Capricious Me » Gaaaaaaah!!!

It seems, as this point, that unless the few millions of uncounted votes contain at least 500000 more votes against proposition 8 than for it, California will have added to its constitution an amendment banning gay marriage. An Amendment to the State Constitution of CALIFORNIA.

What is it about giving marriage licenses to gay couples that offends and provokes such a visceral response? Protecting the sanctity of marriage? Why not ban divorce? Protecting children from being taught about gay marriage? Um… schools are not required to teach children anything about gay marriage. Children are not as dumb as you’d think, although they are certainly not as smart as many parents would hope they’d be. How does this benefit you? It doesn’t, except perhaps you can be smug about denying a right to another group. Does it suddenly change your life if a gay couple living together for years now possess a marriage certificate? They won’t be holding their wedding on your front lawn. They won’t be flaunting their relationship to your children in schools. It’s merely a piece of paper and you would begrudge them that?

The irony is that a lot of the money supporting prop 8 came from the Mormon church, which so clearly upheld the ideals of marriage as a union between one man and one woman so well through out the years. Let’s face it. The state should not meddle with the religious definition of marriage, so if a particular church doesn’t want to marry a gay couple, so be it. However, marriage as it is interpreted by the state is more like a legal contract than a holy/sacred union before whatever god you chose. Religious groups should not meddle with the state interpretation of marriage. Be divisive and turn away people from your churches, but please don’t presume to alter the law to suit your beliefs at the cost of the rights of another group.

Last night I discovered a little spider living in a corner of my kitchen. I killed it. That brings my total up to 2 spiders, 1 earwig, and 2 mosquitoes. Every night I prowl my apartment with my bug zapping racket. I’ve missed a few mosquitoes, I think, because my legs are always bitten during the night. I keep bottles of Bath and Body Works body sprays, which contain some alcohol, so that I can kill bugs and sanitize the area where they died while making the air smell like pearberry or white tea ginger.

I am Yuan, bug slayer, unless the bugs are big. In which case I’ll panic and wish for a vacuum cleaner with a powerful hose.

I got bit by a spider in my sleep. I woke up yesterday with an itchy knuckle. It slowly swelled and spread so that this morning, my hand looked as if i was wearing a fat suit on it. It looks like I have no knuckles on my right hand when I try to make a fist. I can see the two punctures where the spider’s little fangs sank into my knuckle.

Why? Why this unprompted, undeserved attack? I was SLEEPING!!

Seems like an unreasonably large number of people are incensed over the supposed scandal of Zhang Yimou using a nine year old girl to “sing” while dubbing her voice with a seven year old who was not deemed cute enough.

Um. Why WHY are people so hung up over this? Hollywood (ever seen Star Wars? My Fair Lady? Sound of Music?), Bollywood (um…. EVERY SINGLE MOVIE) has been doing this for ages and people love it. The opening ceremonies are just that - ceremonies, a show, entertainment. Lighten up. Enjoy the show. Think about it this way… instead of one little girl getting to participate and receiving all the attention, two will now benefit from the “exposure” of this lip-sync scheme.

I really hate listening to the commentators and coverage. Of all the things to show about China, of all the improvements Beijing has made, of all the modernization China’s gone through, why show us your reporters grimacing and being disgusted by fried scorpions, which is hardly the street food that I or many others grew up with. It’s like having someone come to the US only to report back that Rocky Mountain Oysters are a very popular snack.

America, is this what you consider human rights? This is, unfortunately, not an isolated incident. What a shame. People look to the US as the land of opportunity, but the harsh reality is veiled xenophobia and adverse bureaucracy that seems to mock the greatness this country achieved through the toils and contributions of immigrants.

Ugh. Windows partition of my macbook is in an infinite reboot loop. I can’t boot into safe mode because it won’t obey “Ctrl-Alt-Del” for the login screen and the mouse pointer is stuck.

This. Sucks.

I’ve been doing a lot of my programming on the laptop while I used my work machine to process data intensive stuff. Sigh. My data’s safe, but all my work from earlier today is inaccessible.

Um, what the hell, Seattle? I thought we agreed that you’re done with the rain.

Let’s talk about yesterday. It was warm; it was sunny. And then you decided, around dinner time, to throw a hissy fit and pour as hard as you can. These mood swings have got to stop. July 4th is coming up, and I want my sunshine.

It poured today. I’ve been bundling myself up in a fleece (the MSR fleece they gave the interns is quite snuggly and warm, actually) to go to work this week, despite it being June already… Seattle is chilly. Today it poured. Walking four blocks from the bus stop to my apartment had me completely soaked. The rain was coming down so furiously it was as if I’d stepped into a shower, albeit a low pressure one, but a shower nonetheless.

Where is the warmth of summer? I’m ok with the constant sprinkles and light showers… but cold, pouring rain, thank you, no.

… is meant to be dabbed, not doused.

The woman on the bus next to me today smelled like she bathed in perfume and then rolled around in a tub of baby powder to dry herself off.

Disgusting is an understatement by far.

I went home this afternoon to check on the status… still no power to the apartment and still no power to the multiple traffic lights at the two four-way intersections. Safeway still looked dim as well.

According to Davis Enterprise, “seven large, 60-foot-tall transmission tower poles which tumbled along County Road 102 between Davis and Woodland” is partially responsible for the power outage. Now that the storm’s done, it should be safe for work crews to go fix the problems. I didn’t have much hope for it yesterday, since the winds were supposed to be pretty severe today as well. At least I haven’t heard many sirens today… apparently yesterday a man got trapped beneath a fallen tree and several big rigs actually got blown over.