What an alliance!

I've heard whispers in the past few months of possible legislation to make legal marriages between people and their pets, gaming avatars, between adults and children, and amongst groups.

Apparently, this has caught the attention of more than a few people, because I've also heard rumors (if you can call Mom's letters and Jenni's information rumors) that there's an alliance forming to help stop this. The really funny thing is who's joined this alliance.

Of course the religious groups of all stripes--Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddist, shinto, etc.--are against it. Well, the Mormons and Muslims aren't against all of it, obviously, but they're against most of it.

No, the interesting thing is that the gay rights groups--all of them--are against it, for various reasons. According to Jenni, who's got a really good ear for this sort of stuff, the gays are afraid that this will make a mockery of the institute of marriage. They're joining in with the Christians, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews (who, ironically, said that gay marriage would make a mockery of the institute of marriage) in an attempt to buy off enough politicians to put up an effective opposition.

I suppose it's not such a surprise--when the gay lobby was working to get the civil unions recognized as marriage in the eyes of society, they swore to oppose the slippery slope that the evangelical women's clubs claimed that gay marriage would send us all sliding down. They even went so far as to throw NAMBLA out on its ass--even called on the president to fire his safe schools czar as a member of his cabinet because a member of NAMBLA, open or otherwise, could not help make schools safe.

Mom called it working with the lesser evil to stave off the greater. Jenni's been laughing her fool head off since I showed her Mom's letter.

Hypocrisy really does know no bounds. For once, I'm glad I'm a C.P.A. Otherwise I doubt I could resist pointing that out to Mom and laughing in her face.

Those poor, poor wives.

Not the evangelical women's clubs--they have it coming (pun intended)--but the others who'd rather their husbands left them alone.

About two weeks after the government's medical care plan was killed by new legislation, the nation found out why the evangelical women's clubs were so hot on getting it repealed that they were willing to finally play the game like the rest of us.

The one good thing about the government plan was that it required that everyone receive equal (though really poor) access to waiting lines to get treatments (unless you were dying). That was what those rancid, bitter, nasty tempered, hideous, bitches wanted to change: that everyone was treated equally (badly) under the government plan.

Yeah, they didn't like that they had to wait in line with those whose lifestyles they didn't approve of. Like those nasty whores (that help preserve their sexless marriages), those worthless drug users (who work harder to support their habits than the evangelical women do to support their own families), or those evil murderers (like yours truly).

I don't know how they did it, but the evangelical women's organizations--the Christian, Muslim, and Judaic clubs that banded together in order to do what they saw as our shared God's will--managed to get legislation rammed through that didn't show up on the political market radar until after it was passed. That legislation states that those who could pose a danger of any type, bodily, mentally, or spiritually, to the helpless, good people of the nation may not visit doctors' offices or hospitals. And yes, they even managed to get a list of those they want to discriminate against worked into the legislation. On that list are those like me, who they think pose a risk to their lives; drug users, who might be on something that makes them dangerous, or carrying a communicable disease like AIDS; prostitutes who might be carrying a communicable disease or might teach their daughters that being a sexless manequin married to a man to provide for them financially isn't their only option; or those who work in that den of iniquity that is political bribery--no one but their own, admittedly sizable, subset of the population are eligible for medical care. At all.

The national sex workers' union, lead by our local chapter (269), has declared a strike. Husbands are going to have to start sleeping with their wives, if they want sex--and since most (but not all) of Jenni's old customers were married to members of the evangelical women's clubs, that means the ones pushing the prostitutes to strike are going to be the ones who have to put out.

Those who use various recreational pharmaceuticals are also cutting back and working harder, to come up with money to apply pressure in a different area: the political options market, and bribe-able politicians and lobbyists. Those who work in that market, like my boyfriend does, are teaming up with the self-medicators to apply the pressure, since they know where the money would do the most good.

I'm sure that, if C.P.A.s could get along well enough to have a union, we'd likely be using our own unique talents to apply pressure directly to the evangelical sisterhood of self-righteous thugs. As it is, I don't doubt that agencies that don't have their own private hospitals and physicians likely are doing such on their own, without organization.

In any case, even though Jenni's retired and no longer a card carrying member of the union, she is pretty active in the management and organization of our local chapter. She's one of the ones that had a hand in the planning stages of the strike, and is working hard to keep all of the local girls in line. Thank God her husband is better at listening to her and reading the market trends than my boyfriend--between his job and her new one, they're keeping the girls striking in their apartments and fed, even if the girls are getting behind on some of their less essential bills.

Speaking of relative levels of success in the market...do you think my boyfriend would notice if I bought cheap booze and put it in the bottle he drank the last of the expensive scotch from? I'm tired of him guzzling my good stuff.

Sorry I've been gone. But I'm back now.

I meant to post something the week after Thanksgiving, but had to travel for business. I only got home last night.

And what a homecoming. I unlock my apartment's door and turn on the light to find my boyfriend, face down and sobbing on my couch, a half-empty bottle of really expensive Scotch (which had been full when I left) on the coffee table next to him, and an empty glass on its side on the hand-knotted wool Persian rug he'd given me for Christmas two years ago.

Lucky for him, the glass hadn't had anything in it when it'd hit my rug.

So, instead of getting to kick my shoes off and relax after a job well done (and I had nothing to do with the Peruvian president's recent demise with a cocktail fork stuck in his--well, anyway, I had nothing to do with it), I had to comfort my day-trader boyfriend for a really stupid bet.

I told him to listen to my sister when she said it wasn't going to happen, but nooo, Mr. I'm-the-professional-political-options-market-guru thought he knew which way the market would flip.

I don't know how much money he put into it (though I have my dark suspicions), but he basically bet on the $1.50 per pack marijuana cigarette tax going through. Which meant he bet against the pot-smokers managing to get off the couch and get active in the system long enough to buy enough lobbyists and politicians off to defeat the measure.

Jenni told him that pot smokers don't want to work any more than they have to to support their habit. She told him that the extra tax would require them to either work more or smoke less, and keep working more or smoking less for a long period. She told him that they'd be willing to work more now, in the short term, so that they could return to their normal habits in the long term. She told him that there was no way that tax would pass.

Now all that's left is for him to tell me how much money he's lost. Thank God I keep my finances separate from his, or (given his behavior last night) Mom might be going short this month to make the minimum required payments on Dad's debt, with no way for her to make the regular one.