I did it! I won. I was actually trembling as I hit the "update" button to validate my final word count. Believe it or not, I uploaded the wrong file at first, and I just felt my stomach fall out when the number didn't change. But I fixed it, and came out with a final word count of 51,013. Holy crap.

I did a victory dance around my apartment, and sang "I Am The Champion," which didn't seem to impress my girlfriend or my cat. Whatever. I think I might continue my celebration by taking a nap, or maybe by breaking open a bottle of Awexome Sauce 2.0: Ol' Biddy Stout.

It was a pretty crazy feeling finishing my novel. As I wrote the final line, I got that gut-wrenching feeling I get when I finish reading a really good novel, and it really hit me what I had created. I just hope that other people have the same reaction. I probably need some distance from it before I can really read it critically. I've been carrying this thing in my womb for the last month. It might be a while before I let myself recognize how flawed it is.

All right. Now maybe I'll get back to updating this blog for real. But first, a nap. And a shower. I seriously haven't showered in, like, a week.

I have some serious catching up to do tomorrow.

You know, it occurs to me that the people giving gay people a bad name these days are not your run-of-the-mill homosexual people, but these closeted self-haters, who do all the worst things that all gay people get blamed for (drug use, prostitution, pedophilia), and then talk about how evil all gay people are for doing drugs and being promiscuous pedophiles.

In other gay rights news, Santorum was defeated! I mean, I'm not stupid: I don't think Bob Casey is exactly a friend to gays, but he's definitely better than Santorum. Although, frankly, almost anybody would be.

I have been saying this, or trying to say it, for a long time. Perhaps if the Bible weren't so murky and open to interpretation, there wouldn't be so many competing ideas of what God and Jesus wanted us to do. If the Bible said, "Don't ever eat bananas," that would be a clear rule that would be impossible to misunderstand. But it says nothing of the sort, nor even anything in a similar form, so how could anyone possibly assume they have gotten it right?

Lots of people have book clubs, and these people debate with each other about what the author of a book meant when they wrote a particular passage, but none of them actually has to be correct for there to be an argument. Camille Paglia has argued fiercely about the feminist themes in Ayn Rand's writing, despite the author's anti-feminist beliefs and insistence that women are psychologically inferior to men. Could it possibly be that Paglia was able to find feminism in Rand's words because she was looking for it?

Look, I could read CD liner notes and interpret them as an endorsement for my belief that pie is delicious, but all that proves is that I really really beleive pie is deliclious, enough that I can see evidence to support this where none exists. Whatever the author of a text intended to say is the only "correct" interpretation. Anything else you take away from it is your own addition, and is part of a conversation you are having with the author, and is arguably part of the creative process. But it's coming from you, not the author. I remember a situation like this from high school Spanish class. We were reading some novel that used a horse as a symbol for passion, and the teacher, Mr. Maltais, told us that he had once read a student story that had a horse in it, and the horse seemed to represent passion there as well, which added this whole new element to the story for him. Except the author of that story didn't intend for the story to be interpreted that way. The addition of that symbol may have been meaningful to Mr. Maltais, but he was the one making that addition. This is also similar to the common hypothesis that the events of the show Lost are occurring in purgatory. There's certainly plenty of evidence to support this idea, and it would be a valid interpretation, except the show's creator has said this is not the case.

Like, I don't know how to make this any clearer: You read The Bible, and then you interpret The Bible. Since there is no "interpretation key" in the back of The Bible, the criteria you are using to interpret The Bible can not have come from The Bible. Thus, the criteria must have originated from somewhere other than The Bible. Thus, your interpretation of The Bible is either revealed to you by God, or is a product of your own mind. If you believe that the latter is true, then your "interpretation" is just your opinion, and no more valid than anyone else's, provided they can cite as much texual support for theirs as you can for yours. If you believe that the former is true, and recognize that there have been many interpretations of The Bible, one of them, and only one of them, must be correct. Ignoring for the moment that it's statistically improbable that your interpretation is the single correct interpretation, you still have no way of knowing which interpretation is the correct interpretation. You can say that, "Clearly, the people behind the Spanish Inquisition had it wrong," but then you're interpreting their interpretation! And you are doing so with your own brain and your secular values, which did not come from The Bible.

Unlike with the Spanish story and Lost, The Bible's author is unavailable to confirm or refute any of the many interpretations. Clearly, it is impossible to know, as so many religious people claim to, that your interpretation of The Bible (and where I say "The Bible," I could of course substitute any religious text that demands complete obedience) is the correct one. It is also obviously impossible to know that yours is incorrect, which is a condition known as agnosticism. And once you recognize that you can never know for sure things that are, by definition, unknowable, you are free to recognize that the idea of God is highly improbable.

To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, I could claim that there is a teapot orbitting the earth, which is too small to be detected by any available surveillance equipment. You can't disprove this claim, nor can I prove it. We are both, technically, teapot agnostics. But, knowing what we do about the world, we can posit that it is very unlikely that there is a teapot orbiting the earth, and can operate in our day to day lives on the assumption that this statement is false.

Anyway, I apologize for the rant. I really just wanted to post that quotation, because I thought it nicely summed up my feelings on the matter. I guess I felt I had to expand the idea, even though the quotation encapsulates it so well.

