Well, I decided to join the cool kids club.

This is my first attempt at blogging. There's your warning out of the way- if you enjoy well-written, thoughtful, articulate or interesting reading, back away from the computer now. If you know me, you have an idea what you're in for, and probably never even bothered to check this out.

This blog is most likely going to be non-sensical, odd, possibly too analytical, and hanging together by tangential threads only. Like me!

If you want some thing to laugh at and make you feel that you're a normal human being, no matter what your friends say, you've found the perfect spot.

A little bit of an introduction.

My name is Lisa Regula Meyer. I'm a graduate student at Kent State University, working on my PhD in Ecology. I'm in my third year, passed candidacy exams last December, and defending my prospectus this summer, hopefully May-ish.

I'm also a wife, mama, gestational surrogate, small business owner, certified lab animal technician (in a former life, but I've kept the certification), activist, small time philanthropist, land lord, daughter, sister, in-law, and volunteer. In no particular order, and the order changes on any given day. I've been kicked, beaten down, thrown aside, and run over with a steam roller, but quite frankly I just don't have the f*cking intelligence to stay down.

Oh, and I curse. A lot. I promise to try and tone it down here, but I do ardently believe that there is a time and place for swear words, and when I find one, I use them. It's cathartic.

My three biggest passions are family, ecology, and human rights. Family doesn't just mean mine- yours too. I happen to think that families are the heart and soul of the human race, and they deserve more protection than nations, corporations, or ideologies. And I do what I can to help that along, in lots of different ways.

I happen to be an ecologist by trade and training, and working on certification this year. Ecology isn't a hindrance to economy- the ecology is the building block of any economy. You can't ruin the ecology of a given place and not expect the economy to follow. Unfortunately, I think we're learning that right now, or at least that we as a nation should be learning that. I'm afraid we might sleep through the wake up call on that lecture and miss it, though. But hopeful I'm wrong.

Human rights is the last of my big topics, again not in any particular order. Without human rights, we're not human. That means recognizing and extending. If we don't recognize basic human rights to all people, then we're no better than dogs. And that would be insulting the dogs. All people have human rights, we only loose them by not seeing that others share them too.