10.27.06
Six-word story
Six-word stories? Here is mine:
(It is a highly personal story.)
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10.08.06
physical fitness
Hmmm, I never remembered to post this. Pretend that it was dated in March of this year.
Given that my beloved husband’s favorite father died of a heart attach at 58, I would feel more comfortable if he lost a bit of weight. Thus when we were deciding where to live at UBC, I lobbied for a dorm near the nude beach. I thought that nublie naked beauties luring him up and down the 367 stairs three times per day might improve his longevity and hence my chances for companionship into a ripe old age.
Unfortunately, the prospect of nublie naked beauties didn’t appeal enough to him to influence his decision, so we went to the farther dorm. While I like the dorm we chose, I was a bit disappointed that he wouldn’t be going up and down 367 steps three times per day.
Well, my husband did take up jogging. He runs about three times a week, frequently with a subset of the 25 year-old women at our dorm.
Earlier this week, when it was a bit below freezing, nobody else showed up at 7:30 to run with him, so he decided to take a slightly different run.
When he returned, he announced that a morning at 7:30 AM, in March, when the temperature was below freezing, was not actually the best time to go up and down the 367 steps in order to catch a glimpse of beautiful naked college students.
Imagine.
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05.18.06
not talking
On Monday and Tuesday, my husband, my mother, and I drove from Bellingham, WA to Oakland, CA. Mom was going down for a party and was interested in more drivers; Jim and I were interested in cargo space in her minivan, as we are moving to California for the summer. (I have a summer job at Google that, incidentally, I am hugely excited about.)
It was interesting how we didn’t talk much. Partly we were tired. Mom wasn’t feeling well. I was tired from final project frenzy, packing our stuff, and then helping Mom pack the next day. Jim was tired from packing and packing.
Partly it was hard to hold a conversation. The fan and/or air conditioner was blasting most of the way — it was quite a warm day. Add in that Mom is hard of hearing, and three-way conversations were tough.
And with Jim and I, we just didn’t have much to talk about. We’ve been together for ten years, had just spent three days near each other practically 24 hrs/day, and there are only so many observations one can make about how the terrain changes from forest to savannah to scruff while going from British Columbia through Oregon to California.
I used to worry about running out of things to say to Jim, but it was okay not talking. It wasn’t that we were avoiding talking to each other — we weren’t mad at each other. We weren’t frustrated at trying to find common ground or common interest. Rather, we are so much a part of each other’s lives, so intimately tangled that there just aren’t that many things that the other doesn’t already know about.
About the only thing we did talk about at length was Webfoot Maps. Because I’m going to Google this summer, I can’t work on my maps. Google owns my brain this summer.
I’m fine with trading working on my maps for working at Google. However, I get approached once or twice a month by people who want me to make a Google Maps mashup for them. Given that my husband is pretty unscheduled so far this summer, it seems like it would be useful if I could do a mind-meld with him so that he can help these people with their maps.
Thus I’ll be working at Google and Jim will be doing Google mashups. Avoiding the conflict-of-interest will be annoying.
I am not worried that we’ll be able to do it, however. This is the husband that I made sign an NDA before I would tell him what I did at Interval Research, after all. Two weeks after the Google Calendar showed up in my Google Trusted Tester account, I finally mentioned to Jim, “it’s too bad that you’re not in the Google Trusted Tester program, because there’s something that I’ve been testing for two weeks that I think you’d really like.” He responded, “I am in the Google Trusted Tester program. You mean you’ve been testing GCal too?
So I’m sure we can keep a wall between our work, it’ll just mean we’ll have to find other things to talk about.
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02.01.06
Optimism vs. pessimism
Yesterday, I whined about how my space keeps shrinking. In reality, shrinking the amount of space that I live in isn’t inherently bad. In fact, I sort of liked moving in to the 412 square feet at Green College.
The thing that really disturbs me is clutter — having too much stuff for the space. My beloved husband (who I love dearly!) and I have different attitudes towards stuff. He’s an optimist; I’m a pessimist.
