In the wake of 'When We Were Orphans' (a good book)

There is a certain number of things I have marked as impossible in my life. Currently I muse about the impossibility of reading all of the "good" books in the world. Regardless of the tastes embedded in the term "good" I firstly do not read all of the languages of the world, which significantly decreases my available literature even those in translation. Secondly, books that are deemed "good" in a highly praised way are constantly being produced. Thus, one can never fully have a grasp on the concept and breadth of good books to begin with.

Love is Contagious

During finals week, my campus we torn by grief and depression and stress and fear and hurt. As a community we were broken and hurting. I was racked, and confused and hurting in my own way and decided to start a paper crane making project. It ended up being a lot more successful than I ever imagined, totaling 1132 cranes by Wednesday night.

I needed something to keep myself together, and the cranes gave me a puropose and a reason to be somewhere. Keeping me from being along or dwelling by myself. I am very thankful for everyone who participated and needed the cranes in their own way.


The photo was taken when we put all the cranes on a table to give away. 500 more cranes were gifted to the project on Thursday morning and over the summer I am going to sting the cranes so that they can hang in the windows of the Stonewall Resource Center (our queer hub).

The Reason I Feel This Way

Fear is defined as an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.

anger is defined as a strong feeing of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility.

rage is defined as violent, uncontrollable anger.


My anger is raging and yet I am filled with frightening alarm and panic when I think about campus and stepping foot onto it. This fear is deep inside of me, rooted into a place that I can not touch.

The story: This weekend death threats when up around my campus geared towards faggots and queers. Someone carved into a bathroom door hateful and frightening words that resonate through the community and shake the ties that are already infuriated and unsteady. Our campus is dividing, and hurting in a whole new series of ways, and for once I feel out of control and helpless. I can sit in a room and feel safe reclaiming small spaces at a time. I do not believe that I will reclaim all of the spaces though. We can take action, but I am ever fully aware of retaliation and the ability for counter actions to occur.

Many small things have lead up to this last weekend, and the one before it causing the breakdown of safety and trust. 76 women we targeted last weekend in acts of misogyny, a term I am not trowing around lightly. These women were hurt by men in their lives and communities that they thought they knew and trusted. In some cases their own girlfriends where the butt of the jokes. I am not pinning the acts on one person, or even on a group of people instead I want to focus on the internal mindset and pack mentality that continuously leads to this sort of violence. I do not believe the men actually meant harm onto the women, but the blatant lack of disrespect in something we can not hide from or brush under the rug. I think there is a lot more sequestered than many of us are willing to admit.

So, here goes. I am an angry, fearful, ashamed, out-and-loud, queer, trans person who currently holds fear and internal bias against many white straight men at the college and in my life. The bias has always been with me, with out my consent or my desire to have it. I hate to admit it, but my inclination is deep within me and comes from years of hate and threat from my small community growing up. It comes from the fear I felt in gym class after coming out in high school. It comes from the peer pressure that accompanied me leaving the cheerleading squad, and the deep resentment I still feel inside of me because of this. I was fearful in my community as a junior high and high school stunted, but I lived with that fear and addressed it and became a gay role model in my conservative high school setting. I've tried to move on through the horrible things that happened to me, through the hate and fear I felt in that environment and more importantly away from my classification of straight males as the enemy. It has been hard, and I admit I don't even know or assume the acts against queers this weekend were carried out by an individual who identifies as straight or male, but when I move through the community it is these individuals who I perceive as more of a threat to me personally. These are the words and thoughts that I hide in my darkness, that I attempt to not act upon or through. I think we may all have something hiding in the dark that we react to on a cellular level and that can not washed away too easily.


At Grinnell, I am expected still to fulfill that role, but now I am expected to have a level head and control my fear and anger in a just and responsible manner. I am expected to discuss with members of my community who I fear the most, my emotions and my hesitations and my hopes for moving forward. And the fear and resentment is deep inside of me, mostly untapped until something like this weekend's events happen. Then it manifests itself though shortening of breath when I enter or exit certain spaces. It manifests through the isolation I feel in large groups, and the paranoia I have when walking, especially aline. My mouth gets dry, my heart races and my mind goes numb filling only with the voices and images of my past that strike fear into my heart, mind and body. It is physically and mentally debilitating, yet it is internal and personal and almost impossible to detect unless you are living inside of me.

