Second Generation Faggot

I've been kicking around this theory lately that being queer today is a little bit like being a child of immigrant parents.  The way that immigration often plays out in America is that the first generation gets here and does an unbelievable amount of grunt work. They scrimp, save, and work two jobs, often  while facing considerable racial, ethnic or religious bigotry while they're at it.  They are the first generation in America and they do all of this because they believe it will create greater opportunities and better lives for their children.  Often these children are supported by not only their nuclear family in achieving their dreams but an entire generation of immigrants who are looking after one another as a sort of extended family.

Gay men and women who came out in the 70s and 80s (ie those old enough, largely, to be my biological parents) are not unlike those first generation immigrants.  This summer will mark the 40th anniversary of the riots at Stonewall and the birth of the modern gay rights movement.  Many steps forward were met with violent pushes back.  Harvey Milk was murdered and justice was not carried out in the ensuing trial.  Silence = death and the Regan administration allowed the laissez-faire genocide of queer men.  In spite of these individual and collective tragedies (and often because of them) we are lucky today to have a community that are unbelievable advocates  for our safety, well being, happiness and success.

40 and 50 something gay men and women often take me under their wing in a way that is so unconditionally loving and supportive that to think of the enormity of it is almost overwhelming. I simply put it out to my Twitter community that I'd really like to learn about photography and there was a Radical Faerie asking me what weekend works for me.  I told a producer about my work with Project Twenty1 and he told me wants my help run a film project that he's starting.  Today I was scheduling a lesbian patient for surgery and when I told her I intended to study American Sign Language this summer at Philly Community she gave me the name and phone number of the exact person I should get in touch with.  She gave me her business card, invited me to the Equality Forum and made a point of teaching me a few signs as well before she left.  I have an entire extended family rooting for my success because they have worked so hard to gain dignity and rights in their lifetime and they want it to be even better for me.  This is just one reason that every day I am thankful not just for having friends and a job  and a dog but also for being born queer and thus into this unbelievable community of surrogate moms and dads, aunts, uncles and advocates.

@weeklyblogpost - Dream Job

Here goes my @weeklyblogpost on dream jobs.  (I think I still owe a blog on education and I'm excited to see what the new blog for this week will be.)

Since I can't tell you exactly what I want to do, here's some of the things I'd like to see out of my dream job or, since I have diverse interests and abilities, dream jobs that I would weave together the way that actors now all have clothing lines and such.

-Be creative and entrepreneurial.

-Be able to work from home sometimes and/or be able to have my dog at my workplace with me.

-Have vacation time in the quantity that Europeans get it.  (I know that my two weeks vacation is pretty decent for America but everybody else in the Western world probably finds it justifiably laughable.)

-Have a flexible (non 9-5) work schedule.  This could look like writing from home with breaks for yoga classes and going to my (future) kids' games and recitals or working a number of weeks or months on a film or theatrical production and then having time off.  

Part of the problem is that it's hard to know what jobs exist.  It would be great if there were some system where you input your talents and interests and it listed all sorts of jobs that maybe you never heard of but would love to have.  This doesn't exist at the moment and the one test like this I took in high school included mortician and grain elevator operator in things I might like.  I've seen Cosmo quizzes that were more relevant.  One thing that definitely appeals to me is movie producer because it involves a creative industry and would be served by my joy of networking and bringing people together on a team.  I don't think it's an exact fit or, if it's something I did that I'd do exclusively but it's something I'm considering and would probably fill a lot of my criteria.

@weeklyblogpost - Grid

(Better late than never.)

I think about grids, about living on them, about living off them, and about the Taoist notion that there is no paradox.  (A copy of the Tao Te Ching would be handy here for a brief quote, but alas, I've given away every copy I've ever purchased.  I'm sure I should get another, if only to have it at the ready to pass on yet again.)  Here are the grids I'm thinking about: city streets, life plans, connectivity to electricity and water, and connection to western capitalist life in general.  I'll just stick with the first two for now lest I get especially long winded, but remind me, dear reader, to address the others at some later time.

Here's one of the primary things I love about cities: they are largely laid out as grids.  By orienting myself to a few major streets I can secondarily orient myself to the four major directions on a compass and, even with only a vague concept of where I'm going in relation to where I am, set off confidently in a direction.  If you told me to meet you at 23rd and Tasker I definitely would not have any concept of the specific distance from where I'm sitting right now but I could get there without pausing to consult a map. 

 If, on the other hand, you told me you were anywhere in Fishtown I would envision myself panicking at a series of five way intersections of streets that run with no particular regard for cardinal direction.  Even worse is being somewhere that order is typically expected and then removing it.  To wit, nothing freaks me out faster than Passyunk Ave; it runs through the grid and, if it at least did so on a 45 degree angle I could (maybe) handle it.  It doesn't and I can't.  

Life is invariably more complicated than traffic and road design, and I grew up in Jersey's circles and jughandles so that's saying something about life.  Unlike my walks through the city, I prefer my walk through life to be without such a rigid path.  To continue the city-walk-as-life metaphor this is what it would look like for me: meandering into random homes and buidlings to take in the architecture.  Taking up residence for a month or a year if there were people there with interesting things to teach me.  If buildings didn't look interesting enough to enter and the block seemed to walk around, I might scale them just for a lark.  Why not?

Anytime I've tried to live my life on a logical grid I get drawn off into some more interesting cu-de-sac or labryinth or wooded path instead.  Instead of trying to find a role model who could show me what it looked like to be an artist in a sustainible way, I tried my parent's theory on going to college to get a degree that paid.  The big compromise was going for bio/secondary ed so that I could have a job that allowed me three months off to write.  They weren't happy that I was going to enter such a low paying profession (never mind that my dad is a techer) but it was better than going for English or even Enlish/educations since science and math teachers were and probably are in higher demand.  

As a result I never finished school because I showed up to classes that I hated and I failed them.  I did, however, get consistently high grades in courses such as Contemporary Moral Issues, Art History of Southesat Asia, Global Women Writers and Women and Health:  Power Politics and Change.  I love learning for the sake of learning and I love the intersections I find in seeminly unrelated subjects.  I like looking at veganism through the lens of radical feminist theory and I the Tao Te Ching really helped me understand nutrition, politics, yoga and quantum physics.  I could get a degree where each class logically followed the next and the right series of degree(s), internships and certifications yielded a predictable and profitable career.  I'm glad that lots of people do.  I don't want to, and I've stopped trying.  First of all, none of the destinations seem all that appealing to me.  Secondly, as mentioned in my first post on transit, I think it's all in the journey anyway and that every destination is really just a pit stop, at least for me.  I'll keep on keeping on with my bumbling life path, looking for the transcendtal connection betwen baseball, the Bronte sisters and Panck's constant.

What I'm learning is to meld the two ways of being.  I am walking boldly forward without any idea as to where that will take me.  I will not stop to jusitfy working 16 hour days on film sets with a burrito for payment or tell you how the networking I do there will eventually get me paid.  I don't know how it will.  It might or might not.  I don't know and I don't care.  What I know is that I feel more alive when I'm around the energy of creation that at any other time.  I do not think that getting a degree in art history would be a waste of time if I passed up a steady museum job to be a yoga instructor and freelance photographer anyway.  Just because I'm smart enough to get a degree and use it doesn't mean I should.  I'm going places I love and that doesn't need to satisfy andybody's value system but my own.  I can be happy for you on the grid as long as you can be happy for me meadering through corn fields and meadows.