The fringe benefits of being gay.

You know, being gay is the first truly "alternative" thing I've ever been, or done. It's like instant street cred, scaring middle America and making them think I'm after their kids or something. I feel like Marilyn Manson, with people going "Oooh, scary, rotting our kids' minds, against God's Plan." But inside Marilyn is probably saying, "I'm just little old Brian from Cleveland."

Well, I'm just little old gay Tricia.

But try telling that to Margaret Spellings, the newest Secretary of Education in the Bush administration, who is all up in arms over a PBS show that featured lesbian moms. Wait, I take that back...featured is too strong a word. The moms were just there, not really any different than if the kid in the story had one mom or a mom and dad or lived with grandma and grandpa. The episode was entitled "Sugartime!", but aside from that it wasn't remotely sexual.

Margaret, you're a single mom, so get your head out of your ass. I don't WANT PBS to return the money that they used to make that episode...let's just say that particular wad of cash came from all of the gay & lesbian taxpayers and their supportive friends and family members, so you oppressors don't have to feel like you're funding honesty or anything.

I think I'll send Margaret a letter. If you have the time and inclination, maybe she'd like to hear from you, too.

Falling on deaf ears.

Congress.org is a great website, really. I had visited there quite frequently around the time of the elections in November, and hadn't been there for a while but checked in yesterday. It does a great job of helping you located and contact your elected representatives in Washington, and in addition it provides a "Soapbox" for a bit of editorializing on any side of any issue. More discussion can only help lead to greater mutual understanding, I think. What it doesn't do very well is communicate to its visitors that, at best, it will only send your letter on to the recipient just as you could do yourself. George Bush is not online reading these letters and intervening in the problems of downtrodden individuals, but this desperate woman thinks he is. She's not the only one, and it makes me sad.

I'm not spam, I'm just drawn that way.

Jen has pointed me in the direction of Spamusement, in which hilarious cartoons are drawn from inspiring spam e-mail subject lines. I am still laughing.

My favorite spam.

Of all the spam I've received, I think my favorite is from Christiandebtremovers.org.

"Eliminate your bills the Christian way," it promises, whith a lovely graphic of a couple canoodling on a beach at sunset. (A married couple, one would hope, or there should be NO canoodling.) It features a verse from the Bible that says "The borrower...is a slave to the lender." First off, I'm dying to know what the ellipsis obscures in terms of meaning and context.
And beyond that, is it in any way Christian to welch on a debt that you incurred of your own free will? If you're stiffing a heathen, maybe, but what if the person you're leaving high and dry happens to be another Christian?

Well, it's obvious, really. God must like you better or he wouldn't have sent you the spam in the first place. Some Christian creditors probably get spam telling them to "Collect your debts the Christian way." Smite the bastards who owe you and won't pay.

Where I'm from.

Fun things you can find at the public library.

We took a quick trip to the neighborhood branch of the public library tonight and I found two things that amused me far more than they should have. First was a book called Reverse Speech, by David John Oates. The book itself looked a bit boring, but if you've ever played a record album backward, the website is a hoot.

Then, upon spying the Journals of Lewis & Clark on a high shelf in new non-fiction, I was spurred into a comedy routine that had our intrepid explorers enjoying the full St. Louis experience:

"I say, Meriwether, shall we order an appetizer of toasted ravioli? They won't have that in Nebraska."

"Why, of course, William, and we must stop to get a frozen custard for dessert at Ted Drewes."

"Meriwether, you really must start using the native language. They're called concretes. And there's no way I'm starting this trip without some Imo's."

Of course, one of them must surely have asked the other, "Where did you go to high school?"

Can you classify it as a comedy routine if you're the only one laughing? Probably not.

Like a day without sunshine.

If you find yourself muddling, bereft, through one of the 3 or 4 hours per week in which Law & Order is not on in one or more of its various incarnations, Ben's Law & Order Random Plot Generator is the next best thing. Like methadone...maybe not exactly what you want, but a hell of a lot better than nothing, and with no long waits in line at the clinic. I highly recommend it.

Morning.

She even lets me take pictures of her in the morning, when the light sneaks through the side of the blinds and falls just so across her face. How lucky am I?

Serena, we hardly knew you.

