Day 6.

The bathroom is the Urine Collection Station. Just outside the door into the john, there’s a counter and behind it sits a technician wearing a gown and latex gloves. Some studies involve urine collection, but not all of them. Our study required it the first few days, but we just had to pee in a cup once, first thing in the morning. Some studies involve collecting all your urine in a plastic container, so every time you pee, you have to stop at the counter, hold out your wrist to have your bar code scanned and then wait for the tech to grab your "urinal" (it's just a plastic container) from the shelf where they are all lined up and hand it to you.

So the tech has to watch everyone as they pass, and stop the subjects whose t-shirt color signifies they are in the study that requires urine collection. If they are wearing a t-shirt that doesn’t require it, then the tech has to buzz the bathroom door open.

Here’s where the comedy comes in. This urine vestibule is dimly lit with yellow light (I know! it’s like pee world back there) so the red t-shirts, the orange t-shirts, and the fuchsia t-shirts are indistinguishable. I think it’s the orange study right now that is collecting urine, and it’s a small study so the urine tech should have it pretty easy, but the red study is huge, maybe 30 subjects, and there’s the fuchsia study too, so the tech is going crazy back there, stopping everyone, staring at t-shirts to try to discern colors, trying to remember who is who, and everybody getting all indignant. From what I infer by listening to shop talk around here, urine duty is bottom of the totem pole, so to add this additional humiliation is a cruel joke.

Today we started with the glucometer readings, which require being stuck in the fingertip with a needle. It hurts. And they're going to do it 5 times a day for the next 10 days. I'd much rather they take it intravenously.

I can't decide whether to call my talkative neighbor Chatty or Exclamatia -- she repeats almost everything she says as a sort of outraged exclamation, as if to say Do you believe it?? ("I like my toast burnt. Black! Like this table! I'm talkin' 'bout burn that toast!!") in a Louisiana accent.

She and the guy in the bed between us were talking this morning and I eavesdropped on bits of the conversation. (I say eavesdropped, but they're 5 feet away from me. You have to put in earplugs if you don't want to hear people's conversations. And I do.) The guy was telling Chatty that a lesbian couple, neighbors or friends of his, had asked him to be their sperm donor -- they were planning on having a baby. He said that he thought about it but declined because he didn't want to be entangled in their lives and the life of a child that he wasn't going to raise. He and Chatty went on to debate whether or not it was a good idea for same-sex couples to raise children. They were both concerned about the stigma the child would have to deal with. They concluded the conversation agreeing that they didn't know exactly how to feel about homosexuals but that "nobody's perfect, and who am I to judge?"

That's the thing about the closet. When you get out of the liberal/artsy/lefty ghetto, you overhear people debating, right in front of you, whether or not you have a right to exist. It's amazing to me, has been since I was 14 years old, how people like this assume there is no one homosexual in the room, when they're in a room full of people. The only shift I see in this conversation is that 30 years ago the attitude was almost always more scornful. Now, something along the lines of "Everybody's got a right to their opinion" is more typical. Everybody's got a right to their opinion regarding whether or not I have a right to exist. Sweet.

Speaking of which, I miss my boyfriend like a motherfucker.

Day 5.

I look forward to meals here, everyone does, because, even though the food is usually foul, meals mark the passing of the day. Breakfast this morning was cereal and a muffin again, but we got 2% milk, which was nice. Skim milk is nasty shit. I don’t understand the point of it.

Not much on the schedule today. We got to sleep in until almost 7. They took our blood pressure this morning and drew blood after breakfast, but no ECG or urine collection, and there’s nothing else today but meals. Tomorrow we start what looks like a real marathon until the end.

The Bible study debate went on until after midnight last night. These two are hard core. The debate last night was about whether or not the Bible is actually the word of “God.” Bible Guy took a more scholarly view than Church Lady. I can’t get a fix on his beliefs, but he was telling Church Lady that some parts of the Bible were perhaps more spiritually inspired than others, and Church Lady was not having it. She kept giggling and saying, “You don’t really believe that? No, you don’t! You’re crazy.” Giggle, giggle.

I assumed that he was the more reasonable and sane of the two, but then he started talking about how there were already people on the earth when God created Adam and Eve, which accounts for the fossil evidence. So, there are people living now who are from Adam and Eve’s lineage and people who are not. Step away quietly.

