Everett Maroon's Blog, page 15

Why Girl Scouts Will Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

Last winter, after a 2-year analysis of whether they should lift their policy excluding gay scouts and scout leaders, the Boy Scouts organization declared that the ban would stay in place, and then backtracked a little to take up the issue again in the summer of 2013. Sorry, boy scouts in America, your leaders are more invested in protecting your parents’ archaic judgmental attitudes about sexual orientation, at the expense of your potential future happiness and self-worth.

Worse, I would argue it’s going to leave you more vulnerable in the case of a zombie attack. Here’s why.

1. Their promises–Both groups have similar core mission statements that they make, though the Boy Scouts call it an “oath” and the Girl Scouts a “promise.” Boy Scouts also swear to be “morally straight,” meaning they’ll have strong character and live their lives with honesty. Go Girl Scouts, who won’t waste energy ensuring they’re justified in defending themselves, can just orchestrate a response to a mass invasion and get on with it.

2. The Girl Scouts’ Inclusivity–Beyond the feel-goodness of multiculturalism, there is the strength in having a diversity of experience on the table when a community needs to take action or set policy. If social positionality affects our lived reality, and if we are capable of learning from our experiences, then the Girl Scouts’ history helps them here. Admitting girls (and scout leaders) of all racial and ethnic heritages, sexual orientations, and gender identities ensures they’ll have a broader base of experience to bring to moments of crisis. And in a zombie apocalypse, they’ll need all the help they can get.

3. Their Established Communication Network–While the Boy Scouts focus on their hierarchy of scouting levels (ending with the well known Eagle Scout), the Girl Scouts have created a time-tested, system-wide lateral project, a.k.a. Girl Scout Cookies. Distribution is decentralized across the country, communication is strong across all sales points in their grid, and “Cookie Moms” help mentor girls in entrepreneurship, marketing, and follow-through (also called making sure you receive the money for the orders you have). This communication uses social media and the Internet, old- and new-technology telecom devices, word of mouth, and paper-based media, so if any or more than one of these routes went down in a zombie attack, even a widespread zombie attack, the Girl Scouts would have alternative routes of communication available to carry out instructions to other groups within their organization. Who here denies the possibilities for a Girl Scout-led Pony Express to carry troop movements and critical information through zombie hordes? I sure don’t.

4. Their Uniforms Aid Running–I know they’re not camouflage, but heck, no one color would blend in with every environment in the United States that will see a battle once the zombies rise in their quest for brains and mortal flesh. But they are cut loosely enough to provide free movement for tree climbing, running, and crawling. And before people comment that the lack of pants leaves them too exposed to zombie scrapes and bites, giving the Boy Scouts an advantage, remember that these skirts also won’t slow them down much at all if they need to swim away to safety.

Leave me a comment on this if you have any to add, or if you want to argue with me. But I’m standing by my story that the Girl Scouts will survive better than Boy Scouts. So there.

Keeping up with Our Small Surreal World

My older sister Kathy has always loved the “It’s a Small World After All” ride at Disney World. Every time we’ve gone to the theme park she gets giddy while she’s standing in line for the ride, gesticulating with gusto, talking in between squealing giggles like she’s transported her emotional self back to age 11. When we’re locked into our slow-moving seats the waterworks starts for her, somewhere between the smiling children from Holland and the colorful children from Africa. For me the ride is three notches above the moldy animatronics of Chuck E. Cheese, but for Kathy, it’s a gateway to our connectedness on Planet Earth. Every. Single. Time. For one quadriplegic rider at DisneyLand, however, getting stuck on the ride for eight hours was enough to sue the company. I don’t think even my dear Kathy would want to be subjected to the ear worm for eight hours straight. Everyone else got off of the broken ride, but Disney had no evacuation procedures in place for individuals with mobility issues. And whoever thought that sending Mickey and Minnie Mouse over to him to perform while he was stuck has lost their sense of perspective.

I find life like a broken, singing roller coaster a lot of the time, these days anyway. Is my family in town this week? Are we hosting a guest? Do I have a deadline to meet? Has the baby discovered a new activity that could destroy our house? Is the car still working? Fortunately for us there’s not a single simple tune playing in the background through all of this, nor a series of wooden Stepfordesque children smiling an endless smile in our general direction.

Arizona is afraid of transgender urine, and so wants to enact a law that even “softened,” would be a systemic barrier to any gender nonconforming person’s ability to use a public or private facility when they need one. So much for small government. Liberal judges on the United States Supreme Court question whether they should institute marriage equality across the nation because another landmark case, Roe v. Wade, moved the country “too far, too fast.” So let’s ignore this revisionist history and presume that everything would be great for contemporary reproductive rights if we’d just let women face illegal abortions for another several years, and use it as a battering ram against marriage equality? So while the progressive Left considers not pushing for marriage equality, GOP representatives are getting on board?

I don’t recognize a lot of what’s going on these days. Maybe it’s because President Obama is droning the hell out of the Middle East well beyond what George W. Bush ever perpetrated. Or deporting more undocumented individuals than his predecessor, while calling for immigration reform. Or hearing that we’re all carrying far more student loan debt than ever before, in an economy where many graduates don’t find work that helps them pay those loans off–once upon a time, student loans were supposed to be paid out in ten years after graduation. California just passed a law this week for “faculty free” colleges where students could earn credits simply by passing examinations. What is it that college is for, again? New law colleges are popping up like dandelions even though there are not enough jobs out there for each year’s 54,000 new graduates–and 85 percent of those student loans are more than $100,000 for each newly trained attorney. So listen up, kids: don’t go to law school. Go become a nurse instead.

