I love you Grandma but that was NOT OKAY.

I just got the notification card from the donation she made in my name as a birthday present and it reawakened my anger and hurt over what she did. It reads:

During this joyful time of celebration, a gift was given - in your honor.

To share in Christ’s abundant blessings, a special gift was given to Compassion International to help the world’s impoverished children.

We pray that this gift brings joy to you, as well as the compassion-assisted children and their families who receive its benefits.

In celebration of Christ’s many gifts.

Now, you may be thinking, what’s so offensive about that? Why am I so angry? Poor children are benefiting!

• To start, for the most shallow reason, I am an Atheist and she donated to a Christian organization in my name without a second thought. This is highly inconsiderate of my personal beliefs when I am never anything but considerate of hers, to the point of attending ceremonies with her on holidays when she feels it’s important to be with family.
• Next, I do not believe in religion-based charity organizations. I feel that religion has no place in true charity work and that proselytizing to children and adults who cannot afford to say no or who are not educated about or presented with any other choices is incredibly immoral. This is made worse by the fact that my quick check of Compassion International’s website showed me this: “Compassion International exists as a Christian child advocacy ministry that releases children from spiritual, economic, social and physical poverty and enables them to become responsible, fulfilled Christian adults.
  
  Founded by the Rev. Everett Swanson in 1952, Compassion began providing Korean War orphans with food, shelter, education and health care, as well as Christian training.”
  
  This is not in any way okay. “Spiritual poverty” being implied to mean any non-Christian spirituality is a horrible, horrible idea that erases the validity of the beliefs of the cultures these children are raised in and smacks of an uncomfortable level of brainwashing and the desire to stamp out any non-Christian beliefs in children with no one else to turn to.
• Their website and the card I received are plastered with poverty porn of starving children of color and their white savior sponsor families. With no exception, the children portrayed to be in need of saving are non-white and the sponsorship families are white Christians.
• The fact that the card “pray[s] that this gift bring joy to you” really rubs me the wrong way. Charity is not about giving privileged white bible-thumpers the warm fuzzies because omgz, they’re so kind that they sent money to the little brown children and they can tell their friends how good they are! Charity is not a present that you give in the name of another privileged person to give them the warm fuzzies and make them feel like a better person. Charity should be about a genuine desire to do good for others even if it never affects you in any way and you get no social benefit from it.
• Last, I am especially angry because, if she had asked, I could have given her 5 charities off of the top of my head that I would have been extremely grateful to see receive money. If she had given me a few minutes I could have given her a hugely long list. If she really desired to send money to this specific kind of cause, I would have willingly researched organizations that do similar work until I found one that I was comfortable donating to.

This is not a problem of me not caring about charities, this is a problem of disrespect and holding people and organizations to a higher ethical standard before I’m willing to throw money at them. I am incredibly grossed out and upset.

My biggest problem with Valentine's Day.

Don’t get me wrong, I like an excuse to eat candy and mock cheesy cards as much as anyone. That aspect of V-day is cutesy and fun and something the perpetual first grader in me still appreciates.

My biggest problem with Valentine’s Day, really, is my biggest problem with most holidays: being told when and how to celebrate, giving out stereotypical and expected gifts because you’ll be looked down upon if you don’t, and complaining if you don’t get presents from the right people is not a real celebration of anything. It’s a mockery of love and a cop out to romance.

If you have to be told to do something and pressured into it by advertising and culture, I highly doubt it actually matters. Taking someone out on a dinner date once a year because you’re supposed to doesn’t show love or appreciation. Flowers and chocolates are the gifts of someone who doesn’t know or care enough about their partner to get them something that actually, personally matters.

Real love - with all its fuck ups and messes and pain - is something that you should show and celebrate when it feels right, or when the object of your affection needs to be reminded. Not when other people tell you that you must. Not how other people tell you that you have to.

Celebrations only matter when they’re organic and genuinely meant to appreciate something worthwhile. Valentine’s Day isn’t a celebration that matters.

