ok 2 things in this post.
Yes we are attending a lesbian shotgun wedding.
It's not... exactly... a shotgun wedding. It's a civil partnership ceremony. (You can't call them weddings!! Weddings are for heterosexuals. But at least there are civil partnerships now.) And it was scheduled before my friend got knocked up. But she will be quite obviously pregnant for the ceremony.
See, they scheduled the ceremony, and said, "Once we're legal partners, we'll have a child!" And that was good. But you know, the human body is not a machine. So my friend figured, what the hell, let's start trying now. They've had this reciprocal agreement worked out for ages with a m/m couple down the street, that one of them would donate the, you know, necessary, when it came time. So my friend figured she'd start making the attempt now, and since it usually takes six months to a year to be successful, she'd most likely get pregnant shortly after the ceremony, or perhaps just before, which would also be nice.
Anyway...
Yeah, it worked the first time. So she'll be nearly ready to pop by the end of April. And so it's going to look like a shotgun wedding. As long as they're married before the baby's born, it's all legal, and I think they'll both be allowed to put their names on the birth certificate, which is the important part.


I stayed in a hostel in London (with said friend, actually! Ten years ago now) and it wasn't bad at all, but (e:zobar) is young and not wise in the ways of the world. It is fine and I really doubt anyone will molest his butt. Not with me there to protect him.
But the exchange rate... oh my GOD, I may have to sell my body to pay for booze. Because everything's, like, Manhattan prices there-- what costs you a fiver here costs you a fiver there, and beer is like, seven-- except it's POUNDS not DOLLARS and a pound is TWO DOLLARS NOW! *faints*
It was $1.67 when I was there. It was a long time ago. It was painful even then. Yikes.

Anyhow.
The second thing:
Chita!!
Napping with me:

Yes she's licking Z's beard in the photo below. He calls her his "assistant" now that he's working from home, and she sits on his lap and licks herself and sometimes him, and headbutts him while he's on conference calls. It's cute.

Missing Image ;(

Missing Image ;(

Aw I guess I can't get those to work-- they're really big files but I figured it could resize them. Bummer.

Apparently if you're not on (e:strip) you're not considered human company.
Chita should have her own (e:strip) journal so (e:zobar) would take her more seriously. (E:Chita) isn't taken.

So I am sorry I do not update more. I am on strike over at Livejournal for today-there is a Content Strike protesting the latest round of, "We Own The Site So Fuck You Who Generate All Its Content And Actually Make It Interesting To Anyone In The World, Including Our Advertisers" wankery. You realize now that LJ has been sold so many times it actually belongs to a Russian company with weird shady Russian ties to Russian things.
But apparently some of them are Jewish, and so the fact that the opposition has chosen to have a Content Strike on Purim is Deeply Significant. Which means, at the moment, that I am either Part of the Solution, or maybe I'm Part of the Problem, over there.
I wish I didn't have my entire adult life invested in the archives there. I am serious, it is my entire adult life. I got that journal in 2001, when I was just about to turn 21. I've updated it almost daily ever since. (I think I've gone up to a week without touching it, but that's unusual.) It's not about the site, it's not about the server architecture, it's absolutely not about the graphic design. But it is, somewhat, about the communities. I've had diaries on and off since I was barely literate, and could never keep them up, because nobody would ever read them. Moving to an online journal (I still don't think of it or treat it as a blog) has not only made me stick with it, but is also far more responsible than my $100,000 creative writing degree for any maturation or improvement that has occurred in my writing. It's also made it possible for me to engage in any kind of introspection / retrospection about my life, because I have no real other records of what I did, thought, said, or felt at any given time in my life, and my memories, where they exist, are often wrong. Memory's a tricky thing.

