Our meeting was almost chance, our last names being so similar, we met at school. Our lockers were nearby, we took some of the same classes and our seats were close together, and, as we got to know one another better, our personal interests also aligned. I had a special place for her in my heart early on, and we spent much of those three years enjoying life. By the time the move away from Washington came around, there were only three people that I hoped would not forget me, and she was at the top of my list. I childishly left a trinket with her the day before I flew away, hoping that she would, by looking at it, would always remember how close we had become.

She introduced me to a world where values were not just ideas, but were integrated into life. Because of her, I am the person I am today. A person who values what is right, namely truth, equality, fairness, inclusion, and joy. Every memory I have of her, from scouring the web for websites related to the X-Files to taking her to the 9th grade dance, are all brimming with the feeling of enjoyment and happiness. She taught me to enjoy life, and all of its senses.

Sometimes I forget to keep this perspective. This is when her avatar appears in my dreams. What she represents to me, how influential she was in my personal development as an individual, remind me that I miss not just her, but those aspects of myself.

Who knows where her life has taken her? Mine certainly had some unexpected twists and turns. I am neither the virtuoso nor the Broadway star I had dreamed myself to be. Would I become disillusioned if I got to know her again? I suppose I’ll never know. I always believed our paths would naturally cross again, that we were actually connected in some metaphysical way. Perhaps we are, but I doubt if she will ever know how much she means to me, not in the traditional sense of the phrase, but actually how much she has shaped my life for the better.

She is my dream avatar of Joie de Vivre. The Joy of Life.

From all of the Facebook chatter on the subject, there have been a few points that I’d like to address for my own sanity, and in my own space. First, the argument that the government revoked the voting rights of seven million people shows that this country’s system of power is corrupt and imbalanced, and, Second, that here we go arguing over the definition of marriage again. These two points irk me especially much, and have caused me much thought.

So, while I was waiting for the decision to be released, I was watching some videos of the two attorneys who spearheaded this case with the California State Supreme Court. They reviewed the legal history of marriage in the United States and some notable Supreme Court cases that had to do with marriage, and were answering questions in a interview about overturning the voters decisions. They remarked that this was how the Judicial system was set up – to overturn laws passed that were not constitutionally sound. They said that if we had left it up to the people to vote on it at the time, the laws the prohibited interracial marriage likely would have never been confounded. They also said that public opinion followed the results of that law, eventually, and they expected the same to happen here.

After the decision was published, I found a comment from, unsurprisingly, one of my old missionary companions that said he thought this was not the way a government for the people, of the people, and by the people was supposed to be run and that this is not what the USA was all about, and how dare they revoke the rights of millions of voters their constitutional right to vote for laws they agree with.

On this, I cannot believe the twisty-turns of the brain to make it all right to prevent equal rights of millions of people by passing laws that are based on fear and misinformation, but not all right to overturn that law when it breaks the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution!

Okay, and the second point has me more involved, really. It really tried to boil down the issue into a changing the definition of marriage question. And while the definition he is referring to is the man/woman definition, I just wanted to say a few things. Firstly, that is not the only, age-old, definition of marriage. Marriage has been defined in quite a few different ways across cultures and across time. And I think that what same-sex couples want is more than the title of marriage for equality sake. There is a lot more to marriage than a certificate and a package of legal rights that are currently unavailable to same-sex couples in most states.

I read through the Wikipedia entry on Matrimony, and interestingly enough, it and other dictionary definitions do not define marriage as being between a man and a woman. That definition was primarily contemporary in nature and religious in origin. I would like to present marriage as an idea, a word with connotation, and an experience that can and should be shared with all men.

Some notable quotes about marriage from the Wikipedia entry, which incorporates cross-cultural definitions:

Marriage is a social union or legal contract between individuals that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found.

People marry for many reasons, including one or more of the following: legal, social, emotional, economical, spiritual, and religious. These might include arranged marriages, family obligations, the legal establishment of a nuclear family unit, the legal protection of children and public declaration of commitment.

Marriage practices are very diverse across cultures, may take many forms, and are often formalized by a wedding. The act of marriage usually creates normative or legal obligations between the individuals involved. Almost all cultures that recognize marriage also recognize adultery as a violation of the terms of marriage.

