Many of us live in diverse communities where we interact with a culturally diverse group of people, but because I work in the downtown core in a large, metropolitan city, I understand that for some their racial tolerance has a short expiry date, ending at 5pm on Friday afternoons. Once they get off the commuter train and reach their homes in the suburbs, that tolerance goes out the window. But in this day and age, I'm of the opinion that anyone who has issues with their children dating or marrying across racial lines should have raised them in a forest or under a rock.

I know that some people believe that "feminist" and "lovers" do not belong in the same sentence, either because feminists are horrible people incapable of love (especially heterosexual love, which is why we never shave our pits or legs or bikini lines) or because feminists are horrible people that no one else is capable of loving (because we never shave our pits or legs or bikini lines).Pat Robertson famously opined that, "Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." Obviously anyone who engages in feminism must be terrible.

A few weeks ago, my husband Michael forwarded me the NY Times article, "Therapists Report Increase in Green Disputes" As awareness of environmental concerns has grown, therapists say they are seeing a rise in bickering between couples and family members over the extent to which they should change their lives to save the planet.

I swear that I will one day get over the miserableness that was the previous ensuing decade, but for now I will continue to harp on yet another failure of the previous decade. In January 2009, President Obama started the year off right by signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law. The Act righted a serious offense committed by the Supreme Court, which had ruled that discriminating against women by paying them less than men for doing the same (or even better work) was perfectly fine as long as companies kept it secret for a really long time.

Patti Smith wrote People Have the Power, Peaceable Kingdom and, with Bruce Springsteen, Because the Night and that’s just the tip of the artistic iceberg.  Poet, painter, actor, composer, singer, muse – she’s all of it. She's my age - and I've met her.

How do we know the truth of what is happening in Haiti - especially those of us who are in the global north and west, our perceptions shaped by a tragic history, largely unknown, in which our governments have often been complicit? As the immediate rescue effort becomes a sustained task of recovery how do we know when ideology and naked self-interest warp news accounts and recovery efforts? 

At the end of 2009, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was too young in the 1980s to experience the wrath of the backlash against feminist achievements, but the revival (and worse, implementation) of Reagan-era policies and ideas in the first decade of the 21st century shattered my faith in humanity. I know that the arrival of a new decade and political cycle doesn't mean that progress is back in terms of feminism and gender (history is a pretty good indication that another anti-woman, anti-gender equality shit storm will hit again), but at least the attack on women's rights and gender issues is not relentless right now.

It's one of those horrible stereotypes that gets repeated in movies and on television: the desperate, probably crazy, control-freak woman who tries to trap a man by deliberately "forgetting" to take her birth control pills or use whatever type of birth of control she uses or claims to be using. Well, guess what? In real life, that crazy control-freak woman might be a man.

My brother-in-law and his wife are expecting a baby in June. After they had the 20 week ultrasound, he called to tell me it was a girl. I asked him how they felt about that. "Actually, we are excited because we both hoped for a girl," he said.

Jean Shinoda Bolen is asking you to sign a petition for a Fifth UN World Conference on Women. Said petition would be delivered to the UN Secretary-General, to the chair of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and to the woman who will be appointed to head the new women's "super-agency" in March 2010. Shinoda Bolen explains:

On January 7, Alex DiBranco reported at Change.org's Women's rights blog that carrying too many condoms and hanging out with another person can get a woman arrested for prostitution in DC. On January, 11, she noted that this insanity is official policy in New York and San Francisco, too. She followed up the next day with the DC Metropolitan Police Department response.