unintended consequences.

i've stayed quiet on the debate, making the decision not to shoot my mouth off until it was over.

the case of terry schiavo and her family has become, to me, in the words of one woman, an example of "everything that's wrong with this country," and even more so, everything that's wrong with politicized religion.

of all the things that happened in this media circus, this was the saddest to me:

Despite the Schindlers' requests that people spend Easter at home with their families, demonstrators showed up outside the hospice Sunday. Their son, Bobby Schindler, asked protesters to stop volunteering to be arrested.

people feel that making a statement that no one wants to be made is more important than spending a holiday with their families. they're knocking down their own support. how can they stand there and talk about life and family when they've abandoned their own?

as far as any other claims to christianity go, this about covers it:

"The courts didn't ask Michael Schiavo, 'What do you want to do to Terri?' They asked him, 'What do you think Terri would want you to do?"' said University of Florida research associate Barbara Noah, who lectures on medical law and bioethics. ...

Clark and other protesters have accused Michael Schiavo of violating "God's law" by withholding nourishment from his wife and by having had two children over the years with the girlfriend with whom he lives.

But the legal tradition now separating Terri Schiavo from her parents' presumed protection also has a foundation in biblical law. In Genesis 2:24, it reads: "Therefore, a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh."

this was a family in a sad, sad situation. a daughter struck down, parents and son-in-law fighting with each other. there was, however, never any proof offered, as the courts determined that ms. schiavo would ever recover, or that her parents had ever really thought out the life that waited before them caring for an invalid. they appeared merely to loathe her husband. they seemingly refused to accept that a woman might have conversations with her husband that she might not have with her parents. when a man says his wife told him she would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially, and her parents have no concrete statement from her one way or the other, they really don't have a lot of ground to stand on from a rational, logical point of view. the fact that they were "supported" by people who were more intense, more emotional than they were themselves just says that there is a big problem in this country.

when you politicize frothing-at-the-mouth religion, you get the taliban. you don't get the united states of america, which guarantees "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." 50 years ago, she would have died. 50 years ago, so-called christians wouldn't have been screaming, crying, and tearing their clothes over it. if history goes in cycles, i fear we are entering another phase of muscular, aggressive fundamentalism, apparently all over the world. an extremist is an extremist, and the selecitve application of religious texts to effect erosion of individual rights is, in fact, in exact opposition to what christianity is about. but ignorance is required for fundamentalism and extremism to exist.

sigh. maybe i should get that M.Div (you may all run in fear now, yes ;)

bah.

sunlight notwithstanding, i'm feeling cranky and antisocial. in order to avoid doing something adolescent and embarrassing, regularily scheduled programming has been suspended and will be resumed tomorrow.

just in case you were wondering...

canada is still cold.

we saw most of the family this weekend. his uncle who had a colostomy appears to be amazingly cancer-free. i received four badly-written regency romance novels that are disappointingly bereft of any sex at all from a maiden aunt who works for harlequin. i believe they're destined for the library's book-for-a-dime sale.

saturday we ate too much but avoided the veal marsala and the squid casserole. also sunday we ate too much. there is a container of singapore noodles in my fridge. mmm...

we also played pool with two of his uncles while various other wives and daughters-in-law watched and professed ignorance of the game. eventually they went to watch the matrix which was playing in the background (2 or 3, i'm not sure...it was the one with the guys in white who disappear a lot).

saturday night we went clubbing. goa trance has come a hell of a long way from its origins. it now has a house beat, and the standard build-break-build-break-build-mix structure of other trance. so it felt kind of like hard trancy house with the 303s. but it was a lot of fun, all the same.

the ipod was pressed into service to offer techno, prog rock, lewis black, and jeff foxworthy. i'm much less impressed than he is by audio-only standup comedy. it's just not as funny without the visuals.

we've also determined that we ought to drive across the country sometime before we're too old to enjoy it. watch this space for the soapbox across america. don't hold your breath, though ;)

sigh. back to the drudgery today. at least we didn't lose an hour of sleep sunday night. we get to put that off until next week.

en vacanes.

