I can’t tell you how excited I am about January 20, this momentously important day, one of the most historically significant days in my short lifetime. But as much as I am excited, I have been troubled: reconciling, for example, Rick Warren, and the censorship of Gene Robinson with all the optimism I have about the beginning of our new president’s term.

What I’ve realized, though, is that for me it’s not so much about Obama as it is about not being Bush. Obama’s a centrist. I’m presumptuous enough to call myself a radical leftist. But Obama in the White House means that moderate views, not far-right neoconservative ones, will become the law of the land. If that means a restoration of the (centrist) principles of the Constitution, I can live with that—even if it means that same-sex marriage will still be illegal, we’ll still be pro-Israel, anti-Muslim hawks, and the war on drugs will continue. Even if those things remain the same in the next four and eight years, if President Obama means that no one will be tortured in the name of my “freedom” I can live with that. If I can go abroad without practicing my Canadian accent, I can live with that.

I’m hoping most of all that this administration will reverse some of the damage done by Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. A couple weeks ago, while walking by the security checkpoint on my way out of Newark (“Liberty” International) Airport, I saw one of those body scanner machines the ACLU warns about. And my eyes widened and I thought what I would do, the next time I flew out of Newark, if they asked me to go through one of those machines. Would I refuse on principle? Would they let me fly? What would happen? Would it be worth my safety to put up a fight? Which option, active or passive, would allow me to better retain my dignity?

Anyway, the reason I’m optimistic about tomorrow is that, even though I know it won’t bring some of the policy developments I’m most passionate about, it will bring a basic sense of dignity back to the White House. I’m pretty confident about that. And things won’t change immediately, and I’ll definitely keep protesting the things that don’t, but I hope that slowly I can forgive America for how it’s betrayed me.

I read Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America” out loud to myself last night. I had never thought very deeply about the lines, before, and I realized that all of it—and especially the last stanza—expresses something of how I feel about my country. This is how that poem ends:

America you don’t really want to go to war.
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers’ Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking at the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

The inauguration tomorrow, America, makes me want to put my queer shoulder to the wheel.

It’s that time of year again.

At the end of every year, I try to identify how I’ve changed and grown, what I’ve learned and experienced. Sometimes it’s revealing, sometimes not; I’ll leave you to judge whether my self-indulgence is relevant to anything besides myself.

In terms of momentous circumstances, I think we all know that no year holds a candle to 2008. The election season and its aftermath are testament to that. To come of age in this year of all years has been incredible indeed. I’m still a cynic about The Establishment, but how wonderful that I cast my first presidential ballot in a year when my cynicism could be tempered somewhat. Like, I suspect, many other people, I hope I will always remember where I was at 11:00pm on November 4, 2008, made all the more special because that experience, and the previous several months spent blogging the whole run, were something I owned, as an individual on the brink of adulthood.

That “brink of adulthood” thing is without question the defining aspect of the past year. I usually count the passage of time in terms of academic years, so it’s important to note that this calendar year covered two: part of the last year of high school and part of the first year of college, with an interesting and difficult transition period between. In these two years that make up 2008, I have gone from rebel to “progressive” to rebel again; I have made fabulous new friends and ceased to speak to old ones; I have held something like three jobs with varying degrees of success; I have received my high school diploma, something I sometimes thought I would never do; I have established a foothold in a paradise I alternately love and hate, where I refuse to be part of the blend of freshman anonymity. I’ve cast my first two ballots, opened my first bank accounts and written my first checks, and made my first home away from my parents. I’ve been through quite a few other firsts, too, which are no less important (and perhaps more so), but about which it would be unseemly to write in such a public forum. It’s all been part of the initial–and largest–step in this ongoing project where I take responsibility for my own life and actions. Where I become an adult.

There are so many days I would like to remember from 2008. My birthday party in February; the first Scripps Ranch People’s School I hosted in March; my prom in May and my high school graduation in June; the graveyard shift I worked at the movie theater the night The Dark Knight came out in July; the 10 days I spent alone in my house in August. And then every Nass meeting; every Master’s Tea in Rocky; every Saturday night in Terrace; the crazy night I watched the sun rise; a week spent defending Princeton’s sidewalks; my Princeton Thanksgiving; and the wonderful times I had with friends in San Diego just last week. It all makes me so optimistic for 2009. I have much to look forward to, be it my classes next semester, whatever summer internship I (hopefully) land, my first summer in British Columbia at legal drinking age, or so many more joyous times that I’ll write down so that I remember them forever. 2009 may be an oddly-numbered year, which I find unsettling, but its promise is indescribable.

I do have a New Year’s resolution, and it’s a very serious one, so I’d like to share it in the hopes of inspiring others to adopt a similar resolution. You see, I began to call myself an activist again after Princeton Prop. 8; when I saw Milk in the Loews theater in the Village on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I was inspired as to how I might live up to the label. The message of Milk that resonated most with me is that it is not acceptable to hide oneself. The bravest thing–and still the most essential thing–that someone can do is to be “out,” in whatever sense you want to ascribe to the word. For Harvey Milk, it was being out as gay, the sense we usually ascribe to it, and it was refusing to compromise who he was for the sake of safety or ease. That’s a powerful idea, and it strikes me how so often we hide who we are, what we desire, what we value–out of fear or out of shame.

