Musings of an expat grad student... oy vey.

Just confused.

2006-06-05T00:35:00.000-07:00

I guess this isn't quite so much an angry feminist post as a tired and head-whirling one. Thanks, Otto, for giving me the impetus to post it. :)

I've been reading a lot of really fascinating blogs lately. Feministe, Pandagon, nubian's stunning Blac(k)ademic, and others to which I've been linked through them. Since my few weeks of thesis hell ended in the middle of last week, there's been a bit of a lull, and I've been able to sit back at the computer and read what people have to say.

But I stop short of commenting, because I'm so afraid that I'll offend someone. And that's the last thing I want to do.

I guess I'm trying to figure out a) how big the feminist tent is, and b) where I fit in. I'm a woman and therefore do not benefit from male privilege. For me, this is fairly cut-and-dried; I identify and am identified as female, so that space of privilege/lack thereof is clear to me. But there are so many other components, all of which interlock. I benefit from heterosexual privilege, which is not quite as governmentally privileged in the UK as it is in the US with the inception of gay marriage here (YAY!), but is still socially privileged to an enormous degree. I benefit from the privilege associated with not being non-traditionally gendered. I benefit from class privilege, which intersects heavily with feminism, especially in the US where, for instance, health care is not universally guaranteed and women's health care often seems to be the patriarchy's last priority.

I am trying to be an activist for change - in my academic work, in my life, and in my interactions with others. I am doing what I can to bring down the system. But I worry sometimes that I'm not doing a good enough job. I'm constantly worried that I'm going to offend someone, that I'm ignorant about something and don't even know it, and that my ignorance will cause harm to others. I suppose it's an extension of the academic problem: there's always something else to read, there's always another facet of the situation to explore, and it's never good enough. I think that's why I don't really blog about Issues; I don't feel qualified to do so.

Therefore, I think that I'll continue to do what I'm doing: I'll just read, and listen to what people have to say. Maybe eventually, when I figure out where exactly I fit in and how I can best advocate in the online community for change, I'll speak up more outside this little blog. But not yet.

Summertime...

2006-06-02T15:43:00.001-07:00

...and the livin' is stressful.

There's a big-ass angry feminist post in my head, but I can't think straight enough to write it at the moment as I am dog-tired. So, tomorrow.

Oops.

2006-03-20T01:20:00.000-08:00

Yeah, so I suck at blogging. I think I have a little bit of stage fright, which makes no sense because I don't have stage fright in real life. But when the words I write are basically written in stone forevermore (read: Google-cached), I tend to seize up.

After all, when I'm a famous novelist (hahaha. hahahahahahahahaha.), I don't want to look back and think, "Damnit, my post-adolescent angsty ramblings are publicly available on the Internet!"

Anyhow.

Teaching is going really well. I had a cringeworthy class or two at the beginning of the semester (protip: if you're in a stadium-seating lecture hall, don't give your first lecture sitting down at the desk in the front. Arrrrrrgh) but I'm really warming to the students and, I think, they're warming to me. I'm learning the delicate balance between having lecture notes that resemble a paper outline and sticking to them religiously (my MO so far) and being completely unprepared.

Of course, since their first assignment was due this past week, there's been the normal raft of excuses - I mean, what are the odds that out of less than 30 students, TWO of them had their mothers undergo emergency surgery in that particular week? So I'm still trying to figure out how much of an asshole I want to be with my late-work policy, and how to spread their grades, and how to grade their papers well, and all of that. But - and this is a first and possibly last for me - I've given myself permission not to be perfect at teaching my first time out. I find it relieves a lot of pressure to know that it's okay to be just pretty good at the beginning.

I'm also revising an article for publication in a conference-associated edited book - the due date for that is the beginning of May. And I'm giving a paper at a conference in June, a paper that needs to be finished by the beginning of June, a paper that's going to be published, hopefully, in another conference-associated book. A paper that I haven't started yet. AND I'm trying to work on my dissertation, and it isn't going badly, though I have gaps in my knowledge that you could drive a Humvee through and I'm frantically trying to close those. Oh, and I have a book review for a different journal due - well, this past weekend, technically, but as the deadline is a bit soft, I'm going to give myself until Friday to slog my way through the rest of the profoundly unpleasant book and write it up.

I slacked off far too much in the fall, I think, and I'm paying for it now...

New year.

2006-01-01T02:23:00.000-08:00

So I, uh, seem to have left the blog to simmer for a while. Not sure why I did that. I think that all the writing and reading I've been doing for school have managed to squeeze all the bloggy energy out of me, but now that I've spent a week doing absolutely nothing of value for my PhD, I'm recharged and ready to blog again.