This place is totally sci-fi. Rows of identical beds, everything sterile and white. The staff wear scrubs and lab coats. There are always several studies going on simultaneously, so we wear color-coded t-shirts. I'm in the red t-shirt study. Subjects also wear wristbands with bar codes that identify us, and we carry clipboards everywhere we go which detail our scheduled procedures. There are big red digital clocks on military time, and everything is timed to the second, every ECG, every meal, every blood draw. The technicians go down the rows of beds with carts and machines, sticking pads on our chests and legs, hooking us up to machines, sticking needles in our arms, each subject 3 minutes after the last one. It’s a hive of activity and high-tech beeping monitors that moves up and down the row of beds several times a day. And they rush the little vials of our blood away in frozen containers and write numbers on our clipboards.

There are features of the architecture that resemble a hospital, but it never feels like a hospital at all. There are doctors here somewhere, but not the kind of doctors who take care of people. It’s a lab and we are lab rats.

The first few days here, I was pretty miserable. I got a severe headache from caffeine withdrawal, which I expected because it always happens, but I expected it on the first day. When it didn’t happen then, I was very relieved. It just waited a day. Then when the headache was receding, I started feeling intense deep pain in my lower back and hips. I couldn’t find a way to sit or lie down that didn’t hurt, and the second night was awful. I hardly slept. I’m almost certain it was from the bed and spending so much time in it.

I feel much better now, and I spend most of my free time in bed reading. I finished The Celluloid Closet and I’m trying to plow through Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s Film History textbook. It’s the perfect kind of book for this place. I’ve done a little work on my high school diary project, taken a few notes. The piece is taking some kind of general shape in my head.

Day 4.

The woman in the bed next to me reads a pocket-size Bible along with a magazine which she makes notes in the margins of. The man on her other side peppers his sentences with "Jesus" and "the Lord," etc., even when he's just talking about mowing the lawn. He also sniffs, or I should say snorts because it's that sound people make when they're imitating a pig, in the morning. I want to say, "Jesus Christ, blow your nose!" but 1) we're here together for another 12 days so I don't want an enemy, and 2) I just don't usually yell at people until I'm ready to kill them, and it's not really that bad.

I spend so much of my life avoiding proximity with Christians that it's always a strange surprise to witness what a constant, almost physical presence this thing called Jesus is in the lives of so many people. If I can put aside my revulsion for a moment, it's exotic and fascinating. It's like in an anthropology class when you might read about some hunter-gatherer tribe that leaves babies in the forest to die or something and it's horrifying but really interesting to consider that that behavior is totally normal to them.

There's still another guy, across from us, who is preoccupied with all things Bible. He moseys over every once in a while and engages the Jesus snorty guy in conversation. This guy seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible, old and new testament. I can't judge his accuracy. He's one of those people who have a pet theory about everything. Did you know that Jesus did not say one thing about "hope"? Didn't so much as mention it. He (Jesus) also apparently never recommended that people pray in public together. Yesterday in the dining room, there was something on local news about a child who allegedly had been beaten to death by its mother's boyfriend. Bible Guy's take on the story was that women who take up with violent men shouldn't be surprised when their children get murdered. Bible Guy wears Bud-Lite flannel pajama bottoms, and for some reason that softens my heart toward him.

Today is a slow day. We started at 6 with urine collection and then an ECG and vital signs. Then a blood draw and breakfast, which was a bowl of raisin bran and a bran muffin (with raisins! it was a theme I guess), orange juice, and skim milk. They took our blood again after breakfast, and now for the rest of the day there's nothing on the schedule but meals.

(Lunch, if you're curious, was a small sub sandwich with turkey (I think it was turkey), some kind of white gluey cheese, tomato and shredded lettuce. On the side were packets of mayo, mustard, and pickle relish, and a small bag of Cheezits, a 4-oz. carton of some kind of juice drink, and an oatmeal cookie.)

Today is Day 4. Day 2 was like this, but Days 1 and 3 were dose days (days when we take the drug being studied) and those were very hectic with procedures all day. Lots of ECGs and blood draws. Starting with Day 6, we dose every day, and there are several glucometer readings throughout the day. (It's a drug for diabetes that we're testing.) I think the glucometer involves getting our fingertips stabbed. Looking at the number of times this is going to happen, I fear my fingertip will be a bloody pulp by the time I get out of here.

I Don't Get It.

I've only seen a few episodes of Family Guy, but it has always made me laugh really hard so I guess I'd say I'm a fan. There's been a bit of a stink in the gay blogs today about the recent episode where Quagmire's father turns out to be a transsexual woman. Apparently on The Cleveland Show (Seth McFarlane's other show) there was a similar episode recently which also caused a stink, so the community is not inclined to be forgiving this time. But McFarlane claims not to be "transphobic".

