It's Time To Stop Shaming People For Having Harmless Fun

This morning, as I was browsing my news app, I came across this article from LADbible.  For the TL;DR version: guy runs right into Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross Station in London, hits the wall pretty hard, shouts "Fuck, it's closed," and runs away.  The article recounts the scene from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in which Harry's unable to get to the platform, speculates that this anonymous prankster was doing it for clout (which makes no sense; his name has not been publicised), and anyway, it happened back in 2018.  And when I saw it on my news app, after the paragraph that ends with "It turned out that—on that occasion—it was because the House Elf Dobby had sealed the door in an attempt to stop Harry from travelling to Hogwarts, rather than the fact that it simply doesn't exist and magic isn't real", there was a one-sentence paragraph that simply read, "Sorry, folks, but it's time to grow up."

While the sentence seems to have disappeared from the article as of this writing, I have to admit that I have a bit of a problem with the fact that it was even there at all.  Regardless of what you think about J.K. Rowling and her transphobia—and wow, that's probably going to be a whole other post on here eventually—I deeply disagree with the idea that being an adult has to mean that the only fun you're allowed to have involves raising children, exchanging pleasantries with co-workers, and occasionally going out to dinner (probably for a work thing).  There's this idea out there that once you reach A Certain Age—and nobody really says what it is, but it's probably somewhere around thirty years old—you have to become dull and boring and just completely give up anything that isn't 100% serious and practical.

Quite frankly, fuck that shit.

As far as I'm concerned, even though we carry the responsibilities of adult life, adults are allowed to be silly.  We're allowed to be creative.  We're even allowed to make utter fools of ourselves in front of other people by making references to pop culture things that have since fallen out of style and/or favour.  I'm actually quite in agreement with the sentiments expressed by Randall Munroe in this xkcd comic—that people who are grown-ups now get to decide what that means to us.  Growing up doesn't have to mean that you never have fun or make people laugh.  It just means that you have different responsibilities and more demands on your time.

Besides, life is hard right now.  The cost of living is unconscionably high.  There are two major conflicts happening with the potential for more, and in most of the world, financial policy seems to be focusing on making sure that all of the money gets funnelled to those who don't need it and away from those who don't have enough.  Climate catastrophe abounds.  So does human tragedy.  We need positive change and we need it yesterday.

We also need to add what joy we can to the world.  As long as we're not harming others, that is more than okay!  Sometimes we need a bit of silliness, laughter, and mirth.  Those who roll their eyes and make snide comments will do so no matter what; personally, if I'm going to encounter the petty unpleasantness of small minds, I'd rather do so in the company of someone who's trying to make the world a better, shinier place, even if it's only temporary.

In the words of one of my favourite Tumblrs...

"It is my solemn and sacred duty to make the vibe as silly as I can, and with your support we could achieve maximum silliness."

Nostalgia

 For better or worse, I'm an older Millennial.  My childhood was filled with bright colours, wild 80's hair, awesome music, weird and sometimes dangerous toys (for example, I knew someone who broke her ankle using a Skip-It, and I myself incurred a number of minor injuries on my childhood best friend's Pogo Ball), and technology that was considerably less advanced than what we have today.  I could never have imagined that touching a spot on a screen would allow me to issue voice commands to my car, telling it what phone number to call or giving it an address for the GPS (on the rare occasion when I have Location Services enabled on my phone, anyway).  Being able to take a small-ish rectangular device out of my pocket to look up practically any bit of useful (or uselesss) information was unthinkable.  Portable computers technically existed—my father had one for work—but there is no way on Earth I'd ever have wanted that thing to be on my lap, because it was really, really heavy; I honestly think that it weighed more than my dog at the time, a big, goofy black Labrador Retriever.  Meanwhile, I'm fairly certain that my current laptop computer weighs only a little more than my violin in its case.  Times have changed.

Life, as they say, seemed simpler then.  But then, it always does to a child.  I'm sure today's kids will be saying much the same thing about our current world as I'm saying about the world as I experienced it in the 80's and 90's.

