A Proud Moment.
I don’t have a degree in eating blocks of cream cheese, which sucks because I’m sure it would add a lot of value to my CV. (Instead, I have “lying, poorly”. Does that count?).
I did eat a block of cream cheese once, though. I remember it fondly, because it was one of the proudest moments of my life. This probably says a lot about me, though god only knows what.
I used to be part of a youth group, which is to say, yes, I was part of a church once. I was the “youth leader”, which is the church’s way of saying, “you are the only person in the youth group who doesn’t roll your eyes at us, when we talk to you.” What they did not know is that - aside from not actually being terribly religious - I had made the youth minister my sworn enemy.
He was a weird guy. Very young; not too bright, frankly. Had a goatee, because the law requires all youth ministers to have goatees. It’s true. Look it up. He told us that Mormons owned Pepsi-Cola, and that The Gay Agenda created yaoi to recruit young men, the latter of which “fact” was really, really funny. A lot of the things he did were not so funny. Once, we went to a nursing home, where he decided to jump up and down in the elevator. He knew, of course, that I had an elevator phobia. I asked him to stop. He began sing-screaming, LONDON BRIDGE IS FALLING DOWN, FALLING DOWN, FALLING DOWN as he jumped. A chaperone asked him to stop, couldn’t he see I was afraid? I backed into the corner and crouched there, clinging to the railing. That was the day he became more than just a moron. That was the day I decided I would make his youth-group life a hell.
Most of the time, all I had to do was ask real questions about the Bible, and then ask him questions about his answers, and so on and so forth until he ran out of excuses, or said something deeply embarrassing. One day, he was trying to explain why it was still totally okay for parents to stone their kids to death for disobeying. He was flustered; inarticulate. I pulled a room-temperature block of Philadelphia cream cheese. He watched me unwrap it as he rambled on. I took a bite. I locked eyes. I did not look away. I ate in silence. There was confusion written all over his features. His sentences tumbled apart into further incoherence, and faded away. He was afraid.
I cherish that moment.