I'm inclined to give an artist a lot of leeway in these things, and it seems to me that the folks who get all bent out of shape in these cases are too easily offended, or just maybe irony-deficient. Often the problem is that people will have a hard time distinguishing between a story in which the audience is asked to sympathize with the haters and a story in which the audience is asked to laugh at them.

As McFarlane has pointed out, in this episode of Family Guy, the transwoman is definitely portrayed sympathetically. She's really the only sane, stable character in the story. The humor is in everyone around her freaking out. So far, no problem.

But when we get to the part where the dog finds out he's had sex with her and he vomits for like a minute solid, I'm lost. And then Quagmire finds out that the dog has had sex with her, and he beats the shit out of the dog. Both of these scenes are interminable, and I have to admit, to me, perplexing. Though I'm inclined to be sympathetic to McFarlane, I don't know where to begin deciphering what his point of view is in these last two scenes, because I don't understand why they're funny.

I wondered at first if the reason it didn't make me laugh is because I'm the butt of the joke, so instead of being tickled I'm offended. (There are many in the GLBT community who say that homosexual and transsexual are two different things. I'm not one of those people. But even if you believe they are, the scene where Quagmire tries to explain that his father is not gay but "a woman trapped in a man's body," and Peter and Lois say, "Yeah, gay," encapsulates most straight people's view that there's gay and then there's trans, which is just more gay.)

But I can't even say I'm offended -- I just really don't know what's going on. I'm not clear enough on what McFarlane is saying to know whether or not I should be offended.

Are regular folks so completely repulsed by the idea of having sex with a transwoman that they would identify with someone vomiting forever over it? And the beating the dog gets, I don't even have a guess on that one. Somebody help me out here.

We Will Not Have Questions Answered by Irrelevant Agencies.

I'm never quite sure what to do on Mother's Day. In my family, when I was growing up, we always called it a Hallmark Holiday, made fun of it. But as I get older, I find it hard to resist feeling sentimental when my friends around me are calling their mothers. I say, "I call my mother all year long, and we email frequently, why is it so important to call today?" Then again, why is it so important to not?

I've also discovered that at some point my brother and his long-time girlfriend and my sister and her husband started sending Mother's Day cards and gifts every year. Maybe it was just me who was so anti-Mother's Day? I've gotten to the point now where I don't believe any of the stories I've been telling myself all my life.

The last couple years I've sent short emails to say hi. Not necessarily "Happy Mother's Day!", but at least "hi."

It was my mother's home-grown, instinctive neighborhood activism in the late 60s and early 70s that planted the seeds of my lifelong rebellion. So, this year I recognize the roots of Mother's Day in feminism and pacifism, before it was swallowed whole by the floral industry, the restaurant industry, the greeting card industry.

It didn't start out being about spa treatments and breakfast in bed. It started with Julia Ward Howe's disgust with the Civil War. Happy Mother's Day!


Mother's Day Proclamation, 1870
Julia Ward Howe

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

South Pacific.

I watched South Pacific last night for the first time in decades. (I don't have the heart to post a youtube clip here -- the film itself is so ravishing.)

M and I watched it together. I don't know if it's the age difference or a more general cultural difference in our backgrounds, but M isn't at all familiar with these golden age musicals that are so deeply embedded in my sensibility. (I was going to write "soul" but decided that was a little over the top. But only a little.) I have to admit I found that fact a little scandalous; it totally pushed my these-kids-coming-up-today-don't-know-anything-about-gay-culture!" button.

Anyway, I think he had fun and found it pretty interesting, even if he didn't thrill to the music as much as I do. (He especially liked Stewpot. How gay is Stewpot?) Besides the fact that this show is the apogee of the artform, it's a fascinating look at American preoccupations of the late 50s: race, class, foreign wars, American disillusionment, fear of Communism, anxiety about the end of a familiar way of life. It pretty jam-packed.

South Pacific was the first big musical production I performed in, at about age 15 I think. It figures heavily in my high school diary, which is why it's been on my mind. It was a production of the Putnam County Playhouse, the summer community theater in the town my family moved to when I was in eighth grade. I was in the chorus, so I was basically a sailor. I danced and sang my heart out and catcalled at the nurses. I was in gay boy heaven.

Does Your Privacy Include My Memories of You?

I've got a dilemma. Or maybe not a dilemma, but a question. No, it's a dilemma.

