feminist blogs

On Monday it was my great fortune to have a coffee date with a new friend, one Ms. Jennifer Jane, a.k.a. @peeppeep, found via the social media wonder that is Twitter. (My profile: here.)

Allow me to provide you with a sampling of her posts on Twitter that quickly established her awesomeness, and made it clear to me we were actually going to have to meet in person. (Besides her reply to my message, “Beck’s ‘Lost Cause’ makes me feel better about being one,” with “that song got me through my last breakup. best played while lying in bed for the third day in a row.” So true, so true.)

• bought jelly shoes today. can’t wait until my sweaty feet make those farty noises. i am a sex bomb.
• @ the mall. Person in next dressing room either having sex or an asthma attack. Kind of worried.
• running only on caffeine and a bite of chocolate bunny. ears, natch.
• If you are one of my customers and i am rude to you today, i am sorry. It’s just that i hate you.
• is it okay to tell someone that you’ll have sex with them if they promise not to talk before during or after?
• my last customer was an old lady who totally farted while standing in my line.

See? Awesome.

So we arranged to meet on Monday, and predictably I was running late because I couldn’t find my ass with both hands, much less stuff like keys, driver’s license, and sunglasses. Once I finally found the first two, I gave up on the third and headed out the door. Of course it was incredibly bright outside, all the more so to me because I had just pulled a writing all nighter. (This post. Worth the effort, but still, oof.)

If you’re not in the habit of pulling writing all-nighters and then walking out into the blazing light of day, let me assure you it is an uncomfortable, squinty experience. Then, once in the car, I scrounged around to see if my husband had any abandoned sunglasses laying about. His head is unnaturally large, so whenever I do swipe his shades (like when I steal his socks; he has boats for feet), they tend to fall off me, but they’re better than nothing when I am in need. Alas, I found nothing.

What I did find, however, was one pair of 3D glasses from when my husband had taken the girls to Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds (in Disney Digital 3D! says the promo). At which time, blissfully, I had been writing, exempt from both the added expense (the tickets were $15 each!) and the emotional overwhelm (see this photo for some indication of how I felt about getting dragged to a Jonas Brothers concert during our last State Fair). See why I love my husband?

And while thinking persons might question the wisdom of wearing 3D glasses for driving, after an all-nighter in particular, I have to say they did the job just fine, tamping down the impossible glare, and enabling me to make it only ten minutes late to my coffee date.

And of course, I made a dashing first impression:

…And we went on to have one of the most pleasing conversations I have had with another human being in quite some time, the actual substance of which would be impossible to recreate here, but suffice it to say, we have enough bizarre stuff in common, and enough about our respective life experiences that is radically different, that we totally bonded, talking nonstop until I had to finally dash off to fetch the youngest girlchild from school. (Also, she has teenagers. All our local friends who finally decided to breed did it late enough in the game that my own teen is always the oldest kid in the crowd, when we have family-friendly parties. The idea of getting our respective offspring to hang out too is pretty fab.)

I go through a lot of angst over friendships, because so many of the people I love (outside the network of friends I pretty much married into) are largely out of state. When I meet people locally, so many of them have no context for the whacked out kind of life I’ve lived (geographically, politically, whatever). When I make connections online with people whom I might, ostensibly, meet face-to-face at some point, it’s much the same, with a few brilliant exceptions.

For example, there has been the wonderful Joriel, whom I first found via the Blogger listings for Richmond (before we both moved to Wordpress). Even without having a (by my standards) particularly insane personal history, she somehow understood me (because she is a real, honest-to-God serious writer, and that’s an altogether unique breed). But then she and her equally wonderful honey moved away, to the very place where so many of the people I already love and miss terribly live: Seattle.

And there is the equally brilliant Jane, with whom I have almost as much radically in common as I have radically not in common, which makes our interactions edifying, stimulating and fun (particularly given her wicked sense of humor). (Also, she is a kick-ass photographer. Go buy some of her Etsy stuff, seriously.) And while she is, at least, here in Virginia, she’s still far enough away that we have not yet been able to make good on our threats to go hog wild someday at Ikea¹. (Don’t ask me why this possibility appeals to me. It just does.)

But Jennifer? Not only gets me (a tall order for any human being, seriously), but she lives right here! Less than a ten-minute-drive away! And it makes my heart go pitter-patter, and feel significantly less angstful about my place in the universe.

