Words from Grenoble, words from the past...

 So, I was looking back through some old writings and found this, a piece that I wrote in 2006 when I was living in Grenoble, France.  It was up on the website for the fellowship I was on for a while, but is no longer available there.  It is always odd to look back at writing after years; I know I wrote it, but in ways I am unfamiliar with this ancient version of myself.  Also, this is one of the first things I wrote in which I claimed to be writing non-fiction but was clearly editing and re-writing these emails to weave them into a narrative arc.  

I sat down and tried to write a story.  I tried to write something funny and witty but poignant and moving and something that was entirely representative of my experience so far in France.  The problem was not a lack of stories to tell, I feel like a have a million, but I couldn’t pick one to relate and I found myself absolutely unable to write.  I simply stared at a blank page as the deadline loomed and the idea of distilling my time in France into one narrative became more and more daunting.  With no other ideas, I finally decided, thinking it would also be less work (I was wrong), to share excerpts from emails that I’ve written home to family and friends.  While it is still nowhere near comprehensive, sharing several emails at least allows me to share a progression, an evolution, and a more realistic and intimate vision of my life here in Grenoble.

September 10, 2005

So the apartment hunt.  Ugh.  Imagine looking for an apartment in the states.  Then add in 3 times the confusion as to how to actually go about it.  Then add in 10 times the awkwardness of the phone calls (because, of course, they are all in French and that is not necessarily easy).  Then add the fact that school is starting now and there are about 20,000 students looking for the same places to live.  Cheap, in the center of town, nice enough places.  I really don’t want to live by myself and I really do want to live with a French person; I just think it would be an easy way to get in with a group of friends.  Ready made.  So yeah, a cheap, but nice and well-located apartment in the center of town with a French person.  No Problem, right?

September 27, 2005

I think I finally found  a place to live.  This dude, Pierre, is looking to share a run down but really pretty nice apartment just off the main part of town.  It’s on a small street next to a daily farmer’s market and you can easily walk anywhere in town from the doorstep.  It has beautiful hardwood floors and my room has a (nonfunctional, but romantic nonetheless) fireplace.  The best part however has to be Pierre himself.  No, he doesn’t wear a beret and a horizontally striped white and black shirt.  He doesn’t eat frog’s legs every night.  However, he does smoke, drink his coffee black, and enjoy pâté more than anyone should, ever.  He’s also just a really nice guy and his friends are also great; we went out to a bar last night and everyone was welcoming and interesting.  So moral of the story is that I found a place to live that I like.  With a person that I like.  I’m claiming this as a moral victory.

November 13, 2005

Ok, so last night.... I ate fondu.  Lots of it.  For dinner.  It was a pot of melted cheese, wine, onions, and lardoons (basically bacon) easily the size of my head (including my huge hair) and it was for three of us.  Pierre’s friend, Tatiana, had an American friend come to visit and he wanted a stereotypically French meal.  I guess he got one.  I still feel not quite so well in the stomach.  Along with the traditionally French meal, we played a traditionally French game: if you drop your bread in the fondu pot you had a punishment, a gage, decided upon in advance...  so the first punishment was that you had to sing an entire song a capella out loud at the table in the middle of the crowded restaurant.  And of course, I dropped my bread in the pot about five minutes in to the meal.  In the French spirit of things, I decided to sing Claude François’ French version of “Oh What A Night,” entitled ‘Cette Année Là’ which is deliciously 80s.  It was brilliant and I may or may not have turned a shade of red normally seen only on tomatoes and stop signs.  Also, I can’t sing.  Or speak French.  Ugh.  It’s ok though because later Pierre dropped his bread and he had to stand on his chair and dance the Macarena for 30 seconds.  A highly entertaining evening, full of wine and good conversation, was had by all.  And it felt so French, and the stomachache (and heart disease) that comes from eating at least 3 pounds of melted cheese was well worth it....

November 16, 2005

School is going pretty well, but the very nature of the French education system is a little grating.  At least my program is overtly competitive in a way that I’ve never experienced before.  Professors are constantly reminding students that they’re being graded on a sliding scale.  After the first presentation in my class entitled Biologie Structurale des acides nucleiques et de la transcription des eukaryotes (sounds fun doesn’t it) the professor asked if there were any questions and no one raised their hands.  He then said, ‘You know you should all ask questions because if you ask a really hard one and the group can’t answer it, their grade will go down, and yours, by comparison, will go up.’  Immediately about five hands shot in the air.  I was stunned.  I mean competition in education is unavoidable but I have certainly never seen anything quite that overt.  It just leads to a bit of an odd dynamic between the students.  And I’m really trying not to let myself feed into the competitive nature of the program; I didn’t come to France to sit in my room studying every night.  Otherwise, things are going well; the classes tend to be really interesting and I’ve really enjoyed the time I’ve been able to spend in the lab.  Also, I think I may have contracted mad cow disease.  Seriously. 

