DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT OBSESSED WITH MY DOG.
At the [Barbara Tran] reading the other day, I asked the poet herself what makes her write sections of her poetry in prose versus "poetry." She started off by saying she's probably not the right person to ask about the distinction between poetry and prose because she doesn't have a good sense of that difference. But then she went on to make some comments about why she chose to write certain sections of her poem "Rosary" in prose and others in line-distinguished poetry. For her, there is something very visual about the difference between poetry and prose. The language may be similar or even the same, but she wants there to be a visual cue to a different way of approaching the words. The more solid, square, frame-like box of prose text presents a compact chunk of visual, auditory, and other kinds of information. The lines of her poetry, on the hand, draw out her ideas, allowing a different kind of rhythm to develop in the unfolding of information.
Be careful, all you nature types. Have a wonderful, disease-free weekend!
Right. So, it seems to me that a journal does more than simply reflect one's current mental state. It also helps to structure it, both retrospectively and concurrently. In the first case, reading past journals helps to recall your thoughts of an earlier time in the particular narrative of linear time. In the second, though, the very act of writing helps to make palpable one's often incoherent and contradictory thoughts and feelings. So I wanted to use this page as a way to anchor all the positive aspects of my life. Unfortunately, I don't seem to be know how to write that way. And in fact, it seems that all the difficult aspects of my life I've been repressing these last few years (i.e., family) are now coming back in triple strength to eat away at me. I wish repression worked better. Grrr.
I did wake up much more relaxed this morning though, after surviving Hump Day. It's odd that Wednesday is going to function for me as the climax of each week. It's the busiest day for me, when I get to campus at 7 am and don't leave until 9 pm. The intervening time is spent teaching, talking to students in the office, taking classes, going to meetings, and then more going to class. I've realized it's been very stressful returning to school not so much because of all the work I have to do to prepare for class (lesson plans and reading), but really because I have to interact with people for such long stretches of time -- sometimes all day. Summer spoiled me in letting me recede into my shell (do ducks have shells? egg shells, I guess?), emerging only occasionally for a quick movie or dinner with select friends. But now, I am constantly around people: my officemates, my students, my classmates, my professors, and quite simply just the campus population that swarms around me as I make my way between buildings. It's going to take me another couple of weeks just to adjust to all these people. I really need my personal space.
Now I am in my apartment. I can hear the grounds-keeper (heh) mowing the grass outside, his machine humming louder, then softer, then louder again. My clothes are drying across the apartment complex in the laundry room. I'm ironing some shirts at a leisurely pace in the bedroom where [Skott] sings sweetly over the piano.
And just to keep referring to the goals of the center as the celebration of a "culture" is also absurd. LGBT experience is not even close to ethnic cultural experience or religious traditions. In fact, LGBT experience is exactly so different in that gay youth tend to feel isolated, unable to interact with peers and others in their lives because of their homosexuality.
And this paragraph really pisses me off: "For now, LGBTQ students have a strong presence on campus. But if their numbers drop in the future, it's unfair to other students thirsting for space for LGBTQ students to permanently claim valuable real estate they no longer need." Ummmm. Hello. We're not going to just "drop in numbers" unless we all get queer bashed and killed. And if the numbers of out and visible gay students decreases, that is exactly when such an infrastructural support center will be most important to make sure there isn't greater discrimination and alienation of them.
In response, I just e-mailed to my dad the page [Education on Reparative Therapy] on [PFLAG's website]. I included the following message:
Mostly because I'm tired as hell from lack of sleep, but also because I'm damned fed up with trying to think out the consequences of talking to and trying to engage my parents in a productive dialogue about our relationship and their perceptions of me, I sent this message off without thinking it through too much. It's probably too condescending. It's probably mean. It's probably only going to make my dad cry more. But you know what? At this point I just don't fucking care. He's a fucking medical doctor, for god's sake. He should know how utterly whacked out and damaging reparative therapy can be.
Addendum:
(Just got this second e-mail.)
Paul,
We are glad to have made the trip to NC because we can understand your living situation better and make a better dialogue.
In fact, your studying English did'nt mount much disappoitment for me at all. On the contrary, I am happy for you since you will be
a professor in the future although mom still prefers you to be a MD.
However, I am still very much hopefull that you will change your life style. If you are willing to try and try hard, I am ready to help you
and your boy friend out in any shape and form. It definitely can be done.
Read some encouraging facts. Set you mind prepared first.
We will pray for your success.
With love,
D & M
But I'm actually still quite optimistic about this semester. If nothing else, my students will be writing a lot. And constant practice does wonders, in my book. I had one student who was at the classroom at 7:30 am (class starts at 8). He had even started doing work for the Friday's class session (this was on Wednesday). And he's cute, to boot. I wanted to tell him he wasn't allowed to drop my class.
[Against SUVs.]
Note to self (unrelated to above): Look for Public Sentiments by Glen Hendler.
I'll probably get bored on campus today and write more.
H likes how, at just the right distance, the outline of men's legs takes on a certain fuzziness. The hair catches the surrounding light, creating a halo to blur the hard line drawn by the skin.
Waiting in line at the post office, he notices the curve of one man's calves before him. It's enticing; delicate shadows delineate the muscles of the back of his legs. The man shifts his weight from one leg to the other. He is impatient, even though the line is moving along at a steady pace. H smiles and wonders what else the man has to do today, if perhaps other errands await his attention.
The man finally reaches the head of the line, clutching a letter in one hand, slapping it against his palm to a gentle rhythm. He glances back and catches H's eyes. He smiles, and H grins while hurriedly turning his eyes away.
The [Summer Reading Program] discussion session went alright. I wasn't as prepared as I wanted to be, but the students were remarkably talkative and willing to entertain my sometimes-off-the-wall questions about the reading and the controversy. I only had one student who found the reading "offensive." He was great as a foil, though, for raising some questions about what we expect when we read things (for class and otherwise). For example, he complained that Sells's book wasn't objective, leading me to ask the students how they would define an objective book and why they would expect it.
I finally sat down to tackle lesson plans for the class I'm teaching. It's going to be a lot of work revising things from last semester.
Rob has been working on growing a bonsai tree from seeds. My brother gave me a bonsai kit for our birthday this past year, but I'd been too lazy to go through all the waiting: soaking the seeds, cold stratifying them, planting them, and waiting for them to sprout. But Rob went ahead and prepared the seeds, planted them. And this morning, after about two weeks, one of the seeds finally sprouted! Woo hoo!
It was a dark and stormy night.... Well, it was dark and wet. The menacing thunderstorms were a couple hours earlier.... Crap.
The gods: Countdown to the start of school. T minus five days. Hmmm. How can we fuck up Paul's carefully frantic scramble to get his shit together?
