February 2004 Archives
Thanks so much to my friend Anna for pointing the way to this site. Specifically, these two columns--here and here--should be required reading from the pulpit of every mainstream Christian church in the U.S.
So you want to talk about homosexuality? YOU want to talk about homosexuality? You want to talk about homosexuALITY?
Sit down CHRIStian. Give me that bible you're waving before you hurt yourself. I'm going to resist the temptation to snatch it from your hands and beat you with it. I am your worst nightmare, a Texas preacher who knows The Book better than you do.
You cannot wave your unread bible and scare me. I know its larger story and I will tear you a new biblical asshole.
Show me your scriptures. Show me how you justify condemning homosexual people.
Show me what you got, Christian. The Sodom story? That story is about people who wanted to commit a brutal rape. Let's all say it together, "God doesn't like rape". You could have listened to your heart and learned that, Christian. Move on. What else you got?
....And you come to me with two little scraps of scripture to justify your persecution of God's children?
...Sit down Christian. You have not earned the right to speak to this generation. The right to speak is earned with love.
...I do not think the bible teaches that every expression of homosexual love is sinful. The scriptural witness on this subject is shaky at best.
Even if you do not buy my claim that we have no right to demand specific explanation of scriptures from homosexuals since we don't provide similar explanations for the hundreds of passages we blatantly ignore...
Even if you do not agree that the Bible never really addresses the subject of homosexuality as a sexual orientation...
Even if you reject my biblical analysis and decide that the bible is condemning of homosexuals...
Would you at least agree that the passages are ambiguous and open to many interpretations? Would you at least agree that others may responsibly interpret them and not agree with you?
If you could at least acknowledge that scripture is far from clear on this subject, then perhaps you would be willing to err on the side of compassion. Perhaps you would be willing to open your churches to our homosexual brothers and sisters, trusting them to read the bible just as you do, with love and hoping for Grace from God.
It almost makes me want to shout, "Amen, brother!"
Tomorrow morning Jeff and I are planning to get up early for a road trip. We're taking the new Prius from Arlington to the mountains for a short visit with my Mom and the rest of my family. This will be the first time he's been there or met any of them. I'm looking forward to showing him where I grew up, and to showing him off to my Mom. And the weather is supposed to be warming up, 50s tomorrow, 60s on Sunday, so it'll be a nice weekend to take him to the country, and to actually get some quality time with the new car.
And it looks like we're not the only ones in this boat. This weekend Matt is meeting [the other] Jeff's folks for the first time, too.
From an HRC mailing I just received:
RALLY AGAINST DISCRIMINATION
Oppose the Federal Anti-Marriage Amendment
Corner of 17th and Rhode Island Ave. NW
Washington, DC
In front of the HRC BuildingMarch 3, 2004 (Wednesday)
6:00pmLet's rally together on the heels of President Bush's endorsement to permanently deny marriage rights to same-sex couples! Rally to demonstrate your opposition to the Federal Anti-Marriage Amendment, and show your support for marriage rights for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community!
Erstwhile celeb, uber geek, blogger extraordinaire, and budding talented author Wil Wheaton has taken a principled stand today in his blog against amending the U.S. Constitution and in support of gay marriage. Noting first that he debated whether to post at all, given the divisiveness of the issue, his wide readership and that he has a new book coming out in just two weeks, he then went on to post a lengthy, intelligent and impassioned piece regardless of the consequences because he "has to stand up for his beliefs":
And this brings me to the first thing that's so profoundly upsetting about this entire issue: it's not about marriage, it's not about love, it's not about family, it's not about commitment. It's about hating homosexuals. It's about treating homosexuals as if they are second-class citizens. It's about dividing this country into those who support discrimination, and those who don't. It's about Karl Rove updating The Southern Strategy.
It comes as no surprise to me that, as part of that strategy, George W. Bush wants to take the Constitution, a document that is supposed to limit government and guarantee freedoms to all Americans, away from millions of our fellow citizens who are homosexual. I didn't buy the "I'm a uniter, not a divider, compassionate conservative" bullshit during the 2000 campaign, and this is just another example of Mr. Bush revealing his true colors. And this argument that it's a response to "activist judges?" That's a huge load of crap too. Mr. Bush has a lot of nerve talking about "activist judges," considering that he owes his presidency to five of them....
Now, I have no doubt that this effort will fail. I believe that it will ultimately backfire on the Bush Administration, and contribute to his defeat in November. The United States just isn't the Theocracy that Mr. Bush wants to create.
There is a wonderful opportunity here, though, that I haven't heard anyone talk about, yet: we are now forced, as a nation, to acknowledge and confront the widespread discrimination against gays and lesbians, and I believe that Americans will unite against segregation now, just as we did during the Civil Rights movement.
I believe in America. I believe in the Bill of Rights, and the founding principals of this nation. I believe that goodness, compassion, and tolerance will triumph over hatred, bigotry, and ignorance.
