omgwtf!

M-a-r-r-y-i-ng!

Okay, so there’s one syllable too many, but that’s for the extra awesome in this story:

May 16, 2008
Marriage Equality Comes to California
By George Takei
Our California dream is reality. Brad Altman and I can now marry. We are overjoyed! At long last, the barrier to full marriage rights for same-sex couples has been torn down. We are equal with all citizens of our state!
The California Supreme Court has ruled that all Californians have a fundamental right to marry the person he or she loves. Brad and I have shared our lives together for over 21 years. We’ve worked in partnership; he manages the business side of my career and I do the performing. We’ve traveled the world together from Europe to Asia to Australia. We’ve shared the good times as well as struggled through the bad. He helped me care for my ailing mother who lived with us for the last years of her life. He is my love and I can’t imagine life without him. Now, we can have the dignity, as well as all the responsibilities, of marriage. We embrace it all heartily.
The California Supreme Court further ruled that our Constitution provides for equal protection for all and that it cannot have marriage for one group and another form - domestic partnership - for another group. No more “separate but equal.” No more second-class citizenship. Brad and I are going to be married as full citizens of our state.
As a Japanese American, I am keenly mindful of the subtle and not so subtle discrimination that the law can impose. During World War II, I grew up imprisoned behind the barbed wire fences of U.S. internment camps. Pearl Harbor had been bombed and Japanese Americans were rounded up and incarcerated simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Fear and war hysteria swept the nation. A Presidential Executive Order directed the internment of Japanese Americans as a matter of national security. Now, with the passage of time, we look back and see it as a shameful chapter of American history. President Gerald Ford rescinded the Executive Order that imprisoned us. President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for the unjust imprisonment. President George H.W. Bush signed the redress payment checks to the survivors. It was a tragic and dark taint on American history.
With time, I know the opposition to same sex marriage, too, will be seen as an antique and discreditable part of our history. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked on same sex marriage, “Times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper, in fact, serve only to oppress.”
For now, Brad and I are enjoying the delicious dilemma of deciding where, when, and how we will be married. Marriage equality took a long time, but, like fine wine, its bouquet is simply exquisite.

George Takei

Yeah, the haters are already working to overturn everything, but this is still really, really cool.

I can see why two people, both of whom happen to be of the same gender, being in love together for a really long time in a committed relationship would be so threatening to the Christian conservatives that they’d be outraged about this, you know? Everyone knows that only straight people can have that kind of relationship.

Right?

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So I finally broke through the barrier and got a new credit card! Not a secured one, an actual credit card with Credit One Bank. They’re not actually a bank, and the card itself is probably the shittiest card in credit card history, but it’s got MY name on it, and it’s got a tiny adorable little $200 credit limit, and it’s something I’ve been waiting for for many, many moons so that I can finally start putting some positives on what for over a decade has been a very negative credit rating.

I just spent about a half-hour staring at my account on their website and all the lovely $0.00 notations that appeared today under “balance due” - I paid the thing in full on Friday and spent an anxious weekend checking it roughly every 13 seconds to make sure that the payment posted. When I got the “preapproved” offer for the card in the mail a couple weeks ago I was extremely skeptical, but leapt at the chance to finally have a real live credit card again because for about three months now I’ve been trying to get a card again. My credit this summer finally went from “omfg no” to “no credit history” because all the bad stuff has finally dropped off. I knew it was just a matter of time before someone said “well, okay…we’ll take a chance on you,” but had had no luck and didnt want a secured card.

Then this offer came in the mail and I checked them out and yeah, the company is horrible, but this is where you start over, and I’m okay with that. This is where you begin, reestablish, and then move on to better cards with better companies. And it was pretty funny reading up on them because Credit One has a terrible reputation. Shocking, I know. But I noticed as I was reading that the loudest complaints seem to be coming from the folks who were bad credit risks, got the card, and continued to fuck around by making payments either late or so close to the deadline that they were doomed to be late, or shit like that.