One second you're stopped at a light at a dark, wet intersection behind a high-assed pickup. The light turns green, but the cars in front of you don't move. The next second, you're spinning in your car sideways to the curb, like you'd inadvertently gotten on a roller coaster somewhere on that limbo drive home to Durham from Chapel Hill. Luckily, you weren't hurt at all, not even sore the morning after as the paramedics mentioned might happen.
None of the other three drivers involved were seriously hurt, but three of the cars, including yours, got lucky last night and went home with hunky tow-trucks and their flashing lights. Now you're waiting at home for your insurance company to call back. Your thoughts refuse to cohere. They're still fleeting, full of what-ifs, not content to flesh out any one idea.
I was being careful last night on the drive home. It was dark. And it was wet. I lumbered along patiently in the right lane of the two-lane road. Usually I would be cruising along in the left lane. If I had been that night, I wouldn't have been anywhere near the accident. Or perhaps there wouldn't have been an accident at all.
The throng of paramedics and cops that came to the scene worked haphazardly. Half of the officers seemed to have ADD, asking questions and then wandering off even before we could respond. We stood around wondering what happened, looking to each other for clues. Is she hiding something? Is he the one who caused all this? But we were all too kind to kick up a fuss, demand a pound of flesh from the perpetrator.
A couple of ambulance drivers were behind the accident. The woman said, "I saw it all." There was an attempted lane change gone awry as an oncoming pickup truck moving very fast in the open lane passed by at just the wrong moment. The impatient car spins out and knocks me to the curb. The fast-moving oncoming truck continues forward a number of yards, also in a spin, and manages to clip another vehicle up ahead, later suspected to be that high-assed pickup I was behind. The driver said, "The light had just turned green and I heard the accident behind me. I kept going thinking I was okay, but then something hit me."
Two hours after the accident, an officer handed me a sheet of paper with a woman's contact and insurance information.
Officer Schnee: You're free to go.
I think it's about time someone discusses sexuality in comics and comics-readership. There are so many obvious instances of coded-homosexuality. It's great that now there are openly gay and lesbian characters and issues, but there has always been a lot of attention paid to the epistemology of the closet...
to be famous is so nice, suck my dick, kiss my ass , in limousines we have sex, every night with my famous friends -- [miss kittin and the hacker, "frank sinatra"] (off the mix cd [everything, but] sent me)
FREAKY. This is exactly the sort of action that seeps into the pores of people everywhere, the subtle bludgeoning of hard-won gains in reproductive (and other) freedom, the quiet erosion of rights that more quickly than seems possible results in a tremendous regression to restrictive, moralistic legislation.
["Dad's Sad, Mad: Too Bad"] is an article about the dad's role in abortion (I think the case discussed is mentioned in the previously linked article). I'm sorry, but the fact that this man was able to delay his ex-girlfriend's abortion through legislative means freaks me out. I just can't get past the logic that it should be a man's right to keep a child he has fathered if the mother does not want the child. What ever happened to the logic that the child should be wanted by both parents? Was the father willing to take full custody and responsbility of the child anyways? Or was he going to saddle the mother with the child? Wouldn't a man who wanted a child be happier with a woman who wanted to have a child with him anyways? Why would you want a child with someone who desperately wants to get away from you? As for the imbalance in power regarding abortions/pregnancies, I think it's only justice that women should have ultimate rights as a means to redress millenia of bearing without reprieve the children of our humanity.
I also saw The MO of MI, a really fucked up story of betrayal, and a program of short films from Australia. The shorts program included one called 'Sucker with vampires. :)
This article mentions blogs briefly, but is mostly about the resurgence of the pamplet as a rhetorical medium in cultural politics (construed widely). I've noticed a lot of these little fifty-page booklets in bookstores lately. Guess I never really thought of their appearance as a shift in publishing practices or a subtle change in how thinkers are attempting to propagate their words. The article's turn towards academics publishing in the pamphlet press is of course interesting to me on my way to a profession in academia. If pamphlets make a comeback for politically-minded academics, the rules of the game for tenure and publishing might change...
So I've been to a few screenings at the [North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival] so far. Nothing has been really extraordinary, though I suppose it's a bit naive to think that everything will be simply fabulous. After reading [this review] in the local weekly Thursday, I decided at the last minute to inaugurate this year's fest with Chop Suey, a Bruce Weber film meditation on photography. (I wouldn't agree with the viewer that the film festival has "queered" straight sexuality so much as it has tried to bring gay sexuality back into the folds of heterosexual society -- to examine how straight people deal with the shattered pieces of a heterosexual family torn apart by homosexuality....) It wasn't much my cup of tea, but definitely a thought-provoking and worthwhile film -- especially compared to what I saw immediately after -- The Perfect Son. This second movie was horrible. Yucky yuck yuck. I suppose it's not really that bad, but I just am not in the mood for after-school-special-like reconciliations of errant gay men on their deathbeds with their straight siblings. And the movie played out every frickin' sentimental, schlockey, "common sense" moment it could to wrench the tears from you. I actually left before the end of the movie when the straight brother at the abortion clinic with the woman he got pregnant decides that he's turned over a new leaf and wants her to keep the baby. Bleargh!!! I had to call my sister after I left the theater and rant about how excruciatingly normalizing the movie was. It was like taking all the screw ups of a prodigal generation of sons (one gay, the other a drug abuser/ne'er-do-well writer -- see the paralells here?) and healing the wounds with some good ol' traditional family restructuring. (Though I did not stay till the end, I'm sure after the AIDS-stricken brother dies, the once-maligned son will marry and start a family with his girl and live happily ever after.) The experience of seeing the movie left such a bad taste in my head that I had to go rent Gosford Park to cleanse myself, though I fell asleep during the viewing at home and still have to finish it.
Anyhoo. Yesterday I saw two short film programs -- one centered on transgendered issues and the other on gay men. In the first, I liked Blue Haven, a quirky sort-of-noir-ish fairytale about two skaters, mafia money, and a sex change. Though it could hardly be considered serious, educational, or whatnot, it had the most spirit of all the films in that program. The other films took themselves a little too seriously, though understandably over-informative due to the lack of common knowledge about what transgendered persons endure and even are. There were some good documentary-like stories and a few meditative pieces on sex (male or female or somewhere in-between?). The gay men's program was a lot more light-hearted overall. Boychick rocked as a story about a teenaged male fan of a teen pop idol (Britney-like) who fantasizes having her as his best friend and choreographer. Sexy was a funny, animated poem asking "what is sexy?" Safe Journey was quite moving in pairing an abused street kid and a man grieving the death of his partner. I also liked Tom Clay Jesus and Target Audience. In fact, the only dud was Beachcombers which sucked major ass.
I let myself get to the point of almost fainting from hunger again today, but then Rob and I went to [Quizno's], home of oven toasted subs, and I gorged myself on sandwich and soup. I need to establish a pattern of regular food intake again. Damned bodily needs.
