Defend Traditional Marriage!

The Faithful Skeptic wants to defend "traditional" marriage. Hiliarious!

Similarly, I've never liked the term traditional marriage, because it tends to lead to disengenious arguments about the state of modern marriage and its links to ancient or older traditions. But I'm hard-pressed to find another one. However I will say that the best PC term I've heard to date was from the New York Times last month: 2-sex Marriage.

Two Guys, a Camaro and an Alpaca

This weekend the boy and I to the Homaro into Guilford, CT for some apple- and raspberry-picking. For some reason he got it into his head that he wanted to do a lot of baking this week and I got into my head that you can't make a proper apple pie if you don't pick your own apples (similarly, if you can't harvest your own mussels you should make sure that the ones you buy from your fishmonger were grown on a rope in the middle of a fjord). So off we went, picking about 35 lbs of apples and 3 lbs of raspberries.

Now I love raspberries, but we had to cart them back to New York on a train and since we were rushing to catch it we didn't have time to put it in a proper bag or something so they were sitting open in a carboard container. Right next to me. So I picked at them. The whole ride home. For those of you who have never eaten a pound of raspberries in one sitting you have absolutely no idea the kind of upset stomach and noxious gas that they induce. It was also amusing to be lugging 35 lbs of apples and (now) 2 lbs of raspberries down 125th St. to the subway. We had a few people eyeing us suspiciously, a few people eyeing us confuddled, and one woman on Metro North eyeing us longingly, hoping against hope that I might miss one of the apples I kept dropping on the seat.

In the end we got to make a delicious raspberry tart and a (hopefully delicious) apple-raspberry pie. And since we have approximately 32 lbs of apples left, I see a few more pies, streussels and tarts in my future. And probably a lot more gas...

Must See TV

After a less than stellar dinner at Wondee Siam II (Wondee Siam I was packed and their sister restaurant across the street isn't nearly as good (can we say $10 corking fee?!)) I was tired and headed home where I watched a little TV before crashing early. I caught a bit of The Apprentice, but like to wait until Saturdays to see it because they have amazing, juicy extra footage from the board room. Trump still kicks ass. As does Carolyn (if not more so this season). I never warmed up to George. This season, my money's on Pamela or Ivana (although her name might put her at a disadvantage). I can't get behind any of the men, although I'd like to get behind a few of them, if you know what I mean (oh, smack!).

But afterwards I slid back into my old standbys for an evening alone, South Park and the Daily Show. I don't know how or why I'd missed this, but the South Park episode where the kids go on a Lord of the Rings quest to get the One Video (the porno Backyard Sluts 9 in a LOTR box) back to the video store is pure genius. Genius. Although less genius then when Jon Stewart suggested to Gwenyth Paltrow that she let his kid bang hers. His newborn and her newborn. I have a feeling that Gwenyth won't be accepting any more invitations to appear on the Daily Show.....

Area Code Misery

Well, I finally did it. Today, I canceled my ground line. My blessed phone number, that 212 with such an easy, rhythmic feel to it that I had it memorized in less than 10 seconds, that wonderful, wonderful phone number that I'd had for four blessed years, that number that I finally got purged from most telemarketing lists so for the first time in just under two years I've been able to sleep past 8:15 on the weekends, that fantastic ten digit number will soon belong to someone else.

Please, join me in a moment of silence.

Now you may weep openly with me, so I don't look like a pansy all by myself.

Relaxation...

So I haven't blogged in a while because I've been out of town a good deal. Since I didn't get a chance to get a real summer vacation, and since summer was ending, I decided it was time to relax. And relax I did! My relaxation reached fairly epic proportions at one point.

I shall begin with Labor Day weekend. I decided to join the boy and his fam in a cabin in Georgia. We started relaxing early on Thursday by renting the gayest car on the planet, the PT Cruiser, against our will. We relaxed for 16 straight hours in which we made many relaxing detours through various inner cities in an attempt to find a multitude of Starbucks Skyline mugs. We paused briefly from our relaxation in North Carolina since too much relaxing in a PT (Poon-Tang) Cruiser is bad for your health.

The cabin was in a loverly spot in the Blue Ridge Mountains, far away from everything, which meant we spent most of our time having his sister, our Relaxation Coordinator, driving to various spots of relaxation, where we enjoyed a non-stop barage of relaxing mountain activities such as rafting a class 4 rapids, galloping through the woods on a flatulent horse for two hours, and trying to stay afloat on an inner tube in a chin-deep river travelling forty miles an hour while trying not to spill our beer. So blissfully relaxing!

When we weren't doing such relaxing outdoorsy events, we were relaxing in front of the Weather Channel in an attempt not to wonder if the boy's parents (who live in Florida) would have a house to go back to after their relaxing vacation.

After a few days of this, we decided it was time to relax some more, so we piled back into the gay-wad mobile and drove back to New York. I then got to wake up 6 hours later so I could get to work early, scrample to get my poster ready for my conference and then get up even earlier the next day to spend the rest of the weekend relaxing on the Cape. And by relaxing I mean going to relaxingly long talks about phophatydalinositol involvement in cell signaling, without a break, from 6pm on Wednesday until noon on Saturday. Literally. Which was wonderful because who wants relaxing activities like an hour long lecture about PIP2 binding to FYVE domains in an un-airconditioned auditorium with 127-year-old wooden seats to be interrrupted by something as horrible as sunny weather and all-you-can-eat-oyster bars?

It's a good thing that I got to relax so much because when I got back to work I was saddled with the wonderful job of training our new technician, which means that if my vacation hadn't been relaxing and I wasn't terribly eager to jump right back into my own work and try to get the hell out of graduate school in a reasonable amount of time, I wouldn't really have been able to anyway.

Oh well. At least I know I'm never buying a PT Cruiser.

That Box Turtle's Lookin' Fine...

Apparently if you want to marry a box turtle and make sure he gets insurance, just go work for Home Depot.

The Human Rights Campaign today condemned Home Depot, Sprint, Ecolab and Waste Management — all Fortune 500 companies — for offering their employees pet insurance but not domestic partner health insurance.

“Paying for a parrot’s but not a person’s hospital stay is absurd,” said HRC President Cheryl Jacques. “This is no joke. Employees deserve better from these companies.”

John Cornyn would be proud.

An Absolutely Positively 100% Guaranteed Way To Piss Off Your Lover/Partner/Spouse/Trick/Prostitute/RNC Delegate:

Out of the blue, laugh uncontrollably during sexual intercourse.... Or grow facial hair.

ThirdoftheMonthless

I regret to inform you, my loyal readers (I think there are more than one of you) that this Third of the Month you are going to have to go without my words of wisdom, for alas I shall be out of touch with civilization (Georgia) where I will be spending Labor Day weekend in the mountains. So if you come looking for some Third of the Month advice on Friday, just click here. That should cover you in a pinch.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Within the past year I've switched from getting my haircut at my local barber (who I never really liked but went to support the fact that he had issues of Playboy in the waiting area) to using a more stylish "unisex salon." It's marginally more expensive but I get a marginally better haircut, so I don't miss Jack's so much. What I do miss, however, is the lather. Any guy who gets his hair cut from an old-school barber knows what I'm talking about, that little machine that looks thirty years old and pumps out the warmest, thickest, creamiest shaving cream ever. Then they rub it into your neckline and sideburns and take a straight-edge razor to your bare flesh and clean up the lines. Lo! how I do miss that wonderful sensation. Instead, these "salons" use that fancy-wancy electric razor that goes scrape scrape scrape along your tender, dry neckline. And it isn't nearly as clean and sexy. It's enough to make me want to go back to Jack's. Well, that and the Playboy.