25 Random Things About Me

I'm well-aware of the danger of TMI, but I bit the bullet and participated in this "25 Random Things About Me" meme that's been making the rounds on Facebook.

1) I once lost a spelling bee on e-c-s-t-a-t-i-c. I wasn't.

2) I came this close to going to Dartmouth. I sent in my reply card and everything. On April 30 (the night before the deadline), I couldn't sleep and finally woke up my mom to inform her I'd "ruined my life." I called Harvard in the morning, and told them I was just kidding when I said I wanted to go to Dartmouth. They were cool with that.

3) I played alto saxophone for five years (5th grade - 9th grade).

4) I learned to cook to get out of washing dishes.

5) I think the closest I've ever come to being treated like a rock star (or other mega-celebrity) was in high school when I was in Mexico for a conference hosted by then Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The purpose of the conference was to spark dialogue between Mexican and Mexican-American youth, and they shut down the entire Zocalo (central square in Mexico City) with police escorts for the U.S. delegation. Very big deal! I could only appreciate the significance years later.

6) I used to own a number of pets. I was particularly fond of my zebra finches.

7) The last time I took a math class I was in 10th grade. I'm looking forward to taking discrete mathematics next semester.

8) I'm looking for a new club. A book club.

9) As a kid I detested oysters, rabbit and avocado. Now they're all among my favorite foods.

10) Not counting layovers, I've visited 21 U.S. states, D.C. and Puerto Rico. I hope to visit the other 29 states in the coming years.

11) My favorite U.S. cities to live in: 1) San Francisco; 2) Boston; and 3) D.C. To visit: 1) Miami; 2) New Orleans; 3) Chicago; 4) San Juan; and 5) New York.

12) My favorite class at Harvard was called "Lives Ruined By Literature." I should have studied literature!

13) Thanks to my college friends, I love Indigo Girls, Dar Williams and Tori Amos.

14) I'm so ADD I managed to get stung by the fire coral in Puerto Rico just minutes after being warned not to get too close.

15) I was once expelled from a gocart racing track for "reckless driving."

16) I took two years of Italian in college because the vocabulary is reminiscent of French but it is grammatically very similar to Spanish, which I already spoke. In other words, because I wanted to learn another language in the laziest way possible.

17) I don't understand people who wear shorts or open-toed shoes into bars.

18) As a kid, I would often draw mazes for fun.

19) I plan to give Ethiopian food another chance. Really. Someday.

20) I love cacti and succulents.

21) My parents gave me the option of going to private school or a better public school for high school. I deliberately opted to attend the much less well-regarded local school.

22) I've recently rediscovered my penchant for Scrabble. I'm creaming one of my best Harvard friends (even though I inadvertently swapped my tiles early in the game), but Cal is way ahead of Harvard in another matchup.

23) I have gone through a number of - ahem - distinct fashion phases over the last 31 years. I owned over 20 silk shirts in various hues at one point in high school. For several years in the late 90s and early 2000s, a good 90% of my wardrobe was Banana Republic (along with that of pretty much everyone else I knew at the time). And then there was my faux gangster phase...

24) I find it exceedingly difficult to listen to music and read at the same time.

25) Bette Midler. Tina Turner. Cher. Madonna? Come again? One of these things is not like the others.

New Data on Concentration of Chemicals in Wastewater Residue

New data show that the sludge produced by sewage treatment plants contains a wide variety of toxic metals, pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, and other compounds, including some antibiotics in surprisingly high concentrations.

That's significant because every year more than half of the roughly 7 million metric tons of these so-called biosolids produced in the United States are applied as fertilizer to farm fields.

"Whether the concentrations of these chemicals pose any health threat isn't known," according to an article in ScienceNOW Daily News.

In the next year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expects to complete risk assessments on 10 chemicals in the new data.

Obama's Civil Rights Agenda

President Obama has outlined his administration's agenda on civil rights (and many other areas, including: the economy; energy and the environment; and national defense) on WhiteHouse.gov, the official website of the President.

About half the Civil Rights page is devoted to the President's support for the LGBT community, including this quote:

"While we have come a long way since the Stonewall riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do. Too often, the issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It's about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect."

-- Barack Obama, June 1, 2007

Well said!

Keith Olbermann Special Comment on Prop 8, Marriage

I just rewatched Keith Olbermann's Special Comment on Prop 8 and marriage:



It's an inspiring and wonderful commentary on hope and love :-)

Obama Takes Action on the Environment and Global Warming

From Natural Resources Defense Council:

"Less than a week into office, President Obama announced monumental decisions this morning that show America and the world that he will lead our country in a bold new direction to protect the environment and fight global warming.

The President directed his EPA to immediately review the Bush Administration's denial of the right of California and other states to set global warming pollution standards for new cars. He also directed the Department of Transportation to set higher national fuel efficiency standards.

What will that mean in the real world? If Obama's EPA, as expected, approves the California program, new cars sold in that state and at least 13 others will have to reduce their global warming pollution by 30 percent between 2009 and 2016. And the Department of Transportation will require more efficient new cars to be on the road starting in 2010, and set a course for the average new car to achieve maximum feasible fuel efficiency by 2020."

Go, Obama!