And I am proud to stand up for these beliefs, whatever the consequences.
Given the overwhelming agreement with his position in the comments posted to his entry, I don't suspect Wil will see much negative fallout to having taken this position. But it could have been different, and I applaud him for being willing to stand up for what's right despite the potential cost. Just in case someone decides to boycott him because of his political beliefs, I think I'm going to buy a copy of both of his books.
I've just created a "Defend Equality" page on the HRC web site; on this page you can quickly and easily shoot off an email to your Congresscritters opposing the Federal Marriage Amendment and document that you've called the White House to express your opposition to amending the Constitution. There's also a page where you can donate to HRC's campaign to fight this amendment. I've already donated $100 myself.
My Take Action Campaigns
I've set a goal of at least 100 actions by family, friends, blog readers. Help me reach this goal, if you can.
My Fundraising Page
If you'd also like to donate cash to the campaign, "every little bit helps."
To those who say that their support for Bush because of his war on terror trumps their opposition to amending the Constitution, Andrew Sullivan puts it best:
THE PRESIDENT'S CONTRADICTION: So you can see, perhaps, why the bid to write anti-gay discrimination into this very Constitution provokes such a strong response from me - and so many other people, gay and straight, and their families. It robs us of something no one in this country should be robbed of - equality and inclusion in the founding document itself. When people tell me that, in weighing the political choices, the war on terror should trump the sanctity of the Constitution, my response is therefore a simple one. The sanctity of the Constitution is what we are fighting for. We're not fighting just to defend ourselves. We are fighting to defend a way of life: pluralism, freedom, equality under the law. You cannot defend the Constitution abroad while undermining it at home. It's a contradiction. And it's a deeply divisive contradiction in a time of great peril.
From People for the American Way.
Our Constitution begins with the words "we the people," and we are those people charged with defending its ideals and principles. So are your family, friends and neighbors. Please ask them to sign the petition today while news of Bush's announcement spreads.
Send others this link with a personal note urging them to sign the petition:
http://www.pfaw.org/go/save_our_constitutionWith sincere appreciation for all your efforts,
People For the American Way
I hardly know how to describe how I feel today; since my lunch break from the training class today, when I came back to my desk to discover those big bold top-of-the-page headlines on The Washington Post and The New York Times noting that Bush is calling for codifying discrimination against an entire class of American citizens in perhaps our most fundamental document of national identity, the one that otherwise provides for our civil liberties, I've been shaking. I feel just as though I'd been slapped in the face, punched in the stomach or spit on. I'm angry, I'm saddened, I'm embittered. I'm sick and I'm tired. I expected this announcement, though, so why am I having such a visceral reaction?
I might be able to muster some respect for those who call for a constitutional amendment "defending the sanctity of marriage" and "concern for the welfare of our children" if it were accompanied by a clear consistent message on those fronts; if it outlawed divorce, say, or prohibited marriage to the infertile, closed down quickie wedding chapels in Nevada, or mandated extreme penalties for heterosexual adultery and infidelity. But this message and those who carry its banner are--purely and simply--hateful, shameful, ignorant and obscenely misanthropic and, yes, the real anti-Americans, religious fundamentalists at least as dangerous to this country in their own way as any religious extremist. I'm sickened to my very core about the theocratic undertones to this administration and its actions.
Once our place as second-class citizens of this country is enshrined in the Constitution--hell, our place as Constitutionally mandated sub-humans, given that Bush would have us denied access to (as historically wrong as his claim may be, though that's never stopped him before) "the most enduring human institution"--then, I ask you, who's next? The Patriot Act, a Constitutional amendment... folks, the frogs are in the pot, and the water's starting to warm up.
[The other] Jeff posted a link to an incredible, powerful letter, published in a Vermont newspaper during that state's rancorous debate on homosexuality and civil unions, by a mother of a gay son. Read it. I intend to send a copy of this letter to all of my friends, to all of my family. I intend to work my hardest to defeat this proposed amendment, and to get Bush out of the White House this fall.
I used to believe that those of my friends and family who supported Bush did so with the best of motives and intentions, and that we could still love and support one another regardless. And at the time, that was true. No more. This is a matter of my life, my liberty and my personal pursuit of happiness. I have learned the language of the other side: either my family and my friends are with me on this, or they are against me. There can be no more middle ground where this religious zealot in the White House is in question. As far as I'm concerned, a vote for Bush in 2004 from anyone I know and love quite simply is a statement of ignorance, hatred and scorn, and I will no longer need that person in my life.
One does not have to support gay marriage to understand that amending our Constitution is unequivocally the wrong way to express that point-of-view, and that our country's leader should have much higher priorities right now than fomenting, endorsing and enshrining hatred in a document as precious to our liberty and national identity as the U.S. Constitution.
