Category: Personal Life

15 Minutes of Self-Promotion

The New Yorker books blog has a feature called “The Subconscious Shelf,” wherein readers send in pictures of their bookshelves and the editor of the blog, Macy Halford, comments on their taste in books. Egomaniac that I am, I succumbed. Not to toot my own horn too much, but this is what she said about me and my books:

Emily, what can I say. I find this shelf inspiring, all the more so because this collection represents those precious few books you wouldn’t live without for even a semester (granted some are probably coursebooks, but I’m guessing that most—even if they began that way—now hold personal value). I see many essential reads—Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet,” Butler’s “Gender Trouble,” Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” Whitman, Wilde, Waugh, Freud, Nietzsche, James (William), Ed White. There’s also Peter Manso’s “PTown” and “The Group Singing Songbook.” To state the obvious, this is a gay bookshelf, which isn’t, in itself, anything to get excited about. What I like about it is its range: if you are concerned with a particular topic, it’s smart to read widely and with purpose. I’d wager that you’re interested in activism (or are already active), and have educated yourself appropriately. It’s inspiring because it is all too easy to be both very concerned with something and too lazy to do the work of becoming truly informed. Your books suggest to me that you are serious, smart, and un-lazy.

More, and pictures of my shelves, at The Book Bench. To Halford, I would like to point out that I am currently taking a class in children’s literature, hence the Harry Potter; and that all the McPhee on my shelf comes from the august New Yorker staff writer himself, whose amazing and unparalleled creative non-fiction class I took in spring 2009.

Admissions (Out)reach; or, Policy Which Lends Itself to Ridiculous Puns

My interests in LGBT issues and higher ed policy dovetailed recently (and yielded what I think is a great pun in the title of this post!) with the announcement that Penn will use applicants’ references to LGBT-related causes, activities, and identification to do outreach to queer students, much as college and university admissions frequently do for other minority groups, from students of color to women in science to scholar-athletes. And the awkward and silly thing about being involved in however small a capacity in institutional policy at an Ivy League school is that when you read about one Ivy League school changing a policy, you immediately wonder whether it’s something you could and should implement at your own school. (Well, I feel this way, anyway.) And so I feel moved to pose a question, dear reader: should Princeton follow Penn’s lead in tracking and doing outreach to LGBT applicants, and how should it do this?

Now, I’d argue that in my anecdotal experience Princeton is already helping LGBT applicants along with the other populations of “non-traditional” applicants which it helps. Half the reason I am now wondering what Princeton should be doing in this regard is because in April 2008, when I was a prospective student visiting Princeton for the weekend, my host brought me to an event at the LGBT Center. I may not have identified as gay then, or been as explicitly and consistently involved in LGBT community as I am now, but knowing that there was an LGBT Center at Princeton and that my host (who is not gay herself) wasn’t shy about going there or inviting me to come made me feel like I could be comfortable here. It was the entire reason I made my decision to come here—and I feel like there might have been some intent behind the hosting program pairing me with the host that they did. Similarly, now that I’m on the other side of the hosting process, I write in to tell the program that I’m interested in hosting LGBT students or anyone else apprehensive of coming to Princeton for social-politics-related reasons. Sometimes they go to Yale (not that I blame them), but sometimes they come here—and I think the fact that I’m the one who hosts them is far from coincidental, given the willingness that I express to host those kids.

And so when there are preferences expressed, the administration tends to heed them—because it’s in their best interests, and in accordance with their stated institutional policy to diversify undergraduate culture, to do so. And maybe this could be done to a greater extent—I don’t know to what extent undergrad admissions does specific outreach to members of other minority groups during the admissions office, so it would be hard for me to say whether they should adjust their policies to include LGBT students too. However, Negative Nancy that I am, I am more concerned about who will be left out by such a policy than who will be brought into the fold by it.

As most of my readers are probably aware, more and more teenagers are coming out in high school—or when they’re even younger! Some of my readers, I believe, are out high schoolers themselves, or were; some of my readers are straight allies involved in their schools’ GSAs or LGBT community life in the cities and towns where they live. LGBT youth culture is now a constituent part of LGBT culture as a whole, a recent and exciting development in the variegated experience of being queer in America. And yet for all that many teenagers are out, I’d go so far as to suggest that most aren’t. Most of the kids I know from high school who are now out in college didn’t go to GSA meetings or go to citywide queer-community events—hell, I certainly didn’t! Back in high school, I thought your sexual orientation wasn’t something you put on a college application. I thought it was something you talked about in furtive late-night AIM conversations, or knew in the back of your mind when you saw how uncannily you could relate to the characters in books you read. I’m not sure, when I was applying to colleges, if I would have answered an optional sexual orientation identification question, and if I had I probably would have hovered over the radio buttons such a question would no doubt require you to choose between. When I came to college, I starting identifying myself to others as “gay” instead of as “bisexual,” with intermittent spurts of asexuality in between. When I was 17, would I have been able to choose a radio button? Or would I have declined to, unsure which letter in “LGBT” best described me? Would I have declined to, unsure whether selecting any of them would have made me seem too “unprofessional” for a college application?

