Dunna dunna dunnadunnadunna

That’s supposed to sound like the Jaws music by the way. Just like that, November is upon us. Tomorrow is the first day of NaNo, and NaBlo. For at least a couple days, you should see some more activity around here, as the goal is to post every day throughout the month. I’ve got some ideas for a story for the month as well, though it’s all very vague atm. Just theme and very rough plot. I haven’t got a solid main character, but hopefully she’ll flesh herself out as the month goes on. For anyone who may be playing along at home, to get 50,000 words in 30 days, you need to write 1667 words per day, minimum. The little bar on the left will keep you updated on how many words I’ve written as the month goes on. Can she do it? Yes! Will she do it? …maybe…?

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Thoughts.

Soap Box: Legislation

I dislike talking about politics. To a certain extent, more and more often, I dislike talking about religion for the same reason: Everyone has already made up their mind. On occasion, people will change their mind about a topic, person, or belief, but it usually stems from research, not your next-door neighbor spouting his mouth off. So please know, I’m not here to change your mind. With the visibility of some of the hot issues, it would be hard for you not to have heard about it already. But nonetheless, I have to stand up and say what I believe, and why I believe it. You’re all welcome to do the same.

I believe Proposition 8 in California, and the similar proposals in both Florida and Arizona this year are wrong. For simplicity of discussion, and because it’s the race being watched most publicly, we’ll work with California exclusively. I will make some points related to that California race that may or may not be related to the other state’s races.

Here’s why I believe as I do: Mostly it comes down to the fact that I don’t believe the gay lifestyle is a choice for everyone. I have known a couple people that I’m sure could have chosen either way. But I have also known men and women who have even gone so far as to marry and have children with a heterosexual partner, and have been utterly miserable. I just can’t believe there are so many people in this world that would choose that kind of misery. This is obviously the part where many people disagree with me. I have no facts, only my feelings.

But I think Prop 8 should be denied for other reasons. First of all, for a long time, the gay lifestyle was seen as so deviant that people were told, “They just sleep around! New partners every night!” Not only were men sleeping with men, but they were plucking them up like grapes from the vine. Well, here they come, saying, “I want what so many of you have: A lifelong, commited partner. For better or worse and all that.” They start coming out of the woodwork saying, “We’ve already been together so long, we just want to finalize it before the world.” They want to settle down. Why not support that?

Well, because it’s still wrong. It’s still a sin against God, and marriage is a religious institution, I hear you say. But it isn’t. To at least some extent, there is a separation of church and state in this country. Civic leaders, at least in their public, official roles, hold no religious sway over anyone they meet. But I can go down to the courthouse, put in some paperwork, and walk out with a paper that says I am married. Married. This means at least on some level it is a civic, legal institution. It comes with legal rights and responisibilities, and in most states, men and women have to recieve their right to marry other couples from the state. Your bishop, or pastor, or rabbi, or priest, or priestess can take you through a ritual, ensure that vows are said, tokens are exchanged, and present you to their congregation as husband and wife (or wives…). But if certain procedures aren’t followed, as far as the government is concerned, nothing has changed.

But fine, I say. If you want marriage to be between you and your spouse and God, that’s great. I’m all for it. Continue to ensure that separation of church and state. The church creates marriages, and the state creates civil unions. Which, if marriage truly is between man, woman, and God, is all they really do anyway. Many religions see couples as living in sin, even if married by a courthouse, until it has been solemnized according to the dictates of that religion. So the separation is already there, at least in belief. Just call it what it is in practice. Any religious leader can marry, and your congregation can celebrate your newfound commitments. But if you want your joining to be recognized by the state, your religious leader must jump through whatever hoops to be able to also perform civil unions.

Let me clarify, just in case you missed it: In my alternate universe, nothing has changed but the name. Read that again. Religious people still get married, their officiators still have to recieve their power from the state to make it a legally binding ceremony, and the state can perform legally binding ceremonies that are not religious. It’s how things work right now, we’re just changing the name. (Though I will admit, saying, “We went down to the courthouse and got civil-unioned is awkward. ;D )

As long as you’ve followed the logic this far, we’re doing good. Here’s where we’ll probably start disagreing again: Extend civil unions to same-sex couples. Give them the legal trappings. They already have in several states. Massachusettes, Connecticut, and California (currently) all offer full fledged same-sex marriage. California previously offerred a civil union to same-sex couples that gave them all the same rights and responisbilities of marriage. A bunch of people said “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, call it a duck,” and asked their Supreme Court to just call it marriage already, and thus we find ourselves in our current predicament. Vermont, New Jersey, and New Hampshire all offer full-rights civil unions to same-sex couples, just witholding the title of “marriage”. Maine, Hawaii, the District of Columbia, Oregon and Washington all offer civil unions that come with subsets of marriage rights. What I’m saying is to keep what VM, NJ, and NH have done, and change MS, CN, and CA to match. Keep the opportunity to offer them full rights, just don’t call it marriage. But if a man and a woman get joined in a courthouse, don’t call that marriage either. Civil unions for rights, marriage for God.