December 18, 2005

Home is such an interesting thing.  As a side note, one of the linguistic things I don’t like about French is that there is no word for home... there’s house, there’s so and so’s place, but no home in the English sense of the word.  Flying into Seattle over the mountains, seeing Rainer off to the south and then making the same bank every time over lake Washington, the Pugent sound, the university and downtown...  it just feels so amazing.  But in the last couple of years, home has changed a lot, not so much in its actuality, but in my conception of the place.  I’ve always had a critical vue of my little town, of the people and the place, but it has always been home, and a huge part of my identity.  I think that in the last couple of summers living in Seattle, spending most of my time in Minnesota, and now living abroad, my experience has changed enough so that I don’t really identify that as my home, at least not fully, anymore.  Carleton definitely was home, my friends there are like family, but now everyone’s so spread out.  And then there’s Grenoble.  Grenoble is becoming home, and I love it, I love my friends, my apartment, my lab… but living in a foreign country does lead to a feeling of displacement.  I mean, being an American abroad leads to all sorts of privileges, that’s for sure, but I am not French.  Just one look at me, just one word from my mouth and that’s apparent.  I am tired of people talking to me in that slow voice they reserve for foreigners.  I’m tired of being the token American.  I’m tired of people asking me what I think of Bush, of American foreign policy, of American oppression.  Yes, the American government oppresses its citizens (this is, by the way, the correct answer). About the war in the Middle East.  Yes, I’m a pacifist (correct again).  Sometimes, the romantic ideals of living in Europe, in having a foreign experiment, grind directly with the feeling that I have become the Other.  In a country where citizens define themselves first and foremost by nationality, where the solution to racial discrimination is making everyone French, how does the foreigner fit?  The goofy kid with holey jeans, long hair and a funny accent.  As much as Grenoble is becoming my home, it remains a place where I feel somewhat estranged. 

January 5, 2006

Grenoble is buzzing with skiers. It’s interesting and it makes the town pretty exciting.  And on my first night back it snowed like a half a foot, big beautiful snowflakes.  Then the next day I had to take the train then the bus up to the ski station Dévoluy where I was meeting my friends at the Chalet... it started snowing and the road actually got pretty bad.  A bunch of cars stopped in front of the bus to put on chains so the bus had to stop as well.  Then we started to slide.  To the side.  Slide slide slide, wham... long story short, the bus went into the ditch and I almost died.  Ok maybe not almost died, but I had to wait outside the bus in the cold for 2 hours and that wasn’t very much fun. And one of my legs fell asleep, which is kind of like it dying, right?  The bus driver spent well over an hour trying to get the bus out and couldn’t do it, and we were blocking off the road so no cars could pass.  This guy who was behind us in his car knew how to drive a bus, so he decides to come up and get in the drivers seat (what?!) and within 5 minutes the bus was out of the ditch... then as quickly as he came, he disappeared back to his car.  I think he might have been batman. Nevertheless, a one hour bus ride turned into three hours of fun. The good news is that once I got up there, the week was really amazing.  I mean, yes I was really jet lagged and more than a little bit grumpy, but it felt nice to be out in the sun on the slopes just hanging with a bunch of Frenchies, eating traditional French cuisine from the region (raclette is amazing, melted cheese over potatoes and cold meats… yum), and singing Didier Super (amazing).  Plus, on the drive back into Gnobes, on walking back into my apartment and immediately collapsing on my couch, I couldn’t help but breathe that sigh of relief that comes from feeling both exhausted and (at least mostly) at home.   

On Democracy in Health (srsly)...

This article is an adaptation of a talk I gave to undergraduate students in my Biochemistry class at Vassar College.  To integrate several of the topics they had studied so far this semester, and to connect the course to issues of health, advocacy, and social justice, I screened the film “How to Survive a Plague.”  A lecture on the development and mechanism of HIV drugs followed this consideration of the film.  I find the issues discussed here so critically important and so rarely mentioned that I wanted to share them. 

