I realized Monday night that none of the shirts I currently own that are appropriate for the office are green. And I when I tried to dig out the good jewelry box where my sterling silver shamrock earrings are, things kept falling down. We really need to go through things in that hutch and toss out stuff we never use.
I did find some nice, dark green rhinestones. But I forgot that the last time we cleaned out that section of the bedroom that I threw out a lot of the cheap earrings.
Still, it’s St. Patrick’s day, so when I found the silly plastic leprechaun earring, I figured that would have to do.
My recent ancestors on one side of the family were descended from Irish catholics who came to America after the potato famine. Some of my ancestors on the other side were protestants who came to America from Ireland, though they were descended from folks who came to Ireland from England along with King Henry’s army in the 15th century. (It’s not all Irish and English, there’s also some German, a lot of French, at least a bit of Norse, and supposedly some Native American, though statistically that’s more likely an old family myth than a genetic reality.)
Anyway, there are some who wonder why I, a gay taoist, makes at least a bit of a deal out of St. Patrick’s Day (since Patrick is a saint in the Catholic church which is far from gay-friendly, et cetera).
Well, looking back up two paragraphs, there are two ways to look at my heritage. One is to say I’m an Irish-Anglo-Franco-German-Norwegian-Native American, and the other is to just say I’m an American, a mutt, a mish mash, the genetic version of a ceasar salad—heck, a whole potluck!
Back in Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day is still mostly celebrated as a religious holiday. It’s not a day of drinking—no green beer or discount Irish whiskey shots at the local pubs there. Parades have been a very recent development, and at least according to one report I heard, mostly because American tourists kept asking for them.
But here, in America, it is a party day. We do the tacky green beer and wear the “Kiss me I’m Irish” shirts or “Everyone’s Irish on St. Paddy’s Day” shirts. Since it is only a few days before the Spring Equinox, it’s practically one of the spring mysteries. It’s a Bacchanal!
For me, it’s a day to put on at least one silly earring, to remember my Great-grandpa’s stories about his great-grandpa, to remember my Great-uncle Lyle’s story about my great-great-grandparents.
It’s a day to let out my inner leprechaun. I’m a fairy with at least some Irish ancestry, so that works, right? I may sing a silly song. I may dance a jig at the bus stop. I may cast a wily leprechaun spell that encourages people to give in to the silliness, at least a little. Because life is too short to be borrowing trouble. It’s too short not to have fun.
Just as I try not to often post the what-I-had-for-breakfast type of entry on this blog, I also try to avoid let-me-tell-you-about-my-awful-day posts. Besides not wanting to chase readers away with whiny posts, I also feel as if my awful days are never as horrible as other people’s days. I can’t count the times that I have been feeling that I’ve just had a horrific day, when someone I follow on social media will report that a close relative has been diagnosed with a fatal disease, or that they have lost their job, or have been in a car wreck (and they are posting this news from a hospital bed), or any number of other much more serious calamities than my difficulty with a computer program at work. Which makes me feel like an ingrate who doesn’t realize how well I have it.
It’s like most of my bad days are first-world-problems, while many of my friends and associates are mired in real troubles.
It just didn’t seem right to put some of the more sordid headlines I’d collected last week next to the announcement of Terry Pratchett’s death, so I posted a truncated from of Friday Links yesterday. Here are a few things that came up after I posted, along with a bunch of the news stories that I left out:
It’s Friday. I should be excited, but yesterday the world lost a great, witty, and wonderful writer. And learning that one of my favorite writers had died was only the beginning of a really, really not fun day. So, I guess I’m just glad that Thursday is finally over.
Anyway, here is a shorter-than-usual collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared:
It seemed as if every writer with a blog was piling on about that former MFA teacher (Ryan Boudinot) and his article last week. (I wrote about it here, The Digital Reader has a nice round up here )
This week, one of Boudinot’s former students wrote a follow-up article for the same publication, I Was the MFA Student Who Made Ryan Boudinot Cry. The follow-up agrees that Boudinot’s original comments were wrong, at least in so far as they might represent what teachers privately gripe about among themselves about their most disappointing students but should never say in public. And they were phrased unkindly.
I provide a direct link to the follow-up because it feels as if the former student is sincere in their comments. But their attempt to defend or rationalize Boudinot’s original article is both misguided and wrong.
The former student alludes to Boudinot’s acrimonious departure from the teaching job just before writing the article as a possible explanation for how ungracious the article was. Boudinot’s teaching style is excused as being the kind of “tough love” portrayed most recently in the movie Whiplash. Finally, they point out that Boudinot is reportedly a very loving father to his two kids.
None of that changes the clear, irrefutable fact that most of Boudinot’s article was pure assholery. And now that we know that even students who admire him describe his teaching style as “contemptuous,” “ruthless” and “merciless” we can safely conclude that the article was hardly an aberration.
