In Which the Queerest Identity These Days Might Be Spinster

I’m a single, child-free (child-less?) lady in her late 30s.  I’m straight, and (but?) my work concerns gender and sexuality, amongst other things, but my general theoretical approach to my scholarship relates to issues surrounding those indexes of identity.  I like babies and kids (all of them, really, I’m a baby and kid person) but I don’t have one and haven’t had one.  I like the idea of a husband, but I’ve never had one of those either. Indeed, I am a 21st century spinster.

For the first time in a long time I’m in a serious relationship, which really is grand, and I’ve not written kids off, though, let’s be real: I’m an old lady and that might not be in the cards for me.  (I am not interested in reproductive medical-technological intervention, and I don’t actually think I’m interested in adoption either, so my point here is maybe, but who knows – I’m leaving this shit up to fate, because my life is not empty or missing something without a baby or kid. I’m not saying that people who take advantage of reproductive technologies or who pursue adoption have any problems – I’m just saying I don’t think that those are my things – at least not right now.  My ambition has never been to be a mom, or to be a wife, though I think I might be great at both. But if those were my ambitions, I’d probably have gotten around to one or both of them by now.)

It took me aback this weekend when somebody wished me “Happy Mother’s Day” when I was leaving the sushi restaurant at which I’d had a good amount of Japanese beer with no kids in attendance. Sure, I’m of an age when a lot of women are mothers, but DUDE.  I’m not a mother.  Why would anybody assume I am one?

It also takes me aback that all around me people are getting engaged and getting wed.  Not because I’m not happy for people – I AM.  But EVERYBODY?  I mean, I used at least to be able to count on my gay friends not to be on the marriage parade.  No more!  Indeed, everybody is getting hitched.  EVERYBODY.   Except me, apparently.  And I’m now people (gay, straight, whatever) regard me with suspicion because that’s not tops on my list of priorities. (Note: I’m not saying that gay marriage should be illegal or that it’s a bad idea.  Marriage is great if people want it! I’m just saying that I miss the good old days when my gay friends were not *compelled* to be married, as us straight folks are and have historically been, as if that is the only way to make things official.  Why can’t one be an adult human being without a spouse?)

Seriously: why does anybody need to put a ring on it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m1EFMoRFvY

And yes, I get that marriage comes with legal and social benefits – I’m not stupid, and this is why I get the whole gay marriage thing – why I get the marriage thing in general.  I just wish that I didn’t feel so pressured into that particular institution at this particular moment.  Maybe it’s FINE that I’m a single woman who doesn’t have a child and who isn’t DESPERATE to be married or DESPERATE to have a kid.  Maybe I’m FINE, even without a spouse or a fucking kid.  Dammit.

And yes,The Dude and I are in love and we have discussed being in a permanent-ish situation, so this isn’t about me not wanting a committed relationship!  And yes, we might get married, in spite of all of our (both of our) reservations! I just really resent the idea that people seem to think there is only one way for us to be authentic!  Or for us to be real!  I mean, seriously?

Seriously.

 

 

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Love Means Always Having to Say You’re Sorry for Being a Lunatic at the End of the Semester

Never fear: things with The Dude are good – great even.

But what happens to me at the end of a semester is that I become a giant conflagration of stress and pissed-off-ness.  And that extends out to the people I love, because, you know, I love them, so that means I like to treat them badly when I’m overwhelmed and stressed out.  I think my mom said it best, when I talked to her this weekend:

Poor Dude!  Normally you lose it on me at this time of year, and I’ve learned to leave you alone as much as possible!  Now and at the start of the school year!  (You might want to warn him about that ahead of time.)  But now he gets it and I don’t!  This is fabulous!

Seriously, though perhaps this quote is not totally verbatim, what with the fact that she used his real name and wouldn’t have said “fabulous.”

Now, to be fair, my freaking out was provoked by comments like the following:

1. “Is all of this really that important?”
2. “But you’re going to be on vacation in two weeks: can’t you just suck it up?”
3. “You’re totally overreacting.”

Those are totally direct quotes. So perhaps he deserved a tiny bit of what he got.  I mean, vacation!  SERIOUSLY?  The next thing you know he’ll be accusing me of working only 12 hours a week!  You’ll be happy to know that after the “vacation” comment I listed off the litany of things I need to accomplish this summer, as well as blamed him for me being behind on my book project.  And I cried like a baby.  Because I’m cool like that.

That said, what’s different about this relationship as opposed to other relationships (and, objectively, I have a list of them that have gone the way of the dodo at this point in the academic calendar, and as I informed The Dude on Saturday, probably I should provide him with their contact information so he can understand just how much I’m not being as much of a lunatic as I have been known to be) is that I do actually care enough about him not to want to do this to him.  And I did apologize.  Because, really?  He deserved an apology.

