Today at after-camp daycare, we played Life and Death and God.
Basically, it’s the Game of Life but with some alterations created by the six 8-10 year old boys that were there. I was designated writer of The List Of Stuff, aka the list in which anything we currently “possessed” (ie houses, children, pets, spouses, Gifts From God) was listed under our name so we could keep track.
God was played by the one boy who didn’t want to actually play. When I asked him how God was going to fit into the game, he said that God worked in mysterious ways so he could randomly give people News From God whenever he felt like it. We settled that if someone spun a three, they’d receive a miracle, and if they spun a seven, they’d get bad news, and at the end of every round (ie when everyone had had a turn) he could make a new rule for the world.
“Dude, you should’ve prayed more,” God told one boy as he spun a seven. “Your dog got possessed by a demon and ate your baby. You need to get an exorcism. That costs $50,000 and a life card.”
“Aww man,” the unfortunate demon dog owner said. “Not Shark Tooth Junior. She’s my only daughter.” Flips through his money “What if I don’t want to spend money to get an exorcism?”
God shrugged. “Then I guess you can keep a demon dog,” he said, “but it requires a human sacrifice every turn or it’ll eat you.”
The demon dog owner sighed and paid the money, and I crossed off both Shark Tooth Junior and Chicken Strip the dog off his List Of Stuff.
“Congratulations!” God said on another turn. “You’re pregnant!”
“But I’m a man.”
“That’s why it’s a miracle,” God pointed out. “It’s the next Jesus! Also you have to name him Jesus The Second cause I’m God and I say so.”
I was blessed with the ability to turn water into wine at one point, and started a winery as a side business. Both were added to my List Of Stuff.
At one point, not long after he’d had his first child, one of the boys’ mom came to pick him up.
“Come on,” she said. “We have to go.”
“Give me a minute, Mom,” he called back. “I’m dead. We have to read my will.”
Thus proceeded the reading in which I read through his List Of Stuff one by one and he declared who each item/ability/person/animal went to and I then transferred each thing to other Lists Of Stuff.
“Your wife,” I read. “Elizabeth.”
“I’m leaving her to,” he trailed off, tapping his chin as he considered his options. “You, Kee.”
“You can’t give Kee your wife!” another boy protested, one who had already received three of the dead boy’s children. “That’d make her gay!”
“Kee can be gay if she wants to be,” the dead boy pointed out.
“Yeah,” the boy agreed, “but she’s already got a husband.”
“She can have a husband and a wife,” God declared. “It’s called being bisexual. It’s allowed. Plus I’m God, so that makes it double allowed.”
And that was how I ended up receiving everyone’s wives in their wills, and ended up married to my original husband, Lizard, and my four wives, Elizabeth, Lizzy, Eliza, and Shark Tooth (there was a theme that God had declared we had to follow in naming our spouses, a declaration which came after one of the boys had already married Shark Tooth). I had no children of my own, but had eventually received dozens in wills, as I ultimately ended up as the last person left in after-camp.
And yeah. Life and Death and God was definitely a fun time, and I feel like we’ll be playing it again in after-camp tomorrow. It felt a little like dnd, tbh, with God being the dungeon master, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to spice up their Game of Life. You could probably add in a drinking game aspect if you’re not playing with small children, or make like God Cards or something for people to pull from if no one wants to be God.
If this gets 50 notes I’ll tell you guys how I ran an underground sex ed class and helped put a pedophile in jail during second grade
Okay, so my mom has always been super open about health stuff and when I was just starting elementary school she got me a bunch of those American Girl books about your body and your feelings and they were really informative and truthful and I really liked them. One day I was talking to a friend about one of them and we started reading it and she was asking a ton if questions and seemed really excited and interested by it and I answered questions and explained stuff. We talked about the books during recess and eventually more girls joined in until we were a group of about 10-15 seven year-olds talking about puberty and sex and a lot of things that most adults don’t The thing about those books is that they look really innocent with cute drawings and there are chapters about brushing your teeth and stuff; but what most people don’t expect is that there’s a lot of health stuff about puberty and mental illness and drugs and a lot of really important stuff that everyone should know. The teachers didn’t care because the books looked super innocent and they thought were talking about proper brushing habits or something. We’d go sit down and read a chapter and I’d add some other stuff that my mom had told me and then we’d just talk and ask questions. It was kind of like group therapy but with sex ed. This was all okay until one of the boys saw a page with a ton of boobs on it (the page was demonstrating a breast exam) and he told the teacher. So they found and I got suspended and I wasn’t allowed to bring any more of those books into school.
