{Originally published on Sleep Deprivation Ninja}

Life is hard. I’m not going to lie to you, baby girl. Someday things are going to be really difficult. I can’t stop that. All I can do is give you the ninja skills necessary to take on some of the challenges you will face. But you will face challenges that even the greatest ninja skills cannot overcome.

I think about these things when you reach up and wrap your little arms around my neck, squeezing me out the biggest baby-bear hug you can muster. I know you are really trying to eat my neck but I like to think of it as a big hug. I could hug you all day. And I think of this also when I hear of bad things happening–things that someday soon, you will have to face.

Bad things are happening as I write this. People are dying. People are killing other people. It’s crazy. It’s just madness. I can’t explain it to you; All I can say is that it is. These things happen.

{Originally posted on In Jennifer’s Head}

I’ve been planning this post for some time, but decided to put it off until after the election. I wanted it to be a genuine tribute and not viewed as an attempt to convince anyone to agree with me.

Remember the young man we elected eight years ago?

{Originally published on Lesbian Dad}

I wake up before 6:00am, with the alarm. Dress fast, leave the house before the kids come to bed. I could count on two hands, maybe one, the number of times I’ve done that before.

Daylight savings time at least enables me to pull away from the house in the rosy-fingered dawn, and not the pitch-darkness.

I nab one of the last parking spots at the First Congregational Church, a good thing, since I don’t know where I’ll be going during the day, and there is precious little easy parking in town. Coffee and donuts arrayed on a table outside the church. A long line stretches outside for people who hadn’t attended the weekend Election Day GOTV trainings there. The rest of us go right up to the door, sign in. Name, cell phone number (to be contacted while out in the field, redeployed, what have you). Where would all this work be without the cell phone, one wants to know.

Folks of all sorts there. Young, old, men, women. All races, but mostly white. But this is Berkeley. I wonder what the other “hubs” look like. Across the room I see a man I met eighteen years ago at an LGBT youth activists’ training conference. Two thoughts: one, he’s aged well. Same mustache, even. Two: thank god he made it through the epidemic.

I’m sent off with two fresh-faced young men to a Presbyterian Church in a professorial neighborhood. It’s none of my business, but I think both of them are heterosexuals. It dawns on me: this is just a straight-up civil rights issue to the young people. Each of us has a grocery bag containing a sign, a stack of “palm cards” with No on 8 essentials on it to distribute (Opposed by: Barack Obama, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dianne Feinstein, and on down). Included is a small spool of stickers, should anyone want any.

I position myself exactly where the poll captain directs me, and over the course of several hours distribute a handful of cards. It’s quiet at my poll, and I’m grateful. Before 10:00am it’s clear that this battle knocked the wind out of me long before election day. I am there to help – really, have to be — but I have no spirit with which to do it. Many people smile on their way in. As many studiously avoid eye contact. But it feels like we’re tired of it all. Maybe I’m projecting.

One white-bearded man sporting a hippie-batik kufi cap chats with me at length…