"life is a mystery", the song begins, and as i hear the 80s-synth-chorus i love to hate and head towards the couch to rest until the next song, the realization hits:

i'm still the same bespectacled, bedazzled and besmirched kid with no real friends that i was when i began in this community nearly 6 years ago.

except now, i have a lot of amazing friends, an incredible partner (who i am so fucking grateful is here with me), and a positive self identity to grow from. my chalice runneth over.

about an hour ago, emily webb told me "i haven't seen you smile like that since you got here". she was right. bless her for knowing that. the pieces are clicking back together. my friends are in the next room, dancing like they should. the resolutions have been read, and we've counted down from 10 and sung that new year's song about 50 times. we've all sat down, in groups, in individual conversations, and in caucuses, and done what we knew we needed to do to move forward on a lot of really intense shit. 2005 has arrived, and the journey is just beginning... and to be blessed with optimism is to be one of the luckiest people in the entire world.

There is a real concern that has been raised by Heather secretspice about an overpresence of young adults in many of the discussions that have been happening within (at least) my sphere of awareness on livejournal regarding the Youth Office's decision. I think this either says a lot about who this decision was accountable to, or who our community of leaders (past and present) is accountable to, as youth allies. I'm not a youth anymore, and that's something that I've been wrestling with for the past year, as I've transitioned from being the Youth Observer to the BOT to having no official leadership role. What does it mean for us to be youth allies now that we are barely young adults? What forum do we use to hear youth voices?

Just in case there was any doubt --

In my view, Betty Jeanne Reuters-Ward, Brian Kuzma, Ethan Field, and Jesse Jaeger are four of the most wonderful, purehearted, generous and kind individuals in all of UU-dom. I think it's really important that we make sure to thank our leaders for their sacrifices and their efforts; the times when we have things to argue or fuss about are much more rare than the times when we can sit back and count on everything running smoothly, and that's thanks to their hard work. Personally, I know that if I had been more careful not to take their work for granted over the past few years, and had let them know more often how much I appreciated them, it would be much easier for me to articulate my current concern and criticism without seeming to lack respect for them each as individuals.

So, I'm sorry for that. Thanks for all of your work, all ye in the Youth Office. I know you do everything you do with the best of intentions.

( an open letter to the youth office. )

to any of my friends feeling left out of the GOTV effort, I need your help. i need you to spend an hour or two making some phone calls to get out the vote in certain precincts here in Franklin County, OH. this is the epicenter, you'll be fighting the good fight. call me: 251 370 4261.

here we go! go vote,my friends. here at ground zero things are chaotic as hell. polling places have been overflowing since before the polls opened at 6:30 AM. i slept for about two hours last night. everyone is full speed ahead, racing towards the victory party tonight. there's going to be insane turnout. i'm running a phone bank trying to make sure that people do get out to the polls and to get them rides if they need them, working with moveonpac and a great group of people.

much love to my other folks working in new hampshire or ohio or wherever. we're about to rid the world of a madman and his cohorts. that is so fucking exciting.

here's a post i wrote tonight for something else (the nonprophets forum). a little more detail for y'all.

( Read more... )

holy shit!!

the world looks brighter this evening. ohio is empty of celebration but i've got enough in my heart for the whole of columbus, and maybe the entire state.

and massachusetts is going to continue the sweep on november 2nd, if i have anything to say about it.

HOLY SHIT! I'm going to Ohio!

I leave at 7:10 am from South Station.. will arrive in Columbus, OH sometime tomorrow evening... craziness. Total fucking craziness.

The DNC is shifting people to swing states to work in phone banks, trying to get out the vote. I volunteered because it seemed to make sense at the time. It still does, but I'm going to miss the rest of the Red Sox playoffs (Won't be the same w/out heather and/or mike jackson), which seems a little sunnier as of this evening. I also am leaving home again with no money in my pocket. I will be back after the election, but I'm considering a detour to Bloomington, this might be the synchronistic time to make that happen. I'm not as prepared with music as I wanted to be, though. I am debating whether or not I should bring my external hard drive with me, so I'll have all my work.. could be asking for disaster.

