a fag hag sings the blues

"fag hags are the backbone of

the gay community."-margaret cho

i've been a fag hag since i was a little girl, which is something of an achievement in west virginia. 1991-1994 marked my prolonged crush on a barely-out-0f-adolescence gay man firmly determined to remain in his appalachian closet. i was in third grade and dividing my time between reading books about unicorns and admiring mark's exceptionally well-styled hair. he wasn't like other men. he was my mother's best friend, and when we all went to dinner he talked about his emotions, analyzed group dynamics, and had opinions about the styles of our friends. sometimes he wore purple. i didn't know what gay was, or what love was, or even what a crush was, but i knew enough about myself to know that mark and i were somehow alike, and to suspect it went beyond the fact we were both pisces who loved mushrooms.

of course, as we both grew older mark began to figure out who he was. my mother refused to believe he was gay, until he told her, but for a hag she has surprisingly inconsistent gaydar. i knew it. what 20-year-old guy doesn't date? who works in a florist shop with a bunch of other gay men? who would dare to appear elegant in place defined by grizzly masculinity?

it was a dance for the hags to be supportive of that one. he was a loner, but my mother sought ways to celebrate mark's charms. once this involved rented black tuxedos, with red bowties and cummerbunds, a large floral arrangement and table dressing, and a new year's party that marks one of the only times i've ever seen my mother chug beer. mark was roped into co-hosting, and the three of us wandered around in our tuxes, a little gender-bending fun that didn't threaten mark in the least, but at least gave his creativity free license. this is the kind of thing hags in appalachia do.

this early training in active support for gay men proved helpful later, when in college most of my closest male friends were gay. they were all in various shades of coming out, but being with them meant my femininity could be as fabulous as i wanted. the straight men in my life only cared about whether i was available to them sexually or emotionally, and while they enjoyed a low-cut blouse they weren't invested in my beauty. the gay men in my life, though, appreciated beauty. if i looked good i made them look good. i loved them because they upped my game.

in morgantown, like in most of west virginia, there wasn't much gay culture to speak of. in many ways we had to create our own. (exhibit b, dance parties were helpful.) the gay bar downtown, where we sometimes went to dance, was intimidatingly near the straight dance bars we were avoiding. gay men cruised the adult book store, among other places, and i never did find out what the lesbians were doing, although there were whispers of a lesbian bar a few miles outside of town. more often than not, being a hag didn't mean heading to the gay bar in riotous femininity, but rather acting as a beard. sometimes helping a man pass was indirect, just the assumption of heterosexuality thrown over a couple or group with two distinct presented genders. sometimes it was more direct--making out on a dance floor, or telling a cop you were a couple--and while it was always thrilling to pass it also felt a little dirty. it was my job to provide this kind of support, but i would have preferred to celebrate my friends for who they were.

perhaps because of the uniqueness of my regional experience, i do not know what it means to be a fag hag in new york city. the gay men i've known here have all belonged to a subculture that felt impenetrable, and the time i've spent in gay bars has always felt a little dark. maybe because, in new york, i was superfluous, and my presence in the celebration of gay sexuality wasn't necessary. the gay men might not miss me, but i miss them.

what's a hag to do? it may sound silly, but making gay friends is a start.

which brings me to adam. this man entered my life awhile ago but i didn't take notice, in that way we sometimes don't when someone is a friend of a friend and we must be careful about establishing a triangle. triangle now established, i taught this man to hula hoop and he introduced me to rupaul's drag race. (a fair trade.) there are ongoing promises to bar hop together through the east village gay scene. we share the bond of refugees from a conservative hinterland, and it shows. i am firmly back in hag territory when it comes to adam. there is brunch involved.

still, while i love that adam is putting me back in touch with the best elements of gay culture--celebration, appreciation of beauty, reverence for creativity, positive sex politics, an inclination to booze--i'm also aware that i can't hang my own hag identity on the head of one poor queer. the same as it would be terrible for a queer to hang his identity on one poor hag. we're better than that, we're more than that. (exhibit c, even now, it is important to me to be a hag josh would be proud of.)

like anything you want in this city, you have to voice it before you can find it. the city meets the needs of her people, but you gotta be willing to be open to people. the city runs on people, everything that happens (except maybe the weather, and even that is increasingly altered by our actions) is the result of people's decisions and interactions. the gay community is not going to up and find me, but i am going to up and find multiple communities within the gay community. it has taken me nearly 7 years to scare up a community of activists, so i don't expect the gay piece will be any easier, but the hag in me knows that without it im not fully myself. i moved to new york so i could finally be myself, and while i identify as many things, fag hag is one of them. i guess some of us are just born that way. (final exhibit, i know this is a horrible shot, but i think it illustrates my point.)

