Creampuff Revolution

Creampuff Loses her Religion

Okay. I've been spending a little too much time reading fundie blogs and hanging out on Free Jinger. And I'm embarrassed to admit that when my gateway fundie, Meredith, wrapped up her blog last week, I was REALLY UPSET. Like, "end of Buffy Season 5" upset.

Thank god for Free Jinger, where I and others of my fundie-obsessed ilk can discuss the finer points of Meredith's marriage and how "get off your duff and wash your wife with the Word!" is my new favourite phrase. 

All of this talk of religion got me thinking about my own religious evolution.

I didn't ask a lot of questions as a kid. I had an inquiring mind - just not an inquiring mouth. I preferred to keep my own counsel and "figure things out" on my own rather than actually get the answers from my parents, teachers or friends. I don't know if I didn't want to look stupid - if I didn't want to bother anyone - or if I really just enjoyed puzzling things out for myself. Most of the time, this combination of observation, assumption and imagination worked out just fine for me but sometimes...it didn't. And that's probably why I thought we were Jewish until I was 10.

My mom was raised Catholic and I believe my dad was United but they were fairly non-committal when it came to religion. We attended the nearby Moravian Church sporadically, which was a pretty gentle Christian experience - correct me if I'm wrong, parents, but I think we attended more for the community aspect than the religion aspect - and all I learned about Christianity in Sunday School was that arrowroot cookies and apple juice are two great tastes that taste great together.

No, any real religious instruction in my childhood took place kind of peripherally and it happened in the same place I took swimming lessons and did day camp - the Jewish Community Centre. 

Of course not everyone there was Jewish...the JCC was basically our neighbourhood Y and everyone went there - but I assumed that since it was called the Jewish Community Centre and many people there WERE Jewish, that everyone who went there must also be Jewish, including me. And I thought that was cool. I braided the challah...I hung out with the giborim...I could sing Israel's national anthem in Hebrew. 

I figured that "church" and "synagogue" were just synonyms - I felt smart for knowing about synonyms - and I knew that some people took the Sabbath on Saturday and some on Sunday and assumed that when you were a grown up, you could pick whichever day of rest worked best for you. Sweetass!

I also thought that "Christmas" and "Hanukkah" were synonymous - and this idea was backed up by our yearly "Christmas" concerts at school, because the concert always included some kind of Hanukkah number (including one memorable year when some kid holding a lit menorah set our 6th grade Santa's cotton ball beard on fire and several dads leapt from their seats, batted the beard off the startled Santa and stomped it out on stage. Those dads were heroes.)

My final piece of evidence was that, at the Christmas Eve service at the Moravian Church, they were always talkin' about how Jesus was born the King of the Jews. Since we were worshipping Jesus...and Jesus was a Jew...then clearly we were also all Jewish like Jesus.

My reasoning was pretty airtight.

It wasn't until the Gideons showed up in my 5th grade music class and handed out their tiny new testaments that the sorry truth came out. 

I was very excited about the tiny red book (tiny! red! kid-sized! those sneaky Gideons). I took it home to my parents. The conversation that ensued covered the following points:

• What the hell were the fucking Gideons doing at your school?
• There are two testaments: Old and New
• The content of the Old Testament applies to both Judaism and Christianity
• The content of the New Testament is exclusive to Christians
• From an ethnographic perspective, our family is Christian
• You are not a Jew

Wait - WHAT THE FUCK??

I was super disappointed to discover that instead of being one of the Chosen People, I was just another run-of-the mill WASP. BO-ring.

I then went through a very religious period where I prayed a lot and went to other people's churches and wrote about the Lord in my diary and tried to read the New Testament several times but couldn't get past the lengthy "begat" section. (Actual quote from my diary: "All this "begetting" why can't they get to the "be-doing" ahahahahaha, sorry Lord.")

But I could never really get the religious fervour going again after the Gideons shattered my dream of being a Bubbie someday. And now, as you all know, my personal religion is pie.

Creampuff Doesn't Feel This is Appropriate for Kids

Can we talk about this?

This is the Daddle - the Saddle for Dads! You know - for those times your little buckeroo wants to put his feet in the stirrups and giddyap you in the balls.

I can't remember where I saw this recently - it wasn't the Tonight Show because Jay Leno sucks bag - and so my apologies if it was on your blog and I'm not giving you any credit. Although now I think about it, it might have been Regretsy, but I'm too lazy to go check.

Now, don't get me wrong - I'm all for fun times with Dad. My own excellent father was a keen ride giver and was an expert in rides of the airplane variety. I am grateful for the many sweet, giggling memories and innocent fun I had being tossed around as a child.

But I feel that even my fun-loving, ride-giving dad might have thought it was weird if I'd pulled out the Daddle and said: "Hold on, Dad - let's make this pony ride MORE REAL."

