Don’t Say Gay

According to many organizations’ Firewalls “Gay” is a bad word, in that you can not search for phrases with the word gay lest you set off the firewall security blocker. (This happened to me recently when I searched for Gay Pride in order to find out how to get my employer a publicity booth on the day of the parade.) But now apparently Gay is also a naughty word in Tennessee, as they are working on legislation barring schools from discussing gay historical figures or implying that gay people exist.

One of the biggest arguments against children knowing that gay is a thing (not an insult used to make fun of something that is effeminate or silly) is that children do not know what sex is so they shouldn’t be exposed to the concept of gayness. This argument was used by a “Concerned Women’s Group” against the widely popular use of the “It Gets Better” Campaign and its commercials during prime time television.

I agree that children should not be told about sex until they are mature enough to understand it fully and take on the responsibility that comes with that knowledge. However does that prevent us from allowing them to see heterosexual couples together holding hands? Does it prevent them from being shown straight couples kiss on TV, or from knowing that their parents are a couple? Of course not.

The first thing that people think of when they see a heterosexual couple is usually not sex. However gay people don’t typically have that luxury. Many people, upon seeing a homosexual couple, automatically start thinking about what that couple does in the sack. Like that quote from Philadelphia, Denzel’s character says “That is what this is about, that is what we are all thinking about here, who does what to whom and how they do it.” So in my mind people who assume that kids will equate gayness with sex are simply putting their own judgments onto those children. Children’s awareness of gay people does not mean that they have to know what happens between those people in the bedroom. Sex is a small part of every gay person’s life, not the thing that defines us as who we are.

People will continue to try to wrap their prejudices up and pretend they are something else, but I and many others like me will continue to unwrap those prejudices and show them for what they are.

GAY, GAY, GAY, there I said it, and next time I drive through Tennessee on my way to Florida I am going to make my car into a giant sign that says “Gay, It’s a real thing.”

Muppet Night

On watching Muppets Take Manhattan:

Me: I love that they are able to convince us that people would accept frogs and pigs and animals walking around speaking English and producing musicals or going to college.

Cristy: They would accept it in Sweden, they accept everything there...

Stages of Working Out

The stages of working out:

1. I feel disgusting, I think my blood pressure probably sucks, MUST start working out this very day. If I put it off one more day by making excuses then I no longer qualify as a person with ANY single bit of will power.

2. Join the gym....again. Feel regular gym goers snickering from their machines and wonder what the gym workers are saying behind my fat back. Pay application fee, credit card run fee, restart fee, activation fee and a fee for that watery stuff you spray the machines with.

3. Work out. AAAAHHHHhhhh! I love working out! Working out is the best of all the bestest things I can do! I feel so great afterwards and I have so much motivation!! Why don’t I work out all the time? I feel like a Greek god on steroids who drank five Red Bulls and knows how to fly!!

4. Two weeks into consistently working out. Start to be judgmental towards the people in the Taco Bell drive through as I wiz past them still sweaty from my awesome work out. Have lots more energy so I probably bounce when I walk (is that annoying?)

5. Stage 5 – start to hate the smell of the gym and the people who look way better than me in their workout clothes. Begin forcing myself through the motions and skipping some of the weight machines. See repeats of movies in the workout theater room and curse the club for playing the same movie more than one time.

6. Stage 6 – here come the excuses. I can’t go to the gym tonight because I had such a crappy work day that I know I wont be motivated. Will go tomorrow. Tonight I am going to find someone to go out and have drinks with who I haven’t seen in a while - PERFECT excuse…that person missed me horribly. My toe hurts so I can’t go to the gym. Glee is on tonight (DVR’ed) but still…can’t go. Post on Facebook – does ANYONE want to go get drinks tonight??!!!! Yay, someone does and I don’t have to go to the gym!!!! You see where this goes.

7. This is the beginning of the end of the gym going – I am starting to feel guilty for paying for the gym because my butt never ever goes there. I am not even quite sure how to get there and forget I belong until I see the money come out of my checking account.

Back to stage 1 – I feel disgusting.

I must find a way to break this cycle. I am currently verging on stage 6 and DO NOT want to get there so I need suggestions. I have a very personal reason for being motivated and that is keeping the Stage 6 excuses out of my subconscious, but I can feel them sitting there like little nasty, fat, lazy, taco bell eating monsters, just waiting for a moment of weakness. So any additional advice is appreciated!!!

Angry Wife

So the funniest thing happened on a phone call at work today!

I had called an older lead, a guy named Danny. I called the first number he had supplied and left a message for Danny Jr, based on the voice mail. Then I attempted to reach him on the second number but did not leave a message on that one.

