I think I'm too immature to get to Heaven.

Well, the good news is that I did finally venture out of the library. This morning your favorite (yeah, I said it. What of it?) field anthropologist ended up attending mass, and in terms of having a meaningful experience I think I would have to call it an indisputable failure. And, as always, that was my own damn fault. True, it wasn’t as bad as the time I spent almost all of a Quaker meeting thinking about what would happen if someone were to fart (would they just stand up and claim it as divine inspiration?), but it wasn’t much better.

Usually when I venture into mass or any other service I tend to use it as an opportunity for a nice think, since I’m not much of a participant. Sometimes it turns into a great experience, as if it’s meditation for stuffy Republicans like me, but other times…like today…it’s basically an hour of me trying to block out inappropriate thoughts. And no, you filthy perverts, when I say “inappropriate thoughts” I don’t mean vulgar mental images. Today “inappropriate thoughts” means, “What is the worst song I could possibly start belting right now in the middle of mass?”

This is my version of a Koan, I guess.

Think about it. You are in a large church, surrounded by priests, people training for the priesthood, and the saintly people they know and love. It’s an incredibly important service, there’s a sacrament in it and everything, and my God is there a lot of solemn kneeling in prayer. You’ve given it a lot of thought and you’ve concluded that you’ll probably only be able to get a few bars in before one of the acolytes tackles you into submission—so which song is it? Which song is the most hideously inappropriate thing you could possibly imagine belting during the middle of mass?

What got me thinking about this was all the special clothing they put on for services. Observing the cassock and cotta-fest that is mass made me think of muumuus. Thinking of muumuus made me think of fat ladies. Thinking of fat ladies made me think of the busty black women who sing, “It’s Raining Men.” Which, obviously, gave me the urge to stand on top of my chair and start belting “It’s Raining Men.”

As soon as I became conscious of that thought I conceded defeat. Trying to have a proper think during today’s mass would be an exercise in futility, so I might as well devote the next hour or so to coming up with an even worse thought than singing “It’s Raining Men” instead of “Agnus Dei.”

I decided that “It’s Raining Men” clearly wasn’t beaten by such favorites as Tom Jones’ “Sex Bomb” or Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” but it was definitively trumped by anything produced by the Village People, particularly the YMCA. (Though, once the fog machine that is the thurible really gets going, what is the church if not a massive and cheesy bar mitzvah? Get some cheap DJ lighting in there to play on the fog and you got yourself a Jewish rite of passage.)

The ready-made ridiculous dance moves (and I don’t just mean the wacky arm movements—yes, I mean the embarrassing pelvic thrusting, too) that come with the territory made the YMCA a strong candidate, but thinking about bar mitzvahs made me consider the potential of music from other faiths. The obvious choice was the Islamic call to prayer, but that seemed less ridiculous and more dickish. Simply drowning out one statement of faith with another would be turning a bit of fantasy into a bit of jihad, and that just ain’t my style.  

What about the song “Chai”? 

We had to learn how to dance to this travesty in religious school. I have to imagine that Israeli dancing is probably the most offensive thing you could possibly do in a church; not because it’s offensive to the church in particular, but just because Israeli dancing is simply offensive in all contexts. I should probably provide full disclosure though: the fact that my uncoordinated ass was forced to dance in circles as a crucial part of my religious education from the age of 3 until I was 12 might have something to do with my dislike of Israeli dance. So maybe singing and dancing to “Chai” in the middle of mass is not objectively all that awful, when compared with the option of the YMCA.

But I don’t want to rule out all faith-related musical inappropriateness. Although, to be honest, the worst thing you could possibly sing in the middle of a mass in a high church setting probably comes from the Christian tradition itself:

The Eighteenth Wheel

I’m in the library studying theology. Aw crap, you caught me. I’m actually hiding in the library (with an open theology book, mind you) because I’m too afraid to go downstairs for lunch. The college is hosting an Open Day for prospective ordinands, and so the dining hall is packed with priests, future priests, and potential future priests. I didn't really want to be the only person in the room who's destined for Hell. Not gonna lie, it’s a little intimidating. So intimidating, in fact, that I’m even giving up a free lunch [*gasp!*].

To be fair, even when it’s me among just this year’s bunch of ordinands I feel a little intimidated. I’m not sure “intimidated” is quite the right word, as on those occasions when I’m the only non-ordinand among ordinands I feel less intimidated and more like the third wheel on a 17-person date. They all lean into each other to share intimate conversations about church politics or which tune they’re going to use for the “Magnificat” at Evensong, and every now and then their intimacy is shattered by my feeling the need to laugh with a ridiculously loud volume at a joke about Giles Fraser just to prove that “HEY FOR ONCE I HAVE A FAINT IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!” Those rare moments where I am even capable of doing an honest but deafening guffaw of recognition, however, are vastly outnumbered by moments of those weak smiles of someone trying to hide the fact that they are, relatively speaking, a dipshit. Most of the time I have genuinely no fucking clue what anyone is talking about, and I feel as though I crashed the house party of the Elect.

