Summertime

I'm living back at home with my dad for the summer. It's like Survivor. I wonder which one of us will make it. I threw out 6 bags and 2 boxes of junk he had laying around the house - I did it in the middle of the night so he wouldn't know. I lined the bags and boxes up next to the trash cans and recycling bins in the back yard. He went through the bags and pulled about 30% of it out and told me it was good stuff that I threw away. Told me he wants to donate it to Purple Heart. I gave him 2 weeks. You gotta get tough with the folks, you know? I told him, "It's a broken cappucino maker, Dad, not your youth, let it go." He doesn't even drink cappucino. He argued that he might one day want cappucino. I trumped with, "Dunkin Donuts is less than a mile away." The cappucino maker is not long for this world.

I probably told you, I painted over the old memories and bad energy of my childhood bedroom. It's a great sky blue (satin finish -- flat seemed too, well, flat) now and I'm painting the trim glossy white. It's going to be lovely. If I get in a crazy mood, I just might paint some clouds. My dad told me he thinks I should paint some sunflowers or something. He overestimates my talent. Always has. I love that about him.

Dad's a funny bird. He's really a bird. He's about 5'10" maybe 125 pounds. He's a small man with big bloated dreams. Bloated from the drink, you may well know. He's a drinker who is really alive only when drunk. He's a cranky robot until he can sit at home, in front of CNN and drink glass after glass from the gallon jug of Chianti that sits on the countertop by the microwave. I think of all the good he could do in the world, but I think he prefers to do no harm. Except, of course, to himself. But who am I to judge? Not that I am the queen of health, it's just an observation. Just a way of looking at this man, who once I detested, now pity in some ways, but really, truly love, and learning him. Learning who he is and who he wishes he had become. It's like the insight I got as a child cleaning out a closet and uncovering poems he wrote once, a long time ago, when he was still smitten with my mother. Beautiful, sappy, sentimental poems that would almost be publishable if they could be a bit more remote. Poems I would never have recognized as coming from within the man I knew to be my father. Poems I can now see he used to be able to write. Before.

So, dad's up and it's nearly 10:30. Dad is an early to bed, early to rise kind of guy whose sleep habits Alan, my brother, and I love to make fun of. On an average day, dad is alseep by 8 pm. In the summer, this means dad is asleep while it's still light outside. You can see where a couple of smart ass siblings would take this fact and make an absolute mockery of it. When I visit dad, no matter when, he'll be in bed by 8, sometimes snoring the snores that only come after at least a half hour of sleep. But now that I'm home for a while, dad's up. He's up and he's watching TV. He pops into the room I may be in to share a fact -- just the other day it was Reagan's death moments after it happened. Sometimes I follow him out to the living room and sit in the chair next to him. We might talk about the news, we might talk about politics or the president. Sometimes we talk about gay rights. Now, that I have my internship, we talk often about gay rights. On this topic, he is sweet and liberal and caring and genuinely on my side. Not in a patronizing way, or an I-don't-understand-but-your-my-daughter-and-I-love you way either, just two people talking, speculating on what the hell the big deal is anyway. We ponder and sometimes, when I talk conspiracy-like, he grounds me in the straight perspective without smugness or a feeling of straightness being the right way and without making gay "other" or less than. I love and respect this about him. And I love him for not ever letting me feel he is disappointed that I am gay. I hope he is not. I believe he is not.

So, this 10:30 thing is getting out of control. I wonder if it's because my schedule has pushed our dinnertime back to 7, from 6. But still, adding an hour would only make his bedtime 9:00, not 10:30. I hope that it is because of me. I hope it is because he is glad I'm here. I will take credit for it, even if it is not mine to take. He is the same in every other way. We have dinner every night, well, at least 5 nights a week, at his mother's house. It's me and dad, Aunt Lorie, Uncle Ed and Mommom. Lorie or Eddie or both cook dinner and since I work until 6 and get home at 7, 7 has become dinner time. It's a big change for folks like them and I appreciate not being made to feel bad about it. I think my family is finally growing on me. But check back with me on that in a few weeks.

I am so in love with my job. Yesterday I went to Harrisburg, the capital of PA and lobbied Republican Senators and House Members against a bill that will eliminate domestic partnerships entirely, including benefits by private companies. Really fucked up bills. It was so hard, they were so patronizing, sometimes downright rude, sometimes feigning concern, but I absolutely loved it. This morning when all the other interns grilled me on my field trip into the trenches, I likened it to starting a really difficult class (Civil Procedure was my example, but feel free to insert Calculus or Italian or any class that's absolutely foreign to you) in the middle of the semester without having ever done any assigned reading. It was tough, but I got to be a hardcore activist in a conservative suit with sensible shoes and a lovely briefcase.

I went with the Executive Director of my organization and we met up with an ACLU attorney and his intern (GW student, I was not impressed), a lawyer from the PA Bar Association and 2 full time union lobbyists. My ED, was by far the most articulate, most persuasive speaker. I admire her tremendously. She is a strong, assertive, feminist, queer woman who really did a tremendous job juggling the comments and providing firm, well grounded rationale in a pitch that spoke the language of each of the Members we met with. I saw the depth and nature of the relationships she formed with them and the people we'd pass in those hallowed halls.

