Here We Go!

I took the GRE today, the last day of classes and the audio portion of my Spanish final is tomorrow, and Saturday we're moving!

The GRE was not bad. I got 740 on the verbal section, 610 on the math. I assume the verbal score is pretty good and the math score is just okay, but I'm not really sure. Does anybody know what the numbers mean? (I got a 610 math score on my SAT, too, when I was in high school.) There's a writing section, which I kind of enjoyed -- I won't have the score on that for a few weeks. The "test center" was a small, very hot and dry room full of computer cubicles. I liked taking the test on a computer. It was much better than the fill in the bubble tests. Those drive me crazy -- I can't see the bubbles very clearly because the rooms are always poorly lit and my eyes are bad.

So, over the next week and a half, I'll write a 15-page paper and take 3 finals. Then I have a few days off. I'm flying to Indiana to visit my family the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve. Then probably off to New York. There's going to be a showcase production of my Lizzie Borden show in mid-February, and they'll be auditioning in early January. Lordy.

Drifting Too Far From the Shore.

First it was going to be very non-traditional: poblano chiles stuffed with ricotta custard and herbs, creamed chard, potatoes and sweet potatoes roasted together (I cut them in chunks, toss in garlic, salt and pepper, and olive oil and roast till they're very slightly golden), and crispy-fried polenta with an ancho-chipotle sauce. I made one concession to tradition -- sage dressing. Because I love it and Thanksgiving is the only occasion I have to make it or eat it. Oh, and J was going to make his famous Grand Marnier cranberry sauce.

I was looking for some kind of vegetarian entree -- I'm not a vegetarian, but J is and our kitchen is. But it seemed like we had invited more meat-eaters than vegetarians, so I thought about roasting a turkey (another thing I love but hardly ever get to eat) but J was obviously uncomfortable about the idea when I brought it up, so, after giving it some thought I dropped it for the simple reason that I don't want an uncomfortable Thanksgiving. Who does? In the meantime, I had come across a recipe for a mushroom barley pie with a puff pastry crust. It's pretty easy, sounds festive and delicious, so I put that on the menu for our entree.

I thought, since we were having the bready pie thing, I'd drop the dressing. But when I told J that, he said, "Well then I'm not going to make cranberries." I said, "Why?" and he said, "Because it goes with the dressing." I wasn't willing to go without the cranberry sauce, so I put the dressing back on the menu. And then I started thinking about succotash, which wasn't a family tradition for me (the recipe came from a restaurant I worked at in my twenties in New York called Mike's Bar & Grill on 10th Ave and 46th St.), but I had been making it for Thanksgivings on and off since the 80s, when my ex-boyfriend B and I had dinners for sometimes as many as 25 people at our apartment in Ft. Greene. It's really simple and so good: just corn and baby lima beans, butter, cream, and red pepper. And I was thinking how something really nice about Thanksgiving is that you eat stuff you usually don't have occasion to eat. So the succotash was back on the menu.

And then last night as I was drifting off to sleep, I realized that if we have dressing, we need gravy. No turkey, but I can make a really good mushroom gravy by deglazing the pan after I sautee the mushrooms for the pie. And if we have gravy, we'll all be thinking, "Where are the mashed potatoes?" So, this morning, I'm thinking that I'll roast the sweet potatoes alone and do mashed potatoes. And we didn't get the chard I expected from our CSA last week, so instead I'm going to sautee green beans, which might be vaguely suggestive of the notorious green bean casserole (which I love, and I used to make a great scratch version of it, but I've already got too much stuff in the oven).

Somehow, except for the lack of turkey, I'm back to a pretty traditional Thanksgiving dinner. (I will not however puree the sweet potatoes and bake them with marshmallows.) I'm still going to make the fried polenta, but as an appetizer. And the stuffed poblanos have evolved into a roasted poblano and goat cheese appetizer. So at least my appetizers are not traditional.

Why Not Boycott California?

