A Long Time Coming: Defending LGBT Rights is the Next Great Revolution

It's gross. It's unhygienic. It considerably raises the risk of certain diseases. Only a godless heathen would do it.

I'm taking about eating shellfish, of course. What did you think I meant? Being gay?

Yeah, okay, the old school prohibition against eating lobsters and shrimp doesn't have the eye-catching tag of "abomination" the way other practices do in the Bible, but get to the heart of it and they're all the same: terrible, Satanic, soul-corrupting activities that a "clean" person, a "God-fearing" person, shouldn't do. Oh, and one other thing: it happens to be one of the many, MANY laws (not "customs", but outright "Thou shalt not"s and "Taketh thou"s etc.) that Christians have routinely ignored. What they term the "Old Testament" (I guess even God gets bored every eon or so, right?) is mostly ignored--except for, oh, a handful of eensy-weensy, never-you-mind whatsits. Like "thou shalt not sleep with a man" and "On the third day God created the Heavens and Earth" and other sundries. You know, just odds and ends, Christianity's junk drawer of "ahem"s, "well actually"s, and "as a matter of fact"s. (Except they're not facts.)

Christianity's oddly selective memory is only one of the reasons my blood pressure rises at the sight of missionaries, or every time (and it seems more and more like it's fifteen rimes a day) I hear about some preacher, politician, or right-wing pundit slamming gay marriage. Didn't Jesus, like, come to tell y'all that all that stuff was just the prequel, the smudged blueprint, and God was ordering a reboot? Funny how certain things seem to stick in the collective craw of Christian "civilization" (sorry, almost choked on the irony there) and never seem to fade away? What about slaughtering lambs and burning incense to please God? What about circumcision and the bacon no-no? If all that "Old" stuff can be so easily discarded, what's with the narrowly myopic word-for-word verse-quoting from Leviticus: out of five monster-sized books, y'all can't get over hardly a dozen words?

You know what I think? I think this isn't about Christians following the law laid down by their God. It certainly isn't about the so-called love and grace they claim their Savior came to bring the world. It's about a petty, ridiculous, ugly, brutally old-fashioned grudge against any one who doesn't toe the party line. It's about a diseased and distorted perception of power and gender roles. 

Part of me rages whenever I read about the newest victims: the teens and preteens lost to suicide, the children who are beaten and bullied and ridiculed and threatened--often by their parents, the very people who should be stepping up to defend them to the last. Part of me wants to turn around the rhetoric from that one twisted pastor, and say it's THEM, the bigots and braggarts and bullies and brigands, who should be fenced in and allowed to die off from sheer stupidity and violence. But I can't forget--ever--that my grandmother was fenced in once, starved and enslaved and brutalized, for the sake of "purifying" the higher human race. No matter how bad it gets, we can never stoop so low as that. As tempting as it may be to take that shotgun out of their hands and turn it back on their hate-spewing mouths, once we did--we'd be irredeemable. I don't care if you worship Allah, Christ, Vishnu, or a small green gnome on Saturn: once we try and use the same violence directed at the defenseless for the purpose of punishing the abusers, we cross a line that can never be recrossed. The best thing we can do is stand proud, gay and straight and everything in between or besides, and rise above the hate.

A Quibble, A Question, and A Quest...Yea, Verily

Oh, Blackboard. Thou failest me in my hour of need.

It figures, of course, that the website my teachers rely on for organizing their classes, assigning work, and generally being all fashionably tech-savvy, should stop functioning properly on the first day I have a quiz in one class, and receive a homework assignment in another. To be more precise, in my two hardest and most terrifying courses, the previously-mentioned Physiological Psychology, and, possibly worse, my class on ANOVA. For you lucky uninitiated, that's ANalysis-Of-VAriance, a particular format of upper-level statistical testing used in a number of science-y disciplines, and a required course for me because of my ill-advised Psychology major. Blargh.

Peevish whining aside,what a day! Woke up to three inches of snow and a mischievous nor'wester. Felt the distinct urge, for the first time this semester, to get my hands on a second cup of coffee by midmorning. Didn't act on it, though, being in class and having no money on me and all that jazz. But that brings me to an interesting point that's been nagging me for some time: my blog is entitled "Coffeepot Capers", yet where's the coffee? Where's the caffeine-laced randomness I promised from the start? With that in mind, I promise that my next post, whenever it may be (but hopefully in the next 3-5 days), will finally touch upon the topic of that oh-so-naughty-and-necessary bean that is at the core of the college experience.