As a preamble I want to just state two simple facts[i] to attempt to demonstrate that this conversation is pertinent, alive, and necessary.

This week, for the first time, doctors claim to have cured an HIV-positive infant by aggressive early treatment. While this discovery is unlikely to impact treatment for adults, it may be a game changer for the treatment of at risk infants.

Long story short, the search for a cure continues. And the drugs used to treat that infant are the very ones we will be discussing today[ii].

Secondly, also this week, we are considering the effects of the sequester on science funding in this country. And it doesn't look great. The nations largest funding agency, which continues to fund ground breaking work on HIV and other infectious diseases, will take a major hit in funding. This will necessarily be passed down to individual researchers. The funding situation has already been dire for a decade. We are nearing the edge of no longer prioritizing the types of health breakthroughs we saw in the film[iii]. Research isn't easy - it takes time and money. But it is necessary - as is made so beautifully clear in "How to Survive a Plague."

I don't think we will like the look of a society that is unable to respond to the next great public health crisis, the next great plague.

I want to start this discussion with a brief but desperate plea about why I think this class is important[iv].  You're taking the class, so one might assume that you think it could be important, too.  But, I don't want to make any assumptions.

In the film that you have hopefully watched by now, one of the characters said something that made me sit up in my chair.  It made me gasp.  It perfectly iterated why I wanted to teach this class in the first place.  It was early in the film, somewhere around 1988 or 1989, when AIDS truly was a death sentence.  In one of the interviews with an ActUP member who was talking about why they formed the data and treatment group said, "I will survive the longest the more I know about what types of drugs I am putting into my body."

I want to repeat that: "I will survive the longest the more I know about what types of drugs I am putting into my body."

This was a man who thought he was doomed to death and who had come to the desperate realization that his understanding of the science and biology of his disease and its potential treatment was literally a matter of life and death.  No one else was going to do this for him.  He had to do it on his own. 

It's 2013 and I would argue that for each and every one of us, understanding the drugs and foods we put in our body is quite literally a matter of life and death.

I am a 30 year old queer[v] man who happens to exists in the world in 2013.  I also happen to have a PhD in molecular biophysics.

This is the level at which drugs work. They generally bind to a protein and inhibit or modulate its activity.  Understanding drugs requires understanding biology and chemistry, at least a little bit.  And without understanding biology and chemistry you will never understand the drugs you put in your body (recreational or otherwise).  And it IS a matter of life and death.

Every time I go to the doctor and get prescribed a medication, before I even fill the prescription, I go home and look up the literature on the drug.  You know where I start?  Wikipedia.  Science articles in Wikipedia actually tend to be pretty good.  But I don't stop there.  I look up actual honest to god research papers on the drug[vi], I understand how it acts, its likely side effects, if there are more cost-effective or better treatments. 

And you know what?  My doctor knows this.  Not only because I have the letters D and R in front of my name on his chart, but because I ask questions when he suggests a medication, and if I look it up and don't want to take it, I call back or go back in and figure out another solution. 

I don't want to trust decisions that are centered on my body to the knowledge of others. My scientific understanding serves to democratize the interaction between me and my doctor.  You want to talk democracy, collective decision-making?  It only works if you are informed.  Otherwise you have to trust. 

And you want to talk about having agency over your own body?  How can you have agency when you don't have the ability to understand if the HPV vaccine is going to do more harm or more good?  How it's going to work?  What strains it is effective against, and not?  Whether or not you still need to be screen via standard methods for cervical cancer?  Whether it is beneficial for a man?  A gay man?

Biomedical knowledge should not be held by a privileged few; it should not be wielded only by doctors but ought to be held near and dear by patients and citizens of the world. 

In this increasingly pharmaceuticalized world, science education ought to be a human right.  No democratic relationship can exist between an individual and his/her doctor, the companies that s/he is trusting to make safe and effective drugs, and the government that is expected to fund and regulate this process without a fundamental understanding of the science. 

Here, scientists have failed.  Here, educators have failed.  Here, doctors, too, have failed, and governments and individuals themselves.  We are all failing to see the importance of doing the difficult work of understanding some critical 'truths' about the biological world.  It is not easy work, but it is necessary. 

