The Cob and Log Hampster Wheel

Hello.

So, I took a big writing hiatus, but now I’m back. If you want to read what I ended up completing for BC, feel free to ask me for it. I’m preparing to shop it around to publishers, and since I did not return to the jazzy jam that is Brook Farm Academy, I am now am just hanging out finishing up at BC, looking for substitute teaching positions, and supporting the dear, sweet lesbians of the undergraduate, and working on a gender-neutral coming-out space on campus. Taking a few more required courses, gazing into the enormous depths’ of my colleagues’ diamond rings, the usual for the Ives.  Since everything is boring this semester, I’m pretty big into writing letters and/or drawing portraits of classmates/professors. let me know if you want one.

Anyway, my mother called me a shack-up hussy today and tried to refer me to Dr. Laura Schlesinger for relationship advice.  Like an obedient daughter, I consider the questions that Dr Laura considers Top Priority .

Why hasn’t he called?
Do you really want to be with someone who is not giving you back what you’re giving?
Are you a volunteer hostage?
How do I teach a man to respect me?
What is true Intimacy?
What is sexual addiction?
Should you hang in there or leave?
What is the difference between Sexual Passion and Mature Love?
Who is really responsible for birth control?

Mom, you’re right. I don’t know whose responsible for birth control!

I’ts hard for me to play dumb with my mother, but also hard to convey to  her in a few short outtakes that more pertinent concerns of mine would be more like does fisting on the first date requires gloves?  or How do I negotiate pronoun usage in heteronormative environments while grappling with the the tension of myself as a teacher-authority with (in)visible privilege? or Would Justin Timberlake ever go on a date with me?

My mother is very, very funny so initially I thought she was kidding about Dr Laura. And I’m not quite sure if she is or not. I think she is kidding in the way that people are when they are trying to passively indicate to you their hoped-for outcome.

As the conversation continued, though, I don’t think that she was kidding. When she called me a shack-up hussy, it became clear to me that my mother either doesn’t know that Dr Laura beleives homosexuality to be a "biological error,"  or she also doesn’t understand the politics of relationships in a modern context.  I think there are equal parts discomfort with gay stuff and confusion over gender stuff.  I think that she is confused as to who is "the man" in my relationships, and thus doesn’t know who to blame for things like "running a house of ill repute," or "looking like a slut." 

So, the other day I was really hung up on somebody complaining about "all the T-boys at the Midway,"  but then I turn around and have  my mom telling me that I am never going to find true love and respect if I don’t start acting like a responsible woman and my response was, "Oh, I think it’s cold for my cellphone to work anymore chhhhh, mom I can’t her you chhhhhhhhh I have to go."   I clicked my phone shut and jammed it in my pocket. I can’t have this conversation anymore, even though I know that eventually I am going to have to.  If I move back to the Bay Area, I will be within a day’s driving distance of them, and there will be summertime beach trips and evenings spent eating Thai and drinking Pinot on a patio while she tries to engage me (as she has been my entire adult life) in "girl talk," and I think that i will finally,  at the tender age of 30, for me to tell my mom, to really just shut the fuck up with her gender binary. 

BUT FIRST, I think that I am going to call Dr Laura with the "relationship issue" that my mother thinks that I am having (and for the record, I am having no problem). Because my mother seems to love Dr Laura, and Dr Laura thinks that sexual deviancy is abominable, I want to see what Dr. Laura will say if I call her up and tell her that my mom told me to call her and ask her opinion. I am trying to frame the question in a way that gets me past the screenerse, but also isn’t boring old regular gay rhetoric that is yawningly similar to the GLAAD StopDrLaura campaign. 
I’ll let you all know before I call Dr Laura. Now, go do the right thing!

Mere hours after I typed my last joyous post, I sat in a classroom in high school in which bigotry erupted. The teacher did nothing while 16 year olds pounded their fists on the table reminding us that it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.  The teacher nodder her head to some students, shook it at others, but did not mitigate the fear of queerness that had been unleashed (by a seemingly non-threatening expository text titled, "American Government: Current Issues"). I wont’ repeat all of the gory details here, but there were at least 10 students talking at once. It was incredibly unsafe for any potential GLBT youth in the room (actually unsafe for anyone with a conscience, really).

The next evening, a 17 year old was found in a parking lot about 5 blocks from the high school, with his clothes torn, and his body covered in swastikas and "gay slurs."   When I relayed this information to the teacher’s in the lounge at lunch (worried that it was one of the silent students in that class, terrorized by one of the vocal students), the reponse was a muted affirmation that it wasn’t one of our students. And then, "So, anyway, the new LL Bean…" ( I could not make this stuff up if I TRIED! And beleive me, I try. Every day I go home and think that maybe I imagined everything that went on. People cannot really be like this, can they?)

The long and short of it is that I have to write a full summary for the higher-ups at BC.  You can’t tell anyone about this, but I wanted to post this so that you all know what’s going on. It’s really intense. Really intense.  I met with the Dean last week, etc.

Interestingly, I have been gender-crossing in the teacher’s lounge.  I  sat at the male teacher’s table the other day as an experiment.  Their reaction will shock you, delight you, and hopefully make you continue to be you. Because it’s important that we’re out here.