But so anyway, we talked it through, and we are fine.  Better than fine, really. (No I don’t believe in the wasting of time/ But I don’t believe that I’m wasting mine)

He certainly has seen me at my worst now, and he hasn’t abandoned ship, so this is a good thing.  He did suggest, however, that at this time of year I should procure marijuana and smoke it daily in order to chill out.  I retorted that maybe a person who is in such a competitive career didn’t get there by waking and baking.  He then suggested more alcohol. We laughed.

So, one final down and the grades for that course are mostly tabulated.  By tomorrow afternoon, I should be all done with two classes – ready to post grades.  And tomorrow night The Dude and I are supposed to go to a Sporting Event, which I hope does happen, but may not because his dad had surgery today and I think that he may have to cancel, depending.  (This is also why I’m an asshole: yes, the end of the semester sucks, but it probably does suck more for your dad to be having a major surgery, and maybe I should have thought about that coming up and respected the significance of that before I lost my shit.  Or at least acknowledged it while I was losing my shit.)

And then I have finals for my other two classes on Thursday, and I’ll grade like a maniac between Thursday and Friday, and then graduation is Saturday, and then I will be FREE!  Yes, that’s just free to do other kinds of work, but it’s still FREEDOM!  And then I can be my Best Summertime Self, which is really my best self of all.  Which of course is why it’s very good that The Dude and I met in November, as if he met me during my Best Summertime Self Time and then he got the bullshit I dish out during the academic year?  No WAY would he put up with it.  No, my Best Summertime Self is really the reward for what I’m like 9-10 months out of the year.  Even for me, really, and not just for gentleman callers.

But until I become my Best Summertime Self, this is the song that I have been listening to on repeat.  And perhaps it suggests both my mood and my inability to be giving and nice and all the things that I wish I could be, and will be in just a couple of weeks.

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A Weird Week, More Than Anything Else

1. April sucks for professors.  It’s the most stressful, most fucked-up time.  This April is no exception.
2. All the stuff in Boston: it’s very weird having called a place home and having all those horrible things happen after one has left.  It’s also weird experiencing that weirdness with all the other people you knew then who don’t live there now, because you’ve all moved on.  Except for the friends of yours who didn’t.  Weird.  Also, watching “local” Boston news from my home Not-In-Boston was especially weird.  Mainly because even newscasters age.
3. I kinda picked a fight with The Dude, except for we didn’t bother fighting.  I expressed my problem (albeit passive-aggressively), and he got pissed off at me, but then we just had a conversation and it was fine.  Because you know what?  We’re really good at talking to each other.  That’s worth writing about because I don’t think I’ve ever had that before.
4. That said, I kinda picked the fight because he “we”ed me into a family thing of his for tomorrow, and he didn’t ask me, and then I felt all “being a girlfriend freaking sucks” and “who does he think he is” and whatever.  Also, what has he done for me lately?  But we talked and he got it. He respected my problem.  Maybe he’s awesome.  Probably.
5. I can’t wait until April is over.

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“Free-Range” Kids

So I live in this neighborhood from like the 1960s.  Kids who are like 5 years old walk to school by themselves, and all the neighborhood kids play together outside, like, all the time.  There is no such thing as an organized “play date.”  It’s a neighborhood, with kids, and they play.  And I love it.

But I called off class last night (allergies plus a terrible rejection made me feel “unwell”) and I discovered that the pack of hooligans (seriously- 10-15 kids aged 4-10, or thereabouts) think it’s ok to play in my yard.  Look, I’m not an asshole.  I’m cool with them cutting through my yard to get to each others’ houses, because, you know, they are kids and that’s fine.  You’re tiny – don’t walk on the main street.  But I am now a person who owns property and I also understand things like “liability for injuries incurred on your property.”  A pack of 10-15 little kids here, unsupervised, is NOT COOL.  And nobody asked me if I’d watch their fucking kids!

When I confronted the little hooligans last night, I just asked, “Um, why are you guys playing in my yard?” and a 6-ish year old kid responded, “There’s so much space!” and I said back, “Um, yeah, but it’s MY space, and don’t you have space in your yard?  You guys shouldn’t be playing here.  You have to play in your yard”  And they left.  But so tonight I thought, I’d better drink wine on my deck to make sure this isn’t a regular thing.  And don’t you know it: those little ruffians were back tonight!  One started climbing the fence in my yard!  And I was all, “Get off of that fence!  Go play in your yard!”  And I was RIGHT THERE!  They did that and I was clearly right there watching them!  Dude!

