Just behind on posts.
Things this week:

• Midterms
• Articles/interviews
• Catching up on studying/homework
• Work (I grade papers! Oh man do I have stories about being a T.A. in high school. I am an awful employee. Was, I mean. In high school. NOT NOW. Google, shut up about me!)
• Catching up on/re-doing sleep cycle
• Making the trek to the DMV for my written exam
• Rethinking the course of my life

Updates I should make:

• The Malibu runs like a wagon, does this bizarre pulsating revving noise while idle, and is covered in dings and nail polish in improbable places. It will be fixed up and sold to someone who is not me.
• I am really uncomfortable putting too much online right now. This is all too googleable and I hate doing this shovelware blogging but there ain't much I can say without offering a caveat or ten: what I have to say isn't all that interesting or non-libelous. I have really high standards of what I let the world read from me and it isn't this.
• Stuff in the works: the Renaissance Pleasure Faire (awesome nerdy bawdy Sunday), movies I've seen recently on DVD (and my soon-to-be Netflix experience!), stuff I'm doing with my awful draft I completed for 2008's NaNoWriMo (namely, quantifying it in order to separate myself enough to deal with it without having to actually read it), another Series of Transportive Events post, the arrival of my Coraline Nike Dunks in the mail earlier this week (photos to come!! I just need my camera) and several other things I want to roll in (retroactive posts are icky, but I may do them for the sake of organization. Besides, it would be on the timeline -- I went to the Ren Faire on Sunday, for instance, and the Dunks came in Tuesday.)

Keep an eye out for more from the hypnic jerk.
That is all.

Photo credit: Frants on Flickr via Creative Commons
I just spent an engrossing couple of hours going through the "Our Favorites" section at This American Life's website. TAL is a weekly radio show that showcases various stories (fiction, nonfiction, shorts, anything really fascinating or engaging) surrounding a different theme for each episode.

"Switched at Birth" struck me as particularly poignant (it's also the first on the list, heh heh). It tells the story of two women who learn that they were switched at birth -- from one of the mothers who knew about it for over four decades before telling either of them.

What's also striking to me, though is the photograph accompanying the story on its page. My sister recently came home from a friend's house carrying a large flat rate USPS box full to brimming with photographs, postcards, and newspaper clippings from the early 1910s through the 1970s. Piecing together this family's life -- the births, birthdays, and deaths -- gave me goosebumps. I spent hours in that box, finding in turns the library card, social security card, draft card (for the Vietnam War), letters and clippings, and the obituary of a 26-year-old veteran from Lancaster who died in a car accident.

There are road trip shots, Rose Parade shots (in front of Vroman's, circa 1972! There's a head shot, battered and torn, with some film credits and a physical description handwritten neatly on the back, an airbrushed portrait, a 30th anniversary Disneyland parking stub. There's so much that I feel like I should keep quiet about them until I'm ready.

I may post some of the less identifiable photographs at a later time. Right now it's just an odd and emotional concept to me. One day, your whole family can fit into a box of photographs. Our generation will have simple data that will be wiped off this planet as quickly as I could take a lighter to this box in my living room.

It's hard living in Southern California if you're a non-driver. My oddness in this became more pronounced when I started my commute to Walnut, which at first seemed to me a most suffocatingly suburban city and an unwalkable wasteland. The area surrounding Mt. SAC isn't bad, I'm sure -- I probably just see the blankness of Grand and the endless parking lots saturated with cars and not the wilderness and (maybe) the walking-distance destinations tucked into some undiscovered corner.

I hate driving. It's been on my mind for the last few weeks, now that I'm cramming for the DMV test and practicing. I've been asked by a lot of people why I despise it so much. Why is it that you take the bus to school so far away? What on earth do you do for 90 minutes on those horrible smelly things? It's an honestly innocuous question, but it gets me every time. I bristle and get defensive. It's irrational and rude but I hate to have to justify myself for what is, to me, such a personal decision.

Maybe it's because I don't support myself as my Mountie compatriots do, but I'm keenly aware of what a financial burden my driving would have on my family. I'm always (maybe egoistically) astounded by the costs otherwise perfectly reasonable human beings just get accustomed to: gas, insurance, and maintenance of a vehicle just don't make financial sense when some if not most people can easily do without a car altogether. My bus pass costs $36 a month, and even then I feel guilty asking my parents for that money when I'm already 18 and still at home.

I'm not advocating public transportation for everyone, though. The biggest costs I incur on the Metro are time and, I'll admit, my sanity. I'm probably just desensitized to the stresses of a 90 minute public-transport commute and the constant friction with other people on the bus as the drivers in this world are to the concept of traffic.

I've seen some awful things on the Metro, and my claustrophobia's forced me to (rather rudely) push past the crowd to jump off the bus at my stop, gasping and shaking and near tears. I'm not terribly social and being around so many people is really overwhelming sometimes, especially when the collective mood is tense after a long workday when everyone is tired and grimy and hateful. I came come from school sobbing for the first few days at Mt. SAC.