So, I have a few questions of you, my best friends in the world. It is going to be intense travelling alone, without y'all by my side.

First: how far is Oberlin from Columbus?
Second: how far is Antioch from Columbus?
Third: do we know anyone else in the Columbus area?
Fourth: B-town kids, what would y'all say if I showed up on your doorstep on November 3rd? And stayed for two weeks?

One other note, Jelani called me the other day wanting to know if any of us were going to make it to Bioneers, which was apparently this past weekend. I didn't really get to talk to him much though, hopefully he will call me again soon. Alex, how was the Bioneers satellite conference?

I love you all very much. I have a lot of unfinished business to take care of including follow-through on the BOT meeting and making my plans for January, but those things will come in due time. I know that the Dems are not the systemic revision we need to create.. but let's get Bush the fuck out of office. Wish me luck as I embark into the great unknown.. of Ohio.

Hi friends,

Just checking in real briefly before I get in my car and commute to work (ick). Til November 2nd I'm canvassing for the DNC via Grassroots Campaigns, trying to get Bush the hell out of the White House... and personally I'm simultaneously trying to plan for how to keep the revolutionary steam up when Kerry gets elected. Gotta stop the bleeding before we can start to heal the wounds, or something.

The Red Sox are going to give me a heart attack.

As for my life and my plans: Uhh.. well, here are my constraints:

* My job ends November 2nd
* I have to go back to school in January or else I have to start paying my college loans
* I want to go to Bloomington to work and record

So I'm trying to hash those things out. B-town kids, what is happening in January? The thought occured to me this morning that maybe I can delay school a bit longer by doing my second co-op in January. That would mean that I could go anywhere and do anything, essentially. Hmm.. ideation. Do y'all know if you will be around in B-town from January to June? I need to come up with a plan very soon.

Otherwise, looking forward to visiting the UUA Board of Trustees meeting on Friday. Heather and I wrote an article about YRUU that will ideally be published / made available online for all of you to read... and ideally will be read by C*SC and the Board. The youth of the Association are getting steamrollered right now, there are no genuine adult allies at the table in the Common Ground III conversation and our institutions are being actively undermined by adult pressure on the Youth Office that is preventing it from serving our interests first.

time to canvass. peace.

Hey y'all. The show last week was cool, thanks to everyone who came out. It was a success but also a learning experience. I'll write more about it sometime soon. If you didn't get a chance to check it out, you should come out THIS week - I'm playing again on Friday night in the same place, the Western Front. It's really easy to get to. This week cover is only $5.

Here's the poster:
http://home.intra-connect.net/~tfitzge/embryo/oct1stflyerlarge.gif

Please please come out. I think you'll have fun.

In other news, my brother has nearly finished a dope remix of I Erupt that may end up constituting the b-side to a vinyl single. Possibly.

word
timfitz

happy birthday heather vail!!

the show is tomorrow night.. bryan and i spent much of today rehearsing... i'm pretty excited to say the least.

here is all of the information you will need to come:

* the show is 18+ - sorry to anyone under 18. it's not my call. hopefully i will be able to play an all-ages show soon. i've got more shows coming up for certain. but, if you're under 18 and you were planning to come, leave me a comment and i'll see if there's anything i can do.
* the cost is 8 dollars at the door. the western front accepts only cash.
* Doors open at 9. Our set will probably start not long after doors. ( a note to martina: )
* the flyer is here: http://home.intra-connect.net/~tfitzge/embryo/radixreleaseflyerlarger.gif
* directions:


It's easy to get to the Front from anywhere in Boston.
Those taking the T should get off at Central Square (on the Red Line) and walk down Western Ave until they get to 343 Western (at the intersection of Putnam and Western Ave).
From Harvard walk down Mass Ave to Putnam, take a right, and walk to Western Ave (six blocks).
If you're driving from Boston, take the BU bridge to Memorial Drive, turn left on Memorial and drive to Western Ave (it will be on the right, about 2/3 mile down). Park at Mahoney's Nursery on the corner of Western and Memorial, and walk 2 blocks down Western to the Front.

