antimeria

I realize I don’t write many unabashedly uplifting posts, so here is a list of five things that made me happy recently:

1. My friend J-Wy got into MICA, and will be living with me for a few weeks. Sorry if that ruins the surprise for people she hasn’t told yet.
2. These messenger bags made from life jackets. If I could wear yellow, I would be all about it. I can’t, so I bequeath this to you.
   Update: It is €129. So, never mind.
3. Darkon. Less than five minutes in, there are night/dark elves. Talking in an elf-language. Wearing blackface. And then it gets legitimately touching, and pretty good. Worth watching.
4. Finally, proof that guinea pigs can code.
5. Getting paid. Paychecks are tremendous, but direct deposit rules the schools.

I’m not an emotional person (see #5), and in general, things don’t get to me. But I lost it when Andrew Sullivan linked to a National Review post by Heather MacDonald on gay marriage, which bemoaned the “institutionalized severing of biology from parenthood”:

Orphans and abandoned children are raised by non-biological adoptive parents… But these arrangements were considered outliers to the normal practice of conceiving and raising children, forced on the parties by sad necessity.

As most people reading this know, I’m adopted (see #4), and although I’ve had a sometimes-contentious relationship with my parents, they are two of the most caring and devoted people I know. Their faith was one of the major reasons they wanted to adopt, and they would be devastated if someone told them their act of love a “second-best solution.” MacDonald’s dismissal of loving parents because they don’t conform to her vision of a “traditional family” is one of the most despicable, hurtful things I’ve ever read–and it’s worse because I’m sure she thinks she’s being perfectly reasonable.

In my last post, I wrote that to modern-day conservatives, “Outliers are to be homogenized or destroyed.” I think I need to go farther and put the stamp on it: conservatives see nothing wrong with denying outliers and nonconformists their very humanity in the name of getting their way.

It goes without saying that the rest of her post is pure drivel, so full of half-baked claims not even worth addressing that I hesitated to link it. And of course, any self-respecting conservative commentator needs an astounding lack of self-awareness (bold mine):

The facile libertarian argument that gay marriage is a trivial matter that affects only the parties involved is astoundingly blind to the complexity of human institutions and to the web of sometimes imperceptible meanings and practices that compose them.

Heather MacDonald, go fuck yourself with a pineapple, and pray to your god that I never see you on the street.

Yes, it’s almost a month into 2010, and no, I didn’t actually write anything about the albums. Also, I didn’t capitalize the list, since it was a work in progress. You could say I dropped the ball on this one. On the other hand, I will take the time to link to the Lala album page and include a sample track from each (Update: This obviously took a lot longer than capitalization would have. So, you’re welcome). List after the jump:
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It had to happen, I suppose.

Update: Nothing was stolen, not even my sunglasses sitting out in the center console. On a tangential note, I am disappointed with my Nexus One camera’s ultra-low-light shots.

While discussing a (soon-to-be-revealed!) project with a friend, I suggested that she go explore the south side of Chicago by herself for a day. She demurred on grounds of safety, which is entirely reasonable, now that I think about it. It also made me wonder if my perception of danger has recalibrated itself in Baltimore.

Now, because I loved The Wire, I watched Generation Kill, the HBO miniseries based on the book of the same name and produced by Wire creators David Simon and Ed Burns (synopsis: a Rolling Stone reporter embeds with a Marine unit during the Iraq War’s early stages. The original RS articles start here, and are worth a look). In one particular scene, the unit comes under fire. While the reporter huddles next to the side of a Humvee, one of the soldiers next to him says something along the lines of “Most people think Iraq is dangerous, but safety is all about context. If we were to stand up, we might be killed. But to us, behind this Humvee, Iraq is a safe place.”

About a month after we moved to our current house in east Baltimore, my girlfriend read the then-year-old story of Zach Sowers, a young, freshly-married Johns Hopkins financial analyst who lived a few blocks away. He was jumped by a group of teenagers who beat him into a coma, and he eventually died from his injuries. And during the last two weeks of December 2009, there were six seven robberies, eight aggravated assaults, and two stolen vehicles within a half-mile radius of my house.

But to us, on our block, Baltimore is a safe place.