Marriage is usually recognized by the state, a religious authority, or both. It is often viewed as a contract. Civil marriage is the legal concept of marriage as a governmental institution irrespective of religious affiliation, in accordance with marriage laws of the jurisdiction. If recognized by the state, by the religion(s) to which the parties belong or by society in general, the act of marriage changes the personal and social status of the individuals who enter into it.

Specifically, I would like to focus on the social aspects of marriage. I keep asking myself this question: What does marriage mean to us as a society? If I can say that I’m married, what personal and social status is inferred by that statement? If I meet someone who talks about his wife, what do I infer about their commitment, their relationship, over some other title such as partner?

I think it’s important to acknowledge that for something that most people take for granted, marriage is a lot more than a social and legal contract. It is a social prestige class. And to those who can’t get it even if they wanted to, it’s an elite group to which they are not entitled, legally, through no fault of their own, and are therefore left feeling like a lower class. Like they are not good enough to be accepted by society in that way, no matter how much they try. They don’t qualify, and can never take on those terms of respect: marriage, husband, wife, spouse, ceremony, matrimony, wedding. They are left with these: living together, partner, civil union, boyfriend, domestic partner, roommate, friend. Linguistically, the connotations of these words and phrases are definitely less than those associated with matrimony. I feel that pain, I really do.

So it makes a lot of sense to me that even if, as some have said, in California, I can have a domestic partnership with all of the same legal rights as a state marriage, it is still not the same thing by a long shot. Besides, if there are two equivalent (read separate but equal) institutions which provide the same benefits to different groups of people, should it not also be named the same thing? Math says so: if a=b and b=c, then a=c.

So why is there such protectiveness against the name? Why is it so important to keep the gays out of marriage? The standard homophobic responses aside, I found something else in the Wikipedia entry that caught my attention. This may be one unconscious reason for it:

Many of the world’s major religions look with disfavor on sexual relations outside of marriage. Sexual relations by a married person with someone other than his/her spouse is known as adultery and is also frequently disapproved by the major world religions (some calling it a sin). Adultery is considered in many jurisdictions to be a crime and grounds for divorce.

In other words, marriage is religion’s way to sanction sexual activity. If homosexuals are allowed to marry, and I think this gets to the “destroying marriage” argument, then by association, gay sex is legitimized. Legally legitimized. Made equal to heterosexuality.

Heterosexuality cannot and must not be equal to homosexuality, it never has. This is their silent mantra.

If marriage is their last bastion of power and same-sex couples infiltrate it, their grounds for discrimination are legally stripped. Their power and authority over the “sexual deviants” and miscreants become unjustified, and they will have to find a way to live in a world where we are as respected as they, and in the same ways. But they do not look forward, and they do not remember the foundation on which this country was built:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

If we are indeed created, then there can be no difference between them and us. We are one diverse race, one country, and one human family. Segregation and discrimination will fail, with time, as the world comes to believe this truth. My love and my feelings are as natural and as primal as yours, and my wish is for that sameness to be as recognized and as celebrated as your own.

It’s my first day off since the vacation, and I wanted to do a few things around the yard. Matt and I had picked up some replacement heads for our sprinklers, and I was in the process of messing with one of them when I hear from behind me, “Hey! Hey!” I turned around and there were two young men carrying hula hoops. The one of them asks if I’m gay.

That’s a peculiar question for anyone to start with, especially with someone they don’t know, and I was far from prepared to discuss my sexuality with anyone in the neighborhood, but the penchant for direct honesty won out and I replied in the affirmative. The two boys went on their way up our street and I went about my sprinkler fixing.

Two things about this experience strike me as odd. First, being asked by someone you don’t know if you’re gay, and secondly, what I could have said to make the dialogue more impactful. Who walks up to you and asks you that question? I assume there has been some wondering about us around the neighborhood, what with us not going to church and there being no women about or children in a family community. It must have been the only thing they wanted to know about me. My response, which was a simple yes, could have been something like, “Yeah, so what?” or “Yep, but who cares?” I could have responded with a question of my own like “That’s an interesting question. Who do YOU sleep with?” Eh, regardless, what’s done is done, and hopefully the consequences are only positive.

I know it’s late, but something’s been on my mind for a long time, and it has been brought to the fore by some nice documentaries I’ve been watching on Netflix for Xbox. This isn’t meant to be a concrete set of ideas, but more theories in the making. I’m trying to get a handle on them and the connections between them.