And this is me we’re talking about! Two years later, I’m the gayest of the gay at this college where I wound up, making a life out of nonchalantly throwing around the word “sodomy” at the dinner table. What about the others? How does the admissions office reach out to a kid who hasn’t come out to him- or her- or hirself, a kid who after two years in college still lives in fear of being found out? How does the admissions office reach out to the queer kids who are out, but who are so desperate not to make their outness a defining point of their identity that they would run away from such overtures of community? It’s a tricky line to navigate, that’s for sure—as tricky as are any of the lines we deal with when we create or don’t create queer community at Princeton.

I am reminded, once again, of the big gulf between knowing you’re different and knowing you’re queer, particularly when you’re sixteen or seventeen and being different is such an all-consuming torture that it’s hard to understand it as anything else or anything more sharply-defined. I am reminded, once again, of the time Before, the time when I was still trying to get a seat at the popular kids’ table—I hadn’t yet realized that it was possible to go start a table of my own. And I truly am not sure what I would have done, then, if Princeton had asked me to select a sexual orientation.

Well. With that, I’m off to talk about Mary Wollstonecraft’s attitude towards homoeroticism. High school, after all, was a full universe ago.

Memory, Time, and Woeful Insecurities; or, Blogging for Dummies

Those of you who are Princeton students are no doubt aware of a certain Master of Rockefeller College given to holding forth to a large Facebook audience on life and literature and a combination of the two. A fan of his notes since I first became a member of his college 18 months ago, I’ve had particular reason in the past several weeks to slowly wade my way through his backlog. I’m just getting now to the ones he was writing my first few weeks here, and it’s quite strange to be reading these again in quite a different frame of mind. I remember, then, not understanding why I couldn’t understand what he was writing, why its meaning wasn’t immediately apparent to me. I remember feeling lost, as lost as I felt in my French class, when I didn’t understand the teacher; in meetings for the student publication I briefly wrote for, when I wasn’t as charismatic or articulate as the other writers; and out at Terrace on Saturday nights, when I sat alone in a corner and played with my iPod. I loathed myself: for being so stupid, for failing to integrate seamlessly into a foreign culture so far removed from my California public high school. I phoned my parents in tears and begged to come home for fall break.

But now it’s the second time around, the second read. I quit the publication; I stopped going to Terrace. I never stopped feeling stupider than all my classmates, and sometimes it still drives me to tears—but it’s all redeemed when I get good feedback from a professor, as occasionally I do. I have friends, good ones. And far from sitting in a corner in a well of shyness and discomfort and fear, I’ve discovered that what I do best is talk. I talk in precept, I talk on this blog and on Facebook, I talk in committee meetings, I talk at parties and study breaks, I talk when I’m at home—in the Rocky dining hall, that is. I talk about eating clubs, about how it seems like everyone at this university is in the closet, about Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, about why the American political system is going to hell in a handbasket. And I’ve found out that when you talk enough, people expect you to do things. I’ve been asked to help start organizations and publications, to make things happen, to change the world.

When I talk on this blog, more often than not, it comes back to haunt me. I am not democratically (little-d!) impartial; I do not withhold my political views about my community or about the United States. I get pushback for being one of them legacies, for example, and a post I wrote back in September about dominant Princeton culture has gotten a disconcertingly large amount of mileage. I have tried, as a result, to write less about my life, to bitch a little less, to engage more intellectually with my world. I have tried to make myself think and to make other people think—and if I am going to bitch, I try to bring a method to my bitchiness. As I have learned to write about history, I have blogged about history. As I have learned to write about literature, I have blogged about literature. And as I have learned to engage with the world as an adult, I have blogged about that process too.

