Living as a Lesbian

Perhaps in my next life I will be done with these questions of identity altogether, will cherish fully the body that I am given, begin to see it neither as burden or weapon but only as the vessel of my existence. Perhaps in my next life I will have given up finally this constant struggle to explain who I am not: not woman, not white, not straight, not you and start to revel in the limitlessness of my boundaries. Perhaps each one of us will recapture that which has been lost, start again to accept and acknowledge the profound ambiguity and uncertainty of this existence. It is then and only then that we will find home.

-Robert Reid-Pharr

Miami Dispatch 9: Buenas, Buenas, ¿Que tal?, ¿Como estas?, Buenas.

I’m going to blog this then grab a much, much needed beer and chill.

1) For the last 12 hours, an eviscerated hog, ribs gaping, has lied marinating on a television cart in our kitchen. It is pungent and a little gruesome, if there are degrees of gruesome. It is now being rolled to the backyard where it will be roasted in a wooden box onto the side of which Latino grocery brands are painted like on a race car.

2) Clearly, we’re having a party. I don’t know why. I heard someone recently arrived from Cuba, and my father, maybe facetiously, suggested that the party is for my benefit, even though mingling in 90-degree weather among a brazillion estranged relatives is not really my bag.

3) They started arriving at 8am. Then 10am, 11am, 12pm, and there are more coming. My mom is scrambling to find open bags of snack foods to pour into bowls and position strategically around the yard in an effort to tide them all over while the pig roasts. There is a heap of designer purses on my bed, next to which I’m squeezed with my legs crossed and my computer propped on my knees. Children are crowded on the living room floor watching the Lion King (I couldn’t find Nemo) on VHS, some of them drooling. My mother’s edict is “No One Inside Except Children and the Unwell,” so there are small bunches of highly overdressed family members huddled in the shadiest corners of the yard, some pressing lukewarm beer bottles to their necks and foreheads.

4) This is my dad’s gig and he is a bit hysteric. He delegates tasks but only gives half the instructions. This should be okay–one can certainly take intiative and not leave all to him–except that the tasks are a bit esoteric. For example my task: “Hang the bags.” Roy: “What bags?” Dad: “The fly bags.” Roy: “Bags… of flies?” Dad walks away. I stood in the kitchen for a while then I played an hour of Guitar Hero (I’m trying to kick my brother’s ass on Sweet Child O’ Mine at medium expertise). I returned to the yard expecting to be assigned a new task, but dad asked, “And the fly bags?” Roy: “What is a fly bag?” He pointed to a freezer bag, filled to capacity with water and tied at the top, hanging from the rafters on the back terrace. These bags are supposed to in some way deter (frighten? confuse? mesmerize?) the common housefly. Dad: “The string is on the table.” Roy: “What table?” He’s gone. I search many tables, indoors and out, and find some old string on the domino table under the avocado tree. Of all the tables at the Compound, the domino table is probably the most distinct, as its plastic top is cast with four grooves into which each player sets her game pieces during play. But really, by not specifying “the domino table” and instead sending me on a wild string chase, my dad grants me more time between strange tasks, which amounts to fewer tasks while he gets drunker, more good-natured, a little bit obnoxious but less hysterical, all of which is positive development. Once I’d found the string, I made two bags and hung them, with much care, variously distanced from the first. I showed him my work. “Great! Make about 8 more.”

5) Airfare from Miami to Mexico City is currently $180 rountrip, plus tax.

6) My dad has given me a complex about my tattoo. He said I should wear long sleeves, but it is 92°F outside. Instead I am carrying my right arm lifelessly at my side, less because I want to follow my dad’s oppressive instructions, and more because I want to avoid conversation with folks about what it says, why I got it, and what the hell I was thinking. But it’s in Spanish! I’ll say. From a Mexican novel! Why, they will ask, did you not choose a line from a Cuban novel? It’s just as well, they’ll add, all those writers are communists anyway.

7) I’m totally going to Mexico.

8) One of the guests is a theologian and a former priest. My parents are very excited to introduce me to him. When Pope John Paul II held mass in Cuba in 1998 there was a person at his side who relayed objects around and held things, like the book out of which the Pope Himself read. My distant cousin was that person. He is Educated in things like philosphy and thus we are supposed to get along. My parents said he left the priesthood because “he really missed women.”

