Gay Agenda Revealed!

I know, I'm not supposed to go public with these sorts of tribal secrets, but nobody really reads my blog, so I figure it's probably okay.

Here's the short version, courtesy of Beth Quinn:

Be left alone and not get the crap beaten out of us.

Do normal things, like get married and raise kids.

Hold down a good job and have health insurance for the whole family.

Grow old together and develop a bit of a paunch or big butt from a few too many marvelous dinners.

Stop having whom we share our bed with be of any interest whatsoever to anyone.

Urge those lovable homophobic pseudo-Christians to discover Jesus' true message.

Works for me.

Not Just for Inflight Reading

I often get a copy of Harper's or The Atlantic at the airport on the way out of town. Great reading, and less weight to haul around than the multiple books that are inevitably stowed in my luggage.

I'm thinking I might want to snag this issue a little early.

Wanna Buy A Vowel?

Or a consonant, for that matter? As it turns out, they're all free. Spelling with flickr can be a weirdly addictive testimony to the strong and simple magic of the alphabet:



If you want to see YOUR name (or any other text) "flickr-ized," you can try your hand at it over here.

How Is It Possible

This afternoon I ordered something from an Ebayer in Augusta. New Jersey. How is it possible that despite having lived in New Jersey for almost ten years now, I am still hearing about towns in the Garden State that are news to me?

My sister had yet another "vacation = illness" experience. And yet, to hear her tell the tale, it was one of her best trips to FL yet. How is that possible?

And finally, how is it possible that the young fellow pictured below is now capable of riding his bike to school?



Guess it's time for me to expand my sense of the possible.

Say a Prayer

T said to me, "You should look at a picture." Because she knows that I get virtually all my news from the radio and the blogosphere. And she was right. Some things you just really need to see. This is simply heartbreaking.

Guy Conger

Guy was literally the boy next door. Before the Prikopas moved in, Guy was my main man in the neighborhood. Together we plotted to kill his little brother and talked about what we would steal if we could. We were sneaky and mysterious and up to no good together. Guy was the first and so far only person I ever got into a real fight over. (Someone played that mean seesaw trick on him of getting him up high in the air and then stepping away to let him crash down; I rushed the perpetrator and bloodied his nose.)

I have no idea where Guy went. When his family moved away, I was too young to even ask why. I didn't know yet about the work that keeping track of people represents. I also don't know where Alan Cooke, my first boyfriend (not a typo) went. Or Ashton whatshisname, for that matter.

More importantly, where are Anne Bailey, Monica Russ, and MJ Warrender now? For some reason I'm thinking tonight about people I've lost track of.

Word Cloud

Love me, love my word cloud. These are an interesting reflection of what's going on at any given point in time; if I took a word cloud snapshot of my site once a month for a year, I wonder what that would look like. Would I find out the secrets I keep even from myself, or would I learn, finally, that I've settled into some pretty serious ruts?

(Added later: Hey, if you use del.icio.us (and you should, man), Oliver Steele has a cool app that gives you a window on your tags over time here. Bonus points for naming it Expialidocio.us)

What's Playing

Indigo Girls' Least Complicated (from Swamp Ophelia, 1994)

Jackson Browne's acoustic remix of "Lives in the Balance" (PC/Windows here, Mac/Quicktime here), from Jackson Browne Solo Acoustic Vol. 1.

Three5Human's "Black Rock Queen" (playing only in my head; don't own the CD yet)

Indigo Girls' Get Out the Map (from Shaming of the Sun, 1997) (Did I mention we just went to an Indigo Girls concert Monday night?)

Dar Williams' Echoes (Real Audio | Windows), from My Better Self (2005)

Holly Cole (Pretty much all of her stuff. Why oh why won't she come and sing Stateside? Okay, don't answer that.)

Judith Owen's Lost and Found (again, all of it)

Okay, Laura and Kim and Jessie & Stacey and Scott, you're tagged for seven songs from your playlist. Someday. If you have a second. And yes, the songs you and your kid are singing without benefit of recorded prompt count. D and I are currently into "Jenny's Got A Bright New Penny."

Feelin' the Love

An inexhaustible river of love runs through our lives. Drink up, and Happy Valentine's Day!

Now I Walk In Beauty

Helen's dad Tony's site is up! I'm looking at our walls and trying to figure out which piece to rotate off so I can make some room for a little of this.

From a Navaho prayer-poem:

Now I walk in beauty
Beauty is before me
Beauty is behind me
Above and below me.

We Are the Ones

Did you watch Coretta Scott King's funeral? I'm so glad I got the tip from Kim in time to tape it.

At the funeral, President Clinton talked about the choice Coretta made the day after Martin was killed. She went back to the struggle for peace and justice.

There's this great song I sang when I was in Anna Crusis. The refrain is, "We are the ones we've been waiting for."

I need soul food to get me through.

There's more here.

A Wiki of Your Very Own

(Warning, this post has a high geek factor. If the thought of wireless access everywhere doesn't make you drool, you might want to just surf on by.)

There are lots of things I love about the internet. EBay for Legos. Opportunities to connect with people who share your interests. Reducing waste by Freecycling. Etc. etc.

But my latest kick is the availability of free wikis. If you don't know what a wiki is, the most successful example is probably the amazing Wikipedia. Wikis are sites that enable mutiple people to alter their content, and now, thanks to folks like those at PBWiki, YOU could have a wiki of your very own.

I'm just starting on mine, so I won't share it with you quite yet, but to get an idea of the possibilities, you could check out a list here. Obviously some of these ideas are ones that you wouldn't want to make public or editable by anyone but you, but as the wiki owner, you'd have control over those aspects. Okay, that's it, end of geeky gushing.

Disclaimer: In writing this post, I am qualifying for an automatic doubling of my storage space on my PBWiki. Which I plan to make use of. Any day now.

Older Is Better

What's the deal with the "I only have a cell phone" craze? Do you people really have so little regard for the audio quality of your conversations that you're willing to put up with sketchy cell reception indefinitely? What? Could you say that again? Wait a sec... can you hear me now?

It seems like we finally got phones right, only to do away with them.

We have a princess phone. We love it. It's an original, and we had to do some serious hunting to find it. It rings, it's red, and we're never giving it up. So there.