Nights Without Melatonin

Among the many topics that entered my mind, some to stick around for quite a bit of thought, last night while I wasn't sleeping, were soil project ideas and who might be good connections for problems that maybe would allow playing around with landscape architecture; the sophisticated yet primal beauty of Elphaba's death throes in the book "Wicked," by Gregory McGuire; and, most importantly, that I ought to clarify my most recent blog entry before Something Happens.

I was really mad the other day. It's easy to see how people can get passionate enough about their own beliefs and need for responsibility over their own lives to wish or bring ill upon those who threaten those beliefs and that need. I mean, I was really mad. But, I am also a person who believes in some amount of karmic something out there and generally ascribes to the Golden Rule, so I want to clarify that I do not really hope that everyone who believes it is an important political and moral issue to address gay marriage in our federal government so that God will take care of our country loses his or her job and every penny he or she has. That was more a figurative way of reacting to the threat of someone else trying to drive my life with his (what I consider misconstrued and nonuniversal) values and my general disillusionment with a large portion of the American public and their willingness to succumb to vague political or religious rhetoric or doctrine without full consideration of what that means.

For example, I imagine, though I could actually be wrong about this, that many people who believe the President of the USA should push for a legal nationwide ban on gay marriage also believe that terrorism by Muslim extremists at our doorstep is an imminent danger and that we are a freedom-loving equal-opportunity democracy that should not be threatened by Those People. Yet, as my friend from Turkmenistan pointed out at lunch last weekend, in her Muslim nation there was enough of a holdover from Soviet government when Turkmenistan became independent of Soviet rule, that women there are still paid the same as men for doing the same job. Period. That doesn't necessarily happen here in this Land of Opportunity; there is still a wage gap in the US of A.

But crap; I've blown my self-imposed moratorium on talking politics until after November 4. Dang!