Sfrajett's City 3.0

theory's end

2012-01-02T23:47:00.000-08:00

Hearing the news that Duke University has decided to end its Series Q makes me feel the same way I do when I read the obituary of someone really old: "Helen Frankenthaler? I didn't know she was still alive!" For the past few years, Queer Theory has mostly been living out its retirement in relative obscurity, despite Michael Warner's insistence, in his thoughtful essay in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, that Queer Theory still has questions to answer and work to do (it does). The days of queer studies conferences and special panels are mostly over, teaching queer theory in the undergraduate classroom can feel more like a historical exercise than a cutting-edge subcultural practice, and doing queer work has remained risky for LGBTQ PhD students and Assistant Professors in the face of university cutbacks. All of this is unfortunate, because queer theory, especially as it relates to transgender issues, still has lots of political, social, and legal relevance. Still, when I read about Series Q ending, my first thought was, "I didn't know it was still alive!"

Series Q is ending, appropriately, with work by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who also founded the series in 1992. It was a time when queer nerds were cool. The 1993 Rutgers Queer Studies Conference Warner mentions in his Chronicle article was held at my PhD institution, and almost everybody who was anybody in the work of queer was there--Joan Nestle, Amber Hollibaugh, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Warner himself. So much star power was distracting; every time the door opened during a presentation, every head in the room snapped around. The spectacle undid some attendees. One famously puppyish Rutgers English undergrad showed up late to Warner's talk in her most theatrical stilettos, and as every head in the packed room turned to see who had come in, she slipped while trying to negotiate the aisle stairs. Horror dawned on her face as she went down, down, arms flailing, the the general mirth of the room and the grad students who told and retold the episode in the weeks and months that followed. Most of us swore we saw Warner himself stifle a laugh.

We queer grad students were swept up in it, reading Foucault and dreaming our big career dreams.

Queer Studies then was viciously cliquish as well as glamorous. Different cohorts traveled in packs to the cocktail parties and stood in the middle of rooms, carefully accessorized in leather, pretending not to notice all of us staring longingly at them. The same names appeared over and over on the conference announcements as people picked their friends to give talks and contribute to collections. We lowly ones in school or on the job market stood on the fringes, hungry for intellectual conversation, consoling ourselves with the certainty of our own soon-to-be-fame.

These were the heady days of Series Q. Not long after, the publishing market for literary studies collapsed, and soon, queer studies books began to slow as well. In the race to capitalize on the queer academic market, publishers (cough Routledge cough) churned out a lot of crappy books with "Queer" splashed across the cover. Once the brand was cheapened, demand fell.
Series Q chugged on, producing quality work that was culturally and intellectually diverse.

But queer is always in the past. Radclyffe Hall's lesbian protagonists of the 1920s dreamed they were Neanderthals and primitive warriors. Queer Theory now seems historic, inspired by the politics of the late sixties and the AIDS crisis and culture wars of twenty years ago. Warner suggests that reifying Queer Theory in this way--as historic-- affords "normative" gays interested in marriage equality and military/institutional inclusion the illusion that they have moved beyond the shameful queer sexual politics of their youth. But I think it is important to remember that because queer always manifests culturally through fashion, spectacle, and art in particular historical/cultural moments, queer is also always going to feel like a fashion or trend that escapes the control of the people who feel as if they are engendering it, resulting in a dysphoric relationship between queers being queerly sexual and the ways they get to recognize themselves via their magnification and distortion in popular culture. In my youth I was queer and hip; I wore the clothes and walked the walk and fucked people (I felt) in innovative and exciting ways, and when I got older, I felt no longer fashionable. This feeling, this dysphoria, may not be the product of gay shame so much as the recognition of how our identities, sexual practices, and--let's face it--careers have been determined by fashion trends that help us be legible to each other (not to mention youth cultures we outgrow). We are older now, and the signifying systems through which we came to know ourselves have shifted.

Like our political aims, and theory trends in general. Like the academic publishing industry.

Series Q may be one mode scholars had of understanding and acting on queerness whose time has passed, not because of lack of intellectual interest on the part of contributors and readers out there, but because of the material realities of academia these days, which have come to constitute a new reality for scholarship. Wages have been frozen, grad students aren't getting jobs, and tenure-track lines are being eliminated and replaced by instructorships with minimal contractual obligation, all of which means people can't buy expensive scholarly books. Libraries are feeling the squeeze as budget cuts curtail the books they can acquire.

All of this is to say that the welcoming environment and fiscal largesse of the academy that enabled the flourishing of Queer Studies in the 1990s and ots has disappeared, forcing queerness to go elsewhere to express itself and its art. This might not be a bad thing; certainly choosing activism over the "merely being gay" effect of the Queer Studies grad student will have a greater impact on communities, forcing queer students who want to make a world to think beyond the classroom model.

It also suggests that Queer will rise again, like King Arthur, when the world most needs it. In the wake of vicious recessions and right-wing attacks on diversity, as well as failure to mentor the sons and daughters of queer theory to tenured positions, Queer Studies falls, only to be carried off the field by Marxism after all, who takes him to the Ladies of Feminism, waiting in boats. They whisk Queer Studies to Avalon, located in Australia, which has a law school and can really use him. He will return when the world needs him most, but until then, he'll make a halfway decent salary trying to perk up a moribund curriculum.

So goodbye for now, Series Q. You never would have published me or my friends, but knowing you were out there made us just a little queerer as we waved our chalk around every day. We queers may not be fashionable right now, but we are fighting the good fight everywhere, teaching history, getting married, raising children, and having threesomes if possible. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Friendship and cigarettes

2010-09-03T21:41:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who smokes. He lives far away from me now, but when he is here, he likes to smoke cigarettes and drink wine, and when he is here i smoke and drink with him.

When we were first friends, he lived here, and we would smoke and drink at night outside, looking at the stars. We talked about the people we knew, our plans for the future, our sense of ourselves and our careers. He is from a place far away, and he carries with him the restlessness of the person who has left home and always looks for it again. When i am with him, I feel most myself--the most myself I feel with anybody. He doesn't judge people, which is not the same as not having a critical perspective on them. He just has perspective. He loves fun with the firmness and melancholy of a person who has been beautiful, and young, and utterly careless, but is moving away from these to another place. He believes fun is still always there, though in the simplest of moments. Fun is there in the ridiculousness of aging. He is right.

I like him because he is a boy. Because he is a boy, and himself, he shrinks from over-analyzing people's motivations. He is much more interested in effects. He feels the flow of social relationships, and the feelings that ebb and wash and mix with our own individual desires and dreams as they connect with other people. He feels the effect of big personalities on the world, on history, and on out hearts. We talk about these things when we smoke cigarettes on the porch at his house far away, or at my house here.

We have all of us, in our post-cigarette worlds, lost something with our loss of smoking together. We have lost those moments of contemplation and camaraderie, when we pause in the middle of what we are doing and adjourn together outside for a cigarette and conversation. Television shows like Mad Men glamorize the chain-smoking and drinking of an earlier era, but those shows substitute distracted consumption for the soul of the thing--smoking--which is a sinking down into the present moment, the slowing of time, the enjoyment of now and the people standing right next to you, smoking with you. Fellowship. And being alive, and curious, and social, and full of joy in a good meal, or a good drink, on a cool city night.

On the street, outside the bars and restaurants, we meet people we don't know and will never meet again over cigarettes. We exchange observations and the feeling of being here now, in the world, at our age, in this place. When we adjourn to smoke, we leave our tables and companions to gather in new formations in a space outside the world we have brought with us. We leave our tables and spouses, and move in other configurations for five, ten minutes. We say what comes into our heads. We listen to stories.

We tend not to take this time to just be if there are no cigarettes. One of the things I most loved about my mother was my sense of her, late at night, sitting in her chair in the livingroom, in the semidarkness, smoking her cigarette and just thinking. I would walk down the hallway of my childhood house and past her, sitting in her wingback chair, thinking about her entire life, as much as one can in five or ten minutes. I'm not sure what her insights were, but I know she enjoyed the pause, and the contemplation. The quiet, and the time just for her, just for the moment's pleasure of thought..

i don't smoke much anymore. I don't buy cigarettes because I know they are bad for me. They make my lungs burn and my heart race, and in the morning, they make my head hurt.

Still, they are a treat beyond cakes, or aged Scotch. They are a commitment, for five minutes or so, to standing still, breathing deep, and thinking about everything.

My friend usually leaves me a couple cigarettes when he goes. Tonight I stand on the porch, alone, smoking a cigarette and looking at the stars. The stars are not bright in Chicago, but tonight as I smoke on the porch i look at them, and think of him, and his friendship, generosity, and loyalty. I think of my mother, and her moments of silence. I think of the future and the past, and wonder, still, what life will bring. I listen to the wind, and feel the first autumn chill in the air. I think of how the strong connections we make with other people buoy us up in rough water, and soften our loneliness. The smoke curls up through the night, silver and fragrant, and I watch it as I watch the stars winking faintly overhead.

becalmed

2010-06-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

So much of this blog has been about jobs, about work and the loss of work, that it seems like I should write down what it is like to work right now, in this strange file clerk job, here in the middle of my life. I do not find myself in Dante's wood, because that sounds picturesque, and this office life is quieter, like a ship rolling in windless waters, moving sideways on a slippery sea. It's Monday, and that means tossing for that last hour of precious sleep, waiting for the alarm to go off, then dragging out of bed and into the shower, throwing pajamas back on long enough to make coffee, breakfast, and lunch, packing all of these, then back to throw on clothes before dashing out to the car, hopefully before 8 a.m., and driving the 45 minutes to work.

My judge is supposed to be here by 9 or 9:30 but she never gets to the office much before 10. I'm supposed to be at work by 8:30 but I'm always late.

My responsibilities consist chiefly in preparing the call for the Judge for each court day, which I usually do a week in advance. This means I get the schedule in the box outside my door by 9:30 am, and it is my job to pull all the files for all the cases. Since these are filed by day--say, 23, or 9--I should be able to open the file drawer and find all my cases under "23." Cases can be misfiled, or scheduled for other things under other days, so there are usually some cases you have to hunt down. I do this by double-checking the court date on my back-up call--the call from the last time the case was heard, where I write down the new court date--or by looking the case number up in the clerk system. If there are other court dates for that case, or for siblings in the same folder, the system will show them, and I can look under that number in my file drawers.

The cases I pull are called the "control sheets," and they consist of name and address information, the original petitions filed when the case came into the system, motions, psychological evaluations, service plans, and the judge's notes about the hearings. A case can be heard for initial evaluation, for Adjudication, for Disposition, for services, for various kinds of status updates, and to set goals. The process of setting hearings is determined by statute, so the initial hearing, called a TC (for Temporary Custody) hearing, occurs first, followed by a rehearing, a Trial to determine whether the charges against the parents or guardians are valid, a Dispositional Hearing to determine whether the child can return home under an Order of Protection or not, and subsequent hearings, called Permanency Hearings, that evaluate the goals of that child's placement and services. These goals range from return home to adoption or independence, depending on the child's age.

Every day in court is filled with these hearings. I pull the control files, arrange them in a pile in the order they appear on the call, and look for any motions that have to do with the cases. I get these when they are filed, and I have to keep track of them to include with the call. Once I have my pile of cases, I make notes on the call about what each case is up for, and whether there are any private attorneys on the case. Keeping track of the private attorneys helps all of us know when a case is ready to be heard, which is usually when all the parties are present. If an attorney is missing, we have to postpone the case to later in the morning, or even give it a new court date.

Once I have made notes on the call, I make 11 copies of it to distribute. I give one copy to each to the State's Attorney, the Public Guardian, the Public Defender, DCFS, the Court Clerk, the Court Reporter, and the Court Sheriff. I put a copy on top of the Judge's call, give one copy to my supervisors, give one copy to the main Clerk's Office, and keep the two remaining copies for the day the call will be heard. On that day, I post one of the copies outside the courtroom and keep one for "back up," which means I write the next court date for each case next to that case after it is heard.

So much for doing the call, which I do before or after court. During the day when court is in session, it is my job to see which parties are ready to go, and call their cases in the courtroom. I then announce the name of the case at the door, and the parties, caseworkers, and families come in. The Judge hears the case, and then asks for a new court date for the next hearing. I give out dates from a big binder notebook, depending on the month or span of time she wants (within the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, or 6 months). These dates are determined by the type of hearing: status hearings can be any time for any reason, whereas Permanency Hearings are held every six months until the case is closed by return home, adoption, or independence.

After I write the date in the binder, I write it on the control sheet files when the Judge hands them back to me after the hearing, so they can be filed for the new date. During the hearing itself, I fill out data sheets. These are not part of the controls, but they are filed elsewhere. They are sent down on the day of the trial, and they are to keep track of the parties that attend the hearings and what goals and visitation decisions are determined that day.

When court is done, I drop my data sheets in the interoffice mail, gather my control sheets, and refile them under their new dates. If I finished my call I am done for the day, and can read, browse facebook, answer email, or do whatever until 4:20. At that point I open my door and begin listening for the voices of the other Court Coordinators, who come down to sign out a little before the official end of the day at 4:30.

And that is what work is like. It is the same every day. Sometimes the hearings are different; we may have a trial, or get a TC coming into the system. Sometimes I idly flip through a set of controls to see why the case is here. Most often, it is because a child is born with drugs in its system. Sometimes children are abandoned, or their mother dies, or their caretaker becomes disabled. These are the good cases. Other cases come in because children have been killed, or severely injured, or sexually abused.

My Judge might ask me to look up some cases, though she has only done this twice in the three months I've been there. On Fridays we have no Court Reporter, so there may be one case, or even two, but no call to speak of, which means no work to do. When I was teaching I would catch up on grading or reading during the down time. These days I make phone calls, do email, or read. Now, of course, it means I have time to blog. In a few months, it will mean I can start looking for another job to replace this one, not because it's a bad job, but because it doesn't go anywhere, which is why the turnover is so high and I got it in the first place.

I can't complain. When I try to say what it is I don't like, it all gets fuzzy. Are the people nice? Very. Is the work interesting? Not really, but it's not horrible, and the process of a courtroom can be interesting. Do you hate it? No. Do you look forward to it? Not at all, and in fact I dread it, but when I'm here it's not terrible. Still, though, there's not happiness, or the sense of accomplishing, well, anything.

The days go by. My office is set down from the street level, so I look up and watch people walking. I watch the trees wave in the hot wind. Now that I am alone in my office, I can listen to music, though this will change as soon as they hire someone to replace my former office mate, who left to be a Public Defender.

I think about time passing, and how entry-level jobs ask for so little engagement, but so much delayed gratification. They ask you to start over, to bide your time. They ask you to be grateful, to anticipate reward. They ask you not to want, but to be happy with what you have. They ask you for a minimum of one year, or two, or three. They ask you to be nobody, but a cheerful nobody. They don't want your soul, or your mind, just your body.

I make even less than I did as an Assistant Professor, but not by much. I don't write anything or read anything. There is no grading, or teaching. There are no meetings.

Now I am just like everybody else out there sitting in their offices, dreaming of something else, if they even have an office. Lots of college grads don't, nor do people with graduate degrees--PhDs, lawyers. Plenty of people in my law class have no jobs, and the classes behind me are doing much worse. Some schools are starting LLM programs for recent grads just to keep them from being unemployed, and to keep up the rankings of the schools. Others are raising GPAs ac4ross the board to make students competitive with those from top ten schools, where they don't really grade at all anymore.

In late capitalism, we are required to--must!--feel extraordinarily lucky if we have any kind of job at all.

I watch the afternoons wane, from spring to early summer, from early summer to midsummer, each day blowing away through the trees outside my windows. I want to hatch a plan but the room is warm, and I am tired. We are all supposed to give thanks for what we have, in this time of no jobs and no future. I am thankful for my health benefits and regular paycheck, but I wish all of this could not be for nothing. I wish there could be a place of realization, of flowering again, of the drawing up of powers. And so I think on this to the end of work, and to 4:30, and beyond it, to another day, hoping for a plan.

a night out

2010-06-25T07:49:00.000-07:00

A friend was doing a small burlesque show out in Boystown last night, so some of us decided to go out and be Prideful. The show didn't start till 11, and all of us had to be up by 630 or 7, but that's the point of Pride--to prove, even at your advanced age, that you can still stay out too late in a bar and manage to get up in time for work.

My GF was horrified by the late start time, which just shows how overwhelmed she is these days by having to move out of her office, because nobody loves a bar more than GF. But I decided to go.

So my friend L shows up with a very young little twinky boy in tow--our friend M's latest crush. M has been chasing the young ones and washboarding his abs ever since his husband dumped him a couple of years ago. M is adorable, and seems to get a lot of boys, but this one is young even for him. He's seriously like just barely 21 at the most. Sweet and catty--reminds me of rural gay boys I've known, the way they have no role models so they decide being gay means being an over-the-top flamer hairdresser. He's not from much, and has moved back in with his parents in the South suburbs after doing a tour in a musical production. And yes, he does in fact prove to be a hairdresser, currently in beauty school on the North side.

So he's funny in a way that drains you, you know, because he's trying hard, and you feel as if you should participate and validate. But sweet and heartbreaking in that he says things like "Oh you guys are smart. I'm just a dumb hairdresser." And so I have to tell him that I actually considered going to beauty school after being denied tenure, which is true, but that I decided I couldn't be on my feet all day because they are so bad, which is also true. But I don't know if he believed me.

So we all get to Halsted, and of course parking is a nightmare. We find a tight spot on a side street by Roscoe's and L tries twice to get it in but can't. So I do it of course and the little boy cheers and says it was so good he came (!). I am rather proud of my parallel parking ability, as it is one of my True Talents.
But then, just as we all turn from the triumph of the parking space and begin to walk down the street towards the bar, L remembers she forgot--what? Guess. That's right--her ID. The one that is now a potato chip as a result of going through the washer and dryer in her pants pocket. That would be her driver's license, which apparently she just doesn't carry anymore because it doesn't fit in her wallet. Even though she's, I don't know, driving.

So we are prepared for the evening to end right away, and I'm thinking maybe it's not such a big tragedy to go home, since it's unwise for the old and ungainly to venture out into "Nightclubs," as the seedy bars in Boystown style themselves, but there is our friend Washboard Abs M at the door in front of the bar, talking to our friend C the burlesque dancer. M is cute and lithe and muscle-y, and C is all dolled up with glitter on her face and long thick lashes, and they are so gay and beautiful under the streetlamp, luring the farmboys, that I am awash with love. They both hustle us through the door without incident, in large part because we are so freaking old the doorboy doesn't even card us. Except he does card the sweet young rail-thin hairdresser. Bitches.

So we have a lovely table and a free bottle of champagne, which those piggy gay boys we're with swill down almost immediately, which is fine because it's sweet and warm and you can just tell it's a bad hangover lurking like an evil genie in that bottle. A couple of maddening friends of M are at the bar and they are also sweet and tiresome at the same time, but L and I are drinking vodka and resigning ourselves to a deadly day today (Friday)at work. M is all over this child bride of his, who is busy texting and swaying on his stool as M curves his body over him. Apparently M is now telling everyone the boy is "the love of his life." Right now this boy is just fading out, bored and drunk.

Oh M, you are such a cliche, though you know we envy the fact that you can still ride that rollercoaster. We watch, whisper, and smugly cluck, safe in our lives where nothing ever happens.

At one point the boy is closing his eyes and his head is dropping, and soon it's time to "take him to the potty room" to hold his hair back while he brings forth the bounty of the evening. Unlike my friend N, though, who can party till dawn with the help of strategic oral purging throughout the evening if necessary, this child has no concept of pacing, and has missed his window of opportunistic regurgitation. Sadly, M now has to make good on that daddy/husband thing he's got going, and this means he has to drive the boy home, way South, long before C's burlesque number, and not even half way through the show.

The crowd in the bar is small but good-natured, even when the boring comedians come on. The dancing boys on stage pop their balloons to reveal chiselled physiques, and the girls bounce and jiggle and twirl to polite appreciation (this is--need I point out--a nearly all-male crowd). Our friend C is the last act, and she nearly falls off the front of the stage at one point, but pulls it back together and sails on. She has dark eyes and a hooded look which can smolder if she doesn't rush through the routine, but I think the wobble has thrown her off a bit. She spins her pasties with vigorous if distracted athleticism. It seems as if she's only on stage for, like, 90 seconds. At this point it's 1:30 in the morning and really time to go.

Out in the night the mohawked, eyelined, high-booted, transgendered people drift down the sidewalks. A hippy throwback dances in the light spilling out of a bar. The moon swells overhead, almost sated. L and I stop for onion rings and fries at Burger King, telling ourselves at least we aren't eating White Castle (though this morning my crispy stomach is failing to distinguish a difference).

I walk in my house, and GF and her mom are sound asleep, but Maude is wailing. I go in and pick her up, and immediately she stops crying and starts conversing with me about how dark out it is, and how dark, too, "in here." I change her diaper and offer her water, but she says no, she wants milk, so we walk up the hall to the kitchen, past the lava lamp, which is still on as a kind of night light for me. She says, "It's pink!" and we agree it is very pretty. She actually chuckles as I make her a bottle, a low happy laugh. I put her to bed and brush the hair from her dark eyes, leaving her to her contentment.

And that is my night. It is 2:15. L texts to say we had parked in a permit zone, and she has a $60 ticket on her car she hadn't noticed until now. I text that I'll split it with her. Just the cost of an evening out on a night in June, Vega conspicuous overhead, under the rising moon. Happy Pride everyone! Here's to all those who glitter till dawn, heedless.

spring forward

2010-04-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

I haven't written for a while because I'm not sure what to do with this blog, and I'm not sure if anybody is still reading it, and if they are, they are all on facebook now and thus connecting with me in other ways. While FB is good for updates and news links, it doesn't satisfy the enjoyment of writing the way a blog does, but when I have tried to write lately, my anxiety about the future has made it hard to do much more than complain. Most of all, I've grown tired of sounding discouraged.

But things are changing. While Maude and I were visiting a friend in Austin, I got a call from someone I interviewed with a year ago. I was in the park, playing on the jungle gym with Maude. Well, we were actually playing UNDER the jungle gym, in the pebbles. Maude kept shoving them in her sandals, under her toes, and I kept pulling them out until I realized she was putting them there. My friend was laying on the bottom of a slide, letting the sun hit his hairy stomach, which he calls the Pregnant Lady Monkey Tummy. The air was warm, with a temperature in the 70s, and I was loving the brief reprieve from the Chicago weather.

Then the phone rang. A number I didn't recognize. I ignored it, then got a frantic text message from a friend in Chicago, telling me this job was calling me, and to call back the number. I hesitated. Wouldn't it be weird to just call back? Wouldn't they wonder how I KNEW to call back? I texted this to my friend. "Just call!" she wrote. "Don't say you heard it from me!"

I called back, and was offered a job on the spot, which I accepted, on the spot. It's a job clerking for a County judge, and apparently, there was a new opening, and a salary low enough to qualify me for some loan repayment help. With regular hours, pension plans, benefits. It's just what I really wanted right now, in fact.

The best part is that I knew about this job last year because word was passed along a network of burlesque dancers; mild-mannered office types by day, they become fierce twirlers and peelers by night, headlining various comedy venues and spicing up the social scene with some much-needed girl power. I hadn't taken the bar yet so I couldn't land the position; now, however, everything was different.

So yes, I got my first law job because of burlesque. But most important of all, I got my job because of a network of very cool women who are happy to hire other women.

In a moment life turned around. Suddenly, there was a job, a career, a salary, health insurance for my daughter when GF's job ends this summer--all the things I worried I'd never have again after tenure denial, law school, recession, the collapse of the legal job market, GF's denial of tenure. The sun was shining on my friend's belly, Maude was shoving pebbles under her toes, and I had a job for the first time in almost five years.

Dumbfounded, I hung up the phone and told my Austin friend what happened. "We'll celebrate!" was his immediate response, which tells you a lot about why we are such good friends. And then we just sat there for a few minutes, planning what champagne to buy, thinking about who I should call, savoring the moment.

say goodbye to bar summer

2009-08-16T17:49:00.000-07:00

My friend told me to call her because a guy she knew wanted my resume. I called her today as soon as I got the message. I've been looking for a job since the end of the bar exam--looking full-time, that is. Full-time as in: get up in the morning, have coffee, and summon the courage to face Craig's List.

Craig's List? you say. Don't tell me you are looking for a law job on Craig's List?

It's true, I will tell you. You can look on Symplicity, the law school jobs board, for judicial clerkships for the top 15% of law graduates. You can also find jobs there in Maryland, White Plains, downstate Illinois, California. You can look on the government jobs website for jobs requiring licensure and many years of experience. You can look on Careerbuilder or Monster.com and be told that you can sell insurance for AFLAC. You can cruise Vault and Lexis and Lawjobs for the same listings you found elsewhere.

Or you can look on Craig's List. There, you can find small firms looking for law students who will work for ten (10) dollars and hour. You can find egregious ads offering law students the chance to "intern" (work for nothing) at a small firm. You can find even more outrageous ads looking for unemployed law graduates to work for free while waiting for their bar exam results. And you can find lots of ads looking for experienced attorneys to do piecework jobs (document review). Sometimes you can even find an ad or two that looks like a real job, and so you try once more to de-gay your gay gay resume and gay cover letter, and send them off into the abyss.

Your resume says you have crested your forties and are on the downslide to fifty, and have somehow, inexplicably, thrown away a solid-looking teaching career to rack up 125K more in student-loan debt so you can start doing entry-level work in an office. Your resume says you taught gender courses and interned at gay public interest law organizations. Your cover letter cheerfully explains that you wanted to "engage more directly with issues of social justice."

After you've sent off your gay gay gay credentials, you look can stay on Craig's List and look for work to "tide you over." There is dogwalking, tutoring,and adjunct work aplenty, and you briefly consider the dogwalking gig before you remember you have bad feet, short legs, and a resume that says you graduated from college in 1984. That leaves tutoring and adjunct work.

You send off a bunch of tutoring applications and quickly get back a grammatically-suspect reply offering you a job if you agree to engage in some complicated check-cashing and money-wiring operations. Another recipient tells you that if you get your license to sell insurance, you can have a job cold calling businesses to try to get them to buy policies. That leaves adjuncting.

It is late in the summer. Classes start soon. You know what you have to do.

It's time to put on those fishnets, purse your lips into a pout, and walk the streets selling yourself as a composition lady of the morningafternoonevening. Strut it sister! You love teaching writing! You know you do! Grading paper after paper after paper for a few dollars in your g-string--you want it!!! You flaunt it! Oh baby, your eyes are getting old, but your pen still knows how to drive them wild with a few well-placed grammar suggestions.

For your special customers, you can still offer the lure of the semicolon.

And so you find yourself here again, my friend, five years after you lost your job, in the exact same place you were when your paychecks ended. You have gone to law school, taken the bar exam, published a law Note, and racked up a total of . . . what is it? !50K in student loan debt? 160K? You aren't sure. And you are begging for a last minute comp section to pay rent until a job comes through.

One guy who asked a fancy professor friend for my resume also asked her what I had done to contribute to my jobless situation. I thought about my gay gay life and my gay gay book and my gay gay resume and I thought, could it be my heroin habit? My carelessness with my eyebrows? The fact that I only possess one suit?

The good news is that I told one friend that I was applying for dogwalker jobs and she was so horrified she found me a class for the fall. Now all I need is one more class, or a tutoring job, to get through until November.

So today I'm driving down to a community college on the far south nether regions beyond the city, to turn in paperwork for composition adjuncting. It's going to be an hour commute each way MWF, and with traffic back it could take a lot longer, but I need the extra 5K I'll get from teaching 2 classes (really 1.5) down there. The paper application is horrifying, reminding me just how punitive the job market has become--have you defaulted on any loans? Can you pass a background check? Can you pass a CREDIT check? Are you drug-free? Really, I never imagined I'd have to pass a body cavity search to be allowed to teach comp, but anything goes in this Second Depression, so I'm taking a bath and preparing to leave the house. It is a very cheery campus, with nice facilities and sunny-faced, instructors, so I think I'll like it. More later on the depressing fact/uplifting versatility of having "a foot in both worlds" (or a foot in neither). Wish me luck. It feels like a Classic Rock on the car radio kind of day, and those are always good days.

graduation day

2009-05-16T23:52:00.000-07:00

Today the saga of law school ended, at least institutionally. The class of 2009 graduated, and I was one of them. I did not graduate with honors, which means I was not in the top half of my class, but I think I'm not at the bottom, so that's something. The faculty have a lovely tradition of filing out, then forming two lines at the top of the stairs for the graduates to walk through. It was startling to emerge from the auditorium to see so many of their faces turned towards us, and even more startling to hear my name called and see hands stretched out to me as I walked past.

As I walked up the stairs I walked right by Maude. She was fascinated watching all the blue velvet-lined gowns file past, and even more startled when I leaned down and addressed her. She just stared at me, as if I was some exotic creature. As if I had a mortarboard on my head.

Afterwards there were so many people milling around we had to leave, but as we walked towards the elevators I would see someone I knew and we would stop for a minute.

I don't have a lot of fondness for my law school experience but I don't hate it. It is an experience designed for young people in their twenties, and that is going to be alienating for someone older. I don't blame law school for the out-of-sync existence of middle age, nor can law school be blamed for my commuter relationship to it, my insistence on a life elsewhere, insulated from and outside of it.

The end of things is so rushed. I imagined somehow that I would have time to linger and say goodbye. There were some people I liked.

Two days ago I sat up until 6am writing my last paper, and tonight I spend the last night in my house writing this. This house has been a quiet place elsewhere for me for three years, and tomorrow the road will swallow it up behind me, and this door will close. I am already thinking about the bar exam, the bar course that starts Monday, and finding a job.

But for tonight, I am deep in the feeling of an ending. This was my transition from academia, and the plane has landed. We disembark. If I am lucky there will be an office at the end of the summer, and 8 to 6. But the papers, the research, the school calendar, the professors and classrooms will be gone. If I am lucky there will be interesting work. If not, there will be duty, and life lived in the corners of the week. But that is tomorrow.

This is not how I thought it would end, but the ending is not a surprise. Good night, academic life. Good night room. Goodnight, dusty college town. Goodnight to all the semesters of all the years of my life. Goodnight all-night papers and 48-hour exam crams. Goodnight person I was, and who I thought I would be. Goodnight, goodnight.

And have a pleasant tomorrow.

Daycare Blues

2009-03-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

So parenthood is amazing and stressful, but amazing. The problem is that I have no time.

Now, I used to hear parents--mostly mothers, let's face it--say they had no time, and I was skeptical. Really? No time at all? When I had no time, it was because I was managing my time badly. I had plenty of time. What I lacked was organization.

See? That's how stupid I was.

Then we had a baby. We still didn't lack time, really--what we lacked was 1. sleep. and 2. freedom to leave the house. Baby Maude slept a lot, ate a lot, and cried a lot.

But then she grew up.

Suddenly she smiles every morning when she wakes up. She smiles every time she looks at us. Her firm little round cheeks are red, red rosy red and you could just bite them. Her eyes are dark and deep and lovely. The symmetry of her face is breathtaking. And she will take up every waking minute of my day, or her other mom's day, or our day together.

The first sounds come crackling over the baby monitor at 6, or 7, or on a rare day, 8. Before 6 she has to go back in her bed after she nurses; after 6, she comes to bed with us and nurses and we pray, pray she falls back asleep for a bit.

Eventually she wakes up and starts kicking GF, and moving her arms, and making whiny sounds letting us know she is bored. We know, by the way. We are just ignoring it.

Then GF sighs and moves baby Maude away from her body, which has been getting pummeled. Sometimes I feel a little set of nails scratching insistently against my back. I roll over and see a little set of the darkest eyes. "Hello Maude," I said, and I kiss her. She doesn't stop smiling. GF then either 1. gets up to feed the cats and turn on the coffee, leaving me to play with Maude and eventually get up and change her, or 2. asks me to please, please get up with the baby so she can sleep in just a little more, or 3. gets up with the baby and lets me sleep. We kind of work out who is more desperate at the time.

Sometimes--glorious mornings!--Maude gets in bed at six or seven and sleeps TWO MORE HOURS, and everyone gets up together singing! Those days are the best.

Mornings can be fun. There is baby in the Johnny Jump Up bouncy chair, and coffee and the paper, and then oatmeal with some kind of fruity goodness mixed in for baby, and Greek yogurt or eggs for us, and playing on the floor with blocks and stuffed animals and little plastic colored bowls that stack up or snap together into spheres. Then there is eventual crabbiness (hers) and the nursing prelude to naptime, which can be anywhere from 10 to 1130.

Naptime lasts an hour if you are lucky, and longer if you are especially blessed, but it can also be a failure where certain persons decide they are not tired and are going to make birdlike sounds over the intercom for the duration while they heap stuffed animals on top of themselves in their crib.

When are you getting work done? You may ask. Ask away. The answer is, we're not. No time! She is going to be up in an hour, and one must bathe and dress, check email, make the bed, do the dishes, straighten up.

After naptime, if we are all home and no one has meetings or classes to teach, the best bet is Fun Family Errand Day, or the Zoo, or the Aquarium, or the Art Museum. GF got us memberships to all with her tax return, and they give us places to go with a little girl hungry for things to do. Usually, though, there are meetings and classes, so Fun Family things have to wait till Friday afternoons or Saturday. I am gone at school downstate Sunday night through Tuesday evening; GF teaches Tuesdays and Thursdays and often has Wednesday meetings; I get home late Tuesday nights and teach Thursday nights.

No time! Which is why, finally, we capitulated to daycare.

I feel very guilty about daycare. I am surprised by this. I imagined that daycare would be easy because I would resent the constant caretaking that comes with a baby, and so would hand the little one over to daycare with a sigh of relief. But the thing is, I like taking care of the baby. I like spending the morning with her and taking her on an adventure in the afternoon. The other day I put her in the backpack and we walked to the health food store to get vegetables. How crunchy granola is that? The sun was out and children were spilling out of their schools and Maude was fascinated and I was getting a little workout and all kinds of ladies were talking to us because Maude is so cute in her backpack, and it was a peaceable world, a world of gentle rhythms moving around the life of a child. I wasn't getting anything else done because after going home we would have to make dinner for us and dinner for Maude, and then we would feed Maude and give her a bath and GF would nurse her and then it would be time for her bed. And then GF and I would eat and maybe watch Rachel Maddow and think about work we might get done and then feel so tired. But it would be happy.

Also, we love our Tuesday babysitter, and Maude loves our Tuesday babysitter. The only problem is that the Tuesday babysitter costs 100 dollars for only one day, while daycare for three whole days is 150. And GF has a full-time career, and I am a full-time student teaching a course, so Tuesdays alone won't cut it. Did I say there was no time?

So daycare. Out of several options, including a kind of structured school-like one that sounded very attractive but is run by a woman who can't seem to ever call back (she has no time), we found a woman who babysits in her home and has taken care of other children we know. They love her so much they go back to sleep over even after they have started preschool. I can see why they love her, because Maude is fussy and tired when we go to visit this lady, so the lady decides to comfort Maude by feeding her a tangerine. She peels the tangerine, then takes off the inner skin around each section, extracting the sticky jewel of the pulp and offering her tiny bits of summer. It is thundering, raining, pouring outside the windows of her livingroom, which she has turned into a place for children to play by pushing all the sofas against the walls. There are bins of toys and stuffed animals. Maude seems puzzled about why we are there, and vaguely irritated, as if sensing something.

