Kate and Neil’s Awesome Website

“Oh, and by the way. You are in charge of getting Mr. Nader lunch. He likes Lebanese food and fruit juice.” This is what we were told two hours before the Nader rally at UCSD that we were in charge of getting peeps in San Diego out to. When we got the call, we were in the middle of silkscreening our custom, “SD heart Nader” shirts. Neil went on an emergency mission for some Tabbouleh and Pita & Hummus, which was successful & well received by the Nader crew.

As you can see below by the standing ovation for Nader, there was a most excellent, to quote Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, turnout at the rally. More than 1/2 of the crowd were hearing Nader speak for the first time.

Nader was well recieved, Matt Gonzalez also spoke and people had fabulous questions. But, let’s face it… the shirts were the real highlight of the day. I gave a shirt to Mr. Nader while he was doing a book signing. Unfortunate timing because, he thought I wanted him to sign it & signed the ill fated gift. Luckily Nader’s “handler” caught it & said he’d give it to him later. Now Nader has the ultimate self-aggrandizing shirt. An “I heart myself” shirt with his own signature. Again, most excellent.

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Yesterday Neil & I went knocking to get people out to see Ralph Nader at his upcoming rally in San Diego next Saturday. We went with (the) two other Nader supporters in San Diego. One was our new friend Dennis. He is the head of the gay bowling league in San Diego, among other things. He is really fearless. He showed us the ropes & hit the streets.

While the experience was intimidating, it made me take a deep breath & remember that most people are just really nice people. They just want to have nice lives, nice kids, nice neighbors. They don’t hate. They are just nice. Even the Obama peeps were really nice & took our fliers etc. We also had some people that were really enthusiastic about Nader & it was great to get out the information to them.

I found an article that explains all the frustration I feel about the two party system. Please read it:

“…Yet most folks, it seems, have confused the occasional weekend parade, I mean, protest with a full-blown movement.

Here’s a news flash: Anti-Bush bumper stickers and a heartfelt commitment to recycled toilet paper don’t constitute a movement. Neither do candlelight vigils, vegan diets, petitions, voting drives, letters to Congress, monthly donations to Greenpeace, yellow ribbons, red ribbons, pink ribbons, or becoming the change you wish to see in the world.

All you need is love? Yeah…that and a million dollars a minute.

This is not meant to denigrate or mock but rather to point out that there is a huge difference between having a sincere minority of Americans partaking in such gestures and having a tangible, functional, effective movement capable of inciting, inspiring, demanding social change. The rest of the world knows this…why don’t we?”

Please find the rest of this article at Dissident Voice. It’s everything I want to say to everyone about the election and the state of our nation. Lucky for me, someone else wrote it all out.

Yep. That’s right. I walked to the closest hair salon to campus (which happens to be Fantastic Sams) and got my hair cut. When I explained that I wanted it short one one side, long on the other there was great confusion on the face of the stylist (only partially due to the language barrier). She said that uneven haircuts don’t look good. Finally after about 10 minutes I won her over with my newly developed logical argument skills.

In retrospect, she may have been right. But, good looks never were my style.

So Kate and I met a Nader friend today who is campaigning with us. After we had a nice lunch he took me to the District Voter Registration Office to get voter registration forms and other information about San Diego’s voter precincts. One of the sheets we got listed all the political parties recognized in the county. A few of my favorites are listed below:

• U.S. Taxpayers Party
• Pragmatic Party 
• Prohibition Party 
• Neuroscience Party (Blog) 
• Natural Law Party 
• Puritan Party 
• Rock and Roll Party 
• Pot Party 
• Scientific Evolving Party 
• God, Truth & Love Party

These are in additional to old favorites like the Anarchist Party, Communist Party, Middle Class Party, Poor Peoples Party, La Raza Unida Party and so forth. To date San Diego County has 76 registered political parties. Nearly 30% of voters in San Diego are unaffiliated or registered as a 3rd party member. I just want to close with a quote from the Neuroscience Party’s constitution, “We want every woman to live like a princess with robotic servants and we want everyone to live like wealthy billionaires, wealthy members of royalty, and wealthy slavemasters with robotic servants and robotic slaves that will do all of the work for them.”

You can’t wish for a better world then that…vote 3rd Party!