That’s the answer to the roller coaster, I suppose, and in the US, it always has been. Find the trend. Did you fight in World War II? Well, we’ve got some cheap housing for you, and we’ll pay for you to go to college, welcome to 1947! Here in 2013 we roll differently–all government assistance is evil, even to you veterans of our two most recent wars. There are some local programs for you to find new careers (cough cough NURSING cough cough), so beware schools where tuition is high but they’re not placing their graduates in adequate jobs. Gay and want to get married? Enjoy services in one of the ten states (or DC) where that is now legal. Need to terminate a pregnancy? Stay away from the deep South and North Dakota. Trans and need to use a restroom?

Bring a glass jar with you if you’re in Arizona. Enjoy the ride!

Lowering the Bar Mitzvah

I’m in airports a lot these days. A lot a lot. Getting anywhere from Eastern Washington, in the age of regional carriers means lots of legs to get to my final destination, making air travel something of an airport crawl without the really good beer. I’ve been stuck in Salt Lake Airport on Christmas, stranded in Minneapolis multiple times due to weather or mechanical trouble, on the tarmac in Spokane waiting for an overbooked deicer to get to our plane, and of course there was that time in San Francisco when we were told we’d missed our flight even though it was an hour until takeoff. I continue to stand by my United boycott after that bull hockey. Still, as the 14-hour drive home from SFO pointed out, flying is faster than ground travel. And because I often have faraway places to go (I mean, seriously, everything is far from Walla Walla), I wind up spending copious hours of time in airports. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that the more time I spend in airports, the greater the opportunity for unusual things to happen to me while I’m there.

Last week I had a training in Kent, Washington, to attend, along with one of my staff. Quickest flight I ever experience anymore, a 40-something minute jaunt over to SeaTac, followed by a 4-mile drive. It was as dry and mind-numbing as most trainings, except that it was vaguer than usual, given that nobody in health care still knows how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is going to change state regulations come January. But we stayed attentive and did our best to absorb whatever information streamed over to us. And then we had a quick dinner next to the airport, and a long wait before boarding. And that is when things got funky.

Now then, in the interests of full disclosure, there was a time in college when I called myself born again. I was young, searching for meaning after a dozen years of Catholic school and instruction, and I wanted a conduit to spirituality that didn’t include a third party. It fizzled out shortly after joining the Campus Crusade for Christ because I wasn’t interested in proselytizing to other young people before I’d answered big questions for myself, and I wasn’t a subscriber to their party line on many theological issues. God is like gravity, he’s there but we can’t see him? Really? I was not a fan of Christianity for Dummies. And soon after my disillusionment, I was across the political spectrum and calling myself a queermo. So it goes.

Fast forward to the C Concourse at SeaTac. My coworker and I saw an Orthodox Jewish man standing across the way from us, wearing a large black hat and traditional overcoat, and holding a hat box. I noted that this was the first time in memory that I had seen this far west on the continent. And then we got into talking about other things, forgetting about him. It had been a long day. A few minutes later the man came up to us.

“Excuse me, but are either of you Jewish,” he asked.

The family mythology is that our mother converted to marry her first husband, which Mom denies but which my two siblings energetically insist is true. She now goes to a Methodist church, and of course I’m a lapsed Catholic, but hey, I grew up in New Jersey which was something like one of the largest Jewish communities in the country. I may have celebrated Easter, but I know the Dreidel song, too. But truth be told I don’t think I’m technically Jewish, unless a woman’s conversion is also the automatic emigration of her future children, too.

I said yes. Moron that I am.

My staffer looked surprised. Makes sense, of course, because he’s a reasonable person and I am anything but.

The man’s eyes lit up, and he burst into a smile just as if I’d told him we were long-lost brothers finally reunited.

I think he started speaking in Hebrew. I considered nodding, but didn’t want to communicate in any way that I was comprehending what he was saying, because then we would be off to the races. The Jewish races. Which I don’t know where those go.

“Sorry,” I said. “What do you want?” I should tell him I’m not really Jewish. He asked me, in return, what made me Jewish.

Probably that would not be a good time to tell him how much I enjoy whitefish salad, so I told him about my mother instead. This conversation was getting away from me.

“Oh, if your mother is Jewish then congratulations, you are a Jew!”

Maybe I was going to win a prize! In addition to being one of the chosen, of course. I mean, that’s the jackpot, right?

He asked if I’d been bar mitzvah’d. I told him oh, well, I went through twelve years of Catholic school. I was baptized and confirmed.

He looked confused. In addition to his hat box, he was also holding some dark blue fuzzy arm band-like thing, with Hebrew embroidered into it. He asked if I wanted to be bar mitzvah’d. He said he could do it right there, in the airport.

Now I was worried. This was going to a new place I hadn’t anticipated.

I had many ways of ending the conversation: My Mom’s conversion wasn’t verified, I’m a full-on shiksa (male gentile), and oh, I’m transsexual. Good thing this guy wasn’t asking if I’d ever had a bris. “Gee, is that what went wrong down there, Mr. Jewry? I think my moyel was myopic!”

