Jumping on a recent meme, here are maps of the countries and U.S. states I’ve visited. The map of countries is misleading. I’ve never been to Alaska; my visit to Mexico consisted of two hours in Tijuana, right over the U.S./Mexico border; my visit to China consisted of several hours in Canton, on the southern coast, as well as three trips to Hong Kong back when it was still in British hands. I spent two whole weeks exploring Israel, but it shows up as nothing more than a tiny speck on this map. And I spent a week in Jamaica, but you’d never know it.

Make your own maps here.

I’ve filed my taxes.

It’s said that money is the last taboo. People talk about their sex lives and reveal their deepest secrets on TV, but nobody talks about their income. If someone started a blog meme in which people posted their tax returns online (minus things like social security numbers and home addresses), how many people would actually do it?

This is going to sound really cheesy, but as I was filling out my 1040A and consulting the instructions last night, all with their pink-and-white color scheme, it was moving to think that a vast nation of people is filling out the same sheets, filling in the same pink-and-white boxes, looking at the same instruction booklet. Imaginary Americans entered my brain, such as a middle-aged born-again Christian couple in Kansas, their house filled with 40 years of knick-knacks and memories; a Hispanic bus driver who lives with his wife and kids in Queens; a 30something gay couple in Seattle; a single mom who works as a secretary or waitress. And me. It made me feel patriotic.

Then I thought, you know what? Here I am, doing my taxes like everyone else, filling out this pink-and-white form like everyone else, and yet there are people out there, including many in Congress, who want me to be a second-class citizen just because I’m gay. I deal with the same pink-and-white forms that everyone else does, but there are people in power who don’t want me to be able to marry for love, or raise kids, or even just have the kind of sex I enjoy.

And the color scheme is white and pink.

What a country.

P.S. I typed gay tax into Google and found:

The Anti-Gay Tax Refund
Unfair Taxation of Homosexual Citizens

What’s gone wrong with the Democrats? In today’s Times, Robert Reich discusses the politics of the last 10 years and postulates an answer to this question. It makes sense to me. If you let yourself be defined merely in opposition to others, eventually you’ll have no clear long-term message. (See: the Democrats in the 2002 elections.) The Republicans have the advantage right now because they know what they want to do, while most Democrats just do what they think other people want them to do.

The answer is so stupidly simple. Figure out what you, you yourself, believe in, and why you believe in it, and then try to convince other people that you’re right.

If you can’t figure out what you believe in, you have no business being in politics.