Richmond just got a lot better.

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¹There has also been a proposal that Jane and I might someday see Molly Hatchet together, but when the celestial bodies might properly align to make such a thing come to pass, I couldn’t possibly guess.

My then-six year old, adorably gap-toothed daughter with her pal Neziah (whose little sister is at left), World March of Women, Washington D.C., October 15, 2000.

For the last several days I’ve been struggling with how to approach certain issues in the present election season, finding myself even more reluctant than usual. Why? Because the feminist blogosphere is experiencing an incredible rift. My last serious post on the subject was almost two weeks ago; titling it Heat vs. Light, I was struggling to get at my primary (no pun intended!) concerns as a feminist.

And among those concerns is: Once the Democratic Party’s nomination is a sure thing for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, will we be able to speak with a modicum of civility toward each other? Will we be trust each other, and ready to engage in collaborative activism on issues of crucial importance to women and children? And, most importantly (at least in the short term), will we be able to defeat John McCain?

When this primary season is over, the feminists and progressives I’ll be first to trust will be, among Obama supporters: those who explicitly, and without qualification, opposed this season’s sexist bias against Clinton, and, among Clinton supporters: those who just as adamantly protested racist bias against Obama. (Not clear on the horrific amount of bias directed at both candidates? These examples were collected from only one source, and only during the month of February, but are quite illustrative.)

I cannot separate¹ my profound objections to any system of bigotry; they are interdependent, and serve to keep progressives needlessly divided against one another, when we could be working - as individuals, communities, and in coalitions - against common foes. (A necessity which, of course, must extend, both now and in the future, well beyond this election season, as Aurora Levins Morales rightly reminds us.)

My feminism is, and since 1991, has been, rooted in Bernice Johnson Reagon’s Coalition Politics: Turning the Century (from her speech delivered in 1981). This feminism comprises the root system of my political consciousness. Consequently, where racist narratives have wormed their way into (allegedly) feminist discourse concerning the elections, I’m as angered on behalf of Barack Obama, to whom (along with many of his supporters) that racism is directed, as I am outraged on behalf of feminism itself.

Like many other feminists, I have chosen to support Obama’s candidacy; this choice is congruent with (not despite) my feminism; I’ll elaborate on this theme further in the coming weeks.

For now, though, I want to take a moment to address one (apparently quite earnest) concern raised by supporters of Hillary Clinton:

All I know is if Hillary Clinton cannot win the presidency, then face it ladies, there will NEVER BE A WOMAN PRESIDENT!! [link]

Really? Never?

As the thirty-seven year old mother of two incredible daughters, I’m generationally sandwiched between younger and older women voters, who lean toward Obama and Clinton respectively.

That we haven’t had a female President yet is a problem; of course I get that. (This is all the more disturbing, when the U.S. ranks 68th in the world for its level of female representation within national legislative bodies.)

I’m old enough that I do not, for one second, take for granted the brave work of second-wave (and earlier) feminists, nor the rights I enjoy because of those labors. And I’m young enough that the first election I voted in was the so-called Year of the Woman, in which a “whopping” total of four women were elected to the U.S. Senate in one season. (As I lived in Seattle at the time, it was also my privilege to vote for the now-Senior Senator Patty Murray, who ran on a very down-to-earth “mom in tennis shoes” platform.)

I had watched, the year before, the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, wherein Anita Hill was crudely slandered before a committee of exclusively white men. And I felt, then, a deep rage building: not only about Hill’s treatment (read her 2007 Op-Ed for the New York Times looking back on the experience), but also about the gross underrepresentation of women and people of color among our elected officials.

Now a total of fourteen women are serving in the Senate: a marked improvement, in terms of gender balance, from when I was first watching those rage-inducing Clarence Thomas hearings. Is fourteen a sufficient number? Obviously not. (Then again, for an increasing number of feminist voters, there is no vagina litmus test. We vote on issues.)

But I see no reason to believe this momentum won’t continue to build (which is not to say we won’t have setbacks, or that sexist bias won’t continue to be an impeding factor - far from it). I’m fairly sure a woman President will happen in my lifetime (Janet Napolitano, maybe?), and I’m certain it will happen in my daughters’ lifetime.

