Michael Stipe, lead singer for R.E.M., has said the song is not about religion. The phrase is a Southern expression and I think it's probably more or less a polite euphemism for losing my shit.
My recollection is that Stipe once described the song as being about a crush. Stipe has also described himself as an equal opportunity lech.
I have long interpreted the song as being about a queer person having a crush and the tremendous stress of trying to navigate a social situation where you don't even know if the other person is queer or a homophobe or just what. I think the song is a wonderful piece of great art.
Since the age of seventeen, I have lived a heterosexual lifestyle and I have no expectation that I will ever again do otherwise. I strongly prefer male attention and I have no real reason to get with a woman.
So unlike Michael Stipe, I'm not an equal opportunity lech, thus the term bisexual seems to not really fit me. The word bisexual strikes me as suggestive of Stipe's wonderful framing of being equally open to relationships to either men or women and thus misleading if applied to me.
My participation on Metafilter is part of what caused me to decide to more explicitly make a distinction between my wiring and my lifestyle and contributed to my ultimate decision to be more open about the fact that although I live like a heterosexual, it's not really accurate to label me as one.
It was a Christian who gifted me a membership to Metafilter not long after I became homeless. I didn't really know the guy. He just seemed like a sincere Christian trying to do the right thing.
My relationship to religion is complicated and outside the scope of this post. I'm a big believer in go pray in your closet and I don't really want to get into it here.
I don't care if someone is religious or not. But sometimes folks who self-identify as Christian have a big problem with me, presumably in part because of the aforementioned complicated relationship to religion that I don't feel compelled to explain to people that I barely know.
It is likely compounded by the fact that I grew up in the Bible Belt of the Deep South, where Christian phrasing is a normal part of the culture. So I am very prone to saying things like "God bless you" as a means to say thank you very, very much and "The good lord moves in mysterious ways." because I don't know of a non-Christian common catch phrase to express that sentiment of everything went exactly wrong and it turned out it was for the best.
In the Deep South where I grew up such phraseology is not indicative of whether or not you are Christian. It's just part of the local culture because so many people are Christian and people just talk that way, but on the internet I think it gets misinterpreted at times.
In the Deep South, saying God bless you doesn't mean "I am a Christian. My soul has been saved. I will see you in church this Sunday." It just means "Thank you very, very much. I deeply appreciate what you just did for me and I hope you get good karma in your life for doing a good thing for me. I think you deserve good things for that."
So when I say things like that it should be interpreted to mean "I grew up in the Deep South" and sometimes to mean "I'm trying to be extra polite and respectful for some reason and that's how it's done where I grew up." And that's all it should be interpreted to mean.
I also was gifted the name Talitha in my twenties by a Christian. It was a meaningful gift to me and it took me a long, long time to realize that Christians sometimes took that as a dog whistle indicating I was one of the devout.
I stopped using that name online in part because I realized that it contributed to Christians having a personal issue with me as an individual. My participation on Metafilter contributed to me developing that understanding.
Metafilter kind of bills itself as some kind of hyper Woke space, a safe space for the LGBTQ crowd and a pro women's lib type space but it was a really toxic experience for me. Good Christian members who actively participated in bullying me rather than advocating for me as someone who was very sick and very poor were a large part of the problem.
Mefites are not the hyper Woke folks they like to claim they are for advertising purposes. They are more like the blind leading the blind or perhaps in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
They couldn't help me or even tolerate me because there's a lot of folks there in a lot of pain and they mostly don't really know how to fix what's wrong with their own lives but Metafilter is at least a place where they can try to talk about it. For some folks, the toxic environment of Metafilter is a breath of fresh air compared to much of the rest of their lives.
Abusive people tend to interpret forgiveness as stupidity. They tend to interpret it as a free pass to keep hurting you because you have stupidly said to them "It's in the past. It doesn't matter!" and they go "Whee! Get out of jail free card!" and then keep shitting on you rather than seeing it as a chance to start over and try to turn this into a healthy relationship.
Forgiveness is a gift. Trust is earned.
Me letting go of the past is absolutely NOT me inviting abusive people to continue crapping on me for their personal convenience and their personal gain. But:
So I continue to try, try again to figure out how to write about topics like parenting and nutrition in part because of my experiences on Metafilter.
My recollection is that Stipe once described the song as being about a crush. Stipe has also described himself as an equal opportunity lech.
