I claim this journal in the name of Queen Isabella Crankypants

+ I'm pleased with what I've done on my site so far
+ Meg is walking much better!
+ greenhouse is getting awesome again, and it's warm enough out to put some things on the porch
- I'm worried (often) about what happens if/when my job goes away. I'm not anywhere near confident of getting another one yet, and all my attempts to be happy with what I have and what I can do have an undercurrent of "this only works as long as I have money to eat and keep my house a comfortable temperature"
- hernia hurts, and I feel like I'm getting closer to surgery. I don't want to face it, but I also don't want to end up with it being an emergency
- not sure what's wrong with my butt
+ butt hurts less than it has. it's up and down, but it hasn't been bad enough that I can't sit for a reasonable length of time in several days.
+ meg was able to use the arm bike today, which is a new direction for her shoulder
- I MISS ZOOMY!!!!!!!!!!!!
- I miss Jeanneane. In an immediate sense maybe not more than I miss zoomy, but that's only because zoomy was a daily thing for awhile. I miss Jeanneane in a bigger way (duh).
- I don't feel like I'm giving anything these days. Yeah, I'm still paying to support people, and I'm getting meg to appointments, etc. but time and money isn't what I'm talking about.

There's this idea rattling around in my head about breaking out of patterns. I want to have it all sorted out into a brilliant essay before posting, but if I go for that I'll never say anything at all. I'm never sure which direction I want to go with describing it, or how to make it clear how profound this little idea is for me...so I'm just going to babble and hope there's English in there somewhere.

It's one of those obvious things which is maybe not so emotionally/viscerally obvious. (like something is better than nothing.) Today's big new idea is..."Do something different." By that I mean a bunch of very different things, but I think it's mostly about changing thought patterns and reactions rather than trying new flavors or whatever (though that kind of thing can be important). None of this is a new concept, and yet I feel like the idea in my head is new, and having a mantra to go with it helps me own it and actually use it (it's the economy, Stupid!). So far it's been about noticing little things that lead to things I don't like, and hoping that doing something different enough times will lead to somewhere else. In a way it's related to the above-mentioned earlier epiphany, in that I'm not getting bogged down in trying to figure out what the "right" thing is, because that's a distraction from just trying something *else*. If I notice I'm doing a non-useful thing, or that I'm doing something not obviously wrong which nevertheless puts me on a path to something I'd rather change, I just want to do something new instead of getting caught up in analysis. Not that I won't endlessly think about the implications later...but in the moment, do something different. The important thing for me is that I'm not expecting any particular outcome by doing x instead of y, other than perhaps not ending up where I always end up.

I've been kind of avoiding examples because I don't want to attach this only to specific things, but...ok, ignore that "but", because I just deleted several paragraphs of examples and digressions. Maybe I can come up with useful examples later.

There's a car commercial which claims a person has 3,000 thoughts a day. If they'd said "hour" I still wouldn't believe it's that low, but at least it would be *approaching* something reasonable. Even if you discount any thoughts you have while sleeping, and also count only active thoughts which arrive in your head as full sentences and ignore the constant background of "hungry, laundry, that guy has a nice smile, random wordless sexual thought, I wonder where I left my gloves, what a pretty skirt, sunshine, rhamphorhynchus is spelled funny, what kind of flower is that, banana, how does that thing work, I should check my email..." I STILL don't believe you can get down to one thought every 20 seconds (I was about to say "unless you're in a coma," but really I don't believe it in that case either). If you could, meditation would be a breeze (and pointless, I might add) instead of being something that takes practice and discipline and is still nearly impossible.

eta: this is also why I roll my eyes when I hear of studies which have determined that a person has 10 thoughts about sex in a day, or some such. I'm pretty sure I have more than 10 thoughts about *giraffes* in a day. There is just no way to measure such a thing. I don't remember who told me they measure by having you click a counter every time you think of sex...which made me literally LOL, since of course that would make you think of sex every time you see the counter.

a) I do not know whether I'm going to [party/con/event] in advance. Really, I just don't. I've tried to arrange things so I can make such decisions at the latest possible minute, because making them earlier doesn't actually help. Once I'm in the car, I will *probably* get there, but even at that point I don't promise to make it. So, I don't know. A month in advance, a week, a day, most of the time even an hour: I don't know. For the foreseeable future, that's the only answer you will get, because it's the only one I have.

b) Thinking about potential travel leads to anxiety and makes me feel pressured. *I am not blaming anyone for this*. I'm saying it because I haven't made (most) people aware of the level to which this is true, and it's an important thing for my friends to know about me. The more I think about a possible trip, the more I make myself crazy, and the less capable I feel of actually leaving my house.

