My resolution: Let it happen in its right and proper time. So I'm not jumping into a bottle of red wine I'm not ready to drink. I'm not haring off on an adventure when there is still plenty left to explore right here. I'm not charging for a goal I'm not sure I want to reach just because I see a deadline in the distance and want to reach some goal before arriving at that deadline.
Happy New Year, everyone!!!!
My friend was having her birthday recently, and had declared it Tie Night. Tie Night is a recurring butch holiday, celebrated semi-monthly or whenever they feel like it. [Aside: Yes, Squirt, I'm aware that Tie Night hasn't been fashionable in mainstream (read: breeder) circles since Annie Lennox passed out of public view, but we have our own little gay fashion oasis. In the lesbian fashion oasis, Ties are Still In!] So, I decided to participate in Tie Night although I'm not exactly what you'd classify as a butch, especially in the last couple of years. Nobody was really sure what to expect. Anyway, judging from the number of jaws I had to pick up off the floor, I think my femmey interpretation of Tie Night was a hit. Here are the photos to prove it...
Happy birthday! Note, in the lower-left corner of this first picture, Marvin the Martian is staring at you. As a jane-of-all-trades, I'm proud to say I'm qualified to tie your necktie or change your oil or paint your nails, whatever needs doing. I was responsible for the tying of that particular Looney-Tunes tie, and I tried like hell to make Marvin be the character on the knot part so that he would be staring out at you from my friend's throat. Now, that Marvin at the tail of the tie is obviously too low to be the knot, but there's another one near the middle that was ALMOST, but not quite, in the right place. Anyway, the end result was that I had to put Daffy on the knot. However, between initially deciding Marvin ought to be on the knot and ultimately surrendering to Daffy's superior placement, there were a number of tie-adjustments that looked like this:
As you can see, we had fun celebrating the birthday. There was much laughter all around, and a good time had by all. I'm very excited to have been invited to join "The Blue Bandits" for their next round of board games, and hope to be able to support all the smack I've been talking to my friend in the picture who is NOT a member of The Blue Bandits. I've REALLY been laying it down thick, too, so I've got a lot to live up to. Any Blue Bandits reading this: take note!
Everyone who’s tired of the media—and Madonna—calling Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger “brave” for acting in Brokeback Mountain, please raise your hands. Then say it with me: “poppycock”
Quoting from the article by Charles Karel Bouley II, linked here.
And there’s the problem. The media seem to be running with a recurring theme around this movie: the “bravery” of the actors playing the roles, the “courage” it took them to do it, and the “speculation” about whether America is ready for a “gay cowboy movie.” Certainly not a position a liberal would take, so it befuddles me how the media is labeled “liberal.” Because the media has all but compared these two to war heroes for their portrayal of two closeted cowboys in a story of unrequited love and personal deception.
Say it with me: poppycock.
Now, there can be no doubt it took awhile for this movie to be made. And there can be no doubt there was a lot of fear surrounding it. And that’s what the media should be talking about. Instead of playing into the homophobia about how courageous it is to play gay, the media should be examining why it’s OK to play a rapist, a demon, a vampire from hell, a serial killer who eats his victims with fava beans and nice chianti, or any of the hundreds of sick, warped, twisted characters Hollywood puts out and we gobble up. Why do studios green-light films all the time that have gruesome plots or despicable characters, and why did this film languish for years?
I recognize that very few people in my current life know much about her. That's odd to me, because for 4 years, she was the center of everything I did. I can't look back at that piece of my life without seeing her in almost every memory. I just wish I could look back on that time and say that the memories are good. Unfortunately, I can't, so I don't "go there" often.
I "knew" in an instinctive way that she and I were not going to last forever. I knew it in a way that I couldn't explain logically using words, and literal and literary as I am, that made it difficult for me to keep faith in the knowledge. It was easy to talk my way around it, because I could put that into words and I can believe in words laid out logically so much more fervently than I can an amorphous, instinctive idea. I don't know what words persuaded me that my instincts were wrong and that commitment and effort could rewrite the ending of us, but I was persuaded. So much of how our relationship evolved is lost to me. The changes were so slow, so small, so incremental that they don't even seem like changes at all.