Just try selling the line that, if Hillary Clinton does not win in 2008, that we will never have a woman president, to my teenager, who was chanting this (at her own initiation, mind you!) at the age of six:

…or to my daughter Annalisa, who was an infant when she met then-President of NOW, Patricia Ireland. (For that matter, I was two days shy of Annalisa’s due date when I was a speaker at Virginia’s Pro-Choice Lobby day in 2000, at which time I met the current President of NOW, Kim Gandy. Alas, I’m unable to dig up those pictures tonight.)

Annalisa meets Patricia Ireland, May 6, 2000, Mid-Atlantic Feminist Conference.

And see, too, both my girls at this recent Democratic rally, where, with my sincerest blessing, the infant shown above (now eight years old) held signs for Hillary, and my now-thirteen year old expressed her support for Obama (seeing no contradiction between this and her earlier “Girls Can Do Anything” chant - because, of course, there was no contradiction).

For these girls, feminism is alive and well (Jessica Valenti, if you’re reading this, please know my teenager passed her copy of Full Frontal Feminism around her Middle School until it was dogeared) - still very relevant. But their notions about what is possible for them, relative to possibilities open to me and to generations of women before us - are far more expansive.

So, do I want to see a woman President? You’re damned right I do. But after a long, painstaking study of each candidate’s positions on a range of foreign and domestic policy issues, I have decided to support Barack Obama. Should Obama fail to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination, Hillary Clinton will have my full support, because she is, by far, a better candidate than John McCain, and I will not sit idly by and allow another right-wing administration to suck even more of the life from our very democracy, if I can help it.

Tennessee Guerilla Women, back in June of 2007, put it best, in writing about Hillary Clinton (though they would later go on to endorse her, and are presently waging what can only be described as an all-out war on the Obama campaign, rife with distortions):

We want a woman to be president, but not a rightwing woman and not a centrist woman. What we want is a progressive president!

And that’s what it comes down to, for me: Hillary Clinton’s habit of erring, when in doubt (which, I am troubled to note, is quite often) with conservatives on issues of critical importance to our country (not least of all, the war in Iraq). And that’s why, though it may seem counterintuitive, many people are presently regarding Obama as not only an acceptable choice, but as the better choice for feminists.

But to return to what had been troubling me so deeply at the start of this post - about the divisions between us.

There is no question but that some of us will carry scars from our internecine skirmishes. I’ve been so bothered about this issue recently, I couldn’t bring myself to express it here; I had to go to a friend’s blog, and let it pour out of me in comments. (That friend being, incidentally, a Clinton supporter, who has been exceptionally fair minded about the present debates among us.)

But there are also real signs of hope (beyond the anecdotal evidence of my own daughters). For instance, in this editorial at the Washington Post, co-authored by two feminists: one of whom backs Obama, while the other backs Clinton. And in at least one writer’s suggestion that when all this electoral infighting is done with, Democrats just might be a stronger collective force for it.

To my sister feminists supporting Hillary Clinton, I promise that, should she secure the nomination, I will vote for her in the general election (and will passionately encourage everyone I know to do the same), even while I am actively (and unapologetically) supporting Obama’s candidacy right now. I also promise you that neither candidate will ever get a “free pass” from me; now and in the future, I will hold them accountable and be forthright in my criticisms as appropriate. Finally, I promise this: That I won’t let my daughters lose sight of the tremendous efforts of women who paved the way for us, that has made possible their completely realistic belief that they will see a woman President in their lifetime - if not in Hillary Clinton, then in another candidate, not far down the path from where we stand today.

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h/t Faux Real and Meta Water Shed for some of these links.

¹ This is not to say there aren’t distinctions among them, only that they are mutually reinforcing in a profoundly poisonous way.

I got up ridiculously early this morning (a little after 3:30 AM), having caught up what felt like weeks of missed sleep, after the mixed blessing of having been knocked out so hard by Benadryl that I’d fallen asleep at the dinner table (in a restaurant, no less), following which we’d returned home, and I’d zonked out again almost immediately after noting said embarrassing fact. I’ve done three loads of dishes, one of which was required merely so that I could gain access to the espresso machine (no, I will not soon be nominated for any homemaker of the year award), and I’ve been catching up on a backlog of podcasts for The Writer’s Almanac.

Which was how I came to hear this wonderful poem, called Sestina for the Working Mother, which I hope my fellow mommybloggers (both those who’ve embraced that moniker and those who’ve distanced themselves from it, for understandable reasons, not least of which is the fact that it’s the descriptive label most often invoked by others when a decision has been made in advance that the ‘mommyblogger’ in question is not to be taken seriously) will enjoy; the poem “works” whether one falls under the “Stay at Home,” “Working,” or hybrid designations of the Mother identity.