But it is only my imagination. This will be fine. The lady is Eastern European, maybe Russian, given to hugging and kissing Maude already and speaking to her sometimes, at the edges of her sentences, in a dark mellifluous language. She feeds Maude the tangerine bits, and tells us that she makes food for the other two children she cares for. She nods approvingly when we tell her Maude loves garlic. "Lots of garlic!" she promises, as we put our wet shoes back on and stumble down her stairs. The rain has stopped. I run to the car, happy to drive away with my little girl still with me, safe in the back.

GF and I talk about it, about the three days a week--Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday--that will help us get a handle on the end of my semester, the spring quarter of teaching and meetings, the summer bar study for me and research and writing for her. Three days a week! More time than we can imagine.

And yet. I know that we need to do this, but my heart breaks to think of the hours with her I will miss. There will be mornings lost, flavors tasted, other people teaching her things. I will see her after a day apart from me and her eyes will be filled with a life I don't know. We will be building an economic base for her, and careers for ourselves, but we will miss the differences, the startling beauty, of each morning and afternoon she is away, in someone else's house.

When she was really little we used to put her in a swing to soothe her to sleep. The swing stayed for months in our livingroom. There were fish at the top that used to go around, and a light that changed colors, and music that played New Age baby songs that for some reason she just adored. She would sit in that swing and smile up at the fish and make happy gurgly noises when the baby songs played. Eventually she got too big for the swing, and I had to put it away. I cried a little bit the day I unscrewed the legs to the swing and put it away in the basement, because putting it away meant she wasn't a newborn anymore or even an infant. Then I felt silly. Of course she was still a baby. She was just a bigger one. A big girl.

But still. I made a video of her in the swing once, the only time I taped her there, and I ran across it today when I was looking for something else. I watched it for fun, but before long I dissolved. She is still the same baby now as she was then, but now she is also more herself, older, with more of her own mind. Now she sits up, reaches for things, laughs, and grunts in response to the life around her. I like the person I see glimpses of when I am with her now--sensual, curious, shy, assertive. In the video, though, she is preserved as a tiny being, just beginning to find pleasure in the world. Smiling up at her fish, still too small to sit up by herself, she moves her arms and her head to the music, rocking in her little swing, safe and nearby, as she is safe in my house, totally herself but always and forever mine.

I finally did the damn 25 things, ok?

2009-02-09T22:37:00.000-08:00

I haven't been bloggin' for forever, in part because so many fellow bloggers are on Facebook, and Facebook is more integrated with my law school life, which is not given over to blocks of time to write prose. I have also resisted doing the "25 things" craze because I feel like we all did that already as bloggers.

But then I thought maybe it would give me the chance to write, by which I mean self reflect, and it seemed so much like writing, if shallower, that I couldn't resist. So I thought I would bring it over here and maybe, just maybe, it might help me climb back on the blogger horse a bit.

Hello everyone! Spring feels like it's just around the corner, though I know it isn't. Cheers to optimism anyway.

THE THINGS

If you are reading this, consider yourself tagged!

1. I can teach dogs new tricks. I taught my last dog to jump over a broom because it was fun to watch her do it for food. I taught Joyce and Kate's dog to shake hands, also for food. For the dog.

2. I can jog at least 45 minutes on the treadmill if "Gossip Girl" or "Life on Mars" is on my iphone.

3. I learned to ski when I was five. I have never snowboarded though.

4. I can cross one eye at a time. Kids love this but their parents don't.

5. I am extremely sentimental.

6. I miss my mother every day, even though she died seven years ago and could be a homophobic holy terror.

7. I love writing, and hate that there is no time to do it right now.

8. I am afraid of falling, and so I don't like roller coasters that much and find it inconceivable that anyone would pay to parachute out of a plane. I could maybe hang glide or parasail, though.

9. I am happy that feminism refuses to die.

10. I am a whore for gadgets. I want I want I want.

11. I am not the least bit thrifty.

12. Costco grocery sizes excite me.

13. I would rather bite my nails than trim them any day.

14. I wear a size 11 men's shoe even though I'm only 5'6.

15. I like to cook for a family of at least eight, no matter how few people are actually eating. It's a weird fantasy that's probably tied somehow to exuberance around being the oldest in a family of six, which I was growing up. This inevitably leads to a lot of leftover mashed potatoes in the refrigerator at the holidays.

16. I don't shave my legs, not for political reasons but because I am too lazy to keep them smooth and I hate stubble.

17. My body has trapped enough estrogen in fat to keep me looking young forever. When I recently mentioned my desire to lose some weight, my girlfriend pointed out how young I look and told me "Don't puncture that balloon." I refuse to interpret this phrase.

18. Having a baby has made me rediscover singing songs, dancing in public places, and physical comedy.

19. I have never worked a 9 to 5 office job in my life, and I dread it. I dread unemployment more, though.

20. I wish I hadn't given up playing instruments, and I hope Maude decides to be musical.

21. I used to feel bad about spending most of my retirement money for living expenses while going to law school, but now I think it was brilliant.

22. My eyes are green and blue and brown, and they can look golden, or any of these other colors, with the right shirt. I love this.

23. I like to talk people into things. I want to make them try new foods and join Facebook and get iphones and drink more cocktails. A correlative of this is that I can be talked into doing just about anything. Except parachuting.

24. I am a true night owl. I can be exhausted mentally and physically, but I can always get a second wind at midnight and stay up till 3. There's something seductive about the concentrated quiet of the deep evening that makes it difficult to abandon.

25. I am happy that at a certain point, your friends are just your friends for good, and there is no use in agonizing over whether they like you or you like them or they are too difficult or you are. You just have to love them and stop agonizing about it all.

Maude in the morning

2008-11-20T07:56:00.000-08:00

Morning is her time. I watch this over and over when I am away from her at school.

the other hand

2008-11-07T22:06:00.000-08:00

A reader who voted for Amendment 2 in Florida, the one banning same-sex marriage from the state constitution, left a comment on my last blog post. As I struggled to respond, I realized it might be better to post what I was thinking on the main blog rather than get steamed in a footnote. I am also reposting the comment, since some people read on a blog reader that doesn't have access to comments, and might not know what the heck I I am talking about.

The jist of the comment they left was that they voted as they saw fit, and it was just an opinion. They also said nice things about the blog and added that they thought some day very few people would agree with their position:

"Hi,
I voted for Amendment 2, to maintain marriage as between one man and one woman, but it is not because I fear LGBT nor hate you nor fear you nor am I ignorant of the issues. It was a difficult decision because I DO understand the issues, but still, I felt that it was the right way to vote.
I'm not writing to anger you or upset you in any way, but rather merely to say, that a vote for traditional marriage is not necessarily one made out of hate, fear, or ignorance. It is simply based on a differential in values.
Thanks for writing your blog and sharing your sentiments. For whatever it is worth, I'm sure that one day, probably soon, those that share my views will be in the minority and those that oppose them will win the majority."

The first thing I have to say is that I just don't know how to be dispassionate about Florida right now. Florida is one of the most hateful states is a sea of red Southern states hostile to LGBT rights. Florida is the only state in the entire country to explicitly ban "homosexuals" from adopting children. They aren't even sneaky about it, like Arkansas or Utah--states that get away with discriminating against gay adoption by banning unmarried people from adopting children, then banning gay people from getting married, thus effectively banning gay people from adopting children. Florida is right up front about its bigotry--even though it means many children who otherwise would have legal parents will instead languish in the foster care system. Florida already bans gay marriage with a Defense of Marriage Act--a mini-DOMA modeled on the federal one Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996--and now, with Amendment 2, is enshrining this ban into the state constitution.

Just An Opinion, I'm glad you left a comment. I'm sorry you voted for Amendment 2, though I appreciate your honesty. I wish your vote had been only "a vote for traditional marriage," as you say it was. I wish it had been only an opinion. But it wasn't. It wasn't a straw poll, either. It was a LAW, and voting for it was a vote to make sure some people never get to be married to their partners.

Traditional marriage was unaffected by these votes. Traditional marriage continues to exist whether Amendment 2 or 8 passes or not, and whether you vote or not. People voting for these bans like to say that gays are trying to impose their values on others, but it is pretty clear that when you vote to exclude someone from a exercising a right, or you vote to take it away from them once they have it, you are imposing your values on them. Not the other way around. Traditional marriage was never on the table. Nobody was trying to get it abolished.

What they were voting on--what YOU voted on--was to close the door to same-sex couples being able to marry. Your marriage, the marriages of people voting for the Amendments, didn't change. Instead, our marriages became impossible.

Do you know why a lot of gay people want to get married? One of the best examples comes from your state of Florida. Maybe you read about the lesbian couple who were getting ready to go on a cruise with their kids when one of them suffered a stroke and was rushed to the hospital. You know what happened to the partner and the kids? The hospital whisked the stroke victim away, and then wouldn't let her family back in to see her. Ever. Not her kids, not her partner of 18 years. Nobody.

Do you know why? A hospital administrator told this poor woman, half out of her mind with fear and worry, that she couldn't see her dying partner because Florida was a Defense of Marriage State. That's what she said. She used the ban on gay marriage to keep an entire family from being with one of its members as she lay dying.

That wasn't an opinion. That was a cruel violation. That administrator behaved that way because she thought that's what the Defense of Marriage Act authorized her to do. She felt supported by the law, even though she misread it. She correctly intuited the bigotry and hate in DOMA statutes towards LGBT families, and she expressed that hate freely, feeling justified as she did it.

Do you know what happened then? A blood relative finally got to the hospital two hours before the woman died, and let the partner and kids in to hold her hand and say goodbye. Two hours. Those people sat in a waiting room all night long and a woman lay dying alone in a hospital room because of a "difference of opinion."

That's what many of us are afraid of. What if get broadsided by a car in Ohio on my way home to my family at Christmas, and end up in the hospital? Will my partner be able to see me and make decisions about my care? Ohio is a DOMA state, with an additional constitutional amendment worded so broadly, it bans anything that may be seen as resembling a marriage from legal recognition. Will I sit alone, in pain, while my partner is locked out? Should any of us have to worry about this kind of thing when we travel across a country where we are supposedly free to move at will?

Most people don't understand that hospital visitation is a benefit of marriage. They just assume that hospitals would be fair and kind and have good hearts and anyway, anyone with any decency would let a dying person's partner and children in to see them in their last hours.

In this case, they were wrong. And the saddest thing is, they were wrong because someone like you, Just an Opinion, thought that voting for a state DOMA or Amendment 2 was just a kind of public opinion poll. If I told you that voting the way you did would mean people were left dying and alone, full of tubes, hooked up to machines, while their families were banging on the door in vain to see them, would you still vote the same way?

I know that's an emotional appeal, but I just don't think there was enough representation in this election of the way these Amendments would actually affect people. I feel as if all these people who voted yes on these ballot initiatives think that gay people just want to run around aping marriage. I don't think they get what NOT having access to many of the most important legal benefits of marriage--and there are over a thousand of them--does to people's lives.

So I'm glad you wrote in, Just an Opinion, but I wish your opinion was more of a conviction. Because what might happen to people because of your vote is tragic.

one hand giveth

2008-11-06T14:36:00.000-08:00

Like most LGBTQ people in the US right now, I'm a lot sadder than I thought I'd be, given Obama's victory on Tuesday. GF and I voted a week early, which had its good and bad results. The good results were that I got voting over with, but unfortunately, that meant I was "free" to leave the city and my girls to come down to school. My Trial Advocacy class requires 12 hours of courtwatching, 8 of which have to be jury trials, and I had so far completed zip. I teach on Monday nights, so if I leave town right after class, I can get downstate sometime before midnight. There was a jury trial at 9am Tuesday morning. Ugh.

After spending Election Day sitting on hard benches (4 and a half jury trial hours, check!) that made my tailbone ache and dug into the small of my back, I ran back to my room here to see what was happening. I watched the first red state--I think it was West Virginia--go to McCain. Vermont went to Obama. I held my breath. Obama picked up a couple more states, slowly. And then suddenly the big states started going blue, widening the gap.

This was no 2000. This was no nailbiter, with assurances of victory followed by bitter, bitter disappointment. As the Obama victories started to roll in, the television anchors started getting excited. The commentary began to cut away to Grant Park, to people walking over bridges to get to the rally there. I was sitting at my desk trying to get a draft of a paper done, but I couldn't concentrate. I kept watching the news and checking the electoral totals. Back home, GF was watching with friends, who were texting me and chatting on Facebook.

You know the rest of the story. Obama began to pull away, McCain conceded, and Jesse Jackson wept. Spellman students danced. Villagers in Kenya danced. Chicago danced.

But wasn't going so well for gay marriage.

At one point late in the evening, Chris Matthews on MSNBC pointed in exultation to an overhead shot of crowds "celebrating" in the Castro. Rachel Maddow cut in. "If that's the Castro," she said, "those crowds probably aren't celebrating."

It was true. The votes coming in from California on Proposition 8 were not pretty. Matthews assured everyone that even bad news was potentially good in this instance, because the numbers showed a much more even split between the supporters and opponents of gay marriage. Maddow made a heated retort about rights actually being taken away from people, but the conversation soon shifted back to the topics MSNBC thought were more relevant to a general audience. I went to bed that night euphoric at the Obama victory, but with a pit in my stomach about Proposition 8.

After two days, the returns are in, but millions of absentee votes remain uncounted. Still, it is almost assured that opponents of gay marriage have managed to stop progress in its tracks in California. This morning, my Family Law professor spent the first fifteen minutes of class talking about how strange it is for a state to actually take a way a right it has granted, and how no state has ever had to decide the question of whether its constitution will allow people to STAY married in the event it grants, then rescinds, the right to marry, since the usual question asked of courts is whether the constitution will allow people to GET married in the first place.

Right now, I miss my family. This week feels as if it has been a month long. My little girl is just learning to sit upright in her activity saucer, and I want to watch her try to turn its brightly-colored little plastic wheels that make bells ring. She tries so hard to make it work. She can barely hold herself up, but she concentrates. There are buttons elsewhere on it with pictures of animals on them, and if you can manage to push them while maintaining your balance, they make sounds. Right now she can barely sit for very long, and her legs are so short we have to fold towels up for her to stand on, but some day soon she will make the cow moo, and the dog bark, and the lights flash bright blue under the face of the duck.

The law says that I have to pay money to a lawyer if I want to be her legal parent, because GF and I cannot get married. If we could get married, the same presumption of parenthood that fathers enjoy (even if they are infertile, and their wives use a sperm donor to conceive) would extend to me. But we cannot get married. Instead, LGBT people like me must pay thousands of dollars to adopt our own children.

In California, the courts have extended parenthood in this manner even to same-sex couples who have not performed second-parent adoptions. Here, that's riskier. So we pay, and feel grateful we don't live in hateful states like Florida, Arkansas, or Utah, which specifically prohibit homosexuals (Florida) or unmarried couples (Utah, and now Arkansas) from adopting either the children of their relationship or children from elsewhere.

I'm very, very happy about an Obama victory, but it's hard to feel excited right now. I can't wait till tomorrow, when I can drive home. I miss my family. Despite the wonderful, amazing, historic events of this past week, the world seems colder.

the elusive butterfly

2008-11-02T11:52:00.000-08:00

This whole Proposition 8 thing has me thinking about same-sex marriage pretty much all the time. Videos of protesters screaming at each other on street corners in Oakland circulate on gay internet blogs. People I went to high school or college with, and who now live in California, have become my Facebook friends, and their status updates grow more passionate every day. Some have reported seeing their formerly-conservative neighborhoods littered with Obama and No on 8 signs. Others are volunteering their weekends to try to defeat the measure.

In a stroke of great (unplanned) timing, this Monday in my LGBT politics and social change class we are reading about gay marriage. I enjoy teaching this class even though I am only doing it because I am desperate for cash. It takes up too many hours of my week, but the students are extremely committed to discussing the reading. This week we are going to talk about George Chauncey's "Why Marriage?" and look at the First Interim Report of the New Jersey Civil Union Commission. After that we will watch the documentary "Freeheld," about the fight of a dying lesbian police officer in New Jersey to give her partner her pension benefits.

As you probably know, Chauncey's book argues, among other things, that the LGBT community got really interested in marriage as a result of the AIDS crisis, when it became apparent how precarious the legal status of gay relationships and gay families are with respect to hospital visitation, funeral planning, inheritance rights, pensions, lease agreements, and child custody and visitation. The NJ First Interim Report concludes that establishing civil unions as a alternative to marriage fails to grant the same rights to same sex couples that their heterosexual neighbors get when they marry. "Freeheld," which won an Oscar for best documentary, shows a conservative community coming to terms with the injustice of denying a same-sex couple the survivor benefits that give financial security to heterosexual families when one partner dies.

As I watch Yes on 8 supporters railing against gay marriage because it means children will learn about gays in grade school, it is hard not to make the parallel to Anita Bryant's "Save the Children" campaign. Why does the right's fear of changing gender roles and anger towards the demise of patriarchal marriages have to take the form of campaigns to save children? From what? One white Massachusetts woman in a Yes on 8 film maintained that childhood should be a time of innocence, and that kids should wait to learn about gays until they are older. She and her husband are outraged that grade-schoolers went on a field trip to surprise one of their teachers at her lesbian wedding. They feel that being exposed to such things damages the carefree world every child is entitled to have in grade school. They feel that children exposed to such things--love, I guess--are somehow unprotected.

Watching them, I think about nineteenth-century ideologies of children as asexual angels, and I wonder if these parents also think their children should be protected from other kinds of difference. Surely going to school with children of color will only mar the innocence of white children, who deserve to grow up in an environment free from the knowledge of this country's legacy of racial violence. Ditto for children of immigrants, especially undocumented ones, whose parents will be hauled away by INS some fall afternoon. White children who are citizens should be protected from sadness like that. How about class difference? Middle-class children should definitely be protected from knowledge of poverty, since it will only make them feel sad and helpless to know how many of their peers go to school hungry each day.

These parents don't assume that their children are already going to school with the children of lesbian or gay parents, or with children who may identify as lesbian, gay, or transgender. These parents assume they can keep difference out--at least for now. It is the same logic that assumes there are no gay people next door, or in the schools already, or in your own family. It assumes that learning about difference is bad, and filthy, and traumatic. These parents never talk about why male-female relationships allow children to keep their "innocence," while female-female relationships appear somehow to be overtly sexual, even to toddlers.

Meanwhile, this Sunday's New York Times Styles section is filled with gay marriages, and the "Vows" story that serves as its centerpiece is, rarest of rarities, a gay couple with twin daughters. I think about these children, so wanted that their fathers spent upwards of 100K trying to get them. These little girls surely should be saved from such love, such difference, and their parents should never be allowed to marry and give them anything--not property, health care, financial security, respectability, love. Other children definitely need to be protected from these two little girls, who will grow up confident, secure, and "spoiled"--but not spoiled at all--from being showered with love by two doting, powerful, successful gay men.

My daughter-not powerful, certainly, but very beautiful nonetheless-- is asleep in the next room. One of her favorite toys is a big multicolored butterfly (ok, it's really a firefly, I guess) that lights up and plays songs when you pinch it, or bite it, as the case may be. My partner, who I cannot marry because it is not legal here, calls this toy the Elusive Butterfly, after the 60s song about the butterfly of love, which I taught her because when I was a very little girl I thought that song was so beautiful I would practically faint with joy when it came on the radio. I think there was something about the combination of butterfly and love that was almost too great for my soul to bear. I'm sure I learned that love in my family, especially from my mother, who was fascinated by each one of her children, and who took pains to cultivate in each of us strong sense of social justice and lifelong horror (she came from the South) of racism, snobbery, and all forms of prejudice.

My hope for my daughter is that the love she experiences with us will teach her to love other children in spite of and because of their differences, and that the deep and formative happiness of her childhood is not based on some fake innocence, but on something better than that--some kind of love of beauty and joy in the world that feels so big in her heart, it makes her want to faint with happiness. I don't want to protect her from love, or from emotion. I hope I can fill her with feeling, and compassion, and empathy, and a keen ability to perceive her fellow human beings, the generation she will spend her life traveling with. I hope her only innocence is optimism about her own ability to defeat evil, hate, bigotry, and despair.

Which we, as the generation before her, can address right now. Stop the hate. In any way that you can today, stop Proposition 8.

transcontinental marriage

2008-10-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

In honor of National Write to Marry Day, a blogger action supporting the defeat of California's hateful Proposition 8. See all the links at Mombian.

I have started saying it almost every day, and I know it has become annoying. "I wish we could get married here!" Sigh. It is almost always followed by a sigh.

We have no money to get married. We can barely afford a marriage license and a City Hall appointment. But I dream about a big hall with vaulted ceilings, an open bar, a dance band, and all the people I love who support us every day just because we shack up together.

OK, it's pretty clear that I am dreaming about the party, not the wedding. I can't imagine what I'll wear. I can't imagine what music we'd play, or whether we would do a hokey walk down the aisle.

My partner is a no-nonsense girl, or at least, BELIEVES she is a no-nonsense girl. This means she eschews sentiment. "Why have a wedding?" she asks, exasperated. She says this often when I say, "I wish we could get married here!" (Sigh). She thinks weddings are expensive and stuffy and no fun, especially for the people getting married. She's happy to go to City Hall and then celebrate at a bar. But she was a Mormon, and married once. Her wedding was a restricted ceremony in the temple, her wedding night a huge disappointment. Her reception was the day after the wedding, and filled with the knowledge of impending misery. Her divorced parents spent the day not speaking to each other. There was no alcohol.

Why get married, indeed.

But I CAN imagine a party. I can imagine garlands of flowers, and people in nice clothes. I can imagine our daughter carrying the rings, or strewing rose petals, or just toddling shyly down the aisle (I guess I imagine she will already be walking).

I imagine the friends who brought us food when we were in the hospital with her showing up and dancing with us. I imagine twinkly lights and our families, who have never met, meeting each other at last.

I imagine wonderful little stuffed things to eat. I imagine martinis and champagne.

There are lots of critiques of marriage out there, and critiques of monogamy, respectability, domestication, and the couple form. They are all valid. Marriage shouldn't be the thing you have to do to get health care, or hospital visitation, or de facto parenthood, or survivor benefits, or pensions, or your lover's estate tax-free. But the fact is, if you have marriage, you can get those things, and making marriage more available begins expanding all sorts of other rights to LGBTQ people. Begins. And that's what is important.

My favorite wedding I ever attended was for graduate school friends who had a combination Christian and Jewish ceremony. As they stood under the chuppa, the Rabbi spoke about its four corners, like a roof over their heads, a roof supported by all of us supporting them in their togetherness, with four walls open to all those who loved them, and who they loved in turn. I loved the image of love as a house, not just to contain two people, but open to the winds, a space for two people be something greater than two alone.

I remember that wedding, and I wonder if I will ever have one like it, and I think maybe I won't live to see marriage for us out here, especially if hateful amendments like California's proposition 8 are allowed to enshrine discrimination into state constitutions. Still, the states continue to fall, one by one, to the neutral application of the principle of equal treatment. The Advocate this week called the cluster of northeast states with same-sex marriages and civil unions a "corridor of love" stretching from New Hampshire to New Jersey. I thought that was lovely. I prefer to think of the northeast corridor and California like two ends of the transcontinental railroad, creeping across the landscape, making the flow of love and commerce easier, uniting a divided country. There would be some sort of suitable gay ceremony, hopefully with lots of jokes about what "driving the spike" might really mean. I hope that railroad makes it here someday. I like to imagine that the driving of the euphemistic golden spike uniting both sides will happen right here, in a gay neighborhood of our very own city, and that when it happens we will feel as if our spaces are opening out into the world, beyond our houses and our selves, connecting all of us.

My Classic Dames Identity

2008-10-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

I'm so happy. I love Myrna Loy.

Your result for The Classic Dames Test...

Myrna Loy

You are class itself, the calm, confident "perfect woman." Men turn and look at you admiringly as you walk down the street, and even your rivals have a grudging respect for you. You always know the right thing to say, do and, of course, wear. You can take charge of a situation when things get out of hand, and you're a great help to your partner even if they don't immediately see or know it. You are one classy dame. Your screen partners include William Powell and Cary Grant, you little simmerpot, you.

Find out what kind of classic leading man you'd make by taking the
Classic Leading Man Test.

Take The Classic Dames Test at HelloQuizzy

first cut

2008-10-14T22:48:00.000-07:00

Autumn is here. At dusk, Sagittarius hoists his jeweled bow just above the horizon. School is in full swing, the nights are lengthening, and it is time for Maude to get her first round of shots.

I know that vaccinations are important. I feel anger towards people who decide to forgo them, fearing autism or some other side effect, putting everyone at risk once more for diseases that were supposed to be gone for good. Still, I understand not wanting to subject a baby to needles, and chemicals. It seems barbaric to pierce soft baby skin, and draw bright red baby blood, when a child can't even understand what is happening.

The morning of her shots Maude doesn't want to wake up at all. I run a bath for her, then take it myself, and finally, when she persists in sleeping, we gently rouse and undress her, and slip her into the warm water while she is still groggy. She doesn't cry, or even wake up grumpy, but she only opens her eyes, and submits patiently to our ministrations. As I towel her dry I think about the nurses cleaning her when she was born, and remember standing impatiently, eager to hold her. Her eyes are larger now, and something flickers down inside of them when they look at me, and when I talk to her and tease her, she breaks into sweet, toothless smiles.

Our doctor's office is 20 minutes north, in a tree-lined neighborhood that feels far away from our tired streets. We usually listen to Classic Vinyl or 80s music on satellite radio, with Margo, Darling calling out the songs as "Baby's first Doors," or "Baby's first Billy Idol." The sun streams through the sunroof, and Maude quiets down the faster we drive. When we get to the office we place bets with the nurse on Maude's weight, and she gets it closer than we do. Twelve pounds--how can it be so little, when she is so heavy in the carseat? A little barbell weighs more. My arm weighs more.

Maude is measured, too. Already she is in a competitive world. Her weight is in the 67th percentile; her length somewhere in the 80s. This is good--not too fat, not too thin, and tallish. Her head is the real thrill, though: in the 97th percentile, it is (we hope) a harbinger of SAT scores to come.

The pediatrician comes in and talks to Maude as she lays naked on the table, and Maude looks earnestly at her at makes a variety of conversational sounds. This goes on for a while, and we are a little amazed that 1) she is being so good, and 2) that she and the doctor have so much to say to each other. I feel a little jealous. I'm not sure she talks that much to either of us.

Then the doctor leaves, turning her back on the plump innocent stretched out like Iphigenia on the altar, if Iphigenia wore a diaper. The nurse comes back, and asks me if I want to hold her when they give her the shots. Margo, Darling is already fighting back tears, so I say yes, but I feel terrible about the trusting little body sitting on my lap, the little hands clenched in mine. She faces forward, and the thought comes that I am a human chair, a human electric chair, a lethal injection gurney. Silly--it's just a vaccination, I remind myself. But then the first long needle goes deep into her baby thigh, and she screams a scream so deep that at first there is no sound, like a whisper, but an awful whisper. Then it comes, a terrible cry. I see blood on her thigh when the needle comes out--bright red, fresh, oxygenated blood. There are alcohol wipes, another needle in the thigh, more soul-deep screaming, and it is over. The most chilling part for me is that the hands never vary their grip. Babies can't clench their hands in pain. My hands, though, are squeezing like mad.

Then there are sparkly band-aids, and comforting sounds. I think about the genital cuttings of different peoples, and I am glad this is only an inoculation, not a sexual marking. There will be other castration rituals to live through, other times of handing over a child to civilizing powers. She will need another round of shots in a couple months, and then another. Then she'll be done, and hopefully won't remember visits to the doctor's office as traumatic. I don't think she remembers pain yet, or cultivates aversion. Babies are slow learners in that way--proof (I'm convinced) that repression is a good thing.

Today the tears dry quickly, and the pain seems long forgotten before we even get home. We undress her, guiltily averting our eyes from the band-aids on her legs, and slip her into the softest pajamas we can find, spotted ones with a tail and a kangaroo pouch with a little baby animal in the front pocket. I tell the friend who gave these pajamas to Maude about the vaccinations, and the negotiation of betrayal one feels turning over a child to medical processes, however minor, and she exclaims, "Good thing you didn't have to have a bris!" So we aren't the only ones making the castration connection, I think. The pajamas comfort us, their softness and little baby pocket a sentimental reminder of our own goodness as caretakers. We are good parents. We only hurt her a little now so she won't be hurt a lot later.

Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. We are extra gentle, shaken with the sudden violent reminder of our violent world, the first reminder. When she is sleeping in her crib in the darkness, I sing her a sleeping song, but in my mind I see the vermilion blood spray across her pale fat thigh, and I marvel at its redness, and I think I will never forget the satisfaction of it, of knowing she had done a difficult thing, and we had done a difficult thing for her, and the horror of it. In the darkness I can taste the tiniest taste of an old, ancient and animal horror we memorialize in these everyday health measures, in the restrained sadism of even our safest and most human of rituals.

greater than

2008-09-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

Well, I did it. I put an Obama sticker on my car.

It's not as if I don't want Obama to be the next President. It's just that I'm reluctant to get my hopes up about his getting elected. The fact that people are wowed by McCain's choice of Palin makes me feel the way I did in 1980, standing in the livingroom of my dorm with everyone watching the election returns for Reagan. I just couldn't believe it at the time. Couldn't people see that this guy was an idiot? What was wrong with America?

So when the Palin surge happened, I looked at the Obama sticker sitting on the hall table and felt like I probably should use it. I don't think I've ever put a political sticker on my car. Even if I want a candidate to win, I don't usually identify with any of them enough to want to have them become a permanent part of my self-presentation on the road. They are all straight, all male (except for Hillary), and all againt same-sex marriage (including Hillary). Most of them say what they think America wants to hear, including pandering to Christian conservatives in a way that makes me want to throw up (Hillary most certainly did this). I view elections more as damage control than any expression of MY ideals or MY politics.

Indeed, the only sticker on my car is an HRC "equals" sign I've modified to look like the mathematical symbol for "greater than." As my friend Danny pointed out when HRC first started using the gold parallel lines on a blue field to signify what is supposed to be the political goal of all LGBTQ people, why settle for equality when you can transform the world?

As a tribute to Danny's ability to dream big, I put my "greater than" symbol on the car, hoping that it would make me dream big, too. And today--inexplicably, perhaps-- I decided maybe we could dream big with Obama. Why not? I don't actually believe he's going to change things all that much, but I'm going to pretend that he is, and that universal health care, federal recognition of same-sex families, the end of the war in Iraq, and major investment in alternative energy is really going to happen in the next four years.

In the meantime, I'm trying to get my class I'm teaching to have political discussions without getting angry, polarized, and disrespectful of each other's views. I'm teaching an LGBT history and political change class, and in my efforts to get them engaged, I think I've loosed a whirlwind. We did some reading from Eric Marcus's Making Gay History, and we watched the Four-part PBS/Channel 4 series from the early 90s called A Question of Equality. I think Isaac Julien either made it all or helped on it a lot, because it is definitely hip and decidedly not from the usual white, middle-class point-of-view that gay history usually gets told from. Julian interviewed the drag queens and gays and lesbians of color who took part in the pre- and post-Stonewall LGBT movement to paint a sensitive portrait of the dynamic relationship between coalition and difference in LGBTQ political organizations. I taped the series when I was in grad school because I thought it would be great for an LGBT studies class, and I used to teach it a lot. When GF started teaching LGBT content she used it. It got so popular that her school tranferred it to DVD, though the copy is a little washed out. In my class, as it is usually, students were really engaged with the reading and the film, but the discussion got heated at one point, with a couple of white, privileged women's studies students berating the class for not understanding standpoint theory and their own privilege. Sigh. At one point a couple of students turned on an ROTC student and asked him to defend his position on--I don't know--the war? Conservatism? I'm not sure where they were going, except that at one point there had been an intelligent evaluation of the vulnerability of radical political groups to splinter over differences. Then, suddenly, the class was splintering over differences.

I was just about to intervene in the discussion when another student made a joke about the ROTC guy speaking for all military personnel, which was a sensitive way of defusing things, I thought, and of being sarcastic about the women's studies students singling him out. Also, he seemed eager to defend his point of view, and actually argued that the class shouldn't assume everyone shared the same political beliefs, class background, or moral philosophy, which was I thought a great thing to point out.

I'm making it sound a bit chaotic, which it really wasn't, because I was making them address the issues brought up in the reading and the film, and afterwards I thought it had been really performative of exactly the kinds of differences that we were studying. Then a student with a pierced lip buttonholed me afterwards and said she was shocked, shocked! by the fact that the class had called out the ROTC guy. I explained to her that I thought the other students had defused it, and that he seemed happy to have the opportunity to explain his point of view--to which they listened--and how all in all I thought it had been a successful class, if harrowing. The student also claimed to have seen other students text messaging during the film, and even chewing tobacco. I just looked at her. While I try to make sure the class is never disruptive, I really can't monitor people very well when we are watching a movie IN THE DARK. And I laughed to myself about the tobacco. Really? Is this where student rebellion is at these days--sneaking dip during class?

Seriously, I forgot that teaching can drive you batshit crazy sometimes. And that students expect you to be their mother, or the mother of everyone else. And that they are supercilious even thought they have pierced lips. And that many of them are perfectly comfortable telling you you aren't doing your job of making them feel comfortable. And you can feel bad, because on the one hand, you want them to have a real discussion, without having be watered down and censored so that it feels fake, but you also realize that they could use a good lesson in rhetorical (and other) accommodation, and be reminded that a classroom is not, in fact, the same as a political organization. But this is exactly the reason some people love teaching women's and gender studies classes, and others won't touch 'em with a 10-foot pole.

I found this truly disturbing, because Pierced Lip and I obviously had totally different experiences of the class. I also felt disrespected, because when I passed her in the hall again, in an empty building at 9 o'clock at night, she wouldn't look at me, but instead busily texted someone on her phone. Weird.

This week, Bayard Rustin! We'll see how they do with that. I haven't taught a GWS course in so long, I forgot how heated people get, and how it can make you long for the impersonality of literature.

GF puts it differently. She says it's just hard to care, and it always surprises--and annoys--us that they do. She is being funny, of course, but there is some truth in what she says.

GF is off getting her tenure file together in a coffeeshop. Little pixie baby is asleep in her swing. After exhausting all possible remedies, including food, diaper change, mobile-watching, lying on a play mat, swinging and swaying in my arms, and singing songs, I finally settled her down in front of the Michigan State football game, and she quieted down, watched it with some interest for a few minutes, and fell asleep. I think maybe she's really just a middle-aged man trapped in the body of a baby.

