Rigel

I have landlines at home and work. I DO have a cell-phone, with really cheap service--about 10 cents a minute, pay as you go, no monthly or other charges. I spend maybe $60 or $70 a year. When I travel, I have the cell phone with me, but the power is usually turned off except when I'm making a call or expecting one. When I'm neither at home or work, I'm usually in a place were I don't want to be interrupted--a concert, a meeting, driving through urban traffic, or just in a reverie--not having interruptions allows me good non-linear contemplation time. --Rigel

I sing anything and everything--often songs I'm trying to learn, or reviewing to make sure I still know them, or just something that goes through my head. All kinds of languages and genres. --Rigel

And again! --Rigel

Art is that which allows a refractive perspective on the world. --Rigel

For all of the harm that right-wing reactionaries have done using "the church" to prop up their biases, I can also think of lots of progressives whose strength came from their spirituality and their religious base: folks like Martin Luther King, Jr., or William Sloane Coffin among Christians, or Abraham Joshua Heschel and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi among Jews. I can think of lots of other examples, some more obscure than these, and I've met many fine folks on the left whose desire to change the world for the better is based on religious principles. If progressives surrender the religious establishment to the right, religion will lose, and the progressive cause will lose, too. --Rigel

Getting a new car license plate that doesn't plug the web site is one more of your costs you need to be paid for if you give up the domain name. Not to mention all of the hassles and work involved in changing your car registration (and insurance forms, etc.). And you'll need to redirect everyone to your new website name. I've even visited it myself a few times, linked from GA. If he ever makes it big as a musician, then he'll have money to buy the domain from you at a respectable price. In the meanwhile, you don't owe this guy any favors, unless you like his music--or his shirtless body. I say, don't let it go too cheaply. --Rigel

I'm not saying Elisha was a child molester. Just that the scene set up by the book of Second Kings strikes me as pretty kinky. And regarding R. Crumb: see http://7.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kolazx7M6t1qzz036o1_400.jpg The cover says: "The first book of the Bible graphically depicted! Nothing left out!" and "Adult supervision recommended for minors". This is not your family Bible, but then again, even your family Bible has bits in it that your attention wasn't called to when you were growing up. Remember the rape of Dina and subsequent revenge by her brothers?

The reading you heard at the Bar Mitzvah is actually about the prophet Elisha, not Elijah. And taking it out of context, there's one bit from that Bible story that struck me this morning (at a different Bar Mitzvah) as the sort of behavior that could get you into a lot of trouble if you tried it these days: Elisha comes into the house, and the young boy, the child of the Shunamite woman, is laid out upon his bed: II Kings, 4:33-34: He {Elisha] went in therefore, and shut the door upon them both... And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands: and stretched himself upon the child.... But along those lines, there's R. Crumb's newly published illustrated version of Genesis...

All right--the newest phase at last! By the time I've written this, you will have had the first day back at work, and an evening to recover-- and by the time you read this, you may even have had a second day back at work. Hoping it's all going well! --Rigel

There's a Chinese restaurant in my town. It's name is "DRAGON CITY" but the "O" and the "N" have been burned out for the past couple of weeks. I wondered what would happen if I put on a dress and showed up at "DRAG CITY" and then expressed confusion about what they were advertising... (It's either that or a place for car racing...) On a more serious level, if you see the movie "Taking Woodstock," the character of the ex-Marine security guard who wears dresses played by Liev Schreiber casts some light on the possibilities of drag. The movie has flaws, but the main character is exploring his sexuality in the physical domain of his parents' world. The memoir the film is based on is more explciit--Eliot Tiber (nee Teichberg) had just been present at the Stonewall Riots in New York City a few weeks before returning to the Borscht-Belt part of the Catskills to help his parents out with their almost-bankrupt seedy motel and bringing the Woodstock Festival to White Lake and Yasgur's farm. The Woodstock Festival plays a background role in this story, although the film both pays homage to and works off of Michael Wadleigh's 1972 music/documentary Woodstock. --Rigel

