premarital sex, and why it will save your life. (part 2)
the worst thing about the vow of celibacy is that I was lonely. profoundly so. I don’t really know how to explain to people what happened to me in that year. I spent most of it alone, in my cold basement apartment, just thinking. by the end of it, I felt totally detached from other people, the church and myself.
part of this was the fact that I was still reeling from a romantic relationship with an engaged (christian!!!) man, which had ended maybe six months before the celibacy experiment began. I had slept with him before and during his relationship with a charming Christian virgin girl. I knew everything about this girl, and she knew nothing about me. she ended up losing her virginity to him, before marriage (!!!), because she really believed he was “the one” and that they would be together forever. she switched jobs and moved to my city just to be with him. she had no idea that he had been sleeping with other women, visiting strippers, looking at porn, and generally carrying on a lifestyle that a “good Christian man” isn’t even supposed to contemplate. in the meantime, he kept up the facade by going to church services and bible studies, and trying to convert unbelievers like me… when he wasn’t banging me.
it isn’t his expression of his sexuality that bothers me, now. it was the fact that he created this elaborate farce in order to live a proper “Christian life”: virgin wife, monogamous relationship, chastity, purity. none of this is what he really wanted, it seemed. so he deceived people, hurt them, and ruined lives just to keep his sexual activities secret. but in order to be “allowed” to be part of the Christian community, that’s what you have to do. you can devote all your free time to volunteer work, donate all your disposable income to charity, go to multiple church services each week, be the kindest and most selfless person anyone could hope to meet… but if you have premarital sex, then you’re seen as a black sheep in the eyes of the church. certain churches, and certain Christians, seem to focus almost exclusively on maintaining their virginity and driving any “impure” thoughts out of their head, rather than building a strong character, valuing integrity, and treating others well.
I now feel strongly about the church’s demonization of sexuality. I have no respect for the people who attempt it. but at the time, I felt that I had to do the same thing or else I was evil, God wouldn’t hear my prayers, I would lead a shitty life and to top it off I would spend eternity in The Lake Of Fire. it didn’t help that the church leader, the one who had gotten me to speak for “Sex and Candy”, had gossiped to everyone else in the church about my affair with the engaged guy. so I was trying to be “pure”, and yet kept being confronted with this shameful incident at every turn, reminding me that I very much was not. I felt disgusted with myself, my need for sexual gratification, my disregard for her well-being and for my own self respect. I also felt terrified of ending up like him, enslaved to my own passions to the point of betraying those who loved and trusted me more than anyone in the world.
the second part of this debacle goes hand-in-hand with the first. I began to be aware just how important sex was to me, and as a result, I began to feel that it/I was dirty. I had a Christian friend who confided in me that she masturbated and had sexual fantasies about men — she wanted me to check her computer weekly for porn, and otherwise keep her “accountable” by making sure she wasn’t doing anything “impure”. the idea of sexual accountability began to get to me too; I began to demonize all forms of sensuality. as a result, physicality became this evil thing to me. how could I not, when I was being taught that such things were dangerous? how could I, when I was being told to read such classics as I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which described the “triumph” of couples who didn’t kiss till their wedding day? mere hugs became at once terrifying and exciting and numbing. I fantasized endlessly about feeling the skin of my roommates arm, but I eventually found it impossible to even remember what sex was like.
you might be asking, “why bother with this shit? if Christianity/this church/celibacy are so horrible, why even put up with it?”
the answer is that I was and am truly interested in God’s character. part of this means discovering what God wants. I want to seek Him out, understand Him, live the life He has set for me. I have always felt that need to connect with a higher power, and attempted to explore it through paganism from ages 10 till about 18, despite going to Catholic school my whole life. when I entered this church, it was from a desire to be around people who were all looking for that same thing. I felt the “vibe” of being attuned to that higher power. and so I stayed. and so, like the ascetics of old, I began fasting. I cut out certain aspects of my life in an attempt to pare down the nonsense of my life and become closer to Him.
