I just got Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. I need Office for the editing work I do (OpenOffice just won’t cut it), and for several months I’ve been using Office 2010 for Windows running on a virtual Windows machine on my Mac. I jumped at the chance to be able to run Intel-native OSX software for performance reasons.

So far, Office 2011 has been a major disappointment. The main reason: it hangs. Yesterday, with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint all open, I was getting 20-30 second lags between keypresses and activity. Today my entire system froze while I was using Word, necessitating a hard reboot.

This afternoon, I’m back to 2010 on my virtual Windows setup. Here’s hoping MS gets the kinks ironed out soon.

My sweetie, Quincy, and I got engaged in March. We spent our drive from Ohio to California last month batting around ideas on ceremony and logistics (and reading what Emily Post had to say on the matter, mostly for yuks). We’ve set a date next year, and now we’re confronted yet again with a question it feels like we’ve discussed and resolved several times already: should we make it legal?

Every time we’ve talked about this, a few big shared values have come to the surface:

• We don’t want the state to play a role in our relationship.
• We’re not interested in stepping into the legal complications that we might be faced with if we decided to make changes to our relationship down the line.
• Rather than entering into a civil union or marriage to be able to share health insurance, we want to help make the sort of change that means that no one will need to do this — that we all have access to quality, affordable health care, regardless of whether or not we’re in relationships, or who we’re partnered with.

At the same time, it’s been exciting that this past week’s Perry v. Schwarzenegger decision may soon open a window for us to be legally married in California — the third such window for marriage equality in San Francisco, and the first since we’ve been together. I brought up the possibility of exploring getting married this week if this window does indeed open, and Quincy said he’d been thinking the same thing. There are a few reasons for that, too:

• The last two times this happened, the window was open briefly — once for a few weeks, once for a few months. So if we ever want to get married, it might behoove us to jump on this opportunity, because it’s not clear that this will last, or be available again.
• Both of us grew up assuming that we never could get married. The fact that we just might be able to, after all, is symbolic and exciting.

Stay tuned.

I teach yoga, and over the past couple months, I’ve worked with a couple students on postural alignment. They found their shoulders hunching forward in adulthood, as I did in my early 20s, and like me, they started by hearkening back to the military-tinged instructions many of us were given as children: “Shoulders back!” I shared with them what worked for me: rolling my shoulder blades down my back, and at the same time lengthening the back of my neck.

The whole exercise got me thinking about how pervasive dualistic, either/or thinking is in the U.S. We’re trained to look for answers in the singular, as if all illnesses or discomforts have a single cause, and addressing them requires us to simply focus our energy and effort in one direction. Working with my students on posture, I wasn’t nullifying what they were doing; instead, I was showing them a specific, modified way of doing “Shoulders back!” along with extending the spine through the neck and skull.

A friend of mine, a writer, suggested a simple exercise to both start recognizing this single-focus tendency many of us share, and begin to counter it: replace “but” with  “and.” It seemed bizarre the first time I did it, but once I was used to it, I noticed a shift in the way I see the world. In the U.S., especially in journalism, a common rhetorical device starts with a familiar concept, then uses “but” to bridge to something new, highlighting the two as opposites. Embracing “and” instead lets us allow for multiple different ideas to coexist, appropriate in different places and contexts. It helps us move from a world of limits, to a world of possibilities.