This link should, in theory, should open the RealPlayer audio file, though it’s being persnickety for me, of course, now that I want to share it with you. At least you should be able to read it, either here (on a page transcribing a whole week’s worth of broadcasts) or, better yet, at McSweeney’s (where you won’t have to hunt for it among several other poems). It begins thusly:

No time for a sestina for the working mother.
Who has too much to do, from first thing in the morning
When she has to get herself dressed and the children
Too, when they tumble in the pillow pile rather than listening
To her exhortations about brushing teeth, making ready for the day;
They clamor with goodbyes and “up” hugs when she struggles out the door…

[click here to read poem in its entirety]

In the event this was you earlier tonight:

Accessing, specifically, 12 pages primarily in the Matriarchs and The Family Cactus categories, before I took my blog offline for awhile, please, for both our sakes, go away*. If I wanted to be in communication with you, I would be in communication with you. I’ve worked hard to make sure you can stay in touch with your granddaughters (and thankfully my husband is willing to serve as proxy in this matter), and I’m happy to send gifts at all the right holiday occasions (have you noticed I’m much better about that since we stopped speaking?), but there is a reason I haven’t been in touch since early in 2006 - it’s because I don’t want to talk to you.

I feel much better about, and emotionally generous toward our involuntarily shared history, when we’re not in touch. I like that. It helps me to remember the good stories. It helps me remember that I love you.

If you have some instinct to re-state, icily and indignantly, that you just don’t get it - what happened? why? - I’ve been explaining the what and the why for decades, and only clued into the fact that you would never hear me, much less change, a relatively short time ago.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly yet expecting different results, then consider this my declaration of significantly improved mental health.

Now it’s possible that wasn’t actually you tonight (in which case, apologies for the mysterious and now obstreperous behavior, everyone else), just as it’s possible it wasn’t my ex the other day, accessing 22 pages mostly in the Exes category from the ISP of the specific place I know she frequents (which may explain the other recent outage to others of you out there).

I know this is the internet, and I’m the one who put all of this out there. I get that.

But if you want to show me that you care about me at all (I am not, of course, counting on this), please respect my privacy anyway. Do me that favor, if you do nothing else for me.

You have two granddaughters, and yes, you usually only get to see them once a year or whenever a conference takes you to the mainland, but there were plenty of years of my childhood when I only saw you once a year, because that was how you wanted it.

You didn’t want me; you made that incredibly clear. I was the inconvenience standing between you and any number of adventures that were more exciting than childrearing. And yeah, there were fringe benefits for me (like riding out Hurricane David with you in a St. Thomas warehouse, what a vacation visit with my mother that was!).

But I don’t want anything like that kind of life for my daughters. Relative to my having attended in the range of eight schools between kindergarten and the second grade alone, my eight year old daughter still lives in the house where she was conceived. Ours is a run-down house, and a rental to boot, but I’m damned proud of the fact that I have now lived in one place for ten years - four years having been my previous record. (One reason why, though I only lived there from 1984-1988, after my dad and stepmom kicked me out and you had to take me back - I do, in my heart, regard Hawaiʻi as one of the places I can somewhat authentically think of as “home,” despite the acute postcolonial guilt I felt, even at thirteen, though you, of course, never did).

And really, it’s okay. Hell, I’m the one who gave you this book, a sympathetic memoir about a woman who’d left her children. Maybe in your perusals of this blog, before I turned the lights out earlier tonight, you got to this part:

A normal person would be able to move (construct a new bridge, repair the old one, navigate some other path across), but I have never been like that, nor has my mother been, or she would not have surrendered her custody of me, with no observed reluctance, on so many occasions when I was young - seeking new locales, lovers, and “lifestyles” as she saw fit.

I don’t begrudge her that, any more than I begrudge Maria Housden, author of Unraveled, who, after the death of one of her four children, stunned everyone she knew by seeking a divorce, granting full custody of her surviving kids to her ex-husband. She then struck out on her own, initially, for an artist’s colony, of all apparently self-indulgent sites. Her story placed in sharp relief the double-standards by which women are viewed as parents, relative to how fathers are judged. No one questions that men need identities beyond marriage and parenting. Housden got hers; so, too, did my mother.

