(no subject)

I've been pretty much happily MIA this weekend. *wuffs*

This morning I'm back to work and doing well. It's a much better environment knowing that I don't have to worry about much of anything here past January. In fact, the most work-related worry I'm having today is that coworker G has acute bronchitis and I don't want to get sick. He's going to leave for home as soon as possible; he's just in because he has obligations to do a few things for some executive staff.

For my part, I have a few things I need to do today. Let's see:

I should call the Harvey police to make sure I have info needed for court to fight my car abandonment ticket.
I should call the anthropological association and find out about getting a yearly membership and registering for the conference (this Friday is the pre-reg deadline)
I should call the unemployment service and get some info from them.
I should figure out what docs I need to get a new driver's license for my new address. Mine will be expiring and it will probably be easier to deal with a number of things with an up-to-date license. Like opening a bank account at MB, where I can get 4% APY on a rewards checking account. That would be nice.
I want to look into available architecture tours that the Chicago Architecture Foundation does. danaeris suggested I look into a membership, and it seems like a great value!
And finally, I should probably close some tickets or something too.

Since I haven't been up to Wisconsin in a couple weeks, I'm going to drive up that way on Tuesday after work. I can visit my family and moiracoon. Moira and her partner are both dealing with some stressful stuff and I've been thinking of them and hoping for good things for them. I'm going to work remotely at my parents' place on Wednesday and then drive back to Chicago Wednesday night. At least, that's the plan as it stands.

This coming weekend promises to be lots of fun. Danae and I are making a trip to a Mario Brothers themed burlesque show called Boobs and Goombas. Yes. Seriously!

(no subject)

Would it be somehow weird or disrespectful of me to buy this? I'd have to think for a while about how to articulate why, but I kind of want to.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Soviet-UKRAINE-Russia-MEDAL-CHERNOBYL-LIQUIDATOR_W0QQitemZ320600535565QQcategoryZ4724QQcmdZViewItem#ht_2120wt_1143

(Read about the Chernobyl Liquidators here.)

----------

Turns out that I do not have to appear in person to request a court date as the ticket claims. I would just have to appear at 7:00 PM on the 21st. I was also told that the fine does not rise to the next level until a week after the court date even though the due date on the ticket is the 13th. I'm a little concerned that that will turn out to be misinformation; maybe the fine structure on this kind of ticket is different from what the person on the phone is used to or something. I trust information I receive from a representative of a bureaucracy about as far as I can throw the buildings that said bureaucracy is housed in.

The problem is that the court date is the day of one of my Japanese classes. I really don't want to miss the class, and I am tempted to just mail a payment in today to avoid, for certain, both missing a class and having the fine escalate. Is the avoidance of annoyance and frustration worth the $75 to me? Hmm....

I called the American Anthropological Association, but they are closed on federal holidays. I'll talk to them tomorrow.

On the driver's license front, it looks like I need four things, of which I have three. Of the acceptable options, the easiest ones will be my out of state driver's license, my social security card, a utility bill, and my birth certificate. I was worried about the utility bill; either that or a lease agreement will work, but I don't have a lease agreement (I'm renting a room from a friend of a friend and we didn't write up anything formal) and I'm not paying for any of the utilities there. Then I realized that my internet service is in my name at my current address! And my parents, hopefully, have a copy of my birth certificate. I'll ask them.

Uh-oh. Wait a minute. Now that I think about it, my internet bill has the wrong apartment. 2D (which doesn't exist) instead of 2C. I pointed that out at the time the guy came out to hook it up, but he said that it didn't matter because service was done for the whole building. And it didn't seem like it would be a big deal. But...maybe it is. Ok, I have another entity to call today.

I found instructions on how to calculate my unemployment benefits, so I'm going to look at my pay stubs in my company's online system and figure it out that way rather than wade through the morass of a governmental phone system, so yay for that.

As for the architecture tours, they are full of win and I will be getting a membership in the future. At $55 a year, which includes a ton of free tours, it's a steal!

(no subject)

(I wrote this for Facebook where I have an account under my real name. I think all of you reading this already know all of this about me (and probably more), but I wanted to repost it here too, just to have a record.)

