Scatter Plots, cont: Fudging the Data

Okay, so in my previous post I basically pulled the rug out from under a few (vaguely) identified people in the original Laramie Project in order to show one thing: this play represents the university side of the social divide a lot more heavily than it does any other.  I guess that the next question would be this:  does this matter?

In one important way, it does.  And in one important way, it doesn't.  That's what I'd like to go through with you today. Before we go on, though, I'd like to beg your attention to one thing:  you can't read this post alone because you'll get a distorted view of my opinion.  Definitely read the next two posts too, so you can get the full picture.

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Now that I'll tell ya, here in Laramie there is a difference and there always has been.  What it is is a class distinction.  It's about the well-educated and the ones that are not.  And the educated don't understand why the ones that are not don't get educated.

--Marge Murray in TLP (2000): 16

Henderson and Pasley live in a rural, windswept trailer park amid weeds, engine parts, fishing tackle, and barking dogs. A neighbor, John Gillham, 21, said the couple generally kept to themselves.

About a thousand people attended a candlelight vigil Sunday night near the University of Wyoming campus to show their support for Shepard.

-- AP Online report, Oct. 12, 1998

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Just past First Street in Laramie there is a huge railway switching station that divides the town in two; it's enormous, with the parallel tracks stacked up for at least the width of a city block.  Alison Mears and Marge Murray talk about their own connection to the rail yard in detail.  My own connection to the yard is a little different. I used to spend a lot of time out there when I was a freshman; there's a catwalk that goes over the tracks right next to Coal Creek Coffee Company, and I used to stand on that bridge to watch the trains go by so I could clear my head. Those tracks literally divide the town into two stations, the well-heeled university town and the proverbial "wrong side" of the tracks, West Laramie.

West Laramie used to be the housing block for railroad workers, mechanics and day-laborers, and the houses can be small, gentrified and shabby.   In reality, the distinction is more metaphorical than anything; some of the apartments that the university and Tech students rent on the east side get pretty run-down, too (Laramie has a bit of a college housing problem), but that's not the identity stuck on the other side of town.  For me, the tracks delineate that divide between "town and gown" in Laramie fairly effectively: the university represents wealth, intellectualism and (to the town people) class snobbery and intellectual elitism, and West Laramie represents poverty, conservatism and (to the university) social disorder, intolerance and ignorance. 

So, how bad is that divide between "town and gown" in Laramie?  Well, it's pretty distinct, and the angst on both sides can be bitter.   To be straight with you, this distinction is one I've struggled with for most of my career.  The phrase "oil field trash" might not mean much to you, but it does to me.  My father was a roustabout for an oil company most of my life.  When I got to college, I found out that my lived experience as the daughter of said oil company field hand didn't fit in with most of my white-collar, middle-class classmates and teachers, and I burned with anger every time I heard someone at the college talk about the laboring classes as "those people" or "ignorant" or "trash."  In reality, my father reads more, and reads more closely, than most of the grad students I've met-- and he's also a better poet.   When a beloved and revered professor of mine referred apologetically to my family as "white trash,"  I had to fight not to burst into tears of rage.  This divide hits a little too close to home for me. 

It's also a divide that has split my family.  When I lived in Laramie, both my siblings at some point were living in West Laramie while I lived on the campus, as my brother dropped out of college for personal reasons and my sister was working as a foreman for a traffic control subcontractor.   Our daily lives looked nothing alike, and since I was fulfilling my parents' aspirations for a college grad in the family and they weren't, my parents unfairly preferred me to them.  And, since they felt the bite of that class antagonism that they perceived coming from the campus, they often saw me as part of the same society and bit back.  My sister was convinced for a while that I judged her because she worked construction and her job was "dirty."  My brother constantly got into verbal sparring contests with me to prove that he was smarter than I was (although I've never questioned that).  Although it took several years of hard work on both sides, this rift has healed quite a bit.  In addition, my sister now holds a degree of her own and my brother is back in college; knowing how hard they've both fought to get there, I'm super-proud of them both.

So, that's how I've experienced this divide between "town" and "gown."  This same kind of tension between myself and my own siblings eventually turned into part of the problem after the Shepard beating: Matt was a college kid from a wealthy family, the "gown" side of the debate if you will.  Henderson and McKinney were from the other side of the tracks in the west, part of the "town."  The distinction couldn't have been scripted any better to create class anxiety.  And, since I don't feel like Tectonic was able to break in to the "town" side very effectively, it might actually exacerbate the situation a little bit.  I'm worried that the "town" feels like that the "gown" is judging them for their faults, something that I've outlined a little already in "Failure to Engage."

