Al Gore at the Academy Awards

If you didn't see Al Gore last Sunday on the Academy Awards, check out his appearance with Leonardo DiCaprio and his acceptance of the Best Documentary award for An Inconvenient Truth.

Housing and happiness

Lately there has been much in the news about declining home sales and prices and concern about the impact on the U.S. economy. For going on a decade now, real estate has been hot hot hot. And like so many things, we've lost sight of the connection between a thing and its supposed purpose, not to mention how those things--and we ourselves--fit into the environment around us.

I remember being in Siena with Dad in 2002. We were sitting in a small restaurant on the ground floor of a house that was centuries old. Above us the intricate ceiling was composed of arched sections of bricks... countless blocks mortared together, seemingly suspended in space. How amazing, I remarked, that this place is still standing.

In the conversation that followed, it occurred to us that when that building had been built, it had likely been built as a family residence: one that the family would occupy for generations. With that sort of intention, one would want to build the best possible structure, something that would endure for ages.

Today a house only needs to be good enough to be sold. As long as you can convince someone to buy it, it's good enough. No other objective exists. It doesn't really matter if it's still in good shape in 50 years; the builder won't be around to care.

In the last decade or two, home ownership has undergone a transformation. Houses were once primarily a place where people lived; their status as an investment was a distant and secondary consideration. Today some people buy and sell homes like they are stocks, trading up as often as they can (which the tax code happily supports), taking on more and more debt. While certain areas of the country have long known that kind of real estate speculation, it seems more recently to have become a nationwide phenomenon. And people pay no heed to historical data that shows that the price of housing has increased over the long run roughly at the rate of inflation. Just as with the dot com era, there are oh-so-many explanations for why the old rules no longer apply. And what do I know, perhaps they don't.

I BOUGHT MY FIRST CONDO in 2000. By a happy coincidence, 20 new condos came on the market next door to my apartment that spring, and I cashed in some stock options to fund the purchase. With a couple of weeks, the stock market peaked and began its long decline: this was one of my luckiest moves ever.

Two years later, my company relocated me to Portland, and I bought a loft in a beautiful building in a trendy neighborhood. I kept my San Francisco condo and rented it out.

The Portland loft was wonderful and offered a view I thought I could never afford in San Francisco. I lavishly decorated it... a few months after moving in, I held my first party, and one of my friends said that it was "absolutely complete." Everything was just so, just as I wanted it.

I seemed to be sitting pretty, but a year later I got nervous when my tenants talked about moving out. The SF housing market had moved sideways that year; I was feeling a bit over-extended on my payments. I ended up selling the condo.

And something still wasn't quite right. I wasn't enjoying my job anymore; it was no longer satisfying. I was still earning a Bay Area salary in a much cheaper city, and I have to say that that was pretty nice. But I was growing to hate my job... and feeling trapped because there was no way I could make my housing payments without it.

So I decided to downsize and eventually found an adorable 1907 house. I bought it; I thought that then I'd look for a job that was something I'd really enjoy. Instead I spent six months living with the inconvenience of having the kitchen and bathrooms remodeled. I still needed the job as I was now paying a bunch of contractors, and besides, the furniture that had been in my loft didn't work in the house, so I put it into storage and bought a bunch of new stuff. Eventually I had everything just the way I wanted it. I thought I'd never move.

And then I immediately got the itch to do so and found myself heading back to San Francisco. I sold the house; I made back all of the money I had spent on it. But now I enough stuff to fill a two story house and the full basement beneath it. In San Francisco I planned to start a new career; I wouldn't be buying a house for awhile. And everything went into storage.

That's right. I was now paying to store two households worth of furniture in addition to all of my other belongings. I remember the day the movers came thinking, "How in the world can one person own so much stuff?"

