Okay, so I, admittedly, suck.

So the whole point of starting this new blog was so that I could keep my writing skills in check while I had writer's block on my new novel.
...and then the writer's block cured itself.

So, I am happy to report that I have now completed 200 pages of my new novel, and progress is going fast.

But unfortunately that means that I'm not inspired to comment about the various eccentricities of this world on a daily basis. (A la ... la blog.)

I'm taking a brief pause on this thing until I get the novel finished. (But, I already have an idea for my next novel, so who knows...) I'll work on it! Sorry to disappoint....

Happy Anniversary, New York!

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of me moving to New York. Here is my blog from that first day:

I got into NYC about noon on the 14th, and it was hot. I immediately regretted wearing as much clothing as I had for the plane trip, and then after sweating my way through subways and hauling luggage up and down countless stairs, I regretted the amount of luggage I had brought, as well.

After wrangling with my luggage for a few hours and getting to Manhattan (JFK airport is a busride and a metro away), I called my friend in Dallas to look up a luggage storage center where I could drop off my luggage and relax for a spell. I took my laptop to a Starbucks, ordered a Iced Venti Unsweetened Iced Green Tea (the proper way to call the drink, Barista-trained as I am) and started Hostel-calling.

As luck would have it, the first Hostel I called had an opening, and within hours I was trundling with my unwieldy luggage towards Chelsea International Hostel. It was still hot.
This Hostel turned out to be not bad. 4 beds and a bathroom, 32$. I was the only one in my room at first, but then a guy named Daniel from Melbourne, Australia came in and we had a pleasent chat. Another guy from Brazil shared the room, but then he left quickly to go to a 'Mann' concert ... apparently some band he was excited about from Mexico. My apologies that I don't know more Mexican bands that are popular with Brazilians.

Daniel wanted to find a place for us to hang out and drink, but I confessed to him that I was gay (he was cute, but smelly) and I wanted to spend my first night in NYC doing something gay. After a brief goodbye, I made my way to VIEW Bar NYC (in honor of my favorite daytime chat-fest) and had a few drinks while reading the local fag rag to catch up on what the scene is like. I debated making a whirlwind tour of the gay bars in NYC, but I was exhausted from wrasslin' with my luggage so I needed as much sleep as I could muster before fighting with it again the next day.

Thank god for storage lockers, though! Stripping myself of my heaviest stuff and leaving it at my previous hostel, I made my way to Hostelling International, which was uptown on 103rd street central park west. I checked in ... and I would love to say that I did something super-exciting on my second night in NYC, but it started to rain and so I elected to play video games instead on my Nintendo DS. (I know, you can move a boy to NYC, but you can't move the nerd out of the boy.) After calling a couple friends to tell them I was okay and relate my adventures, it was another early night.

NEWS: Clinton + Ferraro, Kerns

Hillary Clinton's Campaign: Hillary Clinton had to apologize three times to the gathering of her constituents last night, in a trio of distractions from the real issues.

I'm a big supporter of Hillary's, but the lastest news is disheartening. She is smart, presidential, and she will do lot of good for this country - but the people surrounding her haven't stayed on-message, and the campaign itself hasn't really found a narrative message of its own other than "I'm a Democrat."

Sadly, the question has come down full cirle: first it was if she will concede, then it became when she will concede, and now it's back to if she will concede again.

Now, I think that the battle has actually been good for the Democratic party in the long run. Obama and Clinton have both setup large bastions of support in the state contests and brought new people into the process: those emails, addresses and donations collected won't be forgotten in the general election.

But at this point, the battle looks to be becoming acrimonious and implosion-ready.

I am sad that my preferred candidate has no chance of winning. I have nothing to do with all the emnity I have stored up with against Obama - maybe he will reach out and work to releive it after Hillary does eventually concede, and I will become a fan. Maybe I will give him money. I will definitely vote for him.

I am worried, though, and I'm going to go back to the race versus gender argument to explain it. As a woman, Hillary had a huge chance to pull women swing voters from the Republican party. She had a lock, even on the "security moms" that were targeted in the last election.

But Obama? Maybe he will bring enough African Americans back into the process to make none of the previous swing voters matter. And even though I'm sure Obama is more studious than Bush, I worry that the same "inexperience" curse that made Bush such a bad President will strike Obama in some way if he gets elected.

Sally Kerns: The Oklahoma state representative that went off on gay people in a closed-door meeting earlier this week? Turns out, she has a gay son. No surprise there! Shocker!

PROFILE: John Corvino

I have met and hung out a few times with Dr. John Corvino, philosophist and author of What's Morally Wrong with Homosexuality? and consider him a friend.

I am especially impressed with the way that he juxtaposes moral arguments that are bastions of gay rights nay-sayers with their ultimate philosophical argument to dilute their strength. For instance, he has the best argument against the "slippery slope" justification for calling homosexuality immoral: that is, "once we allow homosexuality, we'll have to allow polygamy, bestiality, necrophilia ..."