My God, do you see how far I bend over backwards to find honorable, even feminist analogies via which to generously reconstruct my own childhood experience? Did Maria Housden share with her kids the joys of fishbowling when they were quite young? And then tell, at each Thanksgiving, the hilarious story about her young daughter being so stoned that she turned to the hippie next to her in the cramped car, and, after saying “I’m going to eat you up,” bit into the guy’s kneecap? I’m guessing not.

What’s even more curious? How you’d give up custody of me, more often than not, while simultaneously pursuing an option that would have given you custody of Lori Jo, your brother Billie’s daughter. Because he and his wife were alcoholics, and you were so much better than that. During one of my visits, you even showed me a draft of a children’s book, Evra, which in some fashion concerned Lori Jo. (Interesting how you always had a searingly sharp sense of irony, except when it was your behavior that was ironic; then you were just being rational and benevolent!)

You had a special kind of devotion to children’s issues, it’s true. But I was peculiarly excluded from this category, “children.” You made this even more clear when you took a nude picture of me (seated in the lap of one of your lovers from the period immediately following your leaving my father), and an artist’s reproduction made from that, and hung it from every one of the countless houses you lived in, while also sending copies to everyone we knew, and frequently discussing how, in the picture, I looked so sultry, beyond my years, etc. (Incidentally? Before his death, Billie told me about how he always thought that was inappropriate).

I’m not trying to get my childhood back. It’s gone, and that’s fine. But I’m not going to deprive my daughters of the intrinsic value of this time in their lives. Which is what would happen, to some degree, if you and I were in touch, because the effort is always uniquely draining.

Listen, I do care about you. And I’m really not obsessing on all of this stuff constantly. But you have no clue! And I doubt you can help it. You are, after all, your mother’s daughter (though God knows, you improved on that template).

And yes, I am yours. But I’m the one who did break the pattern of us. I’m the one who did not abandon her children at any number of points on the map whenever whimsy (in your case) or drunkenness (in your mothers) happened to strike.

The bottom line - that it’s my daughters who deserve and require my attention, not you - hasn’t changed from when (this most recent round in) our estrangement began. (And if they decide to become mothers, I hope they’ll do their part to improve on the generational template. No doubt, by the time they are grown, I will have given them plenty of things to legitimately complain about.)

You always joked how it was no accident, your moving all the way to Hawaiʻi, while your mother remained in Virginia. You don’t suppose it’s merely because airfare is expensive (although of course, there’s that too) that I haven’t been back to Hawaiʻi since 1993, and that I ultimately came back to Virginia, do you?

There may be a time when I’m ready to talk to you again. If you push it, it may never happen. And there is nothing I want less than I want that. (Re-read last sentence as needed. Now do you get it?)

I love you. Now please leave me alone.

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* Or if you must read here, for the love of God, have the decency to use a feed reader.

I’ve been working on a huge piece on my (specifically feminist) support for Barack Obama’s candidacy (first conceived as “Part II” of this), but the rascally ol’ narrative isn’t taking the expected form of a polemic. (Which will relieve some of you, and annoy the rest).

At this point, I’ve slept some five hours out of the last 48 - and in a little more than an hour, it will be time to get the girls ready for school. (Their dad, meantime, has carried about 95% of the parenting weight over this weekend - God bless him.) I could either post something for which I haven’t written a particularly coherent ending (the bulk of it is finished though, weighing in at 2,500+ words), much less finished editing, or I can post a drive-by excerpt, nap for a few minutes, attend to Mama Duties, crash while the girls are in school (thankfully I have nothing else scheduled today), and hopefully, finish this up tonight.

Meantime, you can view recent posts in the political category, for some “credibly wonkish” encapsulations that, taken collectively, form some of the basis for my stance.

Finally, please note: this isn’t just a mere excerpt - it’s a mere draft of an excerpt! I don’t often send my words out naked into the universe like this. But if I don’t, no one may believe the essay exists. Which it does, I swear!

I am not a policy wonk.

I am, however, a feminist and a mother, whose personal and political lives have been intensely commingled. Where laws exist that address the welfare of women and children in poverty, I have had a vested interest. So too with legislation concerning lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, women’s access to complete reproductive health care, and the needs of the disabled…

[And] while I can, at times, write credibly wonkish vignettes, this piece is nothing like that; it’s more in the vein of creative nonfiction, where the raw narrative of my life happens to intersect with that of the Polis. Those short on time or attention span may feel free to skip the backstory; I’m just nerdy enough to have wrapped this thing up with a [section to be hyperlinked once completed] summary - in bullet points, no less.