Why haven't the marriage activists proposed a boycott of California? They're picketing Mormon churches (like that'll get the Mormons to change their minds about homosexuality); I've heard lots of calls to boycott the state of Utah. It wasn't Utah who voted for Prop. 8, it was California.

In the early 90s, Colorado passed an anti-gay law, activists organized a boycott of the state, and I remember it being pretty effective. The amount of money gay and lesbian tourists and businesspeople spend in California must be awesome. A boycott of California would be epic, it would get lots of attention. Why has no one suggested it?

Ding-dong.

Before all this hoopla, the institution of marriage was on its way out anyway. (Maybe it still is.) The women's movement mortally wounded it in the 70s, and it was dying a natural death, being replaced by a variety of family structures. We all know the statistics: most marriages end in divorce, almost half of children are born to unmarried women (whether single or co-habitating with the child's father). As "alternative" families became the norm, there likely would have been a shift in public policy regarding families. Marriage could not have held onto its privileged status forever, because it no longer reflects the reality of most family arrangements. We should have let marriage die. Instead, we've spurred a national marriage revival.

It would have been much easier to work for stronger support of domestic partnerhips. We would have had as allies all the people whose families are left out when marriage is privileged. Domestic partnership was already an idea most people were comfortable with. We could have let people who want traditional marriage have it, but fought to extend to all families the privileges that marriage now receives.

The tragedy is that, now that the gay establishment has made so much noise about marriage, it's too late to turn back and try something else. The traditional marriage people have dug in their heels. The very people that the gay marriage advocates think should be their natural allies -- social conservatives who believe that marriage is the backbone of a stable society -- are the people most dead set against them. You will always hit a brick wall with those people. The gays say, "But don't you understand? We want to be respectable, just like you," and the God-people reply, "I'm sorry, you can't. It's against the Bible." And there it sits.

(Did I already post this? Pretty interesting group of signatories.)

And Another Thing...

I guess the real nut of what bothers me about government privileging marriage over other family structures is that it attempts to regulate sexual behavior. Only if you have this narrowly proscribed type of sexual relationship (or at least profess to) do you officially exist as a household. Anything else is invalid.

Stripped (rightly so, because they are also the things that made it oppressive, mostly for women) of all the things that made it meaningful as an institution for community stability -- the strict gender roles, the more or less compulsory children, the near-impossibility of divorce -- there's nothing left of marriage except the being in love part, the sex part. And that's what bothers me about the same-sex marriage campaign, that it is based on the sentiment that everyone should have the right to marry the person they fall in love with. Why? Maybe we should have the right to marry the person or persons we commit ourselves to nurture and support unconditionally forever. Maybe. But the person we fall in love with? Why?

MFA not MRS.

I've been on my high horse this afternoon, leaving long comments on various blogs. I had a grueling week of exams which are all done now and went fairly well, so I feel tremendously relieved tonight and still full of useless nervous energy. When J gets home from yoga, I think we'll smoke some weed and watch The Bicycle Thief which came from Netflix today.

I'm so tired of studying!

I was telling my sister in an email yesterday that I'm kind of over this undergrad thing. I'll have to summon some energy from god-knows-where to push through the final semester and a summer I have left before I get my Bachelor's degree. I'm sure this feeling is brought about this fall by the process of applying for grad school, which reminds me what this whole expedition was about in the first place and I can't wait to get into filmmaking! I do love reading and learning etc., but memorizing pages and pages of arcane science facts is getting a tad tedious. Now except for finals, I'm done with exams. I have two papers to write. Writing papers stresses me out a bit too, but it's a very different stress than exam stress. It's a type of stress I enjoy because I feel like something is actually being accomplished. Whereas, 80% of what I memorized for the Biology exam I took this morning, I have already forgotten.

