Quips and Quiddities

Marriage Protection Amendment. Oh, my God. What is going on?

The amendment coming up before the Senate, and, if it passes, the House, would bring a constitutional marriage amendment before the people. The amendment would read,"Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman." It also says, "Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman."

I personally will suffer if this bill passes. I personally will be unable to legally marry my beloved. I personally will be hurt and degraded by this unfair, bigoted, mean-spirited bill.

I know this is my LiveJournal and not my political stump. But I am asking you, my friends, to stand up for me. Please support me in this, as you have supported me through so many things. Call your senators and representatives. Tell them to vote, and to vote no. Mike DeWine's number is (202) 224-2315. George Voinovich's number is (202) 224-3353. In that call you should say who you are, where you live, and why you believe this bill is wrong. You can also just say that you believe it's wrong, without giving details. You could also write to your senators at:

DeWine, Mike
140 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC 20510

Again, (202) 224-2315.

Voinovich, George V.
524 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC 20510

Again, (202) 224-3353.

They both voted for the Marriage Protection Amendment in 2004. Mike DeWine is a co-sponsor of this bill; he has joined 29 other senators. He is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is currently considering the bill, and will no doubt vote for it's being considered bu the full Senate. They will both vote for it again, if you don't tell them not to. All of their fearful, hate-filled constituents have been calling them and telling them to vote for it; please let them know there is another side. If they don't hear your voice, they have no way of knowing that Ohioans don't all support this unfair, immoral bill.

If you do write, you should make it a new letter, rather than a form. Form letters count for less in their equations than personal communications. Letters count for more than phone calls, and phone calls count for more than e-mails. The vote is the week of June 5. It will take you less than five minutes to call; maybe twenty to write. I have called my senators and seriously, they just want your zip code and a yes or no.

I live in Chicago. We are a blue state. My senators won't vote for this bill. I can do nothing to protect myself and my girlfriend. You can.

I am moving! Comcast is slow on the reconnect, so I will be without an Internet hookup till the week of May 8. You should call me if you want to talk before then. But you should call on the weekend or after 9 my time.

Weddings:

Hurray! I worked my first wedding last weekend. Well, I suppose technically it wasn't a wedding; it was a commitment ceremony. Although we now have a policy of requiring that a UU minister officiate or co-officiate at all weddings and commitment ceremonies at our church, this one was two Mennonite boys.

That's right, Mennonite. Urban, gay Mennonites. It had not occurred to me that there would be a bunch of urban Mennonites, but there are! I love this city. I am constantly being surprised by the diversity of people here. The other day I found out that one of Krista's students, Nimbus Shrestha, is Nepalese. I had wondered what ethnicity a name like that was, and now we know. Nepalese!

Anyway, these kids having the wedding were extremely hip. Mohawks, green hair, all that; I felt distinctly square. (Can I say hip? Can I say square? Sure I can.) Many of them were friends from Goshen College, an Anabaptist-Mennonite school in Indiana. A lot of them were music majors, and then some of their families were there, etc. etc.

I don't know if it was because they were music majors, or just because their church has a rich musical tradition, but the music was extremely good. They had printed hymns in their order of service, and everyone seemed to know them. They sang each hymn in perfect congregational four-part harmony, even though they people had never all sung together before. It was really powerful.

As they were mingling in the loft after the service, the caterer came over to me and asked, “Are they waiting for a blessing over the food?”
“I don't know. Are they? Why do you ask?”
“Because no one has touched the food.”
“Well, let me ask.” I found one groom, who was talking to their pastor, and asked him.
“I don't know. Are they?” he asked.
“I don't know. They might be,” said their pastor. “I don't know. Tell you what, I'll go upstairs and scope it out, and if I should I'll just do one.”
She went upstairs and found the other groom and asked him.
“I don't know. Are they?”
“I don't know,” she said. “Should we say one?”
“We could,” he said. “Should we maybe sing one?”
“Sure,” she said, and they started to sing. Within four beats the entire room of people had stopped talking and joined them. The flawless harmony floated up and over the room, covering everyone. Afterward there was a moment of peace and quiet, that heartbeat after a song when everyone pauses to breathe. That moment was perfect.