I became depressed as winter encroached and the sun began to set at roughly 3:30 pm. family drama crushed me emotionally, and alienated me from the people who should have supported me the most. in retrospect, while the celibacy thing might have been beneficial at a different point in my life, it may have made a bad situation worse. at a point when I really needed to be around other people, I alienated myself: I was obsessed with being obedient to God, sorting out my past relationships, breaking what others considered sexual addiction, and generally figuring shit out. on the other hand, I can see Myself At Nineteen throwing herself into the arms of whatever hot person happened along, just to distract herself from her messy life. so perhaps it was a good thing.
god knows I wanted to distract myself. I began to feel that tension I mentioned in the previous entry, where every interaction became like an audition for my future mate. I was not allowed to view men casually anymore — I was to treat them either as a “brother in Christ” or as a “potential husband”. since I wasn’t shopping for husbands, everybody became “brothers”. it never felt sincere because I never got that family feeling. instead, I felt constantly judged against my past actions and deemed “unfit” because of my teenage adventures.
women, of course, were totally forbidden, which just added to my feelings of alienation and tension. since I wasn’t supposed to have male friends, I was suddenly surrounded by women all the fucking time and I had to pretend I didn’t have a boner for some of them. being celibate didn’t quench my appetites — it only thrust them more into the forefront of my life. it didn’t give me peace about my past, but instead made everything seem so much more catastrophic than it really was. I felt like I couldn’t share any of this, for fear of being ostracized, so I was in a little bubble of my own pain and confusion while I tried to fake the joy they said they felt.
all in all, it made for a disastrous situation.
premarital sex, and why it will save your life. (part 1)
I have been talking to a few friends lately about my theory. also to my boyfriend, who knows everything about me, and to my exroommate, who became part of the same biblethumper social group as I did in 2004. the theory is that, rather than being edifying and purifying and “right”, the Christian emphasis on virginity and chastity is emotionally and mentally damaging. I don’t think it’s what God wants for anyone, and I don’t think it should be the focus of whole Christian books, sermons and songs. I think by focusing on this “virtue” rather than on people’s character or their connection to God or to their behaviour towards others, they are creating a false standard for righteousness and obscuring God’s truth.
to clarify, I know a lot of really decent Christians but I also know a lot of terrifying or disgusting or just aggravating ones. most of you know I was once an active Christian, though I always had a lot of problems with it. I’m still really interested in the Bible, in God and the christian faith in general, but I can’t bring myself to follow today’s version of ”Christianity” anywhere close to the letter.
I went to a small student-run church, with maybe 30 or 40 “core members”. I eventually became one of them. I was on the prayer team, I went to services regularly, I hosted bible studies and prayer retreats in my house, I even spoke in front of the congregation about my experiences. I was farmed out to talk to other girls about my life and answer their questions about Jesus in the hopes that my testimony would help convert them — as baffled as I was, it obviously didn’t help much.
I was even asked to speak at an event called “Sex and Candy” which my church had created as an attempt to reach people on campus about the importance of sexual purity. with lurid stories of sexual abuse, exploitative sexual relationships, one-night stands and gayness under my belt, I was apparently the perfect example of what sexual freedom would do to a person. both the church leaders and the audience seemed to have this fascination with all the sex I had, all of which took place outside of marriage — outside of relationships sometimes — and sometimes also with females. at the time, I had undertaken a “year of celibacy” which I believed would help me focus my mind on God and purify me of all the debauchery I had been involved in, in my 19 years of life.
did it? probably not. in the church’s eyes, I’m probably far more of a deviant than I ever was then. but I was committed to it. so I turned down lots of sex, dates with hot med school students, lesbian blind dates, threesome offers and other such adventures to pursue the church’s idea of purity. I even got rid of my vibrator, placing it in a box of “satanic” paraphernalia from when I was a practicing pagan and throwing it in the dumpster. I was rewarded for my efforts with unsolicited comments by certain males of my church. they assured me that “even though you’ve slept with a bunch of people, I’m sure your future husband will forgive you. there must be a man out there… um, somewhere… who can look past all your horrible, horrible deeds and see what a good person you are now.”
of course, these males themselves were sexually repressed teenage and 20-something virgins, stunting the prime of their sexual lives in a search for an impossible ideal. as a result, they latched on to any unattached female Christian like an angry hamster gnawing your fingertip (because remember, Christians can only date/marry other Christians… and these guys were in a hurry to find a wife so they could lose the big V). one of these guys persisted in taking me on “dates” even though I told him I wasn’t dating. he was really disrespectful of my physical and emotional space. it got to the point that I told him I wouldn’t see him unless other people were coming along. two of our mutual friends were supposed to come along on the next movie outing, but when he came to pick me up, the van was suspicious empty… seems the other two girls had cancelled at the last minute. mysteriously.
