My life has changed a lot in a year. Last year, Christmas was much more of a big deal. This year it was just fun. I'm a lot happier this year, it's strange to realise the stark contrast between this year and last. Last year, I was upset and overwhelmed and frustrated by leaving my faith and things at school and just generally trying to figure out where I was at and where I wanted to go. This year, I feel like I have a lot more figured out, and I like my situation for once. I have good friends, I like my apartment, I am having a ton of fun with my boyfriend, school has been awesome this year and I feel like I'm really getting somewhere with it. They say the first year of deconversion is the hardest, and I've made it.

Chad: The wine the other night was a Peach Chardonnay, it comes from the LCBO, in the section with the fruit wines. They've got raspberry, blackberry, strawberry, lots of stuff. Personally, I prefer the peach. Very little alcohol content, and it's $6.95, go for it. :)

Looking forward to a semester of only having classes between 10 and 2, Monday to Thursday. :)

Okay, Brockvillians, you're all invited to my house on Thursday night at 7ish. My mother says you're all welcome and she's looking forward to seeing you guys, as it's been a LONG LONG TIME. Did you all know that my dad has become a trucker? You can come and see him too, he has a full beard now! I realise that my house is so far away and you'll have to arrange rides, but I am offering the following things as compensation:

- peach wine (and eggnog for those of you who are still abstaining from alcohol)
- a chance to meet my boyfriend
- quality time with my incredibly great dog
- euchre, dutch blitz, whatever else we get up to
- a living breathing apostate! on display for the "once saved, always saved" crowd!

Oh, just come over. We can party like it's 1999 (which is probably the last time I had you all over, actually). ;)

Dani (+husband, if he is around), Darren, Holly, Ed & Kristi, Matthew of the Barton clan, Chad, Trevor, Shawn & Michelle, Ryan & Michelle, Doug, the ineffable Kevin Owen, Nate, Nata, Connie, where are the Lewises these days?, anyone else I'm forgetting... all of you should come over and entertain me, I'd love to see you. Bring some food or something. :)

heatherann at gmail . com
923-5052

Citizens and Expatriates of Brock Vegas: I am coming home the night of the 21st, and will be there until the 26th or so. Chris will be coming home with me but will be returning to the T-dot on the morning of the 24th. IF YOU WANT TO PLAY, you can call us at my parents' residence in the metropolis of Mallorytown. We are already busy on the night of the 22nd, but are up for playing at other times. Dani, Chad, Trevor, Matt, Doug, Bubbles, (Nata? Connie?) I'm looking at you guys. If there is a shin-dig, particularly on the night of the 23rd, I want to know.

I know a few ex-Christians who find Christmas rather difficult. Personally, I don't really, but I do get asked about it by my Christian friends once in a while. One question this week was phrased this way: "By the way, are you going to celebrate Christmas now that you care less about the Christian stuff?" Well, I guess we have to define some terms here in order to answer that question.

Celebrating Christmas: This used to mean going to church, participating in Christmas Lane, seeing Pastor Lawrence leading hymns (complete with fist in time to the beat), and touring Brock Vegas looking for the most ridiculous over-use of Christmas lights, usually to be found on Laurier Blvd. This is different now. My parents don't go to Centennial Road Standard Church anymore, I don't go to church at all. However, we may need to take a leisurely drive around the north end of town to see the utter waste of electricity. Really, I'm celebrating xmas this year by having just under 2 weeks off school, going on a double-date with Janice and her boy, cuddling with my mom, teasing my family, taking my boyfriend home for a few days and introducing him to Melissa (he's met the rest of the family), play-fighting with my dog, and hopefully getting some playtime in with my 2-year-old cousin. Maybe I'll even get to see some stars when I'm home. That would be nice.

"now that you care less about the Christian stuff": As in, I'm not a Christian anymore and I think it's a myth? I don't think that I care less about it, I think about it a lot, I read about it a lot... I just don't believe it's True anymore. It's not that I care less about Christmas, I never really had a big attachment to it in the first place. Rah rah, baby Jesus, okay. Enough with the kids in shepherd costumes, why the hell do we bring a donkey into the church every freaking year? Christmas has been getting better in the last few years, as we get together with my mom's side of the family at a different house and don't fight anymore and there is Eric (the afore-mentioned cousin) and he is just a bundle of cuteness. For me, Christmas is time off plus family plus my dog plus clementines plus egg nog plus friends I don't see that often, and that's a good deal.

