monogodo

Will you be staying in Utah?

I haven't left the house since Saturday morning.

One of Cynthia's leads has kind of panned out. A week or so before Thanksgiving my boss called me to ask if I knew anyone like my wife that was looking for a job. She was wanting someone to be her assistant, doing special projects, researching items, organizing stuff, basically all the little crap jobs that need to be done, but are below my boss's pay grade as Director of National Purchasing. At the time, I couldn't think of anyone who was looking for work, but said I'd keep thinking. After Cynthia called me to tell me she got fired, I called my boss & told her I thought of the perfect person for the position, and that the person was available immediately, and that it was Cynthia. Due to various things going on in her schedule, she wasn't able to set up anything with Cynthia until yesterday afternoon. Essentially, my boss is bringing Cynthia on as her assistant on a contract basis. She knows that Cynthia is the right person for the job, but she has to post the position and consider others. She's hoping that Cynthia doing the job will prove to the powers that be that she should be hired permanently, especially once they see what else she can do. So after church this morning she's going in to our Corporate Office in Richardson.

She's been stressing out a lot because of her employment status. She wasn't sure how we were going to pay rent this month. We talked last night and I told her my plan: Rent is due the 1st, and late after the 3rd. I'd pay the rent on the 3rd by dropping a check in the night drop after the office closes. As long as they have it by midnight, it's considered on time. I'll use a check from our Credit Union, because it processes slower. I get paid on the 6th. From past experience, rent checks usually clear on the 8th when I pay late on the 3rd, but that's with our main bank (which rhymes with Hell's Cargo). Since processing through the Credit Union goes so much slower, it probably won't clear until the 9th at the soonest, which gives us more than enough time for my pay check deposit to go through the Credit Union. With our current balance and that pay check, we'll have more than enough to cover the rent check.

We still haven't heard about her unemployment benefit status.

I'm so looking forward to getting out of this high-rent situation. That $750/month house is still available as of last night. Cynthia fired off an email to the guy last night to follow up. We also drove through the neighborhood around her church (which is the area we want to move to) on Friday to see if there were other places available. One really nice place we found was a 2br-2ba house with a HUGE yard, but it was out of our price range (they want $2k/month). By HUGE I mean it's HUMUNGOUS. As best as I can tell from Google Maps, the lot appears to be 100' by 500', with the 100' edge along the street, and the house in about the middle of the lot. Here's the link to the map. The property is on the East side of Wildwood.

Crap, now I've gotten distracted looking for rent houses instead of getting ready for work.

Here's the listing.

The guy had another house that was 1200 square feet, 3br/2ba, w/ above-ground pool, hardwood floors, for $950, but it got rented already.

I just hope there's something similar available when it comes time for us to move.

Response:

Point 1: I believe people are born to their sexuality, that it is innate to them and not learned. I also believe that human sexuality is a spectrum, not either/or. Yes, there are people who are 100% straight, and others that are 100% gay. And everyone else falls somewhere in between. I'm bi. Always have been. I was only ever exposed to heterosexual relationships while growing up, yet I found both men and women to be sexually attractive. Until relatively recently, I've kept those thoughts/desires to myself, and only acted on the straight ones. I wasn't abused as a child, either. My environment was essentially straight, yet I'm not 100% straight.

My wife's best friend of over half her life was raised Mormon. He is gay. I'd be willing to bet that his environment while growing up was strictly heterosexual in its examples. Yet he "ended up" gay.

The reason you never hear of a "coming out... black" situation, it because it's usually obvious to everyone that a black person is black. Until recently, our society was extremely anti-homosexual, so people who knew they weren't straight behaved as straight, because that's what society said they should be. I didn't act on, or mention, my attraction to men while in high school because it would have gotten me ostracized. Hell, there was a transfer student my Junior year who dressed like Kings of the Wild Frontier era Adam Ant (this was the mid-80s, after all), and he was picked on mercilessly by the jocks & homophobes in the school because they couldn't understand that a guy could have pierced ears & wear eyeliner and still be straight. Imagine how he'd have been treated had he actually been gay. Think back to when you were in HS. People who were different were singled out for bullying. If you felt different from what you were told the "norm" was, you'd be damn sure to hide that fact, so that you wouldn't get beaten up or worse.

When you converted to LDS, I'm guessing you told people. Why? Probably for the same reason a gay person "comes out" to their family/friends. It's an important aspect of their being, and they want people to know about it. I'd imagine it's the same with your conversion -- it's an important aspect of who you are, and you want people to know about it.

When my wife chose to leave the LDS church and find another faith to follow, the main aspect she struggled with was the sense of loss of community. Mormons, to a certain extent, are like Jews. One can be Jewish by faith and Jewish by culture. One can be Mormon by faith and Mormon by culture. There's an actual culture to the LDS church. I've seen it, and I'm sure you have, too. There's nothing wrong with that, by the way, it just is. Anyway, pretty much all of the churches she went to lacked that sense of community. The Catholic church came closest to having that sense of community. Add to that the fact that one must go through classes & specific steps & rites to become Catholic, and it was very comforting to her. She's since learned that ex-Mormons make great Catholics, and vice-versa. They're both attracted to, and comforted by, the rituals in each respective church. She's since discovered a specific parish to attend that has given her that sense of community that she'd thought she'd lost. During her conversion she went to the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, because that was the closest Catholic church to her that had the classes. She had a sponsor assigned to her, to be her Godmother. The woman barely spoke English, and was of no help at all. Most of the parish was Hispanic, and most of the priests don't speak or understand English. She felt very out of place there, but felt that she'd made the correct choice in a new faith. Shortly after I broke my leg in early March, she discovered her current Parish, Mater Dei. It's old-school Latin Mass, and everyone is friendly and welcoming. She's finally found the community she was searching for.

I forgot where I was going with that.

Point 2: The government has the right to recognize marriage because they pretty much always have had that right. Even going back to pre-Christian times. As for Civil Union vs. Marriage, they're both simply terms chosen by people to label the relationship. To me, civil union sounds dry & clinical, more of a contract between two people rather than a unification based on love & mutual respect. Here's another thing that bothers me about what you propose: when you meet a couple, they might tell you that their married. What if they only had a civil union? Have they been civil unioned? Civilly united? Hi, I'm monogodo, I'd like you to meet my civilly united partner, Cynthia. No, she's my wife, and we're married. It's much simpler for all concerned. And when we tell people we're married, no one ever asks if we were married in a church or at a courthouse or some other venue, or if the officiant was a judge, clergyperson, or ship's captain. Whatever they think happened to cause us to be married is fine, as it doesn't affect our marriage one bit. For the record, we were married in a bed & breakfast by a friend of mine who happens to be an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ faith. She's been associate pastor of two different churches and interim minister at a third. Our ceremony was very non-denominational, though. My brother, on the other hand, was married to his wife by a justice of the peace in the county courthouse. We're just as married as they are, and vice-versa.

You said, "Gay, straight, white, black, man woman, if the government would stop applying labels it has no business doing, then everyone really will have equal rights." What gives religious entities the right to assign labels while the government can't? What gives any church the right to "own" the term "marriage" and not another entity? God can't be the answer, because not everyone believes in God, or even the same God. Changing it so that everyone has a civil union instead of a marriage is attempting to change thousands of years of history & custom, and I'd be willing to be the churches would fight that just as strongly as they're fighting gay marriage.

It's just a word. Its meaning is different to everyone. To some, marriage is the union of man & woman for the purpose of having a family. Yet those same people have no problem with infertile couples getting married.

I've got to go to bed. I'll respond to the rest later.