9) I should break gender norms and participate in keeping the children happy and preoccupied, but I really hate random children. I like your child, but I don’t like children. Beer is way better than children. So is hiding in my room.

10) Hsugrits says I should exercise queer jouissance. I should poke tiny holes in the fly bags, tell people I drew the tattoo myself with a marker last night in a drug-addled but inspired paroxysm, earnestly challenge old women to Guitar Hero, display random bouts of violent anger then flirt mercilessly with one of the young, male distant relations until fists fly. This will require more beer than I’d planned to drink, but it’s a worthy endeavor. More later.

P.S. Check out goodreads.com. I’m going to start retro-entering my favorite books. We can be readerly friends and join book clubs together. I love doing it in groups.

Summer rain.

Seeing so many of Fornes’s plays has made me profoundly anxious about my life’s work. Watching them, the last thing I want to do is parse them into theoretical bits. Her style is so full of ambivalence and minute gestures charged with honest, unfathomable disquiet. To me they don’t seem like alternative or fragmented realities, but composites of startlingly familiar emotional gestures and signals that make up a life. I guess I mean to say that watching her plays moves me to write a play, not a dissertation. Dammit.

So I’m sitting here in one of the reading rooms at the performing arts library, watching it rain on Amsterdam ave., trying to focus on critical treatments of Fornes but continually turning to interviews with actors she’s worked with and to photos of her sets. I’m also thinking a lot about the sort of play I would write, and find it completely untenable because it would be another play about some overeducated middle class guy who channels all of his politics through his own ennui. Then I think about how I’d write a play that wouldn’t be like that, and I’m horrified that it would be insincere and shoddy, and that it wouldn’t capture any of the social ideals I hold dear and by which I try to live my life. I’m thinking about how minoritarian art is almost always more radical, satisfying, and edifying than most anything called avant-garde, and I wonder if I could ever write anything that would evoke those things. I’ve also decided to face all of this by writing at least one play before I’m thirty.

I thought all that, and then I came back to a question I ask myself every summer: what the hell am I doing in a Ph.D. program? And this particular summer, what the hell am I doing in archives? I’m getting sick of the mise en abyme of interpretation that we fetishize so hardcore as academics. I think I would be working harder this summer if I was inspired by what I was doing, and when I search for inspiration, I find I want to write a play. And so I just sit here staring at the rain on Amsterdam.

And I want to teach. I want to teach more. I want to teach outside of the university, like my colleagues are doing, and I need to search for these opportunities more actively. I’ll make this promise to myself now and report back in one week.

Now the library will be closing in 15 minutes. In front of me is sitting an actor whose name I don’t know. I can’t remember anything he’s been in, either, but his characters are perverse, alienated, but gentle, idealistic, and mild-mannered. Also German, I think, most of the time. And sweaty, though he’s not sweaty right now. He looks quite leisurely in a white button-down shirt and slim jeans, and his laptop is enormous and brand new. Fuck him.

I’m off to Part III of my day, whatever that will be.

I only intend to write one essay this summer, so here are some thoughts/updates in bulleted form instead:

1) I went to Los Angeles for my cousin’s wedding, a Pérez/Pérez wedding with about 400 guests, two-thirds of whom themselves bore the Pérez surname. This caused a great deal of confusion as guests tried to figure out their seat assignments, designated on souvenir crystals that hung from branches on any one of eight arrangements of miniature winter trees. I didn’t know which of the many “Perez Family” crystals I was meant to respresent, but I found the dude with the guest manifest and was personally directed to my seat.  As far as the souvenir crystal, I don’t have a rearview mirror on which to display it anyway.

2) I was invited to a blogger party at Cattyshack on Sunday and I had a great time.  I also stuffed my face and got a little sloppy drunk.  Thanks, ham on wry, for the introductions and fun times.  The whole thing made me want to renovate my blog and write a little more.  Coming soon.

3) I’ve had a lot of time on my own lately and I feel like I’m reviving some of my old self.  I wrote something that ressembles a poem, which means I’m feeling feelings again.  I’ve also been doing research at the Theatre on Film and Tape archives at the Performing Arts library, essentially watching tape after tape of Fornes productions.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all of that, but I like how it’s dramatized my own inner dialogues:

4) Check out the myspace profile and tell me if the shooting range photo is politically questionable.  I wish it was more hot, but first I’m concerned that it seems non sequitur with my politics.  My thinking is, look, it happens, I shoot things, now let’s recognize and discuss.  It’s what my dad likes to do when we bond.

