The Majority of South Dakotans Want to Repeal Abortion Ban

I got an e-mail this morning from NARAL, telling me about a great organization called The South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families that has gathered 38,000 signatures - twice the required number - to the state’s Attorney General in order to overturn last year’s statewide abortion ban.

This is a carefully planned attack on a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her body. South Dakota wants this case to go all the way to the Supreme Court, where the two new Bush appointees will help to turn the tide against Roe v. Wade.

Andy and I will be making a contribution to the South Dakota Campaign, and we encourage you to do the same.

Via TailRank.

Buy my Couch and Chair

Since I’ve got a new couch and armchair, I need to get rid of my old ones.

Check out my Craig’s List ad if you’re interested in buying a great starter couch and chair for $50.

You must be able to pick them up before Saturday June 5th.

Check Out the Seattle Times Today!

I’m in the letters to the editor section today. My letter is about how Tim Eyman is manipulating people of faith in Washington State for his Referendum 65 campaign by confusing our non-discrimination amendment with a gay marriage amendment.

To be perfectly clear, I support gay marriage. But this is about other very basic civil rights that have nothing to do with marriage. Check out my letter and this FAQ from Washington Won’t Discriminate to get the facts.

On the Other Side of the State

A little girl time is good for the soul. And since it’s the weekend right before Andy gets here, I feel like I’m entitled to some - hence the trip to Pullman, WA (home of the…shudder…Cougars) to visit with my good friend Ashley Chapman.

Ash is soon leaving for a new teaching job in faraway Texas, and I will be accompanying her on a road trip to get all her stuff and herself settled there.

But this trip is just to relax. We’ve been drinking loads of red wine, eating brownies, getting pedicures (in Idaho!) and watching copious amounts of Sex and the City.

Couch Mission Accomplished and Other Tales

One of the things that happens when a light sleeper marries a tosser and a turner is that they need a good place for one of the two to sleep when the other one starts driving them crazy. Currently, there is no such place in my apartment. That’s why I bought a really, really, really nice couch today.

It’s my first piece of actual, grown-up furniture that does not come from Ikea. I am extraordinarily pleased.

In other news, today I also downloaded The Dixie Chicks’ new record (iTunes), and saw X-Men 3. Taking the Long Way is awesome, The Last Stand…not so much. If I had to describe it in an SAT-like analogy, I would say that Last Stand:The X-men movies::Return of the Jedi:The Star Wars movies.

WARNING, major X-3 spoilers ahead!

On top of the fact that I absolutely hated that they killed both Jean Grey and Professor Xavier (who cares about Cyclops?), I was monumentally disappointed with the screenplay and the editing. They had all the components to make a great film, and they just sort of threw them all at the wall in a hazy picture instead of telling a solid story.

It was a real disappointment.

Spoilers end.

As for the Dixie Chicks record, all there is to say is BUY IT IMMEDIATELY! They manage to sound like the same lilting, harmonious women we’ve come to love, but with a completely new vibe that takes their music new and interesting places. Standouts are the already smash-hit “Not Ready to Make Nice” and the album’s title track “The Long Way Around.”

Facebook Thinks I’m Married

That’s news to me. Not that I can’t wait to be, but umm…yeah. I’m still single from a religious and legal standpoint.

I Think I Might Be the Target Demographic for this Product

I wonder what they call us at their marketing meetings, “hip, twenty-something musicians with prodigious sex drives?” or maybe they’ve created an acronym, HTSMWPSDs.

Whatever the case, I want one.

Is Anybody Else Creeped Out by the Weird 666 Ads in Facebook?

It takes you to two sites:

• http://www.signsareallaroundyou.com/
• http://666fear.com/first/

No links = no Google juice. You’ll just have to copy and paste if you want to be creepified.

So if June 6, 2006 is the apocalypse, then I guess we have only 12 days left. At least Andy and I will be together by then.

What I think is so stupid about these things is that God didn’t create the calendar, humans did. And God certainly isn’t bound by the calendar, even if he did create it. The apocalypse - if there is such a thing - could take place on 9/5/2007 or 4/7/2047. Who the heck knows?

Still, I might just squeeze Andy extra tight on the morning of the 6th.

Out in Scripture

I just got an e-mail from the Human Rights Campaign that I would like to share. They have a very interesting new initiative called Out in Scripture that points out messages from the Bible that deliver an open, welcoming and affirming message to human beings of all stripes - including gays, lesbians, bisexual and trangendered people and their allies.

So far, the whole thing appears to be rather Christian-centric. But I like its basic message, particularly the reading of the Pentecost story from Acts of the Apostles which, thanks to Sister Rosemary’s Scripture Literature class (the course description can be found on page 25 of Holy Names Academy’s Course Catalog) has always been one of my favorite bits from the Christian Scriptures.

The Proper Place for Prayer in Our Public Schools

Stuyvesant High School in New York, NY is to be commended for its sensitive and intelligent handling of “Jesus Day,” an event planned by the school’s evangelical Christian Seeker’s Club. Unlike other schools in the district - Stuyvesant did not place undue restrictions on the group. They only required that they meet after school and not use the school day to evangelize and preach.

I have a feeling that were I a student at the school, I would be mildly annoyed by the whole thing. It’s likely I would have worn my “Jews Kick Ass” tee-shirt (which includes a picture of Jesus) to school that day. But these kids have a right to speak freely in their faith, and the school also has clubs for Jewish and Muslim students.