But this isn’t to bitch about the ordinands, the poor dears. They're all lovely people and those rare moments when I do understand what the hell they're talking about make all the moments of confusion worthwhile. Besides, it’s only natural to be very close to people going through the same program, and to be honest I think the people in my own program are more cult-like. Try sitting in on a conversation between a group of student-teachers and see how lost you feel—it’s like we vomit up a never-ending fountain of incomprehensible acronyms and “my pupils are shitter than your pupils” trump stories.

Still though. I think I’ll stay in the library just to be safe.

Paul's Letter to Philemon...as read by me.

NB/CAVEAT EMPTOR/CAVE CANEM/CARPE DIEM: Just remember that you’re reading this blog by choice. Since I’m not forcing anyone to read this I feel free to write poorly and write offensively. So having said that, I just want to stress that if you’re religious—particularly Christian and religious—you might want to give this post (and all of my posts) a miss. To be fair, you might even consider giving me a miss.

HERE THERE BE DRAGONS…AND PROFANITY. AND ALSO A BIT OF BLASPHEMY.

(written last night)
I had another one of those moments today where I realized that I’m foreign. And no, I don’t mean foreign in the nationality sense, which is pretty much a constant revelation, I mean foreign as in I clearly belong on another planet. See, today I was in the library reading Paul’s letter to Philemon, and I came across the sentence, “When I remember you in my prayers, I always thank my God because…” (followed by several verses of Paul rambling on as Paul is wont to do).

I just had to push my chair back and chuckle like a fat person at Thanksgiving. Maybe since I’ve been in a slightly down mood this week I’m desperate to cling to anything even remotely giggle-worthy, but I was vastly amused by what was implied in that “when.”

“WHEN I remember you in my prayers…”

It suggests that there are specific instances when Paul includes Philemon in his prayers, while other times Philemon goes un-prayed for. I liked to imagine that sometimes Philemon pisses Paul off so much that he leaves the slave-owning bastard out of his prayers purely out of spite. Kneeling by his bedside in the evening, sometimes Paul charitably prays for Philemon, while other times he says, “…and please Lord bless the Romans, the Corinthians, maybe even the Hebrews—but forget about Philemon because that guy’s a dick!” Maybe (no, definitely) it’s inappropriate to use this kind of language when talking about the Bible, but I really liked the passive-aggressive “FUCK YOU” that was captured in that “when.”

Now exploding with shamefully nerdy laughter, I rushed across the library to see what the original Greek said. The word “devastated” does not even begin to cover how I felt when I discovered that this delightful “when” was nowhere to be found in the hideous jumble of strange shapes and syntax that is Greek.

When I felt my face fall I realized that I am foreign. I’m sitting in a library laughing at the Bible while everyone else in my program is out getting shitfaced to celebrate that our week has finished. And it’s not like I wasn’t invited—I was, I just chose to hang out in the library and giggle over my interpretation of an English rendering of Paul’s word choice instead. I’m perfectly happy sitting in the Arctic library by myself at night with the understanding that the rest of the world is out being awesome, but surely my comfort with that is weird. Even the poor bastards training for the priesthood had cleared out of the library, having probably effed off to the pub ages ago because everyone in this country is always effing off to the pub.

To be fair, today’s realization that I’m clearly a weirdo started developing earlier in the day when I become conscious of the fact that I had spent a solid 15 minutes staring at the way someone’s ears would sort of bounce when they talked. No fucking clue what they were talking about; all I got from that conversation was that they have bouncy ears. This raised the all-important question of “Are my ears that bouncy?”

I used to think that I had that facial recognition problem that people sometimes have, you know, where they can’t recognize anybody. See, I can know somebody but bump into them on the street and not have the faintest idea who they are. But I think the real problem is that I can have hour-long conversations with people and focus with religious dedication on one particular aspect of their face or one unique mannerism. At the end of the conversation I am intimately acquainted with the way their nose wiggles when they say certain sounds or the way their top lip curls up like a growling dog when they laugh or the particular way in which they wring their hands when listening—but I’ll miss out on more obvious aspects of their appearance, like the fact that their hair is blonde or that they are missing an ear.

Still though, I’ve had a truly lovely day of giggling over Greek (I learned how to say “_____ begat _____” in Greek today), the Bible, wiggling ears, and everything in between. If that is foreign, I don’t want to be native. Because, as the song goes, “Damn it feels good to be me.”

Dead Anglican Monk Ghosts

The other day I had print something, so obviously I went to the mortuary chapel to take care of that. I should probably explain that my college used to be a monastery, and apparently all the old monks used to go to one wing of the complex to die. Once dead they’d be carted down the hall to the mortuary chapel, which is now our computer room.