I want to review three or four things that seem to be unrelated, but may not be: hippies, energy, corn and television among them. Loosely speaking, I have come to wonder what ingredients were present in the late 1960s and 1970s that encouraged the volatile shifts in how people viewed society and the then-radical steps they took to ensure their freedoms were secure. It’s almost as though there was some kind of catalyst at the time that allowed people to make the leap to not only fight for their ideals, but to go out and live them. Looking around at the world today, that kind of impassioned fight for freedoms is simply gone. Vanished. At least, not where I can find it. There are no stories about backwoods communes of people living out their kind of Utopian society. There are no mass protests for the inalienable rights for those groups still oppressed by the current norms of society.

The question that I ask is this: what has changed in society since that time that inhibits us from making that leap?

While I do not know what life was like at that time since I was born over a decade later, there are things that I notice about life today that seem to be pointing me in a direction of sorts. One of the things that has surely changed is this obsession about energy. I know it has changed because I have seen it within my lifetime. In the documentary King Corn, I learned that the US corn subsidy program changed during this time period, encouraging corn growers to grow as much as possible rather than paying them to reduce production to keep the cost of food stable. As a result, the overall surplus of corn grown plummeted the cost of corn per bushel. Then, in 1977, tariffs and taxes were placed on sugar imports, encouraging the development of a new, less expensive sweetener. The resulting product was the now-ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup.

High fructose corn syrup is not just another kind of sugar. It is corn starch combined with specific chemicals to break down the starches and recombine them as fructose and glucose, creating a sweetener. More importantly, a sweetener made from a product already subsidized by the government. No imports required, just a little chemistry. Between 1975 and 1985 corn syrup replaced sugar in every major soda pop and is now found in nearly every sweet product you can buy. Since the introduction of corn syrup, soda has become so universal that some people can’t have a meal without some kind of carbonated, sweetened beverage.

Just go to any restaurant and observe what people order. It’s easier to order the meal than the sandwich by itself anymore, and is only a few dimes more to get the soda if you’re getting the fries with it too. Of course, you don’t have to get a sugary drink with your meal, but since you paid for it…why get just water? Corn syrup and soda lead me to my second item, energy.

Sugar and its derivatives generate an energy high. It doesn’t last long, but it works. The problem is that once your insulin kicks in, your blood sugar levels drop and you feel drained and tired. Like a mildly addictive drug, your first inclination is to soak up some more sugar, which starts the cycle over again. Since soda has been so relatively inexpensive, you could literally drink soda all day every day. Some people do. My point is that with soda having become the obvious choice as your meal’s complementary beverage, we get stuck in this trap because it tastes good. It does. So you go to your favorite restaurant and you are given five to ten choices of drinks. I bet that 75-90% of your options are caffeinated. So once again, you are not only getting a sugar boost, but an adrenaline boost from the caffeine which expands the energy effect. And now it seems like you choose the caffeinated options because you want that benefit.

I realize that caffeine has been around for centuries. Coffee has been a staple of workplaces nationwide since who knows when. But here’s the catch: kids love soda. LOVE IT. Because it’s sweet and tasty. Mountain Dew tastes like a melted Otter Pop for crying out loud. How soon to they have their first soda these days? How many of those sodas include caffeine, deemed by the Pure Food and Drug Act as a “habit-forming” and “deleterious” substance that must be included in a products ingredient list?

Now add to this culture of soda an increasing hunger in the culture of business for productivity. The 9-5 business day becomes 8-5 or 9-6. The economy goes sour after the housing crisis and the pressure not only to go to work but to give a supernatural performance so that you can survive the layoffs. You go to the University where you are in classes for six hours a day, you have four hours per day of homework, and you have five roommates in the dorm that you want to have on your good side or that play Rock Band to all hours of the night even though your first class starts bright and early. College is a party, you know. Anyway, the point is that these minor shifts in our culture all increase the stressors on our body. And guess what? The solution is in the 24-hour Wal-Mart super store across the street in the beverage aisle. It’s called a Red Bull or a Rock Star and these drinks become the fuel of our civilization in a perfectly imperfect world. We have created within our culture a natural energy deficiency and have replaced it with stimulants to make up the difference. And that difference is unsustainable in perpetuity.

