Anachronisms

I am a sucker for anachronism. It probably started back in the days when I was a middle-school kid who was convinced I should have been born in the 18th century, so that I could defend Bonnie Prince Charlie to the death. Or something like that. (It’s a long story.) But now I appreciate music from 30 or 40 years ago, and political sentiments from about the same era. I relish anything that seems at odds with 2009, with the Internet, with jaded cynicism, with the Princeton Organization Kid. And that’s why I’m writing about the band that was at Terrace last night.

Terrace is an eating club, and incidentally the only one in which I will voluntarily set foot. It is also known for its regular high-quality live music, and because I am lame and because most of the bands I like are dead (see previous paragraph), it’s basically the only place I usually see live music. Last night, though, the band was something else. It was playing punk music, which I suppose is not a particularly unusual thing for a band to do; however, it was also from London (which is less usual—at least, in Princeton, and not in London), and its singer/frontman looked to be in his fifties and not quite aware of it. He was wearing ripped jeans, a be-safety-pinned black t-shirt, and glitter-festooned sneakers that would have been quite chic in the early ’80s. Most of the time, he sort of yell-chanted songs; sometimes he played the drums; sometimes he made pronouncements about the evils of religion and George W. Bush (a few people in the audience yelled “He’s gone, man!” but the frontman appeared unaware of the past six months’ events); at one point he walked through the crowd on the dancefloor holding a pair of drumsticks in front of him like a cross—trying to cast out demons, perhaps? It was unclear. He would frequently preface a song by saying “I wrote this in 1978.” He jumped up and down with an energy and agility that 50-something-year-old men aren’t supposed to have. I’m pretty sure he had more in his system than the two beer bottles standing by the amps. But he was fantastic! He was so infectiously energetic! He made me want to jump up and down and yell “Down with Thatcher!” And that was the best bit. I feel like, as someone born in 1990, I really missed my opportunity to be furious at an evil neoconservative government. I do like punk music, in general, and I find it sad and disappointing that I missed the historical era when it would have been relevant.

The other kids at Terrace though the guy was entertaining, but I don’t think they really got him. They turned to their friends, half-laughing. “What’s he doing?” they asked when he exorcised the crowd with drumsticks. One drunk-seeming kid went up to him and criticized him for declaring that “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” without attributing the quotation. “Only at Princeton,” I thought. But I really felt sorry for him. People are angry at the government and the establishment now in such different ways than they were in the ’80s, and particularly at Princeton. I think people in the audience liked him because he was outlandish, or because they were drunk—not because they really sympathized with his message. Even I felt uncomfortable to hear him criticize religion—at Princeton, that’s not the sort of controversial ground you tread on.

I was thinking about this in terms of reading I was doing for class about the role of the media in both the first Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq. It was deeply weird to read a historical account of the invasion of Iraq, because I conceive of it as a current event. Six years isn’t so long ago. I remember the day we had a debate in my 8th-grade history class about whether it was right to invade Iraq. I remember how I was the only kid saying that we didn’t know whether Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction. I remember how there were other kids in the class who thought that, but that they wouldn’t speak up, and I had to take on all the Bush supporters by myself. To my mind, we still know so little about the events and decisions surrounding the wars we’re now engaged in—not to mention the fact that we’re still engaged in them. How can we historicize them?

Maybe this is how my high-school history teacher, a Vietnam vet, felt when we learned about Vietnam in class. Maybe this is how my mom feels, when anyone talks about the DNCs and election night results of the ’70s and ’80s that she remembers watching on TV. And maybe this gets back to what the leader of the band at Terrace last night was doing, when he assumed what seemed to me to be such an anachronistic pose. If I may put words into his mouth for a moment, as far as he is concerned, the threat of Thatcherism isn’t over. Bush II was a convenient vehicle for that ire as well. But he’s a bit lost at present for a figurehead upon whom he can thrust his dissatisfaction with the establishment. His feelings are no less real. But he’s now forced to frame them historically, not in terms of current events. That’s got to be disorienting.

Maybe my temptation is to view anachronism as quaint, sort of like one of those living history museums, just for 20th-century social alienation instead of colonial America. But on a more intellectual level, I think there’s something to be said for not relegating, say, anti-Thatcher sentiment to history entirely. As I think we learned from the Bush presidency, the same political issues, the same sentiments, the same ideological battles come up again. And again. And again. We need to be keeping feelings of outrage on the forefront of our minds, because if we don’t, there’s a very real chance that we won’t notice when the next deeply objectionable thing happens. I know that I want to study and teach history in part so that we can learn from our mistakes—but while doing that, we still need to be aware that history isn’t a done deal. Everything that’s going to happen in the next week’s news cycle is eventually going to be history. What will we remember when it comes to make decisions based on its lessons?