IT'S NOT JUST ME. A 2005 Slate magazine article says that one in eleven households rents a storage unit, a 75% increase from ten years before. No doubt the figure has increased in the year and a half since the article was written. In the way of explaining the increase, the article suggests:

Another obvious suspect, then, is American consumerism. No other country in the world spends as much on consumer goods. As Morgan Stanley notes, in just one telling index, "Over the 1996 to 2004 period, annual growth in US personal consumption expenditures averaged 3.9% — nearly double the 2.2% pace recorded elsewhere in the so-called advanced world." The real prices of many consumer goods are as much as 50 percent less than they were a century ago. It's never been so easy for so many to amass so many consumer products. And who doesn't take pleasure from owning things? But living in a land of wants, not needs, creates its own dilemmas, as evidenced by the concurrent rise of stores like Hold Everything and the Container Store—stuff to hold stuff. Note the curious growth in the "home organization" market: reality shows like Clean Sweep and magazines like Real Simple, or, more strikingly, the robustness of the National Association of Professional Organizers, which saw a 50 percent rise in membership in the past year.

But as consumption has grown, so too has the average size of the American house. The National Association of Homebuilders reports that the average American house went from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to 2,400 square feet in 2004. So, let's get this straight—houses got bigger, average family sizes got smaller, and yet we still need to tack on a billion-plus square feet to store our stuff?

I'VE BEEN READING The Spirituality of Imperfection, a fantastic book that explores the profound truth in the statement, "I am not perfect." It bridges the wisdom of ancient traditions with insights from modern movements like Alcoholics Anonymous, interweaving stories from Hebrew prophets, Buddhist sages, Christian teachers, and ancient Greeks.

In a chapter that seeks to explore the essense of spirituality, the book offers a story about Socrates and provides the following insight:

Socrates believed that the wise person would instinctively lead a frugal life, and he even went so far as to refuse to wear shoes. Yet he constantly fell under the spell of the marketplace and would go the there often to look at the great variety and magnificence of the wares on display.

A friend once asked him why he was so intrigued with the allures of the market. "I love to go there," Socrates replied, "to discover how many things I am perfectly happy without."

Material possessions are not "bad" in and of themselves, but as Socrates knew, the material realities that we possess tend also to possess us. The more we have, the more we want; and the more we want, the more we are possessed by our possessions.

And there's something more: invariably we become attached to objects. And to them we attach memories. We attach remembered conversations or interactions; we attach emotions from events in the past. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But when we surround ourselves with objects that are so strongly tied to the past, we're constantly called back to another time and away from the present. We lose our ability to just exist in the present moment.

LAST SUMMER I WAS SPEAKING to my mother about the commercial nature of the world we live in. There came a point in American life where we were able to produce in abundance everything we needed to live comfortably. And then when faced with a choice of what to do next--and we could have done anything, really--we chose a path of always needing more. More things. Bigger houses. We could have made sure everyone had enough. We could have created a world for ourselves where everyone had the opportunity to develop fully and beautifully as a human being. But we chose the route of "progress" and endless buying, which leaves us with thousands of self-storage units and Christmas decorations in stores in October. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the most patriotic thing we could do, we were told, was to go buy something.

I know, utopian ideas. Everyone's needs being met, crazy! And truly, I don't have something that is better than capialism to offer as a replacement. I want to only make the point that we chose this path that we're on when we could have chosen an infinite number of other paths. And that there are consequences for this path we are on: our impact on the environment, on the very climate of the planet; our need to exert force in the world to ensure that we have access to what we "need;" the fact that despite all of the material wealth around us, people don't report being any happier now than they ever were. In fact, a recent study reported:

The journal Science reported last week yet more evidence and another theory about why wealth does not make people happy: "The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory," one of its studies concluded. "People with above-average income ... are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities."

Wait, there's more. "The effect of income on life satisfaction seems to be transient," the researchers added. "We argue that people exaggerate the contribution of income to happiness because they focus, in part, on conventional achievements when evaluating their lives and the lives of others."

Wow. Let's pause a moment to let all priests, nuns and anarchists take a bow and say, "I told you so!"

"People grossly exaggerate the impact that higher incomes would have on their subjective well-being," said Alan Krueger, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and an author of the study.

The problem is that once people get past the level of poverty, money does not play a significant role in day-to-day happiness, Krueger said. It certainly can buy things, but things do not usually address most of the troubles people experience in daily life -- concerns about their children, problems in intimate relationships and stressful aspects of their jobs.

