It is related, though. Possibly it falls under the category of things that made Small Miriam into Big Miriam.

Right now I'm somewhere in the application process of an organization that rumorofrain has been referring to as the Mennonite Peace Corps. It's not an entirely accurate description, as you don't need to be Mennonite, but it's close enough. They do want you to be an active member of a Christian church, and to agree to abide by their lifestyle expectations. Okay, fine, lifestyle expectations. I think that living simply and an agreement to not racially and/or sexually harass people are good things. And I'm perfectly willing to abide by the drug and alcohol policy. Personally, I don't expect to have issues following any of this stuff. However.

"MCC requires sexual celibacy for personnel outside of a heterosexual marriage relationship during their terms of service with MCC.

Persons of homosexual orientation who meet MCC personnel criteria as noted above will be considered for MCC service if they are willing to abide by MCC's requirement of celibacy for all outside of a heterosexual marriage and if they will not use MCC as a platform from which to advocate for same-sex sexual relationships."

ISSUES ISSUES ISSUES.
Okay, they're a church group. If they want people to be celibate outside of a committed relationship, that's their prerogative, I guess. But I have serious problems with specifying that your committed relationship has to be a heterosexual marriage. And I think the little "the gays are welcome so long as they're willing to act straight" addendum almost makes it worse.

My mother's take on this is that that particular requirement and that particular phrasing is put in there to appease the funding base. I was still feeling somewhat grumpy about the whole affair, though.

And then I realized that part of the application included this question: ( Write about a time when you observed racism, sexism or other forms of oppression, or participated in efforts to work against racism, sexism or other forms of oppression. Please elaborate. )

We were at the house of my maternal grandparents for Christmas this year. ( This gets very long, and may be somewhat disorganized, due to being written over the course of almost a week. )

Happy new year, everyone.

Those of you who have been reading your Smith e-mail this past week will be aware that there was supposed to have been a power outage at 5:00 this morning, with power back on at 5:30 and lots of other stuff (like internet) down throughout the day as we update to co-gen.* My alarm clock has a battery so that it doesn't reset in instances like this, and I didn't notice anything unusual this morning. Turns out, the word on the street** is that whoever was supposed to turn the power off at 5:00 this morning didn't show, and so the whole thing has been called off. And while I'm glad that there aren't going to be freaking out people on my shift this morning, there will still be freaking out people at some point in the future, and since we did all the anticipating for today, it would've been nice to just go through with it and get it over with.
Ah, its/status says that it was canceled due to a family emergency.

It is officially summer. I took my first cold shower this morning and it was marvelous.

It's been quiet today, aside from the lady who wanted to print something and couldn't because the pay-for-print computer was having problems. Either she the computer was asleep and she turned it off instead of waking it up or someone turned it off over the weekend in preparation for the power outage. Either way it won't reconnect to the Pharos server, and the lady was not happy about it. I have to say that I'm really puzzled by these people who come down to print and say that they're in the middle of class and just ran down to print something. I mean, printing doesn't take that long if everything works, but it's still longer than I'd want to step out of class for. Of course I must admit that on at least one occasion I've cut my printing pretty close too, but I managed to be in class with my paper by the time class started.

I finished The Arm of the Starfish yesterday. ( Cut for maundering about books and religion. )
Next on my reading list: A Ring of Endless Light and And Only to Deceive.

Pharos is working again. Whoot.

Em and I went canoeing yesterday, but turned back almost immediately because it was thundering ominously.

I think that's all for now.




*I would like to state that while I entirely approve of co-gen, I fully expected today to be hellish because people often don't check their e-mail/don't think ahead and then bad things happen and they freak out at the nearest person who looks to be vaguely in control of anything: probably me, since I have a shiny nametag and sit at a special desk.

**And by, "word on the street," I mean, "as I was told this morning by the chatty library lady who gives me my keys every morning and whose name I don't know and should probably ask sometime."