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September 14
Today was a little better. One of the many assignments I didn't have done yesterday was the first entry for my Personal Anthology. Every year the juniors in AP American Literature (most of us) have to do this big Anthology project where each person picks a theme and throughout the year you find poems and essays and novels and paintings and songs and comic stips or whatever that relate to your theme. You write a response to each selection, saying how you relate to it and how it relates to your topic. The topic can be anything that's meaningful to you. Some of the people in my grade chose things like "Identity", "Sense of Humor", "Success and Failure", and "Human - Dog Relationships." I finally chose "Developing Religion and Spirituality." Last year a friend of mine who worked for a teen section of the local paper interviewed me about religion. I had a really good time filling it out and came across a lot of opinions I didn't even know I had. I know a lot of people who belong to one religion or another, but they don't really care about it and it's not that important to them. So I started wondering, what's the difference between belonging to a religion and Having Religion? I decided it was spirituality. If your religion is spiritually important to you, then you've Got Religion. And even if you don't belong to a religion but you find spirituality in sunrises and bread and children and such, you've still got what's important. (I think this whole section is somewhat based on a joke my father tells. One Sunday a Baptist woman came to an Episcopal church service. While the rector was giving his sermon, the woman kept yelling, "Hallelujah!" and "Amen, brother!" Finally the rector looked at her and said, "Is there some problem?" She answered happily, "I got religion!" "Madam," came his stern reply, "The Episcopal Church is no place for religion!" I'm not sure if this is as funny for everyone as it is for our family.) Anyway, my problem this past six months or so has been that although I don't have religion, I don't have spirituality either. I don't have any real purpose and I'm happy in the short-term but not overall. I remember how secure I felt when I was still Christian, even if I made myself miserable thereby. And I know that if I could find some religion I really felt at home in I could be a lot happier. So, for all these reasons, I thought "Developing Spirituality and Religion" would be a good thing for me to focus on this year. Yesterday afternoon I found out that our first entry on this Personal Anthology was due that day. I hadn't even started on it and you can bet I was very relieved when he decided not to collect it until today. So I went home to try to learn Cyrilic while listening to a tape of songs about religion Lizzy gave me for my birthday, hoping to find something I could write about for my anthology. Finally I gave up and went downstairs to write. The teacher had said that if we wrote our own essays, we didn't have to respond to them. I wrote down a lot of what had happened since Tuesday and the relevant parts of how I reacted. Almost everyone's reaction to the attacks has involved religion directly or indirectly - whether it's "I'm sorry, I'm an insensitive atheist, I can just put that in perspective" or doubting the goodness of a god you had believed in or increased faith in a religion you already had. So I took the parts of my experience that had anything to do with religion, typed them up, stuck them in an essay, and went to bed. The next day English class consisted of the teacher coming around, reading bits of everyone's entries, and critiquing them. He was pretty critical of most people's work - "This is too general. Under what conditions have you felt this way? Give the reader an example." I was rather dreading what he would say after reading mine. It wasn't double spaced, it wasn't even a response to someone else's work and I was certain I had dwelled too much on my own feelings. He came by and read the two and a half pages silently. Finally he said, "This is very good. This is what I want," and moved on to the next person. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Bridget's going to think I'm stupid, but oh well. Religion and Terrorism
Feeling: still Song in my head: "This Little Light of Mine." We got that email about putting a candle outside your front door at seven o'clock, and I went out mostly to see if anyone else would. The woman next door did for about thirty seconds while talking on a cordless phone. It was pretty stupid, really, because at 7:00 it's still light out. I went in for dinner, but afterwards around twilight I came out again with my candle. No one was out now, but I was. Dad came out we sat around until it was night (three stars. He had never heard of that before, that the Jewish sabbath starts at nightfall, which is defined as the time when you can first see three stars.) Goal: to make pancakes tomorrow morning Highlight of my day: being silly with my sister. She wanted to see my Russian video, so she camped out on the couch adn watched that while I made chocolate chip cookies and translated what I could. I also had a series of bizzare accidents: cracked the mixing bowl and blew out the candle from the porch at the wrong angle, spattering wax all over the wall in the hallway. I had already spilled the hot wax on my hand not once, but twice. Then while I was scraping the wax off the wall with my thumbnail I forgot about the second batch of cookies and they burned beyond repair. It was bad. Finally Allison decided she had had enough of the video and told me she was going to take a nap and to wake her in twenty minutes. She slept while I cleaned up my mess from the cookies and when the twenty minutes were up I tried to get her up. She was refusing and hiding under the pillows, so I turned on "Everybody Loves Me, Baby" rather loudly and got the dog to lick her hand. Still she refused to get up and when I started making her ears dance around she grabbed my skirt, dove under the blanket, and refused to let go. So I stood there and told her that story about how the first Indian woman to wear a sari was this goddess (I forget who) and this demon tried to pull it off, thinking to embarrass her. But the sari just kept unwinding and unwinding and she still wasn't naked, so the demon finally got tired of pulling and gave up. (Stupid demon. They wear skirts and blouses under their saris, anyway.) Allison didn't like being compared to a demon, so she still didn't let go. I was finally forced to sing "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" until her evil powers were weakened enough to allow my escape. But I gave her some of the cookies that weren't burnt, so she was happy. September 15 
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