the other day on thanksgiving, i rang up my brother dave’s house to talk to the family gathered there. after chit-chatting with all and sundry, my brother raul’s girlfriend, passed the phone on to dave’s long-term-partner-now-new-wife. as she handed over the phone, the girlfriend called out, “hey Mrs. B___! jen’s on the phone!”

as she did so, it suddenly struck me: after being one of only two Ms. B___s in my family tree for years (the other being the one who gave birth to me), another woman now shares my surname.

you see, my grandfather’s surname was B____. he had sisters who all changed their surname upon marriage. dad’s surname is B____. my dad has five sisters, who all changed their surname upon marriage. my two sisters have both changed their surnames. my mother is Mrs. B___ by marriage, and although my parents divorced years ago, she kept her married surname.

so for several years now, i have been the lone female B___ who is descended from this particular line of the family tree… stuck way out of the very furthest twig of the limb. and in spite of childhood teasing, misspellings and mispronunciations far too numerous to count, and marrying twice… i’ve never had any inclination to change it. i like to joke that that’s out of sheer laziness, but the truth is that i’ve always been very attached to my surname.

my surname is pretty unique, even in cities chock full of multi-cultural populations. in fact, for many years, it was thought that outside of the cluster of B____ relatives in the new york/new jersey area, there was another cluster of distant cousins somewhere in california – and that was it. these days an internet search brings up a small smattering of people, who are, i’m sure, in some way related to me by historical lineage – i can see the familiar high slavic cheekbones and noses staring back at me with such familiarity in people’s facebook profile pictures, including those with alternate married surnames. my particular surname goes back to a tiny island called unije, off the coast of croatia, where my grandfather, Matthew B____, emigrated from when he was barely a teenager. he journeyed alone by boat (his father Martin having emigrated to parts unknown in the states several years earlier), landed at ellis island, as in the classic american immigration narrative. there’s a famous family story that a dockworker at the port, who happened to know Martin B___, happened by chance to recognise my grandfather Matthew B___’s surname from the hundreds of names on the ship’s records, and managed to put him back in touch with his father who was also working the docks. in a city of millions, what were the chances?

and so it was another set of coincidences that lead me, in one of my periodic google searches, to find a book called “The History and Families of Unije”, a small genealogical book put together as a personal project by an author tracing his own family history. unije’s modern history has been checkered by the forces of war – it has been a various points part of austria, italy, the former yugoslavia, and now croatia. in 2005, a set of parish records were uncovered which dated back to the 18th century. suddenly, thanks to this book, i now can look back and trace the origins of my B___ surname to 1753. i can see pictures of the island where my grandfather lived as a boy. i can see the olive mills and the sardine factories. this amazes me to no end.

i’m not a history buff, and i’m not a genealogist. but something about this commonality with people whose blood lives on in my veins pulls deep at the core of me. it feels essential to who i am. i am the granddaughter of an immigrant, i am the great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of Martin B___, who was one of about 140 inhabitants of the tiny island of unije in the early 1700s. even before i knew this, i felt it.

genetic links are strong stuff. in recent years, my brother and sister who were adopted as infants, have both been in contact with their biological birth mothers. i have seen them standing next to each other, their mannerisms, facial features and smiles mirroring each other. in spite of the years of separation, and differing surnames, they are linked at the cellular level. as my brother dave married the new Mrs. B___, i watched his birth mother and biological sister look on with smiles that were perfect images of the one beaming across his face at his new bride.

this is the truth of why i have kept my surname. it is, for me, a way of representing those links to people whose dna from hundreds of years ago, still circulates through me, and whose immigrant story has made my life possible. i am a B___ because my grandfather and great-grandfather left their stone houses and olive mills and sardine factories to travel across an ocean to the docks of lower manhattan.

but it also represents the links with those to whom i am tied not by the genetic bonds of blood, but by bonds of choice and love. my siblings and i are not of the same genetic descent, we don’t look alike or act alike… but we are family just as true as if we were born that way, and our shared surname reflected that. my new sister-in-law is of greek heritage – her parents too, emigrated here, and are also part of the famed american melting pot. she shares none of the B___ dna, but in adopting her into our crazy family, she is just as surely “one of us” now.