Seriously - at some point doesn't any dad strapping on a Daddle think "Waaaaait a minute here..."

I mean, one minute you're tightening those Daddle knee pads to give your kids a pony ride and the next minute, this is happening:

I have nothing against pony play - I just think kids should discover it through internet porn like normal people.

Creampuff's New Obsession

GOD, I love the internet. Because no matter what weird thing you're obsessed with - oddly shaped post-it notes, Swedish fist-fighting, rugby - there is a group of people out there who not only share your obsession, but have started a forum about it.

A few weeks ago, I went down the internet rabbit-hole reading about the phenomenon of Stay-At-Home Daughters.

The SAHD Coles Notes: these young ladies are fundamentalist Christians who choose to remain at home after completing their home school education rather than going off to college.

They spend their days learning the gentle arts of thrifty domesticity from their mothers, reading the bible and taking care of their (multitude of) younger siblings while cultivating "a servant's heart" in preparation for fulfilling their biblical roles as women - becoming heart surgeons. HAHAHAHAAA! Just kidding. They are training to become helpmeets to godly men.

These girls stay at home - as looooong as it takes - under the authority of their fathers - until they marry and their father transfers his authority to their new husband! For real - it's part of the wedding ceremony.

But here's the most awesome thing - a bunch of these stay-at-home daughters have blogs! I know! And despite their thrifty fundie ways, they all seem to have really excellent cameras with which to document the day-to-day minutiae of their at-home daughter existences. Typical stay-at-home daughter blogs have names like Aspiring Homemaker, the Unliberated Woman, The Father Knows Best, Courageous Womanhood and - my personal favourite SAHD blog - Striving to Serve at Home. 

Striving to Serve at Home is about Meredith, the eldest of six, whose family runs an organic, sustainable dairy and poultry farm in Virginia. Meredith got her real estate license at the age of 19 (studying from home) and enjoys flipping properties - but promises to give up real estate flipping if it "threatens her husband's financial leadership".

I don't need to shit on Meredith and her life choices - while they're not my life choices, I think she's a smart person with a strong work ethic who's a titch more live and let live than some of her fire and brimstone fundie brethren. To be honest, after reading her blog - all of it, since 2007 - I actually kind of love Meredith, even though she'd probably shit twice, die, block my IP address and take a Christian shower if I ever left a comment on her blog.

God love her, Meredith waited a long time for her Prince Charming - in a culture where most stay-at-home daughters are stay-at-home mothers before they're old enough to drink, Meredith was 23 before her guy Stephen showed up. And the only reason they met is that he stumbled upon her blog the same way I did: by Googling "stay at home daughter". Creepy! Yay love! They got married a month ago and he's spirited her off to Oxford, where he's studying classics. She's super excited.

I'm not sure why but I found Meredith's constant talk of "God's faithfulness in scripting her love story" strangely compelling. I guess it kind of reminded me of the "yearning for a simpler time" I would sometimes experience when I read old-fashioned books like Anne of Green Gables, where you rambled in the woods, married a nice local boy, pressed your own apple cider, popped out a lot of kids and didn't have to worry about anything, like voting or having rights.

I yapped to a lot of people about Meredith and her God-scripted, internet-enabled love story but I don't get out too much and soon everyone I interact with on a regular basis had heard about this new obsession of mine and I had no one left to talk to about it. Also, Meredith didn't update her blog during her honeymoon (presumably because she and Stephen were getting to know each other in the biblical sense - or "skronking for Jesus", as my friend Padu would say) and I was starting to get antsy.

So I googled "Meredith and Stephen" and that's when I found my new online home - a fundie-obsessed forum called Free Jinger (Jinger is one of the 19 children in the fundie Duggar family, in case you weren't familiar with the Duggars) with a discussion area called Quiverfull of Snark.

Everyone is there - liberals, homos, recovering fundies, current fundie-lites, people who actually know the Duggars in real life - basically people who are as crazy or crazier than me about these fundamentalists and their homespun ways. Some of my favourite recent topics include: 

• Picture of the Morton Ball coming out
• Sister Wives sighting!!!!!!!
• Can we discuss this Ladies Against Feminism article?
• I found wives for the Maxwell boys
• We Can All Breathe Now - Kirk Cameron Assures Us That the World is Not Ending
• Gospel Aerobics

I have spent more time than I care to admit lurking on Free Jinger. I cannot get enough. And it seems like every time I'm on there, I learn about a new fundie blog or website that threatens to eat my whole weekend.

I honestly don't know why I'm so fascinated by fundies and their radical beliefs and their extreme reproduction and their terrible clothes and their constant talk of God's faithfulness and their eyes shut, fingers in ears, "LALALALALALA"-ing to keep the rest of the world out. But I CAN'T LOOK AWAY.

