-Tori Amos from "Spark"

I've got a good deal of homework that needs to be done on this, the final night of spring break. I figure that I can put one of the papers off until Wednesday night and my Shakespeare reading off until . . . who the hells knows when. And I can probably get a good deal of my play revisions done during school tomorrow. That leaves six journal pages that need to be written. I'm so sick of this fucking shit.

So tomorrow is the big day (my birthday) and I'd just like to say thank you to everybody for making me feel so goddamn special. I love it.

The senile retired pastor that goes to our church gave me five dollars for my birthday today. "Buy yourself a soda or something, honey." Then she asked me what I was doing in the fall and when I told her that I was going to Madison, she said, "Just stay away from those drinkin' people. That where everybody gets into trouble."

Got it, Geneva. No drinking. I'll just go straight for the coke and really fuck myself up.

We had a lovely little "thing" at church today. (Yeah, I actually went.) A men's chorus came to sing today for the whole service, and I've heard them before and hate them and had planned to sit in my father's office reading. But when I walked in and saw their cardboard cutout of the statue of liberty with a cross in front of it, I knew I had to sit through the whole thing just to see how horrible it was going to be. And, yeah, it was pretty bad. The first part was straight Jesus but then they started getting all Pat Robertson-like and singing patriotic songs and saying the Pledge of allegience and singing the national anthem and blurring it all together with more Jesus. And you have to keep in mind that my father is the middle-aged heterosexual male Christian version of myself, so he hates bullshit like this. They're up there in their red white and blue neck ties denouncing anyone who wants god removed from the pledge and my dad's all but beating his head against the wall. Our congregation is made up of old small-town folk and my dad has done a lot of work getting these people to rethink their Christian right-ness, and then these idiots with their Christian hair and their bible-thumping patriotism show up and all of our members are back to their fundi tendencies. Damn that old shrew that keeps inviting these idiots to sing at our church. Doesn't she know we hate them?

"The B-I-B-L-E. Yes, that's the book for me. I stand alone on the word of god. The B-I-B-L-E."

They actually sang that goddamn song. Does anyone remember singing that in Vacation Bible School. Cram a bunch of sweaty kids into pews in the middle of August in Ohio and make them sing bible songs with all the kiddie-christian ferver they can muster. And if you shout it out loud enough, you get to make a Jesus-themed craft afterwords. What a fucking nightmare. I remember going to my aunt's vacation bible school (because ministry is a sort of family thing) and my dad came one day dressed up as Jesus. And all the other kids were calling him Jesus and I, at four or five, was like: "No, you stupid little fucks. That's Mark. That's my dad." Maybe not those exact words because I don't think 'stupid little fuck' was part of my vocabulary, but I did tell them all that his name was Mark, not Jesus, and my aunt was really upset and yelled at me. Bitch. Is it my fault that at kindergarten I was able to see through the bullshit? I hated her. I'm so glad that no one in my extended family is speaking anymore.

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