i am Jen B___. the B___ represents my family – the old and the new of it, the blood, bonds, marriages, divorces, adoptions, journeys, oceans, history, stories, deaths, olive mills, birth mothers, misspellings and cheekbones of it all. for me, it represents all of who i am, past and present.

it is my family, it is my identity, it is quintessentially *me*. i wouldn’t change it for the world.

it’s cool to love your family – feist

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another thanksgiving here in the uk.

i will be working on the day, but hosting a traditional turkey dinner on the saturday – a motley dinner party of three americans, three south africans, two brits, and one canadian. they are friends and family both.

between the the two years i lived in Canada, and the nearly seven years i’ve been here, i’m almost getting used to celebrating on a completely different day. scary.

but i am grateful. this past year my family has welcomed a new nephew, a new sister-in-law, and very soon, another new niece/nephew. so much love.

happy thanksgiving to one and all – i hope you have as much to be grateful for as i do.

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

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last night, my friend amity and i attended a reclaim the night march, as i’ve done off and on since university. it’s a way for women to demonstrably protest the culture of sexual violence which makes the streets unsafe for women.

so we’re marching along in the rain through the centre of london streets. several hundred women, surrounded by dozens of police escorts, chanting, holding placards, drawing the attention of tourists and onlookers. there are guys who feel the need to boo or mock us – which is par for the course, really. some mentally unstable guy spat. whatever.

and then, out of nowhere, in the middle of leicester square, some guy cuts through the crowd, walks up to my friend amity next to me, gropes her breasts, and slips away into the crowd. in the middle of hundreds of women, in the middle of dozens of police.

after the initial shock wore off, i found myself getting really emotional.

it was a massive fuck you. more so than if he’d made some snarky remark (like some men did), more so than if he’d booed (like some men did), more so than if he’d laughed (like some men did).

it was a bold statement: you think you’re safe, you think you can fight back, you think you can reclaim the night… well i’m going to prove to you that i can do whatever i want to you, whenever i feel like it.

you are never safe.

it really shook me. i nearly abandoned the march at that point. after all, if a guy can do that anytime he wants, just because he feels he’s entitled to – then what the fuck is the point?

but as i continued clomping along in my wet boots and bedraggled hair, my sodden sign wavering, my voice having escaped me…

i began to get angry. i mean white hot fury. that “fuck you” was *supposed* to completely dispirit us, make us feel vulnerable.

i will not let that happen to me. not ever. and certainly not because some fucking arsehole managed to momentarily catch me off guard.

fuck you, motherfucker. if you meant to scare us, you failed.

still – if there was ever any doubt that we still need to reclaim the night, that was a perfect example of exactly why it’s so important. why i will continue to participate even when there’s rain, or in-fighting amongst feminist groups, etc.

because until that culture of sexual entitlement changes, nothing will change. until every single person is free from sexual assault, none of us is.

until the streets are free of those who would mock us, or undermine our safety, i’ll keep marching.

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i’ve been thinking a lot about pornography lately. it’s a topic i find hard to grapple with because it’s something that i’ve always had a difficult time reconciling with my particular personal brand of feminism. my brand of feminism, i guess if i had to describe it, is based in a largely pragmatic view of the world at large, but with my efforts funnelled towards those causes i think can have the greatest impact. in my personal brand of feminism, i don’t like to spend a lot of time railing against everything (though one might not guess that from some of my posts here!), but there are key changes needed which i believe are fundamental to the advancement of women’s equality. i believe that, like all fights for rights, the war is a long one, and change is slow, so you have to pick and choose your battles, and wisely consider where best to invest your energies.

pornography is a thorny thing for feminism in general. there are credible arguments from feminists that porn is empowering for women. there are also credible arguments from feminists that porn is truly harmful for women. which leaves me (and others) feeling somewhat stranded between a rock and a hard place.

as someone who has viewed and enjoyed pornography before, i have a hard time condemning porn outright. i’m not a prude, and i don’t have any particular objection to men or women taking pleasure in watching sexual acts, as part of a wide continuum of sexual expression. additionally, i am not an idiot – pornography is nothing new. from the early days of human representational art, sex has been depicted visually in various forms from religious to erotic. film and photographic porn is, in some ways, simply an extension of this.

