Karin's Ramblings

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

2010-04-23T20:17:00.000-07:00

Google is terminating the technology that I use to publish this blog. It's free technology so I can't complain too much, but I'm busy and changing things takes time. My choices are migrate this blog to Google's new technology, abandon this blog altogether, or create a completely new blog using new technology. Given I'm not taking the time to post much it might make more sense to abandon this spot of e-turf.

Even though I work as an information technology engineer, I am weary of the constant need to change everything. Just when you get something working, then it needs to be ripped apart and reassembled. It's a racket if you think about it. IT workers create obsolescence so more work will be created and they will keep their jobs. In the meantime, we're working 50 hour weeks when we're lucky, more when we're not. When is enough going to be enough?

Death of a Cool Radio Station

2010-01-19T05:33:00.000-08:00

I used to brag to my friends outside of San Diego about radio station 94.9 - they had lots of long time local DJs who actually knew the San Diego local music scene. I mean the real San Diego music scene. Bands like Hair Theater and Crash Worship and Crawdaddy and the newer ones as well (of which I'm too old and not cool enough to know). DJs who were at the shows at Iguanas or the Che Cafe. Every morning they had a local band of the day and played a song of the local band's on the radio.

That's gone. Mike Halloran got canned or let go or who knows what a week or two ago. Today I find out they're bringing the hack loud mouth dj from 105.3 to 94.9. So now we get to listen to 13 year old boy humor in the morning - joy oh joy. And it turns out that he and his staff need to pass a drug test. What kind of bullshit is that? Why does a rock n roll DJ need to pass a drug test?

Adios 94.9. I've switched to classical for now until I can find a radio station that supports local music, plays local music and doesn't submit it's employees to drug tests. Lets be real. What's the worst thing a stoned out DJ will do? I know, play good music.

Hope is on the horizon. The great crew at Activist San Diego are trying to create a community FM Radio Station. I don't know if it will reach into the City of San Diego, but if you're interested, check out their website and let them know you support their efforts.

Global Warming And Friends

2009-12-13T17:37:00.000-08:00

Global warming is yet one more in a long line of issues that seems to divide people into believers and naysayers. As a person who firmly believes you don't get something for nothing, burning fossil fuels is an obvious no no. How can you burn up energy in 100 years that it took untold millions of years to creating without violating the something for nothing rule? At the very least, we run out of oil and need to find other ways to live in harmony with the planet. Some people argue that American lifestyles require high carbon fuel usage - but at the end of the day that's what's killing us. We're all fat because we're living off the energy of dinosaurs from a million years ago instead of the calories we consumed today.

I don't know what the answer is other than to go forward to the past - to a world were human energy is important, people lived in self-sustaining communities and our homes aren't filled with toxic crap from China. At the end of the day, buying stuff isn't bringing me happiness, hugs are.

In the spirit of local activism and global warming, I want to take a few minutes to share some of my local heroes. Carolyn Chase and Chris Klein - the amazing duo - who live a few blocks from me and who started the huge Earth Fair that happens every year in Balboa Park. I've volunteered with Earth Fair, am saving a creek thanks to a non-profit these two amazing people started, San Diego Earth Works, and have hope that sane decentralized transportation will become a reality in San Diego thanks to Move San Diego - another group with ties to the amazing duo. If it's environmentally progressive in San Diego, this is Chris and Carolyn are your connection.

The dynamic duo is in Copenhagen at the United Nations Conference on Climate change and have put together a website to allow those of us stuck in our mundane lives to hear some of the debates between regular people like ourselves.

Thank you Chris and Carolyn for all you do. You rock.

***From an email from Chris****************

Carolyn Chase and I are in Copenhagen at the UN conference on climate change (COP15). Officially, we are registered delegates of the Sierra Club, of which we are both life members.

We puzzled over how best to make a difference at the conference. We decided to create a special website, Message to America, and post videos of other delegates speaking their "message to America." We have also posted photos, and and there is a blog of updates, quotes, special notes, etc.

The goal is to give you a better picture of the kind of world citizens who are attending the event, and how critical this issue is for much of the world. It's one thing to deal with figures and technical abstractions. It's another to listen to a woman who's island is in danger of slipping beneath the waves.