Which is way better and less dangerous than being a baby trapped in the body of a middle-aged man. SInce McCain is acting a lot like that these days, I'm going to try to care about politics just long enough to get a grownup in the White House. And maybe watch a little college ball with Maude.

a little night music

2008-09-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

Even before Maude was born, we knew we would have to think harder about music. Margo, Darling began regularly playing Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos in the car, and at night would beg me to sing a song to her rising abdomen. I felt silly singing to a stomach, but I tried to rack my brain for something lullaby-ish that might entertain the little fetus trapped in the dark down there. When she was born singing came more easily, especially since I quickly ran out of things to say to her when she was crying in my lap, too tired and worked up to sleep. Singing is the natural response to a crying baby. It allows you to soothe yourself while soothing her. It allows you to pick a mood and insist on it.

"There's no hysteria here," a song can say. "Nobody is at their wit's end in THIS house, oh no! THIS house is a palace of mellowness." Say it, know it, be it. Eventually it feels true.

As Maude sobbed in my arms and I bounced up and down on the exercise ball trying to soothe her, I would remember the songs I listened to as a child. My father had a big console stereo when I was little, the kind with polished wood sides and a top that lifted to reveal a turntable and radio inside. It lit up inside when it was on, and there was a little oval panel that also lit up to reveal the words "Stereophonic Sound." The radio had a slide dial and warm yellow numbers. The speakers were covered with a woven wicker-type material.

My sister and I loved to sit on the floor with our heads pressed back against the speakers, letting the sound wash over us. I think one of our heads dented the wicker material in a moment of enthusiasm, because I remember a dent in the front. We probably got spanked for the dent, because it was my father's prize possession, but it is equally possible he shrugged it off. Parents are inconsistent like that.

There was a lot of unhappiness, at least back then, so the stereo stands out for me as one of my happier childhood memories. My father played the Kingston Trio; Judy Collins; Mitch Miller; Big Band music; the Weavers; and Peter, Paul and Mary. He played Tony Bennett and Harry Belafonte. He loved early Beatles. He loved Patsy Cline. He loved Bread, the Mamas and the Papas, The Fifth Dimension.

My father was a moody man when we were little. My parents were high school sweethearts who had broken up when my father was in college and my mother in nursing school. He gave another girl his fraternity pin, but my mother still loved him. When she had to have a lower spinal fusion at 20 she waited in for him to come visit her in the hospital, where she lay trapped for weeks in a full body cast. Day after day she waited, but he never came. When she left the hospital she hopped a plane to Atlanta, where her father lived, met a handsome man in a bar, and married him on my father's birthday. She had two children with him before she realized he couldn't hold down a job.

My father's mother told him about my mother's divorce, and the two little girls she had. My mother and my grandmother had kept in touch. I am sure my mother told my grandmother that she had never stopped loving my father, which was true. My grandmother understood misfortune, having survived a tough childhood where she had been given away by her own father, who kept her brother but sent her out to work for any family that would take her in. My grandmother told my father to go get my mother and the two little girls that should have been his. He did.

Which is how my sister and I ended up with our little heads pressed against his stereo speakers, listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary and the Fifth Dimension day after day. At first my father thought that parenting meant beating us with a leather belt for every infraction. I remember having to come up with stories about bruises and handprints on my body for doctors during routine checkups or hospital visits. Later, when more children were born, he began to like us better, and he gave up the belt, and then gave up hitting us altogether. The years passed. We all grew up. I think he grew up more than any of us, grew into a kinder and more generous person over time. In the house of my childhood, all four of us and my parents and our dogs and cats, and horses in the barn, made what I like to call a tumbledy house, a house of noise and mess and lovely disorder and raucous dinnertime fellowship. I remember there was music in our house every night, filling in the cracks and seams between all of us like caulking, creating a reservoir of shared family life that took us all through the next decade together, and then, out into the world.

Eventually my father and I became friends. I borrowed his Tony Bennett and Harry Belafonte records and made tapes to listen to in my car on the drive home from college, and then, graduate school. He would growl at me if records went missing, but only half-heartedly, and if I had them in my possession, he told me to keep them as long as I liked. And when I played them, wherever I was living at the time, in whatever stage of my life, I recreated the raucous tumbledy house I missed, and celebrated my distance from it. The music of my childhood let me miss my family and feel free and separate from them at the same time. it let me revisit a feeling, feel comfortable with ambivalence, and make peace, ultimately, with all the bad things about growing up I couldn't change, and with all the good things I wouldn't trade for anyone else's life.

Before Maude was born I thought about how I would explain my parental relationship to her. I thought I could tell her that my father, the one whose last name I have, is not genetically related to me. I thought about how it may have mattered to me once, but never would now. I thought about how with my mother gone all of us try to see each other at least once a year, and nobody ever cares or seems to remember what degrees of blood kinship are or are not present for any of us. I thought about what a shared life is, what makes family, what it means to be a parent, or a daughter.

And so when Maude was born I sat night after night on the exercise ball, looking for songs that would soother her, and I found the ones from my childhood. I started with "500 miles," then went back to Peter, Paul and Mary for the songs I knew but could not remember. And then I found "Stewball."

"Stewball," of course, is a mournful song about betting everything on the wrong horse and regretting it. In fact, if you go back and listen to Peter, Paul, and Mary, most of their songs and the songs they cover are fairly sad: "Cruel War," "Lemon Tree," "500 Miles," "Leaving on a Jet Plane," and even--especially!--"Puff, the Magic Dragon," are songs about separation, loss, displacement, and disappointment. Did I know this when I sang them as a child? Did something in my sad little heart vibrate with the yearning, mournful minor found in that music? Or did I just think they were beautiful? Are those feelings all mixed together anyway, the beauty, the sadness, the yearning, and bittersweet memory?

Maude loves "Stewball". I can try several different songs, but "Stewball" always makes her happy. Sometimes I play it on my computer, through iTunes, and we slow dance together in the pink light of the nursery, Maude in my arms, her soft sticky cheek pressed against my face, both of us swaying softly to the guitars and vocal harmonies. I think about the heartache and the love and the yearning for safety and fellowship that is so much a part of the ideology of family, and I think about the sweet sad nostalgia I feel for a time when all of us were together under one roof, crowded and cross and driving each other crazy, but together, listening to the same music floating from room to room, humming the same songs. Surviving, fighting, changing, forgiving each other. And I tell Maude that I love her, and that I will probably disappoint her and drive her crazy, but I will try my best to give her a good life, and she is my family, now, for better or worse.

And I feel like our house, our little cramped apartment, is mellow, and calm, and grounded, and cheerful, and full of life and lots of love and all the good things that can be in a place where there is hope and the desire for happiness, and people who try to be their best selves, and love each other as best they can. Which is a lot.

Maude has two

2008-08-30T12:39:00.000-07:00

We are incredibly lucky to live in a state that allows second-parent adoption. This means that I can adopt Maude and become a legal parent, and have my name appear on her birth certificate, just as her biological mother is also a legal parent, with her name on the birth certificate.

When GF and I visited the lawyer before Maude was born, she told us that our state, and especially our city, seemed to be moving towards near-total acceptance of LGBT families. With the caution of one who has seen the political winds change many times, our lawyer stressed that this progress was not something we could absolutely count on forever, and that it was possible for states to roll back such adoptions and leave the status of non-bio parents up for grabs. But she told us how a conservative judge she routinely works with decided on his own that it was unfair to require a social worker to visit the homes of LGBT parents when no such visit was required of heterosexual parents. Her eyes twinkling, she said she never would have imagined that this particular judge would make such a decision, but that she had learned in her many years of practice to be surprised by human fairness.

She also told us that what we were doing was important. While we might think of our adoption as merely a personal or family decision, it was in her mind a political act to insist on the parenting rights of non-bio LGBT partners, and she applauded us for choosing to be out, proud, and legal. Finally, as a last act of personal and professional generosity, she waived half her fee when she found out I was a law student. And told me not to tell anyone she had done so.

Before Maude was born I liked to address her by name whenever possible, throwing my voice at wherever my vague sense of location imagined her to be. A thump that moved GF's belly or made it jump might be a leg, or a fist, if only I could figure out her position. I remember rubbing a hard, solid little rectangle that would float up against the roof of skin still sheltering her, somewhere above GF's bellybutton, and I thought it had to be her butt. Now that I hold her in the crook of my elbow with one hand against that hard little triangle, I know I was right. "Hey little Maude," I would croon to her. "Hey Maudie Maude." In my mind she was already, always, inevitably my daughter because I had called her, planned for her, bought sperm, strategized with GF which donors to choose and why, and called her by name, for all the long months leading up to her birth. Even now I look at her and I see my grandmother's smile, and the shadow of my own baby smile, and my sister's dark hair, and my mother's fierce eyes, and it is hard to remember that she is not actually biologically related to me. But she is mine.

She is mine when I feed her in the blue lavalamp glow of 3 a.m., and she looks at me with those bottomless eyes. She is mine when she hunches against me, trying to burp, or sleep, and rests her awkward big head wearily on my shoulder, my chest. She is mine when she snuggles against me in the morning, as one or the other of us brings her into the bed in hopes that all of us can catch just a half hour or an hour more of sleep, and little baby sighs mark her deep breathing. She is mine when she snores, and when she suffers, as all babies suffer. She is mine every time I sing her a song and her eyes close, and her head sags, and she lets me carry her past the stony gates of sleep to the rest she longs for.

Under the law, unless you live in one of those enlightened states that recognize de facto parenting (and there aren't many), a lesbian non-bio mom has no custody or visitation rights. I would have no right to guard Maude, or speak for her, or advocate as her parent, without a second-parent adoption. Now that I have one, I can access her medical records, enroll her in school, take her to the doctor, travel across state lines, and do whatever else it is that parents routinely do for the biological and adopted children they love.

All summer I read custody cases where biological mothers tried to deny visitation to lesbian ex-partners, and I answered calls from anguished parents trying desperately to see the children that they had raised from infancy, who had been taken away from them by biological moms trying to move on after a break-up. Most of these lesbian moms were heartbroken, and more worried about the children than about themselves. Most of them didn't have a leg to stand on, either.

A ballot initiative prohibiting unmarried couples living together from adoption and foster care just cleared in Arkansas. Senator McCain has stated that he doesn't believe in gay adoption, and Utah bans adoptions by unmarried cohabiting adults. These initiative just keep getting introduced every year, despite the fact that every state needs more adoptive and foster families to take in children, not fewer.

On Maude's adoption day she wore a pink sweater hand-knitted for her by an old-timey lesbian activist colleague of GF's. The sweater came with a matching pink wool blanket. She also wore a beautiful little white dress and socks made to look like little black mary jane shoes. We went into the Daley Center and waited in the family room with GF's sister and a few friends who had taken off work. One of the friends had made her the gift of a college fund. Another had turned over the invoice to me for a freelancing project she actually had done herself, and had thus paid for the entire adoption.

At one point an official leaned over the counter and tapped the sleeping baby with official papers, thus serving process telling Maude that she was required to appear in court. She never even woke up.

GF and I stood before the judge and he asked us our names and occupations. He asked our friends if we would be good parents. He admired the baby. I was nervous because I had just signed a paper stipulating that we were of good moral character, and financially able to raise a child. GF and I had looked at each other, mouthing the words "lie" and "lie" as we waited for the judge. The court seemed to treat these words as mere formalities, but I wondered at their presence in the documents. What would happen if they were ever activated? What in the world was good moral character? Does anyone have enough money to raise children these days, really?

It was a lot like being married by a JP, or at least what I imagine it would be like to be married by a JP. It was jocular but bureaucratic, stately but mundane, a little like a wedding and a lot like getting a driver's license. Sometimes it was bizarre, as when the incredibly crusty bailiff took my fingerprints and warned me, with a straight face drained of all amusement, that now that I was in the system, I had better wear gloves if I wanted to take up a life of crime. He also lost all cognition trying to take down my vital stats. "Hair . . .color?" He asked, clearly flailing in deep waters far beyond his meager social abilities. "Brown?" I queried back, unable to say for sure. Brown under all that blonde, perhaps. Or perhaps the truth of my hair was simply what it appeared to be, or what I said it was. I should have said blonde.

There are many ways that the law can make LGBT people feel like liars, like imposters. It tells you that you cannot marry in the eyes of the federal government, even though you may feel married and act married and need the benefits of marriage for your lover and your children. In many states--Michigan is one--it can tell you your children are not yours if you are a non-bio LGBT parent. In many states it will not recognize that you have changed your gender to fit the truth of your life.

When the law recognizes you, on the other hand, it can make you feel coherent and validated. The other day it told me I was a parent, with responsibilities and rights over the daughter I had helped plan, conceive, and care for. Our lawyer said as much when she took pains to emphasize the language to me of the temporary custody order granting me parental rights until the final adoption went through. In Daley Plaza there is a Picasso sculpture that soars heavenwards, a kind of beast with its legs on the pavement, wearing its strange mask, with mandolin wings and a harp for a heart, towering over pedestrians in the crisp morning. I stood in its shadow and I felt my spirits rise. I think I will always remember how tall I felt that day after our adoption, standing in the sun, still unbelieving, next to my stroller, my partner, and my little, my most beloved and cherished new daughter.

Mine.

maude's ocean

2008-08-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

She cries, and the sound stabs the night. It is time for a night feeding, and one or both of us rushes to soothe her. Sometimes she wakes up in pain, from gas in her still-developing digestive system, and her cry is angry, desperate. Sometimes she is hungry, and her cry is clear and hard. When she is uncomfortable from a diaper, she whimpers restlessly. When she is lonely and wants to be picked up, she wails in short little bursts.

I know some people are driven crazy by the constant cries of newborns, but right now, Maude's cries just fill me with pity and tenderness. Why, why, little one? Why so much sadness for just a meal, or a diaper? I toss her a little, up and down in the way she likes, to startle her out of her jag. I say her name over and over. It often works, and she stops crying and gazes long at me with her dark, expressive eyes. She doesn't want to have to cry, any more than we want to have to listen to it. It's a terrible job she's been given, and her mute look tells me there are no hard feelings, just limited means of communication.

Yesterday she grew angrier and more desperate, waiting for food that was a little long in coming, and when I kissed her eyes I tasted salt. "She cries real tears," I reported to GF, and she told me it was a kind of baby milestone. Crying real salt tears means you are growing up.

In the night I change her one-handed, holding a bottle in her mouth while trying to wipe her clean and fasten a new diaper. I wrap her and sing her songs--mill songs, mining songs, slave songs, Christmas carols. If she likes a song she grows still and listens with her whole being. Her face locks into one expression and her eyes grow dark and far away, yet rapt. Maude loves music, and strains even now to recognize songs she knows.

She has a "sleep sheep" that plays white noise for her--rain, a stream, the ocean. The sheep is a traveling model, one with velcro straps to fasten to a bassinette or a stroller on the go. When she has eaten and been changed, she is rocked and bundled, and we sing her songs, and eventually, carefully lower her to her bed, where we turn on the sleep sheep. The ocean crashes over her head and her feet in the little bed, the ebb and flow of the waves hissing back and forth in a round hollow echo in the darkness. I wonder if the ocean is for her, or for us, imaginary waves breaking on the shores of our rental bedroom, in a city far from the sea.

We are from the coasts, one of us from each side, meeting in the middle of the country. Sometimes I think of the nineteen-seventies country childhood I had, with fields of tall summer grass hot with the sun and tall sticky pines trees to play in, roll in, climb, smell, and dream by, and I could weep for Maude and her programmed urban future. Will she ever know a summer week in York Beach, Maine, running from the icy salt waves on the barren coastline that was my childhood ocean? Will we take her to swim in the hippie swimming hole that is a bend in the river in Sandwich, New Hampshire? Will she know what crickets sound like? And horses--what if she is horse crazy and I, unlike my parents, don't have an acre of field to fence in for a 4H horse for her to buy with her babysitting money?

The sleep sheep blows a dream of oceans into her ear, and I remember what it was to choke on Wordsworth when I tried to explain him to a class of Florida freshman ten long years ago. Then it was homesickness for New England that made my eyes tear up when I tried to explain what he meant by:
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Now I think it is also some sense of calm trust, some sense of knowing the way the world works, and feeling the interconnectedness of all things, that Wordsworth's speaker misses when he speaks longingly of the ocean. How far I feel from the ocean sometimes, here in the middle of the country, far from the coasts, far from home. Deep in the middle of life, it seems like a long way back to the beaches of childhood, to quiet contemplation and a peace beyond words, to the origin of things that is the ocean.

In the quiet night, though, my child cries and I hold her and comfort her, and it makes me feel oddly calm. She is simple right now, and her simplicity makes me simple too. All that matters is food, and sleep, and comfort, and trust in the arms that are there to hold you through the dark hours. The sleep sheep sings its salty ocean song, breathing the waves of my childhood, and maybe hers, in the early hours of morning. I like the sleep sheep, for all its artifice. It is a bird that sings of Byzantium. Maude is my immortal sea, and I am the waves of her ocean, patient, rocking her body until she trusts her eyes to close. It is still night, and Maude, the sheep, and I rock together to the sound of waves.

she is born

2008-08-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

At 6:30 a.m. on Friday I woke to GF chirping something unintelligible from the bathroom. The fans were going in our bedroom and all I could hear was something about "water." I got up and went in. She was sitting on the toilet smiling. "My water broke!" she said. I said something lame like "oh wow!"

My first thought was coffee, because I'm a selfish caffeine addict. Her first thought was to call the hospital. They wanted her in immediately.

This wasn't the way we'd planned it.

I don't know what exactly I thought would happen, but I left work on Thursday fully expecting to go back the next day. My desk was a sea of paper punctuated by half-empty diet coke bottles. I know due dates are approximate, but I think I really believed the old wives' tale that first babies are late. I think I thought we'd spend the weekend at the beach.

When the hospital told us to come in, my heart sank. I was excited, but I also knew that labor lasted for hours, and the standard advice in all the birth books is to wait as long as possible at home, relaxing, before heading to the micromanaged zone of Labor and Delivery. Still, when the bag of waters breaks, the risk of infection increases, so off we went. It was a sunny day, there were no contractions as yet, and we had time for showers and coffee and bagels.

We arrived at the hospital and the valet took our keys. It still felt like we were pretending. Did someone else have to park our car, really? GF wasn't in labor. She could walk just fine. There was no emergency. No police escort was needed.

By nine we were checked in and I began calling and texting the news. Some of our friends got so excited they called in sick to work and camped out at a nearby house, watching movies together and making plans. We thought we'd have a baby by nightfall.

As the morning passed, though, there were still no contractions, so the nurses started GF on pitocin to get things going. By early afternoon her contractions were strong enough that she asked for the epidural, and by late afternoon she was dilated four centimeters. The doctor came in to visit and see how things were going. She had switched shifts with the other ob-gyn when she heard GF was in labor. I love this doctor. When I first heard about her--that she could be brusque, that she was a good labor coach, that she kept her patients from tearing during delivery, that she was an older lesbian with a partner and kids--I just knew she would be our doctor. "That's her," I told GF. Now she teased us and laughed when I told her the hospital was like a casino because it was impossible to know what time it was or how long you'd been there once you were in one of these delivery rooms. She told us she'd see us soon. We agreed.

That's when things began to slow down.

As the anaesthesiologist explained the epidural process to her, GF peppered him with questions. Should she walk? Would her legs go numb? Could she lie down flat? And last, what if the medicine ran out before she had the baby?

The anaesthesiologist chuckled. "This lasts eight hours," he told her. "You'll have a baby before this runs out."

That was at three o'clock in the afternoon. At seven there had been little change, and I phoned the friends who had skipped work to tell them the baby might be later coming than we had supposed. At nine there was still no change, and the doctor upped the pitocin. At two in the morning, GF was finally dilated to eight centimeters.

Great! We thought. Only two more to go!

At this point the epidural had begun to wear off. GF was all for letting it end so she could feel the contractions and visualize her body opening up. The doctor reminded her that she still had two or three hours to go before she got to ten centimeters, and that when she got there she would have some hard pushing to do. We decided to get some sleep, GF started the epidural again, and we turned the lights off in the room.

At 5 a.m. the nurses woke us and the doctor told us to get ready to push. I woke up out of my chair, washed my face, and realized I hadn't eaten anything for twelve hours. The nurses brought me a turkey loaf sandwich on wheat bread. I remember GF putting a little mayo on the bread, squeezed from out of one of those little packets. She was naked from the waist down, propped up in the bed, fixing my sandwich. Even better, she started to push, and in between contractions, I ate my sandwich.

The contractions started coming fast. I could see them coming on the monitor by the bed, the numbers rising and falling with each peak and ebb. When the numbers began to go up, I would grab one of GF's legs with my right arm, put my left arm around her head, and she would pull into a crunch position and push as hard as she could to the count of ten. Then she would lean back, take a deep breath, and crunch again for another ten, and another. Each contraction had three sets of ten crunch-pushes. We did this for two and a half hours.

At 7:50 a.m. the doctor felt for the head and muttered something about it being too big. GF mentioned that our donor was 6 feet one, and I thought the doctor was going to explode. "Six one! Six one!" she spluttered. "A woman your size has no business with a six-one donor!" GF whispered that they didn't really let many short men donate sperm, which is true, and the doctor shook her head. "I want you to give one last big push," she ordered. "And I want this one to be the biggest, hardest, most productive one yet."

Now, GF is a strong little woman, and she wanted to please the doctor, and she had been pushing so hard and with so much effort her face was red and her legs shaking. But still she pushed with all her being, pushed so hard she groaned, pushed as if by pushing this one last time she could finally turn the tide and bring this baby down.

The doctor felt again. It was no good. the head was still too high. "The baby's head is getting a cone shape," she told us. "The back of the head is trying to get down the birth canal, but the major bones of the head still have to come through. I'm comfortable using forceps in situations like this, but I'm not comfortable doing it here." GF and I didn't even have to confer; we looked at each other without a word and she told the doctor a caesarian was fine with her. I felt my throat tighten and my eyes sting, not because I was committed to a vaginal birth, but because it seemed like so much to put GF through abdominal surgery after twenty four-hours of labor. Plus operations are scary. Plus I've seen too many ERs and Grey's Anatomys featuring dead delivering moms not to think anything could go terribly wrong at any moment no matter how routine the procedure.

I kissed her goodbye and they brought me blue paper scrubs to put on. When I got to the operating room I saw GF, strapped down in a crucified position with her head sticking out of a tall blue tent. Her teeth were chattering uncontrollably from the anaesthesia. She looked more tired than I've ever seen her look.

I took a seat by her head and waited. I heard the doctor discussing the incision with a resident, then I heard her call my name. "Stand up!" she said. "Come see your daughter be born!"

I ran around the tent just in time to see GF's stomach looking like a Thanksgiving turkey, and then a flailing baby with an impossibly thick white umbilical cord pulled out like stuffing and hoisted over the table, dark red and covered with what looked to be a thin layer of goat cheese. The nurses brought her to a table and started to dry her off. I touched her and called her name, and she stopped crying and cocked one dark eye at me. The other one wouldn't quite open, but the more they dried her the wider it got. Two dark black eyes looked me over from under a thick dark head of hair. She pursed her lips. "Hello Maudie," I whispered softly. "She's responding to your voice," the nurses told me. They gave me scissors to trim her tough little garden hose of an umbilical cord, then wrapped her up tight and handed her to me. I brought her over to GF to kiss.

GF gamely kissed the baby, and then went back to throwing up into a pink plastic container. Nurses and doctors offered their congratulations and I thanked them. Our doctor came towards me, her eyes merry over her surgical mask. "Well congratulations!" she said, reaching out her hand. I opened my arms to hug her. She bent towards me, and I gave her a big kiss on the cheek of gratitude and relief. She chuckled.

SInce then every day with Maude is new and strange. When she cries we've twirled her in the night, sung her songs, made up rap poems about who loves babies (Everyone loves babies), and looked deep and long into her dark, otherworldly eyes. Sometimes she looks back at me, and I see that she's come from a far place to be with us, and I fall in love. The three of us move in the house now through the long afternoons and cool evenings, all of us just looking at each other, over and over. And life feels perfect.

my hero

2008-07-23T16:44:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why I never read David Copperfield. Blame professors eager to shake up the Victorian canon. Sure, I knew the hackneyed first chapter title "I am born," and dutifully laughed alongside teachers who made fun of a narrator first person-izing his own birth. But David Copperfield was another generation's "Dickens novel," as Hamlet was another generation's "Shakespeare play." My Shakespeare was Lear, over and over, and my Dickensian narrator was Pip, over and over. At some point public opinion shifted to Great Expectations as THE Dickens to teach, probably because it is shorter, no doubt because Miss Havisham provides such a Sexual Revolution-era cautionary fable about the down side of letting your girl parts get too melancholic and cobwebby. Imagine my delight, then, to first encounter, in my mid-forties, the mannered yet modest cadences of young Copperfield, left alone in the world without parents, property, or prospects. Pennyless but for the unconditional love of his good nurse Peggoty and the gift of his own generous and self-improving heart.

I think I love him for his optimism. While the serialization of the novel means there are too many quirky-yet-heartwarming moments for my taste (the characterization and verbal tic equivalent of Disney's rolly-poly animals and birds with long lashes), there are enough brutal patriarchs and brutalized women that I appreciate David's faith that things will--must--get better. I thought when I opened the pages of the novel and began reading during my morning commute that I would sink into the rhythms of Victorian London, forgetting the sway and squeal of the train, the smell of the bodies of my fellow passengers, how tired and unready for the day I often feel. Instead the present and the past tumble together, and I am riding in a carriage through the dark passages of my own life, following the thread of a voice whose story leads ever upwards into a place of arrival, like the escalator I ride every day up, up from underground into the wide white bustle of the urban morning. I wonder, as David does, whether I will be the hero of my own life, even now, every day in the story where I find myself. And I can't help hoping, as I hear that wonderful narrative voice turning and rolling in my head, word piled on word, confident of a reader out there who can hear and be delighted by it still, that I will be.

waiting game

2008-07-03T13:52:00.000-07:00

Midsummer blooms like a tigerlily, and with it come the longest afternoons of the year. Our livingroom is cool, our windows caressed by bright and dark leaf shadows. Outside a lawnmower drones like an insect, and the UPS man buzzes the front door. Today our diaper bags arrive. Mine is a green messenger bag with purple flames. Hers is a Chinese red with orange flowers. The cats eye them with interest, as new scratching pads.

We are waiting, waiting for the Little Nipper. Margo's belly is huge, jutting out in front of her at a right angle. Now it sails before her, its fleshy prow impossible to minimize. Even the largest maternity top makes it look as if she is wearing a tablecloth, because the the distance between the bottom of the shirt and her body is so great. Yesterday she ran away from the neighbor across the street whose garage we rent, because he is an old man, and Margo doesn't feel like answering questions about being pregnant. Last night I laid a fork on her belly at the top of it, where it plateaus, and she asked me tartly whether I was trying to be funny.

Sometimes she wants soft serve at 9pm. Sometimes I come home and she is in tears. This afternoon I found her happily working on her book, lying on the couch, her shirt pulled up to expose a vast, undulating dome. Her torso is a crystal ball inverted, its clouds and shadows pushing from within. We sit and gaze at it, resting our hands on its sides, asking the baby in there our ouija questions.

When I am at work she text messages me her ideas about labor and delivery. Today she asked whether I thought "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" would be a good distraction movie. I thought it was an inspired choice. In the movie the childless academic couple who terrorize new faculty after a late-night party by drinking themselves to viciousness and playing Hump the Host refer to their imaginary son as the Little Nipper. I sometimes think we decided to have a baby so as not to become this older academic couple, drinking too much, nagging each other, creating bitterly destructive parodies of heteronormativity in order to re-animate the dying embers of our relationship. Other times I think we just wanted something more simple and joyous than work in our lives, because children make you remember feeling hopeful.

For now, we wait. The air is cool as the early evening comes in. I type at the keyboard, wondering when the baby will come, and how it will change our lives. I think about the drowsiness of middle age, and the peace we know now, and the clamor and noise and activity that our lives will take on soon. The cats crouch at my elbows, eager to be fed. Margo dozes on the couch, her head drooping on the pillow, dreaming of grace.

Friends don't let friends seek this

2008-06-26T14:38:00.000-07:00

Here's another one for the archive that made us laugh today:

The parties decided that Karen would bear the child, because Carol suffers from hypertension. Karen obtained sperm from a friend, which Carol inseminated into Karen. Despite four cycles of insemination, Karen did not become pregnant. And, because Carol did not like the idea of involving a third person in the conception of the parties' child, they did not again seek sperm from a friend.

legal style

2008-06-24T14:38:00.000-07:00

I work all day in a public interest law office specializing in LGBT issues. Right now we are compiling a 50-state database of custody cases relevant to LGBT parenting and adoption issues. Reading these, it becomes immediately apparent how awkward is the juxtaposition of legal comportment, reserve, and dignity with sex and the language of sexuality. The following are my favorites of today, for your enjoyment. They are quoted verbatim from actual cases:

Silas and Beale had known each other for about one year and they had engaged in sexual intercourse approximately nine months before C. was born. Theirs was a dating relationship.

Appellant and respondent are women who were partners in a personal relationship from 1993 to 1997. In 1996, they paid a friend, Marcus B., $1,000 to impregnate respondent. He did so.

With technological advances, same-sex couples as well as heterosexual couples who were previously unable to conceive children can now plan the conception of a child with increasing ease.

"The moving parties use "alternative," rather than "artificial," insemination to describe the process by which Vivian Ryan was conceived. Alternative insemination is a simple procedure using a squirting device (e.g. a syringe without a needle) to introduce semen into a woman's vaginal canal for the purpose of achieving pregnancy.... [T]he phrase is considered less offensive and more descriptive than the more common phrase "artificial insemination," which often connotes a sinister unnaturalness in religious contexts."

Plaintiff argues the circuit court erred in dismissing count I of his complaint for intentional infliction of emotional distress. He claims defendant's conduct was "extreme and outrageous," when she lied about being unable to engage in intercourse or to conceive due to her menses and agreed to prevent conception of children prior to marriage, but then intentionally engaged in oral sex so she could harvest his semen to artificially inseminate herself.

I just want to say here that I love this use of "harvest."

addendum

2008-06-20T22:27:00.001-07:00

I meant to say in that last post that part of what I am struck by every day is the beauty of routines. Routines at their best can anchor us and at their worst make us feel chained to sensation, sustenance, and brute welfare. I wonder if you have a routine you love, or hate. When i was in high school i used to ride the bus to school everyday for an hour each way. i had horses to feed, so I had to get up at 5:30 or 6 every morning to feed them, eat, dress, pack, and start walking the half mile to the bus by 6:40 or 6:45. The bus came at 7:10, so usually i ran, clarinet or saxaphone in hand, down the dirt road that smelled of winter, or spring mud, or moldy fall leaves. The sun often rose as i walked, in a rosy glow over the horse field. Every morning I ran, and cursed the dawn and the earliness an the far distance. but in my heart I loved it--loved the routine of the world I shared, and the morning.

In a recent conversation I had with an acquaintance who works in a law firm downtown, he complained to me about his routine. he told me he had done it for five years--gone down to the Loop every day, and had his Starbucks. But that's what woking in the Loop is, I thought. It's going down, and drinking a Starbucks (or Diet Coke). He confessed he felt trapped by the money he was making, but I think something else trapped him, though I wasn't sure what.

I wonder if you love the routine you have, or hate it, and whether it frees your mind, or anchors you, or binds you, or sets you free to drift in the rhythms of the world.

to work

2008-06-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

I've never worked a 9 to 5 job before. This summer, for 10 weeks, I get up early and lurch off to the train, always late, to try to make it to work before 930. It takes me 18 minutes to walk to the train--an unusually long walk to public transportation, but then that's where I happen to live right now. I don't mind the walk--I could take a bus to the train but I enjoy the mornings in this weather--but I'm usually running late, and I usually end up running, sort of, in my sandals and office casual clothes. Running and puffing gets me there in closer to 15 minutes. I don't run, really--more like a run-walk shuffle glide. Even that sounds more graceful than it is. I arrive at the train stop with a glistening forehead. I swipe my card and take the stairs in twos, trying to shave just one more minute.

I stand on the platform and the wind cools my skin. The morning sun is warm, but not yet hot. Other passengers space themselves on the platform. The boards under our feet rumble as the train approaches us.

I look at my phone when the train comes to estimate when I'll get downtown. The doors open and I push into a free seat, sitting closest to the window. The seats are contoured, with a raised lip that divides them. I am a wide person with big shoulders that feel smashed against the cool metal of the train wall. Still, the cool metal feels nice against my shirt. I take out whichever book I'm into this week and read.

Sometimes someone will come through the car, asking for money. A couple of days a go a wild-eyed woman screaming expletives in a rapid narrative stream came through the car yelling at people to give her money. Everyone who could looked down to stay out of her way. She ranted and raged, then eventually moved on. Today a well-spoken man came through politely inquiring whether anyone had spare change. Some people gave him money, which I haven't seen happen often. Apparently if you ask nicely, people are more receptive.

The train clatters along the elevated tracks, then dives underground into dark, urine-smelling tunnels as it nears the center of the city. I am no longer confused when I get off at my stop; now i know which way to turn and which escalator to take to my street. The first escalator leads to a station with ticket machines and gates. There is a Dunkin' Doughnuts stand there, and every morning I think about going to it. But I go on to the second escalator, which rises up from the darkness towards a glass canopy on the street, and the morning breaks open upon my head as I emerge in the center of town. I think about Eliot's Unreal City, but this doesn't feel menacing, or sad, to me. Just busy, and scheduled.

There is a newspaper man on the corner named John I say hello to every morning. He always asks me how I am. John has an ex-wife and three children living in another state, and he says he'll go be with them some day if he can get his ex-wife to take him back.

The morning doorman in my building is quirky. I try to catch his eye and greet him, but sometimes he just pointedly stares, or looks away, or pretends to be doing something else. Sometimes he responds to my good morning with a good morning of his own. You never can tell what he will do, and I steel myself when i enter the building. I'm always relieved if he is busy. The other interns at my job say he treats them the same way.

My elevator goes to the tenth floor. I step off down a hall of windowless doors, like the corridor in the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. Our offices are at the end of the hall. I go in, sit down at my desk, which faces a wall in the middle of the room, and say hello to the person who sits next to me. He and I are the only people in the entire office without a cubicle or a semblance of privacy, but we don't mind. I check my email, log onto Westlaw, and spend the next 7 1/2 hours looking up cases, reading them, and entering them into a database or annotating them for a project. It is extremely boring work, but at least it's gay. If I was looking up, say, contracts or something, I can't imagine how i would survive.

Some days we have meetings. One morning a week I work at the Help Desk, taking calls from people with problems looking for information.

We are expected to stay till 5 every day, including Fridays. Technically we have an hour for lunch, but only the paid staff take an hour. We generally bring something back and eat at our desks, even though we aren't getting paid. It's not as if it is relaxing to sit in a crowded Subway or Chipolte alone anyway.

At 4:55 I run to the bathroom, bring the key back, pack up my stuff, and get on the elevator. i get on the train before it gets crowded, so I usually have a seat, but I always have to make room for someone, and end up smashed against the wall for the 35-minute ride back.

Sometimes I go to the gym when i get back, but that means not getting home until 730 or 830. I can run on the beach a little in the evening while it is still cool outside. It feels nice to see the sun, even for the last minutes of the day.

