{"id":7869,"date":"2012-05-09T02:34:39","date_gmt":"2012-05-09T07:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/?p=7869"},"modified":"2012-05-09T04:26:21","modified_gmt":"2012-05-09T09:26:21","slug":"thoughts-for-592012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/?p=7869","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts for 5\/9\/2012"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/wp-content\/2012\/05\/gay_marriage_donut.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/wp-content\/2012\/05\/gay_marriage_donut.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"gay_marriage_donut\" width=\"230\" height=\"219\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7871\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Look, I threw in a picture! It&#8217;s not my picture, but I liked it and stole it from the Interwebs.<\/p>\n<p>Lots of thoughts today, but none big enough to put into its own post (for now). So here are some things to chew on:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I am disappointed but not surprised by the victory for Amendment One in North Carolina, which enshrines a ban on gay marriage in the state constitution. However, I am hopeful that if the Supreme Court decides to rule on the issue of gay marriage within a year or two, laws like Amendment One and California&#8217;s Prop 8 will be ruled unconstitutional, effectively authorizing gay marriage throughout the country. If Obama is re-elected, I think he&#8217;ll fully support gay marriage in his second term. He can&#8217;t do it right now because it would cost him some crucial independent votes.<\/li>\n<li>During my run, I found a guy letting his dog take a dump in his neighbor&#8217;s yard. He walked off like nothing had happened. Nope, not today, jerk. When I got close, I asked if he had a bag. Looking embarrassed, he muttered something and turned back. I kept running, so I&#8217;m not sure whether he actually cleaned it up or not. I should have asked him where his house was so I could go take a dump in his yard. <\/li>\n<li>Dear clowns who call in bomb threats for flights (if any of them happen to follow AndyBox.com): all you&#8217;re doing is wasting everyone&#8217;s time and delaying flights. Real bombers probably don&#8217;t bother to call.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m running about 20 miles a week now and plan to roughly maintain that level through the summer, although not setting any speed records due to the heat. I&#8217;m generally doing 6 miles on Monday, 4 on Wednesday, and 10-11 on Saturday. If I run-walk and hydrate enough, which is means a LOT of water for me because I sweat like a soaker hose, I can handle the heat OK even on a long run. I just got a new style of knee brace, a compression sleeve that covers my whole patella, and I&#8217;m liking it so far. I might get another one for my other knee. That way I can be symmetrical, and there will be joy. <\/li>\n<li>With the possibility of our first family trip to Disney World looming next year, I&#8217;ve started thinking about booking flights. I haven&#8217;t bought a real airline ticket in 15 years, so it&#8217;s a bit odd to think about flights like a normal customer rather than a nonrev. I&#8217;m most concerned about price and departure\/arrival time and mostly unconcerned with the number of people onboard. It&#8217;s completely backwards! Also, it turns out that flying is pretty expensive. Fortunately, I should have enough Rapid Rewards points to get at least three of our tickets, maybe even all four.<\/li>\n<li>I am tired of hearing people mention factors like race and sexual orientation in casual conversation when those qualities have zero relevance to the story they&#8217;re telling. If it matters to your story that a person is black or gay or Mexican or mentally retarded or whatever, then by all means include it. Otherwise, he&#8217;s just &#8220;a guy&#8221;, not &#8220;a black guy&#8221;. When you toss in irrelevant information, you&#8217;re simply revealing your prejudice toward those people.<\/li>\n<li>One of my Facebook buddies is the community pastor at my church. I thought she seemed cool, so I friended her on Facebook. Our main connection is running. Until we raced together last month, I&#8217;d never held a real conversation with her in person. Our interaction had solely come through Facebook and an occasional &#8220;hi&#8221; at church. These are some of the strange types of relationships that social media makes possible. <\/li>\n<li>I write one check per month. It goes to my boys&#8217; preschool. I pay everything else online or automatically via my credit card. Checks are not my friend. Unless, of course, someone wants to give one to me. Then they are great.<\/li>\n<li>Have I mentioned lately how glad I am not to be famous? No interviews, no paparrazzi, no public scandals, no pressure to please millions of diverse people. It&#8217;s also kinda nice not to be rich, either. Being a millionaire would change me somehow, and maybe not for the better. Plus I don&#8217;t have to worry about sycophants and thieves who want things from me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Look, I threw in a picture! It&#8217;s not my picture, but I liked it and stole it from the Interwebs. Lots of thoughts today, but none big enough to put into its own post (for now). So here are some &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/?p=7869\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,20,38,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7869"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7869"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7876,"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7869\/revisions\/7876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}