Sometimes I think that to an outside reader, my posts must seem as impenetrable as a certain college master’s did to me 18 months ago—except that mine are not impenetrable in a way that makes the reader want to learn how to read them properly! And sometimes I wonder whether the ethics of my blogging are appropriate, whether I do the right thing to mix the academic so inextricably with the personal, whether I do the right thing to be so forthcoming about the private angst that dogs my days. Does the world need to know that I am still, after 18 months, resolutely tortured by insecurity and guilt and shame at my failure to perform to academic heights? Does the world care how terrified I am that it seems as if my entire life hangs in the balance of one single professional goal which has become near-impossible to achieve?

Reader, I think all this angst must serve some instrumental purpose. It has to. It has to because writing is the road through angst, and has always been—but it also is a declaration that the rhythm of weekends (Thursday night drinking, Friday morning hangover, Saturday night drinking, Sunday morning hangover, Sunday night spent catching up on the weekend’s work) is meaningless to those who have spent their whole weekends in the library. It is a reminder that if seeking validation and self-worth in a dominant social culture that alienates you isn’t working out, you can after all these years of insecurity and self-loathing find a reason for being in books and in words, in writing and in talking. Of course, there are perils in this approach, the foremost being that now if you feel as if you’ve turned in sub-par written work, or if you gave a strange professor a first impression of stupidity and inanity, you’re disconsolate for days. Now you risk being formed only by what you have done, and thus it is imperative that you do Enough, and it is never possible to do Enough. And no matter how well the life of the mind works out, that much time spent tracing the same path between bedroom, dining hall, library, and coffeeshop, and pacing back and forth across 120 square feet of life above an early-20th-century Gothic-revival archway, can get just a little claustrophobic.

But do you know why it’s okay? It’s because you’re just twenty years old and you know that you’ve already discovered your reason for being. You read and read and talk and talk and slowly the secrets of great texts are unlocked; slowly you permeate the surface of those once impermeable Facebook notes. You read. And you talk. And most days you go to bed exhausted, depressed, dissatisfied with yourself. But some days, when the sun shines just right through the windows of your mostly-subterranean library refuge, and you’re listening to Tchaikovsky and drinking your coffee and suddenly the blank verse you’re reading makes so much sense that you have to scramble for pen and paper to note it down—then you remember why you’re doing this, why the greatest and lasting joy is to be found in what you do, what you were—in some sense—fated to do. What you’ve known since you were thirteen that you would do. It’s then, in those single, singular moments, that you know beyond any reasonable doubt that you’ve sold your soul to the ivory tower—and that you never, ever want to leave.

Status Update

What’s on your mind?

Emily Rutherford…
needs to read Mrs. Dalloway again.
Needs to read George Eliot, anything.
Needs to read Nabokov, more than Lolita.
Needs to read Foucault.
Needs to read Blake, seriously, and Auden and Eliot—T.S.—more than desultorily.
Needs to read Jane Eyre.
Needs to read more Kant, more Nietzsche, more Rousseau.
Needs to read Sedgwick, Butler. The whole catalogue.
Needs to read Wilde, everything; Milton, everything but Paradise Lost, because twice is probably enough to get by on.
Needs to read Freud.
Needs to read Plato. And Aristotle. And Cicero.
Needs to read Elizabeth Bishop, more; Trollope, more; Dickens, more.
Needs to read Shaw, Symonds, Pater… and Plath.
Needs to read Melville, especially Bartleby; needs to read Emily Dickinson.
Needs to read needs to read needs to read.
Needs to read Mary Wollstonecraft for tomorrow.

——-
Addendum: Henry James. How could Emily Rutherford have forgotten him?

On Reading Habits and the Information Superhighway

I once again fail at refraining from joining in the clusterfuck that is the left-wing DC-based blogosphere, because both Yglesias and Ta-Nehisi Coates responded to a third blog post, which fears that Twitter will bring about the demise of American literary culture, by discussing their own reading habits. And I, Millenial Twitterer Facebooker college student—a representative of an age group allegedly more networked and less able to stay focused on a whole novel than the age groups from which Yglesias and Coates hail—felt obliged to weigh in on my own reading habits as well.

Now, my perspective does come with some bias: over the weekend, I pressed the fatal command-Q on my Twitter client, aware that the little blue-glowing notification icon in the upper-right corner of my screen was distracting me from writing grant applications. It’s a terrible thing when you can’t get through a sentence because you feel like an icon is forcing you to switch windows and attend to some all-important piece of information that probably isn’t really that important after all, and is certainly no more important than applying for summer funding. If anything, this is the problem with the social-networking information superhighway: not that it is a non-literary or non-literate form of communicating, but that it creates for the user an obligation to make that icon stop glowing blue, or to keep the number of unread items in Google Reader down to zero. (Yes, I definitely did just look at my Google Reader tab, note that the tab read “Google Reader (8),” and clicked over to start reading the 8 unread items before I realized the irony of the situation.) These unread counts, and the immediacy they demand, are, I think, a problem—because they distract us from other things that surely deserve just as much of our time and attention. I feel as if I must read my new tweets because if I wait ten minutes to send my friend an @-reply, it will be too late—but then what does that do to the intellectual resources I’m devoting to understanding some aspect of my schoolwork?

