Dispatch From Our Nation’s Capital

This is my fifth night in Washington, DC, where I’m spending the next 10 weeks and three days. It’s been seemingly as major a move for me as the move to college back in September was; at least, then, I had my mother to help me move in the first two days, and a built-in support structure to help me and the other 1,250 members of my class in our first few weeks. And yet the first half of fall semester was still depressing and scary and lonely and all those things that a radical change in environment is, for me. Needless to say, these past few days have been a period of rough adjustment for me. I miss Princeton—my friends, the campus, the daily routine—almost every minute. I miss it when working 9-6 every day means that places where I need to run errands are closed by the time I get off work. I miss it when I come home in the evening and immediately grab my computer and set off again to the Georgetown University library (three blocks away), because I don’t have Internet access in my apartment. I went to CVS and bought a cheap little AM/FM radio so that when I am in the apartment, I can keep NPR on nice and loud. My roommate hasn’t arrived yet, and it’s lonely there without other voices.

I like my neighborhood, were it not for the Internet issue. Georgetown is disturbingly like Princeton, with its upscale commercial drags, its large university, its student ghetto filled now with toolish interns who are probably not too different from the people who inhabit it during term-time. I even, in some cruel twist of fate, live on a street called Prospect. But I have precious little time to enjoy it: by the time I get home in the evening, after battling rush hour on a bus, it’s usually starting to get dark, and the streets are filled not with strolling shoppers or people walking their dogs, but with drunk interns. It’s a little like the other Prospect Street I know, and just like Princeton, it makes me feel out of place in a location I love in theory.

This is all redeemed by my day job, though. The whole reason I’m in DC is that I’m an editorial intern at Campus Progress, and I’m reasonably certain that a better internship does not exist. One of my guilty pleasures in the past week or so has quickly become the DC Interns blog, and the ridiculous stories posted thereon make me realize how good I have it. Hill interns answer phones and stuff envelopes and run errands and give tours. I write and report, and spend a lot of time reading blogs and newspapers trying to piece together what I’m going to write and report about. Today, I called Sacramento to interview someone whose name isn’t well-known, but who is reasonably important in the context of the article I’m working on about the California budget crisis. I got a little rush saying “Hi, this is Emily Rutherford from Campus Progress….” Most interns don’t get to do that; most interns don’t get to do things that are fairly similar to what a real person working in their field would do. It’s a pretty sweet gig.

But at the same time, doing it has made me realize that, by shifting my focus away from journalism, I’m making the right choice. I couldn’t live in this world full-time. The 20-something professional world seems so very different from the 20-something grad school world I’ve gotten to know at Princeton, and each of these worlds leads to a radically different career track. I know which track I want to be on, and it’s definitely the one where you get your own office, and where you don’t ever have to leave university campuses. I realize that one of the things I’m homesick for is not just my friends, but the idea of university, the irregular working hours one can and does keep, the rhythms of the semester instead of the work week, and just some indefinable cultural ethos that means I unquestionably fit in. I really feel, on campus, as if it’s my world. I don’t feel like I own Washington, DC.

I don’t regret this summer, and I think I will come through it having enjoyed it. I think that, after a couple weeks, I will get in a rhythm, and maybe I’ll think about Princeton a little less constantly. But as of now, all I can think is that it’s 93 days until I’m back on campus, where the nerds like me belong.

In Which Technological Aptitude Becomes Relevant Again

In high school, I was pretty computer-literate, and proud of it. I invested a great deal of time and money restoring the old computers sitting around my family’s house, getting them running various flavors of Linux or FreeBSD or sometimes even an old version of Windows. I became competent, if not expert, at both the DOS and *nix command lines, and could easily use a system without a GUI for everyday tasks. I was taking AP computer science in school my last year of high school, which wasn’t much—just some Java programming—but I learned the basics of the concepts and language and structure of programming, and branched off from the Java to teach myself some C. I also became well-versed in ways to use up bandwidth, trawling the Internet for applications and movies and music to torrent—sometimes legally, sometimes illegally—and always trying out the latest open-source apps. There was even a brief period of time when I was knowledgeable enough that I was answering people’s questions on the Ubuntu Linux help forums.

