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Holiday Angst

There is something about the Christmas season that makes you think about life in sad ways.

I had a friend visiting not too long ago who had just heard that a friend of hers had decided to have a baby despite the fact that she didn’t have a husband. She kept repeating how sorry she felt for her, not to have had a husband and father, and all I could think was that she did have her child, who was healthy, and she had a good job to be a single parent – she’s a teacher – and that life comes with a lot of goddamn compromises.

I think about my lovely set of friends from high school and so many have had unfortunate surprises in their lives: babies born with serious medical conditions, boyfriends in near-fatal accidents, people who wanted children & didn’t have them (yet), people who didn’t and who did. There are so many ways things can go a little awry, or a lot awry, but I found myself feeling a little angry at the pity my friend was expressing, maybe because I’ve felt that kind of pity directed at me, although not from her, because I married someone trans.

So I’ve been thinking this winter about how to make room in my life for other people’s decisions in a way that really is fair to them. I’m tired of feeling like everyone’s a control freak, as if we all know better than others about what they need or should have. I’m not sure what the answer is but as we all get ready to see old friends and family I thought it might be something to think about.

Life is not easy, but it’s definitely that much harder when you can feel someone’s judgement on the back of your head.

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Safe House

Barbara Carrellas told me that tonight, this night that Obama won, her next door neighbor put a candle on their doorstep & a white handkerchief on the doorknob: the sign of a safe house during the time of the Underground Railroad.

For years I have had my key in our front door and made a point of not turning my head over my right shoulder so that I would not see the big gaping lack in the sky where the towers stood.

I’ve felt for the past 8 years like that crazy chracter Whoopi Goldberg played on Star Trek, in that one episode where she knew the ship wasn’t supposed to be at war, and that children were supposed to be on board, but weren’t. She kept telling everyone they were in the wrong reality.

We’ve been in the wrong reality for 8 years at least. There is a part of me that wants to go back to that time of outpouring of sympathy from the world we received and just apologize already for having shit on their sympathy with aggression & “the Bush doctrine” of Orwellian, preventative war. I want still for the US to say to the rest of the world that we’re sorry for our bad manners; we were traumatized and stupid and scared and that we’re very, very sorry for not having taken their shows of empathy with grace and thanks.

& Then I think of that candle on Barbara’s stoop and that white handkerchief on her doorknob and I think of how far we have gone back, what deep wounds we might heal now, and I am awed at the idea of it.

To the rest of the world: the difficult but lovable child full of promise that the US used to be is back. We’re still a big precocious brat in some ways, but full of love and honor and bravery in others: a 19 year old to your more mature years, still a little impetuous and wet behind the ears but hopeful and not entirely stupid. I feel like we’ve finally gotten to that moment full of tears and anger where we admit how much we were hurt and how much hurting we did and try, still a little clumsily, to try a little harder.

(this post is dedicated to Anne Wendy, whose British liberalism has been a bright, bright beacon.)

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Patience

& Really, I will get back to gender & trans stuff. There’s a lot of stuff bubbling, but right now I’m still just worried about Obama winning. Thank you for your patience.

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Old Drugs

I know I’m often somewhat cynical about scientific studies, but this one especially seems to take the cake. Not because it’s not smart, or comes to wild, unfounded conclusions, but rather because it’s – well, obvious: thoughtful people tend to get depressed.

Verhaeghen, who is also a novelist and describes himself as a “somewhat mood disordered person,” had a particular interest in the connection between creativity and this ruminating state of mind.

“One of the things I do is think about something over and over and over again, and that’s when I start writing,” he said.

Psychologist types can tell me if anything specific is meant by “ruminating” – that is, if the term is used in your field to mean a kind of obsessive thinking and reviewing of thought – because otherwise, to us lay folks, ruminating just means thinking, reviewing. I don’t think of it as being a negative activity by any means, or even an obsessive one.

What they seem to miss – or don’t articulate – is that writing is a kind of thinking for a lot of writers. It’s a way of kind of nailing down a certain kind of looped thinking, following wild hairs to their logical end, sorting out complex connections. In other words, it’s a kind of sanity-making thing to do when you’re thinking all the time.

I had a writing prof who used to say that it’s impossible to tell if people who have a lot of vivid dreams become writers or if writers have a lot of vivid dreams – that is, whether the inclination to write causes someone to dream & think very intensely, or whether people who naturally dream & think intensely find writing is their only good outlet for all the stuff going on in their head. Writing, to me, is an anti-depressant, but in a certain sense it creates this other place you get to go, and like with other drugs, maybe you just get to a point where pushing the button doesn’t result in relief anymore. With DFW, it would be easy to come to that conclusion – he wrote so intensely, so intricately, for a long while, & it’s as if the moment he stopped – he couldn’t stand it anymore. Maybe, as with other drugs, we have to be careful how much we press the button, because we become resistant to its palliative qualities, eventually.

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Not a Goomba*

I was just bitching on the MHB boards that nearly all the only portrayals of Italian-Americans is mafia related, and people pointed out a few others – like did you know Elaine on Seinfeld was supposed to be Catholic? Nice try, but she wasn’t. Other than Ray Romano, Fonzi and Al from Happy Days, there seems to be a real dearth of the rest of us that isn’t Sopranos-esque.

* Goomba, or goombah, is a term used to describe a stereotypical Italian-American, & in a few dictionaries, implies a connection to the mob. & Yes, it’s also the name of one of the bad guys in Super Mario.