These non-identified people-- Lockwood, Woods, and Slonaker--  speak at crucial moments in the play, and to important changes in the community.  Lockwood realizes through the media slam that the community's ideals breed violence (46); Woods sees his dream of support for the gay community come true (63-64).  And Slonaker?  Well... he's Slonaker.  He's our voice of reason almost, the universal gay male experience who can stand back and look at the progress of the community critically, exploding its myths. 

Whether or not you see these characters as "inside" or "outside" the university can make a lot of difference.  For example, here's a little trick I like to play on my students: I have them put together a character sketch of Harry Woods based upon the information given in their edition of the play in preparation for acting his part.  I have them map out his position in the community and his acceptance within it, his career, life experience-- some students even go so far as to speculate where he got that broken leg and who they'd recruit to play his part.  The results are pretty stunning.  Every single group except for two (both extremely skeptical) placed him on the extreme edge of the Laramie society with no community where he finds acceptance, and he's in the laboring class, and that broken leg is often a work injury.  (One group even put him in a plaid shirt and jeans, which of course made me giggle.)  When I tell them that he's an actor and staff of the Fine Arts department, the characterization completely changes, mostly because they realize that he has a community in which he feels accepted and can find fulfillment. Then, I'm afraid, their characterizations of Harry become a tad less sympathetic.  

So, naturally, my students come up with a completely different character sketch of that dour-faced fellow I'd see in the Fine Arts building almost every week before my Wind Ensemble rehearsal.  Actors who play Harry run into the same thing, apparently.  I had the privilege to chat with the actor who played both Jed Schultz and Harry Woods from the 2006 production of TLP after the show, and I asked him how he constructed a character for Harry.  (It wasn't too far afield of my students' analysis).  Then I told him who Harry was, and he was really surprised; when I asked him if he would have portrayed Harry differently if he'd known his occupation, this actor said, "Heck yeah.  That really changes things."  He then told me how he believed that knowledge altered Harry's placement in the community and whom he speaks for. 

So is this a problem, I ask again?  I've already outlined how it is a problem in the way it exacerbates the class antagonism in Laramie.  If you're a Laramie resident and you know that these enlightened and more judgmental opinions are coming from the university (like so much of the rest of the play), this play really could feel like just another attack by the intellectuals on the mores of the society at large.  I can only imagine that people like my siblings, who know who Harry Woods is (and didn't like him) would have listened to Harry give his lines back then and reject what he has to say because of whom they think he represents.  In their minds, Harry doesn't represent them.  He represents others.  And covering up that fact in the play to them would just feel like deception. 

So, did Tectonic realize this problem?  Belber says they did, and that's part of why (I think) these people labeled as "residents" aren't identified by occupation like most of the other interviewees are.  I see a need on their part to have more of a universal voice for certain opinions-- like Jeff Lockwood's realization that "we really do grow children like that here"  and Harry Wood's relief and gratitude at seeing the cold war between straight and gay thaw a little at the homecoming parade.  They really needed those opinions to come from the community as a whole and not just from university professors and actors.  So that's what they became-- Laramie residents.  They flattened out the specificity of these people to remove their "gown" association on the "town and gown" conflict to make them, as Laramie residents, speak for the whole community and not just a part.  They effectively hide it.

So there's a really good reason to want to provide that kind of class anonymity for some voices, and that's what I'd like to look at in my final post on this topic.

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PHOTO CREDITS:

1)  The footbridge  across the tracks, Laramie WY, courtesy elmada's Flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/elmada/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

2)  Looking north from the footbridge, courtesy elmada's Flickr photostream (same license as above.)  

3)  Coal Creek Coffee Company in Laramie, WY, courtesy elmada's Flickr photostream (same license as above.)

4)  The Laramie rail yard, courtesy of ChiaLynn's Flickr Photostream: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/artoftheodd/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

A Picture of Innocence

Right next to the amphitheater where the preachers had their four hour preach-a-thon and I protested them last week is a large pedestrian walkway running between the library and the Humanities building.  This morning as I strolled down the sidewalk I ran into a kindergarten class of about a dozen five year-olds and their teachers doodling all over the sidewalk. After three weeks of adults screaming at each other in the quad just a stone's throw away, the kids and their play seemed to dispel the gloom from the place.  I stopped to get a few shots of their artwork, which I just wanted to share with you. 