awesome. i hope to see some of you there. :) and i'm dreaming of seeing all of you, of course, as always.

hey friends,

long time no update! i miss all of you. i owe phone calls to topher and alex v-w. i've been absent from livejournal, but i'm actually working on building a blog out of fairlybalanced.tk . that will be my new journal/blog tool, for the most part, although i'm sure you'll catch me commenting and updating on livejournal from time to time. with no more ado:

1ne: MY FIRST PERFORMANCE is next Friday, September 24th, at Western Front in Cambridge, MA! I'm opening for the record release party for Radix, a local crew. Mel O (known to some of you as Bryan Beck) will be backing me up on the mic. Also opening are local and national acts including Illin' P, Cadence, and Personal Foul. To see the flyer for the show, with more information, click here.

2wo: I'm chilling here at home with Bryan, trying to find a job, and trying to make some more beats for a future jaunt to Bloomington. When that trip is going to happen is very much up in the air; possibly at the end of this month with BBeck and possibly later. Ari, get at me: gotta figure out if our plans coincide. Also, I have a 7/4 beat I'd very much like you to introduce your ears and flow to. Hopefully I'll arrive in B-Town armed and ready with beats to work with.

The summer is getting away from me already, and I'm still stuck in travelling mode. But really, I just can't be in this house with my parents much longer. I love them, but this is tough. Once I have a place to live, I will be a lot more comfortable sticking in one place. Here's to the future...

p.s. my album is still available via mail-order too! http://fairlybalanced.tk . anyone want to vouch for its worthwhileness? :)

caught red handed.

...while all the while stomping on the backs of big corporations like media conglomerates (including AOL) and credit card companies.

this is pretty cool, friends, and i'm pretty sure not too good to be true. many of y'all have seen my ipod.. you know it exists. i paid about 25% of the actual retail cost of the ipod by participating in a program run by a company called Gratis Networks (very poetic name, don't you think? :P)

Gratis runs a set of websites that offer a variety of free (read: very discounted) items to people who are willing to sign up for "free" (+credit card processing) trials of services offered by a variety of companies - some small and some very large, like AOL. The catch is that you have to remember to cancel your trial before it runs out - otherwise they're going to charge you a certain amount of money (which they tell you about upfront). If you remember to cancel all of your trials, you end up with a brand new something that you always felt would be useful to have but never really felt okay (or able to afford) buying in a store... as opposed to getting for a huge discount that puts the burden of the disparity on large corporations. If you forget to cancel them, you fall into the system's trap and you lose.. game over. I chose the iPod and spent about $75 in processing fees, cancelled my trials, and ended up about three weeks later with a brand new $300 ipod, courtesy of AOL.

There's a new program this company has started. fruiteewill is already participating in this program and linked me to it as my referrer, but I immediately recognized the M.O. of the website: connect as many people as possible directly with advertisers, giving them a unique opportunity to either wage corporate sabotage or be screwed by the corporations that got you to take on more commitments then you could remember to weasel out of. However, FreeGiftPlanet is very easy to mess up with - you have to complete so many damn offers, which you have to cancel in different windows, that it is easy to make mistakes.

This new site - freeipods.com - is much harder to screw up. This site uses viral marketing techniques to pull more people into this project. Every participant only has to complete a single offer to get their ipod - which, if you complete the AOL offer, involves no cost whatsoever. The catch is, you also have to refer 5 people, who also have to complete an offer. Thus the participants multiply and the potential for people who will stick with the services they try increases - hence the motivation for corporations to participate.

If we are smart - and help each other to not be played by this system - we can all get free iPods by putting the entire burden of cost on the corporations that engage in this viral marketing technique, and do lots of other terrible things to boot.