People love to roast my generation for being nostalgic, but I have to admit, I understand the urge to be nostalgic, even the urge to feel a bit smug about the things that we knew and remember, and the skills that we have, that young people today don't understand or have no reference for.  (I recently saw a post on Tumblr about a fanfic in which there was a DVD-style menu repeating on a VHS tape, which is impossible unless, for some unfathomable and/or trolling-related reason, somebody actually recorded a DVD menu onto a VHS tape.)  Because frankly, we've lived through a lot, and it's natural that many members of my generation—perhaps especially my segment of it, the older ones who are sometimes called "Xennials" or "the Oregon Trail generation"—should be looking back at that time in our lives with a certain amount of longing.  

We weren't expected to be available to anyone and everyone at all hours of the day or night.  Most of us were cared for reasonably well by our parents or other caregivers.  The predominant message about us was that we could change the world, our lives had worth and meaning, and if we worked hard enough, we would be rewarded for it.  And as anyone who hasn't been living as a hermit for the past quarter century or so would know, it hasn't exactly worked out that way.

My generation has gone from being told that we were the hopeful builders of a bright future to being convenient scapegoats for many of the ills of the present.  We're told now that we're the entitled and self-centred destroyers of multiple industries, too lazy to work hard enough to afford a basic home (including apartment rentals), too old to be worth a hand up when we have trouble finding work (many of the most helpful job-finding services and entry-level positions with even half-decent compensation are only available to recent college or university graduates under the age of 30), and overall, just a giant disappointment to the world.  Mental health issues run rampant among Millennials,  and have done so since we were in our 20s or so at least.  Small wonder that so many of us try to find joy where we can, including in silly slang and the memory of a time when we were told that we had value, that our dreams were worth having and chasing, and that if we worked hard enough, we could change the world for the better.

Life isn't easy for most people.  And the 80's and 90's weren't exactly a cakewalk either,  but it's easier to get sentimental about those decades because they're so temporally far away now.  And frankly, I find that it's nice to remember a time when I, and people like me, weren't being blamed for everything that's wrong with the world.  It's nice to remember hope.  Sometimes I'm foolish enough to still feel it.

So, yeah.  Cringe at Millennials for being nostalgic if you must.  (Given our general fondness for self-roasting humour, we may well be cringing right along with you.)  But don't be an asshole about it.  If nothing else, someday there'll be somebody poking fun at you for ridiculous generational stereotypes and nostalgia for the world as it was when you were young.

Potpourri

Last night, when I was talking with my Anglican-born best friend, who is now the music director at a Roman Catholic church (I consider it amusing that we've ended up doing music at churches in each other's denominations of origin), he mentioned that he thinks it's odd that the priest there doesn't believe that God specifically sent Jesus to die.  I laughed and told him, "Welcome to the Catholic mindset."  This might have been a bit of an overstatement, but not necessarily by much.  While what it officially says in the Catechism might be different—and I can't say for sure, since it's been a while since I read it—every bit of what I learned about being Catholic when I was growing up really does seem to include his sacrificial moment as a sort of afterthought.

Sin and hell and all of that were, of course, a part of my religious education as a child and adolescent, but they were never the focus of it.  Neither was what we're told happened at Calvary.  (Well, except for around Lent and Easter Sunday, but that's kind of different.)  The focus was always on what Jesus is supposed to have taught in life—and within that focus, the message was always, "This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you" (as a hymn we used to sing put it).  Even the form of the service seemed to put its emphasis on this: come in singing, hear a few scripture readings (and take part in the responsorial psalm), hear the weekly lecture about whatever the priest had decided was an appropriate topic, pray a bit, sing again, celebrate the Eucharist, sing a bit more, pray again, and go out singing. Even the celebration of the Eucharist seemed to be more of a memorial—"do this in memory of me"—than hammering in the idea of "CHRIST DIED FOR YOU, YOU HORRIBLE ROTTEN SINNER!!!!!"

