yay! i can blog again! blogger has been down since i returned home and i haven't been able to say anything else about the trip, or post my many pictures.

so, without further a, well, um, hold that thought, new post coming asap

so i'm sitting at my hotel on a balcony in san diego. it's so wonderful being here. they have wireless internet throughout the hotel, and even by the pool, so i can do this while here and catch you guys up on how the trip is so far.

brief update: jessie and i left san francisco thursday morning. we found ourselves in a PT Cruiser, a fabulous car i never knew anything about but of which i now love. jessie hates it; he thinks it makes us look too gay and pretentious and silly, plus it's got this milk-white color that makes it look like a milk truck. but whatever, i love it. (i'll post photos of it and throughout the trip when i return)

so we made it to my sister's on thursday evening and had a great dinner at outback steakhouse with her and my brother and my niece. fun yummy steak food. then they made me watch some zombie movie-- which was kinda clever in a funny way-- but still, um, i don't like zombie movies. it always seems so stupid that there's just these lifeless eating machines walking really slowly around. but whatever.

so then yesterday, friday, we went from burbank to san diego-- a trip that took longer than sf-burbank even though its shorter distance because of terrible l.a. traffic. reminds us all why we don't want cars or to live in l.a. ever. we ate a red lobster for dinner and it was wonderful. i was also stuffed forever after that. so full. it was also my first ever visit to the wonderfulness that is red lobster. my mom never has liked fish, so we never got to go there growing up. and i'd just never been since then. so jessie took me to his favorite restaurant of all time and he had the 'ultimate feast' of pleasure and i had some great food too. fun.

i love our hotel. our room's a little small, but it's a great little nook on the corner of the hotel with our own little patio section right outside the room. plus just down the walk next to the lobby is a terrific outdoor balcony-- where i am now-- and a beautiful, spacious music and living room. and the continental breakfast this morning was simply delightful. delightful! anyway, i made my way around the island of coronado today and shopped a little. i love this cute little island town. the beach is only a block away, but i don't really feel too much like heading over there. i'm enjoying just being at the hotel too much right now for that. it's a great locale.

also, i bought an ipod yesterday! it's so much fun. we went to target and they had them on sale. and jessie helped me set it up last night and i've already got it loaded with musica. so much fun and i love this weekend! more to be written shortly...

new alice newsletter is up. i worked really hard to get this done before i left for my trip to san diego this weekend. i had some troubles but it came out pretty great i think. the sfyd newsletter is also done and i'll post it as soon as it's public.

new column:

"The Definition of GOTV: Talking the Talk and Walking the Precinct"

My fellow Graduates:

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives! I am honored to be here today, with you, to speak on the opportunities that await us after our years of schooling, study, and backbreaking legwork.

As we move into the future (And the future is ours for the making!). Yes, as we move into the future, there will be risks; there will be successes; there will be heartbreaks. But we will persevere! For we have persevered through these years already. And they have been at times quite difficult. Losses, triumphs, more losses, hopes, and dreams. But we have survived and we will continue to do so.

One of the most important pieces of knowledge that we have gained from our years of education is the wisdom of GOTV. Getting Out The Vote. Yes, GOTV is one of our core principles we know to utilize when it's crunch time.

Webster's Dictionary defines GOTV as… well, actually, Webster's Dictionary doesn't have it listed. But we know, yes, we activists, schooled in the years of training that we have done, know what GOTV means. GOTV means everything to us and our principles. GOTV means the difference between a future of hope and possibilities, or a future of difficult roads ahead. Either way, we know GOTV is the principle that will shape our work.

So as part of that core principle of GOTV, we 'Talk the Talk.' We talk that talk by speaking to our friends, and our neighbors, and our fellow graduates, and our friends of friends. We make sure that they are registered to vote. We make sure that they know where the candidates stand. We make sure they know who will be supportive of us and who will be in opposition to our lives. We make sure we get them to talk that talk as well. We show up at table opportunities and talk the talk in our community. We phone bank throughout every evening. We stand on street-corners and shout it to the rooftops. We do so much talking that we lose our voice.

