This recipe won me two boys' hearts in a single day. I use "recipe" loosely, as it's barely complex enough to earn the title. It's much like a simple scampi sauce, but a bit lighter.
4-6 cloves garlic, depending on preference
1/4 c extra virgin olive oil
1 tbs lemon juice
1/2 lb spaghetti
1/2 - 1 c freshly grated parmesan cheese
Put water on to boil the spaghetti. The rest of the process will be done before the spaghetti is cooked. Peel the garlic and cut each clove into halves or quarters. You want the garlic to brown, so don't crush it or cut it too small. Put the oil in a pan and put the garlic in the oil. Heat on medium-high until the garlic has a brown outline and looks generally roasted. Remove from heat and quickly add the lemon juice, stirring to mix thoroughly. When the pasta is done, drain it and put it back in the pot or a big bowl so you can toss it with the oil mixture. Serve with copious amounts of parmesan. Eat it before the cheese starts to melt, and your mouth will love you.
Serves 2-3
Monday, July 25, 2011
A new sexual manifesto
I grew up believing that my body belonged to God, to my future husband, to anyone other than myself. I was told and thoroughly believed that sex would ruin me, would make me less worthy, would change me in an inconceivable way so that I could never form healthy, strong relationships with anyone else. I was told that having sex was like super-gluing two pieces of wood together. You could pull them apart if you tried hard enough, but there would be slivers of each piece of wood stuck to the other forever. I believed sex was a thing I gave away or could be taken from me.
When I fuck who I want to, how I want to, and when I want to, that is a radical victory for love. When I can do that with someone I respect as a whole, autonomous person, that is a radical victory for love. When I can do that without sacrificing my healthy, committed relationship, that is a radical victory for love.
When I fuck who I want to, how I want to, and when I want to, that is a radical victory for love. When I can do that with someone I respect as a whole, autonomous person, that is a radical victory for love. When I can do that without sacrificing my healthy, committed relationship, that is a radical victory for love.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Activist Exhaustion
In the summer of 2004, I interviewed Mandy Carter for the now-defunct Southern Voice (which has pretty much been replaced by the Georgia Voice, same staff, new management). That summer was full of 'aha!' moments, which I told her about in 2006 when I picked her up from the airport for a speaking engagement. In that first interview, she talked about learning to use her privilege to do meaningful activist work. I had to try not to splutter in disbelief when I asked her what kind of privilege she had as a black lesbian in the South. In response, she gave the example of immigrant rights issues. As a U.S.-born citizen, she could march, speak, argue, and push for immigrants' rights without fear of deportation or prosecution of herself or her family.
Though it's embarrassing to admit, that was the first time I'd ever thought about immigrant rights. It was after the first introduction of the DREAM Act but before it would become a major policy priority, and before the assault on immigrants would make Arizona's SB 1070, Georgia's HB 87, and similar state legislation part of the national conversation. In the run-up to Georgia's passage of HB 87 and now in its aftermath, I have done nothing to fight it. I've barely even spoken about it. Every time I hear of my friends doing strategy meetings or going to protests, the first thing I feel is tired (and the second is relief that someone else has the energy for it).
It's been nearly two years since I felt like I did any real activism. I do some work here and there, mostly in the arenas of sexual orientation and gender, and mostly at or with my alma mater. I like that work, and my job has become my major center of activism. I get to do a lot of strategic planning that works towards sustainable, empowering services for low-income senior citizens in Atlanta, but my work isn't actually organizing. It's policy in a way because I get to decide what sort of programming we propose to do with public funding (and we're a major supplier of publicly funded senior services in the area), but it's very peripheral, very intra-system, and mostly single-issue focused.
I live my personal life in a way that feels radical to me, building and maintaining relationships in ways that don't fit the misogynist, heterosexist ways I was trained to. I love fully and in ways that make me vulnerable; polyamory has become a greater part of how I live my life. I have a DIY ethic and I'm learning and doing more every day. But those things are the outcomes of activism; they aren't activism itself. I don't quite know how to get back to activism; I don't quite know what I'm looking for. Sometimes I think school is the answer, or part of it, but I doubt it will be the answer if I'm doing school part time while working full time. And still, every time I think about what it might look like, all I can picture is a tiny drop in a huge bucket and an overwhelming sense of fatigue.