There's also the added controversy that... well, yes, two or three members of my roller derby league are also members of Livejournal, and read my LJ. I write on there about my whole life, including derby. When I wrote about our last bout, one of the readers linked it to her whole team. (I sort of half-expected she would, but I hadn't said anything I felt was controversial, so I wasn't worried. HA!)
There was a small explosion. And the league's governing Board thought that perhaps it could tell me what to do in regards to my own personal journal. I simply excised any mention of the league by its full name and told them if they wanted more than that, they could fuck themselves. Not in so many words, but more or less. If I'm not going to let some shady Russians who own my servers tell me what I can and can't write about, I'm certainly not letting some overzealous volunteers in an organization that has taken over my life tell me what to do. For one thing, the volunteers don't have Putin on their side.

Anyhow. That's my deep thoughts on "blogging", a word I hate. I am sincerely and truly glad that I have a site I can journal on whose owner I can get drunk with on a semi-regular basis. (E:paul), you are better than lj user=bradfitz, in that I know you and you don't take money from shady Russians.
Well, that I know of.

And here's the real litmus test of whether roller derby peeps read my blog here too (how thoroughly am I being stalked?): the kerfuffle is that I dared to mention that there was controversy over the officiating at our last bout (March 8th), and that I felt like the skaters have really improved from last season but the refs haven't had the same training opportunities and may need some more support. Apparently saying that on the Internet is tantamount to tossing a primed grenade into one of our Board meetings.
I am thinking of making myself a t-shirt (I used to do that a lot, hand-silkscreen/stenciling t-shirts) that just says Trouble on it. I already have one of those O'Reilly t-shirts from ThinkGeek that says "I'm blogging this", which I may just wear to practice next week and see if anyone's head fucking explodes. HA HA.
Sorry. I actually already have a shirt stencil I made in college, that just says, "difficult", because that's what my mother told me I was.
Anyone else want one?

I'm also sort of slowly edging into radical size-acceptance politics. My experience over a year ago of having a doctor be completely disgusted with me and unable to help me at all because I was "obese" has been wearing at me, and so when somebody linked to an article at Shapely Prose (http://www.kateharding.net) I read it, and then spent the rest of the week devouring the site's archives. I love Kate Harding, but I also love the two other women who contribute there, Fillyjonk and Sweet Machine. And I discovered that Sweet Machine is ME:
i.e., Too fat to not be fat, too skinny to be accepted as fat, completely fucked when it comes to finding clothes that fit, etc.
I also got kinda addicted to the blog Junkfoodscience, because OMG SCIENCE. (Incidentally, that's the source for the study (e:Zobar) was writing about the other day.)
The movement is more commonly called Fat Acceptance but I'm more interested in the concept that (radical as it seems) it's just not right to judge someone based solely on their body shape/size/condition. Even on their perceived health. A person is a person, whether they're 135 or 535 pounds. Most size-based discrimination is really income-based or race-based, but hidden behind an acceptable veneer. And almost 100% of the "concern" people express at other people who are too fat, too thin, or engaging in "risky" behaviors like having a glass of wine while pregnant, having a cigarette ever, or, you know, walking down the street while fat: it's the same as concern trolls on the Internet, and it's not about concern for a stranger whose life you know nothing about. It's about the person expressing the concern feeling morally superior. All the "drive-by mommies" who tell other mothers they're not parenting right because their kid is only wearing one sock because the other fell off: Concern trolls. Concern trolls. Concern trolls.
The moral of the story is, mind your own fucking business unless you truly, truly think you can help. Be fucking nice to people and have some goddamn manners. That's all it's really about. And don't assume you know everything because you read a study in the Times that said something, because media-reported studies are usually incomplete, biased, or just plain fabricated. (Just go read junkfoodscience's archives. I'm serious. It's addictive. And fascinating. And depressing. Did you know being obese raises your risk for... surviving a heart attack, or not having one at all? Yup. Take that, concern trolls. ,
And, ha ha, )
So anyhow. I'm kind of glad that this obsession is one that (e:Zobar) can kind of share. He gets shit for being a skinny tall person constantly. I get shit for having fat tits all the time. It's a common interest. Go figure.
So, that's me. How have you all been? I do read on here occasionally, but not enough.