I was about to write about the obscenely preposterous statements of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (geez, even just writing that sequence of four words makes me shiver) suggesting that issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples in San Francisco will lead to licensing drugs and assault weapons, and spark riots and death. However, Jeff already has done such a wonderful job of it, so read his post.
After seeing Robot Stories mentioned a few places online recently, including Matt's post about having seen it the day after [my] Jeff and I met him and [his] Jeff for brunch, I decided to look it up online. Jeff and I then decided to try to see it during its one-week appearance in the DC area, at the AFI Silver in Silver Spring.
The films were uneven, with the one written specifically for the anthology (he noted that one day he just realized that he had these three stories he'd written, all of which dealt in one way or another with robots)--"Machine Love"--in my opinion the weakest, though a plus was that it did feature the cute filmmaker himself. Parts two and four, I think, were the strongest, though the first about a couple taking care of a robot baby for a month while being monitored for their suitability to adopt a real baby had its moments, both poignant and funny.
Grek Pak, the filmmaker and writer, has been traveling around promoting the film--really, an anthology of four short films--and he was at the AFI Silver Friday and Saturday nights, staying to answer questions after the screening.
One interesting observation Jeff and I both had was the placelessness of the stories. Only one was set in a clearly identified place, from the maps of upstate New York one character consulted. It turns out that the films were shot in and around Manhattan, but all of them could have been set in any city with a sizable Asian-American population--San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, Tokyo. The rich diversity of the cast and crew also was notable, as was the enthusiasm of the filmmaker; he passed around notepads for people to leave their email addresses if they were interested in getting more info about the film and his other work. Before I went to bed Saturday night, I'd already received an email, and Pak also already had posted about the night's show in the film's blog.
Robot Stories is playing here in DC for only another four nights (through the 26th), unless it gets extended as it did in New York.
Though I still haven't settled on a name for the new baby, she came home with us last night, as we also said a sad goodbye to her six-year-old brother who went up for adoption in her place. And she's gorgeous, everyone says--it's not just a father's blind pride. She was still so new to the world when they brought her out to us last night, a week premature and with a scant two miles on her odometer, a healthy 175-inch, 2,890-pound Prius, redolent with that unmistakable new car smell.
It was dark by the time we completed the paperwork at the dealership last night, so I wasn't able to take any photos at the time, but I'm planning to shoot some today or over the weekend. I'm really looking forward to having some nice weather to get out and just drive, and explore the ins and outs of this car.
There's a learning curve to a Prius, especially fully loaded with the Smart Start and Entry (unlock and power on the car without pulling the key out of your pocket or purse) system; the joystick-like gear shift; the voice-activated audio, climate, information and navigation controls; the DVD voice navigation system; the eerie silence when the engine cuts off completely at stop signs and traffic lights; the continuously updating MPG display as you make subtle adjustments to your driving patterns; etc. I really have to make a conscious effort to keep my eyes on the road instead of on the wealth of information available on the screen.
I'm very excited, almost giddy--Jeff was pretty patient with my incessant chatter about the car, my staying up until 1am reading the owner's manuals while he went on to bed an hour earlier, but I kept feeling that he was thinking "enough already." <grin /> He had that look of almost pained forebearance--or maybe that was just his stomachache from our late dinner of Tex-Mex.
At the risk of calling Punxsutawney Phil a prevaricator or at least an exaggerator, there are signs here in DC that the six more weeks of winter predicted on February 2 are not to come to pass. Yesterday the temperature reached an almost-balmy 60 degrees, the skies were clear and the sun continued to shine after I left work, and today promises to be similar (if perhaps turning a little cloudy later in the day) with the weekend temperatures also predicted to be in the high 50s.
It seems to be the topic of discussion among everyone I know here, from just between Jeff and me last night and this morning, to among all of my co-workers this morning and several local blogs I've skimmed. We're all very ready for spring.
Last night I had a dream about the new car (I'm due to pick up my new Prius in just 3-1/2 hours). In the dream, the car was full of significant flaws: the most memorable being that the top of the windshield was four inches below my eyes, and even then the top several inches of the windshield were darkly tinted so I had to slouch or lean sideways to see out the front of the car; and the gearshift and emergency brakes were on huge columns (three-feet long and six-inches in diameter) growing up out of the floor just to the right of the brake, so I had to accelerate and brake with my left foot while folding my right leg under me.
Once I finally got the hang of driving the car, it appeared that we were on the mountain road half a mile from my mom's house, except that the side of the mountain was now a jungle, with the ruins of a Buddhist monastery peeping through. I drove on a small, broken dirt road to the monastery to find a group of 20- to 30-somethings who were in the process of restoring it in order to turn it into a commune. Jeff and I were thinking about moving there, but the other folk were concerned that we wouldn't be able to get in and out, since the road we had taken off the highway likely would vanish or be closed during the winter snows, telling me that they came in and out directly up the mountain using all-terrain vehicles rather than via the road we had taken.
