Angel Lemke

Stuff I'm Pondering Re: Writing

2011-04-27T15:28:00.006-04:00

“When you’re a younger architect and starting out, you’re seeking some kind of impossible perfection. You could spend your life thinking about this ephemeral building that would be great to do, it would be the capstone of my career. You realize as you mature, that there’s no ‘there.’ You ain’t gonna get there.” - Frank Gehry

"'Satisficers,' people who attempt to find 'good enough' solutions rather than an elusive best, are also more happy and satisfied with their lives than maximizers." - David Schuldberg, "Living Well Creatively: What's Chaos Got to Do with It?"

"I always thought I was pretending to be a director. Then, at some point, it just went away, the feeling of pretending went away, and I thought, 'OK, I'm a director now." - Sydney Pollack

[UPDATE: April 28] This too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zj5cTNfIdM&NR=1

Hire Me?

2010-10-11T21:51:00.002-04:00

I'm job-seeking in the Columbus, OH area. My background is in higher education and advertising sales, but I am open to anything where I can make a difference. In the non-profit sector, I am especially interested in work with GLBTQ populations and anti-poverty work in urban settings.

My CV can be found here.

Planet of the Blind

2010-10-02T12:35:00.003-04:00

Hey, folks -

At the invitation of the lovely Andrea Scarpino, I've begun contributing posts to Steve Kuusisto's Planet of the Blind blog. My first post can be found here: http://www.planet-of-the-blind.com/2010/10/queer-matters.html. It's an honor to post in their company, and exciting to reach new readers.

I'm not sure how these posts will affect my posting on this blog. I'm thinking that more personal ones will be here while more political ones there, but you know that distinction is shaky at best and sometimes impossible. At any rate, I'll post links here to anything that goes up at POTB.

Take care, all.

Love is More

2010-06-27T12:18:00.005-04:00

My friend David is one of the most loving people Iknow. I met him when I walked into a reception on the first night of my first doctoral program residency. I was nervous, my enthusiasm for this new adventure in my life faltering under the weight of impending hotel bill, homework and the navigation of many new strangers at once. (How strange that is to think now - us Union folks don't stay strangers long, do we?) David was off to the side, smiling at the crowd, exuding openness. Catching my eye, he introduced himself and began asking genuine questions about my life, affirming each path I described. His energy was--and always is--amazing. I felt welcomed and heard. My anxieties moved away for the moment. Every time I see David, we immediately hug--even if its been only a few hours of class time since we saw each other last. A room with one in it is one in which I know that I am deeply loved and safe in the universe's arms. On Facebook, he often comments on my posts, cheering me on, offering gentle support when he--through his loving attention and remarkable insight--sees me wavering from letting myself fulfill my potential, from putting trust in myself and the world, expressing love openly.

David inspires me. I take cues out his playbook a lot, emulating him and seeking to find my own way to spread love just as powerfully. Like Katie Reider before him (and so many of you, too), he has helped me learn how to better Show My Love.

But that other tattoo I considered? The Nietzsche I wrote that I was "over"? "What is the seal of freedom? To be unashamed before oneself." It resurfaces now and then, especially when those with a painfully, tragically narrow view of love get in the way.

In the UU service today, Steve Abbott discussed the ambiguity of the word in our screwed up culture, giving as an illustration a guy saying, "But I love you, baby," to a woman who responds, "I know what you mean, and that's not love."

Yep, we all know what that means, don't we? I think maybe this is the secret of my great love for gay men; David and I can express our love for each other as genuinely, openly, extravagantly as we want, and no one assumes there's anything "dirty" going on.

Don't get me wrong - sex is awesome. I'm a big fan - whether or not it overlaps with love, as long as its consensual and respectful - but I'm not fool enough to reduce the thousands of ways that humans offer love to each other, the thousands of ways that we need each other's love, with gettin' it on. But I am weirdly proud to take it as a measure of how much my life has become built on love over the past few years that, when I got smacked in the face with that stupidity this week, it was at first baffling to me. I'd forgotten that someone could have so small a vision of the world as to read a post David might write on my wall as an attempt to get into my pants. I'd forgotten people think that way at all.

When I was in high school, I was known as a hugger. Less physically expressive friends would sometimes have to dodge me in the hall to avoid being caught up in a sudden squeeze. I have warm kinetic memories of Ashlee and me dozing off in class as we leaned against each other. If I could rebuild the now-gone building just long enough to recapture one moment, I'd go stand next to my senior year locker, along the corridor of English classrooms, and try to recall the energy of the hug I got each day from Mandy (Pfeifer) Steward (despite her own inclination to dodge such expressions) as she headed down the hall in one direction and I headed down the stairs in the other.

Then I started to come out. Then, the summer after my freshman year of college, some dumb-as-shit guy at a party looked over at me throwing my arm around an upset friend to comfort her and said, "What are you two, a couple of fucking dykes?"

Whatever homophobic stereotypes you might encounter, some version of this is always included; they all include the idea of the sexual predator, the thought that because I love some women romantically, I can't go near any woman without sex being on the table. Harvey Milk brilliantly played on this when he said he wanted to recruit you. Suddenly, I quit hugging. I quit freely loving my friends--especially my straight female friends. Suddenly, I started worrying about being taken the "wrong" way, by them themselves or by those who might be looking on. I did not want to get the queer on them.

Ever read the story, "Hands" from Winesburg, Ohio? We never know definitively if that teacher is or isn't queer in his desire, only that the whiff of a hint that he could be causes him to restrain the most expressive part of himself, to cut off the motion of love through him - expansive, healing love in all its myriad possibility - because he lives in a town small-minded enough to think that the only thing a encouraging hand resting on a shoulder could mean is sex. I get that guy all too well. But thousands of loving hugs, arms around my shoulder, sudden wipings away of my tears from friends like David have slowly, slowly reminded me what I knew intuitively as a child, have taught me how wrong it would be to let such narrowness have power. I wll not let homophobia or any other bullshit stop me from giving my love in every way I know how.

In a song about how a guy tried to pit her against other women in competition, Dar Williams repeats in a soaring chorus, "I will not be afraid of women; I will not be afraid of women." I hear that in my head when the second-guessing starts, when the impulse to just step away from those I care about before I get the queer on them starts. I want to say that I have hope that it will help expand what even those conclusion-jumping, rumor-spreading folks can understand about their own capacity for loving the people in their lives, but in this moment, I don't yet have that hope. (Though I do have Harvey's hope for the Us's) I only know that not being the kind of person that my friends have taught me to be, that not openly extolling your virtues, my wonderous loved ones, not sending an encouraging word because some narrow view might read it poorly is simply not an option. (Love illiterates, I like to think of them...and that does help me a little to see them as needing help instead of scorn.) That will not bring the beloved community into reality. And you may remember from my last post, that is the thing I'm truly after.

I will not be afraid of women, and I will not let love be made small.

Toward a New Hometown Story

2010-05-31T21:30:00.032-04:00

"The stories we tell are the ones that we become" - Peter Block

Ask any native of my hometown what kind of place it is, and within the first ten minutes of that conversation you'll hear this: "We don't even have a movie theater."

I'm not sure why this particular detail is so salient, though it was for me, too, as a kid. Now I live a stone's throw from three multi-screen cineplexes as well as a university arts center with programming to please even the snobbiest cinephile. But, as much as I love movies, I don't think much about it; I see maybe five movies a year in a theater, if you don't count the CAPA summer movie series (i.e., movies I've seen before). Having that longed-for movie theater nearby has made pretty much no impact in terms of my quality of life. Were it not for Netflix, I'd see fewer movies now than I did growing up in Court House.

But that's what it's been to live in Court House. To describe it by what it doesn't have. That's been our story. Everything good is elsewhere (or erstwhile--I grew up knowing where everything used to be.) It's been pervasive in my own experience and the most frightening aspect of moving back, as I noted back in February.

This story is no good. As Peter Block says, it is shaping what we become.

On Facebook, a week or so ago, the Record Herald (CH's for-a-long-time-now-not-locally-owned local paper) called for advice for the graduating high school seniors. The very first response was "get out of this town." And it was repeated, over and over.

It was the story I heard, too. Here's the last line of a note Alicia slipped into my backpack on my last day of high school: "Once you get out of this shit town Stay Out!" Earlier in the note, she said, "I realize I keep writing in the past tense," apologizing for her assumption that she'd never see me again. But, as her last line demonstrates, it was a very realistic assumption.

Describing an acquaintance who--in my limited experience--seems to hold grudges and be perpetually put upon a couple weeks back, I noted that something about her reminded me of my hometown. "It's that Hatfield/McCoy mindset, but without the rejection of the larger culture."

We have that "code of the hills" "take care of our own" ethic of Appalachia that you would expect to arise in a town that industry is forgetting, that urbanites turn their noses up at. A town like ours. bell hooks, speaking of her native Kentucky, describes the backwoods spirit--and the backlash against it--this way:

[I]ndividual Kentuckians white and black...managed to create sub-culture, usually in hollows, hills and mountains, governed by beliefs and values contrary to those of mainstream culture. The free-thinking and non-conformist behavior encouraged in the backwoods was a threat to imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy hence the need to undermine them by creating the notion that folks who inhabited these spaces were ignorant, stupid, inbred, ungovernable. By dehumanizing the hillbilly, the anarchist spirit which empowered poor folks to choose a lifestyle different from that of the state and so called civilized society could be crushed.

We've got all the suspicion of strangers, all the sense that our turf is being invaded, and needs to be protected, but none of the critical consciousness. I read hooks and think, "If only..."

A few weeks back, I attended a Bridges Out of Poverty training on the posh Granville campus of my alma mater. I met a fellow Denison alum who teaches at COTC. (Newark, I think, is a community very like WCH.) As we discussed the differing expectations in a culture of poverty versus "middle class" culture, he pointed out that his students often come from the former, but judge themselves by the latter, and that self-image is often a huge barrier to their empowerment. We don't want to see ourselves as anarchist hillbillies, but this is the only alternate narrative available to us at this time. Instead, we want to be "normal" and "average." That's how I think of Court House - at the intersection of small town and mass media consumer society, judging itself by all the wrong standards, and so spending a lot of its time pissed off. We don't know how to be a small town; we only know we're not the city. We need to learn how to celebrate what we are instead of long for what we are not.

Victoria Castle calls this The Trance of Scarcity.

I have repeatedly encountered the tragic theme of I am not enough--not good enough, smart enough, rich enough, young enough, old enough, worthy enough. Almost as prevalent is the theme of There is not enough--not enough time, money, opportunity, love, cooperation, power, you name it. This prevailing sense of not-enough-ness successfully cripples the lives of people who would otherwise be buoyant and passionate...
The Trance of Scarcity has us in its snare and produces unfathomable waste...Many of us spend our time lamenting the way things are, justifying all the reasons why they can't be different, and preparing for the worst...the Trance efffectively keeps us from living at peace with ourselves and each other.
There is life on the other side of the Trance--a life characterized by vitality, fulfillment, and efficacy. It's not a pipe dream, and it's not as far away as we've been led to believe. It does, however, require tampering a bit with our beliefs and confronting whatever has lived within us as the stone cold truth.

Let me say this very clearly before I go on - I do not believe that all need is in our heads. One thing that bugs me about Castle, about the Secret/Thought Become Things/self-help movement type stuff in general is the way of too easily dismissing the material realities. There are people in real need in Court House. I don't want to diminish that. The flight of businesses from rural America has hit us hard, and there's plenty of generational poverty in the community. But I also think the hoarding of wealth, the hatred of the poor going on in this country, in Fayette County, is a function of this mindset. It's hard to think about what you can give when you're focused on what you don't have. We, as a collective, have enough. We, as a collective, have the tools to build more. But we need a collective story to make it happen. We need an identity as a place.

"Everything about a culture is an exit barrier...To have a culture where exit is entirely costless
...is to have no culture at all" - Jacob T. Levy as quoted by Kwame Anthony Appiah

I've spent a lot of my life in another small town - Granville. It's a "college" town and a place with a lot of wealth. It views itself as a slightly less quirky Stars Hollow, a slightly warmer Cicely, Alaska. People like to return there, find it a hard place to leave. It has an identity founded on what it has. Charm and history and neighbors you know by name. Little locally owned businesses, artisan crafts, buildings restored to turn-of-the-century glory. Nothing Court House couldn't have, too. Nothing Court House doesn't already have. But we have yet to learn to love it. And then cultivate, build on it. Can the Purple Turtle become Luke's Diner? Or, better yet, my beloved Northstar? Is it possible? It feels very far away, but why? I'd venture it's because we have been living without a culture, as Levy says, without a story we tell about ourselves. And that results in "no culture at all." And if there's no culture at all, people leave.

Hell, we tell them to leave. The higher achieving you are, the more you hear it. What kind of a message is that? Both for those who leave and those who stay.

When I think about leaving Columbus, there's a thing I'm leaving, a neighborhood, a community, an ethos, that is something more than my proximity to the big screen. I feel very uncertain of what the thing I'd be moving to is.

Wendell Berry asked, over twenty years ago now, if community has a value. He meant it quite literally: Does community have a financial value? I submit Court House as evidence that a lack of community has a financial cost. Here's the end of Berry's essay:

The only preventative and the only remedy is for the people to choose one another and their place over the rewards offered them by outside investors. The local community must understand itself finally as a community of interest--a common dependence on a common life and a common ground.

That understanding doesn't happen without a common story. I don't yet know what the best story is, I can't find it by myself, can't tell it without you. But I can point out that the scarcity story is killing this community.

For now, I submit this:

I looked at an apartment in Court House the other day. From the outside, it looked OK. I know the landlord is someone I trust, so sight unseeen, I figured it'd do. Even though it was a two bedroom, I didn't expect it to compete with my much beloved one bedroom in Columbus with all its cozy converted house city apartment charm...but inside, it was expansive, full of light, an almost obscene amount of space for one person. I pictured immediately where my bookcases went, saw my life in that space. It was more than I thought possible.

That's the story I'm trying to tell for now: there is more here than we yet think is possible.

PS - I think Block's work with A Small Group in Cincy may be a good place for us to start...

To What We Will Become (Or, You Jump, I Jump, Jack)

2010-05-26T10:35:00.007-04:00

Once in a while I feel compelled to explain the longevity of an unlikely friendship I formed when I was younger. I say:

You know, I think we met at a moment when we were both pretty overwhelmed by who everyone thought we were supposed to be. And as we grew up, in many, many ways, we became exactly who everyone thought we'd be. But we rely on each other to remember that we're also something more.

The echo from Adrienne Rich's "Grandmothers" is intentional; we also have her in common. That goes a long way.

Just over a year ago, I wrote this of my friendships with Allison, Marlene and Ali:

[They are among] That addictive handful of people who see continuity and change each time they see you. It is not enough to know you when; what you need is the ones who see something about how you have descended from when to this moment. Maybe not all of it, not every faltering choice along the way, but they still see a line running from the you they knew to the person in front of them today.
Or maybe, the ones who saw something in you then. Something you are only now learning how to make good on. Something latent, waiting for its time to come. Maybe she did see me as I was. Maybe this is what she couldn’t see. What I will become.

This morning, I got my daily copy of the "Crazy, Deranged Fools" newsletter from blogger/cartoonist/marketing guru Hugh MacLeod (who I discovered thanks to a friend). It included a passage from his snarky and smart little book, Ignore Everybody:

The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you...You don’t know if your idea is any good the moment it’s created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is. There’s a reason why feelings scare us.
And asking close friends never works quite as well as you hope, either. It’s not that they deliberately want to be unhelpful. It’s just they don’t know your world one millionth as well as you know your world, no matter how hard they try, no matter how hard you try to explain.
Plus a big idea will change you. Your friends may love you, but they don’t want you to change. If you change, then their dynamic with you also changes. They like things the way they are, that’s how they love you- the way you are, not the way you may become.

Hugh's advice is good, by way of trusting yourself as the ultimate judge of your work, but I found myself grumbling just a bit about that last bit, that your friends love you the way you are, "not the way you may become." What a bleak view of our loved ones.

And then another old friend chimes in with this amazing blog post (which, incidentally, ends with a quote from Hugh's marketing guru buddy Seth Godin):

Wanna know one of my favorite things in the world, something that inspires me like none other? It’s watching someone to decide to take a leap of faith. To uproot themselves, to change careers, to make the choice to do something you never dreamed they would do. To take all that they are and all that you’ve fallen in love with and to pack it all up, neatly folded into a little blue leather suitcase and to say, “I’m off on a new adventure. Wish me luck.”...I can feel my little excited butterflies beating in my chest and traveling up my throat. They make my breath quicken. I can feel this unexplainable surge of hope that jumps, like a spark of fire, from the inspired person to me. It’s almost too hot to hold, certainly too spirited to capture. I can feel my own mind swell with the idea that the box is bigger than any of us have allowed it to be, and there is more, ever more, outside of these walls.

Hugh may be right; Mandy's take may not be the norm. But somehow, in the past few years, it has become the norm in my life.

And not just in the old tried and true folks. Each new friendship seems founded on this value more than any other. Increasingly, it seems to be the only value worth founding any relationship upon...

Thank you for that. Every leap I make is a credit to each and every one of you. And I love to watch you jump as well.

Latest Dissertation Ramble - Panopticon edition

2010-04-23T13:18:00.006-04:00

One of the texts I've taught most frequently over the years has been the Panopticon chapter from Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Authorized by Donald Bartholomae's inclusion of it in his freshman composition reader Ways of Reading and my own sense that beginning writers need to tackle challenging texts, I started using it my second quarter as a grad student, and it's popped up a number of times since then. (But not this quarter. It's always a tricky balance, giving students a sense of agency or getting them to look critically at limits on their agency. Yesterday, we discussed a passage from Appiah's Cosmopolitianism that suggests habit rather than reason is the driving force in any social change; they weren't overjoyed to consider that the academic arguments they're learning to make might not be so useful in the long run.)

I was predestined to "get" the panopticon. Take any of my family members' crazy (mine included), and you'll find paranoia is a dominant factor. The idea that some insidious unseen force is watching and controlling you is kind of like the idea of the sun coming up around my childhood home. Try to dispute the fact that "they're out to get you" with my grandma, and she'll look at you like a sad, sad lost cause.

But lately what's most compelling to me about the Foucault's discussion of the panopticon--indeed, what he finds so insidiously ingenious about Bentham--is the fact that it makes the mechanisms of power so incredibly light. If the prisoners in Bentham's contraption could see each other, they'd recognize immediately that there collective strength could take out the warden in the blink of an eye. But they don't, because they can't see each other at all, certainly can't see each other's strength.

Until now, I hadn't thought of Foucault as a major influence on my research. (Perhaps naively, as I have certainly acknowledged the influence of his biographer, Eribon.) But this the root of my project after all - that urban queers and the rural poor can't see each other. We see only the caricatures - the dandy and the redneck. And so we can't make alliances, we can't storm the tower. (Appiah's piece added another compelling reason to move back to CH to the list; homophobia doesn't go away because people realize it's wrong, he says; it goes away because people just get used to gay people being around.)

For Foucault, though, the genius of the modern state is not the mechanism of separation, Bentham's prison, or even our own mass media barrage of us and assorted thems. It's that we internalize the control, that we self-monitor, self-censor, that we buy in so much that we actively work against our own best interests. All the poor folks supporting the Tea Party, for instance. That's some serious power that makes that possible...

I'd describe my project today by saying that I'm interested in what happens to white rural, working class youth when they claim a queer identity, how that shifts their understanding of class - their own and others - and how it, in our current political climate, cuts them off from transformative struggle against poverty. But this is a subset of a larger problem...there's something more I'm trying to learn here, about how people are conditioned to maintain their own oppression...something I hope will help us figure out how to bust out of jail for good.

Another Round of Revising Pedagogy...

2010-04-14T13:47:00.003-04:00

The food metaphors won't make sense if you haven't read the "Grubbing" post...

When I wrote "Grubbing," two and a half years ago, I was trying to work out the tension between the curriculum I was stuck with as an adjunct, teaching at a couple community colleges who were highly directive with their adjuncts (one even mandated a class-by-class schedule), and the curriculum that I knew had fostered my own intellectual growth as both high schooler and undergraduate. The former was focused on what Abi, a classmate in my first (and still best) pedagogy course, liked to call "the skills to pay the bills." The latter was a hodge podge of canonical "Great Books" and canonical-within-the-field white feminists, with a tiny smattering of queer theory. (Though Denison was far ahead of the field in offering coursework on queer theory, I was still too closeted to take a course devoted to it.) I knew my students were in need of, in the terms of that earlier post, basic intellectual sustenance, but I also wanted to offer up the plate of fancy cheeses - because we should all get that kind of sustenance, too. In fact, I feared, the basics didn't mean much without the rest. (And all this before reading Michael Pollan!)

Abi was an African-American lesbian who was visibly annoyed at how all us white folks in the class took up her phrase as if we'd been introduced to the latest rap single. Most repeated it as though she'd ended her words with Zs: "skillzzz to pay the billzzz." I lost track of Abi pretty quickly at OSU; queer students were not encouraged to make alliances in OSU's highly competitive world - students in general weren't - and Abi & I both had personal demons to manage. I heard, though, that she didn't finish the M.A., a mix of lack of support and disgust with the way her challenges to received authority were met by our professors. I don't recall what little I know of Abi's history here to add another installment in the why-OSU-was-not-a-good-place-for-me saga, but because what I remember most about Abi was a commitment to theory which had an impact in the world, that actually changed lives, and that recognized that sometimes the most important thing a student has to do is pay the bills. That is something we are not taught to do in graduate school. Often we are actively discouraged. We are taught, instead, to assume our students have consciously rejected the reading room world of the academic. (At best, we let them off the hook and blame "society.") We are not taught to ask what have we done to discourage the student.

I was also haunted by Adrienne Rich's "Teaching Language in Open Admissions," and remain so. In a withering footnote in that essay, she discusses the weakness of the composition reader, comparing it to a film chopped up and edited for television consumption, robbed of its meaning, removed from any controversy. I sneered at the reader that I was using with even more distaste than it had inspired before. It was a good thousand pages, with two to four page spliced and diced works, many of which were little more than newspaper articles in the first place. It had been chosen, I was told, because it was priced well for students and allowed more flexibility for adjuncts. I found about five essays in there that I could work with, though to be fair, I only read about half of them before giving up in despair. I could teach them the major rhetorical modes, and the ins and out of citation by asking them to look at each other's work much more effectively. And so slowly, there was less and less reading in my composition classroom.

Instead, Rich's students grappled with the voices of the authors in their own terms, whether canonical or non-canonical. Though she mentions that, upon reflection, she should have taken advantage of the many black voices whose texts were available at the time, part of the power of the essay comes from the fact that students shut out from my posh library reading room were taking Plato to task just as - probably more - effectively as any Denisonian on the hill. And they were connecting it with their lived experience, too.

But I'd taught discussion-based classes with lots of reading at OSU, and over and over again, and at the end of every term, I'd found myself wondering if those students left with the skills they were supposed to get from First-Year Writing. Or if, by stressing questioning texts over topic sentences, I'd left them at a disadvantage for the next writing assignment for the professor who didn't value insight as much as correctness, who preferred order to innovation?

At community college, that fear was multiplied ten-fold. So many of the students are under-prepared. My colleagues worry sometimes that this forces us into "teaching high school." I agree that we must hold our students to a college-level standard, but if they didn't get those bare bones essentials before now, this is it. Ten weeks to undo years of systemic inequality in public education. Who has time for Plato?

And yet...

Last quarter was the nadir of reading assignments in my classes. We read two things as a class - a how-to out of Booth, Columb & Williams' excellent The Craft of Research, and, near the end of the quarter, Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." Otherwise, students were reading on their own research topics. I wanted, too, to encourage them to pursue their own interests, rather than mine individually or English studies questions more generally. David Bartholomae, in "Inventing the University," would've pointed up the problem with that right away, had I recalled him: They don't yet know how to frame questions in academic discourse. They couldn't pursue their interests without knowing what that kind of pursuit looks like. Overall, they finished with good understandings of when and how to cite appropriately. But, their final papers showed, they had very little idea how to locate the salient points in the reading, less still how to effectively question authors with whom they disagreed. Though we spoke often, in abstract and with examples, about how to assess the quality of a source, several students seemed unable to differentiate between a bit of magazine fluff and a scholarly article, except to say that the latter was "too hard." But they had the skills to pay the bills. And no reason to ever get excited about reading a challenging piece again.

But on Orwell day, for just a minute, they'd gotten into it. They'd pointed at passages to support their interpretations. Some who disliked his snarky tone pointed out particularly nasty examples while others defended that tone as consonant with the principle he was arguing in the essay. They came to life. So there was hope.

This quarter, research writing has involved a lot more reading and discussion. We're not tackling Plato, but - quite unintentionally - several of the readings we've done have referenced Aristotle, and I like to think they'd all pass muster with Rich, were she to walk into my classroom. We're asking what academic argument should look like, what academic integrity means in a large sense, we're asking whether the skills to pay the bills actually do. (Today was my favorite, bell hooks day, in which we read a piece that calls academics to task for writing only to other academics instead of to the general public.) The readings bounce off each other, though they ask different questions from different points of view, using different methods. As a class, we're deciding which questions to pursue. (In fact, today, they went somewhere I didn't anticipate at all - connecting hooks not with authors who've discussed argument as oppressive or violent but instead with authors who've discussed the need for robust community conversations about ethics.) We're modelling research thinking, which I hope will result in research writing that is more than technically competent. The second half of the quarter they'll take a stab at their own topics, and I'll downshift again into the how-tos, hopefully having instilled some idea of the wherefores.

But still, I worry. Ironically, they struggled a lot with hooks' essay, making her point about writing for a wide audience seem hypocritical. These students have not been prepared to read well, even to read work that strives to be accessible. Maybe I should spend more time on reading comprehension, give quizzes rather than free-form discussions that sometimes leave students more confused than when they arrived. I still don't know what the best way to bridge the gap between bare bones practicality and "high falutin'" philosophizing would be. Walking someone who's starving into a cheese shop and waving St. Agur under his nose seems like not the best strategy...but maybe if nothing else it lets them know what the inside of the cheese shop is like, should they choose to go in again on their own terms.

Repost: Grubbing

2010-04-05T10:17:00.000-04:00

Originally posted at dollarfifty January 8, 2007.

I've been thinking a lot about the ethics and aesthetics of food lately, and I've been meaning to post about it. I've also found myself thinking a lot about the aesthetics of education lately, specifically why--when I genuinely believe that we can learn anywhere, anytime--I often wish I could give each of my students the experience I was so lucky to have, studying at a college on a hill, with expansive reading rooms and an even more expansive bio-reserve. These finally began to cohere when I got into a conversation about "grade grubbers."

Even if you haven't heard the term before, I think most readers know immediately what I mean, think immediately of some kid they went to school with along the way. The grade grubber will nitpick his or her way to an A with little if any consideration for what can be learned. The outcome--the external, quantifiable outcome--is the measure of success. Grubbers adhere tightly to the letter of the law and ignore its spirit to the point of absurdity; if the syllabus says something like, "You should speak at least once each class period if you expect to earn participation points," they will raise their hands early in class, give you a canned, rehearsed answer that may or may not address the reading or the class discussion or the goals of the class, and then spend months on grade appeals if you award them a B+ for participation.

They are remarkably driven students, often extremely conscientious--just conscientious about all the wrong things. They don't care if they earn a grade, as long as they get it, especially if the process of earning it means risking doing something new, difficult, something at which they might falter, fail, look silly in front of others. Because their motivations are largely external, they are also the students most likely to ask other students what they earned on an assignment. This aids in the grade appeal process, too; "Jeff missed three classes and earned a higher grade than me," does not compute to them. They often spend time angry, disheartened by all the unfairness they see around them.

The point is, they are difficult to reach in class. On the one hand, these are kids who have excelled in school, who still--in a warped way--believe in it, even when so much conspires to turn us off from learning. These are kids who aren't afraid of working hard, but these are also kids who are desparately, heartbreakingly afraid of failure. These kids can't do the most basic critical thinking task--to learn from your mistakes, to try new approaches, to risk. They can only refer back to directives. They are nearly paralyzed. They are mad at me for ruining their GPAs, for not giving them the recognition that has become the main reason they show up to class. I've been that kid at times; I know he's scared. I always hope she'll come out of it, if not in my class, then somewhere along the way.

But why "grubbing"? In its adjectival form, "grubby," it means dirty, sullied, slovenly. The verb, though, according to Merriam-Webster (and grade grubbers love to go to the dictionary to settle disputes of meaning), means "to clear or root out by digging; to dig in the ground, usually for a hidden object; to search about." I suppose one gets dirty with all that digging. The noun, though, is the object of all that digging: "a soft thick wormlike insect larva; food."

Discussing these students with a fellow teacher, I described grade grubbers as content to live on the quickest available sustenance, the thing that they know will keep them alive. They are digging for that A like they are starving--and often, they are. They've become addicted to external validation, need it desparately. (Yes, we all need it, but they haven't learned how to get through the lean times with internal rewards.) If one of them read this blog, they'd hear only my frustration with them, not my sympathy, not my desire to reach them. They wouldn't believe me that a refusal to give false praise, or unearned grades, is not a refusal to see their work as valuable, to give praise when it is due. So it's really hard to distract them from their foraging long enough to point out that there's a cheese plate right over here. But I'm not willing to settle for animal survival. Not for me, not for my students. That's way too low down Maslow's hierarchy.

