Prejudice and Prop 8

I have tried to abstain from the nonsense of the yes/no debate of Prop 8. But I have recently been introduced to several different ads against (and for I might add) the proposition that shocked and appalled me.
For those of you who have not figured this out yet, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am not ashamed of my religion, nor was I forced to donate money to the cause of proposition 8. Honestly I never really heard anything about it in my Sunday Church Meetings. I am also not a California resident. I claim to be apathetic, especially in the realm of politics, but sometimes my opinion needs to be heard and understood.

Some of the ads that jarred me most were the misinformed ads demonizing Mormons, and their leaders. They took their words and used them to support their own purposes. I was in TV production in Highschool and I can tell you now that if I wanted to promote tolerance and respect I could make a video using only sound bites from Adolf Hitler and make a pretty convincing video. If there is anything that I detest more than yellow journalism, it is poorly done yellow journalism. With this thought I turn to my next issue.

“I hate those ‘haters.’” With these words more irony is contained than in any sentence spoken in history (With the exception of some statements by Moliere). How can you hate those that hate and not grow to hate yourselves? Is there something wrong with a person that believes in reincarnation? Is there a reason why a person cannot see marriage as it has been seen for hundreds of years without being seen as ‘medieval’?

Terms have changed, ask any person studying linguistics and they will tell you this, but is there a reason why a different form of union cannot have a different form of name? If a man and a man want to be together they can have one term associated with their union, the same for a woman and a woman, but they do not need to use the term ‘marriage.’ To quote Shakespeare ‘a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet.’ The sweetest part of this change in terminology (not rights) would be to alleviate the fight for marriage. Just use a different term, with the same rights.

I do not want to hear your claims that marriage should be based on love. If that is the case, I have one more question for you, do you agree with polygamy? One could argue that polygamy is based off of love; therefore we should legalize that practice as well. I am fully against reinstating polygamy, does this categorize me as a hater?

One more thing that irked me (On either side) was the astounding lapse of logic used in presenting their arguments. Why is it that one can purport to be ‘tolerant’ and ‘forward thinking’ when all they can say is ‘Why Society is Dumb?’ or Protect Families?. Both sides had gaping hoels in their arguments. Please be articulate when you are arguing your point, or just don’t argue it at all.

*After this rant I would like to add that issues like this are why I am not a political science major. I don’t know how one can cope with society as well as that…oi. I respect Political science majors, you guys are amazing.

NaNoWriMo

I am writing for NaNoWriMo… a little story with horriffic grammar about heroes and villains and the origins of the purple platypus. Admittedly by little I mean 50000 words, but I am going to have  a fun time. And no social life. root me on and await the random posts that will soon come to let me know if you are even remotely inested in what I am writing… I doubt that I’ll let people read the miscreants masquerading as words, but who knows I might actually like it.

Lab Fever

Don’t worry… I haven’t caught anything contagious. I work in a lab in my free time (as little as it is) and I have recently been researching, and researching and researching and researching and reserching and researching… You get the beautiful picture. I have gone a looong time without anything to do lab work wise.I know that growing up pure cultures is not the most fascinating thing in the universe, but at least I could see that i was accomplishing something useful. I know that the research can be boring, but I am almost to the point of creating a second research project an starting it up just for the heck of it. Starting a project that has nothing to do with the bacteria that I am working with…or researching. Maybe I’ll discover a use for some of the odd isolates that we just got in… tac plasmid ecoli or maybe the glowing pathogen… I don’t know. All I know for certain at this point is that if I don’t do some actual research work I will go insane and then I’ll never get to work with the things that I want to.

I have been thinking about studying the intracellular pathways of Lysteria Monocytogenes… maybe that will be a break from the tedium of non-stop reading while your other labmates are creating phage stocks and running disinfectant tests. Reminds me of the time I went to a dance and was left behind as all of my other friends got asked to dance. No fun and you feel more than a little left out. Only instead of being asked to dance last now I am being last to be asked to do PCR.

Tell me something that I don’t know already

It’s official. I’ve taken the test and proven myself against all the others. As if taking a silly exam tells you anything about how geeky you are…honestly they were biased against the Science geeks of the world. Just because I cannot name all of the characters in Star Trek (in their appropriate seasons) or tell someone they look hot in Klingon, does not disqualify me as a geek.