Shelli has kindly pointed me to the website, After Ellen, where media portrayals of lesbian and bisexual women are featured. Very cool site, and they've got a discussion of the aforementioned Serena Southerlyn's revelatory Law & Order departure.

(Lisa says she'd seen the site before, but she didn't tell me about it, so I'm crediting Shelli. Hah.)

Mmm. Steak and cake. Mmm.

We went out for dinner at The Palm last night. It's far more than we would normally spend but due to an unusual circumstance, we were reimbursed for it. And it was good!

We each had an enormous steak, salad, side dish and dessert (the single largest piece of carrot cake I've EVER seen in my life), and somehow I'd lost two pounds this morning, according to the bathroom scale. Now if I can just convince her that we should eat like that every night...

Curses! Foiled again.

It appears that, once again, the elusive Mr. Egg has found a way to evade us. We had him cornered this time, but the screw-up by the Cryo-blanks allowed him to escape. The all-important Basal Body Temperature had elevated this morning by 3/10 degree, which generally means that Mr. Egg is long gone.

We'll give it a try anyway, hoping the temp rise was due to finally needing to turn the heat on in this whacked-out, inhospitable climate where it's always warm. But my hopes aren't high. I could offer a reward for Mr. Egg, but as the town marshal might say, "We've gotta bring him in alive, boys. He's no good to us dead."

WTF.

What the HELL happened on Law & Order? We made sure to watch, as this was Serena's last night, and then when she gets fired, she says, "Is this because I'm a lesbian?"

Uh, excuse me? Did I miss something?

Apparently not. My phone rang instantly, and no-one I know--friend or foe (or family member)--was aware of this little gratuitously juicy tidbit about Miss Southerlyn. Sparked by a comment from my sister's boyfriend, Y.D., that if he were a member of a chatroom he'd by typing away, we actually ventured into a chatroom to find a bunch of hard-core L&O fanatics every bit as confused as we are.

Plastic Fantastic.

Today was, without a doubt, one of my all-time Top 10 Professionally Horrible Days. (There's a list for you to work on, Jeff.) I had human resources issues that spiraled quickly, completely and unforseeably out of control. I had a faculty member who was angry at me, again, and how. As a true measure of how bad it was, both of my bosses were quite supportive and one even had a tray of cookies and brownies sent over to brighten our day, and I made peace and greatly improved my relationship with the aforementioned professor (which alone would normally put today solidly in the great column), and STILL it made the top 10. Or is that the bottom 10?

In any case, the cherry on my sundae is when I find out that the cryo-blanks haven't sent the vials to our donor, as promised, along with the media he needs to send us the "stuff." And we really hoped to get the "stuff" FedEx'd from him tonight, so we'd receive it tomorrow. He phones me at work to tell me this, as soon as he's realized we're missing a key piece of our puzzle. Once we've determined the vials containing the media will not be reusable, I jokingly suggest Tupperware, and tell him I'll call him back.

I race home to see if we have any vials we can FedEx to him, delaying D-Day by only one day and hopefully still having a slight chance to "Catch That Egg." (When I say "Catch That Egg," it helps if you imagine some sort of game show, with a well-coiffed and nicely dressed host and a studio audience yelling out the words that start the game a-going. Try it: "Catch That Egg!" See, doesn't that liven up the story a bit?)

Anyway, no vials at home, and the cryo-blanks are sorry but tell me their pickup has already gone out for the day, so no luck there either. Then they say they do have a suggestion. Great, give it to me. I'm desperate here, folks. My ladyfriend's egg is going to show up soon....very, very soon. Sure, the lady says...(wait for it. It's good)...have him put it in TUPPERWARE.

So, to make a short story long, he's a sweetie who's trekking to Target tonight in an attempt to find a leakproof vessel of some sort, having already tested the ones he owns to find that none were going to do the trick. Hopefully, he'll find something without too much trouble, and hopefully he'll be able to ship the "stuff" on Thursday, and hopefully we'll get it Friday morning, and most hopefully of all, we'll be just in time to "Catch That Egg." Cross your fingers, and remember, Tupperware's slogan IS, after all, Plastic Fantastic. Plastic Fantastic, indeed.

It's not just a job, it's an ADVENTURE.

Today, at work, one of my newly hired temporary employees asked me, "How did you come to find this line of work? How did this happen to you?"

That made me feel great.

No Pork. No Porn.

