Among the various and sundry consequences of having a job that includes sitting up all night staring at Bored Panda and Twitter, listening to homeless people snore, is that you then sleep all day and when that happens enough times, you have no furkin’ sleep schedule whatsoever, which is why I’m wide awake in the middle of the night. I could, of course, be working on a paper tat I gotta write so I can avoid taking a class that is required for my BA, which i do need to do, but I ain’t because it’s incredibly fuggin’ boring. I’ve been working on it at work because I can slam coffee, which I don’t wanna do right now because I do have some intention of sleeping at some point. I do declare though, I have to make a major shift in how I write papers before August. I’ve struggled with every paper I’ve written for credit because I hate academic writing like poison, and it has caused me an awful lot of awful stress and anxiety and angst and anger and I don’t plan on doing that for two more years. So I’ma have to adopt that painfully boring college paper essay style which, as you may’ve guessed if’n ye’ve read thus far, ain’t mine.
The premise of this blog when I started it was to keep some account of my stumbling trudge to ministry. I’m still on that course, though it may often seem like I’ve lost the thread, but some other things’ve been goin’ on, one of which is that my rotten kid’s teachers cannot seem to get their fool heads around the concept of gender-neutral pronouns, which doesn’t seem all that fuckin’ difficult to me. We – the mom and I, plus the kid – have had the Zoom meetings with the guidance counselor or parent liaison or whatever he is, and the mom followed up with the teachers – it was the middle of the afternoon so I slept through it. She – the mom – then wrote a sternly worded email, which she is good at. I am not good at sternly worded emails. I am good at “Hey, I know it’s hard and all, bit if it’s not too much trouble, could ya try?” and when that doesn’t work, I am good at busting in threatening to bust some muthafuckas’ punkins if they don’t get their shit straight. I have no intermediate stage. So, we’re seeing if sternly worded email works. I have brass knuckles ready.
I submitted my app to the seminary of my choice and met with a very nice lady via Zoom, of course, who seemed very nice. I still gotta finish the aforementioned paper, test out of a history thing and take two electives. I have no doubt I’ll be accepted to seminary – my grades are all above average, I’ve got an impressive call story, and I feel quite sure that I’m doing what God wants me to do. Yes, I am expecting Divine Intervention. But I’m also doing the work I’m s’posed to do. Just not quickly.
Among the things I’m doing is checking in with various folks in the church who I’m s’posed to check in with periodically and letting ’em know how things’re going, which often involves talking about what my plans are for my future ministry. I am always straight up about not being committed to any specific plan because the Holy Spirit may have ideas that I don’t now about yet, but unless something changes, I expect to be somehow working with alcoholics, addicts, crazy people, homeless folks and possibly LGBTQ+ kids. I don’t know how those things would come together, but then sometimes I’m laying here not sleeping in the middle of the night and I start thinking about running a shelter for LGBTQ+ teens. Which is what happened a little while ago.
Virginia, oddly enough, is leading the southern states on the LGBTQ+ rights front. We are the most northern and eastern of the southern states, which might mean something, and we’re right up against DC, which I dunno if that’s a factor. And we got Danica Roem, the very first person of the transgender persuasion to b elected to a state House of Reps – she’s right up the road in Manassas and she’s doing a bang-up job. Still, prob’ly the reason we’re doin’ s’good is that several other southern states are going so hard the other way that it’s sickening. Alabama and Arkansas are passing legislation specifically targeting trans kids because I can’t imagine any reason why other than pure fucking bigotry. Fuckin’ Alabama started to feel like they hadn’t persecuted a minority in a while and decided that children who wanna play volleyball are the new black kids who wanna go to school. Not that Alabama ever quit persecuting black kids.
So Virginia could possibly be a fine place to open a Lutheran LGBTQ+ homeless teen shelter. I’d havta get that all approved by the Synod and I’m sure there’d be a raft of paperwork for the lawyers to work up because the guests would be minors – prob’ly most of ’em runaways from Alabama and Arkansas. Honestly, running away from Arkansas could only be a good thing for anybody unfortunate enough to be born there. This is all speculation right now, of course. I wasn’t just avoiding commitment when I said I don’t know what the Holy Spirit has planned for me.
Shit, I don’t wanna write papers for another two years. I’m honestly gonna just follow the most boring, lifeless format I can find. “In this essay, I will blah blah blah.” It’s gonna suck.
Other news: I went up to some friends place recently and got a haircut. It’s been actin’ like spring and i couldn’t stand my hair anymore and I know some lesbians with clippers so now I have a mohawk. It’s a wide mohawk and I haven’t made it stand up or any of that shit, but it is a mohawk and I’m looking forward to having it when I start seminary.
Also, I made this playlist – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAVyNaiWUQu1UBBeH-xprrR4CWrKIZJ3W
Weird Christian Twitter has been pretty good so far. I certainly benefit from it.
Luther von Wolfen 