in other words, porn is not, in and of itself, bad.

the difficulty for me arises from the fact that modern pornography is created, marketed and sold within a particular context – a context from which the end product cannot be extricated or innoculated. a context which is problematic in many ways.

the first and most obvious difficulty is that women involved in porn usually arrive at a place where they are getting their kit off for money because there are not exactly a plethora of other options available to them. in a nutshell, no little girl thinks “i want to be a porn actress when i grow up” – they just don’t. that’s not to imply that women in the porn industry don’t have free will – because many do participate willingly. but selling one’s body as a means to earn a living is not usually someone’s preferred choice of career. for many women, their socio-economic status still restricts the opportunities for earning a living wage. so pornography is an industry which makes its profits off of women who, via various paths, have come to see their bodies as a commodity which they sell, because at a practical level, it made the most financial sense out of the choices available to them at the time. and no matter how you dress it up with hugh hefner’s smoking jacket or cute little bunny ears, that amounts to economic exploitation. exploitation which there is considerable financial incentive to continue to propagate.

which leads us to problem number two: the reason women come to view their bodies as a saleable commodity is because our society is saturated with messages that reinforce that belief. every advertisment which pairs an image of a sexy woman with either a service being sold, or a glossy inanimate object we’re supposed to want to buy, reifies the underlying subtext that women are something you can either obtain or use for money. much like pavlov’s original experiment paired salivation to a bell, this is precisely what happens in the media and advertising world. women’s images are used to sell burgers, cars, lightbulbs. the overwhelming objectification and fetishisation of women’s sexuality (i.e. “pornification”) as part of our mainstream societal wallpaper is not a new phenomenon, and one i’ve written about before here, so i won’t belabour the point. it is, however, that same social context, where everything and everyone has a invisible pricetag, that makes pornography a viable option for women in the first place.

the third big contextual problem with pornography is that is exists in a society which still tolerates (and in some cases condones) sexual violence against women. this ties in with the pervasive mainstream objectification, because a side effect of the women-as-sexualised-objects culture is that it encourages the women-as-sexualised-objects-for-the-enjoyment-of-men culture. men who are taight to view women as objects lack empathy for them as humans – a detachment which can be dangerous. it creates the potential for a sense of sexual entitlement amongst men who have a propensity for violence. historically, women’s bodies have long been objects for the sexual gratification of men to use as they pleased – something which was long embedded in legal and societal mores in western countries. but even in westernised countries where modern-era women’s rights have been been rooting for 50 years, one in four women will still be victims of gender based violence in their lifetime. set against that horrifying backdrop, the pornography industry, whose model and medium is still overwhelmingly male-dominated-women-subjugated, is, at a minimum, not helpful.

so where does that leave me? as someone who staunchly supports a woman’s right to control her own body as a basic human entitlement, i end up conflicted. on the one hand, i want women to feel free to express themselves sexually, and i would never presume to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t do with their body (including monetising it) – whether i agree or not. i want women to be fully empowered sexual beings. yet on the other hand, we have a society which continues to devalue women’s bodies as something to be used and abused. where women feel selling their body is the best of the bad choices. where women are still not free from sexual violence.

in an ideal world, i could support porn… but we don’t live in an ideal world. yet the pragmatist in me knows that pornography is not going anywhere any time soon. i don’t want to demonise erotica as anti-woman, and i don’t want to waste my time trying to eradicate something that will never go away. so i supposed that the best i can do in the meantime is continue to support changing the context. to continue to advocate for women’s education and employment opportunities which give them choices. to fight against the objectification and stereotypes of women which are so prevalent. to work to end sexual violence and hold perpetrators accountable.

and that suits my particular brand of feminism to a tee.