If you're sketched out by this - I totally understand. And I'm totally expecting most of y'all to be sketched out. This definitely looked too good to be true when my old roomate Dan Rosen and I found out about freeGiftplanet.com . but, sure enough, he ended up with an xbox and I ended up with an ipod. So this new program looks like a great opportunity to use these marketer's tactics against them.

Here's an article about this website in case you would like to hear it from Wired. The site also claims to have been discussed on CNN, for whatever that's worth.

Here's what we'd need to do to make this work out for us all. And yes - in essence this is a combination of direct marketing and a pyramid scheme. However, it's not a pyramid scheme in the sense that it's a scam - pyramid schemes put the burden of the participants rewards on other participants, passing a debt down a ladder until it gets to the bottom, where the last people are unwittingly screwed through no fault except of their own mistake of signing up. The pyramid in this scheme requires no financial contribution, so even if people end up at the bottom with no 5 people below them to hook them up with their free ipod, they haven't lost anything at all and they've participated in a giant net loss to a giant evil company.

Here's what we each have to do to make this work:

1. Sign up at freeipods.com itself (note: that link makes me your referrer just so you know. you could just go ahead and refer me or we could try to do this in an organized way through the comments on this LJ entry). This signup process just involves putting in your shipping address, basically.
2. Click on "Complete Offer" and then click on "AOL 9.0 With MusicNet". Fill in your shipping information and your credit card information. You won't be charged now - they're holding the information so they can charge you if you forget to cancel before your 30-day trial ends. As long as you don't forget, you won't be charged ever.
3. Find 5 other people to sign up for the free trial. Make sure they understand how to work the system and which offer to do (the AOL one). Otherwise you're just helping the corporations screw people, which is totally not the goal here.
4. After about a three-day delay for being credited for your signup, cancel your AOL membership. Cancel your AOL membership. Cancel. Your. Membership. This is the most important part, y'all.
5. Once you've got 5 referalls, order your ipod. You'll get it soon. And if you don't, you didn't lose anything anyhow.

So, if you think that some part of that is more than you can pull off or is just plain sketchy, no worries. I'd love for y'all to chime in if you think I'm being a sucker here or if I'm missing something about this. But I personally think this would be really damn cool to do.

Here's what I propose. I'm going to comment with my referral link in response to this post. If people want to participate, they should click on that link, signup for the site and then post their own referral link (which you can find on the "Refer Friends" part of the page) in a comment in response to MY comment. So, it'll be a tree/pyramid. Some people will end up on the bottom after it's done, but it shouldn't be too hard to take this elsewhere and find 5 people who think THEY can take it elsewhere, and so on and so forth. And although some people may not find 5 people or may get tired and stop trying, that'll be fine, because in the end, they won't have lost anything at all. Who's down? Who thinks this is fucked up? I feel a little weird about this because although I'm in the middle of the tree (as referred by fruitee will) among most of y'all I will be at the top of the tree. If you think you can't find 5 people or worry about that process, please don't participate. But if this feels okay to you, let's do it. What do you think?

criminally, i forgot to mention that a few people who i'm really excited to get to know better added me to their friends lists over the summer:
acousticodyssey (Jenna), lovemanifests (Martina), miraclehipz (Zarinah), strengthrupeace (Jacob), and viralata (Gaby).

that's really superexciting. i hope my life isn't too boring to y'all. :)

hey y'all!

i'm chilling at heather's house.. i've been holed up here for the past day dealing with a very painful and annoying digestive implosion of sorts. she's been amazing at helping me be comfortable and to not feel so alone while struggling with my insides. thank you, love.

we went to star island this weekend - quite an experience. that place is beautiful; this was my first visit. i really appreciate the way it's run, and the community among the pels. seeing bryan beck was awesome, it's been a long summer without his presence. it was also amazing to hang out with rick kmetz and bethany glatz, who accompanied me back to the mainland. tim wing also made an appearance, which was dope.