All the posts from last night were a result of giddy sleepiness. I was trying to wait up for Rob, but he still wasn't home by 2:30 am so I zonked out. I was sort of in a cranky mood, too, to post a frustrated message about the Carolina Summer Reading program. I've been skimming through James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein's edited collection Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies today because I'm finally going to return it to its owner tomorrow, and I realized again that in fact my interests in literary studies lie in reception-oriented thoughts. That is, I actually gravitate towards thinking, talking, and writing about how particular books (texts, whatever) are received, how different groups of people react to the same text, how meaning is neither wholly in the text itself nor in an author's intentions, but tangled in the web of readers' interpretations. I've had two professors recommend some works on reception study to me already -- one after reading my paper on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee in which I attempted to trace the seemingly sudden emergence of Cha's experimental work as a canonical Asian American feminist text and the other after discussing my paper on Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self in which I tried to map out Hopkins criticism onto the debates of cultural politics, race, representation, etc. So all in all, I would be delighted to have a discussion on reading practices centered around Approaching the Qu'ran -- What does reading a text mean to students? How does designating a text "religious" or "sacred" change their approach? What do students "get" out of texts? How can we begin to link these individualized questions of a reader's relation to a particular text to larger social concerns such as communal belief systems (like organized religion)?
I was wiping down the windows earlier today with some Chlorox wipes, hoping to stay the further growth of more mold, when a man walked up and asked to use my phone. (Actually, he asked me first if I knew "Christine.") It was really kind of cool, something I wish I could experience more -- social interaction through my apartment windows. I live on the first floor, and it'd be fun to have conversations with neighbors through my windows, sort of like quick hellos while I'm cooking or something. Thing is, Durham is not much of a walking city, especially not where I live. And my apartment windows look out on the dusty parking lot. I miss being able to watch people living outside my window, not just hurrying from their car out of the blazing heat to the cool of their air conditioned apartments. I want to see people taking walks outside, playing games, and reading in portable chairs, on benches, or on the grass.
Ok, now I'm feeling even more like I'm stepping into a whirlwind of malevolent feet-biting rabid squirrels in volunteering to lead a discussion session for this year's Summer Reading Program. The thing is, okay, so the university is acknowledging that some students and/or their parents might be "offended" (crap!) by the reading. But they're exempting them from reading the book and then asking them to attend the discussion session anyways where we will be discussing what? Grrr. I know I'll have students pulling this "it's against my religion" crap in the discussion and disrupting things. So instead of engaging the reading itself, it sounds more and more like this discussion will be revolving around the politics of reading, education, and religion.
I only had one meal today.
Does anyone know how to deal with a mold/mildew problem? I think my apartment is filled with mold. It grows on the insides of the windows to an alarming degree. I'm thinking about getting an air filtering system.
My friend Anne is coming to visit on Friday. Yay! Whoops. That's not until next week. (Hi Anne!)
School starts in a week and a half! That means I should get back on my early schedule (get up at 6 am . . . eek) next week.
-- [AIDS and a Better World; Helping Others Win]
And Rob got back early this morning! Yay! I feel so much better today.
In the end, my parents weren't ready to meet Rob because they never really asked about him when they were here. And then he left town halfway through my parents' visit to help out one of his best friends whose father just died. He drove all the way to Kentucky. He'll be back tomorrow, though. :)
I haven't overshared my life with my parents because they don't want to hear the details. Of course it's hard for them to realize that I don't tell them things because I don't want them to get more upset, not that I somehow get pleasure from denying them access to my life. It's really quite the opposite; I, too, mourn their absence. But my dad's reaction to the single bed in my bedroom was proof enough that denial is a strong coping factor for my parents. Though I had asked them if they wanted to meet my boyfriend before they even arrived, my dad still somehow wanted to imagine that we slept in separate beds, as if we were in those old tv comedies where married couples slept comfortably like platonic friends in matching twin beds. Then during our "talk" later in the week, he had to ask explicitly if Rob and I were "spiritual" boyfriends as opposed to "sexual" ones. It was difficult to burst that bubble for my dad, but I didn't step back from the question like I always have. (Back when I first came out to my parents, my dad wanted me to assure him that even if I were gay, I wouldn't have gay sex.)
I've slept almost all day. But I'm going back to bed now so I can try to maintain a day schedule.
(This article caught my eye initially because I'm interested in how the US will deal with the increasingly polyglot nature of world communications -- all this despite claims that English is or will become the lingua franca of the business world. We might see the tension in this article through the differentiation between ESL and bilingual classes -- the former as a tool to integrate and assimilate non-English speaking immigrants and the second as a way to restructure the very bases of our educational system so that monolingualism might no longer be standard. I was also pleasantly surprised to read the byline and see a friend of mine from college, Yilu Zhao, as the article's writer.)
I've been in a bit of a dazy doze, or dozy daze, since I dropped my sister off at the airport. I spun around in the car a bit trying to wake myself up, passing two severe car accidents that seemed somehow symbolic, but still just wanted to close my eyes. Back home, though, when I tried to nap I couldn't fall asleep, and when I tried to stay awake -- check e-mail, surf long-neglected blogs -- I just wanted to close my eyes and drift off. I finally fell asleep and napped for a few hours (which is why I'm up at 2:30 AM).
Have your parents ever cut their visit-vacation short because they couldn't stand to be around you? My emotional lag-time rivals that of intercontinental jetlag, making it that much more difficult to deal with these complicated situations. On Friday night, while I talked to my dad in the hotel room and my sister to mom in the car, I was the only one who didn't cry.
My parents are filled with infinite compassion in the Christian Right's sense. That is, they feel infinite pain and shame about me and attempt (succeeding in no small part, but never fully) to induce a guilt that will "straighten" me out. It's like Catholicism's rhetoric about homosexuality (and other sins) - LOVE THE SINNER BUT HATE THE SIN. These religious associations are not entirely gratuitous, as much of the existential crises my parents seem to be facing as a result of considering their wayward children seem rooted in some sense of faith or lack thereof.
Of course, it's more complicated than that. My parents are full of contradictions. Hypocrisy is their shared middle name. My dad claims that he accepts the choices that I've made in my life. He claims that he wants me to succeed at what I do, even if it's not what he feels is the best thing for me to do. But he also cries as he says that he feels like he's a failure as a dad. He cries as he tries to convince me that being gay is bad because all gays eventually die of terminal infectious diseases.
I've reached a plateau. While it's still important for me to catalogue my grievances, I want also to work on the future, to figure out what I can do to ease my parents' sadness. I asked my dad directly what he would like me to do. He wants me to call more often, to visit more often. He said he feels like he's lost a son and daughter because we're so far away and not prone to over-sharing about our lives. Of course, making them a part of our lives is difficult because our parents use every detail we give them as evidence of our degeneracy. At least if we don't tell them anything, their intimations of our failure can only be vague and thus remain more easily dismissable. They prey so incessantly on our extant fears, as if they have a way of sniffing out our anxieties and applying pressure just so to break our resolve.