We were taught to pray, to be kind, to give to the poor, to feed the hungry, to love God and each other, and to live a Christ-like life.  Whether we (or the Roman Catholic Church in general, for that matter) ever really managed to live up to those ideals is up for debate, of course, but that was what we were taught, and I still carry some of those lessons with me.

For all that it's a traditional Catholic belief that the bread and the wine literally become Jesus' body and blood through the miracle of transubstantiation, the sacrificial lamb aspect of the story of Jesus never really seemed to be as front-and-centre as I perceive it as being in many Protestant denominations.  Though admittedly, I could be wrong about the emphasis on Jesus' death.  Still, so much of my childhood religious education was focused on his life that I find the belief that the only reason for his life was to die a horrible death to be...difficult to understand, to say the least.

I guess that part of me will always be, for good or ill, ever-so-slightly Roman Catholic.

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Lately the Norse gods have been calling me.  I don't think that they will ever take me away from my beloved Celtic pantheon, but despite all the negative publicity that the Sons of Odin have been giving the Norse pantheon in recent years, I do believe that there is wisdom and knowledge to be gained there.  While the deity-focused part of my spiritual life is a bit difficult to pin down (to put it as simply as possible, I'm a bit agnostic; I believe that the Gods, if they do exist, reveal themselves to us in the ways that we're most able to understand and accept, and that even if they don't, their stories can still lead us to various real insights and truths), I am always drawn to Goddesses and Gods who are associated with the values of compassion, wisdom, and insight.  And as much as I have heritage that ties me to various Celtic deities and mythological figures, I also have Scandinavian ancestry that links me to the Norse pantheon.  I think that maybe it's time to learn a few things from and about them as well.

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I've also been thinking about the reasons why I turned to Paganism in the first place.

I first heard what I can only describe as the call of the Goddess when I was about thirteen years old, which confused me to no end because at the time I was a pretty devout Catholic.  But (as kids often do, which many adults seem to forget) I had a pretty good bullshit detector, and I couldn't stand hypocrisy.  At about that time, a local Catholic teacher was the defendant in a rather well-publicized trial relating to the sexual abuse of his students.  I had also read several news stories about Catholic priests who had committed similar offenses, and it led to

At about that time, my mother had bought a copy of The 21 Lessons of Merlyn (I know...Llewellyn hasn't got the best reputation as a publisher, and I understand why, but this book did in the end send me down an interesting and challenging path, so I'm thankful for that).  And I had always loved spending time outdoors; I grew up next to a surprisingly large forested area, and I took frequent walks out there, singing so that I wouldn't inadvertently surprise any wildlife that might, er, take exception to being startled by a human.  When I started reading about a kind of spirituality that was more Earth-centred, one that didn't tell me that people were supposed to "subdue the Earth" but instead respect it and be thankful for it...something clicked.  In time, I sought out information about spiritualities that weren't so male-centric and that affirmed that women weren't the vehicle through which sin had entered the world, but that we were every bit as worthy as men to be called by the Divine.

I think I needed that.  And I knew from pretty early on—though for a few years I would deny it—that my path didn't lie solely in Christianity or Paganism, but in some strange mix of both.  It's been more difficult than choosing one or the other would have been.  I won't deny that.  And there are people on both sides of the fence upon which I walk who would say that because I am both, I'm not worthy to be a part of either group—Christians would say that because I experience the Divine as a sort of multifaceted entity (which treads pretty close to a couple of heresies relating to the Holy Trinity, actually) that is One at its centre, but shows many faces to teach many lessons, and many Pagans would say that I don't belong to them either because somehow it's okay to worship Gods from most pantheons, but that it's a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE THING HOW DARE YOU to include Jesus of Nazareth (and of course God the Father and God the Holy Ghost) in worship because Christianity automatically equals evil.

For people who are supposedly free-thinking, there can be a lot of black-and-white thought where anything even remotely Christian is concerned.  I can understand it to a certain extent; I used to think I was superior, too, because I had Broken the Chains of Monotheism and Reached a Higher Consciousness and all that stuff.  I'd learned very quickly to equate Christianity with hypocrisy and hate and jealousy and all sorts of nasty things, especially after the death of Tempest Smith in 2001.