One thing that's happened since I inexplicably stopped blogging is that I've picked up a teaching position at a local university (not the one at which I'm doing my degree). I'm just an adjunct, teaching one course that combines two of my major research interests, but it's still bloody terrifying. I haven't actually taught in several years, and when I did teach it was in the capacity of a high school classroom assistant or an ESL teacher, so I'm not quite sure what possessed my department chair to trust me with a classroom full of students who will likely be, on average, two to three years younger than myself. But trust me she has done, even knowing my lack of experience. "University X," she said with a wink, "is a good place to learn how to teach."

The thing is, I'm naturally a pretty good teacher. Teaching seems to come easily to me, at least according to most of my former students, and I think that showed in the interview (which consisted of about one hour of questions and one hour of enthusiastic chatting about my field). But there are certain classroom-management and other pedagogical skills that have to be taught or developed, and I don't have those yet. I know everyone makes mistakes in their first classroom, but perfectionist that I am, I know I'll be incredibly hard on myself for every one I make. I've been devouring the Teaching Carnivals, but I'm still putting a call out now for my one or two readers (welcome, Carine, by the way! I LOVE your blog!): help?

Overall, it's been a pretty good holiday season. We didn't really do much, as my family is all across the pond and my husband's family is dysfunctional and doesn't really speak to each other, but we've spent a lot of time together being boring homebodies. I got Arthur and George by Julian Barnes - one of my favourite writers on the planet - for Christmas, plus a £30 Borders gift certificate which I used yesterday to buy books on critical and literary theory because I am a first-class nerd. As I am far poorer than my husband, he got a Gryffindor house scarf knitted by moi, which he wears around the house while saying "'Ello, 'Arry" like Hagrid. It's hilarious.

I hope the holidays have been equally kind to all of you. Happy 2006, everyone!

Lacuna

2005-10-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

(Wo)man alive, I really need to update this thing more often. The past few weeks, though, have been nonstop motion: came home from visiting my family in the US, spent a few days working frantically on a conference paper that should have been revised a month ago, missed a bunch of screenings at a film festival because I was working on that conference paper, gave the conference paper (it went over really well, for which I am incredibly grateful), and now am finally home and have a few days off.

Well, not really; I have a few pages of a book article due at the end of the week, and I'm meeting with my PhD supervisor tomorrow. But mostly off. And there's been some good news - two more conference acceptances, including one that comes with full funding for flight, room and board - so even though I'm working hard, it feels like I'm accomplishing little goals along the way. The sloggy parts are worth the great ones.

I tried to write a blog entry about honesty and censorship, like I promised, but my brain is screaming for a rest, I think, and the words won't come out in any sensible order. My thoughts are still a bit nebulous, and fuzzy thinking does not a great blog entry make.

Instead, I will save the heavy stuff for another day, and welcome elisabeth to the blog. I wish I could understand your blog, but I love your pictures!

Anonymity.

2005-10-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

First, an enormous thank-you to everyone who responded to my last post. Even if the news isn't particularly rosy careerwise, I'm used to overcoming adversity, and it's really nice to know that I'm not alone in this quest. I've also found a few excellent blogs, to which I've linked: Otto's and handworn's.

This blog entry may be short, as my husband and I are currently back across the pond on a two-week trip to visit my parents and brother in Big City, and we're about to go out for dinner. But I'll add onto it later, most likely.

I made a decision about this blog when I started it: that it would be completely anonymous. And to that end, I decided that I will censor myself, to a certain extent. These are the skeletal facts about me: I am married, female, an expat living in London and a few weeks into a humanities PhD. These are the labels I place upon myself, the categories into which I allow my reader(s) to place me. In each of those declarations, I eliminate a level of uncertainty as to my identity.

But there are two big issues, for me, when it comes to anonymity. The first is one of safety, and the second is one of honesty.

We've all heard the stories about the bloggers who have been outed and lost their jobs because of it. I believe Dooce was the first, but certainly not the last. Several academic bloggers have been investigated, suspended, or fired because their blogs have ceased to be anonymous. While the Internet affords some level of pseudonymic anonymity, it is far from completely anonymous, and its reach is far, its memory long. While I'm not particularly worried about anything I've said online in the past coming back to haunt me, there are a few questionable pictures of me floating around out there which I wouldn't want future employers to see. (No, nothing like that... but a certain photo of me and a few friends in truly garish Halloween costumes comes to mind.) I've also been stalked online on more than one occassion by men who refuse to take no for an answer. One of them found out where I lived and I had to sic the security guard in my building on him. Shudderworthy.

