Blurry cameraphone photo of the busted fence.

This horrible photo from my phone demonstrates just why I really hate people. I realize it’s hard to discern what you’re supposed to be looking at, but that’s a large gap in my neighbor’s fence, with his above ground pool in the frame.

A week or so, someone careened into the fence, knocking it down, and coming within a few feet of the pool. Sadly enough, it isn’t the first time this has happened. This very section of fence gets run into at least once a year. People take the corner too fast—there’s no stop sign to make them slow down before turning—lose control, and end up into this section of the yard. Always someone in the house hears it, and always no one ever gets caught.

Usually the neighbor fixes the fence the first weekend after it’s been knocked down, but I suppose this time he’s fed up with it all, and I don’t blame him. There’s no guarantee that it isn’t going to be knocked down next week. Since this is in a separated, fenced off part of his yard that backs up to the creek, instead of fixing it he’s put up chicken wire or something similar to keep people out. My mum says that he’s waiting for the insurance company to pay for it, because it’s expensive to replace a fence.

Sunday night, though, the most unbelievable thing happened. People went swimming in my neighbors pool. At two in the morning. Also, unable to be seen in the photo is that somebody bent back the chicken wire to gain entrance into the yard, and could be heard splashing around in the pool until one of my neighbors (unclear if it was the guy across the street from us, or the guy who owns the house the pool is at), went outside and started yelling at the punks, and which point the punks jumped into the car they had parked out next to the fence, and took off.

I just don’t understand what drives people these days. I’m sure the punks responsible for both acts are between the ages of 16 and 25, right in my target peer range. And maybe I’m just a closet old lady, but I would never even think about doing crap like this, ever at all. It’s just such a large disrespect of property. These same people who would violate other’s space would flip out if someone thought about doing the same to them.

I can understand why the fence-runners never come forward. They are most likely drunk, and don’t want to get caught. Most of the time, I’m astounded that they never run into the above-ground pool which is right behind the fence with the invisible target drawn on it.

But the midnight swimmers? I don’t understand why they think it’s okay to use someone else’s pool. What’s to stop them from jumping in our pool next time they feel the need for a late night dip? Although, I almost secretly hope they do because our pool is so cold they would scream in pain. Seriously, really cold.

But jeez, people can do some unbelievable things sometimes.

—”I So Hate Consequences,” MmmHmm: Relient K

But, then I realized the reason everyone should vote is really very simple, in my opinion. If you don’t vote, you don’t have the right to complain.

Yeah, it’s as simple as that. The sad thing, really, is that of the projected 30–40%¹ of voters that will turn out for the election, I personally predict that the ones that don’t make it to the polls will be mostly Republicans.

As a Republican, this saddens me immensely. I understand why it happens—the “Governator” is a Republican, thus the incumbent, so a lot of Republicans feel that they don’t have to vote. However, there are other offices to vote for.

For example: Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Controller, Treasurer, Attorney General, Insurance Commissioner, State Board of Equalization, U.S. Senator and Representative, and State Senator and Assembly Member are all up for grabs. Not to mention Superintendent of Schools, County Assessor, District Attorney, and Sherriff all need to be elected with the primary election.

There are also two propositions and a measure to be voted on.

While sure, it seems like a waste to some to have essentially two elections to fill an office, it doesn’t matter. If you’re registered to vote, you should vote. It’s what you signed up for when you mailed in the registration card.

I’m just so tired of hearing people complain about how the government is run, and when asked if they voted, the response is usually no. Then they go on about how their vote means nothing.

The Primaries have snuck up on me, and so this post isn’t really what I wanted to talk about in regards to voting. It’s just a desperate plea to get everyone to the polls. I don’t care who you vote for, just so long as you do it.

Since I have until November for the second round of elections, I’ll be working on an essay-like post all summer about the importance of voting. I have very strong views on voting, even if I’m not politically vocal.

If you have any ideas, or thoughts or anything, let me know. I’m always happy to argue why voting is important

1. Heard this percentage on the radio yesterday morning, and I’m sure it’s pretty accurate. Many people don’t think the primary is important enough to vote in.

Both Ben and Shawn Anthony from Lo-Fi Tribe seem to think what I said was worth something, and Ben emailed me to encourage my participation in this month’s ping homily.

After a few emails back and forth (where the conversation devolved into 9rules and whether anyone’s heard if they’re in yet), I thought that maybe I should jump in, and talk about what it means to me. After all, I have been looking for quality topics to write about.

But, first, the qualifiers.

When I first started reading 9rules and the related blogs (and damn do they have a lot), I tended to skip over the religion community, because I am not very religious at all. I wasn’t brought up into any religion at all; my mum abandoned Catholicism, and my Dad “grew out of” being Lutheran. When I attended church when I was little, it was always a Lutheran church, unless my grandparents were visiting from New Jersey.¹

My parents decided that religion and God was something each of had to find for ourselves, and other than “Bible School” before age seven (and still, my mum only sent us there so she could have an afternoon for herself), they did not help nor hinder our spiritual discoveries. For me, this lead to wild ideas² about what God and heaven were all about, and for my siblings, it’s turned them into atheists.