That state of affairs changed considerably when I started college. Fall semester, I took a very basic computer science course for non-majors—it was fun, but it didn’t teach me anything new or challenge me, and I started to forget a lot of what I’d taught myself that I wasn’t using in class. Java and C aren’t too useful when the most taxing assignment is designing a basic HTML webpage that can run a Javascript number-guessing program. Second semester, my classes were all humanities-based, and I just didn’t have time anymore to take on side projects that weren’t directly related to my classes and my work and my writing; more so, my interests and priorities were shifting. The one completely frivolous project I undertook all school year was an attempt to teach myself Old English over intercession, which at least historically speaking was as far removed from programming as it gets. These days, I just use my MacBook for the same day-to-day stuff most people do, I think: checking email and Facebook and Twitter and the newspapers/blogs, keeping in touch with friends, writing papers, watching movies, keeping my life together in iCal. That sort of thing. The shortcut to the Mac command line sits in my Dock, but I can’t think when the last time I clicked on it was.

And so it’s rather odd to think that the past week has called upon more of my technological know-how than I’ve had to summon in months. In the first place, my job research-assisting a Princeton professor as he writes about American government (de)regulation has required me to exchange large (we’re talking multi-gigabyte) files with said professor online, and figuring out the best ways to do that these past couple days has made me aware of how rusty I am at solving computer-related problems. The kid who once had feet upon feet of CAT6 cables snaking around her room in order to connect three ten- or fifteen-year-old boxes to the Internet had to be reminded by said professor about the existence of the .rar archive as a way to split up large files for easy up-/downloading. That was a little embarrassing.

And then, today, my friend and I ran into technical difficulties trying to play Age of Empires against each other online (yeah, I know, we’re hopelessly nerdy), and as I chased around the Internet trying to figure out how to get multiplayer to work without the game DVD in my drive (a problem that still remains unsolved), I was reminded of how little I retained from my computer-nerd days. Asking for help from a high-school friend who programs for a living and has a good deal of knowledge of how to make things like this work, I listened to him give me advice I felt as if I would have been able to think of independently a year ago. I tried his suggestions and thanked him for his help, wondering what had ever possessed me to consider (however briefly) majoring in computer science in college. It was like how I feel when I don’t take a French class or speak the language for a while, then jump back into immersion. I know I should understand what’s being said, or be able to form sentences of my own, but the words are slow to come and I just can’t force myself to remember the vocabulary and the concepts.

That doesn’t happen to me as long as I’m working in English, though, and it doesn’t happen as long as I stick to the humanities—I think my analytical/critical thinking/reading and writing skills are much more innate than anything I may have memorized through picking up French or computer science, and so I’m probably picking the right major after all. But it does remind me, again, how little any of these disciplines exist in a vacuum unto themselves. Just as my close-reading abilities inform my study of historical documents, or my interpretation of a given historical narrative informs my interpretation of a given piece of writing, so too does the comp sci I was capable of a year ago come back to haunt me when doing research or having fun with a friend. Well, hey. I knew there was a reason I was getting a liberal arts education.

In Which Emily Disagrees With Very Clever People on NPR

I was trying to fall asleep while listening to the NPR Books podcast, which this past week featured an item on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Morning Edition interviews Clinton Heylin, the author of a new book about the publication of the sonnets who posits that Shakespeare never meant for the sonnets to be published, which I was willing to believe, since I know very little about Shakespeare, and most academic Shakespeare-speculation goes over my head. But then Heylin went on to suggest that the reason Shakespeare didn’t want the sonnets to be published is because the poet expresses love for a “fair youth” in many of the sonnets, and that would have been, he said, a “criminal offense” in Elizabethan England.