Anyway, back to my high horse. Adding to the general feeling of irritation the last week has been all the complaining about how we shouldn't really be too happy about Obama's election because after all California voted to take marriage rights away from homosexuals. I'm not totally insensitive to the fact that this is in some way a serious civil rights defeat. But as you know, I'm not a fan of how the marriage fight now dominates the gay and lesbian rights movement. There was a good post on The New Gay, one of the blogs I read, which provoked me to be maybe a little more articulate than I usually am about this issue, so I thought I'd paste my comment here for you. But I recommend reading the post and the comments there to get a good idea of how this issue flies lately in "the community."

Here's my comment:

Thanks for this post. I hope it provokes some good discussion. I feel like, when people start talking about gay marriage there's this assumption that of course it's what we all want or should want, and I'm always the one in the room going, "Um..."

Some time in the 90's the gay and lesbian movement took a really sharp right turn. First we were fighting for a bigger definition of family, then suddenly we were fighting to make it as narrow as possible. I think the reason marriage captured the imagination of the gay civil rights movement is that it touches on a very basic human insecurity, a fear of being alone. A fear which is exacerbated by growing up homosexual, especially for older generations whose only queer role models were reststop trolls. (I use that expression with the utmost affection!) We all want to believe in the myth of Mr. Right or Ms. Right, Prince Charming, we all want to flip through bridal magazines and dream about a fairy tale life full of sweet love, and oh my god how will I ever get to wear a white dress and marry the man of my dreams if it's illegal!

I think it would be more fair, more progressive (and, just as importantly, more palatable to the mainstream) to be fighting for the rights of ALL families, unmarried heterosexual partners, homosexual partners, and all the varieties of families that aren't structured around a sexual relationship (elderly sisters who share a home, a disabled person and his or her caretaker, friends who live together communally long-term, single parents with kids ...). All these relationships should have the benefits and societal support that civil marriage has now.

I say it all the time to my friends (who usually just roll their eyes at me) and I'll say it again. Marriage is a fundamentally conservative institution. It is conservative people who promote it (Andrew Sullivan, Dan Savage, etc.) in order to create a world in THEIR image. But as an institution, it's been broken for a long time. It doesn't even work for straight couples. Why do you want it?

The End of the World as We Know It.

We spent most of the evening at the Driskill Hotel downtown with the Travis County Democrats, watching the returns. There was a long, narrow lounge on the first floor, wall-to-wall people, and a huge ballroom and other large reception rooms on the second floor. All packed. It was a mob scene. Huge video screens showing CNN and MSNBC. Shortly after 10, when they called Virginia for Obama and then called the race, the place erupted with screaming and sobbing and wild embracing. Then we all watched McCain's concession speech and waited for what seemed like forever for Obama to appear and then he did. I don't have anything to compare it to. Everywhere I looked there were women and men, especially men, just standing there weeping. It's hard to absorb it, what just happened. I can't wait to see my friend in Spanish class who is 18 years old and campaigned for Obama. Can you imagine?

It looks like Obama won in North Carolina, and Indiana is still too close to call this morning. Indiana. How can I get my head around that? It's a new world.

I think now I finally know what patriotism feels like.

Good Morning.

I woke up at 3:30 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. Lying in bed in the dark I slipped seamlessly from mild anxiety about the two papers I have to buckle down and start writing and the three exams I have next week to a near panic-attack as I started to wonder what I would do if Obama does not win the election today. A little after 4:00, I decided to get up and make some coffee!



J and I are going to a party at a local restaurant tonight -- I'm not clear on exactly what it is, but it has something to do with election night and queer people (and Mexican food). After that, we'll head to the Driskoll Hotel downtown to watch the returns with the Travis County Democrats.

I thought this day would never come.

Salon.

J and I are having our first salon tonight. This is something we've wanted to do for years. When we first talked about it, it was going to be called Eating and Writing or something like that, a gathering with a literary focus. And food, of course, because food goes with everything. We've made it a little more broad, with songwriters and filmmakers invited too, and we don't have a clever name for it yet. We're just calling it the salon.