I wanted to be more gentle than that, though.

“I think I’d have to discuss that with my wife first,” I said sheepishly. My coworker, who knows all of the above, chuckled.

“Well, you should be proud of your Jewish heritage,” said the man, who now looked very young to me.

I nodded. I told him I was all kinds of proud of my heritage.

He asked if I knew that Passover was starting the following Monday. I assured him I did. Why not add another lie to this list?

Then we started talking about Walla Walla. No, there’s no synagogue in town, I said, but there is a small temple. I laughed and said I knew all six people who went to it. This is where Susanne would have kicked me to start shutting up, had she been in proximity. Maybe I rely too much on her elbowing and my own cutoff valve has atrophied. I should be more self-reliant about closing my trap. Where’s my frontal lobe when I need it?

“Do you have any matzoh in town,” he asked. I nodded.

“And gefilte fish,” I said. Now I was really over the line into absurdity. I hate gefilte fish. If I were stranded on a desert island with nothing but gefilte fish, I would drink seawater until I died just so I wouldn’t have to pop open a jar.

“Oh gefilte fish, good!”

We were really talking about Passover food. We could have been talking about brisket. I enjoy a good Seder brisket, for sure.

“Well, enjoy Passover,” he said, handing me a card. Because I don’t know, we would never see each other again, so why not have a card for when I’d like to schedule that bris?

He walked away, presumably to perform other bar mitzvahs as requested.

My coworker turned to me.

“I felt so left out!”

I sighed.

 

Illegal Urination

Arizona, the state that brought us a ban on Ethnic Studies and some of the most extreme anti-immigrant laws in the nation, now has crafted a bill that would make using the “wrong” restroom–read, one that does not comport with the letter on one’s birth certificate–a misdemeanor, punishable by a multi-thousand dollar fine and up to six months in jail. The language in the bill reads almost opposite as the non-discriminatory language found in jursidictions around the country that protect trans-identified and gender nonconforming people from harassment when accessing public facilities:

All entities covered under the Act, as amended, shall allow individuals the right to use gender-specific restrooms and other gender-specific facilities such as dressing rooms, homeless shelters, and group homes that are consistent with their gender identity or expression (Washington, DC Office of Human Rights, District of Columbia Municipal Regulations (DCMR) entitled “Compliance Rules and Regulations Regarding Gender Identity or Expression.” Title 4, Chapter 8, amended October 26, 2006)

Instead, Arizona’s proposed language requires people to use the bathroom that comports with the sex marker on their birth certificate. This is troubling for many reasons, including in no particular order:

Arizona has no legislative control over other states’ departments of vital statistics, the organizations that generally are in charge of granting and validating birth and death certificates. Some states, like New Jersey, grant new birth certificates with a letter of sex-reassignment surgery, while others only amend previously created birth certificates. It’s unclear if this proposed law would “accept” such amendments over the original certificate. And then some states, like Ohio, never amend or re-release birth certificates for any reason. So any trans individual from Ohio needing to urinate in Arizona should what, cross the state line first? Ask a kind neighbor for use of their private bathroom?
This proposed law, like so many other anti-trans efforts, completely misunderstands the community. For one, transition is a process, and for those of us who have embarked on it, it is a painfully long process at that. It’s not as if any of us dipped our index fingers into a pool of magical hormones and were suddenly transformed, I don’t care how many times it looks that way from movies like Shrek. There are many days, especially early on in this process, when a person can be read as male or female from one bystander after another. It is part of what is so emotionally taxing about transitioning. And for many trans women, some have difficulty not being read as male or as transsexual even years after they started their medical transition. But on the flip side, many trans men pass nearly all of the time after years on testosterone, yet may continue to have an “F” on their birth certificate. Do we really want to see them in women’s rooms, Arizona legislators? And just to throw another monkey wrench into this mix of legal status and presentation, where do butch women who identify as women and effeminate men who identify as men come into this picture? I know many many masculine women who have been chased out of women’s rooms and who would, in fact, prefer them over men’s rooms (wouldn’t we all). Gender expression is much broader than a law like this allows.
The practice this law prescribes is unenforceable. Who carries their birth certificate around with them? There is certainly no law in Arizona or anywhere else that requires one to have any form of identification on them in order to use a public facility. So will people be issued a citation to appear in court to show their birth certificate to a judge or officer of the court, proving their prior urination was legal? Even the Onion doesn’t come up with garbage like this. And what if someone’s petition to their state to change their birth certificate is pending? Can I get a warning? A court reversal? Seeing as criminal penalties are attached to this “violation,” ($2,500 and up to six months in jail) will the state pay for a public defender on my behalf? And how much would it cost the great state of Arizona to process these court cases, handle the arraignments, and the incarceration of bladder maximized trans people who peed in the wrong place at the wrong time? Has anyone looked at the statues on public urination yet, to see which would get us the lighter sentence and penalty?
As with other discriminatory legislation, this proposed law would likely disproportionately affect trans people of color, poorer transfolk, and trans women. This is another moment in which the mythical but nonexistent issue of “scary men in dresses” comes up as the image bigots trot out to scare their colleagues into voting against our marginalized group. So I will restate for the nth time that there has never, never, in the entire 222-year history of the United States (based on age of the Constitution) has a group of men put on dresses in order to assault women in bathrooms. That this is the prevailing story at so many legislative discussions of gender identity or expression and public facilities makes the prejudice of these lawmakers all the more plain. In other words, the best argument for the law in Arizona is based on a hate fantasy. If only the Constitution provided that legislators had to show actual evidence before crafting a bill for passage.