It's important that I write something for national coming out day. Because it is important, it will be long. I hope you will bear with me.

--------------

National coming out day! That's pretty neat. Many of the people I care about are some flavour of LGBT, and life has not always been kind to them because of that. I hope that days like this can have some effect, even if it's just a little, toward reducing discrimination and fear. I think that finding out someone you already know is lesbian, or bi, or gay, or what-have-you might just be enough to make some people willing to reexamine just what it is they think they're afraid of. What it is that they think is threatening them or hurting them somehow. Who this shadowy group of the sinister unknown is. I like to think that society becomes more accepting, and more and more people feel safe enough to come out to their family, their friends, and others in their live, that we'll someday get to a tipping point where these things aren't the kind of unknowns that they are now. People fear the unknown.

And you know, it's not just about sexual orientation. Or even just about transgendered or genderqueer folks (who also have it pretty hard). What about people who are Wiccan who have to explain over and over to members of the public that it's not about sacrificing animals or playing with Oujia boards? What about people who are atheists who don't let the world know what their well-reasoned conclusions about the nature of the world are because they're tired of people thinking atheists are all some kind of amoral, Machiavellians who have no reason to be nice to anybody without an invisible man looking over their shoulder?

And there are other lifechoices too, whose practitioners often hide themselves because they just don't want to deal with justifying huge parts of their lives over and over again. Part of the way I live falls under that category.

It can be argued that personal information about individuals private lives has no business being made public this way. So what if you're a woman who's attracted to other women, or if, on the inside, you think you're the wrong gender. I believe that if there were no longer people losing their jobs, or being bullied to the point of suicide, over things that no one has any business knowing about, that would be true. But because these things do happen, I think it's important for people whose lives are outside the mainstream in some way, and who are in a place in their lives where they can and do choose to do so, to stand up and say "This is who I am. And I'm really just like you." I'd like to think that if everyone could look outside the group of people they know who they think are just like them, and see that there are people they know in their every-day life who are members of the minorities that they fear, that would go a long way toward stopping that fear and misunderstanding.

It's hard to know how to help in gigantic, nation-spanning problems like this. I think we all wish we could do more. Maybe this will help a little bit, somehow.

I'm really pretty much just like you. I go to work. I come home. I have hobbies I enjoy. I like hanging out with my friends.

I'm bisexual. For me, it doesn't make sense for gender to keep me from exploring a connection I make with another person.

I'm polyamorous. I can (and have) had romantic feelings and serious relationships with more than one person at a time. People who are all aware of each other and content with this situation, and who have their own partners who they may have serious, long-term relationships with.

What do those things mean? Nothing. I mean, of course they mean something, but do they change anything else in my life? They're just pieces of who I am, like my devotion to Art Deco architecture, or that I fix computers for a living.

Private details are, for the most part, private, just as they are in most people's relationships, though I'd be more than happy to answer questions about these things in general.

That may be a big thing to associate with my real name. But just as there are people in a same gender relationship who may not be allowed to have their partner be with them in a hospital, there are people who've had to tell one of two people that they love with all their heart (because a heart doesn't have to be divided to be given multiple times; just ask a parent with more than one child) the same thing.

I'd just like people to understand that because someone doesn't love the same way that they love, or because they were born into a body of the wrong gender, or because they happen to love more than one person at a time, that doesn't mean they should be feared or pitied. They don't need to be saved from themselves. They're just people. Like you, and like me.

I've been telling people, on the rare occasions that people actually come to me for advice, that there are no such things as normal relationships. There are only ones that work, and ones that don't. Life can be wonderful, but it's short, and it can be hard, and in can be painful. Let's let people find their happiness where they may, ok? when someone is seeking for what is right in their life, be kind to them. When someone has found what is right in their life, be happy for them.

About life, a character in one of Kurt Vonnegut's books said this; "There's only one rule that I know of, babies. God damn it, you've got to be kind." Please, my friends. To all the people you know in the world, you've got to be kind.

----------

And I so wish Facebook would let me edit my post and fix my typoes. Ah well; the die is cast.