Culture Shock

There are so many things in my life that I’m not blogging about. This week, I went to a professor’s office hours for the first time, and it wasn’t scary, so I’m over that hurdle. I’m also reading Milton for the first time, in my English class, which is this incredible experience. On Sunday, I’m going on a pilgrimage to Paterson, NJ, Allen Ginsberg’s birthplace, on a quest for his childhood homes, some form of spiritual enlightenment, and fodder for a piece I’m writing for class. I’ve been running around like mad this week, going to all sorts of things, from film screenings to quizbowl matches. It’s all wonderful, and I want to write about all of it, how intellectually fulfilling it is, how all my dreams for the future and really inhabiting this world of knowledge and scholarship are coalescing, how I’m becoming a writer as well.

But the weird thing is that what prompted me to go to my computer, go to WordPress, and write this post was the experience that turned all that upside-down. Now I’m very confused about myself and the mental place I’m at. Now I don’t know how at ease and how excited I feel about any of this.

I let some friends talk me into going to a conference on literary criticism and theory, sponsored by the English department, among other people (actually, according to the poster, by basically every humanities-centric entity in the university). And so I went, this morning, to two hours on poetry. I listened to three talks, by three very eminent scholars, standing in the back next to more presumably eminent scholars. I didn’t see any other undergraduates there, or anyone who looked young enough to be an undergraduate. That isn’t usually a problem. I’m very accustomed to being the youngest person in a room. And I’m very accustomed to academic gatherings. How many times have I fought to be able to sit at the grown-ups’ table when my parents’ colleagues come to our house for dinner?

But this was so very different, and you might already be able to see why—because I haven’t told you what those three scholars spoke about, and I haven’t told you what I learned from their talks. Because, you see, I was barely able to understand anything they were saying. I mean, I think I was kind of expecting that—I have no exposure to literary criticism; my only exposure to the study of English literature has been half a semester of Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton. But I still found myself in shock, a bit, at how the words washed over me, sort of like when I watch French-language TV and can pick out one word in three, or one word in five—not enough to piece together the overall meaning of the sentence. Or the paragraph. Or the talk. Bending my knees awkwardly to relieve the pressure of standing up so long braced against the back wall of the lecture hall, I tried to make myself “translate” more attentively, the way I do when the francophone person I’m trying to understand is not hosting a late-night talk show, but rather telling me what will be on the exam. But it was largely ineffective, and I resorted to simply seeming attentive, scribbling down notes not about the content of the talks, but about the fact that I didn’t understand.

Sometimes my parents’ colleagues talk shop when they come to our house for dinner, and then I don’t understand what they’re saying. Sometimes upperclassmen and grad students whom I eat dinner with at Princeton have conversations referencing knowledge that I lack. But never do I feel entirely out of place, there; never do I feel a genuine sense of embarrassment to lack familiarity with very obvious things like Freud or Wordsworth or a vocabulary of jargon that I can’t even remember enough to reiterate here. In the former contexts, it’s okay to just be an academic brat—in fact, that’s what I’m expected to be, when my parents’ colleagues ask them if I will study their disciplines, or I rant in the dining hall about something I’ve read in The Chronicle of Higher Education. And there’s nothing wrong with that—because that’s what I am.

Lately I’ve been cultivating this idea that I’m moving on from “academic brat” to “academic,” that I’m starting to learn higher-level ways of thinking, that I’m honing in on subjects I could study for the rest of my life, and that I’m slowly and steadily immersing myself even more irrevocably in academic culture. But what going to these talks this morning taught me—instead of anything that I’m sure was totally fascinating about the theory of poetry—was that I should stop trying to be something I’m not. That I should accept that I’m a college freshman and that therefore I don’t know shit about literary criticism or anything else theoretical, really. That I should go back to my 200-level lectures and catch up before I try to sit at the grown-ups’ table and really participate in the conversation.

One of the reasons I justified to myself attending these talks was that I volunteered to write an article about them for The Nassau Weekly, Princeton’s foremost student publication (of course). But now I’ve no idea what to say. I can’t talk about the substance of the talks because I didn’t understand them, and the self-deprecating essay on academia that I’d considered seems impossible to write in the context of my voluminous bubble of pride and pretentiousness being burst. So I guess I’m just going to have to start catching up, and maybe give the scholars who spoke this morning the respect of understanding what they were talking about a few years from now, when I’m not such a boorish and philistinic (?) freshman.