Seeing my dad leave a day earlier than originally planned, seeing him sleep instead of dealing with us, only reminded me of where I learned all my passive aggressive behavior. I talked to Joe a little Sunday evening and felt compelled to apologize to him for all the times I stopped speaking to him and deliberately tried to induce guilt and sadness through similar tactics. I wonder if my dad has any self-consciousness of what he does. I see myself in him, know that I learned these behaviors growing up with him. But I see the absurdity of what I do. Does it make any difference to the victims of our actions, though?
I'm going to try to be more explicit about how much I love and appreciate my parents (to them, especially). I'm going to work on bringing them back into my life, naturalizing my everyday for them through constant repetition so that they will begin to see it instead of the veil of lies surrounding popular conceptions of gayness and teaching.
Talking Saturday to my brave brother who has borne the brunt of interactions with our parents, I've also realized more acutely how intensely interwoven my actions are with my siblings'. Though he has not been an open book to our parents (or us other siblings), my brother hasn't actively avoided their presence. It's difficult, though, because of the four of us, he has the most difficult time resisting our parents' every desire to mold his life. It's as if he's not even living his own life, but merely going through the puppet motions of our parents' vision for his life. I want to help him build up more healthy walls -- ways for him to maintain not just a semblance of his own life, but his own realized life made up of his pursuits, dreams, desires.
Rest now.
(Edward Gorey loved Balanchine's choreography and never missed a performance of the New York City Ballet over a number of seasons.)
Saturday, August 31, 2002
I decided this morning that I want to be a poet. Is it going to be a problem if I have no sense of what is poetic?At the [Barbara Tran] reading the other day, I asked the poet herself what makes her write sections of her poetry in prose versus "poetry." She started off by saying she's probably not the right person to ask about the distinction between poetry and prose because she doesn't have a good sense of that difference. But then she went on to make some comments about why she chose to write certain sections of her poem "Rosary" in prose and others in line-distinguished poetry. For her, there is something very visual about the difference between poetry and prose. The language may be similar or even the same, but she wants there to be a visual cue to a different way of approaching the words. The more solid, square, frame-like box of prose text presents a compact chunk of visual, auditory, and other kinds of information. The lines of her poetry, on the hand, draw out her ideas, allowing a different kind of rhythm to develop in the unfolding of information.
>> 1:14 PM
Friday, August 30, 2002
Eek!: [Bubonic plague forces closure of Donner park]Be careful, all you nature types. Have a wonderful, disease-free weekend!
>> 2:31 PM
>> 2:21 PM
Thursday, August 29, 2002
When I need to write, I find that the computer is often the hardest place to do it. Instead, I take pen and paper and scrawl out on unlined paper my thoughts. I can write and write without constantly hitting Backspace. Similarly, [Annie] writes, "It's easier to write on the typewriter, the only dings are at the end of the line and I can't click onto another window and check my email. There's no cut and paste. Just forward motion." This forward motion is crucial to writing, as recursive an exercise as writing might be (always thinking and rethinking what you've just written).
>> 10:56 AM
Right. So, it seems to me that a journal does more than simply reflect one's current mental state. It also helps to structure it, both retrospectively and concurrently. In the first case, reading past journals helps to recall your thoughts of an earlier time in the particular narrative of linear time. In the second, though, the very act of writing helps to make palpable one's often incoherent and contradictory thoughts and feelings. So I wanted to use this page as a way to anchor all the positive aspects of my life. Unfortunately, I don't seem to be know how to write that way. And in fact, it seems that all the difficult aspects of my life I've been repressing these last few years (i.e., family) are now coming back in triple strength to eat away at me. I wish repression worked better. Grrr.
I did wake up much more relaxed this morning though, after surviving Hump Day. It's odd that Wednesday is going to function for me as the climax of each week. It's the busiest day for me, when I get to campus at 7 am and don't leave until 9 pm. The intervening time is spent teaching, talking to students in the office, taking classes, going to meetings, and then more going to class. I've realized it's been very stressful returning to school not so much because of all the work I have to do to prepare for class (lesson plans and reading), but really because I have to interact with people for such long stretches of time -- sometimes all day. Summer spoiled me in letting me recede into my shell (do ducks have shells? egg shells, I guess?), emerging only occasionally for a quick movie or dinner with select friends. But now, I am constantly around people: my officemates, my students, my classmates, my professors, and quite simply just the campus population that swarms around me as I make my way between buildings. It's going to take me another couple of weeks just to adjust to all these people. I really need my personal space.
Now I am in my apartment. I can hear the grounds-keeper (heh) mowing the grass outside, his machine humming louder, then softer, then louder again. My clothes are drying across the apartment complex in the laundry room. I'm ironing some shirts at a leisurely pace in the bedroom where [Skott] sings sweetly over the piano.
>> 10:26 AM
Wednesday, August 28, 2002
Fuckity fuck fuck. I am in such a foul mood. And news of this editorial in the campus daily just came into my inbox: [Somewhere to Call Home]. Aside from the factual inaccuracies of the editorial (the center in question is not a student group, but in fact an administration-mandated infrastructural support office), the argument against "special privileges" is just a thinly-veiled attack on the process of legitimation of homosexuality in the public culture of the university. The claims of the editorial that the climate for gays on campus is just peachy is also stunning in its complete disregard for all the constant suppression of homosexuality on a daily level through the reinforcement of heterosexual normality and privilege. (And let's not even talk about people like the "Pit Preacher," an older man who periodically stands at the center of campus and rails against gays. Even though most students gathered around him experience him as a spectacle, a humorous anachronism or archaism, to hear the insistence in his voice that homosexuality is evil does not make me or other gay persons feel safe.) It's just so infuriating that people argue about "special privileges" (affirmative action is another program often labeled as such) when there isn't even anything close to "equity" (between races, say) or supportive, safe space (especially for gay students). Grrrr!!!!And just to keep referring to the goals of the center as the celebration of a "culture" is also absurd. LGBT experience is not even close to ethnic cultural experience or religious traditions. In fact, LGBT experience is exactly so different in that gay youth tend to feel isolated, unable to interact with peers and others in their lives because of their homosexuality.
And this paragraph really pisses me off: "For now, LGBTQ students have a strong presence on campus. But if their numbers drop in the future, it's unfair to other students thirsting for space for LGBTQ students to permanently claim valuable real estate they no longer need." Ummmm. Hello. We're not going to just "drop in numbers" unless we all get queer bashed and killed. And if the numbers of out and visible gay students decreases, that is exactly when such an infrastructural support center will be most important to make sure there isn't greater discrimination and alienation of them.
