Writing a Book

Yes, that's a banana slug you're looking at. It embodies my pace on the book I've been sitting on for, oh, I dunno, 14 years now.

The Feral Woman's Guide to Undomesticated Bliss is perfectly formed in my head, and utterly, utterly unmaterialized on paper or in my computer. My hope is that by putting my Howdy Doody confession of total sluggishness out into the ethers that I'll be spurred to action.

So what am I doing about it? Flying to Mexico to write a travel guide. Getting my Kundalini yoga teacher's certification. Working. Living my life. Finding ways not to complete it.

And I'm getting older. Now I've added the component of fear that I'm getting to old to write a book for (young) women that's sassy and relatable. Wuh woh.

I sure can't figure out how I can write volumes about the things I do without sitting down to write this darn book. I can confess a certain amount of fear...that this book I feel so strongly for might be heartily rejected. That maybe I'm not a "real" writer after all. Oh, it's all so pathetic.

I know, I know. Just sit my tuckus down and write the damn thing. OK. OK.

Prop8 and "Protecting the Family"

I want to know, once and for all, how the gender of one loving, married couple threatens the stability of another marriage, whose members happen to be of opposite gender.

That is the question. That is the real issue. Yet we hear this inane claim, that same-sex marriage will threaten the foundations of "traditional" marriage over and over with very little time for those of us in support of marriage equality to refute it for the idiotic statement that it is.

Miles McPherson, pastor of the Rock Church in San Diego, said the court "did the right thing.God didn't create the family that way. You can't have a family with a mother and a mother, because [children] need a mother and a father to nurture their personality and their character."

Where are the screams from the literate citizens? "God didn't create the family that way"? "You can't have a family with a mother and a mother"? Did God really say that? Since God didn't write our constitution, it really doesn't matter whether he 'said' something that not one single person can prove the legitimacy of.

Do I need to add any more questions to emphasize how facile this reasoning is? How utterly idiotic this man sounds? Yet he's got the pulpit, and now he's got a quote on CNN with a tag to his church...likely full of people as intellectually incurious and feeble as he is.

Any of these people claiming to be in opposition to equality need to remember that the same constitution that protects their right to practice their religions with rationalized intolerance the way they do also ensures their equality to me, and to every citizen. You don't get to knock out somebody's equal rights because you're a little squirmy about the way you imagine them to have sex. Puh-lease. Can somebody please make a little 8 minute educational film about this? Equality isn't only for the ones who are just like us.

Our amazing Constitution protects the consenting, same-gender adults who are being denied the right to hug and hold and grow old with the spouse of their choice. Yup. It's true.

Oh, this subject riles me so much I can barely type.

So, come on dissenters. I want to hear from you. What is the real reason you fear marriage equality? Sound bites need not post. I want original, thoughtful thoughts. Really, I do.

The Obsession With Same-Sex Sex

I overheard a conversation recently that chilled me. The four women having the conversation over their lunches were in an office setting, two of them self-proclaimed "Christians" (of the fundamentalist variety), and the other two are also "Christians" but not of the church-going order.

In the midst of a conversation about all the bad things in society right now, the younger of the self-proclaimed "Christians" said the "worst thing of all is the 'lesbianism' in the schools." She and the rest of the group proceeded to elaborate on why homosexuality and bisexuality are such menaces. It was inane and it was infuriating.

In a region (northern New Mexico) where teen pregnancy and seriously destructive family patterns are rampant, the fact that these women would take the time to attempt a 'serious' discussion about the dangers of same-sex affection and companionship being the biggest danger blew my mind. That these women, who are absolutely run-of-the-mill, non-college educated people, fancy themselves purveyors of Christian charity and love out of one side of their mouths while spewing hate out of the other floored me.

NOTHING, absolutely nothing, is going to make me understand why people loving each other in the utterly human search for companionship is so absolutely frightening to people. Are these hard-hearted primates afraid that someone will find a better love than they've got? I mean, isn't it clear by now that heterosexual couples have no lock on marital bliss?

Even the ridiculously cloaked-in-morality obsession Christians seem to have with the manner same-sex couples have sex is baffling. We're humans; we have sex however we can manage it. End of story.

I am not one known for being left speechless, but I was so angry and so flabbergasted by this hateful hypocrisy that I literally walked out of the building.

This incident has stuck in my craw because I said nothing. I have gone over and over it and wondered if, in my anger, there was something I could have said that would have made a difference.

I need to find the button that says "Marry Who You Love" and wear it every single day.