In the face of the beautiful-awful-tragic-absurd-mundane-heartbreaking-impossible-wonderful,
all I can think to say is:
and even this...
“I record my life, sifting and trying to separate what is real from what I’ve dreamed. I have decided not to tell you what is fact versus what is unfact primarily because (a) I am giving you a portrait of the essence of me, and (b) because, living where I do, living in the chasm that cuts through thought, it is lonely… come with me, reader. I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all. Kierkegaard says, 'The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. We are most honest when we are lost.' Enter that lostness with me. Live in the place I am, where the view is murky, where the connecting bridges and orienting maps have been surgically stripped away.”
— Lauren Slater
“I want to be remembered as the girl who always smiles even when her heart is broken, and the one that could always brighten up your day even if she couldn’t brighten her own.”
AIM: andeventhis
Email: andeventhis[at]aim[dot]com
No. Ubiquitously and definitively no. Marriage is marriage. No other thing is marriage. That’s how words work.
Plus, and not to harken back to my public high school understanding of human history, but marriage started as an economic practice designed to reinforce social structure and avoid inbreeding when possible, remember? It was completely separate from religion because it was a business transaction pretty hugely steeped in fortifying patriarchy and establishing women as property. It’s been incorporated into most religions over the ages because, duh, religion likes to address things that are important to people, but it has non-denominational roots that span all different creeds and cultures. And, if all of that is meaningless to you, there’s always the fact that Ancient Greece and China had same-sex unions.
I understand you have “student” in your bio and your blog contains such entries as “My dog has a stinky butt,” so I’m going to curb my edginess here, but from one woman to another you should probably take a more active interest in what marriage has meant to women over time, and maybe keep in mind the fact that we’ve had the right to vote for less than 100 years. Our country has a pretty cool history of treating anyone who isn’t a white, Christian male horribly, and it might be helpful to remember that if you were born a couple of decades ago, our law and policy would be taking huge dumps all over your personal rights and liberties too. Just because we’ve been privileged for five minutes doesn’t mean we leave other groups down there in the dust.
More importantly, the fact that you’re not part of the oppressed group du jour doesn’t excuse you from having wildly misinformed and lazy opinions, and if you’re going to express them and don’t want things like facts getting in the way, you might not want to hang out in the reply section of my blog.
Also you meant then, not than.
Wow. I mean, wow. I had no idea I was so offensive...ignorant. I understand that I was on...
Xtine killz it. As per usual.
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.