That's all I recall.
When I got home last night, there were two messages on my answering machine from my Toyota dealer; of course, my first thought when I saw the number on the caller ID was that he was calling to give me bad news (ever the pessimist), but the truth was quite different. My Prius already is here, more than a week earlier than expected (ok, so it's a couple of months later than originally expected, but it's early based on the latest real information). It's being serviced today, and I'm picking it up Thursday after work!
Despite having Internet access at the hotel, and thinking I might post while there, between our various Manhattan activities and resting up between them I just didn't end up doing so. Of course, that also meant I came home to dozens of spam emails and thousands (!) of unread blog entries from the blogs I regularly read via Bloglines. I'm still not caught up on the latter.
This is about the weekend, though. And it simply was amazing. The worst part of the weekend was the trip home last night: with reservations for the 6:00 bus, we arrived at the Port Authority terminal just before 5:30, so we were told we could go ahead and take one that was just then scheduled to leave. We went ahead and put our luggage in the cargo hold before discovering that the only two remaining seats were at opposite ends of the bus, so we weren't able to sit together. But that's really the worst thing I can say about the weekend, though, by far.
Also frustrating, though much less significantly, was that the museums all seemed to be between exhibits: the Cooper-Hewitt only had a single room open, but still were charging the full entry fee, so we bypassed the exhibit for its gift shop. We then hit the Guggenheim, where the top two floors were closed, but we paid the half-price admission to see parts of the permanent collection as well as a wonderful exhibition of works by Kandinsky and Klee, which turn out to be shared favorites of ours. Additionally, there was a range of Picassos demonstrating his versatility (both in the permanent collection and in an exhibit focusing on Umberto Boccioni) as well as Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), a particular favorite of mine that Jeff hadn't seen at all and for which I'd never seen the original.
Friday night we went to the Rufus Wainwright concert, where we had incredible seats three rows from the stage. Unfortunately, a speaker on the stage edge blocked my view of everything from the neck down when Rufus was seated at the piano; fortunately, he also did a few numbers standing up, on guitar, where my view of him was clear. As wonderful as I found his concert last fall in Washington, this one was better; he was in better voice and the overall energy seemed higher. Teddy and Martha were missing this time around, and I missed their backing vocals (though Martha did come out to do a duet with Rufus as one of his encores), but the last-minute addition of the wickedly funny drag cabaret act of Kiki and Herb as a second opening act--and a Rufus-Kiki duet during the show--was a FABulous laugh-til-I-cried surprise.
Saturday afternoon we saw Wicked, a Broadway musical that seems to be getting lukewarm reports from the critics but an enthusiastic reception from the audience. Jeff and I had been listening to the soundtrack for several weeks, which we've both quite liked, but even so I wasn't prepared for just how much I was going to enjoy the show. This show was the entertainment highlight of my weekend, and I really want to go see it again; our tickets were in the next-to-last row of the orchestra, and I'd like to sit closer since there's so much going on in terms of facial expressions and body language, especially in Kristin Chenowith's inspired Glinda the Good.
Sunday morning we had brunch with the bloggers--themselves a newly dating couple--behind Tin Man and Hit or Miss. You really can't imagine a cuter pair, or better suited for one another. They're really adorable, I definitely enjoyed meeting them and chatting with them over brunch, and I also loved their recommendation of the sweet potato fries at the homsetyle restaurant where we met, the Chat 'n' Chew (by the way, Matt, their web site does list a new location at 470 6th Avenue, so I wasn't imagining things after all).
Sunday evening we had terrific seats for Avenue Q, another wonderful, fun new musical on Broadway. John Tartaglia (who I just discovered is a blogger): Jeff and I both are in love with you, or at least something approximate. You were fantastic!
Yesterday we did a little shopping, hitting the bluefly.com warehouse "everything for $25" sale (though it would have been a drag queen's wet dream, with some incredible dresses, there was woefully little in men's wear, and nothing in my size) and the Barney's warehouse sale, where Jeff did luck out on a couple of cashmere sweaters and a beautiful embroidered shirt.
Beyond that, we did a fair amount of walking the neighborhoods, primarily Chelsea and the Village, and hit a few art galleries on Saturday evening. Otherwise, we made frequent and very good use of our penthouse hotel room, nudge, nudge, wink, wink... demonstrating the truth of a Jay Mohr standup routine we'd recently seen on Comedy Central in which he noted that there's something about arriving at--and paying large sums of money for--a hotel room that just makes you want to have lots of sex.
An exhausting but really wonderfully fun-filled weekend. I had such a great time in Manhattan with Jeff, and I'm also continually rediscovering that I'm so much in love, and so lucky to be loved in return by someone so wonderful. I know it's perhaps a little sickening but, hey, I'm way past due for this, so indulge me.
