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More or Less Exactly All Alike

I don't remember when I chose to be born a male.  Maybe I didn't.  Maybe it just happened that way.  It has had consequences, most of which I do not know.

I do know that it has given me some advantages, most of which are completely absurd; shorter lines at the stadium toilets, for instance, and the assumption that I am better at math than females are.  I'm not.

And to be honest, I also do not remember when I chose to be born of Scandinavian descent.  Not just Norwegian, but "a dumb Norwegian".  That didn't seem fair to me.  After all, while I wasn't very good at math, I became pretty good at cod fish.  And I did get through grade school, although not without a temporary expulsion or two.  You know, just trying to make space.

I figured that out, too.  I was dumber than some people, and smarter than others.  It didn't have anything to do with being either male or a Squarehead.  

There are a lot of things like that:  just a continuum.  We find ourselves somewhere on it.

For instance, there is a lot of nonsensical blather these days about marriage being between one man and one woman.  Very often that is so.  It wasn't so for Abraham, or Jacob,  or Joseph Smith, or Charlie Sheen, or even me, for that matter.  This is my second marriage.  Allow me to call it "serial monogamy", and not polygamy.

I will admit, ours is a male/female relationship.  For reasons beyond my ken, I have a hankering for a female partner.  But there are other males who like a male partner, instead.  That is a continuum, too.  It is, undoubtedly, still much more complex than that!  No matter, I find myself where I am.

We have almost learned that whatever skin color we were born with is not a choice:  it just happened, and here we are!  But lots of people think that we choose whether we are attracted to males, or females, or maybe both; maybe over time.  I never chose to be--I shall be modest, again--"attracted" to females.  (I did choose not to say, "aroused".)  The urges within that other people have does not change anything about me.

We used to think that a lot of things were a matter of choice that are not.  We tried to talk people out of being depressed.  We had experts who charged us a lot of money to provide talk therapy.  It worked, a little, probably because a lot of talking can have some small effect on our chemistry.  Pills work better.  If the real problem is that we were born with a chemical imbalance, it is much better to change the chemistry than to talk someone out of being bipolar.

Marriage isn't just between one man and one woman.  It isn't even always just between the same two people, forever and ever, world-without-end-amen!  What you choose, there in Indiana or Istanbul, has very little to do with me and my house.  Fortunately.

Skin color, race, gender, intelligence, height, vocal range, and even common sense all fall somewhere in a  spectrum; along a continuum.
"I see by your utfit dat you vass a skvrehead!" Yep! "A dumb Norwegian!" You can see me there, in that spectrum, just a little off-center. Except in math.

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