I can vividly remember the last time I interacted with a stranger without anxiety they might give me a deadly virus. It was the last weekend I had before a very, very long period of isolation. It’s on brand with the bizarro world that was 2020 (and let’s be real, today) that my last normal encounter was absolutely nonsensical.
It happened on March 13th, 2020, which was the last day of classes before spring break. Of course, we all know how this ends (Is currently going? Somehow still not ending? Will continue on forever?). It would turn out to be the start of my school being shut down indefinitely and my entering the phase of my career (and life) which would involve teaching online in isolation for an entire year waiting for a vaccine, before then entering an erratic and constant ricochet between teaching online and offline, punctuated with endless PCR tests, until… well until right now as I type this, since hybrid learning is now here along with half my class missing on Friday. I reckon it might just continue until the sun explodes and consumes the earth and all evidence of human existence, including coronavirus and Jehovah’s witnesses and my spider plant being grafted without my full consent as I ate chicken mcnuggets, which is the focus of this story and the focus of which I should get back to.
Of course, like any good adventure story, your scrappy protagonist (that’s me, I write the stories, I pick the adjectives, although I have been, truthfully, so less than scrappy during the last two years, often just really crappy, so let me live in narrative form as a braver version of me) was blissfully unaware of what future awaited her on that day in March. If your protagonist had been aware, she might have just died on the spot, because, like seeing God, it would have been just too much all at once.
As it was, a Jehovah’s witness was trying to get me to see God, not literally, but in a spiritual sense, as she approached my table with faith in her heart and a card in her hand and an eye on my soul. To be honest, I will never understand the lack of logic here- if only 144,000 folks are gonna make it to the top prize, why keep recruiting? It’s a numbers game, y’all, play your cards closer to your chest and increase your odds. Speaking of odds, little did she know small Cortney (also me) honed her proselytizing avoidance skills deep in the sweaty heart of the Bible Belt South.
Many have tried, many have failed, but I must say her efforts and outrageous actions supplanted some of my weirder experiences with conversion, including the prior top spot holder, the Baptist preacher who gave us free pizza tickets at a school assembly to lure us to the church. They rushed us through the pizza part before ushering us to our seats in the chapel for the main attraction, which turned out to be a fiery speech on how gay people were going to burn in hell. I, small Cortney with not one not two but three gay uncles, sat full of cheese pizza and rage, and empty of any feelings that someone wanted to take up residence in my heart.
Oh, here we are again, off track-
The scene involved the aforementioned Jehovah’s witness aiming for my soul and settling on my spider plant, which was not on my desk in my classroom but in my possession, because we had been told school would ‘be online for about two weeks after spring break’ (hahahahahahaha, oh sweet naive collective pre-pandemic We, all of Us, how foolish and hopeful). The interaction ended with said Jehovah’s witness giving up on saving my soul and then snapping a spider baby from said spider plant after kind of asking me but mostly telling me that she was going to do it as she did it. What, on earth, is with the theme of Biblical bait and switch paired with food? I ask because this happened during outdoor dining at McDonald’s, since after a surreal last week of school discussing pandemics and viruses and teaching online through something called ‘zoom’ my partner and I had looked at one another and said ‘Wait, so should we care about eating inside with strangers considering the virus, or?’ (hahahahahah, we would go on to not see the inside of a restaurant for a full year, please see previous mention of our year in isolation).
She took the curly ball of the spider baby, dropped her card, and went on her way. Jehovah’s Witnesses in Kazakhstan have business cards, which frankly tells me all I need to know about the approach. Also I feel like she was both coveting my possessions and stealing them, so I feel a bit guilty I lured her in with a potential save and instead made her stumble. Also google doc just corrected the lower case w to an upper case W, but only on this instance, so I guess AI can read how rude I’ve been to the religion during this rant and wants me to put some respect on its name, literally, by making it a proper noun, which is fine, but I’m not going back and changing anything else, I said what I said and we’re here now.
For my part, I went home, dropped off the spider plant, and went to the grocery store to buy rice, horse meat in a can (I live in Kazakhstan, the emergency rations are different here), and powdered milk. At least, unlike in America, there was toilet paper.
I’m trying not to take this space too seriously so I can have fun with it and write whatever I want whenever I want because no one (or almost no one) is reading it but me, so consider this ramble proof of concept.