And furthermore, we also 'Walk the Walk.' We continue our GOTV by taking our talk to the streets. We carry our talk from door to door, from grocery store to coffee shop, from diner to community event. We cover every precinct in town and then we cover them again. We talk and we walk and we get the vote out.

Yes, we have learned a great deal over the years. And we have gained so much. This time is ours and the future is what we make of it! Will you Get Out The Vote with me? Join me as we not only Talk the Talk, but also Walk the Precinct. Join me in doing what we know what best to do. Join me for our future. Thank you.

Now get out there and GOTV!

this is a pretty hard-to-read article about the difficulties of dealing with your biggest secrets in public life. i feel for the guy immensely, the former governor of new jersey, and i just may pick up his book sometime. it really is hard to be openly gay for many, many people; most people in the world. it was hard for me until i came to terms. and frankly, there are still many, many issues with being gay in this society that aren't the most pleasant or happy in the world. there are limitations in life and they suck. there are limitations in my own life and they suck, suck, suck. it's not just 'will and grace' everyday. and even 'will and grace' pretty much sucks anyway too.

but after saying all the above, i wouldn't be someone else for the world. and i've found true happiness being myself, finding myself, and living my life the way i believe and the way i feel. and i'll make the world catch up with me and with having openly gay people throughout the world. and as some of the world catches up slowly, it's beautiful everytime. and when the full world catches up, it will be a terrific beautiful day.

so last friday night i happened upon another event with jason scott lee who, as mentioned before is kinda my one celebrity that i go ga-ga over. it's rather hard to explain, and i sorta tried last time to explain, so i won't do it again. but look here. a friend insisted on taking my picture with him, which i didn't want to do because i was nervous and didn't want to seem like a crazy fan, but i'm so glad i did because i got to have his arm around me! ha, ok, i'm silly now. but still, it was pretty cool:

i'm really getting excited about my trip with jessie. i'm trying to get everything in my life done before i leave town so i don't need to worry about work or volunteer or other things while i'm away. it's going to be a real get-away. and i'm very excited about that concept. should be great fun and a needed sabbatical. now, sometime soon i should make it longer than just 5 days...

i'm going to kill my cat

Amaya's driving me nuts. lately she keeps waking me up, several times, in the middle of the night. i know, i know, i haven't been home, or home alone, in a while, but still... and i know, i know, she loves me and her waking me up is all sweet and adorable-- she's licking my head; she's purring next to my ear; she's rubbing up against me. yes, adorable and sweet. but i'm sleepy! and once i'm up it's hard for me to get back to sleep after her love-fest.

i know, she's sad i haven't been home many nights. and i know, that on those nights when i am at home, i may not be sleeping alone. (yeah, i've sorta been seeing someone. and yeah, i'm enjoying it immensely. and yeah, i'm not going to talk about it here right now. and yeah, yeah, yeah.)

but that doesn't excuse the fact that her love-in-the-night-moments are driving me nuts! i've shut her in her room several times lately because she keeps constantly loving me. it's oh-so-cute and adorable and i've had it!

and the biggest thing is, this is before my big road trip with jessie when she'll be alone for four whole nights. i can only imagine how much this will increase once i'm back. but i do like the idea of four nights without the cat waking me every five minutes. we'll just have to make sure jessie knows not to lick my head or purr in my ear next week.

the signs are everywhere
ran across the randomly-folded leaf on the street the other night. but what does it mean?

the true at&t

photos from my mother of Amaya hiding in the bathtub:

keeping with my plan of taking more photos of jessie (which is made possible today by the letters 'j', 'r' and the number '8', and by the availability of a phone with a camera), here's some more:
enjoying ice cream and treats-- a regular past-time:

converting to evangelical christianity based upon running into a sidewalk preacher:

and here's a few of me very tired after planning for our san diego trip:

statement from my boss's office:

JOINT STATEMENT FROM
Senator Liz Figueroa, Senator Joe Simitian, Assembly Member Fran Pavley, Assembly Member Mark Leno

"We have just learned today that the National Security Agency in Washington, D.C. has been collecting literally millions, if not billions of telephone records of private citizens here in the United States. The government has no reason to believe any of these people – very likely including all four of us – have done anything at all wrong. The government did not obtain a warrant to collect this information, had no probable cause to believe we have engaged in any wrongdoing, and yet has been collecting what may be the world’s largest database of information about private telephone conversations in history.

