Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Among the Stars

So there's this guy. I didn't really expect to like him, but I think it may be the quickest connection I've ever had with someone. We have only chatted on Skype a few times and gone on a group-date, but I'm already caught up in it. Mostly, that's because of how willing he is to be an idiot and laugh at himself. This was particularly evident in an encounter last night. So after we each got home from dinner, we got online and I told him I love singing and/or people singing to me. Side note: He is mostly deaf, completely tone deaf, and generally follows conversation by lipreading rather than trying to rely on his hearing aid. So anyway, he said he would sing for me. He proceeded to attempt a terrible falsetto with accompanying dancing, head bopping, and signing. We just sat there laughing for about five minutes and then he started to teach me some of the signs he used in the song. (I learned voice, sorry, and remember; and confirmed a few others, like penis, sit, and name.) So I thought that would be the end of that, but he seemed to really enjoy how amused I was so we went on like that for almost half an hour; him singing, me sometimes singing along and trying to copy his signing. I felt like an annoying awestruck child making him show me signs over and over while I practiced them. I realized part way in that he may have been offended that I was focusing so much on his "disability," but I was just genuinely really intrigued. And I was also mesmerized by his ability to completely make a fool of himself. It was lovely.

Monday, August 1, 2011

No Concept of Infidels

I was reading a poem, "Everywoman Her Own Theology," for a Women's Studies class and it is the personal story of a woman creating her own spiritual journey. One line in the poem is that her new theology will have "no concept of infidels." What a beautiful theory.
And not as though it is unheard of. My entire life I have been raised in a religion that denounces the idea of "infidel" and yet that line struck me as something I had never noticed before. But mostly it struck me because the line was not that there would be know infidels but rather that the concept of being a traitor to belief does not even exist because, admittedly, even though I was raised thinking that no one was an infidel to my religion, I certainly knew what they were and acknowledged that, to many, I was one. It seems as though it should be a lot easier to forget about heretics if once you were a heretic and then I realize that at sometime, somewhere, everyone has been. Yet we still fall dangerously into the whirlpool of hate. Its an odd world out there, and, as far as I'm concerned, lends itself much more to pessimism, like it or not.