God, folks, there is so much to tell you. I wish I could sit down and focus long enough to get it all down, but I feel blocked. I have to get this summary down, but I fret that I won’t tell the story right, and that nothing will happen.  I can’t bear the thought of that, but I feel somehow compelled sometimes to turn inwards. Or to beleive the stories that They tell, that I’m crazy, that I’m the one that is biased and intolerant, that I’m idealistic, that I’m asking for too much. Well, everything is too much! I have been hungry since the day I was born, since I was first taught how to hate my body — and the feast has only begun.

Lovelies: Every day I go to high school with all of you in my back pocket, so thank you for being here, and please continue to be here. I am up against a lot right now. Not just a big faceless amorphous machine, but a very real situation unfolding before me.  Someone has to sign off on my teaching liscense in a month, and both of those people have indicated to me that they don’t support gay people. So, yes, I’m writing my thesis; yes, it’s my birthday this week; and yes, I going to be really brave and do this, but only because we will die if we don’t stop being silent. I will kill myself if I am silent and starving.  This is what my twenties taught me. Thirty will be dirty and full.

Friends!

This will  be brief, but I had to share the joyous news that my advisor says that my work will be publishable.  This is  my ethnography on being a genderqueer teacher, and what can be observed in student intellectual risk-taking when I use dialectical journals in my history classroom to explore issues of identity. This would not have been possible without the comments and encouragement that I received after posting the excerpt. The zine still is not finished, but a birthday dinner is happening soon.    I am really thankful for all of us being all of us.   We. Are. So. Brave.

Hey y’all again…this is another excerpt from the almost-finished zine. This follows the previous entry chronologically. Love, ives

October 3. The silencing has already begun.

I have been brash and outspoken with my supervisors. My supervising teacher as well as my clinical faculty from BC are well-aware of my opinions. They applaud and appreciate my politics, my sense of social justice, my approach to discipline; they work with me on these things, and they allow me to take up quite a bit of space in meetings sorting through all of the different data and philosophical abstractions about my students and my teaching. What they aren’t aware of, though, is my internal struggle of my sexuality, my gender. My realness.

Some people have asked me, "Why does it matter if you are out or not to your students?"   This seems to be some sort of professional question, alongside whether or not I talk about my weekend plans or what movies I like. My students can obviously already see that I’m "cool," though; they know it. They make sly references to Little Wing and tell me that they say, "yeah, we’ll see you on Myspace, Ms Schlegel." We are figuring each other out. As a teacher, I am sending barely perceptible semaphore, but they receive the more obvious ones first.

I live my life in the spirit of insurrection, of transgression, and of border-crossing of all kinds; when I come into the classroom to teach, I feel that this spirit is apparant to them even subtly. Teaching requires, for me, then, a very delicate balance of teaching students to cross those boundaries, and also policing those boundaries.   

It is easy for me to understand policing professional boundaries, and keeping "personal" details private.  But I have a harder time being "in the closet," both as a queer and as a genderqueer, because it requires work that I am not invested in doing.  On the other hand, I am not necessarily safe in my environment to be "out." I am still being supervised as a student teacher, I am not liscensed, and I am still a student at BC.  In my mind, I am larger than life /Freddy Mercury/etc, but to those who would exploit my weaknesses there are many things that I have to aggressively maintain as a secret.

So yesterday, in the teacher’s lounge, I was sitting with 3 other student teachers from BC — an entirely new crop of frothily-dressed girls, but a group with whom I get along and appreciate more than the girls at the other school.  To my other side were the tenured teachers eating jell-o out of Tupperwares and drinking zero-calorie soda pop. I felt submerged in a sea of heteronormativity.  When I feel this way at my school, I remind myself that I exist in many places besides this one, and that I am myself no matter what. I sometimes touch the edge of my chest binder, or adjust my feet in such a way that I can hear the sound of my cowboy boots scrape across the floor.  These things keep me glued to myself.

But somehow the conversation turned specific enough that I — in another uncensored moment — referenced someone that I had been seeing lately. They immediately asked me what "his" name was. 

I opened my mouth, but then realized what was happening: we are having this conversation. And not just about a date, but about me and who I am ( /am not). The table was looking at me expectantly, and eyes looked over whole wheat bread sandwiches and mugs of tea: shining, bright, cooperative and friendly student teachers waiting to welcome me into their girly land, which they have no idea I don’t really belong in.

I was on the precipice of that choice.  I could tell them I’m gay at this moment. It would only really — really — take 3 little letters strung together to clue them in, and then a hurried, rushed sentence to clarify it. I imagined myself doing it: I’d take a big breath, I’d say it and then I’d tell them, "Well, you know, this is just who I date and this is just who I am, so don’t tell the students because this doesn’t go beyond this teachers’ lounge."

And then I looked around at the teachers and faculty.  The administrative assistant who I’ve heard talking about the dress and makeup of other teachers. The math teacher who calls the students "idiots" and "losers" behind their backs.  The BPS central office dudes in a suit hunched over a spreadsheet in the back. Could I trust anybody in this room to not tell anybody else if they overheard this?

And even if they weren’t there and the student teachers didn’t tell anybody — once that’s out, would it mean the end of the coffee chats in the reading lounge or the shared resource book, or the laughing with each other in our clincal meetings. Would it mean the end of camraderie and the beginning of an exile, and exile which I socially can’t cope with?