(For more on the fact that we're not getting happier despite being wealthier, check out "The Progress Paradox" here and here.)

In "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction" in the March 2007 issue of Scientific American, Michael Shermer shares this tidbit:

Imagine you have a choice between earning $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000 or earning $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000. Prices of goods and services are the same. Which would you prefer? Surprisingly, studies show that the majority of people select the first option. As H. L. Mencken is said to have quipped, "A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband."

So it seems we care an awful lot about what others think. :-) I remember the day I sold my loft and drove with my last load of stuff across the river and toward my new and less extravagant home. For an awful moment, I thought, "You're crazy! What are you doing? You lived in one of the best buildings in the most desirable neighborhood in town. Everyone wants to live there!" And then, I realized, that I was simply creating suffering for myself. Perhaps the step I was taking that day was the first step in my doing what I wanted with my life rather than what I thought other people wanted.

LAST FRIDAY I LAY IN BED with all of these sorts of thoughts swirling through my head. I was having a garage sale the next day. I had moved everything from Portland down to San Francisco a few weeks before, and I was going to sell everything that didn't fit into my one bedroom apartment. I wasn't going to put excess stuff into a storage unit. I was going to live simply with what fit into the limited space that I was occupying.

I'm not sure of my path ahead. I've gone from owning two houses to owning nothing. I can easily think that I've regressed or fallen behind; I'm sure many people do. But for whatever reason, I wasn't content with how things were. And so I'm exploring something else.

I've been listening to Zencast lately, a podcast on Buddhism. I'm intrigued--no, I'm drawn to--the idea of living more simply, in harmony with myself, those around me, and the world around me.

In Matthew 19:21, Jesus says, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." What is this to mean? Who could live this way? In fact, so many of Jesus' teachings are so radical that we can scarely imagine anyone following them. And while we claim to be the most Christian nation in the world, our culture is in so many ways inimical to the teachings of Christ. (See "The Christian Paradox" in the August 2005 Harper's magazine.)

I was once told by someone that I wasn't very spiritual. At the time, I found it hard to argue because I didn't really understand what it was to be spiritual. But as I look back over what I've written--and the years in which I've bought, furnished, remodeled, and sold homes--I'm thinking that maybe that's exactly what has been missing: some spiritual sense of my place in the world.

In talking to a friend recently, we found ourselves akin in a way: well-educated, intelligent, but not exactly sure of what we wanted. We contrasted ourselves to those people who seem to just know--"I want to make this much money," "I want a house with a white picket fence," "I want three cars"--and then set out with an unshakeable industriousness to make good on their goals.

Maybe there is something to not wanting things.

FROM THE SPIRITUALITY OF IMPERFECTION:

Spirituality points, always, beyond: beyond the ordinary, beyond possession, beyond the narrow confines of the self, and--above all--beyond expectation. Because "the spiritual" is beyond our control, it is never exactly what we expect....

We can't hold it in our hands and touch it, manipulate it, or destroy it. Because it is beyond control, it is also beyond possession: We can't own it, lock it up, divide it among ourselves, or take it away from others.

Another viewpoint on Iran...

from Michael Ventura's latest "Letters at 3am" column in the Austin Chronicle.

Choosing sides

Seymour Hersh, the frequent contributor to The New Yorker and one of the primary journalists who broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse story, has written a new piece on shifting U.S. policies in the Middle East.

Since the invasion of Iraq has had the unintended consequence of empowering Iran, Hersh asserts that the Bush administration is adjusting its priorities in the Middle East and choosing to side with the Sunnis over the Shiites. To explain the inconsistency of our bringing down Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, Hersh says that the administration believed that after the bloody Iraq-Iran war of the 80s, Iraqis would feel more loyalty to their country than to their sect. That proved to be a faulty assumption.

Read the article, "The Redirection," or listen to Hersh being interviewed on yesterday's edition of Fresh Air.

The map below was taken from a report to Congress and shows an estimated Sunni/Shiite breakdown by country (the map appears near the end of the report):

More human insanity

Will we ever learn? I read an article in today's New York Times about an unexplained mass disappearance of honey bees in 24 states.

