every word you just said: exactly.
thank you.
what better way to begin the year.
(i just felt my baby kick.)

Smurf, the anecdotes and the new lingo is much appreciated. Toolfriend xylophones, unite!

Anotherjenny, most hearty congratulations on your eminent immanence! I am honored that your partner is getting any guidance from the tales herein, and please encourage her to write me directly (info at lesbiandad dot net) if she has any worries/questions/comments that she wants to pursue directly and offline. We’re all in this together.

You’ll have to go to the source of this photo, on the Utilitarianism page of That Religious Studies Website, to find out why it serves as illustration for Utilitarianism. I just couldn’t bring myself to hammer my own finger simply for the purposes of winking back at LD’s comment, so I had to go borrowing for the image. Am now trying to get the kid to spit up beer for the next illustration.

Kidding.

But in a manly way, to be sure. Now I’m going to go hammer things and drink beer. And spit. Gotta spit.

Happy New Year to you and your family! You are in my thoughts…

So thank you, for her and for me – because as loving and supportive as I may be for her there is nothing to replace the voice of one who has been there.

I recently traveled home and revisited my high school, showing my significant other of three months where I’d grown up. In the halls, I happened across an old teacher who started chatting and asked me, “Is this your brother?” Trying to correct him with poise, the first thing out of my mouth was, “No, this is my sister.” Embarrassed, laughing, shocked at my fumbling, I tried again: “Actually, this is my girlfriend, [name].” The teacher was thoroughly confused at this point. Meanwhile, I sat there wishing I could’ve introduced her using the term of endearment I’m accustomed to: toolfriend (a name she earned after naming me “tool”).

Second story: The two of us have tried to find new gender labels that fit. “Genderqueer” and “queer” are okay, but seem very wrapped up in one specific racial, generational, socioeconomic subset of this country’s population. I found a quote in S.Bear Bergman’s book “Butch is a Noun” which reads: ” ‘ …[hyr] gender is xylophone…’ ” It wasn’t until I was searching Google for that quote to show to the Toolfriend that I realized how much I hadn’t understood the quote: a gender is actually a musical instrument from Indonesia. After laughing for a while longer, we decided that this would be even better than the completely arbitrary term for which we’d been searching. We now refer to each other as xylophones, and that seems to fit pretty well.

Here’s to another amazing year! As long as you keep blogging, I’ll keep reading