On Friday night, Jen and I got home from drinks with friends and we were just chilling before going to bed, flipping through the channels. And Jen suggested we watch "Dominican USA", a public access show. We love "Gay USA" and I guess she wanted to compare the production values, I don't know.

Anyway, we put on Dominican USA and there's some guy sitting in the back of a car service car, acting like that makes him a pimp, thanking all the fans. "You guys have kept me going, I just have to say thank you for all your support. And what better way to say it than by showin' asses?"

And then asses were shown. My, how they were shown! Pretty much the only qualification to get on this ass-stravaganza was size. Just a montage of large ass after large ass, clothed, unclothed, whatever. Many were being shaken, either by the ass owner, or by a helpful gentleman. There was also a pile of asses, all these chicks in boyshorts laying with their asses on top of each other. I felt bad for the chick at the bottom. She had three huge ass ladies squishing her. And they appeared to be at a party. What kind of party? Where?

What really astounded me was HOW MUCH someone must love asses to find this ass montage at all pleasurable, let alone an awesome thank you gift. Cause many of these asses were nasty, you could see better asses lots of places. AND it was JUST ASSES. Once in a while, some pussy would sneak in there, once in a very great while they'd splice in a boob shot. But you never saw the face and rarely even the waist of the person who's giant ass was being presented. Just disembodied asses. Asses gone wild.

I did some research on "Dominican USA" and it turns out that the whole show is ALWAYS just asses! The host goes around filming asses and just puts em up on his show. a)That's fucked up of him. and b)Public access is amazing, truly a forum for freedom of expression that more of us should take advantage of. I sincerely appreciate this. I want to say thank you to those who make it possible. But how? Oh, I know!

John and Kate + 8 is pretty tragic tonight.

I was talking shit about them and now I feel bad about it. They chose to live a public life, but watching people feel like they want to get divorced is just truly sad. Especially when they do love their kids, and their kids love them, and their kids have no idea what the problem is really.

Friday - I "worked" on my "paper" in the morning. Then Adam came over and we had dominican food and chilled in the park. Then I had a glass of rose. Then Adam left and Jen came home and I had a bottle of rose. We got in a dumb fight about me turning off the TV. I realize I must maintain the illusion of choice for Jen to go along with my master plans. mwahahahahaa.

Saturday - Jen and I went down to the seaport and shopped around, watched annoying tourists be annoying, and eventually wandered back to peck slip. Peck Slip rocks! So many cute restaurants and bars. It felt like (baltimore x philly)/detroit. We had already eaten lunch but we got a glass of wine and dessert at a great italian market cafe. We also bought some amazing sun dried tomatoes in artichoke oil, and artichokes, also in said oil. We walked over the brooklyn bridge at sunset, grabbed a fountain diet coke at McDonalds in brooklyn and then chilled at my moms house until she came home and we could take her car. On the drive back to manhattan we stopped at fairway, cause we needed bread to go with the italian deliciousness. I accidentally bought a million dollars worth of cherries.

Sunday - We babysat my cousins while their parents (and other members of my family) went to a wedding. The small guys are 4 and 7? something along those lines. They are too cute though. We were changing the little one into a t-shirt before we left for the park, and when he was shirtless he was like, yeah! and broke into that song LET IT ROCK. Cause you know, that's rockstar. We went to a playground that had old school death toys like that big spinny thing, you know? and that weird toucan with a spring underneath. Then, the unmatchable delicacy of Wendy's chicken nuggets (seriously, those mofos are tasty), back home for the bubble olympics (standings are published and available on their dining room table), some online game called Wizard 101 that was like, a fancy way to dress up time wastey puzzle games like Bejeweled, out to Borders, where the little one reached his exhaustion point and got kinda weepy (we had tried for a nap before but he just lay there fighting off sleep, literally going "no. no!" when his eyes started closing), pizza and french toast sticks and then a Scooby Doo samurai movie that was way more intense and fighty than Scooby Doo used to be. And then YAY! Mom and Dad returned.

Over the course of the day, I made a few wrong turns, cause I have no idea where anything is in their town, and you can't make any lefts in Jersey so that makes it all worse. And the 7 year old was like, "Rose, if I could drive, we'd be there by now." Which was totally true.

We had a good time, and they are very sweet and well behaved children. Oh, and we saw a rainbow!

Today - I should do some more paper. But it is SO NICE OUT. Hmmm. maybe one hour of paper. Then back to enjoying my life.

