You’ve prolly heard by now that the Supreme Court banned partial-birth abortions, making no exceptions for a woman’s health. This is the first time the Supreme Court’s banned a specific abortion precedure, versus specifying the timing of a legal abortion. And this ruling trumps California’s own, more pro-choice laws.

The partial-birth abortion isn’t common, and thus won’t affect that many women. However, it’s one that’s sometimes necessary to preserve a woman’s health. The ban, as NARAL points out, “opens the door for further political interference in our personal, private medical decisions.”

The Supreme Court decision has rather neatly split the presidential candidates along party lines, as you can see here.

So now, NARAL’s encouraging people to send in choice-related questions for the first Republican presidential debate in LA, happening on MSNBC’s The Politico on Thursday, May 3, 2007.

I’m all for getting politicians to take a stand, but considering the fact the the Republican candidates have already like unanimously come out in favor of this ridic ban, I’m not sure what asking more Qs about it will do, besides get all of them to agree on it again.

I suppose it would get pro-choice Republicans tuning into the debate to realize — if they weren’t before — that all of their party’s candidates don’t care much about women’s health. But the Republican candidates could very easily let the convo devolve into grotesque descriptions about partial-birth abortions. Yet if we relied on the blood and gore type descriptions of surgery to determine our vote, even knee surgeries would be banned, as my MD sis points out.

So I guess I’m saying: If you wanna send in your pro-choice Q to Republican candidates, that’s cool. But in my opinion: What’s more important is making sure a pro-choice candidate — and at this point, that’s not gonna be a Republican — becomes the next prez.

Tags: prochoice, abortion, roevwade, election, partialbirth, supremecourt

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The 18th Annual Great Los Angeles River CleanUp — aka La Gran Limpieza — happens Saturday, May 12, 2007, from 9 am to noon!

LA River Revitalization’s been in the news a lot lately — Be part of a movement to restore nature and participate in community building.

To participate in the biggest river cleanup in the nation, all you have to do is pick from one of the 13 sites, register (online soon, or you can register at your chosen river site), then show up ready (gloves, hat, sturdy shoes, clothes you can get dirty in, plus sunscreen and water.

The 18th Annual Great Los Angeles River CleanUp / La Gran Limpieza. Saturday, May 12, 2007. 9 am to noon. (If it rains, the cleanup’ll be postponed to Saturday, May 19, 2007, from 9 am to noon).

Update, 5/12/07: The next tour of the LA River happens on Saturday, May 19. See it while it’s clean :)

Tags: lariver, losangeles, river

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Fair trade student activists couldn’t convince Jazzman’s, a chain of coffee shops in colleges and universities, to go 100% fair trade despite a campaign. In fact, from what I’ve heard, Jazzman’s did pretty much nothing in response to that Justice at Jazzman’s campaign in March 2006.

But now, post-Black Gold and perhaps due in part to the whole Ethiopian coffee trademarking initiative going on, Jazzman’s has bought some coffee from the Oromia cooperative in Ethiopia — the very coffee co-op featured in Black Gold.

No, Jazzman’s has not gone 100% fair trade; it’s just offering this one extra organic fair trade coffee blend called Ethiopia-Oromia Coffee — bringing the total of Jazzman’s fair trade blends to three out of 11 — for a limited time.

Tags: jazzmans, coffee, fairtrade

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• Cash for biking to the Gold Line. “MyGo Pasadena provides commuters who take the Metro Gold Line from one of 3 stations in Pasadena an instant $500 rebate towards an electric bike, as well as a monthly cash reward based on the amount they use the bike to connect to transit.”
• Change It 2007: If you’re between 18-24, sign up to become one of 200 kids to train with Greenpeace — all expenses paid — to tackle global warming and other critical issues.
• Parducci, in north Ukiah operation’s become a carbon neutral winery. Solar panels, biodiesel-powered farm equipment, efforts to recycle waste water for irrigation, etc. Haven’t tried their wine yet though. (thnx Larry)

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• Boys in heels. Fun pics from the 6th annual Walk a Mile in Her Shoes Men’s March in Sherman Oaks, which raised money for the Valley Trauma Center, “dedicated to the elimination of sexual and interpersonal violence through healing, empowerment and increased public awareness of prevention strategies.” [image by Zach Behrens for LAist]
• Want a bullet train that’ll take you from LA to San Francisco in 2.5 hours? Schwarzenegger wants to slash funds for said train line, so he can use the money on freeways.



• Batteries you can recharge via a USB port!. As a sidenote, my dumbest electronic purchase was a digital camera that takes AA batteries, cuz they just don’t have enough power and I constantly have to recharge them. These USBCELL batteries might make things a bit easier –
• Slippery shrimp = 2,519 calories, with 96 grams of fat and 347 carbs, reports LA Times columnist Steve Lopez, in the 2nd part to his foray into fast food.

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Being the open-minded girl I am, I gave raw food another try. This time, I stopped by Cru, a raw vegan restaurant formerly called Jade Cafe, in Silverlake.

