TKM

Sometimes we need our mates to point out the obvious, to challenge our sense of normalcy. Normalcy in this case being a slight blurriness of the world—about which I had been audibly rueful on more than one occasion—thanks to glasses whose prescription remained predictably static as my eyes merrily continued their maturation process.

Our vision degrades most noticeably during that first decade after we’ve been prescribed our first corrective lenses, or so I was told by an optometrist during those formative years, when my prescription seemed to turn on the whim of a fruit bat (a species which—non sequitur alert—was recently discovered to have a menstrual cycle similar to that of humans).

Once we get over that 10-year hump—as did I in my 20s—we expect to tuck into several decades of more-or-less stabilized impairment, changing glasses according to whims determined by nothing more than our own idiosyncratic sense of style.

I didn’t know I was about to fight this vision war on two fronts.

“I’m going to write you a prescription for separate single-vision reading and distance lenses or progressives,” said the 15-year-old optometrist who examined me.

“Progressives, like bifocals?”

“Yes, but because you have a reading-intensive job, you’ll want a wider field of vision in your reading glasses, so I recommend you keep them separate,” he said, avoiding the b word. “But like I said, I’ll write the prescription for either or.”

So this is how bifocals happen. No one sits you down in a quiet room to break the news, or presents them as an optional upgrade—“Tell me, Ms. Morrison, have you ever considered progressive lenses?” You just turn 40 and the next thing you know you’re at LensCrafters* weighing the merits of juggling two pairs of glasses versus the do-it-all wonder of bifocals, now euphemistically re-branded “progressives.”

(*Ordinarily I would balk at patronizing big-box vision over my friendly neighborhood optometrist, but I don’t live in a friendly neighborhood, and the last time I went to a local independent optometrist I disliked him and his entire staff more intensely than I would have preferred given how much money I was giving them. And even if le domestique hadn’t been the one to set up my appointment—after I approached her with my old glasses and pitifully asked whether she thought a broken piece might be successfully glued—I might have recalled that LensCrafters has a program wherein they repurpose old prescription glasses through clinics where some needy someone with a level of vision impairment remarkably similar to my own can walk away with my ex-glasses, which I suppose kind of makes us sight sisters, each with one not-so-bad eye and another eye that just doesn’t try very hard at all. Just imagine, someone in some dusty village in Mali could be walking around in my Oakleys, or those Giorgio Armani torties I wore in college, or even those ill-advised John Lennon glasses I bought back in my early 20s—apparently without looking at myself in the mirror first. I hope all the new owners of my old glasses get to look at themselves in the mirror first. Do Malians have a “geek chic” equivalency?)

Other than the bifocal thing, it had been a pretty routine exam—except when the tech insisted that I “guess” after I failed to pick up any more than two dimensions in the last couple of lines on a depth-perception test.

I blinked hard and opened my eyes wider, as if to let in more of the magic required to gauge depth, and scrutinized each line for its 3-D letter again. “Dunno,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis.

“Guess,” she repeated gleefully, like she was the keeper of some really awesome gossip she was dying to tell me.

“Can’t I guess ‘none’?” I asked. I really wasn’t trying to be difficult, but I didn’t want to randomize, because it seems to me that eye exams would have a sort of inverted guessing penalty. Like, SAT scoring assesses fractional point deductions for wrong answers, but here, correct guesses could result only in compromised vision assessment.

“Just guess,” she said doggedly.

“OK, I guess ‘none,’ ” I said firmly, because I’m no fun at all.

Later, five minutes into my post-exam shopping, the same woman walked up behind me and asked if I had found anything yet.

“No, I’m still looking.”

“I’ll help you,” she said gamely.

I didn’t want her to help me. At all. I had le domestique on hand for any necessary consultation. Besides which, the saleswoman/tech whose name I’ve forgotten clearly had taste dissimilar to my own. For starters, she wore a pink blouse, and also, she was recognizably female.

“Um, maybe give me some time to get an idea what I want first,” I said.

“If you tell me what you’re looking for, I can make suggestions,” she said, punctuating her eagerness with a little bounce on the last word.

If you get any pushier, I thought, I may make some suggestions of my own.

I glanced around the store to confirm my suspicion that other shoppers were being allowed to go it alone. Maybe pink blouse thought she could mentor me and save me from my own worst instincts. Surely she doesn’t look that way on purpose, pink blouse may have thought, filled with a sense of altruistic purpose. I will help her look like the female of her species.

Employing a language of certainty, I managed to shoo her away, but only for a little bit. I’m a very slow shopper, and anyone who thinks I can make a decision about something I have to wear every day—on my face—in a period briefer than, say, the menstrual phase of a fruit bat (24 hours) doesn’t know me at all. Even if my brain’s processing speed weren’t impaired, my decision-making capacity and I divorced ages ago. (Typical sad story: It wanted a level of trust I just couldn’t give it, so it ended up shacking up with some teenage boy who, it bragged petulantly, never questioned it, ever. Last I heard they were doing 20-to-life in the federal pen.)

Pink blouse was back. “Have you found anything?”

I know when I’m beat. I retrieved all the frames I had liked and put them in the little velvet-lined staging area she was holding. If it’s possible to grant someone else some small happiness at no cost to oneself, one really should.

But there was a cost, because now, based on the frames I had chosen, pink blouse thought she had a bead on my baseline taste and commenced her mentorship by showing me frames that, to her, resembled what I had chosen but had a little more of the something she thought I should want, like maybe rhinestones.

I’m not a fashion-forward girl. In fact, I find some fashion so disagreeable it’s viscerally upsetting. For instance, it makes me angry that the very worst fashion instincts of my mid-’80s high-school era are galumphing attitudinously down the catwalk in 2007:

Ill-fitting high-waisted (called “paper-bag waist” in the industry) jeans? Et tu, Diesel?

Because my fashion sense shoots blanks, I generally jones in one of two frame directions: rimless, or something evolved from your standard-issue GI horn-rims. (I can’t wear contacts, as I found out when I was going through the hiring process for the LAPD—yeah, I know, more about that another time—which requires contacts instead of glasses for officers who need vision correction. I got insane levels of calcium deposits no matter how diligent I was about cleaning my lenses, and my optometrist said that just happened with some people. I imagine that for the right contact-intolerant candidate, the department might have granted special dispensation to wear glasses, but we never got to that bridge—my psych evaluation required disclosure of my mental health treatment history, making whether or not I could wear contacts utterly moot.)

Pink blouse was having none of my standard-issue nonsense, as she tirelessly brought me frames that I pronounced too shiny, too flashy, too glossy, too trendy, too sparkly, too clubby, too colorful, too Dolce&Gabbana, etc. She cajoled me into putting some of them on, for her, but I drew the line when she approached me with frames that had a sort of pink undertone.

“They’re pink,” I said.

“They’re not pink.”

“They’re pink enough,” I repeated, assuming the crossed-arm stance of a child refusing cough syrup.

“Just try them. I want to see them on you,” she said.

I shook my head and turned away from her. We’d crossed some weird line now, like I was shopping for school clothes with my mom circa 1974. Why can’t I pick out my own frames like all the other kids?

Once we had settled on five frames, one of which she had picked out—yeah, I threw her a bone—I sat down at one of the fitting stations and began assessing them in a more concerted way. I eventually narrowed my choices to three, and hers didn’t make the cut. It came down to a rimless frame, a horn-rim-esque frame, and these racy frames in a frost-gray color:

The Ray-Bans were pretty flash for the likes of me, but I really liked them. I especially liked them on the shelf, and I tried like hell to like them on my face. I put them on, I took them off, I put them on, I took them off, I put the horn-rims on and took those off and really quickly replaced them with the Ray-Bans, like if I could do that fast enough, then maybe I could effect a side-by-side comparison with myself. Le domestique weighed in; she liked the horn-rims best. Pink blouse weighed in; she liked the ones she had picked out that I had already eliminated best. Then pink blouse shopped me around to her coworkers, and I put on and took off all the frames for them too, imagining as I did so that to a person they were thinking, Well, sweetie, they’d all look better if you grew some hair.

As you might guess, I rejected the Ray-Bans in the end. I know they weren’t actually all that flashy, but they were just flash enough that when I put them on I couldn’t get past the idea of a 40-year-old who had just been prescribed bifocals making a lame play at fashion relevance. Like maybe I should just go get some paper-bag waist jeans to go with them.