At work we have interesting discussions about advancing the cause of gay marriage, or gay custody, or employment anti-discrimination, and all of that is really important and really interesting. Mostly, though, it's a routine. When I get on the train, I open my book for 30 minutes of narrative, and for a while I am not on the train at all, but somewhere else, in a realm of dreams, and stories, and plots that turn on hidden motivations, and characters with unknown powers that will eventually emerge. When the train gets near my stop I blink, sometimes dazed, and can't remember where I am, just for a minute, before the afternoon falls gently on my head again, and I feel the time of day and the time of my life, and the sensation of something carrying me in its arms to a place I don't yet know.

a shared purpose

2008-05-06T22:51:00.000-07:00

Finals can be the best time of the year. Winter finals have always been gratifying, giving the sense of having earned the holidays. Spring finals are more poignant. You say goodbye to a year, and often to a span of years spent somewhere that changed you. There is the ceremony of leaving, and the centuries-old regalia, a graceful nod to the ideals of academic community. It was the magic of finals and the end of the academic year that made me want to be an academic in the first place--the sense of shared purpose, the seriousness of the endeavor, the feeling late past midnight of looking out my window over a campus with so many lights burning still. The shedding of anti-intellectualism for a week of frenzied thought. The groan of real striving out there in the darkness.

The distance between my dreams and fantasies of academic life and its realities became fittingly embodied in the distance between my undergraduate experience of the hushed labor of finals at an elite college and the realities of teaching overburdened students at urban commuter schools. I only just now realized that all my jobs were at urban commuter schools, with students working full-time jobs, raising families, and struggling to pay tuition. I always assigned final papers, which usually weren't very good. Penultimate papers were usually the best work in all my classes, not the last-minute, one-draft wonders shoved under my office door at 4:49 the afternoon they were due. Poor students! They didn't have the economic luxury of finals week. Like many economic luxuries--and I know this identifies me as a Modernist or an Aesthete or probably, an Obamanian Elitist--this one is worth having and savoring, and I give thanks that I get to be reminded of this forgotten pleasure of youth (at great cost to my student loan bill). People who leave school and never come back forget this feeling, though there is something in their voices that remembers when they search for words to describe the satisfaction of their experience there. They think they are remembering being young, but I think what they are remembering is becoming.

Law school is hard. Law school at 45 is harder. I can't look forward to a summer of free time for reading and research after finals, though I will have an interesting job working in LGBT public interest law. I don't know whether to be happy the semester is ending or sad that my time for thinking and writing is flying by. But I do cherish this chance to savor the monastic pleasure of finals, the intense satisfaction of an aching back spent in a chair for twelve hours straight, the last sentence of a paper or final exam that you feel you've done a good job writing.

I write this on the night before the night before my last exam. Tomorrow night will be too taken up with last-minute rehearsing and the honest attempt to sleep. Then an 8:30 a.m. income tax final, then back here to pack for the drive home. Then up late finishing 2/3 left on another take-home due at 4:30 on friday, then the weekend spent on a paper due Monday. Both these last can be emailed. And so I say goodbye to my second year of law school.

It was much better than I thought it would be. Working on a journal was a social experience as well as good training in research and citation. Most of the students around me forget that I am old enough to be their mother. Maybe because I don't look anything like their mothers? I feel as if I know a lot of people. I have more than 90 Facebook friends. I am on Facebook, for crying out loud.

I learned how to write a law note. I took some unusual classes. I got my first piece of legal writing accepted to a journal. I won a 2K prize for the best paper on an LGBT topic. 2K--enough to pay for the second-parent adoption of my soon-to-be-daughter. I got my name announced twice in the law bulletin last week, once for the writing prize and once for a public interest summer scholarship I won.

We got pregnant.

It would be easy to discount my victories. After all, isn't it shooting goldfish in a bowl for a published academic to compete for prizes with grad students? Many of my friends have tenure, or are getting it. Others have more adult milestones, like kids in college, and second homes, and third books. I don't even have a first home. But I think it is good for the soul to accept one's victories as genuine, and take them as seriously as, say, the first semester law school grades that put me at the bottom of the class. Because it's the endeavor, the shared sense of purpose, the striving, the hard work where you know you actually brought creativity and all-night doggedness together and did what you had to do, that is so satisfying. You did something you had to do, but you made it your thing. And you tried to do work that was important, that would have some usefulness in the world.

So goodbye, 2L year. The stars of 1L have faded. The gunners, the CALI winners (top of the class in each course), the top GPAers with lucrative Summer Associateships and several years of corporate slavery mapped out before them, all have dropped away, and you are left in your room, in the dimness, with madrigals playing on your computer and work left to do, and the cold smell of a spring night coming in the window, in the glorious last days of finals week. And you, you are old, but you don't feel it now, because the summer stretches out before you, and your new life stretches out before you, scary, unknown, but becoming clearer to you with each sentence you write, and the hum of the world is out there, and you are part of it, typing, typing away towards the dawn you know now is certain to come. Because it is.

It's a

2008-03-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

beautiful, beautiful girl. See margo, darling for details.

after the snow

2008-02-26T11:21:00.000-08:00

sun, appreciation, and the hope that this time, the diva of winter has taken her last curtain call.

stop and smell the eclipse

2008-02-24T11:59:00.000-08:00

Here's what the eclipse last week looked like from the middle of the country. I take a night class on Wednesdays and a friend asked me if I wanted to go to a nearby small college where they had telescopes set up in the middle of a field. I pretended to consider it, then turned him down. There was no way. Our class ended at 8pm. The best viewing was supposed to happen between 9 and 10. I had three whole classes to read for the next day, plus my law note draft was due the day after, plus the public interest group was having a bake sale the next day and had twice requested my banana bread. There was no way I was going to get everything done even if I dashed to the store and immediately home. Sorry.

I wasn't happy about this, but it was the way it would have to be. I love all things astronomical. I have a Night Sky widget on my desktop so I can see what the current constellations are facing any direction. When I was younger I was obsessed with the rings of Saturn and doodled them constantly.

We left class at 8pm and I walked out to my car. It was very cold. The kind of cold where you immediately feel how deeply cold the pavement is through the soles of your shoes. I looked up. The sky was glittery and clear. The eclipse was just taking the first little bite out of the moon.

My heart failed a little when I saw that. How could I not go watch it? I consoled myself with the thought that I could slip out my door while the bread was baking and check up on the progress of it as it slowly moved across the moon.

Driving to the grocery store I had a thought. What if we had the time wrong, and the best time to view it was not at 9, but now? What if the time had been Eastern time, not Central time? I called my friend and left a message relaying my theory. If he called me back, maybe I would meet him out there. If not, oh well.

Half-way through the supermarket he called me. He said the time was correctly adjusted for Central viewing, but why didn't I just swing by his house and pick him up?

Reader, I did. We drove in the dark out to the little college, on twisty back roads that filled me with panic. What if we couldn't find it, and missed the eclipse, and I STILL didn't get home till 10pm?

We found the signs for the college, drove along even more twisty dark roads, stopped and asked several students where the astronomy building was, parked, and trotted through the darkness towards a small huddle of people gathered around variously-shaped telescopes.

The scene had the air of an ancient ritual. There weren't very many people. A few older couples, some children, some hippie-looking students, an astronomy geek in a jester's hat. Four or five squat cylinders situated in a semicircle. People moving quietly from one eyepiece to the next, murmuring softly. Clouds of breath in the frosty air.

Overhead the moon turned dark red as a shadow crept across its pockmarked face.

I tried to take a picture with my phone, but the moon just looked like a faraway light. Then I held it up to an eyepiece on the off chance I could somehow take advantage of the magnification. I watched the dark screen of my phone as I turned, turned, and then suddenly, a flicker. I snapped it. And there it was--my first good picture of an astronomical event. I didn't care if I sat there all night. I felt giddy. I text messaged GF first, then the rest of my friends so far away from that field at that moment. "Look outside!" I told them. Then I sent my picture.

In another telescope you could see Saturn. Not the giant planet of NASA photos, but the tiniest glimmering jewel in the middle of the scope. White-hot and silvery, with the tiniest, most perfect rings.

My friends started texting me back. "Cool Picture!" "Awesome!" "We're watching it right now!"

I stood under the moon, smiling a huge smile. Overhead, the belly of the moon grew dark, but my soul was light. I felt all the people I loved, no matter how far away they were, calmly circling around me, like lazy swimmers.

Rodney wins the day

2008-02-18T23:24:00.000-08:00

There are so many things I have wanted to tell you about. I wanted to tell you about the discussion class where I try not to ease my eyes out of their sockets and slip them back in again for mere entertainment (since there is no vodka to be had), and I feel as if I am being waterboarded by bad, bad teaching. The kind where the teacher says he wants to sit there until people start talking, and then when they do, he dismisses those people who haven't magically come up with what he wanted them to say instead, and the whole thing becomes either a macho demonstration by the boy students who come up with the "right answer" or a feminine coy subservience butt-licking act by women who come up with the "right" answer, or both. That kind.

I wanted to tell you about the amazing experience I am having in a critical race feminism class, taught by the sweetest, kindest, youngest woman who refuses to be cynical about the classroom, or race, or feminism, or even the law, and who is entirely comfortable insisting that everyone sitting around the circle--yes, the circle--define what feminism means to them. And talk about what it means to be in law school, and choose aspects of your identity while discarding others.

I want to tell you what it is like to listen to the heart of a growing baby every day when I am home, and GF calls me into the hallway, which for some reason is where she likes to stand when she tries to find the heartbeat, and she puts the headphones on my head to listen to the fetal monitor she bought, as she slides it around her growing belly until we find the elusive whoosh-whoosh! of a tiny heart beating under water.

But somehow what I end up finally writing about here is the strange, painful, joyous accretion of identity that is academic identity, the kind you try to leave behind like the snake in the garden, or the burning sword, but that comes back to find you and rain bread on your head when you least expect it. The kind that hurts to think about, but won't let you go, like a bad girlfriend sending you money. Well, enough with the analogies.

So tonight there were elections on the law journal. At first I didn't want to run for anything, since I'm too busy even to blog now, with who knows what to expect once a baby comes this summer (GF's sister has advised us to prepare for the birth by setting the alarm to ring every two hours so we can wake up and fight on a regular basis). I looked at all the positions, considered running for nothing in order to do as little work as possible next year, and then one caught my eye.

Notes Editor. This is where you grade all the competition entries for people trying to write on the journals during the aptly-named write-on period, and then you shepherd a group of students through the note-writing process during their 2L year (currently I am doing a fantastic job NOT writing my note, which is due this week). It means big batches of papers that must be sorted through and evaluated. It means separating the good writing from the bad. Later, it means helping students find topics, organize information, and build arguments into publishable law notes that make a contribution to contemporary legal thinking.

In short, is a lot like being a teacher. I decided to run for this position. Something about it felt familiar, like the smoky smell in a wool blanket that reminds you of wood fires in fireplaces from longago winters. That kind of smell draws you in because you are looking for it before you find it. There were only three of us signed up for three positions, and I thought that was a sweet and kind of perfectly amateurish scenario where everyone who participated got a ribbon. I even briefly thought about crossing my name off if other people wanted to sign up.

At some point it became clear that everyone running had to give a speech and try to convince the other journal members to vote for them, like a high school election. At some point, that is to say, it became competitive. Then tonight, as the first candidates began presenting, left the room, and the Editorial Board began telling everyone how each candidate behaved in cite check, or how each was doing on their note, or if each was the kind of personality that was best suited for the job, I began to panic. I thought about erasing my name from the board. Really, I had no idea how I did in cite check. I knew I lost track of some rules sometimes, like the footnote forms that always required parenthetical explanation, or the correct use of supra., or why our Board didn't like "Id"ing statutes, even though the Bluebook said it was ok (Id.is the legal abbreviation form for "same source as the last quote" or what used to be ibid., I guess). I thought, as I often do, about the ridiculous image of Rodney Dangerfield in the ads for the "Back to School" movies, clad in doctoral robes made ridiculous by the contrast between the gravity of what they signify and the silly chutzpah of his expression as he waves his diploma in the air. Does he know he is ridiculous? I wonder. I think he does. I think his buffoonery is the bravest, most dignified thing he can do in the face of it all--the ageism, the classism, the professionalism that justifies all sorts of predation.

I left my name up on the blackboard and turned over and over in my mind the word "qualifications." I am qualified to be a Note Editor even if I suck at cite check because I like to proofread, I began. I like student papers. I am a kind reader, a helpful reader. I am not a dick. I can deal with large volumes of papers and I can pick out the good idea and help people with their writing.

My old identity crept up on me. I DO like grading papers, I thought, with a pang. I can pretend I don't care anymore but I do. I love making writing better. My own. Other people's. Student writing. Peer review.

As I thought about it it all came back in a rush. The peer-reviewed manuscript, thrown out into the tumultuous publishing sea to wash up on my desk. The page proofs of an article you think you know by heart because it is yours, yet which look so much smarter, so much more careful and polished, when you proudly survey them for the last time. The student writer who suddenly, inexplicably, GETS transitions, or thesis statements, or--Heaven bless us--genuine supporting arguments. All that writing, and the pleasure of it, and the smell of fresh paper and the pride of something carefully crafted or well-taught.

I missed it. And it would never come back to me again, but I might, for a brief time, wallow a bit in the pleasure of writing, and thinking, and striving for something careful, and well-made. So I left my name up.

They elected me, of course. They asked me about my qualifications, and I told them, and they asked with some incredulity why I was running for something I was so obviously overqualified for. I warned them of the danger of thinking they were qualified, let alone overqualified, for anything in the daily humiliation that is law school, and mentioned my interest in damage control vis-a-vis that daily humiliation, and I thought they would die laughing. I had 'em in the palm of my hand. They asked a few more questions about getting along with people, and being helpful, and strategies for helping students come up with topics for law notes, and then it was over, and I left the stage. Apparently while I was out of the room one of my old students, who is a year ahead of me in law school, said fond things about my teaching. For a minute, it was like I WAS a teacher again. I had taught them something about kindness to other writers in my description of how to help people find topics. We had begun an interesting discussion about the relationship between bad writing and good ideas, and whether you can have both those things, or their opposite, in a paper. About the intelligence of grammar and style. About, I think, humility. And all the things life throws a person sometimes. When I came back all the people in the row behind me wanted to ask me questions. Everyone I looked at was smiling. I felt silly, giddy, relieved. Known. Finally, they knew who I was. Or so it seemed to me for a few minutes at the end of the evening.

And so I am drawn once more to grading papers, and to teaching, and to the ways helping people with their writing helps you think about your own. I look forward to stacks of papers coming in, and the deadlines of publication, and the communal project of bringing ideas out of the muck into the light of day, and to the craft of making. Tonight I am struck more than ever by the realization that no exile is necessarily forever, and that the very angel that drives you away from your dearest grove has the unnerving habit of coming back for you just when you have gotten used to your neighborhood, to remind you that what you care most deeply about is not a job, or a place, or a stage in your life, but a workshop in your heart, an experiment in being with other people and their ideas that is always--and this is startling to you--ready to be built anywhere again, at any time, at any season of your life.

new year's wish

2007-12-31T11:42:00.000-08:00

The old year ends, and tonight we try to remember what we have liked about this year. I celebrate that I am now half way through law school. I am happy that the embryo we are hatching is now officially a fetus. New Hampshire, a bastion of right-wing Republicans when I was growing up there, adopted same-sex civil unions. New Jersey rolled back the death penalty. MLA came to town, and while I feared it would bum me out, the reality of it was much more festive, with houseguests who ventured downtown in the morning and came back in the evening overstimulated and full of gossip. GF and I, aided in no small part by the toll the writer's strike took on our television time, began to read novels at night, staying up till all hours sometimes just to follow a thrilling plot.

Lots of other things happened this year, but pleasure reading is one of the things that is making us really, really happy right now. Pleasure reading makes me hyper-aware that I am swimming in narrative all the time. I have thought more than once that much of the psychic well-being I have felt since starting law school--despite its horrors, including the recognition that my creative, daydreamy personality is ill-suited to the sternly disciplined pursuit of law--has everything to do with being caught up in a narrative of becoming. This, I think, is why so many of us stay in school so long, and even go back. This, too, is why teaching for years and years can grind us down, as it becomes clear we are no longer part of that river of transformation coursing around us. In my last job, I felt like a boat that had run aground. In law school, I am surrounded by people--mostly young people--in the midst of fashioning their own stories. Everything is in front of them. They stand, as their hokey graduation speeches remind them, at the beginning of their journey. Even older students like me feel the infectious optimism of this structure. Though we may have already started their lives, or had whole other lives before this moment, we feel a breathless hopefulness at the destruction of the old predictable routine and the possibility that new and different paths might deposit us on strange doorsteps.

This morning the paper argued that John and Elizabeth Edwards took up politics when their son died in a car crash because they needed to focus on something greater than themselves, and they wanted a way of affecting more than a few lives at a time. This is probably true, but I think taking up politics was also the beginning of a new story for them, and they desperately needed to have new stories at that moment in their lives. It was telling, too, that at the same time they decided to start a completely new professional story, they also decided to have more children, not to mention renewing their vows. They wanted to get back in the boat and sail off once more with a whole saga in front of them, like Tennyson's Ulysses. And in spite of the cynicism around them (and inside them as well), and even despite a terrible diagnosis of cancer, they are caught up in optimism.

I was miserable in graduate school when I was on the job market, and the biggest reason was that because it was so hard to get an academic job, year after year went by without anything happening. Four years, actually. The story of me was stalled. My life felt like it had no trajectory. I just kept writing my dissertation and waiting, waiting for another year and another job list, living in a place where I knew I couldn't put down roots. I remember one winter night, my then girlfriend and I were driving to Macy's to buy silverware because we were so damned bored we couldn't think of anything else to do, and we found an injured cat sitting on the side of the road. That cat ended up infesting two separate houses with the worst fleas you ever saw, but at the time, the whole thing, including the vet bills, seemed wonderful, because something had actually happened.

When I found out this year that GF really wanted to go through with getting pregnant I began to sense what it would be like to have a new story. Courtship and marriage and pregnancy are freighted elements of narrative generation, of course, because they function as intelligible markers of the ways people make new stories in their lives (even if it's the same old story). The point is, it feels new to you, when it's your life, because it hasn't happened to you before. I think this is one of the reasons parents want their grown children to reproduce. Feminists used to point out the irony of marriage as the beginning of the story for women, when for so many it felt like the end; ditto for children. I suppose domestic privacy helped cause this, as adventures in the home replaced adventures in the world for women stuck raising the kids. Maybe the world has changed, but that silence seems to be broken. While people have always talked about marriage and children, they seem to be doing a more interesting and critical job of it these days, so it doesn't feel like the end of the story, but the beginning of a whole new bunch of stories. It could be that they feel more comfortable talking about conception, childbirth, and the work of maintaining intimate relationships because this is part of a conservative moment, and this is what we are all supposed to talk about instead of politics. Maybe I am not only part of a conservative moment, but conservative in many ways. But it feels important, somehow, not because it has replaced politics but because it is going to go on anyway somewhere and we might as well think hard about it and figure out whether it is part of our lives. Non-normative people's lives as well as more normative lives. If a non-normative person makes a life that has elements that are similar to normative people's lives, is that normative? Can it ever be?

Yesterday I finished reading Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, which I had tried to read once a long time ago then put down. This time I found myself relishing not only her various tributes to Bleak House, Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, and Tom Jones, but delighting in the new story she makes those stories tell: namely, the story of sexual passion and emotional loyalty between women that may be a possibility in those other books but never gets realized. She takes the pieces of those stories and puts them together in a way that is anything but conventional. I felt pleasure not only in reading that particular story, and the way she rewrites other stories I love, but in my own sense I have when reading her that I am swimming in her swimming. I feel like she is doing something marvelous for lesbians with that book. As she rewrites these stories, she rewrites our rewriting of all the stories around us into our narratives, with plots often fashioned by others, perhaps, and borrowed by us as our own. Feeling alive depends on this sense of fashioning, and she captures it beautifully, but she also shows the tension of belonging and apartness that is part of so many queer novels.

So I look into the new year wondering how my life will be changed by this time next year. I wonder if I will have a child, a job, a sense of the future. All I know is that everything is up in the air, and that is the best thing. Hooray for plots and counterplots, twists and allusions, citations and doublings and triplings of all kinds! If we are lucky, all of our lives will feel like stories we are taking in new directions, and the new year will be filled with the sense that anything at all that can happen, might.

7 random things tag

2007-12-04T10:15:00.000-08:00

Margo tagged me for this, an even though I should be studying for my Evidence final tomorrow, I'll do it. I'll do it BECAUSE I should be studying for my evidence final tomorrow. Apologies if I have told you some or all of these things before.

Here are 7 random things about me:

1. I have really big feet. They are long and thin and flat, fanning out from my narrow heels and small, weak ankles. I am not a tall person--only 5'6"--but I have size 10-10 1/2 feet. Size 10 men's, that is. That's, like, a 12 in women's shoes, which by the time they get to that size are no longer for women-born women. I once contributed an article having to do with sexuality to a book on shoes, and pointed out in my author bio that I had to buy pumps at stores frequented by transvestites, models, or both. The editor of the collection thought this was hilarious--perhaps because my rather stocky ("husky," as my mom used to tactfully put it) embodiment would never conjure either of these two figures to mind.

2. I have almost no food dislikes. I'll happily consume almost anything. This includes liver, hot peppers, wasabi, anchovies, sashimi, ceviche, snails, mussels, herring. Anything. I like my red meat and fish raw or nearly raw. I adore vegetables and salads--huge salads. The one exception is crackers in milk. When we were small and my mother was working nights as a nurse, my stepfather sometimes put saltines in milk and gave it to us. Apparently he was fed this as a child and thought we would like it, poor man. However, I used to view this "meal" as yet another sign of his sadistic nature, and to this day the thought of faintly salty crackers dissolving in a bowl of cold milk fills me with impotent rage.

3. TV drives me crazy, but this has less to do I think with a critique of its intellectual content than it does with the autonomy issues that arise in the context of family viewing. GF loves TV. I prefer movies. I often watch TV with her, though, and like it. She often accedes to our movie dates with friends. Still, we have an uneasy truce.

TV today is good--brilliant, even. There are shows--lots of shows--I watch regularly. Heroes, Battlestar, Kid Nation, Project Runway--the good and the bad together. But when that thing goes on in your house, you are supposed to drop what you are doing in your life until the commercial break, when you are allowed to talk, get up, get food or drinks, pee. If you leave the scene during the show, the people watching it--and we often have friends come over to watch TV-- feel as if you are not being properly communal. I hate that.

I used to have to watch TV with my mother, and that's probably where some of my resentment comes in. If she was watching "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" or "China Beach" alone, look out--she'd lasso you to come sit with her, at least until the next commercial break. She just wanted company, but as a teenager, I wanted to do my own thing. Of course you don't turn down a request like that, but I remember feeling sullen. Of course, now I'd give anything just to sit beside her for an hour, watching M.A.S.H.. I wonder how she would feel about the sluttiness of Grey's Anatomy.

4. I'm a completely unfashionable person with a keen appreciation for fashion and hair--especially hair. A college girlfriend taught me how to cut hair, and usually I follow hair trends with keen interest, even briefly considering beauty school after I didn't get tenure. Flat feet, weak ankles, and a fondness for cargo pants made me rethink standing on my feet all day trying to look hip while touching the heads of strangers, but I reserve the right to drop my ridiculous intellectual pretenses at any time and just "do" hair.

5. I can teach animals how to do things. I grew up as a rural Four-H kid with horses, and I have owned several dogs, so training animals is second nature. At a dinner party not long ago I taught a friend's dog to "shake" for table scraps, much to their pride and consternation. Apparently he is still hard at it.

6. I am freakishly strong and my sister is too. An ex once characterized us as The Strongest Women Alive. We are both bruisers, like the big clumsy sisters in the Mary Poppins books. I can lift enough weight in a gym to make men stare, and I have seen my sister carry her gigantic six-year-old up and down New Hampshire's White Mountains in a backpack while hardly breaking a sweat.

7. I can draw. When I was a kid I used to draw self-portraits, and if I can get someone to sit for me I can usually draw them pretty well. I seldom take the time for this any more, which is too bad, since it is deeply pleasurable. I painted a nude of GF in oils which I hung in the livingroom, prompting her to ask why when I got inspired did her ass end up on the wall. This is a great question but the painting is still hanging in there. I look at it sometimes when we are watching TV.

And now, back to Evidence.

Which leads me to a final random fact, this one about Evidence, for those of you not in the law loop. Remember all those TV shows with courtroom scenes where lawyers would jump up and say, "Objection! Hearsay!" I used to think that they meant, "Oh, someone is just saying that! They can't prove it!" Which makes me wonder about all the "law" things we see on TV and in the movies that are never defined for us. I think there are a lot of them, and I think it's a little scary that we THINK we know what they are about, but don't. Which is to say, I'm really glad I'm going to law school, even though it it often hellish, because now I get to find out what the heck is really going on. I feel this a lot when I read the newspaper and I understand the point of a story about the death penalty, say, or felony murder.

Random Evidence Fact: Hearsay is an out of court statement offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted. We don't like hearsay because we can't evaluate the truth or falseness of a statement made out of court. We want the person who made it to say it in court, and be cross-examined about it. Which is not to say we don't let in hearsay--in fact there are a lot of hearsay exceptions that are allowed in, such as emotional responses("Oh my God! He drove right into that tree!"). But for the most part we are suspicious of it.

File that away for your next episode of Boston Legal.

what rough beast[s]

2007-11-28T16:59:00.000-08:00

I've wanted to write, but there was so much news I couldn't. When news is about someone else's body, they have the right to control when it comes out. However, sInce the body belongs to GF but she is finally blogging about it, I'm giving myself the green light.

The first time something sparked, it was a magical week. An old friend came to town and dragged GF and I out to a party in GF's old neighborhood. Inside the house were various couples; one older, childless couple really into wines; one couple with a young child; the guy whose house it was, who had two mischievous girls and a pretty wife who looked a little like Tori Amos; and us. I liked this last family a lot--he was a mechanic who had bought a house cheaply and slowly refinished his way to the top floor, and she had a mellow, earth-mother way of letting children crawl up and down her body while she sat or stood, calmly talking. We sat around all night, sprawled on the floor in the living room, drinking wine and eating pizza. Sometimes we talked about children; Tori Amos wanted more, she said, because once you start having them you just want more. GF and I wanted to get to the first part of that equation of desire: we were due to get inseminated for the first time the next morning. The old friend sat in a chair all night, drinking wine and smiling benignly down at us all. The full fat harvest moon floated low in the sky, the dusky orange of sweet potatoes and cream.

Two weeks later we were pregnant. Day after day GF ran to the bathroom to pee on the sticks of various pregnancy tests. She carefully lay them on the window sill, one under the other in rows, each marked with the number of days past ovulation. "11 dpo" showed nearly white, with the strong test line and just the faintest ghostly shadow next to it, flickering in and out of focus like a wish. "Is it positive?" I remember asking, sure I was imagining the second line, or tilting the stick under the light wrong to show the x-rays of its chemical composition and give myself the illusion of a companion line.

"There's no such thing as a false positive," she told me. "If it's negative, it's really solid white." Then she took a stick out to show me the smooth plastic of an all-white untested stick. It was true, then. We really were pregnant.

Another stick followed, and then another. Each day the line grew darker, moving towards us in the white mist. Pink lines. We stared at them, unbelieving. Then, believing. But as suddenly as something sparked, it flickered out, and by the end of the week, the HCG numbers were falling. GF was devastated. It had seemed too easy, then great good fortune, then--though we had only just started--tragic.

When we saw some of the people from that night again a few weeks later, at a pumpkin-carving party, we found out that it had been magical, indeed. Tori Amos was pregnant, her wish for a third child answered in the shadows of that harvest moon. GF counted the weeks she would have been pregnant and sighed. I carved a pumpkin for her at the party from a picture we found on the internet of Grendel shambling out of the slimy depths. GF picked it because she said it reminded her of her theory of writing, where you work and feel anguish and then, just at the brink of despair, you begin to see the first outlines of the beast emerging from the muck. She handed it to me, her eyes shining, and told me she had walked by this house, with its carved pumpkins all in a row, when she used to live in this neighborhood, and had wanted so badly to get invited to this party some day. I gazed at the picture with some trepidation. "It looks complicated," I said. She said, "You can do anything."

So I carved it, half-closing my eyes so I could imagine it on the curved surface of the pumpkin. We won two bottles of wine, so we took them home and left the pumpkin, gleaming in the darkness, on the porch of the lady who had thrown the party. We bought a different bottle of wine called Sinister Hand with a scary picture of a severed arm on it and next day we split it between us, for luck.

Medicine overmanaged our second try; Clomid and hormone shots and multiple eggs yielded nothing. GF ovulated on the weekend, so the second insemination was on a Saturday. The weekend nurse wouldn't look at me or talk to me even when I tried to address her, clearly freaked out by lesbians, or me. She was in such a hurry, in fact, that GF didn't even know when the catheter went in, which seemed more than a little disturbing. The up side, however, is that in her hurry to perform her drive-by insemination, nurse Rachit left behind the vial from the sperm sample, with the birthday of our donor typed on it: 1/1/1965. We had known his age before, guessing that he might be gay, donating into his forties. We chose him for this, and for his piano skills, and because he liked purple and could do long division at five. The Cinderella slipper she dropped in her homophobic haste gave us the added charming detail that he was born on the New Year, with all its promise of hope, smack in the middle of a decade where all good things seemed possible.

We smuggled the vial home, but there were no plastic sticks on the sill that month. GF shrugged, a little worried but not freaked out.

This month fell on the week. GF timed her own surge and went in to inseminate by herself, since I was in school. That night I drove home and we went in together the next morning. Two very nice women did the procedure, chatting and laughing with us. Afterwards one brought in pictures of her son. "This one's going to work," she told us. "I'm crossing my fingers for you both." Back in the house GF asked for a blessing. "A what?" I said. "Say something," she told me.

I put my hands on her abdomen and closed my eyes. I thought about my friend who can't father children because he is HIV-positive, but who was so excited when we told him we were trying that he wanted to buy sperm. I thought about my other friend who wanted children but never had the time in her life and her job for it. I thought about my friend who discovered total joy when her sister had a baby. I thought about my sister, who finally had the baby she always wanted at 39. I thought about GF, wanting children all her life but never having it be the right time, the right job, the right person. I thought about me, so sure I would have children when the time was right, watching that certainty pass away when I lost my job. And now, in a last wild chance, with no money and no certainty, we fling ourselves towards something we can't see, knowing that we have to make it real. GF is going to give herself over, and put her body through all this nonsense, and suffer pills and suppositories and morning sickness and childbirth. I'm going to run next to her the whole way. "Come to us," I told something hovering nearby. "We are waiting for you. There's a circle of people here, and they're all waiting, and they didn't know they were waiting until they thought of you." GF said she felt a jolt in her heart.

So now the windowsill is littered with white plastic sticks. "11dpo"; "12dpo"; "13dpo"; "14dpo" and so on. She only did one a day but the pile on the windowsill made me have a fantasy of pushing in the bathroom door only to find it unyielding, with thousands of white sticks spilling through the cracks out into the hall.

GF's HCG numbers soar, double, double again. On the sill the sticks show the history of lines growing stronger by the day and more solid. We pat GF's stomach and call it Mrs. Dalloway. We thought about "the little nipper," which is what the toxic couple call their imaginary son in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," but Mrs. Dalloway seems more cheerful. When she or he is born, if they are born, we may say "For there she was," even if it is a boy, but for now we are trying to wrap our heads around his or her coming, peering into the future cautiously, but eagerly, the way a person squints at a figure they think they know as it walks towards them in bright light.

9/11 is my birthday.

2007-09-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

The fact that 9/11 is also my birthday might give you some insight into how much my post-millennial life has sucked. Not sucked as much as the post-millennial fates of people who died in the World Trade Center, or people who lost people that day--not even close. Not sucked as much as my mother's life sucked that year, diagnosed that spring with brain cancer and dead by the last dying days of the year. Not sucked like the lives of people at Enron who lost their life savings, or people whose families got torn apart by a member's deployment or injury or death in Iraq. Or poor people everywhere.

As my friend Eric likes to remind me, some people in the world are so poor they live on nothing.

But still. Just because I didn't die quickly or slowly in 2001 or have nothing to eat ever, doesn't mean I don't get to smile grimly and indulge in a tiny, luscious dollop of self-pity when someone hands me back my ID and says, inevitably, "Wow, 9/11. That really sucks."

Which is why this year is doubly amazing to me. Eliot said April was the cruellest month, but he should have said September. September is when the summer ends, when school starts, when the first intimations of how lousy the MLA job list will be start to emerge to darken our hearts. And, of course, 9/11. Recently I added the acronym "OCI" to the list of horrors. OCI means "on-campus interviews," and anyone at all familiar with law schools knows that fall OCI is when the big firms come a-courtin' students with stellar GPAs, ready to offer them a cushy 30K summer job that pays the bulk of their third year of school. Most big firms only hire new associates from that summer pool. Most law schools pretend big firms are the best, the only real payoff for all those hours of studying.

But in reality, very few students get summer jobs from OCI interviews. I went to five interviews and felt sick to my stomach every day. When I realized I didn't have the follow-through GPA to close the deal on the good impression I had made with my interviewers, I felt even worse. When I thought about those uptight people and their high-pressure lives, I felt nothing but misery, but when I heard about people with several callbacks (firm visits) and from that, several offers, I just felt like a failure.

But there are dried tubers in September, and leaves to keep us warm. The last few weeks have been a revelation to me, as I gradually came to realize that now that I didn't have to try for the money, I can do--anything. You have to try for the money, you know. It's just plain irresponsible not to. And if it comes to you, you have to take it. And if you take it and they want you, you have to go to them. And then, only then, do you begin to plan your escape.

But if this passes from you?

You are free.

Lately I've been talking to anyone I can about public interest jobs. About activist jobs. At the height of my post-OCI spiritual revelations I went to Lavender Law, the LGBTQI national law conference, and sat blissfully through an entire day of panels on the exciting issues in queer family law, from surrogacy, sperm donors, and second-parent adoption issues to marriage, estate planning, taxation, and elder law. The speakers were riveting. The issues were riveting. They were not lawyers working at big law firms. They were not academics. They were activists and legal aid workers and family law practitioners and clinicians. They did pro bono work and organizing.

They were the most interesting panelists and panels I had heard since, well, the heady days of the early 1990s, when academic conferences were full of feminist panels and anti-racist panels and marxist panels and people of color panels and queer panels, and none of it seemed tired, and all of it felt like it could change the world. I swear, this felt like that.

And it got me thinking.

Maybe it can be like that. Maybe it still can.

I still don't know what I'll do for a job next summer. I still don't know whether they'll be anything but renting an apartment for the rest of my life and wearing clothes from Old Navy. I've never owned a new car and I probably never will. But the best part is, I think I don't care anymore. There's more to life, as my mother liked to say.

So happy 45th birthday to me. All this week we waited for GF to ovulate, filled with trepidation. What if we couldn't begin IUI insemination this month? Worse--what if we COULD?

