If I may, I’d like to raise a glass to you all, my chosen Whatsit family.  My wish is happiness (no matter how each may define it) for every one of us.

Peace and Love, SG

Whether it is the failure of parties in general, or the failure of modern dinners, or the horrible confluence of the two that is to blame is beyond the purview of my rational organ. I wish all dinner party guests at the devil.

A dinner party of any kind is fundamentally an offering of resources. I have these vegetables from my CSA, for example. I have the time and knowledge to prepare these vegetables in an elegant and amusing fashion. I have this table, and tablecloth, and plates, and silverware, and glasses. When I invite my friends, I have done a close calculation on my meager resources to discover if I can offer them without ruining myself. At other times in my life, there has been no tablecloth. But the food has always been good.

I have a painful memory of 2003, practically a lifetime away in so many ways, during the period of my greatest poverty. I had moved to New York without a dime or a job, and my first employment was so unsuccessful I may have personally driven a non-profit into bankruptcy. I didn’t receive wages for two months. If I ate at all, it was somewhat scavenged. I had one friend in the city, a singer I’d known since I was 18. I invited him to join me in my little dinner, having scrounged together a few dollars for pasta and vegetables, to celebrate a new low-wage job I’d gotten. It was all I had to eat for the week, this big pot of pasta, and when it was gone, I would be out of food until my first paycheck. My friend came over and, seeing me take a half a bowl, grabbed the pot and ate it until it was gone. He scraped it with a spoon to make sure nothing remained. What could I do? He was my only friend. After he left, I cried.

Now, my dinner party problems are the opposite. People ask if they can please come to my house for dinner, so I invite them. I spend a whole day, sometimes more, getting ready. I clean the house, set the table, time everything to go into the oven or onto the stove on a precise schedule. I’ve gotten quite good at thinking of courses as a sort of narrative—what flavors will be wanted exactly after this? what do these particular guests desire?—and by evening, everything is exactly in its place, ready to happen. All afternoon, the party was growing. Phone calls all day: Do you mind if I bring my ex-husband? or I heard you were making dinner for So-and-so, and I got jealous! Fine. I’m making all kinds of calculations about how much food there is, how many chairs there are, whether someone will be drinking wine from a highball glass. But fine, I say. I recalculate my resources to decide if I have enough, and I just barely do. I recalibrate my expectations of what I can offer.

Inevitably, five minutes before the party starts, someone is feeling sick and won’t come. The friend shows without the ex-husband, who is shy about new people. The one who invited herself calls—she is too ashamed that she invited herself to come, so she’s just going to drop by for a drink, no food. Half an hour after the party was supposed to start, and dinner getting cold on the stove as we wait, a couple calls to say they haven’t decided what they’re in the mood to have for dinner, so they’ll call in an hour and let me know if they feel like coming. (They went with steak on the grill at home, and it was really delicious, they assure me.)

At times, this results in me sitting with a single friend, dining amid five or six place settings, the table crowded with the specters of people who couldn’t be bothered to walk five minutes to my house. The wise would say that I should either stop caring or stop giving dinners. I should be casual. Casual! Why make everything before guests arrive? Isn’t it more fun to cook and talk with your guests? Then you know for whom you’re really cooking anyway. Bless you who can do that. My mom and I suffer from a similar inability to multitask; cooking with guests already there and chatting with me sounds like cooking while juggling plates on a tightrope. I will definitely hurt myself. And give up making dinner? Are you kidding?

The grad student, we are told, is the kind of fucked up baby monkey who prefers the wire mesh mother, because at least she doesn’t lie to you. I knew all these things, and I was that sad, perverse little monkey who wanted to cling to the wire rather than feel betrayed.

Can I tell you what I found, though? The wire mesh mother taught me how to love.

I finished my education yesterday. I thought when I started my Ph.D. program that, if I survived, it would be after years of constant, clenching fear, watching my back while covering my gut in case of a sucker punch. What I’d been told about grad school was exactly what I’d always heard about life; everyone’s out to get you. If I got the chance, I’d have to eat the weak.

What I learned was that everything else about life is like that. Career is the wire mesh mother. Dating is the wire mesh mother. No one knows how to be kind, so they aren’t. If you offer someone your tender baby monkey paw, they’ll bite it off. But grad school?

When I showed up, I didn’t know how to be kind. I’m still not good at it. When you think everyone wants to eat you, you don’t know the first thing about how to be actively helpful without looking to strike a deal or make a scam. A professor welcomed us by saying, as he did to new students every year, We chose you for a reason. We want you here. We also chose the person sitting next to you. We want that person here too.

This guy who said this wasn’t a particularly nice person. He could be cutting and flippant, and he was super-cool and brilliant, so I assumed at first that it was some shit people say. It took me a while to figure out that what he meant was, Don’t disrespect us by being a crappy student, and don’t disrespect us by being crappy to each other. My job in school, I was finally learning, was to be smart and do good work, not just for myself, but for all the people who would give me support and help, and never to prevent someone else from doing well.

This was policy in my program. When someone else succeeds, even if you’re envious, or you hate them, or you think they don’t deserve it, you fucking smile and say congratulations, or you walk out of the building and vent to some other friend. When someone fails, even if you hate them, you offer them the help you can, or you go take a nap if you can’t.

