The New Year's Blog

The thing about the holidays when you're queer is that you spend all of this time navigating the heteronormative family constructions that are central to both the holiday marketing and the religious observation. So even when you spend time with your partner trying to create your own traditions--mediocre swedish meatballs, stockings and malbec with your closest friends, pet costumes--you still end up feeling empty. Like the holiday wasn't "real". This happened to Cat and I last year. Since we didn't have the money to travel and we weren't particularly welcomed as a couple in my family (my mother had said to me "Cat can come but you know, she's just your friend") we tried to embrace our own queer holiday.

This year, with my family inching slowly toward acceptance and both of us having the advantage of student loans to draw on, we decided to try our first as-couple family holidays. The previous blog captures how well that went for Thanksgiving on my end. The up side: Christmas with her folks was fine. Good even. Everyone was friendly. Her aunt bought me a box of chocolates and her parents bought us her brother's car. As my bestie Deems said last night "so there's nothing for your blog."

Deems, as usual, is kind of right. But this year I'm struggling with something different. A few days before Christmas in 2001, I began my first e.d. hospitalization. I went in because of a myriad of physical problems, a few good friends that had been privy to some recent ER visits, and a high school mentor who made a round of phone calls on my behalf "looking for beds." She was certain that by 2002, without treatment, I would be dead.

I ended up in the hospital the first time for three weeks, spending New Year's Eve learning rummi with soundless noise-makers and i.v.'s.

I have a few good friends who are sober, one of whom is celebrating her ten year anniversary, and there's a part of me that wants to crack the cranberry-seltzer bubbly with her, except that my treatment hasn't worked like sobriety. It hasn't been one wagon.

I spent two years in and out of treatment, two consecutive New Years Eves were spent in hospital. Ten years later, I can't say I've had even one purge-free year.

At the time I went into the hospital I had been sick for more than half of my life. At 28 and a half, my life is even thirds: pre-sick, sick, recovery. But the lines aren't neatly drawn. I thought they could be, beginning awareness, advocacy work, and public speaking when I wasn't even six months out of the hospital. I spent my first New Year's Eve out-of-hospital taking a January-term course in Germany. As I huddled with my friend Rhian in Berlin's wind, being pushed on either side by crowds at the Brandenburg Gate and dodging firecrackers flung aimlessly at our feet, I really thought I had entered a clear cut beginning. Neuenfang.

I've since realized that my illness is chronic. And that each new year is only an extension of the previous years. And so I don't really have much to blog about in terms of New Beginnings and resolutions. I just have the same one I've been working on for ten years. So on New Year's, I'll crack the cranberry seltzer bubbly, kiss my sweetheart, hang out with my queer grad family (a better support than any hospital team or blood relations) and plan the next trip.

Local Gin and Class Evals: Finding Balance at the End of a Dismal Week

So last week turned out to be one of those abysmally bad weeks where nothing goes terribly, life-shatteringly wrong, but the little bad things pile up so that I'm left wondering: what the hell kind of karma glitch am I dealing with? I meditate; I donate what little life-savings I have to the ASPCA and NPR; I buy gifts from local craftswomen; I buy bulk from the co-op; most of my clothes come from goodwill; I recycle my wine bottles. Is it possible that karma made a mistake?

Here's what sent me over the edge. A student decided that instead of submitting the assigned final paper, she would submit a critique of the class that read, in actuality, like a personal attack. What made the personal attack even more tough to swallow--it being stuck in the back of my throat, just out of tongues reach, like one of those canada mints swallowed hole, only dissolving under the pressure of scalding water-- was that this student is a major in my field which emphasizes social justice and what we call intersectional analysis (that everyone has many identities operating at one time, so a woman is never just a "woman" but also affected by things like race, class, sexuality, citizenship, and ability) and a senior. In other words, she is a few short quarters away from graduating.

And her critique stung. She wrote that my class was not a "good" representation of "U.S. Women Writers" and that we only read "insane" women and "lesbians" and she asked rhetorically, "What can I relate to here? And should we be reading the women who have done the real work of feminism?" I was grading papers with a friend at the local coffee shop when I got to this student's paper and I felt like someone kicked the wind out of me. I was breathless as I took a sip from my luke warm coffee. I read it out loud to make sure I was understanding that, in fact, this student was not doing the assignment but issuing an attack. Then I started crying.