As most of you know, I've always been enthralled by people of faith - witness my ten year Catholic iconography obsession - but there's something extra tangy about these wholesome girls baking bread for their 12 siblings and innocently fellating pickles and waiting for their dads to okay some dude to court them. Do I want to save them? Do I want to be them? Do I want to corrupt them by telling them what that pickle photo reminds me of? 

Or do I just want to keep tabs on them because they're having so many fucking children that they will soon be our overlords?

History will decide. And the Lord.

Happy New Year & Creampuff Miscellany

So it turns out that, just as "fervently wishing for the holidays to begin" doesn't actually speed up time, being "in denial that the holidays are over" does not cause time to stop.

I hope you all had really lovely holidays - for me, it was a glorious time of family, friends, food and TV firelogs and I enjoyed it immensely and would really like to be spending all day every day alternately knitting, reading, eating bonbons, napping and learning the secrets of my brand new Mac (don't look at me like that - I HAD to get it. My Dell was making uncomfortable noises, like it had mainlined several street burritos and the blue screen of death appeared more than once. It was time.)

As is my yearly wont, I decided to check out my New Year's post from last year to see what was what and was disappointed to see that I'd only accomplished and/or addressed two of my five resolutions:

1. No death - well, that didn't work out. My grandpa passed away in May. But 2011 - NO DEATH!!

2. Move - CHECK.

3. Don't learn to drive - CHECK-A-ROONIE.

4. Finish Padu's sweater and other outstanding knitting projects - CHE...ck. Well, here's what happened with that - after 3 years of knitting this endless fucking sweater, I stored the front and back of it in a bag while I worked on the first sleeve. The sleeve wasn't going well - it's like moths had gotten into the ball of yarn I was using and I kept finding suspicious weak spots too late, which meant that the sleeve was full of little knots and wispy bits of shittied up yarn. THEN, when I removed the sweater pieces from the bag (months later), I discovered that the bag had off-gassed into the sweater pieces and the sweater now smelled like it was constantly farting motor oil.

I aired it out for days on end - nothing.

At this point, I started to wonder if I should just call it a day - the sweater reeked, it was too long in the front, I started it so long ago that it was no longer in style AND also, I fucking just fucking hated it. 

Knitting something you fucking hate for someone you totally love makes no goddamn sense. So I gave up and knit Padu a scarf with the leftover good, sweet-smelling yarn instead. I finished it while he was here for the holidays! It's very fetching, no?

I also finished the socks I'd been knitting my brother's girlfriend since July of 2009! She was very appreciative and very kindly took some knit porn photos for me. Such shapely feet.

5. Finish my stupid play that's set in the Yukon - Not yet. How long does it take to write a light, comedic one-act play? Four years, apparently. I have no real excuse here - I had a deadline to finish it, then got sick and missed the deadline and then the Olympics and then we moved and then I ceased to care. But I came across it the other day when I was moving files around and decided that it couldn't go the way of Padu's sweater (which I plan to burn in the yard - there will be photos, so get ready).

I'm not going too nuts with the resolutions this year because that way lies insanity and disappointment, followed by binge drinking and recrimination. In the place of grand, sweeping plans, I have reasonable ideas, such as:

1. Weekly blogging. 'Cause if you're going to pay for your blogging software, you should actually use it. 

2. Word of the Day writing project. I signed up for A Word A Day and am spending 15 minutes a day writing whatever crap I feel like, based on whatever the word of the day is. We'll see how long THAT happens but it's three days in and so far, it's ALL GOLD. And by "all", I mean "total" and by "gold", I mean "wank".

3. Watch less tv. I LOVE tv. Love it. But when I caught myself looking at the amazing pile of great books I got for Christmas during a break in Millionaire Matchmaker last night, I thought "Maybe I should read a book." Of course, I could record Millionaire Matchmaker, fast forward through the ads and then that's an extra 15 minutes for reading right there.

4. Smell fantastic. Santa loaded me up with every Christmas-scented item philosophy ever produced and I can't lie - I'm a little obsessed. Should I scrub with Gingerbread today? Is it a Sugary Cinnamon Icing kind of evening? Does my Peppermint Bark lipgloss clash with my Vanilla Cardamom body butter? I don't want to smell like an idiot. Since I had to go gluten-free last summer, it's become clear that whiffing of cupcakes is the next best thing. 

5. Reduce the stash. Don't tell anyone this but...I like to watch Hoarders because it makes me feel good about myself and my personal level of clutter. Still, there's always room for improvement - so I have officially quit making Katr buy me yarn until I've cleared out a reasonable space in the large, three-drawer Rubbermaid dresser I have my stash stuffed into. So you know what that means - more photos of knitting! I know you're excited, so don't pretend like you're not.

Okay, that's five. I could go on, but Millionaire Matchmaker is just starting. Happy New Year to you all - and may your resolutions be reasonable!