Hi.

I wonder if I'm even left on anyone's friend-list? It has been some time.

Anyway, I'm back from Europe. The holidays are reaching their close. I'm kind of stranded halfway-to-home (well, school) this New Year's Eve, sad state of affairs.

Just thought I'd poke my head in on the ol' LJ. Maybe I'll even start posting again. I did miss reading about y'all.

I've started a website. Today actually, so there is only one feature up (my 30 favorite songs of 2007). The website is mostly about politics and music. Maybe check it out? - blackbubblegum.net

Anyway, good chat.

Free online translators? Completely hilarious.

I was looking over the sites for some political organizers in Croatia, specifically the site for "Center za mir, nenasilje, i ljudska prava" - The Center for Peace, Nonviolence and Human Rights. But my budding knowledge of Serbo-Croat was not quite good enough to navigate the "programi" so I decided to see what I could come up with using an online translator.

Well.

The translator decided that "izgradjna zajednice" which in my best estimate approximates "building community" should actually be read as "together with erection." Later there was something about "erection miracle play." I'm still giggling.

Today looked like it was going to be a productive day. I filed a ton of stuff this morning, finishing the nasty task of organizing seven years worth of internal documents and research findings for the Coalition. Totally exciting. But this afternoon... not so hot on the "getting shit done" front. But Fridays will do that to you.

I might party it up on Saturday. Or I may continue to allow Final Fantasy 4 to consume my life. I guess anything could happen, but I'm leaning towards "party it up" since it'll probably be my last hurrah with the other interns. I can't believe summer is almost done. But I'm way excited for Europe.

Also to do this weekend: finish the book I'm reading. Too much computer related nerdery has impeded my reading progress.

Oh and I might quit at the restaurant.

There is not a competent American who does not realize that our public school system is miserably fucked. The real debate is over whether the schools are irreparably fucked.

Some hold out  hope that we can jolt the system back to life with some competition from voucher programs -call that the defibrillator: no big rescue attempted, but maybe worth a shot before one shuffles off the ol' mortal coil. In that analogy, a solution involving a more robust income tax would be the equivalent of, I dunno, stem cell research: probably the best chance at reversing the real damage, but the very notion seems to offend conservatives to the core. Basically, convincing Americans that the public school system needs reform is easy. Now get them to admit they might need to cowboy up for the bill, and watch the room clear out.

Which is why it is phenomenally inspiring to see that the kids who have to suffer through these inwardly collapsing heaps get it.

A small group of pupils from the Students for an Equitable Education, a new youth organization working to change Illinois' school funding system, joined the "Riding for Reform" bus tour. Pupils went to the state's capital to rally for change in education funding.

"We take our education very seriously, and so should Governor (Rod) Blagojevich and state lawmakers," said Marcus Smith, 18, a founding member of SEE. "When school starts again in the fall, I hope we don't have another year of crowded classrooms and crumbling school buildings."

To hear these pupils' cries, Blagojevich sat down with SEE to discuss alternative routes to cover the costs of public school education. SEE members said they would like to see the state look at increasing income taxes instead of relying heavily on property taxes.

If this were to happen, SEE members said school districts wouldn't be defined by the wealth of the communities they serve. Instead, they said, pupils across the state could receive a fair and equal public education.

The call for more money to balance out the rich and poor school districts is a common one. Illinois has a relatively low income tax, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. As a consequence, the state's share of funding kindergarten through 12th-grade public education is 37 percent, ranking it 48th in the nation. Illinois property taxes, on the other hand, are significantly greater than in other states.

Illinois' scheme-as-described is pretty common, and it's too bad. America's poorest communities should not be anchored to it's poorest schools, nor should the least wealthy members of our society be footing high-proportion property taxes just so their kids can get an education that at least approximates what their wealthier counterparts can comfortably afford. And within those parameters there does not seem to be an alternative to redistributive taxation. But as these cool kids point out, an alternative is not needed. We know what will work. So why aren't we doing it?

By the by, I muddled through Illinois' mess of a public school system until I was 8. So, y'know, represent or whatever. I never thought too highly of my schools there, until I moved to Texas, where I learned that the good folks in the Land of Lincoln were amateurs when it came to devastating poor schools.

My laptop has now recovered from some perfectly trivial technical difficulties. Hope y'all's worlds didn't come crumbling to bits without me.