Closer to the end of the year, one of the second grade teachers was revealed to be a pedophile when one of his students said that he tried to touch her inappropriately and then three other girls came forward with the same story. After he was arrested, the girl told me that she said what he did because we had talked about what to do in that exact situation. Because of our group she knew that she probably wasn’t the only one and she knew that it was wrong for him to do that and that she wouldn’t get in trouble if she told someone and that she probably wouldn’t have said anything if she hadn’t read those books.
I started doing it again the next year. No one stopped me.
Bless.
Reblogging again in hope someone could give me those books’ names
I believe it’s this one! Fits the description and the back cover even has the brushing girl.
There’s a series of books! ^^
The American Girl books are really, really good. They talk about things honestly but simply, and cover a lot of important stuff. 11/10 for those books.
These books were the only sex ed I had as a young girl. These were a door to reading bigger, badder texts and getting involved in activism…
100% recommend you buy these for sisters, daughters, nieces. 110%
My “Care and Keeping of You” book was not my only sex ed, but since my “official” sex ed was really creepy “SAVE YOURSELF FOR YOUR HUSBAND BECAUSE OTHERWISE YOU’RE A HORRIBLE DISGUSTING PERSON” sort of sex ed.
However, 99% of what I actually learned about my body and puberty was from a) my subscription to American Girl Magazine, and b) my copy of “The Care and Keeping of You”, which I got because I was signed up for some subscription thing that they sent me books and stuff and when that book came out it was in that.
Basically, idk how well it stands up, but it was great for me as a young, sheltered kid.
Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention. Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.
As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities. This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.
When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.
Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace. Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on. In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.
For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you. It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass. All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.
*
“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”
“We’re getting to that.” He waved.
*
The First Incident in January when, due to a serious cock-up by the church, all the hosts Father Pat received were moldering and spoiled and probably would have killed someone if he’d actually fed anyone them. But it was the first mass of the year, when a peak number of people came in after vowing to got to church more for new year’s. He couldn’t NOT have communion.
“I’ll bake.” offered Maria, the parish secretary and probably the best baker in the county. “So we have hosts. Jesus will understand.”
Father Patrick, not one to pass up the chance at Maria’s cooking, immediately agreed.
A Host is supposed to be composed solely of unleavened wheat flour and water, which is why they taste terrible. It’s a theological point of some importance relating to Exodus or something but Maria had an important theological counterpoint: Jesus both divine and loves all his children, ergo, Jesus would neither be a nasty bland cracker nor want his children to suffer as such and so instead, she made Mexican wedding cookies.
They were a SPECTACULAR hit. Many praises were heaped upon father patrick for the Much Better Wafers and that they’d be sure to show up next week as long as Maria kept making them. Father Patrick figuring that hey, anything that gets people in the doors is good and really, if it was turning into Jesus once inside the parishioner, did it really matter what the wafers were made of? So he continued to let Maria bake the Hosts, and encouraged her to try out new flavors, like nutmeg and cinnamon.
This went on swimmingly for a few weeks until The Bishop showed up for a surprise visit the same week Maria decided to experiment with rainbow sprinkles.
Dad remembers hearing the bishop through the windows roaring “THE HOLY BODY OF CHRIST DOES! NOT! CONTAIN! RAINBOW! SPRINKLES!”
The matter went clean up to The Archbishop, who decided that while Pat was probably right to not feed spoiled hosts to his parish, he should attend some remedial classes to remember what Communion was all about, so that if it happened again, he’s come up with a more suitable substitute.
Father Patrick returned in late March, full of spite and some fascinating new ideas.
*
“Is this where the Cannibalism happens?” Six-year-old me asked, eager to get to the good parts.
