November 22, 2005
A reply from PZ at Phayngula to a reply to one of his posts from me (Got that?):
#49860: PZ Myers — 11/19 at 10:24 PM
Ummm, atheist here. Guess who’s quite familiar with gritting his teeth and smiling?
I wouldn’t play at one-upmanship with a promising young guy like PZ, but if I did, I’d be telling him that I was a girl in Catholic school for years before he was an atheist, even if he was born that way. (Insert cackling and creaking of rockingchair.)
Make no mistake: I was a devout young kid. I loved the way church made me feel; I honestly felt lighter, that walking-on-air clichè, after a Saturday trip to the confessional, even if I did have to invent sins on principle sometimes. I studiously followed the Latin in the missal Grammy Adams gave me, all through every Mass. Singing (in the shower) or even remembering some of those hymns and Masses we sang still makes me high. First Communion was a great big deal, though I must allow that my chief memory of the day was my first taste of raw scallion dipped in salt, a grownup treat, at the party my parents threw afterward. That was, between one thing and another, the year I became an adventurous eater.
But mostly that was the year those Waitaminnit moments started happening in school. Maybe it was because we’d reached the Age of Reason, seven, when the Church starts holding you accountable for your sins (including mortal — none of that juvenile-penalties stuff for them) or maybe it was that for the first time, school was all day instead of half a day. In first grade, Sister Jean (pronounced zhohn) Marie managed to teach us all to read and write, or at least print, and all the usual stuff plus elementary French just for fun, in a half-day shift because hey, it was the Baby Boom and things got crowded sometimes. In second grade, suddenly things weren’t so much fun. There was more emphasis on sitting with our knees together — just the girls, of course — and walking in line and being silent when told to. Oh yeah, and reading “with expression.” When we took turns reading those stupid readers aloud, we were supposed to “read with expression.” I had never in my short life heard anyone talk that way, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” — and had no clue what sort of “expression” was expected.
Sister Eleanor Marie, unlike Sister Jean Marie, called me “Veronica” instead of “Ronnie.” I found it unsettling. If I got Veronica’d at home it meant I was in deep shit. And in hindsight, I figure Sister Eleanor Marie just plain disliked me. She provided me with that Waitaminnit the day she decided to do Desk Inspection.
We had desks that year that were separate chairs and tables with little shelves under the tabletops for books. Mine was a mess. I had to cram books plus Kleenex plus a bag for used Kleenex (those allergies) and, oh, pencils and crayons and all that stuff into this cramped space, and I’m not exactly of a Zen aesthetic by nature anyway. Maybe she gave us a chance to clean up and I was absorbed in reading something, I forget. But my desk was a mess inside. I knew where things were, but it wasn’t neat. She didn’t just inspect our desks; she made us show them for everyone to see. And of course when she got to mine, she wasn’t pleased. She made me back away — I think I was even making a pitiful attempt at hiding the mess — and told me and the hooting class that “The state of your desk is the state of your soul!!”
Deep in my head, that little voice said, “Wait. That’s not right.” I knew I was in better shape than that. And I knew, though it took me days to get the words around it, that she’d done me wrong with that lie and that ridicule.
Somewhere in that year, along with the intensive prep for First Communion and First Confession (which happened the afternoon before, just to be on the safe side I guess) I read “The Night People vs. Creeping Meatballism” too, remember. I suspect the first seeds of subversion were planted that year in my till-then-innocent soul.
And I learned to grit my teeth, and even smile when necessary (and when it was absolutely necessary to not smile, necessary instead to look duly chastened) and be silent. Be silent in all subjection, I suppose.
Posted by Ron Sullivan |
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November 21, 2005
Well, maybe he wouldn’t. But this column from Susan Ives of the San Antonio Express-News is a nice slap at Intelligent Design from, in some respects, the other side.
Speaking as an old laddermonkey, I’m hoping Prof. Myers is feeling OK today, and speaking as an old nurse, I’m also hoping he’s listened to some of his blog-reply friends and got that damned wrist X-rayed. Whoever he goes to will want to palpate that lump on the professorial head, too, I’d bet. Gently, gently.
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November 20, 2005
Oh, come now. I have much more hair.
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November 18, 2005
Junior high, to those of you with US public school backgropunds, and it was rather more fun than a clarifying click generally is.
I grew up in Harrisburg, but was born north of there, in the (anthracite) coal region. I prized my out-of-town connections. My uncle Jackie had given me one of those “automatic” pencils, imprinted with the name and address of a relative’s car-repair shop in Girardville. (The smell of fresh rubber still gives me flashbacks of the place.)
Sixth or seventh grade. We were usually seated alphabetically, so a kid named Billy Schell was right in front of me most years. (They shuffled our class of 60 in various combinations between two rooms from year to year, I guess so no one would get bored.) There was some weird energy between him and me; I never did quite understand it.
The teacher (Da Nun, whose name was, honest, Sister Mary Aloysius) stepped out of the room for some reason, leaving us with instructions to shut up and work. probably phrased differently. Billy reached behind his back and grabbed that pencil out of the pencil groove on top of my desk. Pissed me off, he did—I couldn’t replace it easily. I grabbed his wrist so he wouldn’t get away with my pencil.