Because I was a nasty little monkey—most of us were during our first year—I didn’t see the point. I made allies, and even some good friends, but I quickly formed a cool kids’ club with some other women who hated the same people I did. We’d roll our eyes about how dumb this one was, or how that one needs a new girlfriend. We couldn’t see then what we know years later, that this wrote a brilliant dissertation lickety-split and is a ridiculously talented writer, and that one is a sensitive, quiet man who would devote his life to a massive, slow-burning intellectual project while raising a baby. All we saw then were what we perceived to be edible weaker monkeys.

I had my first psychological crisis during my second year. I’d gotten some bad birth control that contributed to my certainty that I was losing my mind. I ended up in the emergency room of the psych ward with uncontrollable rage. I was afraid of myself, and crying at school about my stupid hateful life. And then a woman, a more advanced student who I know thought I was not cool, came up to me and said, “You need to be gentle with yourself. Just, be kind to yourself right now.”

I had never in my life heard anything like it. My people, we don’t do that. Did she mean some kind of Cathy comic strip scenario where I get frustrated trying on swimsuits and then eat a bunch of chocolate? Because that’s not really my… “No. I mean, today, just go for a walk. Get a pedicure. Sit under a tree. Something that isn’t about… this.”

She didn’t have to do that. She did, though, and it changed everything. My boyfriend at the time was always trying to get me to fix myself; I was always trying to fix myself. That day, I just tried to be myself for a few hours. I’m still learning how to just be myself.

And that, it turns out, is love. Or it’s the love I learned in grad school anyway. Everyone is constantly telling you you’re not rich enough, smart enough, pretty, strong, nice, dedicated, sane, excellent enough, and then someone reminds you that you’re good enough to spend a few hours sitting under a tree not hating yourself. That’s kindness.

I’m not naturally kind. I’m self-absorbed and paranoid. I still gravitate to the wire mesh mother, given the option. But because of the brilliant and kind people I met in grad school, I have something to say to the student weeping in my office, or the near-stranger in the hall who is freaking out. It’s something I said many times to other people in my program who were losing their shit, and something that has been said to me countless times by them when I’m struggling. Be gentle with yourself. Ask for the help you need. You belong here.

And then my head exploded.

I’ve since encountered this idea in a few places, and my head, she will not stop exploding.

Because here is the thing: marriage is, yeah, stupid.  Marriage isn’t just the act of administratively binding your lives together; it has baggage.  Marriage is, no matter how we may queer it, still presumed to be monogamous and wholesome and financially responsible and is presumed to have procreation as its goal.  And as Mr. Kaufman said to Mr. Fisher, if you put the Mount Palomar telescope inside the Mount Wilson telescope, you could not begin to detect my interest in any of that.

This doesn’t matter.  What I can’t wrap my head around is the apparent underlying fear, that now we’re all going to be required to live straight lives plus buttsecks.  (Adjust as needed for gender.)  “We want to be allowed to move to the suburbs” isn’t the same as “we want to move to the suburbs,” and the distinction is extremely important.  Ironically, the argument that could be made to radical queers is exactly the same as the one some of us made or at least applauded in recent years, then directed at conservatives: if you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married.

What, I have asked one friend who pulled this argument on me, should be our agenda, if not these conservative things like marriage and military service, otherwise known as the ways our dehumanization has been validated?  You don’t want the government validating your kinks or your polyamory, whatever the gay rights agenda has subsumed,  it seems to me.

Queerness has to exist on the margins of something, or it isn’t fucking queer.  Better it should exist in the margins of equality, acceptance, safety.  Kvetching about having your queerness coöpted by homos who want to move to the suburbs romanticizes oppression and is an enormous insult to people who still live in fear.

There are things to hate about HRC and that whole swath of moneyed, gay, largely male, lukewarm activism, like how it has thrown, or so I am told, transfolk under the big rainbow bus.  And there is a valid and urgent queer critique of gay assimilationism, and at its heart, it is a critique of other things, probably mostly capitalism.

This ain’t it.  Locally speaking, we have marriage and we have won.  People will still hate us or even just, you know, find us annoying, and we’ll deal with that, but right now, you know what?  We got the biggest bat they use to beat us.  Marriage is ours.  Now get to the work, good queers and friends, of subverting it from within, if that’s your agenda.  Go!

Well, my sister finally passed away.  It’s been a long time coming since she had lived with Multiple Sclerosis for 25 years.  This is a photo of her oldest child with my son.  The big kid was adopted into my parents family in 1980.  The little one born into the extended clan in 2004.  The oldest and youngest cousins.  There are 12 more in between.

I like how this photo flips.

It feels like life that way.  One body tumbling into another.  Both caught up in the dizzying mess of it all.

My sister and her ex-husband raised four children.  Two adopted.  Two naturally born.

 Sweet kids, my sister’s four.  A kind of mongeral little family complete in its incompleteness within the larger birth mythology of my Mother’s Family.  I used to take them thrifting at the local thrift temple back in the 90′s.  The four of them worked really hard, and quite sucessfully to stay sane amist the disater of thier mom’s illness and all it’s tragedy.  I was happy to be thier cool uncle.  And I’m happy to be playing that role now.  Sitting here in the shadow of the Wasatch Front.  Contemplating my benedictory words.  On my brother’s 47th birthday.  Days of 47!  “How circular, how strange . . .”

Women with MS probably shouldn’t have children.  It was the ultimate sacrifice for the next generation. 

 Here’s to my sister!  And her sweet raga-muffin kids! (and to her dopey ex-husband, john the beloved smuck. . . ) 

 How circular. How strange.  How much like life.