Reading QOTD (2009-03-22)

From my gender and sexuality reading, a list called “What Every Young Girl Should Ask!” drawn up by the High School Women’s Liberation Coalition—no date, but I’m guessing sometime in the ’70s; please comment if you know specifically! I don’t have much to add, just thought it was worth quoting in full because of its relevance to modern high-school girls:

1. Can you play basketball, soccer, football?
2. Were you ever taught to use a saw?
3. Did you ever pretend to be dumb?
4. Do you babysit? What do boys do for bread?
5. Do your brothers have more freedom than you? In what way? Why?
6. Are your brothers asked to help clean house?
7. Is education more important for you or your brothers? Why?
8. How many boys are there in your typing class?
9. Would you be interested in birth control information as a service in your school?
10. Did you discuss masturbation and lesbianism in your sex education class? Did you discuss intercourse? Orgasm? Abortion?
11. Would you know what to do if you needed an abortion?
12. What do you want sex education to be?
13. How many famous women do you know about (not counting Presidents’ wives and movie stars)?
14. How many paragraphs (pages) cover the women’s suffrage movement in your history texts?
15. Who are Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mother Jones, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth?
16. How are women portrayed in the books you read?
17. How do your classes react to “ugly” women teachers?
18. Have you noticed that there are college scholarships that discriminate against girls (football scholarships!)?
19. In extra-curricular coed organizations, do girls make decisions? Or do they take minutes?
20. Did you ever hesitate to speak up in a coed organization?
21. Are girls with boyfriends winners? What did they win?
22. Did you ever lie about having a boyfriend? Why?
23. Do you ask boys out? If not, why not?
24. Do you believe boys get sexually aroused faster, at a younger age, and more often than girls? Who told you that?
25. Are you hung up about being/not being a virgin? Why?
26. Should boys be more experienced sexually? Why?
27. Do you ever hug or kiss your girl friend?
28. If you were in a dangerous situation would you rather have a man defend you or defend yourself? Can you defend yourself?
29. Are you the teenybopper, bitch, cheater, foxy lady, or “honey”-type portrayed in rock music?
30. Are you flattered by catcalls on the street?
31. Do you like your body?
32. How much time and money do you spend on your makeup? Why?
33. Why did you start wearing nylons and bras?
34. Will you be a failure if you don’t get married?
35. Do you think of unmarried women as “bachelor girls” or “old maids”?
36. Are these the best years of a woman’s life? Why?
37. Is your mother an oppressed woman?

Well, I certainly can’t speak for my mother, but a lot of these questions ring very true to me, even maybe 35 years after this document was written. Personally, I’ve felt insecure about a lot of these things, especially body-image and sexuality issues. We might not have typing class anymore, and we might learn about Harriet Tubman and the 19th Amendment in school, but you try to find me a teenage girl in a mainstream school (public or private) who’s never felt insecure about her body or her sexual expression. I think it would be very, very hard.

I had another conversation tonight with another young woman my age who doesn’t feel that “feminism” as a word, as a cause, as an ideology, or as a set of goals applies to her. From what she said, I got the impression that it seemed outdated, and too radical to be relevant or appealing. But I think that if today’s girls and young women were to look within themselves very seriously and ask these questions of themselves, maybe they might find reasons why “women’s liberation” is relevant and important in the 21st century. Like I said, things haven’t changed that much in the high-school hallways.

On a related note: I think a lot of folks don’t really consider claiming or reclaiming ideology terms when they hear them. A young woman, for example, might hear someone else or someone else’s actions described as “feminist,” and think, “I’m not like that person, and I wouldn’t commit those actions. Therefore the term ‘feminist’ does not apply to me.” But feminism has had as long and varied a history as has adolescent womanhood. It’s been adopted by moderate liberals and radical leftists alike, women of every race and culture and sexuality and ideological position. “Feminism,” other than generally meaning equality and fairness for women, means whatever you want it to mean. I mean, I like overturning the patriarchy and subverting the heteronormative ownership paradigm, but if your main goal is to feel at ease with your own body, or to have a leadership role in an organization or a business or a political group, that’s totally cool too. “Feminism” is a term that should be accessible to every woman—and, well, it’s a crying shame that a lot of the young women my age whom I talk to don’t feel that way.