To be honest, I have to question how much of this is true. I know I heard the story from a priest, and when has a priest ever lied, but I can’t help feeling like the whole thing was made up for shock value. You know, the other colleges have stories like, “JRR Tolkien used to sit at this very chair!” or “And in this room, CS Lewis probably took a dump!” Tourists and students alike faint with excitement at the mere suggestion of historical connections, no matter how tenuous. And, as much as I like Fort Jesus, we just don’t have that kind of history. Because “people used to die in our college” is kind of the trump card of the desperate, the Helen Keller or Hitler card in “Apples to Apples” if you will.

Still, just in case, I insist on propping the door open when I’m in there alone at night. While not entirely sure if the suggestion of death has made me perceive an aura of death in that hallway or if there is a genuine aura of death there, I don’t like to take any chances. I figure if I prop the door open the chances of the ghost of some dead Anglican monk coming out of the walls and killing me for being Jewish are significantly lower than if I were to close the door.

So last night I was in this creepy chapel that smells of death (that is, if death smells of printer toner and faint body odor) when all of the sudden the door facing the open computer room door opened. Out from the darkened room stepped a girl, maybe about 8 or 9, who made intense eye contact with me. She gave me that look that you always get from your roommate’s friends. I’m not referring to any roommate in particular, I just mean that it’s a universal truth that if your roommate has friends over and you enter the room, all of the friends will turn to stare and give you a look that says, “Who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing here?” After they’ve met you their look drops the “Who are you” part, but they will always give you the “What the fuck are you doing here?” part. I’m genuinely fascinated by this look because I’m deeply curious to know what they could possibly think I was doing in my own apartment. I want to respond to their silent “What the fuck are you doing here” look with a casual shrug and an “Um, living.”

Anyway, this little girl gave me that look, probably minus the “fuck” because she isn’t even aware of that word yet, being 8 or 9. We had an intense minute or so of just staring at each other, a minute in which I had to fight the urge to shout a word, any random word, just because I felt so uncomfortable. Luckily before I could shout “CHESTNUTS!” the little girl peered round the corner of her door and started shouting at someone down the hall. I know it wasn’t in English, maybe it was French. Yeah, I know it’s terrifying that I did a bazillion years of French and the best description of this kid’s language that I can give you is, “Maybe it was French.” But get over it. Most of my brainpower at that moment was being devoted to planning escape routes for various horrific hypothetical scenarios involving the ghosts of dead Anglican monks.

So what’s your computer room like?

The Fiiiinaaaaall COUNTDOWN

Yesterday the song “The Final Countdown” came up on my iPod, and I immediately thought of my brother.


Before I continue, please get this video going. And turn up your speakers. Turn them up as loud as they will go.

My brother’s 14 months older than me, and when we were in 11th and 12th grade (Year 12 and 13) we had finally reached the age when having a sibling so close in age finally stops sucking so much. Instead of acting like total little bitches and tattling on each other from the backseat, now we were old enough to peaceably have the car to ourselves, and we were in total agreement about one thing in particular—every single afternoon, as soon as we started to pull out of the school parking lot, “The Final Countdown” had to be blasted.

I almost mean “blasted” in the literal sense. The force of the music beating out from the speakers felt like hundreds of small explosions, to the point where we would roll down the windows for fear that the sheer force of the volume would blow them all out, and the bass would rumble out with the intensity that jostles your internal organs out of place. I’m pretty sure that this daily ritual is entirely responsible for any hearing loss I may currently be suffering from. Hell, even if I ever get cancer I’m sure that it’d be somehow directly linked to this epically loud music.

I don’t really have a point in sharing all of this. Well, I guess my point is that I’m feeling a little nostalgic. It felt strange—and a little fantastic--to think that I’m studying to be a teacher and living in an Anglican seminary in England while he’s studying in a Lubavitch rabbinical school in the US, and I had to wonder how the hell we got to those places from that car blasting “The Final Countdown” in a high school parking lot in Los Angeles.

The adhan is looking like a preferable alternative

I know I haven’t even been here for two full months yet, but I’ve already grown to hate somebody. And when I say somebody I actually mean an inanimate object that I’m convinced is determined to ruin me—and obviously if something is conscious enough to have a vendetta against me, it is a “somebody” as opposed to a “something.” Clearly I’m referring to my college’s chapel bell.

Being me, I don’t have the normal complaint that some non-future-priests in this college have, namely that the bell wakes them up. To be honest, the first time since my arrival on September 12th that I have ever been woken by this bell was this morning, when it went off at the buttcrack of dawn (okay, it went off at around 8:30).

No, my major complaint about this bell is that I think it is trying to make me crap my pants in complete and utter terror. Before I tell you how, you have to understand how skittish I am: the other day someone came through a doorway a little too quickly and I literally fell over with fright.