driving up to toronto tomorrow to sped easter weekend with his family. hopefully, it will be a nice little vacation. and unlike last time, i won't be the center of attention, which is even more promising.

today is being miserable. still cold. still no sun. what season is it again? i frigging hate march.

bah.

i wanted to post something interesting today, but i walked 1.7 miles home in the cold. and snow. and sleet. did i mention sleet? sleet stings when it hits you. and my gloves leaked. and my jeans are currently melting in the tub. and now it's dark. i'm going to have more tea.

too much of a good thing.

i've been thinking a lot about wine, recently. it's been the result, i think, of having seen Sideways and then having the oppurtunity to visit Moore Bros within a couple weeks of each other.

i don't want to call myself a wine snob, but the truth is that i like good wine, the same as i like good food. i can, with some proficiency, discuss tannin, acid, structure, fruit, nose, palate, and finish. i'm not so hip to terroir yet (besides the obvious, say, chablis), but then, terroir tends to be a mystical realm at best, open to all kinds of mythologies and superstitions (i'm not kidding. there is such a thing as holistic viticulture).

however, as i introduce him into the subtler aspects of wine, i find myself having to compare things that perhaps aren't ideal. i mean, when you compare one really good bottle of cabernet sauvignon with a really good bottle of red zinfandel, there's little room to explain one's antipathy towards the mass-produced, characterless merlot that floods the market. i'm finding myself having the odd urge to hop over to the state store (for those of you unfamiliar with the structure, the pennsylvania government regulates all sales of wine and liquor and runs their own retail outlets, some of which are better than others) and pick up a $5 bottle of merlot, and maybe another one of white zin, just so i have an example of the travesties that can be wreaked ;) it has come to me that when you can compare an estate-bottled, handcrafted vintage with a blended, industrial prduct, you can better explain not only why one should drink good wine, but what the qualities of good wine in fact are. just as you won't really understand why mcdonald's sucks if you never eat there (or conversely, if it's all you eat). and, you know, it probably won't end up being poured down the drain, because these wines are vinted specifically to be smooth and unchallenging and, above all, drinkable.

i think it might be an interesting experiment.

repercussions.

i haven't thought about it in a while, but one of the things i got really into when i was in university was what i came to call "cultural reverse engineering." what it is, essentially, is taking the productions of a culture (their arts, their laws, their language and so forth) and figuring out from those remains what was or was not important to that culture.

this caught my attention today. especially some of these quotes:

Serious, adult sexuality a turn-off for movie audiences... According to studio marketers, it tends to make them (especially men) uncomfortable. "If you spell sex in marketing materials, it doesn't sell," producer Peter Guber says. "If you spell fun, it sells. Sex inside a comedy candy-coats sex and allows the audience to feel comfortable. ... Sex sells, but not serious sex. Films can be sexy, but they can't portray the sexual intimacy most people crave." ... "Today's audiences aren't comfortable being seen in a mass-audience public place like a cinema complex seeing something that is inevitably notorious because of its sex," producer Bill Horberg writes in an e-mail. "If you go to a complex, you might run into your kids, much less neighbors, co-workers." ... "We are a Puritan society," Press says. "We'd rather watch it at home."

what does this say about our society? more specifically, what does that say about our relations with ourselves, with our sex partners, and our conceptualizations of gender?

it's getting even more dangerous.

"I want people to start thinking critically about how these images affect black women today," said Jennings, a Spelman College alumnae and now a law student in New York. "We're telling people [black women] are bitches and hos and sluts and not worthy of respect," she said. "And that's exactly how society is treating us."

later on in the article, they quote a gentleman from Black Entertainment Television telling women not to watch if they don't like it. but let's cut the relativistic marketing naïveté and think about this critically: if you're calling youself black entertainment, this implies if you're not entertained, you're not really black. and you're also implying that blacks are entertained by and construct a culture that values women by their sexual availability. if you'll sleep with a man, you're a ho. if you don't, you're a bitch. there is no room in this structure to respect a woman, and certainly no room to think about a woman's intellectual capabilities.

