channonyarrow

And now I have enough instances to clarify this as a pattern of behaviour.

If you are avoiding me and make the mistake of engaging with me in some other context, I will happily bring up everything you are avoiding me about in that forum.

I think this is healthy - at least for me - because the two times I've done this, the people involved have been heavy, heavy weights on my mind, but I'm quite aware that it's not actually friendly.

Such is life.

I have just realised that I knew a weaboo before the term weaboo had ever been developed. NO LIE.

I am either extremely old, or else I am extremely special, and my friends time-travel through trends. Which would be kind of awesome, minus the part where I'm expected to take anyone who wishes to be addressed as Neko* seriously.

There ARE days I wish I could wake up and be a different person. Someone with less original friends, perhaps. Just to find out what it's like when your life is boring.

* On the off-chance that your life has not been contaminated by the joy that is weaboo, that's Japanese for cat. It is a very popular weaboo name, evidently.

I am sitting at home. I have just finished dinner, I've been working on my pro blog and my email o' doom (and jotting notes about all the deadlines that are about to go screaming past me) and I'm sitting in my comfy chair, looking at the Christmas tree. iTunes is on shuffle, it's warm, there are Christmas lights above the window and a lamp on, and I feel, essentially, cozy and warm and like it's a rather pleasant night.

Meanwhile, part of my brain is on power watch.

The wind is definitely picking up; the snow that's still falling is being added to by the snow that's blowing off the trees, roofs, roads, cars - it's an incredibly fine, dry snow that can really sting for a second when it hits you. It's also blowing under my door, or was until I put a towel across it. But before, even when there were gusts of snow blowing in the light of the streetlamps, the trees were still.

Now, they're moving.

It's not bad, not yet. We're not even really to the storm; the winds are expected to last from about 10 to 1. And expected to gust up to 90 mph. Incidentally, that's 10 mph higher than the gusts from the Hanukkah Eve storm of 2006 that knocked my power out for five days. I have no idea what the temperature was during that storm, but I do know that right now, it's 23F out there. When my parents got power back in their house, three days after the HES, it was 47F inside. Draw your own conclusions.

So. At some point tonight, unless I get very lucky, which I have not notably been in the last few months, I am going to be out of power. Between the wind and the ice in my driveway, there is absolutely no way I can evacuate, certainly not before the wind goes down and probably not after; all-weather tires don't cut it in this shit.

So yeah. No wonder my brain is poking me constantly, telling me to look out the window, to know where my still-packed bag is, to know where the candles, lighter, bottle of water are. My brain, my hindbrain, knows how quickly my cozy apartment can become a cold den of misery.

*****

Relatedly, iTunes is fucking with me. It's picked "The Way The Wind Blows", "The Sky Is Broken", "Just A Car Crash Away", and "Carbon" to entertain me.

ETA: iTunes just added "Icicle", and I just had to push four inches of snow away from my door to get it open. And I just realised that I have a flat roof.

Book stuff:
I have <10,000 words to go. I'm in the right place, with the right word count, and I think I'm actually going to make it out alive (and with a completed 190,000 word rough draft).

Hell, my main character may make it out alive! Right now, he's arguing with God, being driven by an archangel, and about to find out what happens when God and the Devil have an argument. (Answer: Fucked if I know yet.)

But I finally realised today that if I write 2K words a day, which is very doable, I could have the draft done within a week. Sort of creepy. And then I can start the circus book that I don't want to be about a circus!

Job stuff:
I don't know, but what worries me is that I'm not worrying. I mean, I should be freaking-the-fuck-out, given the collapse of the economy (side note: BofA is the devil) and all, and I have very few resumes out, but I have no real sense that I'm in trouble (and I'm not, yet, but that time is coming).

Weird.

Other stuff:
My apartment is fully clean for the first time in weeks, and all extraneous furniture is gone. That feels pretty cool too.

Election stuff:
Oh my gawd. I'm actually really having fun with this one, mostly because McCain and Palin seem to be specialising in Fucking Up Bigtime and I love it. I've got to get back into political ranting - there's just too much there to love.

McCain thinks the economy's great? Palin isn't qualified to lead HP - nor is McCain (according to that great judge of morality and skill, Carly Fiorina)? Obama and Biden grew a pair and started attacking the Reps for their shit about the economy? Palin isn't allowed to speak to the press without accompaniment after her fail at identifying the Bush Doctrine? McCain is looking as old, confused, and doddery as he is - and people are saying it? The only thing the Reps have to attack Biden on is that he's an old white dude, and the only thing they have to counter Obama's popularity is that hey, McCain's for change too, and is too totally a maverick, despite siding with Bush and only breaking with the party when it's going to be a complete clusterfuck for him? (See also: Role in the Keating Five Scandal, statement that Wall Street should be regulated.)