The weekend came and went, and with it, enough ovulation predictor kit sticks to build a modest cabin somewhere strange. Two women with PhDs squinted at lines on peed-on pieces of plastic until their heads swam. And then, Saturday afternoon, two solid lines appeared like a tiny pink pathway. The hormone surge! At last!

So Sunday we threw on clothes, grabbed coffee, and got inseminated (well, one of us did) at the fertility clinic, all before 11am. Afterwards we strolled the walkway outside the clinic and watched kayakers navigate the calm waters of the river that meanders through this part of the city. Canadian geese drifted by, and I felt more peaceful than I have in years. I thought about tides, and how they turn, and then I hoped for everything.

Day 3

2007-08-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

It's day 3 of interviews and people are starting to get cranky. Madam Sosostris woke up with a bad cold, and she (I) struggled gamely to emerge from the Nyquil/Alka-Seltzer plus-induced sleep coma in time for today's interview. The interviewers were young alums from my school, and were very nice. My eyes watered the whole time. I struggled to come up with something to do with my face. What do you do with your face when people in interview situations are telling you things? Narrow your eyes and nod. Oh yes. Try not to look puffy, which means pursing your lips occasionally to get some mobility in your face. Bad water retention, OUT! Good suppleness, IN. Dark circles, AWAY. Twinkly eyes of bemusement, SHINE FORTH.

All this while smiling and nodding and thinking of something clever to say. But not too clever. One interviewer began telling me about an important case his firm had argued before the Supreme Court, and I practically interrupted him to gush about how I just LOVED that the oral arguments had been posted on the firm's web site. What is WRONG with me? Too much school, that's what. Just let the guy give his spiel. You don't ALWAYS have to impress people with how thorough you've been. Insecurity much?

I feel like a blurter. In an effort to convey personality, I blurt and gush. I say stupid things like, "Oh, I've made you talk too much already! You have the whole day to get through!" Idiot. You just told them they talk too much.

Tomorrow, just one more interview! Yay!

naked nose week

2007-08-14T16:40:00.000-07:00

I'm back at school a week early for on-campus interviews. It's odd to leave a place and return three months later as if nothing ever happened, remembering the same highway exits and shortcuts, driving downstate through the farms and fields, all dark green and heavy with the late summer's harvest, to the University town with its sandwich shops and tire showrooms, to the very street and driveway, gliding into the very same parking spot I used all last year. I say hello to one of my housemates, then meet two new ones. I dash into my room as if I'd been there only an hour before--except that I'm dragging a suitcase--and peel off my clothes. With only an hour before my interviews, I quickly change into my suit and apply--horrifying as it sounds--makeup to my feverish face. Face powder to even out the blotchiness, and a little eye pencil for drama. A dark lipstick conveys professional certainty, I wager. I make sure the transcripts I've ordered have arrived, I print out my resume and references on bond paper, and I dash back to the car, clutching my mapquest directions.

I am going less than two miles to my destination, but I just want to make absolutely sure I know where I'm going.

When I get there, people I recognize are milling around in suits. I greet some of them effusively then remember when they answer me with their friendly reserve that these people are not exactly my friends. After a summer with friends, being myself, even making new friends with the incredibly sweet and warm people at my internship, I remember that down here, things are different.

Down one hallway there are interview rooms. When it is your turn to interview, you stand outside the door of the room where you are scheduled. A piece of paper on the wall bears your name, with a time next to it. People in suits stand next to the white doorways, facing each other on the narrow corridor. We might all be in an existentialist play.

Some people are frightening in their suits; others are pretty vulnerable. Some of the men have a gleam in their eyes that says, this is the moment where I become powerful. Their jaws are clenched and their eyes glitter. Other people slump over in their chairs. They lurch out of the interview rooms looking straight ahead, or down.

The women are almost all friendly. They have a gleam in their eyes, too, but they stop to compliment each other on new haircuts.

Everyone is nice while waiting in the hallway. The biggest complaint I've heard so far is having to wear the same suit day after day. I think the people complaining must have a lot of interviews.

I don't. I just have one or two every day. I think I might have gotten these because of the lottery system where you pick your favorite firms, and you have a good chance of getting your top numbers. I got my top numbers. I picked the most gay-friendly firms, the ones that support Lavender Law and the lesbian and gay bar association.

My first interview was with a tax attorney who was also a CPA and did estates and trusts. He was mild, slightly rotund, and older, with pale blue eyes. He said my resume looked pretty public interest, so what was I doing interviewing with law firms? He said it kindly, which made me laugh. I asked him about GLBT lawyers at the firm. He said he was a "G." Then we had a great conversation about how much GLBT law was growing, past the usual areas of family law and labor and employment into estate planning, elder law, and more. I really enjoyed talking with him.

My next interview was with an ex-judge who had gone to work for a firm. She was delightful. When I described myself as older she chuckled and said I was around her age, so I switched my description to "experienced" and "seasoned" and she laughed. She kept pushing me to describe how a social justice-y type like myself would find a niche at a firm, and I told her that universities are large corporate employers too, even if they don't like to see themselves that way, that professors are constantly asked to balance what intellectual and research freedom they have against the financial rewards of doing administration, and thus many professors become very much like firm employees in an effort to make better salaries. I said that professors find the intellectual work they like to do, and that social justice may be in there, but that the pull of the work is what matters most, and that the pull of intellectual engagement can be what makes people find their niche in both academic and law firm settings.

She seemed to like that answer.

I turned the question on her--I felt I had nothing to lose--and asked if she could see me fitting in and where. She was thoughtful. "Labor law," she said, "and litigation, and even in our energy practice. I could definitely see you there."

I know you can't really ask that kind of question in an academic interview, but it seemed, oddly, to work in this case. Plus, it gave me some ideas to mull over.

I didn't feel like the job might be mine. But I didn't feel like I was only a formality.

I enjoyed those interviews. It reminded me, in a good way, of MLA interviews that seemed to "go well." It reminded me, too, that often those interviews don't result in a job, but somehow the civility of the conversation takes the sting away. Not all the sting, but some.

I come home, peel off my suit, and look at my nose in the mirror. I had taken my nose ring out before driving down to school, so I wouldn't forget and accidentally leave it in for an interview. I try to put the ring back in but it won't go. Did my piercing close overnight? I panic, then remember I've had it for at least six years. Sure enough, a straight post goes right in.

I look at myself in the mirror, a forty-five year old woman sticking pins in her nose to make sure she is still who she thinks she is. Maybe I don't fit in to anyone's idea of a summer firm hire. If so, I can breathe a sigh of relief and start looking for public interest summer jobs. The pay might not be great, but the work is supposed to be fantastically rewarding, public interest lawyers are among the happiest lawyers around, and I can probably wear nose jewelry sometimes.

On the other hand, that Summer Associate money sure would help out with tuition next year. Sigh.

I think that perhaps I'll have to get one of those nose screws that slips easily out and back in. You can take it out when you go to work and put it back in when you come home.

Nose screw. What a weird term.

Still Alive

2007-08-06T12:34:00.000-07:00

First things first. Thank you for saying that you like reading my posts. It means a lot to me and keeps my spirits up, not least because you are such smart and interesting writers. I read and reread your comments. Thanks for taking the time to read and write back.

Early August is sliding into middle August. I let them know at my internship that Wednesday will be my last day. I also promised to help on cases down the road. I think I felt like I SHOULD help. I think I feel guilty for leaving a few days early. I have had a love-hate relationship with this job. I think the work is important. I hate the inefficiency, though, of the office mentality that values presence more than work quality, where showing up all day is more important than what you get done. I'm spoiled. I think I have a freelancer's mentality.

Still, it's been pretty interesting to work in an office all summer, to go out to lunch, to have co-workers and group projects.
The good news about the summer's labors is that I got invited to be on a law journal. I also have some on-campus interviews for summer jobs next year, despite being certain that no one would want to interview me. Interviews mean the chance at summer jobs. Summer jobs at law firms mean big money. Big money helps cut down on big student loans.

The bad news is this means I have to go back to school a week early. Interviews are only twenty minutes long, but they are spaced out over four days. After that, there is an orientation at the law journal on Saturday. Monday is the start of classes.

This means--alas!--that summer is over.

I have a few corrections to make to the brief we are filing at work in the Mississippi case. I finished helping out on another brief in an Indiana case. My supervisor tells me there will be lots to do down the road on all the cases we worked on this summer.

I want to end my job today, but I also don't want it to end. Ending means the end of summer, and the end of a liminal time. No job, no money, but infinite choices and possibilities.

I'm afraid of law firms. I'm afraid of tense, mean bosses. I'm afraid of firm interviews. I'm afraid of trim, hard little people in expensive suits who may or may not have wanted to talk to me at all. Interviews on campus are partially requested by employers and partially a lottery, which means they could be rolling their eyes inside as they talk to me. I'm afraid of feeling big and awkward and old. I'm afraid to buy a new suit, and afraid to rely on the old one.

Can suits be lucky or unlucky? I think of my suit as unlucky because I interviewed in it for an academic job I didn't get--a job that was my last hope at the time for keeping my career afloat. GF says the suit is lucky because that job was in a southern state, and how sucky would it have been for me to get that job? So maybe it is a lucky suit, after all.

I am tempted to be thrifty and use the suit again, and buy another shirt to wear under it. And new shoes. The suit is just large and black and sort of polyesterish in that "woman's department-store suit" kind of way. I wonder if I look dumpy in it. Old. Tacky. I think of my trim 20-something classmates in their tight little suits, marching smartly off to interviews, exuding taut control. I am all over the place. Not taut. Not controlled.

I think I want dignity.

But then, when I think about it, the most dignified gesture is often the refusal of dignity. The way a drag queen refuses to renounce the "undignified" choice of wearing women's clothing radiates dignity. So does her choice of the biggest, most garish wig and makeup.

I took a poll about how I should look for interviews. "Would you hire me with white-blonde bleached hair?" I asked people I knew in law school. Young, taut people. "It's who you are," they told me. "You CAN'T not dye your hair."

Though we all agreed that the nose ring should come out just for the interviews. Simple gestures, these weighings and decisions. Right now I'm trying not to think about what it means to take out the nose ring. I don't think about leaving it out for good, but I don't think I'll be wearing it to work.

Yesterday an old friend of GF came to town. He is tall, dark, handsome, and glamorous. He makes lots of money. He works in the beauty products industry, and had two free passes to Lollapalooza for the day. These are the passes that let you into the VIP lounges, where there is free booze, free food, and trailers with air-conditioned bathrooms that have actual toilet paper. Where a ticket for one day runs about 75 bucks, these passes would have cost us $225 each.

GF couldn't go because she has had foot surgery and couldn't walk far. I dyed my hair a bright, bleached blonde, put on my "Homophobia is Gay" t-shirt, and went with a friend to the concert.

The crowd was mostly in their twenties and thirties, mostly white, mostly middle-class, and mostly straight, probably because the music is mostly sensitive white-guy music played by sensitive white guys (although Patti Smith played what I heard was an amazing concert Saturday. Sigh.) Everyone there seemed to be in a good mood, which was remarkable considering the crowds and the humidity. I forgot how old I was, or what year it was. My friend cackled with happiness at our free food and vodka. It was a hot summer night. I watched Modest Mouse from a platform where it was easy to see the stage, then walked from one end of the fair to the other, following the crowds lining up to see Pearl Jam. There was an almost scary number of people. At one point the crowd seemed so thick I didn't see how we would get through it. A woman beside me said "We just stopped here." She gestured to her boyfriend, who smiled sheepishly. "We just couldn't go on."

We did go on, and got a fantastic vantage point on a walkway near the stage. I like Pearl Jam. I don't care what anyone thinks about that. I like Eddie Vedder's voice. I like their songs. There were tens of thousands of people pressed together in 90-degree heat, and no one seemed to mind. I like that the stars began to twinkle over the thousands of people singing "I'm Still Alive," all together, waving their arms in unison. I like that the Sunday night fireworks went off over the lake behind the stage as the band played. The crowd roared, the band sang, and my hair shone brightly in the twilight. It felt like the perfect beginning and perfect end, to summer, youth, other dreams, and other lifetimes.

a road trip

2007-07-12T13:30:00.000-07:00

I was excited to go home. I hadn't been to New Hampshire in a year. I hadn't seen anyone in my family, or visited my mother's grave, or walked in the woods and smelled pine. I hadn't heard loons, or felt the pleasure of a view opening suddenly in the mountains when you've climbed high and far, and the trees part, and you can see cool blue and green hills rising up into the clouds if you face north, and flattening into the lakes as you turn south.

One summer when I was revising my Big Article, after graduate school but before a job, I went home to work. I climbed a mountain by myself one day, taking two dogs, and was enchanted by the discovery that the mountain I had picked had an alpine meadow full of delicate wildflowers as its summit, like something from the first helicopter shots in "The Sound of Music." I remember sitting in the grass eating my lunch, feeling the afternoon sun burning my face as I looked across at the slopes of Mount Washington. A plume of smoke rose from one side, winding its way around in an upward spiral, and I chewed for several minutes before happily realizing I was watching the cog railway chugging up the hill, taking tourists up to the top of the highest mountain in the east.

When I go back to New Hampshire I think I am trying to get back to that day. I was young enough to take being young for granted, alone but not single, employed but not obligated, hoping for success but willing to appreciate what I had right then. I think up there I was happy. In the mountains, there you feel free.

We left town late for our road trip because we had people over the night before. We had scarcely made it out of town before we hit bumper-to-bumper toll traffic. As we got in line for the toll people started beeping at us. Apparently we had a flat tire.

We pulled over on the shoulder and a man in a business suit asked if we needed help. I shook my head and got out of the car, ready to change the tire myself. As I lifted the hood I saw another man jogging towards us from a car he had parked up ahead. He wore a crushed hat and sunglasses. He looked to be in his twenties or early thirties, and was waving a bike pump. I fished the jack out of the trunk and he tried to pump up the tire, "in case," he said, "it had just gone over something and broken the seal." He never asked if he could help; he just started working. When the hiss of air escaping made it clear we would have to change the tire, he helped jack up the car so we could put on the doughnut. His wife and daughter waited up ahead while we finished, and as we rolled our car back in traffic I waved to them, and they waved back.

We were inching sluggishly towards the toll when he ran up to us again. "Our battery seems to have died. Can you give us a jump?" he shouted. I laughed, pulled over, and trotted back to his car. He wanted to try to push-start it first, so his wife and I ran behind the car and pushed it as he tried to pop the clutch. When that didn't work we hooked up the jumper cables. As we worked GF started talking with his wife, and found out that she had met him because he stopped to help someone on the road, who eventually introduced him to her. I marveled at his generosity. Their car was old and didn't even have hubcaps, and they were on their way to the beach with a child in the back, but they had time to stop and help people, and not for the first time. I'm pretty sure the story of his battery did not end well. You can bet that if his battery died just sitting there for twenty minutes while we changed my tire, that battery was either on its last legs, or his alternator didn't work, or both. But he was cheerful. They were all cheerful, headed to the beach on a sunny day.

After we got their car started we all parted ways, waving and laughing. GF and I pulled off at the next exit. Laziness, indecision, and procrastination meant I had an actual extra tire in my trunk--a remnant from my last flat tire episode, when I bought two new for the front of my car and found myself with an extra. Unable to give away or throw out a perfectly good tire, I had kept it. Now, on a late Saturday afternoon when buying a new tire would have meant hours lost, I pulled into a tiny mechanic's garage and asked if they could put my extra tire on the rim that now held the flat. Fifteen minutes later we were on the road again. I was so jubilant I gave the mechanic a 20 dollar bill for a ten-dollar job, which caused him to smile broadly and make small talk. The sun was shining, we were on the road, and the world seemed full of kindness.

The rest of the trip had its bumps. An hour later I got a speeding ticket, though that didn't immediately dim my cheer. Later that night I took a wrong turn and missed the highway, adding an hour to an already late trip. We made it to the hotel, then had a beautiful drive through Vermont the next day. In New Hampshire, one of my sisters took us on a torturous hike that left me barely able to walk for a week, a hike with no payoff at the top. Limping and grumbling on the way down, we finally found a trail that opened out near the bottom, and we ended the hike walking down a ski area and looking at the mountains all around. There were wildflowers under my feet, and I tried to appreciate them, but my knees were killing me and my back hurt. That sister later decided to act beastly, talking about me behind my back for no apparent reason except that it hurt my feelings and made her feel better about her own disappointments. GF stayed in Boston for a week of research, and I drove home alone for two days in 100-degree heat.

I return home at the beginning of the on-campus interview season, when law firms begin hiring people for summer jobs next year. My first-semester grades make it unlikely that I will get one of these jobs, which can help pay down the cost of law school. My heart swells with anxiety as I contemplate more failures, now with the added burden of vast loan debt and a baby perhaps on the way.

I try to get back to the place where there are vistas and wildflowers, but it seems hard. I helps to think about the guy with the family and car with no hubcaps. He doesn't have much, but he isn't selfish or cautious or bitter, and he still stops to help people. I hope he made it. If he didn't, I hope that somebody stopped to help him. He believes they will make it. He believes that with kindness we all will make it to wherever we are going.

Just Say Yes

2007-06-16T08:06:00.000-07:00

"Tomorrow is Bloomsday," I said last night to GF.
"What should we do to celebrate it?" she asked.
"You should get up, go out, ogle some girls, buy a kidney, fry it up, give the cat some milk, and bring me breakfast in bed and pornography to read," I said.
"Why do you get to be Molly?" she said.
"Everyone wants to be Molly, " I said, "Or at least, they should."
Of course, it's also fun to be Poldy--he gets to go to the beach, and later, to visit the Ladies of Nighttown. But he also has to deal with a lot of assholes.
Molly gets a lot of having her cake and eating it too.

Bloomsday, as some critics have noted, memorializes the first day James and Nora went out walking.
Apparently he got a handjob, which back then was considered a pretty good first date for a man.

What did Nora get?

Devotion, apparently. And she got to be Molly.

Molly is an antidote. Molly feels things but isn't morbid. She's physical but not narcissistic. She indulges herself but also evaluates her appetites. Molly is alive. She goes forward. She makes lists. She keeps in touch with joy.

Here's to being Molly. Lounge around in bed, make someone bring you breakfast, sing operatic and popular songs, flirt all over town, give generously to the poor, be pretty, have wild sex, turn heads, appreciate yourself, and remember why you love someone.

Everyone gets to be Molly today. Or at least, they should.

father's days

2007-06-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

I never imagined myself shopping for sperm. Who does? It's not that I never imagined having children--no, that's not right--it's not that I ever imagined I'd never have children, so naturally the sperm I needed to have the children that were inevitable would find me, somehow. A dear friend, perhaps, would naturally live close enough to make the whim that is a child convenient and easy to express. Because children are whims. They are desires that become real in a flash. Or they are desires that don't, whereupon they become obsessions. I never wanted to be obsessed with having children. I was always too busy.

Honestly, I thought I would have one after tenure. It seemed so much harder to imagine how to get a child than how to get tenure, I thought I'd better concentrate on the one first and the other would follow. One didn't. Then real life became more of a problem, fortunately solved by the copious availability of student loans, which have, if you haven't noticed, been operating for some time to prop up the economy so we don't have a revolution. They are talking now about making student loans harder to get, which I hope they don't because then everyone who just keeps going back to school, like me, or just stays in school forever, like I did, will hit the job market, bomb out because, as we know, there are no jobs out there, figure out that there are no jobs, and join a terrorist cell. Then the shit will really hit the fan.

But back to sperm. The plain fact is, trying to have a successful career--or in my case, an unsuccessful career--means that those baby years sort of creep on by. Suddenly. you're almost 45, and back in school again, and there's just no way.

Enter GF. She's been thinking about kids for a while, and she's only 38. She feels fairly secure in her job. So why not get pregnant? Why not get a baby now?

Well, I'm still in school, for one. But isn't it better to be up all night for ten weeks straight when you're in school than when you're starting a job? You bet. There's never a good time, a perfect time, for a baby. Wait for the perfect time and it will never come.

So she'll carry the baby for the both of us. Cool. But then there's the matter of sperm. I first should say that it's very odd how many people will throw sperm at you when they hear you are thinking about getting pregnant. Really. It's like suddenly you're the girl (or boy) on their knees in the middle of the . . .well, you get the picture. Sorry about that if you're squeamish, but you really can't afford to be shy about sperm, if you want a baby. You've got to grab a jar, metaphorically speaking. SO yes, lots of people will offer you sperm. That's the good part.

The bad part, of course, is that they can get a little get mad if you don't want it. And it's not like you're rejecting only their sperm if you don't take it. Or even them. Or quashing their dreams of genetic eternity. No-- They will tell you that it is wrong to not let a baby know its father, if it is at all possible for a baby to know its father. They will demand to know how you could deprive a child of this. Then they will try to get you to take their sperm again.

I have a problem with this. See, I'm the father, in a manner of speaking. I don't want baby to have another one.

I don't mean I'm the father, really. What I mean is that I am the other parent. There are two parents, primary parents, and I'm one of them. So when people start screaming about the "father," by which they mean the sperm donor, I have to wonder what they think my role is in this whole thing. Housekeeper #2? Second Income Lady? Why in the world does the child need to know its sperm donor?

This is complicated by the fact that it turns out you CAN know your sperm donor father, if you want, when you're 18, if he said it's ok, and your mom paid extra for the sperm. Lots extra. And the weirdest part, is that we--me and GF-- actually went through a period where we thought this was a good idea. So, like, you're supposed to raise your daughter or son and tell them their whole life that they can meet their FATHER when they turn 18. And they build it up and you build it up and it takes on some kind of mythic significance no matter what you do, because let's face it, in this culture all that really matters to too many people is who your father is.

It seems weird. Like there's a shadowy person lurking around for the whole time you are raising your child, a fantasy person, a mystery and site of impossible desire.

I should know. I never knew my biological father. He and my mother divorced when I was a toddler, and he was permanently out of the picture by time I was five. But I know I loved him, I think a lot, and I know I longed for him, for somebody I belonged to, when my mother married a man who found me and my little sister annoying and inconvenient. I wanted someone whose flesh I shared, who would scoop me up and hug me close, unselfconsciously. The romantic ideal of a father. But lots of people have biological fathers they never feel close to, so this normative ideal is only that. I could talk about these things with a child, I think, and comfort them and make them think about all the different ways people make families.

I also know what it is like to have a family where your siblings don't like to bring up the issue of different fathers because it's painful for them to imagine you all aren't totally related to each other. Because they love you that much, and they need for family to be defined more than one way.

What I find interesting about all this is that when we decided to go with an anonymous bank closer to home, one where the children would never know their donor, having a sense, an intimate sense, of the donor became even more, rather than less, important for us. The short file where he talks about his favorite foods and the instruments he plays, where he draws a picture of a cat, becomes even more important to us, since it will be all we have of him if we choose him. These days we find ourself gravitating to the men who write lots down on these forms, who fill out every question, who seem to yearn to communicate something to the children they might have. The ones who have nothing to say we discard. One, our favorite, wrote in answer to the question about what he would want to communicate to us, the recipients of the sperm, "Teach your child the love of a good book, forgive them when they are precocious, and don't let them watch too much television. I hope that he or she brings great love into your home and a lifetime of joy and happiness." Another guy, also a favorite, wrote something similarly sweet and signed it "Love, Donor 220."

Does choosing an anonymous donor mean we don't want to know him? On the contrary--we find ourselves choosing the ones who we feel like we know best, donors who try to let us know who they were as much as possible within the confines of the form. And what is funny is that the things you think might be important--height, ancestry, hair color, skin tone, eye color--become much less important than personality.

It might be that the best thing that could happen to the category of father is that it expands to include mothers, co-parents, friends who participate in the child's life, sperm donors, and more. This could take away the "significance" of fatherhood in a way that would make it more significant and meaningful for families like mine (and, truth be told, like lots of other people's families).

In San Juan last weekend people dressed as sperm and danced in the streets to protest gay marriage and adoption. Hopefully people here could also dress as sperm for the opposite reason--to celebrate gay marriage, adoption, and families of all kinds.

All of which is to say Happy Father's Day--to all the donors, participants, and recipients, adoptors, and mentors for children born, becoming, and yet to come.

making a window

2007-06-14T10:56:00.000-07:00

I know that I am a bundle of cheer to read this week, but I just heard a cool story. The spiritual advisor of Michael, the guy who is going to be executed tonight, came by the law office. She a Buddhist, which says nice things about Michael. She knows a lot of the guys on the row.

Some of the inmates get to have cats. Michael has a cat named Joker. There are plans to take Joker away tonight and give him to a family member.

The spiritual advisor smuggles in autumn leaves every year so the prisoners can see them. She sneaks them in her clothes.

One old man put them all over his wall, the leaves from every autumn. She said the last time she saw him, one whole wall of his cell was covered in leaves.

a waiting game

2007-06-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

Today at work, life is a waiting game. Every time the phone rings there is hope that some kind of news will stop tonight's execution. We try to read cases, but most of us are surfing the capital defense web sites, looking to see if any of the executions scheduled this week have been stayed. Yesterday the Virginia governor stayed an execution, saying it is only fair for all appeals to be exhausted if you are going to take someone's life. We will be waiting all day to hear if the Supreme Court grants cert or a stay on Michael's case. The press is already calling every hour or so.

Everyone has mostly gotten kind used to the idea that this is really going to happen. It isn't really mournful or anything. Just the sound of the windy rumble of the air conditioner on the wall, and the high whining ring of the office phone every now and then, and murmured voices in the next room. And counting down the hours till lunch.

While we wait I am reading about a woman on death row in the south accused of hiring someone to kill her husband. There is no proof she did so and her son confessed to the murder. The man who was killed beat them both for years and everyone knew about it. There are holes in the walls all over the house from the son punching them in frustration.

He did not get the death penalty but the mother did. She was in the hospital at the time her husband was killed. She had been eating rat poison for years. The judge took ten minutes to sentence her.

One of the guys who has been working on Michael's case for years is going down to witness his execution tonight. The person being executed only gets to have two witnesses. It seems like the kind of thing people should get to see, but almost nobody ever gets to see an execution.

One of the thiings I always liked to talk about when I'd teach Foucault's Discipline and Punish is his discussion of the delicate balance between the display of state power and the flashpoint of the crowd, and how dangerous public executions can be as sites of resistance. I used to talk about the French revolution and how the people eventually became moved and sickened by the spectacle of so much death. I can't help thinking that a few public executions, or simulcast events, would probably be all we'd need to get rid of the death penalty once and for all.

Lots of people are going to be outside at the prison tonight. Anti-death penalty groups will be there, and lots of police and their families are also going to show up. They say the police are going to be holding blue glow sticks to symbolize the thin blue line between order and anarchy that the police supposedly represent. I haven't heard much about protests on the other side.

South Dakota has just "upgraded" its lethal injection protocol so it can start to execute people. Illinois has maintained a moratorium on executions ever since Governor Ryan suspended the death penalty iin 2003 for being too riddled with error to be considered justice.

If there is an execution tonight we get the day off tomorrow. I am thinking about sitting on the beach for a while. I'll feel the sun on my face, and gaze out at the cool water, and listen to the shrieks of children and birds.

the awful machinery

2007-06-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

This morning when I came to work I met with the news that one of the people we were trying to keep from being executed in a neighboring state had just lost his final appeal in the circuit court. His execution is scheduled for midnight on Thursday.

I came into the dirty office with scattered paper and piles and piles of cases on tables and boxes stacked everywhere with names on them of the different death row defendants. The mood was somber and distracted. I was supposed to read the trial transcripts of a southern woman on death row for killing her husband, but I was distracted, too.

I found a picture of the death row guy on the internet. In it he looks like the boys I went to high school with, the ones with long hair and skinny shoulders and unbuttoned flannel shirts and hairless, board-flat torsos who drove trucks or muscle cars and smoked outside every morning in the smoking area (when high schools had such places). I was afraid of most of them but they were always nice to me. They had fathers who came home tired and dirty, who drank every night and made their sons quit school at 16 to go to work on the road crews, because that meant another paycheck for the family. Those boys came in for cigarettes every afternoon at the general store where I worked on weekends. When they got older they came in for beer, too. They had thin necks and hard forearms and soft eyes and soft, tired voices.

The death row guy has changed a lot since that picture. The ragged mullet is short now. The sullen, leonine face rearing back from the camera is quietly resigned, peering upwards, mouselike. He wears glasses but still has a thin, adolescent beard. His mouth is still uncertain in its expression. Soft. Now he could be a bank teller, or a junior high teacher, or a fast-food franchise manager.

The night that changed his life seventeen years ago he was so drunk he couldn't stand up. Apparently he was in the middle of a custody battle with his ex-wife over his two-year-old son. There was a vandalism call to the police but the police found only a very drunk young man crawling around on the ground near some parked cars, who told them he wanted to lay under them for a while and sleep. The court documents say he was lightly dressed. It was snowing and the men on duty decided to take him in that night for his own good. One officer patted him down and tossed him in the back of the squad car; another got in and started for the station.

The official version of what happened is that another police car on the highway saw an oncoming car slide off the road, and when they got near it, recognized it as a cop car. The driver was slumped in the front seat with gunshot wounds in the back of his head. The drunk teenager was still in the back seat, handcuffed. A gun with empty chambers was on the floor.

After lingering in the hospital for 11 days, the officer died. He left behind a wife and two children.

At the trial, police demonstrated how the teenager could have gotten a gun out of his pocket and shot the driver, though this would have required some dexterity. During the sentencing phase, the judge allowed the victim's wife and his boss to talk about the horrific impact of this crime on their lives. The teenager was sentenced to death.

Later this "victim impact" evidence was ruled inadmissable and harmful, but the death sentence stood.

The boy thrown into the sqad car that night is now 36 years old, and scheduled to die Friday morning by lethal injection. Today the circuit court denied for the last time the petitions filed by his lawyers to stay the execution. Most people hearing about the case think he deserves to die.

This morning we sat in the back room of a tiny storefront office and listened as the lawyer we work for told the death row guy gently over the phone that there was bad news. It was hard to listen to the soft tones of his voice, to hear him trying to comfort the taciturn person on the other end. Men are so often hard and sarcastic creatures. Lawyers especially. The lawyer we work for is sarcastic. He has to be. Listening to his voice being gentle made the upcoming execution real.

The last time this inmate, whose name is Michael, was sentenced to die, the Supreme Court stayed his death with only four hours to spare. He probably won't be that lucky this time.

He says he doesn't remember what happened that night, though he has confessed to mulling over different scenarios in his mind. I think he remembers, though. How could he not?

So the awful machinery rolls on. There won't be a nice public dismembering, frought with political allegory. He is scheduled to die at 12:01 am. There will be sedatives, and a last meal, and a midnight shackled shuffle down a dismal corridor or two. A procession with no bystanders. There will be no sun or moon or breezes. Other prisoners will be angry and sad. There will be arm and leg straps, and numb families sitting behind one-way glass, and fumbling with needles and fluid bags, and flourescent lights. There will be a death like a dog's death, but without the love, pity, and kindness of a dog's death. And it will be supposed to mean something, but it won't mean anything except that people will go to extraordinary ends to make meaning out of something senseless that happened on a winter's night in some teen-age midwestern kid's dead-end life.

They told us at the office to go home early this afternoon. The lawyer I work for tried to straighten up our table before we left. He half-turned to look at a shelf full of boxes labeled with Michael's last name. "We'll be able to clear these out soon," he said, with a short laugh. "We'll take them all out of here and file them away somewhere." He laughed uncertainly again and his eyes looked vaguely around the room, but it seemed like he wasn't really seeing anything that was there.

it still walks like a duck

2007-05-22T22:36:00.000-07:00

News from Springfield today that the Illinois civil union bill ( HB 1826) has been purged of references to marriage, apparently in an effort to appease those on the right who won't be voting for the bill anyway. The story, by Erik Potter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reveals that an amendment by the bill's sponsor is calling for the 49 instances of the M-word that appear in the bill to be reduced to 3. The right claims this editing is an attempt to fool legislators into thinking this bill isn't about marriage. That's just silly, of course, as the language of the bill calls for same-sex couples to be given all the rights traditionally afforded to spouses. Specifically, the bill would give same-sex couples rights taken for granted by married couples, such as hospital visitation rights, medical decision-making capabilities, and inheritance, among others. No matter what you call it, it is sure starting to look and sound a lot like marriage.

The bill currently lacks the 60 votes it needs to pass, and the legislature adjourns at the end of the month, so it is unlikely that there'll be many Children of the Corn born to legally wedded same-sex couples in the near future. But still, we can hope.

What does it suggest that it is still so amazing that such a bill is out there, whether it passes or not? Kudos to Greg Harris, the only out gay Illinois legislator, for sponsoring it in the first place. Courage such as his is still rare. He seems to actually think a political career is about representing the interests of the people that elected you (blue Chicagoans) rather than people who can get you things (red downstaters).

Whether you are for marriage or against it for gays, straights, or anybody, you have to admit that there isn't much room for debate concerning the relative merits and detriments of marriage when it isn't even a right everyone can choose or reject in the first place. I'm keeping my fingers crossed and writing to reps, but even if the bill doesn't pass I can't help feeling as if this wave is coming. It may take years, but the conservatives are on the wrong side of this one, as they almost always are when it comes to civil rights issues.

The fact that we are even talking about getting enough votes to pass something like this in the heartland, that we are at that stage of seriousness, is happy news indeed.

Here is the link to the story, since I can't seem to get the link to work otherwise above:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/illinoisnews/story/A3D2E3D9AC5CB13F862572E300109D6A?OpenDocument.

Or you can click on my link and look for "civil unions" by Erik Potter.

Happy New Year

2007-05-16T09:41:00.000-07:00

It's finally over. My first year of going back to school, taking exams, reading dense, boring prose for hours on end, watching terrible teaching and wonderful teaching, rolling my eyes at the sea of children in my classes, being humiliated, learning to think like a lawyer (supposedly). In class at 8:30 or 9 every morning, five days a week. Having two or three hour breaks in between morning and afternoon classes that went until 3, 4, or 5 some days, because this incredibly inefficient schedule was deemed to be "good for us." Sitting in a classroom with a frozen, patient smile on my face, being lectured at in front of other classmates who stare at the floor in embarrassed sympathy as a country judge excoriates me for not speaking louder at the podium (apparently no one will ever tell you during oral arguments if the auditorium acoustics are bad. Because it is somehow, always, your fault). Keeping the frozen smile as another volunteer judge, woman who works as a lawyer at the county courthouse, reminds me never to dress provocatively in a courtroom because it is a sexist place. This even though my clothes are so baggy and buttoned-up I might as well be wearing a burqua.

Over the humiliation of being spoken to scornfully by professors. Over the devastation of realizing after getting through forty-four years and a PhD without ever taking real exams, ever, I would have to take said exams, perform miserably, and learn how to take a test properly. Over having my life, my achievements, my career, my talents, matter not at all.

The most repeated phrase I heard this week in the halls? "You never have to be a one-L again."

This batch of exams went better, though the last was not my favorite. I hesitate to think I did better, but I think I did.

Before summer, one last job to do. I have to write something for one of the journals. There are several options, and I would be happy with any of them.

