Lance Bass is gay. Shocker! Except, not at all.

It's time for a new underground railroad.

I'm not digging my job right now.

I don't want to think about the Middle East and I feel guilty about that, but I feel pretty helpless when it comes to these global problems beyond my control.

I got my expensive new pants hemmed half an inch too long and it is the most frustrating thing. I don't know if there is an answer besides slightly higher shoes. I want to wear flip flops!

I watched the Adrianne Curry/Chris Knight wedding special on Vh1 last night, and while I don't think it's fair to judge other people's relationships, if you put yourselves on TV, then, well. . . I don't know, man. I remember being in relationships that involved lots of fighting and making up and talking about the relationship and I think, as a general rule, that the more you have to talk about your relationship the less of a relationship you have. I'm sure there are exceptions, but that's how things have worked out for me.

Just peeped this documentary on IFC. It's similar to Capturing the Friedmans in that you're not really sure what to think, and Steve James does a good job of illustrating how so many factors contribute to the way a person turns out. It's never just black and white. Although this movie kind of drags in places, it's quite thought provoking — I'd still recommend it.

The thing about memories is that sometimes you think you miss the things you were doing or the people you were around at the time, but often you miss the person you were at the time, because you know you can never be that person again. Do I wish I was 15 or 17 or 21 again? No, not really. I did a lot of stupid shit back then. Did I have to do stupid stuff in order to become a functional adult? Probably. But I don't think I had to do the same kind of stupid stuff, with different people, but the same terrible results each time. Even though I think I had some kind of ideal teenage life and that college was so fun because my responsibilities were so limited, when I read the actual words I wrote back then. . . I was not happy. I was a teenager in love, but I was limited by so many forces beyond my control and I just couldn't wait to break free. And when I was no longer in love, the heartache was so incredibly intense because I could not imagine living life any other way. I had absolutely no sense of perspective, no idea that life existed outside my little circle and my carefully thought-out fantasies. In college, I didn't realize that having so much time to just hang out was actually a luxury. I wanted to be doing something grand and meaningful. Now I would settle for getting to hang out more. Because honestly, being an adult and working a job that you don't really like to pay the bills is not fun. But it's a lot better than being a financially dependent and emotionally unstable teenager. That's for damn sure.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If Philly improved public transportation, the entire city would rise up several notches. This city is not really conducive to having a car, and young people want to go out to bars and drink and not have to drive home or leave super-early to catch public transport where they will first have to wait in a urine-soaked tunnel with no SEPTA worker on duty; no police officer in sight; not even a camera to document when crime occurs. SEPTA is expensive, smelly and inconvenient. Last night I had a particularly harrowing experience with a psychotic person while waiting for the regional rail at an unlit stop without so much as an emergency phone in sight. I don't think the people who run the city or the people who run SEPTA understand that in other cities, young people actually take public transportation to get to social events. I have taken public transport many times in Boston, New York, San Francisco, D.C., and Seattle and Philly's is by far the most inefficient and the least pleasant experience. As the big wigs in charge continue to let SEPTA deteriorate, they are unwittingly driving people away from the city. Maybe they think they are just affecting us poor car-less individuals who have to use public transport, but they are actually affecting everyone's quality of life.

Something prompted me to look up a specific event in my high school diary yesterday. I never found what I was looking for, but I got so absorbed I read the whole damn thing. I don't know when the last time I read it was; I'm not sure I ever read it after I graduated high school. Unfortunately, reading it made me realize that I have been remembering certain events wrong all this time. Timetables are jumbled. I thought I was very mature for my age, but I was actually quite needy and exasperating. I thought my high school love and I drifted apart and I forgot all about him my senior year. Actually, he broke up with me (partly because I was less than faithful) and I had an incredibly ill-advised rebound boyfriend, who also broke up with me shortly thereafter. It was only then I realized how much I loved the first boyfriend, but he had, of course, moved on. I had some heartbreaking conversations with him, which for some reason I transcribed in my diary as if in preparation for filming My Teenage Life, the movie. I also spent at least sixth months writing tortured letters that I never sent (Thank God!). All of this was just so awfully painful — almost comically painful — to read. Because my teenage self could never have conceptualized that a decade or so later, the boy who broke my heart would cheerfully contact me through Friendster, and I would reply happily, because I wouldn't remember that I'd sat, crying, in the passenger's seat of his car, begging him not to end it like this because we would never speak to each other again in our lives. Teenage heartache is not something I wish to relive.

