Author: cheerfulchaotic

digital camera fun

I finally got around to borrowing the digital camera download cable from a friend of mine, and downloaded some of my old lame pics of san fran from july of 2000. I really have to get one of my own.

Then I played around for a bit, and made some actually recent pics of yours truly. They can be found at http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~scu/pics/me and are the ones with filenames that start off “apr11darlington”. Let me know which ones you like, and, if you’ve ever seen me in real life, which ones actually look like me. =)

The state and marriage

My particular take on state involvement in marriage is that it really doesn’t belong there. This is religion’s purview, and as such, not the state’s. The main legal purposes of it, as I understand it, are some power of attorney foo, mandatory support for the spouse, inheritance, custody, and taxes. Secondarily there are health care benefits, but those are breaking into the field of domestic partner benefits.

If all of these (except the taxes) can be accomplished through other avenues, why do we civil marriage?

The mandatory support for the spouse (see alimony payments) ought to be covered under a basic safety net for all citizens (also, we ought to pay house spouses for their labor, rearing the next generation, contingent upon their proper execution of their duties, blah, blah, blah).

I’ve never really understood the motivation for the tax angle.

Power of attorney and inheritance issues can be handled separately (though wills have been overruled by courts before, though I’ve never really understood why)

That leaves custody. And I cannot think of a compelling reason that co-parents must be unrelated individuals of opposite sexes engaged in some romantic relationship, and furthermore, that they must be limited in number to two. Especially given the number of children with only 1 or no parents.

In short, the government should leave marriage to the churches, imho.

Must Give Us Pause

So, I had a couple of stop-and-think-about-it moments today.

The first was with someone who works in a different group from me. I really don’t know him, but I was carrying my new cell phone back from the post office (yay new cell phone, yay lower phone bills), and we got on the subject of accidental dialing, (new phone is a flip up, old phone was not). And he said something about accidentally dialing my mother while making out with my girlfriend. I found it amusing on two levels, and I was laughing, and I thought that not so long ago, I would have felt compelled to inform him that girlfriends weren’t likely for me, but this time it didn’t really matter to me. As a point of ettiquette, not sure quite what “the right thing” to do there is, but I don’t regard it as terribly important.

Shortly after this, as I was walking to grab lunch, I heard the annual “X person died, at age Y in year Z, at concentration camp A” litany. I did some quick math, and figured that by now, the people she listed while I was walking past would be 70-odd years old, those that didn’t die in some other way. I’m not saying that this wasn’t important, and hasn’t had important consequences down the line, but will we continue to mourn untimely deaths when the individuals would have died years ago anyway? What about centuries?

When we harbor the memory of a wrong done to us personally, it’s called keeping a grudge. In light of the recent events in the middle east, well, collective keeping of grudges doesn’t strike me as a solution to our ills.

Transcontinental Biking and my mother

I told my mom about my biking plans, which I shall hereafter refer to as mistake #1.

She is so not about this sort of thing. The first thing she says is “oh, just like Uncle [redacted]” (who had a schitzophrenic break), she then goes on to tell me that it’s not safe, and even though I’m going with a friend (and I said nothing of the sort to her) it’s not safe. She doesn’t provide any sort of backing for it being “not safe”.

Yet strangely, this was the first time in years that I ended a phone call to my mother by telling her I loved her. She was expressing her concern for me in a paranoid sorta way. And for once I felt I was getting equal treatment with my sisters =) And for the first time in years, (on her next phone call) she skipped the “I love you”. It’s weird, but a little more comfortable.

Physical Affection

Back in the old days of my undergraduate career, as some of you know, I was an active brother in Alpha Phi Omega, a co-ed, dry, service fraternity, without a house (we drew in a pretty interesting crowd). It provided what was probably my, and many others’, first real sense of belonging. I was told, and shown, regularly, “We like you, we don’t care if you’re gay.” Partially this was through, affectionate, but decidedly unromantic touch.

My active status in APhiO didn’t even last for a full semester after I initiated, but I still count some of the people I met through it as very dear friends. And I often miss that contact, the touch that doesn’t demand or request, that isn’t sexual, the touch that simply offers affection. It’s a need that I’ve tried to fill through my love/sex life, but it’s not the same. It’s unfortunately rare in my life.