I'm going to play a recording of one of the songs from Lizzie Borden from the concert reading we did last spring, the finale of the show. It's called "Where Are You, Lizzie?" It's an old song -- I wrote it in 1989 for the first incarnation of this musical -- and there are several new songs in this new version but I don't like the recordings of them as much as this one. I'm also going to sing a song I wrote in 2005 called "Fine." It's not new either, but it's my most recent song other than the new Lizzie Borden songs and I want to sing something live tonight.

I made a slightly spicy and very orange squash soup with coconut milk, using acorn and butternut squash from our farm. We also got lots of kale from the farm last week, so I made potato, kale, and roasted red pepper soup based on a recipe from the chef at the restaurant where I cooked in Utah. And I made baba ganoush for an appetizer. The only bad thing I have to say about our CSA farm is that they plant way too much eggplant. We get barrels full of them in every delivery for months. I have a freezer full of roasted eggplant. But we love baba ganoush, so I guess it could be worse.

Maybe there really is hope.

Born on the cusp, I don't identify with the Baby Boomers or Generation X. I often see the baby boom generation defined as those born between 1945 and 1965, and I was born in 1961, but I was too young for Vietnam, too young for the 60s. My babysitters were hippies, not me. I think of Generation X as the Janeane Garafolo generation, I guess because she was in Reality Bites which was such a zeitgeist movie, and I always thought, still think, a lot of those actors and other artists are very cool -- Garafolo and Ethan Hawke, Richard Linklater, and even the so-called brat pack Breakfast Club crowd. But in the end, they're my little sister's generation, not mine.

I even see a distinction between me and my friends who were born only 2 or 3 years later, because they grew up with Sesame Street and Schoolhouse Rock, which I just missed. I had Captain Kangaroo. Another major dividing line is HIV. I was 22 when the virus was discovered, so I sowed my wild oats (and those were some wild oats) at the extreme tail end of the age of sexual freedom. People just a couple years younger than me began their sexual lives in a very different world, and people a few years older than likely were done with their experimental years. For those of us born in the very early 60s, the iron fist of safe sex came down smack in the middle of our party.

So I'm declaring myself an honorary Millenial. (Can one declare oneself an honorary member of something? I guess not. I'll ask my classmates today.)

Obama is Beautiful World.

Cold Feet.

J and I went to an event at U.T. last night called Fest Africa ("celebrating the mosaic that is Africa"). A girl in my Spanish class had given me a flier for it. Dancing and music and -- this is what caught my eye and made me want to go -- $5 a plate for African food. We watched a couple of the acts, had some food (it was yummy), and didn't stay longer than that. J had a itch for dessert so we walked home and rode our bikes to Blue Dahlia, a newish cafe in the neighborhood where I had bread pudding and J had cheesecake. J has been treating me pretty often to meals out and movies lately, because I don't have any extra money and because he's just a nice guy.

Over dessert he told me that he's getting cold feet about our move to M&J's property. To be honest my feet have been chilly from the beginning. We both love our neighborhood and we love being downtown and near the U.T. campus. But we talked about it for a while and decided, I think, that the advantages of moving outweigh the disadvantages.

I stopped by the financial aid office yesterday to ask a few questions about summer. I will be 9 credit hours short of my degree this spring, so I'm going to take 3 courses this summer. I was reassured to find out that there will be some financial aid available to cover it. Still, I'm going to run out of money around about April or May, so even though my school expenses will be covered I need about $5,000 to cover my rent and food through the spring and summer. Actually, I don't spend nearly that much on rent and food, but I'm still paying off a credit card from my documentary. That bill is almost as much as my rent.

I Voted!

I had a little time to kill between classes Wednesday, so I decided to change the world.

Imperfect Saviour.

I was just reading this essay by Michael Pollan and it reminded that Obama as a Senator has been very supportive of farm subsidies for Illinois factory farms. Which is bad. (Probably anyone reading my blog knows this already, but just to summarize: factory farming, enabled by federal farm policy which includes huge subsidies for farmers who grow massive amounts of corn, has wrought havoc on the energy-food supply cycle, leading to more pollution and less nutritious food, among many other problems.)

