feature image via Cameron Esposito on Instagram
Hi good morning, I’ve been thinking about the idea of loving your enemies. We watched Passion of the Christ Saturday night (we’re a riot at parties), because Megan’s Catholic and I always want to know what it’s like to believe in Christianity. She kept having to pause it to answer my super basic questions and I had tons of them. At one point in the film — and I’m assuming in the Bible — Jesus talks about loving your enemies, because there’s no reward in only loving those who love you back. I thought I understood and agreed with the basic tenets of most religions when it came to why and how best to love other beings, but that line threw me. I can’t stop thinking about it! I don’t want to love someone who doesn’t love me back — unless they’re my own children maybe? I can’t imagine wanting to. I can’t imagine that loving them would be rewarding, either. And I wonder if this is a flaw or a coping mechanism or an unrealized truth I haven’t found yet, or nothing at all and I should just microwave some lasagna and go watch Buffy.
But mostly! I’m wondering whether or not you’d like to know that I found a solution to the Easter dress/armpit beard conundrum from Friday’s comments! Well, let me tell you. I solved that conundrum by wearing a flowy cardigan situation that covered my beards! Cool. And I accidentally bought a 10lb block of ice instead of a regular bag of crushed ice to make ice cream with on Sunday morning. I just panicked inside the Fry’s and was like IDK LANEIA JUST GRAB THE BLOCK OF ICE I GUESS YOU CAN HAMMER IT APART LATER. It’s because I was wearing heels. I can’t make sense of the world in those heels.
Hope you had a glorious and restorative and hilarious weekend! I hope your Monday is like that .25 second right when a confetti popper is popped, but all day long. [Had to stop myself from typing Love ya! at the end of this intro because this isn’t a blog and we’re all dignified adults here. But it’s true, so.]
You Should Go or Do or Give
+ Support Kazoo! A new kind of magazine for girls!
Queer as in F*ck You
+ Equality Groups Filing Suit Against North Carolina’s Anti-LGBT Law.
Related:
+ Play Looks at the Lives and Experiences of Local LGBT Youth. There’s a video!
+ Should Schools Ask Students About Their Sexual Orientation to Protect LGBT Rights? Hm.
+ Some thoughts on Pee-Wee Herman.
+ Deaf Lesbian Couple Who Were Attacked with a Bat Were Scared to Walk the Streets.
+ Well this is amazing: Feds Spend $6K Studying History of French Lesbian Activism.
+ 5 Things to Know About LGBT Issues in Indonesia.
+ Feelings: Lesbian Couple Say Fostering Has Changed Their Lives.
+ Study Reveals That Schools Need More Data on LGBT Students. ?
+ Samantha Bee Talked to Cameron Esposito and it’s been transcribed so you can read it, so you should do that today right now.
Doll Parts
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Saw This, Thought of You
+ {{whispers}} excuse me {{sprays hairspray on bangs}}
+ Why So Many 20-Somethings Want to Stream Friends.
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+ Why Was 1976 Such an Amazing Year for Horror Movies?
+ Thundercats.
And Finally
Mallory though you deserved this last Friday and she was right, so just in case you missed it then: Happy Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson Friday!
armpit beards 4 ever.
? ?
these lions are supposed to represent armpit beards fyi.
“Should Schools Ask Students About Their Sexual Orientation to Protect LGBT Rights? Hm.”
I work for a company that makes student information systems and we’ve recently begun reporting transgender status to various state/federal governing bodies. As a trans woman, I have so many different personal opinions on the subject and I worry that I might be involved in making the lives of trans and other LGBT students harder by participating in this type of reporting. At the same time, I feel like some of this information reporting could be beneficial by making it easier for teachers to identify their students by their preferred names/gender, etc. I’m not sure what to think of it, but being in this position makes me feel rather uncomfortable.
I suppose for me the issue is that giving reporting tools like these to educators depends entirely on how they use the tools. Given the latest news such as places in NC, I can only imagine these tools being used for more harm than good – but that doesn’t consider the potential paper trail that can follow these students from Kindergarden to 12th grade and beyond either. Yet at the same time, we report other OCR information such as ethnicity and homeless status to governing bodies all the time without issues (that I know of). While acceptance of LGBT individuals is at large on the rise, I feel like without universal support of LGBT rights and civil protections, that it isn’t safe to rely on the educators that have these tools to use them appropriately.
I’d really like to hear some other opinions on the subject. I want to be able to present an opinion to my management at some point on the subject that doesn’t sound like I have a personal bias on the topic (even though that might be hard to do). There are kids at stake after all.
Samantha Bee talked to Cameron Esposito, and my week is already 87% better!
Rather than viewing that 10 lb block of ice as a mistake I think you should rent a cold storage unit, buy about 500 more, build an igloo, and play Polar Explorers for the rest of the week.
I like the way you think.
yeah this is very glass-half-full
Please invite me
Eating lasagna and watching Buffy is pretty much always the right decision.
see that’s what i thought too.
Congrats on solving the dress/armpit beard conundrum.
thanks!
that interview convinced me for 15 minutes that cameron esposito was pregnant and I was so excited but it’s not true.
THEY DON’T EVEN MAKE MATERNITY VESTS
OK sorry I’ll see myself out
Yeah, that is really terrible relationship advice. I’m glad Jesus won’t be writing the You Need Help column.