And to all of you out there who are hoping to become medical doctors: this is not a class that you should skate through, get your A, and move on to medical school.  Modern drugs are designed using the tools of biochemistry and structural biology.  You can't understand drugs without understanding allostery, and Michaelis-Menten kinetics, and enzyme active sites.  I'm sorry, but you can't.  And if you don't understand drugs, why should I trust you to prescribe them?  Because a drug rep told you to?  Because you survived biochem not once but twice in undergrad and med school?  I need you, if you want to wield a pen and prescription pad, to be able to use the skills from this class to understand the pills you are asking people to put in their bodies.

As we saw in the HIV/AIDS crisis, trusting those in power to sympathize with your plight and act accordingly can be a death sentence.

Now, as then, understanding what types of drugs you are putting into your body is a matter of life and death.  And we should treat it as such, and work to understand those drugs to the best of our ability. 

---

[i] I know ‘facts’ are rarely simple, and that I am probably not gaining the trust of the reader by attesting so early on that they are.

[ii] Not here we won’t.  But if anyone out there really wants to talk about small-molecule inhibitors of HIV enzymes, feel free to reach out. 

[iii] If you haven’t seen ‘How to Survive…’, please please do.  Although there’s tea on the street that the film ‘United in Anger’ by Jim Hubbard is also amazing and that ‘How to Survive…’ borrowed a fair amount of the footage from ‘United…’, but having not seen the latter and not knowing the deets, I cannot really comment. 

[iv] This class being Bio272 at Vassar College.  Biochemistry. 

[v] I might have used the word gay when actually speaking to my students. 

[vi] Which are often, but less often than they used to be, behind a paywall.  It can cost 50 or more dollars to access a single research article.  The fact that the research described in the article was likely paid for out of your very own tax dollars, as allocated by the National Institutes of Health, makes exactly zero difference.  Legislation recently changed the law and required that many articles funded with public money are freely available to… the public.  There was an effort to roll back this legislation, which was, happily, defeated after a massive and public outcry by scientists themselves.

on love, fiction and art; or, why some things are worth the hard work.

My friends know my aversion to twitter all too well.  I have taken one of my famous 'principled stances' against the social networking platform; I have said "anything that's worth saying is worth taking more than 140 characters".  That quote, by the way is 69 characters.  This, of course, is a simplification and some things can be perfectly said in few words.  I am fascinated by the six-word memoir project that was turned into a book back in 2008, when twitter was ONLY doing 100 million tweets per quarter.  Getting a spirit, idea, feeling across in only a few words is a magical talent.  

And to be entirely honest, my biggest problem in the written (and spoken) word is using too many characters to say what I have to say.  I am honestly jealous of writers who can pack meaning into few words, who can write concise sentences that cut like a knife, that don't require semi-colons and comma splices to translate thoughts from their psyche onto paper.   

Yet the fact remains: almost all of my favorite works of fiction are incredibly long.  Infinite Jest, of course, takes the cake but Absalom isn't much thinner, and I'm pretty sure Just Above My Head is the best James Baldwin novel, but it is definitely the longest, as well.  

I know that with works of fiction, longer, of course, isn't always better.  Works should be perfectly realized, exactly as long as they need to be to inhabit a place, embody human characters.  "As I lay dying" doesn't need to be, indeed shouldn't be, longer than it is.  "L'amant" is sparse and short and shocking; it screams with its silences.  Length isn't, I know, a marker for quality (looking at you, Proust).  

But an advantage of a long work of fiction, as a reader, is that you are forced to inhabit other human beings for weeks, months.  You sit inside of these other people, and they sit inside of you.  You have to work at them, and they work at you.  Long pieces of fiction are not generally easy; our attention may wane.  But, when they are good, they give us an experience that is nearly impossible to replicate.  We wouldn't be willing to watch a movie, on and off, for a month or more.  Books sit with us, they chip away at us even when not open and in our laps.  The time they we spend with them, the weeks or more, the work required of us to strip off our own identity (if briefly, for moments, if imperfectly, if incompletely) and to sit in some one else's truth or place or being, this is the transformative power of fiction.  

It was Zadie Smith (whose novels are not particularly long) who once said in a talk that fiction is the only work of art that convinces us that we are not the only real human being alive, that others think, feel, exist just as deeply.  The idea is, of course, not hers, but she expressed it as clearly as anyone I had ever read/heard at the naive age of 22.  Fiction, and art, teach empathy; they show us that others are real.  For me, being forced to sit with a single work for weeks or longer makes me exist outside of myself in ways that nothing else ever has.  It is a profoundly troubling experience, and with Infinite Jest literally made me feel as though I was losing my bearings on my own construction of myself and my world.  It is a profoundly important experience, and has done more to change my view of the world, of others, of personhood and place, than nearly anything else.  

