What it means to be white

I started temping yesterday at one of those schools you see advertised on TV–get your certificate in Adminitrative Assistance, Carpentry, Nursing Assistance, etc. in a short amount of time.  Will find you a job shortly thereafter.  Change your life, etc. etc.

At least this place doesn’t have the annoying National American University song. 

The interesting part about this job is that the students, and I think exclusively the staff with the exception of the keyboarding instructor and the development director, are all African-American.  This is a situation in which I don’t usually find myself.  I grew up in the sixth whitest suburb in the nation.  I went to college that had a fairly similar diversity demographic.  And foreign study?  Ireland. 

I’m not proud of this by any means.  But it just kind of happened that way.

I answered the phone yesterday at one point and the guy on the other end of the line said, “What you sounded so professional for?  You tryin’ to be white or something?”

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that comment.  Especially when he went on, after establishing the fact that he was talking to “some white woman”, that he was trying to get a job reference from the school. 

I would have laughed it off, except I had nearly the same conversation three more times on the phone. 

The topic of isms of any kind and being members of a minority group is something I think about a lot.  And I go back and forth on whether or not it’s a good thing to be part of a minority that doesn’t have a visually apparent difference (well, that’s not entirely true.  I look pretty gay most of the time). 

But, if I so choose, I can hide that difference.  Play the pronoun game, choose not to reveal it.  Does it let me assimilate into society that would otherwise be prone to reject me?  Of course it does.  It sure worked at Concordia.  Works at church, too.

But there’s a drawback to it as well.  It’s hard to foster community, fight for rights, when you can hide as part of the majority.  It’s one of the reasons I think the gay rights movement is so far behind the other civil rights groups.  And it’s the reason why there is a latent fear about homosexuality–because you don’t know where we are.  We’re like spies.  Or vending machine camouflage. 

I wonder what someone would say to me if I answered the phone “gay”.  I don’t even know I’m sure what that would sound like. 

A Grieving Day

My mom just called a few minutes ago to tell my that my Grandparent’s house, which has been on the market for well over a year, has finally sold.  She sounded a mix of relieved and sad about this.  They appointed her with power of attorney before my Grandfather’s death, so the business side of loss has fallen on her.  She wants me and my sister to go down to the house in Sioux Falls, South Dakota one last time to make sure we have everything that we want before they put the rest up for auction.

I’m very glad I don’t have time to go.  There’s a part of me that feels a loss knowing that the house is gone.  But, really, since my Grandparents moved out in January of 2006, it hasn’t really felt like the house anymore by any means.  And I know my mom wants their things to stay in the family, but really, what good would that do?  If I took the china, that would only be one more reason to procrastinate doing the dishes.  What good are table linens, or pieces of art, or old broken board games, half the pieces missing?

I didn’t take too many things for myself after my Grandfather’s death last year, but what I got is plenty.  His hat, which now wear on stage.  The book that he won for spelling competitions in 1930, that was never away from his bedside table.  The one family heirloom that means a lot to me, now in my apartment, is the piano.  But I don’t need anything else.

I was at a friend’s wedding about a month ago.  It was one of the most beautiful nights I’ve been apart of.  So much love.  So much happiness.  And they lifted the last line of their ceremony from Bill and Fleur’s wedding in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is wicked cool.  Then, during the reception, after Emily had done the traditional dad and daughter’s dance, they announced that she would be doing one more special dance: she and her Grandfather.

And I lost it.  Tears streaming down my face, my breath coming in uneven gasps, I jumped from my chair and sped out of the tent, around the back of the house to the smoking area.  At my cousin’s wedding two years ago, I danced with my grandfather.  He told me that when Karen and I decided to get married, he’d dance with me then, too.  It was the first time my staunch republican, Bush supporting Grandfather had ever acknowledged the fact that I was gay, and that he was okay with it.

Karen and I are no longer together.  My grandfather’s been dead for over a year.  I have no plans and not much desire to ever get married.

But I still want that dance.

I can’t get that out of the house in Sioux Falls.  So, really, there’s no point in going.

Figuring Out The Puzzle

For the past couple years, I’ve been addicted to Sudoku.  I think it started during Fringe 2005, when I wanted something to keep me occupied during my downtime.  I bought a book of ’em, and I was hooked.  I liked the grids, the boxes, how the puzzle could only go together in one way.  Numbers one through nine, none ever repeated in the same box, row, or column.

On a whim last month, I picked up a book of Kakuro puzzles for Amy (and, well, me ’cause I’ve been curious about them).  Known amongst puzzlers as the wicked older brother of Sudoku, it follows the same basics–numbers one through nine, none repeated in the same line, except this time, instead of just fitting the numbers in the boxes, it’s a wordless crossword puzzle, where the numbers have to add up to a certain number.  It’s kind of hard to verbally explain (at least at this late hour), so here’s a link.   It takes logic one step further, and fucks with your brain just that much more.  I like that the most basic solving technique is to look for the unique combinations.  If you have two spaces that add up to 16, for example, you know those have to be 7 and 9.  And if that happens to cross with four spaces that add up to 14, you know the common square is a 7, because the least amount that three numbers can add up to is 6 (1, 2, 3), and therefore those other three spaces in the 14 are 1, 2, and 4 because that’s the only 3 number comination that can add up to 7.