notes on controlling the impulse to control

it is easiest to begin with the weather. it is january, and we are subjected to the varieties of mid-atlantic coastal cold: dry with biting wind and a severe clear sky, wet and overcast but warm enough without gloves, so-freezing-it-doesn't-matter-what-you-wear, and snow. while i remember feeling stagnant, hollow, and brittle in appalachian winters, winter in new york city is an entirely different creature. i have the tequila bruises to prove it. we can't control the weather, of course, but in this kind of cold one starts to wonder whether it is even possible to control one's life, as it is so profoundly shaped by the elements. (exhibit a, the seaport in another light.)

i am a woman who likes to feel in control. we rarely are. our days are framed by injustice and trauma and consequences put in motion by the movements of millions, or even billions, of other people, past and present. any control we can bring to our lives in an illusion, and perhaps that is why i find it comforting to revisit my sock drawer, and match brown to brown, grey to grey. it is perhaps why i'm eating so little, and it is a leap and a stretch to trust the soothsayers. (exhibit b, me when not feeling in control.)

the soothsayers have been a guiding force this winter. soothsayers, in my world, are people older than myself who understand past, present, and future without exertion. they do not predict the future, like a dimestore psychic, they intuit the future based on knowledge of self, knowledge of us, and knowledge of now. remember the weather underground's, "it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing?" that's the sentiment, more art than science, more reliance on gut than on carefully drawn logic in dusty marxist handbooks.

where do these people come from? in a word, "around." they appear in my life for almost no reason, pulled from the ether. we are loosely connected, at first, but we are pulled together by values that frame the foundation for our existence. they are people who have devoted their lives to liberation, and these are the people who are helping me to shape my future, our future, the future that begins right now.

what have they to say? well, there's the woman who owns a building in brooklyn and is willing to give me space, for free or a nominal fee, to build a movement home for the necessary networking and exchange so vital to the development of a community. (exhibit c, is all goes well ill be spending more time at this table.)

there's the former central american revolutionary, who tells me the most important thing is my health, and that i must seek to make my work sustainable. "the marxists taught us to be cold and calculating," he says, "but i have learned to be mindful and present. they are the same thing." the violent overthrow of the state isn't the answer, he says, and he is now dedicated to non-violence and organizing from a place of love. he tells me it is only possible to carry on the work if we care for ourselves and limit ourselves to the projects that allow us to demonstrate our virtuosity. "the work can't just look good, it has to be good."

there's the economic justice organizer with a spanish soul who provides counsel on issues of governance and participatory process over hours-long phone calls, and the former monk who now lives in an intentional community on staten island and provides counsel on spiritual, emotional, and strategic matters, usually in battery park. there's the labor and anti-war leader who tells me, over two hours in a broadway office when the rain stopped and the sun came through the clouds like it does in christian calendars, that i should form my own organization, and if i do he'll help fundraise.

these are my soothsayers. their wisdom is grounded in work on the very things i cherish most, and i am letting experience frame the story of now and the story of me. this kind of trust is sublime; i feel light, airy, like someone has opened a secret library and inside it are volumes on every subject related to my work, all of them indexed with anecdotes and stories and lessons distilled. it is a poignant moment in my life, and it extends far beyond concerns of career or profession, into something that is so deeply buried in my marrow i struggle to even articulate it. my spirituality, emotional well-being, and physical health are so tightly tied to liberation that i know the steps i am taking are the right ones, and i do not have fear, only a desire to get to work. 5 months until im without income.

to exert control over the urge to work more than is healthy, i am indulging in serious play. i am now the proud owner of a glow-in-the-dark hula hoop, and last night i learned a new move: the corkscrew. this involves lifting the hoop on and off the waist while continuously twirling it around body or overhead, and it has taken months to get myself to even a bumbling elementary level with this move. you will see that it needs more work before i have the proper muscle memory, but it is the outline of the dancer ill someday be. (the video below will provide more information than my words can, and yes it is too long. i am a lazy editor.) no word yet on what the soothsayers have to say about hula hooping. im just happy i can at least control a damn hula hoop, if not the weather, my income, or my intuitive process for determining my place in the world.