Yep, you read that right: this wily bastard of an essay is projected to end in bullet points*. Sheesh!

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* Unless I change my mind.

• Sorry, @VioletheVerbose, I won’t lie. Younger children ARE disease vectors, but in time, issues emerge that make one nostalgic for snotnoses #
• @QueenofSpain HU - FUCKIN - RAH! #
• Giant screaming happy dance w/ teenager on news of Obama win in Virginia. Way to rock the muthafuckin vote, oh benevolent state of my birth! #
• I’d turned off news earlier while updating iPod… So, yes, Virginia (as it were!) - I learned of Obama win via Twitter (thx2 @QueenofSpain) #
• @ajfortin - Happy to oblige. Now do your part for Hawaii and we’ll have a virtual party in the ether betwixt us after Obama wins nomination! #
• @acomputerpro - Never underestimate the twooshing powers of a woman high on election season and caffeine. This too shall pass, I promise! #
• Never underestimate the racebaiting powers of some Clinton allies: http://tinyurl.com/2ev2vb (With friends like these, HRC needs no enemies) #
• Napped after the news of Maryland, woke up, had to pinch myself. Did Obama really just sweep VA/ MD/ DC? Why yes he did! Freakin’ brilliant. #
• @CurtMonash - Yeah, there’s no excuse for that misogyny. Just bc I support Obama doesn’t mean I think HRC’s not brilliant & capable - she is #
• @girlinblack - You’ve quite a nerdy quandary there - hilarious! Oddly, I also tweeted today on library karma matters: http://snurl.com/1zmck #
• @QueenofSpain - Fuck the hatas. I commented there for first time tonight - thought your post was good, but can see how it’d be misconstrued. #
• RVABlogs.com has option to pick 3 “most hated” blogs to NOT show up in feed (when you’re logged in); I SO wish feministblogs.org had that… #
• When I hear about the WGA people being back on the job (yay!), my first thought is cynical: “Now they’ll all come down with writer’s block.” #
• @valeriedoucette - No suprise the chefs of Veganomigon thanked whoever dealt w/ Post Punk Kitchen, deleting threads on honey & dating omnis! #
• @valeriedoucette - (BTW, that was Tweeted as a vegetarian, maybe eventually going vegan, who does not plan to divorce my omnivorous husband) #
• I’m delighted to note that some peeps I know (IRL friends here in Richmond and elsewhere) are migrating from MySpace to Facebook. Thank God. #
• @phaedral - I would most likely never be on MySpace but lots of our friends are in bands and such, and MySpace is geared to that. Sucky tho. #
• Call me crazy, but I’m more interested in watching news on the war, the CIA and torture policy, hell even ELECTIONS than I am in baseball… #
• @VioletheVerbose - Oh shit, Valentines Day. I totally forgot. Damn elections! Must get some cards tonight (I’m not ambitious enough to make) #
• Curious as to what @gapingvoid could possibly be referring to here: http://twitter.com/gapingvoid/statuses/708761702. Spill those beans, plz #
• Nothing more reassuring than hearing crashing sound from kitchen, followed by eight year old daughter hollering, “It’s okay, nothing broke!” #
• @phaedral - Dunno that adding ME is going to enhance your MySpace coolness (to whatever extent there is such a thing), but knock yerself out #
• @phaedral - Also, there’s a greasemonkey script for Firefox that enables one to turn off most “noise” from MySpace pages - it’s quite handy! #
• It shouldn’t surprise me, but getting hit on via MySpace bc my profile says “bi” irritates the shit out of me. Do they not also see MARRIED? #
• @phaedral - Actually that look’s somewhere between apathetic & grumpy. I didn’t want to smile (& I don’t list “hooking up” under “here for”) #
• @bip0larbear - That’s hilarious. The Coop! I got followed by him after posting some snarkage about MSNBC (tho I’m still not sure that’s why) #
• @QueenofSpain - At risk of becoming a certifiable Erin Kotecki Vest minion, I dugg ya. (Which sounds kinda wrong. But you know what I mean.) #