Last night Kate and I went downtown to the Gas Lap District for some gelato, from possible the best gelato shop in the USA, Chocolate, and so Kate could look for a new hat, i.e. a corn hat by Kangol. We arrived in the district around 8:30, parked and hit the streets. At this point downtown was more than pleasant. People were enjoying tasty restaurants, all the small boutiques were open and everyone seemed to be having a good time. We looked trough a couple of hat shops and sadly none had the hat Kate was looking for. Around 10 we decided to walk to Seaport Village, a small ocean side shopping district to look at a small hat shop we had seen a few weeks ago.

Anyway by the time we got there (a bad distance calculation error on our part) everything was closed and we were pooped. We decided on the romantic way back to the car via a board walk. Unfortunately said board walk ended up taking us through an abandoned dark alley industrial park…i.e. a vampire trap. I think to date every romantic thing I’ve done with Kate had ended up in a vampire trap. Luckily we made it out alive, but were far away from where we wanted to be. As we walked back to the Gas Lap District we used a sidewalk that apparently is also used by many homeless people as a bed. Walking past what must have been 40 homeless men and women sleeping on cardboard was about the saddest thing I’ve ever endured. Unfortunately for us, it was just the beginning.

Back at the Gas Lap, what had just an hour before been such a pleasant happy place, had deteriorated to a nightmarish, throbbing, club scene where most women, no joke, were wearing an outfit identical to the one pictured here. Just a normal outfit for a teen out on the town, apparently. I guess the depressing part was that most of the club hoppers looked as sad and lonely as the homeless people we had just passed asleep on the sidewalk. It turns out the only thing separating the misery of the Haves and the wretchedness of the Have-Not’s is a five foot chain link fence.

This is my friend Ashley talking about why she is voting for Nader. She is brilliant & thoughtful (no those are not necessarily synonymous).

Yep. Neil and I are now the official San Diego Volunteer Coordinators for the Nader campaign.

That’s what I get for asking for some bumper stickers!

Nader may be coming to San Diego soon, so they really needed some help. I figure, hey, I’ve got nothing else going on right?

This is Neil and I just wanted to update the post with this card I found in my car window after work. Someone had seen our “Nader 2008″ bumper sticker on our car and had written “Go Greens” on this card and put it into my window.

On Friday night we went to do sealings with our ward at the San Diego Temple. It is a majestic building in a holy place. The assignment for our ward was well attended with amazing, amazingly busy people who took time out o their Friday night to serve and worship. The oldest member of the group was, I imagine, close to 80 years old & the youngest probably in her early 20s. I was very impressed by the individual and collective devotion of this eclectic group.

After the temple one of the young couples invited us to Coldstone for ice cream. Never ones to turn down ice cream, we enthusiastically agreed & met them and another couple at the shop. We sat outside with our fudgey gooey treats and conversed in the always perfect San Diego air. We learned a little bit about them, they learned a little bit about us. Often the jovial conversation tends to take a turn for the worst when new people learn a little bit about us. First, they learn we don’t have the same last name. Then, they learn that we met at an anti-Wal Mart film that I screened at BYU. This is when my skeptical shield begins to come up. Glancing at them with distrust I automatically launch into a schpiel about why Wal Mart is a bad place to shop (usually whether or not they questioned the premise with anything more than a raised eyebrow).

Feeling our independent-minded tendencies are exposed I go on the defensive.

The topic in this particular lactose binge chat turned to Proposition 8 which is a big deal in California, especially to Mormons. It is an amendment proposition to amend the California constitution to define marriage as one between a man and a woman only. Most Mormons in the area spend their Saturdays knocking doors & calling people trying to recruit votes for its passage. In fact, we are HIGHLY encouraged to do so every Sunday. (See here for an alternative LDS view about the Proposition).

The girl who invited us to ice cream began talking about gay marriage and the damage she perceived it would do to our society. Perhaps because of my recent immersion into law school, I began to question her assumptions, examples and basic rationalizations. Determined to keep the conversation friendly and Coldstone appropriate I posed all inquiries from a neutral, thought-provoking angle.

However, the conversation quickly escalated and somehow touched on both abortion and the death penalty before you could say, “Jimmany Cricket.” I caught myself semi-shouting “That’s the problem with Republicans…” and the other couple actively jumped up from the table in an attempt to end what they probably perceived to be a potential fist-fight and awkwardly excused themselves and we all got up to end the ice cream social.