In Absalom, absalom we hear the same narrative over and over, from different people at different times.  These myths are created right before our very eyes, and they change with every telling.  Faulkner is often cited as THE american post-modern writer and this novel embodies why.  You literally watch narrative being created, and shifting, and the truth becomes subjective.  Infinite Jest creates a world, a near future, terrifying and familiar.  Characters come and go, are depressed, addicted (to drugs, entertainment, violence), and you are forced to inhabit each of their identities in turn.  And many of them fit uncomfortably.  Time shifts and turns on itself, the world makes no sense.  Just above my head starts with grief that can only be explained by the love of a brother, and best friend.  At first the grief is disorienting and makes no sense.  But after you live inside the relationship,  felt over decades, over relationships made and lost, through shifts in history and geography and politics, the grief becomes real, and personal.  None of these transformative experiences, for me as a reader, would have been possible without literally living inside these books for weeks.  

There is something to be said for putting in work, for trying to tackle big things, for sticking with something or some one even when things are difficult.  It is almost cliche at this point to decry the ways in which our interactions (with each others, with art) have become more superficial thanks to technology.  And yet, it feels to me that interactions have become increasingly replaceable, and therefore it is often easier to discard a person, a thing, a relationship, a work or art or fiction, when the going gets tough.  

There are certain rewards that can come only from interactions that require you to give your time, your energy, your attention, your love.  And not for 140 characters, but for a day, a week, a month, a year.  It's not easy.  But it is essential.  It is art, and fiction, and love.  And, in my mind, it is worth the work.  

I'm gonna nail you for picking your feet in Poughkeepsie

This post is not going to be political, at least overtly so (what, after all, isn't political?) nor is it going to be sweeping social commentary.  It is not going to be a rant about whiteness or soapboxing about some queer shit.  It's going to be… personal.  Which, frankly, is terrifying. 

Most of you out there in the interwebs likely know, if you know me, that I have recently finished graduate school.  I have always found endings more bitter than sweet; while moments like graduations are celebratory and markers of important milestones, they are also goodbyes.  When I graduated from college, I felt the personal goodbyes very dearly.  It was as though, in one day, I had to say goodbye to most of the important people in my life.  With graduate school, it felt like saying goodbye to a life/lifestyle.  I wasn't leaving New York and my peoples there.  Rather, it was a moving on, a growing up.  I would not longer be able to call myself, technically, a student.  And being a grad student at Rockefeller shields one from a lot of fairly horrific things about adult life.  For example: I lived in New York for 6 years and had never had to look for an apartment.  Or pay market price for one.  I lived in a building with my colleagues and friends.  I had no commute.  Literally, none.  

Those of you who know me likely also know that I, shortly after I defended my thesis, took a visiting assistant professor job at Vassar College.  I had, through the fall and winter, been applying for every job under the sun, from the traditional post-docs* through to tenure track teaching positions.  While the post-doc job search went well, clearly tenure track jobs weren't willing to take a chance on a 28-year old without a PhD or any papers out in the last 5 years.  

One school did take a chance on me, and that was Vassar College.  I have a fond place in my heart for Vassar both because I also went to a small liberal-arts college (about which I actually have quite mixed feelings) and because Vassar is incredibly 1) gay and 2) present in NYC.  I can't tell you how many Vassar alums I've met at sex parties and in bathroom stalls (just kidding mom).  And Vassar is located close enough to New York that many of the professors actually do the commute daily.  

The commute.  It's a 90 minute train ride from 125th street in Harlem to downtown Poughkeepsie, roughly 3 miles from Vassar.  This is coming from some one who's previous commute was exactly 0.5 city blocks.  Also, not being a morning person, the notion of being on a train at something like 6:19am in order to be in class by 9am was simply not an option.  I decided that I would only take a job at Vassar if keeping a small apartment in Poughkeepsie (to minimize commute horrors) and Harlem (to ensure that I wouldn't want to jump off a cliff for the lack of an engaging and not undergrad-centered social life) would be financially feasible.  Happily, Vassar keeps apartments on and near campus at below-market rates for professors.  

I took one.  I'm sitting in it now.  

Those of you out there who know me (I'm going to assume that most of you do, because, you know, why else would you have waded this deep into some random millings arounds and personal reflections of someone you didn't know or care about) also know that the last few months have brought all sorts of changes, both for the good and bad.  I will spare the details here, and I am going to try to avoid the all-to-tpyical blog-post self-aggrandization that I find so very infuriating**.  However, I have kind of needed one in the win column for some time now.