I’m much more stable than I used to be in my beliefs³, and I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t believe in any specific religion. I’ve only got my ideas, and ideas influenced by what I’ve seen and read and experienced.⁴. So, in religious terms, I am Agnostic, believing that there is a god, but the rest of my beliefs skew the spectrum, as everything is hobbled together in my head.

What does this have to do with participation in the ping homily? A lot, really. Because of my beliefs, I didn’t think I would fit in with the religious community at 9rules, and figured that they wouldn’t find value in what they said. I’m too used to people who preach at me, trying to explain why I’m wrong and their right, and I don’t have the time or the patience to deal with that. Especially since I’m not out to convert people to my way of thinking. I don’t particularly care what other people believe, as long as their beliefs do not harm me.

However, after the encouragement from Ben, I went and looked what the requirements and purpose of the ping homily was, and realized that I too can fit in with them.

I think Shawn Anthony was right on when he said:

It’s about your meditation upon serious religious and spiritual themes and issues. It is all about your own expression, writing, and spiritual belief.

And how could I not fit in to that? So, with reassurances all around, I feel comfortable enough to participate in this month’s ping homily.

A Brief Homily Re: Beauty

What is beauty, really? I think everyone has heard the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but hardly anyone ever really thinks about what it really means. I find beauty in a myriad of things. In nature (trees especially), in words, in actions, in personality. A building is more beautiful if there is a tree obscuring it. A poem is beautiful. Even a terrible horror story such as Frankenstein is beautiful. And people are beautiful too.

However, no two people find the same thing beautiful in the same way. Both my dad and Dustin think I’m beautiful. I don’t know what they’re talking about, but they keep insisting it’s true. I have a hard time believing both of them, but my dad more so, because he’s been telling me for so long. I used to think that parents had to say that kind of thing about their kids.

But, because they both love me in different ways, they see me in different ways, and so the beauty that each of them sees is unique to them. I can only conjecture, but my dad sees the beauty in the way I grew up to be like him, to be responsible, the sarcastic wit, and knowledge that he helped create me, and even though I don’t need him like I used to, I do still need him. Dustin, on the other hand, sees the beauty in my sarcastic wit, my insecurities, my passion for geeky things, and the way I unconditionally love him (also, all conjecture).

These traits don’t seem like beauty, do they? They don’t mention the color of my eyes, the length of my hair, the size of my chest, the cut of my clothes, or my body shape at all. But that’s the thing about beauty that people seem to forget: what’s beautiful on the inside is what makes what’s on the outside beautiful.

The empty shell, the shallow pond, is only as beautiful as what fills it up. After all, an M&M filled with chocolate and an M&M filled with crap would look the same from the outside, but it’s the inside that counts.

My beauty isn’t something I can see, because I can’t experience it. The only time I see me is when I write. When I let out what’s been bottled in my head, so that I can see it and understand it. I very rarely think to myself “damn, I look hot today,” and even then, it’s because of how I feel, not how I look.

Society as a mass completely avoid the issue of the inside. People everywhere write about how beautiful Lindsay Lohan is, but how many of those people know her? Really know her enough to decide whether she is beautiful or not?

I tend to laugh when I see girls on campus ogling over a “hottie” who’s just walked by. I don’t think I’ve ever been attracted to any guy in that way. I never had teen idols on my walls, I never pretended to want to marry some famous hottie (except Prince William, but that was always contingent on getting to know him first). Romance novels almost always get it wrong, because the heroine is always falling for the hunk before she even knows who he is.

Someone can be attractive if you don’t know them. But, since beauty is on the inside, you have to get to know the person to really determine if they are beautiful.

Ahem. I didn’t really mean to go on that long. I’ll leave you know with a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.⁵ He was a converted Jesuit priest, which didn’t go over to well with his parents, as he was raised in the Church of England. Always a poet, when he entered the Jesuit church, he burned all his early poems, and took a seven year sabbatical from writing poems. It is believed he intended to give up poetry entirely, but he couldn’t suppress it forever. Most, if not all, of his later work was religious in nature.

This poem was published after his death in 1918, and so his work often gets lumped in with the modern poets, although he firmly belongs to the Victorians. Pied Beauty is a homily its self, expressing joy in all of God’s creations, and how beauty can be found in everything, if you just look for it.

Pied Beauty – Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things-
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough,
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
(audio reading available at the Victorian Web)

There you go, a 1000+ word post, longer than any I’ve ever done before. Who knew I had that much to say about it?

