"We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that."

-Svidrigaïlov

from Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky

01. What did you do in 2008 that you'd never done before?
I became a happier person on my own, comfortable in my own skin. I made real progress in body acceptance.

02. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't make New Year's resolutions. I find the whole notion of setting goals for oneself on a particular day to be arbitrary and fraught with the potential for failure. For me, I prefer to focus on aspects of my life I'd like to change and give myself enough room to sort those things out; when I'm ready for change, I make it on my own time.

( 38 more )

This is a terrible photo but in it you can see how I met my destiny last night.



He was out behind the Moore theater after his show. I had wandered out of the NiteLite in search of him along with my friend Sachin (who took the photo). We waited for a bit, then I took off to have a cigarette and was about to go back in when Sachin came around and said that Rollins was out back.

We waited some more, and then when we were up there talking to him, I almost lost the ability of speech. I had nothing to sign (actually, I wanted him to sign my boob but I was much too scared to ask), we talked about Herzog and Tender is the Night. He kept checking out my girls.

When I was just about to leave, I said (in possibly the goofiest-sounding voice), "We have the same birthday!" He said, "You, me, and Chuck Yeager!" And I said, "I, know!"

And it was like a "thing," y'all. Our thing.

( more photos off the crappy iPhone, and you will see I am a much better photographer than Sachin )

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is the announcement regarding the website I built for Equal Rights Washington!

Attend a rally in support of marriage equality this Saturday! Check out our amazing new One Minute for Marriage website! Jennifer, We've launched an innovative new tool to make personal stories in support of marriage equality accessible to elected officials and all Washingtonians. And we think you should be involved. Click on the image below to see it! In our brand new campaign (you're the first to see it), you can browse and view minute-long videos of people who, like you, support marriage equality. The videos are incredibly easy to make - use a home video camera, a cell phone camera, or a digital camera with video. We've got all the directions right there on the site. Your videos will be sent to your elected officials and made available online so that Washington voters can become more familiar with the diversity of people who support marriage equality, and the issues that gays and lesbians face everyday. This couldn't have more perfect timing! Tomorrow (Nov 15), all across America, rallies will be held in support of marriage equality. All 50 States have organized events for people to stand up for equality. Equal Rights Washington is thrilled about this movement and is proud to support the efforts all across Washington. Click here to learn more. Please attend a rally this weekend in your area - this is an incredible opportunity to display the growing movement for marriage equality in America. Seattle Volunteer Park (In the Capitol Hill Area)
Spokane 808 W Spokane Falls Blvd # 550 Spokane, WA 99201
Olympia City Hall 8th Ave. and Plum St.
Vancouver Mill Plain and FT Vancouver Way
Tacoma First United Methodist Church 621 Tacoma Avenue South
Anacortes 904 6th St, Anacortes
Aberdeen West end of bridge on east bound street (on park) near Wal-Mart at 11am.
Bellingham Federal Bldg.-corner of Magnolia and Cornwall

If you are attending a rally outside Seattle, you can really help by collecting marriage equality postcards. It's the easiest way to get someone involved, and send a message to their elected officials! You can print them on card stock or regular paper. Click here to download the postcard.  Return them to: ERW PO Box 12216 Seattle, WA 98102

Can't attend? Here are three things you can do:  Donate at least $8 a month until we achieve marriage equality. Sign the marriage equality petition. Make a one minute for marriage video.

We learned from Prop 8 that marriage equality is not a traditional campaign; the best way to educate people is to make a personal connection. If you watch these videos and send them to your friends, you will be changing hearts and minds and helping win marriage equality in Washington. Please visit one minute for marriage and tell your friends about it!

Thanks for all your help!

Connie Watts
Executive Director
Equal Rights Washington

PS- Please consider our Prop 8: Not in our State campaign by donating $8 a month until we achieve marriage equality. It's a small investment for the future of equality in Washington!

No, this is not some new select filter on LJ. And Mother, you may want to skip this entry entirely.

In retrospect, taking a first date to the bar you go to two, three times a week is maybe not such a good idea. Also in retrospect, finishing a pitcher & a half of beer + 3 shots of Jamesons is also, maybe, not such a wise move.

My friend Kim and I are at the NiteLite and--well, we'll just call him Soulful shows up. He's certainly attractive, if you take away the hair and the shitty necklace. We all sit down and talk for a while, and I am surprised he isn't quite as bad as I feared.

A few hours and many, many drinks later, he starts to look good. I'm facing a difficult choice. December, 1990; after a terrible one-night stand, I swore off them. And for the most part I have lived up to that promise. So when the bar closes and we're all standing on the street and he asks, "Want to share a cab?" [beat] "To my place?" I spend maybe five seconds thinking about the consequences before answering, ( Yeahhhhhhhokay. )

So, today Kim sent me this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npP73QIApFE#

Then she linked me to this:

http://www.bestweekever.tv/2008/09/17/icymi-the-renewed-mind-is-the-key/

And I wondered, what could be better than that?