Though it's embarrassing to admit, that was the first time I'd ever thought about immigrant rights. It was after the first introduction of the DREAM Act but before it would become a major policy priority, and before the assault on immigrants would make Arizona's SB 1070, Georgia's HB 87, and similar state legislation part of the national conversation. In the run-up to Georgia's passage of HB 87 and now in its aftermath, I have done nothing to fight it. I've barely even spoken about it. Every time I hear of my friends doing strategy meetings or going to protests, the first thing I feel is tired (and the second is relief that someone else has the energy for it).
It's been nearly two years since I felt like I did any real activism. I do some work here and there, mostly in the arenas of sexual orientation and gender, and mostly at or with my alma mater. I like that work, and my job has become my major center of activism. I get to do a lot of strategic planning that works towards sustainable, empowering services for low-income senior citizens in Atlanta, but my work isn't actually organizing. It's policy in a way because I get to decide what sort of programming we propose to do with public funding (and we're a major supplier of publicly funded senior services in the area), but it's very peripheral, very intra-system, and mostly single-issue focused.
I live my personal life in a way that feels radical to me, building and maintaining relationships in ways that don't fit the misogynist, heterosexist ways I was trained to. I love fully and in ways that make me vulnerable; polyamory has become a greater part of how I live my life. I have a DIY ethic and I'm learning and doing more every day. But those things are the outcomes of activism; they aren't activism itself. I don't quite know how to get back to activism; I don't quite know what I'm looking for. Sometimes I think school is the answer, or part of it, but I doubt it will be the answer if I'm doing school part time while working full time. And still, every time I think about what it might look like, all I can picture is a tiny drop in a huge bucket and an overwhelming sense of fatigue.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
The stages of breaking up
I don't talk much about my feelings here, except as they relate to my life being awesome or my politics being angry. The last few months, though, have been a new sort of experience for me in my relationship to my fantastic partner and my relationship to my own sexuality, my mental health, and my heart. Much of my life is a political statement and/or a string of rebellious acts against a culture that requires me to be shut in, shut up, and invisible.
So here's how this went.
I decided I wanted to find a casual relationship or two, and I got lucky. I let myself fall for M, the new guy in my life, though I knew from the beginning that he wouldn't be able to do anything more than a very very casual relationship. It ended after about a month and a half, after a lot of fun and a lot of love. I decided that I connected with him in a way that made me want to stay in each other's lives, though I have an irrational discomfort with the idea of him dating other women. This is the shortest relationship I've ever had with someone I love -- beginning in high school, I've had multi-year relationships nearly back-to-back -- so I was surprised to find myself going through the stages of grief that usually apply to breaking up, albeit not in order. I was also surprised (though I shouldn't have been) to find that my partner and my best friend, who is an ex-boyfriend, were standing by with open arms and warm reassurances
This is all very weird, in that it's not weird at all. When I started thinking about being polyamorous, I read The Ethical Slut, which is pretty much the bible of poly. I had issues with it then, and I still do, but everyone reads it because it's the only thing to be read. I remember thinking it must feel so different to be poly, to have multiple relationships, to negotiate that space, to lose a nonprimary relationship. But it doesn't. It feels the same. Sort of. And I think there needs to be some place that says that. So here goes.
Stage 1: Denial/isolation
Only in processing later did I realize that I went through this stage first and third. Through the whole six or so weeks that M and I were dating/fucking/doing our thing, I let the knowledge that it was finite fade from my mind. I didn't take that into account when deciding how much to invest in the relationship. When I met him, I had been talking to a few other people about potential casual relationships, and I let those go. It recognized that there are only 24 hours in a day, but it also meant that I put all my eggs in one basket, thus isolating myself a bit.
Stage 2: Bargaining
This was my second step, though it's usually the third of five when talking about grief. It's supposed to refer to bargaining with God, the universe, or something intangible. I found myself bargaining with M, stopping only barely short of losing my dignity. I knew that he saw our relationship as one between friends who share activities, and one of those activities was sex. I saw him as a sort of boyfriend, someone that I talked to a lot, who could provide emotional support, and to whom I felt intimately connected.