Well. I don’t know about that, and I was so skeptical I actually got out of bed at 3am to write this. I say this with the heavy disclaimer that I’ve read only some of the sonnets, that I don’t know a whole lot about Shakespeare and his time, and that, well, I’m a college student with not a whole lot of knowledge about anything. I’m not equipped to take on the Shakespeare speculators. But this suggestion struck me as dubious because homosexuality didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time. The idea of sexual acts called “sodomy” or something similar that may have been criminalized at the time (I don’t know for sure what laws were on the books under the Tudors or the first half of the Stuarts, but I’m betting there were laws against non-procreative sex) would likely have existed in a completely separate dimension from the idea of a close male friendship in terms of the Shakespeare-era social world. Mind you, I’m talking out of my ass, but I think that even if same-sex sexual relationships were going on covertly, I’m not sure that it would have occurred to the Elizabethans as a culture to make the leap to “criminal offenses” from the expressions of love/affection/desire/etc. in the sonnets and therefore to condemn Shakespeare for having written them—and thus, it isn’t entirely accurate for Heylin to say that Shakespeare’s love for the youth in question would have been a criminal offense, if it did exist.

I say this because I’m thinking about much later writers, like Whitman, whose expressions of same-sex desire went over the heads of many people, such as the contemporary censors who criticized expressions of heterosexual lust but were much less critical of the Calamus poems. Indeed, if I recall correctly, it wasn’t until some time after their publication that the Calamus poems got buried—and I’m fuzzy on my dates, but that might have been after the trial of Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s trial equated “the love that dare not speak its name” with the term “sodomite,” and neatly coincided with the turn-of-the-century beginnings of the psychological understanding of homosexuality that the German sexologists were getting up to. After Wilde’s trial (or so the folklore has it), young men stopped walking arm and arm on the street, as was previously the fashion. Wilde’s trial, to the best of my knowledge, was what made same-sex affection actually seem “homosexual,” and therefore, according to the standards of the day, immoral.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how far it’s possible to go in labeling Writer X “homosexual” or “gay” or saying that Writer Y’s work addresses queer themes or things like that. I’m sure that quite a lot of very important people have written on this issue, and maybe one day I’ll read what they’ve written and figure it out. But I do know that I have an inclination to place writers like Whitman in a historical narrative tracing literary expressions of same-sex desire, and maybe it’s legitimate to do that when his poetry was embraced as a cultural rallying point of some early queer movements, and when legitimately gay literary figures such as Ginsberg cited it as inspiration. But then cases like Shakespeare, which made me sit bolt upright in bed at 3 in the morning to go, “Hey, you can’t make the leap from same-sex affection to implying homosexuality; that didn’t exist in the 16th century!” remind me that I need to resist the tendency to assume that as many figures as possible were gay or bisexual or queer or what have you.

They also remind me of a key tenet of “doing history,” which will probably be very important to remember as I go on to do a degree in said discipline: you can’t impose the cultural frameworks of the present upon the past. Maybe Heylin was just trying to render the context of Shakespeare’s poetry more understandable to the modern NPR listener, and actually maybe I’ve just got all my facts wrong and Heylin’s explanation really does make sense. He’s certainly far more qualified to pronounce upon the subject than I am. But hey: to me, in this case “doing history” means recognizing that putting sexual acts and affection/desire together into a modern sexual-object-choice model of homosexuality or bisexuality or queerness is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and one that doesn’t work retroactively.

And I also have to wonder why we can’t just appreciate what Shakespeare had to say without wondering what his personal stake in things was. His words wouldn’t have captured Western civilization for the last 400-some years if they didn’t have a certain universality outside of his personal experience.

Obama Recognizes Pride Month

This is actually really awesome—from a PDF linked at The Atlantic, which I’m going to quote in full:

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release June 1, 2009

LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER PRIDE MONTH, 2009

– – – – – – –

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION

Forty years ago, patrons and supporters of the Stonewall Inn in New York City resisted police harassment that had become all too common for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Out of this resistance, the LGBT rights movement in America was born. During LGBT Pride Month, we commemorate the events of June 1969 and commit to achieving equal justice under law for LGBT Americans.

LGBT Americans have made, and continue to make, great and lasting contributions that continue to strengthen the fabric of American society. There are many well-respected LGBT leaders in all professional fields, including the arts and business communities. LGBT Americans also mobilized the Nation to respond to the domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic and have played a vital role in broadening this country’s response to the HIV pandemic.