When I see a newspaper article that might be interesting but that I don’t have time to deal with right now, I figure that there will never come a day in the future when I will have the liberty to deal with it, and it probably isn’t that interesting.
Not only that, I am sure that the next time I move, I will have to carry every box by hand myself up seventeen flights of stairs on the hottest day of the year in a place with flocks of angry mosquitoes accompanying me. (And the mosquitoes probably have malaria, to boot.)
That article would be just one more thing to move, so I throw it out.
My beloved husband (who I love dearly!) is an optimist. In my mental model of the universe, he’s sure that some day he will be languidly reposing by the pool, with nary a care in the world except how to best entertain himself. He’s certain that that article, that particular article, will be absolutely riveting, funny, and so profound that it will change his life.
Imagining how much pleasure the article will bring him on that far-off day, he cannot bear to throw the article away today.
(I’m not completely sure how his life could be any improved from his vision of lying languidly by the pool, but in my mental model, it’s his fantasy, and so doesn’t need to make sense to me in my mental model.)
And because my beloved husband (who I love dearly!) does so many nice things for me on such a regular basis, I don’t just throw out all the stupid newspaper article when he isn’t looking, even though
- he won’t ever lounge by the pool for so long that he’ll run out of reading material
- even if he did, he wouldn’t remember that this newspaper article ever existed
- and even if he did, the article is boring enough that he would be disappointed by it
Because, you see, I am enough of a pessimist to believe that he would someday find out that I’d been throwing out his newspaper articles, and divorce me in a fit of rage.
Sigh. Jim wins.
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01.31.06
real estateless
At the time when I met my beloved husband, I was living in a big old house in San Jose. It had 1700 square feet upstairs, and a finished basement that brought the total up to 3200 square feet. There were four or five people living there, but still, it was a big house.
When I married Jim, I moved into his 1100 square foot condo (that he had gotten used to living in by himself).
When we moved up to UBC, we moved into a room at Green College that is 412 square feet.
When we went to Guatemala, we stayed in what was essentially a short-term boarding house, where our room and attached bathroom gave us about 113 square feet.
When we went skiing last weekend at Whistler, we stayed at a hostel with a bunch of of Green College folks. We managed to get a private room (with bathroom down two stories) that was only about 70 square feet.
When I commented on this to Jim, he said that I at least knew that 36 square feet was the limit because he’s six feet tall. I laughed and pointed out that he’s only six feet tall in one dimension.
Most people, if their spouse started visiting casket shops, would start worrying that their spouse was thinking of murdering them. Me, I’d worry that he was shopping for a new home.
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06.12.04
My beloved husband graduated!
Seventeen years ago, my beloved husband dropped out of his masters’ in computer science program to go to Japan. While he took a few classes here and there afterwards, he was still short four courses.
This how he came to take two classes each during the past two quarters. This was in addition to working full-time, serving on the boards of Marriage Equality California and EQCA, singing with the San Francisco Symphony chorus, and taking part in numerous marriage rights-related activities. This is a lot. I’m amazed that anybody could do it.
I assume that I helped. It’s hard for me to quantify exactly what I did that was different, since he still did almost his fair share of the household chores (instead of more than his fair share like before). Partly I just didn’t ask much of him. For example, I didn’t ask for any help in prepping the front door for painting. Regardless, I felt really busy with him in school, and certainly I missed having as much of his attention and affection.
Thus I was very ready for him to graduate. So was he. We were both thrilled when Stanford University informed him that he had completed all the requirements for his Master of Science degree in Computer Science!
He originally wasn’t going to go through commencement — he was a little embarrassed about it, feeling that he’d had his chance seventeen years ago — but I and others persuaded him that no matter what happened seventeen years ago, this was still something very much worth celebrating.