>> 9:41 PM
In response, I just e-mailed to my dad the page [Education on Reparative Therapy] on [PFLAG's website]. I included the following message:
I wish you wouldn't try to "repair" me. I'm not broken. If you want to talk about what makes you uncomfortable about my being gay, ask. But don't tell me that I'm broken, evil, sinful, or anything.
Mostly because I'm tired as hell from lack of sleep, but also because I'm damned fed up with trying to think out the consequences of talking to and trying to engage my parents in a productive dialogue about our relationship and their perceptions of me, I sent this message off without thinking it through too much. It's probably too condescending. It's probably mean. It's probably only going to make my dad cry more. But you know what? At this point I just don't fucking care. He's a fucking medical doctor, for god's sake. He should know how utterly whacked out and damaging reparative therapy can be.
>> 9:18 PM
Tuesday, August 27, 2002
How does one respond when one's father e-mails the web page for a Google search on "changing homosexuality"?Addendum:
(Just got this second e-mail.)
Paul,
We are glad to have made the trip to NC because we can understand your living situation better and make a better dialogue.
In fact, your studying English did'nt mount much disappoitment for me at all. On the contrary, I am happy for you since you will be
a professor in the future although mom still prefers you to be a MD.
However, I am still very much hopefull that you will change your life style. If you are willing to try and try hard, I am ready to help you
and your boy friend out in any shape and form. It definitely can be done.
Read some encouraging facts. Set you mind prepared first.
We will pray for your success.
With love,
D & M
>> 6:38 PM
Monday, August 26, 2002
It appears, sir, that you have been quite delinquent. The days tumble into each other and you cry foul. Lickety-split is all you can think, though never before did "lickety-split" make any sense to you. And the words, words, words on pages and pages, they stagnate in that space between your eyeballs and your brain. Soon there will be time for sleep, though; soon there will be time. It'll be a mad dash until then, and until then many more parcels to post.
>> 9:31 PM
Saturday, August 24, 2002
Anne is here. She is so cool. She's the light of my life. Woo hoo!
>> 9:02 PM
Friday, August 23, 2002
[UNC Board Supports Academic Freedom.] That article title sounds so dramatic. Although important, the support is nothing more than a resolution. I don't suppose they're taking any particular actions to combat those who threaten academic freedom, however that freedom might be understood. Let it hereby be noted that we support academic freedom. Woo hoo! The UNC student congress apparently passed a similar resolution earlier in the week. We support academic freedom. We rock!
>> 10:37 AM
Thursday, August 22, 2002
This year, instead of enacting the usual ice breaker type activity for the first day of class, I decided to get my students to start thinking about why they're taking English 11, and by extension, why they're taking classes in college anyways. It was a bit disheartening to find out that maybe two students out of forty bothered to find out what kind of class they were taking. The rest simply signed up because it's a requirement for all undergraduate degrees.But I'm actually still quite optimistic about this semester. If nothing else, my students will be writing a lot. And constant practice does wonders, in my book. I had one student who was at the classroom at 7:30 am (class starts at 8). He had even started doing work for the Friday's class session (this was on Wednesday). And he's cute, to boot. I wanted to tell him he wasn't allowed to drop my class.
[Against SUVs.]
>> 8:24 PM
>> 7:49 PM
Note to self (unrelated to above): Look for Public Sentiments by Glen Hendler.
>> 8:54 AM
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
This is so fucking cool. I'm hooked up! I'm blogging from a laptop I got from the department for teaching. It's got a built in wireless network connection and a CD-burner. It's faster than my own computer. I love it!
>> 9:55 AM
I'll probably get bored on campus today and write more.
>> 5:33 AM
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
So now that I'm thinking about it and skimming [this article], I'm quite disturbed by the (seemingly?) new accusations that the Summer Reading Program is about "political correctness" (as opposed to say, conversion or whatnot). My one protesting student wanted to say that religion wasn't allowed to be taught in schools because any one religion could be "offensive" to others, and that political correctness began as an assault on the mainstream religion (ostensibly Christianity). He then said that it's not any better to reverse the polarities of offensiveness by forcing everyone to read a minority viewpoint. I really really really hate the Christian conservatives' use of "political correctness" as a tool to re-subjugate voices that have struggled hard to make themselves heard. There's just no understanding the different weight that comes with announcing a belief, depending on the situation. And given these wielders'-of-political-correctness newfound understanding of how things can be "offensive," why do they continue to proselytize and demand that studying the Bible be reinstated as a mandatory component of education or that public, communal praying over the PA system should be allowed in schools?
>> 6:50 AM
H likes how, at just the right distance, the outline of men's legs takes on a certain fuzziness. The hair catches the surrounding light, creating a halo to blur the hard line drawn by the skin.
Waiting in line at the post office, he notices the curve of one man's calves before him. It's enticing; delicate shadows delineate the muscles of the back of his legs. The man shifts his weight from one leg to the other. He is impatient, even though the line is moving along at a steady pace. H smiles and wonders what else the man has to do today, if perhaps other errands await his attention.
The man finally reaches the head of the line, clutching a letter in one hand, slapping it against his palm to a gentle rhythm. He glances back and catches H's eyes. He smiles, and H grins while hurriedly turning his eyes away.
>> 6:31 AM
Monday, August 19, 2002
I am going to be so tired this semester. Today was a long day, and classes haven't even started yet.The [Summer Reading Program] discussion session went alright. I wasn't as prepared as I wanted to be, but the students were remarkably talkative and willing to entertain my sometimes-off-the-wall questions about the reading and the controversy. I only had one student who found the reading "offensive." He was great as a foil, though, for raising some questions about what we expect when we read things (for class and otherwise). For example, he complained that Sells's book wasn't objective, leading me to ask the students how they would define an objective book and why they would expect it.
I finally sat down to tackle lesson plans for the class I'm teaching. It's going to be a lot of work revising things from last semester.
>> 10:18 PM
Sunday, August 18, 2002
I have a porous apartment. I like that term. Porous apartment. I was on the phone with my sister yesterday and among a slew of other topics, we discussed interior air quality. Just a couple weeks ago I finally bought a portable air filtration unit to help clean out the very dusty, moldy, polleny (and who-knows-what-else-y) air of my apartment. But I was lamenting how my windows are very unsealed. They're old and not built to act as insulation from the outside. If you stand next to the window on a breezy day, you can feel the air coming in. If the maintenance crew has been cutting the grass outside, you can smell it inside. So my sister described my apartment as porous. At least it probably helps to keep the air inside from getting too stale.
>> 9:57 AM
Rob has been working on growing a bonsai tree from seeds. My brother gave me a bonsai kit for our birthday this past year, but I'd been too lazy to go through all the waiting: soaking the seeds, cold stratifying them, planting them, and waiting for them to sprout. But Rob went ahead and prepared the seeds, planted them. And this morning, after about two weeks, one of the seeds finally sprouted! Woo hoo!