I watched the closing week of this year’s Winter Olympics, which was unusual for me. I found myself hooked by curling, of all things. At the start of the week, I knew only that the sport involved a heavy rock and reminded me of shuffleboard; by the final match, my sister and brother-in-law and I were jabbering excitedly about who had the hammer in the current end.
I also got swept up in men’s figure skating, and Johnny Weir has joined my list of personal heroes.
During the last couple days of the games, I encountered a lot of news coverage about medal counts. The U.S. set a record for most medals at a Winter Olympics. Russian politicians were disappointed, and have started the process of finding heads to roll. The expectations, and the gloating, and the disappointment made me sad.
Giving high-performing athletes a forum for challenging each other, for raising the bar and inspiring each other is great in my book. And watching people practice their crafts and showcase skills built through years of work can help us all rethink what’s possible and what it means to be human. I’m not the biggest fan of win-lose competitions, but I can even accept that in the context of setting a challenge.
I think the biggest failing of Olympic competition, though, is national borders. These events that ostensibly pit individuals from around the world against each other get put in columns and rows and used to boost the pride of a group of people who happen to be united by living in a given country. Many of the ways that some countries are privileged over others in the Olympics are not big secrets: having big public and/or private budgets for athletic training programs and facilities; having a large pool of people with leisure time and a strong nutritional foundation who can train for years on evenings and weekends; having the cultural and/or political influence on a global scale to make a popular national sport into a worldwide competition (think Snowboard Cross).
To paraphrase a friend, I look forward to a world where national borders are remembered as a dysfunctional idea from a bygone era.

I just spent three days driving from San Francisco to Omaha. From near sea level at home, I crossed the Sierras through Donner Pass (7227 ft.). After the flatlands of Nevada, I crested the Rockies amid falling snow at Vail Pass (10662 ft.), before eventually returning to near sea level in Nebraska.
From my first ever drive in the mountains, I’ve enjoyed the effects of the pressure changes associated with altitude on everyday objects. Plastic bottles of water that I emptied and recapped in Colorado had caved in sides by the time I reached Omaha — as if the bottles had sucked in their cheeks and held their breath so long they’d turned blue. Waking up in Denver on the final day of my journey, I opened a squeeze bottle of lotion to help my skin adapt to the dry air. In San Francisco, I’m perpetually struggling with getting the thick lotion down to the opening and then out; in Denver, as soon as I opened the flip top, the bottle began spurting lotion. In the second it took me to realize that the higher-pressure sea level air in the bottle was propelling the lotion out, I’d ended up with a mess on my hands. The unexpected way that air pressure was playing with me put a smile on my face as I cleaned things up, though.
Years ago on one of my first ever trips over the Sierras (Tioga Sonora Pass, 9943 9624 ft.), my friend Tommy and I kept watch on a bag of corn chips that was already pretty puffy near sea level. I hoped the elevation would cause the bag to explode, but it didn’t; I’m guessing smart manufacturers have an elevation margin of error built into their packaging.
On my recent trip, I found myself checking packaged products at gas stations along the way. It was hard to compare products in bags, but all through the mountains, the seals on cans like Pringles had rounded tops. The experience reminded me of the way I still sometimes treat things I’m used to as “normal” and everything else as not. I thought of the rounded Pringles tops as an effect of low air pressure at elevation, making them unlike the same cans at home at sea level. But after I thought about that for a bit, I realized I could just as easily flip it around, seeing the flat or indented tops at home as an effect of high air pressure near sea level, rather than as a normal baseline.
When I was in Central America a few years ago, it was exciting to regularly see monkeys running through the trees — and doubly so for the nonchalance of the locals, many of whom, I quickly realized, had seen monkeys running through the trees every day of their lives. Since then, I’ve never looked at squirrel running along a power line in quite the same way.
I find these concrete experiences especially valuable for the way they help ground me in recognizing other, more complex ways that I can treat my daily life and experiences as “normal” when they’re just one point on a spectrum. For as long as I can remember, I’ve noticed the tight feeling in the pit of my stomach when I think about holding hands with a guy I’m dating when we walk down the street, and I’ve known that’s not a universal experience — that it’s part of being perceived as a queer couple. But it takes deeply listening to stories my friends tell me to notice that interacting with, for instance, the health care system when I’m seen as a white man is a different experience than if my race and/or gender identities were different. And all of these identities — and many more — intersect what it feels like to climb into my car and drive 1800 miles alone: my expectations for potential interactions with random people at gas stations, or interactions with state troopers across five states.
I try to stay grounded in the excitement of puffed up packaging and scampering squirrels to steer me away from tendencies to treat life as a race to the bottom: the idea that if not everyone has a privilege that I have, then I should figure out a way to divest myself of it. (I once heard someone helpfully refer to this as “miserablism.”) Instead, I try to use this joy as a springboard for work to help build a world where privileges aren’t privileges anymore — they’re just part of normal life for everyone.

