the big gay sketch show

I just find these funny. The first one is lesbian phone sex and the second is lesbian speed dating. Hurray for youtube.

zen noir

If you are looking for a good film to watch, I highly recommend "Zen Noir" by Marc Rosenbush. It basically follows this stereotypical detective (think Dick Tracy) as he's investigating a death in a Buddhist temple. It has a lot of really funny moments, but it also contrasts "logic" with non-linear forms of knowledge. Looks at death, life, the meaning of life, identity, change, oranges, love, it's quite excellent. I really enjoy it. I need to get to bed, I have 8am class. w00t.

this post.. kinda pointless

And insomnia strikes again! Woo! I should really be asleep right now. I promised my little sister that I would make her breakfast tomorrow. Since she goes to high school and all that, that means getting up 6am. Really shouldn't have been a problem. I was all set to go to sleep, but instead of heading right to bed, I checked my email, checked iChat, ended up talking to several people. Finally signed off, turned off the computer, turned off the light, tried to sleep... and clearly I was unsuccessful.

On the other hand, I've made several observations. It got really cold. It's entirely possible that I will have the joy of driving all the way to Luther in a snow storm. I can't wait for the weekend and I haven't really done anything but bum around the house all week. Counting sheep gets a little boring after you reach 1,127 sheep. At that point you should give up and realize you aren't tired yet.

If any of you have an hour to watch a documentary about the internet and "kids these days", you should watch this one from PBS. I love PBS. It's all we watched in my house for most of my childhood. I remember a lot of fundraising programs where they'd have banks of people answering phones and the host at the front talking about whatever group was performing. That actually might just be a memory of one Peter, Paul and Mary concert that my brother and I would watch over and over. Anyways. I've been re-examining my internet usage since watching that PBS documentary. I feel some changes afoot. I'm seriously considering deleting my myspace account. I don't use it for anything of real importance. I just mess around with it when I am bored or want to procrastinate, and their are better ways of doing both. I can still search the site for music, so it's not like I need it for that. Decisions decisions.

Well. Five hours and counting until the great egg cooking adventure. Sleep, take two.

visiting alyssa

I had an interesting experience today. I ate lunch with Alyssa, a girl who transferred away from Luther. She know attends Concordia University Wisconsin which is strangely enough located in my hometown. She went to Luther for two years before transferring away, for several reasons, one of them being that Luther was too liberal for her. The fact that Luther is RIC disturbs her. Well, actually, she didn't know it was RIC until after she transferred, which is entertaining to me. I mean, Luther has been RIC since the 90s. I think it was possibly the first congregation in Iowa to go RIC.

Nonetheless. I'm not exactly sure where she stands, but I'm fairly certain that on some level, Alyssa thinks that queerness is morally wrong. Mainly because of several comments she's made when we've talked. For example, she was telling me about a debate she had in her political science course. She was debating "homosexual marriage" and her group's opening argument was that while homosexuality is wrong according to the Christian tradition, that that shouldn't mean that "homosexuals" shouldn't have equal rights. (To give you an idea of the kind of university she attends, in these debates people whipped out their bibles. Seriously? A political science debate where bibles are brought up as evidence?) Interacting with her is just strange. She has never said anything directly to me about my queerness, she has several close friends who are gay, yet there was the whole comment about her debate, and the fact that Luther's congregation was too liberal for her.

I think what confuses me is that I can't really place her. I'm not used to people who are morally opposed to queerness interacting with queers without either insulting them or trying to cure them or both. It's refreshing that she believes what she believes without trying to push it on to the queers. In some ways, she's being a lot more tolerant than a lot of queer people. I think that's another reason that I am slightly unsettled by my interactions with her. Many queer people are completely intolerant of people who think that queerness is morally wrong. And for me, this is where it gets complicated. Clearly, I want people to accept me and not think that I am a sick and twisted individual. On the other hand, I also don't want to force people to believe something. Just because I believe that I am "right" in this situation, does that make it appropriate for me to say that others beliefs aren't valid? Really, I just want people to be nice to each other. I am not being extraordinarily coherent, I realize that. If any of you have thoughts on the topic, let me know.

