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Cherry picking

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Every now and then some stranger will disagree with one of my religious posts by saying that I’m “cherry picking” the Bible. Of course I cherry pick. The whole tree is too hard to digest. That is the silliest thing to accuse somebody of.

Perhaps I should just say what I’m going to say and not reference chapter and verse at all. Perhaps I should stop citing any references and just assume that everybody has read what I am referring to.

Jesus did that. He just said what he was going to say and assumed that his audience had read the whole Bible for themselves. He assumed that they could follow along with his logic and know that what he was saying was true.

When people accuse me of cherry picking they’re saying that I’m picking and choosing what I’m using to cite. Of course I am. Everybody does that. That is part of writing. Perhaps they want me to use an argumentative structure? Perhaps they think it would be best if I quoted all sides of the debate? That would draw away from my argument. No writer would do that.

Well, I’ll do it if Jesus’ words disagree with what I’m saying. Paul’s words don’t count. He isn’t the Messiah, and his words aren’t counted as the Gospels. Too many people think they are, but they are the ones accusing me of “cherry picking”.

How about this? I’m going to write what I write and quote what I quote and if “they” get it, then great. If “they” don’t, that is their problem. Jesus’ message wasn’t accepted by everybody either, so I’m in good company.

Navigating the “Do you have children?” question.

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A patron was making small talk recently, and then it became large talk. He doesn’t know anything about me other than what he can see. Some of what he sees is the mask that I have to put on as part of working customer service. I like helping people, but I’m not their friends. They get confused sometimes.

He asked me how I was doing, and then after that, asked me how my husband was doing. He’s never met my husband. He knows I am married because I wear a wedding ring. He doesn’t know I’m married to a man, even though I am. Just because I am a woman wearing a wedding ring doesn’t mean I have a husband. Nuns wear wedding rings. Lesbians wear them too if they are in committed relationships.

I replied with the vague and noncommittal, “He’s fine”.

Then he asked if we had children, to which I replied “No”. He pressed. “Why not?”

Stupid question.

One – it is none of his business.
Two – what if we did and were heartbroken that we were infertile?
Three – what if we did have a child and s/he died?

I said no, that they are too expensive. Usually that is enough to stop this line of questioning. Sadly I get it a lot. I don’t get why strangers feel it is OK to ask these questions. Perhaps they think they are being friendly, but they don’t realize the potential minefield they are entering. They just don’t think. It could open up a lot of heartache for someone.

He pushed further, and I was done. He said “When you got married, didn’t you want to have children?”

He only knows my name because he’s read it on my nametag. He’s crossed my boundary already and hasn’t read my lack of engagement as a “go away” sign. I’ve not asked him how his wife was doing (I know he has one because he uses her library card as his own) and I’ve not asked him if he has children. A lack of reciprocal questions should indicate stop asking questions.

I was done. I didn’t want any more of this. I didn’t want it to start off with. I pulled out my biggest card.

I said the truth.

“Both of us were abused as children, and so we don’t want any.”

End of conversation.

There is nothing more to be said. No more pleading to get us to have children. No more trying to change our minds. No more prying.

In the past I would have felt bad for even saying that. I would have felt bad that I had to cross over the line of polite conversation into this. I would have felt bad for having to establish my boundaries.

Now I don’t. Now I know I must, and if I don’t draw a line, essentially people will invade my mental space. It is just like if a person shows up at the door to my home. I have the right, the duty, the obligation to establish how far he can get in.

Normally, I have the ability to decide if I even open the door, but a customer service job blurs that line.

Here is some advice – don’t ask strangers if they have children. If you ignore that advice, then don’t push if they say no. Don’t ask why. Don’t try to talk them into having children. There are plenty of kids on the planet as is. And there are plenty of bad parents who should have thought twice about having children. Maybe if they weren’t pressured by family, friends, and strangers into having them, they would have saved everybody the trouble.

Empty, but not gone.

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Some of you may know that I have (had?) a mirror site to BetsyBeadhead. It is (was?) called Empty Cross Community. It has (had?) only my religious writings. It is (was?) a place where I could sort out what I want to put in my first book, and also is (was?) a place where I could direct people who might be interested in just that topic.

