Anderkoos

Last night I phonebanked out of Harvard Law School, and by sheer coincidence the group was covering Ward 4-1 — my neighborhood. After spending a week in South Carolina campaigning for Obama, it was refreshing (and fun!) to call around to my own neighbors. (People are also less likely to hang up on you right away when you tell them you live around the corner). At one point I realized, about 15 seconds into my spiel, that I’d called the woman next door, whom I’d convinced to put up an Obama sign the day before. We had a good chuckle, and I went back to connecting with all the other folks I can now call “neighbor.”

All of our photos from South Carolina (Flickr)

I’ve been linking to my photo sets on Facebook, but the Flickr photos are more complete and (in most cases) higher resolution.

After a harrowing drive last night through a snowstorm in Connecticut, we made it to Philly and crashed with some Obama buddies and were back on the road this morning at 9. Eleven hours later and we were in Columbia, SC, staying with a local Democratic resident.

Obama HQ was hopping this Friday night, and we were quickly assigned roles. I’ll be helping with data sorting and whatnot, not too different than the database/spreadsheet stuff I’d done for Kerry in ‘04.

There’s definite excitement here and an incredibly energized, diverse, and committed field organization. Tomorrow is both the Republican primary and the dry run for ours. Our fingers are crossed for Nevada, and we await Obama’s arrival on Sunday.

On Friday we are taking a leap of faith and driving down to South Carolina to volunteer for a week with the Obama campaign. We don’t even know where we’ll be (one of the four urban field offices, most likely), but we are excited to do our part in writing a new future for our country.

We are at a crossroads in American history when we must decide whether we will continue to play out the legacy of the Reagan era, or whether we are ready to tell a new story. And I believe that the time is now for a renewal, and that we don’t have eight years to limp along on a dissipated ideology.

Critics have accused Obama of being abstract and vague, mistaking a strategic decision to focus on an overarching vision as covering for a lack of underlying substance. It’s only in the last week that I’ve realized that — duh — we live in a nation with a President, not a Prime Minister, and that the character of that President really does matter. So the “voting public” has had it right all along: pick the person, not the platform. Which is not to say that Obama lacks for actual policy — far from it. It’s just that I’ve never had a stronger feeling in my life that Barack Obama is the person we now to lead us into a new era of peace, prosperity, and justice.

Obama is a man of character, a person of faith but also with faith: faith in Americans, in humanity, in the justice of God’s creation. And it’s in the waning days of an era, when people have been in the trenches so long that they’ve forgotten why some call themselves Republicans and others Democrats and others stopped caring altogether, that we most need someone to come lift us out of the mud and to point out a new way to see ourselves. Perhaps such faith and hope is naive, but the cynics have had their way long enough. Let them play their game of horsetrading and cobbling together petty interests. If a democracy is to survive we must periodically rise above that shallow and narrow view of ourselves and instead reaffirm our conviction in our common principles.

And in the coming weeks we’re proud to be part of the movement that will restore America as a city on a hill.

“I think I file these cases so I can see my mother.” I was talking to Rachel this morning on the steps of the Queens County Supreme Court, where the judge had just adjourned the case of my application for guardianship of my grandmother — my mother’s mother — to January. I wasn’t surprised that my mother had shown up this morning, despite her failure to respond to the court investigator’s (or my own) inquiries. I had realized that probably the majority of times I’ve seen my mother in the last dozen years has been in a courtroom setting.

“I’m kidding,” I continued. “It’s the kind of line I’d use to conclude a treacly essay for the back page of a magazine.” And while I had no motive for filing this case other than ensuring the well-being of my grandmother, it’s also true that I haven’t seen much of my mother in recent years. Only a court case seems to compel her out of her home-bound stupor.

My mother is among that set of mentally ill people who are drawn to the legal system. The measured pace by which cases proceed, the right to speak and be heard, the clarity of rendered decisions — these all provide a certain solace in a baffling and incomprehensible world. That the judges’ decisions often go against her merely confirms her paranoid worldview. There’s a paradox here, for sure, between her mistrust of everyone around her and her abiding determination to continue fighting within the system.

For the current case I’ve sought to retrieve the final order from our first court battle, in which I won custody of my sister. The clerk at the family court was unable to pin it down to one. “There’s over twenty petitions here,” she said to me, with more than a little surprise. I had an unpleasant recollection of those hearings, the interminable harassing counter-suits that my mother filed, trailing off into a series of increasingly rambling claims dismissed by an increasingly irritated judge. Then she was verbally expressive but a courtroom neophyte. Now she pulls around a black rolling case everywhere and lets the documents she keeps inside speak for her: various papers detailing her divorce, the child support orders, her loss of custody, and now her mother’s decline — a legal timeline of her second, lifeless, life.

