Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Monday, Nov. 22, 2004 - 11:37 p.m.

In my neverending quest to wean myself from the devil that is processed sugar, I have tried the Zone Perfect diet bar, in the following flavors, along with comments, in the order in which I had them:

Fudge Graham - neither fudge, nor graham - and you definitely know it

Chocolate Peanut Butter - the best of the bunch, which isn't saying much, but definitely did not suck

Chocolate Almond Raisin - blech; my overwhelming feeling? Tastes like cough syrup.

Chocolate Raspberry - um, yeah...not so much

Chocolate Mint - currently snacking on this. Not too terrible. Not actually good, either.

In short, if you must have a diet bar of the Zone persuasion, stick to the chocolate peanut butter. Which does not so much taste like chocolate peanut butter as it just doesn't suck. I suppose the fudge graham flavor doesn't suck so much either, but it definitely tastes like a diet bar. You know that flavor almost all diet bars have? That sort of essence o' food, diet bar flavor? It pretty much tastes like that. I'd have to say that probably the chocolate almond raisin was the worst, followed by chocolate mint, then the chocolate raspberry. So there. Eat at your own risk.

I went to Disneyland yesterday, with a friend of mine who has a Disneyland passport, who's been bugging me to go with her, on accounta the last time we went, she was rather a large-girthed person, but she's since had her stomach stapled and wanted to demonstrate that she can actually sit with another person on the ride and actually fasten the lapbelt now.

It was pretty neat. I've never been there during the holidays and experienced the Main Street "snow". As I said, it was pretty neat. It started me thinking, actually. In the middle of all these clumps of bubbles snowing down on us, I had one of those moments where you are suddenly completely wired in to the group energy, and everyone is more or less in solidarity, experiencing the same event in more or less the same way. I'm standing in the middle of literally thousands of people, all of us staring up into the sky, oo'ing and ah'ing and trying to catch this stuff we've labelled snow, everyone smiling, a lot of them laughing with each other, and I thought why in the hell can't we be nice to each other all the time? Why are we so intolerant toward each other so often, when we can all stand packed like sardines, happy to catch soap bubbles after a long day of walking and standing and waiting and walking? Why is it so damned hard to be nice to each other as we move through the world? Why can't we remember as we get through our days that given the chance, almost every single one of us would stand in the middle of an amusement park street gazing in wonder at fake snow falling from a night sky, and deal with each other as real people, with feelings and dreams and needs? Why is that so damned hard? Why do so many people have to try to force others to live according to their thoughts, beliefs, and practices, rather than just having respect for them and practicing that whole live and let live thing? It's just stupid and sad and tragic.

My uncle is a deacon in his church in small town Texas. Of course, he finds my approach to God sinful and wrong and does not consider me a Christian. Primarily because I don't go to church every Sunday, I think, but also because I think that gay people are entitled to the same legal considerations provided to straight people in domestic unions. For that matter, probably because I see nothing wrong with gay people, which we had an argument about last summer. He, of course, thinks homosexuality is a choice, not a natural drive. We've also had numerous arguments over the separation of church and state lately, as he feels that anyone opposed to a statue of the 10 Commandments in a government building, or the use of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, is an anti-God warrior for the forces of evil, bent on forcing him to abandon all his beliefs and go straight to hell.

I, of course, do not get this line of logic.

His latest email was all about writing "In God we trust" on the back of every single envelope I mail, as that is the motto of this country, and the good Christian people of this country need to take it back from the forces of evil who threaten it. Threaten it how, I'm not sure, since I fail to see how writing "In God we trust" really does much of anything to save America from any actual threat, but okay.

I got this mail from him:

I THINK THIS A GREAT IDEA. I WILL START WRITING THIS ON FRONT OF ALL MY ENVELOPES, TOO!

You may have heard in the news that a couple of Post Offices in Texas have been forced to take down small posters that say "IN GOD WE
TRUST," The law, they say, is being violated.

Anyway, I heard proposed on a radio station show, that we all write "IN GOD WE 'TRUST " on the back of all our mail. After all, that is our national motto, and it's on all the money we use to buy those stamps. I think it is a wonderful idea.

We must take back our nation from all the people who think that anything that offends them should be removed.

If you like this idea, please pass it on and DO IT The idea of writing or stamping "IN GOD WE TRUST" on our envelopes sounds good to me.

I'M HAVING MY STAMP MADE TODAY!

It has been reported that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore, I have a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess about having "In God We Trust"on our money and having God in the pledge of Allegiance.

Could it be that WE just need to take action and tell the 14% to "sit down and shut up"?

If you agree, pass this on, if not delete.

It was in nice big, bold letters all the way thru. I find this offensive for several reasons, not the least of which being he knows I believe in the separation of church and state and why and that I favor all the things this letter is against, yet he sees nothing wrong in sending me a letter saying people who don't agree with his views need to sit down and shut up, and then the thing actually ends with "If you agree, pass this on, if not delete. As fucking IF. I love people who send you insulting as crap email and then go "but hey, if you don't agree with me, just delete this," like that excuses the whole thing and saves them from a figurative bitch slapping. But my favorite part of the whole thing is that part in bold, about how "We must take back our nation from all the people who think that anything that offends them should be removed."