My brother told me to wait a couple of weeks before trying to send him anything in Iraq, as they will not be in country for a while yet. He carefully advised me that the packages would be checked for contraband items. What it boils down to, he said, is "No Pork, No Porn."

Words to live by, I think. And damn it all, I just shipped off a big ole box full of pork rinds and "Hot and Horny in Hollywood, Volume 8." Postal carrier, please, slow down!

Nerds of the world, unite.

I've decided to undertake a one-woman mission to eradicate what I have now learned are called 'kr8tiv' spellings. My goal? To encourage all peoples throughout the world to spell things properly, and to punctuate accordingly. However, I'm limited in that I only speak English and can read and write a bit of Latin, so the billions on this earth who speak other languages will have to police themselves, I'm afraid.

In any case, this applies to e-mails, billboards, bumper stickers, and the like (damn people with their extra apostrophes), as well as anywhere else the written word must be read by me. (This also applies to names, but I swore not to discuss that anymore.) Most of us have only one language, folks, let's respect it!

In the interest of full disclosure, I am one of the dorks who tends to spell out things in full, properly punctuated and correctly spelled sentences, even on IM and text messaging. According to the bestselling grammar book, Eats Shoots and Leaves, many people claim that they, also, cannot bear to misspell things, even for the sake of expediency. I don't know what fact more strains credulity: that there are others as picky as I, or that there actually IS a bestselling grammar book. But as long as I'm disclosing, I should tell you I didn't get past the first chapter of said book, because...I found grammatical errors and couldn't continue. Perhaps they were the result of the differences in British English and American English, but I'm not certain. I normally copy-edit magazines and newspapers as I read them, but can't bear to write in books and couldn't bear not to, either, so I stopped reading.

I'm not a perfect grammarian, myself, and while a good speller, I do have to look things up often. The point is, does anyone else even bother? Hence, my one-woman crusade. (There are others like me, many of them, but fate has made my quest a solitary one, for some reason. I am, as the US military would tell you, an Army Of One.) I will make mistakes myself, and don't mind being informed when I do.

What will I do to spread the gospel? I don't know yet, but I'm open to suggestions. Perhaps I can convince all text-based programs to perform automatic spell-check before printing, sending or publishing can take place. Perhaps I can create a banner and ask others to put it on their websites, proclaiming "Good Speller." Or maybe even, "I Spell Real Good." Any ideas?

Wherefore art thou, Carrie Bradshaw?

To give you an idea of the kind of snappy patter my family is known for, here follows an actual exchange that occurred between my mother and sister over the holidays. To fully appreciate this, you should know that I was born with a small, strawberry-shaped mark on my hip, while my sister had a larger, peanut-shaped mark on her side, beneath her arm.

Mom: Honey, do you still have your strawberry?
Sister: (awkward silence) ...Uh, Mom, I thought we had this conversation already.
Mom: No, honey, that's your CHERRY.

It was like Sex and the City, but without the annoying, pun-happy voiceovers.

Must. Fight. The. Urge. To. Edit.

Blogging is a hard thing to do if you happen to be someone who's never satisfied with what they wrote. I like to revise and edit until the cows come home, and I don't think that's something you're supposed to do in a blog environment. It's not very "of the moment," is it?

W stands for War

This post is brought to you by the letter W. As in George W. Bush. As in "The War on Terror" (or, as he likes to say it, "terra.")

Today, my little brother--not little, really, a grown man of 27 with a wife and three kids--flies out to begin the mission his unit's been assigned to in Iraq. They will have a refueling stop in Europe, acclimate in Kuwait for a few weeks, then move into Iraq for a 12- to 13-month mission. He is a door gunner on a helicopter that is probably an Apache but may be a Blackhawk, I can never remember.

I don't like this.

He's nervous, I think, and I hope he's confident in his training and skills but I hope he's also just scared enough to take the least amount of risk required to do his job while still protecting himself and his fellow soldiers. He's excited, too, to finally be putting 8 years of Army training to the test....he signed up for this, and he's pointed that out repeatedly in telling me not to worry about him or feel sorry that he's headed into a war.

