I Want to Talk About It

I want to talk about Captain America. I want to talk about Freedom and Justice and being the guy who's willing to fall on the wire when it needs to happen. I want to talk about worldviews that slap you as they walk away and about how you get back up again anyway. I want to talk about how he had a date.

No, actually, you know, let's talk about someone real. Let's talk about Mae Jemison who is a dancer and a doctor and an astronaut, the first African American woman in space. Let's talk about freedom and achievement and the barriers that don't appear to have kept her down. Let's talk about the arts and the sciences and about practicality and creativity in scientific and technological research. And let's talk about the fact that the first time I heard about her was via Barbie on tumblr.

I want to talk about the google doodle for Australia Day and Ineka Voigt, the teenager who designed it. I want to talk about how we talk about our past, the conversations we should be having, the conversations that should have been had, the actions that we need to take to remember and heal and progress. Let's talk about apologies that could never be adequate.

666 ABC Canberra: Clarissa Thorpe

I want to talk about this Humans of New York post and the comments on it. I want to talk about how 80% of the 200 comments I surveyed are positive, either some version of "Christ will strengthen you in your ministry and also here's a bible verse!" or "As long as you have passion and fight the good fight, you do you, girl!" and how the other 20% are ambivalent or speak of deep pain. I want to talk about planting and harvests and about how people aren't seeds or soil- they're complex human beings who have been healed and hurt by other complex human beings and I know it's exhausting to put that asterisk on every single conversation we have about our faiths, but we have to carry the burden of our pasts until the memories have been eroded away by the wind and rain of better futures.

HONY

I want to talk, again and again, about Sarah Kay. I want to talk about how words brought to life again and again to worm their way into my soul, no, not even worm, to beam directly into the parts of my heart that I'd rather leave at home on any given Monday or Thursday or day. I want to talk about how you still have to be brave even when you're beautiful and about how difficult it is to walk through life with your hands held open in front of you. I want to talk about making lists and having ideas and how encouragement and thoughtfulness and love are the underpinnings of every truly great step forward and together.

I super want to talk about Mary Shelley. Have you read Frankenstein? It is not what you think it is. It's so much better. It begins with a ship sailing to find the north pole, a bold adventure to the ends of the earth, and it ends in the same place and in the in-between, the story pulls you from location to location, from the first tragedy of Frankenstein's rejection of his monster to the pain that follows throughout to big questions of what boundaries we can push and how creation should be regarded and what we need to make us happy and why we are so unhappy. It talks about Paradise Lost more than you'd think from just having seen the movies. Did you know she was eighteen when she started writing the novel? Eighteen, unmarried, and pregnant while writing, then nineteen and married and pregnant while revising. Yes, I very much want to talk about the miracle that was Mary Shelley.

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Then again, I also want to talk about George Washington and Alexander Hamilton (but mostly because of Lin-Manuel Miranda) and Joss Whedon and Aaron Sorkin and James Clerk Maxwell and Max Planck and Carl Sagan and Bill Nye and Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor and Mark Ruffalo and Matt Damon and Deadpool and Iron Man and Jesus and Paul. I want to talk about imaginary things and real things and desperately important things and things that only matter to my poor little tired heart.  And it is in the choosing of those things, the things we talk about and think about and carry every day, it is in the choosing of those things that we make ourselves into who we are and the world into what it will be.

And to think, I wondered at my struggle to decide what I wanted to say.

Music Videos Part 4

You look like you could use some more music videos in your life. I know I could. So here ya go! I selected these just for you!

1. Africa by Toto

If you have never seen this before, I have to tell you, it's a treasure that you'll return to time and again, blessing the rains as you do.

2. Submarines by The Lumineers

Always about some animation. And any video with an anglerfish in it is fine by me.

3. Die Die Die by The Avett Brothers

Archival footage set to a fantastic song on what is arguably the Avett's best album, Emotionalism. It's everything I need in life.

4. Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie (vocals only)

Close your eyes and listen to this perfection.

5. Don't Look Back by She & Him

I'm generally on the fence about Zooey Deschanel, but this video's just a good time all around.

A Primer

An opinion I've always held is that as long as you're trying, you're okay. It's the educator in me. Some people might look like they understand the entire world effortlessly, but I know that the people who wrestle with new information, who struggle with new ideas and new ways of understanding, those people are the ones who own the information they take in. We grow via struggle.

I wanted to come here with a guide to dealing with one specific struggle: reconciling religious beliefs with a scientific worldview. But the only word in that clause that doesn't need a thoughtful, nuanced definition is with, and I'm not even sold on that. What is a belief? What do you call a religion? For all that we use the word, does anyone have a hold on what a worldview really is? Above that, what's a "scientific worldview" and does anyone really, in their heart of hearts, hold to that? And even if you have a handle on religious beliefs and scientific worldviews, what do you mean by reconciling?

I can't, with any level of integrity, give you any answers to those questions in the space of your average blog post. I could write a book on reconciling religious beliefs with a scientific worldview and still fail to fairly and completely represent the discussion. But what I can do is outline some viewpoints that might help a person of faith exist in our postmodern society with a little less cognitive dissonance. Or, at least, give you some ways to think about the discussion to help you on your way to your own conclusions. After that, all I can do is send you a booklist.