>> 9:20 AM
Friday, August 16, 2002
It's true that car accidents happen in a split second. It's true that those involved come out wondering, "What happened?" No, wait. Let me start again...It was a dark and stormy night.... Well, it was dark and wet. The menacing thunderstorms were a couple hours earlier.... Crap.
The gods: Countdown to the start of school. T minus five days. Hmmm. How can we fuck up Paul's carefully frantic scramble to get his shit together?
One second you're stopped at a light at a dark, wet intersection behind a high-assed pickup. The light turns green, but the cars in front of you don't move. The next second, you're spinning in your car sideways to the curb, like you'd inadvertently gotten on a roller coaster somewhere on that limbo drive home to Durham from Chapel Hill. Luckily, you weren't hurt at all, not even sore the morning after as the paramedics mentioned might happen.
None of the other three drivers involved were seriously hurt, but three of the cars, including yours, got lucky last night and went home with hunky tow-trucks and their flashing lights. Now you're waiting at home for your insurance company to call back. Your thoughts refuse to cohere. They're still fleeting, full of what-ifs, not content to flesh out any one idea.
I was being careful last night on the drive home. It was dark. And it was wet. I lumbered along patiently in the right lane of the two-lane road. Usually I would be cruising along in the left lane. If I had been that night, I wouldn't have been anywhere near the accident. Or perhaps there wouldn't have been an accident at all.
The throng of paramedics and cops that came to the scene worked haphazardly. Half of the officers seemed to have ADD, asking questions and then wandering off even before we could respond. We stood around wondering what happened, looking to each other for clues. Is she hiding something? Is he the one who caused all this? But we were all too kind to kick up a fuss, demand a pound of flesh from the perpetrator.
A couple of ambulance drivers were behind the accident. The woman said, "I saw it all." There was an attempted lane change gone awry as an oncoming pickup truck moving very fast in the open lane passed by at just the wrong moment. The impatient car spins out and knocks me to the curb. The fast-moving oncoming truck continues forward a number of yards, also in a spin, and manages to clip another vehicle up ahead, later suspected to be that high-assed pickup I was behind. The driver said, "The light had just turned green and I heard the accident behind me. I kept going thinking I was okay, but then something hit me."
Two hours after the accident, an officer handed me a sheet of paper with a woman's contact and insurance information.
Officer Schnee: You're free to go.
>> 10:47 AM
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
[A Comic Books Gets Serious on Gay Issues]: "There is certainly a titillation factor: many of the female characters are impossibly endowed and wear the skimpiest costumes. It's no surprise to discover that the comics audience is dominated by men, who account for about 95 percent of the readership, said Maggie Thompson, editor of Comics Buyer's Guide, a weekly newspaper about the industry."I think it's about time someone discusses sexuality in comics and comics-readership. There are so many obvious instances of coded-homosexuality. It's great that now there are openly gay and lesbian characters and issues, but there has always been a lot of attention paid to the epistemology of the closet...
>> 10:27 AM
Monday, August 12, 2002
My internet connection is slow as ass today. It's moving along at the pace of a snail trying to haul a tortoise on its back.to be famous is so nice, suck my dick, kiss my ass , in limousines we have sex, every night with my famous friends -- [miss kittin and the hacker, "frank sinatra"] (off the mix cd [everything, but] sent me)
>> 12:19 PM
>> 10:39 AM
>> 9:19 AM
Sunday, August 11, 2002
More about that pesky Carolina Summer Reading Program: [Save the Bigots: How to decry persecution by practicing it]...What do these complaints add up to? Let's see: The university is coercing students by requiring them to write about why they don't want to write about any of the open-ended questions the university asked them to write about. The assigned reading (never mind the 19 optional readings) is unconstitutionally pro-Muslim because it's insufficiently anti-Muslim. And it's insensitive not just to require such reading, but to allow it.
This is what "intimidation," "discrimination," and "sensitivity" have come to. Words that once accurately described cross burnings, housing covenants, and slurs are now being used to describe the superficial emotional wounds that come from living and debating in a free society. This dilution is being perpetrated not just by the left but by the right as well.
>> 9:10 PM
FREAKY. This is exactly the sort of action that seeps into the pores of people everywhere, the subtle bludgeoning of hard-won gains in reproductive (and other) freedom, the quiet erosion of rights that more quickly than seems possible results in a tremendous regression to restrictive, moralistic legislation.
["Dad's Sad, Mad: Too Bad"] is an article about the dad's role in abortion (I think the case discussed is mentioned in the previously linked article). I'm sorry, but the fact that this man was able to delay his ex-girlfriend's abortion through legislative means freaks me out. I just can't get past the logic that it should be a man's right to keep a child he has fathered if the mother does not want the child. What ever happened to the logic that the child should be wanted by both parents? Was the father willing to take full custody and responsbility of the child anyways? Or was he going to saddle the mother with the child? Wouldn't a man who wanted a child be happier with a woman who wanted to have a child with him anyways? Why would you want a child with someone who desperately wants to get away from you? As for the imbalance in power regarding abortions/pregnancies, I think it's only justice that women should have ultimate rights as a means to redress millenia of bearing without reprieve the children of our humanity.
>> 8:23 PM
I also saw The MO of MI, a really fucked up story of betrayal, and a program of short films from Australia. The shorts program included one called 'Sucker with vampires. :)
>> 2:58 PM
Saturday, August 10, 2002
[The Ancient Art of Haranguing Has Moved to the Internet]: "But the surest sign that blogging is no longer just a para-journalistic phenomenon is academic recognition: this fall, the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley is inaugurating a course that uses weblogs to investigate current debates over intellectual property."This article mentions blogs briefly, but is mostly about the resurgence of the pamplet as a rhetorical medium in cultural politics (construed widely). I've noticed a lot of these little fifty-page booklets in bookstores lately. Guess I never really thought of their appearance as a shift in publishing practices or a subtle change in how thinkers are attempting to propagate their words. The article's turn towards academics publishing in the pamphlet press is of course interesting to me on my way to a profession in academia. If pamphlets make a comeback for politically-minded academics, the rules of the game for tenure and publishing might change...