*
At his remedial classes, the teacher had stressed the importance of transubstantiation, aka “That bit where the wafer and wine, Actually, Literally, become the flesh of Jesus Christ and we expect you to swallow.” Also on the syllabus was understanding the importance of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice.
“So, I was thinking about Easter Service.” Said father Patrick one afternoon while dad was doing his computer science homework at the church because his dorm was a barely-standing fire hazard and the library was where you went to have sex.
“Well, we do re-enactments for christmas. Why not on easter? Why not re-enact the crucifixion of Christ right here? Make it real for everyone. Trauma’s great for bonding a community together.”
“Who’s playing Jesus?” asked Maria, always one for a good laugh.
“That’s the thing- A Host, it doesn’t look much like flesh, right? Doesn’t look like much of anything, really. Not great for reinforcing one’s belief.
What if, instead, we- and I mean you, Maria, I can’t cook to save my life- make a man-sized loaf of bread, maybe in the shape of a T, and we have some of the boys dress up as romans and whip the bread and we pour the wine on so it’s bleeding and them- then we make a big wooden cross and actually nail the bread to it with, I don’t know, railroad spikes, more wine all over. And we raise the cross, all while telling the story of the crucifixion.”
He paused to take a drink, Maria slowly crumpling onto the floor in horrified laughter and Dad now thoroughly distracted from his homework.
“Then we lower the cross, and invite everyone who wants to take communion up to tear a hunk of Jesus off. Just descend into his corpse like vultures. I think that’d really be a good bonding experience for the church.” he nodded thoughtfully. “The hard, part, I suppose, will be finding enough romans.”
“I WANNA BE LONGINUS.” bellowed my father, barreling into the room.
And so, the plan was hatched. Dad hit up every other guy in the Church and eventually rounded up four more romans, three of them from the Education Department of Cal Poly, and one guy from Chemistry, who just liked to watch things burn.
This, being a play, naturally meant that there was a rehearsal, and test Bread jesus. Maria had decided that if they were going to start being extra-literal, she needed to make the most lifelike Bread jesus possible, and made a distressingly buff and human-proportioned Jesus by Advanced bread-braiding, complete with plaited hair, quail’s-egg-and-raisin eyes, bready muscle groups, and an eight-pack because why not make the lord completely shredded?* She also made the important theological decision that since Jesus loves everyone and was happy to die in spite of all his suffering, he should be smiling, and had a toothy corn-kernel smile. He was Wonderful and Terrifying all at once.
“Maria,” asked Father Patrick after a few minutes of delighted and horrified cooing over Jesus’ toothy grin and abdominals. “Why is he wearing a tea-towel?
“Well, he’s the Son of God. A Man. With all that entails.” She said, pointedly staring at Father Patrick while everyone stared at the suspiciously lumpy tea-towel. “And he might have… burnt, slightly.”
Everyone nodded and agreed that the tea-towel was the best course of action. The rehearsal goes splendidly and everyone agrees that this is the most delicious Jesus they’ve ever had.
*
Easter Sunday arrives and the Church is PACKED, from the more lapsed Catholics showing up for a high holiday, parents visiting for spring break and a whole horde of newcomers who had gotten wind that something was up and they ought to come.
Dad is a lanky as hell 21-year old composed mostly of technical jargon and acne but he is STOKED to be playing Longinus, the roman that speared Jesus on the cross, because he gets to do the BEST technical effect in the whole parade. Since he came in at the end me missed a good portion of the sermon, but did hear the “oooh” from the crowd as the massive cross was dragged in by the other Romans, followed by horrified gasps and high screams and a discernible “What the FUCK” as they brought in Bread Jesus 2.0, whipping him enthusiastically, and hammering him into the cross, the sound of wine splashing onto the floor loud in the terrified silence of that Parishioners.
Finally Father Patrick gets to the part about Longinus, and Dad comes sprinting down the aisle as hard as he can, because in order for Bread Jesus to be seen by everyone, his middle had to be about 10 feet off the ground, so Dad had to run, shrieking latin curses, down the length of the church, with a big honking spear and take a flying leap at Jesus in order to spear him in the gut.