**************End email from Chris*******************

On Starting Graduate School

2009-09-22T07:39:00.000-07:00

Monday, September 14, I started graduate school. A Ph.D. program in mythological studies with an emphasis on depth psychology at Pacificia Graduate Institute in Carpenteria (or Carp as the locals call it) -- Summerland to be a bit more exact. (the land of executive mansions and polo clubs - not water polo, horse polo).

You may be asking, what the hell is mythological studies. Here's the blurb from the program

"Pacifica Graduate Institute's program in Mythological Studies explores the understanding of human experience revealed in mythology and in the manifold links between myth and ritual, literature, art, and religious experience. Special attention is given to depth psychological and archetypal approaches to the study of myth."

I'm still in shock. Three days of lectures - 8 hours a day. Plus socializing with my new classmates, taking the train back and forth, being with a group of very smart students who are more analytical than I will ever be. WOW.

I'm hoping to catch up on the reading and come back and share something meaningful on this blog. But in the meantime, I'm shell shocked and trying to process.

On Being a Girl

2009-08-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

In 5th grade, girls couldn't wear pants. In 6th grade we could wear pants every other Thursday as long as they weren't Levi's brand jeans. By 7th grade, pants were a daily occurrence. In 7th and 8th grade we had separate PE classes for boys and girls. By 9th grade we were co-ed.

I've spent a lot of years doing things that "girls don't do." When I had a life (before my mom's stroke) I used to work on cars, slam dance in the mosh pit and surf (a lot). I also liked to sew my own clothes, bake my own muffins, kiss boys and garden.

I'm still here only now I work with computers (me and the guys on my team, but the other team has a couple of girls who wore pants to school starting in Kindergarten and didn't even know there was a time when that wasn't allowed). I still surf from time to time. Last night I saw friends surfing together and sharing stories with each other about the inside wave they caught or the one that caught them by surprise and bounced them off the sand. They looked so happy together and I wanted that. They were all male.

I have female friends that will go to the beach with me, but they don't surf. I've had that story sharing with male companions before, during and after surfing, but I've never in my entire life gone surfing with a woman and the worst thing is I just realized that yesterday.

When I started surfing, I was recruited for Surfrider's Paddle for Clean Water because I was a woman surfer and they needed more balanced energy. I tried to explain that I suck, wipe out and am basically not physically coordinated, but off I went to paddle around the pier at the second paddle in OB and I've been doing it ever since. These days it's families, young girls, older women and me.

Since I've been locked in a house taking care of my mom, San Diego Surf Ladies has come into existence to foster that type of camaraderie with other surfing women - although they are quite a bit younger than I am. When I go to the beach, I sees women in their twenties surfing in groups of 2 or 3 and having fun as only good friends can do out on the water.

All these things make me very happy. But maybe before I die, I could meet just one woman my age who likes to surf Black's (and maybe isn't that great) to bond with and walk up the road telling stories of the triple bounce off the bottom or the 6 foot wave she caught because she was too scared not to take the ride.

Thought for the day

2009-08-29T20:39:00.000-07:00

Went Surfing at Black's. Got pounded. Exhausted but happy.

On the trail up someone had posted a sign, "Don't go with the flow, be the flow."

~ ~ Words to live by ~ ~

Full Disclosure

2009-08-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

In the interest of full disclosure, I went to Black's on Friday with an out of town friend (who used to be a local) and the lifeguard tower was gone. My first thought was that I was loosing my mind, but in the interest of proving myself sane, we went and talked to the lifeguards - the ones in the palm thatched hut. Apparently Hollywood was filming a television pilot and had the lifeguard tower on the sand (with 24/7 guards) for a few days.

The rest of the story is true, just this slight update. And thankfully the beach is once again lifeguard tower free.

Friday night the water was incredibly warm, the dolphins came out and frolicked in the surf and even did a few back flips for us, and I caught a couple of waves.

Life is good.

An Unstable Bluff

2009-08-13T07:35:00.000-07:00

In more cliched terms, what I have to talk about is a slippery slope, but in the case of this particular cliche, we're also talking about sandstone bluffs and what was once one of the last wild beaches in Southern California.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, there was a beach in San Diego where nudity was 100% legal. Black's Beach is at the bottom of a bluff. On top of the bluff are bizillion dollar homes for the rich and not so famous. Just to the south is the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the biggest children's beach I know of (aka La Jolla Shores).