BONUS FEATURE: Heather Ann in a Dress (1, 2, 3)

(SuprNova has kicked the bucket. How am I going to watch The Daily Show NOW? Crap, and it was just last week that I noticed that they had four full seasons of the Trailer Park Boys up there and I didn't download them...)

Yesterday I bought and started reading For the Time Being by Annie Dillard. It's a personal narrative of her thoughts on spirituality and it's quite interesting. She's a beautiful writer; I think The Writing Life and Holy The Firm are two of the better books I've ever read, and I have reread them several times. Her writing is usually not fiction, it is more observational non-fiction, but it is not history or reporting... she focuses more on developing symbols and giving them depth and meaning so that the reader can find the beauty and horror that Dillard sees in everyday life. She says in the foreword, "By the third or fourth chapter the disparate scenes, true stories, facts, and ideas will be growing familiar. Together they make a complex picture of our world. Does God cause natural calamity? What might be the relationship of the Absolute to a lost schoolgirl in a plaid skirt? Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?" Some excerpts:

NUMBERS · I find the following three approaches to the mystery of human numbers hilarious. Ted Bundy, the serial killer, after his arrest, could not comprehend the fuss. What was the big deal? David von Drehle quotes an exasperated Bundy in Among the Lowest of the Dead: "I mean, there are so many people."

One R. Houwink, of Amsterdam, discovered this unnerving fact: The human population of earth, arranged perfectly tidily, would just fit into Lake Windermere, in England's Lake District.

Recently, in the Peruvian Amazon region, a man asked the writer Alex Shoumatoff, "Isn't it true that the whole population of the United States can be fitted into their cars?"

· · ·
"Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe?" a twentieth-century novelist asked. "The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already."

(Since this book hails thinkers for their lights, and pays scant heed to their stripes, I should acknowledge here that Judaism and Christianity, like other great religions, have irreconcilable doctrinal differences, both within and without. Rabbi Pinhas: "The principal danger of man is religion.")

· · ·
The closer we grow to death, the more closely we follow the news. Year after year, without ever reckoning the hours I wasted last week or last year, I read the morning paper. I buy mass psychotherapy in the form of the lie that this is a banner year. Or is it, God save us from crazies, aromatherapy? I can smell the rat, but cannot walk away.

It is life's noise—the noise of the news—that sings "It's a Small World AFter All" again and again to lull you and cover the silence while your love boat slips off into the dark.

· · ·
SAND · September, 1923: They rode back into Peking. The mules carried 5,600 pounds of fossils and rocks in sixty wooden crates. The paleontologist Teilhard carried a notebook in which he had written, among other things, a morning prayer: "Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed."

The realm of loose spirit never interested Teilhard. He did not believe in it. He never bought the view that the world was illusion and spirit alone was real. He had written in his notebook from a folding stool in the desert of the Ordos, "There are only beings, everywhere."

Matter he loved: people, landscapes, stones. Like most scientists, he was an Aristotelian, not a Platonist. When he was still in college, he published articles on the Eocene in Egypt and the minerals of Jersey. In his twenties he discovered a new species of fish, and a new owl. His major contributions to science came after this Ordos trip, when he dated Peking Man and revised the geology of all the Quaternary strata not only through China and Mongolia but also through Java, India, and Burma. He spent twenty-three years of his adult life far from home in China, almost always in rough conditions. Why knock yourself out describing a dream?

"If I should lose all faith in God," he wrote, "I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world."

· · ·
There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself—in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love—and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.

· · ·
What, here in the West, is the numerical limit to our working idea of "the individual"? As recently as 1894, bubonic plague killed 13 milion people in Asia—the same plague that killed twenty-five million Europeans five and a half centuries earlier. Have you even heard mention of this recent bubonic plague? Can our prizing of each human life weaken with the square of distance, as gravity does?

Do we believe the individual is precious, or do we not? My children and your children and their children? Of course. The 250,000 Karen tribespeople who are now living in Europe? Your grandfather? The family of men, women, and children who live in central Asia as peoples called Ingush, Chechen, Buryats, and Bashliks? The people your address book tracks? Any other group you care to mention among the 5.9 billion persons now living, or perhaps among the 80 billion dead?

There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this.