I have long interpreted the song as being about a queer person having a crush and the tremendous stress of trying to navigate a social situation where you don't even know if the other person is queer or a homophobe or just what. I think the song is a wonderful piece of great art.
Since the age of seventeen, I have lived a heterosexual lifestyle and I have no expectation that I will ever again do otherwise. I strongly prefer male attention and I have no real reason to get with a woman.
So unlike Michael Stipe, I'm not an equal opportunity lech, thus the term bisexual seems to not really fit me. The word bisexual strikes me as suggestive of Stipe's wonderful framing of being equally open to relationships to either men or women and thus misleading if applied to me.
My participation on Metafilter is part of what caused me to decide to more explicitly make a distinction between my wiring and my lifestyle and contributed to my ultimate decision to be more open about the fact that although I live like a heterosexual, it's not really accurate to label me as one.
It was a Christian who gifted me a membership to Metafilter not long after I became homeless. I didn't really know the guy. He just seemed like a sincere Christian trying to do the right thing.
My relationship to religion is complicated and outside the scope of this post. I'm a big believer in go pray in your closet and I don't really want to get into it here.
I don't care if someone is religious or not. But sometimes folks who self-identify as Christian have a big problem with me, presumably in part because of the aforementioned complicated relationship to religion that I don't feel compelled to explain to people that I barely know.
It is likely compounded by the fact that I grew up in the Bible Belt of the Deep South, where Christian phrasing is a normal part of the culture. So I am very prone to saying things like "God bless you" as a means to say thank you very, very much and "The good lord moves in mysterious ways." because I don't know of a non-Christian common catch phrase to express that sentiment of everything went exactly wrong and it turned out it was for the best.
In the Deep South where I grew up such phraseology is not indicative of whether or not you are Christian. It's just part of the local culture because so many people are Christian and people just talk that way, but on the internet I think it gets misinterpreted at times.
In the Deep South, saying God bless you doesn't mean "I am a Christian. My soul has been saved. I will see you in church this Sunday." It just means "Thank you very, very much. I deeply appreciate what you just did for me and I hope you get good karma in your life for doing a good thing for me. I think you deserve good things for that."
So when I say things like that it should be interpreted to mean "I grew up in the Deep South" and sometimes to mean "I'm trying to be extra polite and respectful for some reason and that's how it's done where I grew up." And that's all it should be interpreted to mean.
I also was gifted the name Talitha in my twenties by a Christian. It was a meaningful gift to me and it took me a long, long time to realize that Christians sometimes took that as a dog whistle indicating I was one of the devout.
I stopped using that name online in part because I realized that it contributed to Christians having a personal issue with me as an individual. My participation on Metafilter contributed to me developing that understanding.
Metafilter kind of bills itself as some kind of hyper Woke space, a safe space for the LGBTQ crowd and a pro women's lib type space but it was a really toxic experience for me. Good Christian members who actively participated in bullying me rather than advocating for me as someone who was very sick and very poor were a large part of the problem.
Mefites are not the hyper Woke folks they like to claim they are for advertising purposes. They are more like the blind leading the blind or perhaps in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
They couldn't help me or even tolerate me because there's a lot of folks there in a lot of pain and they mostly don't really know how to fix what's wrong with their own lives but Metafilter is at least a place where they can try to talk about it. For some folks, the toxic environment of Metafilter is a breath of fresh air compared to much of the rest of their lives.
I see that as evidence that women have more voice here. There are a lot of places where women cannot even say "It sucks that women have to deal with this."I've forgiven them for how terribly they treated me. But that doesn't mean I want any of them back in my life.
Abusive people tend to interpret forgiveness as stupidity. They tend to interpret it as a free pass to keep hurting you because you have stupidly said to them "It's in the past. It doesn't matter!" and they go "Whee! Get out of jail free card!" and then keep shitting on you rather than seeing it as a chance to start over and try to turn this into a healthy relationship.
Forgiveness is a gift. Trust is earned.
Me letting go of the past is absolutely NOT me inviting abusive people to continue crapping on me for their personal convenience and their personal gain. But:
Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you. Don’t waste your pain; use it to help others.My takeaway from the abuse heaped upon me by the wealthy and privileged and somewhat often Christian members of Metafilter is that there is much more need in this world for the kinds of things I know than I had previously believed. It's not just the poor and the underprivileged who need some of the things I know and would like to write about.
So I continue to try, try again to figure out how to write about topics like parenting and nutrition in part because of my experiences on Metafilter.