This matters because a third of the food we grow in America is pollinated by the honey bee. Potential explanations for the mass die off--the first documented case of this occurring nationwide--include insecticides and weakened bee immune systems.

And just why are bees immune systems weakening? Well, in our endless attempt to turn nature into one more cog in the U.S. industrialized agricultural machine, bees are now trucked from location to location on 18 wheelers. They are being bred to spend more time gathering pollen and less time making honey. They're being fed a mixture of sucrose and corn syrup instead of honey. And they're being forced to pollinate more months out of the year. The article said that the average lifespan of a queen honey bee is half of what it was ten years ago.

One proposed solution: import Australian bees! Sure, that makes sense... once we kill off the domestic version that's perfectly adapted to our environment, we'll bring in a replacement and take our chances with the unknown consequences of introducing a non-native species.

And we're at the top of the food chain?

Stories for the day

A few things I found interesting today:

• Death of a Gay Rights Pioneer
• In Big Buyout, Utility to Limit Coal Plants
• Missile Fantasies

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

Actual happiness looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

-- Aldous Huxley

Thanks, Jack!

So it was a Jack T. kind of day. Jack is one of my Dad's best friends and has been around my whole life. He went to school at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, when I was growing up in the late 60s, and he brought back a lot of west coast culture to us in the Midwest. He definitely made an impact on who I am today!

Jack worked in a bike shop for many years and has been giving me bike advice and training tips for the upcoming AIDS LifeCycle. I had been planning to ride my Gary Fisher dual-sport Utopia on the ride to L.A., but I've gotten a lot of feedback that I was just asking for a whole lot of extra suffering on the trip. So I took the cash from my garage sale today and went out to the Presidio Sports Basement and picked myself up a Jamis Ventura Elite road bike. It was a 2006 model on sale, and with my LifeCycle 15% discount, I got a great deal... under $800.

Then tonight I went down to Magnet in the Castro and watched a documentary of the 1975 San Francisco Freedom Day Parade. The film was made by friends that Jack had introduced me, too. It was great talking to Ray Reiss and his wife Jane, both about Kansas and SF back in the 70s. Wow, from watching the footage of the parade and the festival afterward, I really got a sense of how innocent those times were. People out just be crazy and wild and free, some for the first time in their lives.

Nowadays the atmosphere of gay pride--and many other events in the gay and lesbian community--feels much more commercialized. We've become quite a market niche to be exploited. Which reminds me of a great book I read several years ago, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture by Daniel Harris.

For a great day... thanks, Jack!

Devaluing the future

Here's a great post on the tendency of human beings to weight the present over the future... in other words, to make choices that result in short term gratification and often ignore longer term consequences. From an evolutionary perspective, this adapation made sense. The question is, is it now a maladaptation which is leading us down a path toward our doom.

Some of our behavior as individuals and societies with respect to global warming and resource depletion can be explained by this phenomenon. I noticed this in my own behavior about a year ago. I've read a lot about peak oil and understand the impact of fossil fuel burning on the climate. And yet I bought a Mazda RX-8 which gets lousy gas mileage. Sure, I offset my carbon emissions with a TerraPass, but even at the time of purchasing the car I found myself asking: what hope is there for preventing catastrophe if even intelligent people (like me! :-) who understand the issues still make choices that don't serve the common good?

Read the full post here.

Quote for the day

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

-- John F. Kennedy

Straight GOP legislator supports gay civil rights in Wyoming

Saw this interesting post on Andrew Sullivan's blog... check out the speech that Dan Zwonitzer, a 27 year old straight, Republican state legislator gave recently against a bill that would have barred Wyoming from recognizing same sex marriages from other states. The bill ended up being defeated in committee.

The more visible we are...

the stronger we become.

That's the title of a new retrospective film of footage from the 1975 San Francisco Freedom Parade, one of the earliest gay and lesbian parades held here.

Raymond Reiss, director, producer, and cinematographer of the film, and his wife Jane are in San Francisco for the film's premiere. So if you're in the Bay Area, consider stopping by Magnet on 18th Street in the Castro at 7pm on Saturday the 24th to see this moment from history.