The Animals We Love

I think that sometimes it's harder to lose animals than it is to lose people. The animals we love teach us things that humans will never be able to - when I have wanted to scream at every person in my life, when I have been convinced I hated all of them, I could never have hated my dog. Their utter devotion, their helplessness without us, their unquestioning affection all teach us compassion and empathy in ways that you cannot learn from another person, or from reading out of a book, or from being lectured to.

I understand the value of a human life, and that people must always come before animals, but I understand also the value of implicit trust and unquestionable love on our ability to develop emotionally. I understand that when my cat followed me when I was 8 and tried to run away, he didn't know what he was doing - what matters is that he did it anyways, and that his helplessness in the face of the world, and my worry that he would get lost, in part motivated me to sit in the bushes around the block until I cooled down and went home, rather than continuing on and getting lost and hurt. I understand that when I cried and my dog sat with me until I could breath again, he had no idea what was going on, he had no grasp of human emotion or what those tears meant. That didn't matter then, and it doesn't matter now. What matters is that he sat with me, that I was comforted, that his distress was perhaps more genuine than any half-true reassurances a friend could offer.

Now those animals are gone. Those dogs, who sat beside me growing up, who inhabit nearly every one of my childhood memories, have passed away. One at the age of 17 after a long and happy life as the adored companion of three little girls. One more recently and far too young, only 10, the victim of invisible disease. That hurts the most - all those missed years without my constant companion. I still expect to trip over him, in his usual position sitting by my side, when I get up off the couch. I still expect to hear him barking when I come home. I expect to be bowled over by 80lbs of childish joy every time a chain jingles and he thinks he might get walked. What hurts more, though, is knowing that he didn't understand. That if he suffered, he didn't know why. That when he died alone and in the dark I was in a brightly lit ER being unnecessarily poked and prodded while he was the one who needed medical attention. It feels like betrayal to have left him alone in the face of that when he never once ignored my slightest suffering.

Our cat we lost to kidney damage, the only chance of saving him an operation that only could have prolonged his suffering. That was easier. We put him out of his suffering, it was relief instead of loss. Our other cat, now, has run away. My sisters are putting up posters for him, but I doubt he'll come back. He was a nasty cat, and hated us. He'd bite you if you paid attention to him and bite you if he thought you were ignoring him. Moving traumatized him and for the last two years he has lived mostly upstairs, hiding under beds and hissing at the new cat and the puppy whenever they get near.

Despite that, I'll miss him. Mostly because he was the last remainder of the animals that I grew up with. I pity him his suffering, I mourn his inability to understand that he was loved, no matter how evil and ugly. Ignorance is the most terrifying thing of all - ignorance of your worth, ignorance of death. When people die at least they understand what's happening. At least they know the whys, the hows, even if they don't know what's waiting for them afterwards (or if anything is waiting at all). Some people might find comfort in knowing that animals die without knowledge of those things, but I never have. I don't think I ever will.

Having been taught so many things by them, I can only feel guilt that I couldn't give them that one reassurance at the end in return, no matter how much I loved them in return for their devotion.

Looking and Not Seeing

I feel like a lot of people go around with their eyes closed and their fingers in their ears. They don't look at the world, they don't see anything but their lives laid out right in front of them.

They look at paintings and photographs and see a theoretical beauty, served up for their interpretation, rather than looking at everything around them and seeing real beauty. They listen to music because it fills the silence, not because they love it. They read novels about knights in shining armor and female heroes that aren't too heroic (because that would be masculine) instead of listening to the stories the people they know have to tell, or picking up a history book. They ask God or the television what love is instead of going out in search of it themselves.

Maybe I just know a lot of people who never really do anything with their lives and a lot of people who do so much with their lives, and I compare them too closely. Or maybe they need to be compared, measured up, and found wanting so that they can learn to fix it.

Purity, Abstinence, Morality and Lack Thereof

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The Social Network (Love or hate or a bit of both?)