On the day of graduation, he was a bit late and so just carried all his commencement regalia over to the staging field in a tidy little black bundle. (That was probably a good move — I remember that the gowns were hot!) I kissed him and went into the stadium, assuming that the classmates he said he was meeting up with would help him make himself beautiful. Little did I know.
At the appointed hour, a great cheering mob of students raced onto the field, complete with an amazing variety of costumage and paraphernalia. There were students dressed as palm trees and sea dragons. There were people throwing beach balls around. There were thirteen students dressed up in the individual letters A-L-P-H-A-C-H-I-O-M-E-G-A. There was a giant S made out of red balloons. There was even a crew that set up a slip-and-slide track. But there was no husband that I could see.
I started sending frantic text messages from my phone to his.
Me: Where u Jim: Take a seat, enjoy show. See if you can ID me. Me: Enjoying show no prayer of finding you w/o fish on yo head o something
I was expecting, hoping, waiting for him to tell me where he was, something like “now nxt 2 balloon S” or something like that. I got a little annoyed that he didn’t give me clearer directions. How on earth was I supposed to spot him in that mass?
Still nothing.
Then more people started entering the stadium, this time in ordered lines walking in single files, with different hood colors in each line. “Ah,” I said to myself, “the graduate students. He’ll come in soon.”
More orange hoods and more orange hoods and more orange hoods came in the stadium, passing about fifty feet below me. I kept looking and looking — you’d think I’d be able to pick out my favorite husband, especially since he was probably one of only three students in miles with a red beard.
Still nothing.
Me: Still no c u
I looked up from my cell phone and saw him! There he was — with a giant duck on his mortarboard, in homage to the duck I wore on my mortarboard when I got my BS! For those of you who don’t know how his mind works, this was his way of saying thank you to me for two quarters of him being missing, and I knew it immediately. I just went nuts, hooting and a hollering.
Me: I cu!!!
Me: O my love, o my love!
Hard to wear, isn't it?
He’d managed to keep it a secret from me, which was also impressive. That trip over to neighbor Ron’s on Wednesday to talk about the condo association’s garage repair? They actually spent most of the time drilling holes into the mortarboard. The phone call from the classmates he was going to meet? Ron, asking if he should drive the duck over yet. Jim taking his gown over in a little bundle instead of wearing it? To hide the fact that his mortarboard wasn’t there.
Yet again, he made me happy that I married him.
P.S. A lot of people thought the duck on my mortarboard was a goose, but it was actually, genuinely, a Pekin duck, the most common domesticated duck. I think Jim’s bird truly is a goose, but that doesn’t matter. I understood.
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06.08.04
Domestic Credits
My husband Jim and I have very traditional gender roles. We just have them backwards. He cooks, I take out the garbage. He wanted a big white wedding, I wanted to elope. He wants kids, I want to burp and play video games in my underwear. He’s nurturing, I’m competitive. When one friend of mine told me that all human actions boiled down to competition and nurturing, I went straight home and told Jim, “I can be more nurturing than you can!!!” Jim, naturally, assured me that he was confident that I could achieve that goal and that he would wholly support me in my efforts.
As you can see, he’s just brutal in competitive nurturing. He just figures that he earns domestic credits whenever he’s nurturing, and that those will be useful in case he needs to spend them later. The problem is that he has earned so many that Alan Greenspan’s going to start warning him soon about domestic credit inflation.
One way that Jim earns domestic credits is by handing me my towel every day when I get out of the shower. (Usually we shower together and usually he starts and finishes first.) Since he was being so nice, I had to start handing him his towel, too, if for some reason I was out of the shower when he finished. When I got into it, of course it got competitive. As soon as the water stops, BING BING BING it’s off to the races! If the person showering gets to the towel first, the showering person wins!
The best part is that if the wet person wins, the dry person has to grovel and acknowledge the winner’s superiority and dominance in all things. (Aside: can you imagine if the sports were like that? I’d watch boxing if I there was a chance of hearing Mike Tyson say, “You win. You’re better than me. You’re superior and dominant in all things.”)