I think this is the most interesting thing about humans—that we ask such questions. What do these things mean? Why, when there is a bombing in Iraq, do we hear that x number of Americans were killed, as well as some Iraqis? Are the American individuals inherently more precious because someone drew some arbitrary lines on a map? Why does it bother me more that there is a Canadian prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, shouldn't all the prisoners there merit equal compassion?

Annie Dillard doesn't believe in God the way that I used to believe in God. In Holy the Firm, she said that every day is a God, with its own power and powerlessness. She says that the creator cut us loose, has no power over its creation any longer, nor (perhaps) any interest in it. She believes in God as a powerful symbol, something useful for approaching part of ourselves. I do not fully understand her approach, since it is so far from any I have tried. Her sense of wonder resonates with me, though.

My sense of God was more that of the fundamentalist evangelical Christian... a definite God who did not change based on my impression of Him, someone who was constant and real and could interact with me if He chose. Someone who was intensely interested in and involved with the creation. Someone more like a human, who might interact with me differently than with others, but who was still essentially the same. I think that Dillard's approach allows her to keep God even with all of the crap in the world, all of the deformed children that she examines in this book and others, all of the horrible accidents and floods and famines, all of the martyrs and murderers. My approach led me to a growing horror that this God was not good, that if He existed, I wanted nothing to do with Him. That if this being were in charge of the universe, I dreaded the future. Dillard doesn't need God to be good, he can be ruthless and indifferent and remain powerful. She does not need him to be interested in her, though she muses on his character and ways through all her books.

I don't know what to do with my continued interest in her writings. I want to know where her musing on spiritual matters takes her. Her writings do something for me. She makes me see the world differently, as something more precious and fleeting. I am also curious what Philip Yancey is pondering these days, and what Joseph Girzone is up to, and who else is having new beautiful thoughts on the Christian scene. How is Brennan Manning doing? Is there someone to replace Rich Mullins yet? How is Steve Taylor dealing with his bitterness and hard words and faith? Will the struggles in the lyrics of Caedmon's Call ever precipitate a deconversion? Where are the women thinkers? (Dillard doesn't count, she's far too liberal for most.)

Most importantly, I don't really see the value of liberal religion, of a set of useful and beautiful symbols which, in the end, are just symbols and not "real" at all. Like Teilhard, I believe in the world much more than in God. I don't know that I want to be a "spiritual" person, and I know that I don't want to be a "religious" person. Sometimes I fear that my atheism is a reaction to leaving my faith, a protective gesture to keep me from falling into religion again. At the same time, I know that it is more than that. I simply don't see any reason to speak of a god as something real; I don't know what a god could be. I don't know why Jesus or Allah or G-d are anymore plausible than Mithras or Athena or Zeus or Odin or Vishnu. As for liberal religion, I still have enough of the evangelical mindset to think that it's a bit of a cop-out—that if you're going to believe your religion at all, you should believe that it's RIGHT and therefore opposite statements are WRONG, that if Jesus is real and what he says is true, then when he says, "I am the only way to the Father," he's not just messing around. I guess my understanding of faith and religion still doesn't have any room for grey areas in the core elements.

Also, why are such writings restricted to religious writings? Why are there no godless writings (that I know of) that contemplate the meaning of life and such numbers and the many dead civilizations and their striving and individuality and loves, and our finiteness both in time and space? Why do these writings always resort to God to explain such things? Can we not be animals, with a "higher" consciousness perhaps, but just mammals in the end? Do we need the sense of a cosmic plan (and planner) in order to contemplate morality and purpose?

Okay, that's 1000 of my words, I'm going to stop here. :)

So, I finally got my courage up and posted a front page post to Metafilter, and it's all about Robert Munsch. :)

I love Canada. I love it so much that the next time my roommate asks me if I'm thinking of marrying Chris (FIVE MONTHS! ARE YOU INSANE!), I'm going to say, "Hell no, I'm straight." Someday, when I have grandkids, I'm going to say to them, "You know, I was 22 when the first gay marriage in Canada happened," and they'll reply, "Holy shit, are you serious? Did they lynch black people too?!" and I'll hug them and say, "No, but one of my friends from home didn't see a black person until she was 16," and then they'll think I'm lying, but I won't be.

