2
Grad schools accepted at: 1
Grad schools attended: 0
Chance of life failure: 67.2%

Best Thing Ever!

Adam and I have saved up, and I got some Amazon.com gift certificates from work, and so we're finally ready. It's finally time.

We're getting a Wii!!!!!

So: what games should I get? I don't know about many of them, other than Wii Fit, of course, and we're obviously going to get that one.

Stupid stupid stupid!

I'm pretty seriously pissed.

Many of you will recall my cat Charlotte's terrible illness this past summer-- the result of a bad reaction to a rabies vaccine. I was hoping to avoid vaccinating her again, but New York State law requires her to be given a rabies vaccine every three years.

So I was thinking that the vet would give us a letter of exception stating that Charlotte doesn't have to have this vaccine due to her allergy, but apparently our vet (who is otherwise wonderful) wants us to TRY AGAIN before she writes a letter to this effect. Basically, she wants to wait and see if Charlotte has a bad reaction to a different type of rabies vaccine before she excuses her from future inoculation. (And if she was using PureVax, the most hypoallergenic vaccination on the market, I wouldn't mind, but PureVax is a one-year vaccine, and New York State only allows three-year ones.)

I am incensed. What benefit, exactly, is to be gained by trying this again? I happen to know that initial vaccinations are almost always sufficient to protect an indoor cat for life, and that boosters are given "just to be sure," not because they're necessary. My cat lives in a 4th floor apartment-- she will never be outside again-- with her sister, a cat who is also an indoor pet and has been vaccinated against rabies herself. It is highly improbable that my cat will ever get rabies. So what is the point here, when testing this again might make her sick, or even kill her?

This is so stupid. And you know, the most frustrating part is: I don't hate vaccines. I'm not one of those people. I understand how they work, so I'm not worried about "overwhelming the immune system" or any of that other mumbo-jumbo that people without any grasp of modern medicine like to spout. I believe in vaccination. I believe it saves lives.

But I also believe that someone with a DOCUMENTED allergy to the vaccine should be excepted from vaccination laws. And as I've said before, if this were a CHILD, the doctors would be falling over themselves to assure me that the vaccination wasn't necessary. When I was little, it turned out that I was allergic to the vaccine for whooping cough. I got sick, my mom complained, I got better, they promised I wouldn't ever have to have it again. The fact that Charlotte is a small cat instead of a small human doesn't change the fact that I am wholly responsible for her well-being, and thus am unprepared to purposefully subject her to a process that has demonstrated to be inappropriate for her.

Argh!!