I’m not sure what verb tense to use, though. It is a bit like Schrodinger’s cat right now. Is it alive, or not? Does it exist, or not? I hadn’t put anything new in it in a while because I was working on the book. Mostly it is sorted out, and I didn’t have anything new to put in it. For that, I’m grateful. In a way, it has served its purpose.

Yesterday I went to put a new post into it and discovered I couldn’t. I discovered that my page had been shut down for a violation of the Terms of Service. There has been no warning and no explanation. I’ve written WordPress and not heard back so far. I’ve reread the Terms of Service and I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. I also think it is a bit severe for them to shut it down without a warning or a notification. There was no chance to correct whatever error they have found.

It is kind of like trying to go home and discovering that the bank has repossessed your house because they think you are doing something illegal in it.

Fortunately, it isn’t my house, but my “vacation home”, and I have copies of everything I’ve written. So nothing is lost but time. And some links. I have a website using the same name and it has a link to the blog which is broken now. I was using the blog to give more information than I could put on the website.

Possibly there is an issue with the name itself. There is a sculpture called the “Empty Cross”. The creator has trademarked the name. The idea of the cross is in harmony with the idea of my page. I’m not saying I’m part of them, but maybe they think I am – and because I’m not, they protested.

Maybe someone thought that the second page was stealing from the first page. Because there is nothing on the Empty Cross Community page that isn’t on the Betsy Beadhead page, perhaps they thought that someone on that page was stealing and reposting my blog.

Again, I don’t know. There was no warning, and no explanation.

Perhaps I need a new name for the second page. Perhaps I need to let it go and just focus on the book. But, I do like the idea of a focused blog page just for my religious writings. I don’t want to direct someone to my vision of a new church or a Bible study, only for them to get stuck in my rants about patriarchy, or wonder about my reading list for zombie fiction.

Or maybe that is the point. I am all those things.

I am a Jesus follower who reads zombie fiction, who has tattoos, who thinks that women are getting the short end of the stick, who works in a customer service job and gets annoyed at being treated like a servant, who tutors ESL and LD kindergartners… I am a lot of things, and some of them may seem to conflict with the idea of what defines a person who follows Jesus. Perhaps that is the issue. I want people to know that they can love Jesus and they don’t have to fit the mold of “Jesus freak”. That loving Jesus isn’t about wearing long dresses and homeschooling your kids and listening to “Christian” music and reading “Christian” books.

Well, it is about those things. But it isn’t JUST about those things. You can love Jesus and do none of those. Or all of them, and other things as well. Jesus’ arms are big enough to embrace us all. He was about turning the conventional way of thinking upside down back then too. He still is.

I certainly was having a problem with posting to both pages, using one browser. It is impossible to log into one WordPress site and then post on another one. It simply will only let me log into one at a time. So I can’t check the second one to see if I’ve already posted something from the first one in an easy way. I’d thought about installing another browser, in addition to Chrome, but now I’m thinking I need to use another blog platform.

And find another name. Anybody know a good name for what I’ve been writing about? I looked at ReVision – and that name is taken. I need something about how church isn’t what we think it is – it is less, and more at the same time. I need something that is easy to remember. I need something that embraces Orthodox and Pentecostal at the same time. I need something that goes back to the roots of what Jesus said and strips it all down. I need something that takes away all the pomp and puffery of two thousand years of humans getting in the way of God. We’ve put so much onto and into Jesus that we can’t see him anymore.

I need a name for that. I’m open to suggestions.

Block

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In part, this is a test. My other blog got blocked, and it is a spin-off of this one. It is just the religious stuff. Nothing new, just condensed, more focused. It links to a website address (that I paid $100 for), so I’m a little unhappy that it is down.

I didn’t get notified, and I don’t know why it is blocked. So I’m testing this one to see if this one is still up. Hopefully it still works, and they will let me know soon what is wrong with the other one so I can fix it.

