Gotta lurve Fox News…

Really, they don’t even try.  Most important story in the very recent past, in terms of U.S. news: The announcement of a nominee for U.S. Supreme Court Justice.  What does Fox consider important?

Guys, do you really even try to pass yourselves off as news anymore?  I swear, the “news” organization parody in Babylon 5 all those years ago reported things in a less biased manner.   First of all, “it’s the showdown you won’t see anywhere but on FOXNews.com”  Yeah.  You won’t.  Because American Idol vs. Britain’s Got Talent is the least important thing that’s made it to the front page since…  well, since CNN.com’s Person of the Year was YOU!  And only on FOXNews.com would you see it being given more space than the new supreme court justice nominee, and more than the partial (and I hope eventually pyrrhic) victory of the Prop Eighters.  Of course, if the marriages hadn’t stood, I could tell you with some certainty that it would have made the front story instead of the second story, but any kind of defeat, however partial means that Fox should deny that it happened slightly. We also have “Obama declares war on gun owners” making a headline and “Sotomayor’s controversial statement”.

What a banner day for American ‘Mainstream’ Media…  guess I’ll be watching the Daily Show tonight.

Circumcision

It’s unusual that I feel the need to comment on an article in Time magazine.  But despite the fact that there are a lot of things implicit in this person’s attitudes that tell me he and I wouldn’t get along in a lot of the issues I talk about here (notably polyamory and implicit attitudes about the chastity of women), I think he brings out an important question about the main point of his article, namely circumcision. Being a circumcised male, I don’t have any perspective on the loss of feeling that might have happened or about whether it helps or hurts my health.  I also wonder what the difference would have been, and as an otherwise largely unadorned person, aesthetically, I think I would have preferred to remain uncut.  But that’s just it — it ought to be my choice, my preference, and if I’m worried that I might catch an STI from not being circumstances based on a single study, then I could go out myself and have it done. There are reasons to circumcise out there, I’ll grant you.  If you’re particularly prone to infection and you suspect this is genetic (say yeast infections and so forth), then maybe that’ll help. It’s been shown to by multiple studies, after all.

Now, no, male circumcision isn’t anything like female circumcision and the two don’t really bear comparison.  But why is it socially acceptable to remove a perfectly functional and useful part of the anatomy at birth just because of ancient custom?  I mean, we could just as well take out a baby’s tonsils at 18 months to prevent them getting bronchitis and pneumonia.  Or we could take out the appendix laproscopically to prevent them getting appendicitis. These are both equally if not more prophylactic surgeries than male circumcision, but no-one would do something so un-necessary to a child.  Okay, not no-one, but not most people.

The study that says that male circumcision is a health benefit are new, unreplicated thus far, and the reasons for the prophylactic effect of circumcision aren’t clear, and well, decisions about sex ought to be left up to the people having it.

I have to say also that I’m a bit … disgusted by his wife’s reasoning that she “doesn’t want to have to touch his penis too much” when she bathes him.  Oh, please.  Are we really that prudish still?  Or rather, even if we are, don’t we feel the slightest twinge of guilt about forcing compliance with that prudishness on our children at so young an age?

Thoughts on implicit gender and sexuality bias…

I was working on posting the story yesterday, and as I did I briefly thought I should print a warning of some sort letting people know that it involved sex between men, and then I thought, “What the hell?  I would never do that for any other coupling.  Hell, I’d never even think of doing that for any other coupling,” and so of course I didn’t print a warning at the top of the story after all, but the thought spurred me on to listen to myself for the last couple of days.  I’ve noticed a few things, the meaning of which I haven’t really decided yet.

In social situations, my vocal register is softer when I talk to women than when I talk to men.  Voice timbre warmer, tone and volume more even, volume slightly softer.  Words don’t change so far as I can tell, though. My softer voice sounds more natural to me, but I suppose I’ve developed a louder, more masculine tone with men to deal with situations where I’m not as self-confident.  I wouldn’t say that I developed it from talking to my old Ph.D. advisor over years, but it certainly made the difference more pronounced and the masculine voice is characteristic of him.  I’d be curious to study myself and see if I use the masculine register for women who outrank me in one thing or another, where self-confidence is based on having a sure footing in the conversation and not looking like a fool.