Smith, who was twelve years old when she committed suicide, was the victim of religious-based bullying; she had been bullied for years by her classmates, but eventually the bullying got worse when they learned that she was a Wiccan.  Her bullies used Christianity as a weapon, and eventually she hanged herself in her bedroom.

While I had never been subject to anything even remotely similar to that kind of bullying, I felt that this reflected very badly on Christians in general.  (I was eighteen at the time.)  And then, later that year, the infamous September 11 terrorist attacks happened, and I heard so many Christians blaming all Muslims for the actions of a hate-filled few.  Even my own father did; at the time, he was a big fan of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other hateful conspiracy mongers of their ilk.  In my disgust, I turned even more determinedly towards Paganism, developing some rather bitter feelings towards Christianity as a whole.  It took years, and the invitation of a friend to join the Anglican church choir he directs, to really start resolving those.  And in the past year, since my best friend became the musical director at a Catholic church, I've attended Mass a handful of times and plan to do so again.  It has proven to be extremely thought-provoking.  And though I don't think I can ever completely go back, as I said earlier on, some part of me will always be Roman Catholic.

I think that in the past year, I've come closer to being the Christo-Pagan I've always claimed to be, rather than a Pagan who regularly attends Anglican church services.

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I killed a forest tent caterpillar while I was writing this.  It fell from the ceiling, narrowly missing my mug of tea.  Almost reflexively, I squished it.  I'm not sure how it even got in the house.  As much as I know that in large numbers, they're really bad for the trees (as in they can kill them if the trees are defoliated too many times in a year), I actually feel bad for having done that.

Funny, that.  I have no problem with swatting mosquitoes or blackflies, but squishing a caterpillar evokes feelings of guilt.  Maybe it's because the caterpillar, on its own, presented no danger to me or even to any of the houseplants.  Mosquitoes can spread disease, and their bites are painful and, later, painfully itchy.  Blackflies can spread disease as well, and their bites are every bit as itchy and annoying.  But caterpillars...they're relatively harmless unless they show up in long-term infestations.

And just before my mug came down on top of the caterpillar, it looked at me.  That freaks me out a little.

At least I gave it a quick death.  Still, conscience can strike at the weirdest times.  This may not exactly be a major moral quandary, but it's got me thinking all the same.

Three Lists Of Three Things For Ostara

(I'm aware that Ostara was actually yesterday, but the last week has been kind of awful and I ran out of the necessary time and energy to write.  Nonetheless, here are some of the things that I was thankful for, looking forward to, and intending to work on yesterday.)

Three things to be thankful for:
1. After a week of treatment for a blocked urethra, it looks like the younger of my cats is going to be OK.
2. I have good friends and a (mostly) loving family.
3. I have music to keep me sane—or at least to keep the worst of my depression at bay.

Three things to look forward to:
1. Thunderstorms.
2. Being able to walk barefoot in my backyard again.
3. My community choir's spring concert.

Three things to work on:
1. Help to promote the cause of mental health and access to mental health care and treatment in my community.
2. Finish some of my works in progress—especially an original story that I abandoned for a few years without ever really losing interest in it and a long crossover piece of fan fiction that I've been working on, in one form or another, since 2008.
3. Research and writing on subjects that interest me.  I probably won't ever get the chance to further my post-secondary education, but that doesn't mean that I have to stop learning.

The Power of Stories

We all have stories that we tell to ourselves.

"I would be so much happier if I had a million dollars."

"Someday I'll meet the right person and they'll be so perfect and I'll never be sad or lonely again."

"Everything will be so much better when I lose all that weight."

"People aren't animals."