• Mad Science Center birthday party was a mad, raging success. Never again will I set foot in a Chuck E. Cheese or similar establishment. Yay! #
• Crashed early, & didn’t answer phone when a call came in which, based on area code, was either my mother, or a long-lost high school friend. #
• ( & Now, the lack of voicemail or clues from a reverse-directory search is going to drive me up a goddamn wall until I find out. Seriously.) #
• So zonked last might I crashed in my clothes. In profound need of caffeine (coffee percolating as I tweet). Sweet husband let me sleep in. #
• “It’s my friend!” says the huz, pointing to a cartoon penguin. Turns out he means Brian Posehn (on Surf’s Up) whom he’s friended on MySpace. #
• It’s some measure of my housekeeping skillz that I just pried a cup off table, stuck there courtesy of an adhesive known as “dried ketchup.” #
• I can’t figure out how to set up Twitter notifications for web-only to save my life. Good thing I have unlimited text messaging on our plan. #
• Walking dog in almost criminally gorgeous weather. Hopefully this won’t lead to unlikely, somewhat cheesy poems about Democratic Primaries. #
• @phaedral - It’s hardly a source of lighthearted cheer, but there is a new haiku @beanqueen: http://twitter.com/beanqueen/statuses/694136212 #
• My “Obama Mama” shirt still hasn’t arrived in mail, so I’m wearing my “NAACP National Voter Fund” shirt (says “Vote 2000″ on back) instead. #
• (This is, of course, to recall the most FUBAR election ever, my volunteering for which was apparently in vain. Obama AND Clinton in town…) #
• Shamelessly eavesdropped on elderly lady & young college-age woman in parking lot who were talking excitedly about voting for Obama Tuesday! #
• Teenager informs me that she’s been getting into fiery political debates with Jerry Kilgore’s son, with whom she has science class. Awesome! #
• Unsurprising number of unclaimed Clinton signs at Democratic event. Got Annalisa one of her buttons though… she’s our one Clinton holdout. # Edited from automatically posted Twitter feed to add: See the pics of my awesome daughters with their respective Obama & Clinton schwag here.
• [utterz] http://tinyurl.com/3bzkcb: Massive Obama rally in Richmond Virginia! #
• Kind of feel like throwing up at having posted my cell number due to a technical glitch w/ Utterz. Nothing I can do about it until I’m home. #

Today we went to a rally held near VCU, outside a fundraising event for the Democratic Party of Virginia. The event itself was attended by both Senators Clinton and Obama, but outside that event, the rally quickly turned into a massive rally, attended by both Clinton and Obama supporters (though there were approximately twice as many Obama supporters present - no surprise considering Obama’s huge lead in Virginia). Generally, it was a friendly affair, but the respective candidates’ supporters were not shy in expressing their enthusiasm, and there was a bit of jockeying that went on, with Obama fans working to upstage Clinton’s, and vice-versa. (See for example woman with green “Go Hillary” sign in front of the giant multi-letter Obama sign assembly below.)

Exceptions to the “generally friendly” category included one woman holding a Clinton sign, who repeatedly chanted Fuck Obama, and some moron with a Bros before Hos shirt. Thankfully my husband was the one who witnessed both the Fuck Obama chanter and the Bros Before Hos shirt wearer, or I would likely have gotten in both of their faces in a pretty aggressive way.

My sign, for the record, read Feminist for Obama, which got a lot of cheers from numerous women, which was pretty awesome. I don’t have a still of me with the sign (several other people took pics of me though - should you be one such random individual, email me!), but I did snap this pic of another woman with the same signage:

Now, I should specify here that within our family, we all think Clinton is an excellent candidate, but three out of four of us lean more toward Obama for the Democratic Party’s nomination. (Which is to say that if Clinton wins, she will be supported by us in the general election with every bit as much enthusiasm as most of us now feel with regard to Obama’s quest for the nomination.) The lone Clinton holdout is my daughter Annalisa (who turned eight today - Happy Birthday sweetheart!), and it was important to all of us that she get her Clinton buttons and signs just as we were decked out in our pro-Obama gear. Here are Mariarosa and Annalisa, then, representing for their respective candidates:

(Though toward the end of the event, Annalisa was less than enthused, complaining that her feet hurt… we went home a few minutes after this was taken:)