And I notice that the story brings back all the same worries that I had about my friends that they might feel weird reading erotica by someone they know.  Gay sex, man, I’m telling you…  brings out the worry in me for some reason, at least writing about it.  I’m consciously working to change that, now that I’ve noticed it, but here’s to self-discovery in the meantime.

Okay, that was only a couple of things I’ve noticed, at least that I can vocalize, but I’m still more conscious of myself at the moment.  We’ll see what else I turn up.

FICTION: David

As always, a PDF version with nice layout and fonts can be found here

When I got the inkling I might be bi on a lonely night of self-experimentation in my first year of college, I never thought it would take ten years before I actually did anything about it. For years, I had only this vague idea that someday I wanted to have sex with a man. There was never a guy I was all-out attracted to; just the notion that when an my girlfriend bangs the living daylights out of me with her strapon I love every second of it. That and the memory of that rainy Saturday night in college I mentioned, sitting in front of a computer screen full of porn when I discovered I liked the taste of my own semen and thought maybe I might like the taste of someone else’s.

Really, that was it.  No torrid exploration of gay porn with secret fantasies that I hid from friends and family. No agony over whether or not to come out.  Not any qualms about whether it was moral or immoral.  I really just wanted to taste cum and feel a warm, living cock in my ass.  Just one little problem: I wanted to like the guy I was doing it with.

I’ll chuckle and admit that it actually wasn’t I who found the guy I eventually did get in bed with. It was my partner, Josie, who during a long night of drinking and watching bad movies with him at his house started relating my fantasies to him. David’s one of her best friends, and just happens to be, like me, a sort of ambiguous bi-guy. He’s slender, olive-skinned, and variously tattooed with black hair that never quite wants to hold whatever shape he brushes it into in the morning.  She thinks he’s gorgeous and I think he’s gorgeous, and fortunately, it turned out that he thought the same thing… about both of us.

She came home the morning after their drunken debauchery and we were in the middle of brunch, quietly eating away at her hangover when she mentioned it.

“Oh thank god this is starting to go away,” she said between strawberries — fresh fruit and orange juice for a hangover, the only thing that I know works for us. “Thank you so much for breakfast, love.  This is helping. So…,” there was a pause as she blushed, ”David and I had a lot of fun last night.” I blushed, too, because I thought that meant they’d ended up having sex, which they sometimes do; however then she said, “He thinks you’re hot, by the way.”  By the way?

“By the way?”

“Well, he was talking about how he realized he was bi, and I said that you came about the realization sort of the same way, but you’d never done anything about it.”

“Right,” Strangely enough, that she’d shared such an intimate secret of mine didn’t bother me at all.  I trusted David, after all, and he was one of her best friends. They always talk about everything and that’s fine.

“And so we talked some more and he said he’d always thought you were really hot, but didn’t want to say anything because he didn’t know you were bi and didn’t really get much of a sense about you.”

“Well, fair enough.  I don’t really think about it that often.  So does he know you’re telling me this?”

“Yeah, he was counting on it.”

I sat there in silence for a minute, picking at strawberries, mentally undressing David and finding that it was really hard to do. I’d never seen him naked or any guy, really, where I was thinking of him in a sexual context. Despite that, though, I felt my cock throb as blood rushed into it.  My ass tingled.  Not knowing what to expect made me aroused.  Knowing that a guy was attracted to me aroused me. I grinned, and Josie noticed.

“Yes? Thinking? Hmm?”

“Oh just…  thinking, yeah. I never really thought about him that way before, but he is hot.”

“Gothy boys do it for you, huh?”

“Yeah, tattoos,”

“Messy hair…”

“yeah, messy hair, and kind of wild.”

“Mmm, yeah he can be wild,” she grinned and said with some extra feeling. I blushed at that while her hand slipped up my thigh. She stroked it and pushed my robe to the side.