So please don't ask; you won't get any information and my ability to go will take a point of damage. I know it's a common thing to ask, and sometimes people will forget that I've made this request, and that's OK. But people can't know this stuff if I don't tell them, so there it is.

[note for clarity: making invitations, offering help, giving information, etc. is not the same as asking if I will be somewhere]

I think a userpic makes it too small to really see, so I'll just post it here.

(those are, of course, fibonacci sequins)

Um. What other purpose would there be?

I'm not saying anything new if I point out that all-or-nothing thinking is what eventually kills most diets (and causes other problem too, but diet is my focus here). Weight Watchers knows this, and they put a lot of energy into telling people it's OK to not be perfect - that going off-plan doesn't mean you have to stay off-plan and you can get back on-plan after you make a mistake. That's great, as far as it goes, and I know that's why WW dieters tend to go farther and last longer than most other plans.

But...I'm noticing that the whole off-plan/on-plan thing isn't actually an escape from all-or-nothing thinking. It's an acknowledgement that no one can be "all" all the time, and it's encouragment to forgive yourself for excursions into "nothing" - both of which are useful. But it's still the idea that there's a good zone A and a bad zone B, with solid boundaries between the two, and the need to travel back to the right place when you stray. I think that whole idea is the biggest part of why it's so hard to "go back" - the thought process that says there's a place to go back to and you're not there right now gets in the way.

I have no idea how to put that in terms that would be useful to large numbers of people, but I'm trying to use it to come up with something useful for myself. There are a bunch of factors involved in choosing food: what it will do to my weight, what it will do to my blood sugar, what my blood sugar already is, how it will taste, what the binge monsters say, how important each of those factors is right now, and how much energy I have to care about each of those (that's assuming that category of factors isn't completely overwhelmed by: what's convenient, what are other people eating, money considerations, time/energy for preparation/acquisition...). So here's my thought: what happens if I consider that combination of things for each meal *completely independent of any other meal*. That's not a radical thought, in theory. But in practice? I don't think that's what people generally do, and I'm sure it's not what I do. I think of this choice as "good" and that one as "bad" and I fall into the trap of thinking "[this or that] is my current way of eating." I make choices based not just on the relevant factors, but also on *which path I perceive myself to be on right now*; often that's the "bad" path because staying on the "good" path is hard work, and it makes no sense to travel back to it if I don't feel like I'm ready to stay there once I arrive. Which means there are many times I might be perfectly capable of choosing healthy foods *now*, but I don't because the healthy choices are way over there in another world I can't conceive of living in. And there are times I end up in a serious binge because instead of giving myself a reasonable treat when the binge monsters started whining, I made "staying on the path" more important, to the point where I exploded.

So what if there were no paths, and no walls between one place and another? What if choosing a salad didn't have to feel like a committment to give up all things that taste good for the forseeable future? What if choosing potato chips didn't have to feel like falling into a pit of badness that I would then have to struggle to get out of? What if the only "plan" were to take all the factors into account and the only "good" was to consider them honestly and come up with what's right for me in the moment?

I don't expect people to memorize this, even if they do plan to adventure with me, but it's useful for me to think out what helps and what doesn't and it might be useful to some of you as well. These things do not apply to every time you spend time with me, but to things I'm doing to push my boundaries and for which you've explicitly signed up to be my support person.

Please don't ask if we can make an extra stop while adventuring (this is distinct from giving me input on what you'd like the adventure to look like before we start, which is fine). To you, "get milk while we're out" is simple and makes sense. To me it's "could you move this one extra boulder with your bare hands?" It will be hard for me to say no. If I do, I'll feel like an idiot for not being able to act like a "normal person" and I'll be discouraged about the outcome of the adventure. If I don't, I'll be pushing myself too hard and reinforcing the idea in my head that everything is too hard.

Be flexible. The sole purpose of adventures is to work my getting out of the house muscles so they don't atrophy. Getting to the destination and/or spending time there is a bonus. If the destination is important to you, please don't offer to be my adventure partner. It has to be *totally OK* to leave after 2 minutes, or to never get there at all.

tell me what *your* limits are before we start. If you're going to loathe driving 6 miles to go someplace a mile away (or whatever), let me know that. Not going along is fine. Saying it's OK if it's not is bad.

please do not chat on the phone in the car. I found this one out the hard way - at first I was OK with it, after reminding myself I could ask him to hang up if I needed him to be more present (though whether or not I'd actually be capable of that is in question). But then his conversation turned to his girlfriend's layoff, and the death of a friend, and then his signal got wonky, which made him speak in frustrated tones...I was getting anxious just from his conversation and this is not what I need when I'm driving on a scary road.