-A great starting point in any discussion is to hear what other people have to say and my favorite short read representation of the issue at hand is Tim Urban's "How Religion Got in the Way" post on Wait But Why. It's got some NSFW language, but I think it lays out your basic contemporary beef with religion with humor and charity. His "Religion for the Nonreligious" post also provides plenty of truth and food for thought.

-Think about what space your faith takes up in your life. Is it a link to a community? A source of comfort? A way of looking at the world that challenges you to be a better person? Why do you show up? Is it essential? The role your faith plays in your life will frame the discussion for you in ways you didn't even realize, so it's helpful to do some soul-searching up front. What attributes of God do you hold to be true? Are you okay if there isn't a God? or a heaven? or a hell? How malleable are you to new information?

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-To me, there are aggressive versions of two diametrically opposed viewpoints that are both unhelpful. The first is religious believer who has a literalist reading of their sacred texts. Young Earth Creationists are good examples of that. Religious texts have deep meaning for the people who read them and we shouldn't discredit that, but you miss a whole world of color and meaning when you come to a religious text intending to read it flat, with only the thoughts and ideas that you bring to the text. You're more likely to pay attention to the words that confirm your point of view and to ignore those that don't. It's one of our innate biases. The only religious text that I have any experience with is the Bible and for me, some of the most profound insights I've gotten out of that book have come because I listened to the conversations that were being had between the different authors of the books across centuries without coming to the text with an idea of what I believed to be true.

The opposing viewpoint that I find to be unhelpful is the one that says that science is the only way of knowing what's true. The umbrella term science covers as many viewpoints as the umbrella term Christian does, but I'd say that if you're looking at the world from a scientific point of view, the only truths in the world are those that have empirical evidence behind them and the only thing that exists is the material world. I think that's a great starting point, but I also find it to be limiting. Now, I know that I'm on the verge of sounding like the Cowardly Lion here:

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but to say that the material world is the only thing that exists limits the amount of things we can know about. I (personally) wouldn't be satisfied with our knowledge of the universe even if we could explain everything about the human experience in terms of physical processes. In the most naive way of stating this possible, study of the material world can never prove or disprove the existence of the immaterial world, so I think it's best to keep an open mind about things.

-Finally, I've found thinking about modernism and postmodernism helpful when you start to dig into what you believe. (I'd heard the word postmodernism bandied around but never defined, so if you're like me and looking for a primer, I liked this article for that purpose.) Attempting to reconcile the idea that science can explain everything in the universe, leaving no room for a god of any kind, with your belief in the existence of a god and the specific creeds that go along with your faith will make you dig into what you believe and what you think about truth and what makes something true.

For myself, I believe in God the way I believe in miracles- I've had experiences that confirm my beliefs but they're so personal, they can hardly be used as convincing empirical evidence. I also know that I'm predisposed to believe in something bigger than myself and that I need to be considering new points of view to counter that bias, to see if that's something I can honestly explain away. And even if it turns out that I'm wrong and the looming potential of a lack of purpose in the universe, I don't know that the human experiment is insignificant. As Night Vale says, "Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is small and yet it is."

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Advice

If there are two things that people in my church back home know about me, it's that I don't wear shoes on holy ground and that I do something with space. (Which, when you think about it, isn't the worst thing. That could be my epitaph and I wouldn't be too upset over it.) So when a girl who's interested in becoming an astrophysicist started going to my church on Sunday, they sent her straight over to my mother who gave her my email. Then the kid did the exact right thing-- she actually emailed me.

Now, I'm already impressed with her just by the fact that she made good on an opportunity, so I spent maybe forty-five minutes writing her an email back that was packed with class suggestions and book suggestions and college suggestions and the occasional life-tip. I might make that into a post one day, but just in saying that sentence, I'm confronted by how weird this situation is.

Someone just asked me for advice.

Me.

And she said, multiple times, that she thought my life was really cool.

(To be fair, I have spent my evening playing covers of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs on my ukulele while drinking white wine, reading chapters of Frankenstein, and discussing the theological implications of the mortality rate of red-shirts on Star Trek, so I'm not at all unhappy with how things turned out. And I did move to this magical foreign country where everyone sounds so fantastic and transactions take place by exchanging actual golden coins, so my life is genuinely "pretty cool", as the kids say.)

But it's weird for me to be on the other side of this advice interaction. I was okay with it when I was at the planetarium- we'd get all sorts of requests for help on projects and I'd be happy to weigh in or send along resources as part of my job. I felt like I was building something then. The title gave me legitimacy and I could, with the privilege of that legitimacy, walk that back from time to time and say that I'm no expert in the field, but this is what I've found that could be helpful.

I wanted to say that here, in this email instance. I'm no expert in the field of life, but this is what I've found. And, judging by the length of that email, I have apparently found plenty.

It's odd to see yourself through someone else's eyes. She said, and I quote, "I find what you've done with your life really cool." And I know it's a teenager who's never met me who's saying this, but there's this fantastic affirmation here, right? There's this moment of Holy Mother of God, there is a human in the process of becoming who she is going to be who has reached out to me for any help I can send her way. I feel an obligation to share the knowledge that wasn't shared with me. I want to walk her slowly into academia and say, This is how this game is played, but you can discover such wonderful things if you do it right. I want to build her into the person that I, through experience and misjudgment, decided not to be. I can be that mentor. She's handed me that power.

