novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- jogging part one These are things that run through my head when I exercise. I am about to turn thirty. Why are McCain's arms so disproportionately short, and why did this bother me so much during debates? Why isn't Sarah Palin outed as inexperienced and dragged through the press? Is Barack Obama too PC to make an issue of that? Is this a good tactic because it shows respect? Wait, it is. It does. This is yet another reason why Obama rules! Let's hope my faith in him continues; I am always so skeptical of leaders. Right now I can't help but buffer him up in my mind as a symbol of hope. And look, he's spoken out against Prop 8: http://www.noonprop8.com/obama?source=google&gclid=CJrvi4PWxJYCFQJNagod-CiByw I'm a fag hag. I'll admit it. It has taken me thirty years (minus one month) to come out of the closet on this one. I've always thought that fag hags were women that wanted to sleep with gay men, but I guess I was wrong, because that's not what I want. If I had to quantify my feelings for the gays on the whole it would probably come to a some sort of chick lit chick movie best girlfriend type of love. (But who would be Sarah Jessica Parker? And why is she so oddly bony?) That, coupled with 'partner in crime' love because my brother was all of these things to me growing up. We're still close, he lives in San Francisco, but my favorite days with him were when we were little and we roamed all over the hill that was our neighborhood like little Lords of the Flies, except we're both Piggy. We'd weave through neighbors' backyards and explore their cellars, swing on their kids' abandoned tire swings, find drug detritus and dare each other to take some of whatever it was, inspect a fort that might also have been a homeless man's hobbit hole. Once we discovered the vines growing from the tree towering over the rich neighbor Storzes' steep blacktop driveway and then realized we were strong enough to support us, we swung across the divide like monkeys in the Swiss Family Robinson, a movie I spent time studying closely, wishing fervently to live in a bamboo treehouse. Then Wolfe would go melt his GI Joes on the stove, smash them with rocks to see what they looked like after. I thought he was so strange for doing that, I would tease the fuck out of him for it. So I'm not homophobic. No, I'm just highly associative. And most gay men seem especially endeared to me because I have big hair, which secretly flatters me. Whenever I am around a gay male I get the strong brother vibe, and it makes me feel safe and vaguely bratty. Today I jogged for the first time. Okay, so I was in track when I was a kid, but I haven't run longer than three feet in at least twenty years. Half of those twenty years was spent smoking too much, so it is a big deal that I jogged today. I want to get my endurance up and start musing/headphone running long distances, but for right now I'm just proud that I jogged the lake. I didn't even plan on doing it; usually my stance on any form of running is that "it makes me bounce too much," but I had all this excess energy surge through me so I just did it and didn't think about it. The news has me really tense these days: the election, the propositions and the measures. One of the propositions, 00, directly effects library funding, which is scary given the current City of Oakland Budget Crisis (I work for the library). And Alan Greenspan himself got up before everybody and admitted that he was half wrong. Alan Fucking Greenspan. It feels like our country can't agree on anything and is this the result of a free market economic-based society? And why am I not proud to be an American? And why the fuck am I asking myself questions like these when my mind could be occupied by far more entertaining, productive things, like painting portraits of dogs dressed in human clothing? Oh, that's right: we've hit rock bottom, so I might as well run my ass off. Via my co-worker: Friends, Also known as KidsFirst, or Oakland Fund for Children and Youth (OFCY), these funds do support wonderful and essential programs in Oakland. In fact, the current funds have already been extended for another 12 years. But in a time when we're entering a severe budget crisis, OO would divert MORE of the City's General Fund, and city services would have to take another big hit. I've been sitting through the city council hearings these last two weeks on the current budget cuts, and I can tell you that if we go any farther we're going to have to start closing Libraries and Recreation facilities. The Yes on OO campaign suggests that: --But I can tell you that the Libraries have NOT been funded by OFCY for years....despite our applications. We were told explicitly that OFCY did not want to support city services, but rather would concentrate on nonprofits. I'm not arguing with that: if they saw the greater need in good non-profit services, so be it. But being told we'll be "eligible" for funds--in a campaign--doesn't really make me feel secure, especially if we'd have to close libraries, cut staff, then divert more staffing resources to applying for funds that we might not get. Oakland Public Libraries provide essential after-school, evening/weekend, and summertime spaces and activities for Oakland's kids--and the city libraries and rec centers are open to EVERYONE. It would be truly a shame to board up these services in order to make more $ available for other kids programs to apply for. Please take a look at the FAQs for both sides of the argument Please forward this message to anyone else you think would listen. Thanks for your support-- I belong to a gym and I was on my way to it this afternoon, wearing the little exercise shorts and everything, all cotton and spandex driving down Piedmont and my car gets swallowed by the annual Halloween street fair. I notice the amount of people roaming the street is unusually large, but hey, it's a Saturday. Wait a second, why are so many kids in costume? And why are they standing in the middle of the street? It took two bikers directing traffic to get me out of there; I'm white knuckles on the steering wheel by the end of this, so I drive straight to the lake. It's my default place to walk around with headphones, primarily because the lake is always the same distance, the route is round like a track, and it's long enough to be fairly challenging a routine. I'm almost at the lake when I realize I'm driving towards what looks like another huge crowd, but this time the crowd isn't comprised of four year old chickens, princesses and superheroes: this is a crowd of protesters, and it looked like they were protesting each other. Oh, California. This is a crowd of us versus them, meaning the exact clash we are seeing in the nation as currently reflected by presidential election. There are the conservatives versus the liberals, and they're all wearing teeshirts. The yellow teeshirts were the "YES on Measure 8" crowd -- the blue, the "NO ON MEASURE 8" crowd. The NO people were outnumbered and all stood around staring stoically at their opponents. And I drove by as fast as I could to my favorite parking spot, where I park during workdays and won't get ticketed, and then ran back across the lake to the protest. There were more and more people now. No news vans yet, but onlookers were gathering, just standing around watching. Some were talking overly loudly to each other about their personal feelings, but only a few were fed up enough to go join in on whichever side of the protest they believed in. And this is when everything public became private. And I haven't even gotten to the part where I screamed at the fat old churchlady. 9:01 am - 10.26.08 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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