the dragons of springtimes past

almost every week i get an email about barbecues and cocktail parties planned by people i never knew or don't remember well, all of them for a weekend 6 months from now. the grammar is usually poor and sometimes the spelling mystifies, and often i have to go to facebook to find the writer's maiden name so i even know who it is. the writers all belong to a facebook group, and just last week i found myself in one of the photos there, drinking at a party on graduation day. such is the nature of planning a ten year high school reunion in the digital age.

if west virginia is an internal wound that won't heal, then high school is a recurrent infection. to say that i remain interested in what my peers are doing is an understatement. i've seen their wedding portraits, i follow their status updates, i know where they work. i don't actually want to know these things, since my friends from that period remain in touch, but i feel compelled to know. just how different is my life from theirs? do we have anything in common other than the fact we shared classrooms and pizzas and bongs for three years? surely there is something. i keep looking, but i fear the only way to really know is to attend the cocktail parties they keep emailing me about. what a terrifying thought.

for reference, exhibit a:

this photo was snapped and then published on the front page of the evening charleston newspaper in the spring of my junior year at capital high. we are sitting on my car because the writer thought my bumper stickers were an important statement. i suppose they were at the time, although i was always a little ambiguous about the aggressive vegetarian one, and in retrospect i don't think it helped the other two. anyway, the photo accompanied an article with generous column inches that focused on disaffection in high schools just after the columbine incident. it was pretty much what you expect, except i had some quotes in there about how the school was failing smart kids and about how my parents were good-natured but not very good at parenting. it's the kind of article that makes everyone in your life hate you.

why was i interviewed at all? i was in the wrong place at the wrong time. specifically, i was in the commons (our word for a cafeteria) scarfing down pizza after skipping class to smoke a joint with my best friend. a young woman entered the commons wearing a very cute outfit, with a lavender bandana around her head. she asked if she could join us, and we let her. we started talking and at some point she took out a notepad. at that point we realized we were talking to a reporter, but it was too late. this is why stoned people do not trust strangers, even well-dressed cute ones. (exhibit b, normally we sat in this spot during lunch. if we had done that instead of being in the commons we would have escaped detection, but the authorities didn't like us in this area because they couldn't properly supervise us. that was the point.)

in many ways the article that emerged was the beginning of the end of my high school career at capital. the various principals already saw me weekly for detention or threatening, basically because i'd found a legal way to skip class. their argument was the legal concept of in loco parentis, which basically states the school is responsible for the well-being and safety of the kids while they are attending, in lieu of a parent. the principals argued this went into effect the minute we left our houses in the morning, which was clearly ridiculous, and if it was a precedent was almost certainly based on school buses and not kids driving to school. (can you imagine a parent suing a school for an accident a teenager had on the way to school? no, of course not.) my argument was that if i skipped homeroom, and therefore ended up on the day's absent sheet that was distributed to every teacher, the school could then argue they didn't have a responsibility for me because they had a record i wasn't legally there. in my view, this meant i could skip homeroom, go to the few classes i wanted to attend (history and english, creative writing and sociology, sometimes latin), and aside from racking up yet another absence, suffer no consequences for my behavior. so i did it every day, and every day the principals sought to catch me. it could only last for so long.

so what could the article say to further strain my relations with the administrators?

"On outstretched fingers...[em and i]...counted 10 friends who are in therapy or on psychiatric drugs. "I'm sure if I sat down, I could think of more," Cheyenna said calmly, her blue eyes matter-of-fact. Then, half-joking, "It probably has to do with all these hallways with no windows." "I'm so sick of the whole thing. They're (the system) is failing me."

that's the gist, and that was enough. while the principal framed the school zone article that seventeen did about us, he did not, i noticed, frame the ones on post-columbine. my biggest frustration was that i couldn't get the adults to engage in what was actually happening, that we were supposed to go to meaningless classes watered down to the point of utter nothingness, based on somebody else's standards who it seemed had never been alive to begin with. it was a broken system and it was awful. (nowadays i hear kanawha county has a 25% drop out rate, so i guess they haven't cracked that nut yet.) the article, and my whole crusade to create a curriculum that actually worked for me, were all part of the same struggle. in some ways high school was where i developed strong antagonism to the state.

exhibit c: cyrus remains a link to high school, in the best way possible.