Spoiler alert! I wrote this entry while I was a bit on the tipsy end - you find that out at the end. As I'm sure you know, I like to mock things/people and so now sober me will go through and laugh at the confessionals of three-okay-maybe-four-glasses-of-wine me.

Today, was the absolute worst day of work ever. (Nice opener.) It was a Sunday brunch shift - typically, pretty simple. And at first it seemed as though this one would fall politely into pattern. When noon rolled around, the place was still empty as when it opened, just Alcione, Cort, Karina and I sitting in the back drinking coffee. A welcome and refreshing start - I didn't get home from Apex until three last night, so I was not too psyched to be catching a metro ride to work at nine .

At some point between 12:00 and 1:00, the place went nuts - it was packed. Two groups with babies, both demanding the single high-chair we owned. Overlapping orders, special drink requests - the place went absolutely fucking crazy.(Nuts AND crazy? I'm surprised the men and white coats didn't shut us down! I need to diversify my set of comparisons for situational clusterfucks) Alcione, who insists on making all drinks, from lattes to cocktails, himself disappeared for twenty minutes, creating a colossal back-up of drink orders. Cort, for who knows why, wasn't writing his table numbers on the ticket which caused the crisis to culminate with us bringing an order of food to the wrong table.  We spent the next minutes apologizing profusely to the table whose order we had fucked up, the table who was wondering where the hell their food had gone, and Karina, who was mad as hell that she had to make the same order twice. That last bit nailed it. I freaking love Karina, and while Alcione gets pissed at me about twice a minute, Karina has never been anything but a doll to me (A doll? Since when do I use that expression? How very... gay).

Needless to say, Alcione was incredibly angry. I didn't really care - the problem started when he let the whole place get backed up on drink orders. And the tips, as a result of the long waits and mess-ups, were pretty poor. Alcione basically berated Cort and I for the thirty minutes it took for us to finish our sidework, and then I left to walk to the metro in the rain.  (EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-mo!  I'm an awfully whiny wine-o)

By now it was three, and my day was in the shitter. But I had plans to reclaim it. (Turning point in the narrative arc, blunt but well established).

I ate an early dinner (having not had lunch) with a side of the Pinot Noir I had swiped from Park Cafe a couple weeks back. Delicious. It was then that I decided to correct that awful culinary situation of my Dad's apartment by cooking up a spectacular sauce for Wednesday night. I could even use the Pinot Noir! Knowing that Andrew and my dad were both fans of spicy food, I resolved to make a kick-ass arrabbiata.  (This segment tries to do too much backwork in justifying why I, for really no reason, became super fixated on cooking an arrabbiata sauce).
 
Bit first things first - I finished the first half of Angels in America. Incredible, incredibly depressing, Now I wasn't sure I wanted to go out on my food-making mission. Mopey, yah? I needed some instant comfort  - (that sounds like a tampon commercial) -, so that third of a carton of French Silk ice cream sitting in the freezer got killed. Indulgent? A bit. But there is probably nothing I love more than ice cream, and that delicious chocolate-y goodness  melted away whatever frustration had lingered from the hellish morning at the restaurant. (This passage gives the mostly untrue impression that reading the book made me mopey after I had stopped moping. Really, I moped continuously until ice cream time. It was a very poor-me kinda day).  With newfound energy, I set off to gather the ingredients for my pasta sauce.

Trader Joe's for the first time in memory, disappointed. I got the garlic and  tomatoes - but they had no crushed red pepper, nor did they have my fall-back substitute (Cayenne pepper). So I marched a few block out in the rain to the Safeway, only to be let down again. What the fuck is wrong with this town? - I thought. I'm looking for a spice that I could literally walk into any fast-food pizza chain in the country and swipe off the table, and not a grocery store in  the District carries it! And then it hit me - fast-food pizza chain! There was a Papa John's just a few more blocks from my apartment. So I made just one more trek through the rain to that humble proprietor of pizza.

"So this is a weird question," I asked the kind of-imposing-manager, "but when people order pizza, do you ever give them crushed red pepper?"

"Give them?" He scoffed - "We sell it to them." He drew  a few packets of the red stuff out of a cabinet. (Nice verb selection with scoffed'. This sounds so much more confrontational than it actually was).