a sick sexual tension had galvanized all the unattached Christian guys at this particular church. I call it “sick” because I believe whatever natural sexuality we are given by God had been so stunted that it could not emerge as sensuality. instead, it manifested itself in male bodies with symptoms similar to physical agony. every interaction vibrated with this need for release, which obviously made everything awkward and stressed. every conversation with an unattached male seemed like a job interview. I could tell they were sizing me up, pondering how fast the “courting” could begin. one guy I rejected ended up dating another very new girl convert, and they became engaged six months after meeting each other. as they said, “it was going to happen anyway.” by the time they were married, they had known of each others’ existence for a mere year.
I was talking to another, very wise Christian friend (who also happens to be male and presumably a virgin) about this marriage situation, and he remarked, “I hope they’re not doing it just to be able to ‘do it.’” I was so glad I wasn’t the only one who was skeptical about such a union, and that someone who was so entrenched in the Christian faith as my friend could look at it objectively. I felt like they and other Christian youth were being forced into an unnatural, sanitized, idealized version of what a romantic relationship should be, completely ignoring the reality of both marriage and of human life.
I have had male friends all my life, and I have three brothers who are a few years younger than I am. I don’t necessarily sexualize all men, or see them as either “potential husbands” or sanitized, unsexual “brothers in christ”. I used to enjoy a comfortable, companionate relationship with other men, and now I found this threatened, because I felt like every single guy saw me only as a prospective mate.
single men weren’t the only anomaly in this little posse. attached men, whether married or engaged or “courting”, were usually committed to their sig others to the point of idiocy. I know one guy who vowed to never be alone in the same room with a woman who was not his wife, which made prayer meetings rather awkward. I can see it making his future job prospects somewhat awkward, too. the church didn’t help; I actually sat through a sermon devoted to the question of whether or not men and women can have BFFs of the opposite sex (Christian answer: they cannot).
as someone who isn’t altogether comfortable with my gender definition, I felt oppressed by the idea that this was to be my lot, assigned to me by virtue of my possession of a vagina. more and more, I felt pushed into this role of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity, revived from the 19th-century sexist rhetoric of the “angel in the house” ideal. I’d like to say that I was okay with my self-enforced singleness, but since even masturbation is supposed to be a sin, it wasn’t too much fun.
Weird Roommate Tales
Today’s morning discovery dissolved all the the fuzzy feelings I’ve been having towards my roommates as of late. Lately I’ve been experiencing loud noises, screaming, yelling, loud rap music (dang those young whippersnappers!) and someone banging/stomping directly over my head which made my ceiling light fixture tremble and threaten to fall. the other day I noticed my cheese was missing, which was aggravating because I really wanted some in my salad. I had been thinking about it all day, and then it was gone.
The most recent discovery was my 5am encounter of mysterious neon orange barf splatters on the carpet.
But I suppose that’s to be expected when you live with a bunch of people who view life as a constant episode of Girls Gone Wild. And I can deal with mystery barf as long as it’s not in my room and I am not expected to clean it up.
I’m actually far more disturbed by Albano’s roommate. He seemed pretty chill when we first met, but he got progressively bizarre. He started to separate food in the fridge and freezer, so that there was a clear divide of at least a couple inches between his and Albano’s groceries. Then he started to divvy up the recycling bin according to who used what; when he would take out the trash, he’d only take his recyclable items from the left side of the bin and dispose of them, leaving Albano’s stuff in the right side, neatly stacked.
Soon I’d come over and notice that the toaster oven and other appliances were missing when his roommate wasn’t there. One day, the roommate left his bedroom door open and I saw a wall lined with boxes and boxes of grocery items and appliances. He apparently has a bizarre fear that Albano is going to steal all his smiley fries and Kraft Dinner, and get crumbs in the toaster oven while he’s at it.