I'm finishing up my last paper of the semester. It's chock full of awesomeness about gay archives...although since I of course procrastinated as usual, it will probably be lamer than it should. Still, I heart gay archives, and like pizza or bahn mi, they can never be that bad.

I'm obsessed with the Lesbian Herstory Archives. I went and hung out there yesterday and it was 2 hours of the best time I can possibly have without involving Jen and/or alchohol. I just had some coffee and chatted with the intern and rifled through their stashes of lesbo comix and queer ass special collections. Its just amazing that a) the archives are in a beautiful townhouse in a very classy part of park slope and b) they let you have coffee and food while you paw their stuff and c) its really about interacting with the community there...they're not fucking around about basing their work on a collective mindset rather than an institutional one. That's sort of what my paper deals with, the difference between the two the movement of materials from one to another... Its just so fun, liberating and empowering to actually experience that difference. If you are at all lesbianically inclined, or if you just love archives, or if you haven't seen enough drawings of vaginas lately, stop by the LHA. You'll be amazed.

I'm also obsessed with late 90s sitcom Cybill. Remember Cybill? Cybill Shepard and Christine Baranski and some ex husbands and a lot of martinis. Its the best EVER, mainly because of Baranski. Although also partly because its a show about ladies who are pals, which you just don't get enough of anywhere. Anyway, I love it and I DVR it every morning and watch it while i eat my breakfast and take my vitamins. I just posted about this on my facebook status and a bunch of gays were like YEAH!!! Which was just tiny but great.

It's just nice to get a camp moment in the day. Or engage in the feminist sepratist ethos of the LHA. Gays are always being so professional and mainstream these days. And of course I want and deserve equal rights. Let's just not lose sight of the things that make us weird and superior.

Judy Blume is very awesome. When I was working at symphony space, Anna and I wrote her an email and she emailed us back, in all seriousness and fairly promptly too. ANd once when I went to a book signing, she listened to me babble about my love for ...Starring Sally J. Friedman as Herself and was responsive to my gush. For these reasons, and so many others, Judy Blume ROCKS. Her books are among the most challenged in libraries, and for years she's been active in the fight against censorship, because she knows that is totally fucked up.

So, Judy Blume wrote a very positive message on behalf of Planned Parenthood for mother's day....and now she's getting death threats from anti-choice extremists. She certainly doesn't deserve that. Send her a supportive shout out. Tell her that you love how she stands up for choice. That she stands up against censorship. That Superfudge rocked. Whatever. Just tell her you're not out to kill her. I'm sure that would be a welcome change of pace.

http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/supportjudy

What have I been up to? Unfortunately, nothing productive. I have a paper due in a week and a half, and another two weeks after that. One interests me greatly, the other hardly at all, but not in that order. Regardless, I should get crackin' on both. But instead, I've been enjoying these you tube videos of two gentleman who know how to shake it.

The other day I was driving down the west side highway in the pouring fucking rain and I slowed down to avoid hydroplaning across a huge, lake-like puddle. As I was doing this, in my rearview mirror I caught sight of a white SUV, moving horizontally across the three lanes of traffic, exactly in the wrong place for it to be, but moving slow, or at least that's how I saw it, so it was kind of beautiful and fascinating. It was behind me, and not coming for me, so as I moved further away, as I got safer, I watched the SUV roll up the embankment on the left hand side of the road and flip right the fuck over, strewing peices of itself across the road.

It freaked me out. I was glad I had been safe, of course, but then I doubted that I was. What if I had slowed down more, or what if I had left just a little later. What if I *had*? I thought maybe I was dead, crushed, mangled and I just didn't know it yet. I called some people. They said I wasn't dead.

Apparently, over the past few days, LGBT books have had their sales rankings removed on Amazon. The excuse, as you can read below, is that  - for the protection of the entire customer base, they don't rank books with adult content. As you can see from some of the titles listed on the second link, some of the dis-ranked books have no explicit content at all, they're just about gay, trans or other non-normative sexual and/or gender identities or relationship structures. For example - books on alternatives to suicide for teenagers who want to  kill themselves because they're considered freaks, manuals on lesbian pregnancy (one of which I own and is the antithesis of erotic) and biograhies of queers and transpeople (Harvey Milk, Kate Bornstein, Dan Savage), grouped in with trashy erotica like Ann Rice's Beauty series, queer themed literary fiction like Oranges are Not the Only Fruit,  a bunch of queer theory books, and of course there are a ton of YA books on there too.