EVERY DAY IS LIKE CHRISTMAS.

I don't even have to continue to harp on the fact that I'm not convinced Trig isn't Bristol's kid! They just keep giving me more and more and more to work with! It's like a party! With gift bags!

I'm fond of the Socratic method.

Q: What does the term "best-seller" mean?

A: It depends on the context, but generally speaking is used to mean something so wildly popular (and therefore financially lucrative) that it is out-selling its competitors. It generally refers to brands or, at best, titles - bear in mind that authors and/or series and/or artists are also seen as brands - that do better than all others in terms of sales. Not actual sales, but more are in stock.

You may or may not know this, but the New York Times best-seller list of books is based not on actual sales, nor even on actual sales - returns, but on sales to book buyers. If you can convince a book buyer to buy umpty jillion copies of a book, even if that book is The Fine Art Of Gardening In The Dark, it will be a best seller.

Hence, how OJ Simpson had a bestseller that was rejected flatly when the book was revealed to be what it was. The buyers were convinced, based on the marketing they received, that this was the must-have book of the decade, and they bought in huge numbers. Then the title, subject, and ploy were revealed, and the book went down like a two dollar whore.

Returning to the main plot, this is relevant only because best-sellers imply a category that is sold specifically for leisure, to me. One does not, conventionally, speak of a best-selling politician (not their book, their politics). Nor does one speak of a best-selling natural disaster, even though it might have kicked the ass of all other natural disasters that year. Best-selling gasoline? Possibly, but then, it's the brand that is selling, because realistically, given the fact that my car will continue to function on any kind of gas, from Chevron to Arco, that I care to put in it, the brand is "where I choose to spend my money", not "the product I have evaluated as being the best for my needs" or even "what I really, really want when I feel like buying gas". Best-selling jewelry? Same as gas.

Q: What does "a brand" mean?

A: If you're me, it means "where I am getting screwed". I am not Naomi Klein, and I have, in fact, never finished No Logo. I do not make sure that all my clothing is brandless, nor do I prefer to buy a no-name toaster versus an Oster toaster. I try to remain current on what is and what is not an effective brand (ie, you couldn't make me buy a Jaguar, but I'll take the Volkswagen, thanks, or the Honda) but I do not seek to be brandless. I would also clarify that by saying that I seek to not be branded, but I am the person who just spent $50 on a DKNY trench coat sans belt and slightly too small because it was made of awesome. And if you would like to argue with me about that, you can go right ahead. I'll be over here petting my trench coat, which is made of something like sueded silk, I swear to god. Also, it was quarter price.

But brands are, by and large, not as good as they could be. James Patterson, author of many bestsellers (provided you use the term "author" loosely) is a bestselling brand. Danielle Steel, ditto. Stephen King, John Grisham, R.A. Salvatore, Laurell K. Hamilton, all brands.

I say this because I love. Read many of their books without knowing who the author is (and how fucking much money they make oh my god) and then tell me whether you find that book as good as the best book you've ever read. If you have any kind of reading vocabulary, you probably won't. And if you do, who am I to judge? I read Janet Evanovich, despite her books defining formulaic and her, personally, not deserving a single cent of my money, since I don't like to provide for outright divas to be divas.

But a brand (remember, I said "this is where I get screwed") a brand is a guarantee of consistency. Is Starbucks the best coffee out there? Hell no. But if I order a grande white mocha no whip in Starbucks it pretty much doesn't matter if I'm standing in the US, in England, or in China. What I receive should, based on what I've ordered, be exactly the same drink in all places, and that's comforting when you're away from home.

That still doesn't make it good coffee, at least to me. That makes it consistent coffee, and I find that a lot of brands do exactly that - they aim for below excellence because it is easier to keep it consistent and because it fits better into the profit margin. I get what I expect, and what I expect is that consistency is better than excellence.

So riddle me this, Riddler. Er, young Plato.

From here:Prozac does not work, say scientists.

In the first paragraph Prozac is described as a bestselling antidepressant.