I've begun working on a new video piece. It's based on my high school diary. Along with the text (I haven't decided yet whether it'll be text on screen or spoken as voice-over, or maybe some of each), I'm using old photos, clips from movies, some new still photos and video footage of landscape and other locations that evoke the time and place of the diary.

Many many people are mentioned by name in the diary and I want to use real names. I also want to use the yearbook photos of those people. I see this work as documentary. I can't see any ethical problems with doing this, but still I have some trepidation about it. Why? Am I missing something? The thing about the photos, especially in some cases the yearbook photos is that they are, in a sense, what the work is about, so I don't know how I fake them or avoid them.

The pictures are, technically, published. They're not private. Any anecdotes I share will be my thoughts, no one else's, and I don't plan to share any intimate details of anyone else's lives. When I write about other people, it's more about how I feel about them. More about me than them. There are a couple incidents which are more sensitive, and I think I will change the names in those cases and not use photographs. Or maybe I will, if there is something in the public record about those people.

I've been mulling this over in my head for weeks now and can't settle on a satisfactory argument as to why I shouldn't use this material. But for some reason I still feel uneasy.

A Second Look at Buffy.

My boyfriend loves Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I mean loves. He has all the DVDs and I think he's watched them more than once, maybe a lot more than once. Before last night I hadn't seen a whole episode of Buffy. I caught a few random clips here and there, but it never grabbed me, in fact it kind of turned me off. You could even say that I have been an unapologetic Buffy naysayer.

However, since M is one of the smartest people I've ever met, I am reexamining my attitude.

I watched the first 2 episodes last night with M. They were pretty much what I expected. Sarah Michelle Geller is one of the most annoying actors I've ever watched. The writing is clumsy and forced.

For instance, early on there's a scene in the school hallway where the cute boy wants to meet Buffy, the hot new girl. She drops her books, he sees his opportunity and runs to her side. He says, "Can I have you?" There's an awkward pause and then he corrects himself, "I mean, Can I help you?"

Let's take it apart. It's a standard sitcom-style joke. A nervous character tries to say something but stumbles and mixes up the words in some way that makes the statement suggestive. The joke depends on 1) the intended statement being completely believable and natural, and 2) the mangled version of it being completely natural-sounding if inappropriate. A high school boy who wants to help a girl pick up her dropped books is not going to say, "Can I help you?" He's not a cashier at McDonald's. And "Can I have you?" is sort of suggestive if you think about it, but this kind of joke depends on you not having to think about it. And "Can I have you?" is not anything that anyone would actually say. Most of the dialogue has this sort of artificial feel. I see the jokes, but they don't make me laugh.

Besides these technical criticisms, there just wasn't anyone in the story I identified with or cared about. They were all broad stereotypes, and just the negative stereotypes: shallow cheerleader, absent-minded smart girl, the bitch who everyone worships, the clueless self-involved parent. None of them seems to have any kind of inner life. Even Buffy's desire to fit in -- which is set up as the narrative engine -- never feels urgent or poignant or real. I don't know if that's because of the writing or because Geller's face is always just sort of blank.

The show felt like a cartoon. I didn't believe any of it. I was unmoved. Not once did I spontaneously laugh.

But! I said I would watch more of it and reserve judgment. Okay, it's too late for reserving judgment, but I will continue watching and try to relax my expectations and be open to unexpected rewards. It's not giving me what I want, but maybe I just don't get it yet. Maybe it's like Glee -- another show M loves and I think is dreadful. Another show full of unlikeable high school kids.

I have a hunch my distaste for Buffy and Glee is related to my dislike of comic books and superheroes. In fact, when I was watching Buffy and rolling my eyes at the ridiculously implausible librarian character, it occurred to me that a character like that, and in fact the whole setting and premise of the story, would be completely at home in a comic book. Here's a short essay I wrote a while back about comics.

My taste in high school pathos TV is more My So-Called Life -- which also dealt in high school archetypes. I guess I just prefer a more naturalistic style of storytelling. I watched every episode of My So-Called Life and cried like a 15-year-old girl. Maybe I just like my high school drama more sentimental than ironic:



Addendum: On the subject of comics and the Archies, here's some fun news. It's interesting that the only comics I enjoyed as a kid were the Archies, not the superhero stuff. Yet, there have been several gay superheroes in comics in the last several years, and only now a gay character in the Archies.

Teaser.