I didn’t feel like I had a choice with what to say in response to what "his" name is.  And –truthfully — to me, the gender pronouns that would place me to these girls on the straight side of things — is not inaccurate. Any pronoun is accurate, but to these girls, pronouns aren’t an appetizer platter being offered forward with the promise of possibility that if you don’t like the shrimp puff you can always get the bruschetta on the next round.  To them,pronouns are prix-fixe, you break it you buy it, buyer beware.

Could I have said anything different in this context?  I played along, and then went into the staff bathroom off the cafeteria. And opened up an instructional supply catalog, and cried for 10 minutes straight.

later

During government class, my supervising teacher, who co-teaches this particular class with me, was leading a lesson on debate and discussion skills.  Student pairs had just shared their thoughts on immigration, which had, of course, morphed into a discussion on personal freedoms and "hot button" issues. Someone asked the teacher what she thought, personally, and she replied that she didn’t want to tell people what she personally thought because she didnt’ want to influence the discussion.  I agreed and felt releived that I wouldn’t have to share my own opinions with the students.

Suddenly, though, she took her glasses off and laid them on the table with a sigh. "You know," she said tiredly. "I"m a hippie about a lot of things, but I can be very conservative about other things."  The students went silent, rapt with the slow revelation of a teacher’s personal and political thoughts.  "I am very conservative," she went on, "about things like having babies out of wedlock, or living together out of wedlock…"   

When I think about this part of her spiel now, I can hear the sound of a ticking clock, although I know that I didn’t realize then what was about to come next, or how many minutes of blissful innocence I had left in the classroom.

"And I don’t support," she said, "People of the same sex having children."

One student yanked his head up off the desk and looked at her quizzically. Another student who had been waiting with his hand raised put his hand down.  She had everybody’s attention in that room, but I couldn’t tell if they agreed or disagreed. Something told me that they themselves disagreed.

Of course she didn’t move on or take attendance a second time or snap down the projector screen or something dramatic like that. She kept talking, listing all of the certain "conditions" that would be "okay" for gay people to adopt children. Like, say, if someone died, and their gay sister had to adopt the child.  Like, say…a bunch of white noise blanked out by my own horror.

I swiveled my chair back around to my desk, feeling sick and nauseous. I looked at all of my students, my students who know me and have said that they like me and are working harder and harder for me as the semester goes on. I silently drilled little mental telegrams into their heads with the ferociousness of my thoughts: "Don’t let me down, kids. Speak up. Use your voice."  I had a wierd feeling that they could say something to disagree with her, to express their thoughts, to express the tolerance that all the corny magazines tell them to express but that they actually do anyway in their actions and niceness.  I wanted my students, with their swagger and bravado, to tell her that she was wrong. With the same nasty and rude demeanor that they sometimes tell me that they didn’t do their work because they didn’t feel like it, I wanted them to tell her that she was wrong.

The authority of the teacher hung in the room like the picture of the gallows still on the board from the French Revolution lesson earlier in the morning. My students stayed silent.  I stayed silent.  I turned around to my desk, and started composing a note in my little teacher plan book.

"Dear Ivy.  I am so sorry. I did the best I could.  You know the truth, and it will speak louder than the silence in this room. Love, Ivy, Ivan, Ivanovich, Iveroo Ives MacIverson."      I wanted to run, I wanted to leave, I wanted to cry, I wanted to lay down on the floor under the table and sob, but all I could do was write myself a note, pin it to the inside of my teacher sweater, smile at my cooperating teacher and supervisor, smile at my students, and get back up there and start on another lesson. 

Hey y’all: this is an excerpt from my new zine. It should be finished by my birthday, so let me know if you want to read the whole thing. Much love, ives

I am simultaneously excited and confused by this turn of events. In some ways, turning 30 is kind of like having a dirty and dangerous lover who doesn’t actually give me an orgasm.  Like, it’s kind of hot and kind of offensive, and I am kind of pinned to the bed but it doesn’t really feel all that good, but it doesn’t feel bad yet I don’t want it to stop because it feels like it’s going to get really good really soon and regardless, it looks really hot, so I’m going to keep turning around and looking at how hot that shit is and wish that somebody could take a picture.  I am forever turning away from my spectacular self, always looking to see how it looks. I watch myself being watched: always.

            So what is interesting about living my late twenties is that I’ve felt as if for the first time, I am not just watching my body but I am living in my body. I am no longer anorexic, I am no longer confused in the way I was before about my sexuality or my identity, I can hardly even remember the pain of being raped or assaulted or what that felt like.  My scars have been beautifully sewn up by the strong hands of people I’ve lived and loved with, and now I reside in a body with very little  dark corners of misunderstanding.

But at this time when I started feeling so foxy super fine confident ( like I am all hot Zen and white lightening and my movements are quick and sharp) I dive-bombed myself into this crazy heteronormative paegentry of entitlement, decided to become a high school history teacher (a job that is awesome and political for many reasons, but which involves some policing of my own identity by the rigorous scrutiny of adminstrators, students, parents and co-workers), and moved myself clear across the country to a city that is not know for it’s welcomeness to strangers.   

And instead  of confidently rocking myself as I always have (get used to this shit, world), I’ve found myself hesitant around things, and then, of course, surprised at my hesitance. Things that I do that seem totally normal and even special and generously important to me (having public sex, ass fucking on the first date,  having multiple sex partners, getting fisted or even just talking about fisting loudly with friends over coffee) are really actually quite bizarre and potentially fucked  up to the straight world. I sometimes look at some my dating situations now through the eyes of an “outsider” (yes, someone outside of the subculture); through their lenses, I should be either committed to a group home or pastorally cared for as a diseased individual. 

