I've been so mentally busy (lists, lists, lists running through my head.all.the.time) that I haven't felt like updating.

My bachelorette party was on my birthday, and it was so much fun I didn't want it to end. I uploaded pics here.

First I went to dinner with 3 of the girls and gave them their bridesmaid gifts. I got Pam a gift certificate to go skydiving, and I'm gonna go with her! It's been 10 years since my jump, so I figured I'd make it a tradition.

Then the rest of the girls met at my house, and Pam surprised me with matching shirts she'd made for the occasion. Then a limo picked us up and took us to places that had some significance in my life, and I'd get a clue before each one.

First up was the house Dave grew up in, where his sister lives now (she was with us). When we got there, we went in and she had champagne and grapes all ready for us! So cute, all the organization. Then we made several stops around my hometown and then at my high school and my college apartment.

Meanwhile, in the car, well, we were getting drunk of course (good, smiley, happy drunk fortunately), and Pam also had a trivia game prepared with questions about me and Dave, which was fun.

There were supposed to be a few more stops, but Pam said we didn't have time if we were going to make it to our final destination on time, and then handed me a bag. FILLED WITH BINGO DAUBERS. Haha, I'm laughing just thinking about how fucking absurd and fantastic that was. I love Bingo. Pam and I went one time and swore we were going to do it every weekend...and then never went back. This was just so perfect.

So we roll up to this trashy full-time Bingo hall, and some people were nice and fawned over us, but most people just hated us. And probably deservedly so. People there were hardcore. It was kinda sad, like you could tell they had this month's rent riding on it. And even though we were all trying to be quiet, that's just not really possible with 8 drunk girls, even the painfully self-conscious kind like me.

So the early-bird round started at 11 (!), and there were 7 or 8 games over that hour, and of a whole room full of people, 2 girls in our group won! $100 each! (This wasn't winning us any friends, but how exciting!)

Then Dave showed up! With the most wonderfully, laughably horrendous sugar-free cake that Pam had lovingly made for me. Awww, so thoughtful. And so, so bad. :D

It was perfect.

My bridal shower is tomorrow. I'm don't want tomorrow to come because...because...then it will be over. :( I know it sounds incredibly cheesy, but I'm just so excited to be surrounded by people who like me and care about me. I don't enjoy being on display, but at the same time I've never really had anyone throw a party for me, so I'm feeling very sappy about it.

This makes me want to cry.

A belief in God or a higher spirit is pervasive. Even Americans who describe themselves as atheist or agnostic have a robust sense of a higher power: Twenty-one percent of those who describe themselves as atheists expressed a belief in God or a universal spirit, and more than half of those who call themselves agnostic expressed a similar conviction.

Smith said some people may identify with the term atheist or agnostic without fully understanding the definition, or they have a negative view of organized religion, even though they believe in God.

I just rode the elevator with Giuliani. I got on and the door was closing when someone stuck their foot in to stop it, and I gave a quiet exasperated sigh, and then he came on with 3 people. They kept giving me suspicious glances, and I didn't realize until after they got off that I'd forgotten to punch my floor's button, so they probably wondered whether I was planning to follow them.

At the risk of completely counteracting my last post, I can't stop listening to New Kids on the Block's new song. In 5th grade I had NKOTB everything, but when I heard they were getting back together, I was like, oh my god, no, please salvage some self-respect and resist, guys. But I'll be damned, I guess 40-year-olds can still deliver catchy pop if they've got the right producers.

Today I found out the one I had a huge crush on (mainly because he suffered from panic attacks and couldn't dance, and awwwww), Jonathan, is gay. And I was like, but he dated Tiffany! And then I realized I'm old.

And yeah, other than wedding talk, I got nuthin.

I had to take a baby picture of myself to a friend's baby shower yesterday. Imagine my amazement upon stumbling across this in the process:



Fucking metal since 1979.

The baby is cute:



But not quite ready to accept me into her life, heh:

So, here's an idea.

Someone should splice together Tyler Perry movies a la Bumbly's Nickelback montage.

