Coffee and cigarettes…

Small Oregon Town Elects Openly-Transgendered Mayor

First off… said mayor isn’t exactly handsome. Or pretty. So consider yourself warned that you may want some eye bleach handy.

But what I find most awesome about this story is this: A small town where, literally, everyone knows everyone else – which is usually the sort of town that is fearful and hateful of things extra-ordinary – has basically shrugged its collective shoulders and said, “Who cares what s/he looks like? S/he does a good job and is a good person.”

We need many more towns like this. Then maybe, just maybe, equality will be real.

Every once in a while, I find something so extremely nifty and appropriate for someone in my life, it just has this way of making its way into their hands.

This is one such case.

Sheer, unadulterated niftyness

(#374 in a continuing series)

Miss Kidd is… well, mouthy. She’s about as unshy as I am shy. And on top of that, she has no clutch between brain and mouth. If she thinks it, she says it.

So she’s relaying her school days to me tonight, and talks about a kid in her geography class. They were doing test review, and this kid was just bombing. Didn’t know the difference between a state and a country. Thought the United States was a continent. That sort of thing.

After the third or fourth total whiff at the plate by this kid, she says, “Jeez, {redacted}, when did you become Sarah Palin?”

…and we deem you acceptable.”

Today was the annual review here at the Fun Factory. I hit a couple of my goals out of the park, and the rest were judged satisfactory mostly because I don’t believe in my office being a sterile operating ward. A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind, and I’m one healthy bastard.

This is my "satisfactory" face.

No, this isn’t about the new president-elect. I’ve come to admire Mr. Obama, and hope he can live up to the hype and hope. I am remarkably cynical about politics in general, though, so while I say that I hope for the best, I am not looking for it to actually come to pass.

This is about our stupid state. Amendment 2 passed, which amends the state constitution to ban gay marriage.

I have plenty of friends who walk all of life’s different paths. It sucks that they’re being denied the right to marry. I mean, really… if they want to be that miserable, why the hell not let them?

I kid… but only slightly. While I’m not a big fan of marriage myself, I understand that it brings a lot of useful traits with it. There are legal workarounds which can add these, to some extent, but they can all be contested or invalidated by determined hostile parties.

I voted against this turd of an amendment. I’m sorry we didn’t get enough smart people voting against it.

Things like this are why I hate living in the crotch of the Bible Belt.

Life has this habit of occasionally going into hyperspeed around me. I don’t know what starts it or how to stop it, so about all I can do when it does this is grab the tiger’s ears and pray there’s no speedbumps.

A few weeks ago, I was killing time at the airport waiting for my sister’s return flight and saw someone appear online that I hadn’t talked to in months. Our conversations had always been casual, and extremely entertaining. She was one of a handful I’ve befriended over the years who managed to keep up when playing ‘follow the bouncing pop culture reference’. I’d actually figured she’d either lost interest in me and wandered off to other things, or someone had wisely snapped her up off the singles’ market.

But she was back, by whatever artifice, and so I said ‘hi’ and struck up a ‘where the hell have you been? and what’s going on now?’ sort of conversation to re-establish communications and catch up on things. I’m still not quite sure how, but I managed to talk her into meeting up with me the following night to have a cup of coffee and actually put a face and voice to the words we’d seen on-screen all along.

What followed have been three of the most interesting weeks (in all senses of the word) than I’ve had in a long time. The tiger’s got an earache by now, and I couldn’t really care less.

I’m not really one who tries to occupy someone’s every waking moment… I’m actually far more likely to look for reasons to let people have their lives as uninterrupted as possible by me, and if there aren’t any reasons, I’m quite likely to contrive some. But, from the start… I wanted to see her.

I wanted to see her a lot.

And that’s pretty much what started to happen.

It’s actually somewhat disgustingly cute. Even the things we don’t have in common (or are outright opposites in) lead to lively discourse, not zealous positional argumentation. The things we do…. well, those are already starting to yield in-jokes, and we’ve pretty much only scratched the surface, I’m pretty sure.

I am inordinately fond of her already. It isn’t the new-toy rush of curiosity alone, though I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t there at all. It’s more like I’ve met someone I should have known for most of my life. And that I’ve met someone I’m going to keep around for the rest of my life, in some fashion.

Cheers, AB… to the start of something wonderful.