R: “I find myself unexpectedly very sad about Ted Kennedy.”

J: “Yeah, me too.”

*

Claire clocked heads with a kindergartener today and came away with a black eye and some shallow cuts. She spent the afternoon at my office and we wandered over to AG Ferrari for lunch.

R: “That’s the earthquake memorial.”

C, remembering earlier conversations: “Your grandmother was born three days after the Great Earthquake! I bet her mother was glad she wasn’t in San Francisco. Your grandmother’s mother is my great, great… wait, let me gather my greats.”

*

R (as I finish recounting this to Jeremy): “And then I exploded. All over Third Street. A fine red mist.”

(A clarification: I exploded with pride in my daughter, who gathers her greats; and not, as my father assumed, in a temper tantrum.)

I’ve been reading Jeffrey Toobin’s fearsomely brilliant The Nine. As usual with books like this I am cast into despair, this time because I am not a supreme court justice. Nevertheless it’s a cracking read, and I’ve been staying up late to finish chapters.

It surprises me how much I knew: I remembered every case Toobin discusses in any detail. And it surprises me how much I did not know. I had quite the wrong impressions of Sandra Day O’Connor and Harriet Miers (although I was right enough on Thomas and Scalia.) Kennedy and Souter are extraordinary characters too. To change is to be progressive. Conservatives stay the same.

Jeremy jokes that I am reading a big book about ringwraiths. It’s a joke that’s been made before, but I am finding it comforting in this context. Despite my best efforts I remain a status-obsessed starfucker; that is, a chimpanzee. It’s good to be reminded that the pursuit of power for its own sake hollows people out and turns them into monsters.

Palin’s resignation: best America’s birthday present ever!

Also fabulous this weekend: riding at the barn, lunch at Mission Beach with Mr J, Claire’s last show at Coastal Camp (she was Four Insect Wings), SF Mime Troupe in Dolores Park (I got sunburnt), fireworks from Bernal Hill, riding again with Salome and a date night with Mr J: Easy Virtue and dinner at the bar at Zuni.

Palin, though. How awesome was that?

Here’s an observation. If your God is telling you to go and shoot a doctor while he is at church with his family? You have a bad God.

Abortion is a matter on which people of conscience can differ, but murder is not.

Doctor Tiller had more compassion and human decency than all of his opponents combined.

I gave in his memory to Medical Students for Choice and the National Network of Abortion Funds.

ETA: Abortion protestors have abortions.

Birth moms have abortions.

My friend had an abortion that saved her life.

[09:35] FurHordinge: As we were going down castro, so I said that milk was nicknamed the mayor of castro st
[09:35] FurHordinge: “Does evey street have a mayor?”
[09:35] mizchalmers: awww
[09:35] FurHordinge: No, but milk helped organize the gay men and women politically
[09:36] FurHordinge: “Like martin luther king did for the black people?”

For Ada Lovelace Day, I celebrate my geeky girlfriends, who kick my ass and keep me honest. I wouldn’t be in San Francisco happily nerding my head off if the generous, the visionary Kate Crawford, Rosanne Bersten and Rosie Cross hadn’t published my earlier, crappier work. They saw the me I wasn’t yet. Mia Ridge turns relational databases into time machines and Bobigail Grahame and Rose White can program orbiting supercomputers by tapping out binary code with their knitting needles. Written on the body? Quinn Norton could hand Jeanette Winterson her skinny ass. Liz Henry, Skud and Sumana Harihareswara are hyperconnected nodes; through them I feel directly connected to the great world where women are taking up keyboards against their oppressors. I owe Cheryl Traverse the incalculable debt of a mentee to her mentor. And there are others, of course, many others, so many that I can never do justice to them all.

May I say, though, that I love the next generation best of all?

Source: FDIC Failed Bank List. We’re closing more banks per month than we used to in a year. 2009’s already worse than previous low point 2002, and it’s only March.

I was on antidepressants from “Mission Accomplished” to Obama’s inauguration. Down to the very day.

I’m seriously annoyed with President My Boyfriend for perpetuating the Bush Administrations self-serving position on state secrets. It’s bumming me out. Our first real fight. C’mon, big O, why you even got to do a thing?

I jumped Cassie on Sunday! It was like an eighteen inch crossbar, sure, but a Taste of Things to Come!

Claire’s been all up on stage lately. Last week it was her first wushu demonstration. I would be very surprised if there is anything on earth cuter than my six-year-old’s kicks and punches, except possibly the expression on her face while she’s doing them. “WE R SRS NNJAS.” In January she and her classmates sang “Chickadee” at the school music recital. That was beyond hilarious: crowded cafeteria; tuneless kindergarteners; doting parents; phone cameras aloft.

