RE: I'm Christian, unless you're gay.

If you haven't read it, go read the post "I'm Christian, unless you're gay."  I know the first rule of blogging is "Don't send people away from your site," but this is important enough to break that rule.  I really don't mind.  Go, read.  I hope you come back, but I won't mind if you don't as long as you read that post.

I first saw this link on Facebook and, like many others, I clicked it expecting to find another diatribe against gays.  Thankfully, it's nothing like that.  It's a post full of wisdom that managed to put words to what I've been feeling for a long time.

And it gave me the courage to write this post.

First Five Books (The Chronological List)

Here's a little game for anyone who needs inspiration for a blog post.  List the first five books you remember reading and comment on each.

1.  The Talking Eggs by Robert D. San Souci and Jerry Pikney

I didn't actually read this book first, but it was the first book I remember being read TO ME.  In grade school, actually.  In today's world, it'd probably be considered too dark for MG (*snicker*), but I enjoyed it and the lesson stuck with me.

Virtue isn't always rewarded, but vice is always punished.

Can I insert an evil grin right here?


2.  The Little Red Hen (Little Golden Book) by Diane Muldrow and J.P. Miller

 A classic story and one of the few books my grandmother kept around her house.  I can't say how many times I read it as a kid.

The hen is diligent and the other animals aren't.  They don't help in making bread, yet they all want to partake of the finished product.  The result?

If you don't work, you don't eat.
Hrm...  I'm starting to see where some of my personality came from.

3.  The Odyssey Done into English Prose

I don't know if the version I linked is the same one I remember, but it looks similar.  Now, before you say 'everyone reads the Odyssey in school', I want to say I checked this book out of the school library in the second (?) grade WITHOUT it being assigned.  Hell, I didn't even know the Odyssey was a poem until junior high since the version I read was a narrative.

Anyway, I read the story and fell in love with it.  Then I cried when I moved and my new school library didn't carry it AT ALL.  I'm still looking for "just the right" hardback version to add to my book collection--the same version I read as a kid.

Yes, I'm Frucking Color-blind

To be more specific, I'm red-green colorblind, but let me go back a little bit and tell you...

As a kid, I never noticed I had an issue with colors.  I can see red.  I can see green.  I can look at a rainbow and name the colors in order.  The only symptom was a chronic inability to play that fractal picture game where you cross your eyes to see the picture.  Oh, and the old style of 3D glasses....  they didn't seem to work.

That's right.  I'm 27 and the first time I saw a movie/show in 3D was the 2011 movie "Thor".

But let me fast-forward a little because I didn't know I was color-blind until I joined the Army.  I didn't connect fractal pictures and 3D glasses as symptoms of a disability.  So I showed up at the testing center.  I got a 98% on the ASVAB test.  My recruiter got excited, telling me how I'd have no problem getting the computer-oriented MOS (job) I wanted.