Are you playing 'Quaker Meeting'?, or the Religious Society of Friends: Least Welcoming of Farts

Probably the most disappointing thing about the Quaker meeting I went to today was that the Quaker Oats guy wasn't there. I know, I know, as a student and future teacher of religion I should be able to look past such stupid stereotypes and come to a deeper and more accurate understanding of religions and blablabla, but this blog is pretty much my only chance to share my honest understanding of the Quakers. When I think Quaker, I think of the Quaker Oats man, a joke in the Little House series (A guy enters a room full of people at a party sitting in awkward silence and he says something like, "Oh, are you guys playing Quaker Meeting?"), and a book in the Dear America series about a Quaker girl in New England who talked about candles and how Quakers can't dance. Maybe it wasn't New England exactly; I'm from the Western US so I tend to label everything east of the Mississippi as New England--not because I'm incapable of learning the difference, but because I just don't give a shit what the difference is.

But I knew the Quakers, like the Ayorthians in Ella Enchanted, have a soft spot for silence, and after getting over my initial disappointment at not seeing anyone who even remotely resembled the Quaker Oats man I settled in for the silence I was expecting.

It ended up being a lot harder than I expected. I mean, being the urban hermit that I am, I've gone for days at a time without saying anything besides "Thank you" to shopkeepers. Keeping my mouth shut for about an hour? That shouldn't be a problem. Except actually it is a problem, because whenever I realize that something is expected of me, I have the almost uncontrollable desire to do the exact opposite. On airplanes I happily sit with my seatbelt buckled..until the seatbelt sign comes on, at which point a voice in my head starts insisting that I take it off and go for a promenade down the aisles. I normally dress pretty modestly--nothing above the knee, nothing too low-cut, and usually long sleeves. I also don't really like over familiar physical contact with people I don't know very well. But whenever I walk through ultra-orthodox neighborhoods like Meah Shearim in Jerusalem, which posts dress code signs on its streets, I get an overwhelming urge to Hulk out of all of my clothing and run around naked while throwing myself upon orthodox boys, trying to hug them and cover them in sloppy kisses ...

Ah, to be 13 again

It's kind of reassuring to me that, even across the pond, gravity still pulls us downward, the sky is still above us, and 13 year old boys are still complete perverts. I am greatly comforted by the fact that the 13 year old boy's unique composition has the same kind of obvious international presence as McDonald's. Except instead of ubiquitous Big Macs it's this ubiquitous struggle of feeling extremely frightened and confused (like the male version of "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret") while also trying to project total confidence (“Although I only figured out what my penis was for just yesterday, I have now decided that I am Casanova/the God of Sex/Gene Simmons.”).

Call me strange, but this is what I find so wonderful about 13 year olds—the girls have sprinted ahead in the puberty race by this point and from an outsider perspective seem to have quite suddenly woken up one morning with a bad case of the boobs, and the guys have to pretend that they’ve caught up. No, the guys have to pretend that they were never behind, and so they resort to wildly inventing stories and experiences that they can boast about to their similarly pre-pubescent guy friends (within earshot of the girls, who by this point are so far advanced in their development that some have actually started menopause), but the wonderful thing about a lot of these boasts is that they don’t ring true to the ears of someone with actual experience or to the ears of anyone in possession of female anatomy. But, most of the time, this doesn’t apply to 13 year old boys—I mean, there can’t possibly be too many of them with female anatomy. ...