Delicate subjects

One of the gifts that I did not mention in my Christmas post was the gift of Netflix. I was most happy with this gift, not only for legal access to animes and my so-called "nerd shows," but to a number of other movies, especially documentaries. I love documentaries and all they embody, going out and talking to people and investing time in creating a beautiful or bizarre, but always eye-opening thing drawing from the real world. I just finished marathoning through two documentaries, drinking in about four hours of talk on a subject that I feel can't be discussed in my house--homosexuality.

Allow me to describe by situation. I have always grown up firmly planted in the Church of Christ. Though I haven't always been the preacher's daughter, I have always been a minister's daughter and raised by devout parents and grandparents, who raised my aunts and uncles the same way, who raised my cousins the same way. Granted, there are a lot of us, and not everybody stuck to the "straight and narrow," as it were, but every family member most immediate to me in my life has been on that path. We are a very happy, well-mannered bunch. I would never question the amount of love or understanding in my family on either side. But some things just aren't good to talk about. So we don't.

But now, I am reaching the pivotal point in my childhood where things begin to shift. My environment is different at school; my peers feel differently about some things than their parents do. We are becoming people, and it's exciting and terrifying and infinitely vital. And we are faced with burning questions about opinions, just as all people are. We must be decided about everything; there is no lukewarm among the young just as there is no lukewarm on the Day of Judgement. And one of the most sensitive topics among teenagers today as well as in my family unit is homosexuality. On the other hand, people love to talk about it in school and such. The problem is they don't always know what they're saying. You've got the talkers who fancy themselves Defenders of Social Justice and of Freedom Among People, the ones who will spew every breed of nasty about every gay human to walk the earth, the ones who lamely echo whatever it is their parents/friends/teachers/role models have said, and then you have me. The one who keeps quiet when she can. The one who says, "I don't know how I feel about this yet." The lukewarm.

When did being undecided become a sin worse than the debatable sin which we are so divided on?

Maybe part of my silence is my fear. A few of my friends and the people that I enjoy talking to harbor a bitter grudge towards the church and the people attending. And when they describe the biggest proponents of Christianity in their homes, I don't blame them. The fervor I hear from their testimonies is more fueled by hate than love. But I also don't want to become one of them. I don't want to be responsible for the actions and verbal venom of the bigoted. And it's paranoid to think that way, but heck, I'm fourteen. I'm paranoid by nature, and I may never outgrow it, though I certainly hope to.

But part of my silence is also lack of knowledge. I'm being pelted with a lot of messages without any factual anchors, and still others with factual anchors that are flipped for two differing theories. I've got my friend over here who doesn't even eat at Chik-Fil-A anymore because of that whole mess this past summer, and my friend over there who gets immensely uncomfortable at the very word 'gay.' Division among my family isn't so obvious. Like I said, we just don't talk about it. But I'd assume that my father certainly doesn't approve, displayed by his grumbling and turning the station when the topic arises. My sister doesn't approve, given her desperate efforts to change the subject when I do try to talk about it with my mom, who I think would explain it to me in a less biased way. And I wouldn't even attempt such discussions with my extended family.  So I must extract my information from documentaries.

The two that I watched, One Nation Under God and For the Bible Tells Me So, did a good job of showing all sides of this argument, the extremists and the ones caught between. The religious men and women, the ones with degrees in Bible and psychology, talked a lot about reading with the historical context in mind and knowing that there was no Greek, Latin, or Arabic word for homosexual. It wasn't thought of.
The translation that we know as 'abomination' was a way of saying unconventional, according to them. They also explained the demand for guests at the door in Sodom and Gomorrah as inhospitable conduct, not homosexual conduct. God had much more to destroy the city for than just the residents with different sexual behaviors. And one interesting point they brought up in both movies was the possible motivation to fear gay men was the fear that men have of being "lowered." Being called girly is equated to weakness and inability. And this insult still works! Even women throw it around! But news flash. There is no "girl" role in these relationships. Neither member wears the pants. And because the lack of roles blows our traditional minds, fear is planted. But it is a far braver thing to love.

We are specifically called to do it, love. Not just out spouses, our families, our communities. We need to love the enemies we've created for ourselves, and we need to love the ones we've never known or met yet. I can't tell you what God has to say about this. I can't go out and organize some sort of demonstration of the lukewarm, a public outcry that we honestly don't know what to think about this mess. But I can swear to you that no matter who you are or what you have done, your Creator loves you as a son or daughter. And I will try to give you the respect and admiration that you deserve for being loved.