I'm transcribing my high school diary for a video I'm making. It's an exercise in self-mortification. My favorite entry so far -- undated, but it's from early 1976:

"I couldn't believe Barbra Streisand was on the Grammy Awards the other night. She almost doesn't seem real, she's so fantastic, like a goddess. She's got to be the most fantastic person alive."

Breathing.

My sleep apnea has been bad lately. I should say it's been less frequent but more severe. I can almost count on triggering it by falling asleep on my back, so I've been sleeping on my side for the last few months. But even then it happens sometimes. Since this started -- I guess a few years ago? I don't remember exactly -- it's been pretty much the same: I wake up with the feeling that I'm choking, I sit up, take a huge breath, and I'm a little freaked out but fine. But when I was in Mexico I had an episode that sent me flying out of bed. I couldn't catch my breath by sitting up, I had to be standing, or at least it felt that way. I had another bad one the other night. I woke up and took a deep breath, but it felt like my throat collapsed again, I took another deep breath, same thing again, another deep breath, and finally I was able to keep breathing normally.

I've also noticed the last few days that throughout the day I frequently feel short of breath and have to take a few deep breaths to "catch up," similar to the feeling I have at high altitudes. I wonder if this worsening is connected to the emotional stress I've been under recently or if my throat is actually collapsing. What is it, MS?, where one of the first symptoms is difficulty swallowing? But that's not really what this feels like.

Should I be alarmed? I mean, I am alarmed, but should I be? I can't go see a doctor. I can't imagine going to the emergency room with sleep apnea.

And then this in the Times this morning. Lovely.

After my food stamp meltdown yesterday, I took a 3-hour nap. (To add insult to injury, I had to return the Barbara Kingsolver book, which I'd been enjoying so much, to the library. It was 3 days overdue, and I can't check it out again because there's a hold on it. I went to Half Price Books to see if I could get a copy cheap, but they didn't have it.) When I woke up I had a message from M asking me over for leftovers and a movie. I could hardly keep from crying when I got there and he asked me how I was. I wanted so badly not to fall apart in front of him, but I couldn't help it. We went for a long walk and he listened to my sad tale, gave me advice and encouragement. I felt a bit better. I spent a few hours today researching grants.

Monday, Monday.

That job possibility I mentioned? 20 hours a week, $10/hour, no benefits, basically clerical work in an obstetrics clinic, with flexible hours. So, it could be a nice, provisional situation. A little income. About the same pay as substitute teaching. But starting a job now would prevent me from enrolling in a drug study. I need the big paycheck from a drug study to get over this hump, to get through the summer, and to pay for the course to be certified for teaching English. So ... the timing sucks.

I woke up at 7:30 at M's house this morning, for my 8 a.m. appointment at the food stamps office, which is right around the corner from M's. When I got there, at 7:50, I realized I didn't have the papers I needed (recent pay stubs and bank statement). So I drove home, got the stuff and returned at 8:14. Too late. The next available appointment was April 28. While I was waiting to talk to someone about rescheduling, I kind of fell apart, started crying. I don't think anyone noticed.

It got down to about 55 degrees last night and everyone was buzzing about how cold it is. I don't get this place.

I Want a Pre-Historic Man.

And then there's Ann Miller. Look at her go.

The Wolf-Children of Austin's Loisaida.

I got a sub assignment for today and tomorrow at a middle school not too far away. Poor neighborhood, downtown, mostly Latin kids. The teacher was there when I arrived; she was doing something in the building all day, just not in the classroom. She left a test for the kids and then they were to watch WALL-E and write down 10 things they noticed in the environment of the film. (It's a science class.) The test was fairly advanced stuff for 6th graders, stuff about cells and genes. I don't know how they did with it -- it's still very hard for me to gauge how much learning is actually going on amidst the chaos.

The teacher left seating charts, which helped, at least insofar as I could get the kids to sit in the seats assigned to them. Taking attendance is a minefield. All the Spanish names you'd think would be pretty straightforward but they're not. Some kids won't acknowledge you unless you roll that double R like Charo. And the next kid gets angry if you pronounce Gabriel with a long A. "It's Gay-briel!" I can't even begin to parse the politics going on there. And there's always a couple indigenous names with Xs that are never pronounced the same twice. It made me laugh that a black girl named Ty'quishia was delighted when I called her name -- she said, "You're the first sub to say my name right!"

