It’s pretty sad when people you used to respect turn out to be complete nutjobs.

Take, for instance, Orson Scott Card, a science fiction writer and author of Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, the Homecoming saga, and dozens of other novels and short stories.

Today I read something he wrote a couple of weeks ago, published in the Mormon Times.

Apparently, Mr. Card is advocating the overthrow of the United States government and/or individual state governments over the issue of gay marriage. As in, encouraging taking up arms against the authorities if gay marriage is legalized. He really and truly views homosexuality as that much of a threat to whatever utopia he thinks he’s living in.

Now, if you, personally, aren’t comfortable with the idea of homosexuality, that is your own private prerogative to feel that way. But the vitriol and hate this man spews under the guise of “logic” are way beyond the pale.

Some choice quotes:

No matter how sexually attracted a man might be toward other men, or a woman toward other women, and no matter how close the bonds of affection and friendship might be within same-sex couples, there is no act of court or Congress that can make these relationships the same as the coupling between a man and a woman.

He really doesn’t do a very good job at all of explaining exactly HOW he thinks a homosexual relationship is fundamentally different from a heterosexual one.

Married people are doing something that is very, very hard — to combine the lives of a male and female, with all their physical and personality differences, into a stable relationship that persists across time.

He declares this as if homosexuals could not achieve the same end result were they allowed to marry.

Only when the marriage of heterosexuals has the support of the whole society can we have our best hope of raising each new generation to aspire to continue our civilization — including the custom of marriage.

When has the marriage of heterosexuals ever NOT had the support of society? That’s what society has always been about! He seems to believe, like a frighteningly high percentage of other people in this country, that legalizing gay marriage is somehow a threat to heterosexual marriage. I have never been able to figure this one out. How in the world would letting my friends Jim and Bill get married be any kind of threat to my marriage to Doc? How is that even an issue?

In an era when birth control and abortion make childbearing completely optional, the number of out-of-wedlock births shows the contempt that many women have for marriage. Yet most of these single mothers still demand that the man they chose not to marry before having sex with him provide financial support for them and their children — while denying the man any of the rights and protections of marriage.

The same old argument: placing all the blame on the woman. Does he not recognize that the man also chose not to marry the woman before he had sex with her, and shares equally in the responsibility for the outcome? It takes TWO people to make a baby; it takes TWO people to decide to get married. He makes it sound like women are involved in a conspiracy to deliberately get knocked up, refuse proposals of marriage, and then (horrors!) stick the man with partial financial responsibility for the children he helped create!

Society gains no benefit whatsoever (except for a momentary warm feeling about how “fair” and “compassionate” we are) from renaming homosexual liaisons and friendships as marriage.

Patently untrue. Society gains enormous benefit from embracing many different types of people and many different types of relationships. Also, the implication that homosexuals are not capable of anything deeper than friendships and sexual liaisons is unbelievably offensive.

If America becomes a place where our children are taken from us by law and forced to attend schools where they are taught that cohabitation is as good as marriage, that motherhood doesn’t require a husband or father, and that homosexuality is as valid a choice as heterosexuality for their future lives, then why in the world should married people continue to accept the authority of such a government?

And here you have it. Not only the “C” word (that’s “choice”), but the call to arms.

I have read and enjoyed a dozen or more of Mr. Card’s novels and short stories, and have always thought he was a fantastic writer who created extremely interesting universes and characters. That hasn’t changed. He is a very good writer with a rich imagination. My friend Chris pointed out that Ender’s Game was laden with homoerotic overtones; Card has incorporated gay characters into his novels on several occasions and has never portrayed them as anything other than normal. Which makes it all the more interesting that his personal feelings apparently run so counter to that.

For about two seconds I considered returning all my Card novels to Half Price Books and refusing to read any more of his works. But then I reminded myself that people are really complex and have many sides to them. I can like someone for one thing, and dislike them for another. I don’t think it’s fair or open-minded to completely dismiss a person you previously admired based on something largely unrelated to what you admired about them. Just because he has some really scary and fucked up ideas doesn’t mean that — ooh, undoesies! — I suddenly dislike all the novels that I previously liked. That isn’t fair, and it isn’t true.