Sometimes I just want to make the world stop spinning and the planes land and buses and trains and cars stop and just get all the people I love in one place. I mean, I am glad I live in a time where people are able to travel all over the world — but, on the other hand, I kind of hate the expectation that one must move far away from one's family and everyone must be in constant motion, always going somewhere or coming back from somewhere. Once, I told my dad that I wished my sister didn't live 3,000 miles away and wouldn't things just be more simple if we all lived under one hut like ancient people? And my dad rolled his eyes and said, "Oh please, I can just hear you now: 'That's my leaf!' 'No, that's my leaf!'" which was funny but kind of unfair. Anyway, I don't really want to live in a hut, but I wish I lived in a close drive to my family and closest friends. Unfortunately, none of them live anywhere I want to be right now. Part of me just wants everything simple and everything close by because that seems very Zen and natural. But part of me wants everything simple and close by because I have severe anxiety and eliminating the endless choices seems like a way to eliminate the anxiety. Of course, this wouldn't really work because eliminating my own choices won't stop me from being jealous of people who are able to travel freely.

Traveling to visit people is especially stressful for me because I am absolutely petrified of air travel and not especially comfortable on other transportation options, either. These fears really mess up my thinking, because whenever I hear of people taking cool trips I get jealous in a weird way: I'm not jealous that they went on a trip exactly; I'm jealous that they went and didn't have to stay up all night for a week before hand agonizing over plane crashes and that they didn't have to take Valium to get themselves on the plane and once they got to their destination they didn't spend half the time worrying if they would ever make it back safely. It is actually pretty amazing how much I have managed to travel considering how severe my anxiety can be.

I don't know how much I would want to stop the world if I didn't have anxiety. But I do think there's something to be said for having a strong community of family (bio or chosen) and friends in one general location. I wish I had that.

Slate has an interesting piece up about gay marriage. While I don't agree with it entirely, I do think that the desire to hold on to traditional gender roles is part of the issue some people have with gay marriage. That's why I think it is fascinating to see how laws are unfolding regarding trans people who want to get married — sometimes it seems like people are scrambling to make their laws comply with their bigotry.

As usual, I find the comments more interesting than the articles. One fine poster spelled it out pretty clearly here:

Ah, the same sex marriage debate. From the amount of pixels spent on it, one would think that the main threat to this country is two gay guys getting married. Yet, despite this, this article is a prime example of people who are in favor of allowing same-sex marriage not being aggressive enough in confronting the real issue. Like it or not, the grand majority of those who oppose same-sex marriage are opposed to it on religious or other grounds that show bias against homosexuality. You might not want to believe it, but that is it.

It's real simple folks. If your religion does not want to countenance two people of the same sex being recognized as married by your church then that's just fine. The problem is that too many of you confuse that type of marriage with marriage recognized by the state.

Let's get one thing perfectly clear: God did not create state sanctioned marriage. It is a creature of government, a contract that is recognized and enforced by government with laws detailing the provisions of the contract and what happens when the parties want to end the contract. Now, once you understand that, the question then becomes whether government has any rational basis to prevent Man A and Man B from entering into that contract, when it would allow Man A and Woman A to enter into that contract. That concept is known as equal protection under the laws. A concept that has been around for a while. The Massachusetts Supreme Court found that the equal protection clause of the Massachusetts constitution said that there was no rational basis for doing this, New York's highest court said that there was.

The legal debate is going to continue until eventually, it is resolved as a matter of Federal Constitutional law. However, the following are NOT valid arguments against it:

1) God created marriage (irrelevant to civil marriage)

2) Marriage is for procreation (then why can infertile people marry?)