1. Actually, I still attend church with my grandpa when he comes out. I secretly like the pageantry involved in being Catholic, and if I had had to choose a religion when I was little, I would have totally picked it.
2. When I was little, I used to believe that we were all in a collective dream, and our deaths really meant that we were woken up in heaven. So, babies deaths were just people who were light sleepers and woke up real easy.
3. Aside from the “dream” belief, I ran through quite a few others. Our lives as lived inside God’s tummy, anyone? But now, pretty normal, I think.
4. Which caused me to curse God on numerous occasions, because I fully believe he isn’t listening.
5. Information based on memory from class, and the Victorian Web.

And by stupid, I mean: dumb, immature, silly, and generally any other description that means not good.

I don’t understand the draw. I don’t understand why people between the ages of 13 and 25 flock to that site like it’s the holy mecca of the internet. I know there are people who spent 1+ hours a day there. And I don’t get it. I mean, how many comments can you leave your friends?

I have a MySpace page. I won’t lie to you. But, I signed up for it because I had a friend who apparently couldn’t check his email. Even though it was a Hotmail account. He told me that I should get a MySpace page so that I could message him and the like. So I did. And then random people from high school found me.

At first, I thought “hey, that’s kind of cool.” But, they don’t leave me comments. I don’t leave them comments. They don’t send me messages. I don’t send them messages. I do get sent the mass chain-mail bulletins that everyone sends everyone else. Not that I read them.

The thing that bothers me the most, I think, is that no one actually reads my page. I have stated quite plainly that I won’t add people as friends unless I know them in real-life. And yet, I get “Friend Requests” from my sister’s friends, from random people who live near me, from the loser pub down the street (and, why does a pub need a MySpace page?), and generally random people.

I might possibly have the smallest friend’s list on MySpace, with only 9 friends, none of which I requested myself. Which is funny, since I don’t talk to any of them except my sister and Matt-Matt. I just don’t understand why people spend so much time on one page, and why they would limit their internet to just this one site.

Oh, and the shitty blogs! Don’t get me started on them…. But then again, I’m loyal to WordPress like nothing else.

So, please, for the love of god, don’t use MySpace. Get yourself a free BlogSpot account or something else. But I just can’t stand to look at bad 1992 HTML on the MySpace pages anymore. I thought we got rid of that crap ages ago, but it just keeps making a comeback.

And please, don’t leave me a comment, send me a message, or send a friend request to me through MySpace. Leave comments on my blog. Email me messages. And, if you have to request to be someone’s friend, maybe you should think about what that means. I know I’m not asking to be anyone’s friend, and you shouldn’t have to either.

- “Worried Eyes,” Desireless: Eagle Eye Cherry

Proposed amendments to the law to create exceptions to specifically protect the health of the mother, or in cases of rape or incest, were voted down. Also defeated was an amendment to put the proposal in the hands of voters.

The fact that the legislature of South Dakota refused to allow amendments to when abortion should be legal, leads me to wonder who these people really are. Would they want their daughters give birth to children out of rape? How about the genetically retarded children of incest? This worries me, because I know women who have have become pregnant, only to be told by doctors that they had to terminate, or risk death themselves. Apparently, South Dakota wants all women to risk death to bring a child into the world.

In abortion, just as in life, there are exceptions to every rule, but South Dakota is only allowing one:

The bill as written does make an exception if the fetus dies during a doctor’s attempt to save the mother’s life.

Although, I am not quite sure what this means. It doesn’t seem to state that if the pregnancy would cause harm to the mother an abortion could be performed. It appears to only allow a fetus who has died – directly or indirectly from a doctor’s doctoring – to be expelled from the body. That reassures me. It’s almost like saying “the only way you won’t be punished for termination of a pregnancy if it’s a miscarriage, or an accident.”

At 23, I most likely am right inside the demographic most likely to have an abortion. I am also violently pro-choice. I think that every woman should have a choice in what is happening to their body.

I do not believe, however, that abortion should be used as birth control. I think that a woman who has had more than one abortion (unless doctor recommended) should take a hard look at themselves in the mirror. And, get some birth control. Condoms are cheaper than an abortion. I also believe that you should not be able to abort a child when it is able to live outside the womb, even if it isn’t fully developed.

Awhile ago, Peggy posted about her choice¹ with Brogan. She is pro-life, and she posted a link to a video that is extremely graphic. The video shows parts of human fetuses that have been aborted at all stages of pregnancy, up to the third trimester.

I watched the whole video. And it doesn’t bother me. Yes, the third-term abortions bother me, because essentially you’re delivering a healthy baby early, and then killing it. Fetuses that in no way could survive outside the womb don’t bother me.

I may be an extremely callous person. I am most definitely unsympathetic to those who seek to ban abortion.

Perhaps they might think about how over populated the world would be, if every child conceived was born. Abortion may be horrible to some, but it’s another way we control population growth.

As always, feel free to disagree. But don’t be nasty. I’ll put out flames on sight.

Articles Referenced:

“S. Dakota Legislature Passes Abortion Ban” 22 Feb. 2006. Reuters. 22 Feb. 2006.

1. Broken link removed 7/8/09.