I have never heard anything like this. Spontaneous, effortless music that everyone knows and everyone joins. A grace that fills everyone up to the top. I feel so privileged to have heard it, even once.

I am constantly trying to find a job. Right? I write cover letters, I mess with my resume, every so often I go on interviews. One of those interviews really stank. I got all dressed up in my suit, headed out the door, got all the way to the train and realized I ddin't have my portfolio. It was too late to go back for it, so I went to the interview sans portfolio. I was also sans umbrella, which was a mistake. It rained.

The first part of the interview was with the editor I'd be working with, and it was fine. He was nice, etc. Then the editorial assistant (and fact checker) that I'd be replacing came in, and she was awful. She said, "Wow, it's so great to be interviewing instead of being the interviewee. Now I get to ask all kinds of crazy questions and you just have to be polite about it. That's great." She actually said this. In words. Out of her mouth they came.

"Let's see, boring boring boring, tell you what. I'll tell you the question I was always afraid I'd be asked. How many ping-pong balls can fit in a Volkswagen Bug?"

I smiled. I brushed it off. She made some smartass remark about how much that question stank. I agreed. She asked it again.

"Well," I said, "That's actually a very complicated question."

"What you'd do," she said, "Is you'd call up VW and ask them what the inside volume of a Bug is, and then you'd get the volume of a ping-pong ball, and then you'd just divide."

I stared at her. In my head was "The hell you would," and "Fancy that," and all sorts of conflicting responses and what came out of my mouth was "Uh huh." More of an affirmative "uh huh" than a negative "uh-uh." Not quite agreeing with her, but not quite saying "You're awful and you're ignorant, how nice for you."

In the elevator on the way out I thought, "That really wouldn't work. It really wouldn't work at all. That would tell you how many times the volume of a ping-pong ball would fit inside the volume of a Bug, but ping-pong balls aren't a liquid. They take up space, and then there's the space around them full of air. You'd have to call a mathematician to get the equation for spheres in a--well, and it wouldn't be a cube, either, it'd be oddly shaped. You probably couldn't get a VW engineer to release the plans for a Bug so you could use them, you'd just have to go measure it. Maybe you could use a model Bug if you had a very good model and some extremely small BBs. Maybe."

It was too late. But do you know what I came across on the Web today?

The actual answer! (To a similar, though not identical, question.)

http://www.cockeyed.com/inside/trailblazer/trailblazer.html

I am right! And she was wrong. So there.

What to do, what to do, what to do.

I've been looking around on Metromix.com for a fun thing to do tomorrow night. ( Read more... )

Oh, Wrigleyville.

I live in Wrigleyville! Baseball season just started! Woo hoo! ( Read more... )

I have decided. The next time I'm around for the beginning of a church group, we're going to call it ABOUUWCTOAN. A Boo Ook Two An. A Bunch Of Unitarian Universalists Who Can't Think Of A Name.

Why did my friends page just italicize?

So. I have yet another church question.

I'm thinking about gay rights, lately, because our church is planning to march in the Pride Parade. I'm one of the people organizing it, and will be marching myself as well as helping out with the service beforehand. This is why I asked the other day for your best pride cheers. I'm still thinking about that and will post a list of the final product when it's done. Thanks so much for your help!

And I need it again. What do you think about gay rights? What do you think are the important issues facing gay America today? What do you yourself think about gay rights? Does it ever come up in your daily life? How do you think we ought to respond to anti-gay bigotry? Arrgh.

See, last year the Pride sermon was great. Megan Dalby talked about the history of Pride Weekend, and the Stonewall Riots, and Harvey Milk. She finished by saying "Come out, come out, wherever you are." It was pretty awesome.