Anyhow, here's a picture of our visitors making the campus a better place to live.  The kindergartners left a huge mess of sidewalk chalk drawings on the pedestrian walkway for us to admire, and they never failed to get a smile from the college students as they hurried to their final classes down the street.

But even more importantly, they brought a good example.   In the middle of those kids being being perfectly normal children, hoarding chalk, complaining to their teachers, and covering themselves in smudges, there were these two sharing their chalk with a smile.  I loved how this photo turned out with a little Photoshop magic:

Humanity looks a whole lot better with a child's touch, no?  Enjoy!

Make your Own WBC Protest Sign... um, really?

Obviously, I've been thinking about protests lately, first from the side of the spectator, and now from the side of the protester.  As I was cruising about on Flickr, I ran into this beauty.

If you're wanting to push the boundaries of taste, a few extremely imaginative counter-protesters have created a website where you can create your own WBC counter-protest.

It works a lot like the lol-style caption sites-- just type in a phrase and create your own protest sign in a variety of Phelps-approved color schemes.

As I look at this, I am both appalled and yet somehow thrilled.  The Flickr photostream for the image above has other pictures of this same fellow protesting the WBC with some rather funny signs. My favorite?  His friend is holding a sign that says "Mikey hates everything."  Enjoy (if you can!)

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PHOTO CREDIT:

Picture by Sir EDW, available through Creative Commons License: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sir_edw/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Scatter Plots: Of Angst and Ethnography

In the beginning of The Laramie Project, one of the company members, Amanda Gronich, expresses a little bit of dismay at the task in front of them:"I've never done anything like this in my life.  How do you get people to talk to you?  What do you ask?" (10).   She's got a valid point.  I suppose that most people think it's a simple matter of just walking up to somebody and asking a few questions, but I'm getting  a better idea of how hard doing that can actually be.  The kind of information you get from an interview depends heavily upon the kind of relationship that the interviewer and interviewee have built between each other, and most subjects are reluctant to volunteer intimate details or make themselves vulnerable to a person whom they don't trust.  In a sense, they were working with the wrong model; they kept talking about themselves as acting like journalists, but some of them (Belber, at the very least) unconsciously start acting more like ethnographers.  Belber, for instance, is painfully aware of his relationship to the people he interviews.  That's part of what pleases me about Tectonic Theater: the kinds of conversations they managed to have with some of these people hints at the creation of a close and trusting relationship between themselves and their interviewees, and they managed to do that in just six visits. 

But how do you get people to talk to you?  I have a very good friend here at the university who is a graduate student in RWL.  Her main emphasis is composition and pedagogy with an ethnographic focus, and she's very interested in academically studying how students from her own cultural background learn how to negotiate in a college environment.  I watched her comb our campus and other colleges in the area trying to find undergraduates who wanted to be interviewed, but after months of fruitless effort, unanswered phone calls and IRB limitations, she had to scrap her original topic for something else.  Now she's drawing her study subjects from among friends and colleagues who fit within the same demographic. 

My friend "Colleen" has been heavily trained in the techniques, ethics and processes of ethnographic inquiry, and even she couldn't break in to the undergraduates' lives enough to convince them to speak to her.  She's even an "insider"; she comes from the same background as these students.  So she had to back up a little and work with people she could count on and who were already comfortable talking with her.  She needed to find people whom she could trust and could also trust her, and that took a prior relationship.

So, what does this have to do with The Laramie Project?  Quite a bit, actually.  "Colleen" discovered how hard it was to break into the lives of a community of people (in her case, college undergraduates) without prior connections; I anticipate that Tectonic had the same problems when they approached a hurting and traumatized community very much aware of how outsiders saw them. 

A little food for thought...

I just wanted to share another one of nothingprofound's aphorisms with you from his blog Out of Context that seems rather apt for the week I have just endured:

You either love what's broken or you don't love.

So true, man.  So freaking true... 