I keep going back and forth on whether or not I actually like The Social Network. Before I get into the detail, let me first say that it was an incredibly enjoyable movie. Witty, fast paced, rude and completely unapologetic, its characters were completely unlikable in all the right ways and there was hardly a dull moment. It won me over in the first scene, where Mark Zuckerberg the asshole is dumped by his girlfriend with the qualifier 'it's not because you're a nerd, it's because you're just an asshole'. (Nerd boys, there's a lot of truth in this. If you're complaining that you can't get a girlfriend because you're 'nerdy', ask yourself first, are you just a dick?)

But here's the thing: I can't guiltlessly like it, because it was also unapologetically sexist. I don't find that as bothersome as a lot of the blogosphere does and I certainly didn't ruin my movie experience by sitting there analyzing all the ways that it was an inaccurate and offensive portrayal of women, but it was there and it can't be avoided. Aside from the intelligent and fed up girlfriend that appears in the first scene as the catalyst for Mark's creation of facebook (by first inspiring him to create a site where girls at the school can be compared side by side and rated) the only girls to appear in the movie are mindless objects for the enjoyment of the male dominated cast. To the extent that they have any influence over the main characters, it is negative.

It's one thing to say 'the main characters of this movie are male because the creators of this company were male', the main defense I've seen bopping around the few negative reviews of The Social Network, and another thing entirely to say that it's justifiable to have treated every single minor female character as a sex object. Even when the company has expanded to include dozens of workers and interns the only girls who get screen time are having lines of coke snorted off of their stomachs and personally delivering things to the main characters so that they can be ogled and cat called. In the background the male interns are shown writing code and doing meaningful tasks for the company...with no women among them. Aaron Sorkin's defense that it's just a reflection of the reality of the techworld doesn't really hold water. There are women doing meaningful things in that environment, they just didn't fit into his storyline so he didn't mention them, even in passing. Alright, whatever, but at least acknowledge what you're doing.

At the same time, at least the sexism wasn't portrayed as a good thing. It just was what it was. The characters were clearly assholes for a whole slew of other reasons and no one was jumping to the defense of their treatment of the women around them.

So...I still don't know if I like this movie or not. I like asshole characters in general. I appreciate portrayals of the more negative side of human personalities and interactions, without a hero or a villain. Frankly, I like seeing people screw each other over and treat each other like shit and, well, act like real people in real relationships. Because real people are generally kind of assholes. Even the nicest ones fall into that trap from time to time, and most of us aren't the nicest that we could possibly be.

So what I think it comes down to is this: I would recommend this more as a source of great amusement, it's far more well written than most anything else I've seen all year, with great pacing and decent acting. But take it with a grain of salt. Realize it could be better and take it for what it is, not what it could be.

NaNoWriMo Is Coming

The site (nanowrimo.org) has been reset for the year, the forums wiped clean just to be dirtied by our rambling minds again. It's a fresh start! I'll win this year, I swear!

For those of you who don't know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and takes place every November not just nationally but internationally. It's a challenge to write 50,000 words in a month (which is short, as far as novels go). No, there's no prize if you win. But you get stickers!

It's an exercise in just getting words on the page. Quantity, rather than quality, is what matters. Save your red pen and editing for December! Or January, when you're not quite so sick of what you just wrote. Being a perfectionist about writing and also awfully lazy, I've never managed to win, though one year I came close and it was only due to an evil conspiracy hatched by my computer and flash drive that I lost (a previous copy of my novel, backed up on the flash drive, was copied over all other existing files at four in the morning, erasing around fifteen thousand words and brutally murdering my motivation).

I'm going to win this year, though. Really I am. Surely it will be easy to write 50,000 words about impossibly adorable genetically engineered pocket sized dragons eating faces, wreaking havoc, and causing moral quandaries, all with a side of questionably motivated genocide and corruption.

Right? Right.

I'm still nervous.