5) To the mountains 7/26, to Miami 8/1, and back in NYC 8/15.  xo.

I’m in LA, btw.

Columbus, Ohio, is gay gay gay. We missed our connection by 10 minutes (thanks Delta!) and got stranded in Columbus on Wednesday night, where we booked a hotel by the airport that seemed to be near nothing.  To make the most of it, we went online snickering like the couple of NYC snobs that we are looking for “Columbus’s one gay bar in a barn somewhere,” and we discovered, upon alighting a taxi on High Street, that there’s a whole gayborhood with all sorts of nightlife.  I had an awesome tequila sunrise.  Final analysis, Columbus, OH: Exceedingly liveable.

So now I’m in my prima’s pad in the ‘burbs, a little jet-lagged.  I’m going to GPS my ass and figure out what I can walk to (so far lots of fastfood and a drive-through coffee place… where’s the b&n when you actually need one?!).  Family Fun Time until primo’s wedding on Saturday, then, I think, back to metropolitan Los Angeles.  I have very few plans.  If you’re reading this from metropolitan Los Angeles or vicinity, please shout.

We’re walking and walking.

Pre.S.: I responded to some old comments. So if you commented recently, um, I responded. Thanks.

Something about my surrounding environment must be toxic.  Who the hell contracts bronchitis in June?  I sound alternatingly like a lawn mower and a sleeping cat.  I’m skipping yoga again and I’m starting to feel less like a flaccid rubberband and more like a stick in mud.  But I don’t want to spume all over those already disgusting padded floors in the wrestling room.  Spume is an unpleasant word.

Part of the reason I haven’t been blogging much is that I have more on my mind than I feel I can distill into prose.  It has to do with housing, my relationships, my work, my employment status (un-), my lack of funds, my desire to counter racism, sexism and poverty, and the fact that I can’t beat the 150cc Special Cup on Mario Kart Double-Dash and unlock Toad and his vehicle.  And worst of all, I can’t drink because I have bronchitis.  It is summer.  I want to be soaked in tequila.

I had a really rough night on Saturday after Danny’s karaoke birthday (happybirthdayiloveyou).  I’m not sure what hit me.  I just felt this profound sadness and futility and complete lack of worth.  Because I’m male, I’ve been socialized to blame sadness on others, or the world.  Because I’m a feminist, I know that depression is a response to real, structural conditions.  I think the last few years have been a struggle in understanding how those two deflections work and still hold myself accountable for what I feel and how to use it, articulate it, or exorcise it. 

So I dumped myself in a hot bath and sang three lines from a Sarah McLachlan song over and over again, then I watched Quinceañera, which was really giving me some kind of satisfaction related to the representability of new, queer social/familial arrangements.  This was until I realized that the entire production team is gay white males and that the whole time I’d been tricked into watching their racial fantasies unfold, including the commodification of others, self-absolution for the ills of white gentrification, and messed up versions of feminism, as if white gentrification is better in a bandana and culottes.  I nearly took another bath.  The good news is I can still use it in a classroom, but with a totally different angle.

Today is my weekly lunch date with F.  I’m going to take it easy and maybe after lunch walk to central park and sit for a while, inhaling fatal pollen spores.

Tomorrow I’m giving some undergrads a tour of East Harlem that I invented.  We’ll walk from the point at which the Metronorth rail surfaces (I want them to see that racial/class boundaries aren’t so imginary), then to Museo del Barrio.  Then we’ll walk over to a de La Vega mural on 111st and 3rd ave, then up 3rd to 116st, which I think of as town center.  I thought I’d take them down my own block, because it illustrates about 26 levels of gentrification in progress.  I might get them on the roof of my building if we have time, so they can see the bowl that East Harlem contours in the manmade topography of Manhattan, which will probably last 5 more years before all these new condo developments spike through.  Then we’ll go to lunch at Camaradas, who have so generously reserved a table for us.  This is all supposed to take three hours.   I think I’m being too ambitious.

Singing sad songs.

Argh summer.  I get so listless.

And mosquitos are eating me, too.

I am so stressed out because it is lease renewal time and I am fighting my management company over a rent increase that may, in the end, be only .25% illegal, if not completely legal.