The last thing is television. Television is our link to the world of entertainment. In the documentary titled “Stupidity,” the film discussed the content provided and how even though we live in the information age, the allure of ignorance is even stronger than in the past. They presented the idea that because content is based on consumer preferences, the networks create programs aimed at the lowest common denominator. This gets them the largest response and the most money. They present nonsense that everybody will watch, some just so they can stop thinking altogether when they get home from their busy day at work. Or so they don’t have to deal with the realities of their life. I’m fairly certain that the television programs from the 1960s differ greatly in content and in number from what is available on basic cable today.

We have so much to distract us, so much to help us escape, and most of us don’t even deny that’s what we’re doing. But what is it that we have to be distracted from? What is so bad that we must escape it? Why, rather than get an extra hour of sleep do we spend our money on stimulants to get us through the day? Whatever the reason, I think a majority of people practice this kind of domestic numbing. It’s cheap and it’s easy.

We live a life of stimulants and of depression. The modern life has taught us that it is better to treat the symptom than to diagnose and address the underlying issue. This, I think, has sapped our society of the will to fight back. I still have no evidence of whether this is was intentionally imposed on us by some mastermind or if it was just an inevitable part of our path for the desire to live the good life combined with our semi-free market system. I don’t suppose it really matters. It makes me want to drop the TV service, though, and read some books again. It makes me want to find a cause and fight for it. It makes me want to live somewhere away from the cultural influence of media. I miss the days of free love and utopia and protests, but I was never even there in the first place.

Peace.

So I’m taking this intro to psychology class for school, and in the final week of the semester, we learned about the concept of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the term that describes how we deal with the natural conflict between our beliefs and our actions, or between two conflicting attitudes. I would go as far to say that it is how we cope with the difference with how we think we ought to behave compared with how we actually behave. These conflicts can arise internally but can often be induced through forced compliance – situations where we feel compelled to act in a certain way regardless of our own personal attitude or preference. The theory suggests that when we experience this kind of dissonance, it causes discomfort, stress and anxiety within. Because of this uncomfortable situation, we do whatever we can to reduce that kind of pain.

There’s a few ways people do this, of course. First, you can change the conflicting attitude. Second, you can gain more information that supports the original attitude. Third, you can trivialize your own attitude, convincing yourself that it is not important. In most cases, people choose the solution that requires the least amount of effort.

Part of the week’s assignment was to write about a situation where you had felt cognitive dissonance at work. As I thought about it, the more I realized that the strongest cognitive dissonance I ever experienced had first to do with my sexuality, second to do with religion, and third to do with my desire for peace and harmony. I chose to write about the religion part, since there was one specific experience where this occurred very plainly to me.

I was a missionary. If you haven’t followed my blog, I was still so much in denial of my own sexuality that I wasn’t even conscious that it existed any differently than it should for a God-fearing Mormon boy. I was entirely convinced during this time of my life that I would go home, find a woman, and start a family. Because of this, I had no experience at this point that fostered feelings of doubt about the truth of the Mormon Plan of Salvation. I was on the last leg of my mission, but I was still struggling with Fast and Testimony meeting. On this particular day, I was reminded of something we had learned at our latest Zone conference: that a testimony can be found in the bearing of it. I kept feeling my heart pounding inside and something telling me to just get up and do it. “You should be bearing your testimony. Why aren’t you bearing your testimony? You have one, right?”

So I stood up and bore my testimony. I don’t remember now what I said or anything else about it, but when I sat back down, I felt so good about what I had done. I started to get that warm, peaceful feeling that people talk about when they feel the Spirit, and I calmed down. And then I felt this strong feeling that what I was doing was right and that what I had said was true. This had to be a spiritual confirmation.

In the context of psychology, this effect is exactly what cognitive dissonance is about. I never got up to bear my testimony because deep down I wasn’t sure I believed in it. This wasn’t conscious, of course, but what other reasons would you have to hesitate when only positive reinforcement awaits you for participating in the meeting? When I finally did, and when it was my own choice and there were no external forces sitting next to me, I felt the dissonance melting away. I began either trivializing whatever doubts I had and changed my attitude toward faith. This was a positive experience because I knew that it would be better for me if I did believe more strongly.

