Anyone looking for fish, click here. Otherwise, read on.

"Bite me" pretty much sums up my current attitude. I'm going through all my diaryrings and checking codes. Amazingly, I haven't found anyone who hasn't put it up. Of course, all I've done is marchingband and half of sci-fichicks. And it puts me in a bad mood.

To be more accurate ("precision of language, Asher!"), it's nearly midnight and I'm tired, which is the true cause of all present bitchiness. Anyway.

I have joined a diaryring for every letter of the alphabet, except for k,t,u, and z. The t ring should be taken care of soon, thanks to thefishbowl. Which is why I have a fish link up there. It's a requirement to join, you see.

I applied for the-spark, but apparently I just don't have it. Ah, rejection. Bite me.

And I'm really freakin sick of reading all these adult diaries and oh, they're sooo mature, they wish the teens would stop whining. Bite me. Bite me. BITE ME!

papaphobia - n. fear of the Pope

I didn't make that up. Nor the one about being tickled by feathers, but I forgot its name. I've been spending a lot of time at the community college lately, as I must go 2.5 hours early for my class while my dad's in Florida, and I spend the time reading in the library. I've been bringing Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring with me, which I'm reading for the first time and quite enjoying, but sometimes I want a break. The selection is pathetic; the marjority of their fiction is either mystery or romance. So I wandered around in the dreaded nonfiction shelves until I found a book called Weird English. Even it was mostly boring stuff that an English professor's daughter would already know, but it did contain a long list of phobias which were quite interesting.

So does a person with papaphobia have nightmares about the Pope chasing him around with his big hat and impaling him with a holy staff, or what?

This is self-righteous and narcissistic of me to say (that's for all you Philes out there...), but I really don't like it when people change my diaryring coding. Okay. Random rant. Sorry.

I love Diaryland, though. Just reading what other people have to say has made me a lot more open-minded, particularly about sexuality. Before Diaryland, I'd always gone along with the typical Christian "gay is bad" response, just automatically. I was straight, so everyone else should be too and if they weren't then they were gross, or evil, or something. But then I started reading diaries, and lots of them are written by people who are gay, bi, or lesbian, probably because all the people here are so wonderfully supportive. And these were intelligent, funny, creative people. And then Mary, one of my online and real-life friends, discovered that she was bi. At the time, I was still under the misguided notion that people have a choice about these things, so I wasn't entirely happy (hangover from how I was raised), but I wasn't about to ditch her or let her sexuality hurt our friendship. And now, the more I've thought about it, I've realized that there's really nothing wrong with having a different sexual orientation, and it no longer bothers me at all. I will never be bisexual or lesbian, because the attraction just isn't there for me, but for them it is. They can't help it; they didn't make themselves do it. They were just born that way, just like I was born liking men. And so what? We're all human, aren't we? What exactly is it that's so bad about liking people of the same gender?

The ONLY problem I can find is that of my religion, Christianity, which traditionally shuns such lifestyles. So I did a bit of research on the web, and found this. The only definite, specific comment on this in the Bible is in the Old Testament with all of the old Jewish laws, where it basically says "don't do; bad." Some other laws in this section? Ritual animal sacrifice, strict dietary laws, death to a man who has sex with his wife while she's having her period. And does the modern Church uphold any of these laws? Of course not. It upholds Jesus's laws, and He never said a thing about it.

So why DO Christians shun homo- and bisexuality? All I can imagine is the reason that I used to: they're (mostly) not like that, so no one else should be either. Which is definitely NOT a Christian attitude, but we're all hypocrites in some way or the other.

So hey... thank you, Diaryland. I love you guys!