One more anecdote (if you were looking for deep analysis, I’m going to try to have something more in that vein posted before Virginia’s primaries this coming Tuesday): There was a point when I was talking with two other women who were holding Obama signs, and they were looking curiously at Annalisa’s and my signs - so I explained what was up: that Annalisa wanted Clinton to win, and I wanted to support her in expressing her ideas even when - or especially when - they were different from my own. I had taken her aside earlier that day, when she’d felt some hesitation about carrying a Clinton sign in an area of the rally that was 95% pro-Obama. I’d told her how proud of her I was, that it was important to be willing to stand by your beliefs even when others don’t share those ideas - the important thing was that we listened to and were respectful of each other. The women I relayed this to thought that was fantastic, and each of them personally assured Annalisa that she should hold her sign proudly (while also wishing her a very happy birthday). And then there was some discussion about how maybe she could be President one day, which got a big smile from my girl.

I’m glad I live in a world now where the two chief candidates for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination are both very viable and brilliant, and represent a major paradigm shift away from white male supremacy. I’m glad my daughter knows it’s possible that she, too, can aspire to that office someday - as glad as I am that her best friend Mariko (who, like Obama, has a white mother and a black father), with whom we attended the event (pics forthcoming), can know this in her heart, too, without ambivalence or qualification.

Yes We Can. It means something, people.

Given the time sensitivity of this matter (if you are moved to respond, please do so before tomorrow morning!), I won’t elaborate much about this bill, except to pass along the alert I received from Equality Virginia, and share my own email to my Senator Walter Stosch (R). More info here; go here to find out who your state Senator is.

From Equality Virginia:

…The measure, patroned by Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple (D-Arlington) passed an important vote today, but on a very strict party-line vote when many Republicans voted for the bill last year.

Your Senator is listed below, and is one of the Republicans who voted for similar legislation before. Please call your Senator at 1-800-889-9745, or email them, before Wednesday morning to remind them that they voted for identical language in 2007 and to please support it again this year.

Read more about this measure.

Don’t know your Senator? http://conview.state.va.us/whosmy.nsf/main?openform

Targeted Senators

Sen. Harry Blevins district14@sov.state.va.us
Sen. Ryan McDougle district04@sov.state.va.us
Sen. Thomas Norment district03@sov.state.va.us
Sen. Mark Obenshain mark@markobenshain.com
Sen. Fred Quayle district13@sov.state.va.us
Sen. Frank Ruff ruff@kerrlake.com
Sen. Ken Stolle vasenate08@kenstolle.com
Sen. Walter Stosch district12@sov.state.va.us
Sen. Frank Wagner fwagner21@aol.com
Sen. William Wampler district40@sov.state.va.us
Sen. John Watkins jnwatkins@aol.com

Here was my (hastily composed) letter to Senator Stosch:

Dear Senator Stosch,

As a supporter of equal healthcare rights, as well as the right of localities to expand vital services available to their constituents, I am writing to encourage you to show the same integrity you showed last year in supporting similar legislation.

At the present time, I am fortunate in that my children and I have access to healthcare through my husband’s insurance, available through his employer. But there was a time when, while we were in a committed, life-long partnership, it was not yet feasible for us to get married; consequently, neither I nor my eldest daughter could be covered on his policy. Had we been in a situation where we could have accessed benefits for our entire family through his employment, it would have been enormously helpful (and would only have strengthened our family, and further encouraged our movement in the direction of legal marriage).

It saddens me, deeply, that our friends and loved ones who either cannot yet legally marry because they are gay or lesbian, or who are not yet at a place in their lives where entering into legal marriage is feasible for them, are more vulnerable than are we to healthcare crises because of the manner in which appropriate, lifesaving, and family-friendly benefits are inaccessible to them. Of course, the measure under consideration at this time will not solve all these problems (as it would only benefit specific types of employees in individual localities), but it would be one positive, measurable step in the direction of what would be, I believe, the greater good for all Virginians. (Equality Virginia has more information on why this is a just and helpful measure.)

Thank you for your consideration, and please feel free to share my remarks with others if this would be helpful.

Warmest regards,

Victoria Marinelli

The only remotely clear shot acquired…, originally uploaded by vmarinelli.

Photo from last night’s game of ‘wrestle w/ teenager on couch while we each try to take embarrassing pictures of the other with our respective cell phones.’ By the end of this game, she looked like a raccoon on account of blurred eyeliner (which in turn was on account of both of us laughing so hard we were in tears).

God I love this kid.