To the naysayers in my life.......

• I am deeply, deeply, deeply in love with my job, with science.  I STILL can't believe someone pays me to do this.  That I get to spend hours of time playing with expensive toys trying to unlock the secrets of how this all works.  Happy brain.  
• I am not my body size.  I am a mostly well-adjusted, content being in a round body.   I don't want to be thin.  I love curves.  I enjoy my roundness.  Resisting a hundred thousand messages a day about fitting into the square hole.  I don't have to do that to love myself.  It would be nice if I didn't have to do it to make you love me either.
• I practice an odd and interesting mix of spiritual beliefs.  I don't expect you to understand or believe what I believe.  I only ask that you tolerate my choice.  That you allow me the free will to choose.  
• Speaking of free will.  That is the basis for everything in my world, that each of us has the right to choose every aspect of our lives.  You do not get to choose for me.  I do not get to choose for you.  Trying to make choices for someone else is merely a lame excuse to avoid making your own.
• I am smart.  That doesn't make me an elitist snob or someone worthy of scorn.   It just means I know stuff.  You may know completely other stuff, practical stuff, like how to fix a combustion engine or design a skyscraper, or maybe you know where those pesky new commands are hiding in the new version of EXCEL.  I think that's the ultimate cool when someone knows a lot about things I don't.  I celebrate that.  I wish people would celebrate their differences with me.
• I believe in both Western and holistic medicine.  One is not the devil and the other voodoo.  They are both sometimes right and they are both sometimes wrong.  I will use both as I see fit.  (No comments on this - see bullet point #4)
• My life doesn't have a soundtrack.  There is music, but it is ephemeral and in the moment.  I like it.  I just don't need or use it the way most people do.  So don't expect me to wet myself over RUSH or DMB or Gaga or whoever you're spinning right now.  Honestly I think I prefer silence most of the time.  
• Pretty sure I have subbed words for music.  The music of the language.  I have an ongoing and lifelong relationship with words and language.  The sounds they make enchant me over and over.  Self-described word hooker and proud of it.  
• I am also not my wardrobe.  Clothes are kinda irrelevant to me.  They cover me because that is social convention.  They don't make me a better person, or a nicer human being, or a more loving friend.  They are just clothes.  Ditto hair and makeup.  

That is all.........you may now return to your previously scheduled programming in progress.