I think I was blind

On my second date with Mimi, I made her dinner and she brought me a mixed CD. Yep, a mixed CD. I've only been made one other mixed CD by a suitor and this is the only one I accepted ;-).  The thing about me with music is I like it, I really do, but I'm not passionate about it, I'm not going to seek it out.  If I hear something I like I can fall head over heels in love with it, tears streaking down my face, the whole bit, but for whatever reason I don't generally go seeking out new music.  Mimi does.  I've hung out with a whole lot of different kinds of music geeks, but she might beat them all.  When the right song is on her whole demeanor changes.  Her body tenses as she waits to hear where the song will take her and then she practically explodes as it takes her through the song- only halfway through of course, because halfway through she's perched on the edge of her seat, biting her bottom lip, looking for the next song- and she tenses up again.  It's adorable. And infuriating, actually. Truly infuriating. I don't consider myself self-centered, but by the 3rd song in my nose flares like that of a petulant child- because clearly she's paying more attention to the music then to me, and that is simply not acceptable. But it's a hard sell because I have to say I am never more in love with her or more infuriated by her then when she's bouncing from song to song to song to song.... (you get the idea.)

But back to the mixed CD.  On our second date, only a couple of weeks into us talking, she made me a mixed CD.  The CD was full of songs that were fun to listen to, some I'd heard before.  A whole lot I hadn't.  But hidden not too far into that CD- 6 tracks to be exact- was The First Day of My Life, by Bright Eyes.  I found out later that it's the track her friends almost talked her out of putting on there, but it was absolutely the track that made me fall in love with her- or at least willing to fall in love with her.  I was pretty beat up and bruised from my last bout with love, but the song... well, you should all follow the link if you haven't heard it before because it's incredible.  It'll make you fall in love.

A few Sundays ago I made a little addition to my person because I felt like I had to. It was too true to not want to capture the sentiment forever... I hope you like it :)

Courtesy of Voluta

New Adventures: Part I

(Please consider this post from last Sunday... we have been internet-less until yesterday, so I'm way behind.  Sorry!)

I may have mentioned before (on Twitter, if not here) that I’m essentially 67 years old.  Mimi’s not quite as old as I am.  Together we probably average out to a content 55 year old couple.  We drink red wine. We go to bed by 10:30.  And our normal night time line up involves some combination of Golden Girls and Everybody Loves Raymond.  Anyway… it means we have very many completely content nights, but we run the risk of letting our dating life become stale.  To avoid this tragic fate (our technical age, after all, is half our functional age… ), we have committed to doing new things.  So each month, we are going to do one completely new thing (not necessarily something we’ve never done before, but something we’ve never done together), and eat somewhere new (we are, after all, in the midst of many, many great restaurants/pubs/so on and we have yet to discover nearly enough of them!).

For April, we’re already two for two.  Over Easter, we went target shooting… yes, shooting.  If you don’t know me, that probably doesn’t sound nearly as alarming as it really is—I shot a gun.  Quite a few times.  100% Democrat; 67% Pacifist; 100% terrified of guns, me, went shooting.  Eek! I was trying to lose some of my fear of guns… I’m not so sure it worked.  I could shoot the 22 I was given without too much issue, but each time I heard any of the guns around me go off I jumped, and when my uncle convinced me I really did want to shoot the glock he was using—I nearly cried.  My whole body jerked with each shot (major kick on that thing) and you could practically feel the fire coming out of it.  Mimi on the other hand looked like she’d found her calling.  (Seriously… I was a little terrified!) BUT that’s hardly the point.  We did something totally new, and to be frank, something I was terrified of, and it was great!  We can call April a success.  As for May… we’ll keep you posted!

Trademarks of a Lesbian Household

So I was looking around our apartment the other day, and realized that we probably have some distinctly lesbian themes and I never thought about it...

So for a twist on the classic "You Know You're a Redneck", we proudly introduce: You Know It's a Lesbian House If....

1. You have hundreds of hair ties and tampons....somewhere... but you can't find a single one of either.
2. Instead of discarding old shoes, you now put them in their own pile and designate them "spider-killing-shoes."
3. Someone cries, at least once every other day-- not necessarily because their sad, or  angry, but because there's so much estrogen floating around, people just cry spontaneously.  
4. All 7 seasons of Golden Girls are sitting on the shelf (to be fair this could be applied to a gay household as well.)
5. There are shoes everywhere. Not just a few shoes, not some shoes, so many shoes, and everywhere.
6. Your primary criteria for a new home is the closet space.
7. Your coffee table is compiled of a conflicting mix of feminist and chauvinistic magazines (hey, if Kaley Cuoco is on the cover, it's worth buying...)
8. You have at least a dozen movies no (straight) person has ever heard of.
9. Most of what comes into or out of the apartment is packaged in Trader Joe's or Whole Foods Bags.
10. You can't wait to be wrapped in the arms of the woman you love :-)

Happy Monday everybody!