I still think he’s a good writer. But I no longer respect him. And I find that sad.

And that brings me to my solution to this problem. I have the answer to the “marriage crisis.”

I think one of the big issues with marriage is that there are two sides to it: the legal side, and the religious/”in God’s eyes” side. As it stands, we’ve kind of mixed up the two; the state meddles in the church, and the church meddles in the state. We need to separate these two sides, call them different things, and let people opt for one or both.

Any two consenting adults — man and woman, man and man, woman and woman — can apply for a Civil Union License. The Civil Union License would afford these two people the exact same legal benefits and protections that marriage does now. Declare an oath, sign some paperwork, and you are done.

“Marriage,” on the otherhand, becomes the domain exclusively of religion. People who have their Civil Union Licence can also opt to have a marriage ceremony, to make it official in God’s eyes, or whatever their reasoning. “Marriage” itself can retain all the ritual, religious significance, and pomp and circumstance that it enjoys today. Individual religious groups can set their own rules on who can get married and under what circumstances — just as they do today. But now you’ve taken the government out of the mix.

So you can choose to get married, which is a religious ceremony only. And you can ALSO choose to obtain a Civil Union License, which takes care of the legal side of things.

I’m sure Mr. Card would argue that my solution has nothing to do with what he sees as the problem (continued reproduction of our species — of course within the confines of heterosexual marriage). I think that if he’s really worried about our species continuing to reproduce, he should remind himself that there are six billion plus people on this planet and we seem to be doing a really overly find job of continuing society, despite the presence of gays, lesbians, and even non-childbearing heterosexuals. I’m not sure how he thinks that “protecting” marriage from The Gays is somehow going to solve things.

About ten years ago, I was jogging on a winding, tree-lined street in the Bluffview area of Dallas. Mind you, I didn’t live IN Bluffview; my house was a small 2-bedroom in the “servants’ quarters” neighborhood adjacent to these enormous houses on hilly, wooded lots. The houses were set so far back from the road, behind screens of trees, that the road was almost like a secluded path through a forest — not like Dallas at all — which is why I liked jogging there so much.

On this particular weekend afternoon, I was running on the opposite side of the road (so I could clearly see cars coming around the tight curves in this area), minding my own business, mind wandering as it does when one runs, when suddenly something hit me, HARD, from behind. I stumbled to catch myself from falling flat on my face, and as I recovered I realized that what had hit me was a man’s hand, sticking out his car window, ON PURPOSE. He and his buddies had driven on the wrong side of the road, rolled down their window, and reached out to hit me on the butt. As I stood there furiously trying to figure out what to do, he drove on… very slowly, looking in his rearview mirror the whole time to gauge my reaction, and laughing.

I cannot even tell you how frightened I was, and repulsed, and angry, and all sorts of emotions. I worried that he might stop, or turn around and come back, and do who knows what to me — kidnapping, rape, and murder came to mind. I was alone on a road that wasn’t high-traffic. Luckily I was only a short distance from a major road so I turned and ran back that way as quickly as I could, before the man could decide to come after me. Luckily, he didn’t. He was just in it for thrills. Did he think he was paying me a compliment? That I would be flattered that he chose ME to assault?

When I’m out in the neighborhood walking, or really by myself on any public street, I often get catcalled by men driving by. It never happens when I’m with Doc, but it happens frequently when I’m by myself or with another woman. I have never, EVER mistaken those rude comments and yells as flattery. EVER. It’s not sexual in nature; it is a verbal assault based on a need to control. It’s a little scary sometimes. I always carefully watch the make and model of vehicle, and try to quickly change my route as soon as the car is out of sight, in case they try to come back.