i am not completely healthy

The past few days when I wake up I haven't been feeling so great. Feel like my lungs hurt a bit, and I usually have a runny nose. At first, I just assumed my body was saying "fuck you" for smoking more than usual over Jterm. But no. My body was trying to tell me to slow the hell down and sleep. Since I clearly didn't get the message, I woke up today with a full blown chest cold. *sigh* I really just want to crawl back in to bed and sleep until I feel healthy again.
My mother has been giving me alavert, oranges and emergen-c all day, so let's hope it's not possible to overload your system with vitamin C. She's also banished me from the puppy room, so I don't make them sick.
Luckily, since it is Jterm break I don't have much to do. Since I am a brilliant procrastinator, I do have a 5 to 8 page analysis of the Matrix to write and email to my professor by 3:30pm. But I'm not concerned. The only difficult part will be focusing on the structures of power in the film instead of talking about Keanu's horrible acting.
I had an excellent weekend. I got to go visit one of my best friends, Mugsie, in Evanston. It just makes me happy to hang out with her. We saw a play, hung out with her friends, talked, good times all around. I also got to eat lunch with Andy, which was also good.
Anyways, I think I'm going to go take a shower before I finish the paper. Happy Monday to all, or something like that.

so i'm in exile...

My mother is doing her poodle puppy selling thing. Well, technically not selling quite yet. She has the families who want to buy one of the puppies over and they look at the puppies and meet the mother. Then my parents sit the people down at the kitchen table and they talk about dogs for about an hour and a half. They talk about the lineage of the dogs. They talk about how long my parents have raised poodles. The family that wants to buy the poodle talks about themselves so my parents get an idea of what sort of home the dog will be going to. They talk about the personalities of different poodles. The list goes on.
Either way, I unfortunately woke up after the potential buyers arrived, which means I'm restricted to the upstairs until they leave. Well, technically this is because I didn't get my laundry last night when it was finished. So I can't get dressed yet. Sitting in exile, in my room. Woohoo.

last jterm ever

I finished my last day of jterm ever today. Woohoo! I'm pretty excited about it. The class went well, even if it did drag during the discussions. The ride home today was rough. We were stuck in stop and go traffic for a long time. My lower back started freaking out on me. It's been rather upset lately, what with the cold, ace bandaging and sitting in the car. I should probably ease up on the ace bandages, and order a new binder already, as has been pointed out to me more than once in the past few days. =)

Anyways, it's just my parents and I at home this weekend. My brother is back to college and my sister is traveling with friends. It's strange, after you grow up with these two other people, always being around them, knowing what's going on in their lives, sneaking into each others rooms in the middle of the night to talk, then suddenly you're in college, and we don't really talk anymore. I think part of why I feel distant from my family is that I don't know how to talk to them about being queer. When I first came out I was terrified of being rejected, and I just let so many things go unsaid. I've never actually spoken to my brother and sister about it. They know that I prefer dating women, my mother and I have talked about the fact that they know. I'm pretty sure they don't know I want to cut off my breasts though. I often feel like being at home puts a "don't ask don't tell" policy into effect in my life. Part of that is my fault though. I don't make the effort to open up to my family, to let them in to that part of my life. I am the one that keeps jumping back into my role as Amy, the oldest daughter, the older sister, instead of just being who I've become in the past four years.

Since my brother and sister aren't home, I've resolved to sit down and talk with my parents. I want to tell them I've picked out a new name. I also want to reiterate that I want surgery, and that I am already planning for it. I would also like to ask them for a very small loan so I can purchase a new binder. As I mentioned before, the ace bandage is not treating my body well and I shouldn't do that to myself.

On a completely different topic, I watched the movie Gray Matters this evening. Woo netflix. It's a decent movie. Much better than many "lesbian movies" in the world. And Rachel Shelley is in it and that's great. I think she's hot. She's not a main character, but that's perfectly ok with me. I was actually planning on going to sleep and watching the movie tomorrow. But after laying in bed with the lights off for 45 minutes without even feeling tired I decided to just watch the movie.

Interesting fact from my life, it seems that every time I come back to Milwaukee, I have a hard time falling asleep the first few nights. Maybe it's just sleeping in a different place. Or maybe it's because I usually resolve to talk to my parents/family and then get worked up about it and psyche myself out. One of my friends told me I over analyze sometimes. That's probably true. Actually, I know it's true. Luckily it's also true that I only over analyze sometimes. I'm starting to ramble. Here's to take two of trying to fall asleep.