Here’s my thing: it’s not wrong for me not to want little kids to fuck around in my yard and potentially get hurt!  What the fuck?  Clearly I need to remain vigilant, and if this continues, I’m going to need to make them take me to their parents and I will need to give all of these parents a talking to.  Free-range kids are grand.  I support kids having autonomy.  But FUCK.  You don’t play in strangers’ yards without an invite!  I could be a child molester!  A mean lady!  Or similar!

Crazy.

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So Where Are Things Heading with You Two?

I talked to my mom on the phone tonight, and this was the question, about me and The Dude, now that she’s met The Dude.  I should note, this is not a typical question for my mother, because typically she doesn’t like anybody enough to have questions about their future with me.  She, and G, typically hope that I don’t have a future with dudes, generally, because nobody is good enough or “right” or whatever.  To be fair, nobody has been   We had a good talk, and she has no preordained ideas about what “should” happen.

My most honest answer I have to that question is that I don’t know – how could I possibly know?  But so far, I do think that he is my future.  We’ll see.

But the thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is about my “path” to this point. What I’m about to write is in no way a prescription, because, dude, it’s not like I’ve plotted any of this out in advance, and also, things could go to hell in a handbasket at any minute.

But here are things that are particularly good because of the life stage that I’m at.

1. I’ve got tenure.  I’m planted here.  Getting involved with The Dude involves no negotiations about location, no angst about how we’ll “make it work” in some imagined elsewhere, some imagined future time.
2. Going along with that, with him, there is no postponing shit to some future point.  I already own my house, I already have my career organized, and whatever might come, there isn’t a sense that we have to “wait” to figure anything out about our relationship because of practical (mainly money) considerations. Any decision we’re going to make about us or the future it is not at the mercy of the academic job market or at the mercy of my chance at feeling successful.  It’s also not at the mercy of anything with his career or his finances or about anything.  Our relationship is about our relationship, period.

And here are some good things about him:

1. At no point in the past five months has he ever disappointed me.  He calls when he says he’ll call.  If we have plans, those are totally set in stone.  He never flakes out.  Ever.
2. I have never felt, at any point with him, that I am pushing him for something that he doesn’t want, or that I have to beg for his time or attention.
3. I trust him to slow us down when necessary, and I’ve learned that him doing that has nothing to do with his commitment to me.
4. We are both all in, even if we are both afraid of that.

I don’t know where things with The Dude and I will go, and yet because of the above, I trust him.

But, let’s say we wanted to have a kid.  (I don’t know that we do, but we’ve talked about it in the abstract.)  We don’t have to worry about timing a pregnancy on the academic calendar, because I’ve accrued 10 years worth of sick time and I’ve already got tenure, so if we did, and if that baby came at an inconvenient time, I could totally take a whole semester off.  Also, if that were to happen, we’d have local support for it, and I wouldn’t be a lonely academic with a stressed out partner and no babysitter.

Let’s say that we just move in together.  Neither one of us wants to do that for any practical reason – he is an independent and self-sufficient person, and so am I.    Moving in together would never be about practical benefits, even though there would be practical benefits to it.

There is no competition between us about career.  And there never will be.  We aren’t together because of our jobs, or in spite of them.  At no point will we need to “take turns” about career opportunities.

All of the above means we can be “all in” emotionally, and not because we have to be, but because we want to be.

Look, we still might break up.  I know that.  But we’ve stopped anticipating that we will, and I think that’s a good thing.  And he has loved other people, and I’ve loved other people, and those things haven’t worked out.  We’ve both had that in mind this whole time.  And yet… we each believe that we have found our one true person in each other, even though both of us are deeply suspicious about the “one true person” business.

For me, I can’t imagine a person who is a better person than he is.  I hope he feels the same, and I think he does, he has said he does.  Who knows where it will go.  But what is great for me in this relationship, that has not existed in any other relationship is that there is no need to postpone anything – there is no need to wait for a right time.  This, so far, is a relationship in the present tense.  And for me?  That is both unique and awesome.

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So This Is Happening Wednesday – LIVE

In an old church for eight dollars.  To me.

 

UPDATE: Last Splash, beginning to end, plus encore.  They sounded so freaking good, an clearly were having so much fun playing together.  And I was happily home by 11 pm, which is great since I’ve got a full day of teaching ahead of me.  Man, do I wish I didn’t have a full day of teaching ahead of me.  Sigh…

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Also Known as Patriarchy. Also Known as Misogyny.

I am exhausted after 3 hours of teaching and a day of work that preceded that, and thus I don’t have anything lengthy or terribly insightful to add to the uproar all over the internet about the Steubenville rape verdict and the subsequent media coverage.  But I do have one point to make.