“Ha! But he’s one of your best friends.”

“He’s David, though.  He hasn’t turned into a saga for me, and he’s not going to for you, either. It’d be fine,” The back of her index finger grazed my cock as I sat there mesmerized by my own thoughts and her insistent hand on my thigh.  She took a hand away, picked up a strawberry, locked my eye, and bit into it meaningfully.  She took her time finishing it and then gave me one deep, intense, strawberry kiss.  “Come on.  I need the rest of my hangover cure.”

I stood up from the table and she bit her lip.  Josie didn’t even let me out of the room, much less to the bedroom.  She pushed my back into the wall and dove her lips into me with abandon, stripping my already loose robe away with one stroke.  I kissed back hard and grabbed her ass with one hand and the back of her hair with the other. Her neck arched back as I tugged gently on her hair and my tongue, teeth, and lips went to that soft bit between her collarbone and shoulder muscles. I could feel her goosebumps rise under my hands as I nibbled gently but insistently along her shoulder, and up her neck. We locked in one more deep kiss, and then I tugged downwards ever so gently and with a gleam in her eye she knelt down to the floor.

Her lips closed around the first few inches of my cock and I felt her tongue swirl around. I looked down; ran my fingers through her hair.  I felt my ass clench involuntarily as I arched toward those lips, hoping that she would take more of me in.  She let go, but held my cock in her hand and ran her tongue gently around my balls, teasing and testing them, warming them, cooling them, making my skin tingle.  When my cock was throbbing hard with every beat of my heart, she took it back into her mouth. Then she reached back and slowly ran a finger up along the crack of my ass before grabbing one cheek hard and curling her fingers so that I could just feel her nails between my cheeks. It felt like every finger wanted to explore me, and I had a brief flash of David completely parting me.

Then she did that thing that only she can do.  See, when a guy jerks himself off, or at least when I do, I can’t help but gradually speed up as I get closer.  But what I like from Josie, on the other hand, is this slow, steady, hard rhythm of sucking all the way to the end as she goes down on me.  She clasped her hand around my shaft and dove in at that perfect rhythm, just fast enough so that every time I feel her mouth slide back down the thick of my shaft, coming becomes a little more inevitable and I’m a little less in control.  My cock burned with every stroke, and I held back, clenched, trying desperately to hold off my orgasm for just a couple more strokes from Josie’s lovely mouth and hand, but then it was too much.  I screamed out and came and with every spasm my knees gave a little.  I leaned all my weight back into the wall and let myself arch into her as I gave one… two.. threemore big spasms and half a dozen smaller ones as she made sure she had everything I had for her.

I slid down the wall and sat there kissing her, she still on her knees and tasting of my cum.  “Thanks,” she smiled and stroked my cheek.  We crawled over to the couch and wrapped ourselves up in each other and slept until noon.
Sometime later in the day, the thought came back to me about David.  “So…  what would I say?”

“Huh?”

“To him.  To David.  I mean, ‘Hey David, Josie said that you said I was hot while you were both really drunk, wanna fuck?’”

“Oh.  Ha!  No.  Um…  I don’t think you have to say anything.  Just sit next to him next time he comes over.  Put your arm around him while we’re sitting there watching a movie.  Let him get comfortable and you get comfortable and you’ll both lean into it.  Start there.”

I sat on that thought.  David was coming over the next day anyway to catch the premier of the next season of Dr. Who, so I guessed that if she was right, that was as good a night as any.  And I passed the time until the doorbell rang the next day without thinking too much else about it.  Good old lazy Saturdays.  Went for a bike ride.  Took some photos out at the lake.  Turned the tides on Josie in bed that night, much to hers and my delight.

The next day, we were doing the last of some random picking up when David rang the doorbell.  It all came back and I fought to control the blush as Josie went to the door. When I felt in control of myself, I managed a “Hey, David. Welcome!”  He hugged and kissed Josie and gave me the usual awkward hug.