Today was a beautiful, late-summer-early-fall feeling day in New York.  I bought some new digs for my teaching.  On the train ride up I had my work spinning in front of me, Frank Ocean (!!!) in my ears.  I've always found trains calming, and the metro north may appear to be my own personal productivity bubble.  There just aren't any distractions.  There is just a nose and a grindstone.

The bike ride from the train was a beautiful summer night and filled with darkness (which I grew up with, and don't see in the city) and country noises (crickets like a mother fucker).  

And now I'm sitting here in my second home.  My country house.  I'm going to take you all on a tour and show you around.  Suffice it to say that I feel at home here, in this place I barely know.  Turns out that a friend of a friend who is a faculty member at Vassar lived in this apartment before me.  I had coffee with him the other day and my time with him made me feel like I would actually be able to build some really meaningful (and political) relationships on campus.  Maybe its this spirit that is permeating the space for me.  Maybe it's all the weird little quirks so typical of houses that were built half a century ago and haven't been generically renovated.  Perhaps it's the ability to have space, and quite.  Perhaps it's the notion that I've been trying to cultivate in my mind that it might just be possible, if only for the year that I am here, to be both a city and country boy, both an academic and a ratchet hot mess, an educator AND a scientist (a rarer combination than you might think), a scientists and a radical; to find spaces, geographical, rhetorical, spiritual and intellectual, for all of my various identities.  

A photographical journey of my new (second) home:

The MetroNorth branch of the Osmundson Lab

The MetroNorth branch of the Osmundson Desk

My Front door 

Yoshi's new home 

The empty kitchen.  My table won't make it in the door with it's legs.  I'll be performing surgery on her tomorrow (with any luck) and will be able to cook and eat soon thereafter.

Living room! 

"Bed room" (view from the living room)

Kitchen (with boxes) 

These lighting fixtures clearly date to the 1950s.  And I wouldn't change a thing about them. 

 Ceiling fan!  It's all happening!!

FOOTNOTES

*Please excuse this political interlude, after I explicitly promised an apolitical blog entry.  I just cannot resist.  For those of you who are not scientists or academics, first, good job.  You've made some solid life decisions at some point.  Second, turns out that, in the sciences, a PhD is no longer sufficient training for a tenure track position.  After completing a PhD, one must enter yet another apprenticeship, working long (really) hours for incredibly little compensation (the national minimum, which is actually paid by many institutions INCLUDING universities in large cities such as New York and San Francisco with v high costs of living, is around 38,000 this year.  People do it, but being a single parent or HOH on 38,000 a year is, well, tough).  Turns out there is a labor market in science (who would have guessed).  And that market is flooded.  While we constantly hear talking points about how our students are being undereducated in STEM subjects, such as biology, we are consistently turning out more scientists than there are long-term, well-paying research positions.  This means that 10 PhDs are educated for every 3 tenure-track professor jobs (all this has been well documented in a series of articles in Time and the Washington Post, amongst others).  Also, turns out research is expensive to do and takes a long time and a lot of labor.  And having a low-cost labor base is an incredibly cost effective way to get that labor done.  Having some one toil away for 5 to 10 years AFTER completing their PhD with absolutely no job security (post-doc contracts are typically renewed yearly) may be a good way to get a lot of science done for not a terrible amount of money.  But it turns out that it doesn't lead to a great morale in a lot of research labs; it's not an exaggeration to say that hopelessness and despair are both fairly common in academic research settings.  

**"SIPPING A COCKTAIL ON THE PORCH, LIFE IS GOOD!" 

   "I LOVE MY BOYFRIEND, IM THE LUCKIEST GURL IN THE WORLD"

   "SEE, THINGS ALWAYS WORK OUT IN THE END!!"

   pukes on self

Some thoughts on hipsterism, and constructive vs deconstructive forces; or the queer art of reconstruction

I just finished David Foster Wallace's excellent essay 'E Unibus Pluram', a meditation on entertainment (well, TV), culture and literature.  I don't really want to write tonight about TV or literature, per se, but I do have some thing to say about irony, hipsterism and queerness.  Hopefully you'll understand what I mean by the end of this post.