Meanwhile, I’m working on putting together posts for my first book. I’m at 45K words right now.

Prejudice

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In the same way that children learn prejudice, they can unlearn it.

Many years ago, I was at a Balinese shadow puppet performance at the Smithsonian. We were all sitting on the floor. A nearby child noticed that one of the male performers was wearing a skirt. The child was a young boy, probably about seven years old. He and I had worked up a rapport, having talked about the event. It was a pretty exciting show. All the performers were wearing long flowing clothes in rich fabrics. The headdresses alone were pretty off the charts, with all the gold and wires and wiggling bits.

The child looked at me and he said “A man wearing a skirt? That’s weird!” This child wasn’t even my child and yet I felt an obligation to help. I said that women couldn’t even wear pants just 50 years ago, and in Biblical times nobody wore pants. What is normal now isn’t always normal. Normal changes. Plus, there is also the idea of men wearing kilts in Scotland.

It was awesome to watch his head expand. His limited understanding of the world just got bigger.

I also know a child who saw a spider outside and it attempted to kill it. I pointed out that the spider was supposed to be outside. Outside is the home of spiders and so it is okay to leave it alone. She looked at me funny, but then she understood. She had learned somewhere else that spiders were bad and the spiders should be killed but I taught her otherwise. If they are outside don’t kill them.

Prejudices are simply limited understandings. They are simply the result of not having enough information.

This is how all of us learned what we learned. We were given just enough information to get us going, and then left to figure out the rest. Hopefully we fill in the rest with good stuff. If we don’t, it is up to teachers to help us out. Teachers come in all varieties. You can be a teacher, and you don’t even need a certificate. If you come across someone with a limited understanding, it is important to teach them a different way of thinking, to fill in the gaps.

I have a friend who is white. She was walking with a little girl who also was white, whom she had just met. The little girl told her a story about someone in school who was mean to her. That someone happened to be black. The girl generalized and said “Black people are so mean.”

My friend was very upset by this and told her about her nephew who is half black and said not all black people are mean. She was a bit distraught about this whole exchange hours later. She thought it was tragic. She couldn’t believe that prejudice still exists these days.

It wasn’t tragic. It was an important moment to teach this child to see things in a bigger way. Our job as adults is to teach them that not everything they know is everything there is. Our job as adults is to expand their understanding. We are supposed to be teaching them to open up their minds and to understand that the world is a lot bigger place than they think.

If you are cooking on the stove and you burn your thumb you may think that the stove is a dangerous thing, but if you have a good teacher with you she will explain how not to get hurt. Then you will start to cook again.

The same is true with people, and cultures, and insects, and anything. If you get hurt once you may generalize and think that is always the way it is. If you have a good teacher with you, you’ll learn how to interact with that person, that culture, that insect, and you will learn that not everything will hurt you.

Our job as teachers is to help children learn to establish boundaries and also how to break boundaries down.

The best part? You can be a teacher and not even be in the classroom. The whole world is your classroom, and teachable moments can happen anytime.

It isn’t sad that this child thought the way she did. This is just part of being a child. She has generalized, like we all do. The sad part would have been to not use that moment as an opportunity.

Addresses?

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Am I the only person who needs an address when being invited to an event?

I don’t know if it is a Nashville thing, or a Southern thing, or just a thoughtless thing, but I keep seeing invitations to events and they tell the name of the place but not the address.

There was a medieval group I belonged to that had its meetings “at the Shoney’s near Opryland.” This was the information on the group’s website, open to members and nonmembers. That line tells me nothing. I had never been to Opryland. I didn’t know where it was in relation to where I live, and I certainly didn’t know where the Shoney’s was in relation to that. I understand that Opryland is huge, so the Shoney’s could be anywhere around there. I finally figured it out by going to the Shoney’s website, looking up the addresses of all the Shoney’s in Nashville, then looking up the address of Opryland and comparing.

Is it so hard to put the street address?

Think of how many people might have been interested in joining this group who didn’t because they didn’t know where to meet. Then, once the person is inside the Shoney’s, where do they go? Further directions need to state something like “In the group meeting room” or “ask for the SCA group”.