It almost feels dishonest. That email was full of such enthusiasm, such encouragement. I feel like I should be warning her as well- in the middle of your studies, they could take away your major. You might feel like there's a purpose in your life, but I need to explain to you how complicated that idea is. You will fight the battle between experiencing all that life has to offer and achieving a dream and I cannot tell you which you should pick on any given Thursday night. Sometimes it's both. Oh, honey, there is so much you have to learn, so much becoming that is in front of you, I don't even know what to tell you, where to aim you, what to suggest. Yesterday, I mailed postcards, bought fabric to sew into curtains and a pair sweatpants because I left mine in the States over Christmas, made small-talk with the guy behind the register, and chose to go to the library when I could have stayed at home in bed, and I consider that to be a phenomenal day. How do I tell her that it's okay if that's where she ends up one day too, as long as she's trying? How do I tell her to say yes to relationships in high school because it'll make it easier to ask for relationships when high school is a deteriorating memory? How do I encourage her to be and to be brilliant?

I can affirm my existence every day. I know the narrative wherein I am living my dreams and I am new to the budding hope that my dreams may have led to something bigger than I could have hoped for. I am smart and beautiful and capable and everything that an eight-year-old version of me could have hoped for, sans working lightsaber. But I'm also not that. I'm human. We all are. And finding that balance is the mark of maturity, I think. 

"I find what you've done with your life really cool."

Well, damn, kid, I do too. But I also don't. 

Welcome to adulthood. 

Finding God

On Saturday morning, I met up with a friend of mine from small group at church and we walked together to the church’s new office space to help another friend do a quick clean of the space before the move-in. Serving with people is one of my favorite things to do and as much as I hate to admit it, I enjoy cleaning. You’ve got a clear, achievable, practical goal and you don’t have to give the task at hand 100% of your brainpower. I like it the way I like gardening- you’re doing something good and useful with your hands. Not that I garden all that much. But I like the idea of being able to.

When we were done, we made lunch, which was lovely, and talked about accents and vacation days and the benefits of having a church without a church building and then we walked back home. On the way over, it had been freezing but sunny, but now the clouds rolled in and I felt the happy feeling slipping away. It was going to drizzle that cold, useless rain on me again after teasing me with just enough sunlight to think that maybe the sun might stick around this time.

I stopped by my flat, grabbed some books and went to the library. On my way, a few tiny snowflakes mixed in with the rain and I smiled in spite my grump. One landed on my eyelash and I almost hated to blink it away. I rolled my eyes at the whole situation and thought to myself, Fine, if this is all the snow we’re going to get, I’ll enjoy it while it’s here. I put on Hamilton and bounced to the rhythm of the words while watching for the lighter snowflakes hiding in the raindrops.

I got some good work done, though I’m always just a little bit distracted in the library. It’s probably the product of my first week there. I let myself daydream a little too frequently and my brain can’t take the place entirely seriously. I considered calling it quits early and just spending a couple of minutes in the chapel downstairs before going back home- my brain’s been bouncy lately and it could be nice to try to calm it down. I got distracted by an article a friend of mine shared about getting out of a spiritual rut, though, and ended up heading straight out the door before closing time. 

Out in the courtyard, it was snowing. 

The whole way home, it was snowing.

And hours later as I sat by my window writing, it was still snowing. These big, beautiful flakes that back home mean that the snow’s about to be done, the wind picking up and swirling them around my window. It’s so pretty, I assumed it must be fake, but I caught a flake or two on my tongue, a perfect second of fresh cold in my mouth, which I’m pretty sure is what heaven tastes like, so this snow must be real. 

It’s so easy to say, poetically, that God is in the snow. It’s so easy to say that this wonderful, beautiful thing that nature’s doing right now is a pure blessing- enough snow to look nice and fill the soul with something like joy, but not enough to cause any problems. I think we as humans, when our hearts are in the right place, respond to beauty in nature with awe and that awe can be translated pretty directly back into our religious beliefs. 

I’m happy to find God in nature, I think, but I’d hate to limit human interaction with the divine to the days and times when the world looks bright, the times when your heart is inclined to believe there’s something good out there after all. You need a God of the ugly as much as a God of the beautiful. And it’s a big step from the God who sent the snow to the God who sent his Son. I’m going to need something more.

I can shrug my shoulders and say that we encounter God in the good- in the beauty of nature, in the love of friends and family, in honest, challenging, but not exhausting work. I’m particularly prone to seeing God in other people’s words and in music, a kind of spark or truth or depth that points me toward something bigger than myself. Christianity fills in the rest, in my spiritual life. So there are moments, maybe, when we’re confronted, but there are also tried and true places we can go looking for God.

When I pray, God’s up and to the right. That’s where I look, that’s where I locate my idea of the thing that I’m praying to, that’s where I address my concerns and my frustrations and my petitions. It doesn’t matter if it’s my bedroom, a cathedral, the car, the street. I like to find a physical corner of a room to look at, but even if I don’t have that, it’s up and to the right. I know that’s problematic in terms of humility and deference, but I was always told to come with boldness before the Throne because God listens to me. It’s only rarely that I’ve gone to God in prayer and felt like there wasn’t anything there. I don’t really feel the need to manufacture a religious experience.