Shifting Diversity

More than once, as of late, I've been sitting in a room and suddenly realized, not only is the room around me incredibly diverse, but I am just as diverse as my surroundings. I know, I know, I don't look like it. Trust me, I get that all the time. At my job, I am the only Caucasian person in my department.  And I was told once, not in so many words, that given that, they didn't expect me to "be the way [I am.]"  It is true, I am very very white. And as far back as you go in my history, you won't find anything else. But in this world, "diversity" can involve so much more than race.

Last week, Mimi and I had St. Patrick's Day dinner at P.F. Chang's (not even kinda Irish, but what can you do!).  Dinner was wonderful, by the way, but I am a chronic people watcher and I couldn't help but look around.  In our little area, there were a half dozen combinations of people.  Immediately to our right was the 100% typical nuclear family-- white mother, white father, one son, one daughter. But to our left was a couple (clearly newly dating), black female, probably early 20's, white male, early 30's.  Across from us, Arabic male, white female, beautiful mixed child-- all speaking Spanish. Across from them a young black man and his (probably) Hispanic girlfriend.  And then of course there's us.  White female, Asian female.  If you want to dig deeper, we both have dual citizenship in other countries- for me, Canada, for her, Turkey. She's half-Korean, half-white, and oh yeah, I mean, we're gay, if that counts.  And in those things we are both different from each other and different than our surroundings and that makes us diverse as well.

And more to the point-- it gives me hope. Being an abomination myself, it gives me hope that what was considered just as abominable-- an interracial couple seated at the same table, even more, an interracial couple having children-- not that long ago is now commonplace at P.F. Chang's on a Saturday night.  And we're there too, maybe a little more secret than the other "different" couples, but we're there. And someday soon our waitress will look at us the same she does the others- like nothing's different.  Even though it's all different. We're all different.  And despite the cheesiness of the sentiment- that's what makes the world go round.

Let Me Get This Straight

First, I would like to apologize, this is far more political then I generally let this blog go. Second, this has nothing to do with me and Mimi-- except, it does.

As a non-heterosexual female, I generally stay away from issues of birth control, abortion, and the like.  I don't figure it's very fair-- my odds of an accidental pregnancy are... well I just don't figure I have a lot of room to cast a vote.(Once in a social entrepreneurship class in college, during a conversation on the morality of abortion the one non-female person in our class tried to defend a strictly pro-life argument... he was quickly informed he was not allowed to weigh-in on that particular discussion.)  The point is: I don't feel it's fair to weigh in on a situation I could never be in. And I stand by that.

But that's not the point.  I looked up the info on the Planned Parenthood website because of all the hullabaloo that's been going on lately across the country.  I've read the tweets (@PPact) and followed the stories, but I wanted to see how the #s play out.  This is what I see for 2010:

Service Breakdown:

• 38%    - STI/STD testing and treatment
• 33.5% - Contraception
• 14.5% - Cancer Screening and Prevention
• 10.4% - Other Women's Health Services
• 3%      - Abortions
• 0.6%   - Other Services

From my understanding, the argument/defense of the Republicans fighting to end funding for Planned Parenthood (and other family planning services) is that they are not making birth control (or other services) illegal, they're just making people pay for them on their own... hmmm... on their own.  Is this with the health care that (those same) Republicans are trying to take away my access to? So as a young female, early in her career, who may/may not have access to good health care I'm supposed to... what? 

We're not talking about selfish services here.  STI/STD prevention/treatment has a distinctly positive effect on a large-scale. Contraception gives us as a society, and specifically women, the chance to chose when we are or are not ready to bring life into the world-- again, a distinctly positive impact on a society that cannot afford to have more mouths to feed than food to feed them.  Breast cancer screenings... they have nothing to do with sex.  Nothing to do with anything anyone could dare cast a moral judgment on and yet we are so quick to deny care.