Which is why the title of this article I read on CNN made me angry:

From a CNN article titled Catcalling: creepy or a compliment?:

“Being in a public space with a strange man who is being sexually aggressive is potentially dangerous,” [New York filmmaker Maggie] Hadleigh-West added….

“When a man catcalls you, you don’t know if it will end at that point or if it could escalate to assault,” [Kimberly Fairchild, assistant professor of psychology at Manhattan College] added….

On the other hand, some women appreciate the attention in certain cases, like Jessica, a 31-year-old health-care educator in Los Angeles who declined to use her last name to protect her privacy.

“Yeah, it’s objectifying and all, but you know, if I walked down the street and didn’t have men looking me up and down and catcalling, I’d think, ‘Boy, I must really be getting old and dumpy,’ ” she said.

Now granted, this was the article’s only mention of “catcalling is actually a compliment”, and it’s not a bad story otherwise, but the sensationalized headline made it seem like “ladies, you should be flattered… we’ll tell you why in this story!” (But I digress; sensationalized news headlines that have almost nothing to do with the story content is another rant for another day.)

A very astute response to the CNN article:

The thing about conflating cat-calling or other forms of domination with male sexual desire is that this is a gross insult to men who can tell the difference between “I’d like to see her smiling at me with pleasure” and “I’d like to see her crying in fear of my mighty manhood that needs constant reinforcing”.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. It has nothing to do with sex; it’s about control and dominance. It’s frightening, insulting, and an affront to the majority of men who are kind and decent people.

Last night I woke up about 4 a.m. and had a hard time getting back to sleep. I laid in bed for a long time and eventually my brain started wandering in that strange way that brains do right before you fall asleep. An image came to me, very clearly: My kitchen, with a plain wooden chair in the middle of the floor. Samuel L. Jackson was standing next to the chair, and he pointed at the seat and shouted “Snakes on a chair!”

This startled me, even in my halfasleepness, but I decided to just let my brain go with it, and I came up with two entire verses, complete with accompanying mental imagery.

Snakes on a chair
Snakes in a suitcase
Snakes in the drawer
Snakes on the floor 

Snakes in my shoes
Snakes in my brain
Snakes down the drain
Snakes on a plane!

Har!

Yesterday Doc and I celebrated our 8-year anniversary! Yay, us!!! It really hasn’t felt like 8 years (well, 12 if you count the time we were dating), and I know that’s a Very Good Thing. We’ve made a point over the last few months of spending more time together in the evenings, and on evenings when we do our own things in our respective studios, I feel lonely.

He is truly the light of my life, and my best friend. He is so funny and intelligent and sexy and cute and caring and generous and honest and faithful and loyal and entertaining. I am so glad that we managed to cross paths in life.

Sometimes it just hits me how much a simple thing like one simple decision can be so fragile, so fleeting, so life-changing. If either of us had made any number of other decisions prior to the moment that we met, we might never have met or married at all.

What if he hadn’t been able to come to that party we had where he discovered my CD collection and realized that we had the same semi-obscure interests? What if I’d gotten more involved with the person I was casually seeing at the time that we met? What if he had already grown distant from Tommy when Tommy and Ginger were dating? What if he and I had decided to date a few years earlier when we were first introduced, when neither of us were ready and it wouldn’t have worked out?

It’s weird to try to tally up all the things that had to go absolutely right to lead us to this point. I think this is where some people like to imagine that God, or whichever higher power they ascribe to, had a hand in things. I don’t think so, personally. This world is so complex that crazy things like this happen all the time, and the times when things work out either really well or really badly is when we start to question the events that led up to that point.

Anyway, back to the anniversary. We did not give each other big gifts, as is our tradition, but I did get him a few bars of fancy soap that he likes, and he got me some rosemary seedlings (since I managed to kill the two large plants he got me last Christmas), because, he says, it reminds him of when we got married. How sweet is that??!