A couple years ago, my mom was blown away by a seminar on cultural differences among the classes and how these difference impede communication about patient care, especially at community mental health centers in which the doctors are most often born of rather wealthy families, the other professional staff tend to be lower middle class, and the clients are quite poor. She recounted one point that really stuck with me: socio-economic class can often be most easily discerned by attitudes toward food.

Poor - Quantity - "Did you get enough to eat?"

Middle Class - Variety - "How many options were there?"

Wealthy - Quality of Presentation - "Was it pretty?"

No wonder my family, caught somewhere between the first and second of those class designations, loves the idea of a buffet so much. No one in the family I grew up in would have the slightest idea what I was talking about if I commented on the "plating" of an entree. Except me, that is, largely because I went to college at a place designed to enculturate me above my station. Worse, though, for my family communication skills, when I explain, they think I'm snooty for caring about such things. I can say 'til I'm blue in the face that doing something artfully is not the same as ignoring poverty, that the reasons I think a pretty dish is better than an overloaded buffet plate have nothing to do with it costing more, that I don't need all that stuff but simply appreciate it, but to them I'm still just a snob. My mom is slowly starting to get why I'd rather sit in a coffee shop with a three-dollar chai once a week than buy a five-dollar can of Folgers and be set for a month, but it is a slow process.

But these food attitudes reveal more than just a little insight into my family communication problems; in fact, I think they yield considerable insight into that strange phenomenon that emerged in the late twentieth century: fat poor people and skinny wealthy people.

A couple years ago, when I was unemployed for several months, my mother wanted me to shop at Aldi's to save money. Aldi's is grubby to me; all senses. It is full of unhealthy food in bulk. When I was a kid, we would go there before a car trip to buy massive amounts of candy and chips cheaply. When you walk into any Aldi's, the first aisle is entirely junk food, sugar and sodium. There are a lot of pre-packaged foods, also high in sodium.

"Mom, I've been trying to eat mostly fresh produce. I don't think they have what I buy."

After a lecture on needing to accept that I may have to eat differently since I was broke, "Anyway, they have produce at Aldi's."

When I got there, I found I could get a 10-lb bag of potatoes for $3-4 bucks. That would be great if I had ten or so people to feed that week. "Mom, I can buy one potato at Giant Eagle for $1."

"That's such a waste; why would you spend that much on a potato?"

"But I'll just end up throwing most of them away."

"Well, you'll have to eat more potatoes so you don't waste them. That's crazy to throw them away."

I don't mean to make my mother sound like an unintelligent woman; she's very bright, and I probably haven't done my part to explain economies of scale to her, but in the end, I think this is less an intellectual problem than a cultural one. The food that is cheap, non-perishable and foisted at the poor in heaping helpings is terrible for them. But it is quick to prepare, quick to digest. It sates an immediate need, even as it creates later ones that keep you coming back for more. It makes them dehydrated and sluggish, prone to diabetes. The middle class are not much better off these days, just happy there's a new flavor of butter on the market. Meanwhile, the wealthy find that a shock of green looks lovely next to a dainty filet. Small portions (not to mention safe, guarded grounds on which to stroll or run safely, with none of the fears an urban or rural dweller might face when travelling by foot) are naturalized to their way of life. (How do you spot New Money? Their stuff is garish, which usually means BIG.)

I'm not sure any of them know anything about nutrition.

This is one way my elite education--and all my education before it--failed me. Though I learned to know what a fancy dinner looked like, how to order it, and enough table manners not to look like a total clod most of the time (one of the most popular student activities programs each year was an etiquette luncheon for students going on job interviews), I didn't know much about what food does to a human body. My attitudes toward food shifted because of aesthetics, not reason.

I recall sometime along the way, in high school, I think, someone explaining what saltwater does to the body. I don't think it was in science class; I think it was in the process of explaining why a literary death was particularly gruesome. At any rate, no one told me that drinking soda was doing the same thing. Sure, I knew how to read a label, but why would I look for salt there? People don't drink saltwater. That doesn't make sense.

Anyway, at that age, I only knew how to make sense of calories and fat content on the label, and that in a very arbitrary, things I heard on talk shows kind of way.

In eighth grade health class we learned about the digestive system. This must have been when I found out that the body turns everything into sugar. I may have been told that we need foods that take a long time to digest, but I suspect only needed to know glucose and the names of the organs for the exam.

Stupid grade grubber.

I knew carbs were bad when the rest of the country learned carbs were bad, but only when my cousin's diabetes was diagnosed last summer did those numbers start to mean much to me.

I've learned more about nutrition watching half an episode of The Biggest Loser than I did in twenty-two years of formal education.

So now I know better. Today I ordered a pizza. I didn't feel like preparing anything, wanted to feel full fast. Sometimes we all take the shortcut, sometimes we all settle for grubs.

The grade grubber learned her cultural habits in an environment where the natural failures of learning something new resulted in ridicule or punishment, in emotional starvation; she learned to meet her needs in the quickest way possible. He thinks I'm crazy for paying $10 for cheese. He thinks I'm crazy for wanting him to revise a written paper that meets the 1200 word requirement.

I have much sympathy for the poor, ridiculed as fat and lazy by a society that doesn't teach them a thing about nutrition, that gives them grubs to eat. The life of the mind, though, I think of as less materially based. It's a lot easier to go from adhering to strict MLA format to critically questioning Kierkegaard than it is to go from eating canned beans to buying fresh cilantro. Isn't it?

My smelly, dank classroom at the tech school has me wondering how much the aesthetics of Denison had to do with learning to be a critical thinker.

I can't quite tell you the way I felt the first time I studied in a reading room full of portraits of past college presidents, with huge tables suitable for folio browsing and ceilings at least twenty feet high. What I was doing felt important. I felt precious and valued. I felt surrounded by people that understood how much you need nourishment to think well. I felt called to ask big questions, to hope to answer them. When I sat around a seminar table, one that senators, CEOs, and famous actors had sat around not too many years before, I felt on par with them.

How silly, all that. Just the kind of grubs they dangle in front of a poor kid like me to make me forget my class loyalty. Denison has a secret society of the Skull and Bones variety, one that probably has strong historical if not contemporary ties to the KKK. Not the kind of people I particularly want to be on par with. And I suspect a lot of people on the board of trustees value the library for all the wrong reasons. Maybe I did, too, at first. But after a while, it was different.

It was one of my first cheese plates. At first, I was just content to gobble up the feeling of sitting there being important. (Mmm..cheese.) Slowly I noticed new rooms, new books, new flavors and textures to be noticed. That feeling of importance that the trappings of class privilege gave me bled over into feelings of importance as a thinker. I wasn't on par with those Wingless Angels jokers--during my era there weren't that many frat kids coming to class, anyway--but with Nietzsche himself. I was authorized to challenge great works, to think with, not about. Good teachers balanced pointing out the good books directly (Try Jarlsberg.) with nudging me toward it (If you like that, you might like Camembert.) and finally trusting me to find it for myself (Wow - this Gouda is great.). There was more in that library than I was capable of knowing at first. Maybe I started being interested in Plato because of the cultural capital that went along with it; in fact, I'm pretty sure I thought that reading room was just the sort of place one should be if one was reading Plato. (I learned to say "one" around this time, too.) But along the way I discoved, I liked Plato, I got a lot out of it, and could read it where I damn well pleased. And I could ask anyone else to read it with me. Like my well-plated dinner, it could look like class privilege, it might start in class privilege, but what I learned to love was art.

Maybe it's pushing the metaphor too far to say I want my students to find their own Goudas, but I say it anyway. Unfortunately, for all my belief in the democracy of reason, the resources I had available to make that shift, from Doritos to Butternut Squash Bisque--not just library resources, but time, comfort, safety, space, vistas--to choose from are not often ones my students have. I do what I can with the time I have with them, but I wish I could let them gaze out of huge windows at a quaint little town below while they think over what we did in class. I know that I make them hone their critical thinking skills; I hope sometimes I give them a taste for art, in the broadest sense. At the very least, an appreciation for simple things well-wrought...

Instead, most of them are shopping at Aldi's. It's what they know, it's what they can afford. They need the grubs, even if the grubs are doing them long-term damage. I think of needing an A to keep you coming to class like needing a bottle of Mountain Dew to stay awake; sometimes, whatever gets you through the day, but--and I have lived on Mt. Dew whole years of my life--most of the time?

Yuck.

The advantage in my case, I suppose, is that I have both aesthetics and reason as means of persuasion. I've seen some grade grubbers change over the course of a quarter. Just think what we could do if we taught more people to reason about food.

I mean, I like spinach now, for chrissakes.

Show Your Ink

2010-03-21T16:54:00.010-04:00

"Show Your Love" was always my favorite Katie Reider song. It's Katie at her best - effusive and poppy, yet concealing a good deal of complexity in a lyric so simple. "Show your love." Is it a call to open pride, as I heard it the first time I saw her perform at a Pride event? Or is it a simple, romantic lyric, aimed at mainstream radio? Or is it an expression of Katie's strong Christian ethic? My guess is the answer to all three is a resounding yes. I've put it on many a mix CD.

Still, when I first heard it, nearly ten years ago, I never expected it to be the inspiration for my first tattoo.

But who saw any of the last decade coming?

I first saw Katie at the 2001 Rockin' in the Streets event, Friday night of Pride - my first Pride - opening for the singer songwriter I was most listening to at the time, Melissa Ferrick. Katie could aptly be described as the anti-Ferrick; Ferrick is the poet of generalized anxiety disorder, angsty, breaking guitar strings every set with the ferocity of her panic. I was enthralled by someone who so clearly spoke my language.

Katie, beaming from the parking lot stage, lighting up the crisp June night, made me want to learn a new one. I've never seen a performer so full of life. I don't expect to.

The version of "Show Your Love" that I have now is from her prophetically-titled live album, No Retakes. She starts off enjoining the crowd to clap along and shake their booties, then teases her brother, then a part of the band, about shaking his booty (which my unconscious just typed as his "beauty," something I suspect Katie would love), before launching the song. Near the end, she and Robbie playfully chant the title back and forth, almost scatting it as they go. Infectious joy. That's Katie Reider's legacy.

In 2004, Katie was giving a concert on my birthday, and Al & Liz conspired to take me. We'd gone to dinner first, and it had been sort of awkward, in the way that birthdays can be, when everyone wants to show you they love you in their own way and the collective can't quite get it together, when friends who don't know each other all that well are trying to negotiate splitting the bill. We were late, and the bar was so full, they wouldn't let us in for fear of violating the fire code. We lingered outside, Katie's music wafting out each time the door opened. Finally, after some smokers wandered out, the woman at the door said they could let in two. I didn't feel like making a choice - or, frankly, being shoved against the back wall of Summit Station by the crowd - and so we went home. Gave up on the good life, on making things work. Tragic foreshadowing.

It was the last time I heard Katie's voice live.

In 2007, my world came crashing down. And that was before Liz - who, I was slowly beginning to realize, could no longer the center of my world - was raped, before I butted up against the hard wall of what I could and couldn't do for her in her recovery. I'd never had more than a couple cocktails in my life, but the weekend after the rape - which happened to be Pride weekend, six years after the one where I'd first seen Katie - I drank until I couldn't feel anymore for the first time. Which was amazing. I still remember standing outside of East Village, about four a.m. Sunday, suddenly hearing myself ramble on about Columbus city council and realizing I wasn't thinking about the girl in pain on the other end of High Street...It was probably the first time I hadn't thought about her in five years.

For the next six months or so, I drank a lot. Not a lot by gay bar standards, not enough to truly endanger my health - though I have to confess that I stupidly drove home buzzed a time or two - but more than I ever had or ever will again. And I spent each night in gay bars, trying to feel community, pride, love, acceptance...I needed it so desperately. The gay bar scene, as much as it put me in the path of risky behavior as well, helped save my life in those months. And at some point in those months, I heard that Katie Reider was sick.

"Are you at least going to come out to see me perform at the Katie Reider benefit this weekend?" asked Deb, whose performance I somehow always manage to miss without meaning to.

"What's the benefit for?" I asked, assuming Katie was headlining a benefit for some worthy cause.

"Katie Reider."

"Wait, what?"

I was drunk, and as Deb recounted the bizarre turns of Katie's cancer, I couldn't believe it. Katie Reider was the picture of healthy in all senses to me. Beautiful face, voice, life, exuding brillance and love. I was incredulous. "You're honestly telling me Katie Reider's face is falling off?"

Just. Not. Possible.

And then, in July 2008, when my crashing had finally ended, and I was looking around at the rubble, thinking about rebuilding, the news - again from Deb, by text. I went to the gathering the night of her passing at Goodale Park, but I didn't know Katie personally. I didn't speak; I didn't stay the whole time. I wandered away, instead, to the parking lot where I'd first seen her, imagined her there again, beaming.

Show. Your. Love.

At the time, I had my first tattoo, the I-survived-losing-Liz (and also a couple jobs and a lot of self-respect) tattoo, all picked out in my head. It was a quote from Nietzsche, which now adorns my bedroom wall: "What is the seal of freedom? To be unashamed before oneself." I'd felt ashamed a lot during the Liz years, usually for reasons that long pre-dated her, but you know, these things tend to jumble. I wandered into a few tattoo shops, got quoted prices that I, with only a part-time job & no immediate prospects, couldn't, even in my haze, even in my highly impulsive state, stomach. By the time I had the cash, it no longer seemed like the thing I needed to remind myself to do. And it seemed long, clunky, a little self-righteous. Nietzsche. I grew up on Nietzsche, but Nietzsche is not where I am anymore. I want something simpler...and yet at the same time, more complex.

Meanwhile, Katie's widow, Karen, started blogging about her grief. (Read the posts from beginning to end. Seriously.) Karen proved to be just as much a beacon for me as Katie, as I struggled with grieving my own losses. (Read the blog, from earliest post to end. It is astounding. Then go watch the videos, at noretakes.com.) Karen's attempts to be real, transparent and vulnerable pushed me out of depression into action time and time again. Slowly, my life began to move.

Winter quarter this year was rough for me. I struggle with chronic depression. I don't usually say that out loud; I usually say something more like, "I suck," which, David Burns points out in Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, is classic depressive cognitive distortion. Winter's melatonin scarcity exacerbated that; the fact of my amazement at landing my new job and my tendency to self-sabotage because I think I don't deserve it pushed me further away from who I should be. I fell down, a lot, as a teacher, as a person. I was angsty, panicked. Curled up in paralysis. I failed my students in some ways because of it, which again, fed the spiral of my crazy.

And then, a couple weeks ago, at about three o'clock in the morning, mid-panic attack, iTunes turned up my second favorite Katie Reider song, "What You Don't Know," a sweet, quiet love song about a love that you haven't yet told about your feelings. And it struck me, based on when the song was recorded, that the "you" is almost certainly Karen. And I said aloud, "Katie Reider would kick my ass if she saw me acting like this. 'You're alive, asshole.'"

I got up and got to work. Oh, it wasn't a total reversal, by any stretch. (Calling oneself "asshole," for instance, doesn't usually engender systemtic change.) But it was a wake up call.

Listening to Katie sing on the way to school the next day, I knew what the tattoo needed to be. And that I needed to do it now, to be reminded, always. Show your love, with whatever gifts you have, in whatever situation you find yourself, in whatever way you can.

It seems right, too, that the tattoo was done in my hometown, by (I'd forgotten) a classmate, (At a remarkable price; seriously, those of you in the area, it's more than worth the drive to CH.), while chatting with a friend about health care reform and Jesus' radical reformer ways. I think Katie would be proud. Who knew Court House would end up being the place where I am most called to show my love? Not me. And who knows where I'll be called to show it next? But at least I won't be able to say I forgot this time...

This is wonderful...

2010-03-09T16:02:00.000-05:00

The Pleasure of Problems

2010-02-28T16:50:00.007-05:00

Test-taking maxim: True/False statements involving the world "always" or "never" are almost always false.

Life-living maxim: Tragedies tend to be sudden; healing always takes time.

In 2005, I was dating someone who didn't love me - and it was cold comfort that I didn't love her either. On the other hand, I was in love with someone, who dominated my time and attention to my detriment, someone who couldn't love me. I was working a job that was sort of in my field, but one that had no joy, that tended to put me at odds with my beliefs, that was in a sometimes homophobic workplace and that, due to my depression, due to my investment in all the wrong girls, I just couldn't handle most days.

I have referred to this as the year of no growth. In 2006, I broke up with the first girl, got fired from the job, and began a tumultuous couple of years changing and the ending my connection with the second girl. That was a major growth year.

But today something I first encountered during the year of no growth popped into my head, reminding me that "You cannot always tell by looking what is happening." Even when you're looking at your own past self.

See, in August 2005, I know from the date on the page I just pulled from my wall, I printed out Rob Brezsny's post, "Bigger, better, more interesting problems." I put it up in my office, then transferred it from apartment to apartment. I never thought about it much, but it's been there, silently prodding me away from my petty little self.

That's not what I'd call no growth. Nor did it fix my whole life. That is an ongoing process. See above maxims.

Today the UU sermon was that awkward annual budget pledge sermon, and I shifted in my seat along with everyone else who has qualms about giving money to religious organizations, though it was a relief to have a speaker who acknowledged the discomfort.

The guest minister, Gail Geisenhaner, spoke specifically about the maxim that one should give 'til it hurts. There's something to this, of course; any good spiritual community asks one to push oneself, keeps one in a place of productive discomfort. But, she said, this is not enough. If you give only until it hurts, you haven't given enough.

Bigger, better, more interesting problem, eh?

Perhaps the most consistent thing about the last couple years for me has been learning to push through discomfort - Andrea recently posted on this aspect of running in ways that capture it better than I can. She says:

The first mile may feel terrible, my body may ache, may cramp. But push through that first mile, start working on regulating my breath, and by mile three or four, the world starts to look up. The kinks are worked out and I start to feel my body do what I want it to do. Keep going, my body seems to be saying. Right now may feel like hell, but give it a minute, an hour.

That's it. That's not giving until it hurts, that's giving until it feels good. Until it is transformative. Until it is more than just getting by. Until it is more than just you. Until you give up the cheap high for the lasting one.

What I am trying to learn these days is how to push through.

Homecoming?

2010-02-18T11:39:00.008-05:00

Photo by Jaime Jones, WCH Class of 1996

This morning I gave my students a sample essay to demonstrate the research skills we've been learning. It's an essay I wrote myself, for the purposes of providing an example, but still on a topic at the heart of my research: the relationship between educational attainment and rural poverty. One of the sources discusses the messages rural small town kids are given about their communities: "If you're smart, you'll get out of here."

Well, for better or worse, accurate or inaccurate, the one thing about me on which everyone has always agreed is that I'm smart. (Which could be maddening in the way any reductive identity is, but hey, if that's the one thing people remember about me, what do I really have to complain about?) Everyone thought I'd leave. My aunt Mary was particularly adamant on this point, frequently saying--without a hint of anything but concern for my well-being--"Get out of here, and don't come back."

And now I'm back. Only not. Only more so than before.

On the drive to Court House today, I was struck briefly with the hunch that maybe I do belong back here. Oh, when I started the commute in the fall, I would think that sometimes out of exhaustion, a "wouldn't it be easier" thought, but this was different, a kind of "maybe I'm finding a new direction" kind of thought. And I don't know...I just don't know.

Having dinner last night with a friend who also grew up in Court House, I joked, "I'm in danger, dude. I'm starting to think it's not so bad." He warned me not to get too comfortable. "If you get snowed in, don't stay, just drive. At least get as far as Mount Sterling." And boy, if you'd asked me when I was younger - if you'd asked me two years ago, before the rebirth...but now...

Of course, it's not just a mindless rebellion against our hometown that leads so many of us to think this way, that led my aunt to tell me to go. Things are bad in Court House. Businesses that dominate my childhood memories are long gone, and frankly, they were struggling then. Unemployment is high. In fact, that's part of the reason my job even exists - an influx of displaced workers into the community colleges. Which is across the street from a Walmart Supercenter, of course.

The things I left for, too, are as important as the problems I fled from. The things I longed to be near as a kid, " the "gayborhood," the arts, the restaurants, the theater, live music, public transportation, grocery stores that stock things like free range poultry, bookstores every few blocks, bartenders who can make a decent martini. I am known, even among my friends in the city, for finding the coolest little places. I clicked on a Facebook group called "Secret Columbus" to find new places to go, and the members were raving about places I already frequent. I am an urbanite as much as I am a country girl...

If I were here, that stuff would return to being part of the pleasure of the weekend rather than everyday, the afterthought. Even if I bust my ass to find ways to bring some of it with me. A world without "Oh, I'll just grab a scone at Northstar" seems like a hard one for this prissy boy to live in. For all the critique I make of white urban queer gentrification, I live and breathe its privleges every day.

And not all of it is luxury; for instance, how would I "eat local" in Court House without growing my own food? And if live in Court House, but I order my books from online retailers and buy my groceries at the Clintonville Community Market on a Sundays when I go to Columbus to attend the Unitarian Church service (where I will also contribute to the offering), then would I really be giving back ($$) to the Court House community in ways that count?

I am finding ways, subtle and less so, to exhort my students to put their time and energy back into this community - to reject the notion that if you're smart, you'll get out of here, to remind them that "we" need them - their talents, their hearts, their minds here, right here.

But I have absolutely no idea what that means for me. Or even where my "here, right here" is.

Mr. Fix-It learns (belatedly) that language is a tool.

2010-02-13T08:32:00.008-05:00

It seems so inadequate. The word. "Love." Puny in the face of everything that goes wrong in this world.

***

For the first couple weeks after E was hit with the last crisis we would (try to) support each other through, I began each morning by writing these words to her: "You are strong, and you are loved." But only because there truly was nothing else I could do. I could do that, instinctively without any manual, and I could (try rather unsuccessfully to) live in a constant state of readiness should she need anything else. Any real help.

Those messages were sent from a MySpace account that I later deleted when things got really bad, and so the messages disappeared from her mailbox when my account went. And that's probably the worst thing we did to our years of friendship at the end, taking away the "I love you"s, one by one.

***

My therapist, trying to (rationally) convince me that simply giving comfort in my self-talk is at least as powerful as trying to reason with my psyche (a proposition about which I maintain a Western philosopher's skepticism), told me of a study conducted with violent offenders. He said that the men were instructed to repeat four sentences to themselves each day: I'm sorry, I forgive you, Thank you, and I love you. And those who did had a much lower rate of recidivism.

I can't substantiate the study's existence. But I like to think it's true. Saying "I love you," it seems, speaks to something in the animal brain - or at least, the "inner child." It creates something beyond reason.

***

In college, I wrote a paper about how the account of love that Hegel gives in his philosophy is logically incompatible with his account of what a person is. The girl I (thought I) loved at the time (who did not love me) found this a truly amusing state of affairs, confirming her own bleak (and disingenuous young adult posing) outlook that love was "bullshit," a tool of manipulation. She laughed and laughed.

I could do nothing but sputter about how that wasn't it, that's not what my argument proved. What followed from my paper was not that love didn't exist, only that Hegel couldn't account for it, that his account was flawed.

These days I think his account of what a person is, though incomplete, is pretty well-reasoned. Except the love part. It's the most Wizard of Oz "Don't look behind the curtain" moment in the Phenomenology. But he just had to tack on that love part because even he couldn't be condemned to the calculated cruel world to which reason seemed to lead. Hegel knew it was a mystery that human beings stop their death struggle to care for each other, ever. But he also knew it damn well happened.

He just couldn't give a complete account of Being without the magic word.

***

I've just finished reading (when I should have been doing other things, undone things that make the self-talk take a decided turn for the worse) S. Bear Bergman's Butch is a Noun, which is probably most of all a kind of love letter from one butch to the brotherhood. Near the end of the book, Bear gives us a chapter called, "When I Can't Fix It." I knew what it was about before my eyes lit on the first sentence.

We all of every gender want to fix things for our loved ones, all have to learn to hold back and let them stand on their own. I think, though, to engage in a little stereotyping, that this is especially hard for butches, in our peculiar mix of gender socialization. The masculine "doing" and the feminine "nurturing" and the queer need to prove one's worth against a world that says one has none. I don't know a single butch who isn't highly other-directed--and often to her or his or hir detriment.

Says Bear:

Some things simply cannot be fixed: loved ones cannot be made undead, lovers cannot be made trustworthy anew, and confidence cannot be bought by the three-pack at Costco. So when I come up against a problem I can't fix or can't help, I feel useless; I feel like I am not worth having around. I also get deeply afraid in the face of the badness I can't soothe. I don't know how bad it will get, and I can't protect my loved one from the effects of it. It makes me crazy. (138, Bergman's emphasis)

Me too, buddy. Me too.

***

One of the earliest conversations E and I had was about whether or not "I love you" was a performative utterance. I took the con position. Love should be shown, enacted. Saying it seems like such a cop out, so meaningless. And the college girl was right in some ways; it does get used to manipulate people--through their animal inner children--into all sorts of bad things.

The conversation was ended when Sarah interjected to cite Judith Butler's Excitable Speech: "If hate speech is performative, then wouldn't love speech be performative as well?"

***

There's not a lot I can do about most of the problems that my loved ones face, and some of the things I know I can do are not my choices to make. (Frustrating and humbling, that realization always is.) So for this Hallmark holiday, I am reminding myself that what I can do--reminding you that you are strong and you are loved--is a lot more than it feels like in the doing. And that maybe I don't need to know why. Maybe I just need to remember that it works.

In the end, it may be the only way to fix things for keeps.
===

I wonder if Lazarus felt like this?

2010-01-30T19:51:00.005-05:00

The consensus among my family members when I was growing up was that I did not have stamina. That view of me--inherited in part from (not entirely inaccurate) the family view of my father, was deeply internalized. I self-fulfilled the prophecy like nobody's business, and by my twenties it was simply true. It was a belief held by everyone from my butch buddies, to the girls I pursued, to co-workers, supervisors, servers at restaurants I frequented...

The year I turned 30, I say, if you ask me at the right time, perhaps with a glass of wine in my hand, I died. What I mean, of course, is that so many of my ideas about myself and the people in my life changed so rapidly that (a la Derek Parfit's later selves) the continuity between the before and after is difficult to come by. (Actually, it might be technically true that I died as well; my vasovagal reaction kicked in very, very briefly during a terrible flu the week before my 30th birthday, though I don't think I made it to asystole. But that is another post.) I recognize the me of the earlier years, but as an old acquaintance, not as myself. I, for example, could kick that girl's ass. I guess it toughens you a bit, coming back from the dead.

I made two small resolutions for the new year. The first was to cut red meat out of my diet - as part of a larger effort for healthier living, but this is the one absolute taboo with which I'm starting. (Unintended positive consequence, btw: no pizza intake. If it ain't pepperoni, what's the point?) The other is private, related to maintaining my mental health.

I made it through January without breaking a sweat. So, universe, bring on everything you've got in the next 11 months. I can take it. I've been waiting for this for years...

Nice Girls, Badasses, and Something Else Entirely

2010-01-26T07:41:00.005-05:00

"I don't trust her," I said, as we dished the dirt about our fellow grad students.

"She's nice enough."

"Exactly. I don't trust nice. If the only thing you can say about someone is 'she's nice,' there's a problem there."

The girl in question was doe-eyed, seemed a bit inept, the kind of girl who doesn't have a lot of presence in the room. The kind of girl who nobody thinks is capable of evil. She hung me and my interlocutor of the above conversation out to dry the first chance she got.

People pleasers, nice girls? They have no souls. Fake-ass fakers. And I always knew that when it came to falling for girls, even if I didn't always know it for myself.

===

"I think you two might work out," said Al of me and Mary. "She's a bitch...but you're into bitches."

"Al was wrong," I explained to Marlene when the (of course doomed) relationship in question came to an end. "I'm not into bitches. I'm into badasses."

I've always gone for powerful women, girls with withering glances, girls who kicked ass and took names, girls who didn't apologize. Ever. Women who filled up the room, who "let me" stick around to admire them. Women who were never mistaken for nice girls.

At some point, though, as She - a variety of Shes, really - filled up the room, I began to run out of oxygen.

===

"Did you ever notice that, in the top five things we say when we're talking about a girl, we never use the word 'nice'?

"I don't like 'nice,'" says Al.

Oh. Yeah. Me neither. Huh.

===

Nice always scares the hell out of me. Maybe it's because I was raised to be a nice girl, so I knew what was going on underneath; we are told to be nice, no matter what might be going wrong, no matter who might be taking advantage of us, no matter how much untruth is in it. "Just suck up and be nice," says Ani in her inspired take on the flat characters women are asked to be, "Pixie," but you know that the creepy sweetness of that song masks incredible rage. Nice girls resent all the constraints they live under, and like my former fellow grad student, they may exact revenge before you see it coming.

But badasses--beautiful, mesmerizing badasses--can easily tip into narcissism. I've spent hours on the phone, listening to girls tell tales of the injustices they've suffered and the foes they've vanquished only to have my own problems and triumphs dismissed as petty and small. I've followed after women who seemed to speak louder than I ever could, and found myself silenced along the way. When these badass women are too cavalier with the people around them, perhaps Al's moniker is the better one, after all.

Maybe this is just another version of the virgin/whore problem. I know that most women are both and neither. I know, too, that I can't add "nice" to the list of traits I'm looking for in a mate. I can't stomach it. But something's gotta change.

Lately I find myself wondering what the badass girl looks like when she uses that power well, when she kicks ass at being open-hearted. Not nice, mind you. But deeply, deeply kind. The kind of kind that takes names, dammit. I'm not sure I've ever really seen those qualities working together before.

