Tweets for the day:

• 11:38 @flamindice Fisting before breakfast? I agree - it seems like a bit much. #

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Tweets for the day:

• 10:58 Ok, the "Senate Stands at Ease" music on the live feed is driving me up the wall. Back to Lady Gaga until they actually start debate. #
• 11:15 RT @NYSenate: Marriage Equality Act passes Senate Rules Committee. #
• 13:09 Senator Schneiderman: "You can't legislate morality, but you can legislate justice." #NYMarriageDebate (via @NYSenate) that's my senator! #
• 14:47 What a douchebag. You can leave your bible out of my goddam bedroom, thank you very much. I'm donating against you in the next election. #
• 14:57 Marriage Equality in NY fails 38-24 #
• 14:59 @Enchanter219 It does, but it's roughly what I expected. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger, and gayer. #
• 16:37 @Enchanter219 Imagine the terror the NY Senate must feel, then. #
• 16:38 RT @EqualityAmerica: NY Marriage Equality rally - Times Square, 6PM Tonight - BE THERE! #LGBT #GAY #
• 22:32 @adrianilo I love that tiki bars are coming back. They're that perfect combination of camp and kitsch. #

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Tweets for the day:

• 10:19 @foxc Sounds like you need an icepick. I've decided that's my new go-to wedding gift. Ornate, but with an air of menace. #
• 14:12 @adrianilo The 90s sucked. I was so straight back then! #
• 14:48 I have my fourth recommendation letter lined up! Now to start working on next week's talk...and the revision to my preprint... #
• 14:49 @adrianilo I'm already planning on missing the 00s. Oh, the waste of my 20s that is grad school! I should be snorting coke off of hookers. #
• 18:46 @adrianilo I'm going to assume those last two tweets are TOTALLY UNRELATED. And get you a gift-certificate to UHaul for Christmas. #
• 18:46 Off to the help room. Hopefully it's quiet and I can work on my talk. #
• 19:26 @adrianilo UHaul has a great selection of gift cards! They have ones with the Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, Rachel Maddow, Oprah... #

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Tweets for the day:

• 18:39 Ok, I'm going to start trying to use twitter again. Life kind of got in the way there for a while. #
• 22:55 @CanadianRabbit Fish huggles! I waggle my fins affectionately at she who needs affectionate fin waggling. #
• 22:56 Today: yoga, grading, job applications (Cambridge & Lisbon), help room, outlining my talk, and now...sleep. #

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I got the chance to tell the story of the first thanksgiving today at dinner. I enjoyed telling it, so I thought I'd share it here:

Almost four hundred years ago today, a group of illegal immigrants who didn't even speak the language snuck into this country, ostensibly to work. However, despite their desire to get jobs in the agriculture industry (where most illegal immigrants worked at the time), these lazy immigrants just ended up living off of the government. What we celebrate today is the receipt of the first welfare check. Of course, those illegal immigrants repaid the red-blooded Americans (whose ancestors had been in this country for hundreds of years!) who helped them by stealing their livelihoods and giving them smallpox.

But things were different back then, right? Because Mexicans don't give us smallpox.

I'm thankful for my ability to think critically about things, which along with bipedality, the opposable thumb, and jellied cranberry sauce, are the best things about being human. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

Tweets for the day:

• 07:17 @TorusFish Oh, ok. I'll promise not to try to kill you for a few weeks. #

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Tweets for the day:

• 21:27 @TorusFish Wait until I give it a shot, cowboy. #
• 21:28 Seeing a production of Brigadoon at St. Clement's. It's a cute show, and a good production. #

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"Hanuman knew that the plants and the mountain colluded to conceal the oshadhis from him. Thinking of Rama, who lay unmoving in distant Lanka, the vanara gave a roar that the planets above heard. He struck the mountain with his fist in rage. Growling, great Hanuman grew greater still. In hands grown vast beyond imagining, he grasped Oshadhiparvata by its sides. hanuman shut his eyes; he gritted his teeth and pulled that mountain out of the earth by its roots.

The vanara's body blazed. He flashed through the sky, bearing Oshadhiparvata above him in immense palms. Like light, Hanuman flew witht he mountain. He flew so fast he vanished from the starlit sky and arrived almost at once in Lanka. Like a falling meteor, the son of the wind descended to the earth. Gently he set the mountain of herbs down beside Sugriva's unconscious army in the zone of the brahmastra, where it was neither day nor night, but bizarre twilight."