Therefore, in the interests of my present and future safety, I will not be blogging about people at my school, or people in my department, even by pseudonym. I may blog about friends, but only in the most general of terms. I will not be blogging about particulars of my research, or even about my field in general. I will never post pictures. So, unfortunately, I'll be pretty boring if you're interested in horror stories about students and the like.

I will, however, be blogging about questions, and answers. About how George W. Bush is an asshole. About concepts and theories and how they apply to life. About myself, and sometimes about my husband. About my cat and the dumb things she does. About postmodernism and poststructuralism and all those other posts.

But never will I brush aside that curtain entirely.

Off to dinner now: honesty and censorship, next time.

Insomnia.

2005-09-29T17:42:00.000-07:00

First of all, thanks, yall, for the congrats on my MA dissertation submission. You made me all smiley. :)

Secondly:

I can't sleep.

I think sometimes that I'm somewhat self-defeating, at least mentally if not materially. For instance, tonight I spent an hour reading Invisible Adjunct's blog, in which the utter impossibility of even a tenure-track position, much less tenure itself, is hammered into the head of the hapless humanities grad student. Discouraging, to say the least. I'm an academic, and as such, my way of coping with fear is to educate myself to the brim about the subject of that fear, hoping that in knowledge lies power. But not in this case. The Goblin King won't disappear this time. (A cookie to anyone who catches the reference.)

See... I want to be a professor. It's What I Want To Do With My Life. I want to teach and I want to research and publish. But I also want to make a living wage at it, and eventually be able to take a sabbatical, and have at least some job security and a pension and all the other things that normal full-time employees have. And the thought of having a contract job my entire working life puts the fear of God into me. I'm doing all I can to make sure that I don't fall into the permanent-adjunct trap. I have a fully-funded fellowship at my school of choice, which is not Oxbridge but is a fairly prestigious school with a very good reputation; I published my first refereed journal article before I finished my MA, and have plenty more on the horizon. By all accounts, I'm doing very well.

And yet.

See, the thing is, I have no idea how many other people have similar or better qualifications to my own. I don't know how they make the decisions as to who to hire. I don't know how many publications I need by the time I get my PhD to be competitive for jobs - is it three? Seven? 15? How much does teaching matter? How much does it matter that I'll still be in my mid-twenties when I start my job search? How much does it matter - like, really matter, not equal-opportunities matter - that I'm a young married woman of childbearing age? How completely bloody random is it?

I, like all other academics I know, am afflicted with the disease of perfectionism; in my case, it combines with a fear of uncertainty to make that nasty chimera, the abject terror of failure. Even nastier because ultimately, there's nothing I can do about it. I can publish and teach and stay up late blogging and run myself ragged all I want, but the fact remains that I may yet fail. And if I do, I know that I will blame myself, even if it really is no fault of my own.

Is it really as bad as the Invisible Adjunct makes it seem?

Annnnnd...

2005-09-22T17:16:00.000-07:00

...I'm DONE!

Done, done, done. The citations are fixed, the missing page numbers are found and inserted, the Works Cited is done, the spell-check is run, the conclusion is written and polished til it gleams...

Now all I have to do is print it out, bind it, turn it in and I'm HOME FREE!

Dissertation...

2005-09-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

My MA dissertation is due at 5 PM tomorrow.

However, I'm supposed to meet two of my classmates at 10 AM at the student union to get our dissertations bound before turning them in, which basically means that it has to be finished tonight.

Ulp.

Don't get me wrong; I'm on my third edit of the intro and the body. The intro kicks all different kinds of arse, and while there are a few rough spots in the body I can't seem to smooth out - I'm not especially good with very long pieces of work - there are also moments of real brilliance. And in a meeting with my soon-to-be PhD supervisor and his "other star student", R, who's doing her PhD on the same author I'm doing my MA on, R told me that one of my main ideas is incredibly innovative and she's never, in any of the criticism she's read, seen anyone take the angle I'm taking (which is a good thing, according to her, because my angle is really good).

But, well.. I haven't written the conclusion yet.

And there are several page numbers I still have to look up.

And I still need to put together my bibliography and works cited.

And title it.

And print it out.

And print out the cover page.

And I'm... blogging.

Guess who's not getting much sleep tonight?

(On the upside, after I turn in my dissertation tomorrow, I've got a VACATION before I start my PhD! Of a whole TWO DAYS! I am NUTS!)