FOUR JOBS YOU'VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE:
1. Goofy (yeah, at Disney World)
2. Programmer
3. Environmental Engineer
4. Lifeguard
FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER:
1. The Princess Bride
2. Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail
3. The Star Wars sextet
4. The Lord of the Rings trilogy
FOUR CITIES/TOWNS YOU'VE LIVED IN:
1. Colorado Springs, CO
2. Austin, TX
3. Redlands, CA
4. Orlando, FL
FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH:
1. Good Eats
2. House, M.D.
3. Trading Spaces
4. Southpark
FOUR PLACES YOU'VE BEEN ON VACATION:
1. London, England
2. Lake Tahoe, NV and CA
3. Maui
4. The Eastern Caribbean
FOUR WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY:
1. LiveJournal
2. UserFriendly
3. Slate
4. MySpace
FOUR OF YOUR ALL-TIME FAVOURITE RESTAURANTS:
1. Any GOOD Sushi place
2. Freebird's
3. P.F. Chang's/PeiWei (same food, different faces)
4. The King's Inn - Loyola Beach, TX/The Two Georges - Corpus Christi, TX (also same food, different faces)
FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS:
1. Sushi
2. Lasagna
3. Hot and Sour Soup
4. Funnel Cake
FOUR SCHOOLS YOU'VE ATTENDED:
1. St. Gertrude's Catholic School
2. U.S. Air Force Academy
3. Texas A&M University
4. University of Texas
FOUR PLACES I'D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW:
1. Home, in bed
2. Anywhere, with a big pile of books
3. On the coast
4. In the scrum
Go to your Calendar and find the first entry for each month of 2005. Post the first line of it in your journal, and that's your "Year In Review". My year is short because i just started this mess in July.
July:
Here I am...
so my friend deena said that she thought i'd make an interesting blogger. with any luck, she will turn out to be right, and people will enjoy reading this ramble. for now, i'm at work, so i'll make this one short and sweet. the reason the blog is titled "on one foot" is that i always feel myself working to stay balanced. my life is always being pushed or pulled in one direction or another, and i work to keep it from being pulled or pushed too far from center. when you're on one foot, you have to work harder to stay balanced. at the same time, the only way you can move forward is to get on one foot and put the other one out in front of you. the best part of taking that risk, of getting on one foot, is the fun of getting to see where the forward foot falls.
August:
moving day...
sleep deprivation is a bad thing, kids. don't try this at home! so i slept little, worked a lot, and had a little fun over the weekend. it was good, all in all. there was some lesbian ex-girlfriend drama, but nothing i couldn't handle. last night, i slept like a dead body for about 12 hours, and i woke up fresh as a daisy today. of course, i overslept a bit, and was late for work, but i'll put in an extra hour at the end of the day and erase that transgression.
September:
BOX BITS IMMINENT!!!
so, in a recent (semi-tragic, way too dramatic, i'm-better-off-now-thanks) breakup, i lost my computer. this may not be apparent from my posts, but i'm a bit of a computer nerd. and a word nerd, and a music nerd, and a scotch nerd, and a wine nerd... but i digress. anyway, sans box, i've been forced to rely on my father's very old, very slow, very $hitty laptop hand-me-down for my home computing needs. this is such an unpleasant situation that i stay away from the computer a lot, and that makes me sad. :( so i'm building myself a kit from scratch, all the way up to mouse/monitor/keyboard and all the way down to case/motherboard/cpu. i even had to buy a case fan!