It’s not as if I don’t read a lot: I am, after all, an undergrad history major with a more-than-passing interest in English literature. I read. A lot. Hundreds of pages a week, in fact, and I did that before I quit Twitter and I do it now, because I have to. I won’t do as well in my classes if I don’t read, and I won’t be as educated a person if I don’t read. Being well-read is in fact so vitally important to my sense of self-respect that reading is one of the most important things that I do. And while I must make time in my day for Google Reader, I must also make time in my day for Wilde and Marx and Milton. It’s a moral necessity, and in the long view a far more pressing one than whether I’ve read everything that the left-wing blogosphere has to say about the latest development in the 24-hour news cycle. In as much as I am a representative of my generation, fully wedded to the wonder that is the Internet, I couldn’t exist without the Western literary canon (though that is not to diminish the value of the non-Western canon) either.

Furthermore, I’ll go so far as to say that the problem with Luddite and anti-Luddite screeds is that they set up a binary prizing an increasingly minority print culture on the one hand versus a dynamic digital information culture on the other—but the two can, of course, coexist. Perhaps reading on your Kindle saves paper (I know I’ve stopped printing out my pdf readings as a way to be more environmentally friendly); perhaps you read and write blogs and Twitter feeds about literary culture. And perhaps you can learn to negotiate which aspects of the Internet will help you, and which won’t. Perhaps you just need to learn when to turn off the constant presence of the Twitter feed.

I think we should all read more. I think we should all be better humanists. I think we should all resist the increasing trend towards specialization that pervades both the academy and the real world. But that in the end has little to do with Twitter, and much more to do with how we use media like it. It has little to do with the existence of technology, and more to do with whether and how we can negotiate how and why we use it. As long as we’re thoughtful about it, and don’t let it eclipse entirely the necessities of cultural literacy and literary self-education, its role in our lives—whatever our age group—is an essentially unalarming one.

Housekeeping

Updated my about page, again. Trying to find the right inscrutability-to-information ratio.

And for stalking and documentary purposes, here’s my schedule for the new semester, which starts next Monday:

There’s just one precept missing, which I’ll try to squeeze in… somewhere.
Key:
ENG 301 – Old English
ENG 335 – Children’s Literature
FRE 207 – Studies in French Language and Style
HIS 280 – Approaches to American History
NES/HIS 245 – The Islamic World from Emergence to the Beginning of Westernization

Hope for the Human Race; or, Seek Beauty

Friends, let me thank you for coming to this wonderful old auditorium, and I hope we’re going to get some good harmony tonight. No, really! If there’s hope for the human race to learn to live in the machine age… it’s gonna be when people learn to balance things so that they can do something on their own, without a machine, something creative, no matter what it is. Of course, I love music. I wish every family could make music, and I often think the best time to start is when you’re just as young as possible. If you know someone with a baby, try singing to them.
—Pete Seeger playing Sanders Theater at Harvard, 1980

This afternoon I walked across my little town to Princeton High School, where Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary) was doing a children’s concert as a benefit for the Princeton Public Library. I sat in the second-to-last row of the high-school auditorium and listened to one of my favorite singers sing some of my favorite songs: “Day Is Done,” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Marvelous Toy,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” all the songs I have on cassettes in a drawer in my old bedroom because we used to play them over and over again when I was little, when cars all had tape decks. Now I have all these songs in iTunes on my computer, and I also have them in my head and in my heart, and in the songbook I use when I get together with friends every week to sing folk music, because that’s the sort of thing you can do in college.

Peter, I’m sure, embraces the precepts of the other Peter I quoted above. He had children up on stage left and right—singing along, turning the pages of picture books, and making us older people laugh. He sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and dedicated it to Mary Travers (who died last September) in such a touching speech. He sang a song called “Don’t Laugh At Me,” and prefaced it with a story about a program he’s working on in Israel, trying to bring Israeli and Palestinian children together to be children together and to end the cycle of hate and violence their parents can’t. To be sure, he made parents’ jokes too—like suggesting that the sound effects in “Marvelous Toy” were what he thought of the US Senate, or saying of “Day Is Done,” “unlike ‘Puff,’ this song has only one meaning.” But above all this was a concert for the children, and I was glad of it, because it meant the concert could be about joy and innocence, not explicitly about stopping war and hate. One of the little children Peter invited onstage was a three-year-old girl with a pink tiara. Peter complimented her on her crown, and asked where she got it. Her answer was, “I have two, so that when I have a friend over we can both be queen. Isn’t that cool?”