Yep, the compassionate badass. That's what I'm looking for these days.
=

Subtraction

2010-01-01T09:54:00.008-05:00

I was listening to Motown Remixed a few days ago and noticed that the track which most improves upon the original is a stripped down version of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back." No lush arrangements, no electronica noise. Total focus on their voices. By contrast, the worst track on the (otherwise really wonderful) album is "Let's Get It On." Marvin Gaye's classic is genius because it stays just barely on this side of sleazy; the lounge lizard-y synth remix does not.

I'm trying to take inspiration from that, trying to put "less is more" into practice whenever I can. To that end, I am beginning the year by tackling my mobile device addiction.

Here is the auto reply you will get if you write to my yahoo or union accounts (or any of the old addresses - osu, denison - that bounce to yahoo):

Dear E-mailer:

In an effort to increase focus and (paradoxically) provide quicker and more consistent responses to electronic communication, I will no longer receive e-mail on a mobile device.

Monday through Friday, I will check e-mail sometime between 11am and 1pm and sometime between 7pm and 9pm. If you have a concern that cannot wait until one of those windows, please feel free to call or text me. Weekends I will check e-mail at least once daily, at no specified time.

For more on the thinking behind this decision, see this section of Leo Babauta's "focus manifesto": http://focusmanifesto.com/2009/08/the-age-of-distraction/. If you are intrigued, I also encourage you to check out his blog, zenhabits.net.

Have a focused, productive 2010!
Angel

I won't be putting the autoreply on my teaching e-mail until I get a better sense of how well it's working, but I'll be telling my students about the schedule.

Those of you who have known me since lemke_a@denison.edu are aware that, while some of you were getting your nicotine fix outside Slayter, I was scurrying off to that dingy, unmarked lab in Curtis to get my own fix on monochrome CRTs.

My name is Angel, and I am an e-mail junkie. This, by the way, does not mean I respond promptly, or that I'm happy to get messages from 1-800-stuff-I-ordered-three-years-ago. Or that I write back immediately - or at all. It usually winds up being less socially interactive than smoking, actually. (Anyone else ever spend an extra five minutes in the bathroom at U because you got distracted by deleting junk e-mail? Just me?) No, like smoking, it pretty much just results in difficulty breathing.

Following leads from Mandy and Andrea's blogs about the new year, my word of the year is trust. As in, I trust that the fate of the world does not hang on my immediate reply to anyone's message. As in, I trust the senders to deal with their own impatience instead of taking it on myself. As in, I trust that I don't cause any harm by allowing myself time to breathe deeply; I might even prevent it.

As in, I trust that you'll help me in whatever way you can. (Remember: less is more.)
==

Woman of the Year

2009-12-29T13:40:00.011-05:00

Dear Dr. Arizona Robbins -

First, let me state clearly that I am well aware that you are a fictional character (and on a wildly popular show full of eye-candy and wildly uneven writing, no less) so no one needs to worry about me having anything more than my usual delusions.

Second, let me say that I'm as surprised as anyone that Olivia Spencer - who dominated my fictional character attention until September - didn't get the honors, but in the end, I already knew most of the lessons Liv had to teach me. You point me toward something new.

It's true that at first I followed the party line and tried to ignore you after Grey's botched the Callica storyline. Like Bailey, I'm not much for the heelies, and it's true that your (apparently - it's still ambiguous as your backstory unfolds) pro-military stance worries me. (For the record, so does Callie's knee-jerk anti-military stance.) It's true that I don't have faith that Grey's won't botch your storyline in a mix of homophobic and assimilationist missteps. It's true that I rarely go for blue-eyed blondes.

But you. Oh baby.

You are the acknowledged best in your field, but unlike McDreamy, do not refer to yourself as a "god."

You recognize and encourage talent in others (see all scenes with Bailey and many with Callie and Derek).

You know your own emotional states, communicate about them (even when your girlfriend doesn't) and hold your ground. (That's the big one for me.)

You're a damn good kisser. (OK, that's a big one, too.)

You're honest, supportive, and honorable, a "good man in a storm."

I hope Callie grows up enough to be a good match for you in 2010.

If not - and if you figure out a way to become a real girl - give me a call.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to be you when I grow up, minus all the femme-y blondeness. I'll leave that to you, dollface.

Love,
Angel
==

Here is Another Reason You Should Read Sarah Schulman's Book

2009-12-21T12:25:00.004-05:00

I don't really like to link to this blog, because it's often a really flip and shallow version of mainstream GLBT politics (Witness the unquestioned use of the acronym DINK - Dual Income, No Kids - a term originated by Pat Buchanan to perpetuate the myth of gay wealth.), but these stats underline something that Sarah Schulman's Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences treats in detail: Queers are routinely victimized by their families in myriad subtle ways that go unnoticed by the world at large.

Oh, now, that's not what the blog says. The blog is concerned with correcting the stereotype that we reject the family, instead of the other way around. But what other group would, in the current economic situation, engage in such obvious attempts to prove their worthiness to love and be loved by making themselves more economically vulnerable?

Seriously, read the Schulman book. The most important book of 2009. Seriously.

Thoughts on The Redneck and The Dandy

2009-12-03T17:43:00.009-05:00

That's one of the titles I've been kicking around for my first book. Lately, it feels wrong.

I'm thinking more about how to wrap my arms around my dissertation project. It is, of course, very early in the process, but one of the biggest advantages of my program is that it is structured in such a way to allow students to start culling together pieces of their dissertation while in coursework. The essay I wrote for Andrea's class is likely to be the kernel around which the rest of the project forms...

But what is the project?

Sometimes I think it's about giving voice to the people lost between these two stereotypes. That's work that needs to be done, and work that queer scholars are beginning to call for. A passage from the "kernel" paper:

Judith Halberstam opens her discussion of the various narratives that arose following the 1993 murder of transgender man Brandon Teena by confessing her own discomfort with the thought of living a queer identity in a rural space:

I am one of those people for whom lonely rural landscapes feel laden with menace, and for many years nonurban areas were simply “out there,” strange and distant horizons populated by hostile populations. It is still true that…a vast open landscape fills me with dread…I quickly rationalized the whole episode as an inevitable case of a queer running afoul of the rednecks in a place one would not want to live in anyway (22, 31)

Halberstam recognizes that there's very little work out there on what rural queer life is actually like, and scholars are already beginning to take up her challenge. But I'm interested in something a little different than recovering lost voices. I'm interested in interrogating the dominant voices.

See, the thing is that I feel the way Halberstam feels, too. But I grew up there. And I think that's true of the majority of adult urban queers, especially between the coasts. It's a recurrent motif in Milk, the idea of the Castro as a refugee camp. Didier Eribon, writing of the same phenomenon in France, calls it "The Flight to the City."

Part of this refusal, of course, is a national abandoning of the rural working-class that has nothing specific to do with queer politics; the majority of my heterosexually-identified childhood peers think of our hometown as "a place one would not want to live in anyway" as well, though they may not feel it as physically menacing. What I'm interested in, I guess, is how that experience of defining oneself against the rural working class--of directly, sometimes quite personally rejecting it as antithetical to oneself--is related to assimilationist strands in GLBT movements. I think of Roy Cohn's speech in Angels in America to Belize, maybe not so unrelated a context as we might first think, calling him his "negation." But imagine when your negation is your first cousin. Things get trickier.

I guess what I'm trying to work out right now is being OK with not so much undoing the redneck stereotype as asking what kind of political work it does in the discourse of those who identify, one way or another, with the dandy side of things. Not simply the truism that the rural working class are scapegoated with (among others) the sins of homophobia and racism, but specifically what is "our" investment in the idea that homophobia is a rural working class disease doing to queer movements, in what ways is it placing limitations on us? In what ways is it stopping us from improving the lives of those most at risk (and by the "trickle up theory of social justice" Dean Spade suggests, our own)? In what ways is it pushing us toward a circumscribed identity politics rather than connecting us with large-scale transformative struggle?

That is to say, I wrote a long paper this year about how Small Town Gay Bar, for instance, distances the urban queer viewer from the rural queers it represents and perpetuates the image of the ignorant, violent redneck, about how messed up that is...but I still cringe during some of the interviews, wanting to send them all a stack of Tegan and Sara CDs and maybe some eyeliner...and for me, it's not that they're so strange. It's that they're so familiar. In one way or another, I went to high school with all those kids.

And that totally skeeves me. And that, I think, is interesting...that, I think, does more than any of us want to admit.

Food for Blogging Thought

2009-11-29T12:28:00.002-05:00

From Grace Paley's "Some Notes on Teaching: Probably Spoken":

No personal journals, please, for about a year. Why? Boring to me. When you find yourself interesting, you're boring. When I find myself interesting, I'm a conceited bore. When I'm interested in you, I'm interesting.

Going Public

2009-11-27T09:38:00.009-05:00

The blog's been shut down for a few months. Consider this a roundabout explanation of this and other hiding hermit behavior to which I have always - but especially over the last two years - been prone...

When all else fails, go back to Adrienne Rich:

To discover that one has been lied to in a personal relationship...leads one to feel a little crazy.
*
An honorable human relationship...is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

"Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" (1977)

Ironically enough, I first encountered this essay while working on developing a syllabus with the woman who, over the years, made me feel more crazy than anyone else outside my family. We were at a crossroads in our friendship, and I was sulking. She flipped through one of the anthologies we'd pulled off the shelf in our search for class material, caught a glimpse of something that seemed apropos to our impasse, and began reading aloud.

The universe, disordered and unjust as she often is, still manages to provide now and then.

Rich is clear, in the passages between the two quotes above, by the way, that "lying" is very often unconscious, unintentional. The essay is really about how damned difficult it is to be honest, how much in this world presses us - women, especially, but really all of us - to supress, deny, disavow. Rich writes of what it is to be honest, that it is more than just the facts, ma'am. She knows how much work it is--how delicate, violent, terrifying.

The essay was foundational for me in that friendship and in general. That friendship - delicate, violent and terrifying as it was through years of hard-won honesty - made us both rather crazy in the end because we knew better than most that we'd reached the limit of hearing each other well.

But that's not what I sat down here to write about. That's backdrop. Context. (Which is to say, that which creates meaning in what follows...)

Over the summer, I exchanged emails with a queer-identified academic. We had much in common in terms of political and theoretical interests, in terms of dissatisfaction with academe. It was thrilling to talk with someone like that. I am lucky in my friendships and in my program to have many intelligent interlocutors, but there are few with whom I shared so many intellectual proclivities. As Ted Cohen argues about jokes and metaphors, there is something incredibly satisfying about finding someone with whom the work of translation is not so great.

When the possiblity of meeting or speaking on the phone was raised, though, I found myself skittish, evasive and finally, just simply unresponsive. I was overwhelmed - am overwhelmed - with the task of my new job, was working through new layers of the psyche with Craig, and my lower brain always goes for flight, given the choice.

In a moment of clarity - in a moment of trying to "refine the truths" I could tell another - I wrote what was for me a raw account of my childhood family dynamics, of the reality that I grew up feeling own my emotional life must be shelved in favor of my parents' overwhelming emotional reactions to each other. That's not something it's easy for me to acknowledge, especially about my mom, and perhaps I put it a bit obliquely, using narrative, not explicitly tying the childhood story to my absence. That's my biggest weakness as both writer and teacher, assuming that if I juxtapose things well enough, the audience will connect the dots. (It's also my greatest strength: I was at best a mediocre poet, but it's this quality of poetry, of the stanza break, of the unsaid, that allows my essays to, on occasion, sing.) Master of the semi-colon, that's me.

Maybe I should have said outright that I'm skittish, that I don't trust easily, that the last person I worked really hard to be honest with, a person who I would still describe as my intellectual other half, was so painful to lose that I don't know how I'd ever let someone get that near again, that I'm not sure that I should. Maybe I should have said, this story about my parents arguing through me over the phone isn't out of nowhere, isn't just about reluctance to phone conversation, but is about a fear of not being heard, a fear of being overwhelmed by others.

But I did say, explicitly: don't take my silence as a sign I am not listening.

Very quickly I got back a response. In the moment, with everything I'd tried to say, with all the emotional work I'd done to be as honest as I could, terrifying as it might be, the response read like, "Thanks for that story. So, when are you going to get over that and meet me? I really want to meet you."

In another context, that could have been flattering, but, well,...it reminded me of this Hugh MacLeod classic:

Maybe that's not fair, but it was how I felt.

There are two logical responses to not being heard. One is to yell, the other is to give up. (See above re: fight or flight.) When the response to a hard-won message about how you didn't feel heard as a child makes you feel ignored again, it's hard to see how writing back, even to point out that irony, is productive.

A month went by, and she sent another email asking for suggestions for course material for a student's independent study in the next term. The message was a bit stilted, an undercurrent of anger or annoyance with me, but formal, professional. I intended to answer it. I was falling behind in all my work and nothing about her message implied urgency. I figured I'd get around to it when I got around to it, maybe not 'til break.

Then another message came two weeks later, angry, calling me out on my rudeness in not responding to two messages and my not "giv[ing] a rat's ass." I was in the middle of cranking out an overdue paper, working in the sun on the patio at Northstar Clintonville. If she'd caught me at another moment, I might have been defensive. Instead: I thought, for just a moment, of my expressed desire to listen even when I may not be up for responding. I thought, a while longer, of how yes, it was rude, but really, what good comes of berating someone for their weaknesses? As someone who's long punished myself for this for my sudden silences and had to work to figure out from whence they originate - see above - I can tell you, punishment doesn't change behavior for the better in any meaningful way. And it just felt so disproportionate, like the anger wasn't really about me. Maybe my withdrawal wasn't about her, either, at first, but I did try to sort that out in a way she could see...refining the truths and so on and so forth. Writing back with these sentiments was tempting, but really it seemed like an invitation to engage further in someone else's emotional world trumping mine. It was a beautiful day, my life was turning back toward feeling like it was in my own hands. I let it go.

Today I was browsing the site on which I first encountered her and found another message to me left at 3 a.m. this morning. It's a strange mix of anger and sex and theory, and I'm not quite sure what its goal is, other than to draw me out. (Fight or flight. For all the people I've felt abandoned by, I still have trouble making sense of those who choose the former.) To make me feel exposed.

Going public always means becoming vulnerable to others; this is why people stay in the closet, why they hide their bruises, why they don't introduce new girlfriends to their friends and families right away. There's the risk of someone else's view shaping your own, the thing that makes me scurry away. But becoming vulnerable to others is also how we connect, and how we get heard and find our own views validated. How we become safer, in the long run. I'd already, if you will, exposed myself. I'd already had that experience of vulnerability when my words fell on deaf ears, so there was no new punishment here. Instead, there was the realization of possibility, of thinking about what exposure does and what is possible.

Maybe the work of being as honest as was possible for me in this interaction in those moments didn't pay off well, but what I am reminded of today is that it is more, not less, exposure that will pay off in the long run. That will give us communities of support and recognition of our experience. That we have to search out those who are able to refine our truths with us. And acknowledge, with no blame, when we simply aren't able to do that for each other...maybe even after years of doing it well.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

I often count myself lucky for those who go that hard way with me. It's harder sometimes to see the luck in those who didn't go that hard way--or stopped to go another way that no longer crossed mine--but that is lucky, too. At their best, such circumstances push us to seek new ways, new connections, new vulnerabilities. And I have to believe that, somehow, that circulating energy will eventually touch those women on their own hard paths.

After all, aren't we all looking for the same thing?

It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can now, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.

It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possiblities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

The possibility of life between us.

Postscript on "We Now Interrupt Our..."

2009-08-26T21:19:00.002-04:00

Original post here.

I take it back.

(Not the grateful part, never the grateful part.)

From fifth grade to seventh grade, I had extensive orthodontic work, like plenty of other kids my age. The only physical trait I inherited from my father that my mom thought would have better come from her was my teeth. While my mom and her siblings had small, naturally straight teeth - they remind me of the front row of a cat's teeth, the ones between the fangs - the Lemkes had pretty bad teeth.

(My baby teeth came in like Enochs teeth, which added to the disappointment when my adult teeth were "wrong." This earlier experience added to the smallness of their teeth makes them all seem like they have baby teeth to me, like they never grew up...but let's not open the family can o' worms tonight.)

Between our two upper front teeth, Lemkes left to their own devices will find a large gap, about half a tooth in size; in my case this filled in with excess gum tissue which was surgically removed early in the orthodontic process. My first two upper front incisors were not pointed, but they protruded from my gums a good half centimeter higher than the other teeth, giving off the effect of fangs that had been blunted. I don't really remember the state of my bottom teeth, but they put in a permanent retainer that I still have to this day, so they must not have been aesthetically pleasing either. My mom was not gonna let me grow up with teeth like that.

The first thing that happened was a bite opener, which I didn't mind, and the extraction of four baby molars with roots so long they completely covered the adult molars & prevented them from growing in. The extraction was painful, but in a short burst, not that much worse than a cavity. Then, while waiting for the adult molars to grow in on the bottom, they started putting the upper braces on. They started pulling together the two front teeth and pulling down the incisors. By the time I got home the first evening, I was howling in pain. By the next morning, I just lay in bed and groaned. It felt as though someone was taking a wrench to my teeth, at four different points, with no relief. I begged my mom to take me back & have them removed. She said it would pass. A week later, I was able to function again. Every four weeks, the process would begin again, though the tightenings & adjustments were rarely as excruciating as the first week.

Maybe your orthodontics were just as painful, maybe they weren't. Who can judge another's pain? But, my to my mother's dismay, I've always maintained that it just wasn't worth it.

I look at my fifth grade school picture, at those teeth, and I am very glad I look this way instead. But, still, that was some of the worst physical pain of my life. Just writing about it, the muscle memory in my face ignites, makes me lower my head as if the pain was still there. It happened. I wouldn't choose for it to happen again, but it happened. I am here. There was good from it; life looks better now for it.

But, no, upon reflection, the pain was not worth it. I will not say it was again.

Another Interlude: In (Partial) Defense of Dimples

2009-08-25T08:08:00.020-04:00

FYI - Dimples=the Otalia fanbase's favorite moniker for Natalia (though like Olivia's "the Goddess" there is blurring with regard to where Natalia ends and the beautiful - and dimpled - actress Jessica Leccia begins when this particular name is invoked).

For those who haven't been following the storyline, a quick-ish update: Natalia & Olivia were about to announce their relationship at the July 4th Bauer BBQ (a momentous annual Guiding Light event, at which several couples have married over the years) when Dimples discovered her denial dalliance with Frank Cooper months before had resulted in a pregnancy of which she had not previously been aware. (Soap suspension of disbelief? Check.) She got herself to a nunnery, literally, with no explanation to Olivia, who promptly - and yet still somehow incoherently, because the truth is that the writers were simply botching the inconvenient need to give Leccia a maternity leave - fell apart. (I'm not fully on board with the pregnancy sl being a mistake, as some of my discussion below suggests, but the total lack of story for Olivia while Natalia was gone was ridiculous. Hello, why not tell her that Emma's dad's about to kick off? Or have her stumble drunkenly onto Grady Foley's rotting corpse? Or something? Anything? Or spend more than two scenes with her eldest daughter as she mourns her supposedly dead Dad? This would also make her current, "Look the world doesn't revolve around you" attitude make more sense, if her world didn't in fact revolve around Nat. Arrgh.) As of last week, Dimples is back and ready to move forward with Olivia, who so far ain't having it. The fan base is alternately screaming "Kiss her already!" and "Make her work for it, Liv!"

OK? OK.

Here's what the writers are really getting wrong; all along they've been trying to treat Otalia like any other couple. And there's a politics to that which I can't help but admire. (I think Otalia is decidedly queer, as opposed to gay, but that's part of the PCA paper to come in the future.) And don't get me wrong, in the build up to the graveyard & gazebo confessions, Leccia, Crystal Chappell and the writers played the homophobic aspect of Otalia's doubt beautifully. But lately, they seem to have forgotten that, no matter how cool everyone in Springfield seems to be when they find out about the couple, Otalia lives in a homophobic world, and especially that Olivia herself has deep, deep internalized homophobia. That didn't go away because Natalia said, "I love you, too." They're not like other couples. Olivia is scared to death of that fact.

Dimples, on the other hand, does not have same self-hate that Olivia has; maybe it's her belief in a loving God, maybe it's that she hasn't been through the traumas that Olivia has, but whatever it is, Natalia is not torn about her feelings anymore. She's got a mandate from God, and we all know what kind of blind confidence that can sanction. That's why she can't wrap her mind around what she did to Liv, how vulnerable she left her. The problem is--because the writers are still trying to treat them like any other couple--neither can Liv.

For months, fans hung on every hint that Natalia might return Olivia's feelings. For months, naysayers said, no, Nat doesn't get it, no, she's gonna end up with Frank, no, no, no. The sigh of relief that went up when Natalia finally declared, in a lovely snowy Dr. Zhivago-y style scene, "I can't marry Frank because I love you!" is still reverberating. And once Natalia said it, once she let herself say it, she accepted it. Once it was undeniably true, it would take nothing less than an act of God (like, say, a pregnancy, which is an act of God from Nat's point of view) to make her doubt it. Natalia is no simpleton, but she is simple; once you say it, you can't take it back. Period.

Olivia, meanwhile, was hanging on those hints, too, but whenever Nat would get close to letting it break through the surface - Remember "Maybe God has someone else for me, just not who I expected?" - Olivia would stomp all over it: "I think you should marry Frank." Remember "I'm used to waking up here with you..." and "Well, we're both gonna have to get used to a new schedule."? Remember how Olivia interrupted the "almost" kiss? No, Olivia only let her feelings be known because the pain of losing Nat was greater than her fear. But her fear's still pretty damn big. (It's why she doesn't put that little twerp Rafe in his place - which she used to do without hesitation before she realized she dug his mom. Now she's afraid he might be right.) The Nat that took Olivia to church & held her hand seemed to understand this. The writers seem to have forgotten.

If, say, Bill didn't show up if he and Lizzie had decided to announce their relationship at the BBQ, that would be a breach of trust. She'd be justifiably pissed, especially if he didn't surface for over a month after. But she wouldn't have all of her worst fears about her own unworthiness for love confirmed. She'd think Bill was a jerk. Maybe he'd have a good reason, maybe, since it's Bizzie we're talking about, he was kidnapped or on the trail of her kidnappers or something, or for the sake of parallelism, maybe he found out that he had a kid he didn't know about & was freaked out about it. They'll get through that, they'll reconcile. We'll root for them, just like we're rooting for Nat & Liv to reconcile. But it'd be different in kind than Nat's betrayal. The Bauer BBQ was supposed to be their coming out party. It was their chance to turn the tables on the gossip Emma's school project ignited, and say, "Damn right, we're her two mommies." And Nat left her there, with nothing but shame and doubt at the moment they were supposed to assert their pride. This isn't just about the relationship. It's also about having your worst homophobic fears confirmed. Olivia has now twice lived through losing Nat, so she knows she can handle that. She's still not sure she can handle living with Nat openly. And Nat's given her an excuse not to try.

I buy that Nat thinks they're like any other couple, and that's why she's taking this approach. That's been consistent from the moment she confessed her feelings; she doesn't see them as queer or gay. (Something resident closet case Doris has challenged her on; I really hope this plays a role in the coming weeks.) She sees them as in love. But - and here's the Otaliafan heresy - that's not all that's going on in this story. It's not just about love, dears. It's about fear, too. Olivia knows they "face so many other obstacles than other couples even have to think about." So why doesn't she say that to Natalia? This is the moment when this storyline could knock it out of the park - the lack of a kiss about which the fans howl could actually be believable if the writers acknowledged how totally freaked out Olivia really is. Last week, for a minute, I thought they were going to get it right. Though the fans hated Olivia's attempt to get Frank to go after Natalia again, it fits. Olivia and Rafe are on the same page here, really. Natalia had only begun to convince her they could be happy when she disappeared. If she'd stayed, Olivia would have seized on the news of the baby just the way she has now. Proof that their relationship couldn't work. Proof that Nat's better off with Frank. Proof this world ain't ready for the two of them.

Dimples, God love her sweet face, doesn't get that yet. In some sense, her not getting that is her greatest strength, but it's wearing thin, writers. This woman is supposed to love Olivia. You've proven you understand the psychology of these women too well to punk out now. It's time for Natalia to really look into the heart of Olivia's doubt, not just write it off as just like all Olivia's other wounds. And if Olivia could tell her, or if even Doris could tell her, if the writers could see that, if Dimples could be chasing Olivia now understanding that? If the ramifications of internalized homophobia were playing out on our screens, if Natalia could understand how important the public claiming of her love for Olivia is (as the fans do)? Well, then we would be seeing something we've never seen on television, indeed.

We Now Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming...

2009-08-24T18:10:00.003-04:00

The GL series will continue, but I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some big news.

I've accepted a full-time teaching position.

Seven years ago this summer, I quit my full-time gig at the very same company I've been at the past two years in order to begin full-time study for my master's degree. I planned to go straight through. I planned to do my Ph.D. at that same school, then go on the job market, 1, 2, 3. I planned to have a full-time teaching gig by the time I was thirty-one.

I'm thirty-one. And I have a full-time teaching gig. I'm working on my Ph.D. at a school that's not perfect, but that's perfect for me. And I'll write a dissertation that's a helluva lot more important than the one I thought I'd write. And my scholarship and my teaching will inform each other in ways that I couldn't have fathomed before I jumped in head first.

This is grace. There is no other explanation.

I've been using the metaphor lately of the forest fire - picked up when a Denison alum I don't know well handed me a poem by a Denison prof - the natural forest fires that make room for new growth, that leave behind ash that nourishes the soil. It was so hard to see that when it was burning. And, oh, did it burn. And the embers smoldered for so long. It's still hard to believe that the growth returned so quickly. And scary, sometimes. One has to remember that those doubts that one doesn't deserve this are true, but that it's no cause for worry; no one deserves anything. We can only be grateful for what crosses our path.

With this news, some people in my life have been tempted to think that I'm "back on schedule" or that I'm "finally getting it together." I've been tempted to let them. But while I've written about the need to not let the last decade define me in ways that are too limiting, I can't get on board with that narrative. There is no schedule. And 2002 - 2007 was no time-wasting detour. Would I do some of those things differently? Absolutely. There are, especially, harsh words said out of hurt that I'd take back and other words that I wish hadn't held back out of fear. As a teacher, most of all, I made mistakes you can't take back. But, I said this once, and I'll say it again, if the only good thing that came out of my choice to attend OSU was knowing someone whose complicated friendship appears completely lost to me now, it was worth every minute. If burning down my life was the only way to rebuild it, then I am grateful to those who struck the match. (Grateful, too, to those of you who helped create fuel breaks to contain the damage, without ever suggesting that it didn't need to burn.) I came out on the other side utterly changed. Seven years later - a good, magical number - and as I start this new life, I am myself completely new.

What I learned in those years, I can't quantify. I am grateful for it as I am for this life now. As I am trying more and more to be grateful in every moment.

The Beacon, Part II: Springfield Class Hierarchy 101

2009-08-17T23:43:00.014-04:00

I took away three useful things from my eleventh grade English teacher - a man who could be exceptionally gentle and devoted to his students one-on-one but who "controlled" his classroom with so much yelling that for me he shut down all possibility of growth - 1)I read Emerson in his class first, shaping my thought on spirituality for the rest of my life; 2)The only thing I learned from a yelling incident: "Write in your books, you twits! How are you gonna find the important passages if you don't mark them?" *slams students book on table in front of her*; 3)the concept of "the author's world."

Later, I would learn to substitute the word ethos, like a good scholarly type, and the later term has the advantage of highlighting the fact that the universe an author creates has everything to do with ethics. But I think the term from high school really brings out the sense that it's not about a didactic moral code that's being firmly elaborated. It's what it feels like to live in that narrative space with the characters. In Zora Neale Hurston's fiction (the author I read for the "author project" that year), people who don't worry too much about money and who sit around swapping stories fare better than those who are concerned with titles, who usually get significantly shamed into humility by one or more of the people in the first group. That's not coincidence. Zora's telling us how the world should be.

While all soaps are concerned with sorting out ethics with respect to family ties and gender, they usually have another prevailing code embedded in their ethos, a general, largely unarticulated principle by which you can determine not just the good folk from the bad folk, but the decent people who are about to err from the decent people who are making the right choices. They may not hold true universally - just as not every storyteller on Zora's porch in Eatonville was an unequivocal good guy - but, it's still a guiding principle of the author's world. So, for example, on The Young and the Restless, as its name implies, the older you are, the more likely you are to do the right thing. Think Aunt Mamie or John Abbott or Catherine Chancellor. They're still flawed (OK, John's dead and I'm not sure Mamie isn't, too, but I don't watch it that often, so cut me some slack), but they're less flawed than the next generation, and less flawed than they used to be. Phyllis is still a bit of a wackjob, but she probably wouldn't drug Danny to steal his sperm at this stage in her development. And Neil would never, ever, ever do what Devon is doing.

On Guiding Light (and to a lesser extent, ATWT), the general principle is this: the poorer you are, the more moral you are...but it's considerably more complicated than that because the class structures are sliced and diced with considerable subtlety. (And also, as I'll discuss in later posts, the three most important characters in GL history were master class manipulators and thus were never bound by the structure.) So, tonight's post is a quick and dirty schematic of Springfield socioeconomic classes.

