Straight but not narrow

A dear friend of mine, much loved and much admired (by me and all who know him) brought the video below to my attention some days ago, and I was truly touched to the core, both by the story shown therein, but even more by his reaction to it - the hurt at being hit "too close to home" and the actual fear that this might happen to him and his partner.

Unfortunately, I couldn't share his feelings towards his video as much as I would have wanted to, because in reality, this is a situation that I am lucky enough to be able to avoid, because I was born in the comfortable normality of the socially accepted side of sexuality. I am straight, so my love for my partner will be never frowned upon, discriminated against, and ignored by both family and the legal and political structures.

Because I see the above as an obvious state of fact, I still can't understand why a discussion on gay marriage/union/whathaveyou still subsists. What on earth is there to discuss? In a world where every kind of hatred is somehow justified, where war is fought in the name of a supernatural deity, I can't understand why there is a still a vociferous majority that refuses to believe that there are many forms of love that can exist, and that two consenting adults may choose to love whoever they please, because really ... how is that love affecting the rest of us?

I refuse to accept people pontificating at me, so I will not pontificate myself and stop here. However, I would just like to say that it's ok to be straight, it's ok to be gay but it is even better not to be narrow.

And while we're discussing this, let me just add that it is also ok to be black, white, green, red or blue. The most important is that while we're at it, we never forget to breathe and live the incandescent beauty of the various shades of grey.

So please watch this video ... and also visit this site: http://www.wearesbnn.com/. You will see that with this kind of thinking, you are in very good company.

Gracie's Back!

The fingers twitch and the keyboard responds. Gracie is slowly coming back to narrate the chronicles of nothing that used to fill this blog on a semi regular basis until the inspiration dried up, and the random events in her life stopped coming with the silver lining of irony that used to make her laugh at herself and want to share the joke.

Oooh. Deepness.

Ok ... so this is what really happened. Well basically, for the last few months, some stuff happened that made everything just a little bit harder to deal with, where sleepless nights dredged on to dreary days, and the will to share was stifled. This was due to events and circumstances that fall under my self-imposed list of censorship and that thus could not be blogged about and so, needless to point out, this blog was all but abandoned since my last post.

In the meantime, I embarked on my own very personal mission to get back on track, tellingly entitled Operation Middle Finger (I leave the reason behind the choice of name up to your own intuition), and made sure to love and support myself in all the ways I could think of. I started exercising and lost some weight. Actually my clothes seem to indicate that I lost some weight - the bathroom scales are stubbornly refusing to budge more than the bare minimum with SoBness that is comparable only to that of another inanimate object in my house, namely the printer, who always used to refuse to work on the day of a deadline to hand in an assignment, or a report, or my thesis. The ugly death the printer had to face should be an indication to the bathroom scales really, but anyhoo, as always, I digress.

Besides the forced exercise (not fun! not fun at all!), I've watched reruns of Friends and rediscovered my love for Chandler Bing, dreamt of anonymity in New York while practising it in Valletta, sang to Kelly Clarkson's "What doesn't kill you" and Augustana's "Boston" too loud and too often and beat my personal record by reading three books in 4.5 days.

On this last topic allow me to publicly thank Suzanne Collins for creating the most lovable and selfless character in the history of modern English literature. Anyone who's read the Hunger Games Trilogy and discovered Peeta Mellark (even if not in 4.5 days) will know what I'm talking about. I sometimes wish I were sixteen again so that I could shamelessly declare myself to be in "Team Peeta!", but being twenty-nine, I will keep it much more dignified, and just say that this young hero is extremely well written, and just the slightest of swoony. And he is not a vampire that sparkles in the sunlight, so really, he is just awesome without visual assistance. Right ... I'm feeling myself going teenage again so stopping right here. If I had to compare teenage angst with the late twenties counterpart, I'd rather pick the latter - at least at my age you're done with your O and A levels and you can pretend to be gainfully employed.

Unfortunately, Operation Middle Finger also entailed an increased range of sarcasm and some unnecessary and uncalled for sniping, which led me to realise that I really must have the most patient friends in the world. Public apologies to those who were on the receiving end of the Full Package of Sarcasm 2.0. Had no idea that it came with so many unattractive features - it's admittedly a blast to use though.

Finally, in these past months I also realised that the mountain that refuses to come to Mohammad is also refusing to come to me, so I decided that I should just walk to it myself by taking a plunge, or two (or three and four) and face some long overdue decisions should such mountain profess the need for them.

Shiny crap ... I'm going all metaphorical and obscure today, which is probably not the best way to get you back to reading this blog, but do try to bear with me and stick it out. As I said, Gracie is slowly coming back. Give her some time and patience.

Operation Middle Finger continues! But in the meantime ... I have some laundry to sort out.

Love,

Gracie