"Well," I put on my best haggling face - "How much for that much, right there?"

"15 cents a pack. So... $1.25 for this."

The tension broke (Hahaha... so ridiculous). "Great!" I couldn't help but enthuse. "I went to every grocery store in the neighborhood and couldn't find this stuff!"

I forked over the cash and walked away with about three times as much pepper as I needed. VICTORY!

So I got home, Cued up my soul mix, and made some pasta sauce. Sadly (AKA not sadly at all), once the allotted amount of Pinot Noir had entered the sauce (giving it a thick but subtley tangy flavor that goes nicely with the bite of the pepper), I couldn't  really resist the call of the open bottle - (the call of the open bottle sounds like dialogue from a really bad Lifetime movie about alcoholism) - and the remaining wine was consumed during the hour-long marathon of chopping, pouring, frying and boiling. But seriously - I have never had an experience as therapeutic as this soul-jamming, wine-drinking, sauce-cooking marathon of AWESOME. The sauce turned out... well, let's just say it's a pasta sauce so good it DEFIES REASON. I just hope a couple days of refrigeration doesn't hurt it at all.

So let it be known: no matter how awful a day has been - a cup or so of ice cream, a bottle of wine, and some sweet Southern soul (not my expression - one song I listened to is actually a meta-soul song that namechecks a lot of soul singers and talks about how great they are) can turn any day around. Today... has rocked. And now,I'm off to read the second half of Angels in America.

(PS: this definitely a drunk LJ entry. I do not apologize at all for any incoherency or nonsensibility.)
(Now, I actually do apologize).

Can I just take a moment to point out how wonderful libraries are? Using taxes to buy books that anyone can read for free. It's like my socialist utopia. And it also means the Borders and Barnes & Nobles that live on either side of me won't be taking all of my money. Because, seriously, with a bookstore on each side of the apartment, my paychecks don't stand a chance.

Anyway, the MLK Library in DC is now the love of my life. Here is what my lover, the library, gave to me today (AKA, this is my summer reading list, part something of something):

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by Tony Kushner
A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-Violent Conflict by Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K Le Guin
We Make the Road by Walking: Coversations on Education and Social Change by Myles Horton and Paulo Freire
Dominion: A Novel by Calvin Baker
Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letter and Communiques of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Apparently, a pre-requisite for me to consider reading a book is that it must have a subtitle.

The crisis continues - rather than doing actual food cooking (which I am now prepared for), Mr. Rowe decides we should do snack/desert foods instead. Ok, fair. I can actually bake pretty damn well, thank you very much. But I get home with less than an hour on the clock to find, no joke, my dad's apartment contains neither sugar nor flour.

So... I made a trail mix. And by "made" I mean I ran out of pretzels and peanuts halfway through and just started pouring in packs of Chex mix. WHY I AM SO LAME?

On the plus side, this is a mighty fine Scotch I'm sipping. And Gayle McCormick has (had?) some pipes on her. Soul and alcohol... the two things that are reliably good in my life.

I'm supposed to make some food to bring with tonight when I venture off to rock 'n' roll adventures with Mr. Rowe. But there is zero food in my apartment. Well there is pasta, but nothing with which I could make sauce. I may need the combined forces of AllRecipes and Trader Joe's to save me. Otherwise... the rock 'n' roll potluck will be ruined! And I can't live with that.

Also, I saw an incredible documentary at the Palestine Center last night. It was about grassroots resistance to the Israeli wall. Tremendously sad, but it was still powerful to see people standing up for their homes even when they knew they couldn't succeed. The facility was really impressive too - I live three blocks from the place and I'd never noticed it. I'll need to head back that way and look around sometime.

This started out as a post for the Social Report. I was just going to wonk out about poverty, but I only succeeded in doing that for about  two paragraphs before it got personal. I may still edit it some and post it on the blog. The personal is political and all that, but I don't know if what readership we have wants to deal with my angst.

Barack Obama sharing screen-time with Anderson Cooper? Hot. Political slash anyone?

Just kidding.

That would be... far beyond creepy.

But not kidding about Cooper and Obama being sexy. They are my political loves.

