doit, doit now!

Here’s a very nice article by Mike Alvear on how the Iowa gay marriage ruling will strengthen heterosexual marriage. It touches on how homophobia affects everyone, gay and straight alike.

I have slept with a fan since I was a baby, and I find it hard to sleep without the comforting sound it makes. However sometimes when I travel I can’t bring a giant box fan with me and then I end up searching for a fan noise online to buy and then play on my laptop so I can sleep. I just discovered SimplyNoise.com, and I love it. It’s super-simple, and lets you generate white, red, or pink noise. I find red noise to be the best, but YMMV. Neat.

Marriage has already been redefined. We’re just waiting for the laws to catch up to reality.

So in my last post I posted a letter my cousin wrote to me after I got married. As you might imagine after reading it, I was livid, and I weighed on whether or not to answer him. I decided I should. I am not one to take being called a sinner lightly, especially by another sinner, Mr. Glass House. My (long) response, after the jump:

Update 12/17/2008 02:25 AM: I have also decided to license of this letter (perhaps presumptorily) with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License. Details are at the bottom of the post.
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One of my cousins felt compelled to write me after I got married and tell me what his understanding of the Catholic Church’s position on gay marriage is. I found it considerably offensive even though it was couched in the language of “Christian love.” I took his name out to protect the not-so-innocent. His letter follows after the jump:

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Kevin pointed out that I hadn’t yet posted that I am getting married on my blog.

So I am posting it: I am getting married on October 4th, 2008, to Jonathan Scott Taylor, the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.

I love you, JT.

My sister is pregnant! I am being the gay uncle and buying lots of things for Cora (my unborn niece’s proposed name). Thus far I have bought a ridiculous number of bibs (including a bib with the Gerber Baby sporting devil horns on it), a rattle, and a spoon with a plastic plane attached to it (to play airplane with baby food). I bought the plane in blue and told my sister that I wasn’t buying pink crap and shoving gender stereotypes down the kid’s throat. She replied “No pink crap!”

Here’s a pic of us before Molly got preggers.

So my friend Andy Hill and I went to Minako Organic Sushi for dinner the other night. Minako is my favorite restaurant in the world. It’s run by my friends Judy/Minako and her mother, Yoko. Judy, who used to work in the music industry (she will kill me for writing that), runs the floor and Yoko runs the kitchen. I call it the Japanese Laundry. It takes a long time to eat there and the food is exquisite. It’s also on Mission between 17th and 18th, which is essentially crackwhore central, and the street is thick with crazy drug addicts.

As we are wont to do, we closed the restaurant. Yoko came out and poured us some sake and started telling us the most absurd and funny story. She said that a (male) Yakuza came in to the restaurant a while back wearing pink pants and talking on a Hello Kitty cell phone. She said he was very quiet and normal and friendly.

But then he started telling her that he was smuggling cocaine and heroin stuffed inside of a condom stuffed inside of a condom stuffed inside of a condom, apparently because then dogs can’t smell them. She also mentioned he was putting them inside sushi fish or something like that (in which case I imagine the dogs really can’t smell them). But then she said he went outside and a bum panhandled him and he karate-chopped the bum! And she actually said “Hi-ya!” in her adorable Japanese accent. I just about lost it. Granted, I had had a lot of sake at this point, but the mental image of a pink-panted Yakuza karate-chopping a panhandling bum was just a little much for me at the moment.

Plus I have had this picture of the Japanese man with the pink bear gun sitting around on my hard drive for a long time and this was a perfect opportunity to use it.

Sadly, this breakup threw me into severe acute depression, and it’s just now I am feeling a little like myself again.

I had lunch on Monday with Carol Lin, a former CNN and ABC anchor who has the distinction of being the first reporter to break the story of 9/11. (She is also friends with my friend Jason Bellini… Very small world. In one of email exchanges she said “Oh I love Jason! He picked me up in Kosovo and drove me to Macedonia.” How often do you get emails like that?). Her husband passed away from cancer at a young age and now her mother has it. When she found out her husband had cancer she decided that she was going to stop working and become his caregiver. Since his unfortunate passing she has decided that she wants to be a force for change in the world of cancer (and chronic disease in general). She’s a very motivated and passionate individual.

We were meeting over the possibility of me helping her out with a new venture she is trying to create. We got along great. After the technical and business discussions finished we began to get a little personal. At one point she started getting visibly and softly upset and said that in the midst of all of her sadness she one day realized that she just had to wake up every morning and choose happiness. She said it was work but that she had to choose it every morning.
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