I am a smoker. I like to say that I’m a “social smoker”, because that makes it sound more acceptable (at least, to my ears), but that’s probably a fiction us social smokers invented. I started smoking in high school, because everyone else was doing it and because the cigarettes that I smoked (not tabacco, [...]

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Apparently some aspect of the LDS temple ceremony will be portrayed on HBO’s Big Love (tonight?). Here’s a picture that was forwarded to me, apparently from TV Guide: Mormons are decrying this as sacrilegious and disrespectful, of course, but as one of thousands who was hoodwinked into going through the ceremony and socially coerced into [...]

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I told a professor here (who was running a forum on the Question of God) that my religious background is ex-Catholic but that I am an active blogger in the ex-Mormon part of the Bloggernacle; that my husband is humanist, my father-in-law is Buddhist, and my mother-in-law is First Nations/Pagan. I got an awesome look [...]

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I can’t remember when I first wanted to get a tattoo, but it was sometime in high school. I wanted a yin yang on my ankle. In college, I finally got it, but at the last moment, I changed its placement to my lower back. It was amazing. It was transcendent. It was painful. It [...]

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For a few weeks when I first stopped being able to find time to blog, I kept windows open in Safari to the point that it was neigh on impossible to shut down my computer, for fear of losing all the wonderful and amazing links I was going to share! But then I got into [...]

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Thanksgiving is a religious holiday. When the pilgrims first gathered to give thanks that they made it through their first few months in a wild new world, they weren’t thanking the natives for helping them, they were thanking their god for making the natives to help them. As a harvest festival, it has its roots [...]

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I had my first final today. In preparation, I spent some time on the library’s balcony, enjoying the view, the silence, and the not-school-ness. I also spent some time in the library’s prayer room. (I also spent some time watching the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam, but this post is not about that.) Hanging out in [...]

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Driving past the high school today, I saw a number of costumed people. Even at the law school, there are plenty of people dressed up. Halloween is the day that this society acknowledges that mask. We all wear different masks throughout the day, throughout the year (the corporate yes-person, the dutiful child, the loving spouse). [...]

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I have to post this, since it’s lolreligion. By now, I’m sure everyone has heard that a particular Christian called others to join in prayer at the bronze bull on wall street to ask god to “shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control [...]

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California, post Supreme Court decision (that discrimination based on gender is discrimination), now uses marriage licenses that ask for the names of “Party A” and “Party B” to the marriage. As someone who still doesn’t feel like the word “wife” applies to her, I think this is pretty awesome. It is, however, causing waves. I [...]

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