Yes, I’ve been chased out of rest rooms — for both sexes. And really, it’s such an arbitrary line to draw over civil rights. It sounds obnoxious when one gets down to it . . . we’re talking about people peeing and pooping. Perhaps men are so used to standing fearfully at a line of urinals that they’ve forgotten that there are also stalls in most public rest rooms, and that’s where many of use transfolk do our business. Because for one, I don’t want to piss down my pants, and that’s how my junk would work at a urinal, but also, I really don’t feel like exposing my genitals in front of other people. I’m sure you all prefer it that way; I know I do.

If I could have removed my body’s requirement that I expel toxins through my bladder as part of my gender transition, know that I would have. I probably would have paid Dr. Fischer another grand for that, but apparently transition didn’t make me not human. So while I continue to be a mortal like the rest of us, I’d really just like to pee in peace.

Bodies, Accountability, and Journalism: What’s So Offensive about the Steubenville Trial

A guilty verdict was handed down by Justice Thomas Lipps today, for both defendants in the Steubenville, Ohio rape case that has caught the attention of the nation. As the verdict was read, reality descended on the two young men charged with raping a drunk and unconscious young woman at a party last August. Multiple reports about the incident noted that before and during that party, young men on the high school football team were used to behaving however they saw fit with no boundaries enforced by the adults in their lives, and that their coach, Reno Saccocchia, was considered a frequent aid in cleaning or covering up the antics of his football players. The trial highlighted accounts by several witnesses and text messages that rather than one awful moment in which Trent Mays and Ma’Lik Richmond had a terrible, hurtful lapse in judgment, this rape behavior was more about an accumulation of unaccountability by the young men, their coach, their friends, and their parents.

The trial itself was not free of misogyny. As I’ve written about during other publicized sexual assault investigations, questions swirled around regarding the ability of the young woman to give consent to her treatment. Even though there were concerns that she’d been drugged by the defendants or their teammates, even though many witnesses attested that she was drunk–which ought to have answered the question of consent right there–and even though the assailants and others said in various media that she was unconscious, “not participating,” or passed out, the defense still saw an avenue to drag her reputation and prior behavior into the testimony at trial. Decades old questions regarding the (in)ability of men to acknowledge or notice a lack or removal of consent were brought to bear as valid discussion once again. In what some analysts called a re-victimization of the young woman, texts, photos, and video of the assault were circulated among other football team members, high school students, and the Internet at large. And of course the trial called up many of those humiliating moments after the fact as part of the prosecution as well as the defense’s case.

I’m not suggesting that the prosecution shouldn’t have looked at the stream of mockery as part of its case that the defendants had no remorse for their actions and knew what they were doing was wrong (although perhaps deleting the photos was more revealing of that than anything), but rather that no matter the intent of the court, these details are another violence against this survivor and other survivors of sexual assault, precisely because justifications for violent sexual acts are so very common.

This case reminds me of another notorious moment between high school football players and a vulnerable young woman–the case from Glen Ridge, New Jersey in the late 1980s, documented in the book Our Guys. In this case the football players came from more entitled, upper middle class backgrounds, and the young woman in question was developmentally disabled, rather than intoxicated. Both cases used specious reasoning to suggest that the victims really wanted the degradation they experienced at the hands of men known around town as wild. Both came with scads of media attention and sloppy reporting. Glen Ridge, however, shows us how very little progress we’ve made since that case. Somehow, more than twenty years after Glen Ridge’s football team gang raped a classmate, journalists still see fit to lament the now “shattered” future of the rapists, without questioning what has become of the future of the young woman, who will surely continue to feel the effects of that August party well past her 21st or 24th birthday (the estimated ages that Mays and Richmond will be when they are released).

And more than the question of what constitutes consent and its counterpart of rape, we have come no nearer to conceptualizing the other failures of ethics in either of these cases–that of the students who witnessed the activity and either decided to participate or who decided not to report it to authorities (or their parents). That of the students who got past their shock at the texting and photos and then added their own comments but who never suggested that what had happened was unacceptable. That of the prosecutor’s office who took so long to investigate the situation even after so many people in town knew of the event. That of the journalists who without consideration for the effects of their reporting–save maybe ratings results–opted to release gruesome detail after gruesome detail of the crime, in a way that sensationalized the emotional and physical damage to the young woman as if she were merely a character on Law & Order: SVU.

It would have been inconceivable for Judge Lipps to rule in favor of the defendants, and yet many of us watching the trial were braced for that result. If that alone doesn’t signal to us that our society’s ideas about women’s agency, men’s “rights” for violent behavior, journalistic ethics, and the concept of consent are outmoded, ineffectual, and anti-feminist, then I don’t know what else could happen to stir us to such a realization. We are so very far from where we need to be on the subject of sexual assault, possibly because we’ve gotten used to incendiary rhetoric around banning abortion even in the case of rape and incest. We’ve familiarized ourselves with a constant flood of violence against women in American popular culture. And in the calls for gun control–because let’s not pretend guns aren’t used in domestic violence assaults against women every day–we’ve even capitulated to the NRA when our youngest children across the country are maimed or killed. In all of that, we’ve given up the woman who before saying no to a man said yes, and we’ve given up the woman who has had more than one abortion, and we’ve given up the woman who was tipsy but not falling down drunk on the night she was assaulted. We progressives have lost our voice in framing issues around women’s agency and right not to be assaulted so much that now we hold our breath when THE MOST OBVIOUS cases come to the forefront. And we have lost millions of women along the way, who are too frightened about retribution or humiliation on a public stage or who are afraid to call what happened to them an assault at all, and that may be the worst aspect of this trial.