Wallace basically claims that TV has appropriated post-modern aesthetics in order to sell shit.  Specifically, TV has become almost fully ironic, allowing the watcher to feel in on the joke, and therefore special.  This has all sorts of ramifications, but I want to focus on Wallace's feelings on irony.  This essay is, essentially, a take down of hipsterism written in 1993, before our current hipsters had stopped wetting their beds.  Wallace writes:

'Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their own cage.' This is because irony, as entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I've had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow... oppressed.

That is, irony is a deconstructive force.  Irony allows us to take things apart, to question paradigms.  It allows us to ridicule.  As Wallace claims, it exposes hypocrisy.  Irony, therefore, can be an incredibly potent tool when it comes to exposing terrible things we often live with without thinking too hard about it.  Irony does not, as Wallace points out, necessarily provide alternative modes of living.  

This is my problem with 'hipsterism': hipsters are too cool for school in an exclusive and terrible way.  They deconstruct everything they see.  They live, as others have pointed out, an extended adolescence, balking at the idea of a wife/husband/kids/white-picket-fence/suburban life.  I fuck with hipsters on this last point.  I think the nuclear family and the societal norms saying that everyone should be in a monogamous relationship and on the path to home ownership are entirely janked.   What hipsterism doesn't offer is an alternative, unless you consider listening to loud music that no one has ever heard of and drinking terrible beer ad infinitum a viable life-style.

I have been going on some first dates lately (yes).  Inevitably, on first dates, the conversation about expectations and long-term future potential comes up.  The reason I have been going on first dates (don't ask) also started me thinking about constructive versus deconstructive forces.  See, for all my queer theory bullshit, turns out a lot of what I want in life is fairly traditional.  I might or might not require/want a monogamous relationship, but I definitely want a partner, and I want to live with this person and think about having kids some time in a near-ish future.  And although I want to live in the same building as all my best friends so my future child can have about 6 co-parents (I believe these used to be called things like Aunties and Uncles), the things I DO want might look a lot like some fun-house mirror version of what most people I went to high school with want.  

And this is the thing.  Queerness isn't just a deconstructive force.  As post-modernists (?), queer folks have been spectacular at pointing out all the flaws in the system.  We can pick heteronormativity apart like hyenas feasting on a fresh kill.  Given our relationship to (and oppression by) heternormative forces, this is in our blood.  But the thing about actually BEING queer as opposed to being a queer THEORIST is that we have to live within the confines of the world we make for ourselves.  

That is, queerness is also a constructive force.  Tearing down walls of bullshit heteronormitivity isn't enough.  We have to construct a queer house in which to live.  We have to try as hard as we can to understand all the forces that socialized us into believing relationships have to look a certain way, and decide how we want our relationships to ACTUALLY look.  Sometimes, some people will make intentional, thoughtful, and queer decisions that lead them towards lives that might look normative, from the outside.  Sometimes, some people will make intentional, thoughtful, and queer decisions that lead them to have several partners, or none.  But all of these decisions, because they are intentional and thoughtful and queer, are constructive.  We are providing an alternative, if only for ourselves.  As weary and cynical as we might be (and as I certainly am at this present moment), we do believe in brighter, better alternatives, and I, for one, am willing to risk my future on the fact that I can build a queer alternative within whose walls I, personally, can live.  

A response to 'Mother who stole son's education gets 12 years in prison'

This story has been in the news for some time, but the verdict came down and the mother responsible is going to see prison time.  And not just a little bit.  What, precisely, did this woman do?  Well, after losing her housing, this woman used a friend's/babysitter's address to enroll her son in a public school in a neighboring district, not where she held her last known address.  

The very notion of stealing a public education is wholly preposterous.  It is at the very heart of structural violence.  Based upon your address, and your zip code, your child will be enrolled in a school.  Districts are often funded by local taxes; therefore the more wealthy the district, the more resources it can allocate to its public schools.  Those who live in less wealthy zip codes don't have access to the high-quality public education that middle and high income communities enjoy.  There is a fundamental link between income and the quality of your education, and there are laws reinforcing this inequality.  If we view quality education as a human right, then laws restricting access to quality education (such as the Jim Crow laws) are inherently violent, and that violence is ingrained in systems of power and law (tax law, educational policy, etc).  

I know all too well how this feels on a personal level.  And I am not alone.

If you know me well at all, you probably know where I come from.  I grew up in a rural community with a struggling and underfunded public school system.  Already, when I compared myself to public school students in Seattle, a mere 45 minutes away, I knew that I was years behind.  Due to years of sustained population growth to the entire region, the historically underfunded public schools were busting at the seams.  The community could no longer deny the absolute necessity for new school buildings.  

