Finally

First, the good news: my friend set me up a blog on my personal domain! …which has been completely blank for a few months now, ever since another friend set the domain up for me.

The bad news is, since it’s my personal domain, I am going to have to be very careful about what sorts of things I write there.  Well, not “very” careful, I suppose, but still.  I’m in the middle of a divorce and I need to be pretty careful right now until papers are finalized.

Which reminds me.  My asshole husband changed the locks on the house. This is after he removed everything, including my personal clothes, papers, and some books– and lied to the attorneys about it.

I don’t think I mentioned how bad it is.  He’s been telling all our mutual friends, as well as my own immediate family, that I am crazy.  He is ostensibly trying to get them to sign papers to commit me. His goal is to punish me for leaving him while still convincing everyone how much he still loves me and wants me back.

But dear sweet baby Jesus in a jetpack, I really do not want to get into all that right now.  I’ll just say that I’ve got two stacks of relationship and abuse self-help books from the library piled up around my desk right now.  And, one of my housemates is home all day with me and he’s been driving me a little mad.  He’s a good person but not the most sensitive… though to be fair, if I am explicit about what I need, he follows directions.  Dealing with a woman who is getting divorced after ten years in an abusive relationship is not exactly something that comes with an instruction manual.

But like I said.  I’ve got my own domain and it’s content-ready now.  So the first thing I’ll probably do is go through some old atheist posts I’ve published here and see about publishing them on my site.  It’s intimidating to have my name attached to everything– anyone who knows my email address can say, hey, I wonder if she’s got a website, and then there they are at my website.  It’s a stage I’ve never had before.  And I don’t want it to be just a place where I talk about my personal life; that’s what mySpace blogs are for, am I right?

Speaking of my personal life, I’ve had a cold for a little over a week.  It’s been a frustrating time: I keep having periods where I feel like I’m doing better and making changes and starting my life over, and then I tentatively start to make new actual changes and schedules, and then something comes up like I get sick and it puts everything back weeks.  I had to postpone my own birthday cake (pumpkin cheesecake) because of all the coughing from said cold.

Plus I ran out of Doctor Who on Netflixs On Demand.  Season 4 gets in on Wednesday, though.

“Jesus is not a swear word”

My parents were fundamental evangelical Christians and raised me to be the same.  This all went according to plan until rather recently– I told my parents about my atheism shortly after I discovered it myself, Christmas 2007.  (Happy Holidays mom!!)  My mom is still a Christian, though she is fairly private about it and doesn’t attend church any more.

My dad started leaving Christianity around 1997, when we left the shrinking fundy church I grew up in.  The new church was Presbyterian, so it was a lot more feel-good and happy Jesus-loves-me kind of stuff.  This was a departure from the old church, which was cultish in the amount of control they tried to wield over congregates.  My dad finally got a chance to look back and realize all the shit they put him through.  After a few years recovering from the worst of it, and deciding which parts of Christianity he doesn’t believe anymore (most of it),  he started attending the “Center for Spiritual Enlightenment”, who had a focus on spirituality rather than religion, which is good for people like my dad. They are not judgmental and do meditation and talk about humanism.  Good times.

Then, recently, he looked up “atheist” in Wikipedia and realized he was one.

He and I were talking today and he says, “You ever see those bumper stickers that say, ‘Jesus is not a swear word’?”

“Yeah!  But Jesus is totally a swear word.”

“Can’t it be both?” he asks.

“Well,” I say, “If people didn’t think Jesus was a god, it wouldn’t be a swear word.  So you can’t really have the one without the other.”

Irony: when Christians propose a deity who is offended by the misuse of its name, because this invites and causes that misuse by people who do not believe in said deity.  I have to laugh… because literally, it is Jesus’ purported god-ness that makes us want to use his name as a swear word, so it’s not just ironic, it’s almost poetic.

But enough of that.  It is time to eat pork chops.

divorce

So I’m getting divorced.  (You probably remember that.)

