Insomniac

It is 2:30. No sign of impending sleep. I have been trying to sleep, off and on, since about 6:30. That makes a total of 8 hours. No dice.

Le sigh.

Lists, lists

In lieu of content, I provide a list of the music that my Music and Gender students have selected to write about for their first paper:

2Pac, "Keep Ya Head Up"
Alice in Chains, "Over Now"
The Beatles, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"
Beyoncé, "Ego"
Britney Spears, "Every Time" [sic]
Britney Spears, "Piece of Me"
Celine Dion (and Peabo Bryson), "Beauty and the Beast"
Ciara, "Like a Boy"
Dashboard Confessional, "Hands Down"
Franz Schubert (performer unknown, so I chose Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), "Erlkönig"
Jason Mraz, "Coyotes"
Jeff Buckley, "Lover, You Should Have Come Over" [sic]
John Mayer, "Daughters"
Judas Priest, "Victim of Changes"
JUJU featuring JAY'ED, "Ashita ga kurunara"
Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl"
Lena Horne featuring Q-Tip, "I Got Rhythm"
Maria Mena, "Sorry"
Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body"
Maxwell, "This Woman's Work"
The MC5, "Kick out the Jams"
Mika, "Grace Kelly"
Miley Cyrus, "Party in the USA"
The Pixies, "Tame"
Rex Harrison, "Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?" [Technically, "A Hymn to Him"]
Santogold, "Creator"
Shakira, "She Wolf"
Shania Twain, "Man[!] I Feel like a Woman"
Taylor Swift, "Love Story"
"Zelda's Theme" from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

and not one, not three, but TWO papers on "Lola" by The Kinks!

In other news, my personal life is quite hellish at the moment, and I am super, super grateful for my friends who have all been amazing as the world crumbles. I am beyond reluctant to discuss matters in this public forum, but feel free to contact me for all the painful details.

In other, happier news, Bea Arthur has left $300,000.00 to the Ali Forney Center, the largest organization in the country (the world?) for homeless LGBT youth. What a woman.

Personal and/or Political

This weekend has been a long one, and not in the Columbus Day sense. It's been full of activities both pleasurable and painful, personal and political, and above all alliterative.

Actually, I meant to say that the activities were often a complicated intermingling of those four adjectives, but then I noticed that they all started with the same letter, and I got distracted. The letter of the day today has clearly been P; we served plain, pepper, pepperoni, and pineapple pizza at our phone bank. Plus pastries. On paper plates. But I didn't sign into Blogger today to talk about the letter P.

I've spent the last hour watching speeches from today's National Equality March and yesterday's HRC dinner. The speeches made me cry, but that's hardly news. They also made me think about politics, activism, radicalism, liberalism, the System, religion, and various other concepts of a poorly-defined and contentious nature. Including Barney Frank, a poorly-defined and contentious legislator if ever there was one. My thoughts are still a bit vague for airing in public, but they will trickle out as I work them into coherence.

Before watching the speeches, I trained a phone bank at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center to call voters in Maine and urge them to oppose Question 1. That's where all the P-themed food was. That's also where I once again donned the lobster hat that has adorned my Facebook profile these recent days. And where I ate myself into a stomach ache without even consuming a meal, for the second day running.

Moving on back in the chronology, my stomach ache yesterday came from deciding that four doughnuts would be an appropriate breakfast substitute. I was, in fact, quite wrong. Yesterday consisted of a voter canvass (source of the doughnuts) and a dinner of mostly cupcakes, with some soup and fried eggplant to supplement. My innards were not happy. My tongue, of course, was thrilled.

I did not actually talk to voters about gay marriage yesterday; I ran the logistical end of canvass day with the boyfriend (yes, I have no nickname for him still. I still think talking about him will make him vanish, so shhhhhh...), then made sure the site was set up for the canvassers' return. Better for my stomach than walking around in the sun for two hours without a bathroom, but less immediately politically useful.

So what is the upshot of all this political action (and political-action support)? What is on my mind after a canvass, a phone bank, watching all of those speeches, and reading various blogs about National Coming Out Day?

My uncle, as I've mentioned here before, has bladder cancer. My grandmother, I found out today, has ovarian cancer. My father will find out on Friday if he has prostate cancer. And my mother has an appointment with Doctor #5 in two weeks because we still have no idea what she has.

Fuck.

Two words

Two words that should look more alike:

Misread

Misled

Really, they should. They rhyme and everything.

October!

The Mysterious X and I have declared this month officially SKELETON WITH BRAIN MONTH! If you should care to visit our humble abode, you will observe the reason we have thusly declared.

We are seriously considering declaring next month and the following month SKELETON WITH BRAIN MONTH as well.


In other news, I don't want to clean my room. But I also don't want to let it be a sty anymore. I am considering torching the place instead. Am I eleven years old?

A survey

Of all the religions in the world, which one do you think is the least religious? That is to say, which religion includes the largest number/percentage of people who identify with that religion while simultaneously identifying as atheist, agnostic, irreligious, non-believer, etc.?

I'm torn between the Jews and the Anglicans, but there are strong contenders in the Catholics and Unitarians.