It ought to also be our new starting point to getting to a better place.

Buffet Lunches Leave Something to Be Desired

Hypothetically speaking, what if the lunch fare at one’s weekly meeting of philanthropists often left diners with a sense of . . . intestinal turmoil? What if many a Thursday–not all of them, certainly–included clutching at one’s midsection, hoping that none of the fellow meeting goers can see one’s distress as one drives out of the parking lot on the way toward one’s office across town? Would one necessarily become masterful at just smiling through the pain while waiting for it to pass? I suppose one would begin fantasizing about relief in one’s office rest room, before recalling that in that building, rooms are only separated by paper-thin walls, acting more like amplifiers than mufflers of decible-laden noise. At that point perhaps one recalculates one’s options, noting that there is also a family rest room in the first floor hallway.

Of course, at this point one may walk in, sphincter at red alert, and come to a disturbing scene in which some other human has decided to smear his or her excrement on the vinyl walls of the room. In all likelihood one would then back away in horror, nervously twitching and holding one’s nose in a vain attempt to shut out the wicked smell of decomposing stool. Oh, the humanity! Surely one would avoid coming into contact with any foreign substance, ducking into their own section of the building and smearing alcohol gel all over their topmost limbs up to their elbows, and over every inch of skin that had been exposed to the noxious air.

Maybe, just maybe, one would forget one’s own indigestion and simply cower at one’s desk, hoping the substantive content of one’s job was adequate for moving on from the terror of the previous 75 minutes. Perhaps one could find an Internet animated gif of a kitten jumping straight up and could move on emotionally to a better reality. And just say that at some point it would be time for one to head home to one’s toddler, who would pant at one through the living room window, calling out one’s name with a smile on his face, as if all was right with the world.

So in our hypothetical situation, say an entire week elapsed and one forgot the trauma of the previous Thursday, until such time that one came face-to-face with the same buffet, and what if it wasn’t until one was standing next to the “Spinach Chicken Cannolini” that one remembered the danger? Wouldn’t it look suspicious to one’s friends if one did not serve oneself, but acted as if one was better than the lunch presented? And then one would continue on with eating the meal and acting as if every internal organ agreed with the food consumption? And afterward one would smile again as one drove away, through gritted teeth and just enough taste of bile in the back of one’s mouth to set one into a real sense of urgency?

Wouldn’t that make a great short story?

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of The Unintentional Time Traveler

Coming your way this summer/fall, here’s the new start to my debut, young adult novel, folks.

I first jumped back in time on September 21, 1980, just a few weeks into high school, but nothing about how that day started was odd in any way. It’s not like the sun popped out of the sky and said, “Hey Jack, how about if you take a trip to a completely different era where nothing makes any sense to you?”

No, it was a regular day where I woke up from my incredibly annoying alarm clock, which of course alerted King, our Golden Retriever, that he should burst through my bedroom door and lick me all over the face until I was awake enough to push him off of me. He followed me down the hall like usual, standing behind me even when I whizzed into the toilet, lest I don’t know, he miss out on any of my fun. He and I didn’t even notice anymore that the sink was wrapped in rolled up towels, held in place by constantly unraveling, goopy duct tape. It had been that way since my parents had started letting me use the bathroom by myself.

I have epilepsy, see, which means that on an irregular basis I lose consciousness as the neurons in my brain decide to go on a bender and start firing like a bunch of kindergarteners who missed their Ritalin dose that day. As one can imagine, this gets in the way of conversations, walking, brushing one’s teeth, or anything else worth doing. But like the padding over the hard surfaces around the house, I’ve gotten used to having seizures, even if I’m not happy about them.

Sometimes—maybe half the time—the “episodes” gave me a tiny bit of warning, mostly by screwing with my sense of balance. The ground around me would abruptly shift diagonally, like a ship listing hard to one side. Or my own private earthquake. I mastered the art of quickly sitting down, before I would fall over into humiliating twitchiness. Before the darkness could collapse over me.

In the kitchen that day, my mother sat quietly at the round table my father and I had built the summer before. There was a glob of varnish on one side that I liked to feel when I ate my breakfast, because it was smooth and irregular, and the wood underneath was more yellow. As usual, Dad had folded the paper to the comics section and left it next to my cereal bowl. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t read those comics anymore. I’d moved on to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.

“What do you have after school today,” asked Mom, still staring out the window toward the poplar trees behind our house. They’d turned bright yellow, but hadn’t started littering the lawn yet. It would be my job to rake the leaves when they had fallen. Joy.

“Nothing. I mean, hanging out with Sanjay, but nothing else. Why?”

Jay lived across the street from me. He never teased me about my seizures, but we’d known each other since preschool. He was kind of an outcast, too, just because he was Indian. We had some stupid kids in our school district.