Okay, so now for this bell. Each morning I stumble, half-asleep and freezing cold, across the garden to the dining hall so I can have some breakfast. I’m sleepy to the point of disorientation, to the point where even remembering if I put pants on that morning is an intellectual challenge. The entire college is in silence, silence so powerful that you can probably hear the likely disgusting noise snails make as they ooze along. And each morning, just as I reach the most acoustically ideal place in the entire garden, the bell lets out a hearty:

BONG!!!!!

And just in case you didn’t hear that first earth-shattering BONG! the bell follows it up with about 30 more BONG!s in quick succession, like it’s the jackhammer of church bells. Like it's rubbing it in. My understanding is that the bell tells people when services are about to start, so I used to think that the bell was yelling at the ordinands, “GET YOUR LAZY ASSES OUT OF BED AND INTO CHAPEL!” (Note: I’m not suggesting that the ordinands are lazy, but rather that this asshole of a bell thinks that they are.)

Now though I’m pretty convinced that the first BONG! is actually a “BOO!” and the bazillion follow-up BONG!s roughly translate to “hahahahahahahahahahaha!”

Why is it laughing, you may well ask. Well, because after the first deafening BONG! I usually react pretty strongly. Sometimes I do a subtle flinch, like someone has just raised a hand to slap me. But sometimes I react in more obvious ways, like screaming “JESUS!” (always welcome in a seminary), or involuntarily flinging everything I’m carrying as if in self-defense, or sometimes I just fall over. Maybe I've made it obvious, but the terror I feel at hearing this bell is immense. The absolute terror I feel after hearing such a sudden BONG! shattering the sleepy silence is the sort of thing that, on a good day, makes me require a hug afterwards and that, on a bad day, makes me question the existence of God. I won't explicitly tell you how much of this is exaggeration for an effect, though if you've known me long enough you'll know that this likely isn't much of a stretch of the truth.

The obvious conclusion here is that this bell is an asshole who won’t stop his campaign of terror until I piss myself with fright .But I refuse to change what time I leave my apartment for breakfast so as to miss the bell. If we change our normal routines because we fear a terrorist will kill us make us pee our pants, then the terrorists have already won.

RE according to Sam

After Friday you should expect a massive post about my first taste of teaching (it’s in the works, I just can’t be bothered to finish it until I turn in my paper on Friday), but in the meantime I’ve been thinking a lot about this paper. If you’re not part of the Religious Education Massive*, then I should probably explain that we need to plan how to teach Christianity to middle schoolers (Key Stage 3) over six weeks. So basically I have six lessons to teach all of Christianity. Whatever, no big deal.

(*I learned the word “Massive” the other week, and apparently it’s like a gang…and now I can’t stop using it for everything. I’ve even started using it to refer to certain items of clothing, like my underwear is no longer my underwear but rather the “TOP DRAWER MASSIVE.”)

What I hate about this assignment is that I have to make the lesson plan that looks good, not the lesson plan that I would desperately like to do. The lesson plan I have to do is carefully justified with education policy documents and research into how kids learn. The lesson plan I would LIKE to do is justified with “because I feel like it.”

Actually, my justification would be in the form of song. I’d sing “because” to the tune of “We’re Off To See The Wizard” from “The Wizard of Oz.” So it’d be like, “Because because because because becaaaaaauuuuuuuse….” And then say, “Because I said so.” It’s the sort of thing that makes me think I’ll be a fantastic parent one day.

Anyway, what is this fantasy scheme of work? Well, basically we’d just sort of walk around—my God would there be a lot of walking. And we’d listen to Christian pop and haredi techno and Weird Al’s “Amish Paradise,” and it’d be fine. Occasionally we’d feed ducks and talk about it, and when we felt like it we would spend hours with our noses in the Bible, looking for something to laugh about. You know, the sort of thing that gives me the giggles during services (“These men are not drunk as you assume—it’s only 9 in the morning!”).

When we got bored we’d make fun of Midrash and then, if we were still bored, we’d invent the field of Christian Midrash just for laughs. We’d make fun of the Talmud for obsessing over minutiae that God Himself doesn’t have time to worry about, and after we finished we’d put together a “WHO WORE IT BEST?” fashion magazine spread for various popes.

We’d make frequent visits to churches, mosques, synagogues, cult centers, whatever, and for once in my whole method I’d lay down the law and I’d beat any kid who set one foot out of line. Unless someone farted, in which case the children would be encouraged first to laugh and then to loudly debate which member of the congregation dealt it. And rank the church on The List.

As I have completely unpredictable whims, one moment we’d be kumaya-ing it up and looking at squirrels somewhere, and five minutes later I’d be screaming at them to sit their happy asses down, shut up and open their books. I very humbly believe that this system, my system, is the best system of education. Ever.

So this one time I died at Freshers' Fair

I feel like every single day of my life my sneaking suspicion that I’m not quite like everyone else gets confirmed. That’s not to say that I’m BETTER than everyone (though, come on, you know I am), it’s just that I seem to be on a slightly different frequency. Last week I had another fine example of this characteristic that defines me when I became convinced, while in line for Domino’s Pizza vouchers, that I had in fact died.