The Youth of Today

Brooks’ “Organization Kid.” That one NYT Magazine article that produced the college essay contest. That dude from Yale who couldn’t talk to his plumber. These articles about the country’s elite universities and the kids who attend them (the first two articles are about Princeton and UChicago, respectively). I know that when these articles came out, they provoked a lot of conversation among their subjects, those kids of privilege whose lives are on track from the best high schools to the best colleges to the best jobs, not stopping to look around, so overscheduled, so grade-obsessed, so politically moderate and so shallow. That portrayal is what provokes the outrage, anyway, among the Ivy League kids who read these articles. “I’m not like that!” they say.

I said that too, to all three articles. “The Organization Kid” was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 2001, when I was 11, but I read it some years later, when I was in high school. And when the NYT Magazine article came out in 2007, and William Deresiewicz and his plumber in 2008, I was still in high school, and I was applying to those colleges. As I applied to Princeton, UChicago, and Yale (among other places) and eventually came to choose Princeton, I hated these articles. They were so unfair, so one-sided, so unreasonably polemic. I dismissed them angrily, as the age-old phenomenon of the older generation unilaterally decrying the younger.

We read “The Organization Kid” in one of my classes at Princeton last semester, and I had occasion to go back and re-read the other two articles today. And after a semester and a half right in the center of the phenomena all three authors are talking about, I find that my knee-jerk reactions are very different. Instead of saying “Those colleges aren’t like that,” I find myself saying, “I’m not like that. Don’t lump me into your judgment of what Ivy League kids are like. I’m different.”

It’s a stupid reaction, isn’t it? It’s a perfectly egotistical reaction, exactly the one that one of those self-centered and spoiled brats would have. Maybe the Ivy League is working its evil spell on me, changing me so that I am one of Brooks’ overscheduled kids, Perlstein’s apathetic kids who aren’t like yesterday’s UChicago students, or Deresiewicz’s grade-grubbing, careerist kids, and maybe it’s closing my mind and my sense of perspective so much that I can’t see how these words of warning apply to me. But yeah: when we read “Organization Kid” in my freshman seminar last semester, and kids were saying how they didn’t think it was a valid assessment of Princeton culture at all, I found myself thinking “Are you blind? Have you not eavesdropped in the dining hall during weekday lunchtimes, or done the same in the eating clubs on Saturday nights? Aren’t you aware of the people around you—and indeed yourselves?” And then I am so insulted to see myself, as an Ivy League student, lumped in with Deresiewicz’s derision. I am not a grade-grubber (as I’ve said before); I don’t consider myself entitled. I went to an average public school and I know some great plumbers with interesting things to say. And I am also downright furious to read Deresiewicz characterize legacies (the children of alumni) as people “who aren’t up to standard to begin with.” Yes, technically speaking, I am a legacy at Princeton. But I went through way too much self-doubt because of it last semester to sit here now and be told that I’m not up to standard. I know that I’m qualified to be at Princeton and I know that I’m benefiting from the education in every conceivable way. Deresiewicz has no right to brand me with that iron, if that’s the metaphor. I’m sure it’s not. (But my legacy status can’t be blamed for my ineptitude with metaphors.)

Well. I meant for this to be a coherent essay, and I think it kind of got off-track. It’s quite a bit later in the day than when I started writing it, and I’m very tired and burned out. But I can tell that my life in the Ivy League is going to be a very long and winding road indeed. If my academic ambitions stay consistent, I could remain in the Ivy League for the rest of my life. But yes, I will keep my soul and my personality; yes, I will still get on quite well, thank you, with tradespeople; and yes, the radical fire still burns within me. So I’m going to stay true to form and keep blogging about why columnists are wrong about who I am. Oh hey, and if there are any columnists out there reading—next time you want to write an Ivy League article, pretty-please hit me up for an interview?

Things I Notice About Being Home

I’m in my room in my family’s home right now, on spring break. There’s a sense of comfort to this room, because it contains all the clutter of my childhood: my ten-year-old Dell notebook, still chugging along fine on Linux; my electric typewriter; my hundreds of books, not just the few I was able to bring to Princeton; my viola; some of the weird clothes I used to wear to school, many years ago; my big, soft bed that’s low to the ground and perfect for lying on, on my stomach, with a computer—or a book.