“Evening, guys.  It was my turn for pizza, so I took the liberty of ordering on my way out here.  We all know what everyone likes, anyway.  They should be bringing up the rear any minute.”

“Excellent, show’s almost on,” I said as I plopped down on one side of the couch. Josie sat on the other side, leaving the middle – strategically – for David.  We chattered idly about stuff for ten minutes or so while commercials flashed silently on the screen across the room from us.

“I was telling Josie last night I got that paper into the conference in Moscow.  I get to go to Russia!”  David’s a young professor in genetics, on the tenure track and working his ass off publishing papers.  Even so, he targets conferences in places he’s never been, because, he says, that’s what it’s all about.  I love travel, too, but I don’t want the kind of life he’s living in order to do it.  He loves it, and that’s fine.  Someone ought to.

“Dude, that’s awesome!  When do you go?”

“Mid-September. I’m so just going to give my talk and leave the conference and check out the city.  Bought Russian language CDs today. “

“Well, my album’s off to the distributor.  It’ll be printing in a few weeks.  If it sells like the last one, then we’ll be able to go to Montreal this year.  I’m jealous of Russia, though.”

“Excellent, excellent!  How many copies did you sell of the last one?”

“About thirty thousand or so.  We’re starting to hit it big, or at least we stand a chance.”

At that point, the pizza came, and we settled into that and a round of Newcastle.  Dr. Who came on, and we watched it and all three of us slowly maneuvered our way into each others’ arms as nonchalantly as possible.  It helped that Josie and David were quite used to being cuddly already, and I just had to put my arm around David.  At some point, he and Josie kissed, and I looked over at him.  His green eyes looked meaningfully right into mine, and I shuddered inside at almost deciding to go for broke.  The moment passed, though, when commercials ended. Josie started teasing him gently with her hand, almost absently, later on in the show, I suppose to… lubricate things as it were.  I kept my arm around him and sort of lightly stroked his shoulder.  The next commercial break came and he looked back to me again and this time, I locked his eyes with mine and ran my fingers through his hair.  I could smell his shampoo as I did so.

We sat there looking at each other for several seconds, and the show came back on and we completely ignored it.  Forgot about the pizza.  Forgot about the beer.  I can’t remember David leaning in to kiss me, but I remember his face being like smooth sandpaper and the smell of him being almost disturbingly masculine.  Disturbing, compelling, whatever it was, it held me, and I kissed back with increasing fury.  Josie backed off, watching intently and as she later said, taking notes.

My back was against the side of the couch and he was on top of me when I reached up and pulled off his shirt.  “You’re gorgeous,”

“Josie told you,” David smiled and ran his hands down my chest before leaning into the next kiss.  I felt his hand on my cock through the fabric of my jeans and it felt different from usual.  I can’t even characterize really what it was.   Then I felt a hand on my leg and I briefly opened my eyes and looked past to see Josie half-naked and looking hungrily at me and running her hand along my calf and then over his ass.  I reached down and clasped my hand around his, grinding it into my cock, which now desperately wanted to be out of the jeans.  I reached down and snapped the first and second buttons on his fly and he dropped his kisses down onto my neck, holding my hair back like I’d done Josie’s the day before.

I ran my fingers down David’s stomach and underneath his boxers and for the first time I held another man’s cock in my hand.  It felt so… odd to feel that form in my hand but not be able to feel through it.  He was warm, hard, and damp at the tip, eager for what we were about to get up to.  Josie peeled his pants off while he undid my fly and dragged mine off.  I pulled my shirt over my head, reached to his shoulders, and pushed him back against Josie, His head fell into her lap and she looked down at him and kissed him.  She curled one finger at me and I drew in to kiss her.  “I want to taste him on your breath,” she said in my ear just before she kissed me.