Instead, I embraced my age, though I took the optometrist’s advice to get separate reading and distance glasses—and not just to avoid the idea of bifocals; I understand that I’m still fighting a two-front war—so once I narrowed my frames to two, the only choice that remained was which prescription to put in each. That was pretty easy, since I was really the only one who particularly liked the rimless pair; they would be my reading glasses, leaving the frames with three-way approval (with the caveat that pink blouse still liked the ones she had picked out best and was only on board with this second choice as a conscientious objector) as my all-the-livelong-day glasses. These are they:

But wait, there’s a denouement.

The standard-issue pair was ready the same day, that being the whole LensCrafters about-an-hour shtick, but rimless glasses take longer—about a week. So I reported to the store the following Saturday—wearing my other new glasses, naturally—to pick up the not bifocals. I gave the optician my name and sat at the fitting table. When she presented them to me, I took off my glasses and replaced them with the new pair, causing her to gasp theatrically.

“Oh, my God, those are so much better on you!” she said with a big sunny smile on her face. “They’re like night and day!”

I looked silently back at her, wondering whether she would dig this hole deeper or go ahead and knock off for the day.

“Your old glasses, I don’t know, they just didn’t suit your face, but these were a great choice,” she shoveled.

I waited another beat before I said, “Actually, these are just my reading glasses. The other ones are my primary glasses; I got them here last week.”

A blank expression flickered ever so briefly across her face before she rebounded. “Oh, well, they’re both great,” she said, then bid me, “Put the others back on.”

I did, and she said, “Yeah, you made two really great choices.” Then we proceeded to my fitting, over which there was some disagreement as to whether the glasses were sitting crooked (my assertion) or my face was itself crooked (her assertion). Rather than argue against the latter, I proposed that an adjustment be made regardless, making the glasses either rest even on what I thought was my properly balanced face, or align with rather than against this newly reported asymmetry. She made the adjustment, but she also made it clear that this was one of those customer-is-always-right gestures, which she might rephrase as “The customer is always right inasmuch as I’ll do any stupid thing they ask so long as they understand that they’re actually wrong.”

A few weeks ago le domestique complained on her blog about our Select Comfort bed, and much to our surprise a real-live Select Comfort customer service representative read her post and attempted to address the problem. So it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility that LensCrafters representatives are currently standing by and—beyond marveling at my copy editor’s fastidious attention to the styling of their company name: solid, with an internal initial cap—wondering how my already great shopping experience might have been even better! So here are some takeaway lessons:

1. Don’t make clients “guess” when they and their eyes reach an impasse during the exam.
2. Don’t stalk clients as they shop.
3. Trust that the client probably thinks about her personal aesthetic more than you think she does, and that she means with all her heart to look like that.
4. Never insist that a client try on frames she doesn’t like, not even for you.
5. Don’t grimace when a client tries on a frame she has picked out—unless the client grimaces first.
6. If the client grimaces when she tries on a frame you picked out, don’t try to coax her out of her unfortunate fashion retardation. No means no.
7. If the client makes a blanket assertion that she does not like, say, pink or rhinestones, assume that she won’t like anything you bring her in the pink or bejeweled family. If the client says she doesn’t want anything “too Dolce&Gabbana,” assume that this includes, among others, frames actually branded Dolce&Gabbana.
8. If you think the client is being a poopyhead about all your great suggestions, see rule 2.
9. Never insult a client’s old glasses—even if you think the new ones are ten thousand times better—not just because they might not be such old glasses but because regardless of how old they are, she picked them out at some point, liked them at some point, and has likely been wearing them—in public!—for a considerable length of time. She doesn’t so much want to hear how lame they were.
10. Even if the customer isn’t always right, pretend that she is right about the symmetry of her features. Arguing with her about whether her face is crooked benefits no one.
11. I cannot emphasize this enough: Disclose the price of the lenses the first time a client asks, and when she says she doesn’t need scratch-resistance, glare protection, or any other treatment jacking up the price of her lenses, don’t insist that the optometrist prescribed the upgrades. Doctors do not prescribe scratch-resistance.

Other than that, everything was great.

——————————————————–

Update: As alluded to in rule 11, pink blouse tried to up-sell me numerous unnecessary lens treatments without disclosure. Her initial quote included a charge of $300 for the lenses alone, with no description as to what that included. When I said that price was absurd, she sort of shrugged her shoulders like a bored teenager. It wasn’t until I insisted on being shown a schedule of charges that I discovered her quote had included not only an upgraded lens material that I hadn’t asked for but numerous special treatments, none of which would have been covered by my insurance. I then specifically said I wanted absolutely basic plastic lenses—the kind my insurance would pay for—at which time pink blouse presented me with a LensCrafters price schedule listing basic plastic lenses at $120.

On February 7 I received a document from my insurance provider explaining what was covered and what wasn’t and noticed a line item for “scratch protection coating” (a treatment I had specifically declined), charged at $20, of which I paid $15. The lenses themselves—the absolutely basic plastic kind I asked for, the ones that are covered by my insurance provider—were listed at $100. Nice, LensCrafters. Enjoy that extra $15 you weaseled out of me, because your ethically challenged business practices guaranteed I’ll never come back.

Now, what was the name of that review site I ran across the other day? Oh, right, PissedConsumer.com. Must go there now.

A musical suite was once composed for me. Only a handful of people are aware of its existence, and I’ve never played it for anyone I know. It strikes me as egotistical to mention it, let alone sit someone down and bid them, “Listen to my symphonic tribute!” Besides, it’s too painfully personal and evocative of the only relationship in my life in which a heart other than my own was broken—casting me firmly in that other, less sympathetic role.

I met Jay McHale in 1987, when I was 20 and working in my first career as a buyer for a retail music store. He was a sales representative for an independent distributor in Minneapolis.

Of the many sales reps I spoke with in those days, Jay was easily the worst at his job, with the actual selling of product taking a backseat to the joy he took in describing it. Where salespeople from other distributors might tag a performer as “Scottish folk rock,” Jay might liken the artist to a cross between Silly Wizard and the Triffids, with a short stack of pancakes on the side and a long weekend ahead—and if you happened to be unfamiliar with any of the bands he made reference to, no matter, he would in turn gleefully relate their capsule history, career highlights, and must-have albums—and because his enthusiasm was 100% infectious and 0% pretentious, one was never made to feel ignorant for having to ask.

Our “sales” calls grew increasingly longer and more frequent, and inevitably we began to swap personal information. It turned out he was 29, older than me by a decade—at a time in life when a 10-year age difference seemed significant. He was born in Racine, Wis., and had a degree in religion from the College of St. Thomas. He told me he had seriously considered the priesthood but never felt genuinely called to service. He was bonkers for the Twins, the Brewers, and baseball in general, immediately adopting my hometown Angels as yet another hard-luck team to root for. He was also a musician and composer who reflexively downplayed his talents.

We swapped phone numbers and took our epic conversations home from work.

You know where this is going, especially if you’ve ever heard me go on wistfully about the Man I Almost Married. Not having come out to myself until the ripe old age of 25, I was still years from that bit of self-awareness. Still, I had only dated a few guys in high school—and only one for a long enough stretch that my lack of physical affection toward him was notable. (And that particular high school boyfriend did note it—the word frigid may have been used.) I certainly had my reasons for not putting out, but like anyone, I longed for connection. Though I wouldn’t articulate it to myself at the time, in retrospect I can see why a long-distance relationship might have been particularly appealing to a lesbian in gestation.

But this isn’t really about me.

I first visited Minneapolis in early 1988. Jay would later write that I had “brought spring to Prospect Park,” and it was true that by the time I left, the bare trees and chill that greeted my arrival had given way to sunshine and new growth, all within the short span of a week and a half. It was a remarkable display to a Southern Californian unaccustomed to such showy seasonal shifts, but Jay was far more a force of nature than I. He took me to about a dozen of his favorite places my very first day there, including multiple record stores and music shops whose staffers seemed uniformly to adore him. I would see several of them later that night when Jay’s then-current band, a power-pop quintet deceptively named Twelve Angry Men, played First Avenue’s 7th Street Entry.