Now, I spent much of my asthmatic childhood using a hand-held nebulizer to inhale epinephrine solution. I carried the damned fragile weird thing with me most of the time—it was glass, about six inches tall, with an intricate little set of glass twists inside, two rubber corks, and a squeeze bulb to make it go. Bigger than a perfume atomizer; you had to use your whole hand to pump it, and it took several sprays every time. So I developed rather a strong grip without ever noticing, until then.
When I grabbed Billy’s wrist, I just wanted him to drop the damned pencil. But he wouldn’t, and he’d let me get him in a mild hammerlock, with his arm twisted up behind him. He stood up, and I stood up with him. I didn’t do anything else, but I didn’t let go either. Actually it didn’t occur to me to let go. Billy was a sandy-haired freckley kid, and was turning bright red at this point. The rest of the class was noticing, and the boys especially started hooting. “Lookitthat, she’s beating him up, she’s twisting his arm!”
I was about to indignantly deny that—though scrawny and sickly, I wasn’t real dainty even then, and if I’d been twisting his arm it would’ve been rather more strenuous—when we heard the Footsteps of Doom in the hall, that unmistakeable stomp of nunshoes and the jingle of the big rosary she had looped in her belt.
Billy dropped the pencil. I reflexively sat down. When the nun came in, Billy was still half-standing and bright red. Of course Sister Aloysius had heard the hoots and racket and I was sure I was in trouble. She demanded that Billy, obviously the focus of it all, tell her what had happened.
He wouldn’t. I was baffled. it wasn’t as if were were buddies and he wouldn’t rat me out—there was plenty of that in that class. He got detention and I got away clean and nobody else ratted me out either, also surprising because I was never particularly popular, and I knew some of the girls thought I was a snob and most thought I was Too Smart.
Honest to the god of your choice, it wasn’t until somebody else told me that I realized it was just that Billy would never admit to anyone, including Da Nun, that he’d been “beaten up” by a girl.
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November 18, 2005
When my mother had to explain what we in the early Pleistocene called “The Facts* of Life” to me, she resorted to a little blue book called Mother’s Little Helper. (It had a counterpart for boys, a little red book called Listen, Son.) It was an instructional book put out by the Catholic Church, about sex and reproduction. Sort of. For your contextualizing pleasure, this was, oh, maybe 1962.
Now, my parents were, at least when I was young, relatively progressive. They were good Catholics and all, put us all in Catholic school, church every Sunday and novenas for Mom and me on Sunday night, regular donations, that stuff. Still, when the younger kids wanted to go to Lutheran Bible School with all their little friends, Mom looked into the course of study, saw that it was all Old Testament and nothing they couldn’t have seen in Catholic school, and sent them. (Think of it: a situation where sending your kids to Lutheran Bible School was progressive. Lord, Lord.) The pastor was pissed off at her for this, and actually scolded her (though not by name) from the pulpit one Sunday, the old prick. But she stood her ground. Go Mom!
In our stratum, which I’ll call lower middle-class, the Church was where you went for help — we never thought of seeing a shrink, for example, and of course a Church source was logical for “FoL” instruction. Mom herself had been an only child, born when her mother was 40, and raised, from what she told me, without much information about sex, to such a degree that she was scared half to death when she had her first baby — me — because nobody had told her quite what to expect. So she took it upon herself to find a helpful book; the idea was she was supposed to read it to me.
Well, she started out doing so, and got embarrassed enough to just let me read it myself after a chapter or two. What embarrassed her wasn’t the subject; she shrugged and said, “I think you probably know all this by now, so how about if just read it for yourself?” What embarrassed her, and ticked me off when I thought about it later, was that the thing was so damned uninformative. There was lots of talk about God’s wishes and sanctity and such, but I don’t recall “penis” or “vagina” or “vulva” in it, and certainly the word “clitoris” never appeared. Never mind the possibility of lusting (not that “lust” was exactly explained either) after a member of one’s own sex.
There was some stuff about menstruation, no surprise, and it was pretty discouraging. I don’t think it went as far as “Eve’s curse” (because of course that was all about subjection and painful childbirth) but the one sentence that stuck with me was approximately, “You can do nothing to stop the flow, and you would only hurt yourself if you could.”
A friend of mine has argued that if there were a loving God, not only would She have made chocolate-flavored semen, but She’d have given us one more sphincter. Can’t quarrel with that.
What I am certain about, because I found the thing and took it back to the dorm with me one year for a more critical reading when I was being that English lit. major, was that the closest to mentioning actually having sex was the phrase “the marital embrace.” As in explaining that children were conceived during “the marital embrace.” That was it; that was as specific as it got. An ordinary seventh-grade kid at the time could be expected to know what “embrace” means — why, a hug, of course, unless one was embracing something abstract like principles.
I re-read that silly thing just to be sure I hadn’t missed anything when I was young and stupid; no, I was right the first time: that book left the reader with the idea that a women became pregnant via hugging. Hugging one’s spouse, of course. That was some official someone’s idea of what girls needed to know about puberty.
Fortunately, my mother was right, and I already knew better than that. I don’t exactly remember where I learned it, either — possibly from my aunt Jean’s antique nursing manuals, which my cousin Jane and I used to dig out of the attic trunks and read on rainy days. Good thing I had street knowledge to fall back on, huh?
*This was enough of a clich that the seventh-grade boys made the word “facts” a sort of dirty word. High times in grade school!
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