Well, this:

http://jennifer-armentrout.com/spencers_renewed_mind.mp3

I plan on writing about how (and why) the VP nom for Sarah Palin will set back women in national, executive politics by years. But first:

I'm torn about the Bristol Palin thing, honestly. The coverage on this story exposes a mode of thinking, pervasive in both parties, that women, especially teen-aged women, who get pregnant out of wedlock are morally bankrupt and deserve our scorn. It also exposes the rather short (and perhaps incomplete) vetting process that McCain undertook before announcing his VP pick. Both underscore the overwhelming sexism in this country.

McCain chose a running mate, he thought, would draw the disaffected Hillary supporters and shore up his own standing with religious conservatives. What he's gotten is a lightweight politician with a record of flip-flopping and seeking out earmarks who is facing an ethics investigation in her home state--hardly the maverick he envisioned. Which leads to the question: Why Palin?

Simply put, the McCain campaign was more concerned with nominating a "historical" VP than experience or balancing out the ticket. So who was McCain trying to draw in with this pick? Pro-life women? They were already with McCain by and large. Hillary supporters? Does he truly think women vote with their genitalia rather than their brains?

No. He's drawing in men, who think "she's hot," who get to decry the sexism in the media when it's used against Palin but who enjoyed (if not participated in) it when it was used against HRC.

And he does this under the banner of breaking the glass ceiling. What hypocrisy; what a joke.

Similarly, McCain's supporters are decrying the media circus over Bristol Palin as an invasion of the family's privacy. They hold up Sarah and Bristol Palin as a moral mother and girl deserving of our sympathy (as opposed to scorn). That's all well and good. If only they acknowledged that the other teen-aged women, the ones without a governor for a mother, face this same choice and don't deserve our scorn. If only they didn't use the problem of teen pregnancy as a stick to herd religion back into public schools. If only they acknowledged a woman's pregnancy, indeed her entire body, is her own, private matter in all situations, not just when one some pretty Republican is under fire.

This is the best thing I've seen in weeks!

12 years ago now, the doctors were wheeling me into delivery. A half-hour later, my life changed forever.

Happy Birthday, Peter!



ETA

9:17 AM -- Call Peter

Me: "Happy Birthday, Peter!"
Peter: "Thanks."
Me: "So, how does it feel to be 12 years old this very minute?"
Peter: "Not much different."
Me: "That's my boy."

My new laptop is awesome. I'm writing this from the Sound Transit bus on the way in to Redmond.

Seriously. I found Richie Havens' cover of I'm Not In Love on napster. I've been looking for this song (would have preferred CD but hey) for nearly 20 damn years.

So. Fucking. Good.

In other news: I'm in HELL now. So much damn work to finish before I leave IBM. I'm throwing a little lunch/party thing next Friday for the old gang at IBM. Some of these folks I haven't seen in five years.

From Wikipedia, on William and Mary's unofficial traditions:

Another unofficial tradition, which the College administration attempts to quell each year, occurs on the last day of classes in the spring and is referred to by the students as "Blowout." On this day, it is customary to wake up early, begin drinking before one's classes, and show to up to class intoxicated and spend the rest of the day at the numerous keg parties which are always held. On this day, a student can win a t-shirt claiming they stayed sober on that day if they blow a .00 into a breathalizer, which is usually administered by a student group at the Sunken Gardens. Some students choose to "blow out" on the last day of classes of the fall semester as well, but it is not as well celebrated.

Hmm. I don't think I knew anyone who got a sobriety t-shirt during blowout. Also, I remember fall blowout being pretty widely celebrated. Maybe that was just me. Personally, I found it easiest to take an opaque, plastic container (preferably large) and mix orange juice (from the caf) and vodka to take with me to classes.

In a recent e-mail to the College of William and Mary's Student Assembly, Robert Blair (of the College's Board of Visitors) states that the decision not to renew Gene Nichol's contract as president was hardly unanimous. Blair indicates in his letter that there was a vocal minority who supported renewing Nichol's contract, however that contract was allowed to expire without a BOV vote.

This raises some concerns about Michael Powell's (Rector of the BOV) statements that the BOV reached its decision not to renew Nichol's contract through the agreement of all sixteen members. In an interview with the College's student-run newspaper, The Flat Hat, Powell was asked, "Was the BOV's vote unanimous?" Powell: "I think it’s fair to say that it was unanimous, yes."