A perfect gentleman, he had arranged for me to stay while in town with his friends Michele and Gail, who lived just down the street from him. And when Jay and I took a side trip to Winnipeg, he asked for two beds at the hotel desk without consulting me. Maybe he was acting on some kind of psychic energy; maybe he was himself reluctant to get physical, whether because of his Catholic faith or his worries that my parents might think ill of a guy 10 years my senior bedding me. (On my departure my mother did make a crack about the possibility that I was flying 2,000 miles to meet up with an ax murderer, but she admirably withheld further judgment.)

While we were both certainly aware of the sexual tension, it never dominated our time together. As he confided in me at one point, a couple of his friends had told him that if after a year of long-distance flirtation we didn’t want to hop into bed together on first sight, something was deeply wrong; he told me he shrugged his shoulders in response and said that what we had was even better—and he meant it.

We sublimated sexual energy mostly through sharing music—and really, if you’re not having sex, aren’t there far worse ways to fill that space? When I heard a new album I loved, what excited me even more than the personal discovery was the idea of playing it for him. We sent packages back and forth, usually with recently discovered favorite CDs accompanied by a long letter and a few items we had come across since last we spoke or wrote that just reminded us of each other. I lived for UPS deliveries. Once I got a package full of fall leaves. And once I received two cassettes containing seven movements collectively called The Suite for TK. (While I had never much liked diminutives of my name, I liked that Jay called me “TK,” incorporating my middle initial, which stands simply for “Kay.”)

With Jay I could talk about someday starting a record label or founding a music festival or living in a lighthouse, and he would respond as if my dreams were perfectly rational and attainable goals. (In fact, he would later start his own record label, Catacombs, and even help to found a music festival, so attainable is in the mind of the dreamer.) Our visits to each other invariably included side trips wherein we would drive off all half-cocked with no reservations and no clear destination, which led to a number of strange nights in the kinds of motels one ends up in after driving till 2 a.m. before deciding to look for vacancies. We found that span on the clock between a prudent bedtime and single digits to be the most fertile for appreciating a new album—perhaps one to which we had delayed our first listen in anticipation of just such a moment. On one of those night drives together we stumbled on the Northern Lights and it seemed as though Jay had arranged the spectacular display—like the sky, in a fit of modesty, had pulled a diaphanous shower curtain about itself—expressly for the enhancement of our listening party. It’s hard to talk about a guy like that without sounding wistfully idealistic or just sappy, but anyone who met Jay would concur that there was magic in him.

I say “was” because I learned this week of his death, which actually occurred five years ago. It was a heart attack, his second apparently. He was 44.

How did I not know about his death before Thursday last? We lost touch, I offer lamely. Even from the most important people in our lives, we drift. We don’t mean to, and if we knew that the last time we spoke with them was going to be the last time we’d speak with them, we’d certainly handle things differently. I last spoke with him, by phone, circa 2000. It was uncomfortable on both ends, and that’s all I feel at liberty to say.

Since I found out about his death, however tardily, I’ve been doing the kinds of things people do when a person important to them dies: reading through the many letters he sent, mourning his loss—both to me and to the universe—listening to some of the music he introduced me to, and kind of mentally assembling a virtual mix tape of music released since his death that I know he would have loved.

That’s no small feat, as his interests ranged far and wide. A memorial concert that was held in the spring following his death featured an array of Jay’s compositions in genres including pop, folk, jazz, Scandinavian music, and liturgical songs. He was instrumental in forming three local bands that I know of: the art-punk-jazz band 2i, the big band Steak Face, and the aforementioned power-pop force Twelve Angry Men. He played with countless other groups including the “celtodelic” Irish punk-folk band Boiled in Lead and the Violent Femmes, the latter of whom was appearing at First Avenue the weekend after Jay died and had reportedly asked him—via a phone message he never chanced to hear—to join them on stage.

I think the improbable tale behind the founding of Minneapolis’s Nordic Roots Festival provides a neat illustration of Jay’s catalytic properties: The story goes that in 1996 a Swedish folk label looking for U.S. representation sent a box of CDs to a Minneapolis distributor, where it sat around in a warehouse until a curious Jay McHale discovered the dusty, still-sealed box and took it home for a listen. He went characteristically nutty for what was inside and started playing favorites for his friends, among whom was a founder of the Rykodisc label, who in short order would found NorthSide, the only record label dedicated to Nordic folk in the United States. By 1999 NorthSide had attracted enough fan support to launch a festival dedicated to music from Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. Jay would serve until his death as an enthusiastic coordinator of the annual event—which still thrives, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. As he said in a 2001 article about the festival, “Whatever excites me, I put it on tape and pass it around. I love to toot the horn for something that’s underrated. Hedningarna’s [third album], Trä, was my Revolver. Hedningarna was a pivotal musical experience for someone who didn’t think there was anything new. This was what I was looking for.”

This all happened well after our relationship had ended, but as I read about it I thought, Well, of course, if anyone could parlay his enthusiasm for an orphaned box of CDs into a new record label and a festival dedicated to the music therein, that’s Jay.

It turns out I didn’t break his heart after all. I won’t let myself off the hook for hurting him, however unintentionally, but I need only read online remembrances of his life here and here and elsewhere to understand that his heart could never truly be broken. What he thought he saw in me was really just a reflection of his own soul, best summed when he wrote, “I believe you are driven by an inextinguishable love for all the ordinary and extraordinary things that life lets us bump into. To be able to see the sacred in the tiniest of things and to view the really big important stuff with the leavening of humor, optimism, and clear vision.”

Yeah, that’s Jay all right.

Cue outro:

The road’s dark with the stars full on
And they’re above you just the same
Like an answered prayer in the sound-charged air
You will be there as the night will soften
Road ends, and without directions
We will drive it just the same.

—Josiah “Jay” McHale (August 22, 1958–October 16, 2002)

You know that urban legend that says if you’re out for a pleasant night drive and you see a car with its lights off, DON’T FLASH YOUR BRIGHTS AT THE CAR, because, the legend goes, it could be a gang initiation wherein thugs drive around in the noir until they encounter a driver courteous enough to signal them, at which time THEY WILL KILL YOU DEAD!

The frequency with which that cautionary tale is circulated and cited as fact speaks volumes about the American psyche: Think twice about drawing attention to yourself among strangers, however friendly your intentions, because you may be singling yourself out for attack!

Well, I flashed my brights at the Episcopal Church via a December 19 Advocate.com commentary praising the gay- and lesbian-inclusive platform its leaders and members have embraced over the last several decades, a movement that reached a boiling point with the 2003 consecration of V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay and actively partnered priest, as bishop of New Hampshire. The church has since been wracked by conflict both internal—several dozen conservative U.S. congregations and one entire diocese have left the national body in protest—and external, with the worldwide body to which the church belongs, the Anglican Communion, threatening in fits and starts to cut the whole darn U.S. province adrift. Much more detail can be read in the essay itself, should you be so inclined.

Mine was meant as a friendly flick of the brights, a little shout-out to the church’s presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who has held the progressive line despite enormous pressure to back down, and its beleaguered members, the majority of whom favor an inclusive church even if such a platform visits uncertainty and strife on their denomination. In recognizing and praising the national church’s vanguard position, of course, I noted its fallout, including the recent secession of that aforementioned diocese (in my own home state of California, no less), an unprecedented event within the church that underlines the recalcitrant position of Anglican traditionalists, many of whom habitually drive about with darkened headlights and a frank willingness to lash out at those who threaten to illuminate the world beyond their frosted windshield.

Given the Advocate.com audience, I anticipated a largely LGBT readership, thus vastly underestimating the Internet’s powers of dissemination. Remarking on the commentary’s Web traffic the day after it was posted, our digital media director said that the piece was logging the kind of numbers we typically see only on breaking news of, say, homophobic Republican senators caught in flagrante delicto with gents in public toilets. And you can’t just make that shit up; we have to wait—sometimes months between occurrences—for such gifts from the news gods.

Happily, most of my traffic was of a friendly persuasion. Plenty of nice Episcopalians, both gay and straight, clicked through from links on progressive blogs; several even took time to drop me an e-mail noting how gratifying it was to see a story acknowledging a straight Christian voice in matters of LGBT social justice. But links to my commentary inevitably also landed in a couple of inhospitable Web neighborhoods, the kind of places where we dykes and faggots had best drive through quickly if at all, lest the thuggish local holy men shoot out our headlights and smite us under cloak of darkness.

