A Day Like This.

I’m feeling a little bit like a whore. I just thought I’d throw that out there.

J and I had dinner plans with some friends of ours in the city last night, which meant I missed my Catholic women’s group. Again. In fact, I haven’t gone since I last wrote about it here.  I sent a sad-style regret e-mail; sorry, can’t come, it’s restaurant week and I’m out with my heathen friends, see ya ’round.

Dinner ran long and I stayed with J, which in truth was the plan all along. That plan hit a sharp corner upon seeing uber-Catholic girl on the train this morning, however, while I was riding in precisely the opposite direction I should have been had I been coming from home.

There are lots of good answers to the question “why are you coming south this morning?” None of them include “because I stayed the night with J.” Let’s see … I had an early meeting. I got sidetracked and forgot to get off, so had to turn around. I moved. I got a new job. LOTS OF OPTIONS, magda. But no. In a moment of extreme caffeine deprived non-creativity, I just told her straight. Immediately I wished I was in the movies, and could just freeze the frame and say “or…not,” then do a re-take.

I got off at the next stop, after she told me she was “so, so sad” for me. Wrath, shock, and anger I would have been fine with. Pity, well, I’m not so sure.

About an hour later, she sent me an invite to come hear a speaker who (by cruel coincidence) is speaking oh-so-conveniently this next Monday. The talk? “The thrill of the chaste: finding fulfillment while keeping your clothes on!” Holy hell! I can’t go. I just can’t; I wouldn’t be able to take it.

When I think back on my conservative and well-churched upbringing, I’m a bit depressed looking at my life today, the choices I’ve made. (But as a brief parenthetical in my defense: I’ve always been completely monogamous. Always. And sex is not something I take lightly). My mom still thinks I’m a virgin; my sister and her husband both were when they got married. That’s how we were taught, what was presented as “right.” I think there’s a lot of validity to abstinence until “the one,” and I know plenty of people who really have felt it fulfilling to wait until marriage. I don’t condemn it, it just isn’t—and hasn’t been—for me. I don’t think that the way I live now is wrong, but I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t ever give me a moment’s pause.

This, my friends, is where “magda” was born. My real name? Not so much. But oh, so appropriate. Catholic school taught me well (in some things more than others, clearly, but moving on…) The biblical Magda—Mary Magdalene—was a whore. A bona fide prostitute, and she was great. Kind of a whore, but great. And Jesus loved her anyway.

Of course she changed after a time, and left her whoredom behind her; but she did it because she wanted to, because she found something better, because she felt she could—not because someone told her she had to. There really is a difference.

As magda I do my own thing; I write on unlined paper in spaces lacking definite parameters. I do it to chart myself, and to check myself; I look at where I’ve been, and decide if it’s where I want to keep going. If not? Then I’ll change, and it will be marvelous and well planned. So I may be a bit of Magdalene. I suspect, however, that everything is going to work out in the end.