Nor do I want to, really. I want everything in my spiritual life to be genuine, authentic. Which is laughable, right, because there’s not a single aspect of my thoughts about God that isn’t steeped in the religion I grew up in, the society I grew up in, the influences of the media I consumed and the breadth of the world I live in. You can’t strip all of that away, no matter how hard you try. You can consciously set some of it aside, maybe, but we are built out of our experiences. We see with our own eyes. You can’t get outside of that to some kind of universal true. Like it or not, we are stuck in our bodies and memories. 

So maybe we do need to look for God in the beauty of our planet and our universe. Maybe we do need to see God in our positive relationships, in the wonderful things people can do for each other, the way we can care. Maybe we need to seek God in art and words and music and all the good things people can make. Maybe that’s the best place to start. If we can encounter God in that tangle, maybe, with practice, we can see God in the tangle of ourselves. 

This Post is Not About My Insecurity

I was going to write about something else today, but this bugged me too much to actually be able to write about anything else. I ran across a NPR article yesterday entitled Pretty Girls Make (Higher) Grades. It's one of those "hey, there's a new study out there with an interesting premise that says something people will want to talk about, so let's write an article about it" kind of articles. And I enjoy those. Usually. But this time, I clicked on the clickbait and opened myself up to a world of hurt.

Read the article for yourself, or don't. It says what you think it says, with a little bit more scientific caveating than the headline could deliver alone. I don't really want to talk about the article. What I want to talk about is my response to the article which, to be totally honest, was, "What do you mean, I didn't earn my grades?"

I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the dazzling certainty I had about my looks in that moment. I want to talk about imposter syndrome and how that thought fed into my worries that maybe I'm not so smart after all. I want to talk about how I shared the article on facebook with the silly silent little girl hope that people would see it and tell me that I'm both pretty and smart and not to worry about any stupid old studies, anyway. I want to talk about my disappointment in myself after I realized what I'd done. I want to talk about cultural and empirical measures of beauty.  I want to talk about what's real and what's measurable and how much those two circles overlap on a Venn diagram of existence, or significance. I want to talk about how I didn't need to hear this news right now. I want to talk about whether all knowledge is useful and helpful in every situation. I want to talk about weakness. And strength.

But I don't know how to have that conversation. A friend of mine read the article and we ended up talking about selfies and getting likes on facebook and the real and hurtful discrepancy between pretty girls and everyone else. And that's a fine conversation to have, but it's not the one I want. I can't put my finger on it, exactly. I want to talk about the damage the idea of beauty does to our bodies, but I want to know where my body stands in that battle. I don't want to stand on either side in arrogance or faux humility. But it's such a slippery idea, how pretty you are, and even people who are paid for their prettiness look unexpectedly unattractive from time to time. And as much as I want to, studies like the one in that article make it impossible for me to completely dismiss the idea of beauty as a useless construct. It has a use. Just not one that I'm comfortable with or completely understand.

I worry that what I want is to be told that I'm pretty and then, out of the power given to me by my looks, dismiss the idea that prettiness makes a difference. That's a different want than I'd have if I knew I was plain and shrugged off the idea of prettiness making a difference. That shrug is a shield against the daggers aiming for my self-worth, but it's one you have to carry- prettiness can never be completely disregarded if you have to shield against it. Still, though, I don't know if those are the conversations I truly want to have. One word from one person would make all of that moot and I'm not in love with the idea of fighting for or against a concept that can be wiped away with a smile from the right source.

I think the conversation I want to have, the one we need to have, is how to fix the system. How do we talk about physical appearance frankly? Do we need to? How pragmatic should we be about beauty and its effects? How do you have that conversation without sentences that are less helpful than you'd think, like, "Yeah, some people are going to judge you based on your looks, but those people are jerks"? Those people are complex humans as well, who may not even know how they're judging those around them based on appearance, and even if they're aware and are making a genuinely douchey choice, how should we understand their actions and try to correct them? How do we avoid talking about positive personality traits like they're some kind of consolation prize? Is there a way to retrain our brains to put the lion's share of the merit we give to other people on their actions and abilities and not on their looks? Can we make that happen without sounding like a 90's after-school special?

There are two doors. One goes to somewhere you desperately want to be and one leads to a slow, painful, but certain death. There's a guard in front of each of the doors. One always lies and one always tells the truth. You're allowed one question to one guard to help you figure out which door you should pick. What question do you ask?

Imagine that society are the guards and self-worth is the place you want to be and I think you have a picture of how this problem feels to me. Now, I can science the crap out of the original riddle- not only are their behavioral postures you can look for in liars, but given the right tools and an actual, physical road leading to a location, you could do geological surveys of the area and make a map without ever having to ask either of the two guards any questions. You could make a third door and make a path connecting to the other two paths and send a robot or a drone to investigate each one. You could get a helicopter and fly out of that situation to the place that you want to be. Also, what if you have a friend? Do you then get two questions and use one to figure out who's lying and the other to figure out which way to go? These kind of things are always better with friends.