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i’m at that point where i’ve got about 6 or 7 half drafts sitting in the queue – the lonely stepchildren waiting for their deserved attention. the problem being that none of them seem quite worthy – they’re only old thoughts, rehashed, retreads. nothing novel, no diamonds in the rough. i give them a halfhearted pass every once in a while, but they’re just a handful of unpolished pebbles.

things in my life are starting to feel a bit like that as well. nothing new or exciting. the holidays are rolling around again in spite of my protest, and i have a feeble commitment to *do something* about them that resembles celebration and cheer. and i do mean it. sorta.

it’s this horrible sense of blah that gets me every time. give me emotional ups and downs and work and stress and drama and love and despair… but if you want to kill me properly, boring will do the trick. what other people embrace as calm and contentment is pure torture for me. it all makes me feel a bit deadened, numb. which is a problem of my personality, i freely admit (and given a big enough vacuum, will manufacture something myself) – but i just can’t help it. there’s time to be boring when you’re dead – that’s my motto.

but writing about boredom is boring. so i wait. i’m waiting for that next challenge or new glittering thing. waiting for the holidays. waiting for inspiration. waiting for boredom and winter and blahs to end.

i hope i’m not waiting too long.

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i’ve held off on commenting on the stupak-pitts amendment to the healthcare bill which was passed by the u.s. house of representatives this week in part because i’ve found it difficult to put my feelings into words, and in part because i feel others have said it sooo much better than i.

(if you haven’t been paying particular attention to the political machinations around this issue in the states, here’s a quick recap:right before this version of the healthcare bill was to be voted on, some right-to-life republicans and democrats [oooh, i accidentally just typed demoncrats - freudian slip?] attached a last-minute amendment which forbids any health care plan, private or public, from offering abortion services if they wish to accept even one federally subsidised customer. since the overwhelming majority of new customers who will be purchasing plans are the soon-to-be-subsidised poor who currently cannot afford health care, this effectively forces providers to choose between any new business, or covering abortions, *and* prevents any poor people from accessing abortion services as part of their mainstream reproductive health coverage.)

the phrase “thrown under the bus” has been tossed around a lot, and that encompasses some of the sentiment that i feel. women were definitely run over here in the name of expediency and pragamatism – those voices that continue to try to convince us that the “compromise” was necessary to get any kind of bill passed.

but what comes closer is this: pure unadulterated ire. how dare you. how very fucking dare you. this was no compromise – a compromise is when you give away some of what you want in order to get more of what you want. the failure here is the lack of recognition that abortion rights do not fall into the “want” category. *rights* are not *wants*. they’re not pie-in-the-sky wishes – they are full-fledged-constitutionally-enshrined-and-protected rights. they are not, therefore, something which can be put into the pot as ante. they are not political capital to be traded away like marbles.

they are womens’ *rights*, damnit, and they are mine and hers and hers, and you can’t just take them away when it suits you. but when only 76 of the 435 representatives are women, i suppose it’s easy for the rest of them to forget.

abortion is the single most common surgical procedure carried out – the idea that health plans not only should not, but *must not* cover it because 64 democrats (62 of whom were men) said so is completely out of touch with reality. are these same providers banned from covering vasectomies because of the religious views of a few? i don’t even need to check to know that they’re not.

the most reprehensible bit is that it is the most vulnerable women that are subjugated to the moralistic dictates of others – poor women who cannot afford their own private-pay healthcare, who likely then cannot afford their own private-pay abortion… yet are somehow supposed to be able to afford to raise a child? the courts have said that a woman’s right to privacy entitles her to primacy over her reproduction. but 64 democrats think as long as *they* hold the purse strings, that right is superceded by their own religious beliefs, fuckyouverymuch. in other words, if you’re dependent on the government for help with healthcare, then we will tell you what their god says you can and cannot do with your uterus.

it’s hostile paternalism of the very worst kind – the kind where games are played with people’s legal rights and doctors are bent to the political will of a few, because a group of 64 representatives think they above all others, know what’s best for women living in america. dangling a woman’s right to control her own body like a playtoy on a string, just out of reach… unless you have the cash to buy an indulgence. rich women don’t have to worry about anyone else’s god but their own.

so really, “thrown under the bus” isn’t the half of it. poor women have been put back under the jackboot of the morality police, and stripped bare of their most basic civil right – the right to control over their body. i’m furious at the newest reminder that my rights and hers and hers and hers, all hang in the balance of just a few elected individuals. i’m angry that once again i’m forced to sit here and stew while hoping that someone else is brave enough to stand up for me and her and her and her. it’s a special kind of torture to have to watch your autonomy twist in the breeze. and that’s not sacrificing women voters for the sake of practicality or compromise – that’s creating a women’s-only fucking abu ghraib.