Because this time, when I come home, things are different. I feel adjusted to college now. I love college. And that’s not like it was my first two breaks, when I sat in my room all day on the computer, caught in this weird limbo between high school and college, not really happy with either situation. Before I decided I had to explain how I was feeling, I was sprawled on my bed reading (reading Norman Mailer for class, but still), something I hadn’t done in a long time. And before that, I was downstairs, sitting on the couch, something I used to very rarely do. It’s true, my cousins are visiting, and I wanted to socialize with them, but I find myself craving the community space regardless. Sitting at my kitchen table with my computer and idly checking Facebook, but in reality watching the action around me, is not too different from doing the same thing in the dining hall during my two-hour lunches.

And, you know, there was a time—a time not too long ago, maybe just a few weeks or a few months ago—when I would have regretted deeply that I wasn’t doing anything more interesting on Saturday night than lying on the couch babbling at my mom and my cousins about nothing. There was a time when I would have been deeply depressed that Saturday night meant time to sit and stare at Facebook and YouTube in the company of my family. But I don’t think that’s valid anymore. Maybe it is at school, a bit, when I wonder about how lame I am, but I don’t know. I think things are changing in me and around me.

This morning, I went to Target with my mom. We drove through my neighborhood, and the place where I’ve lived since 1999 looked so alien to me. I couldn’t believe that the sterile suburban streets with the identical houses and the Southern California chaparral were real, almost. I expect to see collegiate Gothic pretension, and lots of grass, and deciduous trees. I expect to see lots of college kids, not families with young children in minivans. It was weird. It was another planet. It was culture shock. And there’s so much you could say about that, about what a privileged monster I’m becoming that the stone edifices of the north end of Princeton’s campus are normal, but hey. That’s how it goes, man.

The world I live in now is so different from high school. I can’t begin to emphasize that enough. In the world I live in now, I am autonomous—and so it’s culture shock when my mom asks me to set the table. But in the world I live in now, I also spend a lot of time eating bad food by myself—and so it was one of the most wonderful experiences imaginable to sit down to our dining table with my parents, my sister, and my cousins, and eat Syrian food that my mom and cousin had cooked. It’s great to have family in-jokes. It’s great that, a while after dinner, my cousins and I sat laughing hysterically at The Muppet Show on YouTube. And it’s great that it’s ten minutes to midnight, it’s Saturday, and I’m not somewhere getting drunk. I don’t really care if people do that. I mean, I guess it’s a fine idea in theory. But it’s not me. It never was. Instead, I’m looking forward to watching my high school play quizbowl on Thursday. I’m excited about the cool shirt I got from the Target little boys’ dress clothes. I’m worrying about all the schoolwork and job-work I need to do. And I’m both enjoying the time spent with my family and looking to get back to my little fantasyland of stone towers and hardwood floors, long dining tables and famous professors, and the constant busyness and stress of doing fulfilling and engaging and stimulating work. I know I’ve been banging on a lot about this lately, but I’ve been trying to find a social circle and a way of life for quite a few years now, and I’ve never felt so fulfilled as I do right now. I haven’t been to the Street (Princetonese: Prospect Street, where the eating clubs are) in weeks, the longest breaks I take from working are for food, and yet I am so, so happy. Of course I’m glad for the break. Of course I’m glad for a real bed, real food, and the company of my family. Of course I’m glad for sleep and a slightly slower pace of life. But going to college has been the greatest thing that’s happened to me so far in my life, and it’s weird to see myself change because of it. It’s going to take a lot of getting used to, and I’m already worrying about the people I’m alienating because of it. But what can I do? Welcome to the rest of my life.

Grade Inflation

There’s a fascinating article at Inside Higher Ed today about grade inflation, in which all sorts of disturbing trends are bandied about: at Brown, for example, the majority of undergraduate grades were As. That’s just not right. Princeton gets a shoutout in the article (yay!) for its grade deflation policy, which has encouraged professors and departments to be conscious of using a wider portion of the grading scale, and suggests that departments should shoot for a long-term average of awarding As to 35% of students. But 35%? Even that’s not enough.

I’m a hard-liner about grading. I believe something that, in my experience, is rarely practiced in universities: I believe that As should be really fucking hard to come by. Granted, despite the highly inflated grades of my high school career, I’m not really getting As now—I’m more of an A-/B+ kind of gal. But that’s beside the point. We should not be living in a world where the majority of students at an Ivy League institution (Brown, I’m looking at you) are getting As. Not only is that not sending a very good educational message to students about how well they’re doing, it just furthers this stereotype about how elitist, how entitled, how privileged, Ivy-League students are. To bring this all back to myself in a totally privileged way, this is one reason why I’m embarrassed, sometimes, to tell people I go to Princeton. It conjures up images of these lazy entitled kids sitting around doing nothing and just profiting off their privilege.