I knelt down at the edge of the couch and ran my fingers along his cock in wonder for just a second longer before finally going down to taste him.  David’s cock leapt up a little when I ran my tongue around its tip, and then I dove in before it could get away from me.  I made up for years of lost time.  He was warm, hard after a fashion, but springy and the taste and texture and smooth skin was all too much and not enough at once.  I tried to take him all the way into my mouth, and had to stop.  He was probably seven inches or so, about like me, and that’s more than it seems when you first look at it.  I wondered if I’d know when he was getting close.  As much as I wanted to taste his cum, I wanted him in me even more.  I went down on him like Josie did me and he arched into every stroke with a thrust, groaning and running his hands in my hair and occasionally reaching up to pet Josie.  And then I felt it.  He was close.   I pulled back to a groan from him, and asked him, “Do you want in me?”

“Oh hell yes.”

Josie pulled our emergency stash of lube out from under the couch and took David’s cock in her hands, coating it and then coating me with a healthy if somewhat cool portion of lube.  When I felt her fingers enter me I arched into it in anticipation and desire both for her and for him.  She laid down on the carpet then and pulled me down own top of her.  “When I say, I want you in me, until then, hold out but lean close”  Her shirt was still on, but her bra was unsnapped and she was completely naked the waist down.  She was so beautiful disheveled like that, dark brown hair scattered across the carpet.  I wanted in her.  I knelt over her.  And then I heard the condom wrapper and seconds later felt his hands on my hips.  “I’ll go slow at first, let me know if it’s too much.”

It wasn’t.  I knew it wouldn’t be.  I’d had Josie’s strapon just days earlier, and as it was I was so ready, and he did take it slowly.  The first thing I noticed was how smooth it felt going in, forgiving, not like even the best made dildo.  I leaned back into it as he hesitated, trying to take more of him.  I reached back and grabbed the back of his thigh and pulled with one hand.  I needed it.  Josie had my cock in her hand and was running it up and down the slit of her vagina.  She was dripping wet.  He pushed.
And then I felt his hips meet my ass and push into them and he was all the way in. It hurt in a good way, comfortable and full and I wanted him there forever, but I wanted to feel him pull it out and push it back into me. He pulled out and thrust in again, and we slowly got into a rhythm.  It felt so wonderful, tingly inside when he filled me at the end of each thrust, and then Josie said “I need you,” and I let the force of his hips push me into her.

Somehow we got the flow right, me leaning up as he pushed down into me and then pushing me down into her.  The feel of her finally pushed me over the edge.  I came as he was fucking me, and Josie and I screamed together.  He didn’t stop, and the force kept me in her even as I was going soft.  I was trembling with the force and sensitivity of having just come and he was still pounding into me when I practically blacked out from the ecstasy. He slowed down and thrust hard as he came.  I leaned up into it, trying to keep the moment for as long as I could.  Then we were all three down on the floor, naked and sweating and kissing and breathing hard.   I held both their hands and we woke up some hours later still there on the carpet.  The pizza was cold.  We ordered another.

Just a quote

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

Comedy and Decorum

Note to readers with sensitive eyes: I realize the comma has made perhaps too prominent an appearance in this particular post. Considering the nature of it, though, I don’t have the energy to edit just now. Please ignore the extra scaffolding. My intentions were good.

Oof.  Just wrote a hard letter to my parents.  Hard because I didn’t want to sound angry, and didn’t want to write things I didn’t mean.

There are two disorders of communication that seem to be prevalent in society.  There may be more, but two’s what I’m counting tonight.  Both have existed for centuries.  One is what I’ll term the Shakespearean Comedy disorder, and we’ve all seen it.  It’s the premise behind the bizarrely unrealistic romantic comedy and the driving factor behind the insane Rube Goldberg Variations (points to the music majors out there who get that) that we call television sitcoms.   Actors on stage and screen play characters who are pathologically bad at revealing important facts, and the facts themselves play a pseudo role as elusive characters who show themselves to the audience, but only at the very end to the players themselves.  This fuels comedic tension which drives the story onward, twisting the audience in their seats and making them laugh and cry, embarrassed for the characters and angry at the situation.  And in the end, the the crux of the comedy is revealed to all, releasing all the pent-up tension in the audience in the form of laughter or at least relief.