I suppose some context would be helpful. Because I like to collect flyers and other things that I’ll simply throw away later, I decided to go to the Freshers’ Fair, which (for my American readers) is the university’s activities fair. After carefully considering which clubs sounded the most appealing in my thoughtful and discriminating mind, I ended by signing up for any group that harassed me into giving them my e-mail address. So basically I’m now a member of everything. Of my own free will I signed up for the Doctor Who Club (run by people who, quite predictably, make me look like I have social skills), the Walking Club, and the Conservatives.

So anyway, towards the end there was a line where you could get coupons and vouchers for Domino’s Pizza. I didn’t even really want Domino’s Pizza because I’ve been eating so much cake that if I eat even one slice of pizza I think my pants are just going to concede defeat and split open. “You win this time, Sam’s Caloric Intake,” they’ll sigh as they wave the white flag of my underwear. But everyone else seemed so excited about the free pizza, and I so badly wanted to fit in…so I stood in line.

A pimply employee came down the line handing out vouchers, one for each student, while we waited in line to get to the main table. I saw him come down the line, closer and closer to me, handing a voucher to the person in front of me, walking right past me, then handing a voucher to the person behind me. Not wanting to make a big deal out of not receiving something I didn’t even want in the first place, I just shut up and continued to stand in line. But then two people walked in and, without even noticing my existence, cut the line right in front of me.

It was at this point that I realized that something was up. I appeared to be invisible. “Aw shit,” I calmly observed, “I’m dead, aren’t I.” Wracking my brain I tried to deduce how exactly I managed to die at Fresher’s Fair, I realized that I didn’t particularly give a shit how I died now that I was dead. To be honest, the five minutes in which I thought I was dead I was probably the least scared of death I’ve ever been in my life. Like, if this is how calm and relaxed I’ll be when the time actually comes, I mean, I’m good to go.

After a couple minutes of just standing around taking in my newfound mortality, my first plan of action as a dead person was to decide to go to the movie theater. I figured that I may be dead, but the awesome thing about this version of death, that is being an invisible person that still walks the Earth as a ghost or spirit or whatever, is that at least I can go to the movies for free now. I looked at my watch and wondered if I could make the matinee of “The Lion King.”

Taking my first steps as a confirmed dead person, I strode towards the door with the confidence of someone who knows that from now on clothing is optional—and I immediately bumped into someone. “Oh, pardon me,” he Englishly apologized on my behalf. At that point I rather loudly thought out loud, “Shit!” and the poor polite guy probably assumed that I was some kind of a nut who swears at people after colliding with them. But no, the truth is that I wasn’t pissed off at this guy for getting in my way. The truth was that I was just pissed off I wasn’t dead because now I have to pay 12 bucks to go see “The Lion King” in 3D.

"HELEN!!!!!!!!!!"

Say what you want about the teeth, the food, the constant drunkenness, and the unsettling obsession with ceremony, but the British have fantastic emergency exit signs. The United States of America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, where the streets are paved with gold, where anybody can become president someday, and where clouds rain puppies—but I don’t think our emergency exit signs reflect our mission. For those of you who are not American I should explain that, unlike the mirthful British signs, the American signs say quite simply “EXIT” in the same, uniform lettering, and they usually glow a sinister red or green. They’re almost German in their efficiency.

Now for my American readers I should probably explain what emergency exit signs look like here.
Basically it is a silhouette man making a mad dash for the exit.

I’d like to imagine this poor silhouette man running from the flames in a state of complete, pants-shitting terror. “You guys, we have to get the fuck out of here!” he seems to say. “It’s gone all backdraft!” he seems to add. Forgetting all the fire drills they practiced in the land of silhouettes that exist on various signs, he makes a sprinting beeline for the exit and bowls over small children in the process. At this point the animalistic instinct to preserve his own life takes over, and he finds himself practically frothing at the mouth like a rabid beast and plowing through a crowd of silhouette people who have gotten between him and the exit, like he's one of the less classy men on the Titanic.

While being the first to admit that I usually read into things far too much, I’d like to hope that designers, like me, had a full backstory for the poor man on the sign fleeing the flames. Maybe he isn’t the selfish, fearful man that I think he is. Maybe he’s married to the silhouette woman from public restroom signs (yeah, you’d think she’s married to the men’s restroom silhouette man, but that’s because you’re such a racist), and he’s actually fleeing quickly because he wants to make sure his wife, who’s in another area of the building, is okay.

Although the silhouette man does find her eventually, she’s tragically trapped in an upper floor of the building. “Take care of the children, darling!” she calls out from the window, with a stoical look on her blank, silhouette face as the flames climb higher. “HELEN, NOOOOOO!” her husband screams as the silhouette firefighters usher him away. They try to wrap him in a blanket, and he throws it off, raving like a madsilhouetteman, “WHY? WHY? NOOOOO! HELEN! WHY, SILHOUETTE GOD? WHY?”