Over the course of the evening, as I skyped with Cat, I became enraged and focused on proving my student's critique was inaccurate. In a ten week class, we spent three weeks on Harriet Jacobs. We spent another week on Sandra Cisneros. We spent a week with Hattie Gossett's poetry. All of whom are not insane and not lesbians. In fact, we read only one book by a lesbian. And we read two books where the point was to critique diagnostic models of patriarchal power--i.e. question this idea of insanity that has been cast upon women for centuries. In ten weeks, we sampled 160 years of women's writing. But Cat didn't need to hear all this. Cat knows my syllabus. Cat knows that a student critiquing like this doesn't have a problem with the course or with me but with some deep-seated homophobia combined with some fear of mental illness, maybe.

I didn't respond to the student until I met with my supervisor, who advised that I give the student a chance to rewrite. While I was happy to grade the student according to the rubric and fail her, I also felt like not giving her a chance to rewrite would be vindictive. She took the offer. Her final paper is due in January. Since then, my online reviews have come back as a mixed bag of strong reactions: "Not an easy A but the best class I've taken in college" and "The reading was too dense. Watching "Girl, Interrupted" was a waste of time. She's an arbitrary grader." "She's a fair and challenging grader." It seemed like for every negative critique (and I take grading really seriously--providing a lot of comments and a detailed rubric, so I take being accused of being arbitrary very personally) there was an opposite.

This is a blog about finding balance in my 28th year. As such, I'm not sure what to do about such vastly different reviews of my course. I'm glad I'm affecting students strongly but, of course, I want students to leave with a more open mind; with a complicated understanding of identity and power. So when I was done reading my evals, i did the only thing I could think of doing: I poured myself a strong gin and tonic and collapsed helplessly, wondering if I'm really suited for the next thirty years.

The gin itself if local, made of corn. Five dollars more expensive than what we would normally buy.

As I sip, I remember the student who came up to me after that last day of class, three students clustered around him as I was packing up my bag, who said, "I'm not trying to brown nose or anything. I just want to say that you are a bad-ass teacher and I mean that in a good way." The other students nodded in agreement. I smiled, thinking, "Four out of thirty-four--that ain't bad." The gin tastes sweeter in my next sip. Must be the corn. Or the karma.

The Perfect Protein: The Perfect Comfort Food

Today started out dismally. Downpours. Sick cat. Rejection from a competitive professional development opportunity on the heels of yesterday's article rejection from an academic journal. None of these things are life-altering and a week from now, when Cat is done with finals and here with me in Columbus, this morning will seem laughable.

But for now, it warrants comfort.

Enter: the egg.

Warning: if you are vegan, you will likely not appreciate the following blog. It involves runny yolks.

I grew up eating eggs scrambled. Not even that often. Breakfast time was cheerio time. When we went to diners, I ordered pancakes. Eggs were for flus and snow days. When I became a vegetarian at 12, my mother would tell me, when I turned up my nose in disgust at the dinner table offerings of over-cooked chicken and mashed potatoes, "You don't like it? Make yourself an egg." Which was fine by me. One egg and a spoonful of vegetables became a dinner staple when I was cutting myself to 300 calories/day.

In college, though, I learned that eggs can be hearty. That they come in a variety of disguises--my roommate's favorite being a sweet thai chili soft-boiled variety over english muffins. I've learned that there's something delicious about pressing a fork into the over-easy dome of a yellow yolk, hearing the delicate snap as the yellow spreads and softens the sweet potato hash underneath it. The sour dough toast dams the edges of the plate, making breakfast pool into a soggy, salty, delicious masterpiece.

This morning, opening the free-range egg carton--I spend entirely too much on eggs, almost 4 bucks a dozen from a local farm but the politics are worth it--I found two left. One whole wheat english muffin was buried underneath a carton of yogurt on the bottom shelf of my fridge. The amish butter from the fall farmer's market has a couple tablespoons left.

So I heat up my cast-iron. Watch as a lumpy square of local confection becomes a pool awaiting its swimmers. Two eggs, cracked,whitening immediately. Turn to gold brown. Flip over. Survey the crispy brown edges as the yolk gets a quick sizzle.

Flip over.

Plate waits.

English muffin takes the egg's place in the pan, soaking up the rest of the butter.

Salt.

Pepper.

Eggs meet english muffin meet plate.

This time, as I press my fork into the yolk, my eyes tear. My life, momentarily stalled.

I hope the first bite lightens my mood, as I approach 35 papers in need of compassionate grading. I hope, this morning, that eggs are enough.