Driving is another process entirely. I can't jump out of the car when I'm on the 10 feeling the same sense of restlessness I get while on any road. On the bus I can read. I can catch up on my podcasts and listen to the news. I can do my homework and guarantee myself one-and-a-half hours of continuous studying without the distraction of Internet.

There's also the little matter that I cannot kill anybody by simply boarding a bus. Sometimes I feel like people completely fail to understand that they are accepting a shitload of responsibility by taking the wheel of a fascinating bundle of potentially deadly and complex machinery. I'm working toward being a good driver by compensating for my lack of peripheral vision (I'm nearsighted and I wear glasses) and for my own mental problems (I zone out and have trouble paying attention to what other people are doing. Imagine this applied to the friggin' road!), but I seriously doubt that I can master it and not do something stupid and avoidable at some point.

Peer pressure has given in, though. It's increasingly obvious that I need a car if I'm going to be here for much longer, and I cannot hope to find a walker's paradise until I get my act together and move out into the world. I'm learning the workings of driving itself and it's not fun. I'll tolerate it, though; who knows -- maybe I'll find that having control over something on my own will heal rather than harm.

On the way home from school today, exhausted beyond belief and wallowing in the annals of L.A. public transportation, I tried to drown out the noise (and the urge to sleep or scream) with a podcast.

In the split second I glanced down to adjust the volume, the entire right side of the bus jumped the curb and propelled us roughly toward the left side. The jolt was not strong enough to send people flying, but people shouted out, cursing collectively, stretching out arms and grabbing hold of the seats in front of them or else clutching their belongings. The bus came to a halt in front of its regular stop, and it dawned on the crowd what had just happened.

"Ohh noo! My neck!" someone joked, and soon the passengers were roaring with laughter.

The next stop was mine, and I left feeling like I'd brushed against something precious. What was only a moment before a rank and stuffy metal box filled with tired, hungry, silent people had turned into a little piece of humanity. I prepared to board my second bus, without the earbuds in this time. Who knows what I might miss.

Little things.

It's Daylight Saving Time (DST) starting March 8, so set your clocks forward one hour tonight.

Another hour of sleep lost to the arrogance of man. If there is no actual energy savings during DST, why not just come out and change motherflippin' business hours to reflect the shift in daylight? No way, man. WE'RE GOING TO CHANGE TIME ITSELF.

I'd move somewhere this insanity isn't upheld, but the About.com page regarding Arizona's choice to be in Mountain Standard Time after PST springs forward ends on this snarky note:

In Arizona, we just don't need another hour of sunlight!

Final tip: It is NOT Daylight Savings time--there's no "s" after Saving. It's Daylight Saving Time, singular.

So. I see where things lie. Time-shifting aside, I'll quote Lucille Bluth on this one: I'd rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona.

According to the L.A. Times, it looks like the California State Supreme Court is leaning toward upholding Prop 8, but allowing the 18,000 gay couples who got married before its passage to stay married. The L.A. Times has a heart-wrenching article about those 18,000 couples and their strange new position as some of the few inhabitants of "marriage islands."

The Court has been debating the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the November initiative that banned gay marriage. Prop 8 passed with 52% of the vote; the debate lies in whether the initiative was an amendment or a revision. A revision requires a 2/3 vote from the state legislature before appearing on a ballot; an amendment does not.

In the interest of full disclosure, I voted "no" in November. I'm straight. But I'm also equal parts Mexican, Salvadorian, and American. And it makes me sick that this huge group of people who have done nothing but be born gay -- in the same way I have been born with a minority status -- are arbitrarily denied such a private and profound right.

I call bullshit on the concept of "protecting" or "restoring the definition of" marriage. The only impact gay marriage would have is that gays would get married. It's simple bigotry that passed Prop 8; that and sheer ignorance.



The fact is, domestic partnerships create a separate, and, despite even the best intentions for equality, lesser-perceived class of people based on an unchangeable aspect of their existence. Homosexuality is shown in more and more studies to be more about genetics and biology than about choice.

Those who say that homosexuality is inherently wrong an abomination or that it is "not natural" because gay couples are not "fruitful" are committing the Naturalistic Fallacy. You can't apply moral values to nature. "Natural" is just too subjective a term; given this logic, infertile heterosexual couples (who through sheer biology cannot exchange DNA to form children) are also unnatural, and therefore their sexual relationship is morally wrong ... yet their marriage is still recognized by the state government.

Separate but equal was ruled unconstitutional in the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown vs Board of education., an admittedly different issue altogether, but eerily echoing the same sentiments. Then there's 1970's Loving vs. Virginia decision from the Supreme Court, which said that:




There are a number of reasons domestic partnerships are not on the same footing with marriage. If both were equal except in name, it would make sense to eliminate one or the other for the government's purposes. If all couples -- gay and straight -- were civil unions under the law and marriages under whatever churches they preferred, we wouldn't have this problem. But it's much easier to make a change where a precedent has already been set because everyone in government and civilian life is clear on what "marriage" means.

I only hope that the history we're making now will be viewed in the harshest light possible. There is no excuse for discrimination under the law.