For the last few years, I’ve been struggling with where I find myself on a political spectrum. Sure, I’m on the left. I call myself a progressive and feminist. I know that I’ve grown more than distasteful of electoral politics (which once interested me fairly significantly), and that Hurricane Katrina was the moment that I threw up my hands in complete frustration and rage at the general state of affairs. I’ve dabbled in arts activism, local community organizing, sociolinguistics education, feminist activism, tech empowerment, you name it. None of it seems to singly suit me anymore, and most of it angers me. I’ll say it: I have anger issues. Hello, my name is Deanna, I have anger issues. (That one was for my therapist, everyone wave at her– she’s back there in the corner, waving back at you all.)

More than anything, I’ve been a bridge-builder for most of my political career. I come from working class, conservative roots, and I have been fueled in the past by a passion to build understanding between worlds that don’t talk to each other. A lot of that has to do with the tight relationship that I have with my folks; I find myself wondering how they would react to things that I’m working on, or how a particular issue is framed. Far more than I do now I often used them as guinea pigs: Pop’s the hard-line conservative, Mom’s our swing voter.

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Thought I’d finally sit down while I have three seconds to breathe and jot dot a couple of things I wanted to let folks know about:

• I went to SWSXi, and was largely unimpressed. There wasn’t a the sense of forward-thinking that I expected, nor the ground-breaking innovations. The parties were so-so. I had the best time hanging out with grrls from the feminist blogosphere, and with my Hightower co-worker, Laura. Oh, and note to anyone organizing a conference for thousands of geeks: please make sure the wifi actually works at the convention.
• I’m speaking at two conferences coming up here in the near future: Facing Race, here in NYC on Friday; then Women Action Media up in Boston on March 31 & April 1. Guess what I’ll be talking about? That’s right, politics and technology, focusing on social media. YUM.
• Er, I feel like there was more than this. Hrm. I seem to have lost all eight trains of thought. More when I get them back…

Sitting in a meeting for work right now — Phillip Frazer, my boss at the Hightower gig, just said about the current state of electoral politics: “The problem is not that we need a third party, the problem is that we need a second party.”

And an old Hightower quote was just resurrected: “Geoge W. Bush is somebody who was born on third base and has gone through life thinking he’s hit a triple.”