My parents moved to this community from an even further removed, even smaller town up in the foothills of the cascades.  They moved, in part, because they believed their children would have access to higher quality public schools.  The ability to move, to displace their entire family, to give their children a better chance was already an immense privilege not available to every family.  And then they watched as the public schools in this new town became more and more crowded, the class size larger and larger.

And then they built a new elementary school.  

I was going into 5th grade when the new school was to open.  I remember that my mom dragged me to the PTA meeting where they were announcing which students got to go to the new school (with the better teachers, the better equipment) and which students would remain in President's Elementary.  I remember my mother's anxiety as she stepped up to the map that related one's geography, one's address, to one's educational opportunity.  

I remember the look in my mother's face when she saw the map.  All the new developments, the shiny new McMansions that were bought up by folks commuting from down South, were on the part of the map that got to go to the new school.  My house, on the side of town with the farms and the folks who had been around for a while, the folks who's property tax was significantly less, was on the side of the map that was stuck in the school that was built in the 1950s.  The economics of the situation were not veiled.  

And I remembered my mother's anger at the unfairness of the situation.  Her child, for whom she had moved her family, was faced with a barrier to getting his best possible education.  If my mother could have lied to get me into the better school, she would have.  

Wanting the best for your child, and his or her future, and being willing to fight for that future should be a positive attribute.  We hear all too often that poor parents don't care about their children's education.  They don't ask their children to study, or teach them about the ethics of hard work.  These are kids who watch TV and play video games, but don't read or study.  But stories like this rub uncomfortably against this myth.  Here is a mother willing to go to jail, quite literally, to give her child a better future.  She cares, obviously, with all her life.  And what do we, as a society give her?  Do we fight for better schools in all communities?  Do we try to break down the economic barriers between high-performing and low-performing schools?  Do we remove the false boundaries that divide communities and schools?  Do we give parents more flexibility to keep their children in the same schools even after their economics (ie losing a job) may force a change in their address or zip code?  

No.  We send them to jail.  Because they didn't play by the rules.

But the rules are structural violence.  Keeping children from their best possible education is not to be lauded.  And fighting against that violence should not be criminalized.  

the end times

May 21st, 7:20 pm seems a rather unremarkable time on a rather unremarkable Saturday evening.  The day was calm, but an hour ago the heavens opened up and rain poured down.  The city gets quiet at times like this, the sounds of cars dampened by the water all around.  But there wasn't even a single clap of thunder, not to mention a tremble of the ground.  You see at 6pm tonight, a little more than an hour ago, just as the sky was opening up to rain, the world was supposed to end.

For the past several months, a small but loyal group has traveled around the country professing that the end times are near.  They have had a heavy presence in New York, and personally handed me their literature.  Between the wars and famines, tornadoes and floods, global warming and tsunamis and exploding nuclear reactors and birds falling from the sky, they might not be wholly wrong.  But predicting that the God laid forth a date written in code in the bible seems a little risky.  The same group got it wrong once already, in 1994. 

There have been a series of articles in the last few weeks about those who believe with unwavering faith that today will be judgment day.  People have sold and given away all their worldly belongings, given up jobs and time with family, all because they believed with absolute certainty in the coming of the end times. 

This type of faith has always fascinated me; I have a hard time believing this absolutely in much of anything at all.  The one thing I do understand is the sense of desperation and impending doom that drives one to join a cult or a commune or believe in the second coming.  I feel that desperation and I know the pressing weight of doom.  The world can be a terrifying place where little is certain except loss and change.  Although it is cliche to talk about the tough economic times, but I have felt their weight since long before the recession.  Entire towns have lost their livelihoods as manufacturing jobs have been moved overseas.  A lot of working communities have had an identity crisis, and I can guarantee that the May 21st movement doesn't include a lot of Wall Street bankers, but it does contain a lot of disenfranchised white people, people so desperate for something in which to have faith. 

I have thought for a few weeks about the rapture and end times, predicted to be so near.  The image that I have been unable to shake is actually of the day after.  Tomorrow morning when the world has kept on turning, when no earthquakes have come, when no heathens are left behind, and no one has ascended to heaven, a man is going to have to walk back into an empty apartment, having given away everything he owns.  The one thing this man has believed in with all his soul, energy, and will was, in the end, false.  The world did not end.  And now he must rebuild his life, and wait, I suppose, for something else in which to believe, for the next rapture to come.