So, from the top of the economic ladder down:

Old Money - Spauldings, of course; also, Winslows, Chamberlains. Some may have a sense of noblesse oblige--like Richard who had the decency to up and die to give Rick a heart--but generally there's a lot of moral rot here.

New Money - Lewises. Josh, especially younger Josh, really aspires to move up to the next level and give up a lot of the ostentatious hillbilly ways that H.B. and Billy embrace, marking them as not having "class," as it were. Josh also has a strong sense of noblesse oblige. (More on Josh in a later post about you-know-who.)

Professional Class (Old Money acculturation, Middle Class money) - Bauers, Marlers. I think I'd put Fletcher & Holly here, too. Basically, if your family's profession has its own school within a major research university - School of Medicine, School of Law, School of Journalism - you probably belong here. This group is generally morally upstanding - one of only two class groups about which this can be said - but their dependence on the upper classes for work and class mobility can get them into trouble because it leads to a kind of dependence on their "betters." This class is always punished for their transgressions more heavily than those above them in the structure - and those below them rarely make transgressions as serious in the world of Guiding Light. (As painful as the wait was, think about weighing the impact of the effect of Natalia's betrayal of trust against James Spaulding's ponzi scheme.) This is why Rick not only must cede Beth to Philip, but must also effectively murder Ross. This is why Ed Bauer’s marital infidelity leads to consequences that (unlike nearly every other infidelity in the history of soap opera) allow Vanessa to look down on Ed for decades. (Who else has their wife die because they cheat on her?) They also always have the potential for slipping if they cease to act morally; when Ross’ brother Ben appeared, the insecurity of the Marlers’ class status was raised, and indeed, Ben’s kid turned out to be the solidly working class child of a prostitute.

[Some may think there's a gap here. The "Middle" Class isn't completely absent in Springfield, but it's not terribly important, either. I'll look at why this is in depth in a later post. I'm leaving it out intentionally, not accidentally. As you wait for the later post, ask yourself, can you think of any major Springfield family of the last half of the run - I can't speak to the years before 1984 - who is middle class more than they are one of the classes I'm sketching here?]

Working Class - Reardons & Coopers. Though there is an important difference between them. I would argue that the Reardons are "upwardly mobile" in their thinking (though not so much their reality). They believe in the openness of the system in a way that doesn't much interest the Coopers who see moving up as opening the door to corruption and thus, the Reardons are more capable of committing sins than the Coopers. The Coopers usually err out of passion or self-righteousness, but pretty much never out of outright badness. They are, after all, good men. (A groaner for the Otalia crowd.) I think the Raineses go here, too; though Beth has become pretty thoroughly a Spaulding over time, Lillian remains in working class, lately shining as the ethical center of the show, and during Beth's off-screen years, she got mixed up with a working-class wife-beater...and there was that fan-fucking-tastic moment during the Coop/Alan wedding mess when Alan called her a Spaulding, and she said, "My Name Is Raines." And of course, it's not insignificant that it was a Cooper that brought her to this realization.

Criminal Class - Santoses & Foleys (I actually don't think the Santoses or the Foleys in themselves are that important, but there is always a criminal family - or at least, god love her, Jenna Bradshaw - in town who are defined by this aspect of themselves in a way that the law breakers in the other levels aren't, and that seems to merit a class position of its own.)

Spoiler Alert: If you're trying to figure out my top three, it's easy to note the conspicuously missing last names, in no particular order: Shayne, Thorpe, Spencer. It also matters that for all of them it's hard, exactly, to think of them as families, isn't it? The Coopers are not complete in Buzz or Frank or Harley, the Spaulding are not complete in Alan or Philip or Alex, but do Hawk, Cassie, Hart or even Blake change our conception of the first two very much? Does anyone even remember Sam Spencer? (Wasn't his whole job to sit with baby Emma while Olivia tried to decide how crazy Philip was & what to do in response?) To be a class mover, you have to be a free agent. Families reproduce class, pretty much inevitably.

Now, one of the ways the gender dynamics effect this is that if you marry a man above you, you are likely to move up, while if you marry a woman above you, she moves down. Thus, Vanessa, now a journalist, landed in the professional class despite her birth, through her marriages to both Billy and Matt. I think if pressed I could even defend the claim that her marriage to Matt would not have even been possible, given the structure, if Billy hadn't already moved her down. (I know, though I am too young to remember well, there's Nola & Quenton, but a dude can pull a girl up much more easily than a girl can pull a dude up.) Look at their offspring: Bill is still New Money. Lizzie, though, was Old Money, even though her mom wasn't...until she married Bill. Usually, when women marry down there are scenes devoted to the sole purpose of learning to appreciate the simpler things - Lizzie's demented time living with Jonathan and Tammy with the Paris Hilton dog, and her childhood adventures with Bill, for instance - while when women marry up, they are never, ever, ever free from suspicion of gold-digging. (Nola, again, or Harley's marriage to Philip - which Alan still sees as a grab for a Spaulding heir.)

Now, if you're adopted, things change (a little). Gus is working class because the Aitoros were working class, and discovering he is a Spaulding by birth doesn't change that for him, or for Rage - oops, Rafe. Jonathan was born of Old Money and Reva (one of the class chameleons, though it matters that these characters--Jeffrey is one, too--all start out poor, more later.), but he was raised by the Randalls, another one of those off-screen working-class wife-beater situations, so he's working class. And had we been able to see Sarah grow up, I venture that she would have been as well, not just because her dad's genes trump her mom's, but also because she's been raised solely by the working-class parent. So, contrary to popular belief, it's not all about bloodlines determining personality; family trumps genetics. (Hence, though Philip's class is somewhat complicated, as I'll discuss later, he's definitely a Spaulding, and is reminded of this every day. No one ever says to him, "Dude, you are being such a Marler right now." Although, actually, right now, he kind of is.)

That's the basic system. There are minor exceptions here and there, of course, but my top five most important Guiding Light characters are major exceptions.

Next time on The Beacon: a more detailed consideration of two (also, very important, rounding out my top five) characters who don't fit neatly into that structure, but can't successfully manipulate it, either, and whose suffering can in many ways be traced to that failure to fit - Philip and Dinah.

The Beacon, Part I: The Moral Force of Soap Opera

2009-08-16T00:53:00.022-04:00

Despite a momentous occasion in the Otalia storyline coming on Monday, Nat and Liv are not at the top of my soap opera thoughts this weekend.

Though I've mentioned tidbits here and there, I haven't really blogged about what the Otalia storyline means to me personally since I first discovered it, and it's meaning has deepened considerably. I'm not sure I can blog about it right now, though there is writing to be done. It actually caused me to write the first fan letter of my life to the amazing Crystal Chappell. There are wonderful discussions happening on other blogs that, if you are into it, you should check out (My favorites are Superhero Lunchbox-thanks, JC-and A Thousand Other Worlds, the latter of which revealed to me that Chappell is, as her performances and personal statements bear out, an actress well-informed enough about queer representation to cite The Children's Hour in conversation.), and I'm planning to write something for PCA on it--specifically the importance of Doris in interpreting the political significance of Otalia--but that will be after the dust has settled. I won't be done talking about Otalia for some time, sports fans, but that's not what's on my mind tonight, except insofar as Otalia fits into the big picture that is Guiding Light.

Guiding Light ends in a few weeks after 72 seasons. My grandmother followed it in its radio days. I can't wrap my mind around it. A fellow fan said this past week, as we were lamenting the fact that we will not get to see Emma Spencer and Clarissa Marler grow up to alternately bicker and bond the way their genetics predispose them to, that "It feels like my best friend's mom died, and I can't get home for the funeral." Yes, exactly. I know these characters the way I knew the parents of my childhood friends; I probably know more about them than they would really want me to if they were real, I've seen them change and yet somehow be the same as they always were, and I learned values from them that were not totally foreign to the values I learned at home, but which added nuance I can't even begin to map.

I think that the families of Guiding Light - who I shall parse in more detail next time - might very well be my true avunculate. And I think, in a way, this may be one of the reasons soaps have always had a (often unacknowledged) queer fanbase.

Eve Sedgwick, whom I consider to be one of my most important intellectual forbears, not to mention the one whose writing style is closest to mine, argues in "Tales of the Avunculate: Queer Tutelage in The Importance of Being Earnest" that Wilde is asking us, through the elaborate farce of mistaken identities and non-biological child-rearing, to "Forget the Name of the Father!" and instead "Think about your uncles and your aunts." But why? Forgive the long quote, but I can't say it better than she did:

Because aunts and uncles (in either narrow or extended meanings) are adults whose intimate access to children needn't depend on their own pairing or procreation, it's very common, of course, for some of them to have the office of representing nonconforming or nonreproductive sexualities to children...But the space for nonconformity carved out by the avunculate goes beyond the important provision of role models for proto-gay kids. After all, many of us don't turn out like "artistic" Uncle Harvey [or] "not the marrying kind" Cousin David...But if having grandparents means perceiving your parents as somebody's children, then having aunts and uncles, even the most conventional of aunts and uncles, means perceiving your parents as somebody's sibs--not, that is, as alternately abject and omnipotent links in a chain of compulsion and replication that leads inevitably to you; but rather as elements in a varied, contingent, recalcitrant but re-forming seriality, as people who demonstrably could have turned out differently--indeed as people who, in the differing, refractive relations among their own generation, can be seen already to have done so. (63, second emphasis mine)

In short, the vastness of (most) soap families shows us that there are many ways to live one's life, many ways in which we can differ from what came before without disavowing how we were shaped by it. In fact, it is in many ways Guiding Light's end that has led me to question my once well-worn assumptions about the moral inculcation of Victorian fiction, which were disseminated as serials for the most part. Because there is something more that a serial drama does. It asks you to live with people - and with their moral choices - over time. It asks you to perceive morality as happening over a lifetime, and often over generations. Three generations of my family have lived with Guiding Light (which has meant maybe a couple more generations for them, given the rise of SORAS), and three generations of my family have seen the moral questions that matter to them be confronted by Guiding Light's characters, without any sense of discontinuity. It is - unlike the novel, whether Victorian or Modern - an open-ended narrative. The possibilities are not just represented in various characters within a single generation of a family, but also within each character's life. Things could always turn out differently. Not only that. Things will turn out differently. It's best to suspend judgment until you have all the facts. Which you'll never completely get.

People can always make different choices. Olivia's redemption through her love for Natalia is part of that, but so is Frank's slow descent into his current sanctimonious boor-self in the years after he lost Eleni...an identity which the revelation of his coming offspring hopefully will jolt into something new and less gross. Uncle Frank really sucks these days. I'm mad at him in a way that's different, I think, from the Otalia newcomers who see him as a mere obstacle. For me, he's a guy I generally trusted, though I thought he was a bit hokey, who has gotten more and more rigid as a response to his loneliness, so much so that he's actually jealous of his dead brother (And hey, we all know that Buzz does love Coop and Harley most. Coop because of his mom, and Harley because she's the most like Buzz. But, Frankie, at least you're not poor forgotten Lucy!).

I have been living with Frank Cooper since I was eleven years old. Don't tell me you can judge what he's made of and what he's done right or wrong better than I can. You just can't. And that's something soap opera has taught me. You've got to look at the whole, who's he been, what's been thrown in his path, what his mom was like, if you want to know what a person's true moral character is like. And then it's still contingent. The moral worth of a character is always up-for-grabs until they die, with an on-screen definitively identified body. I think, actually, this is the reason that villains have such trouble dying in soap opera. To let Prince Richard Winslow die in order to give Rick Bauer (whose family affiliation and profession both mark him as good in ways I'll discuss in Part II) his heart, or to let Gus Aitoro die to save Olivia (who isn't clearly "worthy" like Rick - also to be discussed later) to live, lets these men - who actually made a lot of bad choices in their days - end as definitively good. Roger Thorpe, Alan Spaulding, and Guiding Light's last back-from-the-dead villain, Edmund Winslow, on the other hand, will always want redemption. (Well, some would say Jeffrey is the last back-from-the-dead villain, and I'd be inclined to agree as far as Liv goes, but more on him in later posts.) It would be cruel of the writers to cut off their chance.

As the reality of Guiding Light's end is hitting me, I almost started weeping when I encountered this quote in, of all places, Alasdair MacIntyre's classic tome of neo-Aristotelian moral theory, After Virtue, in which MacIntyre is arguing that narrative is the stuff that morality is made of:

[T]he narratives which we live out have both an unpredictable and a partially teleological character. If the narrative of our individual and social lives is to continue intelligibility - and either type of narrative may lapse into unintelligibility - it is always both the case that there are constraints on how the story can continue and that within those constraints there are indefinitely many ways that it can continue.

That's soap opera.

No genre comes closer to real life on this moral vision than soap opera. Period. No genre makes it clearer that we are to be measured by the whole of our lives. No genre makes it clearer that we are born into a community, a system, an identity, which we can bend and shape and try to reject, but which we cannot ever fully escape. Harley is like Buzz, Frank is not, and this matters, the habits they inherit and the choices they make from those inheritances matter, are who they are. (See also, Alan, Philip, Alan Michael & Gus, and well, any set of sibs, but Frank and Harley have the unusual-for-soap distinction of having both the same mother and same father and no adoptive history.) But the eldest iteration of that genre is ending. The open-ended lives we've grown to know are all ending. And with them, a view of morality embedded in a community, in a history, in each other, that we see so rarely these days. Yet, as Sedgwick points out, it is also a moral sensibility that has a queer valence. It is both old-fashioned and progressive.

Not unlike you-know-which storyline...

Coming Up on The Beacon: Some Specific Moral Orders I Learned from Guiding Light and Reva Shayne - "The Slut of Springfield" (which still gives me chills)

You cannot tell always by looking what is happening...

2009-08-11T16:36:00.002-04:00

Another version of what I meant in the last post about learning new habits...

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Marge-Piercy/8148

Attachment/Non-attachment

2009-08-11T08:16:00.026-04:00

At Craig's recommendation, I've been listening to Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now on CD. My reactions are mixed.

Let me start with the things that make me squirm (and not in a productive way) about it, the things Tolle would likely say my "mind" is seizing upon to gain power over my "consciousness," thus hindering my path to enlightenment. (More on the mind/consciousness distinction later.)

Early on he hinted at some gender essentialism, but he didn't seem particularly focused on it, and well, that's par for the course for a lot of self-help literature, so I just shrugged it off. But when he actually turns to it late in the book, it's not subtle, and it's strikingly unconsidered. Craig thought that I, as a feminist, would really like Tolle, because he does the ol' transvaluation trick. Women are more in tune with their bodies, nature, emotion, etc, etc and so are closer to enlightenment. Just are. No. What's particularly weird about it is - after long passages about man & woman completing the halves of the imperfect form self (Form for him being really the opposite of Plato's forms, not the true self, but what might be translated as the material self) during which I was about ready to throw the CD out of the window because I thought Dr. Laura on mood stabilizers had invaded my stereo, he turns to the question of gayness. I knew Craig wouldn't have recommended the CD if there was blatant homophobia, but I wondered how Tolle was going to get out of this one. He totally skirts the two halves of a whole thing, but he does say that gays, but virtue of their difference from the normal, are positioned such that they are more likely to dis-identify with the screwed up world. Outsiders, he says, of whatever stripe, have at least more opportunities to see things differently. Here it is clearly a structural feature of the world - the wise Latina argument - rather than an assertion of how things necessarily are. Gays are not necessarily closer to the Good, Tim Wise doesn't have to be an anomoly, but things being as they are, it's less likely that a straight white man will dis-identify from the structures that place him in positions of power. But for some reason, dudes are necessarily further from enlightenment because they don't menstruate. (Not kidding, y'all. That's in there.)

Also, I suppose in keeping with the weird bizarro-Platonism floating around in there, he's got a whole mystical metaphysics that I find annoying, mostly because it makes me feel like I can't endorse him publicly without people thinking I buy into the notion that our vibrations are emanating toward each other. Seriously, Kant was 300 years ago. Can we please stop trying to describe the noumenal world?

So, those were the major complaints. Enough to keep the mind-self churning for a while. The mind-self likes to churn.

The most useful thing for me in the Tolle was, in its way, a restatement of what David Burns was saying in Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy: You are not your thoughts. Or as Peter Block put it in a workshop recently, though not without groans: Are you a human being or a human doing? At the beginning of the book, in a passage Craig actually read to me in session as way of encouraging me to look into it, Tolle says he found himself saying to himself, "I can't live with myself anymore." And then it suddenly struck him as bizarre that he couldn't live with himself, who was this self that "I" can't live with? There must be two of us. This leads us to the mind/consciousness distinction.

I'm not sure that I can adequately summarize what Tolle means by consciousness; to me it sounds very like Emerson's oversou l, but every spiritual concept I find resonant sounds like Emerson's oversoul to me. The other piece, though, is the mind, the definition of which I think is easier to start getting a handle on when you hear the modifier Tolle almost always uses with it: the egoic mind. The mind that sees itself as separate, the mind that is trying to plan and control, the mind that seeks power. It's not that we don't need this mind, it's not that this mind can't do amazing things, solve problems, write blogs and so forth. But it needs to be kept in its place. (I'm wondering in this moment, actually, if somewhere in this is the solution to my interpretation/intimacy problem, if it has something to do with recognizing the limits of the mind to know the other.)

I think of how Einstein seemed so egoless, how when other physicists thought he was a crackpot, he just patiently went through the math again, considering their objections but not taking it personally. It's just math. Of course, there are strong influences here (and in Emerson) from Buddhist doctrines of non-attachment. Non-attachment always sounds scary to me: no caring, no passion. But it would be absurd to say that Einstein didn't care about physics. There's a detachment there, though, which is probably what made him so damn good. He was not his thoughts. (A mark of our culture's deep investment in the egoic mind, I think Tolle would say, is that we do equate the whole of Einstein with his thoughts.)

Lately, though, I've been noticing that non-attachment can be a lot of fun and engender a lot of sympathy. Which is not what it sounds like.

For instance, there's the human-foibles-are-funny part, which my egoic mind already knew but in a much less accepting way. Like this morning, when I arrived at work and parked next to a manager in our department who is particularly rigid, about rules, about hierarchy, no doubt in her own life as well as in the office. I err in the other direction, more often than not, so we test each other. I said, "Good morning," when I got out of the car, and she said, "Oh, hi," and then proceeded to make a dash for the building. I mean, she didn't run, but she was inside the building before I made it to the sidewalk and - and this was the truly bizarre part - as I was entering the building, I saw her abandon her wait for the elevator and take the stairs, so she wouldn't have to ride up one flight with me. The egoic mind would take this as an insult or as a power struggle. But, trying to stay in the place of consciouness, I just found it funny at first, actually giggled during my elevator ride, and then a little sad. Such fear she must be carrying around to make me scary.

There's more - there's the fun-is-in-the-doing with writing, which was in full swing during the residency. The past week or so - with an unanswered question that's driving my egoic self batty, and feeding it in the process - I have been locked up in writing. But I'm drifting back.

What is happening in my life now is this: There are stretches--short but growing longer--when I feel like I have a handle on what the kindest people I know understand, when I feel my own skin earning the wrinkles that soften instead of the wrinkles that harden the face. I can't go there with Tolle and claim enlightenment, too rooted in Judeo-Christian humility and good old fashioned shame am I (also really refreshing are Tolle's interpretations of Jesus' parables and life, but that's outside my scope here), but I feel a major shift happening, to be sure. I am dwelling more often now, I think. It's slowly becoming habit.

(A friend and I once contrasted the Victorians with the Moderns by arguing that the Victorians wanted to enculcate moral habits while the Moderns wanted to avoid habitualization, the old defamiliarization stuff; David Baker once asserted dramatically in creative writing class, "Poets make things strange." He was clearly cribbing the Moderns. There's something to that characterization, of course, but also I think the Mods were simply trying to enculcate different moral habits. Habit as such is neither good nor bad. But it is still unfamiliar to me, this embracing of habit, this cultivation of habit. This trust in my own habits. And incidentally, something the creative writers already know, even if they don't always want to admit it.)

My friend David Goldberg says, whenever he feels someone faltering, "You are exactly where you are supposed to be doing exactly what you are supposed to do." I feel it for others, a patience, a softness. It's harder, for myself, my egoic self, perhaps, finds it harder to extend that softness to me, to acknowledge my oneness with the others. But I'm working on it.

This softness, though. It is not at all what I expected non-attachment to be.

RIP John Hughes

2009-08-10T11:57:00.003-04:00

I posted a link to one of the many lovely tributes on Facebook when I first heard, but I'm just realizing today that he gave us both Ally Sheedy and Mary Stuart Masterson. Damn.

The Mix Tape I Would Make For You...

2009-08-08T18:04:00.003-04:00

If you asked me to explain who I've been and who I'm becoming at this moment...once, many years ago, Alicia proposed the soundtrack of your life exercise, and I guess I've never quit playing it. But, look, ma - no "Anna Begins"! That's a kind of progress, eh?

1. The Seeker - Shelby Lynne (Dolly Parton cover)
2. Campus - Vampire Weekend
3. Michael - Maggi, Pierce & E.J.
4. Precious Things - Tori Amos
5. Crush with Eyeliner - R.E.M.
6. Young James Dean - Girlyman
7. Say So - Uh Huh Her
8. Back O' The Moon - 10,000 Maniacs
9. Stay (I Missed You) - Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories
10. Studying Stones - Ani DiFranco
11. This Year - The Mountain Goats
12. Oxford Comma - Vampire Weekend
13. Winding Road - Bonnie Sommerville
14. Hands Clean - Alanis Morrisette
15. I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono - Dar Williams
16. Someday - No More Kings

This started out as an exercise in what-would-you-play-for-a-new-love-interest...but maybe the fact that it turned into a who-I-am-today list is a good sign that I'm approaching such questions with less need to guard my identity.

And if you think you know which girl each song was about, if you think you know when I'm speaker and when I'm the addressee? Well, yes. But not only.

P.S. - I think Dar took Adam's place.

Got Myself a New Mantra...Again.

2009-07-28T08:14:00.004-04:00

I wrote a while back of my Zora Neale Hurston mantra: "I love myself when I am laughing, and then again when I am looking mean and impressive," and my desire to recapture that, to go back in time - or flashforward.

I wrote also of a desire to change my relationship to time, which might have been encapsulated in Ani's line from "Present/Infant": "So I'm beginning to see some problems/with the ongoing work of my mind./And I got myself a new mantra./It says: don't forget to have a good time."

I wrote (at length) of my conflict over my investment in interpretive intimacy and one of the most valuable mantras from therapy so far: "Ask for what you need, notice what you get." Doing this well requires a lot more time than suppressing your needs and desires. (Well, at least at the front end.)

Thus sayeth Wikipedia: "a mantra...is a sound, syllable, word, or group of words that are considered capable of 'creating transformation.'" Is it any wonder I'm collecting mantras everywhere I go?

My latest mantra is a kind of synthesis of those, in its way, but is unique in that it is mine. It's not a quote from a teacher, though I'm sure, like most wisdom worth having, others have thought and said it before. I love to quote, but one thing I am learning these days is how to put it in my own voice, to recognize that, despite the great masters of the past, I am my own best teacher.

At any rate, the latest mantra is about valuing my own experience, about giving myself space to relax, about staying alert in the moment, about being grateful for the moment: "I do not have time to waste, but I have enough time."

Having enough. Not something I'm known for saying. And enough time? I've been rushing in one way or another since I was thirteen. Of course, it is my mantra not because I'm able to live it fully just now. The point of a mantra is just the opposite. This is the lesson I need, right now.

Something to be said for self-directed learning, eh?

Teachers

2009-07-20T15:11:00.002-04:00

I've been blessed much more often than not when it comes to my teachers.

More often, on here & the old blog (Still meaning to get those back up, but there's just so much life to live!) , I've written of things gone wrong, but I've been very blessed. Most of them have taught me much more than their subject matter entailed.

There's Miss Turner in first & second grade, who didn't out me to my fundamentalist Christian school's administration for being a heathen when I break-danced during her home visit, thus giving my first lesson in the difference between the spirit and the letter of the law.

There's Mr. Rambo in sixth grade, who loved science (pretty rare in fundamentalist Christian-land) and required that our science fair projects adhere to scientific method for the first and only time in my elementary school years. In keeping with his emphasis on experimental design, he was the first man I met whose life had truly been changed by his belief in God, and who openly testified about the mistakes he'd made in his past life because he wanted us all to learn.

There's Mrs. Shoemaker in seventh grade, who was the first person to see my writing as a specific, unique talent and not just part of the general repertoire of the smart kid, who taught me about nurturing potential by giving it discipline.

There's Mr. Martin in eighth grade, who taught us all to remember that it's always a beautiful day, and that something great is always going to happen.

There's Mr. Wollam, who taught me how to listen well.

There's Fred, Shoe & Sauer, Court House's high school English triumvirate, the perfect mix of idealism, cynicism and analytical expertise. It's because of them that I double-majored in philosophy and literature.

There's Lash, who taught me that history was just people making choices &, more importantly, perhaps, though I didn't get it until later, that no matter how good you are at school, it's not your whole life; you should leave as soon as the bell rings.

I could fill more than a few blogs on the virtues of my teachers at Denison, and no doubt will.

And of course, I've had many lessons outside of the classroom.

Today I add to the list one of my doctoral profs, Andrea, one more person from whom I am lucky to learn, among other things, about handling loss with graceful honesty. Here, you can learn from her, too:

http://www.planet-of-the-blind.com/2009/07/remembering-my-father.html

"But acceptance doesn’t seem to be the right word when faced with death or with losing a father. Sadness seems right. And anger. And holes of loss that widen and contract as the day, the moment, the second permits. Remembering seems right. Laughing and loving, even so. Checking in with the dead, even though I don’t believe in an afterlife. Checking in to say hello. I miss you. Two years without you seem like no time at all. Seem like forever."

The Church of Logos

2009-07-14T09:28:00.008-04:00

In a class at the end of last week's PhD residency, I floated a (not terribly original) theory in an attempt to reconcile the apparent contradiction in Plato's Crito between Socrates' mysticism and his investment in reason. I argued that what comes to us from God, what constitutes the soul, for Plato, is human reason. And Socrates can't flee his sentence without, as the text of the Crito attests, violating the principles he holds dear, thus making his life into a logical contradiction.

Alexander Nehamas argues in The Art of Living--which I haven't read in its entirety--that Socrates is the blank space on which all later philosophers project their own claims for what philosophy is: Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Foucault...Nehamas. Maybe Lemke, too.

I first picked up Carl Rogers in the summer of 2006, at a moment when the logical contradictions of my own existence were not yet apparent, when I actually thought I'd already cleared away a lot of them. His notion of "congruence" is usually discussed in terms of the therapist's role, being "real" with the patient, but it's also the goal of Rogerian therapy - to be real with one's self, as it were. Here's Wikipedia on incongruity:

The aspect of one's being that is founded in the actualizing tendency, follows organismic valuing, needs and receives positive regard and self-regard, Rogers calls the "real self". It is the "you" that, if all goes well, you will become. On the other hand, to the extent that our society is out of sync with the actualizing tendency, and we are forced to live with conditions of worth that are out of step with organismic valuing, and receive only conditional positive regard and self-regard, we develop instead an "ideal self". By ideal, Rogers is suggesting something not real, something that is always out of our reach, the standard we cannot meet. This gap between the real self and the ideal self, the "I am" and the "I should" is called incongruity. (emphasis added)

I don't want to deny the importance of positive self-regard in Rogers' scheme, or hell, in my own therapy, but at first blush, my instinct is to re-write it: the gap between the principles by which I tell myself I'm living my life and the way in which I'm actually living my life.

That is to say, if the life you're living is a logical contradiction, you're gonna go nuts. I've written about the changes in my life over the past years as an "epistemological shift." Someone more eloquent that me called her own similar crisis "the logical temporal disaster of wishing I didn't wish what I wish." These days that shift into congruence reaches far beyond the friendship at the epicenter of the change. For Rogers, full congruence is a momentary thing, not something we can realistically aspire to all the time, just as, I suppose, most of us fall short of perfect logic most of the time, but more and more I find myself asking how each action is informed by my basic premises. I would have said that I was doing this before, mind you, but I would in fact have been living on other people premises, finding myself in crisis when their differing views of the world came into conflict. Finding myself battling depression constantly when their views of the world were in deep conflict with my own suppressed tenents for living. (Life is already a logical contradiction fraught with crazy-making, when, as Bechdel points out in Fun Home, "I think" is itself a statement of doubt.)

January through April, I was a bit of a mess, sorting out my neurosis about academia, about the past that had brought me there, feeling paralyzed and trapped. When I named it aloud in April, I could suddenly move again. I'd stopped living the contradiction. These days I'm more than a believer, I've got evangelical fervor. Read Rogers, I tell friends. Read David Burns. Trust your gut. Understand your pain as a sign of contradiction and then ferret it out.

Make a truth table if you have to.

Lightning Fields

2009-07-09T00:18:00.004-04:00

This is an image of Walter DeMaria's The Lightning Field:

I first heard of the project when a friend put a similar image up on her MySpace page. By design, it's not the kind of artwork you hear about unless you have an interest in conceptual art to begin with, and my dogged admiration of Jenny Holzer - whose work has also been supported by the Dia Foundation - and trivial knowledge of the Cage/Cunningham/Duchamp/Rauchenburg crew is about as far as I go most of the time.