My first way of bargaining was to separate out the three aspects of our relationship: talking/hanging out, nonsexual intimacy like snuggling, and fucking. I hoped maybe he could do two of the three, being either fuckbuddies or cuddley friends. Those weren't options for him anymore. Next was pointing out that our last date had ended kind of dramatically (with a condom break and running around at 2 a.m. finding EC), and I hated that that would be the end of it. Or hey, maybe we could just pick a date to stop fucking, especially since we'd both be starting school soon (him in July, me in August). As expected, none of these things worked. He knew what he needed, and I knew it was coming.
Stage 3: Denial/depression
Here I went back to denial, mixed with depression. I knew that I would especially miss our habit of setting specific dates and times for specific activities. As the relationship went on, it had become less structured, but since having a date required scheduling when my partner would be out of the house, we had a weekly standing-but-flexible date for hanging out, fucking, and watching Firefly. We decided to still have dedicated friendates that would involve non-sex activities. The first one was really hard for me. It felt like an evening of constant rejection because I had still hoped it could be something other than it was. I'm still dealing with this a little bit, but now instead of denying that it's over, I'm denying that he's interested in someone else. (He is. He told me. I've asked him not to, but you can't always hide something that's on your mind constantly.)
The night that I consider the actual breakupI put up a new craigslist ad looking for a replacement. Before I met M, I had no idea that it would be something I didn't feel so casual about. I couldn't tell that from his emails or texts. But as I started talking to other guys, all I could think was "This isn't M. He doesn't look like him, he won't smell like him, he doesn't feel like him, this isn't going to be what I want." The depression stage is one I expect to be in a bit longer.
Stage 4: Anger
Anger is a little strange for me. I knew I needed to get angry, but I had no reason to be angry with M. He didn't do anything wrong. Even when I'd asked him not to tell me about other people he was flirting with and it slipped out anyway, I couldn't get mad at him for that. It's not his job to take care of my feelings and reactions; it's mine. He's started fading away a little bit. He's not responding to my messages as often as he had been, and it's difficult to get him to answer even direct questions about specific plans. I'm pretty sure it's because he's flirting with someone else, and he can get very one-track-minded. I think that's where the anger will come from. I knew that we had different interpretations of our relationship from the get-go, but we agreed on our expectations of friendship and this isn't it. Now the struggle is to nurture healthy anger while maintaining a friendship.
What did make me angry was feeling like I had no agency in the situation. I felt like I didn't have a choice, like M decided when what would happen. We broke up when he was too close to falling, not when I was ready. It took almost two weeks (I'm now at 2 weeks, 2 days) to realize that I had a choice, and I made a choice.
M is ready to have a relationship, and for a while it was ok to be casual with me, knowing that I had a serious committed relationship as well. I don't know that a committed serious relationship between us would work, but he said he thought it could, given a different situation. It makes my heart happy to know that despite the fact that he had multi-year serious relationships, I'm the person he connected with the best. If I was available for it, he would be happy being in a more serious relationship with me.
Stage 5: Acceptance/agency
I talk about my life in terms of choice a lot. It's important to me that I choose to be with my partner every day. It's not a difficult choice to make -- he's amazing, we're great together, it's what I want for my life. But still, it's a choice. When M and I were saying goodbye after the breakup finally sank in for me, we were in my bedroom, in the house I share with my partner. As he was hugging me, he looked around. When I asked what he was thinking, he said my life is all set up. I have a partner and a house and pets and a job and impending graduate school and a life. That's something he wants in his life, but he's in the middle of a big transition, and he's not there yet.
I could have chosen to walk away from that, or more accurately to disentangle myself from that. I know it is an option to choose to be with someone else (or no one at all), to build a different life, or at least to destroy the life I've built. Just like it's an option to quit my job, hop a plane to Peru, and live in a tent in the mountains. These things are all possible and sometimes they sound like fun, but they aren't the life I want. The life I want is the one I've got, with the partner who's just right. This was a scary thing to admit to my partner, that I know I have the choice to leave. He has the same choice, and that scares me beyond belief. But I choose to trust him, and I choose to be trustworthy.
And so this is my choice. I choose to be happy, and I choose to believe that I can and will heal and grow. I will let my relationship with M become whatever it will be, and I will take space when I need it. I will find other people to be in my life as friends, lovers, or partners. I will fill my life up with love. Lucky for me, I'm very good at that.
So here's how this went.
