My humanity is up by nine points in Turtle Country, according to the latest Washington Post poll on the referendum that would extend the right of civil marriage to same-sex couples.  The poll of likely voters shows that 52% intend to vote yes on Question 6, while 43% say they don’t have a homophobic bone in their bodies but are pretty sure the Lord God Almighty thinks that Edith Windsor should have had to pay $363,053 in federal estate tax after her partner of 44 years, Thea Spyer, died in 2009. Wow, who knew the Lord was such a micromanager?

My humanity is also leading in Washington state, by the way, and doing well in Maine. Things are little shakier in Minnesota, but it’s possible my humanity will prevail even there, depending on turnout and how the undecideds go. No lead is comfortable, of course, because the…

Originally written February, 2012

Today I’m celebrating sixth months of foreskin restoration, if you want to call a passing thought a celebration. But yeah, 6 months into the big stretch and I’m happy to report things are going well.

In a bitter-sweet sort of way, I’ve achieved semi-consistent accumulation of smegma resulting in the head of my penis becoming smoother and having a healthier colour than before.

Sex is more satisfying in ways I didn’t anticipate. As I said before, oral sex, for me, was a ho-hum affair. I appreciated the gesture, but the excitement really came from the act of it all and not so much the actual skin on skin sensations. I had read how much more satisfying things became after shedding some of that calloused skin, which it has, but what really surprised me was what I was feeling further down the shaft past the head.

It…

At some point in our lives, we find ourselves with energetic and spiritual bonds to people, places, and things that don’t serve us anymore. Maybe we’ve had a breakup, or are moving to a new location, or giving away an item that has a lot of sentimental value.

Sometimes these bonds are even created without our knowledge or consent. If you find yourself thinking about a person, place, or thing on a regular basis, it may be that somehow you’ve formed a bond with it. I find, in working with clients, that sometimes traumatic events that we ruminate over, or items lost in a tragedy (like a house fire), or people that we dislike but spend too much time and energy disliking them, all of these things can lead to an psychic tie merely through repetitive action. I mean, that’s how beneficial ties are formed too – we spend time…

At some point in your teen years, you come to the realization that you want everyone to like you. You might be willing to change your clothes, your interests, the kinds of music you listen to, in hopes that you’ll become more palatable to the peers you’ve decided matter the most to you. For some people, this feeling never goes away, and they spend their lives doing whatever they can to show the peer group they wish to be integrated with that they are already a member – just look at the car they drive, or the hobbies they engage in, or the way they dress.

There are others; there are those who make the harder decision to just stick to whatever they like, and they don’t really care if all the cliques ignore them or make fun of them. In the digital age, it’s likely they can find friends…