When my commentary came to the attention of members at a certain conservative Anglican blog, I was subject to much disliking. (I’m given to understand, courtesy of the aforementioned conservative Anglicans, that gay and lesbian folks overuse the word hate because, in truth, we relish victimhood. So chastised, I won’t be throwing that word around here, nope, not even when speaking of the only emotion I can think of that could possibly inspire random heterosexuals to spend such significant amounts of their limited time on this earth contemplating and communicating the kind of vitriolic hate not-liking speech that springs from the mouths of homo haters dislikers—other than that stultifying fear among certain types of their own inclination toward the love that dare not speak its name.)

What surprised me about the response among conservatives was the personal chord struck by their hatred disliking. Of course I knew when I published the piece that at least a few traditionalists would see it, and of course I knew they would like it not one bit; the commentary lionizes those very stances of the Episcopal Church that make its detractors go absolutely nuclear. But I think I did a fairish job of presenting the facts as well as my opinions without resorting to personal attacks, so I suppose I expected an in-kind response. If any. I mean, really, who the hell am I that those concerned with the serious work of calibrating the nation’s moral compass should waste energy shouting me down?

It took just four comments at the aforementioned blog for its readers to regress from parsing my text to parsing my appearance. From there, nearly half of the 31 comments to the link were concerned with, first, whether I was a boy or a girl, and second—after they deftly worked out that my first name, Teresa, and my self-identification as a lesbian indicated girlness—how much I didn’t look like a girl. Friends, I have met the enemy, and it attends junior high school.

The emphasis on my appearance seemed especially odd since I didn’t say one word about what John-David Schofield, the bishop who led the secession movement in central California, looks like:

But why go to town on a man’s appearance when there’s so much to say about his actions? Namely, that he has betrayed the will of his own denomination by refusing ordination to women, railing against gay and lesbian inclusion in the church, and operating an “ex-gay” ministry through his cathedral—naturally, he is himself a closeted homo (another factoid I didn’t mention in the commentary), having gone on record as an “ex-gay” years ago in an interview his followers now deny exists. But really, isn’t it more of a surprise these days when a virulently antigay leader isn’t a great big closet case?

Regardless of whether parishioners in crystal cathedrals ought to throw stones, they did so with delight—during a week in which I hope they also found time to celebrate the birth of their lord and savior. At one point the discussion addressed the likelihood that my appearance and orientation indicated a history of sexual abuse, an incredibly popular trope among the religious right—Google “childhood sexual abuse” and “lesbian” and your top hits will be “studies” conducted by fundamentalist organizations showing that a lesbian orientation is practically a gift with purchase of molestation. Was the poster asking the others to lay off discussing my appearance in deference to that probability, or was he gamely making sport of sexual abuse survivors? I’m honestly not sure, but I’m certain that the only time it’s appropriate for a stranger to bring up the possibility of my or anyone else’s sexual abuse history is never.

I responded by flicking my brights again, helpfully providing the Anglican blog community with a link to my earlier essay about gender, seeing as how they were so very interested in sussing out mine. Then a funny thing happened: The comments sort of petered out. Oh, sure, there was the peanut gallery member who countered with a link to an article about female aggression and lack of maternal behavior among spotted hyenas, appearing to suggest that, like the hyenas, women like me might be successfully treated with anti-androgen drugs to curb our masculine aggression (omigod, if they only knew how not aggressive I am) and cultivate feminine behaviors. A second poster brought up another popular conservative trope: that they don’t so much hate dislike homos, they just don’t understand why we always have to run around flaunting our relationships.

I know, right? It’s nearly impossible to go to mainstream movies or read popular books without being subjected to same-sex love story after same-sex love story. We lucky homosexuals grow up in environments where our sexuality is constantly reinforced as the norm.

To add homosexual insult to heterosexual injury, a person can’t go anywhere without seeing us engaged in acts of explicit physical affection!

If only we homos could just step back for a moment, we might recognize that ours isn’t the only valid kind of relationship.

Hey, your god just called. He hates dislikes disingenuousness.

Despite the aforementioned couple of stragglers, about 15 minutes after I announced my presence at the hateful dislikeful blog, the theretofore spirited commentary on my androgen-laden hyena-like ways ceased. Were the sanctimonious creeps turned off by the idea that their words didn’t appear to hurt me? Were they legitimately embarrassed to discover that I was privy to their ugliness? Or were they simply not interested in having an actual conversation with participation not strictly limited to those who completely agree with them?

Among many brilliant things le domestique has been heard to say, one of my favorites is, “The Internet slices people too thin.” Whatever personal inclination we want to feed—liberal or conservative, gay or straight, secular or religious, cat or dog, Mac or PC—there are scores of blogs and discussion boards online where we can get precisely the information and resonance we think we need. Such a sense of belonging is truly wonderful. But as the ease and abundance of access draws communities of common interest closer together, it pushes camps who disagree ever further apart, because increasingly, if we don’t want to, we don’t ever have to talk to anyone we don’t already completely agree with. It doesn’t bode well for the promotion of an open society. (For an accounting of 21st-century regressions of liberties and attitudes in the United States, read Naomi Wolf’s essay “Ten Steps to Close Down an Open Society” at the Huffington Post. It’s a chilling reminder of how far we’ve strayed from what most people think of as incontrovertible U.S. ideals.)

My flirtation with the Episcopal Church had consequences both expected and unexpected. While I have made much of the negative reactions by traditionalists, the positive response was tenfold the negative. Never has my writing been so profoundly rewarded as by the gratification and fellowship I’ve felt with Episcopalian readers these last couple of weeks. Confronting that same firewall of depersonalization their conservative counterparts sought so lamely to penetrate, many progressive Christians simply flicked their brights back at me to acknowledge that my gesture was well-received. Those who pulled over to invite me to their churches did so not to pressure or proselytize but to let me know that their doors would always be open.

To clarify, I have not had a religious epiphany. Nor can you expect me anytime soon to gift you with a New Testament—or even an Amy Grant album. This secular humanist doesn’t expect to undergo a faith makeover in the foreseeable future. But I have experienced a shift in my attitude toward Christianity. After a decade of static from the religious right, I had developed a bone-splintering knee-jerk reaction to the ecclesiastically inclined. I didn’t cultivate it, but I didn’t deny it oxygen either—like most people I seek online resources and news stories that reinforce my worldview, and, well, being an atheist sometimes makes me feel like a freak, like I’m missing something that everyone else sees, and feeling like a freak can make a person a little defensive, especially when religious organizations are actively distributing free bumper stickers condemning my right to equality.

Like the conservative Anglicans I encountered, I too had become a bit blinkered to the idea that a monolithic concept—in my case Christianity, in theirs homosexuality—is best viewed in full light of the individuals who give it life. I’ve since been reminded that for every Christian who dims his headlights to get a bead on his enemy, there are many more who understand that true humanitarianism is contingent on communication with people outside one’s immediate faith and social circles. In this age of increasing polarity I’m grateful that such people exist at all, and even more grateful that so many of them flicked their brights back at me to signal that my message was well met—and perhaps also to let me know that those shadowy thugs in the next car, for all the dire warnings we’ve heard of their quick and powerful wrath, are only threatening if we give credence to their legends and thus snuff our own lights.

“Into each life some rain must fall,” sings Ella Fitzgerald. “But someday the sun will shine.” Readers, that sunny day came for me when le domestique and I laid eyes on this:

Our joy was irrepressible, for we knew we had found the perfect kickoff offering for our White Elephant Consensual Re-gift Spectacular 2007. And now we would like to pass our sunshine on to you!

For your consideration, we have a dynamic mixed-media (foam and plastic) artwork. And it is a clock also! Which tells real time! And you may think the colorful googly-eyed sea creatures are purely decorative, but they sway to and fro in a happy ticktock motion for your entertainment, making telling time funner than ever! See, look, here I’m making it move with my finger, but you can make it move all by itself with a single AA battery.

May we share our good fortune with you? Just be the first person to say, “Heck yes, I want it!” in comments to this here post, privately send me your address (will not be sold to predatory lenders), and I’ll ship it to you gratis, postage paid and everything!

