What's wrong with the world

          What’s wrong with the world is that I don’t get chills. I get chills when I read J.D. Salinger. You know what else? I want to write when I read him too. I know it’s a cliché but I swear this time I’m serious. I swear he’s my spirit animal. It’s like he knew me before I knew me, and he knew what I was going to end up wanting to say before I ever thought of it. I don’t get chills every day. I get chills when the National Anthem comes on at a football game or when I’m listening to a song that hits my core or when I think about my parents and how much they love me. One time before I was confirmed in the Catholic Church they made us go on a retreat, which basically means they took us to some camp and made us spend a weekend there. I got chills a lot then. One night we had confession and they didn’t tell us they were going to do it but they had our parents write us notes- see just thinking about it makes my throat turn into a gumball and the hairs on my arms stand up. I’m not a very sappy person and believe me, if I was ever a sappy person it definitely was not when I was in 8^th grade but when I started reading the letters from my parents I immediately stiffened up. I couldn’t help it. I’m not a sappy person and I don’t talk to my parents about how we feel about each other and maybe you think you know how your parents feel about you but I bet you if you have them write you a note to encourage you next time there’s a big moment in your life, you will bawl your eyes out when you hear what they really think. It doesn’t matter if you’re like me and my mom where you are so different but she’s your mother so you love her and she cries whenever a movie even almost gets sad or if you’re like me and my dad whose conversations mostly consist of grunts and nods in agreement but you know deep down you’re the same person, you will bawl. I guarantee it.

            I was dying. I was shaking all over and I knew I was going to cry. I hate crying but more than anything I hate when people see me cry. I almost forgot. You know why I was so torn up? I probably would have been pretty torn up anyway but it was so much worse because they sprung the letter on my right after I got done with confession, at least I think it was right after. Either way these two crazy intense things happening to me at probably my most vulnerable age really killed me. So I they make us do confession and I’m like, “shit, confession.” Then I see my priest who is really cool and always seems so wise and stuff sitting on one side of the stage and a random guy who couldn’t have been more than 30 or 35 on the other side. I wanted to get in line talk with a wise old man but I got shuffled over to the younger priest and I just accepted my fate. I think it might have been one of those chance moments that you think will be insignificant that actually ended up changing my life. For some reason I knew I was going to tell him I didn’t believe in God. At the time I believed but barely, and it was new to me I didn’t believe for a while before that. For some reason all of a sudden I feel like I’ve told this story before. I know I haven’t. Maybe I have? Either way I told him I had a hard time believing in God and I was on the incline but still, I needed to confess it.  You’d think this would be one of those moments where I got let down by a young Christian man naïve to the things he should say to a wayward pre-teen, but it wasn’t. He told me the smartest thing I think anyone has ever said to me, most people would probably disagree but then again they don’t know some of the silly things I’ve been told. He told me in training to be a priest and in the monasteries and stuff, or however that works, most of the priests go through a time where they don’t believe.  He told me if you never doubt a thing then you probably never thought about it very much and that my doubt just meant that I was thinking about it a lot. I really did though. I still do. I think about it a lot. Maybe too much.

            I recommend you have your parents write you a letter. After this I walk down from the stage and go the back and they ask for my name and pull out these letters. It was so bad. All the other girls I was friends with were crying, bawling, hysterical, I couldn’t stand it. They kept saying how they had never been away from their parents this much and how much they missed them. I went to camp as a kid, I was never overly attached to my parents, I didn’t really miss them, it had been what? A day and a night? Maybe two days? I thought they were silly. Keep in mind that I was thirteen. Do you remember your relationship with your parents when you were thirteen? Fond memories? Didn’t think so. That’s exactly the time when you become brat. I was a brat. It was normal, but I was still a brat. These letters though they killed me. The worst part was I think it was mostly my dad’s letter that killed me. My mom’s was long and about how much she loved me and how even though I’ve been rude lately she still was happy to have me and loved me dearly and etc. etc. My dad’s though was a killer. You know in those corny commercials or tv shows when the dad says, “I’m proud of you son” and that one manly tear comes to your eye? It was a lot like that. It was a short letter but he basically told me he was proud of me. Proud of me. He was proud of me. I feel like someone just turned the heater on in my head, my eyes are sweating and my ears are getting warm. I can’t even think about it. He’s proud of me. The worst part is: I never liked my dad much. He made me angry. I didn’t look up to him. At times I think I almost hated him. I was a thirteen-year-old brat and he was proud of me. I forgot all of the shitty things he ever did because in that moment he was the perfect dad in the movie I would never watch that is quiet and manly and I finally made him proud, but it was better than that because I didn’t do anything special. I was at a silly church camp that was only 2 days long and consisted mostly of card games and team building activities that really had nothing to do with the fact that we were supposed to be preparing for a ceremony that in itself doesn’t really mean a thing these days. I didn’t do anything to make him proud and even if getting confirmed into a church a.k.a. walking down the church aisle in a robe and… well… that was pretty much it, even if that was something meaningful in the world, it wouldn’t be to him, he’s an atheist.