For instance, let’s look at the people that I worked with last semester.  I student teach at a high school, with 3 girls that are in my program at

Boston

College

.  They are both really nice girls, very into their boyfriends and also into wearing these outfits all the time that I can only describe as ‘frothy.’  By that I mean that they seem to have a lot of accoutrements: various feathers and non-functional fuzzy buttons and pearl drops hanging off sweaters and things like that.  They wear pointy-toed shoes and stiletto boots.  Our supervisor was a very intense hardliner administrative type person.  She wears stiletto heels also, but generally wears vice-principal attire, and always carries around a giant binder of lots of index tabs. (I have certain irritations with the way she runs her hands up and down the divider tabs of her binder, but that’s another topic).

            2 girls and I tended to have lunch together in the teacher’s room.  The real teachers talked union shop talk, and the 3 of us tended to talk about boyfriends. By this I mean that these girls had conversations about their boyfriends, and I ate my hardboiled egg and acted like I was playing along.    The conversation usually went like this:

            Bootsy: Oh my god, my boyfriend’s TV was broken this weekend, so we couldn’t watch Lost.

            Mitsy: Oh my god, my boyfriend’s cable wasn’t working this weekend either!

            Bootsy: So annoying.

            Mitsy:  I know. We went out to dinner instead.

            Ivy: (chewing thoughtfully)

I tend to keep my personal life very far away from my school life, but sometimes my desire to belong overrides my better sense.  And, as you may or may not know, at the time, I was in a serious relationship with my best friend, who is a non-trans fag. So, one afternoon, when I busted out “my boyfriend,”   I didn’t realize at the time how much it would change the dynamic of our conversations, but suddenly I was in a sorority with these girls.  it was pretty dramatic when I did. I wasn’t really thinking of the long-term affect of having a boyfriend to talk about it; I was shortsightedly focused on the conversation at hand, and when Mitsy asked me where I was going for Spring Break, I said, “To visit my boyfriend.”   Bootsy and Mitsy squealed with such delight and surprise that I knew right away that they had tagged me as a dyke but were now really excited that I like dick.

            They immediately wanted all the details.  Hmmmm, ladies. What details do you want? I mean, do you want to know how big his dick is, because it’s pretty big, and do you want to know what a little fag he is, because he’s a total bitch, and do you want to know how queer is queer? Because, girls, it’s pretty queer.

            Sometimes I realize that it does not matter to me that these girls don’t know the whole story, because who are they to me? What do Bootsy and Mitsy mean to me? But it’s not about them: it’s about my story, my partners, and my details. It’s about feeling like I have to hide these things; therefore, I don’t feel like I am necessarily choosing to keep private the details of some of the other hot and wonderful people I am dating here in

Boston

.   So, when I came to school in late spring, all freshly fucked after an amazing night of amazingly hot sex with a new (local) lover, I couldn’t  plop myself down with the Sex In the City crowd and say, “Oh my god, Bootsy. Guess how hot and off the hook shit was last night!”   And yet, if Mikey had been in town and I had gotten some deep dicking last night, I would have felt comfortable doing so, and Bootsy and Mitsy would have squealed with delight and probably ask me what my favorite position is.

            And all of those thoughts were for someone who, if Bootsy and Mitsy had met, would have read as a straight man.  This is intensely heightened with the potential for me to message about my other lovers, or myself and the kinds of relationships I conduct.  When the pronoun precedes the presentation, how are we messaging who we love, who we fuck, who we are?  In a heavily mainstreamed world, people accept a certain type of shorthand.  But they have less access to my shorthand, and I fumble with language trying to either approximate it, or hide it all together.

            I feel like there are a few levels to having to keep my real life under wraps: the queerness, the genderqueerness and the nonmongamy.

The queerness is in some ways a matter of process, or gradient based on who knows what and has access to what points of information. Do straight people have the necessary information with which to deconstruct everything, so that if I said that I was a fag in this relationship with Mikey that they would understand? Or do I need to give them a graphic organizer to help them take it all apart and recontextualize their idea of sex so that it’s completely sensical that dykes and fags could date each other without ever using the word “bisexual,” or that genderqueer is a state of being or that I think that the gender binary is really some new kind of dildo and can go get fucked.

     Most people don’t, I think, examine their own gender identity with the amount of scrutiny that makes something like this possible, or even useful.

            But this is how I see it.  And this is what I carry around with me the tightest as I think through a whole host of other issues.  Really, what about – I mean, really what-to-the-nth-degree about — being a genderqueer teacher? What about being a gay teacher at all?  What will it be like as we (as a community grow older), in general?  How do we care for each other’s process and praxis and lives and changes?  Who will help me take care of my parents if I’m alone?  Who will I raise kids with? What will all of those relationships look like?

So I start teaching tomorrow.  I have my faggy teacher outfit ready to go, and these questions are looming prominently in my mind.  Perhaps I should be spending my time thinking about my pedagogy much more than my personal relationships and presentation within the school culture context, but it is irrevocably true that we teach who we are. And for the first time in my adult life, I feel that the reality of who I am is simultaneously at its most vulernable and most clear. It’s waiting to be told, but I’m not sure who is going to hear it, or what will construct the message. I’m scared and excited and hopeful.  As per usual.