The final straw was this past Friday when the roommate knocked on Albano’s door, during coitus, to inquire about his coffee mug, which was missing from its usual perch on the kitchen shelf. I suppose it was my fault as I was using said mug for my coffee, because that is what you do with coffee mugs. It was a radio station mug that he probably got for free as part of a promotional gig. I was about to kick him in the nuts, partially because the mug thing is retarded, and partially because he wrecked some really good sex.
Apparently later, he approached Albano and said “so, should I throw that mug out?”
I can only imagine that Albano cocked an eyebrow as he said “no dude, she was just drinking out of it, but I washed it afterwards.”
Roommate: “oh… well, I get weird ideas in my head sometimes.”
Later Albano told me that the mug in question had been segregated from the other mugs and placed on a different shelf. Presumably so that my microbes wouldn’t spread to infect the other mugs. Then again, I suppose it didn’t help that Albano answered the door naked while the I held the mug captive inside the room.
Ex
I have slept with more people than I have officially dated. I am not sure if this is normal or not, but it works out okay for me. Most of my past lovers are people I don’t see often, or if I do see them, I am indifferent to their presence. It is that way with a few of my exboyfriends and girlfriends too. There are several exes I am still in contact with and actually on very good terms with.
However, like everyone else with any dating experience, I have a couple exes whom I loathe.
Today, I found out that they are both ENROLLED AT BROCK and CONSTANTLY IN MY PATH.
Constant readers will remember R from previous blog posts. But today I ran into a high school ex (known to some as “Adam #2″ or “Manswan”) who I was pretty sure was still living in Toronto. I guess not. I don’t think he recognized me, though, since in the five years since I last saw him, I’ve gained 35 lbs and cut off two feet of hair.
This makes university far more perilous than usual. I know R’s lurking-places, but now I have to figure out how to avoid Manswan too. The problem is that they seem to lurk at opposite ends of the school, while I have classes in both. So I dunno. I don’t think a friendly reconciliation will be happening anytime soon, so I guess for now I will just have to work on my “I don’t recognize you” glance.
Quail Battle!
I am one of those people who really enjoys food, working with it, experimenting, trying new flavours and ingredients, and attempting to do that crazy reallyfastdicing technique with really sharp knives that you see on all the cooking shows. I like to cook, but I am only average at it. I’m the kind of person who burns stuff a lot, or over-seasons a dish, or adds too much oil, or mistakes cayenne pepper for paprika. As well, I don’t have the technical training to attempt a lot of the fancier dishes, so the extent of my culinary adventuring lately has been experimenting with stir fry. And anyone can make stir fry.
I also like to watch the Food Network. I love the PEI Giant, who has a real name that I can’t remember, and spends half of each episode wandering around in Charlottetown’s Zehrs. I love Nigella, because she’s sexy and voluptuous and luxuriant and so are all her recipes. I love Jamie Oliver because he has a garden, and his harvests form the basis of his meals. I even love Gordon Ramsay. But most of all, I love Iron Chef America.
Context: Today my mom gave me 18 quail eggs. Someone had traded them for an old, decrepit organ that has been sitting in my grandmother’s basement for three decades. The quail eggs were a delicious surprise, since the organ had been promised to this man for free. But my mom doesn’t know what to do with them and I guess my relatives aren’t interested. I, of course, as a wanna-be foodie, immediately took possession.
The problem is that all the online recipes I’ve found so far call for ridiculous ingredients like black truffles or caviar. For fuck’s sake! It makes me want to just drain the eggshells and use them for some kind of magical art, like a mosaic made of shells. On one hand I feel like I have been given a magical gift. I feel like my inner Jamie Oliver is saying, “Quail eggs are delish, eh, just add a little splash of olive oil…”but my inner Alyssa knows that it will probably end in another kitchen fire, like the last time I tried to make popcorn on the stove.
The only thing I could think of was to email a friend who constantly brags about his cooking expertise. Since all I ever see him eating is manly sandwiches and/or yogurt cups, I can’t really judge for myself. So I challenged him to an Iron Chef-style duel. Normally this would be a recipe for disaster, since most people would probably win against me by 36371905625198 points and also probably not set any fires. But I am hoping he will just email me some recipes, pretending he has actually cooked them at some point in his life, and hoping I won’t call him on it. In the meantime, I can pretend I cooked some too, but actually I will just steal his recipe and use it to make something less expensive than Quail Eggs Benedict and Caviar.