I decided I wanted to find a casual relationship or two, and I got lucky. I let myself fall for M, the new guy in my life, though I knew from the beginning that he wouldn't be able to do anything more than a very very casual relationship. It ended after about a month and a half, after a lot of fun and a lot of love. I decided that I connected with him in a way that made me want to stay in each other's lives, though I have an irrational discomfort with the idea of him dating other women. This is the shortest relationship I've ever had with someone I love -- beginning in high school, I've had multi-year relationships nearly back-to-back -- so I was surprised to find myself going through the stages of grief that usually apply to breaking up, albeit not in order. I was also surprised (though I shouldn't have been) to find that my partner and my best friend, who is an ex-boyfriend, were standing by with open arms and warm reassurances
This is all very weird, in that it's not weird at all. When I started thinking about being polyamorous, I read The Ethical Slut, which is pretty much the bible of poly. I had issues with it then, and I still do, but everyone reads it because it's the only thing to be read. I remember thinking it must feel so different to be poly, to have multiple relationships, to negotiate that space, to lose a nonprimary relationship. But it doesn't. It feels the same. Sort of. And I think there needs to be some place that says that. So here goes.
Stage 1: Denial/isolation
Only in processing later did I realize that I went through this stage first and third. Through the whole six or so weeks that M and I were dating/fucking/doing our thing, I let the knowledge that it was finite fade from my mind. I didn't take that into account when deciding how much to invest in the relationship. When I met him, I had been talking to a few other people about potential casual relationships, and I let those go. It recognized that there are only 24 hours in a day, but it also meant that I put all my eggs in one basket, thus isolating myself a bit.
Stage 2: Bargaining
This was my second step, though it's usually the third of five when talking about grief. It's supposed to refer to bargaining with God, the universe, or something intangible. I found myself bargaining with M, stopping only barely short of losing my dignity. I knew that he saw our relationship as one between friends who share activities, and one of those activities was sex. I saw him as a sort of boyfriend, someone that I talked to a lot, who could provide emotional support, and to whom I felt intimately connected.
My first way of bargaining was to separate out the three aspects of our relationship: talking/hanging out, nonsexual intimacy like snuggling, and fucking. I hoped maybe he could do two of the three, being either fuckbuddies or cuddley friends. Those weren't options for him anymore. Next was pointing out that our last date had ended kind of dramatically (with a condom break and running around at 2 a.m. finding EC), and I hated that that would be the end of it. Or hey, maybe we could just pick a date to stop fucking, especially since we'd both be starting school soon (him in July, me in August). As expected, none of these things worked. He knew what he needed, and I knew it was coming.
Stage 3: Denial/depression
Here I went back to denial, mixed with depression. I knew that I would especially miss our habit of setting specific dates and times for specific activities. As the relationship went on, it had become less structured, but since having a date required scheduling when my partner would be out of the house, we had a weekly standing-but-flexible date for hanging out, fucking, and watching Firefly. We decided to still have dedicated friendates that would involve non-sex activities. The first one was really hard for me. It felt like an evening of constant rejection because I had still hoped it could be something other than it was. I'm still dealing with this a little bit, but now instead of denying that it's over, I'm denying that he's interested in someone else. (He is. He told me. I've asked him not to, but you can't always hide something that's on your mind constantly.)
The night that I consider the actual breakupI put up a new craigslist ad looking for a replacement. Before I met M, I had no idea that it would be something I didn't feel so casual about. I couldn't tell that from his emails or texts. But as I started talking to other guys, all I could think was "This isn't M. He doesn't look like him, he won't smell like him, he doesn't feel like him, this isn't going to be what I want." The depression stage is one I expect to be in a bit longer.
Stage 4: Anger
Anger is a little strange for me. I knew I needed to get angry, but I had no reason to be angry with M. He didn't do anything wrong. Even when I'd asked him not to tell me about other people he was flirting with and it slipped out anyway, I couldn't get mad at him for that. It's not his job to take care of my feelings and reactions; it's mine. He's started fading away a little bit. He's not responding to my messages as often as he had been, and it's difficult to get him to answer even direct questions about specific plans. I'm pretty sure it's because he's flirting with someone else, and he can get very one-track-minded. I think that's where the anger will come from. I knew that we had different interpretations of our relationship from the get-go, but we agreed on our expectations of friendship and this isn't it. Now the struggle is to nurture healthy anger while maintaining a friendship.
