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.

Purity, Abstinence, Morality and Lack Thereof

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Today I Nearly Scratched My Eyes Out

(Or Why Seeing Twilight: Eclipse Was a Bad Idea)

To start with, let me justify why I even wasted money on this horrible piece of cinema:

1. I just learned that if you go to the first showing of the day of any movie at a Century theater it's half price. So I didn't waste MUCH money on it. This makes me feel better about myself.

2. I feel the need to mock things from a position of knowledge because knowledge is power and if I know more about something than you do I can probably make you feel stupid even if you aren't (have I mentioned that I'm an elitist bitch? I'm an elitist bitch who likes to feel smart. There, it's been said.)

3. Honestly I just needed a laugh and to be braindead for awhile.

So yes, I saw Eclipse today with a friend. It was truly terrible. The first Twilight movie actually truly impressed me with the incredible amount of work that appeared to have gone into it simply to make it watchable. Sure the acting was terrible, the special effects were low budget, the script was overall cheesy and rather stilted, the characters unbelievable, and the entire plot (what little there was) gave me the creeps on a profound level; despite all this it was a Watchable Movie, taken from a book that appeared to have no plot until somewhere around page 300 (which I never reached, having gotten stuck somewhere in the first two hundred pages of He Hates Me, I Love Him) at which point SMeyer realized something needed to happen to make it marketable. In the first Twilight movie the pacing was managed impressively and the plot (entirely pointless and irrelevant to the main focus on the progression of Bella and Edward's ~twu wuv~) was interwoven into the utter schlock that was the rest of it, and was made relevant from the beginning. I at no point felt like falling asleep.

Eclipse cannot say the same for itself. I sat in my uncomfortable movie seat, next to the poor unfortunate boy I had dragged with me to the early morning showing, and constantly changed position just to keep myself awake. Next to me the boy slammed his face against his knees, whined, pouted, and mimed stabbing himself.

The movie jumped between scenes with nothing to connect them, leaving me blinking and thinking 'why is this relevant to what was just happening?'. Bella and Edward spent a lot of time speaking in monotone about their Epic Love and inability to be apart while making unconvincing doe eyes at each other. Jacob, who could previously have been argued to be the Better Choice, committed minor sexual assault. Charlie (Bella's father) found it amusing when Bella was forced to break her hand on Jacob's face because of this. Edward and Jacob growled at each other and treated the supposed object of their true and earthshattering love as just that, an object, giving her very little choice in anything they did.

At one point Bella got horny and tried to jump Edward's bones and as always, Edward knew what was best and made the decision for her and said No Sex For You. Bella is then portrayed in book and movie both as the uncontrolled seductress with no knowledge of what she's actually doing, and pure loyal all knowing Edward must protect her from herself by denying her what she wants. Edward proposes and Bella gives in because he won't sexually satisfy her OR turn her into a vampire unless she does, Edward is of course a manipulative bastard. Then Jacob and Bella cuddle on a mountain while Edward watches, and Jacob thinks loud dirty thoughts to piss Edward off. Down bellow a random clan of newborn vampires attack the Cullens and the werewolf pack. Jacob leaves to help them after emotionally manipulating Bella into kissing him and saying she loves him (she does, but 'not enough' because Edward is perfect for her, obviously). Edward sees all this but loves her all the same. Then Jacob kills vampires and Edward kills vampires and Bella is thoroughly useless.

At one point near the end Jacob tells Bella that loving him would be 'as easy as breathing' and she wouldn't have to change anything for him. But nope, Bella would rather abandon everything/one she's ever known to be get dead with a virgin a hundred years older than her.

Is this not making sense to you? Good, it's not supposed to, this is pretty much exactly how the movie was paced. NOTHING MADE SENSE, NOTHING WAS CONNECTED, THERE WERE RANDOM FLASHBACKS. NO COMMON SENSE WAS USED. Everyone did exactly the opposite of what they were advised to do.

The only watchable part of this movie was near the end, where vampires were literally punching each others faces off. But you can find a clip of that online and avoid wasting your money and your braincells like I did.