Hmm. Yeah, I’m probably reading too much into those signs.

“Religious Services: Come for the farts, stay for the God.”

Warning: it’s another immature one.

After the unrivalled success of “High School Graduation Bingo, 2006 Edition” (I got to call out “Bingo!” after hearing, for example, the words “journey,” “spread your wings,” “look to your left,” and a joke about doing laundry very poorly at college), I’ve decided to create a new version of Bingo for farts during religious services.

Obviously you’ll be wantin’ some instructions on how to play Church Fart Bingo: The way it’d work is that any time a participant went church surfing or synagogue chasing they’d bring their Bingo card with them. On it would be different services you could go to: mass, evensong, shacharit, maariv, kol nidre, Rosh Hashanah morning (1st day), Quaker meeting, zen meditation, etc. And then you’d just play the waiting game. Because, if you go to church/synagogue as often as I do, you’ll end up hearing enough farts to get Bingo eventually. And then, no matter if the cantor is in the middle of wailing away in Hebrew about how different people are going to die this year or if the priest is in the middle of turning wine into the blood of Christ, you would be LEGALLY OBLIGATED to scream out at the top of your lungs, “BINGOOOOO!”

So the reason I bring this up is that tonight I ended up at Kol Nidre. Partly because I’m training to teach religion and need to keep up with how different people are praying, partly because I still sometimes feel as though if I don’t go to services on Yom Kippur I’m going to get smote/smited/whatever the word is, and partly because I was missing some old, dear friends. I thought going to Kol Nidre would be a nice way to recall fond memories of getting the inappropriate giggles with friends during Yamei Kippur past, when someone farted during the morning service, when the old professor acting as cantor had a peculiar voice that a friend spent the following years imitating at completely random intervals, or when the cantor went ridiculously slo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-owly and caused the fast to drag on for even longer than necessary.

Hearing all that Hebrew and hearing the familiar tunes made me think of old friends in LA, Chicago and Jerusalem, and I’ll completely unashamedly admit that my eyes started tearing up. It’s rather embarrassing to do this during Kol Nidre, because I’m sure crying while you’re begging God for forgiveness in Hebrew can only look to your neighbors as though you did something well and truly fucked up this year that needs some serious atoning for. I imagine neighbors would be thinking, “Bitch, you clearly need to prostrate yourself.” Not really in the mood for a hearty helping of homesickness, I started to regret coming to the service, repeatedly asking myself, “What the hell were you thinking when you came?”


And then someone in my row ripped a substantial fart.


Stifling a quick giggle, I brushed it off as just a squeaky chair or a shoe noise. But then an unmistakable odor filled the air and confirmed my suspicions. And, dear readers, surely at this point in our relationship you can correctly predict my immensely mature reaction. Yes, the correct answer is indeed a solid 20 minutes of silent giggles, tears streaming down my face, a lobster-red face, and my entire body shaking like I was having some kind of a seizure.

Being trapped in a crowded Yom Kippur service with the severe people of England only made my struggle worse, as my brain kept trying to convince my sense of humor that we needed to behave ourselves. It’s supposed to be the most serious night of the year and I’m laughing about flatulence. Typical Sam, I’m afraid.

I calmed down for a minute, but then reflected on the number of religious services I’ve been to in which a member of the congregation audibly cheesed. After realizing that the number is actually appallingly high, and that the Jews have (according to empirical data that I have compiled) been the worst offenders, I completely lost it again and was back to silently shaking with giggles. With these kinds of stats I feel like I should pass Tums around at religious services, though maybe I’ll wait to see what patterns emerge on the graphs before deciding on a course of action.

But I promise I do have a point in sharing my story of someone farting during Kol Nidre. See, this is what I love about my life. At the very moment when I was feeling my lowest, like I made a huge mistake, like everything was now totally shit…at that very moment what I think is the single funniest thing in the world that could possibly happen ACTUALLY HAPPENED. If that’s not unquestionable proof that God exists and is a loving god, I don’t know what is.

Aw crap though, I’ve started using farts as proof of God’s existence. What would Anselm say?

Hanging out with a cat.

From 10/4/11 and 10/3/11
So I pretty much sat next to Lauren Cooper today. And, much like the adults in those sketches, I had not the faintest idea how to get young Lauren to shut the fuck up. But that truly deserves its own blog post, and I can only write about it after the homicidal urges have subsided. And when I say homicidal urges I actually mean the urge to drown my sorrows with cheesecake. Which I am doing right now.

Instead today I’d like to talk about a cat called Gemma that I became friends with on Monday. Being the socially awkward and inept person that I am, she might very well have been the ONLY friend I made on Monday. I’d like to think that the fact that I am fully aware of my awkwardness kind of puts me one step ahead of, say, PhD students, but this might be a purely theoretical distinction.