Amy bought me the Mensa book.  I had to put it down and succumb to the “White Belt Kakuro” book.  Because it’s that gnarled (and gnarly).

The key to the puzzles is the find those cornerstones; the ones that just by looking at it you know has only one option, and then you can build off of that.  I can sometimes stare at a puzzle for twenty, thirty minutes while I search for that first cornerstone.  And sometimes I’m wrong, and that path will only take me so far before I retreat to another side of the puzzle and work from that angle.

I make a lot of mistakes.  I have a stick eraser at my side at all times (or, as the case usually is, in my mouth), the boxes full of smaller numbers, always in pencil, of possibilities.  But when you finish a puzzle, it is so satisfying.

I think my life is no longer a Sudoku puzzle.  It’s a Kakuro.  It’s no longer contained in a neat grid, a sqaure, with only one real logic that needs to be employed.  It is fraught with equations, confusion, still the same basic elements, but arranged in a totally different way, one which my routine-craving self is sometimes uncomfortable with.  But I do it just the same.

If I put temping here, I can put touring there.  And Fringe fits there.  And writing fits there.  And my friends.   And my family.  And sleep.  And the fall TV schedule.  And my health.

And.

And.

And.

I will ride this wave until I find the cornerstone, that area that needs to be solved first.  Until then, I hope everyone will allow for the eraser and pencil marks.

The Girl on the Plane

We flew from Minneapolis to Seattle last night. I had thought it would be an empty flight; midweek, leaving at 9.45 pm. I was wrong. The 757 was full–49 rows, three seats on either side. We were seated in row 39, and I forwent sitting with the rest of the band and an aisle seat to see how far I could move up in the plane. For some reason, my flight anxiety seems to be less the further up I sit, maybe because I can stay in firm denial about how big the contraption really is. I was moved up 17 rows, and with a window seat.

And I sat next to a small child.

To most people, this would be their worst nightmare. A long night flight next to a kid. But not me. Some of the best flights I’ve had have been next to kids, one particular one standing out was a flight to Amsterdam next to a Croatian family with an infant and toddler, whose asylum from the wars in the early-mid 90s had run out, and were emigrating back home. The toddler and I sat there playing peek-a-boo and other games all the way across the Atlantic. I think I even forgot to watch the movies.

But that was before the fear that grips me when I fly had really sunk in. Now, the presence of a child makes me be brave (and so does my Xanax), because I don’t want to show my nerves to a kid in case they’re nervous.

I shouldn’t have been worried. This kid was a pro. She spent the half-hour before we taxied out to the runway telling me how much she loved to fly at night–going really fast and then…zooooooooom into the air. Looking at the lights of the towns way down below. Seeing the lights move if they’re cars on the highways. The nose tipping down and zoooooooooom back to the ground.

The pilot came on to tell us that, since there were so many storms over the area between Minneapolis and Seattle, the first 45 minutes were going to be rocky, and probably the last hour. I sighed deeply, which is about the biggest outpouring of emotion I have whilst drugged, and glanced at the kid, now perusing my Kakuro puzzles trying to figure out how they worked, wondering if this would shake her. Nope. She grinned and said “I like it when it’s bumpy. It’s like a roller-coaster.”

And then the pilot flipped on the “Fasten Seatbelt” light as we were about to taxi away from the gate, and with some odd Pavlovian response, the moment the accompanying ding sounded, the kid fell fast asleep. On my arm. I looked at her, wondering if I should move her, wondering if her Grandma (sitting on the other side of her) would wake her up and scold her. But I didn’t more her, and her Grandma didn’t say anything.

We flew to Seattle, zooming up in the air, rocking like a roller coaster, over towns and moving lights of cars on highways. And the kid stayed nestled around my arm, missing all of her favorite parts of flying.

Usually I have to be brave for the kid sitting next to me. This time, I had no choice but to enjoy it for her.

How did Kafka do it?

I’ve been temping at a university in Minneapolis in their Disability Services department for the past couple of weeks.  My inner conservative (who somehow peacefully exists with my inner gay man.  They’re good friends but sometimes they find themselves at odds) is having fiscal moral issues with this job.  Since the school is publicly funded, state / taxpayer’s money is going to the institution.  I’m all for publicly funded higher education, don’t get me wrong.  And I think that everyone should have the opportunity to study what they’re passionate about.