I know, I know, this is long, but I’ve got one more point to spout my mouth off about. I want you all to know, I completely respect the right of a religion to decide what is and isn’t sin. Sin is a concept that belongs entirely to religion, and should be left that way. If any, or hell even all religions want to say homosexuality is a sin, that’s fine by me. If they want to say having sex with my boyfriend before marriage is a sin, great. If they want to say eating strawberry ice cream is a sin, have at it. Just don’t legislate my ability to do so. Beliefs and laws are both there to govern behavior. The difference is, when I break a law, I get in trouble with the government, when I break a belief/commandment, I get in trouble with God. In some countries in this world, that means basically the same thing. When a country is run by religious leaders, they can that a sin and a felony are the exact same thing.

But this country doesn’t work that way. George Bush cannot tell me that what I’m doing is a sin, and correlating to that, he cannot put me in jail for breaking a commandment. In fact, laws are what we have to have because of that separation. Because we have so many belief systems, so many gods, so many commandments, we had to come up with something else to govern society. Long story short, the law shouldn’t tell a religion what to believe, and religion shouldn’t dictate the law. Follow the dictates of your God in making choices about your vote in regards to leaders and how to live your life, but don’t presume that what’s right for you has to be right for everyone. That’s what the democratic process is for. The people decide what is right for the people.

This means that religion needs to butt out. In specific for me, the LDS church is in the wrong. They are welcome to send letters to their pulpits reinforcing their stance that homosexuality is a sin, and that marriage is a sacred covenant between one man, one woman, and God. Then they keep their legal benefits. Tax-exemption, closed books, etc. From there, members should be involved in the civic process according to the dictates of their own conscience. But the minute the church starts dictating how members should vote, donate, and organize, they have gone too far. They are now a campaign organization and should be subject to the same scrutiny as all other such organizations.

Please, let me say it again. I’m not saying that the LDS church needs to accept homosexuality. They don’t have to marry them, let them in their buildings, or give them any sort of aid. They can preach against them as much as they’d like. I strongly disagree, but that’s as far as it goes. However, they SHOULD NOT be a part of the civic, democratic process. Their members will and should be, and I realize that it’s a fine line. But it’s one that must be drawn.

Alright, I’ll stop. If you’ve made it this far without having to stop and write me angry comments, kudos to you. If you’d like to write me angry comments, you are more than welcome to. I’ve said my piece here, I’d be remiss if I didn’t welcome the same from you.

Coming Soon

It has been an incredible October around here. Mostly sunny, and still somewhat warm, but gradually and perceptibly cooling. The leaves are all turning colors and falling from the tress, and for some reason I am particularly satisfied by the crunch-swish-crunch rhythm of walking around. We’ve turned the heater on, I bought oatmeal, and big fuzzy slippers. All signs of impending winter. But having this transition has made the potential cold a little more bearable I think. For several years it’s seemed like we go straight from summer and green to frozen and grey, and I’m just not a fan. A nice gradual fall is like easing into the pool.

It also heralds the coming of the holiday season right on through the end of the year. Halloween is coming up, and then the year always seems to fly right on through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year. Included in my personal yearly celebrations, though I’ve never finished, are NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, and NaBloPoMo or National Blog Posting Month. I will once again be participating in both, and my goal is to finish at least one of them. If you decide to play yourself, please leave a comment and let me know names so we can all link up and be friends and the like. NaBloPoMo especially can be a good way to meet other bloggers and find some cool people.

To find me, you can click here for NaNoWriMo, and here for NaBloPoMo. Hope to see you all there!

October 20, 2008

Yeah, I know, boring title. But that’s all I could really come up with. This post doesn’t really have a theme. I keep thinking of writing about all sorts of planned projects I have running around in my head, but I keep getting distracted. For instance: I want to take pictures of all the awful areas in my house (which pretty much equals the whole house) so you can watch as I get the place under control. But then I think, maybe I’ll want to play with the pictures some before I upload them. This reminds me that I want to learn a lot more about GIMP, which is an open-source (read: free) version of Photoshop. Which leads me back to a couple projects I’d like to undertake for the sheer sake of being more creative. Which leads me to my writing, which reminds me that I wanted to check out OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice is another open-source project that is exactly what it says it is. Office, but open-source and free for download. My dad picked it up a long time ago, when it was in its beginning stages, and it wasn’t quite everything I wanted it to be. Most of my usage of any office suite comes from its word processor. I’d type up a document in OpenOffice, port it over to Word, which it claimed to do, and it just looked all skewampus. No good for a picky person like me. Same thing going the other direction. Word-formatted documents just didn’t come out looking right. Well, for shits and giggles, and because I love the open-source community, I downloaded the new OpenOffice suite. It includes a word processor, a spreadsheet… thingy, it does presentations, just like PowerPoint, it has a database manager, and a couple other things that most of us will never use. But they’re all there. And at least going from Word into OO, my documents looked just fine. I’m going to play around with it more, and do some stuff to go the other way. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Then I’m going to finish reading the GIMP users manual, in attempt to figure out a little more of the VASTNESS of tools available, and I’m going to screw with the BF’s latency while I download the latest version. Heh hehehe.