It's so draining. I guess getting up at 5:30 is a factor. But the emotional exhaustion of being such a close witness to the mess of these kids' lives, it's heart-wrenching and it wears me out. It's like they've never had any socialization, any civilizing influences in their lives. They're like very smart 2-year-olds. Every now and then there's one who is hostile, but for the most part they're just clueless. They have no self-discipline; they literally cannot control themselves. It's like a nursery and an insane asylum and an animal shelter. They're adorable, hilarious, extremely manipulative, and sad as hell. They're feral is what they are.

Snapshot.

There are a couple reasons I've slacked off here lately. One has to do with blogging more publicly now on Bilerico and The Gay Place, and trying to find a way to make my blogging style here translate to a forum with a wider audience mainly interested in queer stuff. I'm still struggling a bit with that. Though I love the stuff I've been posting on those blogs recently, I still have some kind of mental separation (which is artificial and unnecessary) between my personal and my public/queer blogging.

The other thing is that I'm in a complicated, sort of rough patch in my personal life. Well, most everything is fine except for the fact that I am broke and have no income. And money trouble fucks everything else up. It's the baby on the bus that won't stop screaming so you can't read, you can't sleep, you can't have a conversation. So when I start to blog about my personal life, which I usually kind of enjoy doing, it just all sounds so depressing and I'm tired of talking about how hard life is lately.

Still, since that's what's going on, I decided to just write it down and post it. Maybe getting it down will help me to put things in perspective, and allow me to think about and write about and enjoy some other things besides the litany of woes.

Money:

I have about $600 left in the bank. My student loans ripened, or whatever it is they call it, this month, with the first payments due on the 15th, I think. I applied for a deferment on account of unemployment. I didn’t pay my credit card bills this month. I have about $18,000 in credit card debt. I say that it’s from my film, Life in a Box -- originally it was, but the balance has stayed the same for 5 years because I’ve reborrowed as much as I’ve paid back. Bank of America is already starting to call me several times a day to ask me what’s up with not making payments.

In the last few months, I’ve applied for maybe 25 teaching positions in the Austin public schools, high school and middle school English, history, social studies, and one art teacher position. I haven’t been called to interview for any of these positions. I check the job listings on their web site every day and fax resumes when there are any new positions I’m even remotely qualified for. I continue to sub in the Austin schools. I get about 2 or 3 days of work per month at $80 day.

I picked up an application at Bookpeople this week. I could enjoy working at a book store. The pay is $7.25/hour. I haven't had a job that paid that little since I worked at Pearl Paint in New York in 1982. I don’t think I could pay my bills and rent and groceries for that, even as simply and cheaply as I live. I applied for food stamps this week, too. If I am eligible, I’ll get about $200/month. That’ll help. MP, my housemate, told me last night that a friend, who is a nurse, might have a part-time job for me that pays $10/hour. It has something to do with paging doctors. She’s going to call me.

In about 10 days, I can start trying again to get into a drug study. (They won’t take you if you’ve been out of the country recently, so I have to wait 30 days from when I was in Mexico.)

I need about $1,000 to enroll in the July course in teaching English as a second language. I want to have that certification so I’ll have some chance of finding employment in Mexico City when M and I go there, which could be in about a year, depending on whether or not and when he gets a research fellowship. If I can get into one of the higher paying drug studies, it’s possible I could have enough money to get through the summer and pay for the course. The only drawback to the higher paying studies is that they often require you to stay in the facility for weeks, sometimes as much as a month. The advantage is that the facility is air-conditioned.

I was floundering like this when I first moved here, almost 4 years ago. I got the great idea to go back to school, thinking that might open up some possibility for income. I went to school for 2 1/2 years, got a B.A. Now I floundering again. And I have another $15,000 of debt. I’ve never been quite so much at a loss for how to make a living as I have been the last few months.

Work:

Tomorrow is the cutoff date for fundraising for my film, Men & Boys, on Kickstarter. I didn’t even break $1,000 out of the $5,000 goal. So, Men & Boys is on the back burner for a while. I have another project that I’m inspired by, though. It doesn’t have a name yet. It’s a short video, composed of the text of my high school diary with photographs from that time. The technique will be similar to Tarnation, but without the home video footage. I haven’t decided if I want to use voice-over, text on screen, or actually scan the diary text and find a way to make it scroll across the screen. The diary contains a long entry in which I come out to myself. I think, I hope, that it could be a very funny, moving piece. The best thing about this project is that I don’t need a cent to make it. I have Final Cut and a scanner, which is all I need.

