My dad bought me Quiet Riot, Metal Health, which was the first record that was actually mine.

the first album I bought with my own money was Spirits Having Flown, The Bee Gees. I have no clue what the first 45 was.

The first cassette I remember having is Madonna's True Blue. It probably wasn't my actual first (hmm, Bangles Different Light?) but I remember it because I had to campaign for a year to be allowed to get it, because of "Papa Don't Preach." Trufax. And look! I did not become a pregnant teenager! I'm not even a pregnant adult!

I didn't have Pyromania but my brother did. I remember his first cassettes better than mine. He also had The Thompson Twins, and Ray Parker Jr. (Ghostbusters, doncha know), and Weird Al In 3D.

I think my first album was Kenny Rogers' The Gambler, on cassette. To which I practiced roller-skating routines in our driveway.

No meeting for me -- the car was shuddering and making sad suspicious groaning noises, and I got nervous and pulled right over.

But the friend who alerted me to the meeting in the first place just called with an update: The new pastor is both an asshole and in extreme likelihood an intentional hitman, whose last two parishes folded under his watch. He's fired all the Spanish speakers on the parish payroll, alienated both the liberals and the conservatives, and gotten in a shouting match with the two most dedicated parishioners they'd ever had and essentially fired them from the parish.

The old man who presided at Hec's and my wedding will probably have to move in with relatives in New Mexico; tomorrow's Spanish mass is probably the last one he'll give. So everyone who can, no matter what language they speak, will show up to support him, and there'll be a polite letter to the bishop, signed off by as many current and ex-parishioners as can be tracked down. And then, when politeness fails, a pissed-off letter, letters from a network of pissed-off priests, and cc'ing all the media we can think of (plus possibly President Bartlett, who was a close friend of the rabble-rouser whose death in '04 precipitated all the other changes).

Then I'm sure the bishop will shut the whole works down and a bunch of people will leave the Church permanently, but at least the diocese will look like a bunch of ugly assholes in big, glaring public view instead of quietly behind closed doors.

And, in completely other news, Matilda was just talking about caterpillars, which she called "callah-pittlers." Emmett corrected her a bunch of times but her caterpillaring got more and more outrageous, and I warned him that now he'd end up messing it up himself the next time he tried to say it, so possibly he should go with another term, like "larval butterflies."

"That works," Emmett said.

"That works!" Matilda echoed. "Marvelous butterflies!"

I called them cappatillers. And still sometimes mess it up after mentioning it. Except now I want to call them marvelous butterflies for ever and ever.

I am sorry the Church is causing such pain. It hurts me to read about because I have such dear people still quite involved with it and so I know it's not just your diocese.

Oh god.

Last night the electricity flicked on and off a couple of times. And I thought no more of it.

Well, today, my apartment has been ridiculously hot. I just figured it was - well, the weather. But then, I kept hearing this clicking sound. I just checked my heater and it's running. No doubt when the lights flicked on and off last night the heat came on.

And my flashlight is dead and the light in the basement next door (where the fusebox is) is out.

candle?

I don't think I have one that would work.

He's fired all the Spanish speakers on the parish payroll, alienated both the liberals and the conservatives, and gotten in a shouting match with the two most dedicated parishioners they'd ever had and essentially fired them from the parish.

Wow, that's kind of astonishing.

It's so awful. There are so many good and valuable people in the church and affiliated with the church, and then there's the church hierarchy, and the abusers, and the cover-uppers, and the people who define pedophilia as only sexual contact with children under ten, which means that the abusive priests aren't really pedophiles after all.

It makes me want to spit.

Cass, Suela, I almost feel like it'd be easier if I were more agnostic--I'd be able to say fuck the hierarchy, I don't need this shit, and walk away. But upbringing, study and personal experience (along with probably just plain wiring; I know there's some neuro research that suggests that some people are neurologically wired for faith) have conspired to make me actually believe it. Eternal inconceivable creator become a small smelly human baby, grown to adulthood and emptied out for all of us, transubstantiation and sacred confession and the communion of souls and the whole nine yards.

I'm just faithful enough to want to stay in the one church that teaches the stuff that pings me to the core, and just educated enough to know all the doctrines that allow for wiggle room and admit of less-than-absolutes, especially WRT gender and hierarchy, so when the hierarchs throw bullshit down, instead of saying, "That's bullshit and I don't need it; goodbye," I dig in my heels and say, "That's bullshit and you're wrong and I'm right, and if you want me to leave you're going to have to physically throw me out."

I swear, sometimes I feel like Lucy in The Wolves in the Walls, down in the garden and feeling grouchy because I could make a home somewhere else, but what I really want is for the rest of the family to get some spine so we can march back up the hill and kick the goddamn wolves out. It's our house and we're not the wolves, they are. Why the fuck should we leave?