Epic Shovelfest!
Yesterday, it snowed.
This winter has been characterized by freakish warmness, where the temperatures climb from -20 to 10 or more degrees (celsius), overnight. Has it always been this way? I’ve lived in this area, in the Carolinian Belt, for most of my life and I seem to remember lots of snow and lots of sun. It was cold, but appropriately so. There were never days when I actually couldn’t go outside for fear of it being too cold. Now, we have warm, wet, springlike days, but they do little to cancel out the embittering windchill and precipitation and frostbite risk of the other days.
Yesterday, it snowed all day. It snowed enough that the City of Thorold thought it necessary to plow that very day, instead of waiting three or four days like they usually do. I came outside to go to my evening class to find my car blocked in by a high wall of snow. Not only that, but I had gotten a $50 ticket for “impeding snow removal” or some shit. Nice. 20 houses down, my neighbour (whose license plate reads “4A PRTY”) was also blocked in, but had not received a similar sweet gift.
Guess who’s fighting the system? I am. The City of Thorold won’t know what hit ‘em. As I told Albano last night, “It’ll be like Roe v. Wade, except better.”
I was right pissed about this new turn of events, but still had to find some way to get out of the snow so I could go to my 6pm history seminar and, later, the Surreal Beaver Ball. It was 5:50 pm. The snow was not budging. I went into the garage and found a shovel and started slugging away, but it didn’t take long for me to become discouraged. There was just so much snow. I thought about going inside, curling up with O magazine or some other embarrassing yet entertaining piece of work, and hoping it would all melt in time for me to get to work on Saturday.
And just then, who should arrive but… my roommates.
I want you to attempt to go back in time, in your memory, and think about high school. Think about the popular girls, the snobs, rich girls who wore the right clothes and had the right hair and were the right size to get all the right guys. They were the girls having big parties, or being invited to all the parties, that you were never invited to and only heard about through the rumour mill for weeks afterward. The pretty girls, the skinny girls. That image epitomizes my roommates. They are thin, shop at Victoria’s Secret, tan till they are orange, lust after Abercrombie models, and go clubbing and bar-hopping while covered in glitter in their spare time. By contrast, I am chubby, homeless-looking, and pale with awkward self-cut hair and an affinity for sweatshirts, reading, and hamsters. We kind of clash.
There is usually tension in our house, strained conversation. This time, there was none. They were already dressed in sweatpants (!!!) and winter gear, ready to dig their cars out of the disaster. And so, for the next hour and a half, I shoveled with them. They dragged the stereo into the garage and blasted R+B as we giggled, laughed, and struggled in the snow. I pushed their cars out of the mire, and they pushed mine. We high-fived. Afterwards, they even offered me some of their delicious-looking leftovers from the Oliver Garden. It was quite the bonding experience.
So I missed the seminar. I did make it to the last hour or so of the Beaver Ball, although in my rush I had forgotten to bring any money. I listened to poet Stuart Ross talk about swimming pools in his very own living room. In the midst of all the bizarre art and people in strange costumes (like my professor dressed as the virgin mary, complete with halo), I felt warm and infused with a peaceful glow. This may have been my body desperately attempting to recover from all the strenuous activities I had just forced upon it. But part of it was the feeling that things in my house were finally ‘alright’, that I could be friendly with these girls without it feeling fake, or without me suspecting diabolical motives on their part.
It is worrisome that the internet can carry emotional baggage.
I’ve exiled myself to wordpress, having long abandoned Diaryland and finding blogspot and Xanga somewhat cliché and lame. I feel like moving into a new home and starting a new life with my boyfriend, Albano, requires a mental/symbolic “move” to a new domain with a new blog. Sad that the internet can carry baggage, but it does. Diaryland saw me all the way through my teens, while Livejournal chronicled the last four years of my life and all the family and relationship drama that came with it. I am leaving my two old livejournals, cult_classic_ and Mouton_noir7, alive for posterity’s sake, but I want to leave those memories where they are and move on.
To make a long story short, my enterprising but tragically stupid roommates have managed to get our internet shut off. So until I’m officially moved in to our new apartment, I’ll be updating sporadically from library computers to ramble on about my hobbies, my work and the love of my life.
alyssav