CHE BELLO loves Massachusetts.
Important news on the gay marriage front! The governor of Massachusetts repealed a 1913 law preventing marriage licenses from being granted to those whose home states wouldn’t recognize the marriage. This means that homosexual couples can now be married by the state of Massachusetts. Although it doesn’t ensure recognition of those marriages in their home states if those states have mini-DOMA laws, it does mean recognized marriage for those in states which do not. As Dory says in Finding Nemo, “just keep swimming, just keep swimming.” One day we’ll have achieved full equality under the law, and Massachusetts will be able to pride itself on taking concrete steps to have brought that achievement into being.
CHE BELLO disagrees with Democrats?
As I flipped through the channels this morning I came across C-SPAN coverage of the debate on the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill introduced 10 years ago that will update and modernize enforcement of the Equal Pay Act. With women still earning (on average) only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man in a similar occupation, it is clear that the government needs to protect the wages of women, especially in a struggling economy where wages are often the first thing on the chopping block. This should be a no-brainer, right?
And then I did a little reading on the bill. Mark on your calendars the day I wrote this, and may it be saved in the archives of the Internet for all eternity: the Democrats have this all wrong.
CHE BELLO’s sage advice.
This one goes out to all my fellow homos: when straight people have to have endoscopic procedures, stay away from them during the few hours afterwards when they discuss every aspect of how uncomfortable it was. Because, inevitably, they will ask you how you’d like it if someone shoved their finger in there and started groping around.
And you will have the urge to say “Just a finger? I hope you felt your money hit you on the back on your way out!”
CHE BELLO’s hero of the week.
In the spirit of former heroes of the week, this award is presented for overwhelming awesomeness and badassery. (Yeah, badass might be my favorite word today.) I may be a few months behind on the story, as it took place in February-March, but that doesn’t make it any less hero-of-the-week worthy.
Paul Wirth, pastor at the Relevant Church of Ybor City, Florida, issued a rather strange proclamation to his congregation. (But I’ll bet it was met with little protestation.) Married couples were instructed to have sex every day for 30 days. That’s right, as much sex as possible, every day, for 30 days. Pastor Wirth said that a lack of sexual activity was indicative of the disconnect in most modern marriages, and that he hoped to keep couples in his congregation together by having them get frisky under the sheets.
I feel we should all adopt Pastor Wirth’s challenge, and have sex with our partners every day for 30 days. But that could just be because I’m a nympho. Meh, who knows.
CHE BELLO’s song and dance.
As most of my return readers know, I sing and dance with Cornell’s ORIGINAL musical theatre troupe, Anything Goes. Video clips from this past semester’s revue, “A Show Worth Fighting For” were posted on YouTube the other day, and I wanted to cross-post a few of them here because they’re just oh-so-good.
First, Seasons of Love, with which we end every revue. The first “solo” is two of my favorite people who doubled up because it was their last performance before graduating. The second one is me. (Read: That should be your favorite if you want to be my friend still.) The third is my BFF Rose Danielle. Enjoy!
And I’ll throw one more clip up here, mine and Danielle’s duet: “Sue Me” from Guys & Dolls. I wanted to add a little more choreography into this number, but we didn’t have time, as it was thrown together the week before the show. (And yes, that is a slight character voice; I don’t really sound like I’ve been on gender-transitioning hormones for years.) Enjoy again!
Hope you guys are entertained! You can find more of our videos by searching YouTube with username CUAnythingGoes.
CHE BELLO calls bullshit.
I can’t be the only one who’s tired of hearing the Bush administration talk about Iraq without really ever saying anything. But the bullshit has reached colossal heights recently, and I need some help understanding just what the hell is going on. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and President Bush agreed last week to a “general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals.”
Now, here comes the big question: WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?
A time horizon? Now, pardon me for sounding foolish, but is that at all related to an event horizon? General relativity tells us that an event horizon is the boundary around a black hole within which nothing can be seen by an outside observer. So, they’ve agreed to a timeline for withdrawal that’s invisible to everyone in the known universe, including, logically, themselves? Correct me if I’m wrong, please, but that’s all I’m getting from that little phrase. And don’t even get me started about how the time horizon has been qualified as “general,” unless you can explain to me how it differs from a specific time horizon.
Furthermore, I would like someone to pin down for me what an “aspirational goal” is. Roughly substituting hope(ful) for aspirational leaves me unfulfilled, as it means these are goals that we simply hope to achieve, not goals that we demand or expect to achieve. It’s like when you tell a friend you hope you’ll be able to make an engagement with them — you don’t really expect to, nor will you be heartbroken if you end up unable to. Is that really the kind of message we want to be sending about our efforts in Iraq, that we’re only “hopeful” about the goals we’ve set? With that level of dedication, it’s no wonder we’ve been stalled for months and months.