Yes. Oh yes, it’s so very cool, because that’s what activism through this kind of music is all about. More than a piece of legislation or a policy proposal, it represents the longing for a world where we can all be queen, where there are enough pink foam crowns to go around. As Pete Seeger said in 1980, we must learn to live in the machine age—and thirty years later, we’re still learning. It’s because we grow up and we see how much awfulness exists in the world, and we either become cynical or we compartmentalize or we get subsumed by machines and become them. We become alienated from our species-life. We forget the words to “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

But keep seeking beauty and peace, love, and understanding, and keep hoping for a happy ending. Put your trust in the children and give them a world they won’t be ashamed to inherit. Teach them the words to “Puff.” Teach them an old union song. And someday, by the grace of any god or none, we may all have our own pink crowns; we’ll all be queen. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Talking Myself to Sleep at Night; or, In Which Marx Proves the Unexpected Cure for Insomnia

I have developed a severe case of insomnia. Every night I lie awake for hours at a time, staring at the shadowed ceiling, consumed by guilt for things I have not done, and consumed most of all by guilt at lying in a bed in Princeton. Daily I wonder why I’m here, why I let my privilege take me here, why most of all I am not doing more for the sick and the starving and the needy. I wonder why, now that I’m here, I’m not training to be a doctor or a human rights lawyer. I wonder why I’m not training to go to Washington. I bang my fists against the mattress and I curse myself and I loathe myself for caring more about and gaining more pleasure from reading Oscar Wilde than from trying, against all odds, to fix the things which appear on the front page of the newspaper of record of a country sliding inexorably into insanity.

But the thing is that I, too, will go insane if I try to contain a whole country in my head at once. I know my mind well. I know how tenuous health and sanity are. I know because I have spent nights staring at the ceiling and days in a haze of depression and anger.

I got a paper back the other day, the last paper I wrote for my political theory class, about Marx’s theory of alienation. I had never read Marx before taking this class, a distribution requirement I complained about all semester. But, well, then I read Marx, and about how much better our lives would be if we labored in accordance with our inclinations, if we could be farmers in the morning and fishers in the afternoon and critical critics in the evenings. I read about how we would have a relationship with the product of our labor—we would love what we do and do it for its own sake!—and I wish so desperately to any god or none that this were more than an unrealizable utopia.

But to fall asleep at night, to stop the tossing and turning and fists slamming down on mattress, I tell myself that utopia is realizable. I tell myself that utopia is a windmill worth tilting at. And I tell myself that even I—beneficiary of privilege though I may be—have the right to be a critical critic in the evening if it’s the labor most fulfilling to me. I tell myself what good is brought to the world by reading history. I tell myself what good is brought to the world by teaching history. I throw myself into my work and I try not to think too hard about what lies outside, always looming and threatening to send me another sleepless night.

Tonight the outside got in. Tonight I threw myself out of my bed to read the New York Times and sob. But tomorrow morning, however much sleep I’ve had, I’m going to get up and teach and learn. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe we can’t build the world we wish to have until we take on the one we’ve got. But hey. It’s how I get to sleep. It’s how I wake up. It’s how I get on with another day as a critical critic.

From each according to her ability to each according to her needs.

On the New Year and the New Decade; or, Continuity and Change

I have been thinking for several days about what I could possibly say to sum up this decade, or even this year, to post on the first day of a new decade. It is hard to think of something that I haven’t said before, because this blog (which I began anew in February 2009) is itself a record of the past year, its continuity, and its change. And it is close to impossible to write a retrospective of a timespan which began back in fourth grade, back before I turned ten, back when my extended family celebrated the millennium in my grandparents’ basement… back an eon ago.

This week I have been writing, for a school project, a memoir of my childhood—of my first decade, my decade of innocence. The memoir ends in 1999, the year my family moved from Georgia to California, the year (unless you’re a pedant) the millennium ended and the new millennium began. As I transitioned from childhood into adolescence into adulthood, I spent the next decade growing tired of being always angry at George Bush and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld; I sought an escapist hedonistic pleasure in movies and my quizbowl team and the internet at 2am and sitting in the passenger seat as a friend drove too fast down Interstate 15. And then I sought an escape from that, in turn, exiling myself to a new world on the east coast, beginning (not without some angst) a new life in a new culture.