Now I’ve got no doubt that this company is awful and that any problems with them are bound to be magnified by a factor of about a million when compared to dealing with a far more reputable credit card company (if there are any - sounds like an oxymoron to me), but the thing that worried me was I saw a couple people had made payments online and didnt see them posted for 14 days, or so they said. So that kind of scared the shit out of me and that’s why I was camping the online statement for three days. I honestly didnt think it would post today, being Veteran’s Day and all, but it did, and I’m all about the YIPPIEEEE!

I paid it through my checking account so I’d not only have the Credit One confirmation numbers but my bank would have a record of the payment, too, and Credit One can’t turn around and tell me they never got it. Since I dont trust the company, I’m being super cautious, but really, now that I see they even posted on a holiday and I’ve already been through the process once now, I am going to go with the belief that as long as I make a payment the day I get the statement, it’ll be posted within a few days, never even go near the “due by” date, and I’ll be fine.

I monitor my credit reports carefully now, and I saw yesterday that Credit One has reported a new account to all three credit bureaus, just like they said they would. So that’s great, too. And in six or eight or 12 months from now, when I have months of unbroken, on time, more-than-minimum payments every single month, I’ll be able to tag one of the better companies and see if they’ll give me a better card, and get rid of this one and its four million percent APR, compounded six times daily and twice extra on Sunday.

Why am I telling you this? Because the day I got that card it was like a prison door opened in my life. It is my Next Chance at a Fresh Start. And I know that I’m going to do great with it because the only reason I got screwed in the first place was because I got laid off and couldn’t pay the bills and they wouldn’t allow me to enroll in the credit protection thingie even when I told the companies about the pending layoffs I was facing more than 90 days in advance. But up until the day I got laid off, I was paying about double the monthly minimum on all three credit cards I had at the time, and was doing extremely well with them and building a pretty good credit rating as a result. And that was on a significantly lower income than I have now. So I know that I can do extremely well with this thing, especially since it’s only a $200 limit, and I can’t really get into trouble with that. And even so, I enrolled in the credit protection thingie anyway. Never again will I be that fucking stupid and not enroll in the credit protection thingie.

So yeah, I got that card in the mail and actually had it out sitting on my desk, propped up against my monitor for about two days before I carefully and lovingly tucked it into my wallet. I couldnt stop staring at it. It is only a small rectangle of silver plastic, but for me, the incredibly significant meaning of this little card makes it completely transcend what it is to most people. I can’t stop thinking about it, I can’t stop staring at it, I can’t stop checking that stupid account page on their website and grinning cheesily as I gaze at that lovely, lovely $0.00 balance. And I’m cogitating very, very carefully what I want to buy first with it.

I was thinking maybe this and this. They have a buy them both and get a deal thing going for them on Amazon.com. But then there’s also this, which is enormously tempting, as well. And then there’s this. And this is also awesome.

And then, of course, almost (but not quite) everything on this list here is extremely tempting, but I do have to go through and update it with the newer stuff that’s come out since I built that list.

This is all just so exciting.

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In one exchange, which apparently took place after MTV News’ allotted hour was up (media outlets were only allowed to remain at the Q&A for a specified hour), Rowling told the audience that Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay and had fallen in love with fellow wizard and erstwhile friend, Gellert Grindelwald, according to the Associated Press and Potter fan site the Leaky Caudron. The crowd cheered, leading Rowling to say:

“If I had known this would have made you this happy, I would have told you years ago.”

I cheered when I read it, too. I knew it, I knew it! How TOTALLY awesome is this!? And he was outed at Carnegie Hall, too. Fantastic.

Man, I love Jo Rowling. And now I’m even more pissed off at her for killing him off.

MTV Article from whence the above quote came.

Link to Google news cache for topic.

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No, no, I mean President Gore…you know, the guy we actually elected a few years back? Yeah, him.

Gore shares Nobel Peace Prize with U.N. panel - CNN.com

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So I was doing a gewgles on rats and incense (dont ask), and lookie these neato bits I found!

Smoking Incense Bottles

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