What do you gotta do in exchange? Just offer a similarly desirable white elephant re-gift on your own blog, paying the weirdness—or just unwantedness—forward. Christmas can go on forever—and without the really lame mall music!

C’mon, you know you want it, and if you’re fortunate enough to be a parental unit, you can blame your desire for it on your child. No one on the Interweb will be the wiser when you instead set it lovingly on your own bedside table.

Do not hesitate! Tell me you want it now!

Please.

“It’s the thought that counts” is a wonderful and even truthful mantra, but I don’t think that means we have to store hideous, inappropriate, or just plain weird gifts in perpetuity.

In fact, unburdening ourselves of gifts that didn’t quite click eradicates visual reminders that maybe our friends and family members don’t know us as well as we’d hoped—if at all. That’s where you, dear blog readers, come in.

That which works not at all for me may be just what you wanted—even if you had no idea you wanted it—and I’m all about finding good homes for outcasts.

So with the orgiastic gift-giving season upon us, I’m throwing a white elephant party for all my friends, both online and IRL. Here’s how you can participate:

I’ll shortly be kicking off festivities by posting a white elephant gift on this here blog.

• To claim it, just be the first to say “I’ll take it!” in comments (and, of course, privately e-mail your address to me). I’ll cheerfully send my offering to you, even picking up the shipping cost! All that is requested in return is that you offer a white elephant gift of your own on your blog. (Don’t feel left out if you don’t have a blog—I’d be happy to host your offering.)

• To offer an item of your own, just post a pic and description and maybe even a funny story about receiving said item. Don’t limit yourself to this holiday season, either; go crazy and post the weirdest, whitest elephant you’ve ever been gifted in your whole life. Heck, list more than one if you’d like. You’re only limited by the number of “interesting” gifts you’ve received—and whatever you’re willing to pay to ship them out of your life. If you want to post an item before claiming one for yourself, go for it! And feel free to announce your participation in comments here to begin driving shoppers to your site.

• Catch all the white elephant sightings! Rumor has it they may be popping up here, here, here, here, here, here, and other fine blog locations to be announced. And, of course, you’ll want to start haunting the site of whichever lucky soul claims my soon to be posted gift—just click the link from their winning comment and follow that blog!

Stay tuned for consensual re-gifting fun! Whatever I list will assuredly be more desirable than this:

A German shepherd mix charged with the unlawful harassment of a squirrel will not face hate-crime charges, according to his lawyer.

The dog, Scout Morrison, confined to his backyard until his court date, still faces a number of criminal and civil complaints related to a Sunday incident for which a squirrel, claiming undue hardship and psychological trauma, seeks compensatory damages in addition to permanent relocation of the accused.

A police sketch of the accused, who was quickly identified in a backyard lineup.

Alarmed at the dismissal of hate-crime charges, the squirrel—who in addition to the unlawful harassment complaint is charging Morrison with reckless endangerment and mayhem—appeared shaken at a press conference during which he called the entire backyard animal behavioral code into question. “I cannot imagine how the court can dismiss such an obvious example of a hate crime,” the squirrel said. “Sadly, the day has arrived when a city squirrel can no longer peaceably live in his chosen backyard, where,” he choked audibly, “my forebears have long acted as the sole remaining visible example of undomesticated wildlife for so many suburban children.”

The squirrel gathered himself and apologized to the gallery. “I’m sorry. It’s been an emotional day for me,” he said, his tail twitching. “I’ve been stressed and anxious since the incident, and now that animal has been confined to his backyard—my backyard!—pending trial. I can’t just pick up and find a new backyard. My family has been farming tangerines and pomegranates here for decades; it’s our ancestral home.”

The victim claims he suffered “extreme traumatic stress” from the incident.

Morrison, just shy of his first birthday, allegedly held the squirrel physically and emotionally captive for a solid hour Sunday, keeping watch at the base of the tall elm whose uppermost branches supported the squirrel.

When a reporter suggested that squirrels are “born tree dwellers,” the squirrel erupted, “We’re not all the same! I happen to be a California ground squirrel, which should tip you off that I’m not exactly comfortable with the heights.” He paused as his lawyer leaned to whisper something in his ear, then added, in a calmer tone, that he has an inordinately high metabolism and had slept only fitfully over the weekend. He said he feared falling from sheer exhaustion.

Reached for comment, Morrison’s lawyer, Slinky, also a backyard resident, said of the judge’s ruling, “Well, of course, it would have been a mockery of justice had the judge ruled otherwise. Even if my client did ‘harass’ the complainant, the notion that he targeted him solely because he’s a squirrel is beyond ludicrous.” Then she added, exasperated, “Look, as an undocumented cat, I certainly understand that canines can seem thuggish during encounters with smaller backyard residents, but we all recognize that dogs have no working concept of different species. It’s just a thing with them. To my client, the squirrel was just another dog, and for that reason a hate crime was plainly impossible in this instance.”

The accused, who chewed a rawhide throughout his preliminary hearing, betrayed no emotion as the judge announced his decision.

The squirrel’s legal team has called Morrison’s hiring of a feline lawyer “at best a publicity stunt, and at worst a calculated act of jury manipulation.” “We see right through this transparent ploy to paint the aggressor as a sympathetic and peaceable member of the community,” said prosecuting attorney Rockford “Rocky” Lundt, also a squirrel. “We’re hoping for an all-bird jury.”

When asked directly whether Slinky’s hiring indicates ulterior motives, Morrison replied that he didn’t understand the question, adding, “She’s the only dog I know with a law degree.”

The only known witness to the events of December 2 is Morrison’s sister, Biscuit, who, though also a canine, is not a littermate of the accused. Biscuit, 3, whose credibility has been called into question by the prosecution team, admitted that Scout “can be a little high-strung, but he was just trying to play with the little dog.” Biscuit called the squirrel’s reaction “a complete misunderstanding and overreaction. Scout just loves meeting new dogs, and he was especially fascinated with this one because he could climb trees!”

“This dumb act has got to stop,” Lundt said. “Dogs understand more than they let on, but they get away with murder because of this reputation they have for compromised critical thinking skills and attention deficits. It really does us all a disservice, and I would think they would be the first species to want to debunk this myth.”

Reached for comment inside the defendant’s home, Morrison’s feline sisters Halo, 5, and Califia, 13, said that they had no comment.

Asked how Halo’s and Califia’s refusal to testify on their brother’s behalf might affect the case, Slinky said, “They’re completely irrelevant. Anything they have to say would be discredited immediately since, you know, they’re ‘indoor’ cats. What are their lives about, day in and day out, other than lounging around on soft, warm things, waiting to hear the can opener?” Slinky then abruptly turned from the cameras and announced that she wasn’t taking any more questions, noting that she had something in her eye.

The accused reacts to the glare of news cameras.

The trial is scheduled for early in 2008.

This made me so happy I may have peed myself a little.

Released today, just in time for orgiastic holiday shopping, the Human Rights Campaign has distilled their Corporate Equality Index into a handy-dandy Buying for Equality guide, delineating the good-for-the-gays from the bad in shopping categories from apparel to technology, with additional sections covering air travel, dining, banking, and more. Click the link or image to download the PDF and engage your deviate self in a little homo-friendly consumer activism this gifting season, because nothing speaks louder to sucky, noninclusive corporate policies and attitudes than a dollar spent with those rotten pro-equality do-gooders down the street.

“Stop Googling yourself!” le domestique commanded when I told her the two-faced kitten had died.

How could she know that having become Googlable represented for me the realization of a hastily conceived eleventh-hour backup dream? Indeed, how could she even understand the singular thrill of finding herself online when she can’t even effectively Google herself, her full name being far more common than mine and therefore returning more hits—72,800 in a quoted search—than are worth sifting through for the little nuggets of self-referential celebration contained therein.

“Teresa Morrison” isn’t such a rare name, of course, returning 1,590 hits of its own, and in searches past I’ve had to sift through my own share of more notable women who share my name—Teresa Morrison the bog turtle expert; Teresa Morrison the Nova Scotian soccer midfielder who, along with her identical twin, plays in a Canadian national women’s league; Teresa Morrison the racing yacht skipper; Teresa Morrison the second-grade teacher whose class collected 1 million buttons for a history project—to find even a single genuine reference to Teresa Morrison the copy editor—that would be me—as listed on the online masthead of The Advocate. Listen, I’m pleased as punch to work on the magazine, but finding myself on its masthead online isn’t as thrilling as all that; I know that I work there, and even what I do, and I can see my name on the masthead in real paper issues any old time.

