Acceptance

I love Spanish movies. Heck, I love French, Italian and Swedish movies. But I guess it really started for me years ago with Spanish films; specifically with Pedro Almodovar. He is this amazing director/screenwriter from Spain who has a penchant for provocative filmmaking. Now, if you're familiar with his work you'll realize that this last tidbit is a vast understatement. If you're not familiar with his work you need to: A) Crawl out from under your rock, and/or B) Stop being a narrow-minded, repressed, judgmental, simpleton and expand your horizons. Having written that, he is definitely not for everybody. Lol...I know, I know I may have just contradicted myself; or did I? Ok, enough with the double talk. He assuredly has a warped mind, with a great vision and incredible knack for making the, sometimes, outlying members of society (whatever that really means) seem so likable, lovable even. He helps to portray them with such compassion and humanity that you can't help loving them. Of course, I love the outlying members of society. Give me a great drag queen. I love that. I love the 'different' telling of a story; the 'non-traditional' track, if you will. I'm one of the most open-minded people I've ever come across. That is no exaggeration. My theory is this: who am I to judge anyone? Who am I to say what someone else's definition of a family is wrong? I thought that separation of church and state was just that; a separation. But, I digress. (I do that)

I guess I was just thinking about acceptance. About embracing. Let me explain. My daughter Viktorria and I were having a very in depth conversation early one morning (4 am), on our way back from LAX after having dropped Tres off. The whole trip back home started out very silly and more than a little loopy. We were both slaphappy. Anyway, towards the end of our trip home we got a little more serious. We started talking about philosophy, religion, and gay marriage (among other things) and the word tolerance came up. She made the point of saying that she didn't like that word because basically you're saying that, "Ok, I'll tolerate you and your lifestyle, I'll put up with you. I'll tolerate the way you live and who you choose to love and spend your life with". She said that instead a more appropriate word might be accept. As in, "I accept you and your lifestyle, just as I know you accept mine. Because as heterosexual people we assume that everything we do is accepted and for some reason we hold the key to marriage, to who people should love and share their lives, decisions, everything with. Well, if that isn't egotistic I don't know what is. She just felt, as did I, that everyone should be accepted, embraced for who and what they are. Whether that's heterosexual, homosexual, transgender, man, woman, white, black, inuit, whatever. I think that the sooner we can get over ourselves (I'm speaking to all of the self-righteous, narrow-minded heteros out there) and accept that 'our' way may not be the only way, the sooner we can all just 'get along'...haha...ok, maybe that R. King quote was too much. But the sentiment is not.