Brian's blog is so much prettier than mine, now that he changed up his template. He's got a kick-ass cheese graphic! Where's my cheese? And Zump's blog allows for user comments. I should really fix mine up sometime soon.

Brain prosthesis! Cool beans.

I love you, Lotte.

Apparently, although Lenny Kravitz is now voicing his opinion and has recorded the afore-mentioned antiwar song, he hasn't actually voted in years and years. Interesting link, Brian -- thanks. ;-)

Rock the Vote and Lenny Kravitz today announced a new song by Kravitz called "We Want Peace," which will be available exclusively at Rock the Vote's website. The song, which says, "There won't be peace if we don't try" is an urgent call from Lenny Kravitz for America to be a peaceful leader in the world. Kravitz wrote the song and performed it with Kazem Al Sahir, Iraq's #1 pop music artist, who is better known as the Iraqi Diplomatic Ambassador of the world and a true legend of Arabic Music. In addition, the song features Palestinian musician Simon Shaheen on strings and Lebanese artist Jamey Hadded on percussion.

Lenny Kravitz, teaming up with an Iraqi artist to create his own act of protest -- pretty cool. It causes me to have a bit more respect for the guy.

R.E.M, the Beastie Boys, DJ Shadow, Zach de la Rocha, and Greenday are also among those who have released anti-war songs. Good for them.

Because there are things I need to get done today, I spent much of my morning procrastinating and browsing the web. I like the NYTimes website, I've decided. It may be my favorite US news site at the moment.

NY Times articles of interest:

• More coverage of the US Supreme Court's Texas Sodomy Law case.


• Op-Ed: Casualties at Home. It's kind of scary what Congress is up to, and scary how it gets lost in the mass of war coverage.


• Another opinion piece on current Congressional activities...


• Washington Trying to Curb U.N. Role in a Postwar Iraq. Apparently, we're determined to continually snub the U.N. as best we can.

One more site that I was particularly impressed with:

• DigitalConsumer.org: Protecting fair-use rights in the digital world. These guys have got an impressive news section.

Today at the DMV, there was a group of people running surveys about travel on 520, gauging how we'd react if they were to make the 520 bridge into a toll bridge.

There was an age bracket question in the survey. I had to choose the 25-40 age bracket. I've moved up. Blah.

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NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, That the citizens of the State of Washington do hereby proclaim that Tim Eyman is a Horse's Ass.

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They didn't ask me today whether or not I wanted to be an organ donor. I forgot to explicitly tell them so. Now I'm afraid it won't be marked on my licence -- ptooey.

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Texas Penal Code section 21.06, the "Homosexual Conduct Statute,"...criminalizes sexual acts between homosexuals, even if the acts are consensual. Texas is one of only four states to have such a law targeting homosexuals...

...The defendants then appealed to the US Supreme Court to have their convictions overturned and the law deemed unconstitutional...

...Oral arguments were heard on March 26, 2003, and a decision is expected by June. Initial reports suggest that the justices were split on the issue, with Rehnquist and Scalia in support of upholding the law, Souter and Breyer in support of overturning the law, with the position of the other five justices unclear.

The Texas Human Rights Foundation: Lawrence & Garner v. Texas

Side notes:

• As recently as 1960, every state had a sodomy law. In 37 states, the statutes have been repealed by lawmakers or blocked by state courts.


• Four states -- Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri -- ban "deviate sexual intercourse" just between same-sex couples. There are nine other states with sodomy laws on the books, but they apply to everyone, instead of being targeted solely at homosexuals.

Geez. I can't believe that, here we are in the 21st century, and the US Supreme Court vote on this issue could go either way. How can educated people be so closed-minded and intollerant?

I heard some of Rehnquist's and Scalia's oral arguments quoted on NPR today. Crazy. It scares me that these people have so much power over our freedoms and civil liberties.

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TCPA - bad. Definitely not a fan.

I was telling my friend Chris the other day that my dog, on the rare occasion when he has an accident and dumps inside, will try to hide it. He'll cover it up with dirty clothes, papers, or whatever he can find.

Chris was amazed that a dog, whose world revolves around smell, would learn that sort of behavior. "Hiding" poo doesn't get rid of the smell -- to the dog, the presence of said poo is still quite obvious. The only reason to hide the poo is to confuse silly humans, who have a less acute sense of smell.

I was kind of amazed, too, once I thought about things in that light. My dog is so smart.

I'm now the proud owner of a WA State Driver's Licence. I ended up getting 100% on the test, which made me feel silly for having worried about it.

Happy birthday me.

Technically, I guess I'm not 25 for another 16 hours yet. But it's close enough.

The crew at Mike and Jared's place gave me a cake, lots of presents, and lots of wonderful cards tonight. I feel so loved. I'm sad that Kirsten and Kristen are moving to NYC this summer, that Tiff is moving to NV this fall, and that Mike and Jared are moving to AZ sometime next year. They're a wonderful group of people; I'll really miss them all.

Bummer.

Sigh.

On a semi-related note, I realized today that my driver's licence expires tomorrow. Gotta do something about that.

Another war, another burst of national idiocy

Depressed about all the hoopola going on right now with the Dixie Chicks (whatever happened to free speech?), I browsed around and finally on the above article. Good stuff. It echoes some of my sentiments, anyhow.

Here are a few bits from posts in my swing dance forum that got me thinking:

What are you going to study in grad school?

Do you hate your job because of the specific tasks you need to perform, or is it more the idea behind what you are doing (i.e., nobody reads it anyway and it's at grade school level; not an effective use of your training to be a writer)?

When I feel unmotivated to do the excruciatingly boring parts of my job (grading papers often comes to mind), I set mini-goals for myself and reward myself afterward. I also find that procrastinating until the very last minute creates enough tension to keep things interesting. :) With that extra fire under my butt, I am amazingly efficient.

