Vote for the Official Hat of Summer 2012

 

The Official Hat of Summer voting has begun. The polls will be open between now and the official start of summer on the Summer Solstice.
Vote for the hat of your choice in the comments below and I will promise to wear this hat every time I go outside during the summer months.

Same-sex Equality

Credit: The White House

President Obama stated today that he favored same-sex marriages. And it was reported on widely. The president's position has been "evolving" for some time, so he says, but he was motivated to evolve faster than he thought after V.P. Biden announced their own acceptance of same-sex marriage inthe last several days.

So, the president has given high-level support to this controversial subject only months before an election. And while I worry that this may further weaken his re-election chances, I am glad that he has made this statement. Because if you're going to possibly go down, make it be because of clearly stated positions to issues that matter, that are meaningful. And that help determine the better definition of what our country stands for and should be about.

News reports I heard on the way home today said that the president's campaign team has calculated that the people who are against same-sex marriages aren't going to vote for him anyway. And so he won't be losing any potential voters. All the more reason, I guess to put his opinion out there and make it public and begin the debate and make the difference stand for something. Maybe this is a bit like Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln knew that his legalistic definition of who would be freed by this proclamation made no difference to the majority of slaves that lived inside and were held within the rebellious Confederacy. (By law and by fact of ongoing warfare, Lincoln's Proclamation had no reality over those individuals while the war was not yet won.) But it made the war mean MORE than simple rebellion or states rights. It made the debate widen to include the reality of enslavement in a more meaningful way.

So maybe Obama's and Biden's statements will make this important issue become something more than a political maneuver. Maybe it will become the beginning of a new chapter in the civil rights movement that tries to live up to the equal ideals that this country is supposed to uphold.

Because this IS a civil rights issue. Honest, loving people, who want to commit to each other have the right to the same sort of legal equality that I have with Lynda. And I don't get special treatment because I happen to be biologically and socially and culturally attracted to women. For me, that is no more in question than the fact that I walk with a hitch in my gait, that I have crooked teeth, or that I have double vision. It is simply who I am and who I have always been. The people that are attracted to their same gender aren't doing so out of rebellion, for why would so many people knowingly choose to live under the disadvantages and ridicule that our narrow-minded culture is placing upon them at this time? I believe they are simply built that way and so why must they be discriminated against?

I also don't think this is a religious issue. The Bible says many things that applied once upon a time but are less directly relevant to the culture that we live in today. I believe in a God that meets people where they are and wants them to live a better, more honest life in true community with others. God is not in the business of discriminating and I don't know the specifics of what God chooses to believe about each individual person.

As a matter of legislation, it is unfair to deny same-sex couples the rights that I have. They are not inherently worse than I am. They will NOT damage our society any more than the many "traditional" married couples that get divorces ever day. They are NOT significantly different than me.

Let them be.

Shuckin' Corn

Credit: me

  I was preparing tonight's dinner of meatloaf, (sorta-homemade mac & cheese, corn on the cob). Standing over the sink, shucking the corn, I remember my childhood summers shucking wheelbarrows full of Dad's sweet corn, freshly picked.

What brought it back was the flash of anxiety as I prepared to pull down the husks of the first grocery-store-bought ear . . . "What if there is a worm?" I thought to myself.

As a kid, I hated encountering the worms in the tips of occasional ears of corn, tiny little wriggles that had bored into the small, sweet kernels, to the fructose inside. The ate little tunnels on the ears and turned the affected areas of cob into mush that got on your fingers and made you think of death, corruptability, the impermanence of things . . . you know . . .

I found no worms in tonight's corn. But I did find myself reminiscensing about those childhood days. I disliked sitting in the humid summer mornings, shucking (what seemed to be) hundreds of ears of corn, getting my fingers sticky with the sugary sap that oozed out of busted kernels. Using a bristle brush to tease out the silks. Again and again and again.

It seemed tedious, and hot, and something I'd rather not be doing when I wanted to watch TV inside with the air conditioner on.

Now, I'd really enjoy sitting down with mom and my sister to whittle down a barrow full of corn. It would be full, familial, and familiar.

Aimless

(This photo chosen specifically for my friend & colleague, Christine.) Credit: www.manateepower.com

I'm feeling . . . you guessed it . . . a bit aimless tonight.
I'm physically tired, we didn't have an appointment, softball practice, family activity, or other commitment to meet tonight, so we all just sort of got home and have stayed there.
I made an executive decision to not try and do any work tonight either . . . which is not always a problem, but it has been recently and guarantees to become a problem as the months of this year go on. But, for tonight, I just don't have the interest in it.

So, I'm just sort of wandering around the house while everyone is either getting ready for bed, resting, reading (which I forced the older girls to do for a while tonight, as I thought they were spending too much time in front of a screen), or whatever. We're all sort of . . . separate . . . which is not always a bad thing. With five of us in the house, it is sometimes valuable to have your own space, even if only for a little while.

But soon the girls will all be in bed and Lynda will probably settle down for a few hours of work. And I'll continue to ignore my laptop, ignore my half-read books, ignore random things, and just continue to be . . . aimless.

Work has been a combination of impending stress (for what is upcoming) and mind-numbingly tedious (for what is happening now). I so badly want to finish my current task but I am not looking forward to the 3 other things that await me in the immediate aftermath. But such is life in the downsized corporate world of today where those who choose to put up with it are asked to put up with much more of it. Maybe I'll prove to not be good at continuing to do it satisfactorily (assuming I did it that way before now)? Who knows. I just feel like one of we few, we (un?) happy few.

The World's Oldest Teenager No More

When I first heard the news yesterday, I was a bit sad, sure. But he didn't mean as much to me as he did to my parent's generation (or to Ryan Seacrest). But, he was an important cultural figure that helped define and promote the postwar Youth Generation that has come to shape a lot of what modern America is about.

So, he had that going for him.

But what I really though about, of course, was why did Tom do it this time?

Credit: www.hollywood.com

You might have thought that Tom was done. I haven't reported (some say speculated) on his actions in a very long time. Did we both take each other for granted? Maybe . . . but when a high profile target like this one goes, people are going to talk and wonder and . . . well, yes . . . let's just say they are going to speculate.

So maybe Tom is getting ready to flip the DVD sales of Mission Impossible IV: Ghost Protocol into his next project. And maybe he thinks that he wants to do a biopic. And well, why NOT the World's Oldest Teenager. Maybe Tom has acquired some interesting back stories of the real Mr. Clark that no one but Seacrest was privy to. (I'm thinking something along the lines of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, you know?) Maybe Tom knows things, man! And maybe, just maybe, Dick didn't want those things known.

And, well, Dick was already sick you know . . . and Tom's movie idea was just too good. (Maybe it's even good enough for an Oscar consideration, right? And we all know that Tom is still waiting for that Oscar. It should have worked for Jamie Fox as Ray, Tom thinks. But I'm better than Jamie. I'll do it better. I'll get my production company to team up with the old Miramax guys and we'll do it up big time. There's no way they will deny me this time . . . as long as Dick is out of the picture.)

And then . . . well . . .