My New Year’s resolution is to never hide again. It’s a challenging task, to be sure, but if I can resolve not to lie about or misrepresent myself, if I can resolve not to be ashamed of anything I am, if I can live my life without apologizing for it, if I can stop being scared of what “people” will say or do, then we will all be that much closer to a world where no one need be afraid to say and be who they are. That, I have begun to believe, is how we’ll achieve peace and equality: by not compromising a single shred of our identities.

I usually end these things with a word of thanks, and so I’d like to thank friends: in San Diego, in Princeton, and scattered around the globe. You are my rocks and my mainstays and the people with whom I most look forward to spending 2009.

The best of the holiday season and the new year to everyone.

I live in the Orange Bubble now. It’s what we call Princeton, that mystical land shielded from all politics except the most cultured debates; from socioeconomic class differences and extreme disadvantage; from care or worry or really any of the problems that plague the majority of Americans, especially in these challenging financial times. Any permeability in the Bubble, in the sameness of never having to worry about anything except occasionally academics, is shocking. It is, rather embarrassingly, such a stark contrast that departing from the Bubble causes days’ worth of contemplation. But I intend, here, to talk about not the effects of the economic crisis or even the nature of Princeton’s atmosphere of gross entitlement. I intend to talk about another, to me more surprising, aspect of the Orange Bubble.

I wrote in high school about “my life as a guy,” my constant quest to balance my baggy sweatshirts and short haircut with the boobs and womanly curves underneath. More often than not, this was a mental and psychological challenge, trying to decide how I wanted people to perceive me. Sometimes I found that this made it easier to be accepted in certain, particularly all-male, social circles; more often than not my presentation was and is just an expression of how I feel most at ease. But that usual ease didn’t erase the fear I felt, for example, whenever I entered a women’s restroom, lest my right to be there be questioned or lest I simply be screamed at in alarm.

I still have very serious and confusing questions about my gender identity, but since coming to Princeton, things have changed. I no longer fear to enter the women’s restroom, because no one’s screamed at me all semester; I no longer get double-takes when I wear a tie to a function. For all its conservatism and traditionalism, Princeton students are surprisingly unfazed by a girl doing her level best to look like she isn’t one.

That may be a testament, though, to the circles I travel in more than it is to Princeton as a whole. There are more folks here who are “tuned in,” as my mother would say; who are used to seeing and interacting with young people who aren’t too into the gender binary. And they’re easy for me to find, whether through LGBT groups or in the less-labeled, though alternative, aspects of the undergraduate social scene; or among graduate students and faculty, all of whom certainly have encountered many of the “nontraditional” among their own number. But whatever it says, whether about college, about Princeton, or about the friends I’ve made here, I no longer expect the criticism that I don’t take enough care to look attractive to boys, nor my fellow teenagers asking me outright what my gender is. I no longer, most importantly, even think too much to myself about how I present. When I went to see a Broadway play last month, for example, I wore a skirt, sweater, and boots, easily the most feminine I’ve dressed since my high school prom. On the other hand, last night, I wore a tie just for the hell of it. It’s easier, in this college world, to go back and forth, and to avoid getting entangled in massive identity crises in the process.

Imagine the striking nature, then, of such remarks when they do come, out of context as they are. It was jarring last night, for example, when I was having a conversation with some fellow members of my residential college. I mentioned east-coast standards of dress, and how I’d asked my parents to get me collared shirts for Christmas, so that I wouldn’t feel quite so underdressed all the time in my California sweatshirts and cargo pants. A girl, apparently quite taken aback, exclaimed something along the lines of, “But guys wear collared shirts!” I didn’t quite know what to say, so unused am I by now to the sense of constantly challenging expectations that pervaded my last two years of high school. I looked down at myself, dressed in jacket and tie on that particular occasion, and wondered. I saw this girl often, in the dining hall–had she noticed me? Had she registered at all how I dress, how my hair is cut, how I sit with my knees apart and laugh loudly? Or maybe–and this was the particularly jarring bit–I really am ultra-insulated, in a sort of Rainbow Bubble within the Orange one, if you will, where gender norms are defied daily and everyone has the language of theory to talk about it. Maybe, I realized, people are just more polite at Princeton, and maybe most are as traditionalist as the kids in my high school who didn’t know how to react when a girl asked for guys’ sizes in t-shirts and PE clothes.

I still don’t know what purpose my presentation serves, gender stereotypes being as they are a societal construct. What statement do I mean to make with my appearance and my mannerisms? Am I just being a provocateur, or am I being me? How much of that would I sacrifice not to feel afraid of the constant challenges and confusion that I’m paranoiacally starting to anticipate again? Or is there, perhaps (the conclusion I’m now reaching) an educative purpose to all this? Can something be gained from telling a girl in my residential college that I prefer to wear collared shirts, even if they’re considered a “male” clothing item? Can I consider it an achievement to respond matter-of-factly to all the teenagers’ challenges?

