To the women out there (or men who feel inclined to reply in a similar capacity, though I suspect that women the recipients of the more injurious and limiting stereotypes) -- I imagine you must deal with some similar issues, given the more or less inherent assumptions that people make about you on the basis of your sex. How do you endure it? And do you think that, in spite of these perhaps inevitable presumptions, it is possible for anyone to judge you as an individual, without considering it -- or is "being a woman" so integral to your self-perception that such appreciation of your (independent) individuality is unnecessary? At any rate, I am deeply saddened by the fact that a few physical features -- here, breasts and genitalia -- seem to make all the difference regarding how people treat one another.

I have been reading about suicide and methods and came across this article as a "disorder" associated with suicidal thought. I found the latter sections of the piece to be especially interesting.

Do you know what it's like to daily experience the things you hate most in all the world? And not only to experience them, but to have them forcefully shoved down your fucking throat during every waking minute not spent in complete and total isolation? In addition to being absolutely certain that it will ever end and having no hope whatsoever that anything could possibly happen to make life worth living in the face of this constant, daily battering, because there really is no possible way such a thing could ever occur -- at least not in this world, with things being as they are?

I hope that you never suffer this.

I'd been meaning to post these for a while but never got around to it. Well, here are a bunch of photos of my old dorm room from umpteen years ago. Yep. (more...)

...has been posted on Scary-Crayon! Look ma, no cursewords.

I wanted to see if they could tell me something important about God before I go to meet the Creator, if the Creator does in fact exist. And I made two interesting observations:

1. The apparent communal atmosphere of the church, whether perceived or real. I'm inclined to think that unlike other churches, the attendees of this one were hardly as close-knit as other congregations -- this being a church on a military base and the members being diverse enough in age to lead me to suspect that they're not Bingo buddies -- and yet many of them felt comfortable sharing their difficulties and joys during the part of the service in which persons ask for the prayers of the congregation or submit their own success stories as evidence of the greatness of the Lord. Today, for example, one woman praised God for allowing her husband to return safely to her from Iraq (which struck me as being odd, since he's apparently been back for a year -- does she say the same thing every Sunday?), a child praised God for granting her visiting grandmother safe passage (cute), a man asked the congregation to pray for his ailing wife (definitely understandable), and a family lamented their car troubles and praised God because apparently the latest difficulty is covered by warranty and will therefore be fixed without incurring any additional costs. What? That last one had me scratching my head -- while I can understand the family being glad about that, if it had been me, I'm not sure I would've submitted it after the preceding testimonies and requests, as it seems kinda trivial in comparison. But perhaps the congregation truly wasn't judging or comparing the individual statements, or at least the speakers didn't expect them to. Interesting. (more...)