“There’s a new study at the hospital for children with epilepsy. I enrolled you in it.”

“A what?” I didn’t feel like any extra studying, so I hoped this wasn’t what she meant.

She turned to me.

“They’re experimenting with a new process to see if they can cure some cases of epilepsy.”

“A process” didn’t clear it up for me.

“Is it a new drug?” I was on my sixth different pill. Pill Number One gave me delusions that I was a doctor, even though I was still a toddler at the time. Mom had found me behind the living room sofa, cutting at myself with a razor blade, announcing I was doing “surgery.” Pill Number Three made my extremities feel mushy and heavy all the time. I tripped a lot back then. I was not a fan of Pill Number Three.

“No, it’s like they have a new way of looking at your brain waves, and changing them. Dr. Barett told me about it.”

Dr. Barett, my neurologist, was fresh out of some big name medical program, top of his class, said the nurses. He was nice but he seemed to like nerve cells more than people. I wasn’t surprised that this juicy new experiment to fix brain waves was his suggestion. I nodded, since Jay and I could hang out any time we wanted, and forgot about it until I came home from school, when Mom hustled me out the door, jingling her car keys in irritation, like they were a bell instead of a device used to ignite our Ford’s engine.

The first part of the study session was familiar to me, because every month since I could remember I’d sat in a similar oversized vinyl chair and let some nurse apply blobs of cold putty all over my head. The nurses smelled like soap and antiseptic. They took a long time to attach the long, thin wires all over my head, and unlike the nurses I had for my monthly checkup, these two women didn’t make any small talk with me while they worked. I wasn’t sure if I liked the quiet or not. Finally I was ready for all of the electricity in my brain to be scratched out by a machine that looked like one of those boxes that measured ground tremors. Then for half an hour I sat as still as a scared rat while they watched the patterns of my broken neurons.

The second part of the study was different, longer, and involved the head of the study, a man with thick sideburns and gorilla hands, sending electrical signals to me to see if he could change how my brain responded. Once again I had to stay absolutely still the entire time, because I could ruin the test if I moved so much as a pinky toe. I tried to come up with all of the ways that staying perfectly still could benefit me, but after two minutes had only listed Buckingham Palace Guard and mime pretending to be dead.

I sat frozen for something like ten minutes, which was a sure-fire way to drive me crazy. Nothing like telling a guy to stay to make him need to move as much as possible. My left elbow started itching, and my right foot was in full pins-and-needles mode. The glob of putty above my left eye ever so slowly oozed down my forehead, or at least it felt that way. I tried to see the clock on the wall ahead of me, but with my glasses safely tucked away on the counter behind me, I couldn’t make out the position of the hands. It was just as well; knowing the time would probably have made me obsess about how much longer I’d be stuck in the chair. It was snot green to boot.

A metal click and then dull hum came over the PA, but I stayed still.

“How are you doing, hon,” asked Cindy, the lab technician. She had bright red hair not to be found in nature, and said everything through a smile. I liked her immediately.

My father had always said “Smile and they never know what you’re thinking.” So I worried I shouldn’t trust her, for all of her grinning. But since she’d asked me something, I answered her.

I hadn’t even spoken yet when the seismograph thing set up next to me went wild, scratching out thick, dark lines on the paper. Alerting the world: It’s alive!

“I’m okay. Itchy, and I think my right foot’s asleep.”

“Go ahead and scratch if it’s not your head, and shake your foot a little.”

I dug at my elbow through my shirt, which didn’t eliminate the itch well enough, but it would have to do. I couldn’t dig under my sleeve without upsetting the wires that trailed from all over my head. I pounded my foot on the floor, trying to startle it enough to wake up. Without thinking, I reached up to stop the glop on my head from getting in my eyes. I knew better than to touch anything other than the tip of my nose, but once I’d started moving itches popped up everywhere, screaming for attention, and I forgot myself.

“Oh, hang on there, bucko,” said the doctor, who’d come into the room from behind me. He put my hand down on the armrest. His touch was heavy and cold; his hand a hairy giant on top of mine.

“Don’t mess with the wires.”

I took a breath and relaxed, having heard this a million times before. He walked over to the machine, running his hand over his mutton chops. A long strand of connected paper had piled up in the basket next to the small monitor, and he bent low to snag the printout in the middle until he had a ribbon of it to examine. Cindy came out from the next room.

“There’s the abnormality,” I heard him say to her, pointing at the paper in a few places. “Let’s run one more test since he’s still hooked up, only this time I want to make a change to the stimulus.” They walked away, talking, and I was free to sneak in a scratch at whatever needed attention. At the moment, nothing bothered me. My body never cooperated. It didn’t demand much when I was allowed to deal with it.

The doctor was back at my side, talking loudly to me as if I had hearing problems, not a seizure disorder. He was a lot older than my regular doctor, with gray streaks clumping together at his temples. Cindy had said his work was the Rosetta Stone of neurology research, whatever that meant. I liked him enough. Nothing about rocks seemed cutting edge to me.

“Okay, Jack, we’re going to do just one more test. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

I nodded, sighed, and waited. A buzz zipped along my spine, which caused me to jerk a bit, and the machine roared.

