green

Good luck with your trip, grrl. Being thin is much more fun. Feel free to write to us about the scenery you experience during your travels into skinnyLand. I personally found mine of interest and would love to hear about yours.

Cystitis is a urinary tract infection and used to be called the honey mooners' disease. Perhaps you are thinking of this. Women can get a bout of cystitis after a lot of heavy love making following abstinence. The folk remedy is to drink more cranberry juice than you can stand. This flushes out the bad bacteria. I have occasionally had it; it is like pissing razor blades and you constantly feel like you are about to wet your pants if you don't find a toilet. I always felt that it was a rip off that I hated the taste of cranberry juice and yet loved sex.

That's the amazing thing about living in a democracy; any fool is free to display his idiocy. In a dictatorship, we have no choice.

By the way, congratulations on your weight loss, Yasmina. We Canadians are now entering the most challenging time of the year: winter, which is comfort food time.

Thanks for asking. I was doing really well up until last week when my ENT surgeon attempted to sew my trach hole close. It hadn't entirely closed by itself. He left a chain of stitches that looked like he was working on a crazy quilt (or was crazy). Over the weekend I started running a fever, my motor co-ordination skills completely crashed (I couldn't hold anything in my hands and I kept falling on the floor), and I began vomiting. Two visits to downtown ERs later, it turns out that I have pneumonia in my right lung and a giant oozing infected hole in my gullet. I feel lousy and the hole is seriously gross to look at. I am back to spending most of my time in bed. This is depressing because I was - only last week! - in the process of getting my life back. I was just starting to contact friends I haven't seen since I first got cancer and I was beginning to work renewing my passport. Well, this should slow down my weight gain, eh. lol

Reasons have already been posted as to why kids do not have the same legal rights as adults. As for marriage between sibs or any close relatives, there are genetic and psychological reasons why this is a bad idea.

Providing that they are a couple of adults and capable of giving legal consent, that is.......

I would figure that any marriage that is performed by a state official must be a right that should be, if permitted to some, then permitted to all.

Just as many people drink booze without becoming hardcore alcoholics, lots of people smoke marijuana without going on to harder drugs. In fact, I know quite a few people who have been smoking recreationally for many, many years now without ever moving on to anything harder. Marijuana and, for that matter, booze are gateway drugs for those individuals who are that way inclined. The reasons for drug abuse and addiction are debated; it is believed that psychological problems play a role as do genetics. In the case of pornography, it is likely safe to say that all perverts look at pornography. But very few men who look at pornography will go on to commit anti-social acts. This being said, I do believe that there is "normal" pornography and "abnormal" pornography; an interest in anything to do with violence towards women, pedophilia, and bestiality is a bad sign, in my opinion.

This would indicate that minorities have the same rights and protection under the laws of the land, would it not?

An excellent observation. I agree. It why I find her posts so wildly irritating. They are regurgitations without supporting observations. It is as if the intervening centuries, all the history and the scientific advances, have ceased to exist for this individual. Moreover, these posts assume that we all believe in her version of her God. Many of us believe in different versions or don't believe at all.....

Before I retired I worked in a male milieu - I built aircraft - and one of the things that I learned there was that men like to look. This doesn't mean that they love their wives any less or that they want to fool around. In just the way women often hinge their fantasy lives on romance novels and chick flicks, men will hinge their fantasies upon what they see. It is a difference in our hardwiring and it is the reason why strip joints remain enduringly popular yet women never really did get into watching male strippers with the same gusto. Men like to look. It is nothing to be threatened by unless there are other aspects of his behaviour which are odious. As my mum used to say about my dad, "when he stops looking at women, he will be no use to me." My mum was one who really enjoyed her sex life. It sounds to me like the opening poster has a really good relationship with a decent guy. She has received excellent advice from the other posters. The above comments were just my two cents' worth.

* the italics, bolding, and underlining were done by MeanGreen.Oh, so they are your pearls now! Well, I always did maintain that you use your God as an excuse to be judgemental and to behave like a moral bully. Perhaps you would do well to remember that "the quality of mercy is not strained....." And by the way, do you read anything other than the Bible? There is a wealth of information out there. There has been, for instance, much research into the probable reasons for homosexuality. These reasons include genetics and the chemical conditions prevalent inside the womb during gestation. For those who believe in God, this would certainly indicate that God made homosexuals as surely as He made the rest of us. Obviously, homosexuals should have the right to all the civil rights and protections that the rest of us enjoy. A civil marriage is one of these.

As long as the government remains in the marriage business, and there continues to be that division between government and religion, same sex couples should have the same rights to a secular marriage as heterosexual couples. This is only fair and decent and this is because sexual preference, like skin colour or gender, is something over which we have no choice. It is part of our inheritance. No one should be penalised for their skin colour, sexual orientation, or gender. And as for abiding by the results of a public vote, the rights of minorities will not always be safeguarded by the interests and biases of the majority. In Canada, we have the Charter of Rights; this document guarantees the rights to equality of treatment of our minorities.

By the way, I love your posts. You sure are putting the "fun" back in fundamentalist.

Jesus was a Jew who was preaching to other Jews. He told them that his covenant, the New Covenant, did not erase the Old Covenant; this means that all those strictures, the dietary ones, the ones about not wearing clothing made of composite fibres, and the one about being stoned to death if you work on the Sabbath still all hold true. Of course, there are many other wild and crazy rules that a careful reading of this document will reveal to you. This means, Battygreen, that if you want to follow your God, and have any credibility as a God-fearin' woman, you had better follow all of His strictures, and not cherrypick! Cast off your 60-40% poly/cotton blend, prepare a ram for sacrifice, and collect your rockpile today. The modern lifestyle is going to require you to do a helluvalot of stoning. You are probably going to end up with tennis elbow.

*snickers from Green*

Making prostitution legal is to put it in the same category as alcohol and cigarettes. Though there will still be troubled women who are pimped out by gangs, there will be more set-ups like the Bunny ranches in Vegas and the Red Light district in Amsterdam. These are working conditions which will ensure the safety of the women and of their clients. Prostitution will never be legislated out of existence; it is better to acknowledge that it is a fact of life by legalising it and drawing up legislation that will deal with the pitfalls of this profession - disease and violence.

Congratulations on your success with the band, TommyO. I, too, will miss your voice around here.

I am a lot less emotional now that I am 1) post-menopausal and 2) on a good cocktail of anti-depressants. It is kind of like being a man. It is very restful living like this.

I have a friend who was prone to getting UTIs after sex. She even got one after using her brand new dildo. She is now kind of off sexual activities......

And I always thought Humble referred to a spiritual place...not an actual town!

I second that.

Thanks, Bjean. I really did mean to thank them. I am not only old, I am also blonde!!! lol

According to the media up here it was the black vote which supported prop 8. The local comment is that it is ironic and sad that one minority would not support another minority.