I had my first seizure when I was 20.  I have hoped to have my last by the time I turn 30.  I’ve had them in wierd places, like the J-train, zazen practice at the Zen Center, or on the puke-green carpeted floor of a motel in Waynesville, Virginia while my bestfriend/husband, who was suffering from a 24-hour flu, threw up puffed-millet in the bathroom.

Amazingly, one place I’ve never had a seizure is while riding freight trains. The first time I rode a train, as we gained speed and the urban landscape melted into the distance, I felt a calm so intense I felt drugged.  Riding trains is a noisy endeavor, but one that shuns casual conversation or chattering analysis.  The roar of the engine, the rhythym of the rails, and the low whine of the passing crossing guard bells come together in a strange circus-like aura atmosphere. I’ve had auditory hallucinations on trains, of circus music, of speed metal, of electroclash bit data, and I’ve sat quietly listening to them as if I was being played a soundtrack from heaven.

Seizures are hard.   My holy body causing havoc from the overload of hypoglycemia, radio and television at a certain volume, high buzzing, flickering lights, fear. Epilepsy is a disorder of which specialists only understand a fraction.  Perhaps some nuerologists have researched and have theories and optimistic research underway (and I’d bet those neurologists have partners who have woken up seizuring in bed, or bitten their tongue during a pre-seizure aura, or endured hapless misunderstanding).   I’ve been told that the cause of my seizures may never be known, but knowing my triggers, I try to avoid them.

Which is why I originally worried about riding freight trains.  I thought that the stimulus, the temperature fluctuation and the noise might keep me awake and agitated, thus creating the perfect environs for seizures.  But a former lover who took me on my first long-distance trip told me that she would pull the e-brake on the train to stop it, and that we’d sleep as much as we could through all of the noise.  Though I’d been on short trips, I was slack-jawed with amazement at how good it felt to sit silently for hours on end, our legs hanging out of an open boxcar while grain fields and cattleland flashed past us.  A secret world of backyards, grain elevators, a french fry factory in which we woke up inside while huddled in the cubbyhole of a Canadian grainer.  With no possibility to exchange words with the person next to me, the externalities faded away, and we simply gazed at beauty before us.

Communication on trains is interesting. There are long periods of enforced non-talking in the roar of the train, where we communicate with gestures (placing a spoon near one’s mouth with a suggestive and questioning expression, or pointing at the landscape and then miming a book to tell someone that you want to read the railroad atlas). Sometimes urgent messages are scrawled on pages torn from Jeanette Winterson books ("Are we close to K-Falls?") and sometimes everyone starts laughing for no particular reason, and we roll around on the floor of the boxcar with blackened faces of joy.

But once the train reaches a siding, the engine powers down, and as the train comes to a stop, the brakes squeal and howl and then are finally quiet.  Sidings can be in the middle of absolutely nowhere, where train tracks bisect large tracts of land and one’s ears strain to hear anything else besides the wind rattling the opposing boxcar door.  Sometimes one hears crickets chirping, a rancher’s ATV in the distance,  the whistle of the opposing train flying down the tracks.  Admist this particularized silence, travelling companions share minute details of the past time period of silence. Thoughts, jokes, hypotheses on where the train is going, "did you see that billboard that said Marraige Before the Carraige?", analysis on how much time everyone has to hop off and take a shit before the train starts moving again.  Once the brakes air up again, the silence once again takes its holy mantle, and we are helpless to the pull of the rails.

The first long-distance trip I went on hooked me. I was certain I wanted to spend the rest of my life on the rails. I could just keep switching from train to train, yard to yard. I’d be brave and dangerous, I thought. But I knew even while I was thinking that that I wasn’t necessarily being brave. I was loathing going back to my life, going back to the endless questioning, the endless consensus process meetings, the endless nausea. I saw my life like it was an Orwellian dream-sequence that sets the stage for some Paris ‘68-style revolt — and I wanted out.

The silence was good. Clearing the chatter was good. I didn’t have any seizures the first long distance trip I went on. But upon return from that trip, I had almost daily seizures for about 3 weeks straight. Partly allergies, partly lack of sleep, yes. But partly a purgative? Partly my body’s cleansing out of all the garbage that had accumlated, that was deemed no longer necessary when I realized that I could sit in silence (that was at the same time very noisy) rather than fill the vaccuum with so much daily chatter and observational high-IQ non sequiturs?

I had failed at Zen meditation. I was better at yoga. I was excellent at sitting quietly while riding trains.   I still don’t know what relationship these things have with my seizures, and then how the idea of silence fits in with that. Sometimes the silence triggers the seizures, but often it repairs them.

So I am trying to countdown to 30. November 10 will be the 10-year anniversary of the first seizure. My 30th birthday is November 9.   I have done pretty well in the past few years, being quieter, knowing my own body more, avoiding triggers, being more sane.  But I’m mesmerized by the beauty I’ve seen from the innards of a freight train, and so I’m trying to cultivate this silence within the capacphony.  This will sustain me.