Then again, I’m not sure the Teresa Morrison in Lake City, Fla., who grabbed headlines in March 2005 as the owner of a cat who gave birth to a kitten with two faces—two sets of eyes, two noses, and two mouths that mewed in unison, side by each like a little domesticated Janus—was herself all that thrilled with her peculiar status on the World Wide Web.

The two-faced kitten TM has long been the most prolific source of hits for all us Teresa Morrisons. So many were the mentions of her mother cat’s queer little anomaly—the first such birth on record—that like a tree lost amid a forest, the follow-up story reporting that the kitten had died just two days later had completely eluded me in my past searches. So it was with some sadness that I recently passed that news along to le domestique, prompting the suggestion from her that I was perhaps spending too much time searching for myself online.

All this self-Googling started a couple of weeks ago, when I noticed a precipitous spike in hits to my blog, including a wealth of click-throughs from a piece I had written for Advocate.com, “The People vs. Loving,” on California’s Assembly Bill 43, which but for its veto by Governor Terminator would have removed references to gender in the state’s marriage laws, clearing the way for same-sex couples to wed—and clearing the way also, by dint of an exceedingly slippery slope prophesied by the collective lurid imagination of the religious right, for polygamy, incest, bestiality, rampant public sex, the death of the American family, and the crucifixion of all that is holy and good.

Even Belgian dogs reject our advances.

The curious thing about this spike was that it came weeks after the commentary had been posted, and therefore weeks since it had been at all prominent on Advocate.com’s splash page. So I Googled the title of the commentary and solved my little mystery quicker than you can say “Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective.”

An article on the subject at The Washington Post’s Web site had linked to my AB 43 commentary, along with other recommended related reading. Let me say that again. A newspaper that is regarded among the top half dozen or so papers in the nation—that little rag that broke Watergate—pointed to my silly old commentary on an LGBT news site that likely sees 1/100th the traffic commanded by its own online maw. And some of the readers who followed the link and read the Advocate piece came, in turn, to my silly old blog!

Good golly, if The Post is tapping my genius, can The New York Times be far behind?

Yes, it turns out, it can be, as I have yet to find evidence of any notice of ME by the newspaper of record. I have found one other news site link, this one from a blog at the Spokane, Wash., Spokesman-Review pointing toward my latest piece, “Boy, Interrupted,” a commentary on our societal gender baggage as seen through the lens of LGBT infighting over the scope of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

That piece also prompted a number of links from sites that aggregate transgender and gender politics news, which is kind of cool considering that I feared just the opposite might happen: that transgender rights folks who read the piece might say, “Who the hell are you to speak out about gender issues?”

For the record, I’m just another voice in the wilderness. And thank you for not yelling at me.

My online proliferation—proliferation being defined here as anything less than complete anonymity—comes not a moment too soon, as I can practically feel the heat of 40 candles lighting up a trans-fat-free birthday cake even as I write this. Depending on whom you trust—me, or the federal government—I entered the world four decades ago tomorrow, or maybe yesterday.

Am I the only person with a Social Security birthday that differs from her actual birthday? I didn’t realize this until several years ago, the first time I tried to file my income tax return electronically. My return was rejected because the birthday I entered differed from my birthday of record, which was apparently entered as November 13, not November 15, at the time my Social Security number was issued. This was news to me, so I naturally called my mother, who had filled out the application for my SSN when I was still in grade school. After I explained the confusion, she expressed a moment of doubt (!) and suggested I check my birth certificate. I did, and it confirmed the date I’ve always celebrated: November 15.

For simplicity’s sake, I changed the date on that year’s tax return to November 13, thinking I would iron it out later, but in years since I’ve been both (a) too lazy and (b) too disinterested to go wait in line at the Social Security office to disabuse the feds of the notion that my birthday is any day but what I say it is. Besides which, when it comes to the Federal Bureau of Misinformation and Wrong-Headed Opinions About Me, date of birth is very low on my list of correction priorities.

So if you think our government is never wrong, my birthday was yesterday and you totally missed it. Otherwise it’s tomorrow.

Whenever you personally celebrate my birthday, I will this week enter my 40s, which is high season for a midlife crisis reflection as to who we are, what we stand for, and how life thus far stacks up against our lifelong goals and dreams. I could overcomplicate this, but for once I won’t:

Failure: I haven’t published a book.
Accomplishment: I haven’t killed myself.

The latter is an ongoing goal that can’t technically be called an “accomplishment” until my death is achieved via any non-self-inflicted means, but I feel confident in declaring victory on that front because I now know of a place I can go where condescending but well-meaning people will keep me away from the knife drawer and ration my pills in little paper cups.

On the other hand, the former goal can’t truly be labeled a “failure” just yet. In life’s marathon, I’m only at mile marker 13, maybe 14 (if you have reason to believe this is an erroneous assumption, please notify me immediately). I still have time to write my masterpiece minor-key memoir, and even if I never publish a book, that goal seems more mutable to me now than it did when I was 12 and first conceived it. In 1979, the World Wide Web was more than a decade from fruition. There was no way for me to conceive then of a future network through which I could pass school notes on a grand scale, reaching 10s, even scores of readers, many of whom aren’t even in my homeroom! Had I known that, would I still have dreamed of one day publishing something as tiredly old-school as a book—an object of heft in the hand, one with pages, whether rough or smooth, that propel the reader through setup, conflict, and, with any luck, a satisfying resolution, after which we may close its covers with some small ceremony, taking a moment to reflect on the just-completed journey, perhaps reading or rereading the author’s bio and gazing at his or her jacket photo with simultaneous deep admiration and slight jealousy?

OK, I might yet be suckling at the teat of that dream. But had I known at 12 what wonders lay just over the Commodore 64 horizon, surely I would have conceived a backup dream of one day being Googlable. And had I been so prescient, that backup dream would seem nigh on the eve of my 40th birthday!

I’ve been inching up the Google chain these past few weeks, and have made significant progress even in the last few days. During a search this weekend, my earliest Google hit was at number 25, with subsequent citations at odd intervals. But a search just conducted in the moment before I wrote this sentence yielded my first hit at number nine! I have entered the Teresa Morrison top 10! High-five me, bog turtle expert, even if my second mention slips all the way to number 61 (!), after which many of me can be found hanging with my homegirls in the 80s and 90s.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it, watching the notoriety of non-famous people—and even famous bog turtle experts—rise and fall like stock market shares?

The Teresa Morrison with the two-faced kitten, once so dominant on the Googlescape, has now fallen behind me. She’s also lost ground to folk musician Teresa Morrison of the duo Up River, available for weddings and your more Celtic-themed bar mitzvahs; New York chanteuse Teresa Morrison, who can be seen and heard on YouTube singing “Easy As Life” from Aida to a noisy-to-the-point-of-rude lounge audience; and, of course, Nova Scotian identical twin soccer stud Teresa Morrison.

And don’t count out that second tier of Teresa Morrisons—the group with whom I identify most strongly, even if I’ve temporarily slipped toward the head of the pack. Many of us are making our case for first-page status even as you read this. There’s the Teresa Morrison of Kitchener, Canada, who in a formal complaint to her district laments that excessive truck noise and traffic on her residential street limits the time she spends in her garden and her outdoor enjoyment of her property. There’s the Teresa who owns the Morrison Inn and Holiday Bar in Morrison, Colo., whose 450 residents fancy theirs “the most haunted town in America, per capita.” There’s the Teresa Morrison of Nassau County, N.Y., who, as a losing candidate for the Farmingdale Village Board of Trustees, campaigned on a platform that pleaded “for people to be happy to live here and for the bickering to stop,” a sentiment I think we can all get behind. There’s the Teresa Morrison who as a lab tech at the University of Georgia School of Veterinary Medicine founded a now-20-year-old pet visitation program for homebound seniors.