Until then, may your scarves stay knotted and your pencils sharp! That your coffee should stay hot goes without saying...aw, shit.

Semester Six: The Showdown

Well! It's been a whole week since my last post, and believe me, I can feel it in the creaking of every one of my joints, and the way diagrams of the human brain keep floating in front of my eyes. I've only had one class of Physiological Psychology so far, and read the first two chapters of the textbook--as evidenced by the 150 virtual flashcards I've made. Last semester I made the foolish mistake of imagining I had a photographic memory, and made half-assed attempts at studying for the tests in my two psychology courses. Definitely not doing that again. Our first test in Physio's almost two weeks off, but I am all up in that shit. Bring it on, basal ganglia. I'm watching you, apical dendrites. I'm fairly certain that by the end of this semester, I'll have at least 1,000 flashcards for this class, maybe even closer to 1,500. While I'm at it, I'd like to give a shout out to the website http://www.flashcardexchange.com/ for being such a valuable student's resource.

In other, non-neurological news, I'm brainstorming story and poem ideas for my two workshop classes. This is it, ladies and gentlemen: this is the test. If I don't come out of this semester with at least two or three polished, mature pieces in each genre, I may as well crumple up my aspirations of becoming a writer and toss it in the corner like a t-shirt your cat was just sick on. I'll cash in my chips--metaphorically, I mean, cause if I had anything to turn in for real cash, I'd do it in a heartbeat--and concentrate on getting into a decent graduate program for clinical or counseling psychology.

On that front, too, I'm a little wary as I begin my work as one of six undergraduate students assisting a psychology professor with his research. It seems like pretty basic stuff--mostly clerical, data-entry stuff--but the level and quality of my involvement with the team may very well be the double-edged sword that either clinches my acceptance into a good graduate psych program, or nicks that hope neatly in the symbolic nuts. It's particularly intimidating to hear that everyone else on the team, aside from myself and one other, is already neck-deep in some kind of extracurricular psychology research on their own.

Sometimes I wish I wasn't so interested in two different majors/programs/careers. Yeesh.

Once Upon A Typical Teen Ambition

What do an alcoholic werewolf, a zombie-raising orphan, a gender-confused and archery-obsessed princess, and a one-armed pyromaniac have in common? Well, apart from the obvious (i.e. they all belong in a clinical psychologist's wet dream), they're all characters in my fantasy story. Yes, that one. The story I started when I was seventeen, scrapped at eighteen, and have been revising, loathing, re-imagining, reassembling like a giant jigsaw puzzle of narrative loops and dead-ends, and generally fussing over ever since. A third of my life has been given to this behemoth of cliches and tropes and commonalities that we fantasy fanatics just love about the genre.

What is it about a fantasy story that so fires the imagination, to the point where even the most sordidly pessimistic, un-blinkered skeptic still longs for it, still craves that adventure, that newness and strangeness, that epic pseudo-historical ambiance? Why do I think that I can write something sufficiently innovative and interesting enough to warrant publication?

It's a tough question to answer, and if I had a milligram of sense, I'd have given up on the notion of ever finishing my story, and settled down to make a comfortable living doing technical writing. Fortunately, I haven't an ounce of sense, and so I continue to dream of vampire demigods, vengeful dragons, continent-hugging glaciers, and mist-wrapped ancient cities straddling the snaking wetlands of a mighty estuary. And I dream of being the next Tolkien or Jordan or Martin, and opening the gates of imagination for a new generation of outcasts and lonely teens.

Or maybe I'll just settle for paying the gas bill with my writing. That'd be nice.

A Bad Joke A Day Keeps Sanity At Bay

An Elf and a Man walk into a bar. A Dwarf walks under it.

Buh-DUM-Bum-BUM.

Thank you, no, really, thank you...thank you so much...it's been a wonderful night...

Have you ever wondered how your own ordinary life might be turned into a stand-up comedy routine? Or a snappy sitcom?

Yeah, neither have I. No, my fingers aren't crossed, that's just a medical condition. Yeah, seriously. Phalanges phuckupus. Trust me: "I'm the Doctor."

Speaking of the madman with a box, I'll bet there are girls out there who are eager to get their hands on a sonic screwdriver...and not to save the universe, oh no.

Too much? Yeah...that's what she said, too.

Buh-dum-bum-bum.