Anyway, being reminded of something negative about Obama actually felt reassuring to me. He's not perfect, he's not our saviour. But he is a man who listens and responds to reality, and I think that's the essence of the "change" we all keep talking about. Knowing there is an issue I disagree with him about makes me feel more engaged. There's a conversation. Democracy is supposed to be a conversation, isn't it? (The closest I've gotten to a dialogue with the Bush administration has been shaking my head and saying "unbelievable.")

The other area of disagreement I have with Obama -- regarding war -- seems very different to me. Somewhere deep in my heart I'm a pacifist. But I am able to somehow reconcile that deeply-held conviction with a kind of philosophical distance from some military action.

For instance in the case of Osama bin Laden. Even though I find killing people morally repugnant, I understand the need for justice. When Obama says "we'll take him out," something deep in me reacts with sadness and horror. But at the same time I understand how killing Osama bin Laden in exchange for him having killed thousands of people may be necessary to restore balance, or justice. I know this is intellectually incoherent.

The Thing About Cats.

It's bedtime, but J's cat Timmy is asleep on my bed and I don't want to disturb him. That's the thing about cats.

I slept till 9 this morning, so I'm not really sleepy anyway. I've adjusted to low-level sleep deprivation since going back to school. Actually I kind of like it. If left to my own devices I'm one of those people who need a lot of sleep. At least 8 hours, and 9 is even better. But on the other hand if I have to be somewhere in the morning I like to get up at least 2 or 3 hours before I have to leave the house so I can be fully awake when I need to be. And I hate feeling rushed in the morning. So these days, 6 or 7 hours is about all I get.

Timmy rarely hangs out with me, except when J is out of town, and J is out of town this weekend. That's one of the advantages of living together but not being a "couple": everything doesn't have to be ours. Some things can be mine, some things can be his. Like the cat. I get all the nice things about living with a cat -- companionship, entertainment, rodent control -- without any of the responsibility. Except when J is out of town.

J and I used to have a bunch of cats. Two of them were his, and two of them were mine. And all four of them were ours.

Identity, Politics, & Buddhism.

I read this blog One City. It's the blog of the Interdependence Project in New York, which was founded by Ethan Nichtern, who was J's meditation teacher when he was living in New York most recently.

If you're interested in Buddhist meditation and politics, you might find the blog interesting. Sometimes I love it. Other times it irritates me. Usually I like the enthusiasm of it, the energy they give to looking for ways to live better. Other times, I think they're a bunch of spoiled, insular and clueless New Yorkers. New Yorkers are better than anyone at being jaded and totally naive at the same time.

Last week there was a post that really needled me. I went back and forth in the comments section for a few days, trying to make a point which I was never successful at making. I offered to write a guest post on the subject but got no response, so I'm going to post it here:

The reason I'm so persistently trying to make a point here is that I believe cassmaster's story is a parable showing one of the spots where Buddhist practice and activism intersect. I think a huge liability for every political movement that is based on identity (the women's movement, the gay rights movement and all its spawn, and take your pick of racial and ethnic civil rights movements) is exactly what begins as their great asset: the individual's self-identification as a member of an oppressed minority.

It is that identification that brings people with common grievances together to fight. Strength in numbers. But then we become so strongly attached to our identities as oppressed minorities that we begin to read every situation in which we encounter frustration as the same story, in which we are the victims, the oppressed, and the other person or institution is the oppressor.

The tale of the spa gift certificate is a perfect example of how this works. In cassmaster’s telling of the story, there’s absolutely no support for an assumption that the boss’s gift was sexist (maybe condescending, maybe sweet, but who really knows?), yet the post is titled “the perpetual undercurrents of sexism in the workplace,” and the whole story is an attempt to gain support for, to solidify, that interpretation of the scenario.

