Last night I watched "Trembling Before G-d", a documentary on people who are struggling to reconcile Orthodoxy and homosexuality. It started out a bit slow, and while I was interested, I was thinking of only watching half of it tonight, but its style and content eventually pulled me in. It presented a lot of perspectives, and showed a lot of conversations that I thought people wouldn't be keen on having recorded. One of the things that left an impression on me was one particular argument about there not being an incompatibility -- the notion that the conenant the hebrew people have with yahweh being one that is always open to amendment and convincing, based on a few examples in the Torah. Interesting argument, yes, although it perhaps poses a lot of questions therein. And of course this is all theoretical philosophy of a sort into which I don't particularly care to delve. Would Poseidon allow us to pollute the seas if we sacrificed enough in his temple?

I'm working on the cleaning-the-inbox kind of thing, and as of this time am down to 7478 messages in there. My strategy rotates between a few things -- if I think of a category of things that can be mass-deleted or mass-moved, I grep for them and handle them. I also sometimes start from the start, list a few articles, and move them all where they need to go, sometimes saving a few for later thought. Today, I came across a really old email talking about a commune that was being set up in Columbus, and it brought back a sharp pang of a really old jealousy that I was feeling at the time I originally read the mail. At the time, Martha was dating .. actually, I don't remember, and my friend Jason (or was it Aug?) mentioned that Marf and her friend were going to be deeply involved in the commune. I was still heartbroken about Martha at the time, and each time I read about the commune, it brought a sharp pang of that. It's strange that I can still feel that, although I guess remnants of first love never completely go away. Of course, having just lost a relationship that was important to me, I'm probably more vulnerable to that kind of thing than normal.

I've lost some weight with all this stress -- down to 150 pounds. It doesn't seem to change how my clothes fit though. I wonder if the scale I have here is functioning properly.