We're here in NYC. Originally scheduled for a 9:00 Peter Pan bus, we got to the bus station at 8, and were able to use our tickets for seats on a Greyhound that was just leaving, so we ended up in the city an hour early. We checked in at the hotel (though we had a bit of a mixup with the room type; I had reserved a penthouse room and they put us in a "deluxe," actually a little larger, but on a lower floor where we could hear people walking around above us, with a shower and no tub, and no terrace access; we did end up moving to a penthouse room, which is much quieter if teensy tiny). We've had lunch at a little hole in the wall cafe directly across the street, and just stopped by the hotel mezzanine where espresso drinks, coffee and tea are complementary 24 hours a day (nice, since the in-room bottles of Evian are $4.00 each), and have stopped briefly in the business center, with free 24-hour Internet access so of course I had to post (we also saw some wireless access points by the elevator, but hadn't ended up bringing along either laptop); I'll also be able to transfer my photos here and email them to myself, something I was worried about since I only have a single 32-Mb Memory Stick in the camera, which tops out at around 30 photos or so at high resolution.
We're about to head back up to the room for a brief lie-down, and then we're off to some galleries before seeing Rufus tonight.
Today really sucked. In what frustratingly looks like a pattern of suckiness--at least workwise--today ranked right up there near the top. If the year were a college of suck, today would be graduating summa cum laude.
I had a phone conversation with one of those stereotypical foreign service junior officers scrambling for tenure, trying to convince me that his project--for which we'd already gone well above the call of duty--was so important that I needed to pull my staff off of everything else in order to continue to work on it, not-so-subtly suggesting (in fact, practically threatening) that if I thought I had work of higher priority, he'd contact the Undersecretary for his bureau and have her call the director of mine in order to set my priorities straight. Yawn. Then I got roped into a two-hour stretch of being available as a "coach" for other employees required to take an online exam; I had to give up my lunch for it, and then no one even showed up. Additional last-minute unforeseen meetings and tasks, exacerbated by the absence of two of my key employees for the day--kept me from getting to my own scheduled work until after the official close of business.
When I finally left, just barely in time to get to the Metro to pick Jeff up, I was still in cranky work-mind. Fortunately, his own exuberance about the four-day Manhattan vacation rubbed off on me pretty quickly. Now we're all packed and ready to get some shuteye in preparation for our weekend, which begins Friday morning, in just a few short hours.
I first saw a question about this on another blog, though I can't remember where. Then today Commissioner Moose, who also works for a government agency, brought it up as well.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel is an independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency, the primary mission of which "is to safeguard the merit system by protecting federal employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices, especially reprisal for whistleblowing." Prohibited personnel practices refer to a variety of discriminatory acts based on a number of classifications. Until recently, sexual orientation has been one of these classifications. Witness this section from the previous version of the OSC's web site, courtesy of the Wayback Machine at archive.org:
What is the OSC's policy about allegations of discrimination?
Race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, handicapping condition. The OSC is statutorily authorized to investigate allegations of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or handicapping condition (see (1), under "Prohibited Personnel Practices," above). However, procedures for investigating such complaints have already been established in federal agencies and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Therefore, to avoid duplicating those investigative processes, the OSC follows a general policy of deferring complaints involving discrimination to those agencies' procedures.
Sexual orientation, marital status, political affiliation. Allegations of discrimination based on sexual orientation, marital status, and political affiliation are not within the jurisdiction of the EEOC. Such allegations, however, may be prohibited personnel practices or other violations of law subject to investigation by the OSC.
Now see the same section from the recently revised OSC web site:
What is the OSC's policy about allegations of discrimination?
Race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, handicapping condition. The OSC is statutorily authorized to investigate allegations of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or handicapping condition (see (1), under "Prohibited Personnel Practices," above). However, procedures for investigating such complaints have already been established in federal agencies and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Therefore, to avoid duplicating those investigative processes, the OSC follows a general policy of deferring complaints involving discrimination to those agencies' procedures.
Marital status, political affiliation. Allegations of discrimination based on marital status, and political affiliation are not within the jurisdiction of the EEOC. Such allegations, however, may be prohibited personnel practices or other violations of law subject to investigation by the OSC.
Note that "sexual orientation" is no longer included among the allegations of discrimination the OSC will investigate. This despite the fact that Executive Order 13087, which prohibits discrimination by the federal government on the basis of sexual orientation, is still in effect.
What gives? And why has this been done so silently, and with no apparent ripples in the media or among gay and lesbian advocacy groups? And is it a coincidence that this happened on the watch of the brand-new head of the OSC--Scott J. Bloch, formerly deputy director and counsel to the task force for faith-based [emphasis mine] and community initiatives at John Ashcroft's Department of Justice?
