NUMBER TEN: My Celestial Liturgy

As I write this, Victoria is doing what she does best, which is listen to music on her iPod too loudly. There is nothing more annoying to me than when you can kind of hear the music someone else is listening to, especially if it is the same techno song they listen to in the shower every morning. Oh wait, there is something more annoying: fanatical religious bullshit (and that includes fanatic scientific bullshit). 

I was in a large room today full of self-important religious bull fucking SHIT today. The Cathedrale St Nicholas de Nice was the first Russian Orthodox Catholic church outside of Russia, opened in 1912. It looks like it's supposed to be about a million years old because all the paintings are so fucking creepy I can't believe they weren't trying to draw aliens. The people all look alike-sharp noses, small, beady eyes devoid of any emotion except maybe sadness, tiny puckered lips, dark hair, and hands. Hands in every fucking picture. Hands where they should not be, throwing what looks like gang signs, floating around near the face like Ricky Bobby, being weird. The features often took up about 10% of the depicted person's face, which is ugly as a butt, oh my God. Culty, culty shit everywhere. If there were children in the paintings, they didn't look like infants, but they were drawn to be about the size of an infant, in the arms of a creepy parent or priest. A kid who could have been anywhere from 7-12 was about the size of their carrier's head. That doesn't even...I don't even know what to say about that. And then there was this tiny, ornate, ugly as a butt sarcophagus that I later learned was PRETENDING to be Jesus's tomb. And a painting of an ugly man with reddish spots all over it; apparently that's Saint Nicholas himself, and the painting was hung outside for a couple of years in the very spot where Nick died, and the heat and weather turned the painting black. Then, they brought the thing inside and for some fucking reason hung a completely black painting on the wall and the fucking healing powers of Christ inside this creepodome brought his ugly face back from the black. The woman who was explaining this to me, she said, "It's magic, it really exists." 

And the Pope went to Australia to lecture a bunch of Catholic kids about how bad the world is today and how to make their entire generation Catholic and bring the moral center of the universe back to religion. The New York Times reported that it was a pretty peaceful gathering of several thousand people, and that the only crime committed was that a Catholic youth punched a speaker for handing out condoms.

Straight from the church's literature:

The top part of the iconostasis represents the celestial liturgy: in the center, Jesus Christ, God incarnate sitting on his Throne as King-Creator of the Universe, his left St John the Baptist. They are flanked by the two archangels Michael and Gabriel, the St Apostles Peter and Paul, the Apostles John the Theologian and Andrew. At one extremity of this row of icons, you can see Saint Serge of Rodonezh and Saint Irene, and the other, Saint Nadeja and St Ann-

One extremity? One second, my phone's ringing; its my friend Nadeja.