Jackrabbit vs. the Street Preacher

Being a Day in the Life of a Conservative, Straight, Evangelical Fledgling LGBT Activist, 

Part 3

A NOTE TO LINKBACKS:  It has recently come to my attention that a blog for fundamentalist street preachers has linked to this post, for which I commend them (especially because no one yet has scribbled their anathemas in the Comment box).  However, if you want to understand why I have such serious reservations about this form of spreading the Gospel message, you really should read the post linked here, not just the one below. The choice is naturally yours, but I hope you find your experience here both convicting and spiritually edifying nonetheless...

~~Jackrabbit

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Well, better late than never, I guess...  Our "friends" (pictured at right,) the fundamentalist, cultish street preachers finally showed up on campus again this week, so my "Protest in a Box" riding around in the back of my car finally got used.  I was heading out for lunch from our library at about eleven thirty when I saw their big, ugly yellow sign cresting over the top of the amphitheater hill, and my heart sank all the way down to the toes of my clogs.  Damn, I thought, I'm actually going to have to do this after all.  I ran for a quick bite of food so I wouldn't pass out before four o'clock, threw the rest in the fridge at my job, and ran off to the far side of campus to cart 120 LOVE signs and paraphernalia back to the quad.  By the time I got back, the hate preachers were in full force, and I suddenly went from wet-my-pants terrified to extremely determined, which was totally a God thing.  I started by working the crowd with my big yellow signs, handing them out to anybody who wanted one, and then stood on the top of the amphitheater in the middle of the quad with a huge LOVE poster.  After about twenty minutes, I started getting in reinforcements from two equally wonderful and equally supportive groups: the LGBTA and the Christian ministry community.  They both offered me a lot of support, one of them offered me an iced mocha coffee (for which I am eternally grateful, dude!) and they all grabbed signs and stood in resistance to these guys' bad press for Jesus.  Man, I can't begin to explain how much I love both of these communities.  Now if I can just get them to talk to each other...

One thing I wanted to do as a part of my personal protest was to wear a yellow arm-band.  Since I'm a little bit chicken-livered in the face of conflict, I wanted a reminder to myself why I had to do this, so my reminder was my friend James (the one who committed suicide back in 2006, which I've talked about before.)  That was my personal kick in the butt to realize how important it was to speak back to these guys' hate, especially because they were singling out gays and lesbians for particular abuse.  A few people asked me about it during the afternoon, so I was able to share with them about James' story and why I felt speaking up against a legalistic concept of God was so important.  One of the girls I ran into was herself a depression survivor, and she had a beautiful story about being led out of despair through the kind of loving intervention that I wish James had found.  (And, if you've never heard of "To Write Love on Her Arms," you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to check them out.)   

Anyhow, I stood out in the Appalachian sun for two and a half hours holding my big sign, passing out LOVE signs to other people, and just chatting with others about what they were saying and what we felt about it.  The protest generated a lot of conversation-- and very positive, open conversation-- between people of all sorts of faiths, politics and cultural communities.  That's what I felt like was the biggest success of the whole thing.  By the end of the afternoon, I had handed out all but about twenty of the 100 signs I had printed, and I only got back three of the fifteen yellow board signs I had painted-- and those had passed through several sets of hands over the course of the afternoon. 

The preachers, of course, were rather pissed about the whole thing, but, the more I think about it, when a reasonable, loving Christian tried to dialogue with these guys, one the preachers told him he was the "Spawn of Satan," so who cares what they think?  One guy kept trying to interfere with us by stationing himself next to my sign-station with a pile of tracts, but I just moved it on him, and one of the campus ministers stood by to fend him off.  Then the banner guy (pictured above) started wandering the crowds next to my little LOVElies trying to get something stirred up.  He did one thing that really pissed me off though: when a girl in a very short plaid skirt bent over to talk to her friends, he pulled out a camera and basically up-skirted her.  He did all this while wearing a "no porn" button on his shirt.  I found this very interesting for a man who claimed that he had stopped sinning the moment he accepted Jesus...  grrrr.  This is exactly what God meant in Ezekiel when He says that he'll judge the religious by their own standards of righteousness, which will be more than enough send them straight to perdition. 
 
The strangest thing was that the first of the three preachers tried so hard to incorporate our signs into his sermon and preach on love.  But, having never spent any real time with the Bible studying the nature of God's love, he just absolutely hashed the whole thing up and didn't make any sense.  For him, God is some sort of ultimate taskmaster whom we can only please by good behavior; loving God for His goodness, and Him loving us out of His goodness, seems to never have occurred to him.  That may have been the most powerful message anybody got out of the whole protest-- that he didn't know what love was.