Never mind all the rest of my issues with the article. Never mind that I really think that antidepressants in this country are used as a cure-all rather than as a tool and that neurochemistry (and the brain in general) are too poorly understood to be wandering around throwing fluoxetine at it. Never mind that I have had a negative experience on prescribed medication and now wander the earth refusing to take any medication except ibuprofen. Never mind the fact that this article is the first charge to prove me right. All of that is either already said or for another day.

My horror, and my point, is around the fact that prozac is a bestseller.

Stop and think about that. Stop and think about the fact that this drug has become a brand, and that, apparently, all antidepressants have become brands, if prozac is able to outsell them all.

And brands don't have to work, they only have to sell.

Stop and think about that. About what we have done and are doing, about what we allow and what we will buy and where the end of this is, because it ain't here, ladies and gentlemen. We are medicating ourselves - voluntarily! - with something that doesn't work, but sells well.

Go us.

Recap the umpty-umpth.

The fastest way I've ever known to make money is to work in Alaska. It's hard work, yes, and occasionally you lose your mind and forget that you don't go into overtime at twelve hours a day but at eight, and you have NO TIME to do anything else (somehow, you fit "drinking a lot" into your schedule anyway) but where else can you, working for minimum wage, make $5000 after taxes in less than two months without being a whore?

Which is not minimum wage work in any event.

But I loved working in Alaska in 1999. Or rather, I didn't LOVE it - I'll be fine if I never have to do housekeeping again, thx, even though I can now clean a bathroom in ten minutes flat - but I liked the money. I worked for Princess Cruises' Denali Resort and their pay scale, at least at the time, is such that you make overtime at more than eight hours a day AND forty hours a week. So when I worked twelve hours on Monday, four of it was overtime, but it ALL counted to hitting overtime for the week by Wednesday night. Add in that my jobs both got tips (sometimes in food!) and we had a total underground economy going on food and all drinks were a dollar for staff, and you get good money.

So I went back in 2001 when I needed money to finance my edumacation. And being the genius of travel that I totally am not, I booked my flight home for just after midnight, September 12.

Let that roll gently off your tongue, but first!

When I went back, I couldn't get on at Denali Princess (I think that the manager for the foodservice staff, who I swear to god had a doorknob on the back of her head, said that none of us were rehirable because we didn't kiss her ass hard enough) so I was working at this other place that was a small independent campground that didn't believe in overtime. But whatever, I pulled another job at the Holland America place across the street and still got decent money. But when you spend the summer working that hard, you mainly want to leave, especially once you add in the lovely abusive boyfriend who wanted to kill me for calling the police on him (not my boyfriend, I add, but the boyfriend of the girl who had the cabin next to me) because I couldn't fucking sleep because they were FIGHTING LIKE WHOA. I actually had to file a deposition with the North Star court about this.

So, I wanted to leave. Now go back and consider the date of my flight home.

My job ended a couple days early, so I was up in Fairbanks with my brother and his wife, planning to take the bus to Anchorage for my flight out.

We woke up to the news of the second tower going down.

I got on the bus anyway because no one knew what was going to happen, and all I knew was that if they did call my flight and I wasn't there I was going to have to pay for it. So we listened to the coverage all the way back to Anchorage, with the news getting worse and worse, and...it was just completely fucked up. Like, that was the day that I saw Denali, which is fogged in approximately two out of three days every year.

By the time we got to Anchorage, it was obvious there was no point in going to the airport, so I got a room at a hostel. Abbie had given me the phone number of a friend of hers in case it got really bad and I had to stay longer - and I was glad I had it, given that I called her friend and arranged to be picked up to stay with her for the duration on September 13th, and then I turned around when I was off the phone, and Mike, the crazy boyfriend was staring at me.

I couldn't get booked out of the airport when they started getting flights back up. In hindsight, what I should have done was gone to the airport as soon as flights were announced again rather than trying to get a slot on a plane that was guaranteed, or trying to find some people to share the cost of a rental car to drive back to Seattle, but I didn't do that. And it turned out that, at that time, because it was so much easier to book a round trip and just leave the return leg empty, I couldn't book the flight because I had a return flight for the first day I could get a plane out and they wouldn't book it. They wouldn't tell me WHY, but I found out later that I would have been in Seattle for approximately two hours before turning around for Alaska, so obviously they wouldn't update the flight.

Eventually, I got out and went to England two weeks later. But 9/11 remained with me. I don't mean to make that sound like it didn't remain with other people, or even that I had it worse than others (I know someone whose father should have been on one of the NYC flights, in fact) but somehow the stress of the time made that particularly moving to me, emotionally.