The members of the community who are affected by this the most, the victims are always looked to for the driving force. Action can firstly not be taken without their consent and secondly often involves their own initiative and motivation. The members devastated are the first t react and many are asked or expected to become the face and the drive, even if some remain anonymous we do not expect the strongest and the most ready to step forward and react.

In a way that is what I am doing here, I am reacting and letting my voice be heard. Even through the pain and fear I have to continue to live and react and thrive.

Art is acedemic too you know!

My campus newspaper often does a special survey where they question students "ARH or Noyce?" This question is meant to create a tally of students who like ARH - where most of the humanities classes are taught or Noyce - the science center.

Yesterday I was in Noyce when asked the vague question "ARH or Noyce" stunned I looked at the questioner and answered "The question should be Bucksbaum or Noyce, so Noyce." He laughed and then carried on his survey to other students in the study area. Apart from the obvious bias of questioning students already in the science center, I began to think about the bias against arts at Grinnell College. It's not a huge apparent divide, but it's large enough to be noticeable.

I spend hours of my day in Bucksbaum, with class and Theatre (both paid and volunteer) and working on projects I can spend half a day in Bucksbaum easily. I know I am in the minority of students at Grinnell but other Theatre students and artists understand my commitment to this building. Not many classes outside of the arts meet in Bucksbaum, only a few English classes are ever moved into these spaces and they are normally the Shakespeare or theatrically driven English courses. I am not saying the system is flawed, because I understand we only have a few class rooms and the rest of the spaces are designed for studio or artistic spaces. I simply wish the arts and artists on campus were recognized as academic instead of creating a divided where only ARH and Noyce are considered acedemic hubs. The work I do in Theatre and the arts is as acedemically drived, with research and procedure taking presidence. Theatre and art also have history and theory that have to be understood, critiqued, and learned.

Extra Energy

I think we all may carry about extra energy. This may be energy from stress of frustration or from happiness or even from sugar. Regardless of the cause of the build up we have to learn how to expel the energy from us. I've learned a lot of techniques to deal with panic over the years. I have even been able to learn how to deal with grief and jealousy. Yet, there are still some forms of energy that I am incapable of dealing with. They distract me, taking away from my day and work. It doesn't upset me that I am distracted by this energy, because it is filled with content and wonder.

I am learning how to deal with energy right now that is growing in silence. It is an interesting new feeling that I hope to better understand and articulate in the future.

For now, this is where I am.


p.s. Midnight has to move, and I still don't know where she will be going.

2010 Grinnell Monologue: Presented in Bob's Underground Cafe

My Path to Enlightenment

I was not a promiscuous girl. As a child I did not show my private parts to any of my playmates, nor did I desire to see any of theirs. I did not explore my own genitalia until a much older age than most report, and even so I did not feel throbs of eroticism until my mid-high school years. I did not know the term orgasm until I was thirteen, and I didn't have my first until nineteen. I may have been a late erotic bloomer, but I have not wasted time in my life. It seems every time I come into the g-mons forum I am enlightened in a different way than the time before. Or I am struggling with the intersections of my own sexuality, sensuality and situations. I am in a constant battle to understand the nature of my sexual condition.

I have long prescribed to serial monogamy, and the rapid turn around from one relationship to the next seeking an outlet for my sexual tension and a net of emotional security in a single other person. This led to a roller-coaster of emotions as I struggled to understand myself in the havoc of post relationship and then in the honeymoon phase of the next.

After many earth shattering breakups I have decided I am done with investing my whole self and all my pieces into one basket. Instead, I am discovering my own promiscuity, intellectual desire and pleasure surrounding sexual relationships, or what I will refer to here as erotic play.

