Mom’s “Sorry Everybody” Picture
The www.sorryeverybody web site is so overwhelmed that it isn’t taking any more submissions, but it still matters that people are making these. Here’s my mom’s. Notice the Cutie Gear!
Getting Excited About My Birthday?
I’m going to be 35 on Monday!!! THIRTY-FIVE! That’s just insane. Even though 35 is that point on the graph where fertility steeply declines, I’m still excited about this birthday, as I am about all birthdays. Maybe it’s because I’m an only child.
Unfortunately, what I’d want most for my birthday is the ability to move out of this apartment, but sadly, that can not be. I have signed a one-year lease, so I owe money through the end of August whether I live here or not. This apartment is gorgeous, but here are the problems:
- A very rude downstairs neighbor who plays loud music 90% of the time he is at home (and sadly, his schedule is about the same as mine) and is hostile when I’ve asked him to turn it down.
- A next door neighbor who plays loud music in the mornings (so I can hear it in the bathroom) and gets inappropriately hostile with her young daughter such that I can hear MUCH more than I ever wanted to hear.
- A location next to a dumpster, which is visited in the middle of the night by a HUGE dump truck that makes LOTS of noise. There’s the turning VROOM, VROOM, then the BEEP BEEP BEEP backing up noise, then the picking up the first dumpster noise (BANG, CRASH, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP), then the whole thing again with the second dumpster. This occurs between 1am and 4am 2-3 nights a week.
- The sometimes early morning rantings of the mentally ill and homeless people who are dumpster diving.
- A fine location right under a major flight pattern.
- A VERY close train that HONKS really often at all times of the day and night.
- Just behind the dumpster are two German shepherds who bark at all things that move. They get all the dogs in the neighborhood barking. Last night it went on for two hours before I called the cops.
- Rave Boy and a few other residents smoke on the steps in the courtyard. The noise and smoke come into my sunroom, where I have my computer.
- The radiators are not under my control, and they’ve not been coming on. WHY?
Other than that, it’s about the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived. What do I want for my birthday? I want quiet. Just quiet.
I’m so glad Aaron is coming to visit this weekend. I need some fun and some company.
Appeasing Liberals with Words is Easier Than Looking Into the Eyes of the Snake
When teaching Multiculturalism to Midwestern college students, especially the “men,” homosexuality was a really hard issue for them. It was by far the most common choice for their resistence projects. Often, the male students associated homosexuality with being less than a man, probably because it was a criticism used on the playground.
They were particularly fearful of being hit on by gay men. For people who have never met an out gay person, they only have stereotypes to go on, and their knowledge that “gay dudes fuck other dudes.” I think being an American man is hard. So many expectations are still “out there” in terms of being a provider, being in control, etc.
What usually got their eyes starting to open was the day I brought in the GLB panel. I always tried to get some really unlikely gay men in there. They were astonished to meet men who had tried to live the straight lifestyle, who had tried to be jocks, and in the end, had realized that they could only be who they are and that living a lie, for anyone, is torture.
But getting straight people who are threatened by gay people to interact in this way isn’t easy. I usually did these panels near the end of the semester when there had been ample opportunities to prepare them for hearing coming out stories, to open their eyes a bit to their own luxury of ignorance. We talk about how if you’re living a sheltered life, you can easily walk through the world and not even realizing you’re interacting with gay people all the time, only you don’t know it.
What was SOOOO powerful was when my friend Matt (one of the regular panelists) would come in and talk about how his fraternity “buddies” would say all this hateful stuff in front of him, and how that made coming out even less of an option. Many of the guys in my class realized that they’d probably done the same thing before, and I got to read about it in their papers.
But creating a safe environment where people can talk about this stuff without fear of being called offensive is so hard. It’s easier for most people to play PC most of the time, rather than do the work it really takes to deal with these feelings of resistance. The author of the textbook I used called it “looking into the eyes of the snake.” It’s easy to play colorblind, pretend you get it, say the right things, then quietly go into the voting booth and say what you really feel… and that might be that you think gay people are abnormal.
All the prejudices of the pre-Civil Rights era are still around, but they’ve gone underground. The conservatives have learned to not get into it with the liberals because they would rather avoid the topics. They say what they know we want to hear and keep on exactly as they have.
I made it! I made it!
My friend Spidra on Tribe just located the link to my picture on on Sorry Everybody. Cool! I’m so excited! I feel like I’ve done something little that matters. Yes, it’s only symbolic, but it’s a start. Thanks, Spidra!
