Still laughing

I was reading about some assertiveness meeting a guy had to attend and apparently when the instructor said, "There's no 'I' in team, a voice called out - yes, but there's a 'u' in cunt".

Moi? Difficult to live with?

Last night my guy told me that he was having trouble to adjusting living with someone. Not trouble as in 'can't do it/second thoughts' - just that he found it a big change and somewhat stressful to suddenly have to share space with a partner. Meanwhile, I've been telling everyone I know that this living situation has been such an easy adjustment for me. and that it's so relaxing.

My clutter is getting to him, whereas I'm more organized than I've been in 15 years and I'm loving living with my cats and a dog thrown into the mix. Admittedly though, my idea of organization is someone else's idea of domestic hell. One day he was upset about the state of our spice drawer. One of the spices had spilled. My thoughts were more along the lines of, "Who fucking cares - no one sees it anyhow", followed closely by, "OMG we have a spice drawer. This is so organized!!!"

Overall everything is fine. We are getting along happily and enjoying watching NCIS together (other shows we are not in agreement on. I never had the cooking channel or whatever the hell it's called and now realize that I wasn't missing a damn thing) - but I need to step up my cleaning patterns or he'll start to resent my astounding ability to live in chaos.

Inspirational message from a religious LEADER

Sometimes it seems that all religion sows is hatred and nastiness. In honour of Easter just passed, here is a fucking amazing speech from Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. Well done sir - I'm so glad you received the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Africa, a Step Backward on Human Rights
By Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu
March 22, 2010

Hate has no place in the house of God.
No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity -- or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity. It is time to stand up for another wrong.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God's family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counseling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.

Uganda's Parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi. These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

And they are living in hiding -- away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen, and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

"But they are sinners," I can hear the preachers and politicians say. "They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished." My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin color, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?

The wave of hate that is underway must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.
Desmond Tutu is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. His editorial is reprinted courtesy of the Desmond Tutu Foundation.

[link found on The Body: http://www.thebody.com/content/art56014.html?ic=700100]