Unfortunately, because this always seems to end well in comedies, we have taken the comedic form of communication, which itself is aberrant, and applied it to our everyday lives.  I hear countless people, usually younger people, say this or that straight out of a comedy, like what has to be worn at what dinner, how awful it might be that someone was wearing the same dress as another person, what this person might or might not think about that person, whether or not these two people are getting together, etcetera.  Worse, there are things like birthdays, anniversaries, important dates, things, ideas that are precious to partners in relationships, and I’ve seen people purposely not put them on the calendar or tell their partner, because the partner “should just know.” Imagine their surprise and disgust when the partner turns out not to have been in the know, and misses something important.  Why must we test each other this way?  Why must we experiment on ourselves and see if we manage to resolve the comedy comedically when we all know perfectly well we could just say the things on our minds?  Because this is the decorum of the day.

Which brings me to my second accusation of disease in communication in society.  The myth that “decorum should be preserved at all costs.”  I don’t mean that people should go around making scenes — context is important, but neither should people let the pressure build until they explode.  See, where I come from, people aren’t supposed to talk about certain things, and have to build for years a set of “faces” that they can show in different functions.  Now, there’s a certain amount of this that’s normal and desirable, but the litmus test shouldn’t, in my opinion be “is what I’m about to say unpleasant, or is it going to make someone else uncomfortable?” Rather I think one should ask oneself, “Is what I’m about to say, unpleasant as it may be, necessary or will it prevent further and worse unpleasantness down the road?”  I believe in telling hard truths when the times comes to tell them.  I believe that if a trusted friend or family member says or does something wrong, and by wrong I don’t mean like 2+2=5, but something that injures relationships, hurts feelings for no good reason, or has other direr consequences, the right thing to do is not to “maintain decorum” or “tranquilite” to use the more derogatory French term, but to think what the right thing to say to them is and then say it.

And the thing is, I also build friendships around this principle, and they are strong friendships.  If we build friendships around comedy or decorum, then when those things are broken, the friends may well go away.  I don’t make friends with someone who can’t handle the idea that my brother is now my sister.  I don’t work for someone who can’t handle the fact that I’m an atheist.  I don’t make friends who value me because of my social status or something equally mutable.  I don’t build business relationships based on these things, either.

Now, despite how bad I make it sound, it’s a very natural thing to do.  I think often we build stature for our simulacra more than we build it for ourselves.  We’re concerned with what we need to be president of the company, mayor of the town, a pillar of the community, but people don’t fit easily into these moulds, these abstractions of What it Means to Be Mayor.  So we construct an outside self, a simulacrum that is only part of who we are.  We vest time and energy into it and, and people, even people we may like on the face of it, attach themselves to the simulacrum and call it their friend instead of ourselves.  We think of them as our friends, value them as our friends.

A whole life can pass by without ever having to question the simulacrum.  A whole life can pass by without losing these friends.  But what happens when something we can’t control changes drastically and makes the simulacrum no longer viable? Friends who want the “Old You” leave.  Your church shuns you.  People concerned with their own simulacra shun you in fear of being tainted.  If you thought these people were friends in need, you can be shattered.

Build friendships based on strong communication and trust.   Don’t let your illusions about each other or about manners and decorum get in the way of this principle.

Why is this related to the letter I wrote to my parents?  Sorry, but that’s not mine to share right now.  Perhaps when this is all over, I’ll give a more detailed account of it.

I have gradually gotten to the point where the new year actually means something to me.  As I was growing up, we didn’t really do anything special for New Years, and resolutions were things left to me to either make or not make.  There was no ritual and nothing sacred about the calendar year changing.

This year was the first year I went to The House of Isher for New Years with my partner.  Isher has been running as a new years party for 31 years now.  The same people have been getting together for that long. Of course there are new faces, and there are a few faces no longer with us, but this party has been going since before I was born, just barely.  It happens over the New Years weekend in Kalamazoo, MI.  The people there are all nerds of one sort or another: computer geeks, physicists, mechanical engineers, entrepreneurs, and even a former bookstore owner who now makes her living as an independent marketing consultant.  It’s not a wild and crazy party, but it is a party and a celebration that those of us who’ve made it to the next year have indeed made it, and those who were lost in the previous year will not be forgotten into the next.