Otherwise, no one truly impressed me. Obama is still my pick. He nailed the diplomacy question where Clinton dropped the ball. I was disappointed by everyone but Kucinich on same-sex marriage. Especially with Edwards. He has settled on what I guess he thinks is a very clever tactic, which I have expressed my frustration with before, whereby he makes the whole issue about "his" struggle and "his" faith - news flash straight people: this issue is not about you. It's about justice for people who are discriminated against and marginalized. Talk about them. Not about your privileged,  heterosexual self. Getting let down by Edwards sucks too.... he speaks so eloquently about poverty and working class Americans. He would be a great champion for social justice in this country, but he can't be that champion if he is too focused on his own story to listen to anyone else's.

Oh I did like Kucinich. He answered every question head on. But I don't think he could articulate his foreign policy ideas too well. Besudes what was with the whole "text peace" thing? That was pretty dorky.

And how come no one is pushing for a single payer health care system? Dammit. I want the government to pay for my shit, m'kay?

/wonkery

Today I was feeling tense as I left the apartment. So I sat in the playground across the street and blazed  Some kids showed up with their mom just as I was leaving, and it was a bit on the uncomfortable side. Then I walked to work while listening to Amy Winehouse. I am in love with her voice, and I am definitely going to be listening to this CD way after it stops being cool. Has it already stopped being cool? I don't care. It was very difficult not to dance while I was walking. Actually, scratch that. Dancing is never not-difficult for me, but I was sorely tempted to try. Good way to start a day though.

File this under complete bullshit:

I finally met with Alcione to sort out the work business. His explanation for why I haven't been called in for the past two weeks? Son of a bitch "meant to call many times." Just forgot. Oh, and it's been slow. So I'm getting cut back to two shifts a week, unless Karina wants me to help in the kitchen. I hope she does, because I'm fucked if I leave for Europe with less than $1,000. Fortunately, I will be able to lift my bank account out of the negative territory in which it is currently stuck. But somehow working 40 hours in two weeks only netted me $250 - and last time I looked at the books, minimum wage is seven bucks flat in the District. Not to mention I saw $150 roll in from my tables in one night. Granted that was a damn good night, but I don't know where the fuck this guy is putting the stuff. Maybe this kind of shit was cool back when Pinochet just dissappeared the uppity workers, but we are neither in Chile nor the 1980s. Sorry, Alcione.

Stop. Breathe.

In better news, Evan and I are going to see a show at Fort Reno on Thursday. I'm excited. I'm detecting a faint pulse from my social life here. Also, I'm going to have the apartment to myself this weekend. So there may need to be some partying on that front. I already have two bottles of wine that might be casualties. And if Alcione doesn't stop fucking with my paychecks, I'll be more than happy to remove the balance from the liquor cabinet.

Also, the YouTube debate is on CNN in about nine minutes, and I am WAY too excited about that.

Lastly, Democratic Vistas rocks and Walt Whitman is (still) my dead gay lover. "In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander's, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex'd Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow'd with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul." Preach it, Walt.

Fun fact about me: not only am I gay, I'm gold-star gay. As in once a girl kissed me at a dance in 8th grade and I was so confused I thought I was going to collapse. Sometimes I get little girl-crushes on tomboy-ish friends, but even in those instances the whole idea of sex is not so appealing. I'm not sure if this is uncommon or not, but Mama Katie seemed to think it was. I guess most of us do some experimentation before we settle down to work in the GayLab.

That being said, there are about 9,000 completely kick-ass women on the planet. And I occasionally go through minor infatuations with them. So these are the female loves of my life, who I will pay tribute to the only way I know how: by posting YouTube videos of them.

( Girl Crushes )

Yeah, this is what I do when I get up early before work. No wonder I never get anything done.

Last night, I went out with the fam to get some Pizza in Clarendon. Bizarrely enough, I ran into my friend Therindu, from school, at the metro stop. He's doing law stuff here for the summer, so we made amorphous plans to get lunch sometime. On the metro a guy noticed the Carleton shirt my dad was wearing and asked about that. Turns out he was a class of '03 grad. Poli Sci, like me. Well, kind of. He was an IR guy. So we talked about Carleton and the department for awhile. I just found it odd that, given how tiny and typically unknown my school is, I would run into two students in about five minutes.

