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.

I'll Stop Slapping You if You Stop Being a D-Bag: Further Reflections on Thanksgiving

The following is my account. I welcome the reflections from observers. As Cat said, "When you're around your family, you act a little crazy. You go from 0-10 in no time." This is true. And my patience, after missing a night of sleep due to an early flight, was threadbare.

The turkey had been eaten. Dishes were being swept from the table to the dishwasher by my parents, the only two people that fit in the five foot-by-seven-foot kitchen. When help was offered to my parents, it was declined--my father is o.c.d. about dish deliberations. The rest of us, minus one sister who was standing in the kitchen likely berating my parents about some need or another, were in the living room. My last grandma. My only aunt. My oldest sister, exhausted from the retail season in full swing. I was sitting on the floor next to Cat, whose flight had been delayed and a connection missed, herself arriving just in time for a 4:30 dinner after being re-routed through Boston and catching a bus. I could feel Cat's sleepiness beside me, her body sinking into the ottoman. I actually felt settled.

Then the discussion turns to the Penn State scandal. My sister's fiance, a "few drinks in" as Meredith whispers over the turkey, their second dinner of the day, begins debating me loudly about how this is not, in fact, about football culture but about individual choice. The scandal at Penn State is about just one person who should probably go to jail. It's a bigger problem, I say. A cultural problem. My aunt, politely and democratically from the couch, "Can't it be about both?"

"You know," I said, "I think it's a bigger problem in big ten football schools when the officially-sponsored game day gear calls Michigan a "whore" and then says "Fuck Michigan". I think there's a bigger problem of gendered violence. I think that's why we have people defending this coach and this kind of assault."

"Football isn't like that," fiance contests.

"It's not a problem inherent in the sport," I contest, though frankly, I'm not sure I even believe that but I'm willing to believe it to make my bigger point. "It's a problem about the kind of violence that is sanctioned in the Big Ten Culture."

"No no no," fiance is yelling now. "This is about who saw what. And I think everyone did what they were supposed to do. And you know that in the case of some girls, when they are dressing--" This is the point where I lose it. I stand up. I approach him in his seat. My arms are flailing. Cat thinks that this is indicative of my watching too much Real Housewives.

"No you didn't!" He tries to interrupt me. "You can not go on saying that women deserve it. Because that's just what you were about to say." He tries to interrupt me again. I raise my left hand, think for a split second before feeling the roughness of his cheek hit my palm.

The room erupts. My mom runs from the kitchen, grabs my hands and holds them behind my back (she has de-escalation training in her role as a middle school special ed director) and ushers me into my father's study. I'm pacing in a 2-foot-by-2-foot space, surrounded by bibles and devotionals. "Just calm down." My mother is waving a dish towel in hand. "Just calm down."

My throat is heavy. I'm heaving tears. I'm gagging. "He's drunk--"

"He's not drunk."

"He's drunk and he just said women deserve to be raped. That is not okay. That is pretty much the most offensive thing you can say."

"I'm sure he didn't say that."

Meanwhile, fiance informs my sister they are leaving. He tells Cat that we aren't staying with them. We're on our own for a place to stay. And suddenly our first family thanksgiving as taken a rather unexpected turn.

I call the next day. My sister won't answer her phone. Possibly she never will. Fiance does and I apologize. I say I shouldn't have slapped him. He says he knew he had a few drinks "and maybe I wasn't as p.c. as I needed to be but I wish you would have let me finish". I don't feel like getting into it. I feel defeated. There's no way he could have followed up his defense with a non-woman-hating recuperation. But, of course, I don't say that. The crime of the evening was my violence, not his. "Let's not get into it," I say. "I was tired. It's a complex issue." It's not that complex. Don't hate women. "I shouldn't have hit you."

"It's forgotten," fiance says.

But I know it isn't. And the nausea stays with me until saturday night when, in a fit of laughter at my bestie Prema's house, sharing our third glass of wine and homemade flatbreads, Prema offers to bring me to her family's thanksgiving next year, slapping skills in hand.