It isn’t going well.

My husband hired a big shot attorney after getting served (I filed the lawsuit, self-represented).  I guess he was scared.  But now he is also broke.

Here’s a fuckin news flash: Two broke people getting divorced do not need attorneys.  That should go without saying, right?  Well, now I have one.  And we are all meeting in a few hours to see how much zero divided by two is.

I should be nervous but I’m not really.  My friend says I’m in denial.  But I’ve been nervous for like a week, and then last night I popped a few pills and passed out, and woke up this morning feeling pretty optimistic.  Plus, I decided right off that this wasn’t my divorce meeting, I was just going to support a friend.  So if I need it, we’ll see how that attempt to psych myself out works.

In other news, I’ve got a lot on my plate regarding my atheist group.  I’ve got to put together a Recovering From Religion support group, decide on a place for a coffee meetup, and plan a LAN party for Left 4 Dead 2.  If you’re wondering what coffee and video games have to do with atheism… we’ll, we’re mostly a social group.  I’m trying to start having a few more regular events on the topic of atheism, or science, or that sort of thing, but I haven’t exactly had predictable levels of energy and motivation these days.  Having your life turn upside-down will sort of do that to you.  But things will be smoothing out soon enough.  The support group is a really big need, since a lot of people in the group (like myself) suddenly found themselves without the faith they grew up with.  When that happens, you lose your philosophy of life, your social group, and often your friends and family.  Some of us have lost everything, and that wound does scab over, but its rough going.  Hence the support group.

But now… I shower.

pest problems

I may be a backyard homesteader, but I haven’t exactly got rows of veg and trees bursting with fruits… and that’s for one reason. Well, two: rats and gophers. They’ve got me covered for ground and air assault. The gophers have robbed me of two tomatoes and one lovely squash, and the rats have taken all the walnuts and they will take the pomegranates the very night they all ripen. We got one gopher in the last month. And tonight we had a small victory over the rats.

The problem is that my housemates are reeeaaal big animal lovers and would strongly prefer that no small furry cute thing be harmed in the making of this farm. Me? I say, fuck that. The critters are eating our food and that’s money in our pockets. I won’t take any pleasure from killing the critters but I will do it without guilt. And tonight, I did.

We set one trap with peanut butter and twenty minutes later, the dogs started barking. So my housemate hands me a 2×4 and watches from a distance while his wife holds the flashlight for me. And I whacked the shit out of a poor little rat with its nose caught in a trap. The little dude was literally squirming around, dangling by its nose.

So that’s a good start. Hopefully we can get the yard cleared of critters by next Spring (no problem, really, unless I lose my 2×4) and I can really get crackin making things grow. Sobering that something had to die so I could do it.

weekend lesson

One of the neighbors has been giving me produce from his garden, and Saturday I was trying to use up a bunch of peppers by making salsa.  The peppers he’s given me before were not spicy at all.  These however, were spicy with a vengeance.  And I processed them with my bare hands.

I then spent the next six hours trying to get my hands to stop burning, including rubbing them with salt, sugar, and baking soda (not all at the same time), using burn gel (yeah, that was a long shot), and rinsing them with cold water, hot water, and milk.  Cold water was the only thing that made the pain stop.

So then I spent the afternoon baking cookies (for the neighbor, ironically enough) and submerging my hands in a bowl of cold water whenever the pain got too bad.

I switched to ice and watched Kiki’s Delivery Service and Battlestar Gallactica, or was it First Blood?  Either way, my housemate took the ice away after the movies and started giving me shots of whiskey. 

I passed out around 9, and when I woke up the next morning, the pain was gone– though it did come back briefly when I took a hot shower.

I figure that as well as it worked, the cold water idea ended up backfiring because when you’re trying to get really cold hands warm, they hurt.  So by the end of the day I had quite a bit of pain.  Thank Bacchus for Jameson.