  Lately, I’ve been telling a lot of stories, and I worry that I appear to people as an annoying vendor of tall tales and exaggerated claims.  And while it’s true that I have a flair for theatrics as well as a self-importance that propels me to build each story into a monument of entertaining words and themes (like this blog, for example), it’s also true that all of the stories that I tell really did happen.   But they sound so made up sometimes!  "Oh, some guy I saw in a film once offered me $10,000 for my eggs" and then a few hours later, "I ate lunch with Carlos Santana when I worked on Dave Matthews Band Tour," and then a few hours later, "So, this one time, when I was living in this city that you had no idea I  ever lived in even though you’ve known me for years…and I ate a bunch of mushrooms and danced on a table."   I feel like someone eventually has to be like, "Wait a minute. Is this for real," and of course it is.  Especially since my aversion to lying is so deep that I once wrote an apology letter to a St Vincent de Paul store from which I had stolen a poodle-shaped brooch.

When I was in high school, I remember very pompously making a choice that I wanted to be a writer. It made sense to me that the best way to do that would be to live an interesting life, and thus have things to write about.  I did not back down from the challenge that I have given myself, and sometimes I can hardly beleive myself some of the stories that I tell. 

So, anyway, rather than simply running a constant Two Truths and a Lie kind of story-telling gambit, I keep telling myself that these stories need to get written down.  It’s not that I’m being vain (well, maybe I am), but that sometimes I wonder what would happen with this information.

But I also realize that in many ways, this is still me showboating.   All of us have stories — why should mine be told with greater vigor or committed to paper?   Or why should our stories be told at all? Other than passing entertainment, why am I always trying to get all of these details to fit into word containers to convey a certain spark of something to everyone else? It’s like I always wish that I could just show everyone a movie of the time that we were chased down the highway in rural Oregon by an angry gas station owner over a broken wooden eyeglasses holder (and we were all wearing Dolphin shorts and leg warmers).  Or that I could just take a stroll with you back to the time that my former partner and I tried out for one of those reality dating shows where they tell you to bicker with your partner while you discuss how hot the blind date you went on was.   I guess it’s just symptomatic of my affinity for really living communally (I want all your stories as much as I want you to have mine), but perhaps it’s just a bizarre impulse.

I dont’ know. I think I kind of just wanted to write this because I was tired of looking at that post about my grandmother’s funeral. I’ve processed that, moved on, and am now setting about writing down the stories of Girl Scout Camp 2002 and the game of Never Have I Ever that went awry!

Oh, yes. P.S.  another reason that I tell so many stories is because my stories are fucking awesome!!  yeah, bitches!

I’m sitting on some pretty big processing sessions regarding the death of my grandmother. This would be Jean Alexia Rudometkin Tolmasoff, the Russian one whose family was introduced to you a few blogs ago. I could start to tell some stories soon. The 10 hour wake with Russian prayers and chanting and the horrid violations of Molokan doctrine that I unknowingly committed sitting a mere 6 inches from my grandmother’s casket. Wearing long white skirts, petticoats, aprons, head coverings, pantyhose, heels (plus Calvin Klein BRIEFS underneath it all, just to assert my Ivy-ness in the midst of such 19th century ridiculousness), only to later turn around at the cemetery to be face to face with a 40 year old Russian woman wearing a tube top and stilletto boots. About my austic cousin who pulled my hair. About the church elder who was ostensibly going to speak about my grandmother, but instead got up and railed against heathers, sinners and ninosh (non-Molokan, so that includes me), and then made a pitch for the new translation of the Molokan Book of Life and Spirit.  My cousins and I in a bizarre moment in the casket room with the salesman pointing out that the very casket we were looking at was purchased by Notorious B.I.G. aka (air quotes) Biggie Smalls. Somehow this same casket prompted my autistic cousin to tell us that he has photos of the motel room in which John Candy died (to which my other cousin replied that John Kennedy did not die in a hotel room but maybe Robert Kennedy did), and then I walked outside into the hallway to eat more chocolate mint patties from the big glass bowl in the funeral director’s office but ran smack into a woman who’s trying to set me up  with her (Molokan) grandson who also "goes to college in Boston."  I smiled blandly at her until my mom walked by, squeezed my elbow until I thought I would fall over and intoned to me to play along. I played along well, until we were able to break our fast by going to Olive Garden on Firestone Blvd.   I promptly got wasted hitting on our waitress (who is trying out for American Idol), only to have my mom inform me that she already asked her and she’s not a lesbian, but then returning to the conversation at the table and fielding questions from several women who want to marry me off to nice Russian boys.

There is so much more to tell you, and when we hang out in person, I’ll tell you about it, but I’m completely overwhelmed right now, if only because I can’t beleive that I’ll never go to another Molokan service ever again in my life.      Perhaps I should tattoo ninosh on my wrist.

Oh yeah, and it’s Day 28+and then some, and i’m convinced that I’m pregnant by divine intervention but also that I am completely 10000% batshit. But if you could have seen this funeral, you would be amazed at what I just went through. I’m not being wierd, I’m just totally being Ivy and telling you: man, humans are inescapably and inexoricably bizarre.

Firstly: you can excuse most of this drivel as me being hysterical. As per usual.

This week is called "Gay? Fine by Me"  week at BC.  That says it all right there. "Fine by me."  I mean, can you sound a little more like an obnoxious brat — "Fine! Be gay! That’s cool. I didn’t care anyway!"    

