A New Year.

I just got back from a week in Indiana. I have an itch to write something long and reflective to start the new year, but it's not taking shape in my brain. Things I want to write about:

How happy I am that my mom's hair is growing back. It's funny how we focus so much energy on the hair loss associated with chemotherapy, as if that even comes close to being the worst thing about cancer. It's just so ... visible, I guess. (She wore a wig when we went out for New Year's Eve dinner. She's still self-conscious -- I guess older women with very short haircuts stand out at the Outback Steakhouse in Muncie Indiana. The wig is very pretty. She calls it "Gina" because that was on the label when she bought it, and I'm sure it looks totally natural to anyone who doesn't know, but it cracked me up because it's my mom in a wig, which is just funny for some reason.) Anyway, without the wig she looks great, like Laurie Anderson with her spiky silver halo and big wide smile.

My nephews, who are endlessly fascinating to me. The oldest (will be 13 this month), who is getting tall and just starting puberty. He listens to hip-hop and lets his pants sag when he can get away with it. He can be a little shit, and he's rude to his mom (who is of course my little sister, so I want to slap him), but he's funny and cute and that goes a long way. He's also very sensitive, cries at the drop of a hat. The tall and cute part reminds me of all the boys I wanted to be when I was 12. The crying part reminds me of me.

The middle one, who will be 9 in March. I could follow him around forever. What's in his brain? He loves musical theater and science fiction. One evening, he and I played a spontaneous game for a long time which went something like this: "I have a million dollars in gold, but it's disguised as an artichoke and hidden at the bottom of a volcano in the past." "I would design an indestructible robot and send it back in time in my time machine to find the volcano and steal the artichoke." "But I have the only time machine in existence and I'm the only one who knows how to turn the artichoke back into gold." "Then I would design a bomb that would selectively blow up the time-space continuum, then use my robot to retrieve the artichoke from the volcano." "But it's still an artichoke." "That's okay. I love artichokes." And on and on. He laughed every time either of us said artichoke. I enjoyed that a lot.

And the youngest, who is in kindergarten, adorable, and spends most of his day just trying to keep up with his brothers.

I'm putting together a list so I can send New Year's cards this year. I've fallen out of touch with so many old friends, and I don't want to let another year go by without remedying that, if I can. My first plan was to write a concise story of the last few years of my life to include with the card, but I've given that up in favor of just letting people know where I am now. I figure anyone who wants details can ask.

As Always, the Smartest Person in the Room.

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What's interesting about this to me is that you see how unknowledgeable Obama is about so-called LGBT issues, which mirrors I think the American people's state of familiarity with them. It's a strange sort of half knowing that maybe (to them) feels more complete than it is because of the massive influx of gay and lesbian images in pop culture with Will & Grace, The L Word, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and other miscellaneous homosexuals on reality shows and commercials, etc. in the last 10 years. Not to mention everyone's favorite homosexual, the one who started the conversation, Ellen. I think people are much less afraid than they were 10 years ago, but they're still pretty uncomfortable with homosexuality unless it's entertainment.

This Rick Warren thing really throws it into the light. The gay community is all like "But I thought you loved us! I thought you understood," and Obama is like, "I do!" and we're like, "Apparently not."

And maybe I'm gonna be hugely wrong on this in the end, we'll see, but I still think it's the wrong approach to compare the homosexual struggle to the civil rights movement. Of course there are parallels, but I think the argument's persuasive power is too limited. Because gay rights is about sexuality rather than ethnicity, it's a different row to hoe. The conversation requires a comfort with talking about sex that most Americans just don't have. The Rick Warren-type 3rd grade schoolyard arguments against homosexual relationships -- "people aren't made that way," "the parts don't fit," etc., the so-called plumbing argument -- are impossible to refute without having a fairly graphic discussion of body parts and sexual behavior. I think most people feel such intense discomfort with the subject matter, a discomfort that I think a lot of people aren't even aware of or wouldn't acknowledge, that they are literally unable to have that conversation, to learn the stuff you need to learn in order to understand that homosexual desire is just as natural as heterosexual desire. I think what most people want to be assured of is that it's natural. It's a steeper learning curve than the race stuff, and it's unreasonable to expect Obama to be anywhere other than where he is with it.

It's so clear, when you look at a mixed race couple, to see what a simple, glaring injustice it is to deny them the right to be together in the exact same way we allow non-mixed couples to be together. The argument against mixed-race couples falls apart when you look more closely at the idea of race. The argument is based on the idea that the races shouldn't mix, but that's ridiculous because of course they already have. Each of us is already a great mixture. So you can't argue that there's some fundamental biological difference between, for example, a white man and a white woman marrying and a white man and a black woman marrying. But two men together, two women together, does present something biologically different than a heterosexual couple. Not that it's not natural or right or good, not that they necessarily shouldn't be encouraged to emulate heterosexual relationships, but it's a different argument to make.