Obama Takes Action to Restore Civil Liberties

From the ACLU:

With four executive orders, our new President has:

1. Ordered Guantánamo Bay shut down
2. Banned torture
3. Ordered a full review of U.S. detention policies and procedures, and
4. Delayed the trial of Ali al-Marri, an ACLU client whose case is at the center of the Supreme Court’s review of indefinite detention policies.

You can thank Obama here.

(Thanks go to Michael Short for blogging about this first, so that I could largely crib his post for my own blog. I'm sure this will not be the last time Michael beats me to the punch! Lol)

all you have to do is DREAM | this sunday (01.18.09)

A big thank you to DJ Hawthorne and everyone involved for putting this together!

5pm til late night
The Cellar
685 Sutter @ Taylor
San Francisco
$10 before 10pm
$15 after 10pm

100% of the profits benefit MARRIAGE EQUALITY.

See you there! Please help spread the word :-)

Dream Deferred: Revolutionary Road, Far From Heaven, and All That Heaven Allows

This past weekend I saw Revolutionary Road, a period piece depicting the life of a young married couple dwelling in suburban Connecticut in the mid-1950s, at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.

Revolutionary Road reminded me very much of two other films: All That Heaven Allows (made in 1955 in Technicolor and set in an unnamed small town in New England) and Far From Heaven (also set in 1950s suburban Connecticut, and made in 2002 in the style of and as an homage to other 1950s films, particularly All That Heaven Allows and other films directed by Douglas Sirk).

All That Heaven Allows is somewhat clichéd in its plotting and dialogue, but critics who decry the "happy ending" as facile or relenting are not looking at the work as a whole, and the admirable dispersal of its gentle subversive power within the context of the social mores it critiques. (The contemporaneous New York Times movie review published February 29, 1956 dismissively refers to All That Heaven Allows as "frankly feminine fiction," which from the context is clearly meant to be an insult.)

Whereas All That Heaven Allows "allows" its protagonists to be united at the end (the studio required a "happy ending" as a condition to making it), Far From Heaven is a bleaker film, in which one protagonist's (Dennis Quaid) future is left largely uncertain, and the relationship between the other two (Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert) comes to an end when Haysbert literally pulls out of the train station to take a different life path. Although All That Heaven Allows is the inspiration and progenitor of Far From Heaven, the shared context and rich intertextuality only add to each film's individual beauty and merits.

Although Revolutionary Road does not take its stylistic cues from Sirk, it feels like kin to these two films, as it too explores the vast distance between the meticulously maintained projection of the American Dream onto the lives of supposed nonconformists in a conformist society, and the inner turmoil that lies just beneath, sometimes simmering just below the surface and sometimes boiling over into rage and venom.

Kathy Bates is pitch-perfect as Helen, the perfectly ordinary real estate agent who sells the home on Revolutionary Road to April (Kate Winslet) and Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) Wheeler. Winslet and DiCaprio are astonishing, taking us on an emotional tour de force – with fits and stops in between: from bruised optimism and utter heartbreak to seething anger and detached enervation – that weaves together and then unravels the lies we tell ourselves and one another to appear happy; to rationalize the abandonment of our dreams; and ultimately, to live or to die.

However, it is Helen's crazy son, John (Michael Shannon), who steals the show, not in the sense that he upstages Winslet and DiCaprio (though, his performance is just as worthy of an Academy Award), but in the sense that it is he alone who sees through the picture-perfect façade the Wheelers have managed to create to convince everyone but themselves that, while they might not always be happy living a dull suburban life, they generally are, and in any case they are at least better than those around them who have bought into the fiction of such happiness. In doing so, he veers to-and-fro from pointed questioning to monologue to haunting near-soliloquy, wildly and yet methodically crafting a canvas where reason and unreason, sanity and madness, brilliance and pathology, all blur together.

It is an actor's film, in that not only do DiCaprio, Winslet and Shannon offer technically brilliant performances that bring their characters to life in all their intimate details, in turn illuminating their very imperfect humanity, they also reveal how for so many of us life itself has come to mean acting – acting out; not acting out; acting like we don't care; at times, actively and inactively refusing to admit to ourselves that we are acting; as we continue to act – always still playing a role.

These three films are about risk and opportunity cost; about the things we buy into and the compensation we seek; and the price we all pay – sooner or later; one time or many; with money or in time lost or sometimes even with our lives – on life's journey. Whether we take the road less traveled, or the road everyone else seems to be on, it's not a question of if we pay, it's only a question of how we pay - in money, in time, in love, in honesty - what currency we use, how we compensate ourselves and compensate for the choices we've made, how we value our lives.

I love Revolutionary Road's parting shot. In its recognition that even when we can't change the channel we can always tune out, in ways big and small, it provides a barely translucent glimmer of hope to encapsulate the beautiful, sad and perhaps bitter pill that life becomes when we will or yen it to be so.

Happiness May Be Contagious :-)

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego, have found that having happy friends can make you happy, but having lots of friends won't - unless they're happy.  Here's to happiness! :-)

Looking Back at 2008's LGBT newsmakers

From Gay & Lesbian Leadership SmartBrief:

The Advocate (1/13/09) and The Bilerico Project (12/29/08) each offers a take on 2008's top LGBT stories.  The Advocate uses a month-by-month approach, while Bilerico ranks its top 10 stories, with California gaining marriage rights as 2008's biggest headline.