Personal and/or Political

This weekend has been a long one, and not in the Columbus Day sense. It's been full of activities both pleasurable and painful, personal and political, and above all alliterative.

Actually, I meant to say that the activities were often a complicated intermingling of those four adjectives, but then I noticed that they all started with the same letter, and I got distracted. The letter of the day today has clearly been P; we served plain, pepper, pepperoni, and pineapple pizza at our phone bank. Plus pastries. On paper plates. But I didn't sign into Blogger today to talk about the letter P.

I've spent the last hour watching speeches from today's National Equality March and yesterday's HRC dinner. The speeches made me cry, but that's hardly news. They also made me think about politics, activism, radicalism, liberalism, the System, religion, and various other concepts of a poorly-defined and contentious nature. Including Barney Frank, a poorly-defined and contentious legislator if ever there was one. My thoughts are still a bit vague for airing in public, but they will trickle out as I work them into coherence.

Before watching the speeches, I trained a phone bank at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center to call voters in Maine and urge them to oppose Question 1. That's where all the P-themed food was. That's also where I once again donned the lobster hat that has adorned my Facebook profile these recent days. And where I ate myself into a stomach ache without even consuming a meal, for the second day running.

Moving on back in the chronology, my stomach ache yesterday came from deciding that four doughnuts would be an appropriate breakfast substitute. I was, in fact, quite wrong. Yesterday consisted of a voter canvass (source of the doughnuts) and a dinner of mostly cupcakes, with some soup and fried eggplant to supplement. My innards were not happy. My tongue, of course, was thrilled.

I did not actually talk to voters about gay marriage yesterday; I ran the logistical end of canvass day with the boyfriend (yes, I have no nickname for him still. I still think talking about him will make him vanish, so shhhhhh...), then made sure the site was set up for the canvassers' return. Better for my stomach than walking around in the sun for two hours without a bathroom, but less immediately politically useful.

So what is the upshot of all this political action (and political-action support)? What is on my mind after a canvass, a phone bank, watching all of those speeches, and reading various blogs about National Coming Out Day?

My uncle, as I've mentioned here before, has bladder cancer. My grandmother, I found out today, has ovarian cancer. My father will find out on Friday if he has prostate cancer. And my mother has an appointment with Doctor #5 in two weeks because we still have no idea what she has.

Fuck.