A year ago today we moved to Philadelphia. Hard to believe. Going through that moving process (and then having to move again a few months later) was one of the things that made me confident about marrying Shaun, from a daily-life-compatibility perspective. It was a hard, intense, stressful experience, and we both hated it, but we didn’t hate or resent each other at any point, and I take that as an excellent indicator for our future.

We decided to drive through the night — I think to avoid traffic? So we didn’t get up terribly early in the morning, but when I woke up I went to get the moving truck while Shaun got all his boxes ready to load. Oh, yes, I should also mention that two days earlier Shaun had gotten sick, and when Shaun gets sick (which, thankfully, is rare), he gets a high fever which leaves him completely flattened in bed for a day or so. I’d had visions of having to do nearly all the box-carrying and truck-driving myself, but fortunately he was at least mobile and generally functional by moving day.

We loaded up his stuff, then took a lunch break, then drove to my place to load up all mine. I hated driving the moving truck… driving big vehicles makes me nervous anyway, but the killer was the car-towing rig on the back. When turning I just didn’t know how it was going to move, and when driving straight I couldn’t see it at all, so I just had to take it on faith that the car was still behind me. In retrospect, we should have just gotten rid of the car in Atlanta… it was near breaking down already, and the guy who showed me how to operate the towing rig didn’t fasten it right and did some pretty severe damage to the undercarriage of the car. I don’t think we ever drove it in Philly, so we wasted the money for the rig and whatever fuel usage it added. And the people we were living with somewhat resented its presence in the driveway, and it’s not like we were lacking in other sources of resentment there.

I think we left in the evening sometime. Saying goodbye to Atlanta was sad for me; it’s the city I became an adult in, and I’ve always felt an uptick in confidence and independence just being there, with all the associations it has for me. Then, too, we were leaving a place where I had a strong network of old friends, and going to a place where I knew nobody. I was excited about the move, but very sad too.

One of the cats pooped about fifteen minutes after we hit the road. I have since learned that he can be relied upon to do this any time I put him in his cat carrier. Fortunately I had put pads down in the crates and brought along extras, so I could just change the pad out the first time we stopped. This was the first time I’d moved with pets, and I was anxious about that. George wanted nothing more than to curl up in his crate and pretend this horrible thing wasn’t happening to him, but Paz wanted to get out and explore, and after a while we let him. I was very nervous about letting him get to the driver’s side, but Shaun said not to worry about it — until he walked across the dashboard right in front of Shaun’s line of sight and Shaun shouted “Get him down! Now!” and it was all very scary for a few seconds, and then I pretty much made Paz stay on my lap and look out the window.

We stopped in Columbia, SC for a break: Shaun and I have a very similar philosophy on road trips, which involves taking prolonged stops in cities you drive through, and trying to get right into the center of the city instead of just stopping at a Cracker Barrel on the outskirts. So we each had one beer, and walked around for a while. I had a little bit of a hunger crisis, because the kitchen of the bar we went to had just closed, and there wasn’t a lot open at that time of night, and I was in that state where I’m too hungry to be rational and couldn’t stand the thought of eating pizza or a pita wrap, and was near tears because I was so hungry but couldn’t find appealing food, and I’m sure the stress was a contributing factor too… and then we spotted a street vendor and I had a kielbasa and it was the most delicious thing ever, and happiness was restored. And I got excited about moving to a city that has street vendors.

We actually did sing the entirety of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Somebody called us in the middle, I forget who, but when we were done chatting we picked up where we’d left off. Shaun suggested doing 999 Bottles next, but I said NO.

At some point in the wee hours of the morning we stopped for fuel and there was an issue with Shaun’s debit card (I think the problem turned out to be that he’d used it so many times in so many states that day). That was a definite low point, as we were both exhausted and had a very low tolerance for frustration. I just had to remind myself, “Of course we’re frustrated and unhappy: we’ve been driving all night after a day spent loading furniture, we have hours left to go, and one of us is sick. Life Overall is not horrible, just this particular moment of it.”

Things picked up quite a bit, of course, when the sun rose and we had less than two hours to go. And Shaun, who had been pining for his home city pretty much every day since I’d met him, was very happy to be there, and my general “new place! new things!” excitement was considerably augmented by my knowing how happy he was.

On the down side, we still had all of our earthly possessions to unload before we could rest. The bed was at the very back of the truck, which I had very mixed feelings about: I wanted nothing more than to lie down RIGHT NOW, but I knew it would be better to get the unloading over with before we slept, and I also knew that I would never have had the motivation if there’d been an option not to. (Shaun probably would have, because he’s much better about the “work now, rest later” thing than I am, so then I probably would have resented him for making me work, instead of accepting it as an inevitability. So, bed at back of moving truck: good plan, would use again.)