In 1977, voters approved an ordinance banning nudity on the city owned portion of the beach (the northern chunk of Black's falls under state jurisdiction). Life went on as before with people frolicking naked along the entire stretch of Black's Beach. Technically illegal, but in practice Black's was a nude beach. From volleyball to surfing, all the in nude, or in swimsuits if you preferred.

Black's was great. No hordes of touristsfrom Iowa and Nebraska only the nudist variety. Great surfing. Community. Full moons on the beach and a steady stream of dolphins feeding offshore.

A few years back, the City of San Diego decided to start enforcing the wearing of swimsuits on their portion of the beach. I don't know all the details of why, but it probably has something to do with the bizillionaires who live in the neighborhood - and what bizillionaires want, bizillionaires get. The state continues to allow nudity on it's portion of the beach.

At first, life rolled as it has at Black's. But then things started going downhill. First hordes of freshman UCSD students started appearing on the beach in swimsuits with IPods. Then tourists from the hotels in the area started wandering around. Not nudist tourists, but tourists who pay $500 a night for a motel room and drive Mercedes tourists - the death of any cool place.

Then last year, the families started showing up with lots of small children and strollers. I'm not talking hippie families whose idea of a mini-vacation is spending the night on the beach, but people with jobs and brand new cars. People who think that their kids are more important than anything else and who completely miss the idea of a wild beach where you manage on your own and with your friends.

Then on Monday the previously unthinkable happened - the City of San Diego installed a lifeguard tower to watch, I'm assuming, over those middle class families and their children. It's not like we haven't had lifeguards on Black's for ever - we have (or at least almost forever). But the lifeguards used to come in with a camper on the back of a pickup truck, or hung out under their palm thatched shade structure they built on the cliffs. Like everything else about Black's, it was homegrown, not part of some big industry.

I feel violated - like something amazingly precious has been destroyed so people don't have to be responsible for keeping their own kids from drowning. I know the clock never turns counter clockwise, but I wish we could go back to the old Black's full of fat naked men with tiny penises and surfers sleeping on the beach so they could be up for the first light and catch those early waves with the dolphins.

In mourning.

Happiness Lives in the Body

2009-07-22T21:27:00.000-07:00

Especially when the body is surfing at Black's Beach at sunset on a warm summers evening with dolphins cavorting outside the break and pelicans swooping across the surf. Happiness is having the energy to catch wave after wave and wipe out, get smacked in the jaw by my board, taste the warm ocean water on my skin and feel my muscles working with joy.

All the best things in life involve touch and smell and exerting my body. I love the climb up the hill, smelling the sweet sage on the bluffs and listening to my breath coming hard and heavy as my thigh muscles power me up the hill.

Happiness doesn't come often enough but when it comes, it is all there as if every moment of life felt this fantastic.

The Listening Gathering

2009-07-19T21:01:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, en route to the Arkansas gathering, I decided that I would spend most of time my time listening. I was coming in late, not bringing much and figured I wouldn't have any major projects to deal with so I would sit and listen to what others had to say. Well Arkansas was full of mud and while I spent some time listening, it wasn't until this year that I got my listening gathering.

From formal councils to informal circles, I listened. Main Council. Shanti Sena Council. Hearing the message of the Hopi woman. Shitter digging parties. It was beautiful and I listened a lot. Seems like at this point in my life, listening is what I need to be doing.

The World of Online Dating

2009-07-14T20:11:00.001-07:00

Given my limited opportunities to mingle with members of the opposite sex, I've been making fores into the world of online dating. It's all very troubling for a woman whose total dating experience consists of one ill fated date in high school (details not for public consumption). Since high school, I've met partners while living life and things have just clicked. Until recently that is.

Now I'm middle aged and it's harder to meet men in the normal course of my day. I won't date anyone I work with, I have a very limited social life so I don't get out much these days, and all the men I have crushes on don't know about my feelings - and sometimes I don't know. Some of them I've had crushes on for 10 years (through other relationships) so at this point, I'm not sure if I'm just used to having a crush on them or if I still really feel attracted.

