yesterday i had a quick lunch with one of my freshman college roommates. because of a disagreement with my father on who my neighbors should be, i ended up on the all-girl’s floor my first year in ny. the bulk of other women on that floor were jewish. i, having grown up in germany with some time in georgia, had – to my knowledge – no prior experience with jewish people whatsoever. then i met s – my first orthodox jewish friend. suddenly i was wondering why god would want jews to walk without an umbrella when it rained on shabbos, trying to wrap my brain around the idea of becoming untouchable when you were on your moon. and what did i have to share? i taught her to dance from the hip,  that you could never overanalyze any situation involving a crush. there’ve been years we didn’t speak, years in which s became a wife and mother of two, an actuary instead of her sophomore dream of a florist. we sat down at the only place she can eat in oakland, a spot called ‘the holy land’. we made it maybe 10 minutes before she brought up the situation in the middle east, and got my honest answer. she handled it well – but it was one of those moments where you have to hold tight to all the things you love and respect as the real world blows up around you. didn’t i say i hate politics? it’s so personal.

i tried to share stargate with jessamyn the other night but you really can’t start on a random episode in season 8. it made me consider that sharing sci fi is hard, so much goes into my love of it.

after a few nights of conversations with amazing women, i was going to ponder here if we were just in an age of silly men who can’t fully show up. but then today several men have done amazing things for me and women i love. so hurray men, those of you who do show up are dope as hell! somedays you know, i have my own gendertypes.

now, back to wishing that some very cool remarkably wealthy human or alien would walk through the door of my office and offer to become our patron so we could just focus on program for a few  years!