Now more raw-wary, I got a dish that’d make more sense as an uncooked entree. I mean, I know a “regular” bento box usually includes some cooked stuff, but Cru’s Bento Box sounded largely like a salad: fresh greens, avocado, cucumbers, carrots, bok choi, and spicy marinated mushrooms.

After decimating the mushrooms and cucumbers — both of which were marinated in spicy tangy sesamy-seedy sauces — I realized that perhaps I was supposed to mix the whole thing up, bibimbap style, to get a lil taste of marinade with each bite. As it was, I then had to finish my meal by nibbling on dry sprouts.

But overall, it was a pretty good salad, mainly because it was just different from the regular green salad with ranch sauce fare. I really liked the marinaded mushrooms and cucumbers, is what I’m saying.

What really warmed me up on Cru’s raw food was the dessert. I ordered the Raspberry Chocolate Crepes with Gelato. I have no idea what the crepe part of the dish was made of, but the raspberries were fresh, the chocolate sauce deep and rich, and the gelato — I had strawberry, because they were out of raspberry — was tart and refreshing without being too sweet. Delicious without the buttery guilt of regular crepes.

The downside: My teeth felt weirdly coated with some odd, organic substance post-meal. Not sure what caused that; I’m guessing it was some strange veggie ingredient included in the vegan gelato.

Cru. 1521 Griffith Park Blvd. Los Angeles. 323.667.1551. Wed. - Mon., 12 pm to 10 pm.

Tags: cru, silverlake, raw, rawfood

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Having a neurologist for a sis is super useful, especially if you’re prone to thinking, at regular intervals, that your brain might have serious probs.

My sis usually reassures me, ever patiently, that the chances of my going completely insane are pretty low, even if I’m a female poet.

We’ve taken v. different directions, my sis and I, but this has surprisingly little to do with the fact that she’s in the sciences and I’m in the arts. We both have proclivities in both directions — My sis plays the piano beautifully, and used to paint really gorgeous watercolors. Today, she knits complicated sweaters, makes her own beautiful curtains, and cooks very creative and complex vegetarian meals.

For my part, I did nicely in AP Physics and AP Calculus and was encouraged to pursue a career in the sciences — then I got to college and used the AP credits to opt out of science-math related requirements altogether. I manged to leave school a year early, graduating with a major in English Writing and a minor in Vocal Performance.

The paths we’ve taken, in my view, have much less to do with ability than with personal choice. She chose to go into medicine, and I chose to write poetry. She chose to go to Harvard then Columbia Med, partially financed by parents but mostly accrued in what became roughly $130K in student loans despite her penny pinching; I chose to only apply to colleges that I thought’d give me a full ride, so that, as a legal adult at 18, I’d no longer be financially dependent on my parents, then picked from those schools. Grad school at USC’s also a self-sustaining enterprise with teaching, though I do take a few thou out in loans every year to finance my drinking habit.

The main diff between us now is that she’s been clear ’bout this doctor-neurologist track since like third grade, while I’ve reached a near-catatonic, debilitiating indecision about what I want to do with my life.

[To be continued, cuz I’ve just opened a new bottle of wine.]

Update, 5/5/07: Continued here.

Tags: sanity, life

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Since I’m a lazy gal who’s not so keen on work in general, Curtis White’s ideas instantly beckon me into contemplation. Arguing that work, as we know it, devalues humanity, Curtis writes in “The Ecology of Work,” published in Orion magazine (I briefly wrote about the first part of Curtis’ essay, “The Idols of Environmentalism,” here):

Our culture’s assumption that there is virtue in work flatters us into thinking that we’re doing something noble (”supporting our families,” “putting food on the table,” “making sacrifices”) when we are really only allowing ourselves to be treated like automatons.

Curtis’ rhetoric gets rather heavy-handed at times, but his overall argument — that we need to abandon capitalism as an organizing principle for our society — is certainly one that strikes a chord with me. Curtis argues that capitalism can’t be greened because “It’s not in its nature to think nature.”

Instead of trying to reform capitalism, we need to replace it, according to Curtis. Quoting Marx, Curtis argues that people won’t knowingly hurt nature, but “The division of labor not only has the consequence of making labor maximally productive, it also hides from workers the real consequences of their work.”

So what to do? This is the part where Curtis’ arguments get murky and nebulous, because he calls for “spirit,” and goes into a rather odd, anti-science-type rant. WTF is spirit? That’s unclear, but Curtis does give some ideas of what he’d like to see:

We need to insist on work that is not destructive, that deepens the worker, that encourages her creativity…. It means leaving a culture based on the idea of success as the accumulation of wealth-as-money. In its place we need a culture that understands success as life.

That sounds lovely. Really, it does. And I’d even argue that a growing number of people are opting out of the “wealth = success” mentality in the pursuit of the happiness that comes from relationships, community, etc.