I keep reminding myself that I am not dealing with people, but with forces; forces that want as much of my money as possible; forces that hide behind email addresses and do not sign their emails with anything (not even The Management), like any good evil force.

When I’ve gone to the office in person to get something corrected, they have acted like 12-year-olds, literally calling me names, turning their backs to me when I talk to them, and yelling at me.  I do not engage this way with anyone I don’t love.  And I do not love the people who work at this management office.

The most heartwrenching aspect of it, besides just feeling so incredibly powerless and despised by the anonymous entity who responds to the emails, is that the women who work in the office are all Latina and working class, and yet they defend this notorious slumlord of a management company practically to the point of fisticuffs. I don’t understand how, even having some stake in one’s livelihood and employment, someone can so wickedly defend and obfuscate the actions of a company as disgusting as this one.  And do so by making the folks who deal with the neglect and exploitation on a daily basis feel like they and their desire to maintain sustainable housing are the problem.  Seriously, it doesn’t take a whole lot of consciousness to break it down.

In the end, the rent increase amounts to $75 more a month, which seems manageable.  I’m not arguing with them on principle, though.  This actually presents a hardship, and one that is not justified by the ways in which they manage their buildings.

Anyway, please leave encouraging words so that I don’t actualize their abjection.

Sundays are boring.

Despite the feelings it was making me feel, I stopped reading José Donoso’s novel, The Obscene Bird of Night, I think only because jury duty ended and I started to think instead about how I need to get my master’s thesis done already so that I have something to show for the last 3 years.

That means finally digging into critical writing on disgust. To my fascination, very little of the work I’m reading seems to deal with disgust as an aesthetic strategy and focuses instead on it’s affective dynamics. That’s useful too. But they seem to focus on how people who find certain things disgusting are bad people. I’m more interested in how artists manipulate signs of the disgusting to evoke it in the context of very specific politics. Part of that for me is figuring out those politics and why it’s worthwhile to frame them within Latin@ art at all. I mean, it is worthwhile, I just have to figure out how to say so.

It is hot, balmy, sticky. We were too lazy last night to install the air conditioner, which is sitting on the living room floor since last fall, and so I tossed and turned and glistened. I wish I had a portico, if a portico is a raised outdoor structure with a roof, mosquito netting, and group sex. I don’t really know what a portico is, but I’d kill for a breeze and group sex.

Sundays are boring. I don’t feel like doing any of the things I can think of doing, but I certainly don’t feel like staying home, especially since there’s no portico. Maybe that means Sundays are fine, but I’m boring, probably because I hardly slept last night. Also, I have little money, although that can often lead to cheap forms of entertainment that are more interesting than fancy ones, but it sounds like it involves a ton of creativity and mindfulness.  As clearly evidenced by this blog entry, I hate creativity and mindfulness.

delugional.

First, a pressing question to any of you who might know anything about dog care. My dog cannot have nice things. She skins tennis balls, eviscerates stuffed toys, mauls plastic frisbees and even those incredibly tough, rubber rods that are supposed to be the toy for the indefatigable dog with razor teeth. She turns these things into piles of colorful debris, some of which travels through her before we get to see it. It seems to be her greatest joy in life to return a malleable object to its elemental state. Even as I write this, she is taking the procedure to a new level. Regard the grisly sight:

I took this with my mobile phone. To the left is the guilty party. To the right is what’s left of a tennis ball, cracked and shorn.

My question is, am I supposed to ask her / train her not to do this? They’re her toys. She doesn’t destroy shoes or, really, any objects that have not been explicitly dog-purposed by us. But a toy lasts all of 10 minutes, after which it is gone and she is bored again. Her only standbys are bare tennis balls and the cat. I guess I mean to say, she isn’t really hurting anyone except the affordability of her own entertainment. It’s just a little disturbing to watch, particularly if the object has eyes. Should I regulate? Share your thoughts.

With that concern out of the way, I would like to announce that I am effectively homebound for the rest of the month of May, as my Metrocard has expired (INSUFFICIENT FUNDS) and I have rightful access to all of $7.34. Even if I could venture out on foot, what would I do? I cannot consume. I have no rightful place in this city. It’s me and hard-boiled eggs, in these same seersucker shorts, until June. Besides, it’s pouring to a tropical standard.

Finally, I would like to frame my next entry. I’m currently reading José Donoso’s Obscene Bird of Night and it has, like, evoked things. Until then.