Stuyvesant did the right thing by allowing its evangelical Christian kids to pray and to spread their message to others who want to hear it. Flyering the school doesn’t place undue pressure on anyone who doesn’t want to participate, and the fact that the event took place after school hours means that anyone who didn’t want to be present didn’t have to be.

There is a place for student-guided, student-centered prayer in all our schools, and I think it’s been achieved here.

The Andy Comes Home Ticker Gets an Update

Ooh, goody goody goody. Andy’s booked his tickets and he’s getting in even earlier than expected. June 3!!! That’s 10 days away. Yeep!

But apart from that, while I was building this beautiful new ticker on the Ticker Factory, I noticed this very peculiar ticker ruler:

If you notice, the words “fertility friend” appear on the pencil. Now, it looks like this site was built primarily for women who want to watch their biological clocks tick online. But why on earth would a pencil be a “fertility friend” to anyone? Is there some bit of key medical information I’m missing out on, or is this just plain weird?

I leave it to you, dear readers.

Thank Goodness for Minute Clinic!

So I’ve been sick for three days and most of my symptoms are gone. No more fever. No more headache. No more congestion. But I’ve still got this horrible, devastating sore throat. I tried to swallow this morning and I nearly fell over from the pain.

That’s when it occurred to me that I might have strep throat.

Since I don’t have a primary care doc other than my fantastic gynecologist, I had three basic options: (1) go to the ER, (2) hope it goes away on its own, or (3) find a Minute Clinic. So I chose to check out the whole Minute Clinic thing and it worked out rather well. I went in. The NP took one look at my throat and confirmed my self diagnosis (of course, she ran a test just to be sure). She wrote me a script for some antibiotics and I was out the door, pills in hand, in just under an hour.

I’m so glad they make a pill for the pain in my throat. If it had been just from a cold I think I might have voluntarily induced a coma until it was over.

I Have the Best Boss in the World

Does anyone else know of a boss that will bring his employees popsicles when they’re out sick? I didn’t think so!

For Someone with a Supposedly Healthy Immune System, I Sure Get Sick a Lot

I think this is the 3rd time in the past 10 weeks that I’ve been laid low by some kind of virus. This time it’s headache, stuffy nose, general malaise, body aches, sore throat and of course the omnipresent fever.

Last night was particularly bad. I went to bed running a high fever which kept breaking and spiking throughout the night. At times I was so cold that I put on long underwear and snuggled up with a heating pad. At other times I was so hot that the sheets were soaked with sweat and I had to dive into a cold shower.

What bothers me the most is all this sickness really messes with my ability to do my job. Blech!

Thinking About Moving to Seattle? Please Don’t!

Thinking about taking that job at Microsoft? Think again. The Pacific Northwest isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It rains all the time and the traffic is getting worse. Just try driving from Redmond to Seattle at 5:00 on a Friday and you’ll see what I mean.

You don’t want to live here. Trust me. You really don’t.

Move somewhere else.

Why Do I Love Christina Aguilera So Much?

I’ll admit, I wasn’t her first fan. She was on the Mickey Mouse Club before I even paid attention to stuff like that. At that point in my life, I was more interested in watching Star Trek than Star Search. But when Christina Aguilera (iTunes catalogue) released “Genie in a Bottle” in 1999, I was hugely excited.

Why? Not because I thought “Genie in a Bottle” was a particularly good song. I heard something in that girl’s voice that stopped me in my tracks: a wailing from behind the backbeat that insisted, “I’m more than this.” And I instantly identified with it.

Growing up, I was picked on. It was partly my fault. I was a socially inept kid, prone to random and ill-advised attempts at popularity that only landed me more squarely than ever in the dork category. I loved Star Trek, wore top hats and striped tights to middle school and sang opera anywhere and everywhere at the top of my lungs. I was also openly queer in eighth grade, which further complicated matters.

But behind all the insecurity I grew up with, I had an understanding that I would outgrow the dorkiness and keep the individuality. Some part of me knew that I was not only smart and a talented musician, but beautiful to boot. And I think that whatever my contribution to my own unpopularity, the girls who picked on me were secretly jealous - because they saw it too.

I learned later in my fandom that Christina faced similar obstacles. She wasn’t shy about discussing her dreams of superstardom or the fact that she’d been a Mouseketeer, and some people saw that as arrogance. It’s possible that she contributed to her own unpopularity by using her fantastic voice and her career successes to compensate for the insecurities brought on by her miserable childhood. If she did, it obviously wasn’t the end of her world either.

I remember watching her MTV Diary (parts 1, 2 & 3) some years ago and hearing her warm up her voice with “Ave Maria.” Years later, I read in People that she walked down the aisle at her wedding this past fall to that same song. As her entire backstory is riddled with songs that sustained her through hard times, it wasn’t hard to guess that Ave Maria is one of them. I got choked up as I realized what that must have meant to her to walk towards the man she loves with that song playing.

Maybe it’s arrogant, or even creepy that I would identify so strongly with someone I’ve never met, someone who doesn’t know my name and likely never will. But there it is. I love Christina Aguilera because apart from the fact that her voice is utterly sublime, I see in her something of a kindred spirit. Here’s a girl who had a rough time of it growing up. She’s an incredibly sexual person who happens to swing both ways and has made bad relationship decisions yet still found the love of her life.

I’m happy for her, and for myself.

Images via GQ.

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