so what does that mean a decade later? a friend said to me a few years ago, "well, chey, you made a career out of being a rebel." i've also found communities that appreciate this about me, and i've moved to a place where my behavior (in high school and now) is part of a larger historical narrative of resistance. my political identity is no longer up for discussion (unless its one of those discussions about political identity that activists love to have, which political discussions in wv are not.)

so why not go back? why not return as a conquering hero, successful in the way i've found a life that works for me? well, that's easy: why return to something that tried to crush who i am? who is to say it won't try again, that the dragon has been slayed? i know what everyone is doing, the limits they have accepted, and to me that indicates there be dragons there. i struggled to leave west virginia, and i struggled to leave high school, and the wound that i carry around is the eternal depression of an appalachian childhood. that wound aches every time i have to hide who i am, so im honest with the world instead, but back "home" that means grief, anger, and abuse. i ache to see my best friends from that period, they are like siblings, and i ache to see the way the sun clings to a hillside of trees on a late summer afternoon. those aches aren't going anywhere, and they continue to fuel my sensitivity to the world. they have shaped me, and i can honor that, but i don't need to do so at a cocktail hour at coonskin park.

as a fellow-traveler recently showed me, it isn't about hating "home" or the people who live there, it is about loving myself and my communities enough not to subject myself to trauma. i am more than the sum of my appalachian experiences, and i have good work to do in the world. west virginia and capital high made their impression already. now i get to make my mine.

the anti-capitalist love story

i am a lucky woman, in that i know many kinds of love. i have the romantic love most of us associate with the word, and the familial love of both biological and chosen varieties, and the selfless love of teachers and mentors, and the intimate love of recognition that comes from like-minded artists and activists. (sometimes, as in exhibit a, there are people and puppets who require us to combine the aforementioned varieties of love in new and pleasing flavors.) our language struggles to recognize all these forms of love, and in turn i think sometimes we do too. we have but one word to encompass so many varieties of emotions and relationships. it can lead to confusion, and righting that confusion may be one of the most pleasurable actions we can take. such has been the case with dan a.

you may remember the spring and summer of 2008, the year i left my boyfriend of 5 years and sought a life organized on my own terms. my life was stable and comfortable, but unfulfilling, and i wanted to broaden my experience. i sought more involvement in the social justice movement, and more involvement with young people who were struggling with their desire to change the way we live. dan represented these things to me, and while i'd been considering leaving for 2 years, dan showed me that i could fall in love, and that i hadn't somehow grown too old or jaded for that opportunity. it seems silly that i thought otherwise, but such was the inertia of living with my best friend in a strong community. it was a little like being asleep, in a pleasant enough dream, but asleep nonetheless. (exhibit b.)

when i met dan i thought the kinship i felt with him was romantic in nature, and he did too, but we weren't able to do anything with that. he wanted to remain in his long-term relationship, and i thought perhaps i could convince him otherwise. that was the dynamic for months, a hurtful and inequitable situation that drove us both nuts.

sometime around the fall i started to see something else emerge. we were working on the obama campaign, taking time off work to phone bank or run the desk. we left the office together one day and stood at a corner on broadway in our sweaters, evening creeping over the city. he was on his way to meet his girlfriend, and in a hurry, but we lingered. it was all shop talk, a discussion of dynamics and methods of the campaign organizers, of what we could do to make young people active, of a strategy for mobilizing people to prohibit the electoral college from actually assembling should the republicans again steal the vote. we were excited by the ideas, by the familiar heady intimacy of meaningful political exchange, of shared values and methods forming a shared vision, a thing that you would think would happen often in the movement but is so extraordinarily rare that when it does happen you want to hold fast. we do not often discover people so like ourselves, and especially those tied to our dearest hopes for change, and that night as he headed off, with a promise to look up the laws about state electoral representatives, i walked home through the financial district, composing the letter i would write that evening to set things right. dan and i weren't meant to be lovers, i realized. our skills were uniquely complementary and we shared a vision. we were supposed to work together for change.

dan agreed with me, and after reading my letter he accepted my invitation to organize together, excited there was a way we could maintain the intimacy and promise of our friendship. i began pulling him into rec organizing even more than before, relying on his expertise in community investment. obama won and we plunged into a jubilant spring. (exhibit c, the two of us in the valley of magical thinking.)