The Treatment Dream

Perhaps its because Thanksgiving is looming, a dark hooded figure for bulimics that starts a holiday season of food faux pas and consumption gumption. But I had that treatment dream again. The one where a medical-like figure tells me my behaviors are irreconcilable and I silently contest, wondering what the behaviors are that compel one to call me a "danger to myself" as they handcuff me into a facility that, in the dream, I've been to before. In real life there were never any handcuffs, of course. But there was a bag check. And confiscation of nail clippers and pepto.

And so, in the dream, I sit around in groups, pleading that I don't belong there, that I've been sick before but this time, this time for real, it was just one mistake. One accidental purge. Nothing serious. Nothing compulsive.

And they tell me that we all say that.

That we are all alike.

The other faces around me in the dream are shadowy, a mixture of childhood friends and college roommates and my middle school crush.

And then they tell me my tests are back. My electrolytes are fucked again. I'm on i.v. again.

And I wonder, how did this happen?

The thing about the dream is that the hospital changes every time. Once it was the actual hospital. Another time is was my childhood church. This last time, it was the bedroom in the parsonage that I grew up in, the one my sisters and I shared, seventies wallpaper garishly beckoning an era before our arrival. And my roommate: my sister.

I could spend a lot of time wondering what kinds of tales my subconscious is spinning together but I think the answer is boringly obvious.

Tomorrow morning, I have an early flight home. My partner and I are meeting in my hometown airport. My sister's fouton is waiting for our arrival. This is our first Thanksgiving that we've been invited, as a couple, as part of the family. Our student debt is buying our flights. We're both guarding against expecting too much but there's a part of me that's hopeful. That my grandmother and aunt will welcome Cat around the table, asking about our lives together and our plans for children, as they do with my sisters, our conversation droning out my father as he excitedly discusses Newt's recent climb in the poles.

But the thing about going home is to just accept what's available. To not look for too much. To remember that my sister, after dinner, will have a bottle of wine waiting for us where we will decompress and she will worry again about how my parents are pushing her into a wedding she doesn't care about. A wedding she can't afford. She, oblivious to the dinner where Cat and I sat awkwardly with our mashed potatoes as my grandmother asks me, again, why I don't have time for a boyfriend.

And we will sip from our glasses, wondering when we can be alone, the Thanksgiving turkey heavy in our stomachs.

And I wonder, why was I put here? Whose in charge? How can I get out? What are my test results?

And I remember, this time, it was my choice.

I Have My Beans to Thank

I was just eating lunch and wondering to myself: "Will this ever end?" The usual November gray stares back at me through my kitchen window, menacingly. My bowl, steaming but bland colored, bores me.

Here's my roster of meals I've been making lately: three bean vegan chili, navy bean soup, black bean soup, minestone with extra red beans, vegan chowder with pureed white beans and vegetable stock, black beans and rice, vegan jambalaya over rice, and baked beans with fried eggs and brown bread (this is a throw back to the Maine roots of my bestie, Prema, a meal she taught me in college). The only time I mix this up is the occasional mini-frozen pizza (always a disappointment), lentil soup, or stir fry with tofu (also a bean) and peanut sauce. Sometimes, in the co-op, I walk by the chicken and think, "I could buy some of that" , and my mouth waters at the thought of a chicken taco or chicken pot roast.

As I finished up what only feels utilitarian, I remembered one of the reasons why beans are my staple:

This weekend, I did the megabus to Chicago. The megabus always says it's only seven hours but it ends up more like eight--a full work day cooped up with my laptop, waves of nausea reminding me of my childhood car sickness (a condition that lasted well into my 20's) and the aches in my hips disrupting any meaningful studying I can get done. By the time I arrive in Chicago, I want only Chinese takeout and my partner's arms.

Thursday, we gave ourselves one night without work but the next day, it was back to the grind, absorbing cultural theory in between keynotes at a media historiography conference. I felt exhilarated by the conference material (a field only loosely related to my own but much more in line with my partner's work) but by Saturday, as Cat and I drained a bottle of malbec and watched Cleopatra Jones (this was work, too, a piece Cat it working on regarding Blackploitation), I wanted more time. I wanted a day with Cat that was just us.

The next morning, we got up, walked the dogs along Lake Michigan, and headed downtown for my 9:40 bus. Seeing we still had plenty of time, we popped into a Dunkin Donuts (of course we did--I'm a masshole at heart and while some of us miss the Red Sox and the change of seasons, I miss my medium french vanilla black). As I'm carefully peeling back the plastic of my lid, taking the first sip of what I can only refer to as my own, very different kind of black gold, I looked up and saw a megabus with "Columbus/Indianopolis" pull away from the corner. "Look!" I said to Cat. "My bus is here! Why is it driving that way?"