Due in no small part to the determination and dedication of the LGBT rights movement, more LGBT Americans are living their lives openly today than ever before. I am proud to be the first President to appoint openly LGBT candidates to Senate-confirmed positions in the first 100 days of an Administration. These individuals embody the best qualities we seek in public servants, and across my Administration — in both the White House and the Federal agencies — openly LGBT employees are doing their jobs with distinction and professionalism.

The LGBT rights movement has achieved great progress, but there is more work to be done. LGBT youth should feel safe to learn without the fear of harassment, and LGBT families and seniors should be allowed to live their lives with dignity and respect.

My Administration has partnered with the LGBT community to advance a wide range of initiatives. At the international level, I have joined efforts at the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality around the world. Here at home, I continue to support measures to bring the full spectrum of equal rights to LGBT Americans. These measures include enhancing hate crimes laws, supporting civil unions and Federal rights for LGBT couples, outlawing discrimination in the workplace, ensuring adoption rights, and ending the existing
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in a way that strengthens our Armed Forces and our national security. We must also commit ourselves to fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic by both reducing the number of HIV infections and providing care and support services to people living with HIV/AIDS across the United States.

These issues affect not only the LGBT community, but also our entire Nation. As long as the promise of equality for all remains unfulfilled, all Americans are affected. If we can work together to advance the principles upon which our Nation was founded, every American will benefit. During LGBT Pride Month, I call upon the LGBT community, the Congress, and the American people to work together to promote equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in
me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. I call upon the people of the United States to turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this first day of June, in the year of our Lord two thousand nine,
and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-third.

BARACK OBAMA

# # #

I’m not really going to start jumping up and down until we get some action on DADT, DOMA, ENDA, etc. But when was the last time you saw a president issue a proclamation like that? Oh yeah—Obama’s the first one. Well done him.

QOTD (2009-05-31)

I think some of my favorites of Whitman’s poems are not always the longest, the “greatest” in size and scope and scale. I wouldn’t dream of asserting that “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric” are anything other than incredible, but I like the simplicity of things like this, from a 1940 edition of Leaves of Grass (poems selected by an editor, not based off one of the original Whitman editions):

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

I like the parenthetical especially, and I like that it’s in a parenthetical. I don’t know enough about poetry to say why this is so particularly arresting, but well. I like it.

There are more of these brief isolated stanzas in the Calamus poems, but I don’t have them in this edition because it’s just selections, and so the editor’s gone and picked all these Civil War things over the beauty of masculine affection. And Ginsberg will always have a special place in my heart, but in his entire oeuvre he doesn’t have brief encapsulations of beauty like this. His greatest works are all fantastic, but they’re either mid-sized, or they’re epic.

That said, though, I miss my collected Ginsberg desperately. It’s only in a box that I’ll see again when I move to Washington, DC for the summer next weekend, but its absence is noticeable. I know all these poems are available on the internet, but that’s a very poor substitute indeed for volumes that I’ve read over and over and over again.

High School

My high school is having its prom tonight. It’s deeply weird to think that a year ago it was I who was a graduating senior, who was so stressed about the whole enterprise of finding a date and a dress (I went with a friend and bought one for $30 at a discount store) and with the deeply weird and alienating experience of shaving my legs for the first and as yet only time. I know some folks who graduated my year or the year before who are going to prom with friends and significant others who are seniors, and I’m glad they’re enjoying themselves—but I wouldn’t do it again if you paid me. I certainly don’t regret going, when I was a senior, to what was my only high-school dance. But I appreciate now the distance that college provides, and the contentment and self-assurance. Once I was so desperately concerned with the concept of going, with how pathetic and outcast I would feel if I didn’t. Now I think I do tend less to worry about those kinds of things.

Last night, I went back to my high school to see its advanced drama class perform The Laramie Project, which is a play about the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998. High schools do it pretty frequently, and I think it’s because the play is very careful to represent all the perspectives of the citizens of Laramie, whether tolerant or intolerant. Parents can’t complain that their children are being force-fed the gay agenda, because there are characters in the play that complain about that too. And yet I was still incredibly surprised when I learned that The Laramie Project was being produced at my high school, a place I associate with homophobia, ignorance, and immaturity, where the health teacher once said that she would like to teach about LGBT issues in her classes, but that she was too worried about the complaints she would get. And so I broke my usual rule about stepping away from my high-school life and bought a ticket to come back, because I wanted to make sure they knew that folks supported this production.