the truth is, i've always hoped that dan would someday run rec. even during the worst phases of our friendship, i saw his leadership as the next logical step for the organization. he has a background in finance and activism, and even ran a campus campaign as an alumnus. i knew his sensitivity and skills to be aligned with the needs of the coalition, and while i may have worried about the effect on our friendship, deep down i knew he would work in a spirit of collaboration. when it finally did happen, we had developed a working partnership, all that came before part of some distant spring rain that flooded the banks and swept out the debris, in the end leaving the landscape contoured in ways much more conducive to our object.

dan's arrival didn't mean i had to leave rec, rather, it meant i could stay comfortably and work with someone i love and respect. it also granted me the freedom to go, because the organization will be stewarded according to the same vision and values that i have tried to infuse into its culture and operations. not only did i not set fire to rec by leaving, in fact my efforts to recruit and support dan's involvement in the organization has basically built them a proper alarm system and a firehouse on site. i can't take credit for his leadership and i wouldn't want to, but i'll always feel my story is tied to his story. that's what happens when you're tied to the same vision.

i haven't even gotten close to my final days at rec, but already i'm a little heartbroken at leaving. i love these people, and i love their efforts to bring democracy and justice to higher education. i love their idealism, and their dogged determination that we can transition from capitalism to a system that is just and sustainable. i love their openness and collaboration and solidarity, and knowing that if i want to issue a call to action there are hundreds, if not thousands of people out there, willing to take it up. (provided it is sound, naturally.) dan is just an example, although maybe an extraordinary one, of the kind of people this movement breeds. these are people who understand love, and i'm a better person for having known them.

to sing or swim

"what can we do today so that tomorrow we can do what we cannot do today?" asks paulo freire. well, mr. freire, it will probably involve small sweet steps. possibly very small steps. possibly involving pita.

yesterday was productive and quiet until roughly 3pm. as the sun began to set my fears of my own forward motion began to take hold: slow down, wait, think, and other doubts without consequence, followed by my favorite old chestnuts, the you-aren't-ready-this-will-end-in-disaster-who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are-anyway-nobody-values-your-ideas-enough-to-fund-them negative tapes that roll on like the river jordan in the background at all times. they're never in the front, of course, that would require confrontation. instead, while my little negative chorus caterwauls im usually thinking about something really simple. something like pita.

i was debating whether to make a snack, a perfectly respectable thing to do at 3pm in the afternoon. trouble is, im following a (admittedly flexible) detox this week: no processed foods, no fat, little to no dairy, no sugar, etc. i enjoy the detoxes because they make me feel so much better, but when you're hungry and about to produce your fourth all-vegetable meal of the day, well, you start to wonder if a little fat and carbs wouldn't be the better choice. so, the scene was me in my kitchen, debating about this little proposed fall from grace, trying to focus on the actual task of slicing brie and pita, and instead getting wrapped into sequential compulsions that failed to address the real problem, which wasn't the need for a snack at all, but the frighteningly loud aforementioned negative chorus.

i felt the first full-body blush of panic, well aware that the waves of panic almost always preclude an actual panic attack, and the decisions i make within those 3-5 minutes determine how i will spend the next several hours. low blood sugar, i've learned, only exacerbates such panicked states, so i reached for the raisins. i took a deep breath, then several, and stared at my friend-made collage hanging above the refrigerator. it was my first such panic in months, and while it didn't become a full-on attack, it's indicative of where things may be for awhile. the dissociative state is easier than the challenge of our actual lives sometimes.

small sweet steps

i recently listened to a dialogue between a life coach and a group of twentysomething social justice activists. the subject was burnout. the folks on the call identified with the definition and symptoms the coach described: feelings of hopelessness and exhaustion, irritability and panic, a sense of being overwhelmed and that nothing really matters, frequent physical illness and a lack of motivation or creativity at work. that pretty much sums up how i've felt about rec since last may.

it's embarrassing to talk about burnout, because it isn't supposed to happen. we're supposed to take care of ourselves, take breaks and make our work sustainable, not run ourselves into the ground like martyrs. the group wasn't interested in blaming themselves, though, instead focusing on the behavior that got us here. the coach noted driven behavior is what causes burnout: always obsessively working on something, taking on too much, not taking proper breaks, allowing perfectionism to run our work lives. our organizations, which are often understaffed and with poor boundaries, aren't set up for self-care, and the culture is to recruit young people and then burn through them. the fact that most professional activist positions don't pay a living wage, and thus are only available to privileged white youth whose parents can help pay their rent, doesn't help matters. in some ways burnout is predetermined, just because of the way our organizations operate. (another post entirely.)

