You’ve managed to do something good.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has named Oklahoma City as one of three finalists for Mission: Orange, a program that could earn the city up to $600,000 for its animal welfare programs. Two finalists receive the funds, and OKC is up against Cleveland, OH and Asheville, NC for the prize.

In the animal welfare area, as in many other areas, OKC has been pitifully behind the curve. But thanks largely to former OKC Animal Welfare Division employee and current president of the Central OK Humane Society (as well as my personal hero) Christy Counts, we’re finally headed in the right direction. OK Humane has partnered with the OKC shelter in an effort to achieve No-Kill status, meaning that no adoptable animal would have to be euthanized.

It’s a daunting task, but with the public’s help, it can be done. You know I have to get up on my soapbox now, because this is the thing I’m passionate about. Here are a few ways in which you can help:

1. Adopt, don’t buy. If you’re thinking about getting a cat or dog, please, please, please check with the shelter first. Or with one of the local rescue groups, since many pull their animals directly from the shelter. If you absolutely must have a certain breed, check with a rescue group that specializes in that breed. (Trust me – there’s a group for pretty much any breed you could think of.) Petfinder.com is a great place to start your search – just put in your location and the type of dog or cat you’re looking for. Just whatever you do, please don’t support backyard breeders or puppy mills.

2. Donate time and/or money. Both the OKC shelter and OK Humane are always in need of supplies. The shelter could always use food, treats, towels, pet carriers – things like that. You can check out OK Humane’s website for a list of what they need, as well. If you can’t donate, you can volunteer your time. Both the shelter and OK Humane continue to search for volunteers.

3. Bob Barker was right. If you already have a pet, make sure it’s spayed or neutered. This is maybe the single most important thing you can do. Animal overpopulation is the reason thousands of potentially adoptable animals are euthanized each year in OKC alone. (The shelter reports that 19,365 animals were euthanized in fiscal year 2007.) If we increase the number of educated, responsible pet owners in this community, we decrease the number of animals that have to die. Simple as that.

And don’t forget – this Saturday, May 3rd, is the Doggy Derby at Remington Park, and promises to be a whole afternoon full of exclamation points.

All proceeds benefit OK Humane’s low-cost spay and neuter clinic! There’s a Frisbee Dog performance! Enter your dog in the competition to become the official mascot of OK Humane! Enjoy food, live music, and fun for the whole family! Hit the Racino afterwards! Dwight and I will be there, working as “mascot wranglers!”

I have an embarrassingly long relationship with American Idol. I’ve been watching, yep, since the very first episode. Since before anyone had ever heard of Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood. Perhaps more embarrassingly, I never once considered not watching.

Until now. I can say with reasonable certainty that should David Archuleta win this year, I’m officially breaking up with American Idol. If Little Mister Look-At-My-Dimples-And-My-Winning-Smile pulls one out over the comparatively superior other contestants (especially David Cook), I’m walking away and never looking back.

It escapes me why this Archuleta kid is such a heartthrob, but then again, I’m not a ‘tween. I guess I should feel sorry for him, because he’s apparently saddled with a monstrous stage dad, but really, I just kind of want to punch the kid in the face. I can’t help it.

Last night was pretty rough. I had my first final of the semester, which I think went okay, considering I only studied for about an hour or so. However, I also received my graded final paper from last week.

I got a B.

Now, why this bothered me so much, I couldn’t tell you. I have absolutely no good reason to be upset. I’ve earned a perfect grade on everything else in this class, and since this paper didn’t carry any more weight than the other assignments, I wasn’t terribly worried about it. Hell, I didn’t even start thinking about the damn thing until about a week before it was due.

So why am I so disappointed with myself? A B isn’t too shabby, especially since I barely put any effort into this paper. Maybe I’m upset because I just found out that OU is hiking up tuition by another 10% this fall. I’m angry that I’m so lazy – that I can’t muster up enough motivation to put in the tiny bit of extra work it would take to get that A – especially when I’m paying so much damn money for it. I’ll have to find some way to avoid The Burnout next semester, when my classes are going to cost 10% more.

