i'm in love

marry me, ajai raj, wherever you are. gay marriage is fun. no kidding. Plus, I'm a good cook.

Seriously, this guy's coulter encounter reminds me of something i experienced back in college. we had a huge gay pride rally thing. bunch of pompous white boiz and gayls sitting in an auditorium listening very seriously to any idiot who could write or make up some personal story about their sexuality and spout it. Thing is, that last sentence was their opinion, not mine; in my observation most of those people were pretty sincere. some of them were being pretty damn brave. for many of them it was their first time publicly speaking about their identity (not sexuality; some of them hadn't even had sex yet. identity, as a person, trying to find themselves through other people. think about it.)

anyways, the braveness wafting through the room stopped none of the gay and lesbian support group members from quite literally bashing everyone. verbally. not to their faces, of course, but i found my own face growing slowly hotter and hotter as they minutely critiqued a laundry list of people (i'm not talking little shit, i'm talking "oooh, she got abused by her daddy, wasn't it funny the way she said this" type of critique. in other words, very much coulter crap.)

i finally got up the courage to speak past my very red face and say i didn't think it was a good thing to make fun of people for having the courage to speak up about their lives at the event we had just spent four weeks planning in order to, you know, give people the opportunity to have the courage to speak up about their lives. i tried to start a dialogue about why we (read: they) were doing this. nobody wanted to address it. i ended up leaving and fuming over feminist texts, and i remember very vividly joanna russ's critique in "what are we fighting for" about how women sometimes hurt or malign other women (those are the bad ones! not me!) in order to somehow make themselves more acceptable to "polite society" - read white, straight, powerful, what have you. and i wondered if something similar wasn't happening here.

and then you have coulter, a woman, a powerful woman, a writer woman with short skirts and plastic surgery poontanging her conservative rhetoric left and right on the stage. bashing the people who had fought to give her the right to sit on stage and be a powerful woman who could get published, wear short skirts, and pay for her damn plastic surgery. and this one kid, ajai, stands up and punctures her bubble of self-congratulation - float on the pain of others, girl! - with invective so unbelievably painful to her - despite her own dependence on swearing to make, you know, "points" - that she has to have him arrested.

i guess i feel sorry for her more than anything else. and again - ajai? you out there? i make a pretty damn good gnocchi.