OK, gay Republicans, the gauntlet has been thrown... your man has decided that "if necessary" means "now." The press is reporting this morning that Bush has decided to endorse a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. So what are you going to do now, Log Cabin? That "seat at the table" you kept crowing about turns out to have been nothing more than a bowl on the floor, empty even of scraps.
The Washington Post reports that "Republican officials said Bush's decision to proceed now was driven partly by his desire to start the general election campaign on a fresh issue, at a time when his credibility has been battered by questions about prewar warnings of unconventional weapons in Iraq, as well as doubts raised by Democrats about his National Guard service."
Well, isn't that great. They've finally realized, as Bush's ratings slip, that the public is wising up to his shortcomings as a self-described "war president," so they're going to scapegoat gays and lesbians. Gay marriage will be the "fresh issue" they hope to use to divert the public's attention back away from Bush's miserable showing on the economy, the failure of his nationbuilding in Iraq, his unprecedented profligacy in terms of federal spending, his pandering to big business and anti-environment concerns... the list goes on.
Can't find a job? Worried about your children's future in a world of massive debt? Disgusted by the ever-increasing toll on human life and funnelling of U.S. billions to Halliburton caused by the situation in Iraq? Don't worry. Be happy. You're better than those nasty queers, after all. Stick it to them, and everything else will turn out all right, doncha know?
This morning, I cancelled my subscription to audblog. They only bill every three months, so I tend to forget about them until I'm surprised by a PayPal receipt, one of which came last week. Granted, it's only $3/month, but my last audio post was in October and I've only posted a half dozen altogether, while no one among the couple hundred blogs I follow regularly has used the service in quite a while, either. And I never really found the right application for audio posts; I usually wrote them out beforehand, so I wouldn't sound like a complete idiot and usually transcribed them in the end, anyway, so effectively they were just like my other written posts.
Jeff and I are counting down the days until our four-day Valentine's/Presidents' Day weekend in New York City. Five days from now we'll be sitting just two rows away from the stage at the Rufus Wainwright concert, Saturday afternoon we'll get Wicked with Kristin Chenoweth and Idine Menzel, and Sunday evening we'll visit the monsters, humans and puppets who live down on Avenue Q.
Unfortunately, the "Bravehearts: Men in Skirts" exhibition at the Met we'd have liked to visit closes today. In conjunction with that closing, the New York Times reported that about 100 men took to the Manhattan streets today wearing minis, midis and tutus to draw attention to the bias in our society against skirts on men.
So... what else should we do and see in the Big Apple next weekend?
Thanks for nothing, John Kerry. The Boston Globe reported today that the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for U.S. president yesterday "vowed yesterday to fight back against Republicans seeking to tie him to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision allowing same-sex couples to marry, and did not rule out supporting a state constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage." He went on to say, "I have the same position Vice President Dick Cheney has. They ought to talk to Dick Cheney, their own vice president, when they [Republicans] start playing games with this, and we'll find out how political and how craven they are." Does Kerry not know that Cheney, as reported just a few weeks ago, has recently said that he would support a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage if the president deems it necessary?
There's hardly a Democrat left in the race that doesn't make me sick to my stomach. Yes, we need to get Bush out of the White House, but even the bulk of the Democratic candidates gladly would sell me out and relegate me to second-class citizen status, at best, to get there in his place.
And if the news about the car weren't exciting enough, when our server brought our bread and butter at CPK this evening, there was an even number of slices on the plate. My observations in the past had led me to a hypothesis that restaurant policy is to provide only (n×2)-1 slices where n = the number of people at the table, meaning that you're always a slice short of a fair distribution. But tonight we both got two full slices.
And more than two pats of butter per slice, when the usual distribution usually is about a 1:1 ratio. It just doesn't get any better than this.
When I got home from work this afternoon, before I went to pick Jeff up at the Metro I called my mother to see how she's doing. After we chatted about some other things, she asked whether I'd heard anything about my car, so I told her about Jay having gotten a Prius just last week, despite only having ordered it two to three weeks earlier. I also noted that I'd spoken to my dealer after that, and had been told that a shipment of 300 (for the entire mid-Atlantic region) was expected soon, but that they didn't yet know what their specific allocation would be; however, he went on to tell me that someone who ordered a car two weeks before I did was getting his next (meaning this) week, so that he was hopeful I'd be getting one this month.
While I was explaining this to Mom, the call waiting beeped. I looked at the caller ID to see "Alexandria Toyota," so I told Mom that I'd call her right back. My salesman, Sam, told me that my car--a silver (my first choice), fully-loaded Prius--is on a ship due to dock in New York on February 19, and should be here in Virginia a week or so later, depending on weather and other vagaries. I'll likely have my new car more or less around the 29th day of February. Keep your fingers crossed.
What a nice ending to what has been a rather rocky week (though with another wonderful high point Wednesday evening, to be sure).