Love:

I’ve been seeing M since around Thanksgiving last year, but I've resisted writing much here about him. Is it because we might be still in that phase where every revelation could be a rock on the rail, every admission of vulnerability feels like a dive off a cliff? I’m ready for that phase to be over. I want to speak clearly about this miraculous new love that grows bigger every day so that my heart feels like it will explode. I know that sounds overdramatic, but I mean it literally. Sometimes I can hardly breathe.

Life:

MP and JP are making progress on the container house they’re building for J and me. Possibly this summer, it will be ready for us to move in. When this project started, a year and a half ago, life was pretty different. J and I were like spinster aunts, with our circumscribed domestic life together. Things have gotten all stirred up in the last few months. I’m away from home a lot, spend most nights at M’s. I still cook for J and me, but not as regularly. M and I talk about the possibility of living together in the future, with no set date. M is entangled as well. He lives with a friend in a domestic arrangement similar to J’s and mine, though his friend is not a former partner. They have a lease, they have a way in which they’re accustomed to living together, a friendship, things they rely on each other for. Sometimes it feels impossibly complicated to me, on top of, or maybe because of, the sadness I feel about my changing friendship with J. And my financial insecurity lately makes all these issues particularly hard to see with any clarity.

Summer is coming, and frankly I’m scared. I don’t want to be furious and depressed from May until October, but I fear I am no match for it.

Today.

M has been gone for 10 days, I haven't gotten any sub work since early last week, there aren't any teacher job openings in Austin that I haven't already applied for. My car is in the shop. JP backed into it last week and smashed the front fender, so they're fixing it.

Things I could be doing: 1) volunteering for aGLIFF, either screening submitted films or helping out in the office, 2) revising either of two screenplays I'm working on, 3) pre-production work on Men & Boys, my short film, 4) preliminary work on a smaller video piece I have in mind in case I don't raise the money I need to make "Men & Boys," 5) reading the new Barbara Kingsolver novel (I started it a few days ago, it's great -- it's set in Mexico City in the 1930s). I know if I sit down to read I'll just fall asleep.

I don't want to do anything today except look at tumblr blogs and play Angry Birds on my iPhone.

Hipsters on Food Stamps.

This is a fascinating read, or at least I thought so, given my current preoccupations with poverty and the artist's life. Two quintessentially American but seemingly unrelated attitudes dovetail nicely: Americans' general disdain for and suspicion of artists and Americans' belief that poor people deserve to eat crappy food.

(Be sure and read the response by one of the subjects of the article. He expresses most of the thoughts I had while reading the piece.)

I've thought about food stamps recently. Not thought about like "I'm gonna march down there and get me some," but thought about like, "What would it mean for someone like me to be getting food stamps?" I've been looking for work for months, and I don't have enough savings to live on for more than another few weeks -- why is it I seem to have a basic assumption that people like me (white, single, middle class background) don't really deserve public assistance? Why is it I assume that since I chose to be an artist I deserve financial insecurity? I'm not eligible for unemployment (the sort of respectable welfare for middle-class people), even though I've paid taxes all my life and even paid double in most years because self-employed people have to pay self-employment tax.

I don't intend these questions to imply that I feel I'm not getting something I'm entitled to. They're genuinely confusing questions to me.

It Doesn't Hurt to Ask. I Hope.

I remember years ago watching a country music awards show with my family and my mom rolled her eyes when one of the winners said something along the lines of "I want to thank my fans who I love dearly because without them I wouldn't be able to do this." I probably questioned the sincerity of the statement, too, this being before I saw at close hand how personally tied up an artist's livelihood can be to his or her fans' support.

When J and I were on the road with Y'all, I loved our fans deeply, sincerely, because, well, without them we couldn't have been doing what we did. Their love and support of our work was the engine that make it go. (Whether or not it made it go a little longer than it should have is a question for another day....)

Not only did our fans provide cash flow for our living expenses by coming to see our shows, buying our CDs and books and T-shirts and whatever else we could come up with to sell, they often fed and sheltered us. I don't know what else to feel but love and gratitude for people who took care of our basic needs, regardless of whether I knew them personally or not.

I still don't feel comfortable asking for money, but I don't want to stop making art, so I've made some kind of uneasy peace with it. I know the constant pleading can be a turnoff. I'm sure we lost fans like public radio stations lose listeners during pledge drives, but sustaining a career as an artist can be a giant money-eating monster, and in order to keep making art you have to keep feeding the monster.

I'll be very frank. I've had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to make a living the last few years, post-Y'all. I've had some great successes recently. A real career high for me has been my show, Lizzie Borden's critically-acclaimed run in New York last fall. That has been and continues to be a huge thrill for me, huge, but it's a success I can't measure in dollars and cents. Literally.