Then there was this year. This year, globally speaking, has been the epitome of the everlasting balance between continuity and change; we ushered it in with the inauguration of a president meant to change everything, and we came to realize that he has changed some things, but not as many things as we’d hoped he would. Those of us who were startled to political awareness by the second Bush administration began to realize just how hard it is to be a Democratic president, to advance progressive policy, to do anything but fight as hard as possible to maintain the status quo. The year 2009 in my iPhoto library is filled with pictures of marches and rallies and protests—in San Diego, in New York, in Princeton, in Washington. I have never tried so hard to bring change; I have never been so gutted when only continuity results. And at the same time, I have been growing increasingly distant, have been putting my broadening understanding of the cycles of American history to the task of understanding that this is what happens—this year, as in all other years, we fight and fight and fight, and sometimes we get what we want, and more often we don’t, yet we never stop fighting.

As I realize that my life is going to continue to be about fighting (for LGBT rights or for tenure, for peace in our time or the attention and interest of my future hypothetical students), I also realize that this year has been about becoming an adult—not just because I can drink alcohol in Canada now, which granted has been a highlight of the year. It’s because I now have just as much chance as any adult does to voice an opinion and be taken seriously; I have just as much right and just as much ability to make change. I have agency, I have independence, I have control. And, finally and most importantly (I think), I am becoming content with and thankful for what I have, perhaps because I can control my life and create for myself the conditions of happiness. I have become able to place my life in perspective, in historical as well as contemporary context, and to understand how much I have for which to be thankful.

This year has been about, in large part, the miracle of living and surviving—with the religious language utterly intended, firstly because I find it more tempting to resort to spirituality when I have thanks to give instead of altered circumstances to pray for; and secondly because there is something so beautiful and wonderful about the purest sense of human existence that it totally transcends the physicality of blood flowing through arteries and synapses firing and lungs expanding. I am not saying that I believe in a supreme being—I never have, and I don’t believe I ever will—but this year I have begun to cherish humanity, and to embrace the positive side of human continuity. We may never end our collective inclination towards making war, but we may also in turn never end our collective inclination towards making art.

And so, this year, I have put my trust in art—in paintings and photography, in music, in literature. My cultural taste has skyrocketed towards the highbrow (with, to be fair, a smattering of the pop cultural), and I’ve begun to develop my own sense of aestheticism, of beauty, of the moral necessity of seeking it. It is this conviction, this year, which has gotten me through the times when I am most ill at ease with the larger world: the National Gallery and the Smithsonian buoyed me through a summer in D.C., and the Met was there for me after the November election. High camp gets me through dirty fights about marriage equality and LGBT rights. Whistler and Mucha and Waterhouse and my friends’ art, as well, have gone up alongside the political statements on my bedroom walls. I relish the sunset; the blazing foliage of autumn and the first budding leaves of spring on the coast that’s now my home. And I don’t just survive—I flourish.

I have some New Year’s and new decade’s resolutions, of course; how could I not? Given my adult agency and the ability I must therefore have to make these resolutions true, I first resolve to keep striving to find the right balance between the personal and the political, between beauty and grit, that will make my life the most fulfilling. I need to find out how to do good without despairing, how not to feel guilty for doing things for myself, how to do both what I love and what is right. In the second place (and in the spirit of reviving conceptions of beauty long since clichéd), I resolve that I shall to mine own self be true—to be honest about what I think and what I want, and to tell the people who deserve to know the truth about these things. We are all playing roles in public, to an extent (for another clichéd Shakespeare reference, all the world’s a stage), but I will strive to make my role as faithful to my private self as possible.

A couple days ago, after enthusing to one friend about starting a book club and to another friend about starting a history society, I came into the kitchen and said to my mother, “It’s great how in college you can talk to your friends about intellectual things.” And that, dear reader, is 2009 as much as anything; in addition, it is what I hope desperately that the new year and the new decade continue to hold for me. 2009—and its education and its friendships, its ability to talk about intellectual things—is in truth, dear reader, the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. This year, for all its political anguish, has been the most fulfilling and rewarding that I can remember, and I hope dearly that I can continue to mean it when someone asks “How are you?” and I say “I’m doing well.”

Happy new year. Happy new decade. Happy every day, because there are always hope and beauty to be found.