Author: Kelly

I woke up this morning with a sort of nagging feeling in the back of my neck, slightly towards my right. Over the last few hours, it’s blossomed into a weird sort of migraine, if you down-shifted the migraine from its usual place to living in the area behind my right ear, down through my shoulder blade, and then radiating shooting pain into my arm.

Ah, CRPS – always interesting.

So I don’t have a traditional migraine, but I might as well, for how useful I feel right now. Granted, not having the light sensitivity is nice, but I might take that over the tactile-sensitivity. The fan blowing across my arm is enough to make me want to scream. (Yes, I should go tape on some lidoderm patches.)

Since writing, reading, laundry, or just about anything else isn’t going to happen until this goes away, I’m watching the Discovery Health channel, which has a show on plastic surgery on. I’ve caught this show before, and always had about the same reaction – on the one hand, I’m glad they balance the vanity surgeries with the medically necessary surgeries, but on the other, I do wish that they would not glamourize it so much. By this, I mean the fact that they show the before and after, and of course before is without makeup and harshly lit, while after is fully made up, soft lighting, etc. But beyond that, they skim over the recovery period, maybe showing a quick still image or two of bandages and bruises. They also discuss “the necessity of this surgery” – such as “aging makes this surgery necessary”, as if there is a problem with the fact that a woman’s age can show in her thighs.

There are certainly appropriate times for plastic surgery – I don’t argue that. It does truly amazing things. I simply question this show, which tries to present itself as a balanced view of the how and why of plastic surgery, while it actually glosses over the thing people know least about, and perhaps fear the most – pain and recovery.

New Hampshire made history yesterday, becoming the first state in America to legalize gay civil unions without court order or the threat of lawsuit. Signing the bill, Gov. John Lynch said

“We in New Hampshire have had a long and proud tradition of taking the lead in opposing discrimination,” Lynch said as he signed the bill. “I do not believe that this bill threatens marriage. I believe that this is a matter of conscience and fairness.”

But I have to wonder at his statement. On the one hand, this makes six states that recognize some form of domestic/civil union for gay couples (Washington, California, Vermont, New Jersey, Maine, New Hampshire), with Oregon joining the list in January. Massachusetts allows same-sex couples to marry, but only Hawaii extends certain marriage-like benefits to cohabitating couples of either sex.

That is where my reservation comes from. If it were truly a matter of fairness, I don’t believe we would need new laws. Instead, we would simply allow gay couples to marry – or straight couples to have civil unions. But at this moment in time, we are creating legal equivalents of different drinking fountains. It used to be that different laws applied based on the colour of your skin – now they apply based on who you join in relationship with.

It does not oppose discrimination to reinforce it by creating and maintaining divisive laws based on sexual preference.