arianna huffington and me

Tonight i went with my mom to a lecture by arianna huffington. (it was excellent and enlightening)

she spoke about how last week she guest hosted the rachel maddow show.

so i came home and was reading the huffington post. and found the clips from her guest spot on the rachel maddow show.

then i found myself on youtube watching clips of old radio shows by maddow.

which led me to this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnZjg-NQXeM

and this is when i say, it's ok, i'm young and impressionable.

i have a lot of conflicting opinions on a lot of things, mostly because i keep trying desperately to learn of different perspectives on different issues and be as informed as i possibly can. and whenever i find a perspective that makes a great deal of sense to me and that i agree with, i find myself jumping over to get behind it, even if it may conflict with something i've said before.

after last week when i was kicking myself for skipping the protest, i was talking to a friend, who actually went, about our conflicting feelings on the gay marriage issue. not that she and i disagreed. just that within herself, and within myself, i feel conflicty about it. because while i'm all for supporting gay rights, i've been frustrated for years at the obsession of the gay 'community' with marriage. and as my very eloquent friend voiced, it's been at the sacrifice of so many issues that are arguably more important.
and before i continue with that thought too far, i'll just connect back to that link and say, good point, rachel maddow! i myself recall being confused with the name HRC. as my dad pointed out, it could actually be a lot of things. turns out, i meant the human rights campaign. which is actually lying in its name because while it sounds like it should be fighting for equal rights for all humans, it's not. it's fighting for rights for gay people in the US. and generally, it seems mostly to be fighting just for the big ticket issues. so, marriage!
but hey look, i found my way back to my point. or my friend's point.
Actually, i find i need to step back to another beginning.
OK. Prop 8 passed. yuck. black voters were significantly against it. as were latino voters. and apparently mormons. But there has been constant complaints of both women's rights movements and gay rights movements that the fail to make efforts to reach out to or include people of color in their efforts. the taboos and visibility in these communities is almost incomparable to the white or mainstream community. if we worked on this , we'd probably get them to like us better. and fewer queer people of color would be victims of discrimination, recrimination, verbal abuse and hate crimes.
There's also the fact that there is a disproportionally high number of homeless queer youth.

Back when i was in college, contemplating writing a thesis, i actually decide what i wanted my thesis to be. but i realised that it couldnt' be an undergraduate thesis. it was something that actually required years of research and finding my way into practically invisible communities. I always wanted to write about that disproportionally high number of homeless queer youth. Where are they, what support system exists for them, and do they become homeless queer adults, or do they eventually find their way back into society? And i kept thinking, surely someone's written about this. but if they had up until 2006, it hadnt' been published in any media i could find in my multiple searches of our database, including lexisnexis (newspapers and magazines), and all sorts of peer reviewed journals.

i digress. but that's the point of a hardly read blog, now, isnt' it?

so many incomplete thoughts/ but i have to go to sleep! arianna huffington says that it's important to get a good night's sleep every night. it will make me a more successful person