But what Curtis doesn’t address is the more pragmatic issue, which is: I still need to pay rent somehow. That, in general, means taking on a job, usually more to get a paycheck than to fulfill one’s soul.

Certainly, we could work to shift the balance further toward the soul and a little away from a monomaniacal pursuit of a bigger paycheck. We could opt for a humble salary from, say, Heal the Bay, instead of making a killing at Exxon.

But rebalancing is just that — a rebalancing, NOT a complete undoing, of capitalism. We’re all aware of the failed social experiments of communism-in-practice (vs. in theory), even while an increasing number of us would like to divorce ourselves from capitalism-in-practice today.

Which — to take things back to a personal note — still makes me feel that even in Curtis’ world, I’ll still experience alienation from the work I’ll have to do to make money, though that alienation’s likely to be less severe than what I might feel if I bought into corporate capitalism wholesale. I won’t be able to escape capitalism, though I’ll opt out of its worst tendencies.

And of course at this point, I start feeling very guilty about the fact that I have the time and leisure to contemplate what sort of work might alienate me less. The vast majority of the people in the world, it seems, don’t have this luxury; they take what work they can get, cuz they’re starving and they’ve got no other options. Preoccupation with the “meaning of life” or the “meaning of work” becomes, in many ways, a very bourgeois pasttime.

Off to do more bourgeois thinking.

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• Design a SIGG water bottle. If you win, you’ll get 100 bottles of your design — and your bottles’ll show up in Patagonia stores, with some of the sales going to Surfrider Foundation.
• Bottled water becoming uncool: A Slate article on “Bottled water’s swift transformation from glass-encased luxury good to déclassé, plastic-wrapped menace.”



• Big Sunday’s described as an “annual, city-wide volunteer day,” but since it’s happenning today and tomorrow, I’d say it’s more like a Big Weekend. It’s not too late to pitch in. (thnx Lisa)
• Blogging gender transformation: Mike Penner at the LA Times decides to become Chistine Daniels and blog ’bout the gender change process.

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[Pic of me and Summer at the World Cafe, way back when]

Happy hour at World Cafe with Kristen turns into a yummy, seafood linguini birthday dinner (for her — she’s turning 30 on Monday) — but now it’s only 10 pm and I’m wasted and tired and home.

At least I biked there and back, which burned off like 1 of the 5 glasses of wine — a combo of merlot (3 glasses), cabernet (1 glass) and chianti (1 glass).

Luckily I have some leftover cab at home. Yay!

Today as a whole’s been emotionally stressful. Yesterday my friend Kyeann — with whom I took part in a panel ’bout green blogging, AND with whom I bought twin Patagonia dresses — told me she was fired from Treehugger. V. shocking, cuz in the green blogging panel, she represented Treehugger and has basically been with that blog for as long as I’ve known her, develping contacts for the blog, promoting it, etc.

So we talk. Kyeann says she feels she’s been fired because she’d asked for an open forum about fair compensation for writers at Treehugger. Time for investigative work for me.

So I talk to my friend Summer, who sorta writes for Treehugger now; she says she was shocked by the abruptness with which Kyeann was fired, but she doesn’t know any deets. More than that, Summer’s v. new to Treehugger and more concerned ’bout other personal issues she’s raised and not heard back ’bout. The writer compensation talk’s on her back burner.

So I email my bloggy friend Jasmin, who now also writes for Treehugger, who says the forum Treehugger provided to talk ’bout the compensation issue — basically, a few different conference calls with 10 or so writers on each — seemed open and constructive to her. Jasmin says she heard Kyeann was fired for other issues — which is what Michael, editor at Treehugger, and Graham, honcho at Treehugger say. None can give details, due to employer-employee confidentiality issues.

I have a long chat with a rather freaked-out Graham, who says he’s absolutely open to open forums, that there’s no “evil divide and conquor strategy” to subdue writers, and that based on the conference calls, Treehugger plans to pay higher than average compensation to its writers.

All of these chats’re happening because what’s happening affects a buncha my friends, and because I contribute to Treehugger, though I’ve declined to sign on as an official writer. Basically, I’m calling people up cuz I wanna figure out what I want to do, and want to write ’bout the experience of figuring this out for myself. This, I find out, seriously freaks out the Treehugger people even when all I’m trying to do’s ask Qs to find out more. Perhaps that’s normal — I dunno.

Which is to say I like being rogue, and at this point, I’m damn glad I don’t have a blog boss. I have serious authority figure issues.

One of these days I’ll search in my gmail archives for the tortured no’s I sent Treehugger the few times they asked me to come on as an official writer. Sometimes I can laugh at myself for my weird reasons for declining to make money from my writing. Most of the time, I know my freedom to write what I want when I want’s worth more than chump change.

Also, do ALL of my green writerly peeps have to sign up to write for Treehugger? I mean, it’s fine, and it’s their choice, but I’d just like to feel like not everyone I know’s sold on same blog, for what I honestly feel is chump change, if for no other reason than that I’d like us to have other shit to talk about at happy hour –

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