Jeff called a few minutes later to let me know he was a little early at the Metro station so had gone inside to Borders, and I suggested we have dinner at the CPK next to the bookstore. When I got to the mall, I said, "We're leaving New York on the 16th; guess who's arriving there on the 19th?" When he answered, "I don't know... who?" I practically shrieked giddily in reply, "It doesn't have a name yet, but it's my Prius!"
Yay! I'm so excited. And now I need to come up with a name for the forthcoming four-wheeled addition to the family.
As my boyfriend said last night, "There really is an ABBA song for any situation." Mamma Mia! was fantastic, and we had incredible front-row orchestra seats, giving us great views of the shirtless boys in the chorus (though perhaps a little too close a view of one of the leading lady's cellulite, as she straddled an inflatable mattress while wearing a skirt slit in four places).
Yesterday evening started off potentially distastrous; at 4:00 a "crisis" was dumped on me at work, and I called Jeff to let him know that while I was sure I'd make it to the theater by the time curtain was to rise at 8, I wasn't at all confident I'd make it to dinner at Les Halles beforehand. But a rush of adrenaline had me working like a madman and out of the office only about a half hour later than usual, getting me to the restaurant at 6:00 sharp, about three minutes even before Jeff. After quickly venting about the past two days at work, I settled into my food and the evening quickly went uphill from there.
Originally Jeff had suggested a pre-theater dinner at either Les Halles or another restaurant whose name now escapes me. I hadn't eaten at Les Halles in nearly ten years, so I decided I wanted to go there. After making that decision, though, I started seeing a number of reviews suggesting that the restaurant had gone badly astray since then, and I almost recommended to Jeff at the last minute that we go elsewhere. But our service was attentive and helpful (if the actual food delivery were sometimes a little slower than it should have been), and the food was excellent. From the pre-theater prix fixe menu I had the mesclun salade and their famous hangar steak and frites (some of the best fries I've eaten). Dessert on the pre-theater menu was listed as a choice of either profiteroles or gateau, and I was leaning toward the former; our server, though, brought out the regular dessert menus and told us we could choose anything from the one side, which included an incredible selection of mousses, tarts and other confections. After some discussion with the server, I eventually decided on a caramel mousse meringue, which I almost skipped over because the written description was short and bland. Her description, though, made it sound much more interesting, and it was an amazing dessert: a caramel mousse on top of a fluffy meringue, all encased in an upside-down chocolate shell (which the menu failed to mention altogether), highlighted with a caramel sauce and bits of toffee. I was in heaven.
A half-block walk to the theater found us ensconced comfortably in our front-row seats by 7:45, overlooking the orchestra pit (containing four keyboards, two guitars and a drum set, all that's really needed for ABBA music). When the curtain rose, at first I thought I might be disappointed, as the short prologue, featuring three 20-somethings and a fairly spartan stage, felt like it might as well be a high-school play. Early in Act One, though, the music really kicked in, the stage design proved to be elegantly simple yet evocative, the actors well-cast and giving some excellent performances, and I started grooving and loving it (the costuming, especially, was inspired). By the time the shirtless groom and his best pals showed up to bust a move, it was just yummy icing on a cake I was already digging.
And I think that the curtain calls for Mamma Mia! may be the most fun and engaging I've seen; I felt nearly like I were at a disco rather than at a theater, and practically the entire audience was on its feet, dancing and singing along with the reprise of several of the best-known ABBA singles from the show.
Dancing queens, indeed. So, ABBA and cast, thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing. Thanks for all the joy they're bringing. And thanks for a wonderful night's entertainment that helped me forget completely, for at least a few hours, this hellish week at work.
With the invocation of "activist judges forcing their arbitrary will upon the people" still dominating his remarks, President Bush tonight issued a statement in response to the Massachusetts ruling on gay marriage calling the ruling "deeply troubled." He went on to say:
"Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. If activist judges insist on re-defining marriage by court order, the only alternative will be the constitutional process. We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage."
What about the "activist judges" that arbitrarily and willfully handed him the presidency?
On a different note, I'm deeply troubled myself by this constant reiteration of the "sacredness" of the institution of marriage. Civil marriage is divorced from religion; you don't have to be blessed by a minister or priest to partake of all the thousands of federal benefits bestowed by marriage. If it's a "sacred" institution, then the state ought to be out of the business altogether of endorsing and rewarding it, for all, straight as well as gay.
Today's ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court holding that only marriage for gays and lesbians, and not "Vermont-style" civil unions, will be sufficient to guarantee constitutional guarantees of equal treatment in the Commonwealth, is the latest in the roller-coaster ride that characterizes news stories around queer issues.