If you’ve been reading any news at all over the last few months, it’s no secret that California’s having some deep-seated budget issues that defy easy fixes. One central piece of those issues is the drive put more and more people in prison over the last couple decades — an action that doesn’t make any of our communities safer, and whose drain on the state budget, after years of being a burden, has finally tipped to unsustainable.
Another piece underlying the current crisis is the series of initiatives that voters have passed over the last few decades, which have too often been contradictory, and aimed at short-term feel-good politics, rather than long-term planning for the sustainability of the state.
Now one of my foundational beliefs is that we all must be able to meaningfully influence decisions that affect our lives. And in that spirit, California’s initiative process is an amazing idea: certain types of decisions must automatically go before the voters (rather than being approved only by elected representatives) to become law, and voters have legal a process for bringing their own proposals before the entire electorate. In practice, though, the system’s fatal flaw is the way it naively overlooks the sheer scale and size of California. This plays out in two ways:

1. Campaigns are conducted using mass media that can reach and influence a majority of the electorate, meaning they merely scratch the surface of issues with soundbites.
   
2. Only people and corporations with deep pockets have the resources to pay for these huge media campaigns.

I tend to overestimate how much I can get done in a given amount of time. However dysfunctional it may sound, this actually has its advantages: sometimes I surprise myself and get an amazing amount done; some days I merely collapse into a heap at the end of the day, worn out in a way that feels really good. But some days, like yesterday, my expectations are so unreasonable, and my efforts so naively earnest, that I find myself feeling frustrated, judging myself for being unable to measure up to my goals — goals that, when I step back for a moment to get some perspective, aren’t just a little over the line, but wholly unrealistic.
It’s pretty clear that a certain amount of this came as predisposition from growing up working class. My mom has been on the go for as long as I can remember: gardening, baking, keeping the house I grew up in clean, and doing paid work outside the house. And I wasn’t the only inheritor of her high standards for herself: over the past 18 years, my sister has raised two amazing kids while working 40-60 hours a week and earning a second bachelor’s degree, a teaching credential, and a master’s degree in night school.
When I talk about my experiences with friends, many of them describe similar feelings. Until recently, I was working full-time at a mission-driven nonprofit organization, and this phenomenon seems pretty widespread in such organizations trying to do work that seems critical with resources that never quite match the need or the possibilities.
My unrealistic expectations have had a whole swarm of negative effects in my life: periodic exhaustion, perpetually feeling like I’m not reaching my potential, occasional inability to follow through on commitments to other people. Noticing this in my own life, I tried to place it in the larger context of the ups and downs of being human. When I put it together with similar experiences that my friends and family members have described, though, it feels more sinister and sadder. And it also points to another cause that’s larger that all of us.
A piece of that seemed to come into view this weekend. I’ve been moving in with my sweetie bit by bit, specifically trying not to expect to do a huge chunk all at once. And yet, in the midst of shuffling furniture between three homes the other day, I recognized I’d once again signed up for too much, in part because I was trying to do it all by myself.
I rail a lot these days against the atomized culture of the U.S. From where I sit, a few factors loom large in forcing wedges between us:

1. Architecture: instead of being able to walk places, in most of the U.S. we have to get into our own cars, cut off from even our neighbors as we drive from place to place.
2. Profits: Companies that make products make more money if we each buy our own, rather than sharing. So advertisements of all sorts push this as a value in ways that range from obvious to subtle. This is one reason I think that libraries are one of the most radical institutions in the U.S. today.
3. Fear: Politicians and big companies benefit from our fear, and we and our friends and families lose out. Politicians frame a situation or an issue as potentially harmful to you, propose legislation that ostensibly deals with this situation, and then connect the dots at re-election time: “I stood up to such-and-such to protect your family.” Companies can use similar tactics: “If you want to protect your family, you need to buy this security system.” While fear wins elections and sells products, though, it doesn’t make for a strong foundation for living together, especially in a heterogeneous society like the U.S. And it encourages any of us with unearned power — as white people, as men, as younger people, as wealthy people — to start identifying people without that power as fundamentally different from us, and to wall ourselves off from them.

I recently resumed a daily writing practice at a local cafe. Tall windows look out on the street on two sides, and the high ceilings give the place a spacious feeling that for whatever reason feels crucial to me in creative work. I’ve taken to sitting on one of the benches that stretch beneath a wall of windows, with the small table before me pushed back, my computer on my lap, and a view of the cafe before me.
Two days ago, the cafe was packed, but I scored the last table with a bench seat. A minute after I sat down, the bench began to vibrate. A minute later it began to shake more intensely. I didn’t even have to look up to discover the source: at the edge of my vision, my neighbor’s leg was hopping up and down. I surreptitiously glanced over: a white guy wearing headphones, also focused on a laptop screen.
Scraggly and a bit depressed looking, he had the air of a forty year old who decided to give up smoking and go back to school at the same time, and was dragging himself to the finish line of a first week that was exponentially more difficult that he’d expected. I was feeling centered, did my best to connect with my compassion, and chose to work on not letting his movements bother me. I continued writing, intermittently looking for ways to enjoy my shaking seat. Of course, I also entertained hacking his leg off with the cafe’s bagel slicer. And even simply tapping him on the shoulder and asking him to stop. The more I thought about it, that one actually made the most sense out of all the options. There were several other people sitting on the vibrating bench, and we all had reasons we hadn’t chosen to sit on something that had a slot for quarters. And besides, the leg cutting thing might have splattered blood on them.
A couple times I looked up, considering saying something. But his headphones prevented a quick “Hey, could you not do that?” And he never looked up from his computer. And then I decided to resolve it the easiest, cleanest way I knew how: I got up, moved to the chair on the opposite side of the table I was at, and resumed writing.
When I moved, he glanced up once or twice. Clearly he’d put two and two together — or perhaps, in the past one or two brave people had actually communicated with him directly about not wanting to feel like they were sitting on a washer during the spin cycle. That day, I found I had stronger powers of multitasking that I’d known before: while writing a thousand words that made a modicum of sense strung together, I also tracked the continued soap opera of his bouncing leg. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed his leg stopped bouncing for a minute. Then it started again. Then out of the other corner of my other eye, I noticed the young white woman who’d been sitting on the other side of me — and who was now subject to the full force of my other former seatmate’s vibrations — bouncing her leg. That got a quick glance from the guy. He stopped. Then she stopped. 150 words later, they were both bouncing again — and in sync. My head exploded.
Today, I returned to the cafe at an emptier time. The guy was sitting on the bench against the back wall, with no neighbors along the entire wall. And he was bouncing both legs.
When I walked in and saw him, a few things struck me all at once. One was that I’m expect to be coming to this cafe for a while — if for no other reason than that my former coworkers got me a gift certificate here when I left my job recently, and I still have a lot of free cups of tea coming. A lot of other people come here regularly at the same time of day, like me. And like the guy who shakes his leg. And I’m going to keep seeing them. And I’m going to keep seeing him. Sharing space with him. Maybe even sharing benches with him.
And this seems like a helpful metaphor for a larger question I’ve been working with: when a particularly challenging problem comes up, with no easy solutions in sight, do I leave, or do I step up to the work of engaging and growing and building with people I’m intertwined with — family, housemates, community — even, or especially, when that involves conflict?
Stepping into the cafe today, I recognized that the other day, in the midst of the leg bouncing, I could’ve tapped the guy on the shoulder, made eye contact and just gestured to his leg, or even waited for him to pull off his headphones and told him the bouncing was bothering me. Those would’ve both been active, rather than a passive, responses on my part. They would’ve clearly communicated that my issue was about a specific behavior, and not about him more generally. They would’ve reinforced feedback that he’s likely received many times before: that if stopping his leg from bouncing isn’t realistic, maybe sitting on a chair rather than on the shared bench would be more appropriate. And the next time I see him, all of those things together would let me feel like this is someone who I embrace as part of my life at this cafe, rather than someone I’ve found fault with, tried to push away, and now feel uncomfortable crossing paths with.
Today’s another day to take another step toward becoming the community member I want to be.