A couple of seconds later I get a return call back from that second number. People cant STAND it when you call and don't leave a message, the curiosity just eats and eats at them until they finally call back. It is great because I can see the number they are calling me from so I know who it is. I answer with "Hello, this is Ann" so that they don't know it is Brown Mackie (otherwise it's an immediate hang up.) They stumble, wonder if they know an "Ann" and then answer with "I must have dialed the wrong number." Now this is the fun part, this is when I say, "oh, is this _______?" They are shocked, SHOCKED that I busted them in their lie. See, see I KNOW that they didnt dial the wrong number, they simply returned my call and they are now trying to get out of talking to me!! Ha! But they all eventually end up hanging up anyway. This happens a good 3 or 4 times a day.

Back to my story. So the lady says "I just missed a call from this number." Already this is different from my normal call backs! I said, yes that I was looking for a Danny Roberts. She said he was not there, and I thanked her and said I would try another time.

Pause, she didnt answer back, and after a few seconds I was almost ready to hang up when she said "Um, excuse me, this is his WIFE!"

Wow. My first thought was "poor him," but instead I replied with "Well, this is Ann from Brown Mackie College and he had requested some information from us so I was calling to see how I could help" using my best fake nice voice.

She contemplated this, realized she had been a giant douche bag, and laughed and told me that I must be looking for Danny Jr, that is her son. Danny Sr is her husband and they are separated.

She thought I was some skank calling her cell phone looking for her husband!! It was all I could do to not laugh as I told her she could have Danny Jr call me if he wanted information on Brown Mackie. She was very nice and thanked me profusely.

The moral of this story is that whenever someone is mean to you, dont get mad, just stay cool! They might just be angry because they assume every female, you included, is banging their husband...

Lessons from the Ride to Work

As I was driving in to work today I noticed an annoyance on the road. Like a bee inching closer to a comfortable seat at a picnic, a car was slowly creeping up on my bumper…in the SLOW lane. Don’t ask me why, but the closing in of a front fender in my rear view mirror slowly (and in proportion to the closeness of the car) raises my blood pressure. Perhaps it is because I do that thing where I imagine what might happen. I might have to stop suddenly due to someone in front of me stopping suddenly, and this ass hole will ram into me crunching my bumper like tin foil. I will be sitting there rendered unable to turn my head to face her as she runs up to my window screaming “why in the hell did you stop so suddenly you %#@ing &*#@ head!!?” And I won’t even be able to answer that the reason is the same reason that SHE stopped suddenly, that I was too close to the car in front of me. The reason I can’t answer is because her stupid face wont stop yelling at me and trying to punch my windows while I sit in agony realizing I won’t be able to go to the gym for a week because my back and neck are injured.

None of that happened of course I just made it up, which in turn made my blood pressure go up, see?

So, eventually I saw my exit and proceeded to dramatically get off of the highway to make my point that she was too close. She didn’t notice because she was singing and as she drove on past I spotted her bumper stickers. Excellent, I thought, I can read said bumper stickers and consequently judge her as a person based on their contents. As I scanned the back of her car, suddenly EUREKA! I found it. A giant UofL decal! “Typical, no wonder she drives like an ass hole.” I thought to myself.

But almost immediately I realized what I had just done. I had grouped her and made a judgment about her character based on her membership in that group. There is a name for that….oh yes “Prejudice.”

People love to say “all of so and so’s fans are _________.” No they aren’t, they are all individual people cheering for their team. There are the wealthy ones who buy all the over priced team gear, sit in the best seats and can actually get just as out of hand as the country folk. There are the drunken fools who spill beer and yell insults at the ref about everything from their mom to their hair style. There are cute little kids, of all races, ages and class who will become the next generations of fans. We all have bad eggs who make the group as a whole look bad but that is no reason to judge the entire group. There is a small group of Muslims who are extreme terrorists and do awful things, but they are just that, a small group of bad eggs which most Muslims will tell you do NOT represent the groups’ feelings and beliefs.

The only difference between you and someone else is your god given personality combined with the way you were raised. Skin color doesn’t change who a person is inside and neither does the sports team which they happen to root for. It also doesn’t change their driving abilities, that comes from something else entirely.

Prejudice stems from a variety of places, but mostly it is a very ugly learned behavior, passed down through the ages because people have a need to feel better than others. I caught myself doing it today and wanted to call myself out because in discussing ugly behaviors we bring forward the reasons they exist and hopefully make our society more cohesive in the long run.

So, now that I don’t have a simple excuse for the lady who rode my bumper today, I can use my overactive imagination to decipher her reasons for doing so. She was listening to Journey and got a heavy foot picturing herself on Route 66 with the wind in her hair? She has dyslexia and gets confused on whether the far right or far left lane is the fast one? Perhaps she was trying to read MY bumper stickers and form judgments about me? Regardless, I thank her for being an inconsiderate driver because she really made me think today!

Religious Uniformity!!