I didn't finish my outline until a little after midnight on the first, but since then I've been going strong. I wanted to write 2500 words a day for at least the first week. That way I'm ahead of the game if I start to lose steam toward the end of the month. As you can see, I'm right on track so far, though I did have some trouble today. I got a little distracted during the day and started falling into my old habits of reading blogs and watching videos and stuff. Not too much, but a little bit. I also got a little frustrated yesterday when I was on the NaNo website. There was an interview with a woman who is writing her novel in the window of a bookstore, dressed in a chicken outfit. Fine. Great. She has a sense of humor and she's a performer (or an exhibitionist). Big deal. But she said the reason she's doing this is so that she won't take the process too seriously. That kind of bugged me, because I'm taking it very seriously. Like, I realize it's just for fun, yadda yadda yadda, but I don't want to think of the whole process is a joke.

Thinking about 60,000 other people working hard to push themselves, challenge themselves, and meet a common goal is encouraging. Thinking about 60,000 weirdos who have nothing better to do than write 50,000 words in a month is not. Anyway, I guess what other people are doing isn't important, but I'd like to think I'm not the only one taking this seriously.

On the plus side, I'm adddicted to my novel. I can't wait to get back to writing it, because I really enjoy working out the story and figuring out who the characters are. I realize a lot of novelists say things like this, but this is the first time I've felt this way about something I was writing. I feel like I'm reading a book that I'm really excited about and I just can't wait to see what happens next. I'm definitely surprising myself, and it's a lot of fun.

So, that's what's on my mind. How is everyone else's month going?

Anyway, there was a point in the first essay in this book that I think sums up the whole debate pretty nicely. The writer mentions his parents, both of whom were Catholic, and one of whom (his mother) was divorced. Unfortunately for her, the Catholic church does not allow people to get divorces. So even though, accoring to the federal government, this woman was single, the church still considered her married to her first husband. Now, the Catholic church does these things called "annulments," which are a cheap way of getting around the divorce issue without actually acknowledging reality, by performing some ceremony in which the marriage in question is deemed to have "never existed." Yes, my friends, the Catholic church has discovered the powerful and terrifying secret behind time travel.

Anyway, since this woman could not get an annulment, she was still officially married in the eyes of the church, but not in the eyes of the state, which meant she was free to get married again, just not by a Catholic priest. She got married before a judge, and she and her new husband lived a hpppy life and enjoyed all the benefits of marriage. Nevertheless, the Catholic church considers these two people to be participating in cohabitation and fornication, the latter of which is lumped together with homosexuality in the Bible's official list of abhorrent sexual practices.

Now, how is this situation any different from same-sex couples that want to be married by the state? Well, it isn't, except that Catholics aren't the ones with all the power in this country. If they were, people might be fighting for divorce rights as vehemently as they are fighting for marriage rights.

I might also point out briefly that anyone who claims the world would be a better place if everyone just accepted Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior might want to take a second to examine the enormous rift between the ideologies of, say, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church, both of which nevertheless are considered Christianity and have Jesus as their central figure.

But, as I said, this post is not about NaNoWriMo. It is, however, about something else I talk about a lot: gay marriage.

Beginning in October, I've been writing "Points of View" articles for EBSCO, about hot-button issue in society today. I got to see the topic list before a lot of other people got to it, so I snagged some big ones, like abortion, animal rights, and gay marriage. And while I have strong opinions on all of these topics, the articles I'm writing are objective overviews of the topics, which proved to be harder than it sounded, especially on the topics about which I felt strongest. Nevertheless, it has taught me a lot, both about these topics and about objectivity. Incidentally, it has also taught me a lot about false objectivity, such as the Fox News brand of objectivity. Take note, Rupert: giving equal air time to two competing views on a topic does not constitute objectivity if one of those views is considerably less reasoned and supported by fact than is the other.

So, I've been learning a lot and enjoying the project, even when covering drier topics, like The Big Bang. Also, in learning more about these topics, and the arguments on either side, I have been able to solidify and more ably suppport my views on the topics.

For example, you may know that I'm in favor of gay marriage. While working on the article about gay marriage, I wrote the following sentence: "Marriage is considered an important—by some, the most important—aspect of culture and community, and as such is a right that is not granted without serious consideration." As soon as I finished writing it, I wanted to delete it, because, as much as people would like us to believe that this is the case, marriage rights are granted to everyone from felons to just plain jerks without much consideration for how well these people will function as a couple or how well they'll raise their potential children—please, god, won't somebody think of the children!?—but if they're gay, well, then, they clearly aren't up to the task. This is stupid. I can't think of anything quite as stupid as allowing murderers to get married, but denying gay people that right, and then rationalizing it by saying you're protecting the sanctity of a sacred institution. Except maybe criminalizing marijuana while keeping alcohol and tobaccco legal, and basing the decision on the spurious logic that marijuana is more dangerous than either of those drugs.

This whole mess really gets me riled up like few other issues, partly because I don't think it should even be an issue. And the only reason I'm not protesting as vehemently for the legalization of pot is that very few people are actually hurt by being denied pot. But make no mistake, both of these restrictions are completely stupid and ought to be lifted immediately.

I'd like to end this on a positive note, which was going to be telling you all to vote on Tuesday so we can start swinging things in the direction of rational thinking and morality, but that inevitably still leaves me on a bad note, because I didn't send in my voter registration form on time and therefore I can not vote in this election.

Always change your registration as soon as you move, guys! Don't put it off! Don't end up like me!