The interesting thing about this game is that the, winner earns some domestic credits and the loser spends some credits.
Another way to spend domestic credits is to cause an argument. Our favorite argument is about time. See, I’m a pessimist. I think it’ll take an hour to get anywhere. My husband’s an optimist. “Oh, we can make it to San Jose Airport from Palo Alto in ten minutes!” “At rush hour???” “Ok, twenty-five!”
He was way, WAY late the night before one performance of Carmen, when we were both in the chorus. He was supposed to swing by and pick me up to take me to the theater, but I could have walked to the theatre both ways uphill barefoot in the snow by the time he finally showed up.
Unfortunately, I spent a bunch of domestic credits by overreacting. It wasn’t actually his fault and we did make our entrances (barely). Maybe I was just a wee bit on the edge from the sleep deprivation from thirty-nine hours of rehearsals in the previous week and from the heart attack in the front row at the performance the night before.
By the time we got home, we were exhausted. We fell into bed like skydivers without parachutes.
Unfortunately, the next day, we had an important meeting at some painful hour of the morning. I tried gentle persuasion to get Jim up, then gave up and started showering by myself. Several minutes passed with still no sign of him. I started to worry. We had to get to the meeting, but I didn’t want to yell at him too hard because of the argument the day before. I was afraid I’d go farther into domestic credit deficit.
!
I turned off the water. Bang! Out of bed down the hall he raced! He was just reaching for my towel when I turned the water back on. When he realized the trick I’d played on him, he laughed — and acknowledged my superiority and dominance in all things.
Best of all, I was net positive again on domestic credits. Yessss!
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06.07.04
Balance and equilibrium
I folded laundry this evening.
Normally, this is not big news, but yesterday I would have been completely unable to do so. Yesterday, I woke up at my mother’s house with not just my Favorite Husband but also a seriously maladjusted inner ear. My balance was shot, and moving my head would make me violently, painfully, convulsively motionsick.
It’s pretty amazing just how horrible something “simple” like throwing up can make you feel. There were times when my body seemed to be straining to expel everything it could from anywhere it could: get it out get it out getitoutgetitout! How else to explain the immediate sheen of sweat over my entire body? How else to explain the tears?
A cousin described a bout of vomiting as being very much like giving birth: involving painful, racking, whole-body convulsions that she had absolutely no control over.
The doctor told me to expect to be down for three or four days, but thankfully that evening, after I had emptied myself completely, I achieved freedom from nausea enough to walk down the hall and exult to Favorite Husband without either falling over or wanting to puke.
I had a little bit of water the next morning and threw it right back up, so elected to pass on any further intake until Jim had driven me the two hours safely back home. A call to medical tech support taught me that dehydration can lead to nausea, and that I needed to come back to food and drink very slowly. A mild soda the night before hadn’t stayed down, so I got a bit more creative: I started sucking on peanut butter M&Ms. I’d suck slowly on one, and when it finally dissolved, I’d have another. This slow, steady influx of sugar helped enormously.
Then, when my husband sat down with his dinner beside me, for some reason, his pickle looked really good. Now, my intellectual and emotional natures rather recoiled from the pickle. A pickle? After a day of tossing cookies? My corporeal nature, however, was unfazed by popular opinion. It wanted the pickle. Body wanted four or five pickles, in fact, and Reason and Emotion wisely stood aside.
I can’t imagine any doctor ever prescribing M&Ms and pickles as sources of sugar and salt to restore electrolytes, but it seemed to work for me.
This meant that in the evening, when the dryer buzzed,
and then buzzed again,
and buzzed again
that I felt competent to fold laundry.
I also felt like it was something I needed to do, as (drumroll) my husband is in the process of taking his very last take-home final in his very last class! Yes, after only about twenty years, Jim is finally finishing his MS in CS from Stanford University! This is way cool and something that I heartily support — even if the past two quarters have been drains on both of us.
