Thank You, Mr. Pope. (Or, My Condom-Loving Wallet.)

Mr. Pope,

Seriously, was this really necessary? Going to Cameroon and saying condoms are not the answer to the fight against HIV and AIDS?

You know what that does? It takes me back to my days in South Africa, where I got to volunteer with Treatment Action Campaign. (TAC has been called “the world’s most effective AIDS group” by the New York Times. At TAC, they are all about condoms.) I even marched in a parade wearing one of the trademark “HIV Positive” shirts.

Like this! (World Bank Photo Collection)

And THAT just makes me nostalgic, so I go to the TAC website. Oh! And look! They are so with it. Anyone on Facebook can make a donation through Causes. So I just did that.

And since we’ve all heard by now that 3% of the residents of our nation’s capital (yup, that nation’s capital, the one where residents are disenfranchised) are infected, I just made a donation to the Whitman-Walker Clinic, too.

Thank you sincerely for kicking my (condom-loving) self into gear. I’m busting out the t-shirt this weekend.

Peace,

Julia

Things I Feel Lucky About, in No Particular Order

1. I just watched this video on Jen Lemen’s blog.

School in Arusha + Twitter fiends in Austin = Glory-ous heart-shaped shamrock.

Do I know any of these people personally? Nope.

Do I feel tech’ed out sometimes and do my eyes hurt from staring at a computer screen all day? Yes.

But it’s really cool to work and live in a universe where one can collect similar examples of this interconnectedness / innovation / idealism / howmanybuzzwordsstartwithi? are everywhere.

Which brings me to:

2. I have a job. At an organization full of lovely, creative, musical, service-minded, funny people.

3. Once upon a time, I met some people and we talked about starting a writing center. (Our secret: we never once talked like it wouldn’t come to life.) And now I live far away but—thanks to the magic of the internet and sometimes even a friendly mainstream media nod—I get to follow along as they pull off a hair- and money-raising spectacle too delightful and ridiculous to NOT be true.

4. Remember library cards? I just got one of those.

As Long as She Doesn’t Forget Where She Came From

And speaking of awesome Elissas being published around the web…

Our own Elissa Bassist has been having a rollicking good time over at TheRumpus.net, “an online magazine focused on culture with some politics.”

In her interview with Michael Showalter, the brilliant Bassist poses such questions as “How do you feel about grammar?” and “You co-wrote Wet Hot American Summer with David Wain. Is writing like sex in that it’s better with another person?”

And in A Baker’s Dozen of My Feelings About David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, our heroine overcomes her feeling that “I’m not a person who is a good enough person to write about David Foster Wallace.” And does a darn good job of doing just that.

The United States, Minus DC: Violating the Fundamentals of Federalism

“The United States is embarrassingly the only democracy in the world that denies the citizens of its capital city from representation in the national legislative body.”

So writes my friend Elissa Froman in A Voice for Every Voter, a piece for the Religious Action Center blog.

Elissa describes the powerful coming-of-age moment that many U.S. citizens take for granted: the day she cast her first ballot, just weeks after her 18th birthday:

…I thought about my four grandparents, not one of whom was able to vote at the age of 18 – disenfranchised by Hitler’s laws and by the citizenship laws of Poland that forbade Jewish participation. I pushed the stylus through the ballot and with great pride, I voted with the knowledge that my vote, meant that I had a voice – that because I voted, I counted.

She goes on to describe her shock when she moved to the District for college, only to find that

Washington, DC has 600,000 residents, making its population approximately the same size as seven states, each with a voting representative and two senators…Yet their representation in Congress is limited to a single non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives.

Read Elissa’s entire post here, or visit DC Vote: Working to End Taxation Without Representation to learn more and urge your elected reps to pass the DC Voting Rights Act.

By Sapphireblue (via Flickr)