The Ramayana, trans. by Ramesh Menon

So I'm back from Maine, which was a tremendous experience. I didn't actually end up getting to talk to any voters, because the folks running the operation found that my super powers lay in a different area. Turns out they needed people to help with data entry and other related tasks which I am exquisitely suited for. So I spent all weekend in a hotel room in South Portland, checking people in, making sure they had rooms, making sure they had rides, and trying to get more people up to Maine.

I didn't get much sleep - I worked 8:30-12:30 on Sunday (those are both AM) and was back up and working at 7:30 on Monday, but it was just incredible. I did take some time to decompress on either side of the trip with my friend Paul in Boston, but I'm still pretty exhausted. I got back to NYC at about 1:30 this afternoon.

I'm going to head to a yoga class tonight, and hopefully early results will be up by the time I get done. Maine polls close at 8:00 EST, and a lot of the bigger precincts have also been doing early voting. So hopefully we'll see results very early - but since it will be close, probably nothing conclusive until tomorrow. There's a protest/celebration rally tomorrow evening with MENY that I might go to...we'll see.

For now, it's good to be home and able to get a decent meal. I'm looking forward to my bed later :-) But I'm glad I did this, and I feel like I really helped make a change. Let's hope it was enough.

Tweets for the day:

• 11:27 Relaxing day in Boston with a friend -necessary, since the next two promise to be grueling. But worthwhile :-) #
• 16:49 Waiting for the bus to Portland. Ready to get my canvas on! #
• 19:34 I have arrived in Maine. Checked in at the hotel and getting dinner. The hotel is crawling with no on 1 folk. #
• 21:07 I have now visited 39/50 states (I added NE and UT on the train trip this summer, and NH and ME tonight). 40 if you count Sky Harbor as AZ. #

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Tweets for the day:

• 19:13 I'm on a bus! Heading to Portland (via Boston) to volunteer with No on 1 #marryme #

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Last post, I promise. Well, for tonight, at least.

I'm going to Maine this weekend to volunteer with No On 1's get-out-the-vote campaign. I'm going to be knocking on doors, asking our allies to vote for our rights. Asking them to make history.

Maine will become the first state to uphold same-sex marriage rights at the ballot box next Tuesday. This is the anti-proposition 8. This isn't the courts, or the legislature, or the president (shout out to the Matthew Shepard Act! Woooo! Those of you who live in shitty states can no longer be beaten to death for your fagitude!) - this is the people.

And those people are going to say that we deserve our rights. And I'm going to help. Barney Frank was right - we need to put pressure on more than just the grass. But putting your feet down on the grass is the first step. I marched on Washington - now I'm marching on Maine.

If you can't get to Maine, Courage Campaign will train you to phonebank from home. It's calling supporters and reminding them to vote - no confrontation, and you can do just a few hours if you like.

Every little bit helps. Proposition 1 is going to prove that Prop 8 was just a fluke. Proposition 1 is the first step toward a new future. Won't you march with me?

I've finally finished the article that's been bedeviling me. The result has been posted on the web for dissemination to the mathematical community. And now, to you! If you've ever wondered what it is that I do, this is it:

Action-Maslov Homomorphism for Montone Symplectic Manifolds.

Pretty sweet, eh?

Now, I have a tendency to bookmark recipes and never cook them. They'll involve something bizarre like pomegranate molasses or green mango or something like that. And since I don't find the ingredient right away, they never get cooked.

But there are also times when the magic-spell quest version of cooking takes over. A few weeks ago, I made a pilgramage to Kalustyan's in Murray Hill. One of the things I bought was Himalayan Red Rice, for a recipe I've had for ages from fox_c.

Tonight, I finally cooked it. And it's incredible. It was all I could do not to eat a second bowlful. If you can't find red rice, just use wild rice. This recipe is too delicious not to cook.

I added chicken so that I could use it as a main course, but other than that, I followed the recipe. It's damn good, kids. Try it.