I don't know how to flirt anymore and I'm not sure what the hell I'm doing and my once upon a time awesome body ain't what it used to be. If any of you out there have landed at this point in your life and you want to share war stories, I'm all ears.

The Gathering is Upon Us Once Again

2009-06-13T08:24:00.001-07:00

The Rainbow Gathering is in full seed camp mode with all the rumors, panics, joy and excitement that brings. I have a blog dedicated to this year's gathering and since most of my thoughts are with the gathering just now, that's where I'm blogging. If you're into gatherings or just curious, come on over to my New Mexico Gathering Blog.

Sonia Sotomayor and Mission Bay Park

2009-05-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

At first glance, most people won't see a connection between the current debate about the role of ethnicity and gender in Obama's selection for his first Supreme Court nominee, but when I walk in Mission Bay Park I think about race, culture and the changing times quite a bit due to the cross-section of San Diegans enjoying time along the bay.

The east side of Mission Bay Park is packed with picnickers at this time of year. Small picnics - a couple or parents with their kids. But there are also large picnics to celebrate birthdays and weddings, anniversaries and holidays. No doubt some of the picnics are just an occasion for friends and family to spend some time in Mission Bay Park, eat, visit, let the kids play, and just wile away the day with cool ocean breezes.

There seems to be two types of large picnics when it comes to race and/or ethnicity. All white picnics. Or picnics with some combination of Hispanics, African-Americans, Filipinos, Caucasians, etc. and a bunch of multi-ethnic children running around. The former is much fewer in numbers than the latter these days.

Which brings me to the charge that Ms. Sotomayor's rulings will be shaded by her ethnicity. Of course it will. And by her gender. And by her life experiences. When a white male is nominated for the Supreme Court, why don't people worry that his gender, ethnicity and socio-economic class will shade his rulings. I don't believe any human lives completely outside their experiences and let's be real here: gender, ethnicity and socio-economic class create your lived experiences.

I think the words "ethnicity" and "gender" are code for the fear that if privileged white Americans no longer control the Supreme Court, the interests of the wealthy will no longer take precedence over the issues of all Americans. This opinion is probably justified, but I'm ready for a Supreme Court that represents the variety of lived experiences, ethnic backgrounds and genders that make up the USA. I live for the day when a transvestite is nominated to the Supreme Court.

As to lived experiences, if the myth of America is that everyone has a chance if they work hard enough, then let's start rewarding those who started life with few advantages and excelled in spite of the obstacles instead of the sons and daughters of the wealthy who were given everything that Ms. Sotomayor worked her ass off to achieve.

This is the American dream.

Earth Fair is Tomorrow

2009-04-18T09:26:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the big Earth Fair in San Diego's Balboa Park. San Diego's Earth Fair bills itself as "The world's largest annual environmental fair and Earth Day Celebration – produced by volunteers." It's free and fun. Environmental booths, music, a kid's parade, and the unofficial mondo drum circle. This year, I'm working a booth for the Rose Creek Watershed Alliance, of which my local community group, the Friends of Rose Creek is a part. I'll be there all day long, so stop by and visit if you like. We'll be on the east end of El Prado in front of the SD Railroad Museum.

If you've never been and you're nearby come on down and celebrate Earth Month with us!

Friendship Park - Silent Vigil on April 15

2009-04-13T08:48:00.001-07:00

Friendship Park is in the northwestern corner of Mexico and the southwestern corner of the USA. It's been a place where people from both countries could get together and picnic, talk, see family they have no other way of seeing, and connect the two sides of the San Diego/Tijuana metropolis - one ecosystem, one community, one city with a wall down the middle.

The federal government has a total lack of understanding of the hardships a community faces with a wall in the middle of it.

This week President Obama will sit down to visit with President Felipe Calderon in Mexico. At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security is shutting down Friendship Park, where people from San Diego and Tijuana have visited with friends for generations. In solidarity with those being denied access to this historic venue, and in protest of DHS decision-making , which has excluded all community voices, friends of Friendship Park invite you to join a Silent Vigil on the day before the presidential meeting.