Two things I've learned today.

2005-09-16T07:20:00.000-07:00

1. Arguing on the Internet, especially about politics, especially about hot-button political issues, and especially on a site where people have differing levels of desire to engage in honest discussion rather than sling personal mud, is at best pointless and at worst really frustrating. Best to take what works and leave the rest. I think that's the last time I'll be venturing into that minefield.

2. London has some of the best sample sales in the world. Sweatshop-free, locally-designed cashmere for affordable prices - I never thought it would be a reality! Thank you, DWS!

Beauty.

2005-09-15T01:01:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about female beauty. Its myths, its consequences. There's been a lot written about beauty in the media lately; some argue that, with things like Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty", we're experiencing a backlash against the gaunt, unhealthy heroin-chic ideals of the 90's, and some argue the opposite: that as Americans get fatter and fatter, models and celebrities get skinnier and skinnier, an ever-widening gulf between the thin and the fat that mirrors the gulf between the rich and the poor. It's a well-documented phenomenon that people who live in poor areas have less access, both financially and mobility-wise, to fresh, healthy food, and therefore obesity has an ironic inverse correlation with wealth.

To be honest, I think the Dove ads are a bit of a breath of fresh air; even though they're selling something like everyone else, at least they're using people to sell it who aren't at one very extreme end of the spectrum. But it's still problematic. By using the term "Real Beauty", they're still suggesting that there is a particular type of body that is beautiful and one that is not. They're still postulating a divide between objectively beautiful and objectively non-beautiful, and the fact that their presented concept of "real" beauty covers a different bit of the spectrum than other advertisers do, and probably includes somewhat more women, does not make it any less troublesome. The suggestion, as it always is in advertising that uses female beauty as a lure, is that if you resemble these people, you're beautiful; if you don't, you're not. And hell, Dove's actually come out and said it.

Not to mention the fact that they've put up ads which have a checkbox so that passersby can vote on whether the model is beautiful, and included things like freckles, which are indelible. Way to place women into a subaltern subject-position, presenting them openly for public judgment...

okay, maybe I have more problems with that campaign than I thought I did.

Notice, also, that "beauty" almost always correlates to "body size" in these arguments. Not health, not facial structure or good hair, not even body shape. For women, at least, the amount of space one takes up in the world determines one's level of beauty: the less, the better. It's an interesting, insidious form of anti-feminism, in a way. Women are still pushed by male fashion designers and male-owned media - and even some other women - to take up as little space as possible, literally rather than metaphorically. And the sway that beauty holds in our society means that too often, to many, the words coming out of a woman's mouth are not as important as the size of her body.

I wonder if part of the reason I've decided to become an academic is that it seems like the only place where beauty or lack thereof is, if not of no consequence, of less consequence than one's intellectual production.

Good things.

2005-09-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

1) As of this afternoon, my draft of my dissertation is complete. It's still got a few quotes missing and a few bits that need tightening, and some things may need to be moved around and changed. And, of course, it'll need trimming, seeing as I'm already up to 13,800 words of a strict 15,000-word limit and I haven't yet written my conclusion because I want to write one based on a final draft of the body. But the heavy lifting is finished, and there is no feeling more awesome than that.

2) As a reward for this, we're taking a weekend trip to Paris. It's actually not a reward, per se; it's a trip I won in a writing contest a while ago and I scheduled it for this weekend because I figured I'd need a break in the midst of dissertating. But as it turns out, my draft is going off to my advisor tomorrow, and there is literally nothing else I need to be doing, other than sipping a latte at a street cafe, or walking through the Jardins du Luxembourg with my love.

Crises.

2005-09-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

First: I cannot stop thinking about the people in New Orleans, those poor people, and I want to drop everything and go volunteer there and dig people out of flooded, muddied houses. I'm going to clean out my Paypal account when I get home and send half to the Red Cross and half to Noah's Wish, the animal charity.

Next:

Do you ever get bored with yourself while writing a paper?

I'm sitting in the library at the moment. I have written about 7,000 words of my MA dissertation of 12-15,000 words; my rough draft is due in on Wednesday, which in my terms means I have plenty of time. (It's just a rough draft, after all.) I know exactly where I'm going with it, and I've done all of my research over the summer - the hardest part - and written a great intro - the second-hardest part. So now it's just the long slog through the body.