to back out further, when sex comedies and violent sex are the only way to entertain people, regardless of race, you're walking a very interesting line. especially when we take into consideration that men tend to make most of the visual entertainment and men are made most uncomfortable by depictions of mature sexual relations. if people never see adult, mature sexuality, where are they going to get their information from? especially among ever-increasing calls for "abstinence-only" sex education, which doesn't even discuss anatomy or biology, parents' increasing reluctance to talk to their kids about sex, and in fact, parents' apparent reluctance to engage in mature sexuality themselves. we're slowly heading back to ignorance, because ignorance is more comfortable. if we don't have to accept the emotion, the intimacy, the vulnerability inherent in sex, we don't have to worry about it.

sometimes it's important to see things that make us uncomfortable, if for no other reason than to sit down and think "why does this make me uncomfortable?" yes, sex is uncomfortable. but it is also a part of life. and it can be beautiful and fun and subtle and joyful, all without the inclusion of violence, tension, or fart jokes. to ignore the possibilities or dilute them is to do a disservice to ourselves, to those people that we could love, and most importantly, to our children and to our children's children, who will have to combat the myths and prejudices all over again.

happy equinox, happy anniversary.

today is the first day of spring (at least up here in the northern hemisphere). it is also, unusually, the exact same date it was last year, march 20. which also happens to be exactly one year since we went to the local pet shelter and got our kitty. awww.

it was a sunny saturday afternoon, very unlike today which is cold and rainy, and i had been doing some random looking on petfinder. i noticed there was a shelter less than a mile from our apartment. and we wanted a cat. we had been forced to give up our other one when the apartment complex we moved into insisted they had a $200 non-refundable pet deposit for cats, $300 for dogs. and plus, his cat loved his parents' house and yard so much, we felt it would be cruel to take her away from that and stick her in a little 1-bedroom apartment. so we didn't have a cat.

we had decided we were going to move out at the end of that year's lease anyway, so we went down to the shelter. we filled out an application for adopting and hung out in the cat room for a while. there was one very striking grey calico kitten who was only five months old and had been given up because her owners were moving (i ask you, who gets a cat, and then gives it up almost immediately? some people make me want to get violent). but she was very stressed out, probably because she was so striking-looking, and everyone was cooing at her and trying to touch her, which you're not allowed to do because it can spread disease between the animals.

and then over on the other side of the room, there was a little grey-tabby and white stray, who, when we paused beside his cage, walked up to the door and bonked his head into it, hard. "hello!" so when they brought us to a visiting room, we asked to see both cats. the grey-and-white one sat comfortably in our arms before hopping out and confidently exploring, always with a little twitch of the question mark tail. the little grey calico kitten jumped out of his arms immediately and went and hid in a corner. so the cats basically made the decision for us :) we took home the grey-tabby and white kitty, and he's been confidently exploring ever since, even if he is a bit of a brat sometimes. luckily, we also somehow managed to avoid alerting the management company, and they never came around to demand the deposit money.

he's sitting on my lap right now. such a soft kitty. we like our kitty.

in memoriam.

Andre Norton. 1912-2005.

a consistenently good, intelligent, imaginative writer, an author not too proud to collaborate and help. one of the first sf/f authors i ever read, along with tolkein and heinlein, so i suppose it's partly her fault (along with my dad, who gave them all to me :)

i would say "she will be missed," but she's written so much that i haven't read yet, even if there's something of a sadness to knowing that she won't write anymore. so instead, i will say that i hope her influence lives on.

whoops.

apparently, i'm not paying attention. how the hell did this slip by me? sniffle.

i'm also depressed to see that PA has such a small showing.

frankly, i'm all for government transparency. when people complain that you have to give up some privacy for security, i don't bother with the apocryphal ben franklin quote, but i say that it should work both ways. if i am forced to give up personal information and privacy under some misguided addiction to data-mining (come on folks, let's call it what it is), then i should be able to see what my government, the one that i elected and pay for, is doing with that information. taking my privacy and then giving me nothing back other than some handwaving and a vague promise of "security" is not an acceptable state of things.