It’s wierd to me to see all these well-scrubbed BC undergrads walking around with t-shirts that say "Gay? Fine by Me,"  some of them underneath a smart little spring-pattern jacket and ribbon accents, and some of them over a cable-knit sweater. What’s really outrageous to me is that every male on this campus looks gay to me.  Even some of the football players.  Everybody is scrubbed and plucked and exfoliated and gelled and pampered and pleasured — walking around in their pastel polo shirts tucked into distressed denim that even show no marks or fraying as they swirl around the edges of their perfectly coordinated Pumas. I swear that the boys grab each other’s madras-covered ass; I’m sure at the very least everyone is fantasizing about throwing each other into the infinity pool at the summer house on the Vineyard.

The girls and their tote bags are less suspect to me.  I don’t even find any thrill in imagining any of these girls exploring their college lesbianism; perhaps it’s because I don’t care for long hair and there is A Lot of Hair at Boston College.  Girls are always flipping their hair, brushing it, braiding it, scooping it up with smooth milky hands and letting it fall back down around their tote-ed shoulders. A lot of girls like to sit with their legs crossed while listening to another girl tell a story, carefully pulling apart the ends of her hair, looking at split ends for a moment and then looking back up with extreme interest: "No way." "Shut up."  "You’re not serious." "Well, then what did he say when she finally came out of the bathroom?"

I am also not a fan of makeup or extremely large breasts, and there is a lot of that here.  So I’m mostly left to gaze at the faux-gay boys (who may or may not be wanting to shake their latent-homo maker) or to, alternately, lose myself in the stacks of O’Neill.   I was on the floor for a long time today staring at geology surveys of the Columbia River basin.  The floor smelled, strangely, like strawberries. Not the kind growing wild on the beaches of Oregon, but the chemical kind that are engineered in labs up and down the California coast.  I mean: whatever. Who cares, right? I had some epiphany in the stacks of the library. Right, Ivy. We get it: there’s a lot of information in the world, there are a lot of stories to be told, the world is really wierd and funny and beautiful while it’s busy being fucked up and cruel.   

But somehow, I end up wanting to dance like a ballerina across the tables of everyone here.  I want to stand up and start throwing books out the window, I want to disrupt lectures, I want to tear down the screen showing the Laramie Project and remind everyone that we see hate crime every day all the time, I want to go through the stacks and write secret messages in every margin of all of the books. 

What is everyone doing with all of this knowledge? What are we all stroking it for?  Everyone flips their hair back and has really nice and interesting things to say about, say, rural development, the Fourth Amendment, or human rights at Guantanamo Bay, but I don’t know how we are all going to do what is necessary. Isn’t there a gulf between the future policy makers here at BC, and the former forest defenders out in the forest (who are bruised, broken, jailed and/or repulsed by the preponderance of rapists in the forest)?   But why even compare BC to the forest defense scene — there is a pretty huge gulf between Chestnut Hill and Roxbury.  People here think that I live in a ghetto because I live in Jamaica Plain, which kills me, because JP is all fancy ice cream and condo realtors catering to lesbians in Subarus.   In one seminar today, an undergrad was talking about how she hoped that her history courses on China would help her culturally relate to the families of her students, and I understand the sentiment, I really do, but somehow I just felt this enormous fear that people still don’t understand the work that we need to do if we’re working for social justice.

Everyone in the cable-knits in the education department is well aware of the fact that they’re white — although nobody will say the word "white" and will only say, "You know, like me."  Non-white cultures are just "different than mine"… and everyone falls all over themself to talk about how committed they are to multicultural education.  Somehow, though, I never seem to get the feeling that anybody knows what that means. I made it through page 7 of our textbook "Creating Culturally Diverse Education" before I was writhing on the ground in pain at the state of affairs that we find ourself in.    And then there is the compulsion on everyone’s part to de-emphasize their whiteness. "Well, I’m Jewish," "Well, I’m Italian," and everyone’s favorite at BC, "The Irish used to be considered colored."  And I dont want to minimizes people’s various identities: We all struggle with oppressions and we all gain from privileges. I get this, I relaly do, but there are quite a few times at BC when I want to just get up and throw the table over. I want to get down and dirty. I want people to say what’s on their mind.  "Gay? Fine by Me"  ?   Fine? Is that what you have to say? It’s fine? Is there anything more we could say about it?  I mean…….I’m not sure I want to hear it, but there are times when I just feel like the facade of charity here at BC is obscuring something. I’m just not sure what it is. I want it all right out there in the open so that we can see how ugly and full of shit most of us are. We don’t even know how to talk to each other half the time, and we aren’t getting where we need to go fast enough for my tastes sometimes.

But then: what the fuck am I doing? I’m sitting here in the library, with my thumb up my ass like I have autism, developing a more complex multi-color highlighting system to complete my research project on nuclear weapons history and stroking my intellectual brain. Sending dirty text messages and shopping on E-bay for a new pair of shoes to wear to San Francisco.  It’s all so intense sometimes.

So that’s essentially where I’m at. At the end of all of this, I’m really just gazing at the twink-looking boy next to me, wondering if he’d want to stop fidgeting with his pink polo shirt long enough to go have a quickie in the "laptop room" with me.

I gave a really stupid lecture the other day about the value of money. It would not have been notable had I not been observed by my supervisor, the scary hardliner vice principal that all the students absolutely hate. 

The topic itself (the value of money) is not a strength of mine. My co-operating teacher suggested (read: insisted) that I cover this topic.  “You know,” he said cavalierly, “commodity currency, fiat, where money gets its value, that kind of thing.”    Basically: “Where does money get its value?” We’re not talking the simple answer (“from the government” or even “from limited supply,” though those things apply). We are talking about complex, abstract concepts about the idea that we can formulate a medium of exchange so that if you and I make a transaction, for example, we know that we both understand the unit of account in the same way.