"At least three giant telephone companies -- Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth -- simply gave their private and confidential customer information to the government without any question. One company we know of – Qwest – did ask the NSA for a warrant, as the law requires. The government said it would not obtain one, and Qwest quite properly said it could not hand over such sensitive information under such circumstances.

"We are the authors of a bill, SB 202, that would make it a crime for telephone companies to turn over exactly this kind of information to anyone other than their customer. When we introduced the bill, we had no idea the biggest violator would be our own federal government – and that phone companies would have no qualms about handing over mountains of private data without even asking if the government had any reason to believe the customers were acting unlawfully.

"This is one of the most enormous violations of privacy we can imagine. We demand to know why our telephone companies have given our private phone calling information away, and why, as both customers and as elected officials, we had to find out about this in the press."

i love living in california and having sane, rational, and just plain terrific elected officials who "get it"

new post from Ariana, that great Woman of the World, during her adventures in Ecuadar with the Peace Corps:

I hope you are all doing well =) I am now officially a volunteer and am living at my site...

I put some new photos on my blog of our swearing-in ceremony last week...

I am now in that awkward period of trying to get settled in, get to know the people in the communities where I am going to work, learn Spanish, and figure out what projects I should work on and what exactly I should be doing with my time. I will probably be coming into Santo Domingo a lot in the next 2 weeks to buy all the things I need to furnish my apartment, so expect more prompt email responses from me! Oh, and I have been trying to arrange phone chats with some people, but now that I am spending all my evenings alone, at least for right now (except for maybe some weekend nights when I am hanging out with other volunteers), you can call me whenever, any time after 7pm est... I will use my alone time to learn Spanish, read books, and write letters =)

Let me know what´s new with you!

Love,
Ariana

this article gets it just right. here's a piece:

[Bush] can't understand why his poll numbers are so low despite what he proclaims is a booming economy....Doesn't everyone have a growing stock portfolio? Didn't everybody buy Google stock early? Aren't all taxpayers swimming in cash because of Bush's generous tax cuts?

Well, no....

If you were once an automotive worker making $60,000 a year, your current job at Wal-Mart may keep you out of unemployment lines, but it hardly makes you feel secure. If the textile plant where you once worked shut down -- moving its operations to China -- you may have managed to patch together two part-time jobs to cover your lost income. You're not counted among the unemployed, but you're working longer hours for the same pay....

Neither [bush] nor his economic advisers seem to see those ugly realities beneath the relatively good unemployment numbers. (For that matter, neither do highly paid journalists in the Washington-New York corridor. On political commentary shows, they, too, often express surprise that Americans are not more optimistic about the economy.) The income gap keeps growing, and Bush and his team have lost sight of the have-lesses.

from rubberhose: see how three presidents answered the question "what was the best moment of your presidency?"

to summarize:

carter: the camp david negotiations

clinton: the resolution of the kosovo crisis

bush: that time i caught a big fish on my ranch

y'know, as richard cranium says, bush is probably right. catching that fish probably was the best thing he's done since he entered the oval office. who says i never agree with the president?

jessie's the photographer in the family of friends around here so he's always getting photos of others, but no one ever gets photos of him. but today, today!, i swiped this one of him while we were sitting out at an outdoor cafe on the beautiful sunday afternoon that it is here in sf. much more to come, don't you worry. we'll be posting lots of photos of jessie, especially once we take our whirlwind tour down to san diego-- or s.d. as the locals call it-- in a few weeks.

well, it's not perfect, but i've been working on a complete overhaul of my house. it's difficult because i have furniture that can only fit certain ways in my small studio, and certain things have to stay plugged near certain other things and i need more space and all that, but here's a good synopsis of my current arrangement. i like it a lot better than what i've had recently.

from my mother:

and from jessie:
our friend brent from north carolina with me in the mission one cold evening. click on the photo to make our tongues even bigger!

yay! finally my new newsletters are both up today:

alice (p.s. check out the very 'serious' photo of me in the group shot in the "Alice PAC Hard At Work" section. what you can't see very well is that i was probably playing with my toys on the desk at the same time...)

sfyd (this one still requires internet explorer to view...)

it's been a long week of trying to get both of those done. yay!