Don’t assume. If people knew where you were meeting, they wouldn’t need to look it up on the website.

In Nashville, they often tell you where something is by the name of the building and not the address. “The concert is at the War Memorial Building”. This is useless. It might be at “Citizen’s Plaza” or “The TPAC building”. Lots of buildings downtown have names apparently. They also have addresses, but event organizers never share them.

If you want more people to go to your event, give as much information as possible. Assume your audience isn’t from around there. Think about it from their perspective. Sure, you are in the middle of this event and you know all about it, but they don’t. If you want it to be a success, share as much as possible. Oversharing is better than undersharing.

Tell the exact street address. Don’t just give a name of the site. Give that too, but not just that. Provide a map if possible.

Tell what the age range is. Are children allowed? If it is adults only, do you have babysitting arranged on site? It is only for children?

Is there a fee? How much? What payment forms are allowed? If you only take cash, tell that. Plenty of people don’t carry cash these days.

When will it start and end?

Is there a form that participants will need to print out and bring with them?

Are there any special things that participants need to bring – food, musical instruments, chairs?

You will avoid a lot of frustration if you tell people as much as you can. Assume (correctly) that they know nothing about what you are planning, and share it. Sure, there is only so much you can put on a flyer. You could put a link on your flyer, but not everybody has access to the internet all the time. Take the time and the space and put as much as you can on there. And give a contact phone number and a name.

If you don’t have enough information on your event page, you might as well not have the event.

Approaching a dog – social conventions on physical space.

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When you come across a dog, you don’t know whether it is going to bite you or not. So the safest thing to do is to crouch down and appear nonthreatening. You put out your hand, palm down, in the form of a fist. This way your fingers are not exposed. That way the dog can come up to you on its own terms and in its own time and decide if you are safe. It is up to the dog to determine whether you get to touch it or not.

The same is true of people. There are number of people, myself included, who have problems with physical space. I was abused as a child in multiple ways, and I only started learning about boundaries in my 40s.

Because of my past, I have problems with physically being around people. I am very uncomfortable with people coming up and randomly touching me. This is true even if it is someone I know very well, even if it is my husband. If he and I are alone together in the house he can still startle me with touch. If I have my back to him, such as when I’m doing the dishes or I am working at the computer, and he comes up to me to touches me or give me a hug, it frightens me. I have told him repeatedly to give me a warning because it because it makes me scared. He doesn’t quite seem to get it. It is foreign to him.

We have a family friend who has a young son who does not understand boundaries. He is like a bouncy puppy. He is a little overwhelming to me, and it turns out, to many others. As soon as I walk in the door at their house he opens his arms and walks into me for a hug. If we are walking outside, he will come up beside me and throw his arm around me. It is very startling. We haven’t been visiting with this family for very long, so there isn’t a history between him and me. Essentially, I haven’t given him permission to touch me.

He has very few friends his age, and has expressed difficulty making female friends. He is very socially backwards in many ways, and his parents have noticed this but are unaware what to do about it. His mother is very forward and direct like him. She does not seem to understand that not everyone is, so she does not know to teach her son how to “read” whether it is safe to be forward and direct with them.

I’m of course older than the middle-school girls this boy deals with, and even I didn’t know why I feel so uncomfortable around him. If I don’t know, then they certainly don’t know. I can suppress my feelings for the sake of not embarrassing him, but they don’t hold their punches. He’s becoming more and more socially backwards.

It was so uncomfortable that for a while my husband and I considered only visiting with them when he was not there. We have finally realized that God has put this child in our path for a reason, and that we are to be like surrogate parents to him. I still don’t know what to say, or how to say it, but I’m trusting that the Holy Spirit will give me the words, as Jesus promised his disciples.

I really don’t want to embarrass him by telling him how uncomfortable his behavior is to me and many other people. But I do feel that he wants to get along, and wants to know how to “play” the social game. It has rules that sometimes aren’t easy to learn.

