A very very happy birthday to the Guy who makes Aretha Franklin’s gowns. Really.

I love me some drama: Rasputina & The Dresden Dolls, both some kind of merger of pop and weimar. I especially love the Rasputina lyrics: Neglected girls should worry? / That’s what god made sailors for!

& Yes, I did hear “If your kisses won’t hold the man you love, your tears won’t bring him back” in a slightly different way viz my own marriage, but it still held up as truth, no?

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This is cooler than most things.

I saw an ad for Smooth Away on a night when I just couldn’t stand the thought of waxing or shaving my legs. Some days I just get exhausted by the maintenance; my nails grow like weeds & so does my leg hair. They always have, which is why I know better than to expect a miracle product like Smooth Away to work; I’ve tried far too many & wound up disappointed.

What made me feel a lot better was reading this review of Smooth Away - not just because it’s very, very funny but because I”m not the only hairy, lazy idiot in the world.

Have I mentioned that I’ve figured out how you know it’s getting to be spring in Wisconsin?

The snow stays on the ground for only a week after it snows.

How cool are these guys?

Yes, I’m one of those people. I hadn’t ever heard of Feng Shui back in the day, and I’ve been rearranging rooms for “flow” for as long as I can remember. I had a friend who used to make me come with her to see apartments so I could determine whether her furniture would work right in it. What I do, for the record, isn’t Feng Shui at all. I just have to feel right directionally.

When I moved into my apartment at Lawrence, I was so thrilled with the size of the place that I tried very hard to ignore how unfortunate the bedroom layout was. Until now. What happened is this: the other night I woke up in the morning and I had moved myself to sleep on the bed perpendicularly. In my sleep, that is, I had rotated myself a full 90 degrees.

So despite the fact that the room doesn’t work so well because of a misplaced radiator, I’ve rotated the bed the same 90 degrees I’d moved myself in my sleep, and voila: I just realized my bed is now facing North, as it should be. (It faces NE in Brooklyn, but that’s because Brooklyn’s crooked.)

I am hoping this clears up some of the wrong moves, wrong words, wrongness in general that has been plaguing me lately.

Today is the 1st annual Drag Day at Lawence University. Okay, it’s just the first, but I’m hoping it’s not the last. The students in my Trans Lives course expressed a desire to play with gender, and I thought it’d be safest on a day that’s already a little nuts: Mardi Gras.

So laissez les bon temps rouler & have a good Drag Day!

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& Happy Valentine’s Day from Sarah Haskins, who just can’t leave the bullshit alone.

I’ve been humming it for days. Betty arrives here in Appleton tomorrow, about 14 hours from now.

Damn.

The woman suffered a traumatic injury several years ago that left her with no nose, palate, or way to eat or breathe normally. In a 22-hour procedure, 80 percent of her face was replaced with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from a dead donor.

It was the fourth partial face transplant in the world, though the others were not as extensive.

How cool is that? I can’t imagine what it might mean to look in the mirror after that surgery, but then lots of people have extensive plastic surgery on their faces for various reasons. I’m so not the type to do that, so maybe that’s why this blows my mind, considering what it’d feel like if I had to.

Oy. I got entirely roped into the CSI marathan that was on Spike this weekend, and today they’ve moved onto CSI: NY episodes.

I come home from teaching Gender Studies 100 (specifically a piece by Ana Castillo) and it turns out the “Jane Doe” is really a “John Doe” — which conclusion they come to by looking up the dead trans woman’s skirt.

Oy.

It’s over, it’s over!! Dubya is out of office, & so are all his fuckwad cronies. I can hardly believe it: the long national nightmare is over.

(Even if there is a lot of cleaning up to do.)

How hot is this?

You can get a year’s subscription to Ms. Magazine AND this nifty poster for $35.

The other day while writing my Blog for Choice post, I realized it was the first time I wrote one with a pro-choice president in office.

& The Global Gag Rule has already been repealed.

There is nothing sexier than a guy who is a feminist & who backs it up with legislation.

(I promise I’ll stop posting about President Obama soon. Okay, maybe not. But I’ll try not to, promise.)

(Thanks to Veronica.)

If you like what we’re doing here & can help us keep doing it, please donate. Thank you so much.

It’s really incredible: watching the Obamas walk hand-in-hand (which is beautiful in & of itself) to the White House just blows my mind. I’m not sure it’s actually sunk in yet that we actually pulled this off. Damn.

& What a mess he inherited, but still it’s incredible.

Here are some of the references made today, either directly or indirectly:

• Lowery opened with the words of what’s called the “negro national anthem” - called “lift every voice and sing” - originally written to introduce Booker T Washington.
• tanks into tractors = swords into plowshares. Interesting choice for a wartime president.
  
• the reference in the poem not just to picking cotton but to picking lettuce, which was a reference to the UFW & Cesar Chavez.
• Feinstein mentioned the ballot or the bullet, which is Malcolm X’s most famous speech.

Anyone catch any others?