So what starts out as empowering and ennobling -- our recognition that we are not alone, that there are others who are similarly oppressed -- eventually eviscerates any power we gained because we can’t see ourselves as anything other than victims. We respond as victims, we ask to be identified and classified as victims (hate crimes legislation, anyone?), we become permanent victims.

As long as we hold tight to this view of ourselves and our place in the world, we’re caught in a Catch-22. But I think, as Buddhist meditators, we have a special perspective to bring to the problem because we have found a method of unraveling it. Our path is all about loosening the bonds of identity, letting go of the storyline we feel secure in, in order to allow a more open perspective on our suffering, a more “real” view of how the world works. Can we bring this special perspective to our politics? What would happen if we did?

C'mon. Have a Milkshake.

You know you want one.

Money money money.

I have to admit my first response when I got home this afternoon and read that the bailout was rejected by the House was relief. There have been a couple times in my life when for one reason or another I've spent a lot of money I didn't have and my debt has gotten out of control, and even I know that the worst thing I could have done at that crisis point was to just apply for another credit card. And I'm one of the least responsible people I know, in terms of managing money in that way we're expected to manage money when we become adults. So what is with these people? Maybe the best thing that could happen right now is for a lot of people to lose all their money. Maybe then we could all grow up and stop expecting to have everything we want when we want it.

... still holding up this little wild bouquet.

I don't think I've ever felt this much faith in the possibility built into our system of government to move our species toward freedom and compassion.

It has been hard -- everyone says "in the last eight years," but hasn't it really been twenty-eight years, since Reagan was elected -- to believe that we could ever buttress ourselves against such a tidal wave of ignorance and bigotry and greed, let alone push back. There have been a lot of moments recently when I've wondered if this big experiment in self-governance is in its death throes, but, maybe because I've been studying American history again, rereading the founding documents, recognizing that the so-called founding fathers knew it would be a constant struggle against tyranny, this morning I'm thinking maybe we're not doomed.

The Leonard Cohen album that this song "Democracy" is on came out in 1992, which is the last time I felt hopeful. I'm less naive now. What Clinton taught me is that even though Democrats might be more in sympathy with my stances on particular issues, they can be just as cynical about government and politics as Republicans. But cynicism is cynicism and the end does not justify the means.

The first presidential election I voted in was the one in which Reagan was elected for his first term. There has not been a president in my adult life who has not been a lying bastard. An Obama presidency will not just change the agenda. Hillary Clinton could have done that. What Obama offers is a tangible change in the way we interact with our government. A fundamental change in the way we are treated by our president.

"Democracy"

It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we'll be making love again.
We'll be going down so deep
the river's going to weep,
and the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on ...

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

James Baldwin.

Last night J and I went with our good friend A to see a documentary about James Baldwin called The Price of the Ticket. Baldwin pops into my life from time to time to edify and inspire me. I would recommend this film, but I just looked on Netflix and saw that it's not listed, which means it's probably not generally available. It's a great doc if you run across it. There's also a great biography by David Leeming, which I read a couple years ago and would recommend.

I don't know how I'm going to manage it with this pile of books I have to read for classes, but I'm going to try to read The Fire Next Time (Baldwin's long essay about being black in America) again this fall. I don't know of anyone who was smarter about racism than Baldwin and now is the season to brush on that subject.

After the film, we had dinner at Curra's, one of my favorite Austin restaurants, and we talked about Baldwin and Paris and the election. We're all so hopeful that Obama will be elected, and I said that what I look forward to most is feeling proud to live in a country that can elect someone like Obama, proud to live in a time and place where that is possible. It feels huge to me. And then we allowed ourselves to speculate on the possibility of McCain winning the election, and we all decided that we wouldn't be able to tolerate living in a place where that could happen, and we thought about Paris, where Baldwin lived for many years because he couldn't tolerate the racism in the U.S. in the fifties, but then I said that since I'm learning Spanish I would like to be an expatriot in a Spanish-speaking country, so we decided on Spain. I'll have to brush up on my vosotros.