One thing I learned when I was working with college students with learning disabilities was that sometimes dyslexia isn’t just about words. Some students with LD have a problem “reading” people and feelings as well. The social rules that we all take for granted are very hard for them as they don’t pick up on nuances at all. They become further and further isolated from the rest of their peers because of this.

I don’t want him to feel isolated, because that is a recipe for another school shooter.

The Tattoo’d lady

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I have a lot of tattoos. I don’t have one little tattoo like a flower or a butterfly on my ankle. Fully half of my left calf is inked. It is impossible to miss when I wear shorts or a short dress. Half of my right shoulder is inked too, but that is only visible when I am at water aerobics. I rarely wear short sleeve shirts, but that was true even before I got tattoos.

The most interesting thing to me is that people will often say that I don’t look like someone who has tattoos. Oddly, that is in part a reason why I have so many tattoos. Sure, I have the tattoos I have because they are meaningful to me, but I also have them because I think it is important to shake up people’s expectations.

So many people don’t really think about anything, it seems. They have their patterns and their expectations, and they are happy to live with them. When they apply “the usual” pattern to a situation or a person, they stop seeing things as they are.

They start seeing things as they think they are.

They stop seeing at all.

I have tattoos as reminders. I have tattoos as goals. They are milestones and markers, of achievements I have made, yet also of aspirations I have.

They function as a sort of Rorschach test too. If people are brave enough to ask me about them, then I ask them which one caught their eye. Then I tell them the story that goes along with that tattoo. It turns out that is the story that they need to hear that day to learn something.

I expose myself when I tell these stories. I may let people know that I am bipolar and have been in a mental hospital twice. I may let people know that God has revealed himself to me.

Are these two things connected? Perhaps.

Sometimes my tattoos create a bridge, and sometimes they create a wall. I’m ok with either. I’m ok with anything that gets people to engage, to wake up, to notice. I’m ok with anything that shakes people out of their complacency and makes them think.

Sometimes this means people are against me from the beginning, because I have marked myself as “other”. I am one of “those people”. But then they look at my smile, and how I am dressed, and where I am and they start to wonder. Their hard expectations of who I must be start to wobble a bit.

When people decide that I’m not like them because of how I am marked, it says more about them than it does about me. This too is useful for me.

In the most literal way I am “colored”. I do feel “other”, an outcast, a minority. I have chosen to highlight it rather than hide it. I have chosen to express on my outside how I feel on my inside.

I don’t show my tattoos all the time, however. There are some situations where it is important to keep a low profile. There are some situations where discretion and decorum are an advantage. But there are others where I have revealed myself to be “in” by showing my tattoos.

Small-town Southerners are generally not welcoming of tattoos. I often get open stares in rural areas, you know, the ones where everybody is the same color and a member of the same faith.

In college towns or towns where there is a diversity of cultures and views my tattoos are often admired.

So, in a way, my tattoos are also like a barometer or a thermometer. They tell me a lot about the local culture.

The artistic life

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I’m on vacation, and I just haven’t written as much as I normally do. I’ve taken the time to draw, which is nice. It seems to take just as long to draw as to write. I’m not sure how I’d find the time to do both.
What is more important? Isn’t it just important that I’m engaging in art? Art of any sort is healing. The ideal is to have time to write, sketch, paint, drum… But then there is a job I have to go to.
I have a few friends who essentially have said that art is more important than a job. They have made art their job. They say things like “money is evil”. While I agree that loving money isn’t great, I do like the things that money can buy, like food, shelter, and clothing.
While I don’t live large, I do like to live comfortably. I have a small house. Most of my clothes come from thrift stores. I eat well, in part because I’ve learned how to cook. While I admire the gumption of people who have decided to strike out on their own, I feel a little like they are saying that my path isn’t valid, isn’t authentic. I feel a little like a meat eater versus a vegetarian.
Their way is seen as higher evolved or more mindful. My way is seen as hedging my bets and unwilling to cut loose from the shore. My way is seen as being a slave to “the man”, whoever that is.
They wonder why their friends and relatives don’t support their choice to follow their dreams. The only problem is that “support” means “pay for”. They expect their friends and relatives to buy what they’ve made or go to their seminars. Meanwhile they mock them on social media for staying with their secure job. You know, that job where they earn money to buy their art.
If we all quit our jobs and start making art, then how are we going to pay our bills? Because who is going to come to our our seminars and concerts? Who is going to buy our books and artwork? We will all be starving artists because we won’t have an audience to buy our stuff.
I feel it is very dangerous for an artist to mock her audience, or to make them feel like suckers. If everybody could draw or write or bead or dance then why would they need to see you do it? Why would they need to pay you to do it?
We need gas station attendants. We need janitors. We need garbage truck drivers. We need them the same as we need teachers, doctors, lawyers, and diplomats. Saying that someone is less evolved, less mindful, or is just plain less because they have a “real” job and haven’t cut loose and created a non-profit or live in a commune is thoughtless and cruel, and wrong. It is wrong in the sense of “mean”, but it is also wrong in the sense of “incorrect”.
You can be creative while working for “the man”. It just takes a little figuring out. And to knock down someone else’s lifestyle choice as being less enlightened than yours is, in itself, less enlightened.

