Friends, I tell you you have not lived until you have spent an hour on the living room couch with a 6′7 German man named Oliver, watching the Gilmore Girls and discussing heavy metal versus industrial, and how Metallica carried us through high school. I guess some experiences really do transcend time and space… though I didn’t think they would really involve Metallica.

In other news, I will be spending about 35 hours in New York at the end of this week. If anyone wants New York presents, you should let me know before Thursday morning because I don’t know what my internet access will be like. I will not tell you what a New York present is… and I can’t honestly promise you that it won’t be something that I find on the street. But if you are interested… comment/ message me.

Work has been crazy, hence the dearth of posting… I regret to say that I have fallen off of the NaBloPoMo project, but I am still trying to write more than I was before, and hopefully it shall continue.

Dodger has been particularly whiney. This had been going on for a couple of weeks following some unfortunate bladder evacuations on his part (a problem mostly solved by us having a stern discussion of the consequences of continued bed peeing upon, and also me locking him in a small room with a litter box and some toys and a blanket at the suggestion of my vet, so that he could relearn how to use the box). Anyway, after the peeing came the noise making, which let up for a couple weeks, but seems to have returned. The common internet knowledge seems to be to ignore the cat when he is whining, and reward him when he stops. My question to the internet is this. My cat walks around the house meowing at the top of his lungs. He could want for me to feed him, or pet him, or play with him, or he could want me to ignore him and tell him irately to learn how to use his words, cause ma’s had a long day at work and needs language with her vocalizations. Now, any of the three former ones are fine, but if he wants the fourth one… I mean, how do I know that I’m not inadvertently rewarding his bad behavior?

Someone will tell me when I’ve gone fully round the bend, right?

Note to self:
Probably don’t read O magazine about the women your organization helps in Africa while on the metro. Crying on the train is so cliche.

Anyone out there who’s curious about what I do, why I put up with the days that make me post stuff like I did last night, and the night before that, check out O magazine for the month of December (currently on the stands). Page 283. These are not stories that are easy to read, but this is why I do it. Knowing that in my own abstract way I am doing something to help these women.

I am faced with the question, how can this be the world I live in? Do men rape women when civil society degrades to a level that there is no reason for them not to? Would the men I know act in the same way if our society collapsed completely? Is this what anarchism really means? If it’s not the collapse of the rule of law that allows such atrociety, what are other possible explanations? Is this the normal state of the cultures in which these women live, or is this caused by the illness that began three hundred years ago with European “exploration”?

I’m tired, and I don’t know if I make sense right now. I would like to believe that there aren’t cultures whose default position is to endorse violence (towards women or anyone else) but my knowledge of the Old Testament belies that belief.

I need to think on this more.

A note on absenteeism. This has not been an easy couple of weeks for me. Unfortunately there is very little of it that is mine to talk about, but in the interest of completeness and honesty, right now is not an easy place for me to be. Things get better in bits and spurts, but it’s not quite awesome. And by not quite awesome I mean at least I don’t quite feel like I’m drowning in this moment.

As is my wont, when I get stressed out I create small, or sometimes large projects for myself. The current project that is percolating is one in which I see all of the monuments and museums in DC in one weekend. This is a baby idea right now, and i have two days in which to nurture it. How many hours will it take? Is my goal of only walking a reasonable one? How many miles will it be by the end? Should I go to museums that are closed, or am I exempt from those? Does the library of congress count as either a museum or a monument?

Does anyone want to join me?

It’s been a day. Something in my room smells of cat piss and I have not yet determined what that is.
Awesome.

There are a million things I want to write about, but in the harsh reality of the fact that, in fact, no one is interested in what I ate for lunch, I don’t really know what to say about any of it.
How do we know which are the right decisions to make? How do I know if I am living my life well, if I am a help to my friends, a comfort to them in their time of need? How do I know how to be the person I should be?

I was recently faced with a person who said he would not be able to date someone who is religious. I didn’t push him on what he meant by religious. Does he mean that he couldn’t date someone who believes in god, who isn’t an atheist, or that he couldn’t date someone who takes the bible as the only truth… he used ambiguous language. Of course that wasn’t the only problem, between us anyway.

I’m not an atheist, I never have been. I’m not agnostic… I think that a lot of modern religion is a crutch that people use in order to feel less alone in an entirely frightening world, and religion as a crutch is a lot healthier for the body than drugs as a crutch, or self mutilation, or any number of other things that people use in order to travel through a world that is generally fairly terrifying.

But I’m not religious. Sometimes I wish I could be. Someday maybe I will. But I was always be a questioner. I am not the kind of person who can follow a rule for the sake of being told to. My mom once said that was what faith was all about, following a rule that you don’t understand in order to show that you believe in whomever set the rule. Faith is far more frightening, and beautiful to me. Faith is what keeps people having children, what allows us to look one another in the eye, what prompts us to create things of beauty, and to continue looking for goodness in others.

I don’t have a whole lot of faith right now. It’s been a hard year, and I feel pretty trampled. I’d like for someone to give me the answers for a little while, and while I know that isn’t something that’s actually acceptable for me, I can see how tempting it is for others who find themselves losing their faith.