About five years ago, I was strongly considering going on a Mission Year. Yes, I wanted to live out my faith by going and living in poverty in an inner-city neighbourhood and volunteering for 20 hours a week and getting really involved in a local church. Social justice + Jesus. I still think it's a great program, it's just... well, I'm an atheist. That's a slight hitch. Maybe I could get hooked up with a Unitarian church, haha. Anyways, I was thinking of it today because I was emailing my ex-christian mailing list about Tony Campolo, whose son runs the program, and I wondered... what would have happened if I had done that instead of going to bible college? Would I have deconverted THERE? Would I still be a missionary of some kind? Would I be like one of my old roommates, who jumps from missionary organization to missionary organization seemingly every six months, and lives entirely on donations from people she knows? I could have been a totally different person, which gets me thinking to identity and then to Foucaultian frameworks of fluid identity and discursive reality.... which would have been impossible thoughts in that life, but are available to me now. It's a strange thought.

So, I've been on anti-depressants for 4 months now. I'm on Effexor RX and the side-effects are starting to kick in. Extremely vivid dreams and night sweats, which piss me off more than anything. Every night, I am FREEZING and sweating more than I thought possible, and when I wake up, I am literally dripping and my entire body is clammy. It's really sexy, honest. I did some research on the Net, and it's really common with Effexor as are the dreams. And really really horrible withdrawal effects when you go off them.... which for me, is about 2 months from now. Hopefully that's the exception and I will be fine.

And the dreams. Oh my god, the dreams. Every morning, I wake up and my first thought is, "well, that was fucked up." Okay, my first thought is, "argh!! so much sweating!!" and THEN ... Not that my dreams are really weird, per se, they're just really detailed and graphic and present and real and I have no idea in them that I'm dreaming at all. Before Effexor, I could fly in about 90% of my dreams, and I can't even remember the last time I could fly in a dream... It's not unlike me to remember my dreams, but this is off the scale. Every once in a while, before all this, I would have a dream that would stick with me and it was hard to convince myself that it didn't actually happen, and it was a weird feeling, especially if (okay, when) I had a dream about a boy that I liked and my roommate shook me awake and said "You're late for class!" and 10 minutes later I find myself in class... sitting next to the boy... and feeling rather confused between the present situation and 10 minutes ago... Now, that's every dream. They all stick like that, they're all that real. And what the hell is with the video-game theme? I keep having dreams where I'm not only playing a video-game, usually Mario Bros. or Commander Keen, but I'm seeing it from the perspective of the video game character and it is 3D and there is REAL FIRE and if I die in the game... I don't even play video games! The dreams piss me off anyways. I mean, last night, I dreamed about cheating on my boyfriend for 2 days with a boy I know from bible college who is engaged whom I felt no attraction to. NO! I'm reading Freud, who is sure that dreams MEAN something, and you're REPRESSING things... and I think these dreams mean "you are on anti-depressants." That's about it. I may start writing them down and looking for themes, though. There's been a ton of dreams about going to get food from a buffet, which is odd in itself.

Let's talk about why I'm on Effexor, though, because it's not ALL bad, it's mostly excellent. Before I was on it, I was anxious and paranoid about weird things. For example... as long as I can remember, I have had the wildly insane fear that I am handicapped to the point that I don't know I'm handicapped and no one will tell me. How long was I unable to convince myself that it wasn't legit? Until I got my driver's license and was allowed to drive by myself, because they wouldn't let me do that if... right? I never told anyone about that fear until about four months ago when it disappeared because I did something about it. Or, let's take the fear of accidental/insane death motif. Every time I drove somewhere, I idly thought, "what would happen if I swerved into oncoming traffic? Might be interesting, maybe I'll do it." Every time I walked by or down a set of stairs, I mentally saw myself falling down said stairs. How many times did I think about suicide, not because I was depressed, but because it might be interesting?

And now, as I type all this out, I'm thinking, "ohmigod, you can't post that, they're all going to read it and realize you're one crazy fuck and you're going to lose all your friends." And another part of me is reciting the Dave Eggers mantra, "what do you have? so you have my secrets, they're mine to give, what do you have? you have nothing, you have what I can easily give. you are beggars!" I'm telling you THAT only because that's the kind of war that happened in my head for EVERY DAMN THING before I went on anti-depressants and realized (surprise!) that's not normal.