What I'm saying, I guess, is that I'm not great at riddles and I don't like problems that are framed like them. I don't want to play the beauty game and, to be real about it, I'm a little confused as to why we have to in the first place. But it seems that we have to and dammit, if I have to play a game, I want to play the best game around.

I just need to know what that is.

Sometimes, You Just Wanna Get in a Fight

When I went to go see the space shuttle in California, my first impulse was to run the length of the room staring up at this real-life spaceship. The next one was to run from the engines up to the nose making rocket noises. I consider both of these reactions to be perfectly natural responses.

Vroom.

What I did instead was completely abandon my friend who had come there with me to walk around the shuttle, mouth open and eyes wide, ignoring every single one of the signs with all the information I could possibly need, just trying to absorb what I was seeing. This thing had been in space. It had taken people to space. People, who were once on the Earth, went up into space in this, and then other people, who were in space, came down to the Earth in this. It's been closer to the stars than I'll ever be. I felt like a cave-lady standing next to an airplane.

Well, a particularly well-read cave-lady who also has a basic understanding of aerodynamics and rocket science and is relatively conversant about the different vehicles used in various NASA projects over the years.

We're basically bros. 

I knew what I was looking at, for the most part, and if I needed to jog my memory, there were the aforementioned informational signs and the internet. So when I rejoined my friend and went over to the rocket engine they had on display in the far back corner of the room and started wondering aloud, mentally placing parts and systems together from the schematic, I didn't really expect a member of the staff to come over and start answering my questions. I also didn't expect him to be so kind and condescending at the same time.

Now, if you know me, you know that I'm a little bit proud of my smarts. It's my go-to fault. The fastest way to piss me off is to even hint that I'm less intelligent than I am. But I summoned all the patience and courage I could and I listened to this man explain concepts that were positively basic. "You say you're an elementary school teacher?" he asked at one point, clearly leaning into the common perception of elementary teachers as young women afraid of science, and in that moment, I wanted to enumerate all of the incorrect assumptions he had made in making that statement, tear them apart with logic and data, and present it with such passion that he'd never again make the mistake of treating a young woman with any less respect than he would an Apollo engineer. I wanted to eviscerate him.

I didn't, you'll be glad to know. Despite the fact that he had totally killed my happy space buzz, I smiled and listened and did what any good presenter does- I listened for good material that I could appropriate into my next talk. I thanked him for all his information when he was done and I walked off to take one more lap around the shuttle. There are some battles not worth fighting and there are some we don't need to fight right then. Plus, he was a sweet old guy who was good at his job, just not at making assumptions about me. I let it go.

But there are also battles whose time has come and that's what I want to focus on this semester. I feel settled, I feel ready, I feel like I've got the time and the ability. If it sounds like I'm giving myself a pep talk, well, maybe I am, and maybe I need to sometimes. If there's one thing a semester back at school has taught me, it's that things can be much more difficult and complex than I can ever prepare myself for. Anyway, all this is to say that I'm going to spend some time on Mondays and Fridays digging into some questions about religion and then science and religion that have come up over the past semester and then also spending some time with some of the movies and TV shows that can lean into those ideas. Wednesdays will still be the usual "Hey I made scones!" kinda personal stuff, so if you're here for that content, never fear. There will always be scones.

I kicked things off on Monday with a longer post explaining where I'm at, headspace-wise, when it comes to Christianity and it's there for you to read at your leisure. As I get more used to the vocabulary I want to use, I might go back and edit that post to tie in more concrete concepts, but it's a place to start. And really, isn't that what a new year is all about? A place to start?

Let's go.

Why Christianity?

I grew up in a fairly homogenous community. I assumed that everyone went to church, except for people who had to work on Sundays, and I assumed that everyone was a Christian the way I assumed everyone thought in English. The words coming out of your mouth might sound different than the ones coming out of mine, but inside, we're saying the same thing. We think the same thing.

I remember asking my Spanish teacher in elementary school why Spanish-speaking people didn't just speak English, if they were all thinking in English in their heads and I was really frustrated when she didn't just answer my question directly. I also remember the first time I met a real Democrat, someone who genuinely disagreed with certain Republican ideas. I thought he was just some smartass making a joke but then I realized, with all the wisdom of a seventeen-year-old, that he really believed what he was saying. Those two moments are connected in my brain as times when the world broke in, letting me see that there are different people out there with different ideas from me and that those different people are real.

I say all this because if I'm going to talk about my current faith, as I intend to do this semester, I need you to see where I started. It was a journey to see that there was even a real choice between Christianity and anything else. I made a Jewish friend in college. That's the first time that I met a living, breathing person who adhered to a different religion than me, other than people who said they didn't believe in anything at all but still celebrated Christmas. Well, okay, I also had a Catholic friend growing up, and for us, that was basically like having a friend of a different religion, but I jumped over that hurdle early on- we all believe in the same Jesus. For the majority of my life, Christianity was the truth, the only thing we could know to be true. The only thing that varied was how true you personally found the truth to be.

But meeting people different from me has made all the difference to me. It's, I dunno, it's like seeing Saturn through a telescope for the first time. Little kids, all the time, they'll run around to the front of the scope to see if there's a picture taped on there because they don't believe that they're seeing a real planet with their real eyes. Or it's like seeing, like, an elk out in nature. Sure, you've seen pictures, you have an idea of what an elk is, but it's still going to be abstract in some way until the living thing is in front of you. Or, you know what, even better, it's the difference between having seen Aladdin and having a roommate whose family is from the Middle East. And that's just a baby step.