Anyway: Gemma. The chilliest cat in all of England. So basically I just sat with her outside for about half an hour. To be honest it wasn’t all that interesting. And quite frankly the only reason I sat with her in the first place was that I just thought she was ill. Mostly because I think all cats look ill. Probably because they’re not dogs.

So I was just chilling—okay, I have to interrupt myself here and say that the English people I’ve met have overwhelmingly used the word “chillaxing,” which is something I thought only dweeby 14-year-olds in the Midwest still said because they thought it was still the done thing in California. But apparently it’s still going strong here. Anyway. So I was just chilling with Gemma, waiting for someone who knew cats better than I did (basically anybody) to walk by, but no one came. So it was just me sitting with this cat who was making this weird moaning sound that I assumed at the time was a cat swan song but that I guess in retrospect is just extremely posh meowing that apparently American cats don’t do.

And my response was to just stroke her. Every now and then I’d stop stroking her because I was afraid she was dying and I really just didn’t want to turn today into a day in which I stroked a dead cat. But then I thought that would be really uncharitable of me, and the key word of the house today seemed to be “charity” (well, that and “cake”), so I continued stroking her and desperately prayed that she wouldn’t die. At least not while I was touching her.

I kept talking to her, calling “Gemma!” quite a bit, because I figured that when you do that to dying people they hang on a little longer. (“Gemma, you’re going to be fine. We’re going to see Venice, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember how you wanted to see Venice, Gemma? You just gotta hang on.”) While remaining slightly doubtful as to whether or not it works on cats, I thought it couldn’t hurt. Having briefly considered whether or not meowing at her would be more productive, I decided that there was definitely a boundary of weirdness that even I wasn’t prepared to cross. So I just continued my little chat with quite possibly the worst conversation partner ever.

Finally someone did walk by and I asked him whose cat it was. Turns out she belongs to the professor who gave me my own copy of the New Testament in Greek a couple weeks ago. The same professor who, whenever he says so much as “Hello, Sam” in the hallway, causes me to cower in reverence and fear of his NT skills. This is his cat. (Urge to make “Magnificat” pun rising…)
Well, fuck. If his cat dies in my presence that’ll probably piss him off and then he’ll probably ask for the New Testament back. …HANG IN THERE, GEMMA!

The guy who came across my little makeshift vet office (Dr. Sam: I cure your pets with love and slightly squeamish stroking) seemed really unconcerned about Gemma, so she must be doing okay. And I’ll admit I didn’t really want to press the issue because he’s part of the ordinand crew, and they scare me somewhat for two reasons: 1) sometimes, particularly during mass, they wear dresses, and 2) I know they can just tell what an asshole I truly am, as most people can, but then they’re going to tell God about it, and then, well, I’m just totally fucked.

Casually waiting for the ordinand to round the corner, I started to get up, and as I did so I reflected on the fact that I just spent a sizeable fraction of an hour talking to a cat. And it was still probably the most productive thing I did all day.

But as I stood up and reflected a most horrific realization dawned on me: ooooooh Jesus have I been sitting in a bad spot. I’d been sitting Indian style right in front of the open door that leads straight to the kitchen. The way I was sitting you couldn’t see from the kitchen that I was with a cat. SO basically it just looked like I was camping out in front of the kitchen.

Look, I don’t mind if the cook thinks I’m just a hungry fatass who is sitting in front of the kitchen at 1 in the afternoon because she wants to be first in line for dinner at 7—in fact, I’d prefer that. But unfortunately I’m pretty sure that even before this incident I’d already managed to accidentally convince the cook here that I have some kind of an unhealthy obsession with him. To be fair, my passionate and extremely loud declaration of love for him when he served me my first taste of Indian food probably sent mixed signals.

Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?

So I think I made one terrible mistake coming here. And by that I mean I have accidentally passed up my one obvious opportunity in life to reinvent myself. No one here knew me when I first arrived. See, I’ve just been portraying myself as Sam, the RE student-teacher who likes Doctor Who, aspires to be Laura Ingalls Wilder, and dances to the Footloose soundtrack alone in her room. Which is fine I guess, because it’s a more or less accurate description of me. But I can’t help feeling like I missed out on a fantastic opportunity to introduce myself to everyone as Pocahontas.

Talk during Doctor Who and I'll have you put on the sex offenders register

Yesterday I watched the season finale of Doctor Who. I ended up camping out on the common room couch for some time beforehand just in case anyone would dare try to watch something besides Doctor Who. Then again, since England only has 1 ½ channels I’m not sure what else they’d be watching. Test patterns maybe?

Anyway, before Doctor Who there’s this terrifying show called “Strictly Come Dancing,” which I think is what the American “Dancing with the Stars” is based on. It’s terrifying because I don’t know all the endearing backstories of the celebrities because, coming from America, I’m used to actual celebrities. So instead of viewing their dancing from a sympathetic perspective, all I see are a bunch of old, sad tarts clad in sequin disasters being rather violently flung about on the dance floor by some eternally cheery young thing who has the almost impossible job of hiding his disbelief at how shit his partner is at dancing. And, frankly, it makes me fear old age. I don’t mind making an ass of myself, but I prefer KNOWING when I’m making an ass of myself. And it seems that when you’re old you lose your awareness of how ridiculous you are, and instead do a dance routine on national television in which you look like an overweight corgi chasing after dropped table scraps.