My Favorite Husband was an absolute prince while I was sick. He held my hand, held my head, helped linearize my perambulations, wiped my forehead with a wet washcloth, and spent another night at Mom’s instead of coming home to study for his exam. So even though I didn’t feel completely steady on my feet, I felt that folding laundry was the least I could do to repay his kindness.
Jim DeLaHunt, I love you very much. Thank you for standing by me in sickness as well as health.
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02.16.04
The Great San Francisco Marriages of 2004, part 3
After the Valentine’s Day rally, Jim and I hopped on a bus with about fifteen other couples and a reporter or two, and went off to take the message of marriage equality to a bunch of little towns in the California interior. Between the rally and the bus trip, we were away all weekend, when I really wanted to be at City Hall helping couples get married.
Thus on President’s Day, February 16, I went up to San Francisco. My beloved husband, against his better judgment, took the day off from work and classes to join me.
The day was cold and rainy. No, that doesn’t really capture how awful the weather was. It was that kind of wet cold that grinds into your bones and numbs your feet. It was the kind of chill that creeps in slowly, and once it’s in, makes you wonder if you will ever be warm again. It was the kind of sloppy wet weather that you really don’t want to be out in at all, let alone for an hour or two.
When Jim and I rounded a corner and saw City Hall, I almost burst into tears. It looked like a hedge made of plastic, with blooms of umbrellas. There were hundreds and hundreds of people lined up around the block who clearly had been out all night in the cruel weather. To see how many people were willing to endure that misery delivered a message to me like the kick of a horse that this was something very important.
When we got closer, I nearly burst into tears again: people were jumping out of cars with cardbord carboys of coffee. “Coffee? Coffee? Anybody need coffee?” Other people were passing out doughnuts and muffins. Strangers were taking care of strangers. People were being incredibly generous, on a scale that I’ve only ever seen in the company of natural disasters.
It was about 9:05, and what we’d heard about volunteering was that we should be there at 9:00. When we got there, there were about ten people standing patiently in line. They told us that a bunch of volunteers had gone in at 8:30, and the People In Charge had told the remnants that they didn’t know if they’d need any more volunteers. So they waited. So we waited.
More people came and got in line, barely sheltered from the rain (and not from the cold) by a slight overhang. And we waited. That’s me fourth from the right in the photo below.
At about 10 AM Joe Caruso from the mayor’s office emerged and looked bewilderedly at the twenty people standing in line. He seemed stunned that twenty people would stand around in the cold and wet (remember I said it was really nasty weather?) for the chance to volunteer. He told us that they didn’t need any more volunteers now, but that maybe they would at 1 PM. He gave us a phone number to call at 1 PM. A few people wandered off, but most of the would-be volunteers hesitated. Joe finally ordered us to leave on the grounds that we were a security risk for the mayor, who would be driving in shortly. (I think he made that up, wanting us to not catch cold in the rain.) Finally, reluctantly, the line dispersed.
Jim and I went back to plan B: handing out literature to people in line, giving them Freedom To Marry stickers, and telling them about Marriage Equality California. We saw some couples that we knew here and there, and one couple that we’d met on the bus trip. We would have liked to go inside, but they were only letting in couples and witnesses.
We clearly were going to run out of materials shortly, so I found the bus-trip couple and asked them if they had brought a witness, then offered to be their witness. They were gratifyingly enthusiastic about that. So I got in line with them. The line eventually worked them through the door, through the metal detector, down the stairs, down one hallway, down another hallway, down another, up some stairs, through a light court, and then into the Recorder/Assessor’s Office. While they were standing in line, they filled out their license application and were given a booklet (as required by law) on how to prevent pregnancy.
From there, we went into the Rotunda. If you have never been inside the San Francisco City Hall, you really should. It is world-class impressive. I was told that the SF dome is bigger than the one in the U.S. Capitol, and it is ornately carved with florid designs. In the center is a staircase to beat all staircases, about two floors high and fifty feet wide.