Next fall my schedule works out to three days a week. Some people I know have two-day schedules. I never have to have more than four, though, unless I want it. And that means more time working at home and less time away from it. Any way you look at it, that's a good thing.

The year is over. The summer is here. And I never, ever have to be a one-L again.
Yay!

One down, three to go

2007-05-03T16:55:00.000-07:00

A short post, because I really do need to pull a last-ditch effort not to fail Civil Procedure. Con Law exam was yesterday. I can't say how i did because my critical skills are inadequate when it comes to law school, but I really did try as hard as I could. In fact, I tried so hard that I felt depressed afterwards. What if no matter how hard I try, I just suck at this?

Which is why I then went to the gym and watched an episode of Grey's Anatomy from season two. Completely overstimulated, I thought about how the media takes extraordinary people and tries to make them seem just like "us." I mean, surgeons who go to Stanford are nothing like me, unless you count overeducation. Nothing. They are smart enough and talented enough and disciplined enough to go through doors that few of us will ever, ever have the chance to enter. You can go to school your whole life and still be mediocre compared to such people.

But Grey's Anatomy makes it all seem so . . . level, somehow. See that brainiac intern? She's brilliant and credentialed, but YOU have better interpersonal skills. See that world-class surgeon? He can't keep his marriage together. Aren't you glad you can? Look at all these doctors trying unsucessfully to balance work and a personal life! Aren't you glad you have a dead-end job and can see your kids/dogs/plants every night?

One of the emblematic shots in the opening credits shows two sets of feet touching in a hospital bed. That picture promises something most of us also never find in the real world: love and sex and meaningful work all in one place, symbolized by two people touching each other in a semi-private/public context. As if we want life and work to be so connected. Do we? Don't we?

Now, I know people in communications and media studies ask these questions all the time. Is television supposed to make us feel normal, not just in its content, but in our participation in its rituals? Because I think I experience it that way. I mean, when GF and I sit down at night to watch tv together, it's not as if we are sharing intimacy--in fact, she yells at me if I talk too much, which I often do, because I get a little lonely and bored. So what are we doing, exactly? We're not together, but we're not apart. We aren't in company, but we are somehow sharing something with an imagined community of people we will never meet or know. Is that what it is? Imagined community--like Benedict Anderson's theory of national identity? It would certainly explain why live network tv is so much more comforting than more divergent cable stations, and why GF and I seldom watch DVDs when we can flip through the channels.

Imagined community explains the appeal of shows like Grey's Anatomy, which are about being young and finding comeraderie in the Rat Race. It explains Seventh Heaven, a wretched show GF adores. I imagine that I watch them because I want to be like the other people watching them. Or at least, share something with the other people watching them. But what?

There are no gay characters on Grey's Anatomy--thought there are gay actors. This is probably part of the point. We are all watching and none of us feels like we can figure it all out, and we want imperfect perfect versions of who we might be, but aren't. Kind of like the theory that women buy more clothes when they hate their bodies than when they like them (do they ever like them?). We all feel inadequate, lonely, queer, poor, stupid, ugly, old, declasse, outmoded. These shows allow us to experience ourselves being constructed in this way, as yearning for a normal ideal and falling outside it at the same time. There is immense pleasure in this, and sorrow, which is also quite pleasurable. The shared sorrow of all of us who don't fit in--because none of us do, really, do we?--getting old, side by side without talking, in the Rat Race. Thinking about what it would be like if things were different, but not really wanting to change anything.

Anyway, there's no point to this musing, except to point out how oddly lonely and communal modern life seems. This may be particular to my being a 44-year-old lesbian stuck in school with 23-year-olds I almost never have a converstion with, or it may be more general than I think. Which is fine, because uncertainty about the universality of one's experience is, I think, the point of these shows, or at least, a big part of their appeal.

I think I'll go to the gym now, where I'll get on the elliptical machine, surrounded by people I will never speak to--and in fact who are usually freaked out if I accidentally talk to them in order to get a machine (they are 20 years old and wear tiny shorts with sorority letters across their asses. I should be the one screaming.). We will all face front, listening to our individual music players, watching the tvs in the front window, or, as in my case, watching our video ipods, and move our limbs in a strangely synchronized sea-dance under the blue light of the television screens, and the early May Scorpio moon.

Happy finals to all, and here's hoping there's a conversation or two at the end of the work--and workout--tunnel.

The end in sight

2007-04-15T10:47:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the last post--version one got published too early by mistake, which explains some of its incoherence. Or it could have been the martini. Martinis.

The end of the semester is two weeks away. I would be looking forward to it, except that means final exams are only two and a half weeks away, and I haven't started outlining yet. Not one damn line. And another weekend is shot, as GF's father, who I have never before met, has come to town on a whim. Which means long meals and NO martinis (alas, those Mormons).

I hate outlining. I can't do it. I have never in my whole life been able to outline, and now my entire GPA depends on it.

It's the variety. I get dazed by variety. Too many choices. Too many things to pick and choose and edit out. I like the details. I like them all. I have been rescued by people in supermarkets who comb the entire store in exasperation only to find me slack-jawed in the same aisle where they left me, staring at soups.

So I have to sit down and go back to the beginning of courses that are now ending, and review and organize all the material, in detail, in the vain hope that I will have it all at my fingertips for the exam.

I hate exams. Some people love them. I hate them. I like papers. Long, lovely, detailed papers.

What am I doing here? How did I end up in law school?

I am maybe the mellowest person around. I walk slowly. I linger and luxuriate. I take baths. I am calm (mostly). I seldom was a hardass as a teacher. In fact, the thing I hated most about teaching was working for the Man as his Gatekeeper. Why did Bobbie have to get a "B" on a paper he worked really hard at, just because he's stilted and organized rather than organic and creative? Bobbie knows how to outline, which is why his English papers sucked. He controlled every damn word. Nothing new ever popped out of Bobbie's prose. I would sigh, and comment on his perfectly anal organizing skills, and note his hard work, and give him a B for boring, but with a plus.

Bobbie is kicking my ass right now in law school. Bobbies do very well there. The worm turns.

So that's my life, as I prepare to pack my things and leave after a day and a half home with my gf, who I didn't really see at all because her father is in town.

I don't get to blog or read blogs much these days, but gf does, and she tells me about people out there not getting renewed in their jobs, academic jobs they have sacrificed everything for. I don't know what to say, except that the world is vast and it will really be ok. GF has a theory that this is all part of the larger plan where life gets to be about more important things, and while that doesn't comfort anyone skulking around their department feeling like a Dead Man Walking right now, life will get better. I am more and more convinced that people who make it in academia do so despite the horrendous people around them, and the ones that don't make it really are lucky insofar as they get the chance to get the hell out of there and make some real choices in their lives. Academia is all about giving up choices for The Job. The Job tells you where you can live. The Job determines if you and your partner get to be together. The Job will let you know you really can't afford to have kids right now.

Screw the job. Make some choices. It's really an incredibly giddy, strange feeling, after spending decades having no choices, to have nothing but choices.

Go ahead and gape at the soups for a while. Look at the salt content. Remember the joys and drawbacks of Ramen noodles. Laugh as you remember your mother's recipes she made with cream of mushroom soup. Wonder if corn chowder in a can is any good.

Look, marvel. Buy them all.

oh hillary.

2007-04-13T22:56:00.000-07:00

They put a college picture of you in striped pants on the front page of the New York Times. How young you were. How earnest. Nerdy and completely adorable.

Did you believe what you said in those days? Oh, yeah. Did you cry in your car when they read the names of the dead on the radio? Could you believe they still played where have all the flowers gone as a protest song, even when your husband was running for governor? I thought that song was so lame when I was growing up, because it just went on and on. Oh yeah. Now, of course, it makes me cry.

Did you think when he deployed troops to Afganistan that maybe we were repeating some pattern . . .that felt . . .vaguely . . . familiar? And when you voted on Iraq, was there anywhere in you the tiniest twinge of conscience? When they asked you about gay people, did you have an answer? No. Oh Yeah. Do you think you'll reverse your husband's policy of don't ask, don't tell? Oh yeah. No. And woman in the military? Women? And Gays? Gays? And the military? What?

Hillary, will you stand by us?
What?

Are there any issues that aren't purely politics for you? What happened to that girl who wore striped pants and opposed the Vietnam war? Do you have her contact information?

Hillary?

Cause I think I'd like to vote for her. You, though, I'm not so sure about.

magic meter

2007-03-12T13:58:00.000-07:00

Law school is depressing right now. It's a little past the middle of the semester, and the glow of new material has rubbed off. The weather has warmed up, briefly, which makes going to class doubly sad. This also means the classroom where I take Criminal Procedure on Monday and Tuesday afternoons is so hot you wonder seriously if you are going to pass out before 75 minutes is up. Today I fanned myself furiously and watched every minute tick by on the wall clock, feeling delirious.

Civil Procedure (on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons) is unwinding in an ever-more dizzying string of rules. The cases all turn on procedural glitches, each of which is assigned its own rule and subsection letter. Twelve-bee motions! Rule eleven charges! Pleading amendments (whose number, alas, I have forgotten already). I try to take notes as best as I can and not fall asleep, or daydream, or check my email, but some days it is so hard. Here I am again. Back where I started from. Stuck in a big classroom, feeling rebellious and stupid, trying to make myself stick with important minutia. The girl in the row in front of me is internet shopping. She is always internet shopping, or reading celebrity gossip. I found out that Anna-Nicole Smith had died because I was idly watching her surf one afternoon. I sometimes wonder how ADD girl does on exams, but I never feel superior in my note-taking. It is possible--very--that she does a lot better than me.

My legal writing teacher has taken a turn with the weather. Lately I've noticed a certain droopiness about her. She's usually nice, but has grown remote. Last week another guy and I walked in at the beginning of her class, papers in hand (they were due that day), but she had just started talking, which meant that we were officially late. I am usually never late to class, but for that day I was one or two minutes off. When I got my memo back I saw she had taken ten per cent off my grade for a late paper. Ten per cent. We broke the rules, and had to pay. The other guy told me he had gone to get a paper clip.

Statutory Interpretation is a little stale too, and even Con Law feels forced. I feel like I have too much personality, like I am too formed for the dormant norm that is supposed to be the awakening law student. I like to talk in class, then feel as if I've said too much. It's not what they were looking for. They wanted the application of principle A from the reading to illustrate hypothetical B. Duh. Stick to the program. Play by the rules. I feel like summer will never come. I feel like I will never be good at this. No one will hire me. I hate rules. I always have. Things will never get better, ever.

Mostly I feel like a freak, as usual. I can't decide whether or not to continue the shocking blonde hair I usually wear, because I am just so weary of being so different all the time. Old, slow, and queer in a sea of young heterosexuals who have never known anything much different from school, just like this. A few who have left and worked and come back, but most, just slogging on, going through the hoops. Traditional--some very conservative. Still their parents' children. Giggling, flirting, never running out of steam. Being exactly the A students they are supposed to be.

Some weekends I go home and GF and I just cling to each other. We sit near each other on the couch with our laptops, or drape over each other in bed with the newspaper. Sundays are especially hard. I put off going back until the sun sets and we are both a bundle of nerves. Then I get in the car and drive to the house I live in for now, the temporary house with too many roomates, with boys I have to share a bathroom with, and who I can hear snoring in the next room at night. I think for the thousandth time about moving but it seems so hard. Sometimes it's better to hearing snoring in the next room than have no one in the next room. Mostly I can't wait for spring break. I can't wait for summer. I can't wait for law school to be over, forever.

Then, last week, I find the magic parking meter.

I discover the meter one morning when I have to park a little farther away from the law school than usual. In a field of digital zeros flashing on and off for empty, this meter stands out. It is a solitary survivor. Its battered white half-moon dial is marked with lines in increments, like a protractor. All along its arc are numbers, signalling the hours from one to twelve. Instead of clock-radio digits, it has a black arrow that points to the numbers to show the time left.

It sits next to a chain-link fence that surrounds a cemetery. Meter 116. On the other side of the fence from the meter is a grave with a little angel on it. I notice the angel because it looks like the one we put on my mother's grave back home.

My mother believed in signs. When birds came back to nest in the back yard, she thought it meant something. When certain items she needed for the week coincidentally went on sale, it was because God was watching out for her. I used to ridicule her. I couldn't believe that God was sensitive enough to arrange for the precise groceries she needed to become magically available. Did He really have time to make sure vanilla extract was in the sale bin at the Star Market for the week of February 10th? She always went along with the teasing but I could tell a part her was dead serious. She really believed that God helped her make ends meet some weeks when it appeared impossible to feed all of us on what was available.

The first time I parked at meter 116, it was noon, and all the closer meters were filled. I noticed its difference from the meters around it, and noted, happily, that its arrow pointed just past the 1 on the dial. I put a quarter in and it jumped to the 3. Wonderful! Usually a quarter only bought twenty minutes. Maybe this meter was an hour per quarter.

When I came out two hours later to add money, though, the meter hadn't really moved. I wondered if it was stuck. I went back in to class, came out, and saw that it remained on the 3. I drove away, feeling the satisfaction of a bargain, but my curiosity was aroused. Was it broken? Would it stay that way? Had anybody else noticed it, besides me?

Sure enough, the next morning was early enough that the whole row of meters was empty. I pulled up to 116, still set at 3 hours. The sun was shining. The morning was new. Even though I had to go to class, I felt a bend in time. Not all rules were absolute. Not every system was monolithic. What luck!

I told my roommate about the magic meter when we drove to class one day. Sometimes I give him a ride to school in the morning. I thought maybe this time I should add some money to it, just in case the arrow fell slowly. I didn't want to impose too much on the universe, or take it for granted. He stood next to me and we both watched in horror as I put in a quarter and the turnhandle stuck for a moment on the yellow "violation" bubble. Oh, no. I wiggled it some more and it fell back down, leaving the arrow on 4. We both exhaled.

"Maybe you shouldn't mess with the luck of it," he murmured as we shuffled across the street. I nodded. It had been a close call. I had to learn respect for my gift horse.

Now I park at the meter every morning. I try not to hog it. I haven't changed my schedule to take advantage of its largess. I still come and go as I please, and sometimes in the afternoon, the spot is taken. I haven't noticed any consistency in the cars that park at it. I don't know if anyone has really put two and two together about its secret powers.

At some point, a parking person will notice. Some keen-eyed cruiser will remember that the arrow was at the same exact number the last time they drove by, and it will be finished. Or someone like me will dare the gods with an additional quarter, and the violation balloon won't snap back down this time. Then the meter will be officially broken, and they'll fix it, or worse, take it out and replace it with one of the soulless digital kindred that surround it.

Until then, it is the bright spot in my morning, like a bit of stolen sunshine. It is always a surprise when it is empty. It makes me happy every time I park at it for an hour, from 9am to 10. I drive slowly by the numbers, scanning the opposite side till I see 116. Empty! Ha! I swing around and pull in, facing away from the school, as if for a quick getaway. I lock up, check the meter dial, and shake my head with immense satisfaction. A free hour! What luck--again!

I walk inside, thinking about the simple pleasure of it. I know that it might seem silly--hokey, even--but in a universe that often takes without justice or kindness, my meter could very well be a sign that even when you are not looking for a bit of luck, even when you don't believe in it anymore, it can sometimes find you, in a tiny, dumb, immensely satisfying way.

public interest

2007-02-22T09:42:00.000-08:00

The day of the public interest job fair, the temperature hovered at five degrees. I had to be downtown at 7:30 a.m. to sign up for an extra interview slot and register. The wind razored its way through the legs of my suit pants. I was grumpy because my day to sleep in was taken from me. I wore a down jacket over my suit jacket. GF drove me down, bless her heart, and dropped me off at the pretentious gothic gates of Secondmost Elite City Law School.

Secondmost had waitlisted me the first year I applied, but my LSAT scores were too low, and they cut me loose. They had been my first choice early admission school. They make you interview. I spoke with a very nice woman who had gone to law school elsewhere and was now working for them. Not a good sign about satisfaction in the profession, I remember thinking. She asked me about teaching, then grilled me about whether or not I really wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to ask her the same question, but I couldn't.

The next year I spoke with an impatient young woman who grew irritated when we both realized my most recent freelance job was not on my resume. I had been bouncing around by then, and was trying not to look unemployed, but my piecemeal writing gig was not what I thought of as a real job, and I had forgotten it. She didn't like that. My LSATs were slightly higher, and I applied early decision again, even though everyone told me the school was a corporate lawyer mill. What law school isn't, though? They didn't bother to waitlist me this time. No corpora te lawyer mill for me.

Now I had a whole day to wander their halls, stuck without a car until after my one scheduled interview at 4:15. Thier cavernous stone entryway reminded me of similarly uninviting halls down at Most Elite University. Impressive but not at all friendly or warm. Interesting that this was the site of the public interest fair, given how many other law schools are in the city. I sat down on a hard wooden bench and tried to keep warm.

At 9 a.m. we were herded into a big parliamentary classroom with high-backed pews that faced each other, descending down to the middle of the room like old-fashioned medical classrooms sometimes have. Medieval-looking crests sat on either side of the stage and podium at the front of the hall. Impressive, but hardly friendly, this room strained to convey an impression of striving, reminding one of nothing so much as the ermine-trimmed patrons in Renaissance altarpieces kneeling with their families on either side of the Annunciation. Rich enough to pay for the painting and even be in it, but not good enough to come inside the house and hang out with the Virgin.

The lottery commenced, and I signed up for an open interview slot with a policy group. I thought they might be interesting because they worked on affordable housing, public housing, and educational policy.

After this we were free to wander among tables where different representatives from city and state government services and public interest organizations sat ready to answer questions, hand out forms, and take resumes. I spoke with people at legal aid clinics, child services, and the public defender's office--all lovely, friendly, skeptical people who loved their work. After that lunch, then the wait to interview. The interviewer at the policy place was not a decision maker, but was there as a kind of intake person. I gave her my resume and tried to be enthusiastic. She was slick, wooden, heavily made up, and under 30. I think her hair was made of polystyrene. I think also she didn't like me so very much.

Finally the whole reason for my being there all day approached. My one interview. I climbed the steps of the library, up into the stacks, looking for the room where I was supposed to be.

The stairs of the law library rose before me, up through the center of the library itself, modern stairs with see-through steps. As I climbed, I looked out at magnificent panoramic views of the frozen lake glittering brightly beyond the huge floor-to-ceiling glass expanse of the far wall. Students sat quietly at tables, reading, oblivious. This treat was only for them, but none of them even raised their eyes to it. I wondered if they noticed it anymore.

The room at the top of the third floor stairs on the right was small, flourescent, and windowless. A little man with white hair that stood out in wispy strands around his face shook my hand. His baggy sweater hung on his shoulders. He asked me why I was in law school. I fed him some line about opportunity he only half-listened to. He cocked his head and looked intently at me. "Do you know what we do?" he asked.

I confessed that I didn't. I hadn't been able to find a web page, or a google reference of any kind, and they weren't listed in the big books that had been in the law theater that morning.

He nodded his head, satisfied. "We do post-conviction habeus petitions for people on death row."

"Fabulous!" I breathed. I couldn't help it. It just came out.

He went on to emphasize that this was no Innocence Project. "These are the guilty!" he announced, happily. Then he told me some of the petitioners were mentally handicapped. Others had been victims of spousal abuse. One woman was on death row for attempting to kill her husband, though no one was hurt.

He asked me what it was like to be back in school at my age, and told me his wife had gone to law school in her fifties. he told me he was 69. He spoke contemptuously of young law students, who he warned me would sit at work and tell me about their boyfriends and their girlfriends. "You're lucky if you can get six hours of work out of 'em!' he cackled.

Then he leaned forward. "I had a guy like you," he said, looking at me steadily. I think he meant an ex-academic going back to school, not an overweight blonde lesbian with a nose ring. He told me that first year students were the best for what he did, because second year students had to take the money of the big firms in the 2L summer, whether they wanted to eventually work at a firm or not. He told me that my writing skills would be perfect for his little storefront office, where he and his wife toiled together to try to save people from being gassed, or electrocuted, or lethally injected for the bad decisions they had made in their fairly awful lives. He gestured to my resume with disgust. "I mean, an English Professor! Of course you can write! How do you like law school? How did you do?"

I confessed I hadn't done so well. He shook his head, as if I had confirmed his worst thoughts. "We'll teach you something that'll be USEFUL to you," he said. "My wife and I, we gotta take care of the older people."

He asked me if I had any questions, and I asked him when he might know about his selections for the summer. His eyes twinkled. "If I offered it to you right now, what would you say?"

I was flabbergasted. "I'd say I'll take it, of course!"

He nodded, satisfied. "Send me an email accepting it," he said. "My wife and I, we'll protect you from the teenyboppers."

I stumbled out of the flourescent room onto the stairs, past the reading students and their panoramic vistas, past night and day and into the stone hallway, out the heavy oak doors and into my gf's waiting car. "I think I just got a summer internship!" I breathed. "He actually PICKED me!" I couldn't believe it. I hadn't imagined that I would actually get something out of the day beyond information and a few applications.

As we drove home past the expensive highrises, past the lake and the big houses near its shores, I thought about people who spend their lives making no money, wearing scuffed shoes and stretched-out cardigans, saving the world in their classrooms and storefront offices and legal aid clinics, day after day. And for the first time, really, since starting law school, I felt happy.

V-Day

2007-02-14T19:06:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's to all! This week has been (happily) hijacked by the freedom to marry people (freedom to marrieds?). I want to give a shout out to Mombian, who has assembled a carnival of freedom to marry posts for your enjoyment.
Oh, and she mentions me. Just saying.

Valentine's Day is great in the abstract but often hellish in real life, especially for gay people, who have to decide whether or not to brave the het crowds in order to drag sweetie out for the ritual meal, so it's nice to have some queer activism putting its mark on this year's mix.

I'm sure plenty of straight couples also find V-Day a bit hellish. It's like New year's Eve, only worse. New Year's is about getting loaded in a crowd, whereas V-Day is all about squeezing intimacy out of a date with Special Someone, at a restaurant with Tripled Prices in Honor of the Day, all while trying not to notice your waiter hurrying you along so as to turn your table for another Special Pair with later reservations. And then what are you supposed to do? Go home to your messy house and have sex while the cats walk on your head and the family upstairs stomps up and down, over and over? How romantic.

My Valentine and I are apart this year, since I'm in school and the date falls on a Wednesday. Still, we spent a good part of today talking on the phone and texting each other. She went to the Auto Show and sent me pictures of dream cars. If I was home tonight we'd probably order Thai and watch tv. Maybe get under a blanket together on the couch, feed shrimp tails to the cats, flip channels. Try a new show on On Demand. Talk about the blizzard that just ended. Drink bourbon. Smell each other's hair. Smell each other's farts, probably, if we stayed on the couch long enough. Give neck rubs. Gossip. Text message friends. Watch the Daily Show and scroll Craig's List on our laptops.

Now THAT would be the perfect Valentine's Day. A normal, quiet night at home. Sigh.

Happy V-Day to all, and to all a V-Night.

Snow day

2007-02-12T08:34:00.000-08:00

I should be in class right now, but I'm home eating oatmeal and bananas with gf, watching the snow taper off. Yesterday when it was time to leave to drive back to school I found myself feeling chilled, hungry, upset, achy, and sleepy. Psychosomatic? Maybe--although I did have a fever of 100.6. So we ordered thai, lay on the couch with blankets, and watched Battlestar Galactica, The L Word, and Rome. Eventually I warmed up and felt better, but not before my window to drive back disappeared. Then it started snowing.

This morning it is still spitting snow. I need to drive back, and I will, and the strange part is, I don't even feel guilty. I needed a lazy weekend. I needed this snow day, this putting off the week for a few more hours.

Last week was perhaps the craziest week of my life (and remember, I was on the academic job market for four years). It began with a Monday morning interrogation in Constitutional Law. Some of my classes have scheduled participation instead of random hazing. This means that class may be organized into panels, so each day some students must be extra-prepared, knowing they will be called upon at length. Monday morning at nine o'clock was my time. I got up early to be extra-prepared. Tuesday we had a rough draft of a change of venue memo due. I got home from class at three, sat down, and worked on the memo till one. I sat up till two reading for Con Law, then went to bed and was up at eight.

I have another class--Civil Procedure-- where the teacher is running down names alphabetically. Guess whose name was due to come up on Thursday or Friday? Also, the final draft of the venue memo was due Friday morning. And there was an extra Civ Pro squeezed in there--a makeup on Friday at noon. By Thursday afternoon it was clear that THAT particular makeup class would be the one where I was called on.

Up till two Thursday night finishing the memo, then up at 8:45 the next day. Skip Statutory Interpretation, unfortunately, because there would be no time to prepare to be called on in Civ Pro at noon otherwise, since the writing class where the memo was due was at 11 am.

Get up and read, read, read for Civ Pro, and try desperately to nderstand the rules for diversity jurisdiction in the cases we were studying. Ah! Not finished, and it's 10:50! Throw on clothes and screech out of driveway. Parking meter at 10:59. Dash to class to turn in paper. Read more in the ten minutes between that class and the next. Go to class and be grilled for 20 minutes straight. Slump over in seat when he moves on.

Home for lunch before next class. Pack and throw stuff in the car for trip home this weekend. Too tired to make sense of the reading. Dash to class, nod off, jump in car and drive home.

Hit traffic. Add extra hour on trip.

Get home three and a half hours later and swing by apt. to pick up gf for dinner plans with other friends. Go pee. Go to restaurant.

Sit and talk with friends. Drink martini. Drink wine. Come home and collapse.

Slow Saturday. Slower Sunday. Lazy Monday.

Time to get up and get going. Gf off to teach. Together we will brush off our cars, parked in the street. We will hold each other tight and whisper about Friday. She will drive to school and I will drive away and we will listen to music and think about each other and think about the week, starting slowly, rolling faster now, passing by in the minutes and hours wished away, our precious time in this life spent waiting between the weeks, between the snowstorms, watching the clock tick by until we can be together again for another timeless, lazy weekend.

Why does it take so long to read for class?

2007-01-24T16:25:00.000-08:00

Sorry for taking so long to write in. I've been soo tempted, but I'm tring to be good this semester, whatever that means, and study harder and longer. I love love love my classes. What a difference from last semester! The procedures classes--civil and criminal-- are perfectly fine, since they are directly concerned with rules of justice; constitutional law is interesting, and my statutory interpretation class is the best class EVER. The name alone says it all: Statutory Interpretation. Sigh. I'm home.

Our topic is Fair Housing. I know--what's not to love, right? But the best part is that the professor is an intellectual. She's a woman, too, which is great, but she has exactly the teaching style that any academic enjoys or would love to have. When I mention to other people in my class how much I heart her, they hesitate, and say, "I don't know . . ." When I press them, they say that she wanders off the topic, or says too much. They say they can't tell what information they're supposed to write down. That they think she is too abstract. What she does, in fact, is raise issues and answer questions by exploring every angle of any comment you make. She paces back and forth and thinks out loud. Think Judy Butler lecturing.

I know, right? Yummy. So when she asks what the factors might be that contribute to the ongoing existence of segregated neighborhoods even after courts refuse to enforce racist housing covenants, and I say something like, "Who wants to live in a hostile environment?" she proceeds to explain how some recent academic work on this topic has addressed the instrumentality of "vibes" and the way they contribute to moving in--or not moving in--to certain areas.

Great, right? This is an intelligent, engaged person who knows a lot and is telling us what she knows. But it's not pure information, and that is bugging a lot of people. Me, I feel like I'm finally back in my own country.

Which maybe gives you a window into how shitty last semester was for me.

So anyway, things are looking up, at least as far as engaging material. I also figured out that the biggest reason for my bad grades last semester is . . .drumroll . . . that I don't type.

I know--how lame is that? We can write or type our exams, so of course idiot me thinks typing is easier to read, so I should type. The problem is, I think I actually type slower than I write, since I am a two-finger typist (three, actually--two on my right hand and one on my left). My contracts exam was six single-spaced, frantically-typed pages. My friend who got an A let me read his exam, and it was . . .13. He claims that two of those were canned answers he had already, but we're still talking twice as much as I wrote.

Do I still think like a professor? I wanted to make it easier on them. Students, on the other hand, think, "Who am I going to be measured against? Who do I have to compete with? How can I show a tired, skeptical grader that I know stuff?"

So to hell with it. I'm a student, and I'm writing my exams from now on. I suspect written exams are graded against each other in a way that is far more favorable than my typed exams will ever be. I'm also going to talk to my teachers from last semester, and I'm going to buy one of those exam writing courses. But seriously, what if it comes down to typing? Ye gods.

So I'm in a coffee house the other night, trying to read for Constitutional law, and I realize for the first time how fidgety I am. I want to go on line. I want to text message GF on my phone. I want to bother the guy next to me. The bench is hard. Con law is dry. I'm bored. I want to go home and drink a beer and watch the Daily Show.

And I am a wicked, wicked procrastinator. Procrastinator. Capitalize it. The solitary vice of OUR times. But instead of the palsied figure of the trembling Masturbator, with his thinning hair and scoliosis, picture a gal with white ipod headphones trickling from her ears, a mouse in one hand, a cell phone in the other, a Neverwinter Nights disk whirring away in her laptop, her eyes shifting around the room. reading the same paragraph over and over from the book in front of her.

I know--I blog, yes? Any of us knows that blogging IS the prima facie evidence of a Procrastinating temperament. But this is somehow news to me. What image of myself have I been carrying around all this time? Mrs. Concentration? Scholarly Lady? The Duchess of Deep Thinking?

I saw myself, and it wasn't pretty. A frenetic shadow on the wall of the cafe booth, looking for a way out of work.

So I am reformed, though as you can see by this post, not so very reformed. I have caught myself, and I will try to stop the urge to disengage before the reading gets done.

Which brings me to my real reason for posting. MySpace. Who the hell invented this thing? I have for so long adamantly refused to join, not from snobbery--ok, actually, yes, from snobbery. But today GF posted me a scary antigay video--the pathetic guy singing "God Hates Fags"--and I watched it in horror on MySpace. Because he's SERIOUS. And he's so, so gay. And his organization is called God'sLove or something like that. And his horrifying song is only about hate. Then I found some people who were commenting on the video, including a cool guy from the UK who was making fun of him. And I wanted to send this cool guy a message, just to say, you know, how cool it is that he's a decent person. But in order to send a comment, I had to join MySpace.

So I joined MySpace. OMG.

MySpace is scaaary! Not only do you get sucked into a profile, but people want to be your friends! Right away! Why? because they are nice, for one. And often interesting, for two. But also? because they are on line, looking for something to distract them. Because they are bored. Because they know they should be doing something serious, but they really just want to party, even if it is only on line. Because they are, when you get right down to it, wicked, wicked Procrastinators.

And I am too.

professional writing

2007-01-11T10:04:00.000-08:00

What Now asked me a great question about professional writing in a comment, and it got me thinking generally about how schools do--and don't--train people to write professionally. Law school seems better than most in offering legal writing, which teaches students legal reasoning and memo-writing. There is a system of analysis called IRAC or IREAC, where you identify the Issue, state the Rule, give an Explanation of the Rule, Analyze the situation, and Conclude. This is the method for briefing cases when you read them, and this is how you go about applying precedent cases to a new situation in order to fashion an argument.

In a legal memo, for example, you might have a situation you have to evaluate. Say, a woman has seen a family member gravely injured by a speeding automobile, and it has affected her life in profound ways. She can't sleep, is depressed, jumpy, irritable, freaked out, and unable to return to work. The driver is already liable to the injured party, but is he liable to her? You have to figure it out.

You realize that her charge resembles a tort called Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress (usually abbreviated IIED), but in this case it is linked to a driver's negligence, so it may be Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress. You look for similar cases in your state that qualify as precedent cases (appellate decisions, circuit courts using your state's laws, etc. that haven't been overturned and thus are still "good law"). You do the IRAC or IREAC analysis to argue why these precedents apply to your case. You then do the IREAC analysis on your case and make an argument in the memo whether you think the woman has a case or not.

All this we learn, and this is the basis for good legal writing and reasoning.

What we DON'T learn is how to write for a test. Supposedly we apply some form of IRAC to test-taking, but as you can see, this rather lengthy process takes a lot of time to spell out, so it has to be different. Also, the point on a test is not to brief cases, but to analyze a situation and apply rules to it.

Let me explain. We spend the entire semester in any given class studying case law. Cases. We IRAC them in some form or other. So far, so good.

Then we get to the test. Even though the semester has been spent reading cases, they don't matter on the test. What matters is the rules that come from the cases. The rules are called "black letter law," as opposed to case law. You will have little practice applying and analyzing the rules at length before hand. Mostly, you will discuss them in their textual (case) context.

The closest comparison I can think of is studying Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway the way one would, then taking a test where you have to recognize metempsychosis or Time Passing in a completely different, silly made-up scenario. The professor has said he doesn't care about cases (novels), only the rules. And there are lots of rules from hundreds of novels (really, short stories). So what exactly do you say, once you have identified metempsychosis or stream-of-consciousness? DO you talk about the story(case)? How much? The new scenario? How much do you say? Time is so short on the exam--have you said too much? Not enough? Have you analyzed it enough? Too much? What did you leave out? You have to stop now and move on to the next question. And you already wasted a lot of time writing complete sentences.

I explained it to a friend as spending the entire semester building a Ferrari as a class project, then being tested on whether or not you could drive it really fast on a racetrack. You never learned how to drive it, and building it won't teach you that. You have to go out and get a Racecar Driving for Dummies book and figure it out.

You can see where this kind of abstraction would trip up an English type like me, even when she can logically see how the abstraction works. Methodical, careful, textual people have got to give it up and get faster, looser, more abstract, more information-managing. Dump it, splatter it, and move on. It's not about thinking, folks.

I've already decided to shell out for at least one of those day-long seminar courses in writing exams. I just have to make the transition and figure it out.

Now, this is a bit like sink-or-swim, but even though I am whiny and cross and depressed, I think it is a lot LESS sink-or-swim than horror stories I have heard about some elite grad school literature programs that cut their MA students after a year. A friend of mine went to one of those superfancy programs, and they kept telling her she needed to write better, but nobody could tell her how (because none of them could teach writing--they just knew good or bad writing when they saw it). She tried and tried and sweated and worked like a maniac and got cut anyway. After running up a year's worth of Elite University tuition debt.

So I know I will figure it out, and hopefully won't get cut after a year! Maybe professional writing can be about flexibility and growth rather than limitations and failure. Learning another kind of writing and thinking doesn't have to be about loss of the expertise one has already acquired. There's a Roz Chast cartoon I love where a woman is reading a tabloid and happily exclaiming: "Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow are on the outs!" Behind her, a fat suitcase labelled "Medieval Art History" is falling from the sky into a big trash can. But we don't have to erase what we've learned from our hard drives in order to make room for new stuff, do we? Can't we just grow the RAM to run it all at once? I love Lucyrain's story--also in a comment-- about her successful lawyer friend who had to overcome writing problems her first year. Thanks for that--and for giving me the chance to talk about all this, and think about professional writing more generally.

Friends rock

2007-01-10T22:30:00.000-08:00

I'm getting lots of support from all over, and I love it. Thanks everyone! Yesterday was pretty rough, but GF took me to a basketball game and I yelled till I was hoarse. And I also cheered the game.