I have begun to construction a series of interpersonal relationships that circle around each other, but do not dissect or disturb each other. Each one is conscious of the next, and the continuation requires a great depth of communication and understanding. I have been doing this semi-unconsciously, before the recent past, with my ex-boyfriend. He constitutes the outward most ring of relationships in my life. The situations is such that, we remain in distant communication and if we find ourselves in the same spacial area we are likely to have coffee and an afternoon frolic. This hasn't happened since fall break of my first year (before he joined the Marines and became a very different person), yet he remains a distant lover and a source of erotic play in my life. This relationship required a much smaller amount of energy to maintain that other points of erotic play, yet is no less satisfying or meaningful than the ones it orbits.

In order to understand and construct the remaining sources of erotic play in my life, it is important to understand that conditioned monogamy leaves little room for this type of promiscuity. There seems to be conflict between fucking and the rest of human activity. I believe that fucking or other erotic play is equally part of the human experience and the transition between them should be as fluid as the moving from a activity such as eating, to and activity such as studying. I define erotic play far outside the bounds of fucking, sucking and touching, though, because I derive erotic play from flirting and nonsexual relationships. These traditionally nonsexual encounters are included in the construction of circles, because I am creating connections and play that satisfy me in very different yet distinct ways. Before I began my pursuit of promiscuous circles, I sharply divided my romantic relationship from my less than romantic relationships. The inner most ring, was held for supreme sexual pursuit, usually monogamous, and the outer rings were only being utilized when the middle circle was vacant. The sexual circles that surround the base circle consist of single night hook-ups and lasting sexual relationships and well as flirtatious physical relationships which don't lead to fucking. These basic aspects travel over to my current model of relationship building with a very important addition, my own personal emotional understanding of these relationships and how they fulfill me and change me.

At anytime these relationships have the possibility to shift placement in the circles. A once close lover may slip into the further bounds of my circle, where I would only seek them out monthly or less than that, while someone who was less frequently a member of my life may come into a more consistent relationship with me. I am also open to the shift of a non-sexual flirtatious person into a physically driven source of erotic play, or visa-versa. I am in a place where I can accept this fluctuation openly and without hesitation, because I understand I am also shifting places in the life of those around me. I can now see the existence and fluidity of my primary partner and the rings which surround him/her/zer from my other sources of erotic play. I am also still able to find some sense of emotional security with a primary partner, without completely investing myself in that one person.

Emotional and physical security is a major tenant which leads erotic play into monogamous coupling, I am not trying to devalue the security we feel with one individual, instead I am urging for a different level of security with two, three or more individuals. There is a strong connection that two erotically sexual lovers have for each other. Two lovers create a level of comfort reached through erotic play that can be healthy and satisfying, yet when we start to define ourselves through these relationship it can leading to coupling. Coupling is something I am now more hesitant to indulge in. This is because of the eventual fading and shifting of relationship in our lives. When I've placed too much value on one situation, I have been left hopeless when the erotic or emotional aspect of this person has left our life.

I still have individuals that I hold closer than others both physically and emotionally, but I am Choosint to define each relationship separately. I'd also like to make clear that I am not simply fucking around, in fact I am in drastically fewer sexual situations than is normal for me when outside of a monogamous relationship.

Finally, I do not subscribe to indiscriminate and evasive coupling, that promiscuity normally get's a bad name for. Instead, I am excited by the idea of progressing and exploring new bodies both physically and intellectually. I hope to have found yet another plane of sexual enlightenment which I hope will lead to working interpersonal relationships. This existence is teaching me a lot about myself, my sensuality and my sexuality. I've learned about attachment and jealously towards others. I've also worked on healthy communication and relationships. In my new system, I do not have a claim on any of the individuals in my life, and they do not have a claim on me so I am free to explore what feels good in the moment. Without the huge emotional lose of self if something goes wrong or changed in these relationships.

Next time I enter this forum I may be monogamous, celibate, or further liberated from those bounds, never-the-less I have no choice but to understand these changes as the nature of my sexual condition. This is my current path – my path to enlightened promiscuity.