In the end, though, I think there may be one way in which I’ve affected the Google fame of every Teresa Morrison out there, and I’m not sure how they’re going to feel about it. Due to the nature of my appearances and citations on LGBT-oriented sites, our name has become a keyword that will generate hits on bottom-feeder porn sites, whose little spiders go out Web crawling and collect captive phrases resulting in nonsensical hits like this one, which, if clicked, will make your monitor erupt as a pornographic house of mirrors with new windows opening faster than you can shut them:

Gay Squirts: Most actual news about hunk fucking and gay surfing; civil unions; gay-friendly; Teresa Morrison!

Or, even better:

Gay Canadians: Best Gay of Mexican hunk information source! By Teresa Morrison

At last, I’ve achieved gay porn search term status! And to all those other Teresa Morrisons who never did nothin’ gay to nobody, “You’re welcome!”

With my backup dream accomplished, and my not-killing-myself goal making steady progress, I can put foolish dreams and cares aside and turn 40 without a worry in the world as to what this second act may yield. With one eye focused bravely on the future, and one lazy walleye retrospectively surveying the detritus strewn about my beaten path, I will move through life with the courage and the pride of a woman who has no need of worldly huzzahs.

Life, I am told, begins at 40. Well, all I’ve got to say is that that’s one fucking lame time for life to start, given all the preamble and muck we have to go through to get there. But seeing as how I’ve arrived and all, bring on the dancing ponies. I’m ready for the good bits.

We’re having butter issues, le domestique and I.

Actually, we’re having buttery spread issues—butter originating in the udder is untouched by the controversy.

It’s sad, really. We thought we had found a buttery spread with which we could form a lifelong bond, but our BBF betrayed us—or, rather, never had our back at all. Land O’Lakes® Light Butter with Canola Oil, a product chosen for its low fat content, rich flavor, and lack of hydrogenated oils, served us in any number of ways for a year or more. We had switched to LO’L from Brummel & Brown®, a yogurt-based spread previously chosen for its low fat content, rich flavor, and agreeable spreadability factor. (For the record, LO’L was a little too spreadable. Straight out of the fridge it was ready to melt invitingly on to—or even molecularly merge with—your toast, your pancakes, what have you. But if you happened to take it out of the fridge too early, like, more than 30 seconds before you absolutely needed to, it assumed its preferred liquid form. That’s what one gets, I suppose, for asking too much of her buttery spread.)

We had turned our backs on B&B—the discovery of which, its product Web site promises, is “like when you discovered that laughing was also a full-body workout”—only because its “vegetable oil blend” (B&B is advertised as 10% yogurt and 35% vegetable oil, leaving the product potentially, by my calculation, 55% puppy blood) contains partially hydrogenated soybean oil—hydrogenation being what puts the trans in trans fat.

I’m not typically a dietary alarmist, but when I heard an NPR story some time ago calling hydrogenated oil “plastic fat,” as in, that’s how it reacts with your biology, those long-dormant alarm bells sounded. My larder is quite full enough, thank you, without ingesting something predisposed to settling into a cozy pocket of my stomach for a years-long nap. Even our corporate-friendly government, by way of the Food and Drug Administration, has declared that when it comes to trans fat, the only healthy dietary intake is no dietary intake.

I labored over my choices. Have you had to choose a new buttery spread lately? The variety is astounding, but while all promise “rich, buttery” flavor, very few lack hydrogenated oils (almost all claim 0% trans fat, but because of business-friendly consumer-hostile FDA labeling standards, those products can still contain significant amounts of the stuff; the only way to figure out whether your butter products contain hydrogenated oils is to stand interminably before your grocer’s dairy case inspecting labels).

After reading the nutritional information on a number of promising products, I settled on the aforementioned LO’L spread, one of only a handful of contenders that appeared to meet all my criteria. And all was sunshine and buttercups until the Human Rights Campaign released its confounding 2008 Corporate Equality Index, a.k.a. the “good to the gays” rap sheet.

As an operative for the Gay Agenda, I’m well acquainted with the Corporate Equality Index, which reports the results of surveys returned by hundreds of large corporations, detailing their LGBT inclusion in employment and public outreach policies. Even if it weren’t my job to pay attention to the list, I’d find it worth studying. With LGBT rights increasingly politicized by BushCheney Inc., how we spend our money has become at least as powerful as how we vote, an idea underscored by the fact that while we’re still having trouble getting a law passed at the federal level that would make it illegal to fire an employee simply for being gay—currently A-OK in 31 states—nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies who responded to the HRC survey met every single LGBT-friendly criterion set forth, which is no cakewalk: In order to receive a perfect score on the CEI, employers must prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation as well as gender identity and expression; provide diversity training covering each of the above; offer a transgender wellness benefit; offer employees’ domestic partners the same benefits package as married spouses; and support an LGBT employees’ resource group. Compared to LGBT rights at the federal level, such corporate policies are nothing short of extraordinary.

Anyhow, this year I have rededicated myself to putting my money where my rights are, and it is with a heavy heart that I report Land O’Lakes received a measly score of 53 on the CEI. According to the chart accompanying that score, LO’L fails to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression; fails to provide diversity training in areas of sexual orientation or gender expression; has no LGBT employee resource group; and makes no effort to include LGBT populations in advertising, marketing, or philanthropy.

For the record, I’ve identified a number of companies with lackluster scores with whom I’ve done business in the past but have no problem abandoning until they get it together to show my people some love. In most such cases, there is at least one counterpart company that seems to have my back. To wit:

• Barnes & Noble got a 63? Fine. Borders got 100 (and I like its stores better anyway).

• Bayer got a 15? Fifteen? Are you fucking kidding me? Wouldn’t you think a company that’s been sued by multiple Holocaust survivors claiming the company was involved in concentration camp medical experiments and other war atrocities would try just a little harder to redeem itself in the 21st century? It isn’t as if Bayer has no competition in the rarefied field of pain relief, or even more narrowly, aspirin, which, having been invented in the late 19th century, isn’t exactly a patented formula these days. (Interestingly—to me, at least—Bayer fought tooth and nail in the early 20th century to trademark the name “Aspirin” and was repeatedly refused, even by its own German government. When the company finally won a trademark suit, in the United States naturally, it began to charge up to 10 times as much for its product here as in the rest of the world. Then in World War I the Allies seized Bayer’s assets, along with those of just about every other German company, and by 1921 “aspirin” had been reduced to a lowly lowercase genericism.)

Should you care for a tablet or two, might I suggest Walgreens’ generic version? The company not only scored a perfect 100 on the CEI but stood its ground when Christian right organizations appealed to their crazy fundamentalist minions to boycott the brand, asserting that the company, in giving money to the 2006 Gay Games, was promoting casual gay sex in an effort to increase the HIV-positive population and thus the client base for prescription medications sold in its pharmacies. I don’t make this shit up. The company disregarded the lunacy and stood by its support of the Games, held in the company’s hometown of Chicago that year. Go, Walgreens!

• ExxonMobil Corp., number 1 on the Fortune 500, got a big old doughnut, just as it does every year. Meaning not only that it fails to meet any criteria for gay and lesbian inclusion but that its PR folks gleefully return a survey to HRC saying so (whereas they could simply ignore the query), implying that such failures may even be a point of pride in the company ranks. Not content merely to ignore gay rights, Exxon managed to regress them when it acquired Mobil, rescinding the latter company’s existing gay and lesbian nondiscrimination policy and domestic-partner benefits. To put that 0 in perspective, and please don’t take this as an endorsement of Wal-fucking-Mart, but yes, even the big W-M, number 2 on the Fortune 500 list, offers the small concession of a written nondiscrimination policy covering sexual orientation and provides diversity training to its employees, earning the world’s most ironic smiley face a 40 on the CEI.

Like Bayer, Exxon has a bit of a gaffe in its past—the whole Exxon Valdez thingy—that one might think would cause the PR department to work that much harder to overcome its poor public image. (BTW, Exxon has yet to pay court-awarded damages to 33,000 fisherman and landowners negatively impacted by the Exxon Valdez’s pollution of 1,200 miles of Alaskan coastline. After being ordered in 1994, five years after the disaster, to pay $5 billion in punitive damages, Exxon filed appeal after appeal seeking to duck the penalty, which at the time of judgment represented one year’s clear profit for the corporation. Even after the award was reduced to $2.5 billion by a federal appeals court, an amount that now represents just three weeks of profit for the corporation, Exxon appealed to our big business–friendly Supreme Court, which, yeppers, agreed on October 29 of this year to hear the case sometime in the spring of 2008—meaning that we the taxpayers continue to pay for America’s most powerful corporation’s refusal to cooperate with a 13-year-old jury award that has since been reduced by half even as inflation has made the amount increasingly insignificant to the company. Something to think about when choosing a filling station.)

