you down?

Has Prenatal Genetic Testing Gone Too Far?

this article strikes a chord with me because i've actually thought about this fairly recently. rip and i had talked about it before, and we had agreed that we would ask for prenatal genetic testing and would very likely abort should it reveal that our child would have certain mental or physical conditions. i've never wanted to be a parent anyway and decided that i would not want to take on the additional challenges of  raising a child with particular handicaps.

j and i obviously haven't talked about raising kids together. but i've thought about this exact issue because, in fact, his youngest brother has down syndrome. i have no idea if he would want to do prenatal testing, or what he would want to do after knowing the results. i do know that if i only found out after giving birth that my child had certain conditions, i would certainly not shirk the responsibilities of raising it the best i could. and i'm certain i would love it just the same.

let them eat meat

have been thinking about vegetarianism a lot lately. ab is mostly one, al is sometimes one. and both do it for ethical reasons. at cmg back in may, ashley said she became one after many years of knowing about the issues and caring about them, but not quite caring enough. one day tho, it just clicked.

when i was much younger i used to want to become a vegetarian. a fruitarian even, after a flight where the woman next to me got a special fruit only meal. back then i wanted to because it seemed cool somehow. and also because it seemed like an interesting exercise in discipline. i didn't do either tho because i didn't really care to commit and i ate at home where my mom made at least one meat dish every meal, and still later i realized that i LOVE meat. ha.

but starting maybe 10 years ago, i started becoming aware of all the environmental issues concerning eating meat. i always knew about animal rights, but they didn't really bother me much because i felt that 1. humans had evolved to eat meat and 2. nearly all the animals we eat only exist because we domesticated them for food.

recently tho, it's really starting to bother me. even the animals rights stuff. we treat our livestock terribly. really really terribly. and eating large-scale commercially sourced meat is bad for the environment. really really bad.

my parents leave on a month-long vacation later this year. i think i'll try out vegetarianism then. i probably won't be too strict on it, but i'll try much harder than i am right now. currently i'll do non-meat when i remember to, and when i feel like it. to be fair, i usually feel like it, but i very often forget. that's the problem when your convictions aren't too strong, i guess. anyway, why not now? because most of my main meals are prepared for me by my mom or even j. ...i know, i know... but let's save that ethical dilemma for another post, yeah?

ps, while vegetarian, should i come across a restaurant serving roadkill tho i'll probably stuff myself silly. it sounds gross, but here's why.

love is...

the hard thing about love is that everyone defines it differently. m said recently that love to him means wanting to spend the rest of his life with someone. apparently j used to define it the same way. that and never giving up on someone. oy.

love, to me, is completely different. for me, love is the physical feeling. liking someone doesn't have a physical weight to me. loving someone does. i can feel it in my chest. as if the amount or the intensity has made it a tangible thing that takes up space in my body.

i feel like wanting to spend your life with someone, or never wanting to give up on them, can be a consequence of love. but that's not what love actually is. maybe that's why i can so easily say that love doesn't mean very much. because you can certainly love someone and leave them. love someone and hurt them. because love is just a feeling. actions don't necessarily follow.

the other thing about love is that even if you define it the same way, it still might not actually be the same thing. there is no objective scale here. your 9 of 10 might only be my 6 of 10. you'll be disappointed to hear i'm only at a 6 but maybe i have a broader scale or higher hopes. 

how "funny" that i've never asked anyone before what love means to them. 

igen

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

"12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009." they're also dating, going out, sexing, pregnant-ing, sleeping less and getting their drivers licence later. they're also more likely to be depressed, suicidal, and feel lonely.

remind me, yeah?, if i ever have kids, to take away their phones at a certain time of night, and give it back sometime after they get ready for school.

btw, "Asked by our parents, 'When will you be home?,' we replied, 'When do I have to be?'” OMG YES. tho apparently this is not kids today. oy!