I Don't Usually Write Stuff Like This...Or Post Terrifyingly Bad Pictures...

     I don't usually think much about when celebrities die, but Davy Jones has me choked up a little. When I was around ten or eleven years old, I went through this weird phase where I was obsessed with The Monkees, especially Davy. I had a couple of episodes of the tv show on an old VHS tape, and I think the second or third CD I ever bought was The Monkees' Greatest Hits. I can still picture being in front of the huge stereo in the living room playing it. I still watch the show when I catch it on Antenna TV.
     When I broke my arm rollerskating and I just got my cast put on, I remember my mom ordering out food (I had chicken fingers..big surprise) and I watched the Monkees reunion show on tv. I remember being really excited and happy because I had my chicken and I got to watch Davy Jones!
     I even have a school picture that has a little Davy tribute in it. Before I describe this sad excuse for of a picture, I want to tell you guys that I am the QUEEN of terrible school photos. Anybody reading this who's my brother or sister, or my best friends from grade school will attest. Anyway, in this particular picture I had my red and white Seuss-hat looking striped sweater on...and I was holding one of those cheap ass tambourines that you used to see in the toys section of the grocery store. (Do they even still have that section???) It was an orange plastic tambourine, and I was sitting with it and grinning stupidly into those blinding lights they use on Picture Days.
      It might be weird, but despite the fact that I was born decades after their heyday, I have really vivid memories of The Monkees from when I was little. I walked down Chestnut Street singing along to "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" tonight on the way home from school. And you know, just like I was happy being a kid with that cheesy tambourine, I did not care that people were looking at me weird.
       RIP Davy.


(PS...just to show you how serious I am about my awful school pictures...here's two of the BETTER ones. I'll see if I can find the tambourine one sometime soon.)

Ever have times you feel like THIS?

Student Life. Not sure if I'm showing my age or if I'm just really, really neurotic.

            I really have not decided on what it is I actually want to do. I’ve always know that whatever I ended up doing for a living would have something to do with communication, law, or education. After my disastrous experiences with my high school counselor and psychiatrist’s office, I started to think about working with at-risk teens and young adults. I don’t know how I want to do that just yet, but I really look back on my own experiences and I can’t help but wish somebody competent was actually there to help me get to the very root about what was going on with me. I had a lackluster counselor who really only had one urge: to satisfy my father and push her one solution on me. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
I have felt very much brushed aside by the school system from that moment on. I tried (twice) to go back to classes when I was in high school, after screwing around for a while.  I got really discouraged the first time I came back, and the second time I was told that 1) I could never finish on time because I was undercredited and overage, and 2) That I shouldn’t even bother trying to get into another option…that I should just drop out. (Yes…that is almost a word-for-word quote.)
             I’ve been toying around with the idea of either Psychology or Law for a few months. When I first started at CCP my major was Education, but I realized that being a teacher wasn’t exactly what I envisioned when I thought about what I really wanted to do. Right now, I’m a Social Sciences major. I’m considering taking my BA in Psychology after this, probably by doing a dual BA/MA program at Drexel or another Philadelphia-area college. After that…I don’t really know. I know that I’m going to end up with a graduate degree, but I’m not sure if I want to get a license to practice law or become a shrink. I guess that’s going to be a bridge that I’ll cross once I come upon it. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up in a job I like once I’m done my master’s and I won’t feel a need to go to go further at all.
            I’m getting the feeling like looking at the big picture right now is making me overly anxious. I still have a healthy four to five years between here and grad school. I think part of me is being impatient because I started college so much later than everyone around me. There’s probably some self-consciousness lingering around in my crazy little head because of that. It feels really weird to watch everyone else LEAVE while I’m just finishing my freshman year.  I know that really shouldn’t matter, but it’s a nagging thought.

It's funny how movies can make you think sometimes, isn't it?