I am irritated by the euphemisms “football culture” and “rape culture.”  Football is a sport.  Rape is a crime.  Patriarchy is a structural system of oppression and privilege in which things like sports, media, and cultural and social institutions and actions are imbedded.  Misogyny is, simply put, the hatred of women, which is linked to the structural system that is patriarchy – though not, I think, identical to it – and this hatred makes it ok to rape a drunk girl, to videotape and photograph it, and to say disgusting things about it all over the internet.

Patriarchy and misogyny produce these “cultures” we’re so busy identifying as specific, localized entities, ones that we pretend to critique from some enlightened elsewhere.  And each and every one of us is a product of and a participant in patriarchy and misogyny, though of course many of us are resistant to those structures and attitudes.

I just don’t see how it’s helpful to make up new terms – terms that elide our complicity and that ignore the fact that what happened extends far beyond the city limits of an economically depressed town on the Ohio/West Virginia border – for what amounts to the same old shit.

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Photographic evidence

This was prettier before we ate and before I supplied The Dude with leftovers.

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Kielbasa and Sauerkraut

Yes, I know it’s St. Patrick’s day.  But it’s wintery feeling, and I’m dating a person who will not under any circumstances eat cabbage but he will eat sauerkraut.  (Yes, I have explained to him that sauerkraut is fermented cabbage.  No, that did not make any impact whatsoever.  I will wear him down sooner or later, but in the interim, I am catering to his silly preferences.)

But so anyway, I was going to remember to take pictures while I cooked, so as to please CPP, but I totally forgot.  Whatever.  Here’s what I did (and yes, I made double because both The Dude and I are huge fans and so I wanted for us both to have leftovers:

Ingredients:

4 lb. fresh sauerkraut

2 lb. kielbasa, cut into 2-inch pieces and then halved

1 medium onion, finely sliced

1.5 lbs. red potatoes, cut into like 1-inch pieces (slightly larger than bite-sized)

1 tbsp butter

2 bottles of beer

black pepper

caraway seeds (I think I used about a teaspoon?)

1/4 cup brown sugar

1. Preheat Oven to 300.
2. Drain sauerkraut.  If you want you can rinse it, but I actually like it a little tart, so I think that just draining the liquid is enough.
3. Chop sausage.
4. Melt butter in pan and brown sausage in the butter.  Put aside sausage.
5. While the sausage is cooking, slice the onion.
6. Saute onions in the fat from browning the sausage, season with pepper.
7. Wash and chop potatoes while the onions are sauteing.
8. Deglaze pan with half a bottle of beer, scraping up the bits from the bottom with a wooden spoon.
9. In a casserole dish, combine sauerkraut, onions, caraway seeds and brown sugar, stirring all together well.  Then, add potatoes and sausage into the casserole, and dump the remaining beer over the lot.
10. Cook for a couple of hours, until potatoes are cooked through and liquid has been absorbed, while being sure not to lose your mind before it’s time to eat because everything smells so yummy.

EAT!

(I may update this with a picture when it comes out of the oven, but I figure that if I don’t post it now then it’ll never get posted.

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In Lieu of an Actual Post…

Some items that each could be posts in themselves!

1. Wow, am I excited that it’s spring break next week.
2. Thomas Friedman is a tool. If only there were a MOOC to set him straight!
3. I’m hosting a non-dinner-party dinner this weekend at which The Dude, CC, and CC’s beau will be in attendance.  I am making boeuf bourguignon, accompanied by mashed potatoes, crusty bread, salad with creme fraiche dressing, and alcohol, so, really, how badly could it possibly go?  It does hurt my feelings that The Dude won’t eat vegetables other than salad, but I suppose that is a small problem, in the grand scheme of things.
4. I found out one of my students has been accepted into law school – with a full tuition scholarship for the first year and research assistantship funding for the second and third years… in other words, law school on a full ride.
5. I’m exceptionally irritated about how some things in my department are being handled, but what else is new?
6. Kitties are at turns irritating and delightful.  I think Hugo’s new exercise regime combined with me being more careful about how much I feed them might be helping with his obesity problem, but man is it annoying how he begs for me to play with the laser pointer.  Oliver is both the sweetest cat ever (to me), the most judgmental cat ever (to The Dude), and the most bossy cat ever (to everyone, including Hugo).
7. This might delight you, kill your soul, be mildly amusing, or some combination of the three, depending on your feelings about Nine Inch Nails and Carly Rae Jepson.
8. Snow in March is stupid.
9. Did I tell you guys that BES won an essay prize from an allied organization of the MLA?  Hells yeah!
10. While I am loving my classes this semester, I am finding myself… tired… of my students in my upper-level course in my specialization, who would “rather be reading Harry Potter” than reading the Booker-Prize-Winning Possession by A.S. Byatt (which is fucking awesome).  Dude, you are English majors.  If all you want to do is read books written for children and teenagers, how can you live with yourselves?

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