So, my first problem is that the topic is, on its own, kind of boring as fuck and also not something that I can expound on very eloquently. But, in order to prove to both my co-operating teacher and my supervisor that I can write lessons and lectures that conform to state standards with precision and excellence, as well as take an abstract topic and help students make the connections between the words in their textbook and the real world around them, I wrote a stringent lesson on the value of money, using Ithaca Hours as the case study. We even watched a corny little video about people buying massage oil and espresso at the Co-Op with their Ithaca Hours. Boring, yes, but we can’t watch Sundance Channel documentaries and gaze at photographs of the Civil Rights movement every day.   

My second problem was that I had kept myself up past my bedtime not only the night before, but the night before that, leaving me hazy and confused.   The large coffee with 2 shots of espresso went absolutely right through me with no buzz or caffeine orgasm whatsoever (prompting a 10 minute tantrum in the teacher’s lounge, during which I claimed that the coffee place had given me “broken coffee” and I ate a lemon Danish in an attempt to eke out a sugar high), and so when I started this lecture, I probably looked like I’d been run over by the Tired Truck.  (After my performance at high school, I went to BC and took a disco nap in the library, and then groggily went to class where I had to give another presentation on ideas about a historic field trip to the Back Bay Fens. The professor asked me about 10 million questions and I kept wanting to ask him to please, if he could, just shut the fuck up. )

So, anyway, the value of money: I knew I wouldn’t have them jumping out of their seats in delight, salivating at the word “fiat,” or immediately rushing the door to get on the Federal Reserve announcement mailing list. The students are very adept at looking like they are paying attention or doing seatwork even when they are doing neither, so my goal for this lesson was moderate/feigned interest, cursory completion of the worksheet, and actual mastery of 3 key concepts.  But, res ipsa loquiter:   boring topic + tired teacher + the roaming restless, underslept mind of said teacher = you’re sleeping before I even open my mouth. What saved me from having 20 dead-asleep students on my hands was the fact that they knew I was being observed. That they acted in solidarity with me is sweet; they struggled, despite the oppressive banality, to keep themselves awake. My favorite student propped his eyes open with his fingers at one point, and then when that didn’t seem to work, he (I am not making this up) shoved an entire Snickers bar in his mouth and stared at me wide-eyed. 

            The thing about my supervisor/vice principal is that she is one of these classically intense people. She seems to like me a lot (probably because I am totally intense, even though I hope, for the sake of all relationships past, present and future that I am not intense in the same way that she is), but she is, as one of my co-teachers said, a hard-liner.  She sends out multiple email reminders about upcoming assignments (with increasing hysteria nearing the due date), listens with a wide-eyed and penetrating gaze that seems to have origins in soap opera dramatics, and – on a completely unrelated note – has the biggest, heaviest-looking engagement ring I have ever seen.  I often see her at 2:30 pm, running around in her stilettos, still clutching her paper Dunkin Donuts bag that still has her ham and egg breakfast biscuit that she never got around to eating for breakfast.  And then she often sits in the afternoon meeting picking apart that sandwich, ejecting the biscuit into the trash and then eating the ham and the egg patty separately. 

Also: Once, when I was talking about a long-distance lover, she for some reason revealed that the pet name for “having sex” that she and her boyfriend use is “the hot dog sandwich.”

            So, anyway, all that really happened was that everybody was trapped by my underslept and nearly excruciating lecture. Bored as fuck, sick and tired of money, and cognizant of sleep and hysteria as sly enemies, one’s only option in that room was either to observe me or observe me being observed.  In honest reflection, I feel like I was just a cuter version of the teacher in Ferris Beuller’s day off ( “It’s called a Laffer Curve. Anyone seen this before? Anyone,  anyone? Class?” ).  I was even wearing a sweater vest and loafers. I almost went for the bow tie, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. 

At one point, I mentioned that other cities had Ithaca Hours, but to name some examples, all that I could remember was Santa Cruz and Arcata.

“Isn’t that where you’re from?”  my favorite (pet) student said. “Did you use the currency dollars things?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I replied. “There weren’t many places to use them.  Just massage therapists and head shops, really.”   

  Students either didn’t hear me, didn’t care, or chose not to laugh at head shop. At first I was horrified by what was really a faux pas (head shop?  Please), but then I was disappointed that what could have been a funny-haha score-one-for-the-subtly-cool-subcultural-teacher moment went nowhere. Like everything about this fucking lecture!   It was one of these total “is this thing on?”  moments. Someone mentioned that Ithaca is “a pretty nice town.”   I said, dryly and dead-pan, “Ithaca is Gorges,” thinking that I was so clever.  Ha ha, like the t-shirt. Ithaca is Gorges. Get it?    Hmmm. Hey, Ivy: they’ve probably never seen the t-shirts, and, really, that joke doesn’t fucking work if you just say it out loud. 

I sat through my post-observation reflection with my supervisor, while she asked me what was going on, just laughing and laughing on the inside.    When she asked how I felt about the lecture, I honestly said, “You know what. We win some and we lose some.  Shit happens.” 

She said, “Ivy, you’re a pretty smart cookie.”   

And gave me the highest marks that I could receive on the lesson observation. Score another one for the eccentric teacher.