Is he fucking kidding? Is the person who originally wrote that actually fucking serious? Are they actually accusing anyone other than the uber-conservative religious right of practicing mainstream censorship? The list of things in just my adult life that the religious right has pitched hissy fits over and demanded the removal of is frigging longer than my right arm. And all anyone else is asking is that the separation of church and state provided for in the Constitution be upheld. I mean, I didn't even know where to start with that. Art, books, fairytales, school plays, television shows, radio broadcasts, movies, record albums, posters, book-burnings, album-burnings, the list of censored items just since I graduated high school goes on and on and on. These are people who demanded the removal of Catcher in the Rye from school libraries, that funding for art they deemed unsuitable be yanked, and Little Red Riding Hood ripped from any book of fairytales in the library. But the Constitution? Piss on that, that's crap. They have learned absolutely nothing from the religious persecution the founders of this country were forced to flee OR from the Taliban and the oppression of the people of Afghanistan. Or for that matter, from Al Qaeda. I love how they figure the religion this country will be ruled by is their own, be it Southern Baptist, Church of Christ, Methodist or Pentacostal. I grew up in places where the Bible was kept on prominent display, and if that's what you think moral living is, you can choke on your own bile and die. I will never go back to that hypocrisy, and anyone who thinks they can force me to has another thing coming. The framers of the Constitution were wise enough to know that ANY religion has no place in government, yet still today, a mere 3 years after we were forced to confront the similarly oppressive religious climate that ruled in Afghanistan and resulted in the deaths of 3,000 people half a world away in New York City, there are still people in this country foolhardy enough to try to force us down that path yet again.

Astounding.

So, surfing the blogs led me to more than a few stories I had not seen.

First, we have Colin Powell claiming Iran is trying to build a bomb. Notice he did not say WMD's, because that would like, raise a few red flags among even the most obtuse Americans, seein' as we're still buried in Iraq, which not only had no WMD's despite Powell's announcement that it did, it's located right next door to the country now being pointed at as an enemy of the state, Iran. Basically, the story says that Iran is trying to obtain material for a really bad bomb, that there's an exiled group of Iranians who can prove this despite the fact they have no actual evidence, of course there are the ubiquitous satellite photos, but Iran says it's not true, and the IAEA can neither confirm nor deny the allegations. Of course, my favorite part of the whole thing - barring the utter identicalness of this story to the "justification" for the invasion and occupation of Iraq - is that the group of exiles providing the information? They're on the State Department's list of known terrorist organizations.

That's right; the US is now blatantly getting its intelligence information from terrorists. If there is anything more perfect than the US using the word of terrorists - "the enemies of freedom" - as evidence for why it should invade yet another country, I don't know what it is. As I said in someone's comments, the irony is so frigging thick, I can't breathe.

Wow. Burning a cross on a black family's front lawn while wearing a white hood and shouting racial slurs is only a misdemeanor in Kentucky. To get any kind of actual penalty imposed, you have to get the federal government to press charges. Isn't that nice? Who says the red states are Civil War throwbacks?

And in another little bit of Red State Devolution, we have the holier than thou Texas pharmacist who refused to fill a woman's birth control prescription because he didn't approve. Yep. Apparently, that's totally acceptable behaviour in several of the more-red parts of the country; pharmacists just refuse to fill prescriptions they don't approve of. And some of them don't seem to think they have to give your prescription back, either. Lemme tell you: if I take ANY prescription into a pharmacy, and the pharmacist not only refuses to fill it because he doesn't approve, but also refuses to give it back to me? That fucker better run for the hills and run fast, because my ass is going over that corner and committing some serious violence, and I do not care that that will cost me a trip to county lockup and a day in court. I'm not kidding. Things will definitely be broken. Just reading that article amped my blood pressure up to the nth degree. It already pisses me off that a lot of health insurance carriers refuse to pay for birth control pills, but they DO pay for Viagra.

Dude. I have to move on now, or I'll snap. There are certain things in the world that piss me off to a critical level, and that is definitely one of them. And the fact that so many people see absolutely nothing wrong with it is another.

That story is courtesy of James over at Your Logo Here, btw. James signed my comments section after I signed his. Hi, James! :)

I've been thinking lately about the subject of breast cancer, what with Elizabeth Edwards pretty much thrusting it into the public eye so thoroughly. My little brother donates a lot of time to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, so I know that's a good organization. As well, a lot of my friends do that whole Run for the Cure thing. I don't run, so I decided to come up with a bracelet, the proceeds of which I'm going to donate to the SGKBCF. I'll post the link here, when I do, in case anyone wants to "donate". Right now I'm trying to find the most cost effective design and way to produce the thing, in order to maximize the amount of money going to the foundation. I'd appreciate thoughts or comments on the subject. For instance, would you be happy to buy a stretchy sterling silver and crystal bracelet for $15 or $20 if it were pretty and benefitted breast cancer research?

Okay, that's it. Gotta do some work.

Peace out,
Katie

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