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i was reading on facebook today about my cousin applying to medical school. and for a split second, i had that stomach-plunging feeling of guilt tinged with shame. only for a split second, but it happened nonetheless. so i shook my head to banish the negative thoughts before they could take root, clicked off the page, and went on with the rest of my evening.

it’s a reflexive reaction, this guilt – the guilt of someone who was always labeled as “gifted”, who was always told how talented and intelligent she was, who was always at the top of the class without even trying… and who has spent the past 20 years doing sweet fuck all.

i remember the first time i was singled out in some way – in the first grade, my teacher took those three of us who could already read and write aside, and gave us the primers for the second grade to begin on. a few years later, i was given an iq test. by the time i got to fourth grade, i was being taken out of class once a week and bussed to an “enrichment programme” to play with computers and work on logic puzzles. by 6th grade the advanced kids were segregated into different classes altogether. by high school, we were being encouraged to take calculus and physics to beef up our scores for a demanding university application. even within in those segregated classes, i was always in the top ten with ease. i applied to two very selective universities, and got into both.

don’t get me wrong – this guilt, this pressure to achieve “great things” has always been completely internally generated. no one ever told me i had to achieve – but with an educational upbringing like that, somewhere the seed that there were *expectations* was planted. to whom much is given, much is expected, after all. so i’ve always had the idea that i was supposed to be a neurosurgeon or human rights lawyer or research scientist – some noble profession that involved academic rigours and long years of selfless sacrifice hunched over in a lab or reading briefs late into the night, but making a notable contribution to the greater good. needless to say, i’ve clearly never pursued those paths. alternatively, i also saw myself perhaps becoming a missionary-type, dedicating my life to helping the poor in underdeveloped countries, leading some important ngo, speaking 4 lanugages and wearing lots of flowing linen and silver jewelery.

yeah, that never quite happened either.

instead, i’ve turned into a middle manager. i live, by all accounts, an ordinary life. i do some interesting things sometimes. i do some boring things a lot of the time. i’m not terribly ambitious about my current career. some of what i do matters to some people – but if i were to die tomorrow, the whole of humanity would not be diminished by my unfinished work. and that’s okay.

i am, by and large, happy. i do things i’ve always wanted to do. my parents and family are proud of me. my friends think i am a good person. it’s all i would ever expect or want for anyone else i know.

yet there are these flashes of doubt. this nagging idea that i have squandered my gifts. every once in a while that internal pressure rises up into my chest and makes me feel guilty for being happy at being ordinary. so when i read about my cousin who is doing research into hiv and preparing for medical school, i can’t help but wonder if i shouldn’t be doing something more than being content with being ordinary.

until i click off the page, pour a glass of wine, settle into the couch with my husband and cat. and spend a few moments in revelling in just how extraordinary being ordinary can be.

ordinary – the alternate routes

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I’ve been wasting my days, Good and reckless and true, I have danced in the dark at the edge of the water, Swinging my hips at the black and the blue, When you die will you be surrounded by friends? Will they pray for a heaven out loud, a hope that somehow they will see you again? And at the end of the day, knowing not what it means, Will you stand in the ashes, building a flame for the rest of your dreams? Would you love, could you love to be ordinary? I know its hard but I can’t see you trying, Would you love, could you love to be ordinary? ‘Cause I can’t see you trying now

And I see strangers at war, I see strangers at peace, Still I hang my head in confusion, It’s always been a choice that’s been harder for me, And at the end of the day, knowing not what it means, Will you stand in the ashes, building a flame for the rest of your dreams? Would you love, could you love to be ordinary? I know it’s hard but I can’t see you trying, Would you love, could you love to be ordinary? No I can’t see you trying now