Since Nichol's resignation, the BOV has repeatedly stated that its decision was not based on ideological differences. It has also pledged support to the more controversial policies Nichol enacted. Nonetheless, many people affiliated with the college (students, faculty, and alumni) feel that the BOV's decision lacks sufficient transparency. According to the BOV's own statement regarding how Nichol's contract review would take place, "the review [would] examine achievements as measured against goals and objectives presented by the President to the Board as well as other metrics." To frame the non-renewal decision within those goals, objectives, and metrics would help mitigate the College community's concerns, most notably concerns that the BOV caved to pressures from conservative Virginia delegates and wealthy donors. This is not an unreasonable fear considering the Virginia House of Delegates used its (rarely exercised) confirmation hearings over three BOV members up for renewal to lay out thinly-veiled criticisms of Nichol's tenure as president. Several delegates indicated displeasure at the Wren cross and Sex Workers' Art Show decisions; one Republican delegate asked a member of the BOV what would be done to ensure the art show would not return to the College. This occurred only days before the BOV reached its decision and informed then-President Nichol.

Let me tell you a little about my college. I graduated in '94 from The College of William and Mary in Virginia. At the time of my graduation I was, overall, happy with the education I received but dismayed by the choke-hold conservative politics had on the College. Of course, times were rather different then. In the South (in general) and southeastern Virginia in particular, many liberal issues were only beginning to be foregrounded. I remember canvassing the student body to support a measure to support domestic partnership benefits (which ultimately failed to pass) and working to legitimize GLBT concerns within the Student Association as well as on campus as a whole. I co-founded a political arm of the GLBT association (to stave off the continued efforts of Christian conservatives to block any funding for the GLBT association). With fellow classmates, I worked to establish and promote a safer environment for women on campus and I was strongly involved in other cultural establishments on and off-campus. Each of these efforts was an uphill battle, primarily because the political climate at the College was apathetic leaning towards conservative.

In 2005, Gene R. Nichol succeeded Timothy J. Sullivan as President of the College. Nichol's background in the ACLU was personally reassuring to me: Although not a current student at the campus, I felt that someone with such a background was better poised to understand the needs of a community of students, faculty, and staff and promote necessary changes within that community. President Nichol can count among his achievements include the promotion of greater, aggressive need-based scholarship programs for the poor, increasing diversity among the student population, hiring more faculty members of color, and integrating the administrative leadership at the College.

Nichol's presidency was not without controversies. In 2006, he ordered the removal of a gold cross in the College's Wren Chapel. This change in policy gained national attention as conservatives and conservative Christians decried the decision (which prompted one alumnus to retract his pledged support of $12m to the College). After the outcry, President Nichol ordered an exploratory committee to determine the best way to handle the situation, and the committee agreed to a compromise. About this controversy, Nichol stated:

The decision was likely required by any effective notion of separation of church and state. And it was certainly motivated by the desire to extend the College’s welcome more generously to all. We are charged, as state actors, to respect and accommodate all religions, and to endorse none. The decision did no more.

In 2007 and 2008, Nichol refused to ban the Sex Workers' Art Show (approved and funded by the Student Assembly) from the campus. On this issue, Nichols said:

To stop the production because I found it offensive, or unappealing, would have violated both the First Amendment and the traditions of openness and inquiry that sustain great universities. It would have been a knowing, intentional denial of the constitutional rights of our students. It is perhaps worth recalling that my very first act as president of the College was to swear on oath not to do so.

On Sunday, after the Charter Day celebration, the Board of Visitors informed President Nichol that his contract would not be renewed (and would end in June, 2008). President Nichol resigned effective today. While the BoV has maintained that its decision had nothing to do with ideological differences, President Nichol quoted an offer made by the BoV for "substantial economic incentives" for both Nichol and his wife if they agreed "not to characterize [the non-renewal decision] as based on ideological grounds" and not to make any statements about Nichol's resignation without the BoV's approval. Nichol rejected these incentives. Rector Michael Powell, on behalf of the BoV, has stated that these incentives were not intended to censor Nichol or his family but has not elaborated on the language or terms of those incentives.

As I am not a student of the College, I cannot say with certainty that Nichol was a better president than his predecessors. But I agreed with many of his policy changes and actions, the controversial and not-so controversial. And I find it dismaying that his contract was not renewed (though I am somewhat relieved that the BoV has expressly stated that they do not intend to reverse Nichol's policies, including the policy altering the display of the cross at the Wren Chapel). And until I am able to discern better the political and ideological leanings of the new president, I will not continue to donate to the College's annual fund.

References: President Nichol's statement | BoV Statement | Flat Hat News

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Top five songs that make you cry. GO!

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My List:

1. My Man - Billie Holiday
2. Famous Blue Raincoat - Leonard Cohen
3. Atmosphere - Joy Division
4. Natureboy - Django Reinhardt et Le Quintet du Hot Club de France
5. Gentle Rain - Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto

Xelas Magazine Blog: Mythologizing "Place"

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