Good things come to those who read

...especially on Christmas.
I was given not one, but three bookish shirts. Here's the one I'm wearing now:

And as you can see, it is too perfect. I mean, have you seen my posts? My brain has been addled since birth.
And another:

And ANOTHER:

And along with these and a plethora of other perfect gifts, I feel pretty special.
Not that I didn't already, of course. But the gifts give me a more...materialistic sense of specialness. And what is Christmas without materialism? It's just some religious holiday that is harder to celebrate and appreciate. But don't get me wrong, I would love to be at home, at church, by candlelight, hearing that same old story. Now that I know Mary's approximate age, it's even more chilling to me. I'd better put on my new Ravenclaw house scarf to keep warm. Or maybe I'll wear my Union Jack scarf. Of course, I could always cozy up with a cup of coffee made with my French press...

Hello, world!

I checked my stats today, and I have pageviews from all over the world. Places I could only dream of seeing, places that I hear about in AP Human Geography. So I'll say something long-delayed to everyone reading in the US and beyond: Hello there! Welcome to the inside of my mind. It can be easy to get lost in here, but not to fear. Overall, it's a confusing but happy place.

It's amazing to me how simple it is, and I was born into the Internet. This is especially apparent to me on deviantART, where I've been a member for approximately nine months. After somewhat establishing myself as a fanfiction author and occasional artist in the more conventional sense, there are three users that I favor. None of them live in my home country. One of them is a very articulate and polite teenager from the UK, one of them is an up-and-coming deviant from Bulgaria, and one of them is a very nice and bright girl from Vietnam who I always enjoy communicating with.
Well, there's actually four, and one of them lives here in the States...but I'm trying to make a point.

We talk about this globalization phenomenon all the time at school; we are geared towards international studies, after all. But actually experiencing it and being caught up in its tides is an altogether different feeling. It's alienating knowing that we are living in the middle of history, that it is being made every day, even when something exciting or shocking isn't happening, and we continue on as though the day was exactly what it felt like--normal. I learned that there is no real normal, only what we perceive to be normal. It's relative, like time. It bends and shifts in individual cases. And our feeble attempts to track it, to change the other normals to be more like ours are almost always fruitless. How human of us, trying to actually make a universal normal.

And even within normals, things are fluid and change over time. That's how we adjust to our age, situation, environment, and everything else. But I think I'll call it here on the thoughts tonight. Wouldn't want to scare the guests.

Yet another reflection

Well, here's another internet post about the Newtown shootings.

I feel terrible. So many people I know are very angry and very vocal about this, understandably. Parents, teachers, even kids my own age. But I have been generally quiet about all of this. And even when I consider it happening to me or to the people I care about, I have an odd sense of peace. And I feel terrible about that. By all means, I should be enraged at the very thought. I should be horrified and fearful of the very prospect. I should be screaming injustice to the winds and crying out for better laws, better humanity. But no. Here I sit, with a reflective but quiet spirit, and drink my tea as though the shooting never occurred at all.

Maybe it's just my inability to relate. I, thank God, am not a mother at my tender young age and don't plan on becoming one soon. I do not understand the irrevocable attachment and protective instincts that result from birthing and raising a child. I simply don't. I can try to imagine it, but it's not the same. Having a somewhat motherly nature doesn't count, either. I have a natural disconnect because of this.

But I also have an elementary-aged sister, so it's not like there's no attachment at all. She could have been one of those kids shot down, or worse, one of those kids to see it. She could have lost a best friend to a tiny ball of metal blasted through her underdeveloped chest at point-blank range and had to learn to cope. I can see the quiet anger building up inside of her young eyes with no outlet for it to go.

But I also know that whether the event would have ended her life or changed it permanently, both she and I would learn to cope. Our parents, our community, our society, would in time accept the atrocity and learn how to keep functioning. Because,

"Things change. And friends leave. And time doesn't stop for anybody."

That's from Perks, one of the best books I read this year. And it's true. Whether we want it to or not, life will do what it always has and go on until the day He declares it to slow to a stop, then restart as life the way we were meant to live it. And whether we allow ourselves to move with it or not, we are dragged along by its current, sometimes to a rocky sandbar where we freeze until we allow joy back inside and leap into the current once again. And after beaching myself on one of those uncomfortable islands and pushing myself away from it, I vowed to myself to never end up there again. I will keep on being content, and try to have rest in the fact that I am being cared for and loved no matter what happens to me or what stupid choices my species and I make.

I will always have my words. If I lose my voice, I have keyboards and instruments and pens and papers to exude my fleeting human emotions and enduring beliefs onto. My words are my solace. And when I run out of words to say, there are billions more to breathe in and pick new words from. This is my comfort, my strength. The story being written as we live and die will continue on and undulate, rising and falling into the valleys of darkness and doubt, but always coming back out into the stark sunlight. And the people that I pity, more than those grieving the lost, are the people who find no comfort in the promise that the Author scratching out their story is doing everything in His power to write them a happy ending.

So yes, I will keep being a child and dreaming about boys and forgetting to read my textbook assignments while even more innocent children are snatched from us. Because no matter how many times I may beg for a more just world, I can't fix what is already broken. Right now, we are all just doing the best we can to keep our heads up as the world fades out, and we are but mere players in the story we did not write.

My deepest regards to the families of Newtown.