Then we slept into the afternoon, which was amazingly wonderful. Then we got up and left the house to begin exploring our new neighborhood… where, as it turned out, we lived for less than three months. I had my very first pizza steak (which is a cheesesteak with marinara and which exceeded my expectations for deliciousness.) We made plans to eat at all the tiny authentic-looking Ecuadorian and Vietnamese and Korean restaurants, very few of which we actually fulfilled. Life now is very different than we thought it was going to be, that day. Mainly awesomer. Also more expensive, and with the sting of resentment and broken relationships attached to a couple of people… but mainly awesomer.

Happy anniversary, Philadelphia! I like you a lot, and I think we should stay together. How about you?

Several years ago, when I was frantically catching up on all the information on sexuality I avoided learning in my youth, I discovered Savage Love. I read through every single archived column, and then went back and did it again. It was around that time that I started to think, “This human sexuality stuff seems pretty endlessly fascinating to me… perhaps I will devote my career to it?” So now I’m about a third of the way through a M.Ed in human sexuality. It’s still early days, but I’m very happy with that decision so far.

So now I want to share the riches of my extensive knowledge. Got a question about sexuality? Ask away! If it’s a factual question, I either know the answer or know how to find it (or can tell you “we don’t know yet, but here’s the fascinating history of the investigation so far!”) If it’s advice, well, as Dan Savage points out, the only qualification necessary to give advice is having been asked for it. I will disguise any personally-identifying information, and I will be nice to you: as much as I enjoy Dan Savage’s caustic style, I’m constitutionally incapable of emulating it.

I’ll run the feature from one to three times a week, depending how many questions I get and whether I have a paper due. If you have a question email me: lirelyn at gmail dot com.

This morning, while Wes was driving me to work, we ended up behind a beat up Toyota Camry with tinted windows.  The bumper was adorned with the following stickers:

“Other than ending slavery, fascism, and communism, WAR never solved anything!”

“Travel the world.  Meet new and exotic people and KILL them.”

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of anyone who threatens them.”

Then, on his gas tank, “Planet Fitness”.

My initial response was, “Oh lord, are you kidding me?  I would like a bomb to drop exactly on top of that douche right now.”  Wes said, “I can’t believe he has those stickers on a Camry.  Should it be an F150 or something?”  He went on to comment that this guy’s penis must be super huge.  Like whoa.

I have thought a lot before about the things that people choose to put on their cars.  It is such an odd communication method.  You have very little space to put something that strangers will see for a fleeting moment.  Based on this fleeting impression, people will make judgments about what kind of person you are.  In the world of Bumper Sticker Communication, the answer people usually come to is “hippie” or “douchebag”.

In the case of this guy, I’m fairly certain that “douchebag” totally applies.  I would even go as far as saying “ignorant douchebag”.  Wes and I decided that the first sticker was the best because it was completely incorrect.

Yes, the Civil War resulted in the ending of the institution of legal slavery.  I won’t deny that.  However, I wouldn’t say that war “ended fascism” as there are still fascist dictators all over the place.  The best, by far, though is the idea that we “ended communism”.  First of all, the Vietnam War didn’t go well for the United States.  I wouldn’t really list that as a WIN.  And no, this is not me being liberal and saying that nobody wins in a war.  I mean, we lost horribly and didn’t achieve our goals (could it be because those goals were not particularly defined?  PERHAPS).  In addition, communism fell in the former Soviet Union after a decades long Cold War.  We didn’t bomb the shit out of them until they relented.  The two countries just sat there with missiles pointed at each other for 40 years, running drills about how school kids should get under their desks when the bombs start to fall.

I remember when I first started working at my current job.  I asked my boss why we didn’t purchase materials (at the time) from one of my former employers.  My boss explained that a couple of years prior the president of my company whipped his schlong out on the table and the sales guy from the other company did the same and they sat there and compared whose was bigger (metaphorically, of course).  Apparently, the president of my company won that contest.  Anyway, this is how I see the Cold War.  It really shouldn’t have had war in the title.  It should have been called the 40 Year Paranoid Dick Size Comparison Contest.

So, I wouldn’t really say that war solved any of those things (with the exception of possibly slavery since the Emancipation Proclamation came out of it…but I would argue that the institution of slavery was only the beginning of the mess and that we still haven’t solved the problem of racism which is what slavery was all about).  I feel like the bumper sticker doesn’t really communicate the proper meaning of the word “solve”.  “Solve” indicates that a problem no longer exists after a certain action was taken.  But I digress.