Once I got home last night, I found the results of last week’s blood work in the mail. Everything was normal – my cholesterol, my kidney and liver functions, everything, that is, except my glucose level and my triglycerides, which were pretty high. Written on my test results was a little note from my doctor, telling me that everything looked okay, but I should watch my sugar and fats intake.

I felt sucker-punched. I envisioned myself having to give up my beloved wine and cheese, two of the things that give me pleasure most in life. (Goodbye Stilton, my old friend.) Also flashing through my mind were images of myself becoming unhealthier and unhealthier, until I eventually succumb to a prolonged and agonizing death.

I felt like I’d failed yet again. First my final paper, then my blood test.

I felt perfectly healthy yesterday, and now I feel like I’m one insulin injection away from an amputated toe. Not only am I a failure as a woman for not being a thin and pretty little thing for the boys to look at, I’m not even a Good Fattie. Good Fatties buck the stereotypes of sluggish, unhealthy people who rise off the couch only to retrieve their next snack. Good Fatties, despite their extra weight, are healthy, vital, active people who eat better than most of their thin counterparts. That’s the kind of Fattie I wanted to be. I didn’t want to adopt the tired mentality that “fat” automatically equals “unhealthy.” I wanted to turn that theory on its biased little head.

I’d always assumed that my high blood pressure was attributable to my passion for cigarettes, and that once I ended that doomed affair, it would go down. Maybe I was wrong, and I’m just another sad cliché, slowly eating herself to death. Just another stereotypical overweight, unhealthy American. A headless waddler on the evening news with ugly shorts and a fanny pack slung beneath my protruding gut.

Go ahead, rest of the world. Hate me.

The worst part of all is that a small part of me secretly wants to lose some of the weight. That feels like giving up. Giving in. I feel like all the hard work I’ve put in, fighting against the incessant, overwhelming pressure to hate the way I look, to conform – all that work has been for nothing. My self-esteem is as low as it ever was.

I’ve failed, failed, failed. On so many levels.

This is kind of a long one, and I can’t guarantee any of it will make sense, so bear with me…

It’s been one of those months where it seems that everywhere I turn, I find a story that makes me wonder if a peaceful coexistence between Christian conservative and secular Americans might be impossible to attain. I hate, hate, hate feeling this way, so thoroughly disappointed and disillusioned with humanity. I reached a breaking point last night. And an incident today broke me just a little bit more.

As I lay in bed, trying pointlessly to fall asleep at a reasonable hour, I fired up my iPod to an old This American Life podcast I hadn’t heard yet. The episode was called, “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change,” and the first act was a pretty heartbreaking story about a woman whose brother suddenly became a born-again Christian and moved off to some remote commune-type place in Alaska with other born-again Christians. As you can imagine, this placed no small amount of strain on the relationship between this woman (a lesbian and secular Jew) and her born-again brother. Their relationship was basically broken after one disastrous visit, in which her brother flew out to see her in Paris, where she was living at the time with another woman. Openly condemning her “lifestyle,” he refused to stay in the same apartment with them. She and her girlfriend had to stay somewhere else and leave the apartment to her brother.

They pretty much quit speaking after that.

Years later, this woman went out to Alaska to try and mend her relationship with her brother. While they were able to recapture some of the closeness they shared as children, there were a few conversations that made me cringe. Every time this woman asked her brother a question, what he believed about something or other, he consulted the Bible. He seemed completely steadfast in his beliefs, unwilling (or unable) to consider any alternatives. No matter how much they tried to understand each other, there always seemed to be an impenetrable glass wall between them.

This story really drove home for me how we secular folks and the hardcore Christians really are speaking two different languages. Sooner or later, we’re going to hit that wall.