What do I know, I picked up a coffee table book of things that have been left at the Vietnam Memorial and started crying. I'm emo like that.

So I've been totally addicted to footage of 9/11 - I watched that portion of Ken Burns' New York three times in two days - ever since. And when I realised that I had, predictably, cocked up and booked my flight to Jersey for Monday night when the concert was Wednesday evening, I decided I'd go into New York. And one of the things I'd do there was go to Ground Zero.

So I went, expecting some kind of amazing impact. After all, this was the sort of shit I was a total junkie for. How could it not be moving to me?

It turns out that it's really, really easy not to be moved. It's a big fucking hole in the ground, with construction equipment and all that, because - obviously - they're building on the site. It was nothing at all like what I expected, and it meant nothing at all to me.

Personally, I think that the best thing the Bush administration could have done, if they wanted us to still remember 9/11, is leave the rubble there. Leave that big pile of building debris, with the American flag on top, leave it all, call it good, let us look at that, let us see the sacrifice that we made, let us see the reason for invading Afghanistan and Iraq, the reason for killing Saddam Hussein, the reason for killing our troops, for killing innocent civilians, the reason for an expensive, stupid, pointless war.

Leaving that rubble there would have been a punch to the gut. There is no question in my mind that if that had been what I'd seen, rather than a very silly hole in the ground, I would have stood there and cried, unashamed of that fact. Call me a tourist if you like, but that's how it would have been.

But no. We have to build, build, build. I don't even know, much less care, what they're building there - the only thing I know is that I went, expecting some kind of closure, some kind of catharsis, and got a big hole in the ground with a bunch of construction vehicles moving around in it.

The fact that that means nothing to me is far worse than I expected it to be. Because it really does mean absolutely nothing. It matches nothing that I've looked at obsessively, it means sod and fucking all to me - and that bothers me a lot, that we can decide to rewrite the past that way, that we can't, because that's some of the most valuable real estate in America, leave it well enough alone and let thatbe the memorial.

We have to rescript the past and forget the things that make us who we are, lest we allow them to mean anything to us.

There's something deeply satisfying about realising that I am always and eternally attracted to people who are not attracted to me, nor never will be. Normally, I would not consider this satisfying, but in the light of my last post, I think I'll call it that this time.

I am, I hope, a pragmatist, most of the time. However, we might all be that, because I don't know any altruists and wouldn't trust them if I did. What else is left? Either you serve yourself or you serve others, and Mother Theresa is dead anyway, so there's that option out the window. In other words, the gamut of human experience is not that great - we all tend to be pretty much alike, and that's the realisation of your twenties that is so horrible. I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake, and neither are you. We're all pretty much the same, accounting for some high swings at either end. I want to go to a high school somewhere and tell every single student that, preferably quietly (remember the cockroaches in Bloom County? Like that.) and watch them all crumble. Because we wear our belief that we are unique little snowflakes on our sleeves. America is the country of I, of the individual, and it shows. We believe ourselves unique; meanwhile, I bet that statistically speaking most people in the McDonald's in Paris near Place de la Bastille are lost Americans. We believe ourselves unique and we conform on a level that, if we realised it, would make our national brain explode.

You are not special; I am not special. You have not felt something that I have not. My ennui is the same as yours. It's like we expect that being wrapped in different flesh, shaped in different ways, means that we're different, but we still speak the same language, we still have the same words, we still know the same concepts. It's merely pretentious bullshit to assume for one second that what you feel I don't, what you have experienced I can't understand, and most of all (most commonly of all, anyway) it's pretentious bullshit to believe that You Are Unique, because you're not. Our flesh shapes us, and we share the same flesh. People act as though explaining something that they feel is like trying to translate the mating call of the Wild Yak into Swedish via Korean, and it's not. There are words out there that we all know, and if you can't explain it with words, try finding the medium you can use, for fuck's sake. In other words, shut the goddamn hell up and learn how to communicate, whether it's through words or tempera paint or feces on a wall. Don't just sit there in your isolationist bubble and pretend that You Are Different, because You Are Not. You are still human, you have still done the things humans have done, you have still got the same tools to describe your life as any other American, and on a broader level any other human. Shut the fuck up. I'd rather hear the story of someone's life that I don't know, that I haven't lived before, than listen to everyone yap like fucking dogs about how they're Individuals. I always mentally add the really stoned "man" to that sentence, because it seems to lack it.

This is what I think.