What did make me angry was feeling like I had no agency in the situation. I felt like I didn't have a choice, like M decided when what would happen. We broke up when he was too close to falling, not when I was ready. It took almost two weeks (I'm now at 2 weeks, 2 days) to realize that I had a choice, and I made a choice.
M is ready to have a relationship, and for a while it was ok to be casual with me, knowing that I had a serious committed relationship as well. I don't know that a committed serious relationship between us would work, but he said he thought it could, given a different situation. It makes my heart happy to know that despite the fact that he had multi-year serious relationships, I'm the person he connected with the best. If I was available for it, he would be happy being in a more serious relationship with me.
Stage 5: Acceptance/agency
I talk about my life in terms of choice a lot. It's important to me that I choose to be with my partner every day. It's not a difficult choice to make -- he's amazing, we're great together, it's what I want for my life. But still, it's a choice. When M and I were saying goodbye after the breakup finally sank in for me, we were in my bedroom, in the house I share with my partner. As he was hugging me, he looked around. When I asked what he was thinking, he said my life is all set up. I have a partner and a house and pets and a job and impending graduate school and a life. That's something he wants in his life, but he's in the middle of a big transition, and he's not there yet.
I could have chosen to walk away from that, or more accurately to disentangle myself from that. I know it is an option to choose to be with someone else (or no one at all), to build a different life, or at least to destroy the life I've built. Just like it's an option to quit my job, hop a plane to Peru, and live in a tent in the mountains. These things are all possible and sometimes they sound like fun, but they aren't the life I want. The life I want is the one I've got, with the partner who's just right. This was a scary thing to admit to my partner, that I know I have the choice to leave. He has the same choice, and that scares me beyond belief. But I choose to trust him, and I choose to be trustworthy.
And so this is my choice. I choose to be happy, and I choose to believe that I can and will heal and grow. I will let my relationship with M become whatever it will be, and I will take space when I need it. I will find other people to be in my life as friends, lovers, or partners. I will fill my life up with love. Lucky for me, I'm very good at that.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Lies I learned growing up in the suburbs
- Food comes from the grocery store. Vegetables come from cans or the freezer.
- No distance is too short to drive.
- All songs are love songs.
- Art is about being cultured, not about expression. It is done by Artists, not by the rest of us.
- Three meals a day. No more, no less.
- A meal is one meat, one starch, and one vegetable.
- Grocery shopping happens once per week, generally on the same day each week.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Assholes & Anchors
It starts here, with this email from a friend:
In responding to him later, I found myself writing about something I've been trying to avoid thinking about for a while. So here's that.
My best friend's father, a man who I have basically anchored my faith in humanity to and have looked up to as a second father for years grabbed his shit and abandoned his family a few weeks ago, and did so by all appearances to be with another woman. I just found out.
In responding to him later, I found myself writing about something I've been trying to avoid thinking about for a while. So here's that.
I know this is really throwing you. It's hard when the very few people you let yourself trust are the ones who fuck up in monumental ways. When I was talking about realizing that parents are just humans, I'm sure it sounded like I was brushing this off, so I want to tell you about when I had that realization with my dad.
My brother got married in 2005, which was a few months after I came out to my family and a week before I met my first partner (who's now my best friend). My dad and I hadn't really been connecting (it would be three years before he told me what a ridiculous reaction he was having to my coming out), but he'd always been the laissez-faire, be-my-kids'-best-friend kind of dad. He'd left my mom when I was 6 and my brother was 8, so he did the buying-our-love thing and it worked pretty well.
I drove to Florida for the wedding and spent time hanging out with my dad and brother while they test drove my first car, which I'd just bought. It was a really nice time, and I felt closer to them than I had since my mom moved me and my brother to Florida 11 years earlier. The three of us went to dinner with my brother's then-fiance, and we started talking about the wedding and how things would go, and how my brother had to negotiate the fact that we're close to both of our parents but not at all to our stepparents, but neither of our parents would've wanted to be introduced as if they were a couple. Out of nowhere, my dad says that if he had to walk in with my mom, he would much rather shoot her in the face. Much as I react to your gun violence-related jokes, I told him that wasn't funny. He told me he wasn't joking. I kept trying to get him to understand that that's my mother he was talking about and that was really fucked up to say about anyone, but it was my mother and the mother of his children. He didn't care. He truly meant, 100%, that he would like to shoot my mother in the face. I'm not one for huffing away, but I left the table. Thankfully I'd driven myself, but I couldn't go back to my mom's house to deal with that kind of awfulness.