Stay where I can find you if I need to leave. Glued to my side is not necessary, but please don't mysteriously disappear or get involved in something it won't be easy to pull you out of.

I have no idea if I'll be able to tell you what I need if I start to panic. The only thing I'm sure is useful in all cases is reminding me I have medication. I usually want physical contact, but please let me decide about that. In the car, turning on the GPS is often good and never bad.

understand that if I'm anxious and you're talking to me, I might not understand or remember anything you say. I might want you to keep talking, or I might want quiet. I might change my mind about which every 5 minutes. This is not about you or what you're saying - it's a thing in my head.

I am very unlikely to be able to explain what's causing panic while I'm panicking, and trying to is bad. Feel free to ask me later (i.e. when I'm at home), and it might be useful to both of us if I have answers, but asking at the time makes me feel pressured to justify myself and I'm likely to feel trapped and more panicky. Even at home, "why does x trigger it and not y?" sorts of questions are tricky and should only be approached with extreme caution.

I've known that on some level for a few years, but recently a friend of mine introduced the concept to me in those words, with examples from her own life, and it's sort of become a mantra. There's a perfectionist in me that doesn't want to do things if they're going to be incomplete/not done "right"/whatever. I blame Yoda. And Dad.

I'm not suggesting that everything in life should be done haphazardly in order to get things done. I think this idea is best when combined with "choose your battles." Some things need to be done a certain way, or in a certain order, or can't be done halfway or set aside in the middle or started without a detailed plan. But the majority of things that need doing don't fall into those categories. I have beautiful new curtains in my room because "something is better than nothing" made me realize I had no curtains for all these years because my brain was insisting they had to be the "right" curtains. After 11 years I wasn't ever going to decide what that meant, and I certainly wasn't going to achieve perfection. But I could figure out what would make me happy enough in a curtain, and I now have that instead of no curtains.

I'm also not saying people should settle for something that isn't what they want. I'm saying there's often a lot of ground between "exactly what I want" and "zippo" that would be perfectly acceptable and happy-making, and people don't always realize that waiting for perfection turns out to be the same as choosing not to have anything.

That said, I do have to be careful about letting NextDayShippingIsn'tFastEnough Girl use this as an excuse to run off and do things without thinking. But in any case it's reasonable to ask "what do I get out of waiting?" Sometimes waiting means I save money, or get something slightly better, or have more fun, or other positive things. but sometimes what I get out of waiting is...more nothing. I don't need more of that.

I went to the AT&T store today (for a thing I have to go back and argue with a manager to get, but that's another story). The mother of someone working there was visiting, and she gave him a great big hug when she left. When he came back to the counter, I turned to supremeherptile and said "I'm going to write a complaint letter. I came all the way out here and nobody gave *me* a hug." I expected the guy to laugh, but the big warm hug I got took me by surprise. Some days I love the world.

I seem to have misplaced the URL, but this comment was very enlightening for me:

"In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you're a Guess Culture person then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you're likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.

If you're an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression."

By some cruel twist of fate, my unsuspecting guess family ended up with an ask child. This explains a lot.

I have a very vivid memory of a day I asked my mom if a friend could stay for dinner. I was baffled to later find out that she was angry with me because I asked her this question in front of my friend. she was thoroughly convinced that I had manipulated her, and used her discomfort with saying no to get the answer I wanted. The idea that it was rude to say no in front of him was so burned into her brain that she expected me to understand that like I understand how to breathe. I was supposed to know that his presence would back her into a corner and force her to say yes. I can only begin to express how utterly lost this concept is on me, but to her it was one of the truths of the universe, so she thought I was using it against her.

And then there's Dad, with whom I had this ongoing problem: I'd say something like, "Hey, Dad, can I go to the movies?" and he'd say, "No, because I don't want to drive you." So I'd go find a ride, and ask again, and he'd be livid because he already said no. It would never in a million years have occured to me that this man with absolute power over my life would feel the need to make excuses for saying no, and in all the times it happened I never ever suspected that's what was going on. From my point of view, he'd give me a solveable problem, I'd solve it, then he'd get mad. Total mystery to me. He thought I was trying to find loopholes and get around his authority, and I thought I was trying to help him fix what he stated was the problem so we'd both be happy. Huh.