It seems like people are just finding out about this, trying to figure out what books are affected and deciding how to collectively proceed, but it's fucked and at the very least I will be boycotting amazon until corrective action is taken (and needless to say, you should too). Sure, the books are still for sale, but removing their rankings, they're basically taking them off public display, excluding them from best seller lists, and search results. Its like if the library or a book store took all the gay books and physically hid them somewhere secret. And then said, but no, they're stlll here, you can still have them, if you already know that they exist and where to find them. No problem right?

Fucked up. An I personally feel betrayed because I've been loving my Amazon Kindle. Although I can at least say that every text I have on there has been gotten for free, and none from Amazon. (In other news, I heart Creative Commons licenses) 
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Further info -
http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html
http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html

In response to an author's query about the deranking of his book:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,
Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

So. Jen and I thought about it and talked about it, and for the legal protections it confers (especially because we want and are actively planning to have a child), and of course because we want to be 2getha 4eva... we're gonna get married.

It's funny. it doesn't really change anything; our lives, our hearts, our futures were already knit together and never coming apart. But somehow telling people we're getting *married* seems like a mini coming out all over again. It's a serious public pronouncement of our relationship.

Which makes me even happier that we've decided to do it. Our relationship will just be that much stronger, that much more protected, that much more powerful. But everybody's OMG, when's the party? is kind of intense.

We plan to go CT and get the marriage license this summer, which will be fine and manageable and probably just us and a few people. But everybody does seem to be rarin' to celebrate in a much bigger way, which is amazing, awesome, I feel so blessed to have such support from my family and friends, but we also have no dollars, and I fear being the center of attention, so it really freaks me out. BUT...then again, I do like dressing up pretty and getting presents and I want Jen to look and feel beautiful and and love the whole thing and I know we are awesome and deserve the big fanfare and fun times. AND the public celebration is kind of the whole point. My mom was like, if you have the big party, it helps people change. And I'm like, well, whatever form our wedding takes, PSA is not really the one I'm gunning for, but I do see her point.

We have to figure out how to do this in a way that's organic to us, and doesn't make me want to hide under a table. And is also somehow magically free.

!
!!!
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Jen and I are totally gonna get married! 
That is like, the sexiest thing I ever heard.

remember Penny on Inspector Gadget? I always coveted her computer book.  And Friday, I sort of got one.

Alright, the Kindle 2 is nothing like her computer book, but it is still AWESOME. I know some people are weirded out, and I myself wasn't 100% sure what it would be like, or if I would like using it, but I think it's fabulous, mainly for the following reasons, many of which have to do with the way I personally read.

1. I like to read a lot of different books at one time. The fact that carrying a kindle allows me to have hundreds of different pieces of reading material at my fingertips is amazing and I love it.

2. I like to read a lot of different kinds of fiction books. And since I'm not picky, there are lots (literally 1000s) of free books that I can get for the kindle - from classics to self published cyperpunk. I have 17 books on there - the house of mirth (my fave), some dashiell hammett short stories, a novel by PG Wodehouse I had never heard of... - and I haven't spent a dime on any of them.

3. I read a lot of PDFs for school and I refuse to print them out. That wastes paper, ink is expensive, and I don't need random library science articles floating around my house. So I've been reading them on my laptop, but now I can read much more pleasantly and portably on the Kindle. You can highlight, and make notes on documents too.

4. I am obsessed with checking my email, and I can easily do that from the Kindle.

I think the problem that people have with the Kindle, from reviews I've read, is that it's not more dynamic. Its not in color, way you control the mouse is a little clunky (with this weird 5 way joystick, when a trackball would have probably been easier). But that's because the primary use for this thing is reading texts that don't change. The internet stuff is a bonus. Which is a really different endeavor than usual computers we're used to that are for documents and webpages that are changing constantly. And as a plus, the internet connection is really really fast, at least in the places I've been in NYC.

Whatever, I love it. Its totally awesome for reading nerds. And already, because its so easy and free, I'm reading stuff I never bothered to pick up before. Leaves of Grass, for one. I always kind of hated Walt Whitman, from the stuff they made us read in school. But while he is an asshole like I always thought, his work is also pretty exciting and fun to read. AND on the Kindle you can look up words you don't know from within the text. So I was reading and Whitman was going eidelon, eidelon eidelon and I was like, eidelon, what is that? I'll have to look it up later. And then I was like, NO, I can look it up RIGHT NOW.

Learning, reading, the cyborigification of humanity, yay.