But I’m not here to talk about Strictly Come Dancing. I’m here to talk about child molesters. And by that I mean people who talk during Doctor Who. So I’m sitting there, practically pissing myself with excitement from watching the resolution of the huge mystery of the entire season, whether or not the Doctor does actually die, when suddenly an entire battalion of visitors to the college decided it needed to have a tea party in the common room RIGHT THEN. “Team, we need to have tea RIGHT NOW, and we need to very loudly and passionately discuss and sort out all of the world’s problems. RIGHT NOW. The world’s depending on us. And to show the world just how seriously we take our responsibility, we’re going to clink our cups and saucers loudly enough that even folks in Siberia are aware that this historic discussion is occurring.” …Sometimes I truly think universities should be made illegal and their students sentenced to 20 years hard labor in kibbutz laundry rooms. Whatever, I tell myself, that’s fine. I turn up the volume a bit and try to keep up with all the crazy shit that’s coming out of Matt Smith’s mouth, which is sometimes challenging enough even if you’re in a silent room…and you’re Stephen Hawking.

But then (and this person is so nice in every way, I just want to make that clear) someone decided to ask me about my day. A slight grunt was my response. Part of me felt so rude to not respond properly by reciprocating the question (or even simply responding with anything besides what was essentially a mouth fart), but the part of me that won out thought that anyone who talks during Doctor Who is clearly some kind of a pervert. And, dear readers, I just don’t have time for perverts.

Now, I don’t want anyone to think that I’m an awful person who prefers TV to human beings—the reality is that I’m an awful person who prefers Time Lords to human beings. And to be fair to myself, I may not have the patience to exchange pleasantries during Doctor Who, but if someone came to me desperately needing a sympathetic ear during Doctor Who I wouldn’t be angry. Hell, if it were something serious and urgent like, “Sam, I’m contemplating suicide,” I might even turn down the volume. A bit.

Sam's brush with greatness

Two days ago I had the surreal experience of showing a famous academic where the bathroom was. My college was hosting some conference on churches or theology or some other thing that presumably means something to God but not much to anyone else, and so our house was invaded by a sea of obese and religious Europeans. So as I’m wading through a crowd of well-fed Europeans so I can get to tea and cake on time and I’m silently cursing all of them for delaying my cake eating, a woman stops me and asks, “Do you know where the toilets are?”

I rather lazily pointed in the direction of the bathroom, and as I did I caught sight of her name tag. Holy crap. “Jane Doe.” I’ve read her stuff. My tutor has mentioned her almost as many times as he’s mentioned trees, and if you know anything about my tutor you’ll know the man loves himself some trees. OH MY GOD. Jane Doe said “toilets” to me! I helped Jane Doe have a (I’ll assume) successful bowel movement!

I wish I hadn’t just lazily pointed. I should have escorted her. I should have shown her Lambeth Palace, which is what I’ve started calling the handicapped bathroom that is about twice the size of my bedroom and that has fine soaps that the regular bathroom doesn’t have, which I guess is supposed to make people feel a little better about being handicapped. Then again, I’m fine with just lazily pointing. After all, bitch got between me and cake.

Writing is against my birthright.

So I’m still having trouble comprehending this whole issue of pens in UK schools. From my limited experience (observations in six schools—still prolly more classroom experience than Michael Gove), I’ve concluded that British children must be allergic to pens. At the start of every class period inevitably a small riot breaks out as the kids loudly inform Miss that they don’t have a pen or demand that Sir lend them one from the supply that he finds himself forced to bring with him.

I find it genuinely fascinating that it doesn’t occur to these children to bring their own goddamn pens to each lesson, and I often like to speculate on the thought process behind that one. I imagine that these children think that they are going to simply do interpretive dance all day at school and are then on a daily basis deeply shocked and offended to find that going to school usually involves writing at least a couple things down in your notebook—“Wait, we’re going to have to write things down? IN SCHOOL???”

I really just don’t get it. In my school people rarely forgot pens. And if you did you would very quickly have a quiet word with your neighbor to ask, completely humiliated and one step away from performing public self-flagellation, whether you could borrow a pen. And if that neighbor was me, you would then have to sign a contract. Because I was that desperate to not have any friends.

The kids’ aversion to pens is almost as confusing to me as British teachers’ obsession with having the kids underline things with rulers as opposed to simply letting the children do the terrifyingly bold and dangerous task of freehanding lines underneath entire words (dare I even imagine such a world?!), which seems like such a frustratingly massive waste of time that it might even earn itself its own blog post.