The work, though, has been coming to mind for me all week because I think it really embodies the Union Institute & University experience for me. The phrase "think tank" gets tossed around a lot here, but even if it is a social justice think tank that word is too overrun with right wing bullshit for me to get very excited about. Instead, I think of us as a lightning field. What we are doing here, I think, is to create the conditions in which lightning - lightning insights, lightning connections - is likely to happen. Each of us is a lightning rod. Together we call down the lightning of inspiration, of creativity, of hope. Together we pull down more lightning than we would if we were apart.

This residency, and in recent months, I've been thinking a lot about my writing process and about how trusting the process and just putting in the hours, even when you're not feeling it, just showing up makes such a difference. It is all about creating conditions in which the magic might happen. It is all about committing to doing it with no guarantees. Once you accept that you could write every day for the rest of your life and still be the shittiest poet in the world, then you can forget bartering with the muses and just sit down and do it. (Substantially, of course, increasing the odds that you will not remain the shittiest poet in the world.) We have to create the conditions of social change, conditions that start with a myriad of people in the same room. Conditions that are not unlike those that make for good writing; for instance, include the acceptance that race will not magically go away if we all ignore it or if an inspired leader emerges out of the void.

Lightning, of course, is possible because of instability, because of charged ions, because of tensions in the air (or within ourselves). For this reason, it is dangerous. We could get electrocuted, after all. A fellow learner recounted tonight a story of a woman who passed out in a diversity workshop because a privileged speaker said something so outrageous that her mind simply could not take it, was overloaded by the divide between them and the sheer magnitude of privilege that allowed the speaker the blindness to say what she said. And yet, here, we are finding ways to stay, despite the risks of being overwhelmed, despite the risks of electric shock, and not just risks, but actual shock, burns, scars. Those of us who hold positions of privilege are learning ways to interrogate our privilege and to turn it against itself. We are finding ways to camp out in the lightning field. There are wounds here; we do not leave our culture at the door any more than the writer leaves her culture behind when she sits down at her desk. (Though, like the writer, we are trying to think that culture in new ways, trying to make a vision for it that is different than what exists now.) We fail. And we get burned.

This week there has been much discussion amongst learners surrounding the firing of a professor of color and heated exchanges which took place in and around her seminar about race. There are problems in the way this discussion is happening; divides, significant missteps - in my opinion - on the part of the administration, lots of rumor. But in another place - say, my master's alma mater OSU - this would all be dealt with quietly, out of the students' view entirely. In another place - say, my beloved undergraduate alma mater Denison - critical questions would be asked more often than not by black students (and then, often, and understandably, only the bravest among them) and the rest of the community would not think it was their problem at all. Or at least, that was the way things happened when I was at those institutions when questions about oppression became charged.

Those are, I think, the two responses the dominant culture usually has to questions of oppression - to silence in the name of "peace"/stability or to project the problem back on the oppressed group. Those of us in privileged positions - as well as those of us in oppressed positions who buy into the dominant mind because of its pervasiveness - will fail often in our efforts to interrogate oppression (I offer this not as an excuse, but simply as a reality, not unlike the reality of shitty rough drafts. We are learning to think in a way that resists fundamental structures of power, structures that are aligned to keep us from thinking in new ways.) but we will fail less often if we set up communities like this one - full of lightning rods.

According to Wikipedia, deMaria's project actually creates fewer lightning strikes than the name suggests, but from what I hear, when they happen, they are incredibly beautiful. Those are the conditions we're trying to create.

Dean Spade is Dreamy.

2009-07-08T21:47:00.002-04:00

Really. I know I keep saying it, but I really think he might be THE most important voice in queer politics today. I will keep trying to convince you.

Dean Spade from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

I love this.

2009-07-05T07:31:00.004-04:00

Another toothpaste for dinner gem.

More thoughts on Adulthood

2009-07-04T20:02:00.002-04:00

A few weeks back I had a dream about an old friend. It was warm and comforting, but in the middle it had a weird moment in it where my friend did something people don't do in polite society, something which I couldn't quite make sense of with respect to our past friendship. I told another friend about it, and she said, "Eh, it's not weird in the context of a dream, just one of the strange things that the psyche does." But I still felt like there was a symbolic weight there that needed to be unpacked.

It finally hit me yesterday afternoon. I was thinking about my return to Union for my second residency, about my decision to repeat the first semester courses a couple months earlier. A younger version of me - and by younger, I mean, say, seven months or so younger, the pre-Union me, the pre-therapy me - would have wished she could hide that decision, wished she wouldn't have to explain it to friends, family, fellow learners. But thinking about it, I realized I didn't feel that way. For the first time in a long time, I knew why I'd made the choices I'd made. I knew they were the right choices for me. I could own my actions, whether good or bad.

In the dream, in the strange moment, my friend lifted up her shirt to show me her bruises and tell me about where they came from, what they meant. She did it without shame. She did it without pride. Just simply: This is part of who I am. I want you to know who I am.

I think maybe that's part of becoming mature, recognizing yourself as you are, recognizing that your bruises are as much you as any other part. Knowing that you are at least as much what you make them into as what they made you into. And if you're lucky, you are more. And if you're very lucky, you find - as I do every day - that you are surrounded by people who want nothing more than to know you and be known by you as exactly who you are.

"This queer power of communicating without words": On Interpretation and Intimacy

2009-06-30T20:31:00.035-04:00

Bear with me, as I start tonight with a long passage from narratologist Lisa Zunshine's essay, "Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness" (Narrative 11.3):

Let me begin with a seemingly nonsensical question. When Peter Walsh unexpectedly comes to see Clarissa Dalloway "at eleven o'clock o the morning of the day she [is] giving a party," and "positively trembling," asks her how she is, "taking both her hands; kissing both her hands," thinking that "she's grown older," and deciding that he "shan't tell her anything about it...for she's grown older" (40), how do we know that his "trembling" is to be accounted for by his excitement at seeing his Clarissa again after all these years, and not, for instance, by his progressing Parkinson's disease?

Assuming that you are a particularly good-natured reader of Mrs. Dalloway, you could patiently explain to me that if Walsh's trembling were occasioned by an illness, Woolf would tell us so. She wouldn't leave us long under the impression that Walsh's body language betrays his agitation, his joy, and his embarassment, and that the meeting has instantaneously and miraculously brought back the old days when Clarissa and Peter had "this queer power of communicating without words" because, reflecting Walsh's "trembling" Clarissa herself is "so suprised...so glad, so shy, so utterly taken aback to have [him] come to her unexpectedly i the morning!" (40). Too much, you would point out, hinges on our getting the emotional undertones of the scene right for Woolf to withhold from us a crucial piece of information about Walsh's health.

I then would ask you why it is that were Walsh's trembling caused by an illness, Woolf would have to explicitly tell us so, but as it is not, she can simply take for granted that we will interpret it as being caused by his emotions. In other words, what allows Woolf to assume that we will automatically read a character's body language as indicative of his thoughts and feelings?

She assumes this because of our collective past history as readers, you perhaps would say. Writers hve been using descriptions of their characters' behaviors to inform us about their feelings since time immemorial, and we expect authors to do so when we open the book. We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects the character's state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first.

Had this imaginary conversation about readers' automatic assumptions taken place twenty years ago, it would have ended here. Or it would have never happened--not even in this hypothetical form--because the answers to my naive questions would have seemed so obvious. Today, however, this conversation has to go on because recent research in cognitive psychology and anthropology has shown that not every reader can learn that the default meaning of a character's behavoir lies with the character's mental state. To understand what enables most of us to constrain the range of possible interpretations, we may have to go beyond the explanation that evokes our personal reading histories and admit some evidence from our evolutionary history. (270-271)

As you might gather, Zunshine argues in her essay, and at greater length in a subsequent book, Why We Read Fiction, for the importance of bringing theories of literary interpretation and theories of cognitive psychology--for instance, in this case, the inability of a person with a disorder on the autism spectrum to make sense of Peter Walsh--into greater dialogue (She's not the only one saying this, certainly, but she's a big one.) and specifically argues that experimental fiction like Woolf's pushes the boundaries of this kind of cognition.

But that's not exactly my point. I've been thinking about this passage a lot because most of the books my therapist recommends seem to suggest that we might be better off if we couldn't make sense of Peter Walsh's actions and if we never interpreted someone else's mental state. And part of me is buying into it. The Burns book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, lists "mind reading" as one of the ten major cognitive distortions that lead to a depressive state. And where, really, is the line between mind reading and interpreting Peter's behavior? And how many times has the sound of someone slamming the door behind her as she leaves made you conclude that she's pissed at you, when it actuality the knob simply slipped from her hand? (And literary theorists are talking about this, too. They've coined a term for the faulty logic of assuming behavoirs correspond to mental states - the Fundamental Attribution Error.) One of the first catch phrases from therapy that stuck, from a CD Craig gave me on the first visit, was "Ask for what you need; notice what you get." That is, stop assuming that the people in your life can read your mind. Make your mental states explicit, make your needs heard and only then can you evaluate their behaviors fairly. You want healthy relationships? Be your own interpreter, and expect them to be their own explicator as well. It's not fair to ask the people in your life to read Woolf, I guess.

Except, it's just....well...God, how I love people who can read Woolf. I mean, what's better than someone who knows exactly what it means when you're hands tremble?

Zunshine is working to push literary studies past a certain default reader-response theory of interpretation that's pervasive in the field, a position that she summarizes in its most basic terms in the fourth paragraph above. (I don't understand Zunshine to be arguing against such positions, exactly, only suggesting that they're far from complete.) Our interpretive skills are forged, such theories maintain, by our exposure to various interpretive communities. For instance, the community "novel readers" recognizes norms that allow only a few possible meanings for Woolf's description of Walsh's behavior, norms that follow from their range of experience and the assumptions embedded in that experience. Or, say, the community "right wing base" recognizes norms that allow only a few possible meanings of Sotomayor's "wise Latina" remarks, norms that conflict with the ones that the "left wing" interpretive community use to make (similarly limited) sense of the very same remarks.

The thing is, when we realize we're not in the same interpretive community, it can feel pretty lonely. I want the important people in my life to be in the same interpretive community as me. Am I just being a baby about the whole thing?

Here's Stanley Fish in the classic essay of reader-response theory, "Is there a text in this class?" explaining what happens when someone can't locate the interpretive context in which an utterance makes sense:

I have told the story to several competent speakers of the language who simply didn't get it, and one friend...reported to me that in the interval between his hearing the story and my explaining it to him...he found himself asking "What kind of joke is this and have I missed it?" For a time at least he remained able to only hear [the utterance] as my colleague first heard it; the student's additional words, far from leading him to another hearing, only made him aware of his distance from it. (579, my emphasis)

The mention of joking here is not, I think, an insignificant choice of words to express being perplexed.

Here's another quote, from a book I love to teach, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, by Ted Cohen:

When [a joke] works, [it] work[s] because its audience brings to the joke its own awareness of certain assumptions about [the subject of the joke]. It is an essential feature of the joke that it not in itself contain instruction in [the relevant characteristics of the subject], but that it presume this knowledge in the audience...This fact is a key to understanding the insinuating quality of jokes, a way in which they force their audience to join in the joke. (3-4)

But while Cohen uses the word "force" here, he generally doesn't see joking as a malevolent force. (There are exceptions - Cohen doesn't follow through in his own discussion of jokes that offend, really, but I think this "involuntary" quality in joking is a big part of what upsets us in the racist or otherwise offensive jokes; to "get" it, you are forced to admit to a world in which such assumptions exist.) But instead, Cohen sees joking - and usually I do, too - as a very, very good thing, a thing whose importance is greater, really, than the simple bodily pleasure of laughter:

I may overvalue the intimacy available through joke-telling; after all, I am one of those who love and need joke-telling. But I am confident that it is an intimacy that should not be underestimated. When we laugh at the same thing, that is a very special occasion. It is already noteworthy that we laugh at all, at anything, and that we laugh all alone. That we do it together is the satisfaction of a deep human longing, the realization of a desperate hope. It is the hope that we are enough like one another to sense one another, to be able to live together. (29)

Cohen uses the word intimacy over and over in the book. In fact, he uses it over and over again in his work. He makes very similar claims for shared taste in art, and in philosophy of language, he says this is what metaphor is for - to bring us closer together through the shared experience of the comparison, the seeing-together.

To intimate--the verb--, Lauren Berlant points out in an introductory essay for a special issue of Critical Inquiry on Intimacy, is "to communicate with the sparest of signs."

Is that what intimacy is? Is that what we want our intimate relationships to be? Or are we simply committing Fundamental Attribution Error after Fundamental Attribution Error? Maybe make the signs less spare and more stable? Have I failed at love because I am a poor interpreter or because I put too much stock in interpretation at all?

Irresolvable conflict? I know. A constantly shifting balance? I know. But--on balance--I choose the version that's filled with laughter. It's just no fun to explain your jokes.

How to Be a Depressive

2009-06-30T08:29:00.002-04:00

Lesson One: Overlook the big picture.
via toothpaste for dinner

A Certain Kind of Ass

2009-06-20T01:33:00.002-04:00

In my intro philosophy class, I met this spindly kid who was, in later years, often compared to Anthony Perkins – and with good reason. The resemblance was there, dark hair, gaunt face, fashion sense. Right down to a general disbelief among many of my friends that there was anything straightforward about his sexuality, no matter how many women we knew who dated him. (“Just look at the way he crosses his legs.”) This kid was like Norman, though, without the nervous abused child-like nature that makes the authorities assume that Mother is doing the killing. He just had this arrogance that blocked me from finding endearing thing, not even the endearing-but-creepy thing.

In the first weeks of school, we kept showing up at the same meetings about student publications. I was a mix of socially awkward and earnest. (You know the kind of kid who doesn’t know things like she shouldn’t admit to liking Robert Frost because she doesn’t know that nobody likes Robert Frost and, hey, she actually read more than just one Robert Frost poem – and damn, he’s pretty good, really.) He was already well-heeled in disaffected pretention. And so he got on better. His success, with the creative writing crowd, and with the creative writing faculty, was part of the reason I became disaffected with creative writing early in my undergrad years. His stories were good; don’t get me wrong, but there was something going on there that I just felt in my gut was wrong.

I don’t think this is the green-eyed monster talking, nor do I think he was just a kid who rubbed me the wrong way for no real reason. It was the idea of performing the writer persona, the non-literary one, the snarky things said at a book signing while a cigarette dangles from your lip persona. He, fairly or unfairly, embodied that for me during my college years. And I did not like it.

He didn’t like me in return. Officially, that’s probably because I raised quite a ruckus when he leaned on me to give up a position on a campus publication he was editing. But honestly, I think our mutual dislike began because he was annoyed when my first philosophy assignment was presented as a “good” example to the class. He was as used to being that kid as I was.

He was in my senior seminar, too. (Both of our first assignments were photocopied as “good” examples to that class.) I was in the prof’s office after class early in the semester when she conspiratorily said to me, “What was up with [him] today?” Though he was no slouch when it came to theory, on that particular day he’d obviously taken some umbrage at a disregard for authorial intention in our discussion of the text. “Those creative writers, man; sometimes they just can’t get over themselves.”

Tell me about it.

I dated Mary not long after she’d finished her MFA in poetry. E, who loved poetry, who had edited her college lit mag and who spent most of her leisure time with the MFA crowd in those days, would say from time to time, with Mary as the clear indirect referent, “Yeah, it takes a certain kind of ass to go into creative writing.”

And it was true that the things I found hardest to deal with in Mary were the things I found hardest to deal with in the creative writing crowd. Mystification of thinking processes, emotional turmoil about what went on in workshop, mistaking interest in the banal for attention to detail, obsession with other writer’s awards and publication, preening to be something marketable instead of something original and authentic…even in the smallest senses. I can talk trash about Mary, sure, but most of the time, I think Mary tried to be what I wanted her to be, she just didn’t really feel the music in that song. (And hell, I was secretly subconsciously pretending she was someone else, so how could she?) In our relationship, she was often an over-workshopped poem. Trying to please everyone, but losing her voice in the process, and so pleasing no one. To Mary’s credit--really, truly--she wasn’t as good at playing the part as that kid was. That gap gives me hope for her finding her authentic voice one day.

I stopped calling myself a writer a long time ago. I didn’t want to be that kid. I didn’t want to be that certain kind of ass. The other night, talking with a friend from Denison who didn’t stop calling herself a writer and who was never very shy about her dislike for both that kid and Mary, I realized she also never stopped thinking I was one. We’d met at a writing workshop, after all.

Not long ago, Al (herself a Denison writer) texted me to report on an exchange she witnessed between another Denison writer and a girl standing in line at a concert who obviously bought into the certain kind of ass theory:

“So what makes you a writer?”

Deadpan: “I have a pen.”

Right. I’ve had this all wrong. I know plenty of asses who can’t write at all. I know plenty of writers who are lovely, giving, smart people. There are those who fall into the overlap of the Venn diagram.

I could just not be one of them.

In Bloom

2009-06-19T11:13:00.005-04:00

I used to have this violet at my old apartment. It belonged to my ex, Mary, when she lived in Ann Arbor, and she left it with me when she moved to LA in July 2004. At the time, it had about four blooms that were wilting from the drive to Columbus. We both had doubts about my ability to keep it alive. I had killed a few plants in my day.

In January of the next year, E made one of her rare visits to my place for dinner and noticed the poor thing on its last legs. I tried to get her to take it off my hands. "Nope. You're taking care of that plant. Time for learning and growing and changing."

"Learning and growing and changing," chanted in sing-song manner, became our gently self-mocking watchword for not taking the easy way out, and I repotted the plant in fresh soil.

My life was really a mess. I was drowning in a job I hated, which was about to get worse as the staff diminished, E and I were--as usual--stymied in our work on the collaborative project, and even though I first thought of breaking up with Mary that month, I didn't until more than a year later. But I watered the plant.

It wasn't until September that I saw the first bloom, recorded in that picture. In unintentionally ironic desperation, I'd spent Labor Day at the office, catching up on the never-ending undone work. I came home and there it was on the kitchen table.

2006. I broke up with Mary. E and I wrote wildly. I lost that awful job. I started teaching. More blooms, more leaves, large and thick.

And then, early in 2007, E and I started bickering constantly, adjunct demoralization set in. Things started getting crazy inside and out. The plant needed to be repotted, part of the root had been exposed when I'd moved it before, but I hadn't got around to it yet. I was cleaning up the table and slid the plant to the side swiftly; it toppled. The weight of the big, life-giving green leaves were too much for the exposed stem, and it broke right in two.

I'd been anthropomorphizing the plant ever since the Labor Day bloom, but I had no idea how much it was still mirroring my life. Learning and growing and changing without a strong base. I grew so much in those years. I lost some of it, in the toppling. I guess we all do.

These days I'm trying to focus on nourishing the root.

Writing Lessons

2009-06-17T23:59:00.001-04:00

My life has been hopeful and joy-filled lately. This has not been apparent on the blog. This means that I have work to do. I am slowly changing my life after a ten year depression. And that seems to mean first and foremost that I am slowly changing my writing.

I wrote to a friend recently, "How's your poetry these days?" She responded, "I am happy, so I am not writing." Ani DiFranco said, not long ago, that happy songs are the hardest to write. We come to language, I suppose, because we are dissatisfied with the state of things. After reaching and crying to no avail, we stammer out, "Ball!" and once we have it in our tiny clutches we settle into our silence again, happy. Part of me has been stuck in that infantile state with my writing for the past ten years.

But I knew, once, that is not all we can do with language. Reading Lewis Hyde's The Gift sent me back to Whitman. There is the celebration, too, the cry of joy and song of hope, the delight in seeing and hearing, in being alive. Celebration that is not opposite the unsatisfied longings and mourning spirits. They are one. Drum Taps and Song of Myself, both Leaves of Grass. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then. I contradict myself."

June 17th is the date of at least three important anniversaries. Two joyous, one tragic, none mine. I felt the last--not mine, but no doubt that it shaped my life--holding me back, gently but insistently, today, like a palm placed against a chest in warning. But not a warning of "No, don't." Instead, "Never forget what we risk each time, never forget what we have lost." The seriousness of the joy; the holiness of the yes. This anniversary is not mine; still, I honor what is sacred.

It turns out, however, that June 16th is - I had forgotten - an anniversary of mine. It is, I confirmed when I got home tonight from my visit to the 15th Reynolds class, the anniversary of my arrival at The Jonathan R. Reynolds Young Writers Workshop, year two, June 16-25, 1996. The fact that I knew precisely where to go to find this information within 30 seconds of walking in the door surprised me, but the past year has been a year of unearthing buried selves of the past. As the writer was dug up, so too her memories of her writing past.

At Reynolds, I produced. And I refined. I wanted to hear about craft. I watched how Townsend and Baker and John Miller and Chacko moved through the world and listened to what they said about how they got it done and what I bought of their acts and what I didn't. I went to the lab and wrote and wrote. I went back to my room and wrote and wrote. I scratched notes all over my drafts. Doesn't matter what book of advice about writing or creativity you go to, no matter how respected or how clearly a hack job, how scientific or impressionistic, it's the one thing they'll all say: Put in the hours. Really, I've been spelunking in them a lot lately. They all say it: Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones, MacLeod in Ignore Everybody, Hyde in The Gift, Bayles & Orland in Art and Fear, and so on, in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Wounds of Passion, The Creative Habit, Notebooks of the Mind, The Genesis of a Painting: Picasso's Guernica, and on and on. Put in the hours. Put in the hours. I did. And then, sometime after I got my heart broken for the first time at 19, I didn't anymore. See, my will was broken, too. And for a lot of reasons, some of which have been discussed on this blog in excruciating detail, it stayed that way until very, very recently.

Nina said later that she was envious of how focused I was. Which may have been the last time I heard that until this year. I was too busy tinkering with my work to get to know anyone else too well, so I didn't know that then. (MacLeod says, "Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.") I know it now because Nina came up to me, a year later, to talk about one of the poems I'd written and how she'd liked the pre-workshop version better. That's something about Nina of which I have often been envious: knowing when to ignore advice.

My recent writing past has been tortured, sporadic, painful. And in large part wrapped up in someone else's life, someone else's work, someone else's tragedies and joys. To steal a line from Goldberg and put it simply, I stopped writing for the love of it and started writing for love. And what Goldberg doesn't say is this: sometimes that works. Briefly. Incompletely. And less and less as time goes on. Like any other drug.

The end result has been that I lose interest in a piece if I can't give it to an audience (including the co-author) for immediate positive feedback and I won't give it to an audience for feedback until it's damn near pristine in order to assure the positive feedback. And I gotta tell ya, it's pretty hard to put in the hours when you're working under those conditions.

Mandy, a lovely friend from high school, has a blog called ”Messy Canvas.” where she embraces imperfection. It’s been quite a blessing to have around these past months, as I’ve been slowly owning up to my own perfectionism. Mandy and I were valedictorians of our high school in successive years. I venture we didn’t get there by being particularly good at accepting our faults. When I remember I was valedictorian--which is quite rarely--I think of this moment from Season 3 of Gilmore Girls:

PARIS: So, how's your valedictorian speech coming along?
RORY: Oh, um, it's okay. Pretty standard. Boring. 'We love the school, blah blah blah.' No one listens to those things anyhow, so -
PARIS: Relax, I'm okay with you making valedictorian over me.
RORY: Oh, good, thanks.
PARIS: Sure. I actually googled the personal histories of Ivy League valedictorians going back twenty-five years, and found some enlightening statistics. They don't necessarily do too well in later life, did you know that?
RORY: No.
PARIS: Oh, yeah. A lot of business failures, crumbled marriages, suicides, obesity.
RORY: Okay.
PARIS: A bunch died in car crashes, several did time, one suffocated when his cat fell asleep on his face.
RORY: Okay, well, thanks again.

I just started reading Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy at the recommendation of my therapist. The premise is that the primarily problem with depressives is distorted thinking, and thus cognitive therapy (which was pretty much being invented when the first edition of the book came out) is the best approach. Depressives tend to greatly discredit their accomplishments, for one. We play Paris's dismissal over and over to our poor internal wide-eyed Rorys (who, after all, were already downplaying their accomplishments before Paris even started). And then we desperately need someone else to tell Paris to shut the hell up. Where's Lauren Graham when you need her?

In seventh grade, I had one of my best writing teachers ever, Mrs. Shoemaker. (More on her later.) She's the person in my head whenever I or anyone else is giving instructions about doing peer review. I can see her, standing in front of our classroom, demonstrating bad feedback: "It's good." Smile, nod. "No, it's just reaaaallly good." Goofier smile, exuberant nodding. She snapped out of persona: "That's not going to help them make it better, is it?"

I know the point was not to give false flattery out of politeness and not to be a lazy peer reviewer and that all work can improve with the help of attentive readers and blah blah blah comp teacher talk. I'm sure she must have said something about how to give genuine flattery that failed to imprint on my brain. I actually remember my peer review partner, Megan, saying later, "Umm, I know we're not supposed to say it's good, but well, it really is good." I always respected that Megan then went on to find room for improvement anyway.

A few months ago, an instructor returned a draft with glowing comments:

Really, I can’t say enough about how pleased I am with this draft, and with having the opportunity to read your lovely writing!

Even though she made suggestions, gave valuable feedback, pointed out strengths & looked for places where they could be stronger still, (you know, all that peer review crap) all I really heard for the first month was, "It's good. It's reaaaallly good."

Luckily for me, this particular instructor knew a thing or two about perfectionism herself:

I do want to mention, of course, that this level of work is not expected by me in every draft. I know you mentioned having anxiety issues, and as I was reading this, I wondered if you hold yourself to a “perfect” standard even with papers that are considered “rough drafts.” If that’s the case, I just want to assure you that I really do consider rough drafts rough—they don’t have to be anywhere near this level of completion when you turn them into me. Okay?

Whenever I've been called a perfectionist, no matter how kind a place it seems to come from, I've thought: You don't get me. That's not it. If that were true, I'd be a lot closer to perfect than I actually am. I am soo not perfect.

Oh.

So...you were saying something about distorted thinking?

I remember talking to my ex about teaching comp and noticing that she seemed to talk a lot more in class about students learning to create, recognize, alter, work with, their own writing habits. The kinds of things I'd talked about in creative writing classes, the kinds of things I'd talked about at Reynolds, but not in "academic" classes as a student (stupid false binaries). The kinds of things that involve looking at the dress rehearsals just as closely as the performance. As a writing teacher, I would say, if asked, that I'm more process than product (another false binary, but a more useful one), but for me, that has meant thinking processes rather than thinking about process. If you made some super insightful points in class discussion that didn't quite flourish on the page, then I'm still pretty happy, still felt like the journey meant something. Like seeing a bad production of No Exit. Hey, there's still some Sartre buried in there. Mary, having spent more time in the creative writing classroom than me, was process in a different way, in a "How do we actually get this done?" way. I can spout platitudes about process, but my own process is still more mysterious to me than it maybe should be. This has everything to do with not putting in the hours.

I've been thinking, though, about that "perfect" draft. And about many unfinished imperfect drafts. And about how whenever I sit down to revise three really good papers that are all long overdue to be published journal articles, I feel like I'm starting at square one.

I started a journal devoted to notes on my writing process a few months back. The first weeks were all about the twin spurring and stifling influences of others, how I'd written for E, for Mom, for Mrs. Shoemaker and her successors. Not much, really, on what I actually did during the actual writing. Just what I felt, where my head was at. Not with the language, to be sure. And then I slowly got more concrete and turned to time, to how I need more time than I used to, to granting myself time, to learning to know how much time I would need as a goal. But if you don't really know what exactly you're doing, it's pretty difficult to gauge how long it's gonna take. (Did you ever notice that old folks know how the weather's gonna turn earlier than anyone else without a doppler radar? It's because they've seen those clouds roll through here many times before.) You have to put in the hours for a long time before you have a chance at predicting how the hours are gonna go.

A writer for whom I have much respect said tonight that writing's not like muscle, you don't lose it if you have that impulse. The impulse, maybe not. The raw talent, maybe not. But I think it is like muscle. And I am out of shape. I can climb the hill, writing those "perfect" drafts--I'll risk embarassment and say I know I've got some raw talent, the genetic predisposition or what have you, because I can pull out that effort now and then, it's there in me, latent--but as it is, it hurts, it takes forever, and puts me in traction for weeks afterward.

Of course, I still expect my best work to leave me winded, but zero to marathon ain't working.

I don't take blogs very seriously, but a few years ago, when I was posting on the old blog sometimes twice a day, these problems were significantly abated. But I didn't know what I know now then. I actually knew it before that.

Mrs. Shoemaker's 6th period English class spent three days a week writing & two days a week reading literature. (Usually short stuff, classics, for analysis. We had a 4th Reading class where we read "Young Adult" fiction and did comprehension-y assignments.) On writing days, Mrs. Shoemaker was in the room and available to us, but we were on our own. We had a basic process model (Prewrite, Rough Draft, Peer Conference, Revision Draft, Proofread & Edit, "Publish") that we were expected to follow pretty linearly and a list of types of writing we had to do each term (Persuasive, Expository, Creative, and others I forget, more workplace-oriented stuff). You had to turn in something about once a week and you had to do all the types before the term was out. You budget your time. You make sure you get it done. There was a desk at the front of the room for conferences. If it's taken, you and your conference buddy find something else to work on 'til it's free. If your conference buddy doesn't want to stop what she's working on right now, you find something else to do. You and your conference buddy don't have to be ready to conference at the same time. You decide. It's your business how you use this time. But it better be writing. No homework for other classes, no reading even for this class. Write. Three hours a week. Go.

Best. Writing. Teacher. Ever.