Brilliant.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through, a part of our union that we have not yet made perfect.

~~~

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past."

We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country.

But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist between the African-American community and the larger American community today can be traced directly to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools. We still haven't fixed them, 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education. And the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

Legalized discrimination, where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions or the police force or fire department meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations.

That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between blacks and whites and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persist in so many of today's urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family contributed to the erosion of black families, a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.

And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods -- parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up, building code enforcement -- all help create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continues to haunt us.

~~~

Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their world view in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away, nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.

~~~

That anger is not always productive. Indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems. It keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity within the African-American community in our condition. It prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.

But the anger is real, it is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.

Their experience is the immigrant experience. As far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything, they built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero-sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town, when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed, when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudice, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation.

Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk-show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

~~~

And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns, this, too, widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. And contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle or with a single candidate, particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction, a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people, that, working together, we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds and that, in fact, we have no choice -- we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life.

But it also means binding our particular grievances, for better health care and better schools and better jobs, to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.

And it means also taking full responsibility for our own lives -- by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American -- and, yes, conservative -- notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made; as if this country -- a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino, Asian, rich, poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

What we know, what we have seen, is that America can change. America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope -- the audacity to hope -- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Now, in the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination -- and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past -- that these things are real and must be addressed, not just with words, but with deeds: by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.

It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams, that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

For we have a choice in this country: We can accept a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle, as we did in the OJ trial; or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina; or as fodder for the nightly news.

We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction, and then another one, and then another one. And nothing will change.

This gets to the crux of what has fueled my interest in public policy for as long as I can remember. And, until now, no one has been in the position to speak knowingly and truthfully from all sides while also commanding respect and attention from all sides. I will be devastated if he isn't our next president.

A few thoughts on recent news stories.

The hubbub over whether Obama is secretly a Muslim or whether he’s an anti-Semite like his pastor, etc, is ridiculously moot – because he’s pretty obviously an atheist – yet the media/society doesn’t even consider that possibility because it’s so far out of the realm of most people’s consciousness.

I was so dejected to discover that the “high-class” prostitute sexing up Spitzer was just your run-of-the-mill, abused, drug-addicted, New Jersey white trash. I’ve always had a fascination with the personal lives of sex-workers, and there was still a part of me willing to believe that these really expensive girls were at least educated and sophisticated, if also victims of abuse; that they’d be able to hold up their end of the conversation at a fancy-schmancy cocktail party without anyone guessing they were being paid to fuck their date afterwards. And that dichotomy intrigued me. But, alas, no, they’re all just dumbshits. In which case, I feel bitter on behalf of all the run-of-the-mill, abused, drug-addicted, New Jersey white trash who aren’t making $4,300 per hour.

Throughout this foreclosure mess, I’ve repeatedly heard charges of racism leveled at mortgage brokers for “steering” their black clients toward subprime or risky loans. But the only proof of this offered is that a greater percentage of blacks than whites have these loans, or that black neighborhoods have higher foreclosure rates (at least in the D.C. area). No one mentions the possibility that perhaps a greater percentage of blacks are stupidly jumping into loans they can’t afford – either due to cultural tendencies to live outside their means (i.e., the emphasis on material goods in all forms of entertainment geared toward black people), or due to an understandable desire for upward mobility that’s too premature to support, coupled with an obvious lack of education about what constitutes a risky loan. But as long as risky loans are legal to market, the responsibility lies with the consumer to avoid them. When my friends and I were all buying houses around the same time, we were fully aware of what to avoid. And that didn’t come from lessons passed down by our home-owning parents; it came from a simple Google search and a copy of “Mortgages for Dummies.” This isn’t an argument in favor of letting them suffer for their own stupidity – I do think government should regulate the industry more – but it is an argument that general stupidity is to blame, not racism.

edit: If anyone has come across articles showing that black clients are disproportionately lied to about the terms of their mortgage, let me know, because that's a different story. Although, even then, it's their fault for not reading the paperwork.