JURY DUTY!

new column:

"Our Own Anti-Arnold"

I’m writing while riding the train from Sacramento to San Francisco. I’ve just attended the state Democratic Convention where Phil Angelides received the crowning achievement of the endorsement of the convention’s delegates. It was a strong showing of support by the Party for the candidate those of us who are Party stalwarts and diehard true-blue Democrats want to move forward past June 6th, onto November, and beyond.

There is tremendous energy and hope among our Party brethren for taking the governorship back from Arnold. No matter how Arnold might try to position himself, once again, in order to win over the voters, our Party members know that we must defeat him come November. And we LGBT people will forever remember his veto of Assemblyman Leno’s marriage equality legislation in 2005. He will forever be on the wrong side of history with that veto and he will forever have to deal with our animosity.

No matter how warm and fuzzy Arnold tries to make himself this year; no matter how much he tries to warm over the electorate and everyone’s hearts; no matter how he might try to pretend he’s a moderate; no matter how many times he will say he has ‘no problem with gays’ or that he supposedly is pro-choice—we will all remember.

We remember that he supported the anti-choice Proposition 73 last year. We remember he called Democrats ‘girlie-men’ in order to try to emasculate us and to taunt us. We remember he pushed a barrage of anti-union, anti-teachers, anti-nurses, anti-women, anti-progressive ballot and legislative proposals last year. We remember how he broke his promises continually. We remember how he said he was going to be the “Collectinator” to get money from Bush and the federal government, but hasn’t done anything of the sort. And we remember the Veto.

We have a real fight on our hands, my friends. Whatever happens this June when we as a Party formally decide who are nominee is—whatever happens—we have a real fight against this man named Arnold. He will have tons of money. He will have Bush’s own political campaign team members who helped Bush win elections—however dishonestly, antagonistically, divisively, homophobically, and with much disenfranchisement. He will have his fake Hollywood charm. He will have the name ID of which most candidates can only dream. And he will have another new image that will be poll-tested and poll-approved—one which he hopes will make him all warm and fuzzy to the electorate.

We will have the hard part. We will have to remind the voters of how wrong he has been for our state, our families, our children, and our lives. We will have to remind them of their anger from 2005—even if they want to lull themselves back into a rosey outlook with Arnold. We will have to remind them that he’s a politician—a right-wing politician—who is playing them for their votes, and not the actor they may want to think they like. And all of this will be very difficult.

Angelides likes to call himself the Anti-Arnold. It’s a good fit for him as he has done so much in fighting against Arnold from the beginning, even when everyone else in the state’s political establishment was falling all over themselves to join with Arnold because of his high poll numbers. Fighting against Arnold during those early days was not easy and Angelides deserves much respect for doing so.

During this year of 2006, as we gear up for the November election to take out Arnold and reclaim the governorship, we will all have to join Angelides in being our own Anti-Arnold. We will need to be talking to our friends, our families, and our communities and remind them all of why Arnold needs to lose come November. We will need to spread the Anti-Arnold message throughout the state. It will not be easy; but we never entered these fights for our lives at the ballot box thinking it would be. Join me as we all become the Anti-Arnold.

here's the insane topsy-turvy, up is down world of bush:

there are these two keypoints from bush's new chief of staff's interview this weekend: 1) Bush has decided he wants "to be more open with the media and the public," 2) "it may be worth considering whether to end the daily televised press briefings"

title of the article says it all: CUTBACKS SQUEEZE NATIONAL PARKS

i was away for the weekend in sacramento for the state democratic convention... crazy busy the last several days. back to normal hopefully now