It is so much easier to understand a story than a generalization, a tale with a beginning, middle, and an end.  The beginning of a young woman’s new job in Ghanzou, thrilled and hopeful, with money to send to her parents two thousand kilometers away...the moment goods arrive in America, swinging over the great piles of containers...the handshake between rich men in California, charming and expedient.

Not much to say on my end tonight.  Larabee State Park.  Thanks to the miracle of modern compression, it's just 170k for all four lovely pictures, a bargain on DSL and one short (ideally under a minute) payment on dialup...

I've spent way too many hours in the last few days arguing ENDA issues on here.  I love that people have come forward to speak on this issue, I truly hate the anti-inclusion rhetoric out there, and it's painful, strange and oddly exhilarating to be arguing for the most basic of human dignities -- the right to work.  At the same time, the debate has become repetitive, radicalized, and hard to access for anyone without rhino skin and six queer rights mailing lists.  

It seems every time someone comes across a piece of news, or first encounter the debate, it's a new, heartfelt diary; if I were trying to figure out what's going on from the dkos scroll, I'd be hopelessly confused.  This diary is intended to help, a little, and also to capture some of the issues, in a few quick links.

Recent days have seen some bruising and inevitably painful discussions about a trans inclusive or non-inclusive ENDA.  Today saw an update.  According to Gay.com, markup of the bill has been postponed in order to allow an attempt at more inclusive legislation...(more after the fold)

I think one could begin a book, starting on a Saturday afternoon in the last weekend of September, and with just that information evoke a particular smell and temperature and feel of the wind; add a third floor apartment above a city park, every tree but one still green, a high overcast sky...and here I am, writing my first top comments.

I just woke up.  I'm having my first cup of coffee and browsing the news.  For some time I've been glad to see ENDA moving forward.  As a transsexual woman, it's been hugely important to me that my country might soon ban anti gay and anti trans discrimination in employment.

I've been reading a lot about outing lately.  Today I read a long peice on how Condoleeza Rice might be gay.  And on how Larry Craig is a hypocrite.  On how this republican, or that republican, people who've put their best effort into control and brutality writ large, a vision of human nature somewhere between lord of the flies and the inquisition...is queer.  Goddamn pervy funky weird no good queer.  Icky.  Like me.

It was just another night in the browser; a few naked boys and girls, a story by a long dead Englishman, a mordant Dorothy Parker poem, and my client’s administrative site, which was supposed to be finished weeks ago.  The slow curl of a cigarette in the ashtray.  It was one of those forgettable nights, the ones where a wet, heavy apathy is illuminated with infrequent flashes of a white hot, distant fear.  Nothing special to remember, the night she wandered into my diary.

We've all got someplace to go. When I was a kid, mine started a few houses down the street.  This trail was mud then; there were garter snakes, and the smell of discarded compost.  Now there is a semi-paved trail and dog poops.  But the trees are the same...

I have mixed feelings about dkos.  There’s a sense in which the medium is the message, and the medium is woefully constrained, the community artificial and distant.  I’ve approached it, truth to tell, as a sort of passionately felt entertainment, with occasional emails to one’s representatives and occasional deep bows in the direction of heavy duty activists, an essay slam and exchange.  Other people bring different things, and take different stuff away, as well.  But if there’s an exemplar of the dkos form, last night’s Feminisms was it...and at the risk of maudlin absurdity, this diary is purely to say "thanks."  (more mawkishness after the fold)

Every diary.  OK, I'll come back later.  Almost every dairy!  Virginia Tech!  The necessity of gun control.  The absurdity of gun control.  Bush in Virginia.  Bush speaking!  Why am I reading this?  Come back later...oh god...more diaries.  Why am I reading this?  What is the matter with you people?

...this isn't really a diary.  It's a preperation for a diary, which is in turn the culmination -- or perhaps the beginning -- of something I've been thinking about for awhile.  What are the software and hardware tools which enable open, sustainable society?  There are a lot of good answers out there, and I'd like to do a diary which provides a relatively complete, ten thousand meter view of the landscape.  Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be doing a long neglected literature review of my own.  Some of my starting places, and questions, after the fold...

Pretty much everyone who has lived in Manhattan or the boroughs at some point has heard of Broken Windows Theory; and for anyone who doesn't like Guliani's Times Square, it is a sanitizing, irritating and grotesque statement of civic life.  Basically, in 1996, Kelling and Coles proposed that in neighborhoods with broken windows and tolerance for petty crime, bigger crimes -- and more crimes -- would follow.  Its been debunked and rebunked repeatedly since then, which is what one would expect from such a vague social theory applied to civic life; and the theory is probably part of the reason our jails are full to the brim.  But...let's set all that aside for the moment, and assume there's a kernel of truth there, however ham-handedly and cruelly the idea has been applied, and however many subsequent studies have called it into question.  When you're surrounded by crime and the results of it, more crime and more despair are predictable results -- and take it a step further. (more after the fold)

Sad day all around.  Molly Ivins dying in the middle of her newspaper campaign.  Listening to Brzezinski, Our Man In Afghanistan, once upon a time, speaking (for the moment I listened) of negotiation and sweet reason, while the NPR reporter tried to keep things "balanced", I guess, by asking what seemed to me were eager, seriously cast questions that merely begged war.  The close surety the country of my birth, and the world, are in bitter shape, a certainty rendered boring and gray by repetition.  Too huge and ugly to quite look away from for long.

But...I had a great conversation this evening, with someone I hadn’t seen in a long time.  Only some of the story is mine to tell, so this is a mercifully short diary, but perhaps it will entertain in the early morning hours between the last bag of fritos and petit déjeuné...more, of course, after the fold...

When I was 16 (a long time ago) my grandfather walked me down to the bank to open a new account in the big, northwestern city where I lived.  There were calendars from his business at the teller cages, and everyone was glad to see him -- but what I remember from that long ago time are the old men who stopped to talk to him -- businessmen all -- and I realized, with an almost physical shock, that he had known these guys (and yes, they were all guys -- their wives may have been the brains, or run accounting and ordering for their entire business, but out on the sidewalk it was guy world) for almost fifty years.  They'd opened their businesses, recreated a society, and persevered through the great depression together.  They'd built something, and it showed.

I gotta find my tinfoil hat -- it helps me write -- hang on a sec, and join me after the fold.

We're all about makin' it happen, and maybe it will...but if you had fiat for ten minutes, what would you do?  The rules are simple -- you can't change the constitution.  You can't ship out all of the mean people, or succeed from the union (or make some other set of states go away).  Your starting point is American government as is.  And you only get six planks.  

What would your initiatives be?  What would they look like?  For these ten minutes, you have fiat -- as in "fiat lux" -- and you don't have to worry how the DLC would spin it or what Pelosi thinks is possible  For less than the two cents they are worth, here are mine:

Every year, if you live in a major American city, there's probably a transgender day of remembrance.  What, you ask, has that to do with me?  Should I get in my car?  Hide my kids?  Send a small check?  What?

This is just a short diary entry, since for some reason the site is signing me out when I try to comment on the "...from and election judge".  This is an observation from someone who has calibrated touchscreens thousands of times...and might throw a little light on the mechanics (or not).