I lay there in the dark, vocally venting my frustration to an empty room. (Empty except for my dogs, that is, who were more than a little freaked out by my outburst.)

I feel like I’ve tried really, really hard to understand where conservative Christians are coming from. Probably not as hard as I could’ve tried, but I feel like I’ve given a fair effort. I’ve had lengthy conversations with several different people. I’ve read. I’ve visited different churches. And I think I get what it’s all about – to a certain superficial extent, anyway.

There’s this book, and in order to be “good,” you have to believe everything (or nearly everything) within it to be true. Most issues are clearly reducible to black and white terms. It either meshes with what’s in the book, or it doesn’t.

I’m sure my Secular Outsider perspective would seem greatly oversimplified to a Christian Conservative Insider, but I think it’s more or less the gist of it. And I definitely see the appeal. I do. I understand it. It takes a lot of the murkiness out of life. There’s a fairly clear code of conduct, and an automatic source of comfort when you need it. There is only one Right Way, and those who do not follow your same path are deemed (either silently or loudly) as Sinners.

But at the same time, the concept of belief in an intelligent being who watches us to see how accurately we’re following his rules is completely, 100% foreign to me. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to really, truly understand how someone could believe something that, to me, seems so incredibly weird and improbable. For years, I’ve thought long and hard about this, and the more I think about it, the weirder and more improbable it seems.

Yeah – you hear that sound? That’s the sound of my face smacking into the glass wall.

Such a belief, or lack thereof, seems like such a fundamental (so to speak) aspect of who one really is. Some believe in God, some don’t. Some people believe in ghosts and ESP, and some don’t. It’s possible, I’m sure, to reach a certain level of mutual understanding, but eventually aren’t you just going to hit that barrier?

Is it even necessary that we understand each other? Maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m spending far too much time and energy worrying about something that doesn’t even matter. I’d like to think that we live in a country, a world, where people genuinely want to understand and relate to their neighbor, but maybe that’s just a naïve pipe dream. Maybe all we can really do is just try to stay out of each other’s way whenever we can, and then hope for the best when we can’t.

That just doesn’t seem like the answer, though. Simply picking a side and giving that glass wall a good Windexing while glaring through it at the people on the other side isn’t ever going to make things better. That’s precisely how stereotypes and prejudices develop and fester.

Obviously, people are incredibly complex, and even though I just got done dishing out my lameass version of Conservative Christianity in a Nutshell, it clearly isn’t going to apply to all conservative Christians all of the time. And this is to say nothing of all the Christians who don’t consider themselves theologically conservative, which is why I’m not including them here (sorry, guys). It’s pretty much impossible, tempting though it sometimes may be, to lump everyone in together with one dismissive wave of the hand – “ehh, they’re all crazy.”

While it’s true that you can never really know what it’s like inside someone else’s head, I think it’s also true that sometimes you can see things in other people that they themselves don’t see. When you’re busy being you, it’s easy to lose perspective. We take things for granted, and maybe don’t question certain ideas and attitudes that we might do well to question. Maybe that’s where we can help each other out.

Obviously, there are some people who could care less about any of this. They’re right, everyone else is wrong, and they have no interest in considering anyone else’s point of view. They’re only interested in proving to them why they’re wrong. I’ll come right out and say that I have little interest in those kinds of people, the ones who like the glass wall. So does that make me a hypocrite if I make no real effort to understand them or empathize with their point of view? I don’t know. Maybe I should be the bigger person and try even harder. Or maybe that’s just wasting time and energy that could be better spent helping shelter dogs find homes, watching a great film, or talking to nicer people.

In just a few (hopefully) short hours, Dwight will finally be home from his week-long trip to Minnesota. I can’t wait. We’ve only been apart a few weeks in the almost 13 years we’ve been together. While it’s always kind of fun to kick it solo for a few days, I’ve never missed anyone so much in my life.

Hurry, American Airlines, hurry!