The Demographics of Gay Marriage

This Sunday's Time brought us the story "Gay Couples, Choosing to Say I Don't," which featured some cute couples with whom I am quite sympathetic.   They are all couples of the Times Style Section persuasion, meaning wealthy and well educated.  The demographics of gay married people are so in flux that it would be hard to make any substantive arguments, but that probably won't stop people from trying. 

It's been clear for a while that among straight marrieds, wealthy and middle-income people get married and low income people do not.  I'm not sure that pattern will hold among the newly marrying gays.  When they marry, low-income straights may experience a marriage penalty in the form of loss of benefits, without any tangible advantages.  In contrast, even low income gays may calculate that the family protections offered through marriage (and for some newly available insurance benefits for gay spouses) outweigh any losses.  Those same marriage protections may not seem as pressing to higher income gay couples, who can create legal protections with a good (expensive) lawyer.  So for lower-income gay couples marriage is a poor man's lawyer, while for wealthy gays not marrying is a cheap pre-nup.

Flip this House: Vacants Edition

My parents brought down my old dollhouse to refurbish for LB.  It was made back in the early '80s by a neighbor with a hobby business.  It's been through a few moves and sat in an attic for close to 25 years, hence a busted window and some missing shutters.  It was also very dirty and it has a lot of peeling contact paper on the floors and walls.  I pulled up the attic fake-wood contact paper to reveal real wood!

I'm thinking I'd like to repaint it light blue with white trim and a gray roof like our house, and then do some new paint and paper on the inside.  I don't know what I'm going to do about the missing shutters, it's not like I have a wood shop available to fabricate tiny shutters.  I was thinking maybe I could try to match them with sculpey.  LB is still in destructacon mode, so I'm trying to stay sturdy rather than fussy.  Maybe when she's older she'll want to redo it herself and do the stuff I did, making little rugs and such.

Dark Mark

We got the slicked-back blond hair and the dark mark, but LB won't have anything to do with her Hogwarts robe or tie, and while she likes her wand, it turns out that it isn't the best accessory for a crowd of preschoolers. 

Debt Watch

It's the post-season, so B is cracking her knuckles and muttering curses at the tv.  That's how I feel about Congress.  No one around here seems very concerned, but I'm still recovering from the trauma of 2008.  We don't have a home, and have only the smallest of retirement investments, so we didn't lose much.  But the memory of sitting in a drafty room filled with rumors of layoffs and hearing the Dean tell us briskly that "the trustees think you're overcompensated," isn't easy to forget.

Recession shaped the trajectory of my adult life.  My dad got laid off my senior year of high school.  I had plenty of skills doing the work that you do when you grow up in a tourist town; cleaning hotel rooms, washing dishes, and making sandwiches (best teen job in town-hostess, worst teen job in town-fish processing plant).  By the time I moved to Boston in 1990, you had to know someone to get any kind of terrible job, which is how I got mine.

Work it out Congress, work it out.

Happy First People's Day!

In celebration of Colonialism Day, we went to New Bedford, MA to eat some Portuguese food and have a look around.  New Bedford is an interesting town.  Economically, it's definitely seen better times, although back in its heyday of drunken sailors reeling through the town it was probably more seedy than quaint.  The historic part of the city is lovely and silent, while all the action, good and bad, happens in the immigrant periphery.

The Portuguese food was just okay.  It's interesting how our tastes are formed throughout life.  I like fancy ("authentic") regional Italian food, but I also like the red-sauce Italian American food of my childhood restaurants (my grandmother learned to "cook Italian" from her neighbor, which meant ketchup on Prince elbows).  The foods of the Iberian Peninsula were not part of my childhood, just grad school nights in mid-priced tapas (pronounced with the aggressive TH) bars.  Our lunch was the Portuguese version of red-sauce Italian American, and it was just okay.

Then we went to the little New Bedford Oceanarium, and it was perfect for LB.

We spent most of our time hanging out by the tank with rays and little sharks, and LB had fun putting her hands in the water and getting splashed by rays.

Since We've Been Gone

We've missed a few internet cultural controversies.

As you can see, it's not that we only eat Barilla pasta, we also eat Crisco and graham crackers.  I'm going to be really sad when this pasta is gone.  Note to self: in the future buy preferred products by the case in case offensive comments require boycott.

[missing: pic of our pantry with lots of Barilla and also a tub of Crisco.]

At least we're putting those graham crackers to good use.

And of course, it's the post-season.

LB's been working out, who knew our baby could do this!

And checking out the scene at the park.

"It's 5 o'clock somewhere"

Or so the radio tells me.  So why shouldn't we be the proud owners of a novelty wine glass that says "Mommy's Sippy Cup"?  This glass was a present for B, which just happened to arrive as as LB has added a three year old's capacity for screaming and hitting to a 2 year old's rage and lack of emotional regulation.  Is it wrong to drink Wild Turkey from a wine glass?

B is off playing softball with homosexuals, while LB and I work through our issues.  We had a successful outing for muffins and coffee, everyone loves a child with messy hair and a stuffed bear, and LB only peed on the ground after we were outside.

Moments of bliss, toddler jokes, toddler kisses, toddler games are interspersed with torturous bouts of screaming.  I was thinking the other day about the lack of lesbian mom/twee perfection blogs.  Which is not to say that lesbians don't have lovely children and homes, and sometimes create etsy worthy crafts, but I can't think of any aesthetically-perfect-parenting blogs by lesbians.  Am I missing out?  Maybe is just that there aren't many (any?) highly monetized gay mommy blogs?

Services, Services, Services: The Update Edition

It's been a week of work, and vomiting, and meetings, with just a little bit of the rage virus added in for good measure.  I finished my freelance job, and God willing, I will be paid some day.  I'm excited to be back to blogging now that I have a minute or two of free time. 

Hump day brought our IEP eligibility meeting.  Not good my friends.  I guess I've know for a long time that I find negativity highly motivating, but this meeting really brought it home.  I can't remember the last time I was in a room with such a bunch of unprofessional hacks, and I'm not even going to qualify that with any excuses about how they must have hard jobs or how they have to work within a broken system.  There is no excuse for what I saw in that room.

I'm taking the details straight to the ombsbudsperson for the school system.  The short version is that they were about to formally deny LB services, when I pulled a bureaucratic maneuver that forced the school team to throw out all of their findings and start over.  It was definitely a strange moment.  [Insert warfare or card playing metaphor here.]  Even though we kept them from getting what they wanted (a closed case), I left the building feeling dirty.  I want to believe in public education, and it sucks to see in action those people who ruin it for everyone: certainly for students and their parents, but also for the good educators in the system, who have to see their efforts to actually educate children constantly thwarted by people who are there to play the game and collect a check.

It's going to be a long 16 years.

66 to Galilee

I don't know where it goes, but that's the bus that went by as I was walking to work.

Blogging on hiatus as I really, really try to finish my freelance job.