the coach told us the way out of this mess, individually, is to take small sweet steps towards authentic behavior that demonstrates who we are as social change leaders. we have to reconnect to our purpose. this struck me as wise advice.

there are ways i can be more authentic at rec, and that's what im working on each day, but im also realizing that my purpose as a social justice leader is no longer working on endowment issues. i submitted my letter of resignation monday, effective june 1. yep, you may have guessed, that was the same day i found myself panicking over cheese and bread.

the challenge

the months between now and my departure are quite daunting. i am afraid. my working class sensibility tells me that life is safe when built upon a rock of adequate finances, and i could be adrift in a turbulent sea of unemployment. voluntarily. the part of me that is my parent's daughter tells me that's ok, because im a mermaid anyway, and if i need to swim instead of sing for awhile that is little more than extra energy. i am alternately joyous and despairing.

while the question of whether professional activism actually allows for revolutionary activity remains unanswered, i have not given up hope on finding a political home that is also a source of paid employment. i haven't ruled out running my own project either, or taking a transition job that allows me to support myself while i tie my activism more tightly to my social life. any of these options are fine and do not drastically change who i am.

in the meantime i expect anxiety, compulsions, aggressive dreams and the like, but i also expect to meet new people, learn a great deal about the movement and my own vision for a more just world, and to be nurtured by some truly brilliant and loving individuals who are kind enough to give me their time. the social justice movement is built for radical creativity, and it is already liberating to engage in transformative ideas again, instead of merely focusing on the next conference call about the database. in that sense maybe im already swimming again.

a toast to our new selves

the seamless passage of time, the perfect mathematical ticking of one year into another, is something no more organic than a monsanto soybean. and yet, i think it's just the sexiest thing imaginable that we get a whole "new" year, a day which is actually numbered 1, by all of us. it's a ridiculous collective illusion, a perfect cultural construction, and made all the more brilliant by the recommended wearing of tiaras and champagne toasting. i can get behind pretty much any holiday that requires hats and booze. (for more on this, see last year's post.) (exhibit a, this beautiful city. exhibit b, david and me for our annual new year's portrait, 2009.)

it is tempting to see the way we begin and end a year as being indicative of the way we have spent or will spend the next. i dig the symbolism. two stories to illustrate my point:

the night 2002 became 2003:

one of my favorite new year's of all time is the last one i spent in morgantown. it was a decadent house party with several live bands, and every room was crammed with people and a soft light that made them look gorgeous. i spent the better part of the evening at emma's fidgeting and gussying my way into a lovely turquoise 1950s number with a full skirt and a lace neckline and a velvet bow just under the bust. i wore a lot of glitter that night, and the reddest lips in town, which i remember having to reapply after every time corey and i made out in a bathroom when no one was looking. (wait, was that another night? hhhmmm.)

the party was a bit of a reunion, because several best friends from high school were there, including the boy i'd had a crush on since 10th grade. the girls pre-gamed in emma's martini-colored kitchen and took long draws from parliament lights. it was a long walk across south park in my fishnets and heels, and from the moment em and i decided to nibble a little klonopin the whole evening took on that sweet feathery softness that blacking out can sometimes produce. we created our own limelight, we felt, whisked away by the sensation of just feeling safe, beautiful, and loved. it was the night audra told marshall that if he loved her he would slap her, so he did, and the night i found my new roommate sarah the artist drinking out of a toy monster cup, and the night that dave r sat on the porch laughing in his leather jacket (avoiding me like a good ex-boyfriend should), and em took out sparklers and danced with them in a corset and lattice shawl on the porch. corey got naked, really naked, while playing the drums with one of the bands, and eventually i slipped out to follow my crush back to the house of mo's, where according to him we made out on the couch for awhile but i only remember falling asleep.

the next morning it was cold but clear, and i woke up in my own bed alone and remembered that i only had five months before leaving m'town and all its glittering incandescent debauchery behind. i think i made pancakes for breakfast. the night remains a radiant vision of what my undergraduate life was, in all its sinfulness and decadence, a kind of bohemian luxury that we all just barely survived.