I wrote a really long (for, you know, seventh grade) story that took me two weeks. Mrs. Shoemaker had asked what was up to since I hadn't turned anything in, and at thirteen, in that room, with all the family baggage that keeps my therapist in business, I was enough in control of my own work that I knew that I didn't have anything to feel guilty about. I simply explained I was working on a longer story & that I'd knock out one of the shorter assignments as soon as I was done. I stuck with it until it was done the way I thought it should be done. Mrs. Shoemaker liked it so much she thought I should send it out to a kiddie lit mag. I did eventually, but it never got published. Later in the year, Mrs. Shoemaker asked us all to put aside our projects and write persuasive essays for the local D.A.R chapter's essay contest, "What the Bill of Rights Means to Me." I won, having argued, in a pre-Patriot act world, mind you, that the first amendment was nice, but it really didn't mean much without the fourth amendment to protect it. Got my picture in the paper with some little old biddys and a nice cash prize. ($100, I think? Maybe just $50, but a heck of a lot for a 13 year old.) It would take me eight years to figure out that the essay--and especially the hazy ground between the "creative" and the "critical" essays--was my genre, but damn, it was all along.

This anniversary moment seems a good time to get back to practice.

Last night (the 16th) came a message from Kristen, another friend from high school whose face I haven't seen for so many years, and in that message, a poem, Robert Francis' "Summons.":

Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded.

I feel summoned in just this way lately. By friends, by the world. Summoned to see, summoned to write, summoned to practice in the deep sense of the word. I was once a hard sell, but these days, not too hard persuaded...

Smack Into the Past

2009-06-09T22:19:00.000-04:00

I woke up late Sunday. Saturday had been a good day, good art, good sun, good friends, good food, good wine. But the sun and wine chemicals had fought in the night, and I had a headache. Not the worst kind, but the kind that lingers, leaves you dull-headed.

The first thing my eye lit on was the latest Netflix arrival, 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama. I'd clicked it into my queue with a bunch of other documentaries a couple weeks earlier without much thought, but now, through the dull pain, I couldn't help but remember the hopes I'd pinned on it in another lifetime.

In December 2007, at wit's end trying to salvage my friendship with E, I'd happened on a flyer advertising its 1 week run at the Landmark Gateway theater here in Columbus. Maybe this. It'd been weeks since I'd seen her, so long since we'd had a conversation with hope in it. Maybe this. We'd sit, 90 minutes or so, not bickering, letting peace sink into us. And then we'd talk about it. Yes, maybe this. I didn't think it would fix everything. But I needed a step in that direction. I needed that gesture from her. From me, too.

Over email, she agreed. I called a couple hours before the first showing on the last day of the run. It went to voice mail. (I knew it would. I wonder, still, how much my loss of faith called her loss of will into existence.) A few minutes later she called back, not having listened to the message. (A pet peeve I've always had that now generates an even more disproportionate response.) She was crashed out, hadn't been able to sleep until daylight. How 'bout a later show? Sure, of course, of course. And then I called an hour before the next show. Same routine, from voice mail to later show. I choked back tears the third time I heard the recording.

We'd discussed Christmas presents a couple weeks earlier. I'd said I wanted nothing but quality time. I knew, knew, knew, as the showings went by one by one that this was the PTSD in action. But I'd seen her make the effort so many times for so many other people when she wasn't really up to it. Maybe a stronger person would have said, hey, she can't fake it with you. You'd never settle for the mask version of herself that she pulls together for social functions with people too self-involved to see through it. But I couldn't see that version at all. I needed that gesture. I needed her to say I mattered, no matter what state she was in.

I don't know what she needed from me at that point. Her every action was telling me she needed me to go away. Or just back the hell off, perhaps, from her side. Perhaps reasonably so. I still don't know if I wanted too much then or simply gave up too soon. (Cue any song sung by the husband in Next to Normal. Who's Crazy, indeed.)

Despite our talk of no gifts, just quality time, I'd bought her a present, one far too expensive for my budget at the time. I just wanted to give her...love. Not romance, not couplehood, not anything so selfish as that - though, yes, no point in denying anymore that was always there subconsciously somewhere - but I just wanted to give her anything that let her know she was loved, anything she could feel, as she slowly shut down. It had been that way so long, me giving her whatever form of love she'd take from me. Me policing myself according to her comfort with that. Why should that change now? If my only chance in hell was an overpriced reference work on narrative theory, well, by god, I'd get it. After the start time of the film's final showing went by, I returned the book. What was I doing? I felt like nothing. Maybe I should be nothing without overdrafting my bank account.

Still, I hoped. At ten o'clock that night (She'll be up now, right? Her days and nights are mixed up, so now...) I called, hey wanna get a late meal? A drink? I don't remember why or how or even if it was all in my head, but she snapped at me, treated some offhand chatty comment with contempt. I was sitting in my car outside my apartment, hearing someone on the other end of the cell phone tell me for the god-knows-how-manyth time that I didn't matter enough for civility, for a few moments good will.

Like I said, there's another version, where it would be a badge of honor to be someone with whom she couldn't pretend. I didn't live that version. I wanted my fucking Christmas present. An hour's good will. That was all I asked for.

In all versions, she's suffering from acute PTSD. In all versions, it's hard to know where to hold her accountable and where to let things slide. Then. Now.

There's yet another version where I asked for far too much, for the world, to be something she didn't want me to be. To use a term like "secondary victim" implies you're family. I wasn't. Despite metaphorical invocations over the years, I guess I never was. Like my disowned father, I know what it is to claim someone who doesn't claim you.

But fuck that I-asked-too-much version. I asked for an hour's good will.

So, Sunday morning:

I figured I better do something about my headache before I considered the flick. Took myself out to a good healthy lunch, spending a bit too much money, but enjoying the cool restaurant A/C and a book about building connections, about possibility, about hope.

About all the things I wanted the Dalai Lama to teach me and E all those months ago.

After lunch, I still had a mild ache, decided to throw some caffeine on it. I stopped at Target so I might look for a frame for the print I bought at the Arts Fest and grab a Coke. And there he was. I hadn't seen him since the last night E and I shared a drink, when he'd wandered into the bar to get his takeout food. The one guy I'd thought she could be happy with, though I'd had my doubts for a long, long time. The one guy I'd thought she'd actually done wrong (and my realization of this had, before the PTSD, marked the beginning of my loss of faith, my own personal Voyage of the Beagle, this guy. The one guy I'd been stupid enough to meddle with, to advise, which didn't help her trust issues.

There he was. In Target. I offered him a hand. We were awkward. He told me to take care.

Strange, to hear that, my constant closing to a conversation or letter. Not much, by way of similarity, I know. Still, E had once recounted a fight with him (about their mutual distrust of each other's friends) in which she listed for him things she admired about him that were things she'd also admired about me, though she didn't itemize in the retelling. There have been times in my life when the only thing I wanted was to hear that list. So strange, in this tiny encounter, to hear this language echo, this maybe we were alike somehow, maybe she had some idea who we were, after all.

It was like walking into a wall. Stunned, but no new bruises. It just made me sad. We all deserved better from each other. We all did the best we could. Nothing more to say but that.

10 Questions was disappointing, even with all the pressure off, with all that over. It focuses too much on historical detail, didn't, to my ear, tie the political struggle to the spiritual struggle. Back then, had it achieved that moment of good will I craved, had it been that gesture, maybe I would have thought it great. Or a great moment, at any rate. More likely, we would have both turned our hyper-vigilant critics on and ripped into the poor filmmaker as a prelude for ripping into ourselves and each other. We deserved better from him, after all. We were a long way from seeing that he did the best he could.

I watched the Tonys and went to bed. Some days you just have to live with the hangover, knowing the next day your head will clear.

dreams

2009-06-05T07:14:00.000-04:00

I had the most vivid dream of E last night.

We ran into each other. We were glad to see each other. We were open, comfortable as we'd ever been with each other, maybe more. We weren't going to be immediately enmeshed in each other's lives again, but we didn't have any defenses or anger or fear in play, either.

That'd be nice one day. That'd do justice to the best of what that friendship could be.

Greatest Hits

2009-06-01T10:35:00.000-04:00

As promised some time ago, I'm finally moving over some of my favorites from the old blog, which you'll see popping up in the archive. I'm not time travelling.

Those of you who were with me back then, feel free to make requests.

Love to you all.

Preach it, brother.

2009-06-01T01:54:00.000-04:00

http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/004980.html

Adulthood

2009-05-25T12:22:00.000-04:00

When I was in junior high, I had (still have) a collection of Joni Mitchell's greatest hits that I loved. Being 13, I thought "Big Yellow Taxi" was a powerful statement on ecology.
I did not understand what the last verse, "...heard the screen door slam...took away my old man..." had to do with the rest of it.

Yup.

2009-05-23T13:36:00.000-04:00

Pema Chodron:

And I would say, as a teacher of meditation and Buddhist teachings, and talking to many other much more accomplished teachers than myself, one of the things that people say is that students can be very attracted to the ideas. And very enthusiastic about it, like intellectually and conceptually. But it's very superficial. It's not changing them at the core of their being. Or shaking anything up. You know, in terms of how they perceive reality. The limited kind of narrow way in which we perceive reality. It's not shaking it up at all. But when real hardship enters their lives, something that they can't just shake off, like great loss, or pain, or anything of this nature, you can't just shake it off. You can't just smile and make it ok. The rug has been pulled. It is groundless. Then people start asking, and seeking, and have profound wish to try out this whole path.

Pure Sugar

2009-05-21T18:55:00.001-04:00

I don't know if those of you who aren't Otalia obsessed will appreciate this one as much, and those of you who are have no doubt already seen it, but this is just a post to say these two are freakin' adorable:

Being and Time

2009-05-20T12:07:00.001-04:00

Craig, my therapist, asks me what I want to accomplish between now and the start of the next semester.

“Leisure time. I want to learn how to have leisure time.”

It’s not that I don’t do leisure time activities. I spend time with friends, I read unassigned books, I watch TV and movies, both good and bad. But in those moments – especially those when I don’t have friends around to buoy me up – part of me is pretty sure I should be doing something else.

“Questioning the ‘should.’” That’s probably the most elemental thing I’ve taken away from therapy so far. Who’s should is that? What happens if that should isn’t met? If it was the wrong should all along? What is the should cutting me off from doing?

I’m just a couple chapters into Karsten Harries’ The Ethical Function of Architecture. (I should not have a lot of interest in architecture, too like my father. I should have read this book back when he was hocking it at Denison back when I was an undergrad. I should have read this book ten years ago, the first time I wrote about architecture. Or last fall when I started to reframe that paper. Or a month ago when I bought it at Half Price Books because it has a passage on house trailers which could be useful in a paper I didn’t revise yet but should have. I should be reading fast enough to be at that passage already. I should not be reading this book at all…) I don’t know if it’s just the smattering of philosophy of architecture guys that appeal to me or if it’s a widespread phenomenon, but it’s been my experience that contemporary architecture critics love to talk about Heidegger. Oh, they like all the post-structuralists, and Derrida hung out with them and all, but even when he did, they talked about Heidegger.

Harries paraphrases Heidegger early in his book, saying that the authentic man (*cough, cough*) always has time.

Huh.

I don’t know a lot about Heidegger. I know he had some sort of affair with Arendt, and that he was mixed up with the Nazis. So far, I’ve never read him directly, only glossed quotes here and there in someone elses work. The idea of “dwelling” is crucial in Heidegger, so he’s a natural fit with the architecture boys. (And they are still pretty much all boys.) Dwelling. That’s what I need to learn. More being, more time. Maybe it’s time to read ol’ Marty.

Me and George

2009-05-15T09:50:00.005-04:00

Grey’s Anatomy finale spoiler alert (There’s something I didn’t think I’d ever type.)

I haven’t watched Grey’s Anatomy regularly since the first season, though I pop in and out now and then. It goes awry a lot, but you can tell smart people are behind it. Like a good GLBT culture watch kid, I followed the Callica storyline with fascination and its abrupt ending with indignation, but now (in the days of Otalia, of course) I can see that, while yes, it was refreshing for Erica Hahn to be often unlikeable, they at least needed to show us why Callie liked her. Instead, they would roll into the hospital having “talked all night” and raising Addison’s eyebrows, but with very little indication what they had talked about. (Sub Olivia for Hahn and Natalia for Callie in the equation and you can see the difference clearly…but soaps have always been good at making bad girls loveable.) I can’t speak to the Calzona storyline, having only seen the bathroom kiss.

But I’m digressing. This is not really about the current state of Grey’s. Except insofar as Grey’s cast is shifting, dramatically. So, here’s the spoiler: George is dead. ABC wants you to think it’s a cliffhanger, but it’s not. George is dead; Izzie lives, but I’m guessing only for a little while. George is dead because he was already off the elevator waiting for Izzie in heaven. Izzie lives because everyone expected her to die in this episode because of Katherine Heigel’s whining, but the writers will want to keep us on a leash for a while, and give Alex a post-Izzie storyline since right now he’s got absolutely nothing else going on. And George is also dead because they mangled his face. This is not the kind of show that can support a mangled-face character. Maybe ER could have, but Grey’s is strictly light fare.

George is dead. Dead, dead, dead. I teared up at the Meredith voice over, at the trite, “Did you say ‘I love you’?” moment, especially since Meredith and George were paired at that moment, for the last time, but I have to say, I'm really not sad to see George go.

Grey’s appeared early in 2005, the worst calendar year of my life, a year I have on several occasions referred to as “the year of no growth.” I didn’t see the pilot, but E did. I was at her place for some reason, and we caught another early episode. (During this time I was bringing over carryout and we would talk and watch bad TV at least once a week. She was breaking up with one of her longer-term beaus; I was suppressing the fact that Mary and I should break up.) E quickly gave me the character profiles.

On George: “OK, so he’s the nice kinda goofy guy who’s in love with the main girl (Meredith), but he really should end up with the nice kinda goofy girl (Izzie).”

George, we learn early in the series, is a bit of a momma’s boy, and his family doesn’t really get him, but they’re really proud of him, just the same. George is earnest and naïve. George is scared, a lot, prone to freezing up under pressure. George is a favorite whipping boy of the bad boy, Alex, who uses George as a foil to highlight his strong (read: aggressive) masculinity. (When, as E predicted, Izzie & George finally do get together for a while, Alex takes this as a personal insult to his manhood.) George is a good friend to Meredith and Izzie, but neither one of them is capable of seeing him as a leading man. When Callie appears in Season Two and starts pursuing George, Izzie and Meredith laugh at the notion that “He’s her McDreamy!”

I guess it’s not surprising, in the end, that the girl who was over the moon for George turns out to be into girls.

I was not interested in George. I was interested in Sandra Oh’s Christina Yang. Smart, tough. Yes, I’m always interested in the smartest girl in the room, and so much the better if she drives a motorcycle and looks like that. (I still think she’s the most interesting character on the show, but because of her friendship with Meredith and her interaction with her superiors – here’s where Brooke Smith’s loss is really felt - and little Grey. Her romances continue to be incredibly stupid writing.)

In an episode that first aired in February of 2006 – that is to say, one month before I broke up with Mary – Meredith deals with some of her family’s screwed-up-ed-ness, confronting the father she hasn’t seen in twenty years as her mother’s Alzheimer’s careens out of control. McDreamy is busy trying to make his marriage to Addison work. Meredith careens out of control. And there’s George, who loves her, who picks this moment to actually say it out loud. And yeah, she does it. Er, him. Or starts to. We learn in the next episode that Meredith starts crying in the middle of sex, so George stops, and much awkwardness and hurt feelings ensue. But this episode ends with the two of them falling into bed.

I was revolted, actually physically ill.

“No, no, no, no, no. That’s such a bad idea. Meredith so sucks for doing that. George is so stupid for doing that. I can’t believe the writers did that.” (Actually, retrospectively, I think this is one of the moments the writers got right. People totally do that. Of course, that doesn’t mean that people aren’t stupid or don’t suck.)

Mary thought that this might be OK. That this might actually work. George would love Meredith, and it wouldn’t matter that Meredith didn’t love him. This was before Mary realized she wasn’t Meredith. Everybody wants to be the “main girl.”

George floundered in the post-Meredith-almost-sex era. He fell behind in his schooling, he married Callie even though he didn’t love her, then cheated on her with Izzie, who was, at the time, his “best friend.” He missed his chance with little Grey by being oblivious to her attentions and focused on the past and his own failures. I have no idea what he did this season. I suspect not a lot. I suspect the writers didn’t know, anymore, what to do with a nice guy, without an uninterested girl-with-an-edge (Meredith or Izzie) for him to moon over or a nice girl to moon over him. (Callie’s more interesting than that, but little Grey is not.) But he’s dead now.

Dead, dead, dead.

It’s not that nice guys can’t be the hero, can’t be McDreamies. (McDreamy himself, though often thick as a wall, is much nicer than any of the other men on the show.) It’s that they can’t be dominated by the main girl. McDreamy holds his own with Meredith. George could not. He couldn’t even hold his own with Callie. George didn’t know how to love a girl without being ruled by her.

That guy is dead.

1997

2009-05-05T05:25:00.000-04:00

"I love myself when I am laughing...and then again when I am looking mean and impressive" - Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston has come and gone in my consciousness since I was 15, longer than any of the authors I list as favorites except Sherwood Anderson, who I first read the same summer. (Dickens I'd read the year before and hated the first time through.) For a time, late high school, that line was a secret mantra I chanted to myself, on good and bad days. Either way, love yourself. Find something that makes you - it only has to be you - proud.

That was before I'd learned to doubt the power of my love. After all, it wasn't enough for...well, any of them. And so it slowly became not enough for me either. I needed them to love me, whether laughing or no.

Zora, I learned when I was 17, made ten years of her life disappear. This is how it was presented in the racist/sexist literary reference works to which I had access in high school, and it still didn't get corrected when I studied her as a college freshman. No accounting for it, just another crazy eccentricity in the life of an author whose death in obscurity was explained, even post Alice Walker, as much by her own insanity as by the systemic forces against her. As if these things can be so neatly divided.

In fact, Zora lied about her age so that she could finish high school via public education. Simple. Logical. Not even a hint of crazy. Still, the marginalizing myth had only endeared her to me. Crazy folks can be great authors, too. Maybe they even get something prolific freaks like Dickens miss.

Every author I really love is bats, after all. Nietzsche, Anderson, Wilde. They all flip out one way or another. Can it really be only coincidence?

It occurs to me for the first time that these past ten years or so maybe don't belong in my autobiography after all. Like, I could just leave them out.

The reason I have such trouble letting go of E, of who I've been, no matter how miserable, is that to do so feels like saying those years were meaningless. Which feels like saying I'm meaningless. Which, as convinced as some deep parts of my psyche are of that, the most writerly parts sometimes, I cannot accept, fundamentally. I love myself...even when I am floundering, aimlessly.

But what if those years weren't wasted? What if those years, like Zora's twenties, just weren't? What if I just wrote them out of my narrative, to borrow from Robert Nash?

My earlier post on Peter Block's idea of letting the future shape our lives instead of the past is echoing here. In the story I am writing, how relevant is the detail that I spent five or so years waiting for love from someone who couldn't give it, until a trauma ripped us both apart because I spent the five years prior living out the emotional legacy my parents taught me? In the story I am writing, maybe that is the part that is skipped by the flash forward.

I loved myself when I was laughing...and then again when I was looking mean and impressive, sometime around 1997. I mean, like, on a consistent basis. That's where I'd cut, if I was cutting together the movie. A shot of me realizing I was falling in love on a dark summer street, lamppost, very My So-called Life.

So now, the next scene...consistent with that self, but changed, by all this stuff there's no need to include anymore.

Crap is thicker than blood.

2009-04-27T15:45:00.014-04:00

I had a really crap encounter with a member of the paternal genetic pool last week.

My father's wife passed away. I hadn't seen the woman since I was eleven. Even when I was seeing my father regularly, she wasn't a big part of my life; her mother's cooking was the best part of seeing my dad, but Loretta? She was never mean to me; she was never anything to me. I vaguely remember that we both liked the Miami Vice soundtrack. I also remember feeling bad for her because she always put herself down in the service of telling my father how smart he was. When I was a kid, my mom would sometimes make inappropriately petty criticisms about her in front of me in the service of nursing her wounds, but that didn't interest me very much, and was pretty infrequent, all told. Probably the first time I disagreed openly with my mother about her feelings on her divorce was when I said that I didn't think Loretta was at fault, even if she was almost certainly boffing Dan before my parents split. She wasn't married. She didn't have a kid. And she never did.

I honestly didn't think about Loretta too much, and it always seemed the feeling was mutual. She knew what she wanted her life to look like. That's more than I could say for either of my parents, who seem to have just let their lives happen to them. For that, I had a sort of begrudging respect for her.

On the other hand, she was the embodiment of everything about my father that was worthy of scorn. Not the infidelity - as late as 2006, he still denied that, though they married five days after my parents divorce papers were inked. Hell, maybe they weren't technically schtupping, but something was going on. No, the reason she embodied his crappiness as a father was that he built his life around her, and well, see above. Kids weren't a part of that life, not even the three year old he already had.

From 3 to 11 (when I refused to go again, after a traumatic court date I won't rehash today), I saw my dad biweekly, for 8 hours. Here was our itinerary:

10am - Picked up at my house in Washington Court House. Any communication between him and Mom would take place by handwritten note carried by me. (My father never gave us his home phone number. Once, toward the end, he asked if he gave it to me if I would hide it from my mother. I knew that was fucked up and said no.) If my Mom abbreviated anything or god forbid misspelled anything in her note, my dad would read it aloud phonetically in a mocking tone and then ask me what I supposed that meant. We would then drive to Columbus - from whence he had just come - while listening to country music or Paul Harvey. (I cringed every time I heard "Good day" until the day that man died.) I could ask to repeat country songs he had on tape, which was nice. My choice of radio station or genre was not a consideration.

11am - Arrival at my father's apartment. The one he shared with his wife, and had vacated at approximately 9am that same day. Loretta would be finishing up getting dressed. She would be drying her hair or picking out shoes or something in their bedroom. I would plop on the couch. Toward the end I got smart enough to bring books for the ride & this portion of the visit. I wasn't usually allowed to turn on the TV. We'd spend maybe half an hour there, waiting for her to be ready. Then we might run an errand or two in Columbus, drop off mail, pick up something at my father's office, whatever. Then we hit the road again.

1pm-ish - Arrival at Loretta's parents' house in Leesburg, OH. Leesburg is approximately 15 minutes south of Washington Court House. I'll say that again: Leesburg is approximately 15 minutes south of Washington Court House.

That's right, folks, 3 of my 8 hours with my father were spent travelling to a house just 15 minutes away from my own because his wife couldn't get up & leave the house by 9 on a Saturday, nor could she drive herself in her own damn car to meet us.

That's not her fault. That's my father's fault.

My father and his wife hung out with her parents and maternal grandmother - all of whom were pretty frail - upstairs and chatted, while I went down to the basement to play with the toys left over from the mid-1950s. They had tons of Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys. There were crayons and markers, and like I said, I got better at bringing books, so I managed to entertain myself. They had a dog, a mutt that was probably a shih tzu mix, that mostly stayed upstairs and played with my father, but that was cool, too. Sometimes my father would check on me, but mostly I was on my own until dinner.

4pm-ish We'd have dinner. Mrs. Adams, who insisted on calling herself Grandma Adams on all cards, etc., made a nice spread, and there were often fresh tomatoes from the garden, which especially made me happy. Then the menfolk would retire to the living room to watch TV - I learned the word "davenport" in those years - and Loretta and her mom would chat in the kitchen. I'd usually head back downstairs.

5:30ish Connie Chung's face will always thrill me a little bit, because the beginning of the Saturday evening news was the signal it was time to go home.

Geez. It sounds worse than I remember it, and I remember it as incredibly lonely and mind-numbingly boring. Truth be told, I don't think my father would have been in my life at all were it not for the urging of his in-laws, who needed to maintain some idea of their daughter and her husband that fit with their fundamentalist Christian worldview. I was there as a prop, and not a very interesting one. You see, though, why, despite feeling sad at the loss of any life, Loretta's death wouldn't hit me so hard.

I can see, too, though, that my father is probably devastated. They were together over 25 years, and from the minute he moved out of my mom's house, he built his life around her and her family. Again, I'd rather we could all be spared the loss of our mates, but, given the circumstances, I'm no one my father should come to for comfort.

His youngest sister, on the other hand, thought I should get in touch with him. I got screwed on all sides when it comes to the avunculate, but I usually don't think about my father's siblings much. I can actually give my mom credit that she went out of her way to keep them in my life for several years after the divorce, which in general was not something she was very good at, but it became apparent that for them this only meant showing up once a year to a Christmas party at which my single mother put on a huge spread for five working adults who didn't contribute any food and brought me crappy presents because they didn't know jack about me, so eventually that petered out, and they just went back to being the strangers they'd always been. That is not the kind of aunt I'd be.

So when Nancy, who I last saw at my high school graduation, and before that had seen maybe a dozen times in my whole life, decided that she knew how I should feel about Loretta's death, I decided that was enough. I responded to her e-mail with my feelings not about Loretta's death - there's no family member on any side of the pool with whom I could talk about it without having their response eclipse my own - but with my feelings about her butting in and about the fact that I was included in Loretta's obit as if I was her family. I took enough time to cool off after the news to respond reasonably, but I didn't mince words. Why should I? Nancy responded with a crazy mean insulting message about how she'd done nothing but love me.

Huh? What on earth are you talking about?

The obit thing had me livid. Like I said, Loretta the person was no one I had a particular grudge with. But damn, she's not my family. Neither of them are my family.

But family isn't exactly what I'm after, anyway. Not family the way they use it. I'm looking for something far more important than having the same gap between our front teeth.

And lest you think I'd make it through a post this long without an Otalia reference, here's more on how we queers are threatening the blood ties even as we speak, via Guiding Light: http://otaliagasm.com/freetherapy/2009/04/26/what-otalia-is-getting-right-defining-family/

RIP

2009-04-27T13:44:00.002-04:00

More Human

2009-04-27T01:42:00.002-04:00

Panic, again. Another unproductive weekend.

Wandering through a bookstore--a big chain bookstore, another way I'm not living up to what I'd like to be--on Sunday, in the haze of I-know-I'm-not-gonna-get-it-together-but-I-still-can't-face-that, I see on display a book that mattered to E, that matters to a lot of smart people I know. Here I am, I think, thirty-one, and I haven't read it yet. Maybe if I'd read this book, I'd be happier now. Maybe if I could stop everything and read it right now, I could focus and throw off the bad emotional habits that my childhood taught me and that the years with E in my life entrenched. But I can't stop everything and do that. Because I haven't done what I need to. Because I'm out of time, over time. And so here I am. Less than what I could be. Again.

The book is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I may not have read it, but I know enough about it to know this is ironic.

It hits me, just for a moment, in the bookstore: this book would not make me any more human than I already am. For a moment, I felt OK. I felt like I had some sort of inherent worth, the kind I think we all have. But I can't hold onto that feeling very long.

Once, E burst into tears when I pulled a book out of my backpack that she'd recommended years before; god, that was so addictive. If I read the right thing, turned a nice phrase, wrote a good blog, then I could stay. Then I might even be worth having around. I always felt like I had to earn my right to be around. I don't think that was all in my head, though sure, some of it was. But this anxiety, this feeling of never being enough, of not being a real person unless I performed, it wasn't like this before her. And I remember conversations wherein I had an idea about a paper she was writing that ended in, "That's good. That's enough for today," like I'd earned my keep by helping her do her own work, and then she'd send me home, and I'd hope like hell I'd have something interesting to say again the next day. She'd say, she did say, on her blog not so very long ago, that there was a disconnect between the perciever and the percieved, that we both misunderstood each other. Perhaps on some things. On this, no. I lived in a perpetual state of proving my worth.

A lot of psychologists would say that, childhood being over, it's no one's job but my own to give me unconditional regard. But I think--maybe this is why, despite my qualms, I've kept coming back to Rogers again and again--we all owe each other that, at some level. That we all should recognize that hurting human being next to us. Otherwise, what are we? The kind of people who step over the homeless...we have to give each other more than that.

Says E, many moons ago, that if you treat people like people, they'll act like people. This is elaborated largely as a principle for dealing with students - and sometimes the homeless. It's less useful, it seems, for friends and family. But perhaps I presume too much in thinking I was ever really in either of those categories. No better way to make clear that I'm not a person for her than this past year. It's cruel. Was I asking too much of her? Were we codependent as hell? Did things need very much to change? Yes, yes, yes. But it's cruel, this exile, this disappearance, this silence. I haven't thought that before, haven't allowed myself to think that before, but it's 2 a.m. and that's all I can think now, how cruel it is. Says Liz Phair, "When you said that I wasn't worth talking to, I had to take your word on that." I can't take her word on that anymore. It nearly killed me. It's still killing me.

I'm sitting in the dark, torn between a desire to go, read like mad, try to churn out some work, try to earn my worth somewhere, with some inner demon that I'm embodying in the concrete of my doctoral program or to just sit here, telling myself I'm a person. But, Craig the therapist would likely point out, every undone thing just perpetuates my doubt that I deserve positive regard. I'll just be walking by that unread copy of Zen and the Art for the rest of my life. But I don't know, it seems really important to break myself out of proving my worthiness. I have to hang onto that moment. Reading that book, writing that paper, writing this blog, none of these things can make me more human. I'm a person. I need to figure out how to treat myself like one.