As soon as you start to see the crack in the concept that was your complete view of the world, you have two options. You can superglue the crap out of it (because we build up our model of the world for very valid reasons of safety and comfort and our first impulse is to keep that safety and comfort) or you can start to pick at it. And me, I pick at things. You can ask my mother. Once I had it in my mind that people genuinely believed something different from me, I needed to know... everything. I needed to know why people had different ideas about different issues, why there weren't clear correct answers to every question, why there might never be clear and correct answers to every question. At eighteen, I had the world figured out. At nineteen, I realized that everyone else had too, but that we had come to different answers. I needed to know why that was and what it meant. For me, pursuing that question meant looking into other religious faiths.

I was still a physics major, so I didn't have time to take every class available, but I took a Hebrew Bible class and class in Biblical Hebrew, I took an Islamic studies class, I took an Evangelicalism in America class because I honestly didn't recognize that part of my religious heritage as mine until I came into class one day not having read the assigned article but being able to summarize and cite all the Left Behind books. My philosophy credit was in the Religious Studies department, a class called Heaven and Hell that talked about the different ideas of the soul and what happens after we die and it's probably the closest thing I got to looking into any non-Abrahamic religions. Like everything else in education, classes like this really only taught me how much I didn't know, but with each experience, the crack grew an inch or two and more light got in. Meanwhile (and afterwards), I was realizing how wonderful and beautiful the lives of other people who had different views of the world were and I ate up their experiences like the storybooks and novels I read as a kid. It was life-giving.

This kind of autobiographical tale usually ends with some kind of revelation, with the author realizing that everything they knew was a lie and abandoning the faith of their past and, I would argue, putting a new one in its place, either self-reliance or some other new religion, but I didn't do that, not exactly. It's true that I have much more difficulty relying on Jesus than I once did, but the church, man, the church was always there for me. It was the place I felt at home. And I know the church has hurt other people and I know that we need to own that and that we need to be better and I feel deep down in my soul that the only way the church can grow is by holding its community accountable to the standards of radically loving our neighbors and our enemies alike and giving selflessly to the world our prayers, our presence, our gifts, and our service without asking anything in return. That is our witness to Christ and I know sometimes we live it poorly, but it's the witness we have.

The thing is, I broke my little model of the world, the one that told me that the church had it together and no one else did. I don't believe that anymore. I can't. I know too many other people with too many other stories. When my model broke, my understanding of Christianity broke with it. The church should be a glass shard, slicing open my hand when I go to pick it back up and look at it. But it isn't, not for me. It's a leftover bit of convex glass that, in the right light, helps me see myself the way I want to be- loving and loved. All the colors of the world can still be seen through it, just focused differently. If I hold it right, I can see something that looks like heaven, a heaven I want and a heaven I want here, where no one hurts anyone and no one's hurt.

That's worth holding onto. It might be naive and it might not be true, but if it reminds me to be kind to other human beings, if it dares me to care about somebody besides myself, if it helps me frame every action with a view toward the redemption of the world rather than its destruction, then it's worth it to me.

It's a big if, but I'm dumb enough to hope for it.

An Open Letter to Teenage Girls

Dear Teenage Girls,

Don't you dare.

Don't you dare waste everything I've worked for.

Okay, that's harsher than I meant. Let me explain.

See, you hurt me when you post stuff like "share this and see what your friends think about you!" or this gem right here:

I want to sit you down and bake you cookies and watch The Force Awakens or Buffy or Agent Carter and tell you that it genuinely does not matter what anyone else thinks about you. It only matters what you think about yourself and when you share posts like this:

you show me that you aren't sure of yourself, that you need affirmation from outside yourself. You don't. You don't, you don't, you don't. And I need you to see that, for your sake as well as mine.

When I was a teenager, I didn't have the self-awareness to see how much of a special flower I thought I was. I had friends, I thought I was smart, and I went through my daily life without too many worries. I thought I was being saved for someone fantastic, so I didn't really mind it when I didn't get a lot of male attention. I was actually frequently bemused and amused by it. (Justin Thomas, wherever you are, I am exceedingly sorry for laughing at you when you asked me out in the 9th grade. I hope I didn't scar you for the rest of your life.) I shrugged off ideas of what I should look like or how I should act. I had an idea in my head of who I was waiting for and one day, my prince charming would show up and we'd be happy and I could be content waiting for that to happen. Maybe you can identify with that, the waiting part if not the "being content" part.

That mindset saved me a lot of heartache, I think, but it also stopped me from some happiness, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. Sometime after I stopped being a teenager, I came to terms with the idea that Charming wasn't going to just show up in my life, as you do. And you meet a lot of temporary people in your twenties and I was in a lot of temporary situations, so I didn't go out looking for him either. You'd think that I'd be able to accept my role in this situation and learn to live with being alone if I wasn't willing to ante up the courage to go out and find someone, but if you think that, you're not a teenage girl.