Looking back, now that I have left the church, I look at the oft-quoted phrase about gaining a testimony in the bearing of it, and I realize that it’s another cog in the machine of manipulation to convince you to believe — and more importantly, convince you to stay. When you declare something publicly (whether you believe in it or not!), rather than be called a liar you convince yourself even more deeply that what you said was not a lie. This reduces the discomfort of dissonance, and it makes you feel better about yourself. So, in a way, the phrase is true: when you say something to someone else, you believe it even more. On another level, you realize that it’s a way to erase doubt without presenting any additional facts.

Normally on this day, I see people coming out and talking about all the good reasons to come out. I would like to focus on how coming out gay has not been a highlight of my life. The only aspect of coming out that did not improve my life was how my relationship changed with my family. Actually, when I think of my coming out experience, it was rather rough.

It was first in October of 2004 that I awoke to the fact that I was attracted to men. In fact, it was in the middle of my first earnest attempt to start a relationship with a dear friend of mine of the opposite gender when the scaffolding came crashing down. You see, I was a devout LDS kid, and while I had met several gay people in my life (do theater for a while and they add up fast), I always had believed in the Church’s plan for salvation. If you don’t know, the plan pretty much lays out all the specific and general things you have to do to get to the best heaven. That includes, but is not limited to, heterosexual celestial eternal marriage in the temple. I was, in a way, gunning for the highest prize, but never could bring myself to be serious about a relationship. Well, when the thought that I might be homosexual really took hold in my mind, you can imagine that my entire world seemed to verge on collapse.

I spent the next couple months really trying to deal with this…thing. I read all the talks and lessons given by the leaders and really tried to explore the reasons that they gave for this plague that had suddenly afflicted me. In about December, I came to the prayerful conclusion that not only would my temporal happiness be jeopardized if I were to ignore it and keep it in a closet, the happiness of whatever spouse I chose could seriously be affected as well. I remember that, while walking around BYU campus to a class, it just hit me that I always had been and always would feel this way. That I had been able to block it out until now had actually been a blessing, that I could focus on being the best person I could be. I had been able to develop a moral code and really trust my internal compass. I felt like it was up to me to explore the happiness that could be found.

New Year’s Eve, I celebrated it with my friend Clark. We kissed when the ball dropped, a quick peck, and that night I posted it on a message board where I knew I would be supported. I was still unsure about where I was going to stand religiously speaking, but I had committed to myself that whatever happened, it would not include sex until marriage. At some point during the next year, I made a goal to come out to my parents when I had come to a full acceptance and understanding about myself, and I romanticized how it would be – I would say something cliche like, “There’s something I need to tell you,” and they would respond in an unconditionally loving way, and everything would be cool.

I was horribly wrong. Someone spied on my posting online and told my parents that I had kissed a guy. January of 2005 I felt the most betrayed and strung along I have ever felt from my parents. My mom called me one day and told me to cancel all my plans and come home by a certain time so we could talk about something. The thing about it was she wouldn’t even give me a clue as to what it was about. Only that we had to wait for Dad to be home to start. So, I dropped my plans and headed home. At the appointed time, Dad wasn’t home, he was running late. I attempted to press Mom for some more information, but I only got “we’ll talk about it when your father gets home,” and I just felt so weird about the whole thing. I knew they were worried about my staying out late, but it never amounted to a full-blown meeting before.

They ripped me out of the closet. Being the kind of guy who believes in honesty, when they asked about it, I responded in the affirmative and told them that I hadn’t done anything more than a New Year’s kiss and I wasn’t planning on it either. Long story short, my parents cried, and to this day I have a lingering sense of anger and betrayal over how it was handled that day and how it has been addressed (or not addressed) ever since. The next couple weeks were filled with conference talks left on my pillow and impassioned requests for me to forget this whole gay nonsense, not just from my parents but from my siblings as well. Everybody seemed so concerned for my eternal welfare, but nobody wanted to get down to how I felt. I felt like nobody looked at me or talked to me the same, like there was some fear about what I might do or say. Since then, along with the betrayal, I can’t bring myself to believe that they even want to understand. And that has broken down the trust that we used to have together.