As it happened, my friend in the cast told me that he hadn’t heard of any backlash or objections to the show; the house was the fullest I’d seen it in a few years. A fair number of alumni had come back, and there were plenty of parents in the audience too. I had to wonder what they all were thinking: I looked around the audience and saw friends’ parents who I knew for a fact had voted in favor of Prop. 8; I saw a kid who had once told me that God didn’t approve of my lifestyle choices. One of the characters in the play is a college student who talks about how his parents objected to him performing in a scene from Angels in America because they believed homosexuality was a sin. I wondered whether there was anyone in the cast whose parents had expressed similar opinions.

I am always dubious as to whether young casts have the maturity or life experience to pull off a show as weighty as The Laramie Project, but the script—as I discovered while watching; I wasn’t familiar with the show before—is brilliant, and it’s pretty hard to ruin it. The cast was obviously trying very hard, and a few performances in particular were incredible—at points, I was genuinely moved. I don’t mean to sound surprised, but it’s always great to see something you were cynical about turn out well. I didn’t think that the high school for a neighborhood that’s overwhelmingly right-wing, and that surrounded me with Yes on 8 signs last year, would have been able to do this; I didn’t think they would have attracted a crowd. They did.

Obviously I’m sitting here stewing about this, and I know a few other folks have—I saw some Facebook notes go up with people’s reactions to the show, and I’m very glad it provoked reactions. Theater should. Now, of course, most of the cast—if not all—is even as I type at a hotel in downtown San Diego, wearing fancy clothes and dancing and celebrating the end of high school. I wish them well—and I hope they treat this show as more than just their last time on the high-school stage. I hope it made a difference to them, and to their families and classmates in the audience. I think it’s probably too much to hope that an advanced drama class production could change anyone’s minds, but hey, I’m still surprised there wasn’t a substantial backlash. Maybe there’s a chance; baby steps are still progress. I may have left high school and all its trappings very firmly and decisively behind, but not so much that I can’t say I’m so very, very proud of these kids for taking on a serious and relevant subject, and doing it maturely and sincerely. Well done.

QOTD (2009-05-28)

Here, have an op-ed/thing from the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, which is coincidentally the Palins’ local paper in Wasilla, AK (h/t my editor and cool dude Jesse, who posted this on Facebook):

While the word “homosexual” is not in the Bible, the behavior of those who practice homosexuality, and God’s estimation of them, very definitely is. When the word came into existence I cannot tell you, but what we can say for sure is that when Noah Webster published his first dictionary in 1828, it was not included. This means that homosexuality is a modern word invented to replace the word Noah Webster did include, sodomy, defined as a crime against nature. This is historical revisionism in action.

I’m pointing this out not because of the homophobia—we’ve heard that all before—but just because of how hilariously lazy it is. I suppose that Ron Hamman, the author of this article, must never have heard of the OED, whose first citation for “homosexuality” is an 1892 English translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which defines the word as “Great diminution or complete absence of sexual feeling for the opposite sex, with substitution of sexual feeling and instinct for the same sex.” Do you see the word “sodomy” there? Yeah, me neither. That’s because, no matter what decade you’re from or how out-of-touch bigoted you are, “homosexuality” and “sodomy” are not, historically speaking, equivalent terms—as the historians’ brief in Lawrence v. Texas (subscription-only) famously pointed out:

… sodomy prohibitions have varied enormously in the last millennium (and even since our own colonial era) in their definition of the offense and in their rationalization of its prohibition. The specification of “homosexual sodomy” as a criminal offense does not carry the pedigree of the ages but is almost exclusively an invention of the recent past.

Prohibitions against sodomy are rooted in the teachings of Western Christianity, but those teachings have always been strikingly inconsistent in their definition of the acts encompassed by the term. When the term “sodomy” was first emphasized by medieval Christian theologians in the eleventh century, they applied it inconsistently to a diverse group of nonprocreative sexual practices. In subsequent Latin theology, canon law, and confessional practice, the term was notoriously confused with “unnatural acts,” which had a very different origin and ranged even more widely (to include, for example, procreative sexual acts in the wrong position or with contraceptive intent). “Unnatural acts” is the older category, because it comes directly from Paul in Romans 1, but Paul does not associate such acts with (or even mention) the story of Sodom (Genesis 19) and appears not to have considered that story to be concerned with same-sex activity.