The night ended with me stiffly saying, “Ok, great to chat with you guys. Thanks for inviting us. I’ll see you Thursday for visiting teaching. He-heh.”

Needless to say, I don’t think we made any new friends. But, even more disturbingly, I found myself in the old trap that my friend Ash described as interpreting people in the language of my own fears and suspicions. My immediate suspicion of their motives and views kept me from getting to know them and listening to the heart behind their ideas & arguments. I combated pat lines with pat lines and poor logic with poor logic instead of trying to love and see.

Often at church, or school I feel a very “other” feeling. I am the other. “They” don’t think (act, dress, eat) like me.

Friday night, over Germancholattkake ice cream, I realized that that same mentality I have creates the suspicions and hate that I perceive.

My mind is in need of more respect. My heart is in need of softening. My eyes need to automatically look for how we are all the same. My words need to seek to understand not to tear down. My hand needs to gladly reach for the hand of a new friend not suspiciously shake that of the “other.”

1. Listen to extremely loud, extremely obscene music in your rice rocket, low rider and/or apartment. All the time. The key is to never stop. The louder it is the cooler you are + bass.

2. Listen to the constant hum from the large power plant across the street. Hmmmmm. Zzzzzzzz. Crackle. (This may explain the loudness of the music in part, but c’mon teens! We believe you. You are cool. Those rappers do like singing about hoes & you are cool for listening to it. But, we are decidedly not cool. In fact, we are just lame old curmudgeon whiteys who like to go to bed at 10pm. Have mercy!)

3. Listen to (not see) Sea World’s fireworks. Nightly at 8:50pm. Like clockwork.

4. Listen to 7am Simon & Garfunkel karaoke (Same polyphonic levels as aforementioned music. Despite the mixed genres, we are unsure… it may be the same culprits.)

5. Listen to the hundreds of barking dogs across the street in the COUNTY’S GIGANTIC ANIMAL SHELTER. That’s right folks. Volunteers walking dogs around the neighborhood in constant loops around the clock.

Funny the things you don’t notice when you check out an apartment for 10 minutes before signing the contract.

6. Smell marijuana smoke at any time of the day or night. We have the distinct pleasure of having it blown in from our fans. Our neighbors must have a pretty serious, yet invisible to the naked eye, medical condition. (Yep, you can get a prescription for marijuana in California. According to webhigh.com, a very reliable source I’m sure, “All you have to do is go to your regular doctor and have him or her document any medical condition that you have that qualifies for medical marijuana.” According to ehow.com, “Conditions which, by law, can be treated with medical marijuana include AIDS, cancer, chronic pain, anorexia, glaucoma, and arthritis.“) I am seriously considering getting a prescription for my back pain.

7. Squish bugs. As Pamy so eloquently put it in her comment on our last article, “that’s the problem with beautiful places; the bugs and the hippies always find them.” Especially spiders. Apparently they decided that humans were smart and ALL headed for the sweet life in southern California.

8. Listen to planes flying overhead. Too bad the City of San Diego didn’t hire Neil on as a “Junior City Planner” earlier (he recently applied for this position- cross your fingers) because someone back in the day decided that the airport for a major metropolitan area would be best situated RIGHT DOWN TOWN very near the bay. Brilliant.

9. Study. Ok, that’s not really a favorite pass time. It’s just what I do a lot of. (I guess I glossed over the checkbox on the Law School application where I indicated that yes, “I have the attention span of an adderall riddled doctor of library science & affirm that I will never get bored reading things entitled “United States v. Armstrong” and the like. Pity.) As you can see I have rigged a cardboard study desk for my frequent studying. And yes, that is a Macbook Air. Sweet, sweet law school loans.

10. Obsessively check the Craigslist.org “free” category for random items. Where else can you get a free “nonworking dishwasher” or free “box of artificial roses” or a free “old wooden horse drawn wagon” or free “lobster bait”?? Ok, you can really do that in any neighborhood thanks to the world wide web. But, look at the wonderful fruit San Diego Craigslist has yielded our little apt. Ok, the couch wasn’t free… but, we got it for a song & it just goes so well with our lime green walls!