Bully in the library.

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I can’t stand bullies, but I often wrestle with what to say or do so that I help but I don’t become a bully in turn.

It is easy to spot a bully when he is hitting someone. It is when he is using non physical forms of aggression that are harder to spot and to deal with.

I was in a library while on vacation and overheard a woman chiding some people. She kept going on and on about how they weren’t working fast enough, that it was almost time for lunch, that they weren’t going to get done in time.

She wasn’t helping. She was actually slowing them down by her constant harangue. She not only wasn’t trying to figure out what was causing the problem, she was becoming part of the problem.

She wasn’t using her library voice either. She was annoying me, a patron.

I looked through the stacks to see what was going on. There were three people at the table, all women. The lady who was doing the talking was about 40 years old and about 250 pounds. She had a binder open in front of her with a lot of charts. The other two ladies looked like they had some developmental disabilities. One was around 60, black, and had a brace on her wrist. The other was around 20, white, and had a beautiful smile.

I took a breath in and walked up to them. I said in a cheery voice “What are you all working on today?” while looking over what was on the table in front of each of them.

I feel I have an advantage with this tactic. While it is considered rude to initiate a conversation with a stranger, I’m physically very non-threatening. I’m short. I’m female. I don’t stick out. In some ways I’m invisible.

The lady said that she was their supervisor, but didn’t tell me what they were working on. I looked and it was an activity to help the library with summer reading. They were hand writing something for each reading log. Why the words hadn’t been printed on the sheet in the first place is beyond me.

It looked a bit like busy work. It looked a bit like their time was being wasted. Everybody needs to have meaningful work to do. Nobody likes busy work.

Since they were in a time crunch, (as evidenced by the constant reminders of the supervisor), I asked her why she wasn’t helping them. She pointed at her binder with its charts and graphs and said she couldn’t.

I said “A boat goes faster if all the oars are in the water.”

The younger lady gave me a huge smile at this. I feel like both she and her companion were frustrated at this lady but couldn’t say anything to her because of the hierarchical relationship they had.

I walked away, and listened. No more harangue. No more bullying. Bullies hate witnesses. Thinking that nobody is watching is what gives them power. I just let her know that she was being observed.

Ideally, she would have been working with these ladies – not necessarily doing the work with them, but finding out ways to get them to do their best.

I have seen quite a bit of this kind of “supervisor” of people with developmental disabilities at my workplace. So many are short tempered with their clients. So many are snappish. For some reason they feel it is ok to show off how smart they are by subtly making fun of people who have cognitive impairments. They treat them like children. They treat them like dummies.

The only dummy is the supervisor.

Getting impatient with how “slow” a person with a mental disability is makes no sense. It is like getting upset at a person who is missing a leg for not being able to keep up with you. They can’t compete.

But they shouldn’t have to.

The caregiver forgets that this person is doing the best she can, and that it is really hard all the time. They forget that their client is a person, first and foremost, and deserves to be treated with respect and kindness.