Now, at the end of times, when the government is falling to pieces before our very eyes, buildings and churches are burning in flames and lawlessness has run amok so severely that we aren’t safe from ignored doggie poop in our own neighborhoods, NOW is the time to return to the good old days when religion was in bed with the government….literally.

Christians were persecuted during the Roman Empire, so it is time to get justice!! The tables have been turned and there are too many of us now. This will solve all our moral issues in this country because people who are Christian are automatically moral people! They don’t do things wrong. I mean you would never hear of a priest say, molesting anyone. Or of a conservative Christian cheating on his wife in one of those gay sex scandals, no, no no. It just doesn’t happen my friends.

Uh oh, what happens if Christianity no longer becomes the majority religion in this country? Will I have to worship Buddah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you ask? Nah, that is the beauty of having government intertwined with religion, we can TELL people to believe what we want them to believe!!

Conversely there are no good people in other religions, they just all bomb stuff with their terror bombs so having a Christian government is certainly the way to go for our country, and well probably every country.

Seems to me that most people will be accepting of this arrangement. So much so that perhaps we should impose our opinions and beliefs on the rest of the world. We will call it the “Great Crusade.” That is “ade” with a long aahh, as in the word façade, so it’s different from that other one, see?

This will allow us to get rid of that pesky gay marriage issue once and for all when the government itself is a Christian one! After all, a same sex marriage and partnership is NOT in God’s plan. God’s plan was to create life and love and then have humans procreate. They would then grow distant enough from God to become sinful. So then the plan was to wipe out all those people with a flood, and again allow humans to procreate, this time to a disturbingly massive number which damages the planet to the point of our own extinction. Then the plan is to take back the rainbow from the gays ( I assume by wiping them all out with another flood on pride day when they are gathered together to fornicate.) Then straight humans can go on overpopulating until I think God will just create another earth! Twin earths, how cool. Gayless twin earths.

The founding fathers meant for this to be a Christian nation with good old Christian values and who are we to challenge that? They were right about every thing, and EVERY thing should be restored in order to save this country from imploding. I mean, who doesn’t miss slavery? Slavery is fun! And I don’t really need to vote, especially when it’s cold and rainy in November. NO fun.

I’m sure everyone will agree on MY denomination, I mean it is the best. If people are pushy about being able to choose a denomination, then perhaps each state could adopt it’s own. I just hope that my group doesn’t end up in Alaska…I hate the cold.

Pets

Anyone who knows my cat, Sammy, knows that she is an extremely vocal cat. Sammy screams for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s when she wants to be let into her room where her food and litterbox are so that she can do her business. When the dog gets too close for her liking (usually within about 1 foot) she will scream and smack. She screams as she runs into the room to announce her presence. This is especially hysterical because the running scream becomes a staccato noise. Mah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. When Sammy is hungry (which is all the damn day) she screams and it gets louder and louder the closer I get to the food bowl. maaw, Awww, AAWWWW, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWW!!! If you enter a room which Sammy has already occupied for the purpose of sleeping or self cleaning, then she will scream at you to let you know that she was there first. Pick her up, Scream. Pet her, Scream. Look at her, Scream! The noise sounds like a baby banshee crying in anguish.

Anyone who knows my dog, Koda, knows that she has OCD. She has a severe obsession with her tiny tennis ball from PetSmart (henceforth to be known as “Ballie.”) Ballie is the source of endless amusement for Koda. Throw it for her and you will be her best friend. She never, and I repeat never gets tired of that game…even if you do. Spread out a blanket on the floor and Koda will carefully fold ballie into the covers and then search for the buried treasure. Ballie can be hidden in Koda’s toy box and she will remove every toy in search of the precious thing and then parade it around the house with pride to show us how she retrieved it. Her most beloved game (and most hated by us) is playing “Risk.” Risk involves nudging the ballie gently towards the couch/bed/dresser (anything it could get stuck underneath) and trying to catch it before it goes under. If she is unsuccessful it has to be retrieved in other ways (i.e. barking at it until we get it out.) Koda will even take Ballie to eat/drink with her, which means that ballie waits patiently IN the water bowl while Koda drinks. The result is that eventually every ballie turns into “ugly ballie” and must be surreptitiously replaced with a new one.

This past weekend I took Koda out for a walk around the back of the condo and I noticed a ballie laying in the grass like a fuzzy neon Easter Egg. Apparently a game of Risk ended in ballie rolling off of the deck which is a frequent issue (which has recently been resolved thanks to crafty Cristy.) I led her over to grab ballie and while I was trying to help Koda sniff out the now nasty thing so she could carry it in all of a sudden I hear from above me “MMAAWWWWWWW!” I look up to see Sammy’s chubby cheeks staring down over the railing off of the deck. So I can now add to the list in the top paragraph that Sammy also screams when she can look down on you in disgust.

Anyone who knows my pets knows that they are so weird.