Would you wear a shirt with your dad's face all over it?

Bona Mugabe would. She did, actually:



Read this story about the 20 year old and the pressure to deport her from university in Hong Kong. This is an Afro-Asian connection that perturbs me.

We are family

Bring the family back to San Francisco!

One day I will have more energy and find some better articles about this. But I thought this would suffice for now.

As a San Franciscan, born and raised, this city is in my heart and soul. Sometimes in my dreams about one permutation of life in the distant future, I will raise children here. But this appears to be a fading dream. Although I may not ever live that dream, I would like it to at least be possible for others. I know firsthand the enchantment and wonder of growing up in this wonderful place. Sure, nostalgia always gets the better of me. And if other trends of gentrification, hipster migrations, and carpetbagger yuppies aren't bucked then it will become a San Francisco supremely hostile to the urban values of diversity and maverick independence that make the children of this magical peninsula soar.

A different kind of love for V-Day

Please read this article: "Love On Campus." Special thanks to Mana for sending it to me.

At first it may seem like another media studies analysis, but by the end I was inspired. Surely, there are parts of it that I take issue with. For one, can't this love be the province of more? Could we not extend it beyond the coterie of a professor-student ingroup? Can't the bearers of love also be non-academics?

There are so many different kinds of love. While I feel the love that the author talks about in this article is abundant in my life, it is not the only love with which I am nourished. Thank you to those who have bestowed any form of it upon me. Oooh, gotta cut it out before I get too mushy...

Stil, this article is particularly cool, because it speaks to some of the reasons why I want to eventually continue with scholarship. The feeling, the power, and the ardor of ideas run deeply for me. And I want to pass this on to others. But I would also hope that I do and will continue to do so beyond the strictures of the classroom or office of a university. Also, can those relationships happen more equitably, be a more balanced exchange? I don't think the line between pupil and teacher is always so cleanly cut. Aren't we always both? Also, how does this kind of love operate in tandem with or in opposition to others? Dare I say it, is there a hierarchy of love?

Nonetheless, it is a solid reminder that we should celebrate love in its many forms and challenge the long-held notions that confine people to privileging heterosexist eros.

If that wasn't enough to get you to click on the link yet, here's a little tidbit preview:

"Teaching, Yeats said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket, and this is how it gets lit. The professor becomes the student’s muse, the figure to whom the labors of the semester — the studying, the speaking in class, the writing — are consecrated. The alert student understands this. In talking to one of my teaching assistants about these matters, I asked her if she’d ever had a crush on an instructor when she was in college. Yes, she said, a young graduate student. “And did you want to have sex with him?” I asked. 'No,' she said, 'I wanted to have brain sex with him.'"

When we're talkin' brain sex, call me unabashedly polyamourous.

Another bad effect that Prop 8 propagates

This is an article I just read that really reflects one of the concerns I had the moment Prop 8 passed but Obama was elected. In other words, our struggle is only as good as we see how it connects us to others.

For non-Californians here is more info on Proposition 8.