I have an LJ friend with aspergers, who often talks about feeling totally lost when people talk about social concepts she Doesn't Get. On this topic, I think I have some idea where she's coming from.

I've tried to go through my adult life with the philosophy that if I ask for something, it's the other person's responsibility to give me the answer they want to give. But knowing how very different people's views on this can be, it's been tough, and asking for things can still be emotionally confusing for me. There are other reasons that asking for things is hard, like feeling like I don't deserve things, but I think not knowing whether my requests will sound like requests or demands to the receiver is the big one. To a guess, asking might seem like deliberate pressure to say yes. To an ask, saying yes when you don't mean it seems inconceivable. It's amazing how differently brains can work.

In my mind, it's *good* to ask for things, because there's no other way anything will ever happen [like last-minute trips to Delaware, for example :)]. But I need to trust that the person I'm asking will say no if that's how they feel. Knowing that's not always how people work makes me pause, because I don't want to put my friends in uncomfortable positions. And having a better idea now of what it looks like when a guess person is on the other end of a request, it's hard to know how to react. How do I tell the difference between "I would really love to do x if only y" (which is the meaning I always assumed when I was younger) and "I don't want to and I'm giving you a reason because 'no' by itself is uncomfortable for me." Generally I just make myself hear "no" and ignore the rest, but if I feel close enough to someone, I *might* say "if that's the only reason and you want to solve it we can, but if you just want to say no that's OK too."

When I was taught multiplication, my teacher explained it, then said "if you do this backwards, it's division, and it looks like this: ... " then she went back to multiplication. Nothing more than that, but when division came up the people who came from her class had an easier time of it because the concept was already in their heads. I think when teaching exponents, people should say "and by the way this is what it looks like when you do it sideways." I'm not suggesting you teach logs to all 4th graders, or go into depth about how to use them, but I think attaching the concept to exponents where it belongs as soon as that concept comes up would prevent a lot of chaos later. It really really does make a difference when you plant that seed. And don't get me started about radians. I'm not so much annoyed that I was taught everything in degrees instead, but I did feel a little betrayed by math teachers everywhere when at 40 years old I heard a word I had *never* heard before and was told it was preferable to degrees. I now understand the concept of radians, and I can convert from degrees to radians and back again, but I will never ever think in radians. I probably wouldn't have either way, but if I'd been introduced to both concepts together, my brain would have meshed them to some degree, and I wouldn't have sat in trig class feeling like I'd just been told "English is for babies, we really speak Russian in this country, so catch up." There seems to be a school of thought that says certain "big" concepts shouldn't be introduced until higher math because it will confuse people; I believe those concepts confuse people mostly because they're kept a big secret and are surrounded by a cloud of mystery that could easily be dispelled.

My bigger problem with the way math is taught is the tendency to teach things that are WRONG in order to keep things simple. My husband uses an example of an absolute of math that he was taught in the 2nd grade - something that was drilled into his brain hard so he'd never forget it: "you can't take a bigger number from a smaller number." Just what did these teachers expect to happen when their students encountered negatives? Not only are they going to have a harder time with the concept than necessary, but they're going to rightly wonder if *anything* they know about math is correct. Next week you might tell me addition doesn't really work the way I think. My latest algebra teacher said at least a dozen times "you can never ever take the square root of a negative number" and I muttered "yes you can" for the people near me. Which they really appreciated when we got to the chapter on imaginary numbers *in that same class*. It's bad enough to put a wrong idea into students' heads and pass them on to someone else, but to do it knowing you'll have to contradict *yourself* in a few weeks is just dumb. I'm currently hitting my head against a wrong idea that I didn't know I had, because multiple teachers told me "you can't do that" when they meant "you don't have to do that for the purposes of this class." If I'd examined things more closely earlier I would have seen it, and I can see it clearly now, but that wrong idea is stuck well enough that what to do with a certain kind of problem doesn't jump out at me the way it should. It's a simple concept and I feel totally stupid. And a little baffled to find that I've never had a problem that challenged this idea before, or maybe I did occassionally and didn't look closely enough at why I got it wrong. I hope it's not too late to reprogram my brain.