Am I missing something?

Actually, That's Not True and You Know It. Asshole.





He's either stupendously ignorant or he's lying, and I assume this guy has read the Bible, so that leaves out ignorant. What bothers me more than the meanness or power-hunger or whatever it is that makes people want to control how other people live their lives down to its most intimate details, is the contempt for history, for knowledge, for science, for simple common sense.

It's like they're talking about Sasquatch when they repeat their "definition of marriage that has been in place in every culture and society for 5,000 years" mantra. On some level I can understand the ignorance of science and history, if these crackpots were educated in American schools, where they don't really teach that stuff to kids because it offends their parents and so after generations American science and history curricula are just a big swamp of avoidance, denial, and misinformation. So maybe Warren is a little weak on science and history. But how many wives did Moses have? I assume he knows it was more than one.

I'm still practicing patience about this one, but I have to admit it hurts. Surely there must have been a less appalling choice than Warren to participate in this historic inauguration.

Semester 3.

If you were wondering, I finished the semester on Monday with my last two finals. Here's the breakdown: all A's except one B in my geography class, and I got A's on both papers, the one about Native American homosexuality in Texas and the one about the Mike Nichols films and marriage in the late 1960's.

The geography class ("The Modern American City") was a bit frustrating. Overall, it was one of my favorite classes I've taken at UT. The lectures were fascinating, the professor is very funny and opinionated, the reading was interesting. If you gauge the value of a course by how much it illuminates your view of the world, this one would score very high.

But the exams were insane, not so much hard as loopy. They defied any notion you might have about what is important to remember and what is not. Questions were often along the lines of, "What was the pun I made in my lecture about residual spaces?" The class grade was based completely on 3 exams, and I studied hard and couldn't get much above an 85 on any of them. There just didn't seem to be any way to prepare for them, they were so unpredictable. If you didn't write down that pun and memorize it, you were out of luck. (Yes, I know this is essentially about my ego. Whatever. I'm not a B student!)

Inclusive Means Everybody.

The fact that the griping classes in both the Christianist and gay camps are in full indignation mode about this is probably a sign that Obama calibrated his choice perfectly.

My take on this, and on pretty much anything Obama does that at first doesn't sit right with me, is that Obama is a black man who was just elected president of the United States, which must make him like the smartest person in the world, politically speaking, so why don't we just relax and give him the benefit of the doubt instead of jumping all over him about which preacher he picked to say a prayer at the inauguration. Yeah, he could have picked a lesbian Unitarian, and that would have pissed off about 90% of the population. Rick Warren only pisses off about 3%.

I kind of like the notion of a Evangelical bigot being compelled to bless the presidency of Obama, whose election basically says to Warren and his people, "Your time is up."

Middling.

I've been trying to find information about GRE scores (what's good, what's average, etc.) because I got my scores right after I took the test, but I had nothing to compare them to. I should look on Wikipedia first for everything, because that's usually where I find it. According to the entry on the GRE, my verbal score is in the 99th percentile and my math score is right around the 50th percentile. To be honest, I'm surprised that 50% of people who take the GRE are worse at math than I am.

Poor Tinkerbell.

We live with a pig. Our friends -- whose house we're staying in while they're on vacation and for a few months after they return until our new container house, which they are building on their property, is ready -- have a pig named Tinkerbell, and she is turning into a bit of problem child. What does she want?

I can't cook with her in the kitchen (she's huge and unyielding and constantly begs for food or attention or whatever, butting her big wet snout against my legs), so I shoo her out. She just gripes at me and won't move until I push her, sometimes with a chair (gently) because frankly I'm a little afraid of her. The other day, she bit my big toe. She didn't do any damage, but it did hurt a little.

The last couple of mornings, she's been intense and persistent. When I go to the kitchen to make coffee or refill my cup, she scurries over to me and butts my legs . So I've taken to running from her. There's kind of a lap around an island formed by the stove and a table between the kitchen and the big main room, so I run in, fill my cup with coffee, and when she comes at me I walk around the island, she follows me, I grab the 1/2 and 1/2 as I pass by the fridge, pour some in my coffee quickly because she's coming around behind me, return the 1/2 and 1/2 to the fridge and grab my coffee, she's on my tail but I'm out the door before she catches up.

It sounds funny and it is, but I can tell she's unhappy. There are several big pillows on the floor that she sleeps with, and when she gets frustrated because I'm running from her or pushing her out of the way, she throws the pillows around, and yesterday she tore one of them up.

J put up dog gates in the doorways to our half of the house, so Tinkerbell and Bones the boxer can't come back here -- so that Timmy the cat can escape from them when he wants to, but they serve the same purpose for us. Tinkerbell smashed through one of the gates this morning. My friend A told me yesterday about a friend of hers who had a pig who, when it got too big to stay in the house and they put it in the yard, would tear right through the screen door.

The photo is not Tinkerbell, but that's just what she looks like.

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.