Happy birthday Trebs. As you approach ancientness, may you find sufficient stamina to allow Dan to make it a VERY happy birthday celebration indeed. --Rigel

Condolences to you. May your father visit you sweetly in your dreams, and your friends help you through your mourning. --Rigel

I didn't go to Woodstock, and would probably have had a very different experience than most people if I had gone--unlike everyone else who camped out in the mud and rain, I probably would have had a bed at the home of distant cousins who lived near Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, NY (within an hour's walk, more or less). But I didn't go. (I was only in high school back then, and too young to drive into New York State.) The 1969 Woodstock festival was a group of people who survived adverse conditions by banding together in an impromptu community. Woodstock 1999 devolved into chaos and violence when the community of festival-goers realized they were being ripped off by uncaring promoters--some of the same folks who had woefully under-prepared in 1969 did even worse 30 years later, For example, they prevented people from bringing in adequate water and then tried to make people buy bottled water at $4 a bottle. I regularly attend folk festivals, which are like Woodstock (1969) on a MUCH smaller scale--a couple of thousand people at most. The are well planned for, have strong senses of community, and even the ones that get rainy and muddy don't deteriorate into free-for-alls. They also tend to be much more participatory--the attendees are as likely to be co-producers of their own music as they are consumers of someone else's entertainment. Some of these festivals I attend annually are even in New York State! --Rigel

Robert-- Your stamina is up to three hours at a stretch--that's great. But before you're ready to go back to work, you'll need more stamina than merely the hours you plan to work, Toss in some time for commuting, some time for lunch, some time for breaks--and things like lunch and food breaks will be very important to observe if you to hope to continue to recover. Now add some time for personal maintenance and the things that make life worth living (like snuggle time with Dan, and that's as detailed as I plan to get...)--and you'll see that you're not quite ready to resume work yet. The way I figure it is you're not ready to put in an eight-hour day at work until after you've got the strength to put in a hard eight-hour day at Disneyland . Instead of worrying about getting back to work, my advice is a Zen-like enjoy the situation where you are. Life has dealt you some "time-out" time, and you should take advantage of it. Best wishes for continued recovery. --Rigel

While its a truism that Reform and Reconstructionist branches of Judaism are most open to gays, followed by the Conservative movement, and the Orthodox are generally unwelcoming, here's an interesting article about an Orthodox rabbi who welcomes gays into his congregation: http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/13912/unorthodox-position/print/ Some terms in the article might be unfamiliar, though most are defined there, at least by context. One small correction to the article: Ohev Sholom is in the Shepherd Park neighborhood of Washington, DC, (the northernmost part), and not in Dupont Circle. Just goes to show that you can occasionally find gay-friendly congregations in the most unlikely denominations. --Rigel

The other thing you can do is simply say "sorry, I'm ineligible." without going into any detail. There are all sorts of reasons why people can be ineligible. There was the time I had been with a group of people who shared a bottle of vodka, all drinking directly out of the bottle, and then it turned out one of us was in diagnosed with hepatitis the next week. We were all at risk until the potential incubation period of several months had passed. None of the rest of us got hepatitis (the alcohol of the vodka being a sterilizing factor, probably), but until we were in the clear, it was the prudent thing not to give blood. --Rigel

So what's the tune?

Mend well. Mend quickly. Best wishes for a speedy, complete recovery. --Rigel

Offering hugs of encouragement and celebration, with all electrons properly filtered through the Internet to remove any possibility of germs. --Rigel

Another round of thoughts, prayers, energies, and comforts beaming to you from close to the nation's power center, FWIW. Keep up the good spirits (Dan--that's where your help is invaluable!). Enjoy whatever music or games get you through this. When your immune system is recovered enough, maybe you can go visit Mickey Mouse again (or DC). --Rigel

I've had at least a couple of times in my life where the experience I sensed were perhaps best explained by the presence of ghosts. I suppose there are perfectly good scientific explanations involving sounds of wood settling or wind-gusts and refocusing on reflections in a window until I imagined a face there, but none of these scientific explanations account for the emotional responses following, like why my hand was shaking or why I felt more sensitive to the world. And science doesn't explain why I woke up one night alone by myself but feeling as though someone had sat upon the edge of my bed, only to discover that the timing worked out with a close friend of mine dying in a car crash thousands of miles away at the time-zone adjusted same hour of my experience. Perhaps its all just coincidence, I don't know, but ... --Rigel