He was working onsite at a client’s all day yesterday, and when he came home we spent some quality time together (wink wink) and went out to stuff ourselves at Texas de Brazil (and if you’re planning on eating at a churrascarria and having sex in the same evening—two ways of getting stuffed, har-de-har-har—I’d highly recommend having sex FIRST).

I do love that place but lord have mercy, is it ever expensive. We had a buy one/get one free coupon (they send those out to their mailing list for birthdays and anniversaries), and that’s about the only way that I’d be comfortable eating there. At $45 prix fixe per person, you’re looking at $100+, more if you have anything to drink besides water.

They offer a dessert menu, but I have no idea how anyone could possibly fit dessert in after partaking of the orgy of meat and salad. The 5-inch-tall slice of cheesecake with an inch of fudge on the bottom and caramel on top looked pretty appealing, even so.

And I think I mentioned this last time I posted about Texas de Brazil, but I swear I could eat my weight in goat cheese. Just give me their rice, black beans, and goat cheese, and I’m a happy girl.

Doc observed, as he turned off NPR on the car radio on the way to breakfast this morning, that “A Prairie Home Companion” is basically “Hee Haw” for northerners. Ha!

Our trivia team tonight expanded beyond the limit I’m comfortable with. I think we had ten people, when we were thinking we’d have about six. Next time: smaller table; any excess acquaintances should probably form their own team. It’s so incredibly hard to hear in the Trinity. So loud. Sitting outside might work for a while, until it gets hot again.

However, all that being said, we came in third place tonight. That garnered us a $15 gift certificate, which seems a bit hard to split up, but I suppose we can just apply it to the table’s bill next time we’re there.

Normally I don’t read the spam e-mails that get through my filters; I can tell by the subject line or sender name that they are junk and delete them unread. But for some reason this one caught my attention this morning. It made me laugh out loud.

While soaring through the web on the winged horse of inspiration i came across the magnificent manifestation that is your web presence. Your site resonates with the kindling of creativity. You are wonderfully gifted and your cyberexistence is a pleasure to peruse. Thank you for sharing your authentic and nurturing reality as your life and work are significant. I wish you the power of enlightenment and an inspired life. 

May you connect more deeply with yourself and may yours be an angelic existence where you unleash your bliss.

Yours in Earthly Communication
Micheal Teal
The Ancient One

I’ve wondered for a while why we often don’t call our meat the same thing as the animal that it comes from. For instance, you don’t cook up some ground cow, or eat strips of crispy fried pig. You eat beef and bacon.

I am currently reading “The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way” by Bill Bryson, who is a terrific writer and can make even something seemingly as dry as the history of language extremely interesting. Anyway, in a discussion about Britain under Norman rule (French Vikings!), he illustrates the tiered social structure of Norman society — the French-speaking ruling class vs. the English-speaking peasantry — and the linguistic differences, as such:

The breakdown can be illustrated in two ways. First, the more humble trades tended to have Anglo-Saxon names (baker, miller, shoemaker), while the more skilled trades adopted French names (mason, painter, tailor). At the same time, animals in the field usually were called by English names (sheep, cow, ox), but once cooked and brought to the table, they were generally given French names (beef, mutton, veal, bacon).

So there’s one possible explanation.

Something else Bryson mentions, that I’d never thought about consciously before, but now find fascinating:

When we make an everyday observation like “I have some homework to do,” we pronounce the word “hav.” But when we become emphatic about it — “I have to go now” — we pronounce it “haff.”

Weird, isn’t it? I think that it’s actually the phrase “have to” that gets pronounced “haff to.” When it means “must,” the v sound turns into an s. When it is used in the possessive sense, the v remains a v.

Been thinking a lot about what to let go, to cut down on my stress. I need to be as healthy as I can to support Doc while he’s having a rough go of it, and to make it through all the extra work I have committed to.

So I’ve decided to put one thing on hiatus, and stopping worrying so much about a second thing.

