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.

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.

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.

Political Histories

I get really excited about politics in the past. I think that's maybe because I get really excited about politics in general and I like to see the progression of how we got to where we now are. Yes, that is a very conservative notion on my part but this is a point where I am quite certian.

Especially concerning speeches of famous individuals. I really like speeches by those who were and still are considered famous mostly through political grounds. Currently in my posession I have speeches by, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Malcolm X, and Martian Luther King Jr. all for the sake of my play. Yet, really when I read the words in my book that are claimed speeches by Douglas I can't help but feel the nudge of excitement as I visualize the charachter and the man that was. I've read parts of his biblography and seen pictures of him so I am creating him while his words fold out in front of me. He was there and people listened to this speech. The past gives me an eerie poke of satisfaction, nothing exists singularly.

the Desire to Consume

All I've wanted to do for the last two or three weeks is consume. And I have been consuming so very much, in all different forms of media. I read comics and books and poems and short stories and blogs and newspapers. I listen to podcast of short stories and poems and politics. I watch movies and theatre and anime and youtube. In conversations I listen to stories and monologues and rants. I can never be doing only one. I read three books at a time not counting what I am doing for school. I get bored with one if I am alone with it for too long. Everything needs it's own break which is why I can't do blogs or tv shows everyday. Just a little L word today, and a little Kafka tomorrow, then some blogs and poems. Keep the balance, you know.

I have been eating it all up and ingesting it. All the art and the language on my computer or bookshelf or table.

I find myself wanting to spend my life reading in parks, on benches, in the library, on my couch, or in my garden. Spending hours of my life enriching myself, indulging in art.
I could be very happy.

For now I am also very happy, doing some consumption for school and some consumption for myself. and sleeping a little in between. It's a happy balance.



Right now the first volume of The Count of Monte Cristo is siting on my table along with 3 books of Kafka in the native German. One is Die Verwandlung which is one of my very favorite books, yet I have never read it in German. I am excited now to be about 3 pages in.

That's what ze said - the transqueer that is

Today I made a public blog statement that I wanted to start using gender neutral pronouns in the form of ze. This would in turn look like
Ze laughed
I called zer
Zer eyes gleam
That is zer
Ze likes zemself

Now before I was using the gender non-specific "n" as my pronoun so you all may wonder why the big change now. My idea behind "n" was to not make a blig public statement about my gender, or lack there of but instead try to use this individualistic expression as something not important. After reading more literature, and being active with a trans community online I've decided that the movement to make ze or em natural pronouns in the English language is an important shift.
When I choose to change my prounoun I am already making some sort of statement, weather I like it or not so I feel now that it is important for me to help alone the moevment in this way. being thought of as ze isn't that wierd to me anymore that she is but at lease now I can have the satisfaction that ze is going somewhere in the mind of those who have no idea about trans issues.

You may not understand this logic compleatly but I feel strongly that since I don't want to be refered to as she is doesn't matter what lable I actually aquire so why not help a term become more wide spread.
yeah?

Happy monday all

Queer as Fuck

I am sitting in my room with an open package of Hostess chocolate covered doughnuts(not vegan but I don't care right now!) to my left, and a jar of water to my right. The topic in my mind today, and everyday really is gender and my gendered self. With two looming conversations with my mother behind me (and an awkward conversation with my father), I think we have began to make some progress in understanding each other. I haven't mentioned things like pronouns or hormones with her because I know these things will only upset her, and I haven't made any decisions on this front yet.

At any rate, with so many more people questioning gender and identifying as queer I find myself back where I started years ago in my gender identity. Hell, not only are my gay and lesbian friends identifying as queers but I know straight girls and guys who take on this identity. It is not because they want to step down from their privileged seats in the straight world, but they fully believe they do not embody the identity they have had from childhood and have learned that even straight people can be queer. I fully agree with them and I honor there choice of identification, it just makes my own thoughts more complicated.

So, who am I!? I am someone who identifies as a genderqueer, or more frequently these days ambiguous. I find that if only for my own sake and for the further breaking down of gender I am in a position where some sort of identity clarification is necessary.

So what does ambiguous gender mean to me. Being ambiguous means 1) making a conscious decision on my presentation when in public and private, and making decisions on how to hold conversation, how to walk, what gaze I hold other individuals in, and so forth. 2) publicly announcing (not necessarily verbal) and being active in my gender expression. 3) understanding my gender expression is determined through traditional gender stereotypes such as skirts, or suspenders that I rarely merge or delude.

you can see that I almost always have gender in mind, even when I am not presenting myself to others. I constantly find myself studying individuals who fall more dominantly into the male or female sides of gender to learn cues and styles that are common or less common for each subtype. Although I am between genders, it is hard to live that in an overly gendered society therefore it is much easier to embody the stereotypical roles, sometimes even taking those roles to extremes in identities such as kings/queens.

You would think that will all of my thoughts on gender and with my identifying as an ambiguous person I would enter the movement with open arms. The truth of it is because I am rather femme I am not often take as an individual who completely has issues when it comes to public bathrooms, and who sometimes cringes at the pronouns people use when referring to [her]. My perceived gender is always female, and there is little I can do about that. It also doesn't help that I know I am not moving further into the tranny process because I am not looking to have a sex change. Although I am contemplating hormone usage I am staling that process because I don't want to include my mother and I still have small dreams of become a natural mother someday.

Also I am not 100% comfortable in my gender. Walking a mile in my own shoes is sometimes hard and I fall back into the femme lesbian identity more than I would like. Although I do not identify as a lesbian to anyone, I am perceived as one because I do partner exclusively with women. I understand that I am sending the world mixed messaged, but the world started it first! If you are as confused about genderqueer and gender ambiguity as you were when you first began reading, don't worry. You and I are not the only one's confused.

Assistant Stage Managers

I have been working on the North American premier of Testing the Echo, a British play by David Edgar. Tomorrow after an 8 week process it finally opens at Grinnell College. I am the Assistant Stage manager, and in charge of all the backstage business. Today after a bit too much stress I broke down and the actors saw me cry. I am embarrassed about it now, but I don't think any of them will say anything about it.

During this whole process I have been reading quite a bit of Theatre theory. Frances Harding has an article titled Presenting and Re-presenting the Self: From not-acting to acting in African Performance. I have been reading about African performance lately on my own accord because I think that I want to spend the rest of my life working with it. Re-Presenting the Self resonates with me especially now because it talks about the stage-hand as a performer who is support of the central character/charters. This performance role is a fully functional balance between acting and not acting. As the assistant stage manager I am performer the role of backstage mom, making sure that the actors do not worry about timing, costume, or other technical aspects of the performance. This is a very necessary role to have performed during any show, yet is the least recognized.

I have come to terms with the fact that an assistant stage manager's duties are invisible yet valuable. Harding say it better than I when he writes about stagehands, "in spite of the deliberate absence of visual signals (costuming, behavior, etc.) the stagehand is drawn into the "informational structure" of the performance. It is because they are invisible that the show is able to be experienced in its entirety. I wish I could thank all the invisible assistant stage managers of the world for the hidden magic they bring to the stage.