...

If you are at the end of your procrastination rope and are inundated with projects, that may be also leading to lack of interest in your job, 'cause it's overwhelming right now.

Can you organize each project into stacks (or folders, if they are online) and stack the most pressing one on top and just start muscling through (with lots of treats standing by for each time you complete one)? That's what I try to do with my ocean of work (which you will note I am not doing right now). If the most pressing project is too overwhelming, I sometimes start with the easiest ones in order to just get some feeling of accomplishment going (checking things off the checklist feels good).

...

Anne

This is good stuff for me to keep in mind when I go back to work or school, and even now on a daily basis. I really suck at breaking things down. I'm not great at motivating myself.

Blah.

I was away this weekend. While I was gone, three men forced their way into an apartment here and robbed the owners at gunpoint. There was a rash of car break-ins. Several cars were stolen. The plates off of some cars were stolen and replaced with other stolen plates.

Crazy.

Happily, my car was sitting in Capitol Hill. Not the best place for a car, necessarily, but apparently much better these past few days than the lot at my apartment complex.

Another gem from the newsgroup:

One helpful piece: A request is not a demand. I can ask for some help. But the person I ask can turn it down. Conversely, I can
turn them down when they ask. -- seems that the people who have the worst time about asking for help are those who won't refuse. You're equals, so can ask for and offer help freely, and decline equally freely.

(Robert Grumbine, Re: Who's the craziest? Winner gets a prize...)

I have trouble asking for help. I've never really thought about it in those terms, but I do have trouble refusing others. Perhaps some of my guilt in asking for help does stem, at least in part, from an assumption that the other party is incapable of saying "no". Interesting.

A GREEN Dragon Lies Beneath!

I took the Inner Dragon online quiz and found out I am a Green Dragon on the inside. My Inner Dragon is the embodiment of Nature and the Earth. Greens spend almost all of their time below the canopy or just above the treetops in tropical rain forests. Not a bad life considering every other creature in the forest looks up to me, figuratively and literally. I speak the language of every animal and plant in my domain and know most of them by first name. If people mess with my forests, I'm more than happy to wail on their puny butts. Because of my protector/caretaker role, I am the Earth Elemental dragon.

Naturally my whole life pretty much revolves around the other couple million species I keep an eye on, but that's not my whole dragon. I also like to like to impose my steadfast will on others, commune with Nature, and lobby governments for alternative fuels and conservation. My favorable attributes are gemstones, mountains, caves, soil, respect, endurance, responsibility, prosperity, and purpose in life. Folks shouldn't get the idea I'm a hippy pushover though, because my breath weapon is a nasty Fire/Acid combination. Maybe I should invest in a hemp shirt reading "Don't knock my smock, or I'll clean your clock." *wink*

Alex says those descriptions look pretty bogus. I, unfortunately, do not know my dragons very well, so I can't say one way or another how the descriptions fly.

Happy birthday, Jeremy!

Tonight, I was on top of the world!

Seriously, it's been a great evening. I had an awesome dancing night! I was in a weird mood; really playful. This was the first dance I've had like that where sleep deprivation wasn't somehow involved. I danced with several leads I hadn't danced with for months, and they were all really impressed with my dancing. Idaho Dave said that the dance I had with him was one of his favorites all evening. I had a kick-ass dance with Kevin Buster -- during the dance, I'd do something cool and he'd be like, "YEAH!" and make all sorts of approving noises, and he thanked me for the dance over and over again afterwards. Five thank you's or something over the course of the next half hour. He said it was our best dance ever. Sweet!

Before the dance Alex and I grabbed some Thai food, and we sat and ate it through the first few songs. Just listening to the music, hanging out, eating great food... it was a nice way to start out the evening. And then I was on for almost the entire night. Mike led me in Tango during one of the slower songs, which was cool, but I had a few off dances after that. It's hard to go back and forth. I got my groove back two or three songs later, though, and I think those two or three songs were the only ones that didn't feel absolutely great. And even those few were still good, by my regular standards.

Alex thinks my following has dramatically improved just in the last week or so. Maybe the break I took from dancing was good for me. Hmm. Food for thought.

We all went out to the grill afterwards. It was Tigan's birthday, so even Alex was feeling social enough to hang out for a bit. I had a milkshake, a coffee, and I stole some of Alex's cheesecake. The cheesecake had raspberry sauce dribbled all over it -- yummy! I ended up with a tummy ache -- too much lactose, or the Thai food catching up with me, or something -- but even that didn't bring me down from my dancing high.

I am so happy tonight. Yay.

I just got a copies of the family pictures we had done while I was back in MN this past December. They make me really happy! I wish I had a scanner; I'd scan one in and make you all look at it.

This is the first time my family had all been together in almost a year. It's the first family photo we've had taken in probably six or seven years.

Sadly, with my brother in Kuwait and with me out here in WA low on funds for travelling and all, that Christmas is probably the last time that we'll all be together in the same place for quite a while to come. It sucks, because I really do love my family. I've met all sorts of people out here who come from really disfunctional families and are glad to be apart, but not me. My parents, my sisters, my brother -- good people. I miss them.

I'm the queen of run-on sentences today. Yay me.

It's hard explaining depression to someone who's never really been there. And trying to explain... it makes me feel like something's seriously wrong with me, like I'm so much less of a person because I get sucked down into the depression, without there being any good reason for it, no real motivation for being unhappy.

Blah.

I am feeling a little better now though. I mean, I was feeling depressed anyway and I still am now, but there was other stuff going on that was getting to me. Mike and I had a good talk and worked some of that out. So I'm not happy right now, exactly, but I feel like a lot of weight has been lifted off my shoulders. It's good.