And it's been 5 years since I made Life in a Box, what I consider to be my biggest artistic achievement. The film did well, premiered in the San Francisco Int'l Film Festival (a fact which I'm very proud of) got great audience response during its festival run in 2005-7, and continues to accumulate admirers. But it hasn't made a dime and I'm still paying the credit card bills.

And I'm broke. I've been applying for every teaching job I can and trying to get work as a substitute and very rapidly running out of money. Lately, one thing does not seem to lead to another, and I wonder how I will ever get back on my feet. I hope I don't sound over-dramatic, but things are a little scary lately.

In my more confident moments, I don't care if I never get back on my feet again as long as I can continue to be creative. I want to make another movie. I'm tired of waiting. I've been writing screenplays, songs, essays, blogging like crazy. I'm doing the most complex and thoughtful writing of my life now. My best work is ahead of me. Broke and desperate or not, I need to be producing work.

I've written a short screenplay that I think is the ideal project for me now -- it's a simple, provocative story that I can shoot and edit without a lot of fuss, on a very small scale. But the only way I'm going to be able to do it is if I can get a short reprieve from the wolf at the door. A few thousand dollars will let me take a break from looking for a day job so I can finish writing, do some preproduction, shoot and edit the film. This is a tiny project, a 10-minute film. Probably a two-day shoot and maybe a couple weeks of editing. The speck of a budget also provides small stipends for a crew of one or two, two actors, and lunch on shooting days. I just need a couple months of being a full-time artist and then I'll go back to being broke and desperate.

If you appreciate my work and have $10 bucks or more to throw my way, now's the time.

Hot Guy.

Man oh man, I am sure having a complicated reaction to these photos of a beautiful man. This is Olympic pole-vaulter, Balian Buschbaum, née Yvonne Buschbaum.

I don't see anything queer at all in these pictures after (after?) his transition. He has become exactly the sort of impossibly handsome, athletic man that I have resented and desired since I was about 11 years old. I am aware that I am reacting to pictures, to a presentation, not to an actual man, but I was responding to a presentation, to a performance, in 5th grade too: the straight white teeth, the shirt open 3 buttons, the hiphuggers, the masculine swagger that I couldn't master.

I don't have any pithy conclusion to offer; I just found my reaction to these photos fascinating.

I'll Watch Drag Queens Do Pretty Much Anything.

I get bored fast with all the Project Runway/American Idol, etc. talent shows, but for some reason (i.e., because it's drag queens) I'm mesmerized by RuPaul's Drag Race. I actually teared up a little last night at JuJuBe's harrowing last-minute save from elimination when she Lipsynched ... For Her Life. And we laughed and cried to see Jessica Wild sashay away.

If you don't have time to catch the whole thing, this parody from Big Gay Sketch Show pretty much nails it.

More Gay Movies & Entertainment News

Uuuuhh.

M and I were on our way to A's house for his weekly RuPaul's Drag Race gathering last night, guessing that everyone would want to know about our trip to Mexico City last week, and of course anxious to tell everyone how wonderful and magical and absolutely amazing it was, but we both sort of realized that we didn't know how to turn it into a narrative. And, too, I thought, I don't know how to turn the last few months of my life into a narrative. Which is saying something, because I'm pretty good at the narrative thing. Even if I have to bluff.

I fell madly in love with a man, and then I fell madly in love with a city. That's all I've got so far.

So, I'm seriously neglecting my blogging. Not just here, but at The Gay Place and Bilerico where I'm required to write something about something instead of blubbering about my incoherent thoughts. Not only did I take a week off, but now, three days back, I can't focus long enough to write a paragraph that's not a mess. I'll come up with something, I hope soon, but right now my mind is spinning too fast.

Oh! My birthday was Monday, the day I returned from Mexico. I turned 49. Unbelievable. I spent the eve of my birthday vomiting on the bus from Mexico City to Nuevo Laredo at the border. Nice. Maybe it was the lax food safety laws in Mexico (are there any?) or the water, but I'm telling myself I was just overwrought and overwhelmed. I was actually crying the night before we left, I was so sad to be leaving. I haven't fallen so hard for a city since I was 18 on my first visit to New York. Hard core.

(Okay, one coherent thought: the street food in Mexico City is sublime. We ate almost every meal from street vendors. Usually for less than 5 bucks for the both of us, we stuffed ourselves on the most delicious food I've ever had. I guess, in a way, that fact can stand in for the whole experience of the city.)