Umm.. In other news, I need to find a book I’ve misplaced and then get the whole pile back to the library. If you’re looking for some enjoyable reads, pick up Neil Gaiman. Warning: many of his stories include a somewhat explicit depiction of sex. I wouldn’t call it pornographic, as he’s writing from his character’s point of view, and he’s just honest about what’s going on, but if you want your books sex free, you may want to double check which ones you pick out. If nothing else, I’d recommend them, because I think pretty much everything I’ve read so far is FANTASTIC. Just keep an eye out, and skip a couple pages or whatever. I read Coraline (meh), Fragile Things (short story/poetry collection, which I always enjoy), and Stardust, which I have to say is one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in years. Srsly. I wasn’t quite satisfied by the ending, but everything up to that point was like eating your favorite ice cream.

An Excellent Weekend

I just got through having one of the best weekends I’ve ever had. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get everything in here, or even really convey how much fun it was, but my poor partied-out brain can’t come up with anything else at the moment.

It started Friday afternoon, with a trip downtown to support Signing for Something. This is a website dedicated to the idea that while the LDS (or any other) church is more than welcome to determine its own moral standing, and to preach that standard to members and non-members alike, it should not be involved organizationally or financially in the political process. They asked for people willing to come down and in a respectful manner deliver both the petition and copies of letters people have written to the LDS church and its leaders. So I did. It was uneventful, and fairly unsurprising in its reception. Call me cynical, but I’m just hoping those pages lasted longer than 10 minutes outside a garbage can.

Friday night was the big deal though. First off was a friend’s birthday party. They had these cheeseballs that were so freaking good! I swear I probably ate half of one all on my own. Mmm… I also had a bottle of Harvest Moon, which is Blue Moon’s seasonal beer. It’s theoretically supposed to taste like pumpkin pie, but it pretty much just tasted like beer to me. I still haven’t caught the big appeal of the beer thing. Not when there are cocktails in this world.

Which leads me to the other party of the night. Several good friends were in town for a conference and so the awesomest chick in all the land threw a party. I know most of these people through the internet, so it was great to finally meet them in person. Forgive me if I name no names. I try to keep most people’s names out of this thing anyway, but several of these folks are going through some ugly stuff, and consequently are protecting their online selves even more.

Anyway! Speaking of cocktails, CounterMan made up these coffee-chocolate-tasty things that were responsible for several hangovers the next morning, I’m sure. These things are evil, but they are so freaking good. Which is part of why they’re evil. They just don’t taste like they’re going to mess you up as much as they do. It also didn’t help that as soon as you finished one off, he’d press another full one on you. Of course, in my case there were also a few swigs of some pretty tasty whiskey to be had. However! Yours truly was not one of the folks sporting a pounding head or an upset stomach this morning, so it’s all good.

There was drinking, and eating, and laughing, and kissing, and rocking, and t-shirts, and boobs, and testimonies, and lotion, and much much awesomeness. I just feel honored to even be a part of this amazing group of people. There’s just no way to describe how incredible they all are as individuals, nor are their words for the interactions we’ve created. ‘Fuck’ just skims the surface. ‘Twat-monkey’ dives a little deeper, but it still just doesn’t do them justice. Thanks to all of them for being them, thanks espeically to CounterMan and DoubleEight for hosting. I love all you guys.

Just Checking In

Hey! Just hopping on to keep the postage rolling. Today’s going to be a pretty crazy day. Assuming I can finagle the card out of the BF’s back pocket without waking him, I’ve got lunch with a bunch of cool peeps from out of town, then this evening it’s off to a birthday party AND a cool-peeps-from-out-of-town party. Mass craziness, but also tons ‘o fun! In other news: Something funny!

New Look

As I’m sure one or two of my readers (you’re still here?) know, moving blogs can sometimes be a big pain in the ass. So for now at least, I’m going to stick around here. But! Click on through your feed reader, if that’s how you keep up with me, and check out the new look. Yes, that is me at the top there, thanks to TallMan and his kamera skillz.

I’ve got some ideas on what to do around here, so hopefully things’ll pick up a little more. For now: Enjoy the newly minted poll feature on WordPress!