Chevron (which also owns Texaco) and BP (which also owns Arco and Amoco) both received perfect scores on the CEI. With a gas station at just about every major intersection, we have options, so if you can’t ride your bike or walk or take mass transit to work, while there might not be a true “best” choice for your fossil fuel needs, there sure as hell is a worst.

• FedEx got a 55? Fine. UPS not only earned 100 on the CEI but came in at number 39 on this year’s Best Corporate Citizens list, which scores large companies according to criteria such as community relations, diversity, employee relations, and environmental efforts. Besides which, deliverywomen look hot in their UPS browns.

For the record, the other companies who earned perfect CEI scores and are among the 100 Best Corporate Citizens are, in order of BCC ranking: Nike, Motorola, Intel, IBM, Agilent, Starbucks, General Mills, Herman Miller, Dell, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Adobe, the Gap, Google, Eastman Kodak, American Express, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, Xerox, Bright Horizons, Sun Microsystems, Best Buy, Lexmark, Nordstrom, KeyCorp, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Principal Financial.

Hey, not all corporations are bad.

As much as I want to adhere to the lists for all my consumer decisions, there are instances where that’s impossible. Of the three pharmaceutical giants whose products I require enjoy, two received perfect scores, while the third received an 85. AstraZeneca fails to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression; while this issue is pretty close to my heart—because I think it’s utterly absurd that anyone should get antsy about anyone else’s personal presentation and, let’s face it, I have a somewhat alternative PP myself—I feel that it is, mentally speaking, both easier and wiser to reconcile such an omission in AZ’s employee relations than to go off a med that keeps me relatively sane.

I also recognize that I often have no idea how smaller companies, who are not rated by HRC, conduct themselves. Just as not all corporations are bad, not all mom-and-pops are good. In my nine years of service to an independent music store—during which I served as the senior buyer and witnessed its expansion from a 1,000-square-foot strip mall space to a 5,500-square-foot store, moving twice to accommodate its growth—I never received a single paid vacation or sick day, and I was completely uninsured. Nevertheless, anyone who shopped there felt superior for not shopping at nearby chain music stores like Virgin and Tower, who undoubtedly compensated their key employees more fairly.

While the competing low-fat, non-hydrogenated buttery spreads I’ve located are hardly mom-and-pop enterprises, they are marketed by companies that fly a little further under the radar than LO’L (number 301 on the Fortune 500). For instance: Smart Balance and Earth Balance, my leading contenders to replace LO’L. The Balance sisters are two of only three buttery spreads available at Whole Foods, which outright bans any products made with hydrogenated oils. (While Whole Foods’ score of 90 isn’t perfect, it beats 75, awarded to both Safeway [which owns Vons] and Kroger [which owns Ralphs]. My overall grocer preference is for Trader Joe’s, which is too small to be rated.) The third was a rice-based spread, at the idea of which le domestique made a face.

As it turns out, the Smart Balance® and Earth Balance® products I tried are both contender-worthy. At least I think so. Le domestique criticizes SB’s spreadability factor, which is very low. While it melts obligingly enough on hot skillets and just-toasted bread, it is otherwise as dedicated to its solid form as LO’L is to its liquid. Which confuses me, because the very reason hydrogenated oils show up in so many processed foods is that hydrogenation solidifies oil—fully hydrogenated oil is shortening—making it very versatile in achieving desired consistencies. I had assumed LO’L melted all over the damn world because of its lack of such hydrogenation; it certainly isn’t due to its inclusion of actual butter, which in its refrigerated form is about as spreadable as my dog’s jaw when I need to give him a pill.

Despite my desire to pronounce the Balance sisters both delicious and pro-gay, and therefore my new BBFs, I think it’s only fair that I do my best to hold the smaller companies to the same standard as the larger ones, so I sent the following e-mail to Smart Balance Inc. (as well as Trader Joe’s, while I was at it):

Hi there—

Can you please tell me whether your company promotes LGBT inclusion by including sexual orientation and gender identity/expression in its employee nondiscrimination policy? And, where applicable, are the domestic partners of your employees entitled to the same benefits as married spouses? I enjoy your products very much, and as a consumer it’s important that I spend money with companies that support my rights. Thanks very much for your time!

Best regards—

Teresa Morrison

I acknowledge that whoever fields consumer feedback may dismiss mine as the work of a crank, and I imagine that if I receive a reply at all, it will be along the lines of:

Dear Ms. Morrison—

Thanks for your feedback about our products! Please use the attached coupons to continue enjoying them.

Kind regards—

Your New BBFs

Then I figured that as long as I’m corresponding with the corps, maybe I owe it to LO’L’s rich buttery flavor to give it another chance. After all, according to the company’s corporate home page, “Land O’Lakes Inc. values and recognizes the unique talents and potential of all employees and is committed to continue to build a diverse workforce.” I figured I should drop LO’L a line to let the feedback folks know of my quandary and offer them a chance to tell me about any upcoming diversity planning.

Hi there—

I’ve long enjoyed many of your products, particularly your light butter with canola oil. It’s difficult to find a butter spread that’s both low in fat and free of hydrogenated oils, and yours happens to be my favorite.

As such, I was dismayed to see that Land O’Lakes Inc. earned a relatively low score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. I recognize and appreciate that you prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and that you offer your employees’ domestic partners benefits equivalent to those of married spouses. But many Fortune 500 companies like yours now explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression as well, which I think is necessary for the full inclusion you strive for in your workforce.

I hope that you’ll consider adding such protections to your written nondiscrimination policy; LGBT issues are becoming increasingly politicized, not so much by LGBT people themselves as by our own state and federal governments, and sometimes it seems that our only political capital lies in spending power. In such a scenario, it’s essential that I put my money where my rights are, and I would love to be able to include your products in the “buy” column of my consumer activism campaign.

Thanks very much for your time!

Best regards—

Teresa Morrison

I’ve thrown down the exceedingly polite gauntlet, and now all I can do is wait to see whether either, neither, or both of these companies care to answer my plea for just one delicious buttery spread that has my gender-vague lesbian back. If not, we may have to try that rice stuff. Le domestique hopes it won’t come to that.

————————————————————————————————-

November 6 update!

I have just received the following reply from Trader Joe’s:

Teresa,
We appreciate your inquiry and bringing your concerns to our attention. Trader Joe’s specifically prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. We also offer the same benefits to a Crew Member’s qualified same-sex partner as we would to a Crew Member’s opposite-sex married partner.

Sincerely,
Amy
Trader Joe’s
Customer Relations

Yay, Trader Joe’s!

—————————————————————————————–

November 11 update!

Smart Balance Inc. responds:

Dear Ms. Morrison—

Yes, to all questions asked.

Sincerely,

Smart Balance Customer Relations

Brief? Perhaps. But affirmative all the same.

Reality shows learn ourselves alot of stuff. Like, myself has learnt “myself” is alot better then “I” or “me” when myself talks about I. Of course myself’s English “teacher” learnt myself wrong, or efforted to, when myself was little, but myself never liked herself!

Myself was messed up by “school,” so when themselves on reality shows—their so way awesomer then wrote ones, and whom cares about a dumb “writers” strike anyways now because ourselves just say ourselve’s own words on TV and stuff—were all like “the alliance is Lance, Brett, and myself,” myself was like “whoa!” because myself’s English “teacher” was all like “the alliance is Lance, Brett, and me (or I?).” But now myself knew herself was wrong! “Myself” is alot righter then “I” or “me,” unless myselves are talking about myselves, then myselves are all like “Myself is so full of me (or I?).” Know what myself mean?

Let ourselves review:

“I am only concerned with me, myself, and I.” Wrong!
“Myself is only concerned with me, me, and me.” Rite!

“Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.” Wronger!
“Like a bridge over troubled water, myself will lie I down.” Rite!

Maybe next time myself can learn yourselves about “lay” and “lie,” if myself is all like wanting to write and stuff.