3) It will weaken the "institution" of marriage. (check out that divorce rate)

4) If you allow gay marriage, then multiple marriages would have to be allowed, or marriages of children, or marriage between a human and a dog. (Multiple marriages, I've never understood the argument against, there is an obvious basis for not allowing children below a certain age to marry, and the last one is too ludicrous to even address)

When you strip away all of the charged language, the reality is that this is a contract created and enforced by government and there is no rational basis not to let any two people of a legal age enter into such a contract.

I don't think I agree with the comments about multiple marriage, but in any case, that's a different argument for a different day. If you read through all the comments (which is pretty annoying, with Slate's layout) you will find that there is also another common argument against gay marriage: if gay people get married, then everyone will marry his or her same sex friend to get the incredible tax benefits. First of all, I'm not sure that the tax benefits are really that amazing — if that were the case, wouldn't most of the unmarried cohabitating heteros want to cash in on that financial gain? If people are concerned that everyone will marry for money (and historically, isn't that what most people have done?) then we could either not give married couples a financial incentive since marriage is supposedly not about money anyway; or, we could make divorce laws harder (except in cases of abuse, of course) since divorce is a much bigger threat to straight marriage than gay marriage is.

It seems like there is a huge problem with semantics, and a lot of people who support civil unions just don't want to hear the words "gay" and "marriage" next to each other. So call it something else. How about the government recognizes civil marriages for straight and gay couples and the churches recognize holy marriages within their own institutions according to their own standards? I'm sure we can think of something here.

The blog over at Baby Name Wizard recently a posted a list of the names most frequently cited as friendly, based on the many comments in response to an earlier post about friendly names. Here is the list:

GIRLS
Sarah*
Katie*
Laura
Molly
Amy*
Emily*
Annie
Ellie
Sadie

BOYS
Charlie
Ben*
Steve*
Andy
Jack*
Jake
Sam
Adam
Evan
Tim*
Tom*
Will

*These names run in my family

I guess I can sort of see the friendliness factor, but I have never even met a Sadie in my life, and I don't see Adam, Tim or Will as particularly friendly. Especially Adam, and I've met plenty of nice Adams. I also don't know anyone named Evan, but I always thought that seemed like the name of a nice guy. I'm not a big fan of Senator Evan Bayh, but I really like the way his name looks when I type it.

I caught this documentary about Gay Republicans on Logo last night. I don't think there's anything that weird about being a Gay Republican, necessarily, but I do think it's weird to be a Gay Republican who supports this particular administration or any of the Republicans in power now who are pushing for a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. I don't really understand people who back any party one hundred percent regardless of the issues. One of the things that was really exciting about the documentary was watching the Gay Republicans team up with Democrats (and Independents and Greens, etc.) to try to defeat a proposition that would define marriage as being between one man and one woman. (The proposition passed.) As I was watching, I kept thinking how cool it would be if elections were about issues and not parties. I think we'd find that there is a lot of cross-party agreement on issues. And maybe we'd actually get to have a real discussion about issues for a change.

First of all, I'm glad we are now all clear on the definition of sexual assault. I am so disgusted with these kids. And even more sadly — and scarily — I am not sure how rare this behavior is. A bunch of drunk college dudes watch internet porn and come to the conclusion that sexually humiliating a young woman is a good idea. I'm not suggesting that the alcohol or the porn caused them to act so atrociously, but I don't know. . . it just sounds like something I've heard before.

Not to get on my old lady high horse, but I am really disturbed by a lot of the attitude that seems to be a little too common on college campuses. An attitude of selfish entitlement, the same attitude that knows that Mommy and Daddy will call to complain if Junior gets a bad grade, and they'll foot the bill to Cancun for Spring Break so Junior can get wasted and watch girls go wild. I think this attitude, especially combined with living in close quarters, drugs, alcohol, and the expectation that everyone should be having constant sex is bad news. I am not saying that every selfish college kid is capable of sexual assault, or that there is anything wrong with being silly and irresponsible when you're 20 years old. Lest you think otherwise, I partied a lot in college, which was only a few years ago. I did a lot that I am not proud of. But you know what I did not do? I did not vandalize anything. I never left beer cans and plastic cups all over the ground. I never flipped over a car or lit anything on fire and I never disrespected another person or thought it would be fun to sexually assault anyone. I didn't think I had the right to do these things, because I didn't. And neither do these kids.