Buuut I think she’s adorable and wonderful (who doesn’t, really) and I taped it the other day. Tara passed out after demanding (sweetly) that we put on Star Trek, so I was absently watching it and it just occurred to me that the whole Ellen phenomenon is so strange to me. I mean, here’s this big ol’ queermo with a massive straight girl following. MASSIVE.

And, it’s not that she gay and I don’t think straight folks would like her because of that. It’s this intense adoration she provokes, and it’s the fact that all those straight hotties in the audience (and on stage) dance all up on her! It’s all the soccer moms talking about how they’d “go gay” for her.

All those old white women living in the midwest who love her, they can’t all be liberals, it just can’t be. Do they make the connection in their heads? Does she help erase that image of mullet wearing, home depot going, braless lady lovers that flashes in their minds when they hear the word lesbian? I think she embodies such a rare kind of queer representation. She’s the closest we have to the harmless gay boyfriend who goes shopping with you.

I have this whole post waiting in my draft folders about queer representation in pop culture, and it’s implications personally and politically. But finding pictures of hot celebrity lesbian couples seemed to be so much more fun tonight.

Scene: Looking at some old pictures and stumbling over a photo of my parents house taken before they moved in (it’s right next to my Grandparents old house, so we see these a lot).

Me: Wow, I’d forgotten there was a huge flagpole in the back yard before we moved in. That flag sure did end up coming down awful fast…

Dad: Only after I turned it upside down.

Dried kale flakes.

Who are these people?! I think the people who write this shit must be total freaks. Kale flakes? I mean, I live in San Francisco and all but…thin just isn’t worth it.

5. BBQ Baked Beans
4. Ranch Corn Nuts
3. Garlic
2. French Fries

1. Peppered Beef Jerky…really, any kind of beef jerky.

Actually, I take back the garlic part. Garlic is super sexy. Just not first date sexy.

I’ve been watching some of the footage today from the protests at Berkeley and feeling nostalgic for sit ins, and at the same time acutely aware of how cheap higher education is here in California, at least compared to my state education. I worked for a year before college, because my parents didn’t want me to go and I had no idea how to (or money to finance the endeavor). Then I went to a shitty community college for two years, and transfered to the state university in Chicago because I didn’t think I could go anywhere else (though now I think that I could have). Hindsight and all that. Regardless, it turned out well. I can see God’s hand in it for sure, and a lot of blessings came out of the entire experience. I think that having to forge my own way through college, financially and otherwise changed me deeply (in a good way). I feel like perhaps students here are a little out of touch though, even my community college was over TRIPLE what it is here. My state university tuition was (I believe) around 15k a year. That’s 5k more than what UC will be AFTER the tuition increase.

I mean, I agree, higher education should be free or at the least vastly more accessible than it is now. Just sayin’ though…you know.

God only knows I’ve been to my share of protests in college. Actually, my first protest was right after the war started (I think) and I marched ELEVEN MILES with a Quaker peace organization, through the campus of Wheaton College, all the while carrying one half of a huge banner through high winds. I couldn’t raise my right arm past my shoulder for a week it hurt so bad after that. That protest was also when I heard Kathy Kelly speak and fell in love with her, and with social justice Christianity.

Owch, my arm!

Kathy Kelly...

Marching under the el tracks.

Another May 1st march.

I want to take my kids to protests.

Anti war a couple years later...with Honna I think.

Even I felt slightly melodramatic when the bags came out. Thus I opted for literature organization.

Last Chicago protest. By this time I'd found the real rabble rousers, the reverends...best marching buddies evah.

Now the only protests I’ve been to in the past few years are Prop 8 ones, and those even felt really hollow to me. Maybe my job has really made me pissy with activists too. I think that, though I love and deeply admire activists, there is a huge under-informed and lazy portion of them. When I was walking through the Castro, down Market and through so much wealth, I can’t help but wonder when the last time some of these wealthy white gay men gave money (or even more so, time) to any organization other than the HRC (sell outs) or something…I wish some of them would come to school with me. Plus, the work for gay marriage that needed to be done in San Francisco was sure as hell not found walking down Market. At my most hopeless I felt like it was a huge (and ultimately futile) exercise in progressives mutual masturbation. I kind of feel like this a lot in San Francisco sometimes. But then, I love it just as much as the next Mission resident.

Ahh...my parents got married here! I'm sure they never imagined that their daughter, who was slightly more than a twinkle in their eye upon their wedding day, would one day be standing outside this building...

First pride...

It’s really an odd town.