            I never asked my dad if he was an atheist. I made that up. He hates church and makes fun of it. That was all the proof I ever needed. I highly doubt he believes in God but when I think about it I like to think he’s at least an agnostic or in my wildest dreams he has a secret shrine in his closet hidden behind his pants with one of those candles with Jesus in Technicolor on it with the sacred heart and he’s just been fooling us all this whole time. Another thing about getting confirmed: you don’t actually have to do anything to prepare. They made us take this class, it was like Sunday school only on Wednesdays and specifically to prepare for being confirmed. They made us learn all of these things that I forgot the instant I learned them so I still can’t tell you. I know one was the Ten Commandments but there were other things I think a prayer or two and something about virtues maybe. I didn’t take it seriously, like usual, and my best friend at the time who was in the class too, she was so afraid and kept studying. That’s how it was for us in regular school too. I never gave a crap and got A’s and she worked harder than anyone and got A’s too. We had to go into a back room and talk to the priest and he was going to quiz us on the stuff we learned. She was scared to death and I didn’t care. What were they going to do tell me I couldn’t be in the church? They don’t turn people away from the Catholic Church these days. They just don’t. There’s this façade that they’re secretive and really traditional; the truth is there’s a lot of rituals and traditions but they don’t care what you’re wearing or what you believe because they’ll never ask and they don’t yell at you for anything, they just greet you when you walk in and smile and tell you wise things and then you leave. It’s nice. I like it way more than most churches. I feel judged at other churches, like I have to be something I’m not. Maybe I don’t want to stop around screaming, ”JESUS! HALLELUJAH!” because maybe that just looks silly and maybe I can think about religion and mortality and immortality a lot more in depth when there isn’t someone screaming next to me, “JESUS! HALLELUJAH” or someone on stage screaming, “START SCREAMING JESUS HALLELUJAH.”  At mass it’s not like that. There are women with their arms up singing along loudly and passionately and there’s old men falling asleep and getting nudged by their wives when they start to snore and nobody judges anybody else. Nobody judges me for a god-damned thing there, and maybe it’s because they don’t care enough or because there’s so many people that you get lost in the crowd, but I still feel safer in a pew than I do most other places.

            Well anyway, my best friend Samantha, the one who was very serious about school, she was freaking out. We had to know a bunch of stuff for this quiz and the head priest himself was giving the quiz, it was scary. I wasn’t really scared for some reason, until I was walking down the hall to him thinking, “Crap, I don’t know anything about this.” Needless to say I got there and I really didn’t know anything. I think I got most of the commandments, definitely not in order, and a couple of the other things. I freeze up when I’m on the spot like that. Tests are fine, I write down what I know and I’m good, especially when it’s multiple-choice. With multiple-choice, even when I have no inkling of a clue what the answer is going into it, after I read the answers I can be positive what it is and tell you about it later. If there was a profession that required answering multiple choice questions, I’d have it made. Anyway I basically failed and then he yelled and threw me out and my grandmother cried her heart out when I didn’t get confirmed. No, but seriously though it turned out it didn’t really matter what happened. It was all a big smoke and mirrors experience. On the one hand, it was stupid, it was a waste of time and effort, and it means nothing to anyone that I’m confirmed. On the other hand, if I was at a different church and they said study for this test, you better believe that when I failed, they’d give me stern words about how I should live my life for Jesus and put effort into my relationship with God and crap like that. I’m pretty sure Jesus never said you needed to memorize things or you’re out. I guess another church might not have had the quiz to begin with but the example can still stand. Yeah, He stuff about selling everything you own to follow him but he never said you had to, and he never judged people. Well now I’m just saying things that don’t even make sense but the point is, that’s the story of a thirteen-year-old agnostic brat getting confirmed as a Catholic.