And goddamn, I find my topic fascinating. Without giving two much away, my dissertation is on my all-time favourite author and combines two things I find among the most intellectually stimulating in the world. But goddamn, if I'm not sick of listening to myself talk. Or watching myself write, or whatever. I get bored in the middle of sentences. Why? This is fascinating stuff, and as far as I can tell, no one's ever taken this particular tack before with these particular texts. It's exciting. But oh, so very boring after a while.

I called my advisor this morning, having a crisis of faith. "I'm convinced I'm going to be a failure," I said. "Everything I write is completely obvious, or else it makes no sense. I'm ineligible for funding because of my international-resident status, so I'm self-funding, which will look really bad to hiring committees. The academic job market is insane and I don't know why anyone would choose me out of a field of two, much less 200. I'm convinced my PhD program only let me in because I'm paying international tuition rates and they want my money. I am going insane."

She told me that every single academic has these worries, that she's sure I'm going to get a job, she's read my work and hell, I've published already in a refereed journal and I'm only an MA student and stop worrying about the job market right now anyway, I've still got three more years to go and she knows both of my PhD advisors-to-be very well and neither of them would ever take a student who won't succeed. It wasn't a panacea, but it helped. She knows her stuff, and when she says that I'm a good scholar, I try to believe her. And I do, mostly. But only mostly.

And I'd be an even better scholar if I wrote my dissertation, so that's what I'm going to do now.

Condolences

2005-08-30T13:39:00.000-07:00

Badger's husband has lost his battle with cancer.

There are no words that could possibly express my sorrow for her and her son. Poetry will have to suffice:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--

This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow--
First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go--

-Emily Dickinson

Procrastination II

2005-08-27T07:13:00.000-07:00

I'm a very strange procrastinator.

Most people, when they procrastinate, choose to do something completely unrelated to whatever they're putting off. So if they're meant to be writing a paper or reading an article, they go watch TV or play games or go shopping.

Me? I write abstracts.

You see, every week, I get about 30 calls for papers dumped into my inbox. They're for conferences and journal issues and collections as disparate as "Neo-Medievalism in Video Games" and "New Perspectives on Religion and Theatre". All of them look fascinating, and many of them inspire in me the mad, frantic creativity of ideas that drives the mind of the academic. I start deconstructing the topic, making a mental outline, lining up theorists and sources. I generally have at least the introduction written in my head before I realize that it's for a conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on the day of my brother's bar mitzvah.

Notwithstanding the ones that are impossible due to geographical or temporal impossibility, though, and the ones that fall outside of my area of study, I've now submitted at least three abstracts for books and conferences, most of which were written when I was actually meant to be doing something else, like write my dissertation. One of them has already been accepted and two are likely to be, which would put my academic publication count (including conferences) at four. This before I'm even six months into my PhD.

Why is it that I choose to distract myself with more of the same? Perhaps because an abstract represents a promise to do something later, a vague commitment that I won't actually have to deal with for months, and therefore is infinitely preferable to slogging through the minutiae of theory necessary for my current dissertation? Is it like a kid wanting a puppy because his dog isn't cute and small anymore?

And why is it that I seem to love collecting publications? They're like notches in my belt, instances of ultimate validation that I can point to in order to prove that I'm a success. Either I've bought into the academic notion that the number of publications one has is the ultimate measure of success as an academic, or I'm entirely too up my own arse about publishing. Maybe both.

In any case, my dissertation word count is now 1700/12-15,000, with almost all the research done. Considering, however, that I once wrote a 7,000-word A-minus paper in about 12 hours total, including research, I'm not terribly worried.

But I am a little, because instead of writing it right now, I'm working on an article proposal with my husband for Dragon magazine.

*bangs head against desk*

On... oh, fuggit.

2005-08-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

The "On [thing]" posts were getting a bit pretentious and JS Mill-like for me, so I figure I'll stop trying to be an Academic and just be a person who happens to be an academic. Also, I find it terribly ironic that my post on procrastination was immediately followed by a three-week silence. Go, me. Though that blog-silence was mostly filled with dutiful library visits, and I've now got over 12,000 words of just notes for my 12,000-word dissertation, as well as a thousand words actually written, so I'm riding high on the getting-stuff-done endorphins.

First of all, there's something very important. A woman pseudonymed Badger, someone who I don't know personally, but who is a fantastic, inspirational writer, has a husband who is dying of liver cancer and whose medical bills are through the roof due to the good old American way of letting the poor and sick fend for themselves. A kind, generous woman whose blog I found yesterday - and whose academic coaching I will almost certainly partake of in a few years' time as I enter the job market - has set up a fundraising page for them at this URL, so if you're one of the one or two people who reads this and you have a few extra bucks in your Paypal account, drop them that way, eh?