The filmmakers plan to arrange screenings in other cities as well.

More details here.

Iran... what's next?

The issues are extremely complex: what to do about Iran and its reported nuclear ambitions?

Given the mess in Iraq, it's easy to assume that we'd never get ourselves involved in another Middle East war so quickly. But... assumptions are great for getting one in trouble.

I myself have mixed feelings about the path forward with respect to Iran and its refusal to stop enriching nuclear fuel (the UN deadline was Wednesday; see the latest New York Times and Washington Post stories).

On the one hand, a nuclear-armed Iran seems too dangerous to accept. Not only are they positioned to threaten many of our allies, nukes would give them the ability to control access to oil in the region. And whatever your feelings are about our dependence on oil, the simple fact is that our way of life could change drastically if any nation had the ability to turn off the Middle East spigot.

And on the other hand, it's extremely difficult to imagine a scenario in which we could successfully pull of the complicated military operation necessary to eliminate Iran's nuclear facilities... and even harder to imagine our doing it in a way that didn't further inflame anti-American sentiment in the region and amongst Muslims worldwide.

So while a second American aircraft carrier group begins to patrol waters off Iran, the Bush adminstration still refuses talks with their government. How very junior high of us.

Harper's ran a three part series last week featuring various perspectives on whether we're likely to go to war with Iraq: opinions from independent analysts, former CIA officials, and think-tank scholars.

(There's also a great article, "Parties of God: The Bush Doctrine and the rise of Islamic democracy," in the March issue of Harper's. It discusses our options in the Middle East with respect to Islamic political parties: encourage reform in the autocratic regimes we currently support and engage the moderate Islamists, or continue down the path of simply labeling these parties as terrorists and assuming that they are incapable of rational behavior. An interesting comparison was made to how the Irish Republican Army eventually renounced violence and it's political wing became a legitimate political party. The article isn't online yet, but check back in a couple of weeks if you don't want to pick up a copy. The article is now online here.)

I don't know what the future holds, but some of the options are ominous. On the other hand, we finally may have made some progress in nuclear talks with North Korea. From Andrew Grotto's Washington Post column today:

The ideologues' strategy of confrontation failed because it strengthened the determination of North Korea (and Iran) to acquire nuclear weapons in order to deter military action by the United States without offering countervailing incentives and disincentives.

The credibility of a U.S. threat to overthrow offending regimes, however, dissipated as the insurgency in Iraq began to metastasize. And while the United States can squeeze regimes, it cannot suffocate them without the help of partners, such as China. China, however, rejects the regime change strategy and opposes measures that could end the Kim dynasty in North Korea.

In contrast, pragmatists in the Bush administration view negotiation more practically. As former Secretary of State Colin Powell put it, "You can't negotiate when you tell the other side, 'Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start'." This means offering a country both incentives and disincentives for renouncing nuclear arms.

He is right. Countries must be backed into a corner, but they must also be offered an attractive way out. That's what happened with Libya, the Bush administration's lone success at convincing a country to renounce nuclear weapons. Years of sanctions and isolation had backed the Gaddafi regime into a corner, and the United States and its allies offered it an attractive way out -- a grand bargain whereby Libya verifiably renounces nuclear weapons and terrorism in exchange for normalized relations with the United States and Europe.

So get informed about Iran and our options there. Voice an opinion. And listen to others.

Talking... what a concept!

Judgment at Nuremberg

On my friend Bette's recommendation, I watched the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg today (also see its Wikipedia entry, and check out the entry for the Nuremberg Trials themselves while you're at it).

Spencer Tracy was excellent as chief of the tribunal's panel of judges. A very handsome William Shatner makes a pre-Star Trek appearance as Tracy's aide.

[I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 2005. At 1147 pages, not counting notes, it's quite an undertaking, but Shirer's documentation of the events leading to the rise of Hitler, his early years in power, World War II, and the Nazi defeat reads almost like a novel.]