And there’s maybe a little bit of substance to that stereotype in this case. Because you know who isn’t being affected by the grade inflation trend? Community colleges. The study that led to all the data about four-year universities also found that, if anything, community-college professors have become tougher graders in recent years—and interviews with community-college professors seem to suggest that their students prefer such a system. It’s a far cry from my anecdotal evidence at Princeton, where virtually every student I’ve talked to hates the grade deflation policy. It’s all about them, and how their As are not only their right, but a necessity for law school or business school or med school or the job market.

But I have no sympathy for this perspective. Sitting right now in a cafe on-campus, drinking my $1.50 cup of coffee and typing on my MacBook, I think that the very least I can do is try to work as hard as I can, to somehow be deserving of all this privilege bestowed upon me, and to become educated and intelligent enough that I can somehow give back to the system that’s giving me this. I’m an academic brat. I’ve grown up in this system and it’s my home, and I still want it to mean something. I would like to know that three-and-a-bit years from now, the piece of paper Princeton gives me actually has some significance, and isn’t just a receipt for $200,000.

On a related note, I was just talking online to a friend who’s studying nuclear engineering at another university. He was showing me a graph he’d produced for his schoolwork that I certainly didn’t understand, but I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty about my liberal-arts education. “I love how your schoolwork matters in the real world,” I said. And as long as my B.A. isn’t going to be contributing anything to resolving the energy crisis, well, I might as well at least get grades that are appropriately evaluative of the intellectual masturbation that I do. You know?

Time for a Little John Donne

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

I’m not an actor—my roles onstage in children’s theater were all non-speaking parts—but my high-school English teachers loved to have us read plays aloud in class. I was always the only one who volunteered, so I got to play some of my dream parts: Feste in Twelfth Night, Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, the Stage Manager in Our Town, and Vivian Bearing in Wit.

Wit is a play about an professor who is in a hospital being treated for cancer. Much of the play’s dark humor is of a distinctly academic nature. I don’t mean any offense to my English class, but I think some lines didn’t mean quite so much to them as they did to me, even then, before college. Vivian is a professor of English: she loves words. She obsesses over them. She close-reads her doctors’ diagnoses. And much of the overarching theme of the play hinges on her life’s work, the interpretation of the final line of “Death be not proud.” It’s one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and Vivian’s deal (if I remember correctly—I don’t have the text of the play) is that in one manuscript that semicolon is a comma, and whether the punctuation is a semicolon or a comma changes the entire interpretation of the poem. When I played Vivian—my English teacher telling me that I captured the essence of the character very well, I might add—I couldn’t really imagine ever finding a single punctuation mark that important.

I’m in a university class on English literature now, my first one ever. We’re reading Renaissance poetry, too, and “Death be not proud”—what I could remember of it, anyway—came to my mind yesterday. I’m learning how to fixate on words the way that Vivian (“Professor Bearing,” my well-trained mind insists) does, and how a choice so small can have such great meaning in a text. Vivian tries to apply these concepts to her real life, struggling to cope with her mortality in a not entirely dissimilar way from Donne in the Holy Sonnets, if I haven’t totally misunderstood the Holy Sonnets, which is quite possible. I’m trying to do so as well, as all my classes and indeed my life emphasize so much to me this importance on the smallest word or punctuation mark, the smallest choice. But I wonder whether there is a limit to how much academia can intercede in real life. I think that Vivian’s quest to confront her mortality through Donne is ultimately futile. Donne, after all, had God. But what does that say about the importance of texts to our lives? Texts obviously have something to teach us, or we wouldn’t be reading them. And as an English professor, I’m sure Vivian is fully cognizant of this fact.

I guess my point is that Vivian was my favorite role because I knew her—whether through department parties and family time spent reading Paradise Lost aloud, or through some inkling of self-knowledge. That self-knowledge has been brought to the fore, now, as I make the first stumbling steps towards doing, cognitively and professionally, what Vivian does. I’m not sure what that means for me—will I spend my last days alone and embittered in a hospital ward?—but I think these posts demonstrate as well as anything the direction in which I’m headed.

I think people tend to see Vivian as a pathetic character, but you know what? As for me, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I am sick and tired of second-class citizenship

This afternoon, I had my discussion section (Princeton, you might recall from previous posts, calls them “preceptorials,” or “precepts”) for my gender and sexuality class. We were talking about one of the earliest gay rights movements, the “homophile” movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Fifty years ago, organizations such as the Mattachine Society reached out to gay and lesbian Americans—particularly in California and New York, but all over the country as well—and preached a gospel of equal rights. Different activists and different organizations disagreed as to what the best strategy was to achieve this end, but the homophile community was focused on fighting back against discriminatory government policies that drove gay people out of jobs and society and denied them any legal recognition.

Well, times haven’t changed all that much. Even as my precept was discussing the Senate report on “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,” the California Supreme Court was hearing arguments in the suit against California’s Proposition 8. Civil rights lawyers argued that the ballot initiative, which amended the state constitution to declare same-sex marriage illegal, was an unconstitutional amendment, and thus should be invalidated. The other side, led by Pepperdine Law School dean Kenneth Starr, argued that the “will of the people” in passing Prop. 8 cannot be questioned. Also up for discussion is whether same-sex marriages that took place between May 15, when marriage was legalized, and November 5, when Prop. 8 passed, will remain valid. The lives of all the couples who were married in that window are now in legal limbo. We will have to wait 90 days to see what the court decides about both Prop. 8 as a whole and the associated issue of the already-married, and it’s presently quite unclear how the court will rule.

What maddens me about all of this is that things have not changed that much. LGBT rights advocates are still trying to persuade federal and state governments that LGBT Americans are entitled to the same rights as straight Americans. Government seems to either not understand the nature of homosexuality—as it clearly didn’t in the ’50s—or to simply be unwilling to accept that gays are people too. I don’t know what it is. I can’t understand them. To be perfectly honest, I simply can’t view folks who want to deny LGBT people civil rights with any sort of reasoned fairness anymore. I just want to bang my head against the wall in frustration.

While things are certainly better for the LGBT community than they were 50 years ago, the ramifications of the institutionalized hatred for the queer population that was de rigeur then still pervade our society. LGBT folks can’t serve in the military. Gay men can’t give blood. There is no federal law protecting folks from being fired on the basis of sexual orientation. Most strikingly to most Americans, same-sex marriage is illegal in 48 states and the District of Columbia, and on a federal basis as well—and with that comes the loss to LGBT couples of all the social and economic benefits that marriage brings. And the problems extend farther than the legal sphere. Queer teens are at a far higher risk for suicide than their straight peers, and homophobic bullying and slurs are commonplace in the public school system. It is challenging on both a legal and a social basis for LGBT parents to raise their children. Transgender and gender-variant folks most often can’t get the support they need to live as who they are. I could go on and on and on.

Some folks argue that Americans are more comfortable with the idea of homosexuality than they were back in the day, thanks to Will and Grace, Ellen DeGeneres, and Rachel Maddow. Some queer folks look around them and say, “I’m not being harrassed; I have a job; I have friends and a community; I’m not living a double life. Things aren’t that bad.” Well, they kind of are. As far as the state is concerned, LGBT people do not exist. And you know what? That’s a problem. Even if focusing on marriage rights isn’t your thing, you have to admit that there are a lot of things shitty about being an LGBT person in America today. There are a lot of things that must be changed. The slowness with which the gay rights movement has progressed in 50 years is a sad thing, and so now we need to get out there and shake things up.

Folks who read this blog might well wonder why I’m so single-minded about LGBT issues. I guess I’m as self-interested as anyone else. As an LGBT American, I am sick and tired of being a second-class citizen. I want my kids to have the knowledge that their mom and their family are treated just the same as any other American family. And I fully intend to do what I can to make that happen.

Sometimes Princeton shocks me speechless

I overheard the following during my daily two-hour stint in my residential college’s dining hall:

A girl is saying that she’s thinking about med school, and her male friend says:
Male friend: The medical profession is very attractive to women because you can work a nine-to-three.
Male friend #2: So you can pick the kids up from school?
Male friend #1: Yeah, I mean, somebody‘s got to raise the kids.

To her credit, the girl in question replied that both her parents worked, and she thought she turned out okay. But honestly! I’m sure that if questioned, the guy who said that shit would deny that he was being sexist, that he was just telling it like it is, that a lot of women really do prefer a work schedule that accommodates their children’s schedules. Statistically, that may be true. But I know that all the female doctors I’ve had have been strong, intelligent career women, and I’m willing to bet that their circumstances allow them balance their careers and their families to a degree that doesn’t mean sacrificing one or the other. I’m willing to bet that they have spouses who are willing to allow that men are capable of caring for children. I bet they’re not stuck in the way outdated notion that women need to sacrifice everything in order to be there to pick the kids up from school.

Yes, okay, I’m waxing hyperbolic. But I am so angered by the terribly blinded people around me who persist in this outdated gender-roles paradigm. Personally, I do want to have (well, adopt) children when I grow up. I am very invested in the notion of helping to raise the next generation. But I’m not willing to do it at the expense of all the other things I want from my life, at the expense of my desires, my ambitions, or my passions. I know that I can balance all those things with a family—or, at least, I’m not going to have one if I can’t. It infuriates me that some people still seem to believe that women’s only appropriate role is to raise children. Raising children is, of course, a critical aspect of keeping our society going—but so is equal rights.

Oh, and the kids who had that conversation? Now uninformedly trashing Moby Dick.

The day I knew I wasn’t in high school anymore

Was in the first week of this semester, three weeks ago, when my history of sexuality professor mentioned in passing that Jane Addams, the influential 20th-century reformer famous for her work in the settlement house movement, had a long-term female romantic partner. I’d had a decent high-school American history education; we’d learned who Jane Addams was. But to learn that she was in—gasp!—a same-sex relationship, and to have the professor mention it so nonchalantly, so usually? That was when things changed.

I’m still struggling to learn the modes of thought that go with real academic study. The transition to analysis, from the fact-based modes of learning and regurgitating that I learned in high school, is proving astonishingly difficult. And so it’s these little pieces of trivia that still fascinate me, almost more than the almost unbelievably higher level that all my classes operate on, and how blindingly intelligent my professors are. And so this fact stuck with me—not because it was a gay-themed fact, or a “liberal” fact, but because we as students are no longer accepting the facts as they are fed us. We are no longer accepting the spoon-fed narrative of American history that goes Pilgrims—Revolution—frontier—Civil War—Gilded Age—progressives—some more wars—freedom and democracy! I’m taking three classes this semester on American history and society, and they overlap a ton, which is fantastic, because between the three of them I’m filling in these gaping holes created by the omission of everything wrong that America has done, or social categories and questions considered too complex or controversial for treatment by a high-school classroom or an Advanced Placement curriculum.

And I almost don’t regret it being 1am and exhausted and not having finished my reading, or how soul-sapping working hard is, or not having a social life really (not that I ever had one to begin with). This shit is just so incredible that I’m in awe every single day of something I read or something one of my professors said or something that came up in a conversation with my friends at mealtime. It makes me think, too, that even if analytical and critical thinking isn’t coming so instantaneously to me, that this passion for the subjects I’m studying is enough that I can learn those modes of breaking down the facts. That graduate school and academia is a possibility. What my 19 years as the brattiest academic brat I’ve ever met have taught me are that more than anything else for getting along in academia, you need utmost passion about a subject. Well, I think I’ve got the passion—I just need to, a few years from now, figure out what to direct it at.

On a semi-related note, it’s validating to know that I can create my own little ivory tower within an ivory tower, and not be constrained to a “typical” Princeton undergraduate experience. I don’t want to prescribe what that typical experience is, but I think we’ve all got a pretty good idea what I’m getting at. Another “big idea” I’ve been learning this year is that Princeton can be all things to all people, and that there are other undergraduates who are essentially going to a completely different university from mine. I’m not happy 24/7 with the university I’m “building,” and I think I’m still adjusting to collegiate life, but it just keeps getting better and better. And I’m so grateful every day for the people who reinforce my desire to give in to my inner nerd, to talk about things I haven’t mentioned since I started socialization five years ago. In the past couple months, I’ve gone back to movies and books and music I haven’t touched since I was fourteen because I suddenly realized again what it was like to be passionate about these academic trivia. When I decided to start learning about Old English over intersession, I had a flash of memory of the time my family went to Powell’s Books in Portland, my dad said I could get one book, and I picked a 700-page academic tract about the 1745-6 Jacobite rebellion. I think I was twelve or thirteen, and I read the book all the way through, too, though the picture inserts were my favorite part—and I think they probably still are, of any book like that.

I still can’t control my book-buying habit; I still can’t resist reading aloud to my roommates every single passage in my school books that I think is cool. And although I’ll go to Terrace of an evening, and although I’m trying out this very new idea of training at my journalistic craft, the utter joy I’ve felt of being able to reclaim the almost carnal joy that comes from trivia and facts and as much scholarship as a college freshman can muster—this, this is amazing and validating and so utterly beautiful.