That was nearly five years ago, and I’m still sad about the outcome. I hope someday I can love and trust them, but I find myself going through the motions so they don’t think I’m a lost cause, or that I want nothing to do with them. In fact, I just wish I could feel like they treat me like a well-educated, intelligent adult rather than the 14 year-old boy I was when I was perfect and on my way to great things.

Okay, I work for Verizon Wireless. As such, I deal with customers on a regular basis who feel they have been cheated out of their money by the big red corporation. Of course they haven’t, they’re just lazy and don’t pay attention to what may cost them money or what they may have agreed to in the contract. To be honest, I’m kind of sick and tired of dealing with those kind of people.

Now, Verizon Wireless’ policy is not only fair, but more than fair. We have policies that allow for customers to make mistakes to a certain degree and not have to deal with the full consequences. There is a big however, though.

The business model of the wireless phone company must be revised. I don’t care if it’s Verizon Wireless or if it’s anybody else, but having been on the receiving end of a million complaints, I think there is one solution that can solve the wireless business model’s woes.

Currently, if any given customer exceeds their chosen plan allowance, they pay anywhere from $0.25 to $0.45 per minute, usually at the higher end. I spoke with two customers today who exceeded their allowance by over 300 minutes. That’s between $75 and $135 added to their regular monthly bill. Obviously, if one of your bills is over $150 more than you expected, you would be rightfully upset. Well, that’s when they fault the company for overcharging them on their bill. Inevitably, they either threaten to leave for another carrier or they deny that they made those calls. The fact of the matter is that they exceeded the allowance they agreed to and therefore are paying the agreed upon overage rate. Right? Okay. So Verizon Wireless says that if you change your plan to avoid these overages in the future, we forgive at least 25% of the overage. So in the above example, $34 or more. This generates thousands of calls and walk-ins every day.

What if you could never go over? Well there’s the unlimited options – $139.99 for everything including the Navigator. That’s per month, per line, buddy. More and more carriers are moving to an unlimited focus because people don’t want to have to watch their minutes or pay the excessive overage costs when they forget.

But what if, instead of committing to unlimited just for peace of mind, your plan automatically adjusted based on your usage? It’s not like it would be a difficult thing to program into the billing process. The programming is already done in other places, you would only have to copy and paste and adjust some variables and create some conditional code to execute if the plan needed changing.

So instead of $135 for 300 minutes over, generating a call or walk-in, which costs the company in payroll, and then adjusting the balance due, which affects the company’s bottom line, have the plan change at the end of the cycle. I mean, sure, there would be some legal disclosures like, “Your plan may change by itself, but only if it saves you money, so don’t freak out,” but even if the auto-adjusting plan cost a premium of double the cost of the difference, the customer would only pay $40 instead of $101, nor would it end up costing an additional $10 for the company to pay a representative to sit there and wait for 10,000 calls about the same issue every single day.

Besides, if I had a plan that shifted my monthly cost based on my usage and not on what I THOUGHT my usage was going to be, there would be a lot less variance in my bill if I were to be dumb and not choose the right plan or underestimate my kids’ usage when school starts back up again.

Seriously.

I’m just tossing this idea out there, and using the only wireless company I know as an example, but I don’t care who takes this idea and runs with it. It will only be to everybody’s benefit, and it won’t seem like the wireless corporations are hoping the customer goes over to increase their profit margin. Instead it will seem like they have the customer’s interests at heart – even though they will still be making profit from those who overuse.

Okay, so in just a few days we open Into the Woods at the SCERA playhouse. Yay. Last night was our first rehearsal with lighting, costumes, and makeup. Yay. Oh, and before I go on, here’s a $3 coupon:

I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so stressed out about a show. And interestingly enough, I’m not stressed about the performances. I think this will be a fantastic show. I’m getting stressed about the production elements, none of which are complete, and most of which were introduced just days before opening. Listen to the tomes of experience: TECH MUST BEGIN AT LEAST 1 WEEK BEFORE OPENING. Not 3 days.

So, while last night was not a disaster necessarily, there are some frustrations going on. Mine had to do with the fact that my first pair of shoes were too small by about two sizes, so I asked for bigger shoes. When I saw new shoes I was really happy until I tried them on and they were about two sizes too large. Other people had concerns with their costumes as well. And when theater people have concerns, they talk about them. At the end of the night, I caught the tail end of what might have been a confrontation where one of the costumer’s husbands was telling an actor that his wife had been up until midnight several times working on these costumes and that not only has made her angry, but as a result has made him angry and he didn’t like the way we were talking about the costumes. Seriously.