But I am sorry, primarily because I don't agree with this war, and he knows that. I do agree with my brother, and with Colin Powell, that whether or not we should have invaded Iraq when and why we did, we broke it and now we have to fix it. But I don't like the way we as a country pick and choose our enemies...North Korea is Iraq, but without oil (and without a dictator who happened to attempt to kill our president's father). Why are we not in the Sudan, instead, where we could do a world of good? Why are we not still focused on Afghanistan, or Pakistan, searching for Bin Laden? Next up will be Iran or Syria, I fear.

I love my brother and I'm proud of him for taking an oath to protect his country, and for honoring that vow. I don't like to think of how he might be changed when he comes home. I'm angry beyond words with our president for asking him to lay his life on the line for a cause that, for me, leaves a lot to be desired. I understand the need to be proactive in the effort to minimize terrorism (it will never be eliminated as long as there are Timothy McVeighs living in our own country), but I think that was an excuse to start this war when we did. I will not be putting a "Support Our Troops" sticker on my car, because that is an empty slogan to me. I will be having a bumper sticker made that says, "My brother is fighting in Iraq so you can drive a Hummer. Enjoy!" There are lots of giant, gas-guzzling SUVs here in Texas, and most of them have "W" stickers on the back. Whatever happened to the idea of sacrifice in times of war?

I'm a downer today, aren't I?

Still beating a dead horse.

If you are fascinated (and repulsed) by the names others give their kids, go browse the forums at Baby Names World. Reading over the names appeals to the voyeur in me, somehow, and many of the people don't even mind it when others make vicious comments about the names they're considering. There are many lovely people there, I'm sure, and many of them are picking beautiful names for their children.

Many more of them are not. And the ugly names they're picking? They're spelling them funny. Madecyn? Izaiah? Jazzmon? And I'm going to hold Gwyneth Paltrow personally responsible when I have to sit through a graduation and hear 8 girls named "Apple" get their diplomas when my kid gets out of high school. (I know, big talk from someone who doesn't have a kid, anyway.)

I don't understand it. But I promise I'll stop blogging about it. Honest.

Spelling bee.

Would you name your child "Copernicas"? And, if you said yes, would it be because you can't spell, or because you like to spell things in unusual ways?

Reading the article I posted earlier on made-up names really got me thinking. I've noticed lately a real explosion of people who either invent names, or more commonly, take a relatively common name and change the spelling. I'm not trying to disparage you, if you've done this, but I want to know WHY IN THE HELL DO PEOPLE NEED TO DO THIS? Seriously, I'm trying to understand.

If you want to name your son Jeremy, why name him Jerheme, Jerame, Jeromy or Jereme? Or how about Jason? No, wait, let's make it Jassen, Jaison, or Jaysson? (Don't be swayed by the fact that many of these links lead to athletes. That's mere coincidence, I think, as they just happen to come up first on Google. I know regular folks with these names, too, but I don't want to put them on my blog.)

I can accept that there are some names for which several spellings are equally common: Haley and its various permutations is one that comes to mind. But when you name your son Jerheme, you have NOT given him an unusual name. You haven't. All you've done is insure that he will have to spell his name for Every. Single. Person. Who. Ever. Needs. To. Write. It. Down. I often have to spell my last name, and this is not a treat. Jerheme is Jerame is Jeremy. Get over it. Save the kid the trouble of spelling it over and over and over again for the next 80 years.

And the made-up names? I wonder where on earth some of them come from, and the only logical explanation I can come up with is that a few must be family names. Others, I'm not so sure. Was Plaxico a chemical company this guy's mom saw outside the hospital window? How about Laveranues? (On top of that, it's pronounced "La-ver-nee-us," when I swear it should be pronouned "La-ver-a-news." If you make up a name, how about at least spelling it the way you pronounce it? Laveranues gets bonus points for naming his son Trilion.) Naveah, anyone? (That's "heaven" spelled backward, if you're wondering.) Branaric might either be something you'd take for an ear infection, or a particularly fiber-rich breakfast cereal.

I admit, it's worked well for Beyonce and Shaq. But it's not for every Tom, Dick and Harry.

Name that baby.

I find it ironic, and a bit sad, that the mayor of San Francisco--a man who is a champion of marriage rights for gays and lesbians--is getting a divorce himself. On the other hand, being a regular working stiff, I can't identify with the idea that your careers and your bicoastal marriage is what drove you apart...seems like a flimsy excuse that could be overcome if you seriously wanted to stay married.