Today is my husband's birthday, and he's spending it at a friend's stag night. At first it bothered me, but hey, he has a birthday every year and this is, hopefully, the one and only time his friend is getting married. The wedding is in two weeks and it will be the first wedding for us since our own. I wonder if it'll be strange or joyful or both to watch someone else take the vows we took, and know that our wedding, which took 16 months of heavy planning and was attended by almost 200 guests, is in the past now. A major milestone already passed for me, and I'm only 23. Sometimes I feel a bit of a fraud, like I'm really still a kid and fooling people into letting me make all these adult decisions. I've got a cat! I've got a flat! I've almost got an MA, and someone accidentally let me into a PhD program! I've got an academic publication coming up! I've got a MARRIAGE! What yahoo decided it was a good idea to trust me with a marriage? I'm worried I'll drop it or something.

Next time I promise I'll go back to the cultural analysis...

On procrastination.

2005-07-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

I was supposed to go to the library today, but decided at the last minute that my time would be better spent at home, checking my email and updating my blog. I think sometimes that my decision-maker is broken.

It's weird, isn't it, that research is always such a daunting task? Even when it's something you love? I'm studying science fiction, and even though I absolutely adore science fiction more than almost anything else in the world, it's sometimes so easy and seductive to just do something else instead, like read the last book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series. It's like there's a mental block there, or a hurdle: I'm scared that once I start I won't be able to stop, and that the task is so huge that I'll never be able to do it justice. Especially since I've just spent another day procrastinating.

That's the problem with procrastination. It's a self-perpetuating, reflexive system. The more you do it, the more you're tempted to do it, and the bigger and scarier the fear becomes. The huger the workload becomes, the less I want to dive in and tackle it because I know I'll be swamped with regret at all the things I could have done with it if I'd just started it earlier and been more judicious in my time management. Innocent articles sitting by my bed become huge lurking goblins - or worse, chests full of treasure that I won't have left myself the time to appreciate. Unfinished stories lying dormant in the bowels of my computer moulder and crumble, their meaning lost, their plotlines decayed. Potential is being wasted with every moment I while away.

And here I am, writing this and procrastinating. It's all recursive. Surely there's a lesson in there somewhere?

On oddity.

2005-07-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

I'm weird in a lot of ways.

I play Dungeons and Dragons. That's really, really weird. Most people I know don't play Dungeons and Dragons, because it's really quite a particular taste, but I and some of my friends do. It's weird, but it's fun.

Watching old Japanese films and really, actually, genuinely enjoying them? Bizarre. Buying two of something when I really like it and I'm unreasonably worried that they'll go out of production? Strange. Being scared of the water jets in swimming pools? Good Goddamn, that's odd. There are a lot of unusual things that people do and unusual ways that people are. The problem comes when one fails to make a distinction between what is usual and what is acceptable.

There are many people in this world who think that things that are unusual are also unacceptable. The people who made fun of me and my friends for playing Dungeons and Dragons, for instance, and the people who give strange looks to those who dress and behave according to a subculture that isn't the mainstream norm: Goths, for instance, and gutterpunks. (They're weird too.) People who denigrate single mothers and divorced women, and people who laugh at those who meet their significant others online. Lots of people look at something unusual and think Other. They think Not Like Me. They think Scary, Wrong, Sinful. They think Punishable.

And that's the problem. Because weirdness is what makes things interesting. Weirdness is the sprinkles on the ice cream. It's the ends of the spectrum, the detail in the painting, the higher polygon count. Weirdness is not only acceptable, but desireable. Things that are unusual have always been looked down upon by some. Unusual things can be scary to people who are used to things always being familiar. That's why weirdness is not only desireable, but essential.

Weirdness is necessary in order for things to progress, for people to learn that there are things out there that are different from them but that are good, not bad nor scary. Those of us who are weird need to express that weirdness, we need to shout it and wallow in it and integrate it and insist upon it and be it. If you're weird, don't hide. Celebrate it, and publicly. If you're GLBTQI, then be GLBTQI in whatever way you want to be. If you like Dungeons and Dragons, for God's sake, play it. If you want to divorce your crappy husband, sign those papers and never look back. If you want to buy three pairs of those jeans because you're convinced that they'll never make them ever again, then plop down that plastic and keep the jeans for a rainy day. And don't ever be ashamed. Because you're essential.

First post!

2005-07-17T06:19:00.000-07:00

Just a placeholder, folks...