Teenage girls, I get you now a whole lot better than I did when I was one of you. Hormones show up and mess up everything- periods (nightmares), bras (nightmares), emotions (absurd and perpetual nightmares). Your body gets you noticed or it doesn't and you lose either way- you get used to valuing your appearance or you see the value other girls' appearances give them but not you. You're told by everyone who to be and what to want. You're supposed to chase after romantic relationships. No, you're supposed to focus on school. You should have all these teenage experiences. But, more importantly, you should have a loaded activity section on your college application. You should be cute. You shouldn't care how you look. They might as well make flaming baton twirling mastery compulsory, just to give you a goal that's actually achievable.

That's the situation I found myself in when I hit my twenties. I should be finding myself, sure, but I should also be finding, in my case, a man- someone to complete me or whatever Halmark bullshit they're selling greeting cards with these days. I might have dodged the insecurity bullet when I was a teenager, but it got me right in the heart in my twenties. I wasn't pretty enough. Even when I tried, I wasn't pretty enough. I wasn't the girl that got asked out. I wasn't the girl that got looked at. Going through insecurity for the first time in your twenties has the added horror of knowing that your makeup looks ridiculous but not being able to call on expected inexperience to explain your failure. Here I am, a young independent woman and I can't figure out effing eyeliner. Or how to smile at the right time.

But I'm here to tell you that there's a way out. Learn to recognize the messages that are being sent to you. The world is like an encrypted enemy transmission- once you break the code, you have all the information you need to beat them. Recognize that the people who tell you that you have to be pretty are just selling something and now you have to choice of whether you want to dress up your body or not. Recognize that the people who tell you that you have to be dating someone don't understand your strength (and are maybe also selling something) and you get the choice of figuring out who you are when you're by yourself or figuring out who you are when you're with someone else. Recognize that the people who are defining normal for you are inventing a system of understanding the world that benefits them and that they are not thinking of your well-being and you get to have control over what normal is.

This is the only one of these pictures that I'll link to because this kitten is adorable.

Listen, you tiny teenage balls of worry and self-depreciation, you have immense value. Dress up or don't- how someone else reacts to your appearance is their problem. You are a gem either way. Smile at the person who makes your heart beat fast and take it as a blessing if they smile back and a fact of life if they don't. You can't control other people's emotions and thank God for that- it's hard enough to deal with your own. And, miracle of miracles, your worth is not increased or decreased by the number of humans who have a crush on you or want to date you or sleep with you. You breathe. You exist. That simple fact defines your worth much more clearly than the potential thoughts of other human beings.

So stop sharing those passive-agressive posts about how no one likes you or you're not pretty enough or you don't care how you look lol because we all know that "lol" really means that you're dying a little on the inside wishing someone would tell you you're pretty. You're fucking beautiful. Write that in your diary daily until you truly believe it in your spirit so that you can ignore all those voices in the world telling you any different. Or, better yet, accept that beauty is a made-up idea that you can choose to believe or disbelieve.

No, you don't dress up for school because you chose not to. No other reason.

Don't be your own worst enemy here. Make the difficult choice, every minute of every day, to listen to the voices that build you up and to ignore the ones that want to tear you down, even if those voices are in your own head. You'll be better for it. Then, once you know how fantastic you truly are, we can talk about reasonable assessment of skills and setting goals and bringing dreams into reality. But I really do believe that you have to start digging the well of self-worth now, so you can draw the water of self-reliance from it later. Enlist your friends in the project. Hand them a shovel. It's easier than digging alone and, once you've started your own well, you'll know how to help them dig theirs.

I had to work for this realization. You will too. But every single time you shout your ugliness into the world, you dump dirt down my well. You hurt me. Because I know what it's like to believe those lies. It's easier than believing the truth. The truth is that you get to say what is beautiful and what is ugly in the world. It's a terrible responsibility. But it's yours.

Be. Better.

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Love,
A Twenty-Something Bundle of Wavering Confidence

Things I Did in 2015

Some days I think that words are going to become obsolete and we'll communicate through a series of pictures that best express our thoughts and emotions at the time via the memories and meanings read into the images, so in that spirit, here are some pictures that express 2015 to me. Plus, I didn't like any of the collages that facebook automatically generated for me.

From the rafters of the Smith Center- Chapel Hill, NC

Night out with Leigh! -Chapel Hill, NC

Skywatching with the planetarium at Jordan Lake- Chapel Hill, NC

Outside the Flat Iron, after that one time I drove a moving truck to NYC. -New York, NY

NYC

Grand Central Station- New York, NY

Setting up the portable planetarium for shows in the NC Children's Hospital- Chapel Hill, NC

The Old Well in particularly fine form. -Chapel Hill, NC

The Bean with Pamela! (Okay, this might actually be 2014, but it's fantastic, so.)- Chicago, IL

Boston waterfront with Crossflame- Boston, MA

At the airport, beginning our West Wishes adventure. -Charlotte, NC

Grand Canyon, AZ

Bryce Canyon, UT

Anaheim, CA

Disneyland, CA

Angels Game with Joy!- Anaheim, CA

Possibly the last time I was warm- Kitty Hawk, NC

Edinburgh from Princes Street Gardens -Edinburgh, Scotland

Salisbury Crags- Edinburgh, Scotland

Comrie, Scotland

View from the top of St. Paul's- London, England

Things I Loved in 2015

In a fit of nostalgia, I went back through my facebook timeline to see what got my attention this year. This made me realize that I curate the life I present online much more than I thought I did, but it also provided a lot of pop culture that I want to make you aware of, in case you missed the wonders that 2015 had for us.