     I actually don’t have anything particularly gay to talk about today, except for mentioning that I watched Kissing Jessica Stein last night. If you’ve never seen it, the rundown is pretty simple. Girl journalist has awful luck with men, and gets called out on being ‘too picky’ by her ex/boss. There’s a personals ad that her friend comes across in the paper with a quote that miss journalist had just read…only…it’s in the WFW section. On a crazy, bicurious whim she answers it. The women awkwardly traipse through a lesbian relationship; complete with the journalist covering up their relationship by saying her girl is her “friend”, etc… The pair go through the relationship, the relationship dies of lesbian bed death, and they remain friends afterwards. The journalist is kind of left ambiguous, because they set her up with her ex /boss again, and her girlfriend is seen with another woman.
     Now that’s all very gay, but the driving point of this movie has a lot more to do with how we view ourselves when it comes to human relationships. The delightfully bisexual characters in this movie really were pretty spot on when it comes to figuring out that you’re bi.
     Watching this pretty much got me thinking about my own dynamic in relationships, my types, and all that. Everybody has their preferences, and bisexual people are no exception. There are a lot of jokes out there that we’ll pretty much boink anything human that moves, but that’s never ever been true for me.  Obviously, like any responsible person of ANY orientation I steer way clear of any kind of disease I can catch, and I’m a real stickler for getting all parties involved screened for HIV before anything remotely physical happens.  The phrase “herpes is forever” should be mentioned here, too.
     All that being said, I think there’s a difference between “picky” and “careful”. Everybody has their preferred type, sure. That’s normal. For me, if the in question potential partner is a guy, he’s always older than I am (usually by enough to be noticeable) and always has dark hair. Most of the time, they’re either Italians or Nikki Sixx wannabes. For girls, I cannot get into butch chicks. Being bisexual, I don’t see the point. It’s not my thing. The other weird thing is that I don’t usually like white women. Normally we look like birds and it’s just not attractive to me. Usually.
     Having a type is not what I’d consider picky. Picky would be having this ideal person who’s absolutely perfect in every single way in your eyes and expecting every single date you go on to be “that” person. Picky would be those people who go on and on like Jack Black’s character in Shallow Hal. I think picky is also a front for self esteem issues a lot of times too. There seems to be this very real issue for people in deciphering what they admire and want for themselves, and what they want in another person. For example,  Girl A thinks that she wants to be ‘with’ Girl B because Girl B  has an outgoing, shiny personality.  The girls would date for a while, and then the traits that Girl A thought she liked about Girl B get annoying. They split, and Girl A blames the entire scenario on Girl B not being “enough”. What really happened there was that Girl A saw things in another person that she wanted to be/have for herself, and was not aware that the problem was really with herself and her self-image, not  with her “crappy” partners. I’ve had mad girl crushes like that, especially when I was 17 or so years old. It was easy to confuse what I “wanted” with” what I wanted for myself”.
That was pretty much the realization that miss journalist was given in Kissing Jessica Stein. It was pretty thought provoking because when you apply thoughts like that to all of your failed relationships, you sometimes look back and see that it really WAS you, not them.

Posting sooner than I thought!

YES!
I got a new laptop today, from a screwup from Dell. So sweet!!! Not only does this mean that I can post on the blog more often, but I can work on my research paper.

So not only do I fall under the categories of "LGBT" and "Catholic", I fall into the categories of "German-American" and "French-American" as well. My research paper is about how the visual media reinforces stereotypes and ethnic profiling of Germans/the German American community. During my research, I've found about a trillion great sources. My favorite by far was this video right here, which pretty much sums up my entire thesis: Stereotypes on German People
(Like literally, some of my examples are featured here. It's freaky.)

So yeah...I'm so excited to be able to work on both of these writing projects. It is a GOOD day!

Media Spin & NoH8 Congress!

Hey!

     I know, I've been gone again. Not having a computer to work on makes writing this thing kind of difficult. I could have written this yesterday, but I was racing around between home, classes, and Mass for Ash Wednesday that I had no time.
     While I was on the el yesterday, I was reading the news and came across this article. I read through it a few times, and I still can't totally decide how I feel about it. On one hand, I give the guy props for sticking to his guns. But on the other, I can't help but feel like this is small-time and cliche. That feeling may be what the author of this piece was going for, considering that the sentence:"Time will tell if this the first salvo in a larger hairstylist revolt or, simply, an isolated incident." closes this article.
     I know that there are a lot of pro-grassroots people and groups when it comes to issues such as lgbt rights. There are countless amounts of people who do small things every day to open minds and advance their cause. Some of these people mean well but trivialize the argument, like the "Occupy" gays that "glitterbomb" people they disagree with at events. The hairstylist in question may be meaning to open up the mind of his client, and it may well work, but the way this situation was presented to the mass public will probably have an impact on deciding whether it was attention-seeking or cause advancing.
      In other news, it was pretty awesome to see ten members of Congress participate in the No H8 Campaign. I'm not surprised at the lack of Republicans in that mix, but I am disappointed about it. There are pro-equality Reds on the Hill, believe it or not. They need to speak their support about those opinions to balance out the hateful people (and stereotype of) the Republican party.

The "b" and the "t" in LGBT.