But I do have a problem that they’ve got six full-time temps, plus allocating all of their student worker hours, plus their regular employees when not busy with other projects, working on document conversion:

1. Vision impaired students bring in all their texts for the semester.
2. All of the textbooks are then scanned.
3. The scans are saved in a file, then uploaded into an ocular recognition program.
4. Someone goes through and “zones” each page: putting text boxes around all of the text sections, erasing the graphics.
5. Once the document is zoned and saved, it is then automatically converted into a word document that will be read by the computer reader.  Except, the computer doesn’t recognize hypens, and if there are any blemishes on the page, they won’t translate as words. 
6. Ergo, one must go through each book, page by page, and take out hyphens, look for misread words, and bold / format any headings so the computer reader does it differently.

It’s a tedious process.  Wouldn’t it make more sense for the textbook companies to hire the same number of people to do this job, and then the audio versions could be purchased by the universities, instead of having each school (I’m assuming we’re not the only one that provides this service) take on the fiscal responsibility to serve three students a semester? 

While I was sitting in the midst of Population Geography yesterday, an email came through my inbox with the link to the New York Times article about my group’s performance last weekend.  And it was good. 

The New  York Times.  Thought we were utterly brilliant.  And the day the article was published, I was sitting on my ass in a cubicle surrounded by other temps and student workers, typing sentences such as “migration has a different impact than fertility or mortality on population geography.”

Well, no shit. 

Kafka was a bank worker his whole life, writing in his spare time at night, at home.  How did he reconcile these sides to himself–that creativity and the mundane? 

Each day I’m here, I find it increasingly harder to do so.

Imagination

Someone asked me the other night if I have a good imagination.  Sadly, the answer is no.  It’s a conversation I’ve had with others, to which their answer always is, “but you’re so creative!”

As I have come to learn, creativity has nothing to do with imagination.  I put words on the page, experience on the page, in a way that, to my audience, looks serendipitous.  Maybe it is, but it’s also the frickin’ truth, ’cause my brain is limited by my reality. 

I would love to be a fiction writer.  Create a new world, new people, new plotlines outside of the confines of my own life.  But each time I sit to do that, I freeze.  It sounds stupid, contrived, untrue.  Probably because it is (at least the latter two). 

And it doesn’t just effect the writing.  It gets to the music, too, stopping me short of becoming a jazz musician because, um, improv?  Not so much. 

Fantasies?  Not so much (but wow would I like to have that ability).

We make do with what we have, and create our world accordingly.   And I thank God every day that I’m the centre of the universe and live such a crazy life to keep it interesting.

And you know that last sentence is true, ’cause I just don’t make shit up.

The do-over

There are days in life where we plead for a do-over.  This does not indicate a bad day, an embarassing day, or any other supposed connotation.  Just a chance to do everything one more time, or change little things here or there.

I want yesterday back.

I want to sleep in late and wake up in our New York hotel, creep quietly through my hungover / passed out band-mates to find clothes, and head out on a Manhattan morning for a leisurely walk down 7th avenue, stopping in the deli for soda, the bakery across the street for a muffin.  I want to make my way through the tourists, languages mixing delicately with each other,  watch a parade of blazer-clad young school boys walk well-mannered in two straight lines following their chaperones, the glint in their eyes of innocent wonder and excitement giving away their desire to breakfree from their prep-school constraints.

I want to sling my sax case over my shoulder and head around the block to play a show in front of a 2800 seat sold out house, feel the grove with the boys on stage and hear the roar of that crowd, watch their smiles and nodding heads as we play, hear my sound reverberate through the house.

I want to be all sweaty after pouring out the last little bit of rhythm I have in me.

I don’t want a friend of our agent’s to tell me to work on my “stick flare” as I play the drums.

I want to ride subways to the East Village, meander through neighborhoods with someone who knows the place, where I don’t need to pull out a map.  I want to make puppets in a workshop converted from an old commercial kitchen, watching fish, crocodiles, and leopards taking form out of foam, fabric, papier mache.

I don’t want to act like a dope in front of the one who runs the puppet shop, who I had slightly known five years ago.

I want to ride the train to Brooklyn, and emerge onto a neighborhood that looks like one I’d dig hanging out in.

I don’t want to make a lame joke that it looks like the Cosby Show street.

I want to happen upon a little hole-in-the-wall bar, filled with people crowded in the backroom listening to a jazz combo, the upbeat quazi latin rhythms awakening my rhythm reserve in my left elbow, letting the music wash over me, the combination of music and beer fueling a night of animated conversation with friends, the low-lit bar hiding the redness of my face from the copious amounts of beligian beer I was consuming.

I want to meander the streets, taking in the sites, marveling that somewhere in New York it is actually possible to see stars.

I want to catch a cab and drive across the Brooklyn Bridge back to the hotel, the fantastic view of the Manhattan skyline sillouetted against the dark sky rising in front of me.

I don’t want to somewhere along the lines lose a full, unopened back of smokes forcing me to pay an exorbitant amont for a new one.

But I can’t have a do-over of a beautiful day.  All I can do is try hard not to forget the moments.