Where: Border Patrol Headquarters
2411 Boswell Rd
Chula Vista, CA 91914

When: Wednesday, April 15th, 12 noon
Friends of Friendship Park will arrive early and stay late –
join us on your lunch hour!

What to bring: Silence!
Wear white clothes. Please also bring Mexican candies as
gifts for Border Patrol.

For more information on Friendship Park and what it means to those of us in this part of the world, visit http://www.friendshippark.org.
If you can't be there on April 15, visit the website and send a message that now more than ever we need to maintain community and communications between countries.

Fixing a Scene

2009-03-29T09:51:00.001-07:00

Today I'm working on fixing some kludgy places in chapter 16 of my novel. On the wall above my bed I have written out the logic of motivation reaction units (MRU). Every time something is clunky or not flowing properly, I try to re-write it using an MRU and most of the time, the scene starts to flow "naturally." If you're a writer, this is a killer craft tip. Read more at MRU online.

McCarthyism Redux

2009-03-05T07:19:00.000-08:00

Communist threat = war on terrorism. Will we never learn?

Dying from Alcoholism

2009-03-01T09:46:00.000-08:00

In this year's season of dying, I just lost another friend. The mother of my first long term committed relationship significant other, passion of my youth. His mother, like my father, died from alcoholism. Too many people dying from alcoholism, yet I take it as a given. I grew up in a world where grownups drank a lot. I don't think that at the time, they considered it to much. It just was. These days we consider drinking yourself into the grave a tragedy - and one that should be prevented if possible. But then again, my father drank himself into the grave at 76. He was basically healthy until a couple of months before he died and then he went quickly - a blessing for him and his family.

Most of the people I know who have problems with alcohol have problems with the world. They are lonely or don't fit in or are stressed by the de-humanization of life in the USA. Some of them suffered destruction of the world they thought they were going to lead due to war. Some of them broke ground in changing the world and weren't able to live with the changes.

As a child of an alcoholic I'm supposed to have issues but I can't tell, because I don't think I've ever had a friend who wasn't the child of an alcoholic.

In the end we all die. I may have been hanging out with the waiting to die set far too long, but going quickly is the key. Of course a sudden heart attack while gardening or walking in the woods is best, but even the swift death of liver failure isn't bad. At least it's only a couple of months, not a couple of decades.

Shirin - thanks for everything.

The Deaths Are Piling Up

2009-02-22T08:58:00.000-08:00

My friend Sailor passed away on Thursday. I had known him since 1994 or 1995. My best early memory of him was at a regional gathering we did in Imperial County around that time. I was committed to creating an alcohol free front gate. My van and my boyfriend's truck were at right angles with a tarp strung between. This was the front gate shade space.

Sailor came over to sit with us and he brought a beer. Now what you have to understand is that the Sailor I know hates drunken energy at front gate, but he had to be a rabble rouser and push my buttons. Since he and my boyfriend had been friends for a long time at that point, we all got into a bit. I don't remember if Sailor got rid of the beer or not. That's the Sailor I knew. Full of contradictions, always wanting to be a contrarian, but his heart was in the right place. Hey Sailor - keep up the good work.

Bob Nanninga was not a friend so much as a fixture in local politics. He was the gay, green, revolutionary voice of opposition in white new age Encinitas. I met him briefly once or twice at meetings in the way it happens when you're talking to someone else and that person says "by the way do you know...". Since Bob's reputation preceded him, I felt on firm ground saying, "I know of you." What's not being said is that he died of pneumonia (code word for AIDS I'm guessing as who else dies of pneumonia in their 40s). Remember to use a condom folks. AIDS isn't going anywhere.

For more insight into what San Diego will be missing, read Logan Jenkins' column or The Coast News' Obituary.

A Season For Dying

2009-02-15T08:47:00.000-08:00

The deaths are piling up like used tires. First Cyndi's dad, than the grandfather Grant had been living with for years in Sacramento, keeping an eye on G-Paw as we called him. My friend Sailor is dying as I type this and sending good thoughts to him and Catherine. But today's post is about Jay Hays.