They're in a Catholic Church for this Conversation

2009-04-23T12:59:00.002-04:00

Seriously. GL is taking risks.

Unlike the blogger to whom I'm linking...

2009-04-22T11:38:00.002-04:00

I clearly have no problem with sending you into Otalia overload.

Here's an awesome soap blogger (oh, I'm so far out of the soap closet now, aren't I?) on Otalia in the context of GLBT representation.

http://1000worlds.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/purple-postscript/

Random Observation on Homophobic Constraints in the Workplace

2009-04-16T10:24:00.002-04:00

I've been thinking more about the Otalia storyline today. So far, there are two other same sex couples in daytime. On ATWT, teenage boys, and on AMC, girls in their early twenties. I don't know much about AMC, but I'm under the impression that a character's kid came back, after experiencing a bout of SORAS (Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome) while in Europe or at boarding school or at boarding school in Europe, with girlfriend in tow. The boys I've seen a little more over the years; Luke slowly came out in what was initially more of a family drama (Mom got it, Dad who raised him struggled but eventually got it, Bio-Dad was a jerk). Olivia and Nat came together more in the traditional soap couple mode; thrown together for reasons out of their control, spent lots of time together, developed witty banter, etc., etc. What usually happens with a straight couple developing like that in soap opera is a sudden conflict. The betrothed turns out to be a Capulet. Your dad takes over her mom's company, your brother steals his sister's baby, one of you gets kidnapped by a serial killer who locks you in a lighthouse, your true love doesn't realized that you only married that other girl so she could stay in the country, etc., etc. They've thrown a couple curves at Otalia, but for the most part, they didn't need a sudden conflict. They had conflict built in. They're queer. And it's a conflict that won't simply go away when they get together. Perfect for soaps. Maybe the reason soaps are finally getting it right.

It's the things that happen after you come out, the things that have nothing to do with people being just totally despicable bigots and have more to do with people just making assumptions that the world encourages them to make. That's the part I'm interested to see GL start narrating. That's something that hasn't really been narrated on television yet. Occasionally we get people reacting awkwardly to a woman referring to her wife or the beaten-to-death misunderstanding of partner (or, sometimes girlfriend) joke. But the other stuff is so much subtler.

Today, I encountered a customer at work who had the same, relatively rare, last name as a girl with whom I went to college. We had one class together, maybe had two conversations. But I thought she was super-dreamy. I inquired of my customer if she was a relative. She said no, so I continued my usual schtick. But it occurred to me after that I have heard my neighbor in the office have the following sales call conversation several times over the years:

"Oh, are you related to Johnny X? [pause] Yeah, he was ahead of me in school, but I remember my friends and I all thought he was so cute! What's he up to?"

I can't say that.

Although, damn, my friends and I did all think this particular girl was all kinds of dreamy. (Throaty voiced rugby player. Yeesh.) Harmless flattery, but if I say it, it could land me with a complaint to management. I might lose the sale because it makes the caller feel uncomfortable. I might even be accused of sexual harassment. For idle chit chat that my co-workers make every day.

That's the stuff people just don't talk about, the self-policing that queers usually don't even notice they're doing themselves. That's the stuff that needs to get narrated if people are going to get it. Bio-dads and baby kidnappers got nothing on that.

Love and Change

2009-04-15T21:14:00.003-04:00

Love Asks You to Change. Or Happens 'Cause You're Ready to Change. Causality is unclear (Read your Hume), correlation is not (Look at your life).

Otalia is turning out better than anyone who's tracked any representations of women loving women or anyone who's been tracking the slow demise of daytime soaps could have expected.

Here's today's knock out scene:

And today's lesson?

Not that Olivia is wrong to sacrifice her happiness for Natalia's, that happens, sometimes that should happen, but that she's wrong to sacrifice both of their happinesses to avoid change.

"I love you, but I don't know what offering my love will do to you. It'll ask you to change who you are, and what you believe, and that would make this whole thing a lie, wouldn't it?"

No, Liv, darling, it wouldn't. It would change the future, but the love you've had so far, the friendship, so far, it's not a lie. Don't let anyone tell you it was. You know it's not a lie most of all because that love changed you.

Here's a gorgeous quote from Italian theorist Francesco Alberoni, which I have because of the blog of a woman whose love changed me that says it better than I ever could:

We fall in love when we are ready to change, when we want to discard a past, worn-out experience, and have the energy and strength to begin a new exploration and change our lives. We fall in love when we are ready to use untried abilities, explore new worlds and fulfill dreams and desires we had renounced. We fall in love when we are deeply dissatisfied with the present and possess the inner fire to begin a new stage in our existence. For falling in love to take place, therefore, there must be something amiss with the present, a slow accumulation of tension, a great deal of vital energy and then, finally, a spark to trigger it all off. Falling really in love follows on from a crisis in existing relationships, from an impression of having gone wrong and having got caught up in something unreal and false, while feeling acute nostalgia for a truer, intenser and more real kind of life.

It's a relief, finally, to think of it this way. I fell for her when I met her. I put that away. And then, sometime between the Mary breakup and her PTSD, I changed again. The years between were no lie. No one, not even she, could convince me of that. I'm lucky. I fell in love twice with a most amazing creature, and each time I was made new.

Here's to change, darlings. This world is full of it, which, my sometimes faulty logic (Sorry, Hume.) says, means the world is full of love, as well.

Babies

2009-04-08T08:25:00.002-04:00

This was my write-in vote for "Senior Song" in 1996:

Mrs. Breedlove, our physics teacher and one of our senior advisors, who had let me borrow her early R.E.M. CDs when I was just a freshman (Without her, I might not know Document. *Shiver*) and who had once mentioned the Indigo Girls as a clue to a quiz question about the history of physics, (which is to say, Mrs. Breedlove who in my 18 year old opinion had impeccable taste in music), said I was the only person who picked a song that actually was a Senior Song.

Most of my classmates wrote in Pink Floyd's "The Wall." This was vetoed by TPTB, so the second choice, an awful, cloying song by one-not-even-hit wonder Jordan Hill, "Remember Me This Way" that had actually made it onto the ballot somehow was the officially recorded winner. I've never listened to the whole thing because it's pure schmaltz, but I looked up the lyrics today, and it sounds enough like a senior song to me. A senior song was not that important to me, but Breedlove's compliment was. Also, I was totally in love with Natalie Merchant.

This morning, though, I thought of the song because the sun streaming through Victorian Village as I drove down Neil Avenue was just the kind of sun that Nat is singing about. And I realized, here I am, thirty one and a half, way better able to live these days than I was at eighteen.

Oh, things go wrong, things go horribly, irreperably awry in ways that an eighteen year old can barely imagine. But that shaft of light is still there. I'm lucky. The people in my life, they're good at seeing beauty. If I get lost in the dark, Maggie sends a crystal of a song, Alicia turns a perfect phrase, Al reminds me that the Heirloom Tomato Salad exists.

The version of "These Are Days" above was recorded in April 1993 for MTV Unplugged, a performance that would yield an album and their biggest radio hit, a cover of Patti Smith's "Because the Night." (That cover is why I fell in love with Natalie Merchant.) It was the Maniacs last album with Merchant. I don't know if they knew it then, but I suspect she did. (The woman who would become the Maniacs next lead singer is on stage with them, a band in which Natalie had long been the lone girl. New worlds are already forming before our eyes.) I think she knew she had gone as far as she could with this phase of her life. One last bask in this golden glow before the next version of Natalie begins.

I remember being so jarred by the change in the first solo album. I came to love it, too, but it was a lesson about those days. They are fleeting by their very nature, just like the light. You can have new ones, but they'll never be the same.

Last night Al and I flipped through some pics from the college years. "Babies." We kept saying. "Cute, cute babies," about Robyn, Mary, Stine, Sarah, Marlene, Andrew...But, Al points out, a pic of me and her and Stine taken last week is pretty cute itself. "But we're not babies."

This is a moment when I can look back and see the golden light, and look forward, and see it there, too. It's time for a solo record.

Fools on the Hill

2009-04-02T09:09:00.001-04:00

I wake, on April Fool’s Day, with one clear thought from my dream: It didn’t matter what choices I made; she was always going to go.

I spend the day with people who knew me before her. That addictive handful of people who see continuity and change each time they see you. It is not enough to know you when; what you need is the ones who see something about how you have descended from when to this moment. Maybe not all of it, not every faltering choice along the way, but they still see a line running from the you they knew to the person in front of them today.

Or maybe, the ones who saw something in you then. Something you are only now learning how to make good on. Something latent, waiting for its time to come. Maybe she did see me as I was. Maybe this is what she couldn’t see. What I will become.

We fools are new selves in each moment, but maybe just a little newer than usual this night. We are living post-her, post-him, post-us. We share wine and stories until sunrise. There is a line that runs from what we were, to what we are, to what we will be. We will make good on it, again and again.

Postscript on "What Goes Around..."

2009-03-25T08:14:00.003-04:00

See here for original post.

I want to add that I've asked myself a thousand and one times if holding 1 & 2 is simply self-interested, egocentric thinking. (And in fact, in late 2002, when it all came to the surface for the first time, E convinced me that it was.) But the truth is that it would have been and even now probably is in my narrow self-interest to abandon my belief in 1 & 2 with respect to the particular situation of my friendship with E.

But to do so would represent - and I hesitate as I'm sure this will sound like exaggeration to some - nothing short of an epistemological crisis. And for a good five-plus years that's where I was: convinced I couldn't know what I knew. Given strong philosophical arguments about how it was unethical to feel what I felt. Is it any wonder that every aspect of my life was characterized by doubt? A perpetual struggle between me and E - my letting her judgment stand in for my own. It started in that moment. It's one thing to say I had to respect her autonomy (response #2) and accept that she could only act on her own reading of the world. It's something else entirely to say I had to distrust my own reading, to apologize for my own reading of the world over and over. (I mean, this post, really, represents still an attempt to explain myself, which is one meaning of apology - the most philosophical, for that matter.) Perhaps one day one or the other of us will launch a whole theory of interpretation that revolutionizes our field(s); it will at some level have been borne of those years.

The months during which I realized I could no longer bear to deny my belief in those contested claims were very much what Didier Eribon calls, in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, "a moment of madness that will change everything about the way one is" (108). Eribon, of course, is describing the moment of shifting away from a closeted consciousness. Susan Brison cites a philosopher whose name escapes me now who says that the goal of epistemology is "to feel at home in the world." Is it any wonder that the only thing I knew for sure was that I had to move to the neighborhood right then? To be somewhere where I could feel at least a little assurance in my knowledge of the world, in interpreting, as Bonnie Zimmerman has called it, through "perverse reading."

At some level - and I don't mean that straight and gay people can't talk, or be friends, or that we can't understand each other, or even that one is necessarily "true," or even that you have to be attracted to the same sex to have one or the other view of the world - but I think, at some level, heterocentrist and queer epistemologies are incommensurable. To try to live one externally and think in the other internally represents a radical break in consciousness. It will not be good for your sanity.

A moment of madness that changes everything. Eribon's clear that change is ongoing, in the grand tradition of queer self-creation...one supposes that at some level the madness must be as well. Still, I feel more at home in the world every day. So, yes, it is in my larger self-interests to hold 1 & 2, but only because not doing so means relinquishing my right to know anything. And well, I studied philosophy...which is, a girl I used to know would often remind me, love of wisdom. There are some premises you just have to hold.

Why I Need a New Job

2009-03-24T12:09:00.003-04:00

In my current position, I work for what Hugh MacLeod might call The Middle Seat Department: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/004881.html

I am not looking for a super-rewarding life-giving career at the moment. I prefer to put my energy into my writing - and figuring out my writing neuroses - and then I'll find something that allows me to do both. But in the short term, I really need a position that's not on the short list of disappearing relics of the 19th & 20th centuries...

What Goes Around...

2009-03-23T08:20:00.002-04:00

I don't like to think of karma punishing people, but I do think it occasionally conspires to ensure we see what it was like on the other side of a conflict.

Like, this weekend. I got contacted by someone who wanted to date me last fall. I hadn't handled turning her down very well, but I hadn't by any stretch been unclear, either. Apparently, that wasn't enough. She wanted to make sure I saw it as she did. These were her arguments:

You sent me mixed messages. Which, of course is related to
You seem(ed) to want something you're not willing to own up to now. And, if all else fails
You knew I was vulnerable and should have better taken that into account.

Hmm...these are vaguely familiar, eh? My responses were:

I didn't send you mixed messages. You misread me, despite cues to the contrary. (Though I didn't do it explicitly since she wouldn't get the reference, I was actually mentally invoking Hume on causation as I fired this part off.)
The only possible knowledge you can possibly have of my wishes is what I explicitly told you. (The problem of other minds. Oh, it was a good morning for brushing up on my Enlightenment thinkers.)
It's not my responsibility to look out for your vulnerability.

Huh. I've heard those somewhere, too.

I'm as sure that claims 1-3 are invalid in this case as I'm sure that claims 1 & 2 were valid when I used them. (Claim 3 on the other hand, I think is complicated. Which maybe is weird, given that 1 & 2 are actually the more traditionally intractable philosophical problems, but I don't know...sometimes there are things you just know, emotionally, I guess, even if you can't ground them in any rational epistemological theory. Or maybe it's just the recent Ethic of Care readings making 3 more complicated than it historically has been...at any rate, the balance of self/other is a constant struggle.)

What is stunning to me is how wronged I feel. I've been misread before, plenty of times, but in this I feel willfully misused. That's not something I ever wanted to do in making those claims myself. That's still not something that I can grant I did. How do I continue to hold 1 & 2? I do still hold 1 & 2 where E. is concerned, though I don't hold her at fault for them as this girl did me, nor do I think they constitute a valid argument for why I should be loved. The whole thing is just so sad...I didn't previously know what it is to feel this way, but I did know she felt this way about it. And I thought she was wrong. And I probably always will. Even knowing how truly invaded it makes me feel. I get now how unsettling it was. I'm still angry, and I saw that girl for all of a month and had a conversation this weekend that was all of ten texts. Unnerving. And it would probably be even more so if even a fiber of me thought she could be right...

But the response to 2 trumps everything. I accepted that with E, even while holding 1 & 2. What I didn't do was walk away. If you hold claims 1 & 2, then you're going to get yourself into trouble, no matter how hard you try to honor response 2. You're going to wait for someone to realize claim 2 - at some level, no matter how hard you try to fight it, deny it, push it down, crush it, crush yourself. If we could just come to agreement about what you "really" want...some part of you will always hope. But we have to take people at their words. Even when we distrust them. Because it's practically true, regardless of what we think the objective reality is. I've always been more idealist than pragmatist, but I'm starting to see Rorty's appeal.

We have to take people at their words, no matter how doubtful. As much for our own sake as theirs. And when we can't, we have to get out of that situation. I'm realizing more every day how much my own crazy has developed from living in environments where trust was impossible. I tried to cut off my belief in 1 & 2 for years, but it just kept manifesting in cutting off my belief in my own mind, in distrusting myself. If we can't trust each other, we'll make each other crazy. No matter how good our intentions are, no matter how much good will we have for each other. Either I don't trust you or I don't trust me. Or, in this case, eventually I don't trust either.

What I said to E. at the end, the thing that was probably devastating to hear, given what was happening in her own life, and which certainly provoked an outraged response, was "I can't count on you anymore." And there's no doubt she could have leveled the same charge at me. We both needed someone to trust. We both were that person for each other in many ways, when family and boyfriends and girlfriends weren't, colleagues and employers. So many times she was the one person in the world who could make me feel sane. But once we couldn't trust anymore, once the ways we would always distrust each other, the things we knew about each other and ourselves that the other simply could not believe, were foregrounded, that was it. Crazy-making. Devastating.

I suspect most people think we should have walked away much sooner than we did. But despite all the crazy-making, I learned so much in those years. I wouldn't trade 'em for all the sanity in the world.

I hope that's a premise we'd agree on, though I suspect I can never know.

RIP Shane McCutcheon. Now the rest of you queers assimilate, already.

2009-03-15T14:16:00.011-04:00

For those who haven't seen the 6th season - I'm mostly looking at you, Al - this will reveal all, so if you still care about spoilers, don't read on.

You've been warned.

Now. Forget Schecter. Forget Schecter right now.

Months of Jenny eulogies, a season of death threats. And now we're all bitching that we don't know who killed her? These friends are left talking about her in interrogation rooms? Enough. Schecter is, as she constantly feared, ridiculously insignificant.

Like so many viewers, I never gave a damn about Jenny. Oh, some of the season 5 stunts were funny, but where was she when anyone needed her? Ever. In any season. Maybe Shane was right that she was a lost soul who needed looking after - that's certainly what Tim thought - but even before the final season crazy, she was nobody's friend.

Jenny is notably absent from the most inspired moments of friendship in the series. My top three:
3. Pot brownie party w/Dawn Denbo crash. The sheer joy of Tina and Shane dancing on tabletops while Bette calls the cops. Where's Jenny? In the closet, fucking a moron.
2. Lara recognizance. Alice heading up the demented mission, complete with gratutious TiBette make-out, bathroom conference, electronic communication, baffled and mortified Dana, and the conclusion that Lara passing on Shane proves her straight. Where's Jenny? Oh God, don't make me go back and look to be sure. She's looking at either Marina or Tim in a way we're supposed to find meaningful, I have no doubt.
1. 17 Reasons Sign Theft. Alice: "This is crazy." Shane: "Yeah, but it's romantic." And Alice throws pod-Shane through a window while calling her "Fatty." Where's Jenny? Don't know, don't care.

Who's always there? Shane...and Bette. Which brings me to the topic at hand.

OK, one last Jenny bitch - plenty of people have noted that Shane's season five finale tryst with Niki was the most fundamentally out of character thing that Shane ever did. When Alice says, in the series finale, that Shane has never been honor-bound when it came to sexual fidelity, she has to specify because we all know that Shane honors one thing and one thing only: friendship. It's why she let that heroin-junkie boy move in with her in season one - and the same reason she supported her roommates kicking him out. It's why she doesn't question Jenny & Max's sudden arrival in LA while Carmen is annoyed to have their place invaded by these rubes. It's why she lets Helena be the awful receptionist at Wax, why she faces mauling to help Bette get Jodi's sign, and why she's spending the night at Alice's in the season finale, no matter how much shit Jenny will be likely to give her for it. So with regard to Jenny, I say, if Shane was willing to wrong her, we should all take this not as a fault in Shane, but as a sign that Jenny may be so low as to be undeserving of honor in her friendship.

I know you won't all follow me there. And the Niki affair was character assassination, I know. It's not that I hated Jenny. Jenny was not the girl I loved to hate. I saw no point in Jenny. I still don't. We certainly didn't need her to be our avatar in this strange world of dykedom. We had our loveable, awkward, badly-in-need of coaching Dana for that.

Oh, Dana. I better move on.

At any rate, the one attempt at a structuring gesture we get in the finale is a scene that parallels the pilot, in which Shane is returning home in the early morning and chats briefly with TiBette, who've been up all night having coupled monogomous sex in a house.

(Screen shots taken from AfterEllen.com)

Notice that in 2009, everyone has a lot more clothes on?

This is the opposition at the heart of the show. Shane is our butch (yes, I know, Shane's not as butch as butch can be - and the Weezie thing, sheesh - but bear with me) on the prowl, our flaneur, our player. Bette and Tina are our baby-raisin' domestic couple.

And in the end, they win.

In the end, the greatest fear is that Bette will undermine the family by acting like...Shane. The footage of Bette and Kelly on Jenny's magic iPhone is exactly what Jenny saw when she encountered Shane and Niki at the end of season five. In the unlikely event that someone did kill Jenny, all the visual cues say it was Bette - to protect her family.

At the beginning of season 6, TiBette throw homeless Shane out of their place because her predicament hits at the heart of their past weakness. And then they send Shane trotting over to Alice's apartment of contrivedness where she and her not-yet-Mama T are having a fight about fidelity. No room for Shane here. Only a single straight woman, not coincidentally of a different race and generation, can take her in. Thank God for Mammy Kit. So much for friendship. Couplehood trumps.

Shane wanders home in the early morning of the series finale, having spent the night taking care of Alice. No more wild and crazy sex in Sheri Jaffe's walk-in closet for you, mister. No more bridesmaids. No more young girls. Certainly no girl like Molly who doesn't need sexual fidelity to love you. No, we can't explore any of the non-traditional relationship configurations that gay men (and dykes, too) have come up with. We're women, goddammit. We nest. We reproduce.

Because she doesn't, Shane is ruthlessly punished. Her picture is plastered all over town first by Etheridge's girlfriend and then by corporate greed. All of East LA (aka the de la Pica Morales family) wants her dead. She endures insult and degradation at the hands of Rosanna Arquette. Her supposed rival, Papi, is a cartoon character. She is saddled with an orphan only to have him taken away from her. And then the final insult, the one that was lurking there all along in the next room - Jenny. She's forced to settle down with a monster. That'll teach you to leave Carmen at the altar.

The price you pay for straying from the norm. Be warned, little lesbos. If you want happiness, you better read up on attachment parenting and find yourself a contractor.

Same sex, different city, indeed. Maybe TiBette can make playdates with Carrie & Big.

A Lotta Nerve

2009-03-14T20:36:00.003-04:00

I fall quiet near the end of my therapy session on Tuesday. Despite the profound way my cold took control of my body this week - or maybe because of it, my issues being what they are - it's been a productive session. I'd come away from the last session with a lot of insights and had two weeks to start sorting them out, give them some kind of substance in my actions. We'd talked that over, added to it, "done good work" as a shrink might say.

"What are you feeling right now?" asks Craig.

I start to respond, "Well, I'm thinking about how I can--"

"Not thinking. How are you feeling? Angry, sad, happy, fearful?"

I don't know if I visibly grimaced. I instinctively hate that opposition of thought and emotion. But he's right. I don't pay attention to my emotional world until it's out of control, that's part of why I'm here, so I think about it.

"Nervous?" I offer, hesitantly, fearing he's not gonna think that's an emotion, either.

"Nervous?" he says. And I start trying to fill it in, talk about what I'm nervous about, find myself equating nervous with fearful.

But nervous isn't fearful.

Most of my adult life I've been anxious. Nervous is not anxious, either.

Angst is an onomotopoetic word for me. That not quite not pronounced g, stuck in the throat - gutteral, gagging. An inability to breathe. Angst is awful when you have it. And then you get rid of it - or, well, some of it - and you suddenly realize how much worse it was than you even knew. I could have been having so much more oxygen to the brain, to the heart, all this time. This week I have one of the worst chest colds I've ever had, but spiritually speaking, I'm breathing amazingly well.

(Chest colds are what I do now. Along with the thought/emotion binary, I hate the mind/body binary. It seems whenever a major shift in my approach to life happens, there is an attendant shift in my default illness. In elementary school, problems in leg joints. In junior high & high school, the hyperactive vasovagal reflex. In college, chronic ear infections. In grad school, lower GI problems that culminated in the removal of my gallbladder. Then the slipped disk took out my lower back. Feel free to fill-in the metaphors; they're obvious enough. It is nice, now, to be building strength in my lungs.)

But anyway, I'm nervous.

The first kinetic memory I have of nervousness is from when I was fourteen. (I remember angst before that. You don't spend the first decade of adulthood having an emotion that doesn't have roots in your childhood.) I always thought teeth chattering was a cartoon device, didn't think it was something human bodies actually did. But near the end of my freshman year of high school, I was sitting in a hotel meeting room at an awards banquet for FBLA state. As it dawned on me and my cohorts that I was probably winning and qualifying for the national competition, my teeth started chattering.

I don't know why that emotion bubbled up so palpably in that moment. I was never that into FBLA, hadn't worked hard at all for that award. Nervous. I was hopeful for the award, for the trip to D.C. I was fearful that I was wrong about my pending win, that I'd somehow embarass myself on the way to collect the trophy.

Hopeful and fearful at once. That's nervous.

But in Craig's office, I disavowed the hope. Why?

Friends direct me to a secret blog by a girl I've never managed to get to know well - both of us, I suspect, I venture, with those hard gs stuck in our throats. She writes of hope. She writes of hope a lot. She has always written more than most.

Maggie - she who has always owned her hard gs because how could she avoid it with a name like that - writes to tell me she is writing again, after quite some time. She is writing.

Writing is always about hope. It posits a future. One changed by your voice. There is fear in that for me. Maybe there always is. Good writing, they tell us, takes risks.

I realize, a few days after my session with Craig, that the first time I didn't write something I was "supposed" to write was when I was eleven. The details are not so important, but I see very clearly that I wanted my parents to notice the absence of my voice. I swallowed hard gs while I waited for it to happen. The grade card came and went. My mom attributed it to the wrong cause; my dad didn't seem to know. Since then, I have wanted the absence of my voice to be noted by many people.

Craig said, in what seemed at the time a totally unrelated part of the conversation, "What would Liz say she felt when you suddenly dropped out of school?"

"I have no idea. I have no idea. I still don't understand how she couldn't have seen it coming."

No point in detailing all the signs that were there for her to notice. She didn't. And it wasn't her job to.

I'm reading about Ethic of Care philosophy this week. It's hard, having written so much about how love manifests as attention, to now notice cracks in this conception of love. How hard it is to make that attention really and truly responsive to the other, and not to the other you want to see - especially since, and helpfully so with respect to the history of philosophy, Care Ethics recognizes that our ethical responsibilities to each other are really very rarely responsibilities between equals in the sense that classical moral theory has wanted to posit...and it is hard, to the extent that I still buy that conception of love, to see how much it was missing from those I wanted to love the most.

I'm nervous, now, the more clearly I see that it's up to me to notice from here on out.

I'm writing. Slowly. So slowly it is imperceptible, right now, to the other humans with whom I have made a covenant to do this writing for the next three years. In the past, I would have forced myself to write for them, if I thought that would earn me their love. Especially early on. But if I saw that my writing did not earn me love - or respect, or whathaveyou - there would be no need to continue. Likewise, though, if it could not earn me more love. (I realize that I have struggled to start writing in this program for the same reason that I struggled to write my senior research "for" Marlene or to re-write the Westerns paper "for" Goldblatt. I already had their respect and regard - in some cases by virtue of being me, by virtue of past work, or, most stunningly, most astoundingly, most importantly, by virtue of being human.) Yep, I have written the most over the years "for" - wait, no quotes this time, since they often in one way or another acknoweldged the contract - for those people to whom I had something to prove who still seemed capable of receiving the proof. And if I stopped writing for them, it was only so they could notice. I can't think of a nice neat term for such folks, but I'm pretty sure it has a hard g in it.

I miss my cohortmates. Feel myself writing back toward them, in my way, in my way, but have needed this distance to figure out how I must write now. How to write for me now. How to write with a hope that is not the hope to be loved. That makes me nervous. Hopeful. Fearful. But slightly tipped toward hope tonight.

Good Morning.

2009-03-13T07:18:00.002-04:00

Karen Reider's blog this morning just reminds me how good it is to be alive. Maybe it will you, too: http://karenreiderbeingrtv.blogspot.com/2009/03/songs.html

Take care, my friends.

Garafalo on Chasing Amy

2009-03-12T13:32:00.002-04:00

among other things.

I saw this when it first aired in 1997, and it's a little frightening to me how many times in a given week I find myself mentally quoting something out of just the first six minutes of this clip:

"baby-voiced lesbian"
"yes, i can see how you'd make that mistake"
"when asked, that's my favorite gay."
"huge drag queens with feather boas...coming out of their asses."
"that will never happen to me"
"you're just gonna have to take me home..."
"be aloof!"
"these people have sex!"
"i mean, we are really pushing the envelope here"
"and i'm worried because i have matronly upper arms...never the twain shall meet...know about life and love...and losing."

Miscellany from My Meandering Mind on the Ride Home

2009-03-05T21:01:00.004-05:00

"I'm just a little girl-boi, tryin' to make my way in a man's world."
-Animal, "Best Cock on the Block"

I have mad, mad crushes on both Dean Spade and Rachel Maddow right now. Like, I totally want pin-ups. (If you don't know, oh dearies, please go find out.) I think this is a to-do-or-to-be issue. I think it's to be, but hey, why not both? It occurs to me that if at some point my writing career allows me to be on a panel with the two of them, I could die right there.

I don't know how either of them feel about being identified as butch, but (and in no way meaning to elide Spade's trans identity, since I don't think butch and transman are mutually exclusive by any stretch) that's how I read them. The L Word ends on Sunday, and as much as the last season has sucked, and as much as the portryals of lesbians of color and butches have been cardboard - and the trans narrative has just gone completely off the charts into all kinds of offensive, I can't help but note that representation matters. I move through the world a little lighter because Rachel Maddow is out there, showing Martha Stewart how to make an obscure 50s playboy style cocktail. And I think we all should.

Top Five Break-Up Albums
1. The Globe Sessions - Sheryl Crow

It starts with "My Favorite Mistake" and ends with "Crash and Burn." In between there's a Dylan cover. Should I go on?

2. Educated Guess - Ani DiFranco

It would be number one, except it leaves you wanting to die.

3. But Seriously... - Phil Collins (Although I do really think Genesis' "In Too Deep" should be moved to this album to make it complete.)

I don't argue that Collins is a great artist, but this is the first album that taught me sadness had a sweetness about it.

4. The Emancipation of Mimi - Mariah Carey

Pop I-don't-need-you attitude alternates with schmaltzy I-miss-yous. Yeah, we're all too sophisticated to feel like that, right?