And I never want to see another chili pepper as long as I live.

ruining the day before it really starts

I’m eating leftover soup and sandwich for breakfast, which is having the unintended consequence of making me feel like the day is half-over.

But I’ve got my coffee, my iPod (4 Meg, fuck yeah!!), and a comfortable temperature in my office space (for once), and I am ready to get this ball rolling.

First, a quick note to whoever has been reading my blog thanks to search engine results– I must say I did not expect that.  I figured I would log in after two months of inactivity and see a flat line on my visitor’s log chart.  That’s a pleasant surprise– thanks.

And to anyone who likes me enough to have me on your feed reader… good things are in your future, my friends.  Good things, full of atheism, backyard livestock, three-layer-cakes, and a couple more swear words.

Stay tuned.

militant

I’m not a militant atheist; I’m more of a “yeah, whatever” atheist.  But lately I find myself turning into a militant radical feminist. 

Example.

Last night at a bar, the ‘tender yells out, sudden-like, “Hey, everybody, we got a birthday over here!  Let’s sing her happy birthday and see if she swallows!!”  [a shot of booze]

Cut to Alice with a “What. The. Fuck.” look on her face.

Everyone sings happy birthday.  The woman looks embarrassed.  Then the bartender says again, “Alright, men, let’s see if she swallows!”  The woman hesitates, then shrugs and downs the shot.  Free liquor is, after all, free liquor, whether or not it is offered by raging patriarchal jerk-faces.

“She swallows!!” 

So then, I get over my shock and shout to the bartender, right during a nice lull in the cheering, “Hey, fuck you!”

Whew!  Let me tell you, I felt better.  And two women thanked me.

The birthday girl was not one of them, alas.

Fuckin jerk face bartender.  If someone were to try that with me on my birthday, I’d pour the shot out on the bar and walk out.

everything is okay

I don’t know if anyone read my last blog before I changed the privacy setting.  But I’ll just pretend it’s not there.  I’ll just say my husband and I are still together, and everything looks like it might actually work out.

Instead, I’ll share an email I received from an old friend.  She finally noticed my Facebook says “atheist”.  So I get this.

I’m going to say something about your loss of faith in God which might embarrass or anger you, but I’m going to say it anyway. I  want to say that just because other people in your life haven’t succeeded in the Lord, or haven’t had a life in God you were interested in imitating, doesn’t mean you can’t.

I’m not sure where she got that idea about my “loss of faith”.  I did explain how it happened to her.  And I’m not sure how to follow up a clarification on what it means to be an atheist without making reference to Santa Claus.  And that might be a little mean.  But I’ll give it my darndest.  

Sad, tired, confused, and swearing like a sailor, but only in my head.  I don’t really know what to do with myself.  Don’t even want to read, which is unusual to say the least.  So I’m drinking black coffee and getting to work.

brand new!

After an unfortunate and life-changing event– it was a seemingly small event, but a complicated one, and I don’t think my communication skills are up to the challenge, so you’ll pardon my skipping the details– I have implemented Phase One.  Phase One of what, I’m not sure what to call it, but perhaps it will become clear once I get through a few more phases.

I have just purchased my first, very own, mobile phone.

It is a G1 and I am very happy.

crushes and coming out

I have a confession.

I have crushes on at least five people right now– that’s five off the top of my head.  If I pay more attention and take notes as I go about the week, I’m sure the number would be a lot higher.  Come to think of it, I bet I’m a little bit in love with all my friends.

It sure feels good to be able to admit that.  Even if this is an anonymous blog that nobody I know in real life reads… still.  There are so many different kinds of love; it’s nice to know that people are all kinds of beautiful and wonderful, and I can appreciate them.

Also, I just had lunch with some coworkers.  And you can add one to the list of people who know I’m an atheist.  She’s a Christian and it didn’t bother her in the slightest.  It was maybe a little condescending when she said, “It’s okay if you don’t believe in him; he’s still real.”  But still.  She didn’t even blink, and that was nice.