If you Google enough, you can find all the latest news, though you may need to dig for it. A Google search for "new Hampshire marriage" led me to TowleRoad (http://www.towleroad.com/2009/05/new-hamps...l-in-limbo.html) which led me to the Nashua (New Hampshire) Telegraph article http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.d...5/-1/columnists. It hasn't reached Governor Lynch's desk yet, but you need to understand the complexity of the way the bill was passed. It began in the NH House, was altered by the Senate and then went back and forth, and some of the amendments became bills of their own--for example, the one correcting the error of limiting marriage to "gospel ministers," which legislators suddenly realized would exclude non-Christians. The idea is to gather all the bills together so they can be presented to the Governor simultaneously--both the bill setting up same sex marriage and the bills correcting the original bill. Before the Governor gets them, each bill requires lots of signatures from lots of officials, so it has to pass around like some interoffice memo until everyone involved has put their initials (or signatures) on it. What's fascinating is the article goes on to discuss a misleading poll by Cornerstone Policy Research that said that New Hampshire residents were against gay marriage. The question it actually asked was: ""This survey concerns a new law the state Legislature just passed that will affect marriage in New Hampshire. Do you agree that marriage between only one man and one woman should be legal in New Hampshire?'' The way I read that question, it doesn't ask about same sex marriage; it asks "should heterosexual monogamous marriage be legal in New Hampshire?" Duh--yeah. Who could object to that? Well, at least 64% agreed. It's worth Googling more about that Cornerstone Policy Research poll to find out how to lie with statistics--it's a really blatant misuse of polling techniques. --Rigel

Benji-- In Maine, the anti-gay forces will have about three months from the time the legislature adjourns to gather some 55,000 signatures to force a referendum, a process sometimes referred to informally as a "poeple's veto." If enough valid signatures are gathered, the law's implementation will be postponed, and it will be voted upon in a referendum, perhaps in November 2009, or perhaps June 2010. A majority vote in the referendum could overturn the law. I'm optimistic that under a referendum, gay marriage would be upheld in Maine--several years ago Mainers defeated a referendum attempt to repeal a bill which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The liberals in Maine would be in favor of gay marriage, and New England conservatives tend to be libertarians rather than social conservatives imposing their interpretation of religion on other people. In previous centuries, New England was a battleground between Protestants and Catholics, both of whom are plentiful in the populace, and because of that, the inhabitants are acutely aware of the dangers of imposing religious dogma on others. If the referendum is defeated, it will also have an impact on anti-gay forces in the rest of the country, because it will amount to popular approval of gay marriage, or at least, it will be spun that way. It could also give momentum to a ballot initiative to overturn Proposition 8 in California, if such a referendum is necessary to restore gay marriage to the Golden State. No such referendum is possible in New Hampshire. --Rgel

The national press are mainly concentrating on the Maine story, since it includes a governor's signature and has been enacted into law (barring the possibility/probability of a "people's veto" referendum. Such a referendum might well get on the ballot, but it might well not pass, given the temperament of most Mainers I know; if it DOES get on the ballot, it will delay the start date of the law whether it passes or not). To find out real details about the New Hampshire goings on, you'll need to google for an in-state source, or at least a news medium catering to New Hampshirites. (It''s a small state geographically, so many of the television and radio stations are across the border in neighboring states.) --Rigel

The New Hampshire legislature passed its law in final form today (the House had to pass a version today in harmony with the Senate's bill with its latest tweaks--for example, the original exempted "ministers of the gospel" from having to perform marriages against their churches' teachings, the revisions made provisions for rabbis and other religious institutions that don't have gospel ministers, including Quakers). Now it goes to Governor Lynch, who has 10 days to either veto it, sign it, or not sign it, in which case it becomes law in 10 days without his signature. --Rigel