Later Christian authors did combine Romans 1 with Genesis 19, but they could not agree on what sexual practices were meant by either “unnatural acts” or “sodomy.” For example, in Peter Damian, who around 1050 championed the term “sodomy” as an analogy to “blasphemy,” the “sins of the Sodomites” include solitary masturbation. In Thomas Aquinas, about two centuries later, “unnatural acts” cover every genital contact intended to produce orgasm except penile-vaginal intercourse in an approved position. Many later Christian writers denied that women could commit sodomy at all; others believed that the defining characteristic of unnatural or sodomitical sex was that it could not result in procreation, regardless of the genders involved. In none of these authors does the term “sodomy” refer systematically and exclusively to same-sex conduct. Certainly it was not used consistently through the centuries to condemn that conduct. The restrictive use of the term in the Texas law at issue must itself be regarded as a historically recent innovation.

The brief goes on to discuss at great length the sodomy laws that were established in colonial America, which followed a broader definition of “unnatural acts” as described above. So if we’re going to be throwing around the “revisionist” label at anyone, it should really Hamman’s side—he’s the one deviating from the letter of the Bible and how it was implemented in Christian societies all the way through the 19th century. “Homosexuality” was a word that became increasingly common in the early 20th century in particular to describe a psychological condition, and later a less stigmatized way of being and sexual object choice. Its connotation is not that of specific sexual acts, and it’s pretty damn inaccurate to say that “homosexuality” replaced “sodomy” as a term. You simply can’t equate the two words, whatever connotation you want to ascribe to them.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I know that whoever reads this probably doesn’t need to be told all that. But if I may rationalize my self-indulgence, I think it’s important to reiterate these pieces of history, which even LGBT folks and their allies rarely learn, unless they take it upon their own initiative to do so (credit, by the way, for the Lawrence stuff goes to this past semester’s gender and sexuality class, information from which has graced this blog many times). I think there’s a lot to be said for compiling a historical narrative and then making sure that it gets heard, and that historical inaccuracies are called out—even if Hamman and folks who agree with him never read this post. If someone is motivated to be homophobic by their personal “ick” factor or their personal understanding of the religious doctrine they subscribe to, well, there’s not a whole lot I can do about that. But I have the facts on my side, and I think there is an intrinsic value to making sure they get heard alongside the complete disinclination of someone like Hamman to learn them.

Happy Memorial Day

The best way to support our troops is to ensure that no more of them have to die in Afghanistan and Iraq. In honor of Memorial Day and all our men and women in uniform, here’s Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and friends singing Pete Seeger’s song “Bring ‘Em Home” at Pete’s 90th birthday concert a few weeks ago:

This song got Pete banned from television when he played it on the Smothers Brothers show at the height of the Vietnam War. And it seems relevant, perhaps, to quote from a Memorial Day post by a very dear college master of mine:

I wonder if, on a day slated to honor the noble sacrifices of fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, you and I might make room as well to honor the silent inclinings of the hidden heart, along with more conspicuous and civic movements, to avoid the necessity for those sacrifices in the first place.

Amen.

A Year of College

I’m sitting at the kitchen table in my family’s house back in the California suburbs, after a year of college. It’s almost culture shock, even though I haven’t really been out of the house yet—all I can think about, when I look out the window, is how few trees there are, and how big the sky seems, the things I remember my mom first remarking on when our family moved out west ten years ago. It’s weird (though certainly a pleasant change) to go downstairs to the kitchen, instead of walking across a courtyard and swiping into the dining hall. It’s so different to see my parents and my sister, instead of my friends and my professors and the college staff. It’s particularly bizarre to think about how going anywhere—the movie theater, the bookstore, restaurants, Starbucks—now involves getting in a car. I haven’t driven since I was last here, at spring break, and as I remarked to my dad last night, I have been in a car exactly three times since then. I hate driving. I don’t miss it.