the night 2006 became 2007:

by the time december rolled around in 2006 i was incredibly emotionally ill. i spent the waning daylight hours of the 31st pulling half a dozen dresses out of my closet, pouting in them in front of a mirror, and then placing them back inside plastic bags and returning them to their hangers. they hung on me like undefined sacks, which i found terrifying. my weight was back to what it was when i was thirteen, and i spent much of each day hungry, but i didn't realize just how skinny i was until i slipped into dresses that had formerly fit like custom tailoring. my anxiety, already on homeland security orange alert, escalated.

i wore the only one that didn't hang on me, a red satin 1980s prom dress my mother bought at a thrift store for a marilyn monroe costume she never wore. i stuck some patterned hose and strappy heels with it and called it done, though i allowed gabriele to add eye liner and a touch of glitter, just for old times sake. (exhibit c, skinny me.) the party was at annie's apartment in astoria, and all the girls commandeered her bedroom to get ready, each of us gussied and pinched and assembled. (there is nothing organic about a woman on the town on new year's eve.) i sat most of the time on her bed looking through old photos of the gang from high school. the boys, in suits and tuxes, munched on snacks and took slow pulls of beer, until at last we left the bedroom and declared the party had started.

that night was frightening to me, but i danced with chava and my boyfriend, drank scotch that didn't seem to ever really warm or affect me, smoked cigarettes on the porch while noticing the beautiful ankles of my female colleagues in the moonlight, their legs bent over each other like swans at rest, and tried to lose myself in the reunion of friends that included the boy i followed to the house of mo's the night 2002 became 2003.

in the morning fielding and i took a cab home, a gypsy cab that roamed the outer boroughs,our house guests piled in with us, and in a few hours made waffles, golden and light and slightly sweetened with vanilla. (exhibit d, waffles are awesome.)

that evening fielding made mushrooms and spinach for me on the stove, the only thing i could eat because of my compulsions, and we fretted quietly about my illness while my friends circled around us in a warm and loving company that couldn't seem to alleviate my chill. it was a long year.

each evening was an exercise indicative of larger themes inherent in the period. they are memorable in that they tell a larger story: the glittering party girl of morgantown was my narrative at one point, as was my struggle to build a life with fielding and exist in the world despite my illness. this year is no different, an evening nestled in a series of events. you can no more break the night away from the year before or after it than you can isolate a river. and yet, year after year, we try. tonight will be no different, but here's to the hope we wake up better people than when we went to bed. you never know the power of a tiara and good champagne.

a year in 160 characters

i am a hoarder, and ill hoard anything. i hoard things that are easy to justify, (pieces of paper that can be reused, old letters, books), and things that are less easily justified (dried flowers from important occasions, cds, response papers from graduate school). this month, though, i took my hoarding to new heights when i began to hoard the most difficult thing yet: text messages.

texts are snippets of conversation or intention, and though they can be recorded, for the most part they are ephemeral, deleted when the phone's inbox becomes full. i've always saved the best ones on my phones, but that does little to stop their decay, given that cell phones must be replaced every few years. to truly hoard text messages they have to go into a word document.

this week i am on break, and already i've spent two hours typing texts on my computer. removing the texts from one phone is finished, which means it can now be released back into the wild via a phone recycling center. the other remains my active work phone, and it reminds me of the nest of a broken birdie, so many sad little tangents it holds in its pea-sized chip brain. the texts from each are particular to the personal or professional subculture linked to that phone, adding another layer to my relationship with these objects. i get sentimental about them for what they can tell me about my communities.

sometimes i feel like the curator of my own life, and a proper curator displays objects with only a smidgen of context, allowing the viewer to have a personal reaction. to that end, perhaps to talk about this with any meaning is to let the texts speak for themselves. (there are no dates attributed to these, but they are roughly arranged seasonally.)

from magno: a deep water sailor thru storm & strife gladly protects you w/ his life but should calm domesticity prevail he’ll weigh anchor & hoist a sail. magno left the seaport last winter to return to life at sea. it meant losing a best friend, losing sunset banjo picking aboard wavertree, and losing an advocate on the pioneer. we got a new crew this year, and the full time mate and deckhand were removed and a little uptight, less appreciative of the strengths of sailing with a bunch of new yorkers than aware of the deficiencies of a crew that isn't made up of professional tall ship sailors. it was a rough transition. we all miss magno, personally and professionally. (exhibit a, magno in llama hat with banjo.)

from emily: good news. no swine flu. bad news. bronchitis. good news. medicine. fevers and aches defined whole months of 2009, which was bad enough, but it turned sinister this fall when it took down emily and ryan both. on the up side, swine flu made it acceptable to wash your hands after entering any kind of public space, a boon for obsessive-compulsives nationwide.