(The title comes from a performance that Margaret Cho took on the road in 2004 titled “I have chosen to stay and fight.” I didn’t see it (though I love Margaret!) but my understanding is that it was a call for people to fight against the Bush administration and all it stood for, rather than throwing up their hands.)

Media coverage of Roman Polanski’s recent arrest in Switzerland has traced an unusual arc. Almost immediately after word of his arrest made it into U.S. media outlets, quotes from Hollywood supporters of Polanski joined the indignant reactions from some European politicians (French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand was quoted by the New York Times as calling Polanski’s arrest “absolutely horrifying.”). The articles suggested a pretty uniform opinion among those interviewed that Polanski should be set free and the charges against him should be dismissed.
Having read a few basic details of the case last year in reviews for a documentary about Polanski and the case (“Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired”), I at first wondered if I was missing something about the case: it seemed hard to fathom that I was the only one who didn’t feel great about a man who raped a child avoiding accountability for his actions.
Then, little by little, reactions from people not working in media or entertainment began to percolate up where I could read them: in the comments section on big media websites, then in a couple NY Times blogs. Within a couple days, the tone of reporting (as indicated by scanning Google News hits) shifted, the common knowledge of “Everyone thinks the arrest is ridiculous” getting modified with, “Some people think he should be locked up and the key thrown away.”
The arguments that Polanski was “misunderstood,” that he’s paid enough for his crime, or that his art somehow mitigates his actions hold no water for me. At the same time, though, what the system of punishment in the U.S. metes out is generally a far cry from justice.
When I was younger, an older man who I respected tried to initiate sex in a way that left very little room for me to say no. I resisted and made him hear my voice, and he stopped, but the experience left me shaken and mistrustful of men for years. When I risked telling that traumatic story to friends, I discovered that his guy, a local celebrity, was well known for making intense advances on younger men, and had somehow gotten away with it for years. In the intervening decades, his behavior has gotten him bad press and criminal charges, and a couple years ago, he agreed to register as a sex offender in exchange for not receiving jail time. I’d never felt comfortable with sex offender registration before that, because I don’t believe in writing people off, in assuming that people can never do better than the worst thing they’ve ever done. In his case, though, I found myself glad that his history is now public knowledge, that there’s a means for it to follow him around. But that still feels like a hollow, kludgy solution: better than nothing, but barely.
When it comes to justice, I’m inspired by the work of organizations like San Francisco Women Against Rape, Generation Five, and Community United Against Violence. Rather than punitive approaches to stopping violence against women, children, and queer people, these groups, and many others like them, are organizing from visions of what a world without these types of trauma would look like, and then stepping up to the work of helping to create it. Rather than singling out people to demonize and punish — which arguably makes our communities less safe in the long run — CUAV, for instance, talks about creating “truly safe communities where everyone can thrive.”
A tall order? Yes.
Lots of questions we don’t yet understand how to answer? Definitely.
Possible? Absolutely. And it’ll take all of us to make it happen.
p.s.: I’ve donated to all three of the organizations listed above; I invite you to join me in giving a gift that’s significant to you to help move forward these visions of what justice can look like!