I met Jay in the 1990s at Oh My God Hot Springs in Southern California. East of the San Diego mountains and west of the Salton Sea. Oh My God was a free place to camp, soak, or just be. My first trip out there was for a regional rainbow gathering in the early 90s. Jay is a Vietnam Veteran who used to travel around in a school bus with a couple of Rhodesian Ridgebacks and play drums. He is a drummer's drummer. Jay started college in the early 1960s but then went off to Vietnam and came back broken like so many men I have known. He tried to use alcohol to fix himself for a whole lot of years.

A few years after I met him, when I was seeing one of his best friends, he called me from the VA hospital in San Diego where he had checked himself into the drug and alcohol rehab program. That point really marked the beginning of our friendship. From there he went to the old Veterans Village on PCH and stuck with sobriety.

Over the next 7 or 8 years, he went back to college - community college. Then on to San Diego State University where he majored in Counseling with an emphasis on drug and alcohol addiction. He did a combination BA and MA program despite a few health related setbacks that slowed down his progress. The years of hard living etched in his body.

It was February or March of his last semester of school that his body collapsed and he ended up back at the VA. The doctors wanted to do operations and try to fix him, but Jay wanted to graduate. He wanted his MA in Counseling before he died and so once he was stabilized, he went back and finished up that last semester.

He invited his friends to graduation and being the oldest student in his graduating program, somehow wrangled a lot of tickets. When I showed up I ran into people I vaguely recognized from those days at Oh My God Hot Springs. Once they introduced themselves, I laughed and said, "I didn't recognized you with your clothes on." That was our running joke and was repeated time and again as more old friends show up.

It took Jay forty years to graduate, but he did it and I'm so proud of him. All my attempts at going to grad school are inspired by Jay. I too started going to community college a long time ago (1976 or 1977). I went to college on and off until the year 2000 when I received my BA from UCSD but that doesn't compare to Jay's track record. He was the one who made me realize that it's never too late.

His mission for the last few years of his life was to help as many people as he could.

After Jay graduate a few years ago, he was hired by an Indian Tribe in Rainbow Arizona to run a drug and alcohol rehab clinic. I haven't seen Jay since he moved, but we've talked on the phone, email and written each other. About a year ago, his health problems returned with a vengeance. His liver began shutting down. He was able to get on the list for a liver transplant and died on the operating table on January 28 of this year. Jay knew his days were numbered for years.

Jay we're going to miss you. A mutual friend was with him at the end and Jay was worried that his comrades in this battle against using alcohol to fix brokenness were going to backslide and he didn't want that. So if you're out there, please call a friend, go to a meeting, or plant a tree. It's what Jay would have wanted.

The Dreaded Questions

2009-02-06T20:12:00.000-08:00

There are two questions that ruin my day:
1) How are you?
2) How is your mother?

Most days I try to stay focused on the moment and work on my to do list. I think about my goals and hope that if I keep working towards them, someday I will be in a place I feel good about. As long as I stay in this space, I'm OK even happy at times. But then that space is blown by one of the two dreaded questions.

When I get question #1, I have two choices. Just lie and say I'm good (and that doesn't come natural). Or tell people I haven't slept in ten years, had sex in way too long (and that sounds whiny). I have like two friends in the county who I see a couple of times a year and spend the rest of my life in front of a computer or with a woman who can't talk. I never have any privacy but I never have anyone to talk to either. I work 14 hours a day six days a week and 8 on Sundays. I'm fat, out of shape and have a skin problem on part of my left foot that is driving me crazy.

When I get question #2, I feel like it's a slap in the face. When I finally get out of caregiving or computers and spend time with a friend or acquaintance, I don't want to even remember that my mother exists. And how should she be? She's severely disabled but healthy as a horse. When she dies, everyone will know because I will have a life again and friends and maybe even a lover. She can't talk, go to the bathroom or make a phone call. She doesn't know how to roll around in her wheelchair, so she's basically a brain trapped inside a body. This is how she was in the year 2000 and 2005. This is how she is today. Disabilities don't get better, so please stop asking.

