Free Love: Don't be frigid with your words

My friend today told us all on Facebook that she has made some friends during her time with the SCA, Society for Creative Anachronism, a place where they recreate the arts and skills of 17th Century Europe. Yes that exists, and yes they are not usually sober when they hang out in costumes jousting and shit. Some of her friends she met along the way in the SCA have become more like extended family to her, and she posted to her Facebook friends that she may tell you that she loves you, and she's not doing it to be awkward, and she hopes you don't take it wrong.

I'm not usually a feeling person, like the notion of expressing how I feel about you outside of "you piss me the fuck off eat shit and die," doesn't really come naturally to me. If I really like you, what's probably going to happen is I just talk on and on around you because you broke the wall surrounding my comfort zone. To me, that should be a compliment, like that's a big deal tearing down protective walls people build around their oh-so-precious feelings. Most people, however, don't see it as a compliment. Instead, they are more annoyed that I won't shut up.

But throughout the recent years, I've become more of a softy where I am not afraid to tell random people that I love them. I think it all started when I was on the phone with my mechanic, and I said, "Bye. I love you." By accident. I was just so much in the habit of saying it to my mom and husband on the phone, the only two people I usually talk to, that it slipped. I didn't realize the oops until long after I hung up. He thought it was just hilarious, so we started confessing our undying love for each other every time we talked. People might of thought he was my husband because we were so comfortable saying, "I'll be back tomorrow, Love ya." ... "alright, love ya too sweetie."

One day I was talking to him on the phone and said I love you, and the husband raised an eyebrow. I was like, "It's just Matt."

This might be a good time to mention that Matt was also married, a little older than me, and missing some teeth. It wasn't romantic what so ever. We flirted a little out of fun, but it really was platonic at the heart of it. I'm saying this for those of you who are thinking I professed my love to a guy I fantasize about stripping with my teeth. No it wasn't like going up to your old high school crush and saying, "I love you, just so you know."

I should also mention that Matt just recently passed away. He will forever be in my heart and maybe some day, I'll see him again in heaven, with Crest Commercial perfect teeth despite all the dipping and smoking.

My friend's post today got me thinking though... I don't know if it's an American thing because I do imagine Europeans to be much different, but it might be a people thing, but we are afraid to tell people we love them. We are more cautious about using those words with someone than we are about wrapping our legs around them, nekkid, inserting things. The words, "I love you" to us seem to be more sacred than our virginity, and we reserve that for only people we consider family, whether it's your mother or some guy who has been hanging around your sofa for the last year. I think the reason we wait for a person to feel like family to tell them how we feel is because we are scared otherwise. We wait until they tear down the walls surrounding our comfort zone to get into things like expressing feelings.

Instead, what we do is find other ways to show affection. Ways that don't entail professing secret feelings. Little things like buying someone's coffee, or actually listening to what they say (you should be doing that to everyone you speak to, just sayin). Things that if someone said, "you are doing this because you love me," you can hide behind some other excuse. The point is, we do little things in code hoping the other person never finds out your real intentions behind doing something nice or goofy. We do this to protect ourselves from "rejection."

Is it so wrong to let someone know you care?

I mean we all wish people cared about us more. We all wish more people cared about us. The main motivation for humans, of all cultures, of all time, is love. We all desire love more than any riches, more than any self actualization or transcendence (which love is part of those things), more than anything we can imagine. Most religious people expect LOVE from their God for a reason. In reality, God is Love. We all seek that, in some way or form from each other, from our pets, from our children, from our stuffed animals as children.... Love is so valued that we are all eager to take it, but cautious about giving it. Even our wealthiest would rather donate money before showing love.

How many of you hide your pain? If I asked you, "How are you?" How many of you would respond with, "Fine," regardless of how you feel? With that said, how many of you would have a much better day just to hear someone say, "I love you." And for them to mean it.

Maybe if we told each other we loved each other more often than we fuck each other, maybe some of the world's problems might go away magically. Seriously, our biggest problem of all in society, our economy, our government... our biggest problem is our attitude. An attitude that might get adjusted when it knows it's loved.

I'm asking you to put aside your fears of rejection and just tell people how you feel about them, not for your sake, but for their's. Even if they push you away, you know deep down inside they needed to hear it.

P.S. I'm not going to my high school crush and telling him I love him by the way. Do I look like Adele? I'll buy him a drink though.

Love and Marriage... and dirty dirty sex

For those who don't realize it, a lot of people on Facebook are changing their profile pics to a symbol similar to this. The original can be found at the Human Rights Facebook page here. What does it mean? Today is day 1 of the Supreme Court Hearings, today on Prop. 8 and tomorrow on DOMA. You too can show support for equal rights by changing your profile picture. I made this one sparkle. 

Now I personally am trying very hard to avoid politics with this blog, but I've said it before in a previous blog, it's really an unavoidable topic because it's about our lives and future. 

If one of my children grow up and discover they are attracted to their own gender, I don't want them to be denied the same rights I have just because of that. I'm all about equal rights. And that's what this is about more so than anything, providing equal rights to people. 

