Hmfff. Just this past Monday, Svet and I were discussing the Kinsey Scale, and he said, "You're a six, aren't you?"

Klein Sexual Orientation Grid

I scored an average of 3.40

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

Heterosexual

Bisexual

Homosexual

Meaning

This result can also be related to the Kinsey Scale:

0 = exclusively heterosexual
1 = predominantly heterosexual, incidentally homosexual
2 = predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
3 = equally heterosexual and homosexual
4 = predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
5 = predominantly homosexual, incidentally heterosexual
6 = exclusively homosexual

Summary

The idea of this excercise is to understand exactly how dynamic a person's sexual orientation can be, as well as how fluid it can be over a person's lifespan. While a person's number of actual homo/heterosexual encounters may be easy to categorize, their actual orientation may be completely different. Simple labels like "homosexual", "heterosexual", and "bisexual" need not be the only three options available to us.

Take the quiz

Last night was Mardi Gras. I had all my beads out and around my neck and my gold sequined mask ready to go. Alas, Svet has no sense of festivity or adventure and instead of hitting the Mardi Gras parties, he took me to watch his akido rehearsal. Akido is one of those karate type sports and they rehearse in a special studio covered with mats. I expected the mats to be traditional things imported from Japan; they were imported alright, though not from Japan or even Asia—they were from Germany!



With all the Japanese stuff everywhere and lots of Japanese language terms, I was a little surprised that the director for the rehearsal was this tall, slender, white boy from Ohio with a furry chest and a shaved head. They had a lot of clients from various ages and genders. They all wear these little white belted pajama-thingies, and the more experienced ones have these absolutely FABulous billowing black pantaloons. They also made a big deal out of wearing sandals with their costumes and then walking the four steps from the dressing rooms to the mat and then taking off their sandals and going barefoot for the evening.

It was, of course, a very trying evening for me. My anxiety levels were manageable until they started throwing people around and hitting the mat with their hands, each slap reverberating through the room and stabbing me like a knife. I kept having all these flashbacks to fifth grade when my father made me take a judo class at the YMCA. I just sat there and tried to act butch and not shake so I wouldn't embarrass Svet with his friends. The director guy kept coming over to talk with me, though (he's quite a salesman), so I had to put on my brave face and go into cocktail party mode to chat with him.



Svet naturally had a great time there. He and his buds were throwing one another around with abandon and taking turns pinning each other to the ground. Other than some tall, blond, white boy from Africa who's a friend of Svet's, everyone else ignored me, which was good.

During the rehearsal, after a bunch of very intense group warmup exercises, they divided the crowd into experienced people (who were the ones rehearsing right by me) who got to play with sticks and those who were more beginners (who rehearsed in a wing off to the side I couldn't see well) who got to grapple and throw one another around. Svet's only been learning for a few months, so he rehearsed off to the side, and I couldn't get any good pictures of him. Nevertheless, here are a few bad pictures of him.




After the rehearsal, I was all in the mood to go out and eat sushi, since we weren't going to any Mardi Gras parties, but Svet was tired and took me straight home. Alas. I didn't even get taken to Braum's for a milk shake.

This afternoon I was at the downtown Brooks Brothers (men's clothing store, for those of you who don't know), and I was all excited because they were having a special made-to-measure trunk show and sale on business suits, with their national tailor in the store to take the measurements. The suits were only $1,500, which is a fabulous buy for made-to-measure suits, so I was going to replace my navy pinstripe and pick up a lovely grey windowpane with a dark turquoise thread in it.

Then I remembered. Today is the first day of Lent; I'm giving up clothes shopping for Lent.

D***, d***, d***!

So much for new clothes. When next you see me, if I look threadbare, blame Jesus.

A large standing-room-only crowd packed St. Matthew's Cathedral at noon today for the imposition of ashes and to hear His Eminence Terence Cardinal McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington, say Mass as part of the annual Lenten observance for Ash Wednesday. Cathedral rector Msgr. Ronald Jamieson concelebrated with the cardinal.

The congregation was packed into the pews and hundreds of people stood along the walls and in the narthex in back. Some unidentified press was there as well, both with video and still cameras.

I had been in the neighborhood for an interview late this morning and I didn't realize either that the cardinal would be celebrating that Mass or that it would be so crowded, or I might have gone elsewhere. It was a nice service, though, and I think this was probably the finest service from both the liturgical and the musical standpoints that I've seen at St. Matthew's in the past year.

The eighteen-voice Schola Cantorum was in full force, singing in Latin mainly a capella Renaissance works, and sounding very well-rehearsed and professional. They had quite a number of anthems to sing today, too. For the introit, they did the Mode I chant of "Misereris omnium, Domine." During the imposition of ashes on the foreheads of all of the people in the congregation they sang "Inter vestibulum et altare" by Cristobal de Morales and "Emendemus in melius" by William Byrd. The offertory anthem was "Exaltabo te, Domine" by G. P. da Palestrina. For communion they did the Mode III chant of "Qui meditabitur in lege Domini" and a wonderful "Os justi" by Anton Bruckner. The mass setting was David Hurd's New Plainsong Mass. Processional hymn was a psalm with a Richard Proulx antiphon and the recessional hymn was Erhalt uns Herr. There was no organ prelude or postlude.



Comic relief for the Mass was provided by this African lady who came in late and then tried to squeeze into one of the already packed-full pews. The ushers were trying to convince her that she couldn't sit there and had to stand at the back, but she was totally uncooperative and kept trying to climb into the pew (exactly where she was planning to sit I've no idea). Eventually, a man got up and gave her his seat, so she moved there with her two big shopping bags, where she promptly unfurled this large cloth with a picture of Jesus and a picture of Mary which she draped all over the back of the pew in front of her. Then she dug in her sacks and pulled out a big red square pillow held together with red tape and a big plastic gold toy crown she put on the pillow; she held the crown and pillow for the rest of the service, even when she went for ashes and for communion. She's apparently Catholic, since she seemed to know the service, but she spoke the congregational responses too slowly and too loudly to blend in with the rest of the people. I couldn't tell if she was mentally ill or just culturally different. She wore a dress made of bright red fabric with a gold metallic design on it, and a piece of the same fabric was wrapped around her blonde hair (I don't know if it was bleached or natural, but it looked odd on her dark skin) like a turban. She wore a white lace scarf on top of that and she had this thing that looked like a gold-glittered flat snowflake Christmas ornament safety pinned to the top of her head. White canvas shoes and white socks were on her feet.

The ushers just didn't know what to do with her. She didn't want to cooperate with their traffic control, and she didn't want to get her ashes or take communion from the station set up near our seats. Every time they tried to keep her from wandering off to other areas she threatened to scream. When it was time for the imposition of ashes, she managed to sneak past a woman usher and push her way through a full pew of people, carrying her pillow and crown all the time, and went to the center aisle where she cut in line to get her ashes from the cardinal. At communion, the ushers argued with her long enough that she acquiesced to going to the communion station by her seat, but instead of returning to her seat, she walked to the center aisle again and wanted communion from the cardinal, but he'd just finished and was returning to the altar, so she had to receive from the rector and she looked very disappointed about that.

Aren't cathedrals fun?

Here's a picture of the cardinal washing his hands just prior to consecrating the bread and wine.