October:
Serenity...
so i went and saw "serenity" over the weekend. it took some phenomenal schedule-wrangling and my dog had to stay locked up in the apartment for about 12 hours as a result, but it was worth it all the way! (don't pity the dog too much, she got a fantastically long fetch/swim/walk before the confinement, and she threw all my clean clothes on the floor so she could bask in a sunbeam on the couch while i was gone)
November:
new book goodness
I bought Anne Rice's The Witching Hour and the two sequels, Lasher and Taltos on Monday night. w00tzoR!!!!1 I love reading. Seriously, I could give up my computer forever, as long as I had a limitless supply of books. Anyway, two chapters in, and i realize now why Rice is such a popular author. Goodness on a Sheet of Paper, I can't believe it took me this long to get around to reading Anne Rice. Diggin' it lots. Thanks, Rose, for the suggestion.
December:
I've been "published"!
Doonesbury (online at Slate.com) has a regular feature called "Blowback" where Trudeau posts the more interesting and relevant feedback he gets. As the invitation to comment says: "If you'd like to send us a comment yourself, please note that civility, if not approbation, counts."
yea! My Little Green Men are no longer on strike. They returned yesterday at about 5 pm, which would have been inconvenient for me had I tried to go home at my usual time only to find my apartment just beginning to warm up. Luckily (?) I had to work until nearly 7:30, so by the time I got home, the Little Green Men had fired the furnace up and heated the apartment thoroughly. Unfortunately, I still had to clean out my fridge and freezer and re-stock them. Last night Dallas/Fort Worth had its annual (we pray it's the only one!) ice storm, so I was out driving around in the ice and snow. I can handle that, at least better than the average Texan, because of the time I spent in Colorado. I learned a few things while I was there, so the ice usually doesn't present problems for me. I'm leary, however, of other Texans' ice-driving skillz. I was much relieved to arrive home with my bumpers intact.
So I woke up yesterday morning around 6. The electricity worked. I went back to sleep. I woke up again around 7. The electricity did not work. Now, I have this longstanding theory that electricity is not controlled (as your science teacher would have you believe) by the principles of magnetism and the motion of free electrons in, on, and among the valence shells of atoms that hover around the metal line on the periodic table of the elements. Nooooo... Electricity is controlled by the flow of the Traffic Of Little Green Men. In your alarm clock, the Little Green Men hold up glowing placards to indicate the time and bang on little gongs or blow on kazoos or flog cats to create the alarm tone. The method of noisemaking depends on your clock. I had one in which the Little Green Men drove a schoolbus in reverse to create that "whoop whoop" backup warning. In your microwave, the Little Green Men run into the dark oven while you're pressing buttons (the number of them depends on the buttons you press) and then stand under your food holding little Zippo lighters that they use to heat your food. When you open the door, they all run back into the walls of the microwave. Different electrical appliances are operated differently, but the Little Green Men get in through the plug wiring and they do what they need to do inside, and then they go out on break.
Well, yesterday morning, all my Little Green Men were on break at once. Apparently they were striking outside my apartment and refusing to perform any further services for me without payment. The nasty thing is, I DID pay them. I sent my payment to them through my online bill pay service over two weeks ago! You'd think the Little Green Men would be aware of this, since they carried the message to the bank in the course of their duties. I guess I should be grateful the Little Green Men are not reading my mail, but in this case it would have been better for me had they been snoopers. Anyway, the Little Green Men were gone, and there was no way to get them back from within my house because I needed Little Green Men to dig up the evidence that I had in fact made the payment and then to find the contact information for the relevant human entities at the bank and the Little Green Men Local Union #4242 (aka: TXU Energy).
The research had to be put off until my work (for which I get paid) was done, which meant I couldn't contact any relevant human entities until 5. Given that I had to talk to various Little Green Man-powered fake human entities for a good period of time in order to reach an actual human entity, I'll just skip to the conclusion and tell you that I had to sleep in the dark last night. That's not so bad, since it would have been dark anyway. I generally give the Little Green Men the night off, except for the ones that I have on call inside my phone. Occasionally I do employ a few of them as candleholders when I'm reading or to operate the Steam Engine that makes Magic Smoke for my computer, but that's mostly on weekends. However, there is one service which the Little Green Men provide that I REALLY missed last night: they tend the Furnace of Central Heat and Air Conditioning at my apartment. With no Little Green Men, the Furnace went out and my apartment was far colder than I prefer it to be when I awoke. I was safe and all, given that I'd bundled up and this is tropical Texas, but I was VERY UNCOMFORTABLE getting out of my warm covers and into my chilly room this morning.