I lost all sense of the room, the wires, the cold putty. In a flash of painful light I was on a hillside, in mid-step, running up a dirt trail, holding something in my hand. I wanted to know the shape of it, but couldn’t figure it out. I had the impression that I held it a lot. Something felt wrong with how I was running, too, as if the effort it normally took to lift my feet had been recalibrated.

“Do you notice anything,” asked the doctor through the microphone in the other room. I blinked, saw the pale green walls around me and the fuzzy metal clock on the far wall. I was back. But of course I hadn’t left.

“I saw something,” I said. With each passing second, I felt less sure about where I’d been.

“Can you describe it,” he asked, panting a little at the end of his question. It creeped me out.

I told him, feeling foolish, about the hill and the dirt path. A weird image came to me just then, that I had been wearing strange shoes. Leather moccasins, maybe. But I lived in these red Converse high tops. Why would I think of moccasins? Where did I even learn about moccasins?

He wrote down what I said, turning off his microphone partway through. I could see him through the observation glass, talking with Cindy. This would be a good time to know how to read lips, I thought. He stepped back into the room after a couple of minutes and told me I’d done a good job, clapping a hand on my shoulder. His palm took up all of the real estate I had there, but I sat there rigid. I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to be tough.

Cindy unhooked me from the machine; I was grateful to end transmitting all my brain waves to everyone in the room, even if people couldn’t exactly read my mind from the printout. She pulled over a tray on wheels, and dabbed a hand cloth into a steel bowl of warm water. She wiped most of the putty off of my scalp and temples in silence, no smiling anymore. I looked at a picture of Olympic swimmers on the wall in front of me. What the hell was this poster about, and why was it here, of all places? Were we supposed to aspire to athletic greatness even if we could have a seizure in the water?

The doctor walked over to my mother who was hunched over an issue of People in the waiting room. She looked up at him and waited for him to update her.

“Jack was great today,” he said, “and I’d like to see him next week if you can bring him in. I think we can isolate the source of his seizures.”

“Oh, really,” she asked, looking at me. “He’s such a good kid. It’s just terrible that he has to deal with these episodes. I’d hoped he’d outgrow them by high school.”

“Mom,” I said, in an attempt to get her to stop talking.

“It’s okay, Jack,” the doctor said, now grinning. It was clear he didn’t make facial expressions all that often. “I’m really glad we got you in this study.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I shrugged. But I was troubled.

Not the Application Letter to Send to LLF

I like to write a couple of biographical statements when applying to residencies and workshops and such, to get up to speed, as it were. Here’s the first draft that I won’t be sending along.

Unless everyone thinks it’s great, that is. *wink*

Writer’s Statement

Don’t waste your time with this application. Just move along to the other ones. I’m the guy who comes in just below the cut, most of the time, anyway. See, I used the word “anyway” in the preceding sentence—what world-class writer would deign to do such a thing? I’m sure I earned that rejection from Lambda Literary last year. I’d bet good money, or the $8.27 in my pocket, that someone in LA actually laughed at my 2012 writing sample, but not in a good way. It’s like that time I lost in a talent contest in a Syracuse gay bar—I did my best stand-up act, and some drag queen with a goatee got the bouquet of roses. Heck, I failed to make the finals in the Lammys this year, even though my category only got four finalists when usually there are at least five—meaning that my memoir wasn’t even good enough for the darkened pixels on a screen to spell out “finalist.” And it’s hard to lose out to a book titled Teeny Weenies.

This is my longstanding tendency, after all. Twenty years ago I pissed off Mary Karr when I screwed up a vinaigrette at the English Department potluck and we all had to drink three liters of water because everyone was dehydrating from the salt level. English Department faculty do not like having their water levels wicked away by fucking salad dressing—that’s what alcohol is for. Mary was nice about it, at least, and of course I combed through Lit looking for a reference to my shoplifting arrest at the local Wilson’s Leather store while I was hanging out with her favorite poetry student, until it hit me that hey, this book isn’t about me.

It also wasn’t about me when I was passed over for that Interlochen scholarship when I was seventeen. Sure, it would have been a much more glorious senior year experience than the one I had at that moldy, underfunded Catholic school in Trenton, where I fended off sloppy kissers waiting for the afternoon bus. It spurred my creativity enough simply to pretended that the pleated, acrylic brown-and-gold kilt I had to wear wasn’t my mortal enemy. I may have transitioned to being a man just because of that uniform.

I get that the building blocks of literature, the writing workshop, isn’t about me, either. I’ve never stood out in a discussion of work, so I totally understand why the committee will pass over my application again this year. No hard feelings. I don’t have that Infinite Jest voice. I’m about as edgy as a microwaved marshmallow. I couldn’t even keep a nipple ring on my body for more than a year. There are sure to be more capable, hungry trans and queer writers out there who will apply this year who are writing about the LGBT experience in such fascinating ways that my stories about generations of trans people look pallid in comparison. The best advice I ever got in a workshop was from the drunk instructor who stopped reading my story after the second sentence. “Make it sound more real,” he said. Or at least I think that’s what he said. He slurred a lot. He was going through a divorce and it was a hard time for him. But to this day I ask myself if my words sound real enough.