>> 10:20 AM
>> 9:33 AM
So I've been to a few screenings at the [North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival] so far. Nothing has been really extraordinary, though I suppose it's a bit naive to think that everything will be simply fabulous. After reading [this review] in the local weekly Thursday, I decided at the last minute to inaugurate this year's fest with Chop Suey, a Bruce Weber film meditation on photography. (I wouldn't agree with the viewer that the film festival has "queered" straight sexuality so much as it has tried to bring gay sexuality back into the folds of heterosexual society -- to examine how straight people deal with the shattered pieces of a heterosexual family torn apart by homosexuality....) It wasn't much my cup of tea, but definitely a thought-provoking and worthwhile film -- especially compared to what I saw immediately after -- The Perfect Son. This second movie was horrible. Yucky yuck yuck. I suppose it's not really that bad, but I just am not in the mood for after-school-special-like reconciliations of errant gay men on their deathbeds with their straight siblings. And the movie played out every frickin' sentimental, schlockey, "common sense" moment it could to wrench the tears from you. I actually left before the end of the movie when the straight brother at the abortion clinic with the woman he got pregnant decides that he's turned over a new leaf and wants her to keep the baby. Bleargh!!! I had to call my sister after I left the theater and rant about how excruciatingly normalizing the movie was. It was like taking all the screw ups of a prodigal generation of sons (one gay, the other a drug abuser/ne'er-do-well writer -- see the paralells here?) and healing the wounds with some good ol' traditional family restructuring. (Though I did not stay till the end, I'm sure after the AIDS-stricken brother dies, the once-maligned son will marry and start a family with his girl and live happily ever after.) The experience of seeing the movie left such a bad taste in my head that I had to go rent Gosford Park to cleanse myself, though I fell asleep during the viewing at home and still have to finish it.
Anyhoo. Yesterday I saw two short film programs -- one centered on transgendered issues and the other on gay men. In the first, I liked Blue Haven, a quirky sort-of-noir-ish fairytale about two skaters, mafia money, and a sex change. Though it could hardly be considered serious, educational, or whatnot, it had the most spirit of all the films in that program. The other films took themselves a little too seriously, though understandably over-informative due to the lack of common knowledge about what transgendered persons endure and even are. There were some good documentary-like stories and a few meditative pieces on sex (male or female or somewhere in-between?). The gay men's program was a lot more light-hearted overall. Boychick rocked as a story about a teenaged male fan of a teen pop idol (Britney-like) who fantasizes having her as his best friend and choreographer. Sexy was a funny, animated poem asking "what is sexy?" Safe Journey was quite moving in pairing an abused street kid and a man grieving the death of his partner. I also liked Tom Clay Jesus and Target Audience. In fact, the only dud was Beachcombers which sucked major ass.
>> 8:57 AM
Friday, August 09, 2002
I am a record executive's wet dream. Every once in awhile I surface from a dry spell in cd purchases and voraciously consume a wide array of pop albums currently in vogue. In the past week alone I've bought seven cds.
>> 1:32 PM
>> 12:25 PM
Thursday, August 08, 2002
The weather's beautiful. Wish you were here.I let myself get to the point of almost fainting from hunger again today, but then Rob and I went to [Quizno's], home of oven toasted subs, and I gorged myself on sandwich and soup. I need to establish a pattern of regular food intake again. Damned bodily needs.
All the posts from last night were a result of giddy sleepiness. I was trying to wait up for Rob, but he still wasn't home by 2:30 am so I zonked out. I was sort of in a cranky mood, too, to post a frustrated message about the Carolina Summer Reading program. I've been skimming through James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein's edited collection Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies today because I'm finally going to return it to its owner tomorrow, and I realized again that in fact my interests in literary studies lie in reception-oriented thoughts. That is, I actually gravitate towards thinking, talking, and writing about how particular books (texts, whatever) are received, how different groups of people react to the same text, how meaning is neither wholly in the text itself nor in an author's intentions, but tangled in the web of readers' interpretations. I've had two professors recommend some works on reception study to me already -- one after reading my paper on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee in which I attempted to trace the seemingly sudden emergence of Cha's experimental work as a canonical Asian American feminist text and the other after discussing my paper on Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self in which I tried to map out Hopkins criticism onto the debates of cultural politics, race, representation, etc. So all in all, I would be delighted to have a discussion on reading practices centered around Approaching the Qu'ran -- What does reading a text mean to students? How does designating a text "religious" or "sacred" change their approach? What do students "get" out of texts? How can we begin to link these individualized questions of a reader's relation to a particular text to larger social concerns such as communal belief systems (like organized religion)?
I was wiping down the windows earlier today with some Chlorox wipes, hoping to stay the further growth of more mold, when a man walked up and asked to use my phone. (Actually, he asked me first if I knew "Christine.") It was really kind of cool, something I wish I could experience more -- social interaction through my apartment windows. I live on the first floor, and it'd be fun to have conversations with neighbors through my windows, sort of like quick hellos while I'm cooking or something. Thing is, Durham is not much of a walking city, especially not where I live. And my apartment windows look out on the dusty parking lot. I miss being able to watch people living outside my window, not just hurrying from their car out of the blazing heat to the cool of their air conditioned apartments. I want to see people taking walks outside, playing games, and reading in portable chairs, on benches, or on the grass.
>> 4:52 PM
>> 11:59 AM
>> 12:46 AM
Ok, now I'm feeling even more like I'm stepping into a whirlwind of malevolent feet-biting rabid squirrels in volunteering to lead a discussion session for this year's Summer Reading Program. The thing is, okay, so the university is acknowledging that some students and/or their parents might be "offended" (crap!) by the reading. But they're exempting them from reading the book and then asking them to attend the discussion session anyways where we will be discussing what? Grrr. I know I'll have students pulling this "it's against my religion" crap in the discussion and disrupting things. So instead of engaging the reading itself, it sounds more and more like this discussion will be revolving around the politics of reading, education, and religion.
>> 12:29 AM
I only had one meal today.
Does anyone know how to deal with a mold/mildew problem? I think my apartment is filled with mold. It grows on the insides of the windows to an alarming degree. I'm thinking about getting an air filtering system.
School starts in a week and a half! That means I should get back on my early schedule (get up at 6 am . . . eek) next week.
>> 12:15 AM
Wednesday, August 07, 2002
Those with the power to stop the pandemic -- from governments of wealthy nations that have provided precious few funds to combat the crisis, to governments and other leaders of nations heavily affected by HIV/AIDS whose responses to the decimation of their own people have often been criminally weak -- risk their humanity by failing to act meaningfully. To the extent that you and I can affect our governments' and society's response, our humanity too is on the line. The enormous human stakes of the AIDS crisis and the test it presents to the nature of our humanity make it central to our challenge of creating a better world.
>> 11:29 PM
Tuesday, August 06, 2002
I had lunch at this place called Bread and Kabob. The owner/cook is from Afghanistan. I love their grilled chicken. So tasty. Mmmm. (This is how exciting my life is.)
>> 2:40 PM
And Rob got back early this morning! Yay! I feel so much better today.
>> 11:34 AM
Monday, August 05, 2002
inure v. 1 tr. (often in passive; foll. by to) accustom (a person) to something esp. unpleasant. 2 intr. Law come into operation; take effect. inurement n. in use or practice.
