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Monday, July 31, 2006

 
3:30 AM: run-on sentence [#] [0]

so much to say but i gotta go to canada for a couple of weeks without saying it! in brief: the "child custody protection act" is both grievous & hypocritical; please vote against ip51 (parental notification); the women this most effects should have a voice, but they can't vote yet; i had an abortion tshirts; your silence will not protect you; a great tshirt i saw at planned parenthood last week: "don't fuck with us; don't fuck without us"; beyond marriage is an interesting movement: can it gain support for alternative marriage rights without dismissing people who are already married?; network neutrality is still something i'm failing to write about but you've got to admit the senatemap is a great tool; erika-moen-who-now-lives-in-portland has one of the best 404 errors i've ever seen; i don't even think i wrote about leeann's visit!; or hedwig & the angry inch which we saw w/ todd & kristen; or fup's birthday; or a scanner darkly we saw w/ mph; or sven's job at bent image lab (thanks, grace!); or that i'm on lipitor & am eating cheeseless pizzas because my doctor found my cholesterol "alarming" for my age; but this led to discovering the chocolate-chip cookie recipe i have been searching for all my life -- and much to my surprise, it's vegan!; i just finished making a new calligraphy piece (best wishes to philip & teena on their wedding!); it's way too late for me to be up writing this when i have a drive to canada in just a few hours.

so tired. still need to pack. night night. see you in a couple of weeks after we've frolicked with the moose.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

 
11:35 AM: modulation [#] [3]

oh, god. i'd rather go to the dentist than call qwest dsl support again. after over an hour of painful troubleshooting, they essentially said it wasn't their problem and referred me to my isp, easystreet. but i had already called easystreet (who has really great tech support) and THEY said the problem was with qwest! so i bought a new dsl modem just to see if that solves it, because i've gone from one crash a day to one crash every 10 minutes. i can't do -anything- without making the modem crash at this point. it's not the airport, and i can't even get the modem to give valid ips to laptops that are directly plugged in via dhcp.

qwest tech support is obviously foreign in nature. he kept calling me sven because it was too difficult to explain that i was gretchin. i asked what time it was there and it was only an hour later than me. curious, i asked "where are you?" he said, "ma'am, i can't tell you where we are located, but we are a unit of qwest communication and i will be happy to help you." must be a frequently asked question. but while waiting for the modem to "powercycle," i asked him how the weather was. "it looks like it might storm," he said. i said it had been very hot out here. "is it summer there?" he asked. so i guess he's not from around here. finally, after telling me he was very sorry to have to tell me i'd have to contact my isp, he said "ma'am, have you been to the qwest website?" oh, no, i thought. "because i suggest bookmarking it as one of your favorites." oh, no. i really don't think so.

my easystreet support calls, on the other hand, were delightful in comparison. i always walk away from easystreet feeling better, not worse -- even if it's still not entirely working, i feel heard and that the problem was competently reviewed and that's there's a decent next action to take.

a new modem is on its way, but can anyone verify whether comcast has better support? i'd hate to give up easystreet, but we need a faster connection to view all that stopmo animation, anyway, and today i'm loathe to give qwest any more money to upgrade. we're just about to go to canada & i have some stuff i want to wrap up, so the timing on this is terrible. maybe i need to spend some time at a coffeeshop. or at michael's. ;)

Thursday, July 20, 2006

 
11:06 AM: overload [#] [3]

yeeeeeeee! cute overload published a submission i sent them! leeann's pix of a friend's puppy were so adorable i was compelled to promote them my favorite fuzzy website. though they spelled my name wrong, i even got an "Ah-nerr-ahh-bull" out of it! *swoons*

Thursday, July 13, 2006

 
5:49 PM: hate mail [#] [2]

i just finished changing the addresses of about 700 hundred planned parenthood subscribers, and it turns out all the "interesting" mail is at the bottom of the mail bin:

someone clipped this headline from a letter: "they've criminalized abortion in south dakota"
then wrote: good now Lets Do it Everywhar

on the outside of an envelope:
NO - MURDER HAS ALWAYS BEEN CRIMINAL

scrawled across a return address:
Peta thinks it is OK to kill baby humans but not rabbits & mink
woman's choice: just say "NO"

on the outside of another envelope:
Abortion is Murder

my primary motivations in this struggle are twofold. first, each person's primary right is that to their own body. second, every child should be born a wanted child. while assembling donation thank-you letters last week, i had a couple of ideas for my own slogans:

better abortion than abuse

an unwanted pregnancy=an unwanted child

better than either of those, of course, is this line i found on a sig file:

now that you've saved that gay fetus, are you willing to defend its right to marry?