I still don't know who is responsible for the miscommunication, but basically my payment for the services of the Little Green Men went to a gas company in Arizona. It used to be affiliated with Little Green Men Local Union #4242 and now it's not and somehow either my bill paying service or the Little Green Men who courier my messages became confused about the intended recipient of the payment. I clearly expressed my intention to pay money to Little Green Men Local Union #4242, but my payment went to the gas company in Arizona. Sadness.
Anyway, all that got sorted today, and hopefully I'll be reunited with my Little Green Men tonight. Now all that's left is to bash some heads in until I get my lost money back.
... to trilia.net in my "Blogs I Like" section, but this post especially is a good one. She wrote it in honor of World AIDS day last week. It's part of a series of posts that she and some of her friends do called 55 Friday, wherein they have to write a snippet that consists of 55 words on Friday. Being only 55 words, it's a quick read; but to save you lazy I-don't-wanna-click-the-linkers the effort, here it is:
“You look ravishing in that dress.” Obviously. It took months to find this shade of red.
“It would look better on my floor though.” Agreed. I was kind of hoping the night would come to this. “So… you got protection, right?”
“I don’t like condoms. Can’t feel anything.”
“Then the dress is staying on, babe.”
Doonesbury (online at Slate.com) has a regular feature called "Blowback" where Trudeau posts the more interesting and relevant feedback he gets. As the invitation to comment says: "If you'd like to send us a comment yourself, please note that civility, if not approbation, counts."
So I commented on their latest Straw Poll, on the current-event topic of Waterboarding. Lo, and behold: my comment was published. Check it out: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/blowback/ It's the one from Kim in Fort Worth, and it will scroll further down the page as time passes and eventually drop off.
My friend and I were discussing it last night, and she asked: "If we're not allowed to use those types of methods, how are we going to get the information we need?" I struggle with that, because when it happened on 24 last season, (Jack Bauer used physical torture to get information that probably saved millions of lives) I almost found myself in favor of his actions. At the same time, if we (America) don't uphold the Geneva Conventions and treat Prisoners Of War and Political Detainees and Enemy Combatants with HUMANE dignity, then we are just as bad as those we villainize (Japan, Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) for their inhumane treatment of our captured citizens.
It's always a weighty ethical question, whether or not torture is justified, especially when many civilian lives hang in the balance. It's never easy to choose between the principles of individual good and collective good. The end of the line, I think, is that if you DO allow yourself to descend into the use of torture that you MUST be prepared to accept that others will use it against you and yours. You may have high ethical standards governing its use, some way of verifying that the victim actually HAS information that will be relevant to you, and that you are capable of extracting that information within the limits of your tolerance for torture. You must be prepared for the fact that your enemies will not necessarily have those strict ethical standards regarding the use of torture and that their methods will be inflicted on the front-line soldiers and aviators who are most likely to be captured. That is always the way of war, though; the politicians make decisions that never impact them directly, but which are felt in the skin and bones of the fighting men and women.
I don't think there's a "right way" and a "wrong way" to torture. I think whether it leaves physical scars or not, it's wrong. I wish I could say I was opposed to it in all cases, but even as idealistic as I am, I see the need for harming one individual in order to effect the greater good, especially when time is short and I haven't the resources to get the information by other (more ethical) means. It's a dangerous precedent to set, however, because every time you commit such a wrong, it becomes easier to commit it again. Accumulate enough of these lesser wrongs, and you've cancelled completely the collective good you were attempting to achieve.
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