The black rolling suitcase testifies to my mother’s paradoxical relationship with the legal system. You would think that a person who is convinced that evil agents eavesdrop on her every word and siphon money away from her every transaction would see the courthouse as the epitome of oppression. And yet that same institution quite literally gives her voice (I have not heard as many coherent sentences from my mother’s mouth as I had this morning in many years) and, in her eyes, gives her freedom. Many years ago when she was still flailing back at her imagined enemies, she gave me a copy of her divorce papers. I had the sense that through me she was serving those papers to Them, her oppressors. I may lose these cases, she seemed to be saying, but I am still a person in the eyes of the court.

And when I really think about it, perhaps my own faith in the legal system is just as irrational as hers. My law professors drilled into me the limited powers of courts. What’s more, I know that the skein of relationships among my family is too tangled for anyone, least of all a judge, to straighten out. Yet here I am again appealing to the courts to intervene in yet another losing situation. There’s something in common between my mother’s and my legal skirmishes. They speak to a desperate yet abiding hope.

Professionals doing their own work is a funny thing: on the one hand, you often read about architects who design their own homes. On the other hand is the saying “The doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient.” Well, on Friday I eschewed the DIY approach and retained an attorney in New York to seek judicial intervention on behalf of my grandmother, who had a stroke two weeks ago today. (She’s doing fine at the moment, though at 93 years old, anything is possible).

While technically anyone could have filed the necessary papers, the complications of acquiring a court number and serving any interested parties (in the appropriate language) became daunting. This would be a good time to note that law school (nor the Bar exam) didn’t really cover the minutiae of actually being a lawyer. I’m embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t even clear on how a retainer works until I had to pay one.

I am especially grateful to the Elder Law clinic at CUNY School of Law, who provided background info and attorney referrals. Having worked in legal aid for five years (and Rachel had put in a good four semesters at a similar clinic in JP) I know that the work they do is vital to the community.

I’ve been working on a monster post about my trip to Singapore and Taiwan, but first, here are pic’s (on Facebook):

Singapore

Taiwan

I’m not into hyperbole, but “pretty bad flight” doesn’t make for much of a blog post.

My flight from LA to Hong Kong sat on the tarmac for about 2 1/2 hours while an engineer twiddled with one of the engines. I’m of a few minds on this. On the one hand, I’m all for engines not falling off while we’re halfway over the Pacific. On the other, the engineer had been twiddling for 2 hours when the pilot announced that he’d give it another 15 minutes. What exactly can you fix in 15 minutes, a heat shield? Also, why was the engineer and pilot “coordinating with Hong Kong” — did we outsource our engineering supervisors?

Anyway, things were back on course and we had a peaceful 11 hours of nonstop flight when the pilot announced that the weather in Hong Kong was too poor for landing, so we turned around and landed in Taipei. By this point in our intercontinental flight we were all welded to our seats anyway, so another 3 hours sitting on the Taiwanese tarmac was only that much more marginally painful. At some point the crew gave up on us (having exceeded their legal limit for work) and we were bused literally 20 feet to another plane, which finally arrived at Hong Kong at about 2am. There was rampant speculation that the delay was largely due to the airline (Cathay) avoiding the need to put us up at a hotel. Indeed, instead of a hotel, we were escorted to a holding area:

… which isn’t all that bad since there’s free wifi and power outlets galore here. Free wifi… maybe the communists can teach us a few tricks after all. And sleeping on the floor ain’t so bad — in fact, it’s pretty good for the back.

The folks I feel worst for are the ones who were heading to Taipei and weren’t allowed off during our unwilling layover there. Instead of being done with their journey, they were force-marched here to Hong Kong, waiting for the first flight back there again.

(In Cathay’s defense, it does appear that there’s a typhoon making its way up the coast that was hanging out near Hong Kong last night.)

Oh, I should mention that I’m on my way to State of Play V in Singapore. Hopefully, I will be there in time for the planning session we’d set for the workshop I’m helping to run. So much for touring the island tomorrow. I mean, today.

I’m not sure whether it was sleeping wrong, running 7 miles, moving my sister’s boxes, or watching “Transformers,” but sometime on Sunday I pulled or tore a muscle in my neck/shoulder area. Boy, is that a pain! Losing the ability to turn your head means doing full-body turns to check for oncoming traffic when crossing the street.

Fortunately(?), with my new tablet I have set up a ludicrous workstation where I’m lying on the floor, with the tablet monitor rotated around 180 degrees so that I’m looking up at it. (I’ve got my new keyboard on my lap and mouse on the floor). When, um, I’m wearing pants I’ll take a picture of this setup, just because I want my dorkness immortalized.

More practically speaking, my mother-in-law helpfully suggests physical therapy for neck pain. Thanks Eunice!

I’m excited that my sister Amy will be coming up to Boston, where she just got a job with Common Impact as a consultant. I’m a big fan of Common Impact, not just because we are friends with its founder/CEO, but also because as someone who’s been in nonprofits and nonprofit IT, I know that many mission-driven organizations are desperate for better technology infrastructure.

Hopefully Amy’s blog won’t suffer overmuch when she moves from the fashion capital that is New York City to the relative backwaters of Boston.