One way or another, we all have our myths, whether they take the form of ancient stories, religious narratives, tall tales, rumours, urban legends, or common wisdom that may or may not actually be wise.  Among other things, I have my faith, and I do believe that I have good reasons to have it.  But I'm also willing to entertain the notion, if only as a mental exercise, that the atheists may have it right.  I don't believe that we should take anything as absolute truth just because it makes sense to us or we've been told by someone we trust that it's absolutely true.  We should never let anyone else take responsibility for our own thoughts and beliefs. (Even atheists shouldn't, in my opinion, but because of the nature of my spiritual life, I suspect that I may not be the best judge of this.)  In fact, I would argue that to let that happen is a little lazy and extremely irresponsible.

Whether or not our everyday myths stand a chance at being true, and whether or not there actually are Gods, angels, demons, faeries, etc., it just seems like most humans need something bigger than ourselves to believe in.  It doesn't have to be supernatural.  It just has to be bigger than we are in some way, or more important, or something that convinces us that we're right in spite of whatever doubts we might have (regardless of whether we'll admit them), or at least something that gives us the promise of a better life than we currently have.  Something that promises enlightenment, or power, or the possibility of getting what we want.

The power of the stories that we tell to ourselves is immense, and I often wish that it wasn't so frequently misused.  Stories can do tremendous good; they can inspire us to be better people, comfort us when we're sad or lonely, give us hope when we despair, and give us entertainment as well.  But when they're misused, stories can do tremendous harm as well.  They can inspire, or at least be used as an excuse for, some of the worst impulses in human nature.

Never underestimate the power of stories.

Gifts

Look, I know that it's extremely important to a lot of people that they buy the perfect Christmas gift for everybody on their gift list.  (Incidentally, I find the idea of compulsory gifts somewhat ridiculous—yes, even when I'm the one receiving them—but that's a whole other rant.)  And I know that the task can be rather frustrating.  But those articles that list gift suggestions for people based on whether they're women or men are...well, quite frankly, they're getting a little tiresome.

Instead of reducing complex human beings to ridiculous gender stereotypes (women like frilly pink makeup with diamonds, men like computerized power tools with boobs), why not think about the individual to whom you're giving the gift?  What do they like?  What are their interests?  What really matters to them?

On "The Church"

When talking about Christianity, people inevitably end up talking about "the Church," as if all the denominations were still (if they were ever really) all the very same.  But the thing is, despite the fact that all of them talk about this dude named Jesus who said some pretty awesome and radical things about 2000 years ago—and I'm not just using the words "awesome" and "radical" in their 90's slang sense, though those meanings could certainly apply as well—they all have their own different ways of creating and maintaining their communities of faith.  Don't believe me?  Check out Roman Catholic, Eastern Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches and attend their worship services, and you'll see precisely what I mean.

In spite of the many similarities between them, these denominations are not all one.  If they were, there'd be no need to give them different names.  So really, when talking about Christianity, one might more accurately talk about "The Churches" than about "The Church."

I just realized something.

Just now, I was re-reading the post that I wrote on the day of Troy Davis' funeral, and I realized something.  In that post, I refer to "the state of Georgia," but (I hope) it is implicitly understood that I meant its institutions; its government, its legal and judicial systems, etc. rather than its people as a whole.  It seems to me that in general, we tend to refer to provinces, states, entire countries in this way; we talk about "the country of Canada" or "the province of Prince Edward Island" or "the state of North Carolina" and don't actually mean the general population, just the people and systems that run everything.  It is a tendency, I must admit, that I don't particularly like.

I'm not quite sure where I could take this thought, but I thought it was somewhat interesting.

When All Else Fails...

It seems to me that the phrase "when all else fails, read the directions" isn't always a great piece of advice.  Sometimes the directions don't work, or are too vaguely outlined, or, in the worst cases, are set up so that only some people will ever really get the full benefits of whatever we're supposed to be reading the directions for.  Sometimes the best advice can be "when all else fails, completely disregard the directions" or even "when all else fails, forget that there were directions in the first place."

Today's semi-deep thought brought about, of all things, by my tendency to experiment when I'm cooking (or, it seems, deciding on a spiritual path).  Hey, I haven't ever blown up the kitchen, poisoned anybody, or caused a church or sacred grove to spontaneously implode, so I guess that's an optimistic sign. ;)