5. ?

I'm undecided, looking for nominees. Thinking about Etheridge's Breakdown, but there's something too lush about it for me. Break-up albums should be raw. (Even Mimi is raw in its anger & newfound spirit of liberation, despite its slick production.)

Suggestions? Whaddya think? Best Break-Up Album?

The Triangle

2009-03-01T10:45:00.002-05:00

It’s one thing to acknowledge that one of the most important friendships of your life was deeply co-dependent. Or even to acknowledge that you learned those habits from your relationship with your parents. That’s the kind of thing that sends you to a therapist saying something like, “Well, I don’t want to find myself doing that again.”

It’s another thing to realize that the structure of all of your relationships tends toward co-dependency.

I’m explaining a very minor incident to my therapist, Craig, in which I didn’t express my true needs to someone who (unlike some of the folk I easily recognize as being part of this cycle) probably would have respected my needs without question or justification. “It just seemed like what I should do, what a good person would do. But then I felt like a sucker, except I knew I’d suckered myself, not taking care of myself.” Pressed on whether I was actually being manipulated and admitting that I was not, I made all the choices that led to my needs being unmet, I end up saying something like, “Well, my mom would have thought I was being taken advantage of. Whether it was my fault or someone else’s.”

Craig refers back to an example in the audiobook he’d given me as homework a couple weeks earlier in which a woman is constantly battling with her in-laws about their failure to respect her husband/their son. The husband lets her do all his anger toward them for him, which allows him to get his emotions expressed vicariously (since they gotta come out somehow) but lets him maintain the illusion of having no strife between them. Most of the time he ends up being their defender. They’re caught in a triangle.

Huh. You don’t say.

I acknowledge this was happening to me in the situation I described, letting my not-even-present-or-aware-of-the-situation mother “feel” my discomfort at not honoring my needs so that I could go right ahead and ignore them for the sake of being the “selfless” (i.e. self-abnegating) friend who doesn’t make a fuss. Our conversation moves away from this into a narrative of my relationship with Mary; the therapist is way more interested in this conversation than I am, but I trust him enough at this point to go along. My capacity for pattern recognition has always made me a good literary critic, and so as I’m listening to myself tell Mary stories, I hear the triangle popping up here and there. Craig takes copious notes in all our sessions, and I’m sure he’s drawing circles and connecting lines on this night all over the place.

I say things like, “It drove Liz crazy when Mary…”
Or, “Yeah, Al didn’t really think Mary and I should…”
Or, “Mom thought everything was OK until…”

During the whole Mary time – October 2003 to March 2006 – my description of my emotions is pretty much always mediated through someone else.

Liz and I had a conversation a few years ago about the way we discussed her boyfriends. (I suppose most people thought, or think, that I had a vested interest in those relationships not working out, but the truth is that it was only during the first six months of those six years that I thought Liz and I could be a viable couple. We may have operated like one at times, but we weren’t, and I was aware of that reality as anyone could be. I really did want each one of her boys to be the one that made her happy, not least—and not healthily—because I thought that would make me happy.) Somehow she always ended up defending them against my concerns. I noted that she never seemed to remember the negative things she told me until I repeated them back to her later. “It’s like you use my memory as a repository for all the bad things they do, so that you can forget and go off and have fun with them, knowing I’ll remember when something happens to upset you.”

She said she didn’t want to do that anymore. But in the final days of our friendship, it constantly felt like it was me against the rest of her world. In our last couple phone conversations, she told me about things that Jon or TJ or her family members did, and, especially after Christmas, I’d try to bite my tongue, wondering if she was just trying to get a rise out of me so that she could smack me down for caring about things that were none of my business. I was so tired of being the one she defended against. I wanted to be defended, too. Maybe she was defending me, in some other triangle on the other side of town. I needed so much to hear myself valued at least as much as the people whose outrageous mistreatment of her was so obvious to me (read: her, when she told me). I was so tired of being the enemy. I still am. Tired. (And apparently, the enemy.)

Liz thought that the re-introduction of Al into my life was a factor in the strife, because Al “disapproved” of her. I guess she couldn’t bear to have the needs, the dissatisfaction come from me directly. Better to cast it out to the far corner of the triangle.

But this post is not about me and Liz.

When discussing the “why is that everyone else but you can see when you’re on a crash course trajectory?” phenomenon, I tend to refer to Arendt’s description in The Human Condition of the Greek daimon who hides out behind you, so that you can’t possibly look at your true self, only others can do that for you. (For Arendt, this is part of the reason the public sphere is so crucial.) But what if everyone else can see it because you told ‘em? What if maybe they don’t even see it, you just think they do? Maybe the truth is that you do see it, better than anyone. You just don’t want to.

I knew Mary was not right for me. I’m pretty sure Liz knew that TJ was a shitty friend. Al already knows a couple things I’ve been telling her lately, by way of “having her back,” or rather, having her fears for her. I knew, long before I ever met Liz or Mary or Al, that things aren’t always healthy between me and my mom. And, even though I was a tiny, tiny kid when this triangle started – my first, I’m pretty sure – I knew long before my mom took up the banner, that my father was an exceptionally crappy parent. It’s just really hard to face up to the fact that you have to defend yourself against someone who claims to love you. So much easier to let someone else who loves you do it instead. Then you get to keep 'em both. But God, it’s so bad for all of you. For all of you.

Liz couldn’t bear to lose them, so she lost me. I couldn’t bear to lose Mary, so I lost Al. We should have never been in those positions.

So what I’m trying to do now is stop building triangles. If you don’t honor my needs, that’s between me and you. Nobody else. I'm gonna try to not even tell other people about it unless I'm absolutely sure I'm not using them to do my emotional work for me. And it’s my job to make sure the dishonoring stops, one way or another.

Because the day of my break-up with Mary coincided with plans to write with Liz, everyone to whom I tell the story, including myself sometimes, can’t help but oversimplify it to me choosing Liz over Mary. (Triangles are pervasive in all my stories.) But when asked when I started to grow up, to move out of the depths, I always cite that day and what I know was the real break-up moment, the moment it all clicked together in my head, and I knew the relationship had to end, and Liz was nowhere near my thoughts: I stood on the landing and asked Mary point blank, “So you’d rather I was working at a job that makes me miserable than doing something I love and that is important to me?” And she was so caught up in the heat of the argument that she said, “Yes!”

That was it. My needs didn’t matter. Explicitly. Time to go.

In a much less black and white, much more tragic for all concerned way, that’s the same thing that happened with Liz. That’s when it was time to go, anyway. I’m culpable for burying my needs for so many years and then asking that they be met at the worst possible time. But when your needs don’t matter, it’s always time to go.

I should have been studying medicine all this time.

2009-02-24T21:11:00.000-05:00

You know how if you take pain medicine for a broken ankle but don't actually treat the bone you could end up with permanent nerve damage?

That's what I've been doing-been taught to do-with my emotional pain for years.

I watch House only occasionally, but on last night's episode he foreshadowed my post-therapy, post-box of Red Vines revelation: he didn't know who he was without pain.

So, the sobering up-metaphorically for those who worry-continues.

Why I Am So Good at Philosophy

2009-02-23T08:35:00.003-05:00

(It's a Nietzsche reference, not just arrogance. But bravado, perhaps. That's very Nietzschean. Anyhoo...)

I am so good at philosophy (when I get it done) because I studied literature first.

Philosophy classes teach you first and foremost to read against the grain and to look for holes in the argument.

Literature classes teach you first and foremost to read for authorial intent and for tropes that create unified meaning (to look for wholes of the artwork, I might say if I were writing a trite critical thinking textbook that needed a forced parallelism).

Literature students can seem a bit dumb in philosophy class if they are simply nodding along with the author, but philosophy students can seem like they didn't even read the text in the first place when they come in looking for a slip up at the outset. They seem to willfully misunderstand in order to create a position of superiority. You can't critique a position you don't understand. If you do, you're Sean Hannity. And no one wants to be that guy.

Gerald Graff writes in Clueless in Academe about teaching students to do the second move, seeing this as authorizing them in a way that the (to use Friere's term) "banking model of education" disauthorizes them. Donald Hall responded to him with respect to educators working in territory where students are part of the dominant culture but the educator is not (or is attempting to speak for those who are not), such as queer and women's studies. He argues that in such classes authorizing the students in the way Graff proposes does more harm than good. I say, we can do both if we train 'em like I was trained. And they'll have way more authority from which to speak when they do move to critique.

What critical thinking courses don't do enough is teach this: you have to read with the grain before you read against the grain.

Deborah Tannen writes about this more artfully in most of her books; Carl Rogers' method is the best way I've found of doing the first step without compromising rigor. At any rate, I find this is what separates the great work from the passable, both as a teacher and as a reader of professional scholarship. And I thank my lucky stars that the order of my training made me naturally inclined to work in this way.

Nietzsche, who began as a philologist, might be similarly grateful.

(OK, that last bit was a little bit arrogant.)

Teaching, Studenting

2009-02-22T22:19:00.002-05:00

I've had good teachers and bad teachers.

I've had smart teachers and dumb teachers.

I've had kind teachers and mean teachers.

They all think I'm smart. Every teacher, no matter how bad our relationship was, has called me smart.

I haven't needed a teacher to tell me I was smart since I was 18, since, I remember vividly, my first written assignment for philosophy class. Once I knew I could hold my own in that club, I knew I was smart enough for whatever came along.

But the best teachers?

The hands-down best teachers?

They're the ones who've told me I'm not crazy. That's the authorization I've needed most as a scholar. As a person.

This, I think, is what bell hooks means about the power of theory for healing - on the individual level, at least. And well, on the cultural level, too. We're not crazy. The world is always trying to tell us differently. In my case, internalized voices in my head, from family and loves and the culture...but every now and then, someone says hey, it's not you. It's them.

I mean, I am a little crazy. But, you know, not usually in the ways other people think.

It's nice to be working - or, well, trying to work - in an institution where they are the norm.

Wishing I had time to read Rollo May's The Meaning of Anxiety this week, but glad I get the jist already...with a little help from the good'uns.

I'm off to try to work. On my own terms. Novel.

Take care, all.

Darkness and Light

2009-02-19T00:02:00.004-05:00

I'm in the dark place right now. I'm fighting my way out of it. I moved some in the past couple days - that inch a year movement from (of all places) an Ayn Rand quote Liz sent me in 2003, when I was quite deep in the dark place. I kept a printout of that e-mail in my wallet for years, until it disintegrated...by then, it was in me. Maybe you can't move much, but move as much as you can...Liz taught me that. I hope she's living it these days, too. Every inch matters. I hope she's giving herself credit for them all. Me, I try. I tend to move more in a reckless rubberband motion, lots of backsliding...but right now, plodding inches and trying not to be mad at myself for not leaping...anyway, I'm gaining momentum.

I've written before about how Katie Reider's death shook me. Though you'll see a link to her blog on the left, I haven't written about how Karen Reider's strength has inspired me. Please check out her video blogs here: http://vimeo.com/3088708.

What I find most amazing is that she doesn't seem so much to have inched out of the dark place as tried to fill her dark places with light. I hope I can learn that. I really want to learn that.

Too Funny.

2009-02-18T23:22:00.002-05:00

Stick with it. At least until, "I know it's hard out there...."

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/2326/brooke-shields-in-playground-tales-from-brooke-shields

Thank God. It's Not Just Me.

2009-02-16T13:51:00.002-05:00

That blog-that-links-to-really-old-blogs I've been meaning to get to is partly about my (no other word for it) obsession with Guiding Light's Otalia storyline. (Oh yeah, I'm still on that.) Here's someone else raving about it for a change(although she gets a little of the backstory wrong.): http://unicorn23.livejournal.com/133914.html.

They really are pulling out the classic soap opera love story stops at this point, complete with the cliffhanger question hanging in the air.

"What are we?" *squeaks* They better damn well get airtime tomorrow as well.

Watch This

2009-02-15T23:04:00.000-05:00

If the stat she gives at 2:55 doesn't make your head explode, you are an alien to me.

Stupid Pet Peeve #15A

2009-02-12T17:09:00.003-05:00

The use of pronouns without antecedents to refer to one's significant other.

Example:

Co-worker 1: Do you have any plans for Valentine's Day?
Co-worker 2: I don't know how late he has to work.

Ugh. Pass the candy hearts and leave me be.

Audacity

2009-02-10T20:59:00.003-05:00

I didn't get a chance to finish the post mentioned earlier today, but it's a-comin'. Meanwhile, I ran across this quote, which knocked my socks off:

"[Love] is the skillful audacity required to share an inner life"- Gertrude Stein

Whaddya think? Does Gertie know what she's talking about?

Time Travel

2009-02-10T08:30:00.004-05:00

In Community: The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block quotes Werner Erhard:

I suggest that you consider making it clear that it is the future that one lives into that shapes one's being and action in the present. And, the reason that it appears that it is the past that shapes one's being and action in the present is that for most people the past lives in (shapes) their view of the future.
...it's only by completing the past (being complete with the past) such that it no longer shapes one's being and action in the present that there is room to create a new future (one not shaped by the past--a future that wasn't going to happen anyhow). (16)

I started this blog because I needed a clear break from the self who wrote at the old site. I needed to become into the future. I needed to focus on possibility instead of regret.

Most of all, I really needed to not have Liz in my audience. She could find this blog if she wanted to, much more easily than she could have the old one, actually, but it wasn't about hiding from her as much as it was not having (my version of) her judgment in my head as I wrote. It was about deciding that what was messed up about that friendship should be in the past.

That's not really getting complete with your past, even if it was an instinctual gesture toward letting the future shape my life. Draw a line. Start over. Start now.

(The most frustrating thing about my first few weeks with my new therapist has been giving a history of my life, reliving the past when I am ready to live the future. And I do think this is on principle something to be on guard for in therapy. To continue my previous directed study analogy, I've never been interested in historical minutiae, only what a historical period can tell us about how to better live today - or how to undo the messes we've gotten ourselves into. If that doesn't materialize soon, I'll therapist shop again.)

I find myself thinking more lately, though, of posts I wrote on the old blog. Things I got right. Things I'm still thinking of. Questions I still have. I think I'm moving toward a slightly more integrated self. Time to try a little harder to become "complete with the past."

To that end, I'll be putting up some posts from the old site over here so that I can link to them & discuss as necessary, starting with a post I plan to write later today. I'll be back dating them, so you'll notice posts appearing in the past. I blogged at dollarfifty for about two years, but only a smattering make the jump into the future with me. The rest are in the past, and I'm fine with leaving them there.

Just when you thought it was safe to shop somewhere skeevy.

2009-01-29T08:14:00.001-05:00

I remember an argument a few years ago between friends who were a couple. One member, repulsed by the aesthetic of American Apparel's ad campaigns and stores was expressing her adamant dislike when the other member busted out information about their fair trade practices, including the fact that some of Ani's t-shirts were, in terms of manufacture, American Apparel. That seemed a pretty convincing argument, and so the matter seemed settled.

Turns out the first friend was right: you can't separate form from content. Objectification of women in one form is always tied to objectification in the most profound ways.

Luckily, I never shopped there anyway. They don't come anywhere near my size. Coincidence?

Timing - Personal, Cultural

2009-01-21T16:30:00.005-05:00

So, I took a sick day today. I was sleepless last night, with a headache & just a little bit of a fever, though in truth, I think it was a no-sleep-fever. Anyway, I needed to make up the sleep and cool my jets a bit.

Despite yesterday's joyous inauguration, I was considerably thrown by my evening appointment with my new therapist. So far, I like him - or at least, I'm impressed by his insight. I'm a self-diagnoser, by nature, usually belatedly, and had a strong sense of what I needed to work on when I got there, but he let it unfold the way I wanted it to, asking the right questions, and - like any good teacher, in my opinion (I think of therapy as a directed study on my own psyche and behavior) - left me with some tough and important questions to ponder on my way out the door. So, yeah, just like the first time I read Kierkegaard, I was up most of the night, head pounding, going, "What the-?"

Once I started milling about the house this afternoon, tidying up and chilling out from the hard thinkin' (In honor of the outgoing administration, I wasn't gonna do too much today...), I flipped on the soaps.

I grew up on soaps. People from all over the political spectrum trash soaps for many reasons, but you gotta admit they're interesting & often complex. I was on a panel at PCA last March that included a great paper on how Passions contains structures that encourage scathing critiques of traditional gender roles, heterosexual romance plots, and especially female passivity. In David Herman's anthology Narratologies, Robyn Warhol does a very smart little jig about As the World Turns to illustrate how narrative analysis can inform feminist work (and vice versa). And of course, soaps can be defended in much the same way Romance and Sensation novels have been defended as objects worthy of study.

Whatever. I grew up on them. I know the family trees of all characters on the CBS soaps. (This is important for predicting the not infrequent almost-incest plot twist.) I catch about three episodes a year (a few more of Y&R, because of Mom, not so much by choice) and, as soon as I orient the new actors to the family structure, it's like I never left. It's pure indulgence for me.

But much to my surprise, my all-time favorite, Guiding Light, opened with a girl-on-girl kiss today.

I don't have a reasonable sample to work from (me and Al, ok, so far it's just me and Al), but I suspect that a lot of dykes have affection for GL. Part of that is just sheer volume - GL is the longest running soap in history, having started on the radio, so plenty of us in many generations have been in its audience. But also, the predominant ethic in the world of GL is that the poorer you are, the more moral you are, and this of course appeals to disenfranchised groups in a lot of ways. (ATWT shares this ethic, while Y&R and B&B subscribe to the higher age=higher moral standards formula; there are constant exceptions, of course, but this is the overall ethos.) Most of all, GL has revelled (at times) in tough women, first in my heart being the fabulous (currently written off screen due to a dispute with the long-time actor) Harley Davidson Cooper. Yep, her dad named her after a bike. That's pretty dykey.

But today it was Olivia Spencer and Natalia Rivera. I had caught a whiff of this story line brewing when I caught an episode right before New Year's which ended in Olivia, Natalia and Olivia's daughter Emma (who are living together as a result of financial convenience and connection through a dead male character) watching the countdown clearly as a family, but I figured they were going to go in for a more generic "we aren't queer, but we are a nontraditional family" lesson - the last couple years, GL's been pretty preachy.

Apparently, fans are all over this already & it's gotten a mention on AfterEllen.com, with lots of fears that it's a ratings stunt for daytime's most poorly rated soap. (*Sigh* I hope instead they're going in for good writing because they've got nothing to lose, but that's probably naive of me.) But the story's been brewing for a long time, at least since last May according to one commenter on the Otalia (yeah, that's what they're calling them) youtube page. Today's episode is resolved with the two clearly NOT getting together, Natalia starting a new straight relationship, but with reason to believe that Olivia is deeply conflicted about this, and it left lots of room for Olivia to have new realizations about her sexual identity.

Olivia as a character has - even for a soap opera woman - had shitty relationships with men, almost always about either her or the guy trying to manipulate financial/workplace/political power, usually both of them. She's a survivor of sexual violence (a fact that was revealed more to explain the mysterious lineage of a younger female character rather than to explore the subject thoughtfully). She's a tough, sassy broad, who's pretty deeply flawed and often quite angry, but since Emma's birth, reuniting with Ava, the daughter she gave up after the rape, and especially since her heart transplant (a cloying device which GL has used more than once), seems to be moving toward some kind of redemption. And (like a lot of GL women, another reason it has dyke appeal) is pretty hot but not in a totally conventional way. (GL's Springfield looks nothing like the L Word's LA) So, there you have both an argument for her being the worst character to have a crisis of sexual identity and an argument for her being the best character to have a crisis of sexual identity...she fits into our world, but also fits into their stereotypes in many ways. So far, what I've seen suggests the writers are going for authenticity. Not to mention the occasional campy in-joke, like when Olivia, commenting on Emma's coloring project for the New Year, says she wants to dream "big purple dreams." Hello, Lavender Menace!

Here's the thing, though, for me. It seems like there are stories all over the place of women coming out - or at least, for shows like Grey's Anatomy who punk out, seriously rethinking their sexuality - in adulthood, in their thirties or later. There's Cybil Shepard's L Word character, of course, and Grey's, and now GL. Culturally, I think this is wonderful, not only because I'm glad to see women for whom this experience is their reality represented, but also because I hope it will lead to a more complex public discussion and understanding about sexuality in the longterm. Coupled with increasing (though also still really wooden more often than not) representation of transpeople, this kind of thing can help us get beyond the choice/not a choice inanity that not only ignores a lot of people's (not everyone's, sure) lived experience, but also puts ridiculous limits on the possibilities for thinking about civil rights.

But personally. Well. I was up all night thinking through patterns in my friendships and relationships, the most important of which were with straight-identified women. What I don't need right now, as I try to break cycles that are bad for everyone involved, is the television telling me that, hey, if I just wait a few more years, one or more of them might figure their shit out and give me a holla. That is not something I need to be waiting for.

I'm choosing to believe that the universe has created this convergence for a reason. On the one hand, to remind me that reality, fantasy, and possibility have very fuzzy lines between them. (I mean, wasn't it radical of 24 to cast a black president just a couple years ago?) On the other, to remember that what's healthy for me might require that I (at least until evidence tips the scales) take a Sharpie to those lines now and then.

It's that third category, possibility. That's the one that gets me every time. Who wants to shut that down?

More Wow.

2009-01-16T18:05:00.003-05:00

Still buggin' out on Peter Block, reading part of his latest book, Community, via the amazon.com preview. More on this book, especially my "Wait, he's that guy?" moment, soon. Just wanted to lay a couple quotes on you, from the opening pages:

"Accountability grows out of the act of cocreation."
"As soon as you have professionalized care, you have produced an oxymoron."

Here's the most succinct way I can think of to tell you how cool I think he is - and actually, I think I can say this of all invited speakers at the residency - these are the authors I want Obama & his team to be reading.

Public Television is so gay.

2009-01-16T06:45:00.003-05:00

Like all good cornfed kids my age, I grew up on Sesame Street. And like all good snickering teenagers my age, I figured out Bert & Ernie were gay before I figured out I was. Recently, there was a cute article in The Journal of Popular Culture subtitled "The Muppets Made Me Gay" and while I appreciated the reading, it didn't strike me as earth-shaking. (I'm Scooter according to the MySpace "Which Muppet are You?" quiz. *Sigh* Too apt to deny it.)

I don't have an interesting point to make, really. Mostly I just wanted to post a video of Easy Reader from the Electric Company, which was my true favorite, and which led me to adore Laugh-In reruns during my later childhood...I know Laugh-In is cited by Sesame Street creators as an inspiration, but it seems more direct on this show, full of freaks and geeks, just like I like 'em...also, after the video, is it any wonder I associate reading and sex so thoroughly?

Why Obama should Keep His Blackberry...

2009-01-15T16:58:00.002-05:00

From The San Francisco Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/11/EDUD156N5M.DTL

Or get the super-James-Bond version:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10141398-38.html

It is becoming an iconic part of his image, as evidenced in this slideshow from the new White House photographer, Pete Souza:
http://www.npr.org/multimedia/2009/01/souza_obama/index.html

Why the obsession in the press with this aspect of O? Any ideas?

Deepening the Marriage Critique

2009-01-09T07:36:00.000-05:00

As many of you know, when I get going on my conviction that the queer (wait--AHEM--GLBT, except not so much the T, right, HRC?) movement is misguided in its pursuit of marriage as a civil right, I usually go right to the economic argument.

In the process, if you catch me on a particularly enthusiastic day on which I start tracing the historical uses to which marriage has been put, you're likely to hear me talk about miscegenation laws as one example of how the institution has been used to exclude and to consolidate property, but, except in that (still powerful) legacy, I don't usually think hard about how race is operant in the contemporary discussion.

Enter this post from The Black Scientist (via Feministe), which you must read.

It occurs to me that nearly every image of civil union ceremonies, etc I've seen in the mainstream press has been of a(n apparently) white couple. And within queer "lifestyle" rags, I've only seen a few "wedding" pictures which included people of color, usually sent in by readers not as part of the editorial content. In fact, I think cartoon characters Clarice and Toni of Dykes to Watch Out For are the only mixed race couple I've seen in all the portrayals of fake-matrimonial bliss out there.

That's staggering, not least because I'd barely noticed it before.

Wow.

2009-01-08T17:41:00.003-05:00

So, as much as I identify with Sports Night character Jeremy Goodwin (see previous post especially, but also in his awkwardness, his arrogance, his anxiety and his taste in women), that video doesn't begin to capture the overall sense of excitement and wonder of this process. The coming home-ness, yes. But the wow, the places we can go from here-ness is what I'm feeling this afternoon. Rob Bresny sometimes uses the phrase "Cosmic Wow" as a synonym for God. I don't know about God, but I am definitely feeling a cosmic wow.

A big part of that coming to the fore was our afternoon workshop with Peter Block, and even though I don't have a lot of time, I had to sign on just long enough to tell you all that you need to know about him and his approaches. Here's the website: asmallgroup.net

If you click on the "about" section, you can get the theory, but the practice is the powerful part - well, the alignment, the practicing in a way that supports a different theory of the world than we encounter in most spaces, so look around more, eh?

Love to all.

Short Version of How the Residency is Going

2009-01-08T08:36:00.002-05:00

What keeps coming to mind is the exchange between Jeremy and Issac from end of this (here truncated) episode of Sports Night, particularly Isaac's line, "a lot of the time, [not fitting in] is how [qualified people] end up working here." Jump to 3:30 if you don't want/need the backstory.

Learning.

2009-01-04T09:15:00.002-05:00

I awoke with a start this morning. I can recall flashes of the earlier parts of my dream, but the scene that woke me was me, yelling into a phone (one with a cord, perhaps the one from my current hotel room, perhaps one from my childhood) at (somehow) the 2 voice mail systems of my father's oldest and middle sisters, "Where's Your Compassion???!!"

It was totally absurd. I haven't seen my aunts since I was eighteen and rarely think of them, though Mom had reported on the oldest's Christmas newsletter a couple weeks ago. I don't hold them accountable for my father's failures as a parent (though I know if I had a sibling I'd be a different kind of avunculate), so I don't think there's any deep emotion coming to the surface with respect to them.

I think, in fact, the point was the absurdity. You can't scream someone into compassion. That impatience I wrote of forgets this. I am still working on it.

This is my latest patience lesson.

I was frustrated with my fellow students yesterday, feeling dismissive, wishing silently for them to just "stifle it," as Archie Bunker might have said (such a brilliant word choice on the part of Norman Lear & Co.) so we could get on with things, as they pressed our instructor, questioning the canonical nature of his syllabus. During class, I felt annoyed, especially as the instructor provided justifications for his choices, pointing out places where the canon would be deeply questioned. "Shut up, shut up, shut up. Can we just get to the course requirements already?"

A good night's sleep (startled awakening notwithstanding), a half hour's meditation and a few pages of bell hooks (assigned by that very instructor, another reason I was willing to grant him more latitude than class members who didn't know they should a happy dance inside when the first reading was passed out) later, I can hear their points more objectively. Reading hooks on how domination happens through labeling some works "theory" while disparaging the 'light' nature of more accessible works grounded in practice. I recall one of my classmates bringing up our keynote speaker's work in the non-profit sector and realize that, despite his questioning of the canon, our instructor does (as do I, I admit shamefacedly) buy into some of that spurious hierarchy as he said that the keynote's theoretical framework is "very thin." (No disrespect intended here, I'm sure, but the drawing of the line, hooks pushes to see, has effects nonetheless.)

I'm nearly out of time, but this exchange also has me thinking more about the nature of philosophy as a discipline and about my own choices with respect my two highly canonical undergraduate disciplines and my own work. So, more soon.

I hope I learn and grow and change every year.

2008-12-31T08:21:00.002-05:00

But 2008 was a big one.

In 2007, I was a strung out addict, needing love from the women in my life more than I needed to live. (If you think I'm exaggerating, I'll confess that in the spring of that year I was selling plasma to support my habit.) The first half of this year was all about the DTs.

But the second half.

It wasn't perfect, by any stretch. I screwed up, the people I love screwed up, but on balance we moved forward. ("Maybe we are just good people who've done some bad things" - "Hour Follows Hour" came close to being the year's theme song. Even more Ani than usual, this year.) Some time around June, I can't completely say why or how, I began to find something in me I'd been searching for since I was eighteen. Maybe even fourteen. Since before "Anna Begins" became a permanent fixture on the soundtrack of my life, at any rate. And then, Ani delivered Red Letter Year.

Four and a half years ago I eked out my Master's Degree requirements by the skin of my teeth, with the help of the two women who dominated those years of my life, my girlfriend and my best friend. This January, I'll be starting my Ph.D. with neither of them around. Neither of them were around this year. Literally and figuratively, respectively, they haven't been around for a couple years. And yet, as this year draws to a close, I find myself thinking of them both more than usual. I couldn't have gotten here without them. Couldn't have learned what I've learned, couldn't be who I've become. I hope, if nothing else, they can say the same about me.

And, no matter how self-sufficient I become, I'll always have (wouldn't want to lose) a weakness for American Girls. This year I went from addict to connoisseur. no more settling for Hershey's when there's Vosges to be found. But either way, they'll still always be my favorite high.

Happy New Year, friends. I can't wait to see what 2009 brings, in wine, in women, in "what you will."

Systemic Violence Against Women

2008-12-27T12:33:00.001-05:00

Brought to you by a government agency. (What pains me most is how few of you will be surprised.)

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/12/27/cia-uses-viagra-as-bribing-tactic-in-afghanistan/