Jorge was in town last weekend for my birthday, which was pretty awesome. What was not awesome was the fact that his flight landed at SFO (after taking off there) before it came to JFK. So unlike last time, where it was 4 hours late, this time it was 3 hours late (last time they stopped at ORD). Anyway, he got in at 3:30 AM, which means I got about 4 or 5 hours of sleep before my 9:30 seminar. Anyway, with all of that exhaustion, we decided to take it easy on Friday. We went to see "Coco Before Chanel," which is the new Audrey Tatout (you know her from "Amèlie") film. It was pretty awesome. I'd like to hope she'll get a best actress nod, but I'll settle for a Cèsar (it's in French). Go see it if you have the chance and love Audrey Tatout.

After that, we had dinner at La Paella in the East Village and met up with the SB boys at DTox. kiwisquash narrowly avoided his first lap dance, much to our amusement. From there, we grabbed pomme fritte and headed to The Duplex to meet up with suyana, her boy, and spawrhawk - and later, some more SB folk. It made for a lovely evening, and we closed the Duplex down...which, it turns out, would be a theme for the weekend. I saw 4 AM four times in a row.

On my birthday, Jorge and I decided it would be best to just spend the whole day in bed. Seriously - I put my pants on twice before dinner: once to go fetch coffee and once to fetch ice. We had a drink at Therapy and then walked through a soaking rain to dinner. Dinner was spectacular Italian at Alto in midtown. I ate cheese again - there was parmesan (well, something hard - I'm not sure what exactly) grated over my duck and foie gras ravioli, and I'll be damned if I was going to let it get between me and those little pasta pieces of heaven. Next time I go there, I'm just ordering 4 pasta courses instead of having a normal dinner.

After Alto, we headed down to the Duplex to meet up with Mike and Deb. We spent a while there, but ended up drifting back to the East Village after Mel left. We ended up at the Cock Bar...which was an experience. Let's just say Jorge said he'd never been in a gay bar like that...and he's been in a few. We closed it down, and headed home.

Of course, another 4 AM night meant another day in bed. We slept in, watched a movie, and then headed down to Angelica Kitchen to have dinner with everyone before we went to see Alan Cumming at the Highline Ballroom.

Which was awesome. The set list involved "Wig in a Box/Wicked Little Town" from Hedwig, "My Interpretation" by MIKA, "Taylor the Latte Boy" of Kristin Chenoweth fame, and a truly delicious version of "Mein Herr." He put on a helluva show. Funny and just generally delightful.

We headed home after that, because Jorge had a 6:00 AM flight on Monday. So I got to see 4:00 AM from the other side, for once. I took him to the airport, and then got a bit of a nap in before a 9:00 AM yoga class and a 10:30 lecture. A pretty lazy weekend, but I still ended up pretty exhausted.

Tweets for the day:

• 07:22 I think this is mathematically ludicrous and sociologically fascinating. A common combination. shar.es/1ERE6 #

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So we've been making a lot of noise about Obama dragging his feet on gay rights issues. And he has been - don't get me wrong. But only in a very public way. Basically, there are two big elephants in the room that he's been dragging his feet on - marriage and DADT.

But while everyone (both us and them) is distracted by that, his administration has been chipping away at discrimination throughout the federal government. HUD announced today that it will consider same-sex couples as families for the purposes of public housing support. There was the (very quiet) announcement in May that the State department would treat same-sex spouses equally. There's the way-under-the-rader DPBO act, which would basically amount to expanding the State department ruling across the entire federal government.

Now, some of these things were coming before Obama came along. The State department in particular is famous for being gay friendly (they don't really have any choice). Really, what we're seeing amounts to a very slow, very subtle, but truly monumental change in the way the Fed approaches gay rights.

Now, I'm not counseling patience, because I'm over patience. But I'm beginning to wonder if Obama isn't a helluva lot cleverer than I've given him credit for...and I give him credit for being pretty damn clever.

Tweets for the day:

• 11:40 You can make a pretty mean glass of limeade from a single lime. I'm kind of thrilled about this discovery. #

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Tweets for the day:

• 21:53 @flamindice I love it! The bagoina! New favorite euphemism for naughty bits. #
• 21:54 At the Stonewall inn to see Mel's show, despite the nor'easter. #

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Tweets for the day:

• 13:02 @syllepsis thanks! I was just today trying to remember why I was going to boycott pepsi. I read this yesterday, and had forgotten by today. #
• 13:02 Well fuck you too, Pepsi. bit.ly/UGEKh (via @syllepsis) #

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