On a lighter note, we're enjoying lots of discussion on the top baby names of 2004. Unfortunately, some names we liked for our (non-existent) baby are on there, so off the short list they will likely be. It's amazing to me what a process naming a baby is, how so many people like to create different spellings of relatively common names while others (myself included) abhor the practice. Meanwhile, in the UK, making up names is apparently all the rage. That's probably true all over; I read recently that there were more children in the US named Armani in 2003 than there were named Ann.

There won't be any Social Security for me when I'm 65 (or even 75, I'd wager), but those crazy kids at the SSA do publish a list of the most popular names, with the added bonus that you search for your own name to see how popular it is, and search for whatever name you want to give to your munchkin, to make sure he's not one of 13 Connors in his kindergarten class. I think Julia Roberts may have had a good idea with Hazel and Phinnaeus...there's not a lot of that going around yet.

This was a test. I failed.

When the fertility monitor asks for pee sticks and you're all out of pee sticks but you knew you needed pee sticks and still kept forgetting to buy pee sticks, that doesn't bode well for your chances of taking care of a kid, does it?

Thank you, Nanny.

This had me laughing. Out loud and for many minutes.

What has me crying, and I mean every single week, at least a few tears, is the Fox show 'Nanny 911.' It's reality TV, which I hate, and yet I'm drawn to it like a moth to a flame and I don't even think it's inflicting any kind of brain damage on me. (Shocking, I know, since it IS reality TV and it IS on Fox.) If you're not hip to it, first of all, what the hell are you doing reading this when you could be watching the show? A brief synopsis is that each week, one of three British nannies is sent to help an American family whose kids are out of control. The families have had as few as two and as many as seven children, and here's the fun bit: it only SEEMS like the kids are out of control. In truth, it's always the parents who need to shape up. Turns out, kids do crave structure and consistent discipline in addition to all the nurturing and love they can take, and the transformations these families seem to undergo are often quite moving.

The scary part is that we're trying to have a kid, and perhaps eventually a second one, as well. I'd comforted myself with the thought that, while it seems that it can go from "ok" to "complete and total chaos" in the blink of an eye, that seemed to be the families with four or more kids. We like to think that we'll be great parents--sensitive and patient, yet firm and strong--but we certainly felt like having two kids instead of, say, SEVEN, would definitely tip the odds in our favor.

Then we saw the family with two little ones (and a former-nanny Mom and Marine Dad, to boot), and briefly glimpsed the vast expanses of the dark continent to which we hope to travel. In effect, it gave us just the merest suggestion of that mass of the iceberg that isn't the tip, but that will gash a hole in the hull of your Titanic faster than you can say, "What the hell is that?"

Iceberg, right ahead! I just hope I make it onto the lifeboat instead of floating on that iceraft with Kate and Leo.

Circum'scuse me?

Well, one of my favorite topics is being discussed by one of the funniest people discussing anything...and I'm on her side. We won't have a Dad present, in the usual way, for our prospective future son to compare himself to, but I still don't want anyone operating on the tiny genitals of any tiny person who is depending on me for protection, nurturing and sustenance.

Besides, I'd read not long ago (though I have no idea WHERE I read it, so it may be an urban myth) that only about 50% of boys born in this country over the past few years were circumcised. So, if that's true, half of the kids any son of mine will know will likely be uncut, and where I come from, 50/50 odds weren't the sort of thing that led us to gang up on anyone. We needed a much more clear-cut, cruel situation where the child to be humiliated was an obvious member of an easily identified subset of weirdness: glue-sniffers, booger-eaters and the like. Oh, yes, we were FAR too sophisticated to worry about how your genitals looked, especially when we could SEE you eating your nasal excrement.

Resolve.

It's time for New Year's resolutions, isn't it? I won't bother, though, at least not with anything I'd share here. Because I can't resolve to have a baby this year, as much as I'd like to. And I should resolve not to worry about not having a baby this year, but I know myself too well for that, too. The only thing I've been moderately successful at is enjoying the things we won't be able to do whenever that baby comes: sleeping in, dining out, being spontaneous with jaunts to the mall or a movie.

It's shocking to me that we started this in 2003, so this is our third calendar year on the Fertility Express. ("Express," my ass. This train is clearly a local, stopping all the time and NEVER getting where we want to go.)

I want to believe this is the year, but I just can't believe anymore that this will ever happen, and that depresses me to no end.