The weekend that absolutely did not go to plan…

Last Friday I found myself with bugger all to do once again, having repeatedly failed in my attempts to organise a night out with a bunch of lads from school.

My mother, on the other hand, was out having the time of her life with her colleagues from work, who had been drinking at a steady pace since 3pm. When Alan (mum’s boyfriend) and I went to pick her up, it was 9pm. She was, if I even need to say so, pretty drunk. This night also happened to be the 5th anniversary of her-and-Alan’s first date, so she decided it would be a wonderful idea to take me along to the bar where they met, where she regailed me with stories of the first time they shagged (‘It’s okay, though! We waited until a month after we met!!!’).

During the afternoon of this particular Friday, the internet access in my dorm-room had once again gone tits-up, so I got Alan to drop me off outside the medics’ society building before he drove Mum home (they’ve got wi-fi and 24-hour access for members). After spending an hour or so getting my facebook fix, I wandered down to the student union where The Christian had told me he and the rest of the university Christian group would be spending the evening, giving out hot chocolate and biscuits and talking about God.

I ended up staying and chatting to them until about 2am. The banter was actually quite good, although any conversations I took part in involved a minimum amount of God. After a while, passers-by began to assume I was part of the group. I had a lovely conversation with a random student about biscuits – we argued over the merits of chcolate digestives, and I told him the best way to eat a digestive biscuit is to put two together with butter in the middle, like a sandwich. He replied,

“Wow, I’ve never heard of that! I didn’t realise you Christians were so nice!!”

The irony was a little delicious.

Anyway, I decided to go back to the church with them and give them a hand putting their equipment away – that way I wouldn’t have to walk home by myself. I declared to The Christian that this was my good deed that would get me into heaven. He told me that such an idea was an inherently Catholic one (he doesn’t think Catholics are real Christians), and proceeded to go off on a long tangent which I’ll briefly summarise by saying he thinks it’s faith, and not actions, that gets you into heaven.

I said, ‘Okay, okay, stop. You’re confusing me. Just complete this sentence for me: When I die, I will go… where?’

“Well, hell.”

‘…Does that make you sad?’

“Of course it does..

(Yes!! I’m in there!)

..That’s why I spend time doing this every week – it makes me sad to think that so many people are going to hell because they didn’t get a chance to be converted.”

Damn. Now I don’t feel at all special anymore.

Anyway, we had packed up all the stuff, and they had all had a big support group-like discussion with each other about the people they had encountered throughout the evening and the discussions they had had. It made me realise that, annoying as these guys may be, they really do have the best of intentions. They honestly do believe if you don’t believe in god, you’ll go to hell. The fact that they’d give up so much of their time to try to, as they see it, ’save’ people, is really quite sweet. I felt that the evening had been a valuable experience for me, to have gotten this insight into the motivations behind the preachy behaviour of religious folk that is normally held in such contempt. Until…

‘Okay then everyone, shall we pray?’

Oh. Fuck.

The Christian

I recently (read: almost a fortnight ago) went for drinks with a guy from my course - he’s in my tutor group, we were paired on a lab practical and then got paired together again for an interview assignment. He also, incidentally, happens to be a Christian. Of the hardcore variety.

Now, my previous experience of having any kind of interaction with Christians has not been particularly confidence-inspiring. It might have something to do with the fact that I’m not the most tolerant of people. And I’m pretty argumentative.

I take the ‘everybody has the right to express their own opinions’ stance like any other democratic, free-speech-enthusing Westerner… but only when the opinions in question aren’t fucking stupid. I hate to sound authoritarian, but some people just don’t deserve the right to express their opinions. Racist people, for example. With the right to free speech comes the responsibility not to use it to harm others, and some thoughts and theories do just that, whilst having no other value, intellectual or otherwise. I realise there’s a lot of grey areas here – some opinions, when expressed, will unintentionally cause offence to some while still expressing a valid point. And I also realise that there’s no way to stop wankers from saying stupid shit.

I’m just saying that when they do they should fully expect me to deliver the mother of all verbal smackdowns.

ANYWAY. I don’t know whether this guy was just particularly amiable, or because I had imbibed enough alcoholic beverages to make me unusually amenable [normally when somebody says 'I think homosexuality is wrong' to me, I get a little hot-tempered], but we actually ended up having a really cool conversation.

During the course of which he let slip that he doesn’t want to have sex before marriage.

 

…

 

Challenge accepted.

The whole wide-eyed and virtuous thing just totally does it for me - I don’t know where this predatorial, despoiler-of-innocence thing suddenly came from, but all I’ve been able to think about since the pub is riding this boy. I don’t think it’s the idea of the sex that turns me on so much as the bit afterwards where he curls up into a ball and weeps with shame at having forsaken his mighty principles. It’s a power-trip – that must be it.

In any case, we get along astonishingly well considering how we disagree on fundamentally everything: he disdains drinking, and I only ever drink to get drunk; he doesn’t believe in sex before marriage, I don’t even believe in marriage; he believes in god, I’m practically a nihilist. And he likes musicals for fucks’ sake.

But in spite of all these things, or maybe because of them, I absolutely adore him.

Twilight pt. 2 – Breaking Dawn [SPOILERS]

PS: And don’t think I didn’t notice the blatant glamourising of Bella’s asinine determination in the face of all that is sensible to continue with a pregnancy that would likely result in her gory and exceedingly painful death. It reeks of pro-life agendising. I like my trashy teenage novels to be free of thinly-veiled underlying Christian motive, thank-you-very-much.