Least you think I'm off the deep end, I do recognize that in polite society asking how people they are is the polite thing to do. Yet when others do it to me, I feel that the asker lacks even the most basic understanding what caring for a person with this level of need entails and how their questions make me feel. (Like crying in case you care)

January Mold

2009-01-31T18:35:00.001-08:00

Am I the only person who suddenly notices mold in the corners come January? The corner behind my desk starts growing mold in January. The wall behind my mom's bed. The window sill in the living room behind the couch. I swear it's not there in December. But suddenly one day in January every year I notice spots of mold. It seems to surface about the time I'm getting worn out by the cold and never being home when the sun is shinning. It's a long six weeks of cold weather we get in San Diego that keep the windows closed and the heater running.

I can't get to spring until I rid the corners of mold. Not that it's a big job, but fitting it into an overworked schedule is tough. It bumps the project to clean out the kitchen cabinets and has side tracked my filing job.

I long to be done with January mold and have my arms in the soil planting brocolli.

I Don't Deserve This Moment

2009-01-19T18:41:00.000-08:00

My entire life has been lived in the world of cultural change. As a child, I experienced the changes unfolding in the world and as an adult I've tried to move the change forward a few inches. Yet today, on the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the eve of the inauguration of our first African American, Black, Negro president, Barack Obama, I feel like I'm reaching the top of the mountain and I truly don't feel I deserve the celebration or the joy I am feeling.

Not that I haven't been harmed by racism and inequality, because I have, because we all have. Not that I haven't tried to help others understand why racism is wrong, because I have, because so many of us have. But I haven't been beaten, arrested, denied a job or prevented from being with the one I love because of the color of my skin (or my sexual orientation for that matter). Listening to our American heroes from the big like Congressman John Lewis to the 90+ year old set of African American civil rights foot soldiers talk about what this day means, makes me feel like an impostor, like I haven't suffered enough to enjoy the celebration.

And yet.... Tuesday morning I'll be watching it live on television and, no doubt, I'll be crying like a baby.

Be the change you which to see in this world.

It's Official, I'm Crazy

2009-01-17T09:23:00.000-08:00

I'm applying to a Ph.D. Program in Myth and Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. If I am accepted, I have the privilege of spending three years taking classes and two years writing a dissertation. I already have two full times jobs so I ought to have my head examined.

I'm attempting this because I want to write stories that help humanity progress in a conscious way and that illuminate the great works done by all the heros I know that are saving the planet or teaching peace or feeding people or growing organic food. I'm lucky that way, I know a lot of heros.

Since when is public dissent terrorism?

2009-01-13T06:30:00.000-08:00

For those of you who somehow missed this, in the weeks leading up to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis last summer, people were planning to engage in peaceful assembly outside the convention center. Now I don't pretend to know all the stunts that were planned - stunts designed to draw attention to issues and causes, but if someone tries to tell me any of these people were planning on doing anything more than clog a street or two, I'd say go see your shrink.

To make a long story short, there were a lot of meetings where people discussed how they could make their voice heard in the media circus that is a political convention. Before the convention even started, eight of the organizers were arrested and charged with a host of crimes that could result in more than ten years in prision including conspiracy to riot in the 2nd degree in furtherance of terrorism, a felony which is the first ever use of Minnesota’s PATRIOT Act.

Since when is a convention more important than the constituction? Luce Guillen-Givins, Max Specktor, Nathanael Secor, Eryn Trimmer, Monica Bicking, Erik Oseland, Robert Czernik and Garrett Fitzgerald need your support.

If you are in the area on Sunday January 25th, please attend the
Defend The RNC8! Town Hall Meeting from 3 PM to 6 PM at Walker Church: 3104 16th Ave S. Minneapolis.

If you can't make the meeting, sign the petition to dismiss all the charges. What happens here is critical to the rights of all Americans to engage in civil disobedience, peaceful assembly and public dissent.

Featured Speakers on January 25 include:
*Coleen Rowley--Retired FBI agent, TIME Magazine's 2002 Person of the Year
*Phyllis Kahn--MN State Representative (DFL-59B)
*Peter Rachleff--Professor of History, Macalester College
*Michelle Gross--President, Communities United Against Police Brutality
*Meredith Aby--Anti-War Committee
*Mordecai Specktor--Publisher of American Jewish World, Father of Max Specktor

Speakers will be followed by small-group sessions and participatory discussion, with a focus on action! The event is free and open to the public. Snacks and child care will be available.