We waited in another (shorter) line for an officiant, and eventually Supervisor Bevan Dufty came all the way down all those stairs to collect “my” couple. As we were walking up all those stairs, I wondered why Bevan didn’t just marry them in the Rotunda. What better spot could there be?
Um, the San Francisco Board of Supervisor’s Chambers. Aside from being isolated and quiet, the supe’s chambers are panelled completely in wood and lavishly, sumptuously carved. (I guess during the gold rush, San Francisco had some money to throw around — and they did!)
Dufty spent quite a lot of time with “my” couple. While he didn’t dawdle and ask about the weather, he was very respectful, deliberate, careful, and thorough. This was a pattern I saw and heard of over and over about the officiants. Clearly, the idea had gotten around that this was a very special, important day to each of the couples, and they deserved for it to be treated as such. I was glad that I had dressed up.
After “my” couple left, I was inside and a free woman, so I went and found someone with a volunteer tag on. I was determined to help! The person I found was Rob, who was taking people from the Recorder’s Office to the officiant line in the Rotunda. It’s not far — probably only fifty feet — but it’s a big and confusing place and we wanted to make everything as smooth as possible. I helped Rob with the shuttle service for a while. At some point, the Minister of Volunteers came to Rob and said, “I need four or five volunteers! Can you come?” Rob said, “Uh, I’m busy — take her!” and pointed to me. I, thinking quickly, said, “I can get you five volunteers in about thirty seconds.”
I phoned Jim (who was still outside the doors) and told him to come to the front door with volunteers; after some confusion, we got Jim and a few others in the door. It turned out that they had run out of those velvet ropes that they use to show where people should go, so we were to stand about ten feet apart and point to people which way they should go.
There was a city employee who was handing out directions to couples as they passed through the metal detectors who was complaining about being hungry. By this time it was probably around 2PM, and she had had neither breakfast nor lunch. Somebody handed me a bag of purple foil-wrapped kisses and asked me to pass them out. I gave some to the city employee, which she appreciated greatly, but even so, she suddenly disappeared, presumably to eat something. Thus I ended up handing out instructions on how to get married to happy couples coming through the metal detector. As not everybody coming through was a couple — some were city employees, some were press — I’d ask them, “Getting married?” before handing them a paper.
At one point, a slight Asian woman came through. Uncertain, I asked her, “Getting married?” She laughed and said, “Yes! No!” and laughed again before explaining, “I’m Mabel Teng!” (County Assessor Mabel Teng is one of the people who made this possible!)
For part of the day, the deputies were allowing couples to come to the door, point out their witnesses, and the deputies would let the witnesses in. At one point, however, about fifteen people — some of whom were not their witnesses, just desperate couples — muscled their way in. Shortly after that (and yes, I think there was a causal relationship) they stopped letting any witnesses in. That was most heartbreaking when a woman pleaded to get her eight-year old grandson in, her grandson who had the rings.
In part because of the friends who couldn’t get in, there was a big crowd outside. I was close enough to the doors that I could hear the crowd cheer every time a new couple emerged.
At one point, a couple in absolutely beautiful Mexican formal dress left, and a mariachi band started playing. Apparently the couple had hired the band, but the band couldn’t get in.
(While it was sad, I can understand why they didn’t feel they could let more people in. It was pretty packed, and presumably the city employees who were volunteering their time would like to go home at some point. Yes, I say that knowing full well that I got in via subterfuge. While I am absolutely thrilled that I got to be a part of it, they would have been completely within their rights to kick me out.)
As I stood there passing out instruction sheets, many couples thanked me personally for being there. The first time, I was speechless. Me? I wasn’t one of the ones who was standing out in the ick all night! I don’t deserve the thanks, it is I who should be thanking you!