Speaking of that cafeteria I am pursuing funding for a new school building that would include a proper auditorium. Ideally we’d like solar energy, grey water reclamation, the whole shebang. I am having a ridiculous amount of fun finding clues on the Internet and brazenly calling people at their places of work with naive questions. Last Friday I discovered $3.6m earmarked for it in the SFUSD facilities budget and tonight I talked to the head of facilities. The plot thickens! It’s not going to be easy by any means, but it is actually possible! I bounced into Kappy’s office and said:

“I love research!”

“I’ve heard that about you,” she said.

More: I’m off Zoloft; everything seems a bit colder and brighter. I loved Thrumpton Hall, The Arrival, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The First Part Last and Stories of Your Life. Frost/Nixon was pretty good too. Claire wanted to come with us, but when I said “Great idea! It’s the story of the confrontation of two huge mediated egos over foreign policy at the cusp of the electronic age!” she decided she’d rather hang with McKenze instead. Julia, and now this is going to astonish you, remains delightful.

Ursula Le Guin says: Offer your experience as your wisdom.

This is my country. This is where I am from:

I was born twenty miles from where this photograph was taken. I swam and fished in that water throughout my childhood. I rode my horse across those hills. I love this place beyond the telling of it. Today I am sitting in my office in San Francisco and missing my country right down to my bones.

Everything you see is stolen.

On this day 221 years ago, George Johnston stepped out of a boat and onto the sand of Sydney Cove. “Johnston received extensive land grants in areas of modern Petersham, Bankstown and Cabramatta… Johnston’s other grants included land which is now the suburb of Annandale, named for his property that was in turn named after the place of his birth. He and Ester Abrahams farmed and lived on this land with their children until the 1870s when it was sold and sub-divided for residential development.”

George’s daughter Blanche had a daughter she called Isabella, whose daughter also called Isabella had a daughter Brenda whose son Robin is my father. My family prospered and I was given an inheritance and an excellent university education. The people from whom the land was stolen have not prospered.

“Over the period 2002-2006, Indigenous Australians died from diabetes at nine times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians and from kidney diseases at four times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians.”

“Over the period 2002-2006, Indigenous Australians died from hypertensive disease at four times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians died from rheumatic heart disease (which predominantly affects children) at 9 times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians.”

“Indigenous males and females died from avoidable causes at around 4 to 4.5 times the rate of non-Indigenous males and females.”

Nor have we finished stealing.

I have a big post brewing but in the meantime, have you noticed how much better things are under an Obama administration? There is life on Mars, and when people fall out of the sky over New York City, they live.

What a year, eh? I have resolved to stop whining and start Counting My Blessings again, which should as a happy side-effect help repopulate this somewhat neglected blog. So! The kids are shiny. Claire has been promoted to first-in-line in her wushu class – a Chinese martial art, think weaponized tai chi – and is onto her second book in piano. Julia got the memo about turning three and is stubborn and stormy, yet still irresistibly kissable. Even the cat is mellow, it being the season where she views me as a heat source as well as potential food. Jeremy is 38 and thus officially the oldest dude I have ever got happy with. We had a spectacular meal at La Ciccia to celebrate, all the lovelier in that we got to walk home afterwards.

I’m nervous about going back to Australia because it always throws me into tailspins about What Might Have Been; but I’m also looking forward to some summer and beach and proper mangos and coffee and such. And I can’t wait to see everyone and wear my brand-new rock star sunglasses. And then when I come back we’ll have a new preznit, one you won’t necessarily want to throw your shoe at. Pacific gyre and methane clathrate gun and we’re all so doomed aside, as they say here in California, it’s all good.

Harvey answers the phone and it’s some gay kid from Minnesota. The kid is thinking of killing himself. Harvey’s distracted but tries to focus: “No, no, don’t do that. Get on a bus. Go to the nearest big city. Go to Minneapolis or New York or LA. It doesn’t matter what anyone says. You’re not sick. You’re not wrong. God doesn’t hate you.”

It’s true what they’re saying: Sean Penn is incredible. I’m a Milk completist and I had to concentrate, hard, to see that it was Penn in the role, so absolutely does he disappear into Milk. It’s Gus Van Sant’s masterpiece, the film he was born to make. It’s painful, of course, and some parts of it were very hard to watch: Prop 6 so neatly prefiguring Prop 8, but without the wrenching end; the murderer walking through the City Hall where my dear friends married last month. The candlelit march down Market.

But it was at “Get on the bus” that I started crying. GLBT history doesn’t matter only to GLBT people. It matters to all the fellow travellers, to anyone who likes opera or books better than football or stock car racing, to anyone who even just doesn’t want people like us dead. Weird kids, misfits, outsiders. “Get on the bus”; where would I be now, if no one had said it to me? “Get to the nearest big city. You’re not wrong. God doesn’t hate you.”