"YOUR love is just a glandular feeling," he shouted at us.  "It's not real love.  Your kind of love will send you to HELL!"  At that point, an co-ed on the quad pulled a wry face. 
"What does that mean, a 'glandular feeling'?" She asked me incredulously.  I couldn't help myself.
"I think that it's sort of a squishing sensation,"  I replied back, scrunching my fingers together to illustrate.  She roared with laughter.  Then I went around handing out a few more signs. 

So, what did I learn?  I discovered that there are a LOT of Christians on campus who want to speak up and give a more loving response to the world than what creeps like this are up to, but they're scared.  All they need is a little gumption and somebody to tell them it's okay to do it.   I think we get so freaked out about protecting our "witness" that we forget to witness.  I lost count of the number of Christians who came up to me to tell me how badly they had wanted to do this.  Oh, and those two ministers I was so unsure about on Monday?.... as it turns out, I was totally wrong about them.  They showed up and held signs.  And they didn't care a whit who was straight, who was gay, or who was atheist.  They came as Christians who wanted to support the campus community, and I was so proud of them.  I think I owe those two fellas a huge apology sometime. 

I also learned, for the upteenth time, how loving, supportive, and open the GLBT community can be in the face of oppression.  My favorite part of the protest was about thirty minutes in, when a much beloved professor of my acquaintance (and herself a member of the GLBT community) came bounding up the hill just to get a sign with this look of pure joy on her face.  She had seen me holding my sign from her office window.  She couldn't stay for the protest, but since her office was directly in sight of the protest area, she hung the sign out of her office window in support of all of us.  

Every time the preachers would yell something that made me wince, I'd look up to the fifth floor of the Humanities building, see that yellow LOVE sign glowing in the afternoon sunlight on her window, and I'd smile.  So, until next time:

"If I have a faith that can move mountains and have not love,
I am nothing." 

--the apostle Paul, 1 Cor. 13:2

Same Planet, Different worlds

Being a Day in the Life of a Straight, Conservative Evangelical Fledgling LGBT Activist, 

Part 2

My oh my, what a week this has turned into.  I shared with you already about the crazy street preachers who showed up on our campus and started screaming at everybody last week.  Sometime Wednesday afternoon I was struck with an overwhelming conviction to protest these guys.  It was such a strong conviction that I felt it had to be wrong.  But, no, God was definitely nudging me to do something about it.  And the more I looked into these guys, how they work and what they preach, the more I felt I need to make a stand.  The question was, how does one Christian picket another?  Biblically, that gets very interesting-- and I don't think there's a good answer to that.  And, how much does the LGBT activist me and the Christian evangelical me get to coincide on a project like this?  That was an even harder acrobatics routine... 

I finally decided on copying a protest I'd seen pictures of in Athens, GA against the KKK-- signs that say only "Love" on the front, and a code of conduct on the back.  That's one of my signs right there.  I also decided that I had to do this as one Christian speaking back to another, so I made some larger signs with a few Bible verses on the back about love to make my stance on the whole thing clear.  My favorite, and the sign I was going to hold had 1 Corinthians 13:2 on it:  "If I have a faith that can move mountains and have not love, I am nothing." 

So, because I was still a little queasy about picketing what is, ultimately, still a Christian message even if it's not a Christian approach to the Gospels, I needed some advice.  I started with my husband, who eventually just shot me a baffled look and said, "Jackrabbit, I don't know.  The big problem I'm having is that this isn't something I would personally do because that's not how I operate."  Then I asked my minister friend.  He was on the fence, but cautiously optimistic.  I asked one of my pastors after church on Sunday.  He was extremely ambivalent, but for some reason he wouldn't tell me not to do it.

Finally, I asked a couple of ministers at a non-denom Christian ministry for a little insight into the Christian campus community and see if they were interested in helping me out.  They were overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Oh, thank goodness, I thought.  Finally somebody understands.  But, to make my motives clear, I felt like I had to tell them why I felt led to do this.  So I told them I was a member of our LGBTA as a straight supporter, too.  That got them a little flummoxed.  On the one hand, they thought it was just awesome that I was both a Christian and a part of that counter-culture because they hadn't figured out how to do that yet.  On the other hand, they thought I needed help. Help for what?   "Jesus always sent out disciples in twos," they kept saying.  Um, we'll see what happens with that. 