The second sticker cracked me up because it is one of my dad’s favorites.  It’s something he often says whenever the subject of the military comes up.  I probably don’t have to tell you this, but we are not a military family.  At one time, a brief time, I considered doing ROTC at school for pretty much one reason: I was feeling horrifically undisciplined and thought it would be good for me to do something so ridiculously unrelenting and rigidly regimented to get me in shape and get my mind organized. After a little bit more thought though I realized that I would have to give up something major to be able to think that way.  I would have to check out, at least partially, to do whatever my CO would tell me to do…especially if it involved killing people for a reason I didn’t fully agree with or understand.  I knew that doing ROTC would mean being in the reserves for a certain amount of time after school, and seeing that Shock and Awe occurred on my 22^nd birthday, I would have been screwed and horrified.

But the military mindset seems to come down to a combination of the 2^nd and 3^rd bumper stickers.  Our Constitution and way of life is being threatened (so they tell us), so we have to go off to interesting places and kill the inhabitants because the inhabitants won’t just surrender (though they should because America is better).

I know, I know.  I sound like such a hippie, and that’s fine.  I am not a pacifist.  In a lot of ways, I think that the Civil War and World War II had many necessary elements.  It is unlikely that the institution of slavery would have gone away with just a bunch of talk.  It is also unlikely Hitler would have thought better of killing all those Jews (and others).  He had a mission and he had convinced many in his country that his mission was just.  Diplomacy would not have stopped him from carrying it out.  But since then, none of the conflicts have been just nor have they made much sense.  As a member of the American public, you only get parts of the story.  As a member of the military, you get even less of the story (unless you are particularly high ranking).  The military preys on the poor by promising them access to things that more privileged people have (education, medical care, respect) and then once it has them, it leaves them in the lurch when they can’t kill effectively enough anymore.  The treatment of the soldiers who returned home during the most recent war in Iraq reminded me of horse or greyhound racing.  “Oh, I’m sorry, you were unable to catch the rabbit fast enough today.  Bye bye.”  The difference is that there is no gun to the temple. The gun is replaced with lousy veterans’ care and denial of PTSD.

Promises of great things can do away with skeptical thoughts for those who are approaching desperate.  A few months ago I was driving behind another car that had the following bumper sticker:

“My Marine can pick off your honor student for 30 clicks”

Doesn’t that just explain it all?  It fully admits the stereotype that good soldiers are not book smart and suggests that this is the way it should be.  “While your kid is learning useful information and going on to bigger and brighter things with the power of his brain, my kid is shooting and killing people from far away because the government told him to.”  Skepticism and reason have no place in this mindset.  When the General says jump, you ask how high. When he says kill, you ask how painfully and how fast.  To ask anything else is to be a traitor to your country.  You cannot question and be patriotic at the same time.  If you know too much about the world around you, it may be incredibly difficult to participate in its decimation.

In the ideal world, there would be no need for militaries, obviously.  But that ideal will not be achieved as long as people (and therefore governments) embrace irrationality and faith.  A people must be able to and must want to question their governing bodies.  We can’t just support the invasion of foreign lands and the killing of people just because they say so.  THEY MIGHT BE LYING BECAUSE THEY WANT A WAR (Remember the Maine).  I know that the ideal is not achievable, but I would be happy with an ask questions first model as opposed to what we currently have.

When I see a car like the one I saw this morning, one laden with stickers showing that the person inside blatantly misunderstands history, the underlying concepts that led to the founding of this country, and a complete disregard for the autonomy of other humans, I just can’t help but wonder what they’re really doing.  Clearly the guy is military, but if you don’t give a shit about people then what are you fighting for?  Aren’t you just a government sanctioned murderer at that point?  If you think it’s a joke to go off and kill exotic people, and think that multitudes of people in your own country aren’t as worthwhile ultimately, why should I support or care about you?  Why should I respect you?  Because you’ve got balls?  Asking questions and defending a position in the face of ignorant hate mongers takes just as much courage as pulling a trigger from 30 clicks…if not more, because depending on where you are when you’re challenging that ignorant hate monger, that gun could be pointed at you.

So yeah, likely douchebag sighted this morning.  As for the “Planet Fitness” sticker, I bet he can totes bench press 3 terrorists…on the point of his bayonet.

Wait…no one uses bayonets, do they? How about a musket? No? Too colonial?  Crap.