But if I’m still confused as to where exactly this leaves me and my sartorial choices, I know a few things. I write this now on a plane back home to San Diego, a city in a state that I haven’t seen since Proposition 8 passed in November. And I think about what I said and wrote, when that happened, about the need not to hide anymore. As I said many times in the weeks after the election, the past few years of the gay rights movement, and the marriage equality movement, have relied on normalizing. The idea is to demonstrate that queer folks are just like straight folks, and therefore non-threatening; that everyone wants a house and a yard and two kids and is, if not conservative, at least not radical. Not question-inducing. Not different. But I think what happened in California indicated that our future lies in confronting and embracing difference. On a very small scale, my ability to always walk into the restroom of my choice without any girls screaming depends on doing it often enough, and putting up with the screams, until it eventually becomes commonplace. That, in our own ways, is what any of us have got to do to get ahead in this world.

At Thanksgiving, privileged people like me are meant to talk about how thankful we are that we are so fortunate. And I am thankful for that. Even as I had one of the most fun Thanksgivings of my life, I awoke this morning to read the news of the terrible terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed so many people. Believe me, I’m fully aware of how fortunate I am.

But what I’d like to talk about most of all is how this Thanksgiving represents how well I’ve adjusted to my university community. I sit here, the most privileged of the privileged, able to attend what is arguably the best university in the country, lacking for nothing. And yet the first several weeks of my experience at this university were frankly harrowing. I went through a week of being terribly sick that effectively put me in hospital (well, it was McCosh, but still) and a minor nervous breakdown that got me seeing a psychiatrist regularly. My parents paid for an unscheduled trip home. I couldn’t manage the enormous volume of work. I had no friends, no connection to university life, and I was miserable for it. What’s more, I believed that I was only here by virtue of my mother’s degrees a generation ago, that I didn’t deserve my place as much as my classmates did, and that I was an idiot by comparison.

And now look at me this past week. I’ve assisted in organizing a piece of political theater that’s attracted nationwide attention and reawakened the radical in me, as well as the historian of radicalism–which in turn has gotten me interested in history again as a discipline. Through this, I’ve met all sorts of clever, interesting, friendly undergraduates who are so inclusive that I don’t feel insignificantly stupid. The president of the university gave a guest lecture at my seminar on education policy last Tuesday, and through her words I finally realized what I’m doing at Princeton and why I deserve to be here. I no longer am ashamed of my mother and how her past brought me here–and I had a wonderful email exchange with said president on account of it, which led me to only greater faith in the administration of this place. I’m now at the point where, even though my room and the school itself have emptied for Thanksgiving, I can relish having a little time to myself, instead of just being desolately lonely.

The weather was lovely this morning when I woke up late and ventured forth at about 12:30 to find a place to eat on Nassau Street. I walked all the way down the road–so far that I could see a gas station (with gas below two dollars!) in the distance–and spent about an hour ascertaining that the only place open was Starbucks. But it was such a lovely day, and such a pleasant walk, that I didn’t mind. The Starbucks clerk was resolutely friendly, and despite having to work a double shift on Thanksgiving, he said he was having fun. I was cheered by his cheeriness, I drank my hot chocolate, I wrote about a third of an essay, and I beat a very difficult song on Guitar Hero, one I’ve been working at for a good few weeks.

Later in the afternoon, I went to friends for Thanksgiving “dinner” (I put “dinner” in quotes because like all such holiday meals, it didn’t occur anywhere near dinnertime; not because it wasn’t fantastic, because it was). And this, I think, is the bit I’m most thankful of all for. My friends are graduate students, you see, and with all due respect to undergrads, I’m constantly impressed by how intelligent and amusing they are, and thus by how fantastic it is that they do things like invite me to their Thanksgiving. I spent several hours at their house (well, apartment), ate a wonderful meal, played an incredibly intense game of Risk that I didn’t lose entirely, met some of their friends, and had a fantastic time. I couldn’t believe how quickly the time passed, and that I really spent that many hours consistently enjoying myself. I couldn’t believe that some of the people there were a good 10 years older than me, and yet it didn’t so much matter. And, finally, in the past few weeks these folks have been the spark that’s made me decide not only that going to grad school is inevitable for me, it’s what I want to do.

For me, Princeton has become a place where, as President Tilghman confirmed, I belong (no matter how much disgust I may have for certain elements of the student culture), and where I feel like I can do anything. I feel like an independent person who’s capable of working hard and putting out decent product; or walking into Terrace alone and having a good time; or sitting down in an hour and writing a column that gets me praise from the undergraduate intelligentsia of Princeton or the non-profit progressives of Washington; or opening the university community’s eyes to political injustice; or even, most remarkably, having friends. It all makes me feel as if when my four years are up and it comes time for the next step, I’m not going to be the loser I always fear I will be. It makes me feel as if I’ll be able to do whatever it is that I worry about–that I’ll get my PhD and get tenure, or get that book published, or be terribly interesting and glamorous, or have a social life beyond an old, dark apartment and a dozen cats.

All this has happened weeks before the end of my first semester. There are seven more of those to go–think about how many other wonderful things could happen.

That is what I am thankful for.