The Breadbin

Rumours spread all over the Internet the other day that NASA had "changed" your zodiac sign. You can thank Cosmopolitan magazine for these bogus rumours. No surprise there...this is the same source that thinks spreading hot pepper on a man's frenulum will, ahem, spice up his sex life. (Don't do this. Don't even THINK this ow ow ow ow ow.)

Repeat after me, COSMO: AS-TRO-NO-MY. AS-TRO-LO-GY. Two entirely different things. One is a science. The other...isn't.
Astronomically speaking, the Earth's spin 'drifts' slightly, about one degree every 72 years. Over two millennia this adds up to a shift in the signs of the (astronomical) zodiac. This is not to be confused with the astrological zodiac, which is a constant. For a more in-depth discussion, go to this astrology-friendly page.
If you live by your daily horoscope, you'll hate what I'm about to say. It's bunk. Complete and utter bunk. You can prove this yourself, if you'd like to, by …

I love my wife so much.
She knows it (I hope)...after having known her for seventeen years and change, well, she'd better know it. Still, it's important to reaffirm (a) that I love her and (b) how much I love her, some place where everybody can (c) it. 
Her birthday offers a convenient excuse.
Eva has had a succession of bad years. Shortly after her birthday last year, she hit rock bottom and started her long climb up. It's been nothing short of inspiring to watch her, hand over hand, ascending. Don't get me wrong, she's not doing this alone. She has the unfailing support of Mark and I, and she needs it on occasion. But the strength, the determination, the necessary softness and critical hardness: that's all her.
Eva's not where she once was; she may never scale the heights she once did. But she's scaling entirely different heights now, heights of love and compassion.
People say I have the most open heart they've ever encountered. That's nice, b…

I post a fair bit of music to Facebook, usually stuff that I think my friends haven't heard. All sorts of different genres. I don't know how many people listen to my song of the day. I hope at least one does each day: this stuff ought to be appreciated.

Today I went to put a song up and realized I had to write a blog about it. Then I started writing the blog and it kind of ... grew.

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I have a deep, abiding love for musicals.

This shouldn't come as any surprise to people who know me: I love music, I love stories; stories set to music are my favourite songs. And if you can gather a bunch of song-stories together like a bouquet of flowers and put them into the service of a single, overarching story, and give that story capable, talented actors and singers to tell it...I'll be captivated.

People have assumed, based on that single piece of information, that I must be gay. To be fair, I conform to some other gay tropes, but I've had people w…

There is an absolute plague of supposedly just-for-fun apps on Facebook purporting to tell you things like who your soulmate is, who your eleven most important friends are, what your greatest flaw is, who plays what role in your 'gang'...silly little things. You click on them, they say something like "analyzing profile....calculating results" to make it look like analyzing and calculating is going on...and then they present you with an answer in the form of either the person who 'likes' things in your feed most often, or someone chosen at random. Retests usually prove one or the other.
They're silly, they're fun (sometimes)...and I usually don't post their results, because those results are often...awkward. Sometimes hilariously so, sometimes just...awkward. One of my cousins used to like and comment on practically everything I'd put on my timeline, so for a while she was my "next great love" and "the other half of my heart"…

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day.

I have never attempted suicide. I idly thought about it as a teenager and came very close to attempting early last year, but I didn't go through with the attempt. I do, however, have more of an intimate history with suicide than I'd prefer to have.

David Foster Wallace, a writer who ended his own life, had this to say on the subject of suicide:

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively a…