*Insert Minute Man joke here*

Thank you, and Good Day!

I occasionally peruse wordpress blogs to see if there is anything worth reading in the religion section, and occasionally I find something worth commenting on.� Often, it is a derisive comment, but sometimes I run into something worth paying attention to.

So just now I ran into a post entitled Why it’s OK to hate religion, and liked not only what he had to say, but how he said it.� Take a look, and if you like what you see, subscribe (like I did).

 

Yesterday I got onto my last train to get home after work.  I only ride it for one stop, so I was only on it for a couple of minutes.  When I got on, I stood in the door opposite the exit side.  Two men were standing on the exit side having a very lively conversation that I, of course, came on in the middle and because the train was noisy, I could only hear a few things here and there.  I don’t normally eavesdrop…at least, I don’t make a point of it when out (eavesdropping was how I got a lot of my on the job training for my current career and we don’t particularly have any rules against it in our home.  In fact, we encourage each other to pay attention to what’s going on at any given time, so yes, I am basically always listening in general), but this conversation caught my ear.

One of the men looked pretty young, possibly in his early 20’s.  The other looked older, probably in his mid to late 30’s.  The young man was explaining that there had been just too many things that the church he used to belong to was doing that was against things that are non-negotiable.

Before I heard the next part, I just assumed that the young man was explaining how he lost his faith, how he was an atheist now or something.  Then the older man said,

“Yeah, I mean, their whole elder structure was totally not even biblically correct.  It’s the Bible!  How are you going to argue with that?”

“Exactly,” said the young man, “You don’t go against the Bible.  I’m going to trust in God and you’ve got to do what the Bible says.  So, I left the church.”

I was astounded; not because it turned out that while these men had generally been so offended by their church that they left, but remained faithful, but because I am still so unaware of the reach faith has everywhere and how most people do not just leap from “My church is full of it” to “and so is religion”.

After I got off the train, I made a stop at the market near the station.  There were long lines and so I was idle for a while.  A group of people who vaguely knew each other were saying hello and after a couple of minutes they were asking each other what church they go to…and they all had an answer.

I continue to be impressed by how skewed my vision of all this is.  Even though I now know (finally) that atheists certainly do not make up the majority of the American public, I still have this lingering sense that most people still don’t really believe.  But lately I’ve had quite a bit of evidence that this is not the case at all.

But perhaps it is all about identity.  How important is the actual belief and practice of belief to most people versus simply calling yourself a person who believes?  When I was growing up and generally surrounded by a whole host of odd things, I suppose I believed in them to a certain extent.  I think it was always a sort of tongue in cheek belief though.  Astrology was not something that I defined myself by.  Sure, I liked a lot of the qualities that are classically assigned to Aries people and liked to believe that I exhibited them.  Even moreso, my mom had this book that talked about each individual day of the year and what a person born on that day is like and man oh man was mine good.  My birthday is the last page in the book and because the year is cyclical, people born on my birthday were supposedly the most evolved…somehow.  Talk about ego stroking.  But all the while as I was reading it, I knew that it was ego stroking.  When I finally let go of all of that, I don’t remember it being horrible and I didn’t feel emptier because of it.  I hadn’t lost community because of it.  My identity remained unchanged (if not a little stronger without all the woo woo stuff getting in the way).

Spirituality was never honestly part of what I considered as my identity.  Wes reminds me that I used to believe and I was resistant to forsaking it completely, but whenever I finally did I felt better for it.  It’s how I feel whenever I get rid of something that effectively closes my mind or stops me from being the ultimate person who I want to be.  Each layer gets cast off and I feel freer.

But religion is a very different thing.  Many are indoctrinated into it from a very young age.  Their impression of themselves is built around it.  If they have reason to doubt their faith, they have reason to doubt themselves.  And if they make the step of leaving everything of faith behind, they are also leaving behind the entire world that they knew.  So I guess it makes a lot of sense why leaving a particular church doesn’t immediately lead to leaving faith altogether.

I had a friend who was going through a major crisis of faith a few years ago.  I couldn’t understand why it was a crisis.  I looked at not being able to believe anymore as some kind of gift he was giving himself.  I thought it should be a happy occasion, “You’re free now!”  But I couldn’t possibly understand.  I have never lost something so fundamental to my sense of self.  Apparently, I have a bit of atheist privilege…something I didn’t even know you could have.

