i was at the zoo and just kind of vagueing out leaning on a rail and watching the duck pond and in the background a kid started yelling “he’s coming for you! he’s coming for you!!” and i thought it was some game she was playing with her family or something up until i felt a little hand grab my elbow and looked down to see this tiny wide-eyed child staring up at me with the world’s most serious expression and she said in a solemn voice
“he’s here for you”
and something reached out and grabbed my other hand
it turns out that a resident cockatoo has figured out that if it just waddles back and forth along the rail it can get the maximum amount of attention and headskritches with the minimum amount of flying and objectively this is very cute but at the same time this was very nearly the way that a grown adult died of a heart attack at the zoo
i love bird tumblr so much, where else could you go “hey look at this bird” and have a complete stranger not only know where it lives, but declare that it’s their nemesis
picking RPG clothes based on maxing stats instead of whether they match or not
[*rpg music playing as gear gets picked* boss (wearing paper crown): so you’ve finally… arrived… what the hell are you wearing? player character: it’s my ass kicking outfit, bitch!]
i have a fake son.
his name is Tim and he is working on his M.S. in astrophysics at Berkeley.
he is devestatingly handsome and enjoys rock climbing and volunteers as a counselor at the local YMCA there in Berkeley, California.
i am so proud of my fake son. i have raised him up in my own head to be such an outstanding member of society.
“Tim” is only brought up when asked about by one particular woman at work that i only see on occasion. i don’t make a habit or game of lying to people, but with her, it kinda came about as follows:
Faye is one of those people who has been there/done that and will hang herself on the cross while she tells you how much worse the experience was for her. i’ve seen this woman Kanye West an 8-month pregnant girl at said girl’s own baby shower to glorify the gift she gave her as well as go into how horrible her labor was with her own children. Faye also is a braggart. her car/purse/house/ring/shoes/etc. all cost more than whatever yours did and her children are all angels.
i was forced to work with Faye for 2 days about 5 years ago. she called me Emily a few times before i finally told her my name is Amy, not Emily. she gave me a sideways glance and said, “I like Emily better”, and since then, she has always called me Emily. i let this go because to get angry with her and tell her off is to see her become dramatic and begin crying and insist she did not mean anything by it while not issuing anything close to an apology. Faye is always right, too, you know.
anyway, when she shut up long enough about herself and her fabulous offspring on the second day, she asked, “Do you have any children, Emily?”
i replied that i do not. she then launched into her daughter taking fertility drugs so that she could give her mother grandchildren someday.
that was the only question she asked me until i saw her about a year later.
“Oh, HI, Emily! How are you?!”
“Hi, Faye…how are you?”
“Wonderful, wonderful. Stephen just graduated from UT. He’s going to be the best doctor ever! How is your son, uh, Tim?”
it took me a second. Tim? son? what the hell is she talking about?!
it dawned on me what a complete narcissist she truly is. she hadn’t heard me the day she asked if i had children, because she didn’t care. she didn’t care enough to call me by my real name, so it wasn’t much of a surprise.
i couldn’t stop myself. i briefly thought about correcting her, but i decided to just go with it.
“Tim is doing so well. He was just accepted to Berkeley after his amazing thesis on planetary nebuli. We are so proud of him.”
her eyes grew big. “Oh, how nice! But, Berkeley? That’s so far from home. UT is an excellent school; surely he could’ve been accepted there?…”
i gave a small chuckle. “Oh, well, they wanted him for sure, Faye. I mean, all the letters he received, practically BEGGING him to study there. But, well, they just don’t have a sufficient astronomy department. UT is a fine school, but not for the subject that Tim is going into. Astrophysics is not something you can study just anywhere, you know.”
her eyes narrowed. “Medicine is what these young people should be going into. Astrophysics? What is that, anyway? How will it contribute to the world?”
“Gosh, I don’t really know how to explain astrophysics, Faye. It’s so mind blowing for simple minds like mine and yours. But searching for things in space that could potentially help our planet is a pretty big deal, I think.”
Faye promptly excused herself. i knew i had gotten her.
i’ve bumped into her on and off throughout the past 5 years and she always told me how her angels were saving the world, especially Stephen, and then she’d ask about Tim. and i made sure my Tim was one step above her Stephen. her face would turn crimson and she would have to abruptly leave.
i saw her as i was leaving work yesterday and she stopped me to wish me a happy Easter.
“Stephen is coming home this holiday. He’s bringing his fiance. She’s a doctor too, you know. How is Tim? Don’t tell me he’s still not graduated?…”
“Oh, Faye, don’t be silly! Astrophysics takes YEARS to graduate from. It’s not as simple as medicine. But, yes, he is close to graduating.”
“Is he coming home for Easter? I can’t imagine spending holidays without my children; how dreadful! Oh, but he’s all the way in California…it costs so much to fly here, I assume.”
I grinned. “Yes, it does. But he’s such a sweetheart, he’s flying me out there this year! Taking a break from his studies and humanitarian efforts to have his dear ol’ Mom around for Easter. I’m so lucky!”
“…yes, well, have a nice time, Emily. Happy Easter!”