i need to ask the traveller's caucus for some help -- some of you know that my phone bill for the month that we were together was about 120 big ones. in retrospect i should have been stingier with allowing people to use my phone, but at the same time, my phone was very central to a lot of the logistics of our trip and made a lot of things happen that otherwise could not have. so, unless your name is alex vanderweele (who has already contributed $20), if you used my phone and you feel like you owe some part of that bill, or you just want to help out, please go here: (

Just to remove the bone from the meat:

My new album, "Fairly Balanced", is now available for online purchasing! O Glorious Day!

be there or be square: http://fairlybalanced.tk .

this is the single best thing i've accomplished to date, for whatever that means. i'm really proud, it's the most expressive and real thing i've ever been able to produce. i hope that y'all will have a chance to check it out. i'm serious about this music thing, give me a chance to prove that to you.

thank you, friends!

Hey everyone, I'm home!

Ahh, back on the East Coast, where the air is humid, my nose runs for no reason other than that it exists, and the sun wakes me super-early in the morning. It's good to be home though, I'm looking forward to getting back to beatmaking and starting some other new projects of self-improvement, as well as pushing myself ever harder to be a better white anti-racist ally and activist in general.

Also really exciting --- my cd is done, and I've got copies right here in front of me! I've updated my website with lyrics, a message board, and a magical "Buy Now" button that allows you to submit an order for the CD with a credit card or PayPal account! It's wicked easy. I really want to get copies to y'all, please check out the three tracks that are up there and consider supporting my efforts: http://fairlybalanced.tk .

The summer was one of many stories and it will be interesting to see, once everything settles down, what we can do with some of them, as far as assembling and publishing them. Concon was incredibly trying, on a community level, and painful, on a personal level... some things happened that just shouldn't have and some things haven't happened that should. This summer put stress on a lot of sacred friendships but even as some buckled or otherwise shifted, most of them withstood the journey and that makes me very happy, and it makes me feel very grateful to have the friends and allies that I do. Heather is an amazing friend, ally, and girlfriend and being back here with her is a more amazing situation than I could have hoped it would be. We're stronger than ever. I give her last post's conclusion a big hand-nodding-thingy.

I'm deeply worried about YRUU and how we are pushing the community too hard from the top down. Everything we are trying to do is worthy of our efforts and our energy, but I'm worried that if we don't keep a long-term view we might end up regretting the breakneck pace we feel compelled to do this work at. Common Ground III is one thing but I just don't want to see YRUU collapsing and leaving the UUA Board and committees to chart the course of the denomination's youth. Their definition of what it means to be anti-racist and anti-oppressive is not one that I can affirm without deep reservations. How can we keep our firm commitment to opposing and working through oppression at every YRUU event without sacrificing the business and community that is neccessary for YRUU (and, by extension, our A-R work) to exist? Youth Council's got to do some actual fucking business one of these days. There's little priority given in our movement for visioning (unless it is in regards to anti-racism efforts) and maintenance. As a white ally I wonder if there isn't an element of my personal feelings of guilt driving me to push us faster and harder towards the "answer" sometimes. I think it's a question we all need to ask, because we all understand that change will be the product of a long road. YRUU will not reverse white America's culture of oppression and white supremacy on its own, but given the proper care and maintenance it can be a crucial part of that long-term fight.

Bonnie Rovics, Christefano, Caitie and Rinny Stephens North, Heather and I had a wonderful meal at Bonnie's the other night, at which we concieved a Big Book of Worship. We need better worship-related materials for SDCs and as a general community resource that will preserve within our institutional memory not only specific rituals that our community has created/utilized but also the specific skills and mindset that allow worship planners to reach deeply into a community's soul and drive it towards truth and justice. This is another much-ignored component of the Anti-Racism/Anti-Oppression struggle, one that is very central to its very essence, in my opinion.

Much love for you all - thanks for hearing and reading my heady concepts. Once again, http://fairlybalanced.tk - your support would be greatly appreciated. If y'all have heard the disc, feel free to comment here and testify as to your experiences and opinions - or use the message board on my site. Peace out.