So in addition to everybody being stressed out, or perhaps as a result of it, now there have been words, and because this is community, and people do this kind of thing because they like it, there may be resentments that compromise the integrity of the production. Bleck.

I think Laura put it best when she made the point that while we aren’t being paid to be here, the costumers are. And you know, if the costumes aren’t ready until three days before, fine. But they should be ready. Another point for avoiding community theater again, and another point for never doing a show at SCERA again. It’s just too much stress to deal with.

On the other hand, after they told me I could nix the wig, I actually started having a good time. That was a part of the process I had been missing. We were so busy working on getting the words right and the blocking right that I realized that I hadn’t been enjoying the music to one of my favorite shows. I hope it continues to get more and more enjoyable from here on out.

The problem with the community theater is that if something goes wrong, nobody loses their job or gets their pay docked, so nobody tries extra hard. It just seems like it’s all done at their convenience – even the actors – because it’s not lucrative enough to motivate. They do it because they want to, not because they have to. So nobody is at their best because it’s more like a hobby than a job. Even though it is a job for most of the production elements.

Whatever. It will be good in the end, but again, I’m going to say don’t come opening night because the show can’t be ready when we’ve never done it as a complete production before opening night.

So I’m not a political person, but I am an observer. And there’s a disturbing trend with our current President. I recall not believing that he would be voted in as President, but even so I voted for him to avoid more of what Bush brought to our table (although for that I also only have a vague idea). I wanted to see an America reborn and revitalized with change, and I felt that President Obama was the candidate for the job. After he was elected, I didn’t think he’d make it to inauguration, but he did. Now, almost a year since the general election, he is raising the hackles of his opposition. This is what I’ve seen:

• TEA (taxed enough already) demonstrations
• Obama/Hitler comparisons
• Socialist, Communist, brainwashing, fear when he addressed students recently
• Radical conservative outbursts during town halls and meetings having to do with healthcare
• …and general lack of decorum when it comes to what the President is doing

And these are things I haven’t seen during any period of my life, toward any other President. Even when George W Bush was in office, and most people were fed up with him, they still treated him with the respect his office deserves.

Okay, okay, so there’s always the critics and the political cartoonists that will always be there to poke fun at whatever goes on in the White House. I know. But the general feeling I get from the President’s opposition is that they are using scare tactics and intimidation to get their politics across. I even started wondering what was going on with the President after hearing so much against what he was trying to do. People are not giving him the benefit of the doubt.

I even started to fear that there are those out there who fear that the automatic privilege of being White in this country are fading, and therefore are lashing out against this symbol of their god-given rights to a better quality of life than the rest of America.

Today I watched his address to Congress on healthcare reform. I don’t think I’ve watched any leader broadcast so much information about what is really going on than President Obama. I was also inspired by his obvious and exaggerated effort to be bipartisan in the reform effort. He is also obviously not about to turn America into a socialist nation. Yes, he feels like government needs to step in where it’s needed, but he also understands that the people have the choice. He is great to listen to, but that doesn’t make him Hitler. He is forthright, he does not require allegiance to his office, nor any of the other things that I have heard said about him recently.

After listening to his speech today, I feel like he truly has our best interests at heart. He doesn’t have to do that. He has nothing to lose for another three years.

So I guess that puts me in the Obama camp again. I just wish we could see a political system that was based on improving the country rather than improving whatever party you prefer. He’s the President, but he doesn’t have all the power. The power is in the people, in the elected representatives who vie for their constituents’ best interest. When I see him giving live broadcast addresses, I see a President who is actually trying to inspire the patriotism I’ve lacked for all my years. I see someone who is trying to show that he can be a leader and not just a figurehead. I see someone who has the drive to get things done and will not compromise on what he believes is best for America.

He has a dream, to be cliche, and I like that. I relate to that dream for a better country. I relate to his idealism and strength. I see him trying to emulate the Presidents that he has looked up to.

Whatever. Hopefully the politics will die down and I won’t have to think about it much anymore. I just wish people would learn how to reasonably express themselves rather than devolving to animal tactics.