For me, the best part was sharing with my partner in something she’d been in love with for years, and finally being there on one of the few holidays that’s really important to her.  We stood atop the only hill in Kalamazoo at midnight and rang in the New Year with fireworks and a song (Oo ee oo ah ah, ting tang, walla-walla bing-bang) on ukulele from one of our best long-distance friends.  It was a lot of laughs, and there was joy without tears, great big flaky snow, exotic food, not-so-exotic food, interesting science, and reading aloud.

I hope to be going there fore many years to come.  The people and the atmosphere are truly special.

Homecoming

New laptop in hand as of about 3pm today.  We’re back from Chicago and hopefully things will be calm for awhile.  Two weeks of vacation spent like Americans spend their vacations — traveling, seeing family, seeing friends, and taking no time off whatseover.  We need a vacation from our vacation, in other words.  I’d write more now, but it’s 1am where I am, and by rights I should be in bed.  So good night all, and happy new year!

Laptop

I don’t really know what to say about it yet, because it hasn’t really sunk in. It’s gone. Stolen, 99% likely from the airport in Charlotte. I didn’t have anything on there I can’t replace except for the last month’s work on my PhD, which I hadn’t backed up because of the sheer volume of data (I deal with large volumes, tens of gigs of data, and it’s not practical to back all that up). Still, the thought that someone else out there has all my stuff that was on there is icky, and the sudden lack of my trusted computer, the first computer that had been definitively *mine* in years (I had many computers, but all of them were ostensibly owned by work) is shocking enough to me that I really don’t have words for it.

And it’s funny, because it’s not like I’m really all that bent out of shape about it. The words I lack aren’t lacking because they’re so dire, dark, angry, or gloomy, but really I can’t decide how I feel about it most of all.

I’m here in Chicago, a city that I have missed, and I’m not about to spend the next few days obsessed over what someone might be doing with my computer, or over the vague ache that I have somehow lost a limb, as despite how very much mine the computer was, it’s nothing that dramatic. People steal things, and I was an easy mark with an obviously valuable article in a busy airport secured by a velcro bag out of which nothing had ever been stolen before. I was an easy mark for my own complacency that my stuff was mine. I’ll be more cautious in the future, of course, locking my bag and encrypting the portion of my harddrive that holds important data like passwords (I’ve changed all my passwords and I’m watching my credit cards and other accounts to make sure they haven’t been compromised).

But I’m here, surrounded by friends and snow, cuddled against my best friend in the world and an elderly, slightly wierd, and very blind cat. I’ve had coffee while walking in a foot of snow in clompy boots. I have tea and cocoa and Pat Rothfuss’s excellent Name of the Wind. So I guess everything’s alright.

Civil Unions

People protested Proposition 8 around the nation on Saturday.  It was wonderful, and I’m sorry I missed out myself.  I hadn’t expected to, miss it, actually, but things conspired against me.

There’s an idea out there, though, that I think should be the eventual goal.  More people are thinking this every day.  End the state-sanctioning of marriage entirely.  I was surprised today to see even Keith Olbermann supporting the idea.  The thing is, as far as I can tell, and people can correct me if I’m wrong, it’s genuinely a good idea.  It’s not a compromise solution.  It’s really a perfect solution.

Why are marriages sanctioned by the state now?  It’s tradition, plain and simple.  Marriage itself is a dually loaded term.  On the one hand, it’s loaded from the religious angle.  Every tradition has its own way to marry people, its own standards on how people become eligible to marry, and its own rituals.  Even the meaning behind marriage is different in different cultures and religions.  And there’s nothing wrong with that, in principle.