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kimberly munley is the cop who shot the suspect in the recent Fort Hood tragedy. and instead of just praising her for being a brave *cop* and doing her job in a crisis, under pressure (as she was trained for countless hours to do), the media keep using gag-worthy phrases like “tough cookie”.

really? “cookie”? how sexist can you get?!! and by focusing on her sex as if it’s somehow extraordinary that a woman should be brave, they completely undermine the heroic achievement of a lifetime. in hamhandedly trying to honour her, they completely demean her.

because when you focus on the fact that she’s female (yes, cnn, i’m pointing at you), the implication is that even in 2009, people are still surprised that women (who’ve had the exact same training as any man in that job) could enter a dangerous situation with an armed suspect, and respond exactly as she’s been drilled to: shoot to kill.

the crazed episode itself is obviously newsworthy. the fact that she is a woman is not. can you imagine an article about a man using the word “cookie”? or emphasising his “toughness”? or calling him “aggressive”? no. in fact, what they say when these kinds of articles are written about men are:

they were just “doing their job”.

yet our stereotypes about the “weak woman” are so thoroughly embedded in our social consciousness that we often don’t even realise it. i’m absolutely sure that those people who are calling her a “tough woman” don’t realise that by doing so, they’re actually perpetuating the idea that women aren’t *expected* to brave, competent, steel-nerved cops. that even when they are doing the same risky job as a man, the public don’t expect them to do the *really* risky stuff.

we see it repeated nearly daily in the media – the stories about the women soldiers, and the handwringing over the children they leave behind (as if the fathers are expendable) when they end up killed or hostage. the particular emphasis on “women and children” whenever casualties are counted -as if women and children are somehow equivalent in their innocence and helplessness, but men are supposed to die. over and over, the reification of the subtle but persistent idea that women are the “gentler” sex, that women should be protected first and foremost because they are less able to protect themselves, that women should be shielded from the brutal, nasty, dirty, risky stuff of living.

and now for something that may, at first glance, seem like a complete tangent: this is part-and-parcel of the reason i cannot stand to have a door held for me, or to have people pay for me, or to have people allow me to go first in the queue. it’s all a subtle and pervasive way of reminding me (whether consciously, intentionally, or not), that society still sees me as a less able person than a man. it’s a hard leap for many men to understand – they have often been indoctrinate to show “manners”. they don’t understand how i can see being “chivalrous” as incredibly insulting.

to which i’d say, if you truly respect me, you’d see me as your full equal, and not needing any deference or assistance *simply because i’m a woman*.

so every time a newspaper calls someone a “tough woman”, it’s a reminder that that is somehow surprising or exceptional. and every time you offer to pay for me, it’s a reminder that i’m not expected to have as much money. every time you hold a door for me, it’s a reminder that i’m expected to be weaker. in short, every time you offer me help or protection i don’t need, you remind me of the stereotypes that pervade our entire culture, and which i have to battle against every day.

and every time a woman cop or solidier is hailed as being a “tough cookie”, it’s a reminder that in spite of doing the same job as any man, in spite of being a trained, skilled, focused professional who gets paid to put her life on the line…

underneath it all, she’s still just seen as a “cookie”.

eta: even the ny times falls into the habit: would they ever describe a man as a “ball of fire”? or contrast his ” fierce love of hunting, surfing and other outdoor sports” with tending his garden and playing with his daughter? ugh.

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and in a move which will live on in ignominy, yesterday maine became the second state to rip full marraige rights out of the hands of gays and lesbians.

i don’t often agree with andrew sullivan, but he manages to nail precisely why this defeat hurts so much, why it’s so important. and why love *will* prevail in the end.

The truth about civil marriage – why it is the essential criterion for gay equality – is that it alone explodes this core marginalization and invisibility of gay people. It alone can reach those gay kids who need to know they have a future as a dignified human being with a family. It alone tells society that gay people are equal in their loves and in their hearts and in their families – not just useful in a society with a need for talented or able individuals whose private lives remain perforce sequestered from view.

This is why it remains the prize. And why our eyes must remain fixed upon it. In my view, the desperate nature of the current tactics against us, the blatant use of fear around children (which both worries parents and also stigmatizes gay people in one, deft swoop) are signs that what we are demanding truly, truly matters.