Rachel is my shepherd.
Hi I’m so late to this comment thread party but re: WEEKENDS
So on Saturday I was going to go DANCING, like at a CLUB, because I’ve been unemployed in Portland for a whole month and have done literally nothing but walk a dog and read the whole time
And on my way out Dog Family was like “lol go to this bar to eat first! It’s VEGAN”
And so I did, and it started raining on the way there, and it got really dark and the street had no streetlights and I tripped in front of a bunch of people, and then when I got to the bar I immediately had a panic attack and walked out
SO! SO. I got vegan pizza, took up an entire booth on a busy night so that I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, and started weeping.
But I Couldn’t Go Home, because Dog Family thought I’d be out until at least midnight and it was only 9:45. They never get time alone because they TRAVEL.
So I wandered around Portland while weeping openly until 11:30. You know as one does.
BUT THEN
THE NEXT DAY
I SAID “FUCK THIS” and immediately started working on a comic about it, but with a few surrealist / magical realism type twists because why make a comic if everyone is human, honestly.
And I’m SO PLEASED with how it’s shaping up and also: sakura brush pens are everything. Seriously everyone who is too lazy to use actual brushes or too afraid of spilling permanent ink in someone else’s house while using brushes (me) should get some brush pens.
I was so iffy on them and damn they really came through.
OK sorry that was really unrelated to this article? I’m just so Psyched about these pens and my current creative Wave Of Energy And Follow Thru.
Also re: wave of energy
For those artists who, like me, have criminally low self esteem and don’t Believe In Themselves
Doing ur rough pencils in a composition note book really like
Takes the pressure off??
It’s just like youre (failing) high-school again! This is just Doodling in the Margins. Stress Free Scribbling.
I’ve been wanting to try some brush pens! Super excited about your wave of energy. Super respect.
I didn’t know Megan’s Catholic! Me too! I used to always use that passage about loving your enemies when people at my church would talk about being pro war and pro death penalty and how much they hated muslims and pretty much all conservative points of view.
Oooooh this is very good and tricky of you. Very wise Mey.
Ah, but with a big block of ice you can re-create the artist Francis Alÿs’s performance piece “Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing” (https://youtu.be/ZedESyQEnMA )
It took me three goes of reading the headline to work out the deaf lesbian couple were not attacked *by* a bat. :-/
Thank you for this perspective Ali! I don’t feel like that’s a healthy relationship model either! I don’t think ‘sinners’ do love people who love them. Man, I really don’t agree with this sentiment at all, but I feel much better about disagreeing with it, now that I’ve seen this excerpt.
I was raised catholic but turned away from religion when I grew older. Thus, my definition of love is disconnected from any religious idea. For the record, I do not rebut faith in general, I just don’t like the institutionalization of it.
This might be a very simplistic viewpoint, but to me love is a feeling which can manifest itself in a number of different ways, be it romantic, platonic, etc.
Therefore, I reject the notion that love is an action within an incentivized system. First off, I don’t want to treat people differently based on my feelings for them. Whether it is my enemy or my friend, ideally I want everyone to treat with respect and dignity. Also, what constitutes an enemy in this context? An enemy might be someone that I disagree in core values with, but that doesn’t mean that they deserve to be treated less. And secondly, the idea of being rewarded for loving someone seems very problematic to me. There is this notion of unconditional love that I also don’t support as in my book love is an irrepressible feeling existing independent of any external factors and therefore is unconditional by nature.
Maybe that’s just me, but I cannot control my feelings, whether it’s love, rage or any other. Of course, how I act on those feelings is within my power but for that the feelings need to exist in the first place. And I am not saying that those feelings can not be influenced and shaped by the way my counterpart behaves towards me, but that comes after the fact.
As a side note re: Catholicism
For reasons that are still mostly unclear, I converted to Catholicism Easter of 2011.
Converting to Catholicism is, by the way, a total pain and involves a lot of classes and also a stranger who has volunteered to be your Godmother.
(At this point I would like to note that, in the spring of 2011, I hadn’t for a second considered that I might not be straight. Also I was wearing a lot of my cousins Abercrombie hand me downs, which feels related.)
So anyway, I don’t go to church anymore, but I’m still Catholic in the sense that I will always feel weird about it and also enjoy all the knick-knacky Shit that comes with that particular brand of Jesus, and I never took the whole “love thine enemy” thing very literally.
I always interpreted it as “please don’t waste energy actively hating your enemy”
Because that’s exhausting and poisons your soul like in that poem, that William Blake poem, which was in my English textbook my freshman year of high school. I used to read the stuff in the textbook instead of doing the work assigned in class, which gave me the odd distinction of being a teachers pet with straight C grades.
But I Digress :
“I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
And into my garden stole.
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see,
My foe outstretchd beneath the tree.”
My parents, both of whom are atheists, on having to come to an Easter Vigil Service to see me get what Father Mossiman called the Sacramental Grand Slam (baptism, first communion, confirmation)
(Easter Vigil is Christian Code for “church at midnight”, btw) :
“we knew we were in for a long haul when the first reading came from Genesis”
You can always use that ice block to go ice blocking, assuming that you have access to a grassy hill.