But we can't say that this year. We need to say something different, that will still get people to march in the Parade, and get them feeling energized and strong about gay rights, and bring them to a place of spiritual transformation, and all that. And I have no idea how to do that. What do you guys think?

Hey all,

My church, Second Unitarian in Chicago, is planning to march in our Pride Parade this summer. I'm loooking for chants or cheers that we can do as we march. Last year we said "What do we want?/GAY MARRIAGE!When do we want it?/NOW!" and that was great, but we need more. I got really tired of that one. Do you guys know of, or can you think of, any good chants we could use?

I've been looking at a bunch of radical cheerleading sites, and their cheers are okay, but thecy're not really a good fit for the church. We need something that's not political on any cause but queer pride, and that doesn't knock anyone or put them down. We need to say what we are, not what we're not. And the language needs to be accessible. So far, all I can think of is: "2, 4, 6, 8, liberal religion is really great," which is sort of okay but not that cool. None of our words rhyme well, and they're all so long and clunky.

Do you guys have any ideas?

--Quinn

Homeless children have an amazing mythology.

Everyone should check this out. I remember Bloody Mary from grade school. But this is way beyond any of that.

Knight-Ridder has been sold to McClatchy. Read the story here.

I suppose I shouldn't be as surprised as I am. The newspaper business is in trouble. I guess everyone knew that changes were going to be made. But this is so unsettling to me. My father worked at Knight-Ridder newspapers for twenty years. I always loved that company. Now the company isn't there any more. And who knows what will happen to the Beacon Journal and the News-Sentinel, the papers I grew up with? They're both being sold.

Shock.

Something has been bothering me. Then Scarlett723 posted about it, and it crystallized for me. Here it goes:

I AM A FEMINIST. ( Read more... )

Today is a very special holiday. That's right, it's International Pancake Day. IHOP will give you a free short stack if you go between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m. And I just went! Mmmm. Mmmm. I had maple syrup on the first one, then butterpecan, strawberry, blueberry, boysenberry. Then butter pecan again. That stuff is delicious. And it was free!

Oh, man, I'm so excited. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza is speaking at Loyola this weekend. She's one of the great-grandmothers of feminist theology. She's seriously in the bibliography of, like, every feminist theology book I've ever read. I'm inviting everyone I know. And it's free!

So we kind of had some technical issues with the computer this weekend. Namely, the operating system, um, went bad. We went to Best Buy aand the guy there said, "Yeah, sometimes, especially with Windows, it just gets clogged up. Then it dies. You can fix it with your restore disk, but you'll lose all our data. Did you back up?" Of course we didn't. He said, "I can take your hard drive out and transfer the data to another hard drive, and then you can restore it and keep your data. It'll cost $89 and take two to three days." Of course we didn't have the money or the time. So we called Stephen, WHO IS WONDERFUL. Di you hear that, Stephen? YOU'RE WONDERFUL.

Stephen loaded a new operating system (Linux) onto our machine, and put all of our data onto his spare hard drive. Then we reinstalled Windows, and now it works just fine. Thank God. Thank Stephen.

I've spent the day rearranging my files and putting them all in order. One thing I'm doing is cleaning up my music files and making sure they all have names and artists' names and all of that. My goal is to get them all in mp3 format so they take up less space, but then be able to record them in a CD format so I can burn CDs and play them on my Discman. Right now I have some mp3s, some wmas, and some, I don't know, some other stuff. What program do you guys think I be using? I'm in Media Player, and I can't figure out how to do this. Any ideas?

I was talking to my mother last night (on my new phone plan) and she said that the people buying her extra house are "downsizing from their McMansion." She could never have said that fifteen years ago. How weird is that?

By the way, Kat, I love you too. Why don't you ever update?

I found this old entry, which I think I never posted, on my computer today. ( Read more... )

Hey, everybody, I changed my phone plan. Now I have a thousand daytime minutes. Call me!