I think that everyone needs to shut the goddamn hell up about the things that create barriers, not because I love my fellow human beings because by and large I don't - this doesn't mean that I don't want your body, though - but because I am really fucking sick of hearing about how I can't understand. I can't understand what it was like to be in Vietnam. I can't understand what it's like to be a man. I can't undersand what it's like to have a specific sexual definition. I can't understand what it's like to be a victim. I can't understand what it's like to not be a victim. I can't understand what it's like to be you.

Fuck that shit. My understanding is not fucking broken. You want me to understand, you tell me. You don't want me to understand, tell me that. It has nothing at all to do with understanding, and everything to do with the amount of work you want to put into it to make me understand.

You are not special, I am not special, no one is special because we are all human, and we exist within a narrow range of personalities (because there are so many possibilities we don't use) and experiences. I can understand anything you can do, even if I all understand about it is that I had to have been there. But for fuck's sake, give me some credit and let me tell you that, don't tell me that. And quit pretending that you're standing on a ledge looking out over a sea of misery/love/success/virtue/non-virtue/soup and NO ONE ELSE is standing there with you. We might not be lemmings, but we're certainly not alone in the world or in our progress through it.

If you feel alone, maybe it's because YOU have stopped communicating.

Chew on that.

And all of this has gotten me angry again. Actually, I've been doing a slow burn for about four days. I will never have beauty, I don't know truth, I wouldn't believe in Justice any more if I tripped over the bitch with a broken beer bottle in my hand - but I know anger. And I'm mad again.

I will show all of you. I will be Someone. Not someone special, because that person doesn't exist, but I will be someone. I will be me, to the greatest and fullest extent possible, and you're invited along for the ride if you wish to come. I don't think that it will look any different than it did before (now I'll start posting all entries in rhyming quads and iambic pentameter sonnets!) but I'm angry again. I am going to be someone the world will not soon forget, goddamnit.

Just to show you that I was better than you ever thought.

Just to win. I always want to win. If I can't win, I won't play the game, and I'm still here so I must be able to win.

We all believe we were slaves to fashion back in the day, but that's not true. There were, always will be, and always have been, other clothes available than what was fashionable. Granted, it might be hard - like the time I spent weeks looking, in two countries and about ten shops, for a green button down shirt - but it's always possible to get something else.

Even if it is unfashionable. Stores don't sell complete outfits (well, yes, they do, but unless you're buying a seventies-style jumpsuit, they're not holding a gun to your head and demanding that you wear the whole thing), they sell pieces. Your job is to put the pieces together in a way that pleases yourself. I have had more than one conversation in my life where people have been amazed to find out that something they took as being very punk (or pirate, or conservative, or whatever) came from a store that they didn't associate with that type of clothing. Or from a pattern that didn't look anything like what I did in the end.

And it's because you put the pieces together yourself.

Unless you are insane, you put the pieces together in a way you think is acceptable - I even include that of the woman I saw on the bus once that - I shit you not at all, and I wish to god I'd had a cameraphone - had stepped straight out of the seventies, from her glasses to her shoes. Rarely do people dress seriously in a way that they dislike - even if there is a dress code for an event, most people will find something that makes them comfortable unless it is absolutely impossible.

So why do we look at pictures of ourselves and complain? The woman who runs the coffeeshop here was given a stack of old photos of herself by her mother - in the middle of myself and someone else looking at them, she was complaining about her eighties style and how horrible it was.

Wrong. It is only horrible in hindsight because now we realise how bad most of the fashion choices that were all the go at the time really were. At the time - it was awesome. And we shouldn't judge the past by the standards of the present. That leads to things like saying that OBVIOUSLY George Washington can't be the father of our country because he owned slaves and that's omgeleventyone wrongzzors.

I'm sorry, that wasn't legally wrong until 1863, and whether it was socially wrong or not is a matter of opinion and rather strong ones at that. It would be wrong of me to say that owning slaves in 1799 was actually wrong - that's my opinion, not his, nor the opinion of the time he lived in. And it's fallacious to judge someone who is dead by the standards of a time past the one they lived in. It's equally fallacious to judge our fashion sense in the seventies or the eighties or the nineties or last week by the standards now. Remember, we thought we looked great in the eighties, scrunchy socks and stupid hair and all. And in the end, it all comes down to the fashion industry telling us that omg bootcut jeans are GHASTLY YOU MUST BURN THEM, when the reality is that people don't buy jeans that often - they're obviously designed to take damage - and so they change the styles to make people buy more jeans.