I ended up pulling into a parking lot nearby and calling T, who talked me through understanding that parents are humans. No matter how much we valorize them, they are humans, and they have the same ability to be awful, confused, scared, or childish as any other person on earth. T said he had that realization about his parents around the same time most people do -- when he was a preteen. It took me a decade longer.
Since the asshole in question in your life isn't the father you grew up with, it's even harder. You didn't have childlike awe of him -- you had young adult-like awe, which feels like it should be far more reality-based. In general, I have a hard time balancing the idea of following my bliss and the idea of honoring commitments. It sounds like this dude had the same struggle, and he eventually came down on the side that makes you wonder what the point of building relationships and honoring commitments is at all. You can't decide he's a Bad Person because that means you were duped for years. You can't decide he just made a bad decision, or even made a decision that's good for his life, because we don't like to think of ourselves as people who can hurt our loved ones so deeply, especially in the service of our own happiness.
I don't have anything smart to tell you because there's nothing smart to do. It sucks. There is nothing that you can do to make it hurt less for yourself or the people you care about, and nothing you can do to un-make his assholic decision. This is going to hurt for a while. But hurt fades, and when it does, you'll find that you're still an introspective guy who can think about how this shook your world and how you can get a hold on it again. You'll get there. I don't know you well yet, but I know that you learn from everything that happens to you.
Take care of yourself. I'll be here for you when you need me.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Being a Supreme Court wife
There's been a lot of fervor over the fact that Ginni Thomas, wife of super-conservative misogynist Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, was running a teapartyish group called Liberty Central. She's recently stepped down very quietly now that the mid-terms are over.
There's been a lot of talk about how when you agree to be a Supreme Court justice, you give up certain rights, like expressing political positions. I agree with this overall, especially since a few of the ultra-conservative justices have been making public appearances at conservative fundraisers. But when we talk about "Supreme Court spouses" and how they agree to give up their rights, I can't help but sense the sexism in this assertion.
Of all the Supreme Court justices in history, four have been women. Three of those currently sit on the Court. Two of them do not have spouses. When we talk about who has to sit down and shut up, especially because their spouses have voices that overpower every law in the country, we are talking about women, though we conveniently call them "spouses." We are talking about yet another reason that women shouldn't just be overshadowed by our spouses' careers, but we should be controlled by them. Because "we" have "agreed" to accept a Supreme Court post.
It's true that spouses' political opinions often give a window into Supreme Court justices opinions, but it's not true that their spouses' actions actually do anything to affect their rulings. The fact that Ginni Thomas founded and headed a super-conservative political group doesn't tell us anything we don't know. Let's take a vote. Raise your hand if you didn't know that Clarence Thomas is a misogynist, conservative asshole.
Right. That's what I thought.
There's been a lot of talk about how when you agree to be a Supreme Court justice, you give up certain rights, like expressing political positions. I agree with this overall, especially since a few of the ultra-conservative justices have been making public appearances at conservative fundraisers. But when we talk about "Supreme Court spouses" and how they agree to give up their rights, I can't help but sense the sexism in this assertion.
Of all the Supreme Court justices in history, four have been women. Three of those currently sit on the Court. Two of them do not have spouses. When we talk about who has to sit down and shut up, especially because their spouses have voices that overpower every law in the country, we are talking about women, though we conveniently call them "spouses." We are talking about yet another reason that women shouldn't just be overshadowed by our spouses' careers, but we should be controlled by them. Because "we" have "agreed" to accept a Supreme Court post.
It's true that spouses' political opinions often give a window into Supreme Court justices opinions, but it's not true that their spouses' actions actually do anything to affect their rulings. The fact that Ginni Thomas founded and headed a super-conservative political group doesn't tell us anything we don't know. Let's take a vote. Raise your hand if you didn't know that Clarence Thomas is a misogynist, conservative asshole.
Right. That's what I thought.
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