Thank the good lord that we’ll soon be, under the leadership of a visionary President Obama, withdrawing our men and women from a pointless war effort that no longer shares the support of the leadership of the country that’s been invaded.
CHE BELLO loves the British!
First, a note on the recent lack of posting. Some personal issues and conundrums have left me in a not-so-blogalicious kind of mood. I’ve tried in the past to push through and find some sort of flimsy content to throw up here just to keep you yearning masses happy, but I just haven’t been able to manage it lately. I imagine once I get back to Ithaca this late-summer malaise will blow over, but until then you might just have to bear with me.
But, on to more important matters, like how awesome British people are. First of all, there’s the sexy accent, impeccable taste, and swoopy hair. (Cedric Diggory, anyone? Hollerrrr.) Then there’s the wealth of culture that has been disseminated across the globe. But, most importantly, there’s the no-bullshit attitude. One of my favorite bloggers (who, incidentally, is about to release a book), the Waiter, wrote a guest column for The Guardian. He criticized British travelers to the United States who don’t leave an adequate tip, threatening at the end of the column to nuke the country from space should it happen again.
But the best part of the article is the comments. Did the British apologize for not knowing the American custom? Did they thank the Waiter for informing them of a cultural difference? No, of course not. They laid in to the American wage system, criticizing restaurant owners and lawmakers for forcing waiters to accept a sub-subsistence wage and then expecting customers to subsidize that wage by adding a premium onto the cost of food. To paraphrase, “Bloody hell, man! That’s bollocks!”
Dear Europe, please invade the United States and civilize (read: socialize) us. I’d love you forever, even moreso than I already do.
CHE BELLO’s strange dream.
During a late afternoon nap today, I had a very strange dream. If any of you out there are Freudians, please feel free to offer some guidance as to what my seriously cracked-out subconscious could have been thinking.
My family owned some sort of convenience store/restaurant-type place, but they weren’t my real family. Nobody in my dream was recognizable as someone from my waking life. I was close friends with a blonde girl, and we were both 12 or 13(?) or so. Her family and my family went together to a pet store and they had tigers, very friendly tigers that would roll around lick you on the face and acted just like puppies. They also had two larger tigers, similarly behaved. Except one of them had the mannerisms of a human. After watching it, I became thoroughly convinced that this tiger was a man in a suit. Nobody would listen to me as I pointed out many reasons why this was so, including a striking difference in the male anatomy. As the rest of the group went to the other side of the store, the tiger-man ambled over to me and started snarling menacingly, like he knew I had figured out his game. I started to pet it and found a zipper, peeling it away to reveal human flesh. I began to yell to the rest of the people I was with that it really was a human, but again nobody would listen. And the tiger growled even louder at me, baring its teeth and pawing me to the ground. My family took home one of the tiger cubs, but the blonde girl liked the pattern on the tiger-man’s fur, so she picked it. As it climbed into the back of their van, it turned to glare at me one last time. It cocked its head to the side and, in a completely human gesture, waved goodbye.
The next morning I came downstairs to find my mother speaking to a policeman and crying over a cup of tea with honey. My friend and her entire family had been murdered and the policeman was explaining that a rash of killings had taken place in which escaped inmates disguised themselves as animals, went home with families with children, and savagely hacked them to pieces as they slept.
I don’t think I’m a very troubled person, but this dream has me very concerned. And also afraid of tiger-suit wearing escaped ex-cons.
CHE BELLO’s difficult realizations, part II.
I have watched my mother be mistreated her entire life. She passively accepts this, always finding a reason why leaving would be worse than staying. As a child I would sit up with her until 3 or 4 in the morning, when my stepfather would stumble in the doorway smelling of cigarettes and Budweiser, the gleam of neon bar lights still in his eye. I promised myself, perhaps subconsciously, that I would never follow her example, that I would never allow myself to be degraded that way. But that promise, those years of watching the antithesis of what I wanted for myself, have made me overly sensitive to the smallest problems. When the first thing goes wrong, no matter how insignificant, I panic and rationalize with myself about how I deserve better. This urge to value myself so highly has lead me to make mistakes — to leave people who loved me, to display a kind of arrogance that is unbecoming.
Perfection in a relationship is unattainable, but perfect happiness may not be. I have always sought the former at the expense of the latter and almost did so again. That’s the difficult realization: that I’ve been looking for a state that doesn’t exist.
CHE BELLO 