Come to think of it, perhaps I’ll get enough out of applying again, even if all I’ll receive is a short form letter, misaddressed to someone named Richard. I know it’s not personal. I’ll keep writing stories and novels and a bit of memoir. I’ll keep fielding calls from queer and trans youth who got something heartening out of my words, and I’ll continue to respond to every email from them. Because at the end of the day, those people are why I work so hard to be an author. They’re why I publicize other writers’ work, and encourage reading in this community. It would raise my craft considerably if I could spend a week learning from Samuel Delaney, because shit, this manuscript about four trans folks who try to build a school for LGBT kids is pretty crappy so far. But I admit I’m going into this application ready for rejection.

My apologies for the time spent reading this. I know the committee will never have this time back, and I feel badly about that.

We Saw Your Boob, and He Is Named Seth MacFarlane

Dear Academy Awards Producers–

Did you think the name, “Academy Awards” sounded too generic or uninteresting, so you should “update” it to “The Oscars?” Are you now concerned that your rebranding campaign has only one major cultural reference point, that of the disastrous emceeing job by Seth MacFarlane? Did the new name of “Oscar” make you think that audiences wanted the ceremony to channel the sloppy mind of a chauvinist? Perhaps you forgot that Oscar from the show The Odd Couple wasn’t actually a complete asshole?

Did you really think that the “We Saw Your Boobs” musical number was funny or in any way original? Did a feeling resembling shame even darken your hearts when you asked actresses in the audience to pretend to be embarrassed or humiliated? Were those shots ahead of time any indication at all that maybe this was too offensive for an awards show meant to highlight the best moments of Hollywood in the previous year? Was there even one moment in rehearsal or the planning meetings in which you wondered if this would cross a line for viewers or the people who have given their lives to your industry? Or were you just so taken with the idea that rambunctious young men may tune into your show over Sunday night reruns? Did anyone dare to mention, if only at a whisper, while writing the lyrics to this number, that maybe including four rape scenes in the “boobs” lineup might not be in the best taste? Maybe only for the films that were based on real life rapes? 

Was it William Shatner who phoned in to tell you that the public would be incensed by MacFarlane’s misogyny, anti-Semitism, anti-Hispanic racism, or pedophile-baiting jokes, or did he get the short straw to include him in the telecast as from the future, revealing the near-certain anger from the national audience? Was he the only actor in town who could pull off this cameo without vomiting? Did you think presenting the probable reaction would somehow get you off the hook? Were you surprised when people ran the fake headlines as real headlines on Monday morning, or was that part of your plan?

Did you vet the Quvenzhané Wallis joke with George Clooney beforehand, or was this comment by Seth some kind of revenge for never having appeared in an “Ocean’s” film? Was it solely Seth’s idea to toss a bottle of whiskey to Clooney during the ceremony, or did you think that alcohol would be an even better context for suggesting that Wallis was just about Clooney’s allowable age for dating partners? Speaking of young girls and old Hollywood power brokers, did you design the joke about Jack Nicholson’s house to refer to Roman Polanski’s rape of a 13-year-old, which happened at the same house, or was that just coinkidink? Did you feed the nasty C-word Tweet to staff at The Onion or was that just another happy dovetail of bad humor? Do you think we all wish you would have come out with your own apology for the nasty awards show that you produced?

When you all wrote the joke about Hispanic accents and attractive Latin bodies, were there only white non-Hispanic men in the room? Did you actively fantasize about Selma Hayek slapping the crap out of Seth, and would you have been ecstatic if that had occurred on live television? Did the line about Rihanna and Chris Brown come up after one of you remembered to include African Americans in the comedy set, since only two of them were nominated this year by your body of 94% white members? Did turning a problematic movie about slavery into a laugh about domestic violence make you feel giddy at your power to control images, narratives, and popular culture?

When Jennifer Lawrence tripped up the stairs to receive the highest honor in her profession for acting, did you hope to see her boobs? Were you angry that her after-the-ceremony interview was 1,000 times more interesting, down-to-earth, accessible, and hilarious than anything you staged during the 3.5 hours you had to captivate the country? Did it pique your curiosity in the slightest that the biggest rounds of applause during the event were for Shirley Bassey, Adele, Barbara Walters, and Meryl Streep, four women you couldn’t include in Seth’s song and who have in their own right generated decades of interest and and fan followings not predicated on sloppy frat-boy antics?

Did you ever admit, even to yourselves when you’re all alone with nobody to guffaw at stupid off-color jokes, that you’re actually afraid to try hard enough to provide a quality show that doesn’t feel the need to offend entire classes of people in order to entertain a small segment of viewers?

Because that seems pretty clear to me.

Commentary Roundup: Critiques of Oscars 2013

I keep wanting to write something about this, and I may in the next day or two, but in the meantime, here are very thoughtful analyses of The Man Who Loved the Sound of His Own Voice, Seth MacFarlane, and Hollywood’s love of the cruel.

From Salon, a look at how four of the “We Saw Your Boobs” mentions were actually of rape scenes—
The New Yorker breaks down the intersections of offensiveness throughout the celebration—
A run down on Huffington Post of the worst MacFarlane moments—
Think Progress’s comments on why our conversations about comedy are so devoid of principle—
The juxtaposition of MacFarlane’s sexism and The Onion’s abhorrent comment about a 9-year-old—
The New York Times reports that producers were happy with the ratings bounce from MacFarlane’s performance—
The Atlantic brings up the banality of sexism and racism at the Oscars—

And now because we’re all so pissed after reading all of this, here’s something to remind us that some people in Hollywood, even award winners, are pretty awesome people: