QOTD (2010-02-06) 6 February 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, QOTD.add a comment
Auden, “O Where Are You Going?”:
“O where are you going?” said reader to rider,
“That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,
Yonder’s the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return.”“O do you imagine,” said fearer to farer,
“That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking,
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?”“O what was that bird,” said horror to hearer,
“Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.”“Out of this house”—said rider to reader,
“Yours never will”—said farer to fearer
“They’re looking for you”—said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.
In utterly unrelated news, I’ve had the best birthday one could wish for.
Captive on the Carousel of Time; or, The Best Two-Decade Post I Can Muster on Too-Little Sleep 6 February 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog.3 comments
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round in the circle game
—Joni Mitchell, “The Circle Game”
I spent the formative years of my life in Montessori school, a cultural institution very much full of its own peculiar traditions. One of these was a birthday ceremony which entailed lighting a candle in the middle of the circletime circle (circletime being an integral part of the Montessori day), giving the birthday child a globe to hold, and having her walk around the candle—which symbolized the Sun—the number of times that corresponded to her new age. Usually, the child’s parents or older siblings would come to school that day, and share photographs and memories for each revolution/year.
Now, twenty years is a lot more than four, and I’m an exhausted 20-year-old who’s short on time. But it’s strange, so very strange, to think of having lived two decades. I’ve lived through four presidents, in four states and two countries. My living memory includes wars and impeachment trials, my parents’ academic careers, and now—as I sat today at lunch with a professor of mine and dimly contemplated the job market—the beginnings of my own. I’ve gone from stopping the battle to inventing a religion to taking on the bureaucracy of my high school. I’ve gone from plaid skirts to an authentic kilt, from a Thomas Jefferson costume to ’90s-style grunge, from sweatshirts to sweaters, and now back in circles—last night, after five years, I wore my Thomas Jefferson costume again. I’ve run the gamut from individuality for individuality’s sake through to assimilation for assimilation’s sake, and now rest somewhere in-between. I’ve marched for more causes than I can count. I’ve been an idealist. A cynic. A pragmatist. I am trying to become a scholar.
I am thankful to no longer be a teenager. There seems so little way to avoid one’s teenage years being sheer hell, and it is only with a sigh of relief that I feel as if I can technically close that chapter of my life. But I have in the process felt an intense longing for the naïveté of childhood, when the problems were easier. A five-year-old kid could stop a battle. Conflict mediation at recess resolved a dispute. An impeachment trial or a war in Kosovo was surreal. No one expected you to find Kosovo, or even Washington, DC, on a map. But now I am an adult, and there is no excuse for not confronting real problems, head-on. When you’re not in Montessori school, it takes so many more people to bring an end to injustice, and yet we have to keep trying, and keep being willing to try. We have to keep prizing reason, and we have to keep seeking beauty—and first, we have to learn what we mean by reason and by beauty. We have to read, to read so much—more than we ever thought possible when finishing a Redwall book was the accomplishment of the month.
I cry when I think that the wonder and magic of childhood is something that I’ll never be able to reclaim. But then again, there is simply too much to be done. Today I’ll light a candle in my room, I’ll walk round it twenty times, and then I’ll get on with teaching and learning, with nurturing seeds of right and calling out clouds of wrong. In the last twenty years, I solved so many child-problems, even without trying—I just stood up for what I thought was right. If I can solve even one adult-problem in the next twenty, well: maybe then I’ll stop mourning innocence lost.
Maybe.
Being a Dispatch from Your Friendly Neighborhood LGBT Task Force 2 February 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Princeton.2 comments
With the help of other members of the Princeton LGBT Task Force (a faculty-staff-student committee which addresses LGBT policy on campus), I wrote an op-ed that appears in today’s Daily Princetonian. It argues that we don’t need marriage equality to lessen homophobia and transphobia here in our own community:
You may wonder why members of the Princeton community have to worry. Don’t lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people on campus have community resources, such as an LGBT Center? Aren’t many students, faculty and staff out of the closet? Yes — but to mistake this for evidence of a safe, fulfilling and welcoming environment is to mistake tolerance for acceptance. Those of us who are LGBT at Princeton have the benefit of some institutional support; threats of physical violence against our community are no longer the predictable routine they were 30 years ago. But Princeton is far from an accepting climate in which to be queer, and many members of the University community remain closeted. Marriage would help matters. It would give same-sex relationships the legal and symbolic status of opposite-sex ones, and, practically speaking, it would make less complicated the lives of Princeton employees who live in New York, which recognizes same-sex marriages (but not civil unions). With that option now off the table, however, it’s time for us at Princeton to look inward. There’s much that we can do in our own community to change policies and attitudes, make it easier for students, faculty and staff to come out of the closet and move from relative tolerance to full acceptance of LGBT members of our community.
Go and read the whole thing, please, and for once I’m not just saying that because I wrote it. I don’t know what they did with my bio—did they confuse me with the editors of Equal Writes?—but that doesn’t diminish the value of the column.
QOTD (2010-02-01) 1 February 2010
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Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, section 149:
Thus Children may be cozen’d into a Knowledge of the Letters; be taught to read, without perceiving it to be any thing but a Sport, and play themselves into that which others are whipp’d for. Children should not have any thing like Work, or serious, laid on them; neither their Minds, nor Bodies will bear it. It injures their Healths; and their being forced and tied down to their Books in an Age at enmity with all such Restraint, has, I doubt not, been the Reason, why a great many have hated Books and Learning all their Lives after. ‘Tis like a Surfeit, that leaves an Aversion behind not to be removed.
I can only think that if more of my teachers post-Montessori School had embraced this 18th-century philosophy, I (and my peers) would have been a lot less miserable for much of our childhoods.
In Which the NYT Makes a Hell of a Lot of Sense 29 January 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Politics/Current Affairs.add a comment
The Times had an article today on same-sex couples who have open marriages (i.e. are married, civil-unioned, or otherwise committed partners, but have an agreement about dating and/or having sex with people other than the spouse/partner). Completely blowing my mind about what the NYT will cover sanely, I think this article brings to light a point I’ve been trying to negotiate for several months now: namely, the short-term need of same-sex couples to secure partner benefits in what often wind up being life-and-death situations, but with the long-term (and admittedly more radical) question of whether our society needs to be built on monogamous two-person unions hovering in the background. Nut graf:
None of this is news in the gay community, but few will speak publicly about it. Of the dozen people in open relationships contacted for this column, no one would agree to use his or her full name, citing privacy concerns. They also worried that discussing the subject could undermine the legal fight for same-sex marriage.
Right, right, right. Those of us who take a historical approach are aware there was a time when same-sex marriage was a laughable political goal—that just wasn’t the cultural standard by which the gay community (yes, particularly the gay male community) negotiated its sexual and romantic relationships. Of course, there have been groups calling for same-sex marriage since the 1950s, but the movement didn’t become mainstream until the Clinton era and the DOMA fracas and the tidal wave that Goodridge v. Department of Public Health in Massachusetts unleashed. And now, look at how quickly things have changed: I’m as skeptical about marriage as the next professional gay, and yet when it comes down to it, I’ll report on marriage for my job and attend (and plan!) marriage-equality rallies and work on marriage-equality political campaigns. I’ll get into marriage tug-of-wars just like anyone else does. And I’ll admit that I felt a frisson of nervousness reading this headline and then the article, wondering whether it will be used as ammunition to prove that LGBT people are less capable of family values than our straight allies—similar to the so-called evidence of poor “lifestyle choices” used to damn queer people at the onset of the AIDS crisis.
But thank you, NYT, for reminding us that marriage doesn’t just mean replacing “one man, one woman” with “two people,” and that there are so many more ways to have stable committed relationships. I would have liked this article to acknowledge that straight people, too, can have open relationships, and that there isn’t this dichotomy between traditional relationship choices on the part of straight people and exotic ones on the part of queer people. But hey: the more matter-of-fact dealings we can have with non-monogamous relationship patterns, the better off I think we’ll all be.