1. Hamilton

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Let's all just remember 2015 as the year that Hamilton came out and rocked the world. If you haven't experienced it yet (and you're nowhere near New York to see it on Broadway), the whole soundtrack is on Spotify and it's sung-through, so you're not missing any crucial parts of exposition of this hip-hop musical about America's first treasury secretary. All I can tell you is how fantastic it is and how glad I am that Lin-Manuel Miranda exists and made such a glorious thing.

2. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

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I have so many thoughts and feelings about the new Star Wars movie, but I'll save them until I have something new to say. Or a compilation of the fantastic things that have been said.

3. Age of Ultron

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For a movie that had so many checkboxes to tick, it was truly a fun ride that gave us smiles and feelings. It's what I want from a Marvel movie and the haters can just step on away. I loved it.

4. Inside Out

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It's that Disney movie about feelings. I own it, so you bring the tissues and we'll just have a grand old time.

5. Live Vol. 4

I have been waiting longer than I want for a new Avetts album and when Seth sang this song at NYE 2014, my heart split into pieces. Of course I bought Live Vol. 4 as soon as I heard about it and I've listened to it at least five times since then. Taking rain like an appaloosa hoof print. It's the Avetts I fell in love with.

6. New Horizons

NASA/APL/SwRI

It was a great year for space news and the flyby past Pluto of NASA's New Horizon probe gave us so many wonderful things.

7. (Probably definitely) Water on Mars

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The photo link has a description of what exactly is going on in this picture, but flowing water on the surface of Mars! Guys! Space news! More reasons for space exploration!

8. Jessica Jones, Daredevil, iZombie, Agent Carter, Agents of SHIELD, and Supernatural

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Each one of these could get their own number on this list, but they're the "current" shows I watched this year. If you've got the time, I have nothing but praise for Jessica Jones, Daredevil, and Agent Carter. If you've got even more time, WATCH iZOMBIE WITH ME. And Supernatural. And Agents of SHIELD. Glorious timesucks.

9. Agora

This fantastic movie (which was on Netflix the last time I checked) tells the story of Hypatia, an astronomer in 4th century Alexandria. It has an extraordinarily intelligent and sympathetic depiction of people who choose religious fundamentalism and those who choose pure rationalism. Plus Oscar Isaac pre-Star Wars. But mostly, the smart stuff.

10. Welcome to Night Vale: The Novel and The Investigators

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Joseph Fink has long said that 2015 would be the best year ever and man, did Night Vale deliver this year. The Night Vale novel was fantastic and I went to go see their touring live show, The Investigators, twice. If you've got minimum fifteen minutes of your life to spend, I'd love to introduce you to a friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep.  If you want to start listening on your own, it's available wherever fine podcasts are dropped. (I started listening on Soundcloud- scroll down to episode 1- it's a bit serialized.)

11. Veronica Mars, Casablanca, What We Do in the Shadows

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All movies (and a movie plus a TV show) that I picked up on this year and will now incorporate into my life.

12. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Trevor Noah

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I cried at the end of the Colbert Report, I cried the most at the end of Jon's run on the Daily Show, and I did all the proxy server acrobatics possible to watch Trevor Noah's first Daily Show. Late night Comedy Central won't be the same, but it's gonna be good. (Also, tip of the hat to Larry Wilmore's show taking over Colbert's time slot- I've been a fan so far.)

13. Wait But Why

waitbutwhy.com

From his post on the impending AI Revolution to his thoughts on religion, Tim Urban has made my life so much better this year. Give some of his posts a read. A fantastic place to start is with the mammoth up above.

14. Postmodern Jukebox

Scott Bradlee had such a fantastic idea and every video they come out with is a winner on some level. Here, just take a listen to this playlist. Your ears will thank you.

15. Humans of New York

"What's the hardest part of being a mermaid?" "Holding your breath."- HONY

You've probably seen the posts around facebook and the internet, but the mind behind Humans of New York goes around New York (and the world) taking pictures of people and telling their stories. Some of his stories have literally changed the lives of the people in the photos, but sometimes they're just adorable and heartwarming. They've also got a book out!

16. Tomorrowland, Ant Man, Mad Max, The Martian

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All four of these are movies that I will watch at the drop of a hat. Again, I hate to not give them all their own bullet point but life is short. 2015 did not disappoint. Hell, if a movie about a superhero the size of an ant can be superb, I can believe anything.

17. Thrilling Adventure Hour (& We Got This & Dear Hank and John)

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This would have been the year of the podcast for me if there hadn't been so many other fantastic things going on. The Thrilling Adventure Hour ended its run, but all the episodes are still up for listening, Mark and Hal from TAH started their own hilarious podcast answering useless questions, and John and Hank of Vlogbrothers fame talk about the impending demise of the entire human race and give out dubious advice weekly on their often funny, often insightful podcast. Oh, and Serial's back this year, but I hardly need to tell the internet that.