I've been thinking about drawing trees, and how as a kid I drew tree trunks as these sort of slanted lines that curved a bit at the bottom - curved into nothingness at the point where the viewer was supposed to assume the ground was. Maybe I'd even draw in some grass to make the point. Later, I made a few attempts to actually draw; I was fascinated by the magic of lines representing real things. I wasn't particularly good at it, but even so, if I paid enough attention to what the lines in the real world did, I could put them on paper and make recognizable shapes. The magic in that, for me, wasn't so much what ended up on paper as it was the act of noticing the details and proportions of the lines that made up the objects. There's a whole lot of amazing stuff in that place where the tree meets the ground that I had totally ignored in my simple drawings.

Who Wants to be a Superhero (no spoilers until the cut) was the corniest thing since sliced cornbread. It was pretty clearly scripted and/or rigged, at least in part, and it could have easily won the "silliest thing on television" award. I loved it. I laughed, I cried, I kissed 3 bucks...no wait, that part's not right :).

Where has my inner skeptic gone? (Inner? Ha!) I hate being "taken," feeling like a fool, believing in something that isn't true - and I often solve that problem by believing nothing. Fiction is fine, but if someone claims that what I'm seeing is real, I spend my time analyzing it rather than just enjoying what's there for what it is. Maybe I've learned something, or maybe the subject matter made me come at this from a younger part of my brain; whatever the reason, at some point I decided to take this show at face value and not worry about how "real" it was. This utterly ridiculous program was full of stuff worth paying attention to, had many moments that were quite moving, and had some good things to say about the power of ordinary people. I'm glad that for once I didn't miss the point by being so smart and grown up that I can't see what's important.

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The contest is closed, but I finally came up with an idea.

young woman's voice:
"textbooks..." she's at the counter with books, mom walks up from behind her with more and thunks them on the counter "...$800"
"matching backpacks..." mom pulls a backpack out of a shopping bag, kid makes a face and pulls out the same one, mom facepalms "...$150"
"2 laptops..." mom at table working on laptop, kid on floor with laptop and books "...$5000"
kid in cap and gown "graduating from college - " mom appears in frame also in cap and gown "-with Mom...priceless" :-)

This morning some ongoing "relationship issues" came up, and I was feeling unhappy, unsure of myself, and in need of communication and closeness. In response to all this, Greg fixed my dryer.

Yeah, I know there are exceptions, and I know someone out there is going to take issue with this generalization, but men and women DO communicate differently. Being firmly in the typical woman camp (in this respect, anyway), let me tell you it can be maddening to be in love with someone who doesn't talk about feelings, "process" arguments and reassure with words. But communicating differently doesn't equate to not communicating, and I believe that if women expect men to make an effort to speak their language, women need to listen carefully to the messages of power tools.

I'm a pretty sensible person. I know the difference between reality and fantasy - sometimes so much so that my disbelief suspension system has a catastrophic failure and drops things on my head. I'm a pretty easy cry if your story is moving, but I also spend a lot of time rolling my eyes at plot inconsistencies. My brain picks things apart even when I don't want it to, and little plot holes become enormous craters impossible to ignore. This is something the reader must understand in order to fully appreciate what I'm going to say next.

I believe in Superman.

Yeah, that's right, the guy who's faster than a speeding bullet and all that stuff because our sun is different than the one in the solar system he was born in. I'll tell you it doesn't make sense for so-and-so to have killed what's-his-face because the plot points don't hold together. But ask me how it is that a man can fly just because he came from another planet? 'Cause he's Superman. Duh.

I never knew him on paper. I was 12 when I met him on screen - when I was young and impressionable, and before I'd seen too many movies to avoid being jaded. It didn't bother me that a 6'4" man could hide behind a pair of glasses, or that physics was turned on its ear in an attempt to justify what he could do, or that nobody suspected the man who disappeared every single time Superman showed up. I fell in love with the shy, awkward, socially clueless geek who just happened to have super-human powers. And because I was 12, or because the movie was my first experience with him, or maybe just because - not only was Superman real, but he was really Christopher Reeve.

When that run-in with Kryptonite left him paralized (I never bought into the cover story about the horse), I was pretty upset. But I had faith he'd get better. Real, honest-to-God, unshakable faith. I *knew* that the next Superman movie would star Christopher Reeve. People laughed when I said that, but it wasn't a joke - I believed it. When he amazed the world by moving an index finger, I wasn't amazed. Thrilled, yes, but I already knew he was going to fly walk again, so there was no surprise there. When he died, on my birthday, before he was finished getting better - that was the surprise. I never cried. Maybe something in me was holding on to that faith; something in my normally logical brain said, "He's off fighting crime somewhere, and he doesn't want Lex to know!" Or something.