What about those of us who have (or plan to) science as their major? What about people who think that studying bacterial pathogenesis and other toxin-producing microbes are cooler than playing trivial pursuit? What about people who life in labs for most of their College careers. My Microbiology professor told me today that I should under no circumstances go to medical school over graduate school. He claimed that it was a waste of my talent. I don’t know about that, but honestly in my opinion it’s far geekier to know what a Dendritic cell (and the four cytokines that activate them) than to know information about imaginary characters or play video games all day.

But, despite my dislike of the entire geek classification system I am proud to call myself an official

Those who know me, laugh at me (and with me)

Goobye and Memories

The trouble with life is that sometimes, despite your most valiant attempts to discern the inner conundrums, no matter how many pieces of advice you get from your friends the ‘sure bet’ is never the one that you want, it’s the one that came to you in the first place. The one who talked to you, played with you, protected you. The one who stole your heart and never really gave it back. One who you never thought that you’d see again, the missing friend that will never really be back.

You see, that boy does not exist. He is perfected in memory, and memories of ones loved are always tainted by the rose lens of liking. That man will always be perfect, although I know that the reality was far different. The memory danced with me, he caught me when I fell, he dreamed my dreams, he saw my thoughts, the memory took all of my pain and dashed it, hid it in a wall where no one would think to look. Pain does not make for pleasant rememberings, nor do goodbyes make for a good tale to tell.

Sometimes goodbye is the most painful word one can hear, but to not hear it, that is the worst. To not hear good bye is to mean that there is hope that he will return to you someday. There is the irrational and illogical dream that despite all evidence to the contrary he still holds you in his heart. There is the sad realization that every morning your hopes are brought up only to be torn apart as another day passes.

You miss him terribly, knowing that you hurt him as much as he hurt you. You can deal with your pain, but the thought that you caused another’s pain, the thought that you ripped out his heart makes you want to dig yourself into the deepest hole that you can imagine and thrust yourself down into it.

And then you do. You make yourself believe that the only way that you’ll ever be happy again is to see him smile, to know that despite your worst efforts he can still live life, he can still love something, he can still exist. You cry because of his pain, you celebrate because of his triumphs, and you watch from afar, keeping in the back of your mind the reminder that that part of your life is gone. No matter how hard you try you cannot erase the pseudo farewell from your heart. You don’t believe it, but you must, because despite your imaginations, despite your hopes, despite anything that your foolish, lovesick imaginings can conjure he is gone. That is the sure way to say goodbye. To look at the past and remember. . . that he wasn’t perfect, that dreams aren’t reality, and with that knowledge you can move on with life at last knowing that you tried your hardest, despite the failures. You then look at the past and realize the end of one story is merely the beginning of another.

College and Dancing

Four years of training and work and you find yourself the little fish in a big pond. In actuality it was more like you went from being a minnow in a tide pool to a miniscule zooplankton within the majesty of the ocean. The average SAT and ACT scores have grown so astronomical that one questions how anyone got here in the first place and if they did how much of a life they had to prepare to take said examination. Test scores and classes are wonderful in itself but in order to truly thrive here there is one talent that they don’t teach at most college prep high schools. Apparently the only way to be able to bring yourself to a more multi-cellular experience at college you must either be able to speak twelve different languages, be well on the way to curing world hunger, or be a pretty darn good dancer.

By good dancer I mean for guys you have to actually ask girls to dance and for girls this means that one must be acquainted with fourteen hundred thousand different types of pairs dancing. Take tonight for instance. I frequented a swing dance where males were dancing with females (the typical arrangement). A male asked me to dance, and I discovered that although I knew West coast swing, balboa, lindy-hop, and various renditions of triple swing I did not know the form of dancing that he was familiar with. Then you get hopelessly lost and there are only two ways to reconcile this inadequacy, you either fake it and pray that you don’t fall, or you admit defeat and retreat to the wall. I chose the latter over the former, and stumbled my way through a few dances before I found a couple of guys that I could at least follow their lead.

Following is the best skill a female dancer can learn in this life. If you are a good follow then you can do just about anything with the guy if he’s talented. And dancing with the talented ones are the only reason I submit myself to the dancing scene.