That's all it is. There is no mystery. This is the same logic that prevailed in the Victorian era when fabric was milled in such a way as to be very suited for specific types of dresses, or in the late forties when Lucky Strike convinced Chanel and a couple other fashion houses to make green the new colour, on the basis that women would buy cigarettes that coordinated with their clothing. It's all the fashion industry telling us that what we did in the past was horrible.

Because it wasn't. There's never been a fashion for wearing the bones of your enemies as outerwear, at least in non-native western culture (I think those Plains breastplates were animal bone anyway). Nor for walking around with feces plastered over yourself. It's simply out of fashion - not inherently horrible. We all looked fine at the time. We don't think we did now, but we generally did then.

It's all right that we all had ghastly hair in the eighties. Even I did, and I was only four when the decade started. It doesn't mean that we were stupid (well, yes, actually, we WERE, but for different reasons) or that we need to pretend that those photos aren't real. Just because we've changed and fashion has changed and now we know that no one, really, should consider bangs that stick up the be-all-and-end-all doesn't mean that we should look at photos of ourselves then and exclaim how horrible they are.

We all looked like that back then. That's why it was the fashion, after all. And it's easier to do something other than the fashion as we get older and realise that, really, it's not important to buy all our clothing from Hot Topic, which sort of limits what people can do. It's easier to go with what we find comfortable and defies fashion as we age than it is when we're younger, but that doesn't mean that the fashion of the time is inherently bad or that we need to spend a lot of time commenting on how horrible we looked.

So. Gender has been much on my mind lately. Possibly because of discussion with the crew, not to be confused with Lzz's Buccaneer Crew, the topic has come up a lot lately. Fortunately, I studied it last year and have an Informed Opinion.

Basically, the next time someone confuses "sex" with "gender", I will tear their liver out with a spork. "Sex" is the physical, and "gender" is the mental, and you can get even more elaborate and start adding on preferences in partners, whether those partners are sexual or otherwise. But to go back to the previous sentence, they are two very distinct concepts, and ones that do not need to correspond, whatever society says.

In fact, I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the notion of gender is fundamentally flawed (so speaketh the female who genders male and can't quite figure out how to cross-dress...). Although people have an identity, there is no reason that that identity should be (or can be) bound up in terms of gender - which are, essentially, specific notions about how people behave.

Those notions are defined by society, which, as we all know, is a stable and rational institution, dedicated to making life easier for all of us, correct?

Wrong. Society is merely the notion of a group of individuals collectively identifying with each other and generally speaking occupying a specific area of land. It has nothing whatsoever to do with nationality, government, or any other institution. Society is a collective process, defined by its members. Or, to look at it another way, society tends to make decisions based on what's shoved under it's nose.

Consequently, society's default response setting is to do nothing. Once something - gender, in this case - is shoved under society's nose, the response setting is division by zero. We live in a time when gender and sexuality are fluid concepts, at least for a percentage of the population (I sometimes have trouble remembering that not everyone cherishes their one straight friend as an aberration). Society's response to this has been to overwhelmingly define "acceptable" gender and sexual roles, and this is done through fairly insidious techniques.*

Look at the proposed marriage amendment. Society is reacting, via division by zero, to any idea that it is possible to be in a satisfying relationship, one of permanence and that is not a phase, with a same-sex partner. Society has decided that, by and large, it likes its relationships to be opposite sexes, thanks, and it's going to mandate that.

This is, of course, muddled by Bush's need to make political hay, but the point remains - this was not an issue until someone tried to get married to their same-sex partner. Or, to look at it from an even more fundamental standpoint, until the word "homosexual" was created, "heterosexual" did not need to be defined. It is, etymologically, the newer word and was defined solely on the basis of the recognition of "homosexual".

Consequently, I have lost interest in society's notion of gender. I think it's time to start redefining (if it's possible to escape labels, another thing I hate) gender and sexuality. Hell, we can even redesignate sex.

There is no reason to continue to conflate sex with gender because the concepts are transitory. They are being redefined on a larger scale than ever before, a fact that warms the cockles of my heart when I stop to think about it.

I admit, I'm biased. I live in my own little bubble of a world, filled with like-minded individuals, or at least ones who are coherent in defence of their positions on such matters. And I've no idea what The Public thinks.

But I stand by what I've said.

*A further explanation of this concept can be found in either Backlash or Stiffed, both by Susan Faludi.