“You too, Kay! Oh, I mean Faye!”
you know, like i said before, i don’t like to lie. it does seem very silly to have let this go on for so long. Tim has been a fabrication in the making for over 5 years now, he almost feels real to me.
when i see Faye, i have images of my fake son, looking so handsome in his lab coat as he’s peering into a microscope looking at dust particles from a comet. i see him jogging with his dog on the beach. i see him hiking and biking and climbing. i see him helping an elderly woman with her groceries.
it’s a true testament that if you lie, or let a lie go on for a while, it becomes a solid thing that you have to keep up with.
oddly enough, i don’t lose sleep on this lie. i don’t see her often enough to fib about this on a daily or consistent level. Faye never cared anything about me or my life until she had something to try to one-up me on. SHE is the one losing sleep on account of her Stephen not succeeding quite like my Tim. it’s amazing how this lie has eaten her alive and made me feel proud of something that doesn’t even exist…
eh well.
i’ll be boarding the fake plane to Berkeley this afternoon, to celebrate Easter with my fake son.
Mama’s soooo proud of you, Timmy!
Seriously, these Christian reviews of “The Red Tent” are making my week.
Favorite quotes:
“What would Jesus do? Burn it!”
Ah yes, because Jesus never socialized with prostitutes or sinners. He stayed far, far away from anyone like that. Yep, totally a Jesus move to condemn anyone who isn’t of a “pure” life.
“This book is earthy and vulgar and filled with descriptions that belong with private matters. I had hoped for something that reflected the daily lives of women of the time period[.]”
So sorry. Here you wanted a glimpse at the women’s daily lives, and instead the author only wrote about private matters! What a horrible misunderstanding!
“[This book] takes the central character and tries to make us believe that a girl who is barely into puberty can have a deep romantic sexual experience and fall deeply in love with an adolescent male after just meeting him.”
Yep, because no one believes in love at first sight. Especially not teenagers. That’s why our culture hails Romeo & Juliet as the ultimate story of waiting three days before calling a girl back.
“[Anita Diamant] has written books outlining how to reject the Christian religion and convert to Judaism. I would suggest ‘The Red Tent’ only as a companion guide to someone who has such a goal.”
Score, nice to know that there’s a trustworthy guide for this!
Um…it’s inherently a Jewish book. Don’t want to comment specifically beyond that without reading the book. There are enough Christian books in the world already that I think my community can get some of our own too??
god
is it so hard to leave jewish books alone
My Hebrew professor, a yeshiva educated conservative rabbi, highly recommended The Red Tent.
One reason why the “we need more nonsexual LGBT spaces because gay bars are evil dens of sin and predation” thing bothers me so much is that I have known quite a few nonsexual, minor-friendly LGBT spaces that did not revolve around alcohol consumption as business model or whatever – I worked for four years at a gay and lesbian bookstore in Vancouver’s gay village! You know what’s really, um, difficult to do (under capitalism etc)? Maintain a successful small, community-based business that caters to a marginalized community! It can go well, but it can also be just really really hard. The place where I worked was firebombed multiple times (not while I worked there, although I did have shifts canceled a few times due to bomb threats), it was put at the center of a sprawling legal case about government censorship of LGBT literature that cost the owners literally millions of dollars, when I worked there I don’t know if it ever really turned a profit, and no one was paid enough, and the owners eventually got burned out but couldn’t find someone with decent ethics to sell it to so they’d be sure that their employees and this space they’d built for LGBT people would be in good hands.
I loved that bookstore with all my heart and soul – it was my one refuge when I was living in a violent, abusive situation; it was the first place I was able to have a sense of belonging to an actual community of LGBT people, an experience which was really formative for me and helped me heal a lot from the small-town homophobia I was coming from; when I was too poor to buy food, the manager told me to just take whatever I needed for dinner or groceries or bus fare out of the till and leave her a note letting her know, and she’d literally just like, reimburse whatever I needed. This is an OUTRAGEOUS thing to do, but she was an elder lesbian and she knew I was young and bi and in a really tough place so she did it anyway. One of the store owners, at a time when I wasn’t speaking to my mom for a number of complicated reasons, would call my mom to let her know I was showing up for work and I wasn’t, like, dead in a ditch somewhere. Those people looked out for me – and for other people like me – in ways that went so beyond what I could have ever asked anyone for. And they did it while struggling immensely as a business.
And you know what often kept that place afloat? Gay bars! I’m serious – when the bookstore was in trouble, when they had legal fees, etc, it was gay bars who hosted fundraisers. It was gay bars who provided space for stuff like LGBT trivia night, or for the bookstore’s anniversary and new years’ parties, or for anything that required more space than a small bookstore could accommodate.
So I really resent seeing people pit the idea of spaces like LGBT bookstores and cafes against the idea of spaces like gay bars! Listen: it’s been said a million times, but I think it bears repeating, that most of the people doing this seem like they have never been to an actual gay bar but are basing this stance entirely on what they’ve seen on TV. But also, I feel like maybe these people have never been to an LGBT bookstore or cafe or community centre or other social space for LGBT people that isn’t a bar! Because if you think that there’s no connection ever between these spaces and the ways they exist, if you think that undermining the right of gay bars to exist is supportive of gay bookstores and coffee shops, you’re very, very, extremely, much, very wrong.
theclumsiestninja 