At some point (3PMish?), they closed the doors. Everything at the metal detectors slowed down. Jim decided that he’d like to actually see one of the ceremonies, so he got in the “want to be a witness” line. He was at the head of the line when Michael and Ismael got to the front of the line; they had no witness, so cheerfully accepted Jim’s presence.
It turned out that they hadn’t brought any rings, so Jim shucked his wedding ring and his “practice ring” and lent them to Michael and Ismael. (I’d gotten us a pair of cheap $5 rings to wear for two weeks leading up to the wedding just so we’d be used to having rings on our fingers and hence be less likely to lose the good rings on our honeymoon. Jim liked his “practice” ring, so continues to wear it.) Jim noticed that they were very careful to give the rings right back when they were done with the ceremony. Jim is very proud to wear what he calls “his twice-blessed rings”.
That left me with a pair of deputies and two women who were both waiting for the Recorder’s Office to spit out their friends. I was chatting with them when a man came toward one of them, proudly showing a marriage certificate, beaming a smile that could have melted the Arctic icecap. I will always remember that look of pure, unadulterated, unguarded, unrestrained joy on his face.
(His partner finished up in the Recorder’s office a few minutes later — and it was someone I know!)
You’ll be happy to know that at about this time, an official came down specifically to let the eight-year-old grandson out of the crowd and into his grandmothers’ ceremony.
About this time, Jim realized that there was media all over the place who would probably enjoy getting a statement from the Policy Director of Marriage Equality California, so he started hunting reporters.
Eventually things wound down and we decided we should go. As we walked out, I whispered to my husband that he had an audience outside, so should say something. He kind of made a face like he wasn’t sure that was appropriate, but I talked him into it… and he gave one of the most eloquent impromptu speeches that I’ve ever heard him give.
I should note that my beloved husband was working full-time, taking two classes, singing with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, and serving on the board of two non-profits. He really couldn’t afford to take that whole day off after spending Saturday and Sunday on the rally and bus tour. He has no regrets.
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02.14.04
The Great San Francisco Marriages of 2004, part 2
For several months, my husband had helped a bit to organize a big Freedom to Marry rally in Sacramento scheduled for Valentine’s Day, 2004. They wanted to make it a really big deal with lots of people. I worried enormously that there wouldn’t be a big turnout: that they’d get set up for seven hundred and only get seven.
Well, because of the marriages in SF that had started two days ago, there was adequate interest. Way adequate. There were about a thousand people there.
There were speeches and cheering and speeches and cheering and speeches and cheering and speeches and cheering. One of the speeches was given by my beloved husband to prove that there are straight people out there in favor of equal access to marriage. (I got to stand next to him to prove that he really is straight. I remember fixating on how my pantyhose was riding down.)
Looking out at the crowd, I remember feeling really gratified at the sea of “WE ALL DESERVE THE FREEDOM TO MARRY” signs that I saw. You see, the Freedom to Marry Coalition had printed up some large number of signs — I think 500 — for the 2003 San Francisco Pride parade. I spent quite a lot of time trying to hand out those signs before the parade with very little luck. At the end of the day, as we were leaving, we decided we really should go past where we’d left the signs to salvage any few that might be left there.
I was very discouraged to see that most of the signs were still there. It seemed like it had been a big waste of money for the coalition to print up all those signs. Looking at the huge piles of signs, I was tempted to just cut and run and let somebody else throw them away. It had been a long day — I was tired, I was hungry, and people clearly didn’t cotton to those signs. Furthermore, the signs were kind of dirty, and I had on good clothes. (If you’re going to subvert The Establishment, it helps to look like The Establishment.) Jim said that we really should take the signs home. He was right, and I knew it, but I didn’t have to like it.
So we loaded several hundred signs in the back of our car, took them home, and unloaded them into our already messy garage, where they stayed for seven months. We loaded them all into our car and took them to Sacramento with us, where we passed them out.
Thus, to see all those signs made me feel really good. I might not have wanted to collect all the signs, but we did, and that turned out to be the right thing to do.
Go to part 3 — volunteering
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