I didn’t have any goodfellas in my own Italian family, and we’re even Sicilian / Calabrian. I tend to describe my dad as “the other kind of Italian” because he is – more Joe DiMaggio than Godfather. Mostly if it’s not mafia it’s about food, or more likely, it’s about both. But honestly, is there a culture where the food isn’t important? My Big Fat Greek Wedding got closer to my experience of being Italian-American than any of those goomba movies.

& These days, in New York, there’s about three blocks left of Little Italy; Chinatown has been encroaching for years, and Italians left the city – for everywhere. (Though the midwest could use a few more, because finding inexpensive, good Italian food in Wisconsin leaves you at Pizza Hut. ugh.) But at least now there’ll be a museum of the whole Italian-American experience, located where Little Italy used to be.

(Thanks to Nettie, Caprice, VM, & Donna, all of whom put in their two cents.)

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GREat

Today I’m taking the GRE, or Graduate Record Exam, and let me tell you, I’m not excited about it. I don’t mind taking a test for four hours – my time spent writing often runs longer than that – but the idea of this exam just pisses me off. I don’t do well with standardized anything, but the idea of standardized intelligence is so unbelievably counter-intuitive, especially for us humanities types.

I’ve always been good at math; I just didn’t like it. My sister, who always scored higher on verbal than math, went into banking. I always scored higher on math than verbal and I’m the writer. Maybe it’s just inborn perversity, or maybe this whole idea of a “right” answer offends me. Math encouraged the wrong bits of me entirely.

I’ve spent most of my intellectual career teaching myself not to look for a right answer, but to look instead at things in a way they’re not usually seen, to ask questions that expose more of the riddle of the thing in question. I love the idea of imbuing the subjective narrative with authority; of defining the universe in a kind of Buddhist solipsism. You know, in a healthy sort of way, that maximizes the importance of our humanity and decreases our judgment of what’s right or wrong.

Call me a recovering Catholic, but I had a literature professor in my first year at Fordham – I started out a theology major, no kidding – who called me The Church Lady because I found Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” a moral outrage. I was The Church Lady with a mohawk, but judgmental nonetheless. I think that tendency is sometimes referred to as liberal fascism, or for you D&D types, Lawful Evil. I recognized the streak and since then have learned to tame it.

And then this test comes along, a test I avoided taking the first time around by getting my MA in Writing, of all things, but now, considering doing a Ph.D., I can’t avoid any longer. And they want to know the best opposite of restive is, and I have to spend the first seconds while reading the question turning off the part of my brain that wants to know the context, and whether restive is being used sarcastically, who’s using it and what they’re describing. The next seconds I convince myself to just answer the damn question the way I expect they want it answered, and the next seconds after that I have to convince myself to stop thinking about it because my first “this is the answer they want” impulse is usually the one that gets me the check mark of correctness. It’s exhausting.

I don’t believe in check marks of correctness, and the idea – at this age! – of having to take a test to give someone a numerical way of understanding how smart I am, or am not, is pretty damned frustrating.

Either way, I’m taking the GRE today.

Please wish me luck in not sticking the pencil in my own eye out of frustration.

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Snooty-Pants

Our friend Lynne pointed out this interesting article from The American Scholar about the problem of elite schools. I particularly liked this section, since it’s so rare we actually talk about class in this culture:

Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.

He goes on to talk about types of smartness, the goal of liberal arts, and the uses of solitude.

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Just a Guy

Our downstairs housemate of the past 5 years or so left today, to move to his hometown, where he got offered a job he couldn’t turn down. I’ve been friends with him nearly two decades; he’s the one who made my wedding gown, and who watches our cats and feeds our fish while we’re away, and saying I will miss him is the understatement of a century.

I’m also a little envious that he got that job, the one that you’d leave NYC for, and that he’s going home to have his close friend and family nearby. There is a certain disjointedness in my life these days, and I know that mine will not come together in the ways his is – my parents are retired in FL and there’s no way on God’s green earth I would ever move down there, and even if I did, it wouldn’t be home. Maybe that’s a good thing. Instead I stay here in Brooklyn, with my sister 20 blocks away and more friends than I can count.

Except, of course, the one I’ll be missing starting today.

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T Shirt

I don’t often wear trans shirts when I’m with Betty – no need to out her casually, she does enough outreach for one trans person – but Betty was sick this past week & so I was walking to my sister’s wear my NCTE “T” shirt (the old one – I don’t have the new one yet.)

Then someone on our boards asked if people would say yes if someone asked them if they were transgender.

And it made me wonder how often people think I’m trans – because of the t-shirts, the various places I post, the relative absence of partners in trans circles, and especially in LGBT circles. I think I mentioned here how two people I met at USC had assumed I was the partner of an FTM since the queer-identified partners of MTFs seem to be few & far-between – okay, practically non-existant.

It’s made me think of the days I was an honorary lesbian, which I am, still, kinda, depending on who’s deciding what I am.

I never told people I wasn’t a lesbian – unless the person was who wanted to sleep with me or a person who I wanted to sleep with – and in the same way I don’t think I’d care to clarify that I’m not trans if someone thought I was.

Maybe I should get a shirt that says GVETGI = Gender Variant Enough To Get It.

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39 The First (& Only) Time

39. Shock & horror. It’s not possible I’m this old.

My mother was 39 when she gave birth to me, 39 years ago today. (Thanks mom.) I was her 6th child, and here I can barely manage three cats & a trans husband.

But at least Betty’s as old as me!