I was never familiar with the political context of the Nuremberg Trials. Judgment at Nuremberg tells the story of the third of the military tribunals (there were 12), the defendants in which were all judges. (The tribunals followed the Trials themselves which tried the most significant members of the Nazi regime.) Near the end of the movie, the Soviet blockade of West Berlin begins. The tribunal judges experience pressure to go easy on the German defendants in hopes of enlisting support from the German people for the U.S. in the Cold War against the U.S.S.R.

The verdict is memorable, with Tracy largely focusing on the role of the one defendant (Janning) who admited before the court his complicity with the Nazis. I found this excerpt on the web (no vouching for its accuracy):

Janning's record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial. If he, and all of the other defendants, had been degraded perverts, if all of the leaders of the Third Reich had been sadistic monsters, and maniacs, then these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake, or any other natural catastrophe.

But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary, even able and extraordinary men, can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat through the trial can ever forget them. Men sterilized because of political belief, a mockery made of friendship and faith, the murder of children. How easily it can happen.

There are those in our own country too, who today speak of the protection of country, of survival. A decision must be made. In the life of every nation, at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at his throat, then it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient, to look the other way. Well, the answer to that is survival as what? A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult. Before the people of the world, let it now be noted, that here in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.

There have been times in the last five and a half years when this mindset of sacrificing our principles for the sake of survival has taken hold again here at home. I'm beginning to hope that those days are behind us, but it's always good to remember: How easily it can happen.

Everybody into the shower!

I just read an interesting discussion on Andrew Sullivan's blog of some of the issues involved when people of different sexual orientations shower together... and how some of those issues bear on the Islamic practice of having women veil themselves.

Sullivan wrote one of my favorite book of essays, Love Undetectable.

Ah, sunshine!

It's a beautiful, sunny day in San Francisco, and I just pumped my bicycle tires full of air and went for my first bike ride in over a year. Woo hoo!

Downhill, not a problem. Uphill... okay, I now have a sense of how much training I have to do in the next three and a half months for the AIDS LifeCycle.

Fundraising update: I've raised $825 in the last two days. Only $4175 to go to reach my $5K goal. Click here to make a contribution!

QUOTE FOR THE DAY:

I am only one; but still I am one.
I cannot do everything, but still I can do something;
I will not refuse to do something I can do.

-- Helen Keller

Relationships

I ran across an interesting story, "Romance Starts with Mom," in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle. While I hate to let you off the hook of having to read the article, the final paragraph really stands out:

Contrary to the popular American myth that people left to fend for themselves become strong and independent, the psychological research seems to show exactly the opposite is true: It is the people who are confident enough to reach out to others for help -- and to whom help is given -- who become truly capable of independence.

The article reports on a 25 year study which tracked 78 one-year olds into early adulthood. The researchers at the University of Minnesota found that "the kind of baby you were at 12 months can say a lot about the kind of lover you will be at 21."

I have been reflecting on my own experience in relationships recently, and a couple of weeks ago I had an insight while sitting at the gym. It occurred to me that a number of my past romantic relationships have been characterized by a fair amount of drama, and that the most dramatic ones, in fact, held a special mystique for me.

The insight was that somewhere along the way I decided that drama is the price people have to pay for really being in love. And having had that insight, it's so clear to me now that that is not the case at all. Drama is not the price that has to be paid... moreover, it's not necessary at all.

Now that may not seem earth-shattering to you. But it sure brought a smile of relief to my face. :-)

I ENJOYED AN EXTENDED WEEKEND the past few days and made a trip up to Point Reyes on Tuesday. I had never been to the Point Reyes Books before, but I highly recommend it. Every book I picked up caught my interest; I spent well over an hour just perusing the politics and science shelves. Check it out if you're up that way.

Also on tap was watching Children of Men. Don't ask for an explanation of why women have become infertile in this movie set in the near future; just take it as a given and let the movie carry you along. My last three trips to the theater have all been great (Notes on a Scandal and The Queen were the other two recent movies I've seen). Perhaps something is shifting in Hollywood... or maybe I'm just making better selections.