I was dumbfounded most of the time, trying desperately to muddle through the thicket of jargon and comaraderie and pretense. In many ways, I felt like I was in church. I felt like an outsider. I felt like I was supposed to be deferential and demure. I felt like my handshake was too firm and my posture too erect. But, also, I felt proud. Oddly, I felt patriotic, in the cleanest sense. I know very well the links between partriotism and patriarchy. I know that colonial times and colonialism are one and the same. I know the beast that is racism and that white supremecy was a founding father of this nation. Yet, I swelled with pride, and almost, almost, welled up when I saw Ben Franklin's portrait on the wall, and his title Speaker of the House and the years in the late 1700s he held that position. You know, I always think of Ben as a cooky fellow, a bachelor inventor and quick witted scribe. I think of him as inncouous and clever. But it was breathtaking to stand in this beautiful building with its original cobblestone flooring and marble walls, wooden banisters and vibrant, rich paintings and embellishments. It was really a sight to behold, a real bestill my heart experience.
But I'm exhausted.

I couldn't sleep the night before, from all the excitement of the impending trip and because I had come home from 24 hours in New York with Eunice and was on the tail end of the exictement of being with her again and staring down at least a week without her. So I woke up only a few hours after finally falling asleep. I was out the door by 6:00 am and met ED at 30th Street Station (the Grand Central Station of Philly) at 8:00. Had to be early for the ED, so I arrived a half hour early just in case. It was a 2 hour drive to Harrisburg and we hit the ground running.

We had meetings on the half hour, every hour from 10-5. And it was up and down stairs all day long, and back and forth, back and forth between opposite ends of the capitol building, House on one side, Senate on the other. Much like the Brittish House of Lords and House of Commons (Commons, right Nikki? She'll kill me if I'm wrong...she pointed it out to me 80 billion times when she drove us around London), separate, bicameral legislation, but you definitely get the sense that one's better, they're both supposedly equal, but one's definintely more important. I'm certain Nikki will go bonkers over me saying bicameral and House of Lords in the same sentence, but cest la vie. We're moving on. I must have shaken 100 hands yesterday. No kidding. I got home after 9:30 and dad was up, and he wanted to hear all about it. He was so excited to me. Living bicamerally, vicariously through his police officer son and his law student daughter. That's about all the excitement he can stand.

I'm so exhausted. But I am really truly living my dream. My job is way better than I ever even dreamed a dream job could be.

I got a cool research assignment today. I'm trying to find case law that represents the limits of what crimes PA judges will accept for petitions for a name change. Murder and other felonies (for those of you who watch Law & Order, et al, the list is similar to the felonies that bump ordinary murder up to felony murder) will bar a name change. So, I'm trying to find cases that demonstrate the crimes judges have determined preclude name change. The statutes (Sections 701 & 702) grant name change for any reason other than to evade justice or avoid debt. So, monetary judgements ordering payment of debt most likely preclude name change as do convicitons for some crimes.

The law works in mysterious ways and lawyers must educate judges as to how they should interpret the law. This is done by creative storytelling and case law. Basically, the place to start in interpreting a law is reading the statute. Then, you move on to see how other judges have interpreted the statute. Then, you craft an argument as tightly and persuasively as possible that your way of defining how the judge should act is the right, just, efficient way. So, it's my task to create a memorandum that outlines the case law on name changes and come up with some general rules from those cases. It's really up to me to determine what the law is. That's power. It's a power I'm trying not to be afraid of. Power I'm trying to feel entitled to. Working with the women at the Center is giving me that entitlement. They're not saying, "Here, do this, you're entitled to it," but they are, between the lines. Their faith in me and their casualness, their benefit of the doubt and their friendliness is telling me that it's all up to me and I'm up to the challenge. I love my job.

I'm also going to start investigating whether PA legislators have EVER sued private citizens. There's a case now where a bunch of legislators are suing a same-sex couple who filed (only filed!) for marriage in New Hope, PA. Their petition is disgustingly homophobic and contains explicit details about gay sex (anal sex is x, y, and z). It's chock full of bullshit equating heterosexual marriage with fidelity (bah!) and gay marriage with debauchery. So I'm trying to find out what the hell that's all about. It's pretty cool. I have no idea where to start, but having read the complaint I am mortified. I am saddened that there are people in this world, in this Commonwealth, that are so desperately against just plain people trying to obtain a right the US Supreme Court has called fundamental, the right to marriage.

I've never in my life been so in favor of gay marriage as I was when I read this complaint. I just hope that the masses of people who could care less about gay marriage or politics or those who don't understand what the big deal is are as offended by this lawsuit. I hope that the plaintiff's crusade backfires on them and the masses say, "Hey, buddy, you've crossed the line." I feel that day is coming. Because this assignment is amorphous and doesn't have an immediate purpose, but rather is a general overview of litigational history, I know it is big. I know it is a teeny step in the marathon of this case. This is for a case the organization will try in a couple years, maybe sooner. This is one of those that will be brewing and marinating for some time before coming to trial. I like that I'm part of the pre-preliminary process of organizing this case. I'm one tiny cog in the machinery that will start up with a roar once it's set in motion. Look out, 'cause here I come. Have I mentioned that I love my job?