Coffee

My mother has always drank coffee. When I was a child, coffee makers were expensive, so she drank instant coffee. Bitter 1980s Folgers crystals, mixed much too strong and then nuked in the microwave until burnt, and she drank it black. To this day she is never without her coffee cup, and although she now uses an actual coffee maker, she still drinks bad coffee. She makes her morning pot around 6:30 am and drinks half of it, then turns off the warmer and goes to work. At noon she comes home for lunch, pours herself a cup of old, cold, coffee and nukes it, and drinks a couple cups that way. At 4:00 she does the same thing to the dregs in the bottom of the pot before making herself a new pot. And half the time she forgets the cup in the microwave and has to reheat it all over again. It's oily, bitter, and leaves a film of dust in the mug. It's disgusting.

When I was 15 or so, I decided I was going to become a coffee drinker, to establish myself as an adult. After a couple swallows of my mother's coffee, even fresh brewed, I went back to Mountain Dew as my caffeine source of choice.

When I was 20, in 1997, the coffee shop, Seattle, Starbucks, Central Perk, giant cappuccino mug movement was in full swing and I took a second job, at a coffee shop. This particular coffee shop was a lunch-break haven for yuppies during the day and a beat-poet 20-somethings hangout at night. To this day I equate acoustic guitars and paperback copies of On The Road with mocha lattes made with Hershey syrup. I discovered that in a 2 to 1 ration of steamed milk, I could tolerate coffee. I even learned how to make Turkish coffee, although the grounds always bothered me. But then I got pregnant and, as a single mother, exotic coffee drinks were suddenly out of my price range. Back to the Mountain Dew.

Now I'm 33, and I have to wake up to get my 11 year old daughter off to school and care for my one year old son, and Mountain Dew costs $5.00 a 12 pack. And, the same daughter whose very existence made espresso drinks a thing of the past bought me an espresso machine for Christmas a couple years back. I still use Hershey syrup, and I now microwave the milk rather than steaming it (steaming it took so long the espresso got cold and the tiny tank on the machine ran out of water), but I now start my mornings with a giant insulated mug of coffee. Hell, today I had two. I can't drink it past noon or I'll be up all night; pregnancy plus a year of breast feeding hath robbed me of my Mountain Dew induced caffeine tolerance. And my husband detests the smell or taste of coffee on my breath. But I have finally, finally, achieved the adult coffee-drinker status I wanted in high school, now that I would love to be mistaken for a teenager once again. How ironic.

Actually, it fits pretty well

I saw an article titled, "Gay Christian Network Is A Bit of A Miracle" and it made me think. Why is it such a miracle that gays could be Christian, or that some Christians might be okay with gays? So I thought about it and I realized that Christians today tend to be assholes, at least the loud ones do. I mean, Jesus, what little I know of him, was a pretty cool guy. he was progressive. He said, "Don't worry about all the little rules and all the stuff God said he hated, just be a good person and treat people well and suck it up when life craps on you and you'll be rewarded later for it." He said, "Don't morally judge people. Leave that to God. Don't pull rank you don't have." Of course, I'm paraphrasing, but that's the jist of it. We are the kids in this deal; God is the parent. And just the same way I don't let my daughter hand out punishment to my son, because she's his equal and not in authority, we should not be speaking for God.

God works in mysterious ways. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than you can conceive of. These are both ways of saying that we're not able to get it. We don't have the mental capacity to know what God wants or why he does stuff or what it all means. Just because we can come up with a reason for straight people and not one for gay people doesn't mean there isn't a reason, just that it might take a mind better than ours to grasp it. God made gay people, and cross-dressers, and fetishists, and transsexuals, and flamboyant musical theater costume designers who against all odds actually turn out to be straight. We don't have to know why He made them. We don't even have to know if He had a reason for making them. All we have to do is withhold judgment, try not to stare because that would be rude, and trust that He knows what He's doing and doesn't need us umping up to help all the time. Nobody likes a kissass, and I assume it's the same with the man upstairs. You worry about your work and let the others worry about theirs.

And as long as the gay couple down the street pay their taxes, mow their lawn, keep their stereo turned to a decent volume, and close the curtains before they shower or fight, it has nothing to do with their neighbors. You don't have to approve of everything they do; you're not that important. But if they live a good and honest life and try to bring good to the wold and not bad, then they're following that Jesus told us to do more than a lot of folks are.

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" . . . Remember he was actually stopping a whore's criminal sentence from being carried out when he said that.

My father was a slut. Not an indiscriminate slut, and not indiscreet enough that I heard about it at school or anything, but he got around. And, I later found out, he coincidentally broke up with a woman who had a baby 8 months later who (also coincidentally) grew up to look exactly frigging like him. And that guy hates me because, somehow, I am to blame for his dad not being his dad and his entire life being a lie handed to him by his mother. Or more likely I'm just a reminder of it all, but still it sucks to get the blame. And that guy married a girl I went to school with and she went to the high school reunion tonight and they sat at the table right next to mine, with the original long-haired pizza boy. And the first maybe-brother guy worked at the pizza place too, so Oh Boy, didn't Tom have fun teasing me about the pizza boy "restraining order table".

And the people I went there to see, the asshole jocks who never turned out to be anything, didn't show. Jackasses. But I did find out that I may get an address I have wanted for a long time. I am nervous and excited, and I will write more later.