    This is Andrej Pejic, a model from Bosnia. He also happens to be an androgynous man, who's been named a lot of things and is sometimes called a gender-bender. Today, CNN headlined their article about him by labeling him a "transgender" model. I read the article, and it didn't necessarily scream "Trans" to me. They have the definition of Transgender that GLAAD uses in the article, and I have to admit that it's not what I always heard the 'T' in LGBT defined as.
     GLAAD includes cross-dressers and genderf*ck individuals as "Transgender". I don't know if I agree with that definition. To me, trans generally means people who are physically born one sex, but their brainwaves and person have the identity of the opposite gender. Pretty much, your physical sex and gender identity don't match. (Sex is physical, gender identity is defined as how your mind/emotional system is wired, or what you perceive yourself as.)
     I'm not really sure how the trans community is going to respond to this article. It is nice to see high fashion embracing alternative presentations of gender, yes. But is the novelty of this model insulting to the people who struggle everyday to live as who they are? I can't begin to fathom the response I'd have if I were transgendered, because frankly I'm incapable of fully stepping into those shoes. I could never fully understand.
      One of the most insulting things I have ever heard, and one of the nastiest things I have ever regretted saying, is that Bisexuals should be happy that Transgendered people exist because we can have "the best of both worlds in one person". If you look in the back of the CityPaper on any given day, there are tons of ads for TG escorts for "guys on the DL" and "questioning" guys. Some people who are into TG pornography talk about how they aren't queer because the T Girl stars "look too much like women".
     To me, both seeking out TG escorts and checking out TG themed porn is both dehumanizing and self hating. Dehumanizing because the people being made into fetish objects are just that- people. TG individuals aren't freaks of nature and don't deserve to be treated like a sideshow or fetish toy, especially when just living a normal life feels damn near impossible sometimes. It's self-hating biphobia at the same time. I'd go so far as to say a lot of the guys who are into TG as a fetish are probably in denial about their attraction to certain..aspects...of their escorts. Otherwise, why would they be watching explicit scenes that are rather phallic-focused? That "little bit of both to check out" mentality is extremely bisexual! But yet, they'll go ahead and say something like: "It's not gay! It's the uber-feminitity that attracts me!" I'm sorry, but that's a crock if I ever heard one. That sounds like denial to me. That sounds like the guys who buy the huge trucks and try too hard to be super masculine because they're trying to chase away their thoughts about Matt Damon.
     Seriously, all these DL bi guys should just come out already. They've got that famous self-loathing down to an art.
    

He's a Supercreep, Supercreep...

  If you know me, (and judging by the amount of traffic coming from the FB link...many of you do) you know what kind of music I'm into. That being said, reading some of the news about the GOP race, I came across a celebrity endorsement that I'm literally shaking my head at.
   Dave Mustaine from Megadeth has come out in support of Supercreep!
"I think Santorum has some presidential qualities, and I'm hoping that if it does come down to it, we'll see a Republican in the White House... and that it's Rick Santorum." Although I'm a little repulsed, I'm not really surprised at this, considering that Dave also said that "the system was taking God out of schools to dumb us down" a while back.
   If that's the case...how low can you go?

   (And by the way, creepers, who are you?! There's this funky little button that says "comments"....just saying! :) )
 

Mein komputer ist toten sein! :(

     Yes, my computer has died.
     I'm really kind of pissed about it because I have this massive paper to write for my English class this semester and now I'll have to practically live in the library! I'm not going to be able to shop around for a new computer until late next month because of how my cashflow is at the moment. Boo.
I think a portable, like a laptop or a netbook might be a better choice than a desktop this time. If anybody knows where the best deals are, please feel free to let me know!      Not too much going on in the land of the Bi Girl lately. Lots of school, getting ready to go back to work, and trying to keep an eye out for big happenings in the world. Today there was a White House conference on LGBT health and mental health here in Philadelphia. The conference was hosted by a really, really great organization here called the Mazzoni Center, which helps provide low cost health services and HIV screenings to queer patients in the area. They were streaming parts of the conference on their Facebook earlier today, but I was unable to catch that. The PGN will probably run an article on it this week, so when I see it I will let you know what's up.
     I guess that's it for now. Slow news day, eh?

So The Bi Girl Is A...Catholic? How does that work?

     When most of us think about how Catholicism and issues like gay marriage mix, the phrase "oil and water" comes to mind. I think most of us would be about half right about that idea. Homosexuality is not to the Church what ridiculous, false churches/terrorist organizations like WBC make it out to be. Homosexuality is a sexual sin along the lines of fornication. All gay sex is fornication to the Church because that sect of Christianity does not recognize gay marriage. Any sex outside of marriage is a sin to the Church, whether the couple is gay or straight, together or in an adulterous affair. (That last one, well, that's actually a lot worse than the others given because Christ himself had a serious issue with vow-breaking and dishonesty in that regard.)
     The US Catechism of the Catholic Church does address homosexuality, and it's not in the way that you'd expect. I'm going to paraphrase here, because the subject crops up a lot in the book, but basically it is the Church's stance that: 1) being gay/lesbian/bisexual was NOT something that the person in question chose; and 2) it isn't right to make judgment calls or treat a member of the Church or any other person like less because of that. It also still has the same laws regarding sexual sin that heterosexuals have. Basically, the problem with the Church and gays isn't that people are gay. It's sex in general. (Tell us something we don't know, right?)
    So how did a life-realized queer end up in the pews on Sunday mornings? It's a really long story. My parents had what the Church calls a 'mixed marriage', meaning my father is Catholic and my mother was not. When I was growing up, religion was practiced more by my grandparents than by my parents.My paternal grandfather is a devout Catholic married to a Baptist, and my maternal family had a mixed marriage of Catholic and Swedenborgen. I wasn't really raised going to church or in any particular denomination, but I was given the typical Judeo-Christianesque values. I went through that teen phase of "question everything", and after my mother's death I walked away from the Church. During my absence I found a home in the Neopagan community. I still hold a lot of the beliefs from that vast umbrella of faiths, and I still stand with the community for getting legal recognition in the United States. Recently, a lot of not-so-savory things have happened in my life that led me back to Christian life. My grandfather's influence and my own instinct led me to Catholicism.
     I am not out to my parish, nor am I out to my priest. As much as I do like my Father as a person, I get the feeling that the atmosphere between us would change drastically if I were to come out. I don't know if I would be treated the same. I have a boyfriend, and he goes to Mass with me. I know that I pass as straight in Church. This is a really sticky point for bisexuals, and it's not really a fun place to be. One of the big accusations that the LGBT community has with bi people is that we can "pass as straight to make life easier". I guess there can be a grain of truth in that. I don't like the way it feels. It feels like I'm hiding a facet of myself, but in this part of my life, I'm aware that the facets of my faith practiced and my orientation do not mix well. Where I am in the city and where I am sacramentally-speaking, I feel like I have to keep this facade up for longer than I'd like. I feel like I'm reinforcing the "hiding bisexuals" stereotype with this.  I am out in every other part of my life, I've got a bi pride tattoo proudly stamped on the back of my neck. That in mind, I'm pretty sure that the LGBT-aware/ally people in my church notice it when I'm kneeling during Mass...
There are some great Catholic/Episcopalian churches out there that are very open to LGBT Catholics, including St. Luke and the Epiphany's Dignity USA chapter. [ Dignity USA ] I think once I've moved to a different part of my city and can attend a more gay-friendly Mass, I will. I know that God knows I'm queer. He doesn't seem to have a problem with me on it. My prayers get answered, like everyone elses' do. I try very hard to live a moral life, even when I'm in a lesbian relationship as opposed to a straight one. I tried to do that as non-denominational, as Pagan, and now as Catholic. I don't think being queer nullifies my Baptism, and I certainly don't feel like I'm less of a person or a bad person because I'm not straight. This isn't just a question of faith for gay and lesbian Catholics. Those invisible bisexuals get it too, and even with our own spin on the problem.

(Crazy side note, I'm listening to Pandora radio as I write this. Just as I wrote that last paragraph, a John Lennon song called "God" came on. Lyrics are beyond ironic!)

The Very First Post!

Hey people.

It's been a really long time since I've written anything resembling a blog, so I've decided to come on back to this land of ranting, mundane details about life, and occasional literary gems. (Don't expect the last one to come from me, though.)
A little bit about who I am: I'm 23, and I live in the greatest city in America- Philadelphia. GO FLYERS! E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!
Ahem. Excuse me...reflexes, you know...

Anyway. I'm currently embarking on the journey of higher education and the debt that comes with it. I have two cats, a great boyfriend, and a generally normal life. I also happen to be one of those much-lambasted, often said to be mythical bisexuals. That's right, there really are people who don't feel a need to "pick a side" and aren't "confused". We're not right there with the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. 
This blog isn't just a chronicale of the boring things that take up my life. I want to be open to sharing news and opinions from both the LGBT and hetero communities. The bisexual community faces discrimination and stereotyping from both sides, and I'd really love to open up that perspective to people who assume that it's somehow "easier" to be straddling the fence. I want to share what it's like to be one of the many people who often get pushed aside by both the gay and straight crowds. The "gross" ones, the "greedy". I want to show what life under that pink, purple, and blue is really like.