As of 2 days ago, Project 365 is on officially on summer vacation. Hopefully only for a few weeks, but eliminating the stress of “oh fuck, it’s almost time to go to bed and I still haven’t taken a photo” is going to make a difference. It’s not like I’m doing it for anyone except myself, anyway, and I need to learn how not to feel guilty about failing to achieve personal goals, so this is a good start.

And the thing I’m going to quit worrying about is cooking vs. eating out. The stupid spaghetti incident from last night made me realize that not wanting to cook, and getting takeout instead, is not the end of the world. I routinely worry about what to pack for my breakfast and lunch for work, and about cooking when I get home at night, WAY more than most people probably think I do. Planning all that is so prevalent in my mind that it’s probably adding more to my stress levels than I ever realized. So if I’m tired, I’m going to go out and just not worry about it.

For a while.

Until my August and September freelance hell months are over.

Until Doc starts feeling better.

Doc and I saw this asinine advertisement again last night (silly me, I thought they’d retired this shameful piece of corporate whoring a couple years ago) and the damned song has been running through my head ever since. It’s CRUMBELIEVABLE!

What I didn’t know is that the song was not recorded by a studio band. Kraft actually pulled together the surviving members of EMF to re-record the song, with new cheese-related lyrics. Talk about whoring yourself out to make a few bucks. Nice job, EMF.

I was never fond of “Unbelievable” but it reminds me of my idealistic college years, and this frightening commercial sellout remake points out how art is neither sacred nor respected, and nobody seems to be immune to the reach and the pocketbook of Big Corporate America.

I wonder if this ever happens to anyone else? Sometimes when I learn of a major event after the fact, either in the world or in my circle of friends and family, I think back on what I was doing when it was happening (which is probably not so unusual) and wonder if maybe I “felt” a tiny twinge of something at the exact time of the event. Like an ESP sixth sense kind of thing.

And much as I want to sense the disturbance in the force, I never do.

For instance, when Yvonne had her daughter Zoe at 8:22 a.m. last Saturday morning, I was sitting at my computer making a poster prop in InDesign for our film project. At no time did I suddenly look up and stare off into space going “Huh. I felt a twinge of something there…”

It’s weird, because I almost feel GUILTY for not being able to sense these things as I blithely go about my business unawares. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but then again, there are a lot of things about me that don’t make any sense, so there you go.

E-mail subject line of the day:

“Procrastination Brown Bag Luncheon: Rescheduled”

I think maybe I’m approaching Project 365 all wrong now. What I tried to explain in my previous post about it is that it’s not fun anymore; taking my daily photo is becoming one more thing on my to-do list. Because I go the same places and see the same things almost every single day, I’m not seeing anything unusual or interesting anymore.

I think that maybe I do see interesting things all the time, but it doesn’t register. I need to learn to NOTICE when I see something I like, and stop to record it, rather than letting it flow in and out of my stream of consciousness as I’m on my way to do other things.

The other thing I was thinking, along the same vein, is that I need to try harder to notice the simple beauty in everyday things. Like the curve of a tree branch, or a discarded cigarette butt, or the texture of a crack in the sidewalk. Or even like right now for example, the bottom of the lampshade in my office has a really nice curve to it. I don’t think I would usually think to take a photo of that.

I’m too worried about taking The Perfect Photo, every day is portfolio-worthy.

I wonder if it would be different if I weren’t posting my photos publicly to Flickr, where the world can view and comment on them (not that too many people have). Am I, in a sense, performing for this imagined audience, instead of really thinking about the goal of my project?

Brett suggested that I wake up 15 minutes earlier each day and take a photo in those 15 minutes. That would basically limit me to the inside of my house, for the most part… but I think that I’ll try it, and try to maybe find a part of my house that I haven’t ever seen to take a photo of each day for a week. I think that there are a LOT of individual spaces in my house I haven’t seen yet.

Yesterday Yvonne alerted me that the plants outside the front doors of our building were covered in icicles. Perhaps a sprinkler system malfunction? Anyway, they were still there this morning. I’m not sure that the temperature rose above freezing either yesterday or today.