from kerry: omg. there’s a deer walking down the sidewalk. fire island is covered in deer, and their presence only added the beauty of whole weeks spent running around in the waves, flying kites, hula hooping, making big dinners, riding bikes, and playing in the sun. (exhibit b, the deer.)

from ryan: just took the “which mad men character are you” quiz on facebook and got salvatore romano. (the closeted one.) two things about this one: 1. ryan got me watching more tv than past years, but im ok with it as long as it's only actually a couple of shows. i see it as part of my effort to transcend the ivory tower and not be such a damn snob about what constitutes art. 2. of course ryan was salvatore romano.

zeke: a road poem for you in 160 characters: the smell of hot tar and mown grass/on this now familiar west-bound road/I think of you when I travel/and sing you songs. this is the year zeke finally moved from providence to syracuse, bought a house, had a baby, and became an "adult." he's a professor for fuck's sake. it's nice to have someone cutting away the underbrush ahead of you, and that's how i like to think of zeke, all busy up there in siberacuse making it safe for the rest of us degenerate sailor types to grow up. also, it helps that he writes little poems by text message from the road. keeps the spirits high for everyone when your life is scattered across three or more states. (exhibit c, zeke.)

from ryan: about to conduct fanfare for the common man in front of 5000 highly uncommon people. part of how ryan and i stayed connected over the distance between us this summer was through text message. many of our conversations started, ended, or continued only in snippets between rehearsals and conference calls. this might be my favorite.

sender hidden: the lady sitting next to me is a conspiracy nut...and there's no wireless...this is going to be a long bus ride. sometimes we make incredibly stupid decisions involving matters of the heart. this guy was a mistake im still paying for, despite the brevity of the romance. this experience taught me it is never worth bending any of my ethics or values for a relationship. most of his texts were of the angst-ridden tragic romance kind. this one was at least funny.

from monty: Obama, Biden & Clinton showed up at the State Dept. to introduce a new era of Diplomacy 2 days after the Inauguration-it was a party. monty was a part-time student organizer with us out in california. he still works on the campaign out there. often i get emails or texts from him celebrating a political victory he finds inspiring. i saved this one because, yeah, a new era of diplomacy gave us all reason for hope. that was before the nobel peace prize speech about war and peace being the same thing.

from martin: The Senate just passed our resolution-first unanimous decision in two years. Couldn't have done it without you. i work with students all over the country but im pretty personally invested in some of the campaigns. this text, from a student at a boston school that is particularly recalcitrant, meant a lot to me. any time we were successful building a campaign there i got a message from him. this one is about the student senate passing a resolution in favor of their demands for a legitimate socially responsible investment policy. i save all messages like this because these smaller battles are hard-won, even though they may not be the BIG victory that we're working for, they're evidence we're getting somewhere. (exhibit d, martin.)

from ellie: We're on the balcony speaking. Come if you can! the spring was all about occupations and student unrest and the hopefulness of young people who thought obama was going to bring change and we could all get the democracy we're entitled to at every level of our society, even our universities. in that spirit a student group took over a space at nyu. this is text from one of the leaders and one of my friends who participated, inviting folks to come and rally in front of the building. i spent a couple cold nights out there this spring.

from josh: could our minds and souls ever be strangers? i think not. a twenty block walk in the near future appeals like dances in hilltop orchards. here’s to that beautiful dog. josh and i send half-poem texts to each other regularly. sometimes they make sense. this one is sweet, others are about things he overhears in bars in ithaca, but it's a nice way to stay in touch over distance.

compiling these texts has been exhausting, mostly because there were literally hundreds to sort through. im realizing their value, though, and what started as a bit of a lark for my vacation has taken on the sharp taste of realization. in doing this, ive fully realized that this technology is making it possible for me to maintain a spontaneous dialogue with friends that i most cherish, regardless of distance. the reason these are so wonderful is because they conjure, for the recipient at least, the flavor, smell, and tenor of an interaction. each one places me specifically in the mindset of the moment i received it, the emotions as sharp as they were at the very first. perhaps any piece of a conversation can do this for us, but the beauty of the text is the exactness of it, down to the spelling and punctuation, whereas conversations become muted by memory as we replace the other's words with our own. ill keep saving them, i think. perhaps the library of congress would appreciate a national "save our texts" drive? now there's a people who appreciate hoarding.