Ewok and I woke up early last Sunday and went for a stroll to the nature preserve near our house. When I found our house in Virginia, next to an elementary school and park, with a nature preserve behind both, and thought I’d found heaven. Turns out I was right.
I know I occasionally use this blog as a soapbox to express (read: gripe) about politics and philosophy and other things, and I know that I owe everyone the rest of my “Best of Tucson” series (I have a camera full of photos for that) but if you’ll bear with me, I want to share this recent article I found in my inbox from a listserv I subscribe to.
Those of you who don’t like it when I put my views on the blog, now is the time for you to close the browser and go shopping.
Homosexuality is a tricky question for me and for many years now I’ve relegated it to my list of “things I refuse to discuss unless I have to” spot, as it didn’t really impact my life and I felt like the less said by me, the better. On top of that, when I came home from Japan 10 years ago, I had gotten used to the sort of 1950′s-era culture of Japan, where everybody pretended things like homosexuality simply didn’t exist. That was fine by me. I wasn’t gay, and I was just trying to get by, learn the language, adapt to the culture, etc., so it became a non-issue.
Then, one day, I had an epiphany when I was talking with a friend, and I realized my best friend from high school was gay. I wrote him a letter, terrified, asking if I was right. I was. His response was hostile, to say the least. We’d been estranged for years, but finding out that he was this whole other person than who I thought he was also kind of pissed me off. I wasn’t just angry at him, I was angry at all gay people (yes, I know this is irrational). When Marti and I started going to a church in Tucson and we found out it was accepting of gays, we left. I simply couldn’t handle it. I had a lot of anger, and seeing openly gay couples at church functions made me feel awkward (where was the judgment? where was the hellfire and damnation?)
Time has a way of working these things out, though. Several years later a teenager I mentored came out, and I during that time realized that, over time, my heart had changed. I wasn’t angry at him; I was proud of him. He was a great kid, a promising, brilliant kid, and I didn’t give a darn that he was gay. Since then, I’ve put a lot of thought into it, and I can see that my heart has grown in compassion instead of anger.
When I ran across this article, it was one of those moments when I realized that someone had spelled out how I feel better than I could, and this made me want to share it. For what it’s worth, my life philosophy at middle age is this: a compassionate response is always better than an angry or judgmental one.
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Implied question: “What does the Bible say about homosexuality?”
“How you answer this question depends hugely on what you take the bible to be. IF you believe that the bible is a single, timeless, internally consistent teaching on matters of human morality dictated by God himself, then yes, the Old Testament book of Leviticus is definitely uncomfortable with homosexuality. But it is also uncomfortable with menstruating women, shellfish and pigskin. (And for the record, it has some very harsh words to say about lending money at interest, a prohibition that even Biblical literalists seem to find it perfectly permissible to disregard!) more »
Changes are in the air and it looks like we’ll be leaving Tucson for the east coast in a few short weeks. It seems rather incredible, since we’ve been here for nine years now and fully expected to end up either in the State Department (and all over the world) or in the Pacific Northwest, but an offhand application to a job in DC came through and I’ve gotten the offer of a lifetime.
The next few weeks will include a lot of packing, prepping and good-byes, and one of the things I would like to do on this online journal of mine is to feature photos of some of the cool places in Tucson, the places I like to remember. Today’s photo is a tribute to author Holly Black, particularly her book Ironside, in which nature-loving faeries choose an urban landscape for various reasons. I have long been a fan of her work and secretly wanted to be just like her, as she is a librarian-turned-YA-author who writes fantasy…that gets published. 
The photo is of a local piercing shop, where I had my (location redacted) pierced the year I turned 30 and freaked out over getting old. Back then it was called something else, or at least it looked differently, but when I drove by the other day I was amazed by this incredible iron sculpture of a tree with a man standing next to it. The sculpture is massive and hugs the entire building. It’s also amazingly cool. So thanks to Straight to the Point for dressing up the famously ugly Speedway Boulevard in Tucson. May many more follow your footsteps.
The photo was done with hipstamatic on an iPhone using a John S lens and Kodot XGrizzled film.
Wow, it’s been almost a month since I’ve posted on here, and I don’t know what to say to everyone.
“Sorry, but I got a life and stopped posting on my blog every day?”
Yeah, I wouldn’t believe me either. How’s this:
“Sorry I’ve been lazy for the last 3 weeks and haven’t posted anything on my blog.”
Yeah, that’s better.
So…a lot has happened since 3.14159. First off, there was spring break here at the U of A, which mostly means nothing to us, as Marti and I both work on campus. Well, I wouldn’t say that — it means there are actually parking spots less than two miles from my office for a brief period, AND I don’t have to stand in line for lunch with sorority girls. Other than that, it’s just another week. However, this year I did something AMAZING. I convinced Marti to go on a short vacation to the White Mountain (Bai Shan in Chinese, if you care) and stay in a cabin for the last few days of spring break. It was cold and snowy and I mostly tried to catch my breath in the high altitude the three days we were there, but there were some good points, too:
Yeah, you might have noticed that we didn’t take the dogs on this vacation. We’ve decided that “dogs” and “vacation” just simply do not belong together, so we paid off some of Ben’s friends to stop by and feed them. They looked a little haunted when we came back (the dogs, I mean), especially the small one who had to dodge coyotes, but to Marti’s great disappointment neither had become coyote fodder while we were gone.
We had a really nice time and I got a needed reprieve from Tucson in March. IT IS 90 DEGREES HERE, PEOPLE. Yes, everyone who is trudging through the mud of early spring in the north probably hates me, but we had to turn on our cooler a few days ago because it was 82 in our house already. Another Tucson summer is almost here!
Well, we came back to…work, school, the usual story. The miracle this time was that nobody got sick on the trip, NOT EVEN ME. That might be a record.
Other than that, our lives have been boring, although I’ll try and record myself speaking “Chinese” for your entertainment sometime soon. I have a 15-minute final speaking test coming up in about 4 weeks, so I’ll kill two birds with one stone by recording myself (practice AND entertainment!). Or, as the Chechnyan professor from my Kazakh culture class [the class description really said: "Explore Kazakh outside of the movie Borat!"] says, “I will butcher two foxes with one hand. That’s how the saying goes, right?”
And now, without further ado, photos of our trip (do you think if I’d been born 30 years earlier I would have been one of those people in the 1970s who invited friends over to watch slides?):
The view from the front porch
The view from the front porch
A store owner saw a herd of 200 elk crossing this meadow one morning.