We can't have it both ways.  We can't spend day in and day out pushing the vital, undeniable importance of the nuclear family and then toss women to the curb and hope they survive.  I've realized in these last few months that the entirety of the women's health debate is so much bigger than sex.  This is so much more than abortion.  This is about priorities.  It has been proven in study after study, where women go their families go.  And now the same party that has fought for "perfect" families, is fighting to cut funding for women's health, and further to make it harder for any of us- male or female- to have access to the health care we need to pay for those services for ourselves.

I just don't get it.  The entire matter ridiculous- but they're doing it.  They're winning. States are agreeing to cut funds, and casting their vote that women aren't all that important.  I disagree.  We are important.  And I shudder to think what the impact will be on us as a society, male and female, if they are successful.  Less screenings means more stds; less birth control means more ill-timed pregnancies; less care means more preventable deaths. Personally, even though not all of those services apply to me- they're worth my tax dollars. Are they worth yours?

Love, Hurt, and Conflict Resolution

I have not been in many relationships before this one, but I have been in several, and to be honest: we didn't really fight (in any of my other relationships.)  Maybe a disagreement now and then, which usually I won, but no fighting... Quite frankly, if we really didn't see something the same way, we just broke up.  And that was it.

Mimi and I, however, we fight.  We fight over stupid things and important things and completely trivial things.  We fight when I feel lied to, or when I feel hurt, or when she feels like I'm not really understanding her.  And when we fight, we definitely fight about that-- I feel like she's mean when we fight, and she feels like I take things too personally and to be honest, I'm sure both of us are kinda right.

Don't get me wrong.  We don't fight all the time.  But we do fight.  And usually when something new comes up that we haven't experienced (together) yet.  But when I thought about it, I realized, this isn't all that surprising.  We have spent twenty-some years, learning, growing, and living- apart.  Not only that, but we have done all of that growing in living in distinctly different environments.  So it isn't remotely surprising that our reactions to life wouldn't always line up, and more so-- that those differences would, on occasion, cause conflict.  And it occurred to me yesterday in the made-up-aftermath of our most recent fight, that maybe the fighting isn't such a bad thing.  We never stop loving each other when we fight, and though we get angry- maybe this is stuff we need to figure out?

Right now, we're safe.  We just have each other to take care of, we don't have anyone else around listening to us argue about how to handle the money, or the car, or work, or whatever.  And that's stuff we need to figure out! Since we did not grow up together, these aren't things that we naturally agree on 100% of the time, and I'm really glad that I'm finally close enough to someone that it's worth debating through the issues, even when it doesn't feel so fun at the time.

So my words to you-- love, live, and fight it out.  It's worth it! (Or at least that's what I'm hoping :). )

My First Valentine

In 7th grade, I think I got about 4 or 5 teddy bears (of various shapes in sizes) from assorted boys.  In 8th grade, I had a "real" boyfriend (because of course all genuine relationships occur when one is 13) and that year I got the kissing Halmark bears (2003 version, of course. See picture :). )

That was a pretty good Valentine's Day.  One time in high school I was with a guy for a while and I think I got some flowers... but for the most part, my relationships have stacked themselves nicely around Valentine's Day.  I tend to start dating people towards the end of the year and then break up with them right before Valentine's Day (the worst was when I broke up with my last (ever) boyfriend, February 13th... yeah...) Then of course pick up someone else right after Valentine's Day and it all falls apart long before Valentine's comes along the following year.

But this year... I have a Valentine! (Also, I know I'm a bit behind in posting, but we didn't celebrate Valentine's Day until this weekend so I wanted to wait until all festivities were out of the way... in the interest of full disclosure :). )  Valentine's Day was on a Tuesday, as you know, which is not very convenient.  Work, life, and everything made it a bit difficult to celebrate, but we made do.  I had Valentine's Day (though I was specifically instructed to be very low-key...)  I crept out of bed at 5 am to get breakfast ready... Cheese Blintz's (Of the Low-Carb, Metabolism Miracle appropriate variety :) ), coffee, and flowers.

Maybe not as lasting as the kissing bears, but I think we're moving in the right direction :). Anywho, Mimi's part of Valentine's Day was this weekend... We have spent the entire weekend in a Valentine's Date, and it has been wonderful. Friday, I got presents: a wine aerator, and... a promise ring to match hers :). 

Saturday, we hit up the IMA, lunch, movies and on and on... without risk of boring you in a detailed play-by-play, it was a really great first (real) Valentine's Day.  I have never really appreciated the holiday, but I've got to say-- all things considered, it's not so bad :).