Ginny is an excellent source for me to start to understand what this is like as she has gone through (and continues to go through) this very thing.  It is a world that I have been so far removed from that I still don’t really get it.  I have discovered that my identity is pretty fluid.  I change things, I accept others, I evolve, but I generally always feel like myself.  I have sometimes felt a small sense of loss when friends and I don’t really relate anymore, but it isn’t ever that painful because the people close to me are rocks that keep me grounded in all of it.  I have never been abandoned by anyone or anything that really mattered…and I’m starting to see that this is a privilege and a rarity as well.

I wasn’t raised with having newspapers around regularly.  My parents were NPR listeners.  My friends and my grandparents, however, did get newspapers everyday and I would look forward to visiting with them because I would get to look at the comics section.

Looking back, I don’t know how many of the comics I actually thought were funny.  I must have been amused to some extent, but I can’t honestly say that I really looked forward to Hagar the Horrible or anything.  As a kid I probably just liked the pretty colors on Sundays (thanks God! I’ll be reading that instead of going to church!) and was happy when I got the joke.  Needless to say, I generally skipped Doonesbury, because that shit never made sense to my kid brain.

But for all the comics that I enjoyed (even if just a little bit), there were a few that I despised.  Don’t get me started about how idiotic “Family Circus” or “Ziggy” is.  Still, the cute drawings/bright colors could keep me from becoming completely irate.  One comic, however, could not be tolerated.  That comic was “Cathy”.

I just couldn’t understand how anyone would ever even talk to this woman if they could help it.  Cathy was that coworker that end up talking to while waiting in line for food at the company picnic.  The conversation goes something like this:

Coworker: Oooooh…are those RIBS?!?

You: Yes.

CW: Oooooh, I just love RIBS.

You: Yes, ribs are good.

CW: Oh, but I can’t have any.  They’re just so fatty!

You: I guess.

CW: Oh, but they just look SO GOOD! I really want some ribs.

You: Then I suppose you should have some ribs.

CW: BUT THEY’RE SO FATTY…

You: …

CW: Well, I guess I can have one…and just work out really hard at the GYM!  I’M SO FAT!

You: …

You’ve had that conversation, right?  No?  That’s just my coworkers?  I think you’re lying because television, and the existence of Cathy indicates that this is what women are like.  I mean, we’ve just got so many issues!  According to Cathy, a woman’s daily existence consists of waking up and almost dying without coffee, going to work where you and your female coworkers are all the same (OMG RIBS!) and all the men ignore you.  Then in your free time, you go and feed a hopeless addiction to shoe buying and crying about how swimsuits JUST DON’T FIT.  Then you have dinner wherein you overeat and then feel bad about it and then hide in the bathroom eating chocolate (CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE! ACK!).  Somehow you land a boyfriend and you then spend your days hiding everything about who you are in a desperate attempt to keep him (hence eating chocolate in the bathroom).

And then you die.

Thank goodness for that.  Am I right?  I was quite happy to hear that Cathy kicked the bucket.  What a gift to the next generation!

Side note: Yes, I’m ranting about these things, but I do acknowledge that things like body image, forever seeking a way to be thinner and younger, feeling insecure are all very real issues that people have (myself included)…I just find cheap humor based on the Stereotypical Female to be aggravating.

So, why am I talking about this?  Well, today I, along with Jessie, was involved in a photo shoot for a project called Girls and Ice Cream.  Basically, it was a calendar’s worth of ladies, each one representing a different ice cream flavor.  For instance, I was lemon and Jessie was cookies and cream!  The group of women was made up of people of all shapes and sizes.  The point? To illustrate the beauty and fun of women when they are allowed to simply be who they are.

Leading up to the shoot, we gave our preferences for which flavor we would like to be.  I picked lemon, not because I am such a huge fan of lemon sorbet, but because I felt that the flavor fit my sarcastic personality.  Also, I like bright colors and it seemed like the most “classic pin up” flavor for me.  After we got our flavors, we were basically told what time to show up.  We were encouraged to bring our own costume and makeup ideas.  We had a huge amount of creative input with our shoots.  In fact, most people brought their outfits, said, “I was thinking this” and the photographer said, “Oh wow! Awesome.  We’re going to do that.”  There is something completely empowering and exciting about being able to be sexy on your terms and be rewarded for it.

What do sexy woman-of-any-size positive photo shoots and Cathy have in common? Nothing.  That’s something that made me so happy about the shoot.  Instead of an event lamenting how we are close to powerless to stop ourselves from eating evil, fattening ice cream, we were instead representing ice cream.  We were claiming it!  I have rarely met a person who doesn’t like ice cream.  It makes people happy, and I would much rather be associated with literally being it, rather than have it be some sort of horrible tempter sent to make us less acceptable for human consumption.