Still, at $10 a pop, it's become quite a gamble to head out for a movie these days. I've heard that studios and theaters are considering the idea of returning to a system where different movies have different ticket prices. I'll happily let people pay more to see the latest blockbuster if I can see indie flicks for less. At least that's how I hope it would turn out!

Congratulations, Dad

And it's a couple of weeks late, but just wanted to say...

Congratulations on your retirement, Dad!

And in honor of Valentine's Day...

The latest research on love is finding physiological explanations for the way we feel when we're newly in love, as well as evidence that being in love and being in lust are clearly different and can be distinguished by what happens in a person's brain.

Enjoy! :-)

Potential HIV vulnerability discovered

Detailed analysis of the way HIV enters immune cells has identified a potential strategy for developing a vaccine. The development is being billed as "one of the best leads to come along in recent years."

A little humor...

For the literary or tech support-minded folk out there... :-)

Check out this YouTube video if you've ever wondered how people took to using that revolutionary technology, the book.

And Happy Valentine's Day!!! Hope yours is as sweet as mine. Muah!

25 years of struggle: the records of the Human Rights Campaign

Cornell University has an online exhibition of the records of the Human Rights Campaign. The exhibit chronicles HRC's efforts to gain full civil rights for gays and lesbians in America.

Global Cool

Ever since I saw The Devil Wears Prada (and if you haven't, you must... Meryl Streep is fiendishly wonderful), I've loved KT Tunstall's song, "Suddenly I See."

Turns out KT is also involved with an organization called Global Cool. Their mission is to give every person the ability to take a little action against global warming, with the idea that together people can make a big difference.

As they say, "Global Cool is here to save a planet because we haven't got anything better to do." If you don't either, check them out.

The latest "Meatrix" video

Here it is, the latest video in the Meatrix series.

Moving in... and heading out! -- AIDS/LifeCycle

Yippee, I'm almost moved in. Sure, the apartment still looks like a disaster, but nearly every box has been emptied. Now it's just a matter of storing it all away and having a great big garage sale. :-)

Last March when I was packing up my house in Portland, I found myself astonished by how much stuff I had accumulated. It was impossible to avoid the question: does one person need all of this?

Now I'm shoehorning the contents of a two-bedroom two-story full-basemented home into a one bedroom apartment (thus, the garage sale :-). This move has forced me to go through every box; there's no option for just storing away those "mystery" boxes for the next move.

Better said: I'm choosing not to explore the other options. I thought about putting some of my furniture in storage, and boxes along with it, but I've had some pieces in storage for three years already. The process of purging feels... liberating. We attach memories and emotions to objects. In their presence we can be drawn back to the past. That's not always a bad thing, but too much of it is a distraction from the here and now.

And so I downsize my personal stash of stuff.

I must say, though, that there have been a few lovely surprises. A couple of years ago I thought Schick was discontinuing the three blade razor that I liked, so I went online and stocked up. When I opened a box last week and found 80--yes, eight zero--razor blades, you would have thought I'd struck gold.

It's been great to get my CDs back. And all of the clothes, shoes, and jackets have made it feel like Christmas around here.

I'm also really excited to have my bike back, though with the rain I haven't ridden yet.

THE BIKE ALSO GIVES ME THE OPPORTUNITY to do something that I've thought about doing for a long time but finally got off my ass and registered for this year: the San Francisco to Los Angeles AIDS/LifeCycle. The ride covers 545 miles in seven days. June 3rd is less than four months away, so I have plenty of training ahead of me.

I'm riding to raise money for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. HIV and AIDS appeared on the scene just as I was about to come out; I'm sure I stayed in the closet for a few years longer than I would have otherwise. I have countless friends living with HIV; thankfully, I've lost very few to the disease.

HIV/AIDS has many faces. It's a manageable chronic illness here in the U.S. In the developing world, it's a devastating plague that continues to take people in the prime of their lives.

I'm doing the ride. If you'd like to support me, check out my LifeCycle page.

Depletist

My friend Charlie in Victoria, B.C., shared this short video with me today. It unveils "depletist," an antonym for "environmentalist." The video maker's intention is give the environmental movement a new tool in shifting the debate around resource usage and our impact on the planet.