Had two conversations with friends who made me feel better. One was with a friend who just felt angry for me. Everyone needs a friend like that sometimes: no wrangling or reasoning; just pure loyalty.

The other conversation was with a friend who was a lawyer before she became an English professor. She said I was overtrained in reading and writing and I just needed to learn to take law school exams. I asked her if I was doing the wrong thing going to law schooland she said absolutely not, which since she is pretty pragmatic about the suckyness of most jobs, including lawyering and professorializing, I appreciated. Also she could care less about grades of any kind, which I also like.

GF has been amazing. After freaking out for less than ten whole minutes, she pulled an about face and kicked into super-support mode. Last night I tossed and turned with worry but tonight will be better.

And you friends reading out there are awesome. Thanks for writing nice things.

Time to regroup. I'm trying not to dread the semester, and you all cheered me up. Thanks!

if grades equal identity, i'm a gentleman

2007-01-09T13:06:00.000-08:00

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Grades came out today. I don't really know how to talk about my unbelievably mediocre performance, other than to say that I am clearly not the only person demanding answers from Google right now. The web is full of comforting voices trying to reassure the desperate and suicidal that indeed, plenty of people get Cs their first term and go on to get stellar grades and great jobs afterwards. I am trying to listen to them and refrain from what I really want to do right now, which is withdraw from next semester, cash in my entire TIAA-CREF retirement account, and try something else.

If I hadn't worked so hard last semester I wouldn't be so devastated--after all, you know when you didn't go that extra mile and you should have, and when you get your grades, you say, yeah, I really didn't work as hard as I should have in this one particular way. But the truth is, I did go that extra mile. My problem is efficiency. I worked hard, studied hard, outlined, read supplements, and sucked at taking the actual exams. Sucked hard, apparently.

Why?

I have no idea. I suspect some of it has to do with my inability to touch type and my slow, plodding insistence on full sentences. Maybe I should have hand-written the exams. I have talked to at least one 3L who tried this after her bad first semester grades, and subsequently did much better on exams.

I've already been on the phone to my school and made an appointment for the first day of classes to talk to a career counselor. The secretary and I joked about making an appointment for my "friend" who needed academic help. Ha ha.

"Law school," a fellow student in my section is fond of saying, "when your best just isn't good enough." She gets called on all the time and often appears to be asleep. I bet even she did better than I did.

Then I found Harry Blackmun's law school grades on "too much about nothing," and it comforted me. Granted, Blackmun still finished 120 out of 451 at Harvard, but still, these babies make a gentleman girl failure like me feel a teensie bit better.

Harry Blackmun's Law School grades, courtesy of Too Much About Nothing:

Year One:

Civil Procedure: B
Contracts: C
Criminal Law: C
Property I: D
Torts: C

Year Two:

Bills & Notes: C
Equity II: D
Evidence: C
Property II: A
Sales: C
Trusts: D

Year Three:

Conflict of Laws: C
Constitutional Law: C
Corporations: B
Property III: A
Public Utilities: B
Suretyship & Mortgage: B

So there you have it. It's a low bar and I'm certainly not at Harvard, but mostly, the only way to go is up. Cheers, Harry.

the gayest christmas

2006-12-26T14:25:00.000-08:00

I'm home and I get to sleep in my bed next to my very own person. I swear to you I will never take it for granted again that I can roll over and see her sleeping face. She sleeps with great determination, her lips pressed tight together. Some days we sleep in to ridiculous hours. Today we slept till almost 11, for no good reason other than that we liked it. Our Christmas tree glitters in the next room. The cats have developed an obsession for plastic garland. We find it in the hallway when we get up. Sometimes it is in the groove lounge next to the kitchen. The cats always look guilty when we find them chewing it. The girl, especially, looked ashamed yet defiant, as if we have caught her masturbating. Which, since she's a cat, would be a lot more socially acceptable in our house than her inexplicable garland fetish.

It is gray and cold outside, but we have leftover apple-glazed ham from Christmas is the fridge, which means I can make extravagant egg, cheese, and ham sandwiches on english muffins in the morning. I don't usually like or eat ham, but our friend Travis had a hankering for Christmas ham, and brought a giant spiral ham to add to our 18-pound turkey on Christmas Day. We warmed it in a porcelain cooker plugged in under my desk in the study. I've never wanted to sit down at my desk as much as I did smelling that ham.

People drifted over all during the day on Christmas. These last few years we have been having gay Christmases, which is the Christmas you really want to have with all your gay friends where you sit around and eat and drink and watch something campy. One year I made everyone watch The Littlest Angel, which to me is the best blend of bizarro psychedelia, Hallmark sentimentality, and queer sensibility ever seen in a made for TV Christmas special. Think muscle-y angels in impossibly short togas doing calisthenics. Think Tony Randall as an administrator in heaven. Think Johnny Whittaker being sung to and softly caressed every now and then by Fred Gwynne.

This year I got up at 730 and made celery, onion, and mushroom stuffing with fresh herbs, then rubbed the turkey with oranges and stuffed it. I went back to sleep for an hour, then got up and made sweet potato-carrot puree with creme fraiche and two apple pies. I gave my neighbor the bag of potatos and he made them in his kitchen. Friends brought nuts, chocolate, and wine. We heated up rum punch and it made the kitchen smell like apples and allspice. The turkey reached a nutty brown color and we took it out. We threw in the pies. Damian put his green bean casserole (the kind you eat at church suppers) in the oven to warm up. Travis and I snapped the tops off the fresh green beans and cooked up a bunch in a little butter and garlic. The neighbor showed up with the potatos, and brought a homemade cheesecake. Damian made fresh cranberry sauce. Travis finished the beans and I made a lush tub of gravy from the turkey pan drippings. Someone started carving the turkey in the next room. Bottles of wine appeared and were opened with satisfying pops. GF lit the Lily Munsterish candleabra, a grandiose thing we found last year at Target, and put it in the livingroom on the coffee table. The tree glittered. The candles burned. Everyone heaped their plates with food and gravy. When no one could eat any more everyone flopped down on couches and the floor and watched Auntie Mame. Later, inexplicably, we all roared through four or five kinds of cheese, literally licking the rinds.

Yesterday GF and I had great plans to go to the gym, but instead we did a little work and GF surpised me with a spontaneous Dream Date. She took me out to a nice restaurant where I had mussels, then lamb in the most amazing reduction, which I am still thinking about. Then we went to see the movie The Queen, which was remarkably emotionally gripping. If you were wondering whether you still could cry at Diana's funeral, the answer is Yes. A lot.

Today is a late start, but we have sworn to really, really go to the gym today. I have to. I think my cholesterol must be at record levels. But first, I think I'll help myself to just a bite of leftover pie. Then I'll sit next to the Christmas tree, and look at it, and think about all the people I love who are gone, or far away. And I'll miss them, but feel only the tiniest bit guilty that I'm all alone with GF, and the cats, and the gentle crunching sound of plastic garland.

I wish I was more surprised

2006-12-13T23:07:00.000-08:00

I'm Caligula. Who knew? And I thought that girlhood love of horses was just . . . dykey.

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
You are Gaius Caesar Germanicus - better known as Caligula!

Third Emperor of Rome and ruler of one of the most powerful empires of all time, your common name means "little boots". Although you only reigned for four years, brief even by Roman standards, you still managed to garner a reputation as a cruel, extravagant and downright insane despot. Your father died in suspicious circumstances, you were not the intended heir, and one of your first acts as Emperor was to force the suicide of your father-in-law. Your sister Drusilla died that same year; faced with allegations that your relationship with her had been incestuous, you responded, bafflingly, by declaring her a god.

You revived a number of unpopular traditions, including auctions of properties left over from public shows. When a senator fell asleep at one such auction, you took each of his nods as bids, selling him 13 gladiators for a vast sum. You attempted to have your horse, Incitatus, made into a consul and hence one of the most powerful figures in Rome. It was granted a marble stable with jewels and a staff of servants. At one point you forced your comrade Macro to kill himself - in much the same vein as your father-in-law - accusing him of being his wife's pimp. You, of course, were having an affair with said wife at the time.

Things went from bad to worse. When supplies of condemned men ran short in the circus, you had innocent spectators dragged into the arena with the lions to fill their place. You claimed mastery of the sea by walking across a three-mile bridge of boats in the Bay of Naples; kissed the necks of your lovers, whispering sweet nothings like "This lovely neck will be chopped as soon as I say so,"; dallied with your sister's lover and made her pull her unborn child out of her womb prematurely. Towards the end of your reign, you had a golden statue of yourself made and dressed each day in the same clothes you yourself wore. When you eventually died, the terrified people of Rome refused to believe that such a cruel reign could ever end, and believed you to be alive for years afterwards.

three down

2006-12-13T21:46:00.000-08:00

Three exams down; one to go. I've been off-line at home most nights till recently, since my airport card had a conflict with my roommate's wireless server. It's kept me from internet shopping. I know I can write at night off-line and save the document to post later, but there's something about writing on line that makes blogging easier.

Anyway, the semester draws to a close. I'd like to be able to say I aced all my exams, or bombed them, but the truth is I did ok on all of them so far, and left the room knowing precisely what I had done right--and what I had messed up. Contracts--the class I worked the hardest to stay on top of--was the most satisfying exam. Open book and open computer, it rewarded preparation and organization. I went in to that exam with an outline bristling with multi-colored tabs and filled with red-highlighted Restatements (Second, of course). Sometimes I was flinging myself out into space answering those questions. I think I missed things and got some things wrong. I talked at length about a parol evidence problem, for example, without ever managing to use the words "parol evidence."

Criminal Law was the exam I feared most. Closed book, it seemed that we not only had to memorize endless information, but apply it quickly and with precision and economy as well. Again, I felt when I got in there as if I was bursting with things to say--more than I had time to write. So much more, in fact, that i left myself too little time to round out the last question. I ended with the word "mens," in mid-sentence and mid-thought, trying to explain the mens rea that a prosecutor would have to prove for a battery charge. It should have been simple--I had already done the more difficult one for attempt, with the enhancements you have to apply for inchoate crimes such as conspiracy, attempt, and accomplice liability--but I hadn't left myself enough time. I walked out of that one kicking myself. In a good way, I guess.

Today was Property. I thought Property was a slam dunk--until I started really studying and realized how much information I had to memorize. I did what I could, but I definitely felt tiny details escaping me today as I tried to remember them. The difference between covenants and equitable servitudes? DIdn't seem to know it--though I knew future interests and estates cold. But we were not asked about these, alas. Adverse Possession? Yes--at least I knew adverse possession. I made up NO ACHE to help me remember: notorious and open, actual, continuous, hostile, and exclusive occupation of someone else's land in an effort to claim title for one's self. Joint Tenancy? I knew Joint Tenancy. Four unities, right? Time, Title, Interest, and . . . something beginning with P. Place? Didn't make sense. But say place.

Even though the answer is . . . Possession.

Idiot.

Ah well. On to the three ring circus of Torts. And after Saturday, my first semester of law school is over.

And no matter how well I didn't do, or how well I did, it's almost 1/6 over. And that, as the phoenix-like Martha would say, is a Good thing.

turkey hand

2006-11-22T20:57:00.000-08:00

I wanted to write Happy Thanksgiving, but it hardly seems fair to stand behind a celebration of the beginning of the upper North American project of conquest and genocide, as brought to you by the English. So I decided to wish you all happy fellowship, which is what Thanksgiving is supposed to celebrate, in theory. At least, that's what they tell us in second grade when we are making our hand turkeys. But then I realized that the other part of Thanksgiving is sheer gratitude for survival. Those darn Pilgrims were just happy to be alive. And it seems, with apologies to those whose survival was snuffed out by said Pilgrims, that survival is not such a bad thing to be thankful for.

Growing up in the 1960s, I got the usual spiel about the first Thanksgiving, from the unexamined perspective of the Pilgrims. How happy it was. How we all had to be grateful for the harvest, for surviving the autumn, for peace with our neighbors. In New England, where I am from, the language of the local tribes has sunk into the land for hundreds of years now. Lake Winnipisaukee. Mount Monadnok. Mount Chocorua. Big Squam Lake. Mount Passaconway. Kangamangus highway. Penacook. All Indian names. All those people gone, mostly wiped out and finally, driven into Canada. The great chief of the Pennacooks was Passaconway, the Merlin and Arthur of the New World, six feet tall and a wondrous magician, able to wipe out the white invaders but choosing not to do so, keeping peace treaty after peace treaty until he himself was finally driven north out of the lands his people had lived on for centuries. Born as early as 1555, he is said to have live beyond 100 and to have finally been taken in a burning sled up into the sky, like Elijah.

Then there was Chocorua. Sometimes he is given another name, but this chief trusted his son to the care of a white friend when he went on a hunting trip. The boy ate rat poison left out for varmints in a bowl of porridge, and died. When his father returned, he went wild with grief, and set about massacreing as many settlers as possible. When they finally cornered him at the top of a steep peak, he leapt to his death, but not before cursing the land and all its inhabitants.

Many scholars have written eloquently about primitivism, about the lure of the fantasy of unfettered freedom that indiginous peoples symbolize to many westerners. I wonder if this is part of the attraction of Thanksgiving, but I wonder if it is more ambivalent and vacillating in its fetishism than stable on one side or the other. It's not that you are the Indian, or the Pilgrim, but that you can be the Pilgrim and the Indian too. Isn't that so American? That kind of identification seems predicated on a certain security as a survivor, doesn't it? You know you will survive, so you have the luxury of being either side, or both sides at once.

There is a road just north of where I grew up, a dirt road running nine miles through the wilderness, that once housed an entire settlement. Now all that is left are the cellarholes of farms, schoolhouses, taverns. These people moved on when the Ohio valley and beyond opened up. They felt Chocorua's curse on their farms, tiring eventually of pulling one granite boulder after another out of the sandy soil in a vain attempt to plow. They kept the exodus going after the Civil War, taking their doors and expensive windows off their hinges and frames, leaving the snow and rain to sift in and quietly pull the houses apart with soft fingers. In the heart of what used to be a town there is a tall rock where a minister famously spoke in good weather to the congregants below, exhorting them to cling to each other in the wilderness. It is still known as Pulpit Rock. If you go there you can hear the river bubble on the rocks nearby, and hear the wind in the leaves.

Our house was built in 1780. A man named Sturtevant climbed an enormous pine tree and surveyed the land around it, eventually building several houses, including ours. It served as a summer camp for girls from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen sixties. Supposedly the girls dressed as Indians and rowed out on the lake in canoes. They had rituals and songs about warriors, adventure, and magic. They gave themselves and their lodges Indian names.

In the fall when I was little we gathered the flaming orange and yellow leaves from the road for our school bulletin boards. We made Indian headdresses out of construction paper and string. In late October or early November the chill might warm for a week or two to 60 or even 70 degrees--Indian summer. Some said it was called that because the warm weather had meant new attacks on white colonists. Indian summer was a scary time once.

We played on stone walls covered with moss and thought nothing of it. When you walk in the woods up there, even in dense trees, you will cross stone walls. Beautifully built stone walls that remain sturdy and thick, stretching on over the tops of the hills. And you know that you are walking in someone's field, and that it has been reclaimed these long years past by the trees and the pine needles and the underbrush. I wonder if these farmers thought they would stay forever.

I'm not sure what kind of alibi or consolation it is to remember the Indians like Passaconway, who could have wiped everyone out but chose peace. I'm not sure where it gets you to think about why people like disidentifying with the rulers they are and identifying with the people they have wiped out. I like to think about Passaconway, though. I wonder why someone so powerful and intimidating chose diplomacy and forbearance.

I remember the giant pine trees in our driveway at home, sighing in the wind. Sometimes you could see the silhouette of a great horned owl in one of them. Of course we never felt like pilgrim stock. We were children free on the land. We were powerless yet we had all the wealth of exuberant childhood, and all the righteousness of people who were not grownups. We had survived the centuries to be there, yet we would never forget what the land whispered to us, or so we thought. We were so American. We were Indians, with Pilgrim futures. We still are.

Breaking the Syndrome

2006-11-11T10:19:00.000-08:00

If you are anything like me, you experienced a roller-coaster feeling on Tuesday night. By "roller-coaster" I mean that mix of queasy and happy, alien and familiar in your stomach that started to set in as the poll numbers came back. Like a middle-aged person who has found love again, I felt hope, and it was a strange feeling.

Remember 1992? Remember how it felt after the bleakness of the long Reagan-Bush era to see the country choose someone intelligent, liberal, vibrant, and in touch?

That night I celebrated with friends now long gone from my life, sitting around the tv with champagne and cheering as the states came in for Clinton. I was just thirty years old and the country had come to its senses for the first time since I had been old enough to cast my vote at eighteen for Jimmy Carter in the Reagan landslide.

I don't even have to say how much has happened in the last fourteen years, besides pointing out that I can't believe it's been fourteen years. The personal and political tragedies that have ocurred in the interim seem common to people all over. Very few of us have not lost jobs or seen our wages stagnate or fall. Some have gotten rich on real estate, but not the people I know. My friends have battled depression, illness, unemployment. When we looked to the national mood, it routinely confirmed the bleakness in our hearts.

There was little joy in soldiering on, though we did. Of course Howard Dean was ousted by the crypt-keeping party elite, the compromisers and slick operators like Kerry and Hillary who sold out so long ago they can't remember who they were. They voted for a war we knew was wrong, and what was worse, we knew as we watched them that they knew it was wrong, too. We watched them lose and we didn't care. They were a bad TV show we dutifully sat down to because it was a habit from younger days and there was nothing better on. Like ER.

So last Tuesday was a revelation. As the numbers came in and I watched the tide turn, I felt something lifting and moving away. People were coming to their senses. They finally saw this administration for what it is--an abusive husband who isolates you from your friends, beats and exiles your sons and daughters, cuts your spending allowance while demanding more and more of your labor, lavishes scarce resources on opportunistic cronies that prop up his masculinity, and pays for his self-indulgent new gadgets by mortgaging the family farm.

Like battered wives, the nation returns over and over again to these strong men, these people who threaten you with fear and violence, who take from you and tell you that you need to be taken from, who tell you that you are evil and immoral and must be punished. Republican hegemony has created and played on the masochistic psyche of our guilty culture. We know we are pillaging the earth but we don't care. Beat me daddy. I'm a bad, bad girl.

After a while, though, even whips and chains can become routine. So maybe our bored consumers are ready for a less perverse adventure in political optimism. Maybe they are ready to like themselves enough to end the ridiculous blood and penance kick of the post 9-11 neofascists, and get on with being grownups in a morally-nuanced world.

How did you feel when you watched the tv this week? Surprised? I would like to say that this feeling I experienced when I saw state after state turn blue was happiness, or even exultation, but I think it was more basic than that.

I think I just felt relief.

Ima peach

2006-10-18T23:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks Hilaire and LucyRain for this fun test.

The Peach
Random Gentle Love Master (RGLMf)

Playful, kind, and well-loved, you are
The Peach.

For such a warm-hearted, generous person, you're surprisingly experienced in both love and sex. We credit your spontaneous side; you tend to live in the moment, and you don't get bogged down by inhibitions like most women your age. If you see something wonderful, you confidently embrace it.

Your exact opposite:
The Nymph

Deliberate Brutal Sex Dreamer

You are a fun flirt and an instant sweetheart, but our guess is you're becoming more selective about long-term love. It's getting tougher for you to become permanently attached; and a girl who's in a different place emotionally might misunderstand your early enthusiasm. You can wreck someone simply by enjoying her.

Your ideal mate is adventurous and giving, like you. But not overly intense.

DREAD: The Battleaxe

CONSIDER: The Peach, The Playstation, or The Window Shopper

Link: The 32-Type Dating Test by OkCupid - Free Online Dating.
My profile name: sfrajett

the competition

2006-10-16T15:43:00.000-07:00

After working all weekend to revise legal writing memo number one, due today by noon, I have a little breathing room. Property is cancelled this week, although there is a makeup Criminal class tomorrow in that time slot (but not today! and not Wednesday!) I could be studying Contracts, but I'd rather blog.

Contracts gets me down. I enjoy the reading so much and I hate the class itself. Contracts is evil. Something happens to my mind when I get there. No matter how much or how little time I spend on the reading, I always feel blank and unbalanced. Today we did math. We calculated, or attempted to calculate, damages. We read a case where a lady had bad plastic surgery and ruined her nose. The doctor had promised her beauty and perfection, and delivered disaster. We had to plug in figures and variously calculate restitution, reliance, and expectation damages for her. I missed that she would still pay the hospital, since she was actually suing the doctor. How did I miss that? Dumb.

I think I have mentioned that the girl sitting next to me bugs me. She started out nice but then I think decided that I wasn't very smart since I never answer his questions very well. So she is snappish. I think she worries I'll ask her for something. Competititive people are like that. They always worry that in a world of finite resources, someone will try to take away from them what they have justly earned. I don't want to think about her. Why do I have to think about her? I feel this way about school often. I can't keep myself apart enough to remain unruffled by the bizarre emotions of these first-time graduate students. If I try to hang out with them, though, something is never right.

There she sits, typing furiously next to me in two classes, three days a week, driving me insane.

We are different species. She is trying to be smart, but she talks like a Valley Girl so the boys will like her. I have spent my life learning to be critical, and I don't care who knows it. Her smile is brittle under the strain of trying to seem nicer than she feels herself to be. A lot of the things I say and think would be considered mean and judgmental, or "too intense," by people like her, people in their twenties. She is compulsively overprepared. I gave up briefing cases weeks ago when I realized that it took up enormous amounts of time merely for the benefit of helping professors teach their classes by calling on you and having you recite facts. She is the kind of girl who would have a Mean People Suck sticker, or at least, agree with it. I am a mean person. I suck.

I like to judge people, measure them, put them in categories, find their limitations, then fall in love with them when they try hard to be smart, or interesting, or kind. I like passionate people. I like people who are messy and unruly. You would think this was the very definition of a young person, but in fact, young people are rigid. Very young people are still worried about what other people will think of them. Other young people. Their professors. Job interviewers.

When people, any people, are worried about what other people will think about them, they make you feel that way, too. You know the feeling--you suddenly feel too loud, too cynical, too fat, too old, too learned, too butch, too opinionated. Too much. People in their twenties can make you feel like that. A lot of women of all ages make each other feel like that. Women in general have a lot in common with twenty-somethings in the way they monitor other people's behavior. Women are idealists. So are twenty-somethings. Idealists want a utopia. They want purity and goodness. They want to uniformity so that the rules can work. They also compete with each other. Monitor, compete. Two sides of a coin that replicates itself, mother to daughter, down through the ages.

Men, they are angels for remembering to breathe. But women? They'll drive you crazy. They drive me crazy.

GF came to visit me for the first time this weekend. She has offered before, but I have insisted on getting the hell out of here instead. This weekend she had a conference paper to write and wanted to work in the law library. We spent the whole day Saturday sitting quietly next to each other getting work done. It felt heavenly. Getting her away from the stresses of our apartment--two needy Siamese cats and a running toddler pounding the upstairs floorboards day in and day out--made us both realize that we enjoy each other a lot. Even just sitting quietly, working.

GF and I fight sometimes under the strain of it all. Not this weekend, thank goodness, but sometimes. She calls me a beast. I call her a horrible person. At some point it blows over like a summer storm. It is never about anything except its own energy released. The energy of idealism, of being nice, of being women. Women and lesbians in a stern world.

I think maybe it is the best kind of feminism to fight with women, to tell them what you think of them, to forgive them and love them again, to let them be themselves in a world where only men are allowed to march differently. I wish I could crack the manic achiever facade of the mad typing girl. I wish she would blow up or calm down. Throw things or laugh. If she did we could be friends. But her mask is tight on her head, and she's not coming up for air until after exams on December 16th. Tll then, we'll be at an impasse--she with her pursed lips and flying fingers on one side of the long table, me with my rolling eyes and slouchy sweaters on the other side. Worlds, genders, generations apart.

Unless I kill her first.

Solidarity

2006-10-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

Half way through our second section of Contracts, the room started to get tense. Forty minutes earlier I had asked someone how far she thought we'd get in the reading. She looked down at my open page covered in highlighting. "Oh we'll NEVER get that far," she assured me. I certainly haven't read to where you are. If we do, you'll be the best-prepared one!" I laughed uneasily. I wasn't so sure.

Thirty minutes in, the professor called out a case and page number. I heard several indrawn hisses from the seats around me. The girl next to me muttered "Oh Jesus" under her breath. Suddenly I realized that the whole class was worried. Would he get beyond where anyone had read, or would he stop at the very precipice of our preparation?

We marched on, working our way through the textbook. I watched every minute tick by on my computer clock. On through the cases I knew, into the thicket of discussion notes and hypotheticals that provided filler. One note concerned a man who checked a parcel of furs and sued when the checkroom lost it. The checkroom insisted that the disclaimer on his ticket stub amounted to a contract. The case referrred to a "bailer" and a "bailee" in a most confusing manner. The language was convoluted and archaic, and included several confusing court results. The appellate judges had disagreed about whether the man should get a thousand dollars or 25, as per the stub disclaimer. I had barely noticed it in my careful reading of the surrounding cases.

"Ms. Sfrajett." My heart stabbed. I felt it stab. With five minutes to go, he called on me.

No problem. I scanned the case. No highlighting. No notes. Why had I not written any notes? He asked me who won. I couldn't say. I read it again. I gave one result, but that wasn't the one he meant. He badgered me for the final ruling. I swear I couldn't find it in the oddly-worded argument. One guy piped up from across the room that it was hard to tell what it said. The professor moved on, just as I found the answer. The court held that the ticket was not a contract becuase the ticketholder thought it was just a ticket. But I was too late. I remained an idiot, unredeemed in the eyes of my peers. The ex-English professor. What a joke!

Class ended and the room erupted. I heard one woman behind me complain bitterly that she hadn't been able to tell what he was asking when he called on her. She said she knew he thought she was stupid.

I didn't think she was stupid. I don't think anybody else did, either. The person I had spoken with in the library laughed about how she had nearly peed herself when he started jumping pages. I laughed back. What can you do?

I thought about the guy across the room who had piped up in my defense. The relief when class ended was palpable in people's voices, as they rushed out of the room in a warm wind. I felt it all around me.

Solidarity.

A Gay Wedding

2006-09-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, gf and I flew to Massachusetts for a gay wedding. I remember getting the first draft of the ceremony on email a week or two before. "Oh no," I told gf, as I gazed in horror at the clauses of a Pablo Neruda poem, something codependent about your hand being my hand and my hand being your hand. "It's so . . . sentimental!"

I also freaked out about the date. A whole weekend spent travelling in the middle of the semester. Flights with two legs each way so we could afford them. A day of missed classes on Friday, and Monday morning missed as well. And what--with my year of overweight unemployment wardrobe--to wear?

"Why, why do gay people have to get married?" I wailed. Why indeed. Weddings are a drag. At my sister's wedding, my mother freaked out and wouldn't let me stay at the house. All the lesbians sat at one table together. None of us felt very comfortable dancing. Weddings seem always to be more for the older people than the people getting married. Weddings are about the fact that you made your parents happy
1. by actually finding someone unwary enough to marry you
2. by giving them the occasion to show their own siblings and cousins that they are not such dysfunctional parents that they can't produce reproducers, and
3. by giving them the chance to look as if they are big spenders.

Now, a gay wedding to go to, for one of my oldest friends. The first gay wedding I'd ever been invited to, and that rarity of rarities besides, a LEGAL one. I'd been asked to co-officiate. Because I don't live in Massachusetts, I couldn't be the "official for a day" that married them, but I could help the official. I could write something sweet to say. Ugh! Now I had to find something to wear AND do wedding homework.

GF and I flew into Providence and were picked up at the airport by friends of my friend. They had an SUV with a navigation system that talked. They had named her Dolly, and we joked about what would happen if Dolly snapped. What if you caught her on a bad day, and she was drunk and maudlin, feeling unappreciated? Would that calm, valium-coated calm crack? What if we took the opposite route from the one she patiently outlined? Would she swear at us, or pout quietly? Would she take her revenge by luring us somewhere completely out of our way?

Not having many friends wealthy or bourgeois enough for SUVs, let alone with navigation systems, GF and I marvelled at Dolly, and the lesbians who used her so callously. We patted the creamy leather seats and laughed at all their jokes. Later that afternoon, we marvelled at the big bed and breakfast on Buzzard's Bay where we had luxurious rooms paid for by my friend, who wanted us to come and knew we couldn't otherwise. You could see the ocean from the windows at the headboard of our king-sized bed. Lesbians with money. How dreamy it felt to be swept into the soft rush of comfort, where material things were mostly taken care of and people were free to focus on their emotions, their friendships, their families. How nice to escape our apartment where bored cats clamored constantly for attention, and the toddler upstairs regularly erupted in a lengthy, head-splitting trot up and down the entire length of the apartment.

GF always seems to look nice, and has a decent wardrobe of teaching clothes and snappy outfits she pulls together on a shoestring. I have one suit and a bunch of polo shirts, but that suit jacket and a brief trip to Dress Barn Woman resulted in some passable ensembles for the dress reheasal dinner and the wedding day itself. The couple who drove us and another couple we knew were staying in the B & B with us. We all drank champagne and chatted in our underwear as we changed for dinner. Suddenly, it was festive.

The dinner was at one of the brides' family house. We all showed up in our suits and drank up their liquor and ate and ate. We made my friend getting married sing Vikki Carr--something she used to love to do 20 years ago. She pretended to protest, then sailed off on "It Must Be Him," accompanied by the rest of us in a rousing chorus. It was a brief, but very welcome camp moment, a female impersonation of female impersonation that offered a respite from the lovely soft normativity of it all. I kept looking around and pinching myself. "It's a gay wedding, " I wanted to say out loud, to the various people I didn't know but tried to chat with. It didn't feel any diffeent from any family event, any wedding I had been to. But it was.

Later that evening, all of us rather drunk, our group sat alone with the brides and talked about relationships. I couldn't believe they were actually going to be able to be legally married in the morning. It felt like something that happened to other people, people on the inside. Not to people you knew well. I found myself looking at them speculatively. I felt like they were different from us, would always be different from us now. They had turned their backs on the sexual revolution, on the "We don't need no piece of paper from the City Hall keeping us tied and true" era of Joni and Janis. They were moving away from the radical sexual politics of the 90s. They were taking vows to be monogamous, to join their stuff together.

They were matter of fact about it, but I wondered whether we would do it too if we could, and how it would feel. I thought about what it feels like to be defined by a lack of options, and tried to imagine the choices I would make if I had them. I gave up because I just couldn't imagine what it would actually feel like. if I could imagine such a thing, would I be a lesbian any more? Or something else?

I became acutely aware of my own guardedness. I am always guarded around straight people--the more normative they are, the more guarded I am. I suppose this is something like the way people of color feel in crowds of white people, though with differences. Some straight people are cooler than others, but few of them get how it feels to be a freak on an everyday basis. Accomodating while being fiercely ourselves is the balancing act of our queer lives. Don't worry, boss, we're really ok EVEN THOUGH we are gay. Don't worry Dad, we won't embarrass you, and you might be surprised how much you like hanging out with us. Don't worry, student of mine, I am your out professor but I really am thinking about World War One poetry right now. It's ok, girl who sits next to me in my law school classes, my body space won't take up too much of yours.

Gay people live like this all the time. We get on a train, and people stare at us, and we pretend not to notice, or care. We get gas in a rural area and leap back into the car as fast as we can. We smile, or don't smile. We try not to seem too comfortable. We rarely say hello to people's children, even when they say hello to us.

At the wedding we were surrounded by lots of heterosexual family, in this case the local family of one of the brides. Family usually means high guardedness mode for me. These were not artists or intellectuals, either, so there were no real bohemian queerish exceptions. They were resolutely normal, married, with kids and houses and jobs. BUT they were there for a lesbian wedding. The secret was not only out of the bag, as it usually is, but it was the subject of the event. The subject.

Can you dig it? That means even the thinnest layer of genteel closet that stubbornly sticks to the social relations around any event not dominated by gay people was GONE. I'm talking about decorum, about social logic, about the truth of relationships. The center was gay, you see. No one could be erased. The species in the center defined other parts of it. We were not aggregate particles, but the main event. And that, my friends, was mind-blowing. That was was made everything lurch slightly out of its normal perspective into something shaded differently. Gay people were not a majority of the attendees by any means. But we were not a minority, or outsiders, because the rules defining us as those things were not possible given the nature of the event.

When the violinist started playing and the flower girls sullenly tossed their petals, I felt like my whole body was being squeezed. My throat closed with emotion. My friend came down the aisle to stand in front of me, escorted by two burly gay men. I blinked back the tears that welled up immediatley with the first strains of music. I looked around, and everyone was blinking back tears. Then her lover came in, and walked down slowly, with a sideways smile. Friends came forward and spoke about the two of them, and about love. I was supposed to speak about evolution in relationships, but having consulted with GF, decided Pater's exhortation to live each moment today was better than talking about measuring a relationship by its pastness. Burn with today, I told them. Let today pulse through you.

Then it was time. We gave them the rings and they said their vows. "Now you will shelter each other," we told the two women getting married that day. "Now you will not feel the rain." Everyone held their breath.

The woman co-officiating with me then tried to say "By the power invested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts" but her voice broke at "Commonwealth." Everyone let out a sigh. Sobbing, she squeezed out "I now pronounce you married!" They kissed, and all you could hear was sniffling in the room.

And then, a loud, long cheer.

google book search and irony

2006-09-24T22:23:00.000-07:00

Is it weird to you that the school that didn't tenure me bought my book for its library? Just wondering.

Sweet

2006-09-13T12:36:00.000-07:00

Property was cancelled today. That meant that my entire section--60 people, or 1/3 of the Class of 2009-- got out of school at 11am instead of 2:45pm. I haven't see such hilarity in years. I actually heard one guy tell his friends he was getting drunk before noon. I don't think he was kidding.

Sometimes the sections are broken into half sections for smaller classes. My half section--A1--went out to lunch together to celebrate our good luck. We sat at long table in an Italian restaurant and ate pasta and chatted.

It felt so nice to actually talk to people. One girl said we should try doing this once a month.

Sweet.

remote control

2006-09-12T14:55:00.000-07:00

Getting my first paper back is a good occasion to blog about what it feels like to be a student again. I look at the short, loopy cursive messages tracing the borders of my Legal Writing assignment, a "single case analysis" that examines a situation in light of a precedent case, and hypothesizes how that situation should turn out. "Good that you use a direct quotation here!" it applauds on the first page. "Clarify," it commands, elsewhere.

Going to law school is a schizophrenic experience. The first half of the week, I hate it; Thursday and Friday, I like it very much. I find the reading fascinating; I'm not so wild about wandering the halls as a student. I like getting lost in the material; I hate how in order to do it I have to drive away from gf, both of us inevitably in tears.

