I think i’m going to apply to grad school. Berkeley. SIMS. Peter Lyman. For next year. Application due on Sunday. OMG.

I had lunch today with a rather interesting fellow… He runs an organization called “Students for Genital Integrity” at SFSU. Since i already knew a lot about Intersex Genital Mutilation and Female Genital Mutilation, we spent a lot of the time talking about the other area that they cover that i know very little about: the problems with circumsizing men (and the controversies around this topic). It was fascinating – he gave me an interesting history of the issue, it’s place in medical, social and religious texts and otherwise engaged me to think about something i hadn’t ever considered. SFIndyMedia.org has a nice little article on the topic.

I love how good places let me think… Today i’ve been trying to grapple with the overarching tendency to see the digital realm as a Panopticon. This troubles me because while the end results are awefully comparable, Bentham architected the Panopticon for a particular purpose. Conversely, the digital realm was not constructed with this purpose in mind; it has evolved. In its evolution, people are not cognizant of the observation and thus are not following the same type of obedience to authority noted by Bentham. Instead, people are developing their own prison under the false impression that they are building a castle (referring to the terrible movie “The Last Castle”). They think that they are providing information to help their lot, but instead they are building boxes that not only keep them in but compare them computationally to a societal norm and then treat them according to their distance from such. Anyhow, fresh thoughts… yummy thinking.. Yay for San Francisco!

After a bit of nuttyness trying to find a place (the dog bite didn’t help assure me), i found the most amazing people and the most amazing home… I will be living in the Castro in the living room of a place on the third floor on a hill overlooking the city with sun-facing rooms. I will be living with three rad queer girls (one of whom shares my birthday) in a gorgeous apartment with dimmers in every room, a living room with bookshelves built in, a dishwasher and a garden! Plus, there are three precious kitties (and two goldfish, one of whom is named Calculus). YAY!!! [Oh, and for fun, we all met at Fairy Butch‘s Hannukah Hoedown.] YAY!!!!!

Cunundrum. The vernacular approach to “Happy Thanksgiving” is “Celebrate life and love with family and friends”. Yet, Thanksgiving is a holiday based on destruction, death and imperialism. What does it mean to be a holiday? To celebrate these values? I hadn’t really remembered that Thanksgiving was approaching, because i never actually wish anyone a Happy Thanksgiving, partially outta frustration that i see that day as my birth day and therefore refuse to give it the violent inscription, since i need to own it for my own sanity… But then, at last night’s Ani concert, some punk ass screamed out “Happy Thanksgiving Ani” and Ani stopped singing and said “Imagine living in a country where our holidays celebrate life instead of death.” Of course, this made me smile, because i couldn’t agree more.

And now i’m faced with a situation. I need to tell 1000 people that we’re not going to be doing our normal weekly thang because of the holiday, but how do you politely and respectfully say what the vernacular means without implying the historical insensitivity?