While in Clarendon I bummed around the Barnes & Noble. Christ, I love books. Apparently Frederic Jameson has written a book about Utopian speculative fiction. Just the idea of being able to read about science fiction and critical theory at the same time got me so nerdy excited. I also found this book, "In a Shade of Blue", which attempts to apply Dewey's pragmatism to dilemmas in black political thought. Which, Dewey apologist and anti-racist that I am, has moved to the top of my summer reading list. Just need to finish these books for the Croatia program first.

Today, I'm confronting my boss about this minor fiasco wherein I've worked for him for four months and yet somehow not been paid. Yeah, total bullshit. I'm also going to swallow whatever dignity I had and hope he'll cut me in for hours again, because I need to make some cash before I go to Europe. This whole work situation is royally fucked up.

DC is about as soulless as one would expect the seat of the US government to be. I've tried to trick myself by thinking of it as "that place Fugazi is from" instead. Not so effective.

Though honestly, there are quite a lot of organizations here doing important, and in some cases, outright inspiring, work. And then there are some truly evil motherfuckers. I neither know nor care what the evil motherfuckers are up to when they aren't setting some dastardly scheme in motion. But I'd like to know what all the people mobilizing for justice and stuff do for fun on Saturday nights. Because right now too many of mine have involved staring at my computer screen and wishing summer would just be over.

I think I need to expand my social network.

Wait, expand my social network? Look, I'm trying to be angsty and it sounds like management-speak.

Anyway.

I like the other interns at the Queertower. A lot, actually. As much as I'm struggling with the absence of any political and intellectual companionship right now, they have quickly become a major support structure in my life. I'm usually pretty slow at making friends, so it's nice to know that after a month I've already made some real connections. But I'm slightly disappointed by the  gay agenda as practiced in DC.  It's this totally bizarre atmosphere where everyone I talk to is at least a third degree black belt in Queer Theory. And a lot of people, especially my boss, are really acutely aware of how fucked our social system is by race and class issues. I guess you can't work in social policy and not figure that out.

But beyond rockin' the Q, it seems like there is no political consciousness. Example: The movement against DADT. The legislation we're backing is called the "Military Readiness Enhancement Act". All the rhetoric is about how our giant fucking monster of a military needs to be optimized for defending the US from the evildoers. Which is, first off, a lie, because I can't remember the last time our military did something conceivably related to "defending" anyone. What we're talking about is getting queer people to help the gears run faster in the world's most terrifying death machine. Why does asking for equality have to entail uncritically accepting imperialist violence? I just don't buy that it can be an ethically neutral proposition to "enhance" the military given its past and present forays into brutality. Why are we in such a hurry to prove that queers are just as good as straight people at shutting up and following orders?

And look, I get, why, politically, it's going to be this way, which is why I just took notes quietly at the meeting. But when I tried to vent to my fellow interns about how fucked up I found the whole thing, I got lots of pat-on-the-head "I see where you're coming from, but...", which would immediately be followed by an interrogation of how committed I was to anti-discrimination, and didn't I see why it was wrong to discriminate even if I didn't sympathize with the goals of the people being discriminated against? Which I do. I do support repealing DADT, but doesn't anyone else feel at all bad about playing into this whole culture of militarism? No one really seemed interested.

I guess that's what I've found with a lot of the activists in DC so far. People have their issues. Maybe even a lot of issues. But there's no sense of solidarity with people struggling on other fronts. People are activists as a career commitment, but too few actually own their activism at any personal level. I think... I think I need to find some radical friends like the one's I have at school. Or I am just going to lose it. Meanwhile, all this is causing my pragmatist and radical inclinations to engage in some serious internal conflict. The pragmatist says I should go to grad school, study a subset of social policy, settle down with some policy work, and really try to bash some sense into at least some parts of this fucked up social system. But my radical inclination is to study political theory and social movements like I'm doing now, take up community organizing somewhere, and just commit to a grassroots struggle. When I think about doing the latter, I sometimes feel that I'm privileging my own desire for ideological purity (and intellectual stimulation) over actually helping people. But the former just feels so much like selling out, and the experiences I've had in DC so far only confirm that I'd be working with a lot of people who just straight up don't share my values.

What to do?

Indymedia says the Anti-War Committee meets on Tuesday. Maybe I'll go to that. But I swear if I hear any sexist, homophobic, or transphobic bullshit, I'm out. I really can't deal with the anarchy jocks right now.