>> 11:37 PM
In the end, my parents weren't ready to meet Rob because they never really asked about him when they were here. And then he left town halfway through my parents' visit to help out one of his best friends whose father just died. He drove all the way to Kentucky. He'll be back tomorrow, though. :)
I haven't overshared my life with my parents because they don't want to hear the details. Of course it's hard for them to realize that I don't tell them things because I don't want them to get more upset, not that I somehow get pleasure from denying them access to my life. It's really quite the opposite; I, too, mourn their absence. But my dad's reaction to the single bed in my bedroom was proof enough that denial is a strong coping factor for my parents. Though I had asked them if they wanted to meet my boyfriend before they even arrived, my dad still somehow wanted to imagine that we slept in separate beds, as if we were in those old tv comedies where married couples slept comfortably like platonic friends in matching twin beds. Then during our "talk" later in the week, he had to ask explicitly if Rob and I were "spiritual" boyfriends as opposed to "sexual" ones. It was difficult to burst that bubble for my dad, but I didn't step back from the question like I always have. (Back when I first came out to my parents, my dad wanted me to assure him that even if I were gay, I wouldn't have gay sex.)
I've slept almost all day. But I'm going back to bed now so I can try to maintain a day schedule.
>> 10:42 PM
(This article caught my eye initially because I'm interested in how the US will deal with the increasingly polyglot nature of world communications -- all this despite claims that English is or will become the lingua franca of the business world. We might see the tension in this article through the differentiation between ESL and bilingual classes -- the former as a tool to integrate and assimilate non-English speaking immigrants and the second as a way to restructure the very bases of our educational system so that monolingualism might no longer be standard. I was also pleasantly surprised to read the byline and see a friend of mine from college, Yilu Zhao, as the article's writer.)
>> 2:05 PM
>> 1:36 AM
I've been in a bit of a dazy doze, or dozy daze, since I dropped my sister off at the airport. I spun around in the car a bit trying to wake myself up, passing two severe car accidents that seemed somehow symbolic, but still just wanted to close my eyes. Back home, though, when I tried to nap I couldn't fall asleep, and when I tried to stay awake -- check e-mail, surf long-neglected blogs -- I just wanted to close my eyes and drift off. I finally fell asleep and napped for a few hours (which is why I'm up at 2:30 AM).
Have your parents ever cut their visit-vacation short because they couldn't stand to be around you? My emotional lag-time rivals that of intercontinental jetlag, making it that much more difficult to deal with these complicated situations. On Friday night, while I talked to my dad in the hotel room and my sister to mom in the car, I was the only one who didn't cry.
My parents are filled with infinite compassion in the Christian Right's sense. That is, they feel infinite pain and shame about me and attempt (succeeding in no small part, but never fully) to induce a guilt that will "straighten" me out. It's like Catholicism's rhetoric about homosexuality (and other sins) - LOVE THE SINNER BUT HATE THE SIN. These religious associations are not entirely gratuitous, as much of the existential crises my parents seem to be facing as a result of considering their wayward children seem rooted in some sense of faith or lack thereof.
Of course, it's more complicated than that. My parents are full of contradictions. Hypocrisy is their shared middle name. My dad claims that he accepts the choices that I've made in my life. He claims that he wants me to succeed at what I do, even if it's not what he feels is the best thing for me to do. But he also cries as he says that he feels like he's a failure as a dad. He cries as he tries to convince me that being gay is bad because all gays eventually die of terminal infectious diseases.
I've reached a plateau. While it's still important for me to catalogue my grievances, I want also to work on the future, to figure out what I can do to ease my parents' sadness. I asked my dad directly what he would like me to do. He wants me to call more often, to visit more often. He said he feels like he's lost a son and daughter because we're so far away and not prone to over-sharing about our lives. Of course, making them a part of our lives is difficult because our parents use every detail we give them as evidence of our degeneracy. At least if we don't tell them anything, their intimations of our failure can only be vague and thus remain more easily dismissable. They prey so incessantly on our extant fears, as if they have a way of sniffing out our anxieties and applying pressure just so to break our resolve.
Seeing my dad leave a day earlier than originally planned, seeing him sleep instead of dealing with us, only reminded me of where I learned all my passive aggressive behavior. I talked to Joe a little Sunday evening and felt compelled to apologize to him for all the times I stopped speaking to him and deliberately tried to induce guilt and sadness through similar tactics. I wonder if my dad has any self-consciousness of what he does. I see myself in him, know that I learned these behaviors growing up with him. But I see the absurdity of what I do. Does it make any difference to the victims of our actions, though?
I'm going to try to be more explicit about how much I love and appreciate my parents (to them, especially). I'm going to work on bringing them back into my life, naturalizing my everyday for them through constant repetition so that they will begin to see it instead of the veil of lies surrounding popular conceptions of gayness and teaching.
Talking Saturday to my brave brother who has borne the brunt of interactions with our parents, I've also realized more acutely how intensely interwoven my actions are with my siblings'. Though he has not been an open book to our parents (or us other siblings), my brother hasn't actively avoided their presence. It's difficult, though, because of the four of us, he has the most difficult time resisting our parents' every desire to mold his life. It's as if he's not even living his own life, but merely going through the puppet motions of our parents' vision for his life. I want to help him build up more healthy walls -- ways for him to maintain not just a semblance of his own life, but his own realized life made up of his pursuits, dreams, desires.
>> 1:28 AM
Sunday, August 04, 2002
Tired, very tired. Dropped my sister off at the airport earlier this afternoon. Parents left last night. My dad changed their flight to a day earlier. We had a "talk" Friday night after dinner and he cried and everything. I think he is genuinely sad that I'm not a part of his life more (as I am), but at the same time wanted me to feel guilty for not being everything he wants me to be. Lots of sibling conversation this weekend. At least there are four of us to deal with the emotional fallout of our parents' inability to cope with us and the world (nothing really fits their ideal and so they have an incredibly negative, defensive outlook on life).Rest now.
>> 5:13 PM
Thursday, August 01, 2002
["One Was an Obsessive Genius, and, Oh, So Was the Other One"]: "George Balanchine founded the company with Lincoln Kirstein in 1948, and his aesthetic, which valued spareness, angularity and extended technique, and stressed counterpoint over harmony, came to dominate over the decades to and beyond his death in 1983. That aesthetic was largely shaped in collaboration with Igor Stravinsky, the two having first worked together in a revival of "Le Chant du Rossignol" for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1925, when Stravinsky was 42 and Balanchine 21. Balanchine's greatest achievements at the City Ballet included Stravinsky festivals in 1972, a year after the composer's death, and 1982."(Edward Gorey loved Balanchine's choreography and never missed a performance of the New York City Ballet over a number of seasons.)
>> 8:36 PM
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scattered speculations on the question of doubt