"It's probably just turning around."

I take another sip, check my phone (9:03) and perch myself on the sidewalk. Then it occurs to me.

"What time was your bus?"

"9:40."

"Are you sure?"

"I think so. The Columbus one leaves at 10:40 so of course it's the same time." I pull out my reservation number and ticket printout. "Shit."

"It was 9:00, wasn't it?" I circumvent Cat's question, this time gulping my coffee, as she grabs the ticket out of my hand.

"So I guess you're getting on tomorrow's bus." Cat smiles and we head toward Union Station to check prices on our phones and book me another ticket. Fifty-seven dollars later, I'm booked for the next morning. I cancel my Monday teaching. I worry for a second about the money but then I remember: my savings. Every week, I put twenty bucks in the savings account, money I scrape together from grocery bills spent on my soup recipes.

Another sip of my Dunkin, this time luke warm, and my stomach settles into the idea of one more day with Cat. And I have my beans to thank.

The Day Girls: God's Gift to Skinny Jeans

I've often curled my lip up at the stick-figure boys in ratty jean jackets and wanna-be-Maine flannels, their hair delicately coifed in an elvis-throw-back-to-the-days-of-white-appropriation-in -the-jim-crowe-south, wondering "what's their message?" And I've often stared in moderate disgust at their heterosexual-yet-so-alienated white female counterparts, their bodies paralleling their boyfriend's in an androgynous mirror that makes up the pbr drinking 20-somethings.

The problem is, I'm not that interested in watching a torso maneuver around on a pair of muscle- atrophied legs because, quite frankly, it makes me wonder if I should follow closely behind, a stocky shadow waiting to catch them if the wind blows them over. It makes me anxious.

But then a beautiful thing started to happen a few years ago. Everyone started wearing the skinny jean. I began to see more attention being paid to well-crafted leather boots; patterned chiffon re-emerged as a delicate draping across a well-cupped breast (can you tell I'm a lesbian yet?) and off-the-shoulder flap-dance sweaters brought the Reagon-era into the ironic forefront, juxtaposing itself against our black president and his socialist healthcare proposals (proposals I wish, frankly, were actually a bit more socialist).

As I started to invest in cheap trends as a way of updating my teaching wardrobe, I realized that without the skinny jean, my body looked like a large sack. And so I talked to my sister.

I have two sisters. Both of whom have the same ass as me, an ass that has often been admired in our Puerto Rican neighborhoods, cat-called by passing cars in South Boston, and squeezed uncomfortably into poorly-tailored jeans in department stores. Buying pants has been a constant struggle--I know I buy a few sizes up and work to raise hems and take in leg lines, every new or new-to-me pair of pants becoming a few hours on a Saturday afternoon of needle-pricks and tangled thread.

Luckily, when I started to feel like it might be time for me try out the skinny jean, my oldest sister knew exactly what to do: she's spent the last 15 years working in retail and is now currently a store manager for a popular jean line in downtown Boston. "You need to buy a size up," she said. "And you need to buy a jegging--they have more stretch." She loaded my arms up with clothing to try, my own personal shopper who just happens to have my ass, and off I went to dressing rooms. We settled on a pair of charcoal black skinny jeans ("jegging") that have since become a staple in my wardrobe.

Here's what I like about them: I didn't have to do any tailoring. I can do the splits in my jeans (which, technically, because of physical therapy, I'm not allowed to do anymore). I can show off my motorcycle boots. My ass has a shape.

I've been feeling good about my new jeans all fall until recently, when pictures emerged on the FB from a baby shower a few weekends ago. There I am, in the company of colleagues, in a bright maroon cardigan and an orange scarf, my legs thick as they anchor me onto a kitchen stool by the food table. I feel wide. The largest person in the picture. And I struggle to see myself positively: curves, in skinny jeans, making an oxymoron out of a fashion statement. And then I think: perhaps the problem is in the name of the jean. Perhaps the problem is in that double-n that screams off the page, making a mockery of those of us who simply want a little stretch in the fabric of our jeans.