A most peculiar mademoiselle

AHHH!

AAH! IT’S TODAY! I leave for Paris in 67 minutes! Ahhhhh!

I’ll play Fifi from gay Paris…

I’m leaving for Paris on Thursday for a Month! It’s my first time out of the country, so I’m bouncing around everywhere right now. It’s a bit scary and daunting, but I know I will be super excited when I get there. I spent last night reading maps of the city and marking what metro stops I want to take to get to my classes.It seems like the more I do to get ready, the more there is that pops up that I need to do. I just hope I can get everything together and relax on the plane. But until then I need to do my laundry, copy my passport, pack, unpack, and repack my luggage, call my cell phone company, shave, charge my ipod, check my bank account, print my schedule…

I’m kinda freaked out…

When I was in high school-a small, all-girls catholic school- there was a rumor about the school being haunted by a nun who was murdered. I never paid the story much mind, I thought that give the building was at least 50 years old and full of teenage girls, silly little stories like that were bound to pop up, like the flasher in the soccer field, or the gym teacher making seniors stay after graduation to complete her class…actually, that bit about the flasher was true.

But anyway, I found out a lot more about that nun the other day. She was real. Not just an urban legend. My mom, an English teacher at my high school, was really the one who found out about all of this. She was asking her students about haunted buildings, and some of them mentioned the story about Sister Cathy. That she haunts the theater department, warning students to protect them from the clergy. Yeah, that’s where it gets weird. You know all about the sex-abuse cover up shenanigans in the catholic church, yes? Of course. Well, this nun knew quite a bit about it, and what any reader or critical thinker would infer from reading this article http://www2.citypaper.com/story.asp?id=9526 is that she knew just a bit too much and was done in by someone who had a hell of a lot to cover up. It just seems so bizarre. I never thought the whole sex abuse stuff would be so far reaching in to a community I was apart of for so long. I attended or am close to people who attended all of the parishes that priest was at. I wonder how many people I was around that knew about these crimes and abuses, but didn’t do anything? Do they live with this guilt? Or do they become suppressed memories?

And yet, I’ve been told not to talk too much about what I know and have learned. Now wait a minute…isn’t this how this mess started? By keeping the truth a secret? Exactly. When girls were abused by priests in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, they were told that it was probably their fault for tempting the priests-the righteous men of God that they are-and that they should keep their traps shut. Because what happens if you tell someone?

You end up in a landfill.

The fact is, victims were told to keep what happened on the DL, so as not to embarrass anyone, especially themselves. Even today, when sexual assault is taken much more seriously, there is still a degree of guilt cast upon the victims. Women in particular are STILL chastised for being too sexual, too tempting to men, without actually coming on to them. But don’t our boyfriends all the time say they can’t pick up on our nonverbal hints? So why are we too promiscuous without even saying anything to men, and why is it our fault either way? I feel that it boils down to this- society is still reluctant to take women seriously. The male victims face this obstacle, too, because not only is it emasculating to be sexually abused, but to be victimized in such a way by another man is enough to ostracize you from the kind of community such as the church. And large, corrupt institutions (I’m looking at you, Rome) are more than able to take advantage of this worldview. Even I’m guilty of being dismissive of school girl stories- I didn’t believe in Sister Cathy’s ghost until now. I think I’ve given up on hopes for the catholic church respecting its female members as equals-I’m not catholic and never have been, but I’d like to think of such a large institution as having a more modern sense of equality. Until something happens, like we start to recognize the role that sexuality plays in society, how women and men are equal, that sexuality is not something that just “goes away” when someone takes vows,that abuse can happen, and above all, that children are not immune to bad things- until these things happen, we girls gotta watch out for each other.

Even if it means by haunting a high school.

I need a name for my wind trio by midnight

and I’m about to just ask the prof if we can wear red, green, and blue sweatshirts and we call ourselves ‘Ducktails.’ Really.