So my ups and downs have a lot to do with leaving home and getting ready to return; with tough material and material I feel less alienated from, and from the simple material effect of scheduling and endurance issues. Still, I spend a lot of time thinking about being a student across the divide from the teacher. I think about what it means to have the norm be 23 years old, and how that might make some teachers feel as if they are talking to children, or building knowledge up in a person with nothing for a foundation. I suppose I am talking about infantilization, but I am also reaching for something about the powerful effect it can have on students when they feel constructed by their teachers. Constructed as tedious morons, or as remarkable young people, or as an odious task to get out of the way so that research can be done, or as sensitive, lovely thinkers.

How do you think about your students? Do you think they know?

I have Contracts on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings from 9 to 9:50, and again Monday afternoon from 4 to 4:50. Property is also on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, from 1:30 to 2:45. When I come back from seeing gf for an all-too-brief weekend, I face a dreary first part of the week. Contracts is taught by a renowned expert in his sixties who flees the room as soon as class is over. Today it was my turn to be called on, and I did the best job I could presenting the case, in which a man read a newspaper ad for mink stoles on sale for a dollar at Abraham and Strauss on a first-come, first-served basis, presented himself, was told the sale was for women only, and sued. I successfully contrasted it to the Nebraska Seed Company case, pointing out that the mink stole advertisement was clear, and for a stipulated item at a specific price and quantity (unlike the Seed Company case, where the company got off the hook when it couldn't fill a customer order because the amount of seed it offered for general sale was not specified). When Professor Contracts asked me what the point of the first-come, first-served stipulation was, I had already answered the question (a specific amount of goods) so I thought he was asking something else, maybe about performance. When I attempted to explain this, (the customer presented himself, which satisfied the requirements for performance on his part) I was told with some disgust that we all knew the definition of first-come, first-served.

Later I asked a question about the wording of an acceptance and whether it constituted a closing of the deal or merely a preliminary negotiation. I asked it to get back on the horse, but it wasn't satisfying, even though he liked the question.

Property is taught by a corporate gal who makes very detailed lecture notes. She is still unsure of herself, though very interesting to listen to, and very smart. It is clear that she wants the class to like her, but she also wants them to be a little afraid of her. I try to volunteer examples in her class, but I think maybe I'm stating the obvious. Her voice always drops, almost to a whisper, when she reluctantly says my last name. She has never been unkind, but she has a way of making me feel like it is probably better just to keep quiet and continue typing my notes. Mostly, I do.

The second part of the week is much better. Torts is Thursday and Friday mornings from 8:30 to 9:45, and Criminal Law is Thursday and Friday afternoons from 1:30 to 2:45. I like both of these classes a lot, mostly because I like the teachers as well as the reading. Torts is taught by a guy with a fabulous flair for absurdly ridiculous hypotheticals that get more and more outrageous over the course of the class period; Criminal Law, by a precise, very smart prosecutor with faint traces of a Maine accent. Both of these teachers are very kind. There is something engaged about them--a genuine interest in the students they call on. They like what they do, and they like the people they teach. You can tell. Their classrooms are more relaxed, but no less rigorous. Most of the time, people are raising their hands to volunteer answers. When these professors call on you, you feel as if it is your moment to shine, to engage the material. NOT your moment to fail. These professors are comfortable in the classroom, and comfortable with themselves. They are passionate about their material, and not afraid to show it. They like their lives. They like us.

I'm sure it doesn't hurt that both Torts and Criminal Law are concerned with the vagaries of human nature, but this doesn't entirely explain the dread I feel in the beginning of the week, and the happiness I experience on Thursdays and Fridays. What I am trying to say, perhaps not successfully, is that it I can pretty much tell how the teachers in my large lecture classes feel about individual students, about their roles as professors, about their classes. I can tell which professors are enjoying class and which think it is a bother. And this affects how I feel about being there, about myself, about my capabilities and what I know.

Did I mention that some classes make me feel stupid? Worthless? Like a loser? Other classes I feel excited. I am not threatened by what I don't understand; only intrigued. I sit on the edge of my seat, sometimes talking, sometimes not, but always in the fray. I feel lifted up and carried along by someone else's mind, by their expertise. At the end of class I realize I have been flying.

So this is what it feels like. Throw in a Legal Writing class Tuesdays from 3 to 3:50 and Fridays from 10 to 10:50, and a Legal Research class Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 to 10:50, and you have my schedule for the week. These last are gnat-like classes that fly around my head and pester me while I am trying to get the work done for the big classes that will determine my life. These little classes are basically pass-fail. These are the classes that my heart longs to love, since they best resemble what I am used to in academic work, but I cannot love them. They require a stern eye and a cold cheek. Turn away from their voluptuous primary- and secondary-source siren songs, their vixenlike concise arguments, and master the other material that you will be evaluated on at the end of the semester. In one. Single. Exam.

Did I mention that the entire semester hinges on one single exam in each class?

So I don't like being a student, but I do like learning new things. I don't like the pressure, but I do like the accomplishment. I don't like the student-teacher divide, the strange passivity that can be enforced in a classroom, the odd disconnect that happens when you become part of a bullied mass. The solidarity of that mass with each other. The silent compact not to speak under such conditions.

I like being in a classroom where that isn't happening, and oddly enough, when I am in this better classroom, I feel the divide between teacher and students disappear. I know it is gone because I am no longer thinking how much it sucks to have lost my job, to be stuck in a classroom feeling like an idiot. I forget. I marvel at the patient logic of law and its painstaking rules. I get lost in ideas, and contemplate marvelous machines.

When I was teaching, I used to complain about students who seemed to have a "remote-control" attitude, where they got to sit back and watch me dance and perform for them. I felt harried, defensive, judged. Now it is easier to see what kinds of teaching contributes to that, and what breaks it down. Sarcasm, disgust, and condescension build it up. Zany humor, earnest engagement, intellectual and moral passion, self-deprecation, and mutual respect and admiration break it down.

It's what I think I always knew, but from where I sit now, it's just as plain as day.

the few, the proud

2006-09-06T14:54:00.000-07:00

WARNING: This isn't one of my serious-type posts, where I try to be all artsy and tie everything up in some profound bow. This is a newsy, slightly bitchy post. I hope that's ok, because I am feeling slightly bitchy a lot these days, which means you have to listen to it but hey, it's better than depressed. For me, anyway.

I went to my first meeting today. No, not THAT kind of meeting, though after this weekend's multi-martini bender in Midwest City with GF and my best friend from out of town, I probably should go to one of those meetings. No, today's meeting was a chance at last to meet GLBT people at my school. I have been looking forward to it. The group calls itself SOLIS, which stands for something I've already forgotten having to do with Sexual Orientation Legal whatever. I find this acronym very interesting, because it sounds so, well, solitary, which is exactly what I've felt here. Note that the usual name for the gay groups in many law schools is OUTLAW, of which there are chapters all over the country. Now, besides the sly nod the name gives to the way gay behavior has been criminalized in the past, OUTLAW is also a cool acronym because it sounds very OUT. SOLIS, on the other hand, not so out. Maybe masturbatory, as in one of my favorite nineteenth-century euphemisms, "solitary vice." But not exactly loud and proud.

Ok, so I used to teach English, and I'm a little heavy with the close reading, which law school is only intensifying. But I go to this meeting, and there are twelve people. I know, you're wondering, "Where's Jesus?" Me too. But besides this, I'm wondering why the hell there are only twelve gay people in a college of 680 J. D. students and 37 L.L.M. students. To make my heart sink even further, the president of the group applauded the "large turnout."

So you're doing the math, and you're coming up with about 717 students, right? Ten per cent of which, if Kinsey is anywhere near the mark, should be gay. That's 70! Five per cent if you credit recent scholarly insistence that Kinsey overestimated his one in ten. That's 35! Half of that is, well, you get the picture. We didn't even get half of that. The twelve of us waited for our pizzas to arrive (pizzas are apparently the way they get you to show up to organizational meetings at my school), and introduced ourselves to each other. It wasn't hard. And you better believe I memorized each name there like it was my secret agent password to get me out of the war zone.

Now, I understand that the law is a conservative profession. I understand that my school is in the cornfields. I understand that even the people that make it to law school as out GLBT folks tend to stay in big cities, if only to stay alive, get a date, and not go ballistic when they walk by the Federalist Society organization booth.

But we are a public institution less than 150 miles from one of the largest cities in the country. I couldn't help it. Yes, I was crabby. "Is this it?" I asked, loudly. "Is this really a large turnout?"

I regretted saying it almost immediately. Some of the people in the room got that sad, shamed look in their eyes you see when country people think you are making fun of their town. I grew up in the country, and I don't think city life should always or even ever be the measure of value and sophistication. That wasn't what I meant. Certainly this college town is fairly urbane. When you go to the Panera (ok, now I'm getting that look in my eyes) you can see a mix of people that includes genuine farmers in jeans and John Deere caps, ladies with long white hair who look as if they have looms in their houses and pottery wheels in their backyard sheds, Sikh men in turbans, hippies, many different people of color and families of color, professor types, student types, graduate student types, people who haven't quite figured out how to leave here and get on with their lives, people who are various combinations of several of these identities, and more.

In addition, our law school is in the top 25, top 20, or top 15 of the 200 law schools in the country (depending on which ratings system you go to). I certainly don't feel as if this is a second-rate or backwards place. And yet.

Twelve people.

The good news is, I could probably take over the gay organization if I wanted. Hell, I could crown myself Queen of the Night and drop down to my seat in Contracts every morning riding a crescent moon. But all of this doesn't matter if there are no subjects to rule. Where are they? Did they not come? Are they not out? Or--and this is my favorite theory--are they so young and so interested in NOT being alternative that they aren't out yet even to themselves?

On the bright side, I met some very nice people at the meeting. One went to my undergrad college, though much more recently than I--aged thing--did. Two knew people in common that I am friends with at Elite University, though as teachers, not friends in the way I--aged thing--know them. One went to the MidAtlantic university as an undergraduate where I--aged thing--got my PhD. The 2Ls and 3Ls planned barbeques and happy hours, talked of getting a speaker or two, and invited the 1Ls to visit a firm in Midwest City in October.

The best part, though, is that several people in the group are 1Ls, which makes me think that even if Jesus doesn't show up for one of our meetings, talks, barbeques, or happy hours, we'll somehow figure out how to keep our tiny sect alive here in the coming years.

There's my moon idling outside to rapture me off. Gotta go read Torts now, but next time, I promise to tell you all about how truly creepy it is being a student in the machine that is the law classroom.

I won't make you wait long, because it is bugging the hell out of me.

Cocktails in cyberspace

2006-08-31T10:54:00.000-07:00

The hardest part of law school is not the reading, or the sleep deprivation, or the Socratic method, or even living 150 miles from GF and cats in the middle of the cornfields. No, the hardest part of law school is socializing.

Socializing? you say? I know--how lame is that? I have always been proud to think of myself as one of the lesser misfits of academe. To me, at least, I was the girl who could make conversation flow in a standing group of painfully awkward cup-clutchers. I vowed never to be one of those professors whose every social interaction was defined by their role as a teacher or mentor. You know who they are. They date graduate students because they like their intimacy peppered with some kind of professional security. Call it emotional tenure, if you will. In social situations, they lecture people because they are used to it. A friend of mine calls this "talking in paragraphs."

As I write this, I remember that lately I have become aware of my own tendency to talk in paragraphs, or not talk at all. I think maybe I am not so cool as I once thought. At a certain point, I fear, we all become a little teacherly in our lives. These days I find myself frighteningly out of my element. In law school, you are supposed to bond with your classmates. The school tells you that this will get you through, that your study groups will help you excel, that your law school friendships will last the rest of your life. But few of my classmates are older than 25. In fact, a large number of them have come straight from undergrad, despite encouragement on the part of the law school that everyone do something else for a year or two. I don't know what to talk to them about. I worry about seeming lonely, which I am, or tolerated, which would be worse.

I went to a social gathering at a bar during orientation week and anthropologically observed gender behaviors I hadn't seen since high school. Girls in skimpy, singles-bar wear. Boys acting gruff around the girls and each other, trying to be cool. Eventually I found the nerds and married people, but the nerds didn't really want to talk, and the married people sat stoically try to make their husbands or wives not feel excluded. I drank too much and tried desperately to make conversation. I asked people about themselves. People kept asking me about books. The best conversation I had all night was about Joyce, but I think it was more of a lecture than a conversation, though that is of course what I had been invited to deliver. I defended him passionately, then felt sick inside. I had talked too much, and in paragraphs. What if being a teacher meant that the only thing interesting about me was what I could tell people about books?

So right now I want to meet people but I don't really like softball. Beer darts? Do I really have to play beer darts? Lately I have taken to sitting in the atrium and reading, hoping that casual conversations might happen. When one does, I try to pitch in, or laugh, or just remain good-naturedly on the fringes, if that seems right. Today a couple of us passed around a crossword puzzle, and it felt like a major intimacy victory.

The other day I realized I am old enough to be their mother. That my mother was my age when I was one of them.

I try to strike up conversation with a former philosophy grad student. He is 24, but always seems older to me. I feel encouraged when I pass him in the hallway and he stops to talk.

"I'm not sure what the right thing to do is when I see people I just talked to a half an hour ago," he said. ""In these small sections we all keep running into each other. Should I stop and talk or not?"

I laugh, warming to this one. "I know!" I say. "I'm actually wondering how to communicate with people when I feel like everyone's idea of what socializing is is so different. Like, is socializing different for 40-year olds than it is for 23-year olds? Or are we all just eager to talk about the same things?"

"Well, he says, "I guess talking about talking is what you and I talk about."

"Oh, but that's very meta, so I don't know if it counts," I say. Then I add, because I like talking, "Well, I guess if you have already talked to somebody just a few minutes ago, then you can just nod if you are busy and on your way to do something." I know I sound stupid but I'm trying here, ok?

He laughs. "So since we talked here, next time I see you I'll just nod, ok?"

I nod back, but now I feel a little dizzy. So I just had a conversation about NOT having conversations?

It's all too much. I duck into the library and open my laptop. The screen lights up, and rooms telescope out from the back of my computer like a long, familiar corridor. Are those your names on the doors, you bloggers? Are you typing away or reading in your offices, studies, bedrooms? If I think about you all I hear voices, like the voices that echo in a house at a party, and the tinkle of glasses.

I think I hear your voices, familiar voices talking about books and crushes and jobs and graffiti and how much families can drive you up the wall, and children and how much you love seeing them grow up, and how sad it makes you. You talk about your pets. You trade music and poems and favorite movies. You worry and drink too much and work and laugh at yourselves.

I am still in the library, but I am somewhere else now. I know you all are out there, talking to each other and to me, humming, living your lives but touching other people you've never even seen in important and sustaining ways.

I feel lucky to know you. In the rooms you have made, all of you are conversational, strong, and graceful. None of you are clutching your cups.

First week

2006-08-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

"Property Owner" by Andy Dixon

My first week of school was one of the longest weeks of my life. It began with Contracts at 9am in a big auditorium. The teacher is an older guy who looks like the "kindly drill sergeant" character in a war film--stern, unapproachable, ready to take you down for the good of the unit, but all about your growth in the end. He wants us to know words like "demur." We spend an hour on the idea of consideration, or the grounds for evidence that a contract was made. Consideration might include a promise for a promise, a performance, or a bargain. Gifts are not consideration. We look at examples of people caring for their neighbor's escaped bulls, of secretaries' pensions bestowed by grateful CEOs and rescinded by skinflint grandsons, of grandmothers who promise money to grandchildren on the condition they refrain from drinking and using tobacco. Professor Contracts interrogates several of us during the class, but his questions are fair, and if someone clearly does not know the answer, he moves on. He does not, thank heaven, call on me.

The next class is Property. It is taught by a woman who looks to be in her late thirties, a slightly hard femme, very corporate, skin evened out by the best cosmetics. Looking at her you do not have to be told that she worked for a major law firm, that she did the partner track, that she has handled important accounts and made bundles of cash. Professor Property did not make partner for some reason, though she seems like someone a law firm would find very useful. Like many lawyers who leave high-pressure firms for better lives, she is trying her hand at teaching.

From the start of the class it is clear that Professor Property believes in property. Although she passes out short readings (Bentham, Blackstone) reminding us that property cannot exist without the law standing behind it, property is for her far more than a legal fiction. Her eyes flash at the mention of encroachment, her voice loud and strong when she speakes of ownership.

I begin to realize that I actually think deep down in my heart that owning things is wrong. Especially land. Who in the world imagines that they actually own the earth? We are all caretakers, or should be. Pillagers, too often. But owners?

Yes, I believe I feel the gentle stirrings of rebellion in my heart. Still, once you have the system in place, you have to think about its rules. We discuss a case where somebody builds a wall on his property line, and his surveyor messes up, and the foundation stones of his wall jut one inch into his neighbor's yard. The neighbor sues and the court says either the wall has to come down, the one inch of land be sold to the wallbuilder, or the offending stones chipped down. The neighbor won't sell the inch and won't allow the builder to come over and chip away the stones, so the only thing left to do is tear down the wall. The judge, in disgust, splits the court costs even though the builder lost, largely just to penalize the cranky neighbor for being so difficult.

Professor Contracts asks who among us think such a small encroachment is still significant. I raise my hand. After all, an inch is an inch.

Then she asks who thinks it's no big deal, and a number of hands go up. She seems surprised. "Really?" she asks. Then after a moment,she says to the people still holding their hands up, "I'm just curious. How many of you are Democrats?"

I can't believe I heard that one right. I watch as a guy with his hand up who I know is a Mormon snatches his hand out of the air like he'd been burned. I don't think anyone has ever called him a Democrat in his whole life. Later I overhear him talking to another Mormon guy about starting a Republican Law Students club.

Professor Property laughs, pleased with herself. "I just like to test my theories sometimes," she says. I think about how her theories are wrong. After all, I'm practically a socialist, but I think encroachment is encroachment. Mormon guy is obviously a right-winger, but he thinks small encroachments can be handled reasonably between neighbors. You can't make generalizations about people's politics, and you really shouldn't make snide comments about people's religious or political beliefs in a classroom. But what do I know? I'm back to being a student myself, and my job consists of trying to tell professors what they want to hear on exam questions.

A friend of mine who went to an elite law school told me that there were things he liked about being surrounded by conservatives. He said it helped him define for himself what he really believed in.

I think I'm beginning to know what he means.

bedtime blessings on a friday after my first week in law school

2006-08-25T23:57:00.000-07:00

Ah children, such sweet greetings. Sfrajett is very tired. She has spent all week determining contract consideration and property lines and tortfeasors and whether or no you can arrest child molestors for sexual fantasies. GF is passed out on couch. I am home for 2 days. I will tell you stories tomorrow. Thanks more than you know for the beautiful trumpet carillon of welcome, and welcome back, and welcome to the new year to come. Tomorrow, stories. Sleep on, my fellow-journeying friends. I am so glad to have each of you out there, no matter which patch of territory this mission has parachuted you towards.

the perils of orientation

2006-08-19T08:12:00.000-07:00

Late summer has come and gone, and many of us can no longer pretend that the beginning of a new semester isn't here. The difference for me this year is that I am not going back to school to teach it. The old sfrajett has finally left the building. Last week, she bought a new computer, took a carload of stuff downstate, and re-entered the front door as a student. Take Rodney Dangerfield, reimagine him as Phyllis Diller with spiky hair and a nose ring, and you have me, middle-aged and paunchy, trundling through a sea of young, thin, glamorous, incredibly normal twentysomethings at the beginning of their professional lives. Ye gods.

The trip down was itself an excercise in the dangers of being different. Trying to avoid construction in the city, I took an alternate route and ended up lost for an hour and a half in the strange sprawl that bleeds south of the city into the cornfields. Why oh why couldn't I just stick to the script, obediently following the line of cars moving slowly through the dusty sheep pens of changed lanes and orange cones, patiently waiting my turn? Lost, on strange roads with numbers I didn't recognize, I called gf, who patiently helped me navigate with help from google maps. I finally arrived at my new house at 8pm, met the roommate who owns the place, decided he was incredibly sweet, and proceeded to miserably unpack my room. I put flannel sheets on my bed because they seemed soft and comforting. I put a few lamps around the room to get some low-level illumination ambiance going on.

The next day was the first of two packed orientation days for 1Ls. From 830 to 5 we were welcomed, exhorted, flattered, warned, and celebrated. They fed us sandwiches. They reminded us of the next day's mock class. They invited us out to bowling and miniature golf that night.

I returned exhausted to my new house, where I live with three other students, all of them boys. But more on that later. I sat down in the livingroom to watch the finale of So You Think You Can Dance, knowing that my gf and friends in Chicago were all sitting down to watch it together at the same time. I pretended I was with them. I decided to stay in and reread the case we had been given for the mock class, the landmark 1974 New Hampshire labor case Olga Monge v. Beebe Rubber Company. Turns out Olga gets fired because she won't go out with her boss, so she sues NOT for sexual harassment, because such a thing didn't really exist yet, but for breach of employment contract. The NH Supreme Court upholds her lower-court victory, but takes some of her damages away, reasoning that she should only be entitled to lost wages under a contract dispute, not compensation for mental suffering. The decision changes labor law because it argues that an employer cannot terminate an employment contract for bad faith, malice, or retaliation, and that the public has an interest in the fair balance of employer and employee rights.

Next day I nearly oversleep, spring out of bed, slug down some coffee, and dash to day two. There is some anticipation about the mock class because the professor leading it is known as a tough and entertaning interlocutor who chooses his victims according to whimsical categories that appeal to him at any given moment. So for example he may choose students with the same surnames as baseball players or movie actors. Today he has chosen students with common last names, such as Jones. One duplicate name strikes him because, unlike Smith or Jones, it seems unlikely to turn up twice in one class, yet has. This name is Chamberlain. I sigh in relief. My last name, while English, is rare.

Having chosen a Jones and a Chamberlain, he proceeds with his interrogation. What are the facts? How do we know? What is at stake? What is the new rule of law fashioned here? How would this new rule apply to different situations? "Can an employer fire someone because he doesn't like them?" he asks. He decides to muddy the waters. "Can he fire someone because they are stupid?" There is some discussion about whather or not "stupid" constitutes a category of incompetence that could justify termination without malice.

Then he decides to get outrageous. "Ok, so what if Olga is a lesbian?" he asks. "What is the difference between firing someone because they are a lesbian and firing someone because they are stupid?"

I sit there, the only recognizably out lesbian or gay man in a sea of 188 faces, and think about why this example is still ok to bring up as a marketably entertaining example of minority status. If he had asked about Olga's race, he certainly would have been more circumspect about the proximity of color and stupidity. If he had said "gay" instead of "lesbian," it wouldn't have gotten laughs. He says "lesbian" with a big round "L," the way some people say "ho-mo-sexual" with emphasis on every syllable. Pronunciation makes the word strange, unpracticed. Pronunciation can imply that the speaker is unused to this word, and by association, the idea it conveys. At least he didn't say "one-legged" or "one-armed," the way so many people using the lesbian example often do, collapsing disability and sexual variation into one steaming, hilarious package.

The students he calls on are a little upset by the juxtaposition of his examples. One boy stutters that you can't discriminate against a lesbian because sexual orientation is something that a person can't help. "What about stupidity?" the professor asks. More laughs. The boy clarifies his argument, pointing out that lesbianism doesn't affect job performance, whereas stupidity might. He is indignant. I feel that the heart of the class is with him. I love him very much at this moment, and think that this generation of young people is lovely.

But there is that little matter of his argument about what you can and can't help. I ponder it as I sit in my seat towards the back of the auditorium. It is much easier to defend a quality that someone can't help having than a quality they choose. This certainly explains why the gay rights movement has jumped on the biological determination bandwagon in the last few years. But is it fair to defend people's right to be different only if they can't help it? What if Olga chooses to be a lesbian? What if I do? Do I still get protected from hate speech, employment discrimination, violence?

And why is the best and "funniest" example of true minority status still the one-armed lesbian?

I Guess Gay Doesn't Mean Happy

2006-07-17T13:01:00.000-07:00

The incredibly tedious Opening Ceremonies to this year's Gay Games should serve as a stern warning about the terrible price of mainstreaming. For four excruciating hours on Saturday evening, my butt sweated on a hard plastic chair in Soldier Field in 90-plus degree heat as I watched what can only be described as the most miserable high school assembly I have ever had to attend. And the worst part is, I actually paid to be there.

Not so much money as the participants, who should be howling that the best part of the show happened long after they left the stadium, which they had to do if they were competing in the next day's 6am triathalon. Not so much as the suckers who coughed up 100 or 150 bucks a seat. I bought my tickets Friday afternoon, shelling out 35 per plus handling fees for two mediocre seats above the timber line of the stadium. That night, I watched in horror as fistfuls of free tickets were given away at the bars in my neighborhood, apparently because saner people than I had just said no to the 35-dollar base ticket price.

I should have known this was a bad sign, but I consoled myself with having donated money to a "good" cause. And drank another double pint of Harp.

Next day, with enough free tickets in our hands to gain separate entrance for each one of all our various limbs, should we choose to play twister among the stadium seats, my friends and I climbed the ramps to the top of Soldier Field. At 8pm, the start of the festivities, the seats were still fairly empty, though that changed in the next hour to about half full.

The sun was sinking behind the Greek pillars at the top of the old part of the stadium, and it was a beautiful, if sultry, evening. I admit I had my fears when I looked at the organization of the program: five parts to the ceremonies, each with its own theme. First, a "Prologue," with speeches of welcome and the procession of athletes from all over the world. Megan Mullally was supposed to say something.

Second, "Exclusion" would feature a dance of some kind, Kate Clinton, a song by Andy Bell of Erasure, and four legends of women's music--Holly Near, Barbara Higbie, Nedra Johnson, and Teresa Trull. Hmmm. A little slow, but I guess there has to be some solemnity, right?

Then I saw that the third part of the program was called "Oppression."

Oh, no, I thought. This is going to suck.

"Oppression" looked like it would go on forever. Scheduled were speeches by James Hormel, and George Takei, another Andy Bell song, a tribute to Tom Waddell, an award in his name, more speeches, a Jody Watley song,a "rainbow run" against HIV and cancer, and something with the AIDS quilt.

Then would come "Expression." This would feature more dancing, a song by Heather Small, a song by Andy Bell, some marching bands, and Margaret Cho. Are you counting? Are we done yet? Hey, Margaret Cho will be there! How bad could it be?

Oh, then there would be "Ignition" and the lighting of the torch. Cool! I love giant torches!

So the program starts. The athletes march in, and it's really nice to see so many people from so far away. China, for instance. A huge bunch from The Netherlands. Bulgaria. One lone guy from Uganda with a handwritten sign who got a huge ovation. More people from California than from all the other countries combined. Until Chicago showed up. Twenty-one hundred people from Chicago.

The lights go off and all the athletes are holding variously-colored glowsticks, to form a giant rainbow flag on the filed. Cool! How did they get the bands of color so nicely organized? You can see a fuzzy approximation of the colors in the tiny picture above that I took with my cell phone.

Megan Mullally was in a hot little black and white dress and spike heels so high she looked like she was on point. Her voice was rich and warm, and she was relaxed as she slammed the Rupublicans for the politics of exclusion. She was great. We loved her.

Unfortunately, things went downhill from there. I'll summarize by saying we sat though interminable sad and angry speeches. Even Kate Clinton wasn't funny--she just spoke very slowly about how hard it had been to be a female athlete when she was young. OK Kate, but can you tell a story? You were a high school English teacher once, for crying out loud! Can ya give us an illustrative example? It's 92 degrees out here and the only thing to drink is Miller and Bud Light! Pleeeese!

At some point an actor read a gay boy's suicide note. An angry woman raged about the Bush administration. Someone started a speech and I heard, faintly, a man's voice in the stands screaming "We Know!"

Unfortunately, nobody heard him, and the speeches droned on. Andy Bell kept appearing with listless disco anthems. Everyone was wilting. The four women's music ladies belted out an extremely depressing a capella "We are a gentle angry people, and we are singing, singing for our lives," putting the "eee!" in "cliche."

The dance numbers were, well, odd. They featured people in strangely caped costumes and one lone guy in a t-shirt that looked like an International Male take on the wifebeater, and this guy kept flexing his arms beseechingly at the heavens. Maybe he was imploring the Goddess to end it all with a hailstorm. At one point Greg Louganis gave out an award, but I couldn't hear anything because my head had melted and collapsed like a candle.

"Good luck with this," some cute boys said, gesturing at the field as they left the row next to us. By the time the gay marching bands, drill teams, and flag twirlers came on, it was past 11pm, and lots of people had fled the stadium in disgust. The bands were great but my ass was permanently stuck to my seat, and a thin plastic veil of heat grime covered my face and neck. How had we fallen so far? Where was the irony? Where were the drag queens, for heaven's sake? Gays were the people responsible for the best entertainment and cultural production of the twentieth century, and THIS was the best we could do?

The whole thing reminded me of that dreadful queer tv show from the early 90s, the one that took itself so seriously and tried so hard to be politically meaningful and socially non-offensive that it was unwatchable. What was it called? Ugh.

The marching band was terrific. Where had they been for these long three hours? Just as they began making formations, a streaker ran across the field. Everyone perked up immediately.

The streaker surrendered quietly to security guards at the other end of the field, and I blessed him in my heart for having remembered how to be entertaining.

Margaret Cho commented on the streaker, noting that when she saw his balls whizzing by her face, she knew she was at the Gay Games. Everyone laughed, probably because that was the first they had heard of it. Gay? Up until then, a Promise Keepers rally would have been more exciting.

A cool acrobatic troup in tighty whities rolled hamster wheels around the stadium, then somebody lit the torch, and eventually some real pretty fireworks went off, but by then everyone was cross. The worst moment was being one of five people left in the entire stadium to applaud the last song, a terrific number by the Gay Games Mixed Chorus, who sat there all night in long-sleeved white clothing only to have ABSOLUTELY NOBODY left to hear them perform.

Which brings me to my question.

Why does every gay event have to look like every other gay event? Is an athletic event the same as a Pride March which is like a protest which becomes Take Back the Night?

Why Exclusion AND Oppression? Is it worth being pious if you make everyone so angry and bored that they associate politics with torture? Should people pay to be tortured like this?

Okay, those are lots of questions. But seriously. The "real" Olympics pays tribute to the courage of athletes without making us watch two hours of clips about Bosnia and footage of the Olympic hostages. The "real" Olympics has a sense of the balance between respect and celebration, politics and triumph, tragedy and hope. Where were the gay and lesbian athletes that felt not only the agony of defeat, but the thrill of victory? Billie, Martina, Greg, Brian?

Most important of all, where were the drag queens? Drag emcees? Baton twirlers? tumblers? Female impersonators?

Even Janet Jackson flashed some booby at the Superbowl.

Insensitive, or Just Bad Timing?

2006-07-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

Is it me, or does anybody else agree that it was in really poor taste for the New York Times to publish, in the same week that both New York and Georgia rejected same-sex marriage, Maureen Dowd's insipid column today about heterosexual married couples getting all giddy about amalgamating their last names?

Whether we agree with marriage or not, it is hard not to feel disheartened and depressed about this week's bad news. New York decided that heterosexual unions are less stable than ours, but that the children of heterosexuals are more worthy of state interest and protection than the children of same-sex couples. The New York majority decision also recirculated the unproven assumption that children who grow up in heterosexual households are better off than children who don't. The "truth" of this assumption will be news to people who grew up with fathers or mothers who beat them and raped them while their opposite-sex spouses looked the other way. Apparently half-baked, unproven moral opinions are suddenly valid if uttered by judges. But I digress.

I didn't link to it because it's on Times Select, so unless you are paying for the paper I don't think you can read it. But it doesn't matter, cause it's stupid, and I'll tell you about it here.

To begin by adding insult to injury, Dowd titles her piece "A Tale of Two Rachels," leading many a reader to wonder, hope even, that she was really, for once, talking about two women. Maybe even women in a couple. But nope! Fooled ya! She's talking about a married man and woman who decide to make their first and last names the same! How freakin' hilarious is that! The woman takes her husband's last name, and the husband takes his wife's first name--but ends up only using it as an initial, to avoid problems making plane reservations! So he's still a guy on paper, and she's got his last name!

Those heterosexuals are so rad! Changing society one custom at a time!

Another couple decided that the wife would legally change her name to his when they had kids, but keep her "maiden" (ya, right) name as her professional moniker. Amazing!

The only guy in Dowd's account to truly change his last name is Tony Villaraigosa, the mayor of LA, who by all accounts seems like an ok dude. Yay, T. V.! You got a pretty name out of the deal, too.

Changing your name is icing on the cake, the mere symbol of the union already recognized by the law, the state, the church, the families, the neighbors, and everyone else, when one is legally married. It's frivolous and fun, and anyone who wants to do it should have a good time being inventive.

But seriously, kids. Is this the right week to gloat about it?

what happens in vegas, stays everybody else's access to marriage

2006-07-06T09:51:00.000-07:00

So New York decides not to extend marriage to same-sex couples on account of how the blanket of marriage seems too small to cover those darn impulsive straights. With three in the majority, one supporting, and two dissenting, the court argued that opposite-sex people need marriage because they can accidentally become parents at any time, while same-sex people cannot:

"These [same-sex] couples can become parents by adoption, or by artificial insemination or other technological marvels, but they do not become parents as a result of accident or impulse. The Legislature could find that unstable relationships between people of the opposite sex present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up in unstable homes than is the case with
same-sex couples, and thus that promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships will help children more. This is one reason why the Legislature could rationally offer the benefits of marriage to opposite-sex couples only."

I so wish this would mean that infertile couples now can't marry, and post-menopausal women can't marry, and impotent men can't marry. What if you couldn't marry if you need a surrogate, or in vitro fertilization, or fertility treatments of any kind? Or if you're old? Or if you need Viagra? Or if you've had a hysterectomy, or a vasectomy, or had your tubes tied? Or if you're on the pill? There'd be hell to pay, that's what.

It's clear that there's a willing blindness here about non-reproductive heterosexual sexual activity. After all, as the judges argue:

"A person's preference for the sort of sexual activity that cannot lead to the birth of children is relevant to the State's interest in fostering relationships that will serve children best."

The decision later takes up the question of excluding childless straight couples and dismisses it by arguing that such an exclusion would be too intrusive. Apparently, however, it's not intrusive to prohibit gay and lesbian parents from marrying. So the possible but unlikely children of childless het couples are more worthy of potential protection than the actual, living and breathing children of gay couples? Or is it just that straights are way more unstable, as a rule?

And does this mean that marriage will be extended to polygamists? After all, if anybody is engaging in sexual activities that could lead to accidental and impulsive conception, it's those Big Lovers, right?

I think it's time to hurl ourselves into the fray, and I encourage all of you to out every straight couple using birth control to your local officials and representatives. Those of you who prefer oral or anal sex, or do use birth control, or cannot conceive without performance-enhancing drugs or fertility treatments, you are on notice. Your parasitic enjoyment of the rights and privileges reserved for breeders is over, your queer status now about to be revealed as anti-American and selfish.

Meanwhile, we lezzie girls need to throw a sperm-wrestling party or two, while the homo boys can play "surrogate toss," if they can find women willing to be human horseshoes. These diversions should up the accidental factor enough to get us our piece of the marriage pie, and also prove an entertaining spectacle. Cheer up, queers. Summer picnics in the park are about to get a lot more interesting.