Please take moment to imagine you are some normal god-fearing catholic who has decided to visit little bobby or maybe patricia at college and you’re all going to church together like a nice family and this Fucking madman has decided to go all Silence of the Lambs on mass and now there’s some sort of underfed translucently pale man in ill-fitting Roman armor and cape flying at a horrifying glutinous effigy of your lord and savior, with an actual fucking spear, screaming like a madman. Don’t you feel yourself drawing closer to God already? Defensively, perhaps, like an octopus trying to ooze itself into a crevice against the horrors of the ocean.
However, two things happen that were not planned on
1. Dad misses. In his defense, Bread Jesus is close to but not quite the size of a man- more like the size of a doughy teenager, and his middle is a small target 10 feet up in the air and dad is has a computer science minor, not an athletics scholarship. He misses by about 8 inches and instead very solidly stabs Bread Jesus right through the groin, leaving a big hole in Maria’s tea-towel and the spear jutting out at a decidedly… attentive angle, as Bread Jesus’s Bread Dick drops to the floor with a splat. Nobody notices this, however because
2. In rehearsal, Dad had managed to get the spear right in jesus’s navel but neither Father Patrick nor the other romans could get the wine up there to make his middle appropriately bloodied.
Maria come up with the Genius solution that since wine is made of grapes and Jam is made of grapes, she could make a jelly-filled Jesus for Dad to stab. There was a normal-sized test loaf and when dad stabbed it on the table, it had a nicely gooey dribbling effect.
However, this time the loaf was torso-sized, still hot from the oven and upright, so when dad speared the very end of the loaf, all the steam-pressured jam had collected at the bottom and a spray of lukewarm smuckers exploded out from bread jesus, turning the first three pews into a splash zone of symbolic entrails.
There was a hot, sticky minute of complete silence in the church after that.
Then, Father Patrick indicated it was time for the cross to be lowered, and continued on with the normal preparations of the Host, he himself covered in hot smuckers, as though nothing particularly ordinary was occuring, quietly kicking the bread-dick under the altar. At the end of it all, Father Patrick and invited everyone up with the Last Oration:
“Thou, O God, has kindly allowed us to have a part in this Holy Sacrifice; for this we give Thee thanks. Accept it now to Thy glory and be ever mindful of our weakness. Amen.”
…And everybody came up, shuffling like terrified zombies, pinching off tiny bits at first but then the madness took them and they began tearing apart bread jesus by the handful, weeping as they partook, scattered prayers and begging for forgiveness. The whole congregation was kneeling about the altar, tearful and united in their guilt and their need for God.
*
“IS CHURCH ALWAYS LIKE THAT?” six-year-old me asked, absolutely stoked. I’d convert on the spot if I got a show like that.
“No, it’s normally bland wafers and lots of chanting in latin.”
“Well that’s boring as hell.” I remember muttering and Dad snorting the coffee he was drinking out of his nose.
*
As people filed silently out of the Church to a gloriously sunny California afternoon, faces wan and smeared with wine and jam, Father patrick turned to Maria and asked “You don’t think that was too much, do you?”
“No.” Said Maria with a sarcastic deadpan so intense it was hard to tell from sincerity.
It was the exact same tone she used when the Archbishop and Six other high clergy showed up, clutching a letter someone had written, Livid and almost foaming at the mouth, demanding to know if such blasphemy had transpired.
“No. That’s crazy.” She said, staring down the archbishop like he was an idiot.
“Such imaginations some people have!” Said Father Patrick, much less convincingly.
“And you- you didn’t… Spear an effigy of our lord and savior?” the archbishop demanded of my father.
“Do I look like I can jump that high?” Dad asked, having in the interim been drafted for 51 days then nearly died of pneumonia from it, and therefore no longer afraid of the Church, the Law or God.
Somewhat relieved that he’d only received the extremely detailed ramblings of a doddering parishioner, the Archbishop sat down and complemented Maria on her most excellent Mexican Wedding Cookies, may he please have another plate for his nerves? Perhaps the ones with sprinkles?
Dad went on to help build the internet, Father Patrick converted to Buddhism and Maria became a Nun.
*For those of you wondering, Jesus was made of Challah.
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I AM LITERALLY WEEPING AND WHEEZING AS I LAUGH UNCONTROLLABLY FUCK.
knitting in the dark 