Back in July, on my second date with Chris, I was going nuts, I really liked him and I was terrified of getting into a relationship, and I don't even know why. All I know is that I was thinking, "this could be really good, I can't do this, I have to run away, this is too much, ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod," and I finally thought, you know what? I want to date him, I don't want to feel this anxious for no reason, I'm going to the doctor. My doctor said, "but dating should be exciting, it should be fun!" and I said, "and it is! but I'm so anxious!" and so ... Effexor. And it stopped. And I stopped thinking about falling down stairs, and people hating me from the first second or suddenly realising that they wanted nothing to do with me, and "you can't walk down the stairs because Something Bad is there, you better take the elevator," and I started being able to talk to people I didn't know without being uptight and frantic, and I started realising that all that extra dialogue in my head was abnormal and unnecessary. I haven't thought about suicide in so long, even idly. I've made friends with so many people this semester, people I would have been absolutely unable to talk to before. I've felt so settled, so calm. I am dating Chris, and it is exciting and fun and I'm not anxious about it.

And I blog about it because this is common and my uncle committed suicide last spring and mental illness is taboo, and I'm unwilling to accept that. I refuse to hide it, here it is. I'm not going to be ashamed of it.

This is what I'm doing tonight:

Come hear a first hand account of a Canadian journalist (Scott Taylor) who was taken hostage in Iraq. Since August 2000, Taylor has made a total of 20 trips into Iraq to report on the effects of the UN sanctions, the ravages of depleted uranium following the 1991 Gulf War, and the heightening tensions with the United States. Since the beginning of the occupation of US forces in Iraq, Taylor has returned frequently to Iraq to view first-hand the ongoing humanitarian crisis plaguing this still embattled country. As a former Canadian solider / peacekeeper, Scott has the unusual ability to get the truth out of soliders currently serving in the military. The stories that he has to share are at times shocking and sometimes heartwarming. Do yourself a favour and get the story straight from the horse's mouth. I think that most of us are tired of the mainstream media crap.

December 7, 2004 – 7:30pm Pauper’s Pub, $5 / food included
539 Bloor Street West (Bathurst & Bloor)

Should be interesting, we'll see. All I know is that a $5 event that includes food is enough to warm my Dutch heart. ;)

If you're wondering about this entry's title, sometimes Chris and I like to re-tell fairy tales... but with Jesus as the main character. Jesus and the Beanstalk was pretty funny, and the moral of the new version is "There is no God, but there is a Hell." Chris has also graced me with a new version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, now titled GoldiJesus (fitting name for a Jew, yes) and the Three Whores. Its moral was more about avoiding STI-filled whorehouses, and had charming lines like "The first whore was toooooooo big, the second whore was toooooo small, but the third whore was just right." Spoiler: Jesus ends up returning to the 'just right' whore every day for his remaining four years on earth before dying of a horrible sexually transmitted disease.

Ahh, there's nothing better than boys with heretical senses of humour. :)

So, Chris has been celebrating birthday week since last Thursday (his birthday is on the 2nd), which marks the first time that birthday week has been extended to the male section of the species. Birthday week is, I humbly submit, my best invention ever. It is 15 days of pure goodness. Basically, any day that is within a week of your birthday is part of birthday week. It is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for laziness. Chris has tried to use it for monetary gain ("buy me a new computer?") but that doesn't work, and not just because my bank account says it's impossible. He has, however, managed to get me to carry his backpack and make him pancakes, which are both acceptable uses of the holiday. Personally, I have perfected a rather cute pouting face and just the right tone of "... but it's my birthday week!" to get my way when my time comes along. I don't do ANYTHING extra on my birthday week, and that includes looking at my watch for the time (I just ask other people) and reaching for things that are clearly within my grasp. It's Laziness Extraordinaire without the guilt! :)

Bush visits Canada and...

Some American journalists, while killing time waiting for the Bush-Martin news conference to begin, passed the time by searching for "the most desirable Canadian souvenir: flu shots." $20 bought them the shot at a nearby clinic.

Oh, America. You are unintentionally funny sometimes.

Some links:
- Fresh Yarn: The Online Salon for personal essays - some are quite entertaining :)
- New Perspectives Quarterly - haven't looked through it much yet, but it promises to be interesting
- Chemistry: The Songs of our Lives - because it's too funny when people make popular songs into chemistry-themed anthems
- Jesus Wrapping Paper - for wrapping Jesuses!

The other day, I saw a Buy Nothing Day table at York... covered in merchandise. Oh, the irony, it is so thick.