But the culture shock is more than the physical, apparent differences between being at home in the suburbs on the west coast and being on a college campus in a small (admittedly suburban) town on the east coast. I have changed so much since this time a year ago, when I hadn’t yet graduated from high school. I may not quite be an adult, but I am by no means a child anymore. My world is now so much larger than these California suburbs, than my high school. My circle of friends has widened to include people from all over the country and all over the world, from many different backgrounds and many different outlooks. Last summer, I worked for minimum wage at a movie theater, driving five days a week to a strip mall that is the perfect embodiment of gaudy American materialism. This summer, I’ll be living on my own in Washington, DC, interning at Campus Progress. It’s a change, and it represents how far I’ve come, and the degree to which my center of perspective has shifted from west to east, from suburbs to cities.

I’ll also be doing some research-assistant work for one of my last-semester’s professors, learning as I do so what a history professor actually does, and whether I’m making the right decision in focusing so single-mindedly on that as my life goal—oh yeah, last summer I feared that academia was an inevitable career path for me, but kind of regretted that I didn’t seem to have a choice in the matter. Now I welcome it, and I think about all the steps I will have to take to get there. I know I’m going to study history and American studies now, in college; I talk to my parents about grad schools. On the flight across the country, in between wading through historical documents for the research-assisting and dozing off while listening to Ginsberg recordings, I suddenly thought of a senior thesis topic: a way to do Ginsberg in the context of history/AMS and work in the LGBT theory and cultural stuff I’ve gotten so passionate about this semester. I’m not ready to really explain it yet; I don’t even know if it’s a viable project. And it’s a little early, anyway. But it’s a start, a very first step on the road to becoming the person I want to be, to being an academic and a writer and a public intellectual and never leaving the college campuses. I may be looking outside right now at the cacti-and-succulents-decorated backyard my parents are in the process of fixing up (very nicely, I might add), and I’m glad for the brief vacation being here provides. But mentally, I’ve left the suburbs, and I hope for good.

I was telling someone about what’s changed in my outlook in the past year, and particularly the past semester; how I feel as if I’ve mentally realigned myself to a world beyond these suburbs and that high school. And he sat, and listened, and said, “I think this year has been empowering for you.” And I nodded vigorously. That’s exactly it. My world is large. I’m full of the things I want to do and accomplish and study and learn. I feel so very self-assured right now, not ready to let anyone make me feel inadequate, not caring how I compare to the folks whose performance I once would have measured myself against. Mentally free of the suburbs, I feel as if the demons I once battled are gone—or, at least, that they’re different. Because I know I’m on the right track, I know I’m making good choices and responsible choices, and I know I’m getting back what I put in. In everything from my grades to my friendships, I’m seeing the results of a year of self-discovery.

In the next three months, I’m going to miss my campus desperately; already I can’t wait for fall semester, to see my friends and to be in classes again, and to take up residence in my secluded little fourth-floor room (I’m really excited about that part). But mostly I’m just excited about everything. Life at this point feels limitless and I feel like I can do anything. My god, everyone should leave the suburbs and move across the country. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

QOTD (2009-05-18)

Via Bilerico, there’s a bill in the South Carolina legislature that would introduce a program into the schools for educating middle- and high-school students about domestic violence—except its sponsors are adamant that it should only teach about domestic violence in opposite-sex relationships. Here’s one of the sponsors of the bill:

Bill sponsor Rep. Joan Brady said excluding gay relationships is fine and declared that, “Traditional domestic violence occurs in a man-woman, boy-girl situation.”

“The fact is, this is a gender-specific, abusive behavior. The overwhelming predominance of dating abuse occurs in a traditional or heterosexual relationship,” said Brady, R-Columbia.

This is one of those homophobic statements that’s so ridiculous, you have to laugh. Not only is traditional marriage between a man and a woman, so is traditional domestic violence! Since I usually expect the anti-gay line to be that same-sex relationships are more unstable or more prone to issues such as domestic violence, I was pretty surprised at this one. Maybe if that’s what the South Carolina legislature thinks of same-sex relationships, they should consider striking down their gay marriage ban….