I’ve had enough experience with various kinds of jerks, jackasses, and other abusers to recognize the pattern. Every single abusive person who has ever breathed has also had any number of people who would swear that the person actually meant well, they’re just blunt. Or their communication style is simply argumentative; if you give as good as you get, they’ll respect you. Also they clearly love their own spouse/kid/dog so much that it is simply impossible that they are the kind of mean-spirited, angry, judgmental dickhead that their recent actions might be construed to imply.
Bull.
And I say that while confessing that there have been times in my life when I was exactly that kind of jerk or jackass.
Being angry makes you do stupid things, obviously. Being angry about how one lost a job (or how one felt forced to leave) is going to leave you prone to say unwise things about that job. But the problem with this excuse is that none of his vitriol was aimed at the school or the program. The people who have agreed with him act as if he was leveling an indictment at the system that determines which students get into the program.
While it is possible to infer that underlying message, he doesn’t ever say the graduate admissions system should be scrapped—he says he wished some of his students had suffered more. He places all of the onus for students being unprepared on the students not being “serious” or “not the real deal” or not being talented.
When you’re angry with a specific person with whom you have a shared history, you will sometimes say things that you do not really mean or that you don’t believe are true because you want to hurt that specific person. Sometimes. More often, what you say is stuff you’ve believed all the time, but have refrained from saying for one reason or another.
When you’re not yelling at a specific individual who has hurt you, you never say anything you haven’t always believed to be true. Being angry doesn’t make you spout random thoughts that never entered your head before that moment. All being angry does is remove your filters. You say things you have refrained from saying not because you were trying to be kind—you refrained from saying them because you didn’t want to deal with the consequences of speaking your true opinion.
And as far as him being a good father? Maybe he is, I don’t know. But it makes me think of those virulently anti-gay politicians who suddenly understand that gay people are human, too, but only after their own child comes out. If they were a genuinely nice person, they would have had the empathy to see that when the victim of the hatred wasn’t someone they have a vested interest in. Similarly, I’m not impressed by a person who is able to be nice to his own family while he is so mean and nasty to people he no longer believes can do anything for him.
I’ve quoted before the saying, “If you meet one asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. If you keep meeting assholes again and again all day long, you’re the asshole.” If you get a bad student who isn’t interested in learning or becoming better at the craft, you got a bad student. If you keep meeting bad students again and again in ever single class you teach? You’re a bad teacher.
Late last week, Ben Carson, one of the many people who are hoping to snag the Republican nomination for President, when asked about whether gay people deserve the same civil rights protections of other minority groups, gave a weird answer involving prison rape. He didn’t explicitly say prison rape (or any other rape in forcibly homosocial environments), what he said was that some people go into prison straight, and when they come out they’re gay. Therefore, this “proves” that being gay is a matter of choice, and therefore gay people don’t deserve civil rights protections.
I think he was more than a little surprised at how many people on his side of the political spectrum thought that was a ridiculous thing to say. There’s lots I could say about this, but I think the following clip from CNN in which a reporter talks to Dan Savage about this, sums up things fairly well. Please watch it, then I’ll continue on a related topic after:
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To be fair, before the day was over Ben Carson had back-pedaled and offered a so-called apology. Keeping in mind that Ben Carson is, literally, a brain surgeon, and had just the day before his interview had officially announced that he had formed a Presidential Campaign committee, his answer is that he doesn’t really know whether there is any medical or scientific studies about whether being gay is a choice, and because he isn’t a politician, he wasn’t ready to speak about this issue. He also tried to blame the media for taking his remarks out of context.
There is an overwhelming medical consensus that being homosexual is not a matter of choice, nor is one’s sexual orientation mutable. Every medical association, including all of those Ben Carson has been certified by, reached that conclusion quite some time ago. So as a doctor, he should already know whether or not that have been any medical studies. Second, the moment he formed a Presidential Campaign committee, he became a politician. It could be argued that he’s been a politician since he started taking speaking fees to go to conservative political events and talk about what a bad president Obama is, and how he would be better at the job. In any case, he’s a politician now, and he can’t claim not to be. Besides, his whole schtick up to now has been that the reason he’s qualified to be president precisely because he isn’t a career politician, because career politicians don’t speak truthfully.
And, of course, if you go watch the original interview, you can see that throughout Carson’s entire painfully stupid answer to the question, there is not a single pause or jump-cut. His comments were not taken out of context.
And, as Dan points out, if something being a choice disqualifies it, philosophically, morally, of ethically, from equal protection under the law, then a lot of people are going to lose their rights.
But that isn’t my biggest gripe in this whole case. I’m more irritated at how everyone, even reporters like the guy in the clip, keep saying that it was Dan Savage who took this into “vile” territory. That Dan shouldn’t have mentioned a specific sex act in his reply.
That’s a load of hypocritical hooey.