From the absolutely horrific upholding in Kansas of a 17-year prison sentence for a young man who, at 18, had oral sex with a 14-year-old boy (the sentence if the 14-year-old had been a girl would be a maximum of 15 months), with its explicit ruling that the state can punish homosexual sodomy significantly more harshly than heterosexual; to the sad ruling in Florida upholding that state's right to deny gay people the right to adopt, while 3,000 children remain parentless in foster homes or state facilities; to the new Ohio same-sex marriage ban, one of the strictest such laws in the country, recent news has seemed uniformly bleak and regressive.
And even today's news from Massachusetts, so positive on the one hand, nevertheless leaves me dreading the continuing backlash, already begun around the country and fanned by the winds of Bush's State of the Union Address.
Most frightening were the comments of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, whose statement read, in part:
"We've heard from the court, but not from the people. The people of Massachusetts should not be excluded from a decision as fundamental to our society as the definition of marriage."
Why frightening? Because our top elected officials--even our President, in his castigation of "activist Judges"--seem to understand so little about our political framework, and that the Constitution and the judicial branch are designed specifically to protect our rights against "the people," when that term, as here, is used to mean "the majority." That latter phrase isn't used by these officials, of course, because it so clearly evokes its frequent antecedent, "the tyranny of," which they would prefer to keep unstated.
The legislature of my own home, Virginia--with so glorious an early history and so repugnant a current political and ideological climate--is spending way too much time in this legislative cycle condemning gays and lesbians. The state already bans gay marriages, yet the House of Delegates recently overwhelmingly approved a resolution urging Congress to propose a federal constitutional amendment "protecting the sanctity of marriage" (whatever that means in this age of Britney Spears and Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire), and the state Senate is considering the resolution now. The House also is considering a bill, the "Affirmation of Marriage Act," that would prevent the state from recognizing marriages, civil unions, partnership contracts or other arrangements that provide some or all of the benefits of marriage. One delegate is introducing a bill that would make it a crime, punishable by up to a year in prison, for gay couples to be married elsewhere, return to Virginia and sue within the courts for legal recognition. The same delegate has introduced other legislation that would make public sex a misdemeanor when heterosexual and a felony when homosexual.
But I want to be happy for the ruling in Massachusetts, I really do. And besides, tonight Jeff and I go to a wedding... of sorts, since we've got front row seats to see Mamma Mia! at the National Theater. Yippee!
I came home this evening after a particularly dreadful day at work, got onto the computer to blog some quicklinks, and discovered that several of the items on my serendipity quicklinks blog were gone. Vanished. Poof.
After the day I'd had, my first visceral reaction was to curse and moan. I posted a note on the usergroup about the oddity of the missing entries, and then went looking to see if I could recover them elsewhere--or at least determine the extent of the problem.
Thanks to Bloglines (I love me some Bloglines), which seems to cache old entries from the RSS feeds you access with it, I was able to pull up all of my serendipity entries. Comparing this to the current state of the blog, I was able to determine that I'd lost twelve items (after an initial miscalculation that had me thinking I'd lost 41, which started me swearing again), and precisely which twelve they were.
In the meantime, though, I'd already started receiving personal emails from the Dude development team, and over the course of the next few minutes they were able to track down the bug and fix it so that additional entries wouldn't vanish. We also discovered that the entries only vanished when someone else had "duded" them (normally this just makes an additional copy) to their own blog; since this meant that all the ones that had vanished from mine still were available in the system, and I already had determined which they were, it was pretty easy to find them and dude them back to serendipity.
So, as upset as I was initially to see my links gone, I really have to give a lot of credit to the Dude folks for their incredibly prompt response (after regular business hours) and sense of humor. Thanks, guys.
Since first compiling it last November, I've continued to update the list of DC Metro Area gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, etc. blogs and journals.
With the most recent update, which brings it to a total of 105 sites, I've also included an OPML file containing the information of the 77 (at this date) with XML feeds, for import into your favorite aggregator.
In addition to the "serendipity" quicklinks blog I created at Dude, Check This Out!, today I also set up a Prius quicklinks blog.
To be more accurate, I'd had my nose in The Da Vinci Code since Friday, finishing it yesterday afternoon. It's a quick and easy read.
I enjoyed it well enough--in fact, I did find it difficult to put down, especially since, moving through it quickly, I realized the end was attainable by weekend's end--but I didn't have the strong reaction I've noted elsewhere (e.g., Cornelia). Though it's certainly true that I'll never look at Da Vinci's The Last Supper the same way again.
Perhaps the book just had been hyped too much. Personally, it felt like Dan Brown was trying too hard to be Umberto Eco, and definitely failing to reach that level of skill; I'd venture that I found Katherine Neville's The Eight and practically anything by Artur Perez-Riverte much closer to that ideal. In fact, while looking up the Amazon codes for these latter authors and their works, I found that someone there already had put together a guide entitled "So you'd like to... read a book like The Da Vinci Code, but better?" and I'd have to say I agree with most of the choices on this list (though number 6 on this list, As Meat Loves Salt, failed to keep my interest about halfway though, and I haven't yet finished it).
