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Today I found a wallet in a parking lot and took it in to the customer service desk of the nearest store.
Good thing I was raised Mormon, or I would have taken the credit cards and done frivolous things with money that isn’t mine. Maybe I would have built a mall. I would have at least gone to a mall.
I realized last week that I am not actually a very bad person. I was feeling some conscience pangs over some minor goading I perpetrated against my semi-arch-nemesis the week before. I was determining how not to do it again when I suddenly realized it’d been a week since I’d done something actually wrong. I had been sinless for days. I’d been guiltless for days.
For a moment my mind tried to grope for yesterday’s sin of omission, for that morning’s transgression, for that afternoon’s wrongdoing. And it came up blank. BLANK.
My mind has never gone fishing for guilt without catching something and gutting and roasting it over a spit. A number of things could account for this fishy absence of guilt:
a) I don’t actually sin much anymore
b) I just don’t feel guilty anymore
c) Jesus washed away my sins and I forgot ‘em like he done told me to
d) I’ve had a lobotomy
I used to functionally believe that my level of guilt indicated my level of depravity. I changed my formal beliefs, but the guilt stayed. It was drastically reduced guilt, with smaller severity, shorter longevity, and fewer causes. It made a world of difference. But I still had guilt in spades. (Just little spades like the 2 and 3, instead of the Queen.) After a couple years, the best evidence was that guilt was wired into my cognition patterns. Being guiltless seemed infinitely improbable. Option B above seemed as likely as option C — which is to say, not bloody.
I’ve never really agonized about the commission sins, but the omission ones haunted me. I never brooded over wanting to kill people, it’s more like I’d have cold cereal for breakfast and then cry over unmade pancakes. I didn’t feel unworthy to live because I was evil, I felt unworthy to love — to be really truly fully loved as much as possibly possible — because I wasn’t perfect.
It’s like I had a recurring Office Space nightmare where my friends were sentenced to at least four years in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison and then the judge would turn to me and dictate “Chandelier, you’ve led a trite and meaningless life, and you’re a very bad person”.
I think the key that re-opened this Pandora’s box and let a cagey Hope fly out was letting go of the sins of omission fixation; the fear of a trite and meaningless life. And believing “you are perfect enough.” And maybe I finally watched The Philadelphia Story enough to believe Nom de Cypher telling Kate Hepburn that it’s lovelier not to be a goddess.
My youngest sister is beginning school at BYU. She’s trying to figure out her GE requirements, and how to get all that annoying learning out of the way, so yesterday, she calls me up and tells me “mom asked me to ask you how you got out of taking math in college”.
You could almost hear the circular churn of the can-opener in the background; almost hear the disgusting squirm of worms inside the food storage can.
Math and women is a major issue for me. It’s definitely a focal point of my feminism, and an issue that extends far beyond the particular problem of women in Mormonism. I have a low tolerance level for discussing this issue with my family. It can be expressed like so:
(m * w)-2f = t
where m = math, w = women, f = exacerbation factor, t = tolerance level. The result is that the higher f is, the closer t gets to zero.
More often, however, it is expressed less like that and more like this:
ARGH!!!
“Argh” really lacks mathmatical elegance, but it kind of has a piratey elegance.
In third grade, I learned that I couldn’t do math. My parents came home from a parent-teacher conference and told me the news. I thought that I couldn’t do math for the next, oh, (24 - e) years or so. I was sure I was bad at it, it was a matter of fact. And I thought it ’cause I was taught it. I was taught more that I couldn’t do math more than I was taught math.
Math became anathema to me. I created little hate poems on “anathemathematics”, my coined portmanteau. I was placed in remedial classes from Jr. High on (which was horribly embarassing for me; I excelled academically in everything else, and put all my best eggs in the smartypants basket). When I was auditioning for music teachers in high school, one of them heard me play and said “you must be good at math. You play very mathematically.” It was intended as a complimentary, although it didn’t seem like it (and if it doesn’t seem so to you, you probably don’t like Bach, or you don’t see any beauty in math). I said “no, no—I hate math! I’m terrible at it.” And I did hate it. I loathed it.
I had a miraculous math teacher in high school. I’m not much a believer in ministering angels, but I suspect she is one. I was at the top of her class, but I didn’t change my mind about my math abilities. And then I went to college, and took a math class—a logic class—for fun, not realizing, I suppose, that it was math and I was going to fail it. I ended up with a big fat A. It was the most interesting and exciting class to me; I loved it. I went on to take the next class, and I ended up filling my advanced language requirement with math (though I covered it up on my transcript by filling it again with Arabic).
And still my mom thinks I can’t do math. We weren’t exactly close in my college years, but if she had listened to a word I’d said, she would have known about this class, about how much I loved it, loved my teacher, loved my textbook. About how suddenly I rocked at math.
If she ever did know, she’s forgotten, and the really sickeningly maddening thing is, I think I’ve started to forget too. I’m studying math at home, for fun. I bought a textbook off Amazon for less than $5, and DH is creating a curriculum and grading my assignments. The first night, though, I had some sort of mental and emotional breakdown; I started screaming and crying and throwing irons and toasters in a frightening fit that scared the shit out of poor Sol, who hadn’t realized that violent despair is part of doing math.
The ironic part is that I usually crunch numbers to calm myself down. I only became consciously aware of this habit about two years ago, and now I know it for a telltale sign of stress. Whenever I’m particularly stressed at work, I’ll jot down a few math problems and play a few number games with myself. During my last year of believing in the church at BYU, I did math problems at a frenzied pace throughout the three hour block of church: when I found my dusty scripture case after my apostasy, I pulled out dozens of folded sacrament meeting programs and Sunday School and RS handouts with numbers scribbled all over them.
I haven’t chronicled the half of the gross entanglements of the Great Math Debacle, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. I’m frustrated and upset that this happened to me, but what I’m really afraid of is passing it on.
I told my sister “Tell her I didn’t get out of it. I took it and I loved it.”