I try not to let the little things bother me. Despite all the “chicken soup for the soul” and “don’t sweat the small stuff…and it’s all small stuff” platitudes out there, letting small things eat away at you is the first step toward madness.<\/p>\n
So, I’ve let go of getting irritated when people don’t exhibit manners or “common” courtesy. I’ve let go of getting emotionally involved in most causes; I’ll do what I can but I’m not going to hector my friends, or even random strangers, when they don’t toe the same line of principles.<\/p>\n
I’m not going to let go of it when someone tells me I’m mentally ill.<\/p>\n
Published in today’s Washington Post<\/span>, Dear Abby’s column<\/a> responded mostly well to a parent with concerns about a 14 year-old girl admitting being attracted to other girls. Abby encouraged this parent to examine his or her own attitudes toward homosexuality, and to seek out advice from other parents of gay or lesbian children (PFLAG<\/acronym>, god bless ’em!). It was going great until this fabulous gem: <\/p>\n In addition to the booklet, the Children’s National Medical Center’s outreach program provides clinical mental health services and referrals to other knowledgeable professionals, a free monthly support group for parents and children, an online discussion group for parents, and a Web page with information for both parents and professionals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now just what in being a lesbian requires the assistance of a clinical mental health professional?<\/p>\n The Girlfriend insists that the advice was motivated by the fact that the rest of the world has a problem coping with gay men and lesbians. I’m more paranoid than that. <\/p>\n In a political climate where the conservative right chips away on a daily basis at individual freedoms, where the state of Virginia is considering not only an amendment to the state constitution to prohibit marriage between same-sex partners but has also taken the step of banning any sort of contractual agreements<\/a> that mimic marriage regardless of the sexes of the contract signers, why should I attribute this sort of advice to anything but malicious motives?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I try not to let the little things bother me. Despite all the “chicken soup for the soul” and “don’t sweat the small stuff…and it’s all small stuff” platitudes out there, letting small things eat away at you is the first step toward madness. So, I’ve let go of getting irritated when people don’t exhibit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-217","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-thoughts","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}