In the small hours after the acceptance speech, I was reading – very anxiously – the Conservative blogosphere. I do this occasionally to get out of my echo chamber. Liz does it in a much more disciplined and organized way, and while I’d like to emulate that, mostly it upsets me too much. Anyway I followed a link to this one guy’s blog and now I can’t find it again and don’t want to wade back through all those comments, but –

His point was that he was extremely sad about the result, and cynical about an Obama administration, but grateful about and awed by the peaceful transfer of power. I remembered that that was my only real shred of comfort in the wake of the Democratic losses in 2000 and 2004. What a grown-up thing! Bitter partisans accepting the other side’s triumph!

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that this is democracy. We liberals want to be all yay! Vindicated! Take that Dubya and whatever, but Obama’s victory is only partly that, and partly a manifestation of this nation’s innate desire to change things up every eight to twelve years. That honest grief I felt for Gore and Kerry? I know McCain’s supporters feel that way now. I can see it in their faces. I can remember every pang of sorrow. I wish them only peace. It’s why Obama urges no high-fives, no triumphalism. It’s the United States.

This is the price of democracy: that committed, political people will, half the time, have their hearts smashed to bits. Every few years we open executive power up for debate, and sometimes the other guys win, and then we mourn and rage and say it’s gonna be the end of the world. But the alternative is to have the same guy in power for ever and ever and that is MUCH, much worse.

This is democracy! It’s a chance for the disenfranchised to take the mike. And in four or eight or twelve years? We’re gonna have to give it back. That’s the deal. It’s this or a dictatorship.

It’s easy to say it right now, with my guy having just won, so remind me of this next time us liberals are out in the cold: I say it is worth it. I will endure the grief of loss ten times over before I will deny anyone else the right to vote for their candidate ahead of mine.

Abe Lincoln (who totally supported my guy) put it like this:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory will swell when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.

And Ze Frank is saying it with Tubes.

My centrist Christian tax-cutting guy beat the other centrist Christian tax-cutting guy. Euphoria! Hippies dancing in the streets wrapped in the American flag. Yet California voted against love.

And yet and yet: there will be a black man in the Oval Office. A president for his supporters and for the people who didn’t vote for him; a president from my America, for the world; a 21st Century president for the Long Now and the Big Here.

I’ll miss compulsively-reloading Nate Silver, whose outstanding wonkery covered itself in glory. I’ll miss Fake Sarah Palin. I’m not under any illusions; the country and the planet are in a big-ass mess with no easy way out. But I will never forget last night or this morning. I feel honoured to have witnessed this.

Completely failed to Nanowrimo yesterday or today; a bit distracted deciding the election the way I fly every plane I passenge in – KEEPING IT ALOFT BY PURE FORCE OF WILL.

Lucky MT lets me back-date ’em…

Am in possession of one (1) husband. He seems intact. He’s all epiphany-licious and wants to Seize The Day. I’m all After the election, buster.

Toe news: vast improvement.

We had a very ordinary, in other words perfect, weekend. Wushu for Claire and Spanish class for Julia on Saturday morning, after which Jules and I walked through sunny autumnal Noe Valley all fragrant with jasmine down to the Mission Library to meet Jeremy and Claire and Salome and Milo. Tacos for lunch and then home for naps. Sunday morning was Claire’s piano class so we walked up the hill in bright sun but against an icy wind, the first glimmer of winter. This may be my favourite time of year in San Francisco, with the wind’s raw edge promising cognac-laced pumpkin soup and Halloween and Oz apples and Lemos Farm and Thanksgiving turkey and pie and everyone’s birthday and Christmas. Harvest food is the best.

Jeremy and I went over our position with respect to, you know, the global collapse of capitalism and the impending apocalypse and so forth. We’re about as okay as a middle-class techie nuclear family could hope to be; we have savings and a reasonable fixed-rate mortgage and no other debt. We’re especially lucky that our green cards just came through, so if the company or companies tank, which merciful Zeus forfend, we can get jobs elsewhere. We’ve already been eating out less and buying clothes second hand and going to the library, see above. I could afford to knock it off with the Internet shopping, but the number one flashing red light of a way to cut our costs is to get rid of my beloved car Hedwig and her $50-a-tank dead dinosaur habit. And I think we were both half-investigating the possibility by spending the weekend on foot or on public transport.

May I point out here, though, how royally it pisses me off that we are having to economize? I am so tired of selfish people running the country that I have given into the temptation to brainwash my daughters. “John McCain has thirteen houses, which means there are twelve houses other people can’t live in,” I tell Claire. “That’s because John McCain’s momma never taught him to share his toys. Do you know how many houses Barack Obama has?” “Just one,” says Claire.

“And Barack Obama will end the war,” Claire adds. “Which is good, momma, because then you won’t have to cry about it any more.”

This must have become a fairly routine conversation around our place, because when Julia overhears what we are saying she cries: “Barack Obama? NOT AGAIN.”

ETA: Right now in the bath, Claire pretending to be on the phone.

“What? McCain’s winning? YUCK, YUCK, YUCK!”

“No he’s not!”

“Now the war will go on forever.”

“Oh no!”

“Obama’s got the mumps.”