Ignorance is anything but bliss.

“I started to see that they were not just political targets, they were real people who just… wanted to get married. It started to feel like a petty issue.”

Amazing. How many people in this country are still stuck in the first half of this position - not yet having realized that people ARE people and "not just political targets" - simply because they've never carried on a conversation with an individual on the other side of the debate? How many people would, if they had a few simple conversations with real human beings, change their minds about what they themselves have the right to deny their fellow humans?

The quote above came from a news story, one that I read by way of Yahoo: http://tinyurl.com/6hxtytw. There's nothing surprising about the idea that a young man - only 25 years old - formed strong opinions based on limited knowledge. What's kind of exciting is that even though he didn't go looking for experience that might challenge his opinions, when he stumbled upon that experience he thought about it enough to let it change his views.

How much could we change our nation if we could reduce the collective level of ignorance by 10%? Or even 1%? And how do you measure the collective level of ignorance in the first place, you ask? I don't know. But you get my point.

Sorry - I just can't seem to muster any snark on this issue. This fairly minor incident - a single anti-gay marriage activist changing his mind - has actually kind of blown my mind, because the REAL problem is so unbelievably obvious.

Check out the article; I think it's kind of an astounding study in human ignorance, and the capacity to learn.

An Open Letter (8)

Dear Aetna,

I clearly shouldn't have believed you when you said I didn't have to pay you any more money until March. But of course I didn't realize my foolishness until, on the last day of January, my pharmacy said you wouldn't pay for anything. You had your money by Tuesday. But could the pharmacy get any money out of you Wednesday? You're joking, right? Thursday? Still no dice.

Friday a young woman on your payroll - who was actually quite pleasant - confirmed that you had indeed received my money and you were indeed prepared to pay out on my behalf. And yet a few hours later the pharmacy still was unable to get you to fork over. Even after the very nice pharmacist (a rarity these days, but that's another rant) called you and confirmed that yes, you had my money, and you acknowledged willingness to pay for my medical treatments. But not to the pharmacy. Because apparently while every other computer system on the entire planet (with the possible exception of Egypt, currently) can transfer information between machines in seconds or minutes, yours take more than 72 hours to get data from one place to another.

So well done, Aetna: you've managed to find the only computers on the planet that are actually slower than the Pony Express. And if I'm lucky I'll get my prescription in three more days, because God forbid anyone in medical insurance work on the weekend. Oh wait... that would imply that they work at all.

Die and rot in hell.
Yours truly

Sometimes I Hate Winter

OK, ice storms make the trees look pretty. But everything else about them pretty much sucks. They cause damage, they make people fall and hurt themselves, and they get you up early in the morning just so you can spend that many extra hours stressing out about the appointments you can't get to. And wondering how it is that other people got out of their driveways so easily. And wishing you lived someplace where ice is known only as what clinks in your glass. Or that you at least had chains on your tires. Or maybe one of those ridiculous driveways with heating elements built into it so you could just switch in on when you woke up and by the time you had gotten dressed and eaten breakfast you'd have nothing but a little slush to clear away.

And really all I want to do - all I have wanted to do for about three days - is make hot, buttered popcorn and watch Beauty and the Beast on VHS. Yes, really.

The Trouble with Vacation...

The problem with having nice long vacations is that you fall too completely into the vacation rhythm. You have time to fully adjust your schedule.

During a short break you're constantly catching up: getting your teeth cleaned because you can finally spare the time, vacuuming the carpets that only get vacuumed during breaks, tying up loose ends from the frantic last two weeks before the vacation, and then turning right around and getting ready to go back.

On the other hand, on a long break you have time between the catching up and the getting ready to actually fall into a routine: having a leisurely breakfast, going to the gym, reading in the evenings, cooking nice dinners. By the time you have to start getting ready to go back, you have a whole new schedule that gets interrupted.

I think the solution is obvious: make all breaks longer and more frequent, so that the work-time schedule is the anomaly, coming in brief spates, and the relaxed schedule is the norm. It also would reduce or eliminate the catching up period at the beginning of each break if breaks were frequent enough, so they wouldn't need to all be 3-4 weeks long for full effect. I think perhaps a week off each month would do the trick.

Feel free to suggest this to your employers and educational institutions...

Secret Agent Man

Today I likened myself to Clark Kent, and it's funny to me that it's taken me so long to think that. Not that my alter ego is Superman - far from it. Don't worry, I have no delusions of grandeur. But I do sometimes feel like I'm leading a double life. Mild mannered (or loud and sarcastic) engineering student by day, theater grad/rock star by night. Except that my nights are more often spent doing homework and going to bed early. Maybe baking cookies.

And yet, no matter how boring my life may sometimes seem to me, whenever someone else finds out what I've been doing for the last ten years it suddenly sounds like the most exciting life a girl from Jersey could ask for. And I guess some of it *has* been exciting. Like that time I worked for a real rockstar (he had a hit song on the radio!), or the time I acted on a tour for eight months, or the time I played in a bar upstairs from a strip club and some of the guys who meant to go downstairs got confused and came upstairs and decided the band and I were better than the strip show so they stayed. Hard to say which was better, that time or the time we got stuck in traffic, took 9 hours to get from Boston to NYC and missed our set time, but my friend who was working at MTV at the time flashed her work ID and demanded that I play. That one was pretty good, too.

I guess I do have some good stories from it all. And the fun of seeing each new friend find out that *secretly* I've done all this other stuff. And that I'm not 22.

My engineering friends found this out today. They said I should write a blog about them - so here it is, guys! (Except they're not guys, they're girls, because girls can be engineers too, dammit.) But now I need to stop blogging and get back to finishing that paper we have due Monday. Good luck with your studying, ladies.

An Open Letter (7)

Dear NY/NJ Metropolitan Area,

I love you, you know I do. I grew up here - I've spent the majority of my life here. I love the way the leaves change color in the fall, I love the chaos and crowds of The City (and that anyone from here know that The City is the *only* city). I love that I can find gluten free vegan pizza AND gluten free vegan cupckaes within a few blocks of each other, and that the best *normal* pizza I've ever had is just a mile from my parents' suburban house (in their little Italian town).

But we need to talk about this weather. Today I left the house wearing long johns under my jeans and a wool sweater and a down vest between my shirt and my knee-length, heavy down coat. Need I mention the hat and mittens? And yet I was cold. The wind, the maybe-sort-of-freezing rain, the complete lack of sun - they stole all my warmth, and a little piece of my soul.

And so, NY/NJ, I'm giving you fair warning: I'm afraid I won't be able to continue this way. Everyone says the globe is warming, and maybe you can take advantage of that and turn "winter" into "two weeks of fluffy, snowglobe snow in January flanked on both sides by months of warm sunshine with temperatures no lower than 50*." Wouldn't you like that just as much as I would? Imagine all the happy children who could play outdoors in November and February without worrying about losing toes!

If you can't manage that, though - that one minor concession - I just might have to leave. Because I value both my warmth and my soul and am not prepared to surrender them to your weather.

I'll miss you.

Metal Head

One of the reasons I'm currently writing a musical is because my friends have always teased me that my songwriting seems well suited for the stage. "Andrew Lloyd Webber has left the building" may or may not have been uttered during the recording of my last album. That's the kind of music I write.

So am I the only one who finds it ironic that, now that I am *actually* writing a stage musical, I am for the first time writing - for that same stage musical - a heavy metal song?

I have to go now - I'm listening to heavymetalradio.com's stream and I can't string words together while this is happening in my ears.