But in any case, I talked to a larger campus ministry meeting (where I didn't come out as a LGBT member, which was a serious mistake) and told them what I was up to.  They seemed pretty enthusiastic.  But then I had to go to my LGBTA meeting thirty minutes later and give the same pitch.  Here's what happened...

I showed them a LOVE sign and explained what I wanted to do.  They were pretty enthusiastic about the idea of protesting the street preachers, and I was surprised at how willing they were to stand next to me with a big Bible verse on my sign.  But then the questions started:

"Can we make fun of them?" Someone asked. 
"Well, no.  It's a silent protest.  Besides, look at the front of the sign!" 
"Can we make faces, then?"
"Um, no.  Same reason."   
"Can we interrupt them with noise or anything?"
"Nope.  Silent protest."  One guy tried to get creative.
"Um, can I, like make a big sign with Bible verses about how the moon gives off its own light or the world is flat and stuff?"  It was hard not to snort with exasperation. 
"Can you get that to fit into the 'Love' theme?"  I asked patiently. 
"Wow, that's hard... I guess I could find a way to do that," he conceded.  Then another guy stopped to ask me one more question:

"Did you tell any campus ministries you're planning on doing this?"  Silence in the room. 
"Uh, yeah," I said, and I told them which one. 
"They're actually okay with you doing this against the preachers?" He asked incredulously. 
"They were pretty enthusiastic," I said.  The room almost erupted with excitement. 

"This is so great!  I'm going to bring my rainbow flag tomorrow, okay?"  one girl said excitedly.  I stopped in my tracks for a moment.  What will all those campus ministers think of a giant rainbow flag? I asked myself, panicked.
"Um...  I think that's okay," I told her.  That girl, "Martha," grinned excitedly and took off.  I emailed those campus ministers to get some advice and to warn them ahead of time if they walk up to see a huge rainbow flag in the middle of the protest.   

So, I get a call this morning from one of the two ministers I had talked to (Who I'll call "Torben"):

"Hey, Jackrabbit, I got your email last night and wanted to touch base with you," he said.
"Okay, so what do I do?" I asked him.  Silence for a moment.
"Well, my feeling is that they need to respect what you're standing for, right?  And bringing that flag isn't doing that, is it?"
"Why don't you think so?"  I asked. 
"Well, because that's changing the nature of the protest.  If they want to join in, fine, but they have to do it under your terms."  Is it really?  I thought to myself.  I thought that was sort of the point. 
"Look, I'm not going to tell my friends they have to step back into the closet if they stand alongside me," I countered.  "That'd undo all the good work I've done in there so far." 
"But if they stand alongside you, they need to stand for you as well, don't they?"   Torben asked.  "That's not asking too much, is it?"  I had to think a moment.  Yes, it is, I decided. 
"Torben...  That's what my LGBT friends tell me every week," I told him.    Silence on the other end.  
"What do you mean?" 
"That if I'm standing alongside them, then I have to stand for them." 
"I see."
"Welcome to a day in my life, Torben," I told him.  "I feel like a ballerina dancing en pointe on a straightedge razor." 

In any case, so far it hasn't even been an issue.  I woke up to a steady stream of rain soaking everything that still hasn't stopped-- and no sign of Crazy Preacher Man.  I think they got rained out and will be a no-show for today.  My meticulously painted signs are sitting in the back of my car, I feel tied to the quad looking to see if they're there, and I'm wondering:  what the heck was all this for?  With the money and time I spent on signs I could have done one of the following:

• Fed a room full of homeless people a hand-cooked meal
• Sent the money to a friend going on a medical mission to Sudan-- and driven to South Carolina to deliver it
• Bought an awesome little wireless remote for my wicked new camera and taken pictures of sunsets all weekend
• Donated it all to To Write Love on Her Arms and spent the weekend playing frisbee
• Gone to see Alice In Wonderland in 3-D about six times 
• Blown it all on a day-trip to Dollywood (I am in Appalachia, after all...)

Well, I guess that the answer is that this was an exercise in Christian obedience.  And acrobatics.  We'll see how long I can keep all these balls in the air-- Christianity, social justice, GLBT activism-- in the air before I fall off the high wire...