Last night I went to see Superman Returns. I hadn't paid any attention to the hype; I'd been vaguely offended that they were making another movie before the real Superman got back, and for some reason it had completely escaped my notice that this was actually meant to be part of the same series and not just a separate telling of the Superman story. The little snippet of the John Williams theme at the end of the WB music shocked me into a painful reality - Christopher Reeve was just a guy. A guy who died before he got his chance to come back and make this movie that should have been his. I felt like an idiot, but I sat in the theatre and sobbed through the first 45 minutes of a freaking comic book movie.

Today I've been thinking about him a lot. I remember that after the accident (I guess it was a horse after all) he did a lot of interviews. He was always smiling. He worked hard in the last few years of his life: he did constant physical therapy while he wrote, directed, acted, and was active in changing the world for people with disabilities - something I personally appreciate. But most notable to me is that he never seemed to stop believing what I believed - that he would walk again. And fly. It's easy to be a superhero when you can stop bullets, leap tall buildings, grab falling airplanes out of the sky... but he sat in that chair, attached to a ventilator, stripped of his powers, and he was still a hero. I'm OK with the fact that he wasn't really Superman after all, 'cause as it turns out, Superman is a wuss.

Several of the people recently have described manic episodes, and the distorted thoughts that go with them. They were all convinced they were something invincible, extraordinarily important, way above everyone else and that everyone adored them. They believed they were totally in control of themselves and the world around them. It's clear to them when they're no longer manic that these thoughts were never reality.

So...if mania and depression really are polar opposites, it makes sense that in the worst of depression I have thoughts that I'm worthless, a burden to my friends, that no one can really love me. That I have absolutely NO control over my own life and that I can't change anything. Those thoughts are just as distorted as the manic thoughts. As George Carlin said, "I'm going to say that again because it sounded vaguely important." Those thoughts are JUST AS DISTORTED as the manic thoughts. So why do they leave echoes when the depressive episode is over? Why does self-esteem continue to be negatively affected by those thoughts for a long time? Is this different in mania, or are the manic folks just not admitting that there's a little part of them that still believes they're Christ? Is the state in which those thoughts exist but I'm still able to at least grasp the idea that I'm depressed and not thinking straight actually "hypodepression"? Is depression, like mania, a psychotic state?

Am I the only one who doesn't like the phrase "marriage is love"? I'm all for giving a marriage license to any group of adult people that wants one (and perhaps someday people will even stop saying "couple" as if that's the only way it could be), but marriage != love. Perhaps love is involved in there somewhere, but that's not always the case, and "despite what pretty poets say", it's not even the point. Marriage is people legally bound together, for whatever reason they choose to make themselves so. Health insurance, citizenship, societal acceptance, tax breaks, and many many other factors having nothing to do with love are often the inspiration for marriage. Many people who marry don't love each other, and many who love each other are content without adding the legal aspect.

I fear that using such a phrase to support an unrelated concept will backfire. Yes, any set of adults who choose to legally commit themselves to each other should be allowed to do so. Absolutely. But do we really want to plant the idea that without marriage there is no love? Isn't the misconception that there can't be real love between people of the same sex the excuse some people use to keep the privelege of marriage to themselves?

Love is an emotion. Marriage is a civil right. I'm not sure the conflation of the two is a useful tool in this fight.

My kid just blew away her talent show. She sang "Kiss Me" by 6 Pence None the Richer, and played guitar. She was REALLY, REALLY good. People were on their feet stomping and cheering before she was quite finished. You know how people hold up their lighters and wave them around when they really like a song? People were using their cell phone lights :-) When we tried to leave, we couldn't get out of the building; people kept stopping her to say how wonderful she was. She made a mistake though; she had decided to be an unjudged act, so she did not win the $150 prize (I'm almost certain she would have). Sam and I gave her $50 for Best-Loved Act. I think she liked that better than winning 1st prize, anyway :-)

But for me, the best part was the cheer that went up when she was introduced. I was so afraid for her when she started high school. She's overweight, has hair on her face, has odd tastes, is creative and smart. All things that make for a miserable high school career. But she marched in there, confidently, with no fear of being herself, and she made FRIENDS. Friends who show up to an event to support her. Friends who are eager to stand up in front of the whole school and say "Hey, I like her!" Friends who look for her after the show to give her a hug. Wow.