The problem comes with it being dually loaded. Marriage also has a legal meaning.  The legal meaning makes marriage a sort of traditional old-fashioned melting pot, where the meaning of marriage is smeared judiciously so that everyone’s idea of marriage can be kludged into a civil partnership that can be recognized and celebrated universally by law.  Rights come with marriage.  Responsibilities come with marriage.  That some of these carry weight of law makes marriage seem like a civil right.  Certainly partnership is a civil right, and I think that eventually, even polyamorous partnership could be seen to be a civil right.

The fact that other countries allow for homosexual marriage simply reflects the fact that in these countries, the legal definition and the religious definition are more separate, and that in general the world tends to be less religious than we are here in America (sorry for my international readers, but this is for the people in my country).  Here in America, that doesn’t work because of the strong ties marriage has to religious ritual and confirmation.  Fine.  So be it.  But that means that the church and state are joined at the hip over the marriage issue, and that needs to stop.

The answer is, truly, civil unions.  For everyone.  Civil unions for some and not others leads to the separate-but-equal starting point, from which we will eventually diverge, granting a right here and there to married couples that civilly-joined couples/triads/etc don’t have.  Say…  fast-tracking adoptions for traditionally married couples.  Or maybe better insurance coverage from private insurance carriers for traditionally married couples, or better fertility treatment coverage.  The divergence will start small, and it’ll be honest at first.  It will seem like a good idea at the time.  And then things will get wildly out of hand, and there will be two classes of partnered citizens, each with their own set of rights and responsibilities.

There’s already precedence for this, and that’s what people don’t understand.  An old professor of mine went to get insurance for himself and his domestic partner when he started working for the university (this was in Illinois).  When he said his partner’s name, they said “that’s a curious name, where’s he from?” “He?  She’s a she,”  At that point, they told him that he had to be married to her.  Domestic partner status was only for same-sex partners.  Opposite sex partners had to be legally married to obtain insurance.

Now, why is that?  What is the point of that complication? It doesn’t do anyone any good.  It makes for more paperwork.  It makes for more uncertainty, and it gives plenty more chance for error, not to mention potential for lawsuits.  Now, because of who I am, I’m inclined to believe that in the rest of the 49 states, for every kind of little nitpicky detail of legal prejudice against unmarried heterosexual couples like that, there will be a dozen against partnered homosexual couples.  It’s not even necessarily that people will try intentionally to short-sell them.  It’s simply that without everyone being in the same lifeboat, there’s no good reason to stand up for everyone else’s rights.  I’m taken care of, and if I’m most people, my concern stops there.  Others’ rights being unequal might be sad and unjust, and I might even go hold up a placard on Saturday about it, but as an ally, I’m still not in the same camp with the entrenched.

That’s wrong.  Put everyone in the same predicament, and things will get done.

It’s time that we leave marriage to the churches and leave civil declaration of partnership/mutual-interest to the state.  It’s really better for everyone, I think.  Strangely enough, I think it’ll even be easier to achieve.  Oh, there will be one great push against the people who are scared to death that no-one will ever get married again if the state doesn’t require it for taxes, but there are few enough people now for whom taxes are the main motivator.  There will be a great push from people who think that divorce rates will increase and children will get the short-stick, but frankly divorce is already easy enough in this country, and there’s no need initially to change anything about the divorce code or the way children are treated under that code.

But if marriage is no longer a requirement of society, think of how many fewer people that “threaten marriage as an institution” will want to get married.  Hell, I won’t.  My belief system doesn’t really fit with any of the vows that people make in marriage.  My expectations of how to behave as a married person don’t have anything to do with the expectations most of married society has for me.  I’m married, because civil code works for me if I’m married; it’s the easy thing to do.  If I hadn’t married my partner, then for every right and responsibility everyone else in society takes for granted, I would have had to cross all my ts and dot all my is to make sure that our rights were the same as they are now.  I would have had to take the chance that one of us missed something.  Sure, it could be done through strata of contracts and powers of attorne and legal fees.  Or we could just do like we did and pay the $25 license fee, grab a couple of witnesses, and see a justice of the peace.

And doesn’t everyone deserve to be able to do the same?