John breaks it down to three challenges. First, have the arguer explaing why bestiality, polygamy, and necrophilia are wrong. Then, have them explain why homosexuality is wrong. Then, use their own arguments against them.

For instance, a lot of people use the bible (no, I will never capitalize it again) as carte blanche justification for why homosexuality is immoral. Specifically those pesky verses in Romans and Leviticus.

Does the bible ban polygamy? Oh ... whoops ... nope ... it does not... in fact, how many wives did so-and-so have?

You will have them running in moral circles. Of course, the bible does outright ban bestiality, but it doesn't make them equivalent to homosexuality.

More on this argument can be found a http://www.johncorvino.com/ ... where you can truly find way to break down the moral objections of almost anyone in their views about homosexuality.

It's really hard to defend something you have no good reasoning for. Challenging the moral equivalency merit is usually all it takes for a gay rights foe to argue themselves into a corner.

News: Spitzer, HIV+ Ban Removal, Kerns

Spitz-and-Swallows: News came yesterday that Gov. Eliot Spitzer was wiretapped making arrangements for a prostitute in D.C. on Feb. 13th. The day before Valentine's day! Of course, while I don't necessarily think that prostitution between consenting adults is a horrible thing, I'll criticize him for the same critique I gave Sen. Vitter last year: you cannot do in your private life something that is different from what you champion in your public life! I hate hypocracy more than anything in politicians.

Of course of interest is the way that kotaku.com looks at it: this is the same guy that championed against the inclusion of prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto 3. So he's a double, triple hypocrite.

I was excited when the Democratic Governer who was anti-corporate-greed got eleected last year, but only because we were filling the seat with a Democratic one. New York is one of the two states that could get gay marriage through its legislature - along with California, but we all saw what happen when a Republican Governor Schwarzenegger got the bill before his desk - he didn't sign it. (Interesting side note: Gov. Schwarzenegger said that any decision about gay marriage should come through the court system, where it currently has been argued at the Supreme Court level - exactly the opposite argument that Republicans have been making when it came through the court system in other states, saying that it should come through the Legislature....)

So I thought that a Democratic Governer would give us gay marriage in New York, currently one of only three states that I would like to live in in this country. (I would consider moving just to marry my beloved, I feel that strongly about it.) Now we can't villify the Republicans, unfortunately, as being hypocrites in all of their moral hifilutin'.

The silver lining? The Liuetentant Governor, Peterson, is a champion of gays. He would definitely sign gay marriage into law. Awesome.

HIV+ Ban: There was another provision attached to a bill making its way through the Senate to lift the ban on HIV+ tourists. The U.S. is currently only one of 13 countries who ban HIV+ tourists.

Kerns: Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern went on a tirade against homosexuals in a meeting full of supporters. After the video got posted to YouTube, she defended herself openly in the government house, to which her Republican colleagues gave her a standing ovation. Bigots, all of them. Bigots, bigots, bigots!

New Sins!

Hey everyone, grab an energy drink and your "sin gloves", because you're going to be working extra hard from now on committing sins!

Today, a Vatican official added some new things to the official list of sins, including: polluting, widening the discrepancy between rich and poor, doing drugs, and creating genetic manipulations of human beings.

Let's take a quiz, then. Which one of the following new sins has George W. Bush NOT been on record as contributing to:

(a) genetic manipulation
(b) polluting
(c) doing drugs
(d) widening the discrepancy between rich and poor

Ding ding! If you answered A, you're right. George W. Bush has vetoed every stem cell bill before his desk, possibly contributing the death of thousands if not millions of people!

Makes it all worthwhile now that we know the rules of the Catholic God, eh?

Fight Giraffe Terrorism!

There was an interesting counterpoint today in a newspaper I read about the millions being wasted to search bags on the NY Subway.

While the point was made that you can legally decline to have your bag searched, the police officer you decline has just as much right to see that as "suspicious activity" and hold you anyway. The constitutionality of such a Catch-22 is still at play.

What most struck me about this article, though, is that the author introduced me to a new term: so-called "Giraffe Terrorism", about the theory that we could pour millions of dollars into protecting the American public about terrorist giraffes without any real results. The fact that we are spending the money, however, is supposed to make the public feel better that we are doing something about acts of terrorism committed by giraffes.

And yes, I mean "giraffe" the animal, not as a code word for any "group". See the absurdity in it? So next time you and your friends talk about wasted dollars protecting the American people against "unseen threats" - go ahead and tell them about the killer giraffes that we are fending off and introduce them to this term.

It's an easy way to point out how absurd unchecked funds for counter-terrorism are really just a fleecing of the American public.

Oh, did I mention that the President got billions and billions of dollars for the war in Iraq because he diverted funds from Congress-approved "counter terrorism funds"? So ... even if we do stop funding the war, they'll find a way to get their money through this backdoor program.

What we need is accountability and oversight -- not redefinitions!