Carson’s dumb comments about prison turning someone gay were not about homosexuality as a sexual orientation, they were about the reality that in the closed environment of prison, straight men with no other means of getting sex will rape (even if sometimes the coercion isn’t a physical assault, it is still rape) weaker men, most of whom are also straight. Many of those less physically strong or mentally vicious men find that the only way to survive is to allow themselves to be used by the other men. That doesn’t make them gay. Being coerced into performing same sex acts is not the same thing as falling in love with, being attracted to, and feeling physical desire for members of the same sex. It’s different.
And that culture of prison rape was exactly what Carson was talking about. So, it wasn’t the gay activist who first made reference to a “vile” sex act.
In a bigger sense, conservative politicians and their anti-gay supporters, are always talking about gay sex when they make their arguments against gay rights. Some of them are like that crazy Harlem pastor I’ve written about and linked to stories about before, who can’t seem to stop talking about anal sex and gay semen. I could link to those stories again, but none of us need to go there. Or like the politician who sneered that marriage equality advocates were trying to equate “the violent invasion of a colon by a penis” with the love between a man and woman.
Other opponents of gay rights are more subtle, using the code phrase “gay lifestyle.” The religious right is especially fond of claiming that they love their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, but they can’t support the “lifestyle.” But when someone like me points out that my lifestyle is sleep, go to work, discuss with my spouse what we’re having for dinner, wrangle over who’s doing the dishes, sometimes watch TV, try to get some writing in each day before going back to sleep, and somewhere in their paying our bills and taxes—and then ask them which part of that lifestyle is wrong or harmful, then start stuttering. They will allude to the answer euphemistically: that two men are living together as husband and wife. And then I say, “Yes, paying bills, cleaning the house, sometimes disagreeing about whose turn it is to empty the garbage. What’s wrong with that?”
You keep pushing hard enough, and they’ll finally admit that it’s the sex. And usually they refer to specific sex acts which they incorrectly believe all gay men engage in all the time. Which is why some of us point out that hundreds of thousands more straight people engage regularly in anal sex than gay people do. That lots of gay men don’t do anal sex at all.
They may try to wiggle out of it by saying that most gay people are promiscuous, living a life of meaningless one-night stands and drug and alcohol abuse. When we point out that statistically lesbians are better at monogamy than either straight couples or gay couples, and that there are again hundreds of thousands more straight people trolling bars, consuming mind-altering substances, and looking for hook-ups with members of the opposite sex every weekend than gay people doing the same, they get flustered.
Seriously, the last time I was in a bar, it wasn’t a gay bar. We were celebrating the birthday of a straight friend. The last time I was in a gay bar was, um, I think 1999 or 2000, and we were having breakfast before the Pride Parade. The last time I was in a gay bar at night with the intention of drinking and dancing and so forth, was 1998. And I’ve written before about that fact that not only have I never been stoned, but I was in my mid-30s when my husband, a former bartender, had to explain to me that the annoying smell I was complaining about in a convention hotel hallway was pot smoke.
There are lots of single straight men out there living a “gayer” lifestyle than a lot of gay and lesbian couples.
When people from Focus on the Family, or the National Organization for Marriage, or the religious right wing of the Republican party talk about the gay lifestyle or claim we’re assaulting the sanctity of marriage, et cetera, they thing they are angry about is the kind of sex they think we’re having. We need to stop pretending that that isn’t what they’re talking about. We need to confront them about it, and remind them again and again that they are the ones obsessed with our sex lives. We’re not the one’s making “vile statements.”
It’s Friday! The first Friday in March. Already! I should be more excited, but I’ve been sick all week and while I’m hopeful that the antibiotics will get rid of this cough sometime soon, I’m just too tired to be enthusiastic about anything.
Anyway, here is a collection of news and other things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared:
When I wrote that response to the ex-MFA writer’s diatribe about writing students (Wading through the elitist BS), my first draft had a lot of snarky comments which I deleted lest I muddy my own point. They also betrayed a bit of my own form of elitism. For instance, in the original article the writer listed several books (in addition to The Great Gatsby) that he believed one must have read, enjoyed, and wanted to read more of in order to be a “serious reader.” All of the books he mentioned by name are ones I most often hear about from the sort of supercilious swanker who is constantly looking for a reason to hold other people’s intellects in disdain…Continue reading Running about with lit matches→
I’ve written before about an acquaintance in college who was shocked that I’d never heard the pun about this day: March Forth! It’s a date and a command!
For the last few years I’ve been observing my own March Forth tradition. I urge you all on this March Forth, to go please donate to The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.
One of my favorite news sites posted an article by Ryan Boudinot, an ex-MFA (Master of Fine Arts) teacher, about writing students. The article is an incredibly good example of both clickbait and elitist BS. And the writing blogs have reacted in a manner which is just increasing the traffic to the article, making it likely the site will put up more of the same. If you haven’t seen it, yet, here’s a link using the excellent Donotlink.com service: Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One – The Stranger, which will get you to the article without increasing its search stats.
A lot of people have posted rebuttals, I provide regular links to some of the best at the end of this post. The point I most disagree with is Boudinot’s definition of “serious reader.”Continue reading Wading through the elitist BS→
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