Marriage, however, is a difficult subject because it's based on religion, but we have evolved where marriage is also a government contract between two people, one that we use to define a lot of what goes on in every day life. Marriage means something. Even if you don't believe in religion at all, marriage still means something. This tradition has evolved in of itself, going well beyond the boundaries of religion. So from a government contract perspective, I'm all about it.

I'm all about helping people save money on their tax returns, and we all know married filing jointly helps, a lot. I am also all about helping people get healthcare, and you have to be married to get on your spouse's insurance. I'm also all about helping children stay with their other parent after one dies, and that's like impossible for a same sex couple to have that right without a marital contract (and obviously by parent, I mean person raising and caring for child, not person who donated sperm or womb).

Now, I may not be a religious person, but I am a very spiritual one who believes in God, Jesus Christ, and the Bible. Maybe I was brainwashed as a child growing up in the Born Again religion, but I would think converting to Baptism and having a church do me really dirty would undo most of that. Either way, from a religious standpoint, I know most Christian based religions consider homosexuality a sin and therefore are not only against homosexuality at all, but they definitely oppose homosexuality in the "sacred" nature of marriage. Some Christian fanatics go even farther into the realm of hate, which to me is because they are also assholes, and that's what assholes do, hate people for stupid reasons. 

I don't think the Bible says homosexuality is a sin. I think it says freaky sex is a sin, and I think it's a sin almost everyone commits regularly, whether they are homosexual or not. But I DO (haha punny) love it when someone gets all "homosexuality is a sin," and that someone is someone I know for a fact has no room to talk about sin in the bedroom (either because I was with them when they committed the sin, or because they brag about their awesome sex). It just amazes me people who themselves engage in oral sex, anal sex, masturbation as foreplay, dildo's, nipple clips, butt plugs... will lecture people about the sanctity of sex. Even more hypocrisy when they commit ADULTERY (that is a commandment breaker whereas being homosexual is not), lie to their spouses, divorce... lecturing us about the sanctity of marriage. Jesus did say something about casting stones once didn't He? 

I just believe God is Love and where there is love, there is God, and if two people want to get married, that has to be love because marriage is a sacrifice, a very big sacrifice, a bigger sacrifice than death, and if love isn't a good enough reason to do something, then God isn't either, so if you love God at all, you'll love love, no matter what. 

Whatever happens with this Supreme Court stuff, I do have faith that love will conquer all, eventually, and by the time my children are old enough to be allowed to get married at all, that they will have the option to marry any person they wish to marry, outside of incest.

The sad thing is, when I talk about homosexual marriage, the only time I really need to censor what I say is when it comes to the Bible, ironically. I'm telling you people, that book should be rated R with a parental advisory sticker for violence and sex. 

A True Love Letter

Dear Prince Charming True Love Soul Mate guy:

I was waiting for you. I waited and waited and waited. Then my biological clock started ticking and I really was sick of being in a position where I might catch an STD just because I needed something to cuddle up to that night. I needed to settle down and do the family making thing. You were no where to be found outside of my dreams.

So, I married some guy. He was the best possible option made available to me in the history of my options. Deep down inside, he's a good guy. His parents are fucking crazy and I now have the worst possible scenario for in-laws, and his culture raised him to expect 1950's gender roles bull shit, but he lets me blog and blow copious amounts of money on Diet Coke. The best part is, we reproduced. We now have little spawns who never would have existed had I not settled for Adele's "Someone Like You."

So here I am trying to enjoy my "This will do" ever after, but I can't. Nope. Destiny. Soul Mates. Blah blah blah. I keep diving down that hole chasing a white rabbit with a clock bitching about being late. The problem is, that world may or may not exist. That world might be my own insanity. That world, things don't make sense. Meanwhile, I'm sleeping through this world who will never measure up to Wonderland.

I am having dreams about you, all the time. I can't forget you. My sleep won't let me. Then I wake up and try to make sense of things like most people do. Between God, astrological charts, dream interpretation, The Magic 8 Ball, and so forth, everything tells me to have faith, leaving me wishing and hoping you will come swoop me off my feet out of this life I settled for and give me the life I dreamed of, the one we were "destined" for... I've decided to drop the faith.

I decided that you are nothing more than an illusion fabricated by my insanity and needs and wants and desires and Freudian stuff. You don't exist. You never have. Real romance is not Disney's Cinderella. It's Voltaire's Candide. It's a story about a young optimistic person who endures reality. Life broke his dreams. He didn't get to enjoy his true love until after she was old, ugly, and scarred from her life, and by then, there was nothing left to enjoy. All they could do is find peace in boring life things and the company.

That's where I'm at. I'm not with that true love dream I had. I'm with this husband guy instead. Life did a number to him much like it did with me, and we are at the part of the fairy tale where we just learn to be content with mundane tasks like the dishes.

Just because I am rejecting True Love Faith and have decided you are an illusion, that doesn't mean I'm totally rejecting you. If you really are out there, when you decide to grace my life with your presence, I'm all about happily ever after. I'll be your down ass bitch then. But until then, I have to exchange some of the intangibles for the tangible.

No matter the Destiny, free will is a bitch, and we both married the bitch. May God protect you and may you live, laugh and love and all that jive. Peace out I'm doing laundry.

Sincerely,

Alice Not In Wonderland