but one of the frustrating things is that all this focus on abortion seriously skews planned parenthood's image, whose primary responsibility is actually for the reproductive health of both women & men. so my next project is culling through a few thousand quotes from women who participate in the Family Planning Expansion Project (FPEP) program -- a federally-and-state-funded program that provides its services to low-income patients. the ratio of federal dollars to state dollars is $9 to $1, but the federal funds are contigent on the state, who has to choose to support it every time a budget is passed. which means every two years, planned parenthood has to defend its services and prove how much women depend on them. the quotes i pick ultimately get added to a database that can be used for multiple purposes.

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

 
4:38 PM: fireworks [#] [2]

the neighborhood was crackling & blooming with early fireworks last night, but the best show was the epic thunderstorm we had at sunset. the light began weirdly yellow-green, like tornado light. meanwhile, the clouds were colored like cotton candy, in surreal shades of blue, magenta & salmon, and they rumbled as they swallowed the moon and became dark. soon they covered the sky in a mass of dark grey, at which point the lightning began. the lightning branched and swelled, looping and spiralling through the sky, sometimes in the form of a spider or a lacey octopus, sometimes skimming the horizon. at one point the lightning seemed to land right between the houses across the street and the thunder was so immediate and so loud we clutched each other in terror and elation. then the rain began, slapping us with quarter-sized drops, driving us under the shelter of the front porch. afterwards, the air was as thick and sweet as honey.

tonight we'll go to the river to see the show by the hawthorne bridge, but how can it compare? ;)

Monday, July 03, 2006

 
11:56 AM: sunday in the park [#] [0]

yesterday was todd's birthday, so we took him to our favorite brunch place. then we stopped by kristen & todd's new apartment, which, as it is very near laurelhurst park, is conducive to a sunny sunday stroll.

upon reaching the leafy canopy of the park, almost immediately we discovered the pdx hooperz:


[click the images to view larger]

two girls leaving told us anyone was welcome to play, and a nice woman set us up with the basics, so play we did! i can still feel it in my stomach today, in fact. :)


[click the images to see us life-size!]

todd chose to simply watch us make fools of ourselves, but who can blame him?


[click the images to view larger]

the "hoop jam" is free every sunday from noon-2 p.m. at laurelhurst park.

Saturday, July 01, 2006

 
6:20 PM: eventful [#] [3]

lots of stuff recently:

* i began volunteering at planned parenthood last week. "it's been so long since we've had a volunteer!" they said, which really made me sad, because i'll bet pro-control organizations aren't having the same problem.

* last thursday todd, kristen, sven & i went to see the female odd couple, which i found shrill and emotionally binary: they were frantic or they were not, and there was nothing in between. btw, i was in this play in college...


click the image for a larger version and scroll to the right to see the whole strip. yep, that's me in the apron and the long hair. :)

* todd, sven & i went to the found reading at powell's on wednesday, and they sang one of my favorite songs, "the booty don't stop" (which they do way better live than recorded).

* mph, alex, sven & i went to see superman returns on wednesday. i thought it was pretty good: much better than xmen 3. a lot less eye-rolling and gritting of teeth than i would have expected. there is obvious reverence for the mythos and everyone is trying very earnestly to make the spirit of christopher reeve proud.

* the portland art museum was free yesterday, so i popped down there with sven for a bit, because the last time it was free we didn't leave ourselves enough time to see the upper two floors of the contemporary wing.

* then sven & i went to a reading of kristian willams' book american methods, which details the history of miltary torture and prison abuse. (sven helped edit this book.) afterwards, kristian did something i've never seen an author do: "so my first four questions have been asked by men. are there any women who want to ask questions?" calling the gender discrepency like that was both astute and compassionate. and sure enough, once called out, yes, several women did want to ask questions. go, kristian!