…

But guess what? Civil marriage is already here. It exists in several states already, it exists in the consciousness of an entire generation. It exists abroad in America’s closest neighbor and in America’s closest allies. The speed of the movement towards it is unprecedented in modern civil rights movements, even as it may seem crushingly slow to those who live under discrimination’s weight. These defeats – even narrow defeats as in California and Maine – should not discourage us. The desperation and fanaticism of our opponents proves they know that this is the crucial battleground. And they’re right.

But civil rights victories, the final and enduring ones, are always built on the foundations of defeats. Sometimes, the defeat of a minority’s sincere aspiration to equality helps reveal the injustice of the discrimination and the cruelty of the marginalization. Sometimes, it helps show just how poorly treated we are, and galvanizes a community to fight back more fiercely as we saw in that amazing march on DC last month. That has certainly been true of previous civil rights movements. It is just as true of ours.

So congrats, Maine Equality. You did a fine job. Congrats, HRC. You helped. No congrats to Obama who is treating this civil rights movement the way Kennedy first treated his. But we don’t need Obama.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. And we will win in due course, with a good spirit and keen arguments, and with passion and conviction in our hearts. We will win.

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remember that episode of “friends” where monica’s credit card is stolen by a bon vivant, and used for all sorts of fun things?

[Monica is examining her bill. Rachel emerges from her room]

Rachel: Oh, Monica. You are not still going over that thing.

Monica: This woman’s living my life.

Rachel: What?

Monica: She’s living my life, and she’s doing it better than me! Look at this, look. She buys tickets for plays that I wanna see. She, she buys clothes from stores that I’m intimidated by the sales people. She spent three hundred dollars on art supplies.

Rachel: You’re not an artist.

Monica: Yeah, well I might be if I had the supplies! I mean, I could do all this stuff. Only I don’t.

Rachel: Oh, Monica, c’mon, you do cool things.

Monica: Oh really? Okay, let’s compare, shall we.

Rachel: [Yawning] Oh, it’s so late for ‘Shall we’…

Monica: Do I go horseback riding in the park? Do I take classes at the New School?

Rachel: [Yawning] Nooo…

Monica: This is so unfair! She’s got everything I want, and she doesn’t have my mother.

yeah. so what happens when someone clones my debit card? they spend £900 on purchases at a garden centre and driving lessons.

what does that say about my life?

been caught stealing – jane’s addiction

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the other day i was inspired to start clearing out my emails, i’m not sure why. rather predictably, somewhere along the way i fell into the rabbit hole of actually reading them, rather than deleting them. and in the course of that journey down memory lane, i found myself re-reading early emails between jonno and myself.

oh! those early emails! they so perfectly reflect that time of falling in love – falling, tumbling, helplessly, eagerly. the intense desire to both know and reveal everything, the apetite for the most personal details, the willing offering of scars and trust. the awkwardness of trying to figure out where all the pieces fit together, the coupling of couplehood, negotiating boundaries in a tangle of limbs and emotions. it makes my heart hurt to read them, they’re so raw, so needy, so vulnerable, so tentative, all at once. shyly reaching out a hand, the electricity when warm fingers meet and wrap firmly around your own. that freshness of desire that it always feels like you must be the *very first people* to ever discover. that this love is like no other love which has ever been, obliterating all past hurts, blocking out the past like it never was.

it all fades, of course. the rhythms and grooves become comfortably worn. as partners, you map out the terrain of smooth highways, rocky detours and dangerous relationship landmines to be traversed. the small triangle of freckles on their shoulder becomes as familiar to you as your own skin, habits and patterns fitting neatly into the shared life you construct together. the experiences melding together to become something thick and rich and deep with time. and you wouldn’t trade it for anything, really you wouldn’t.

but oh! those early emails! preserving in clumsy words the overwhelming excitement and nervousness of discovering a soul which complements yours so well. i thank god for those emails that, in their own fumbling, bumbling way, stand as record of a heady time we can never recapture, but which i can revisit with just a trip through my inbox.

you and i – wilco

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