I've kind of actively avoided blogging about graduation because what do you say? There's enormous accomplishment but there's also an entire swath of your life that's over. And if you had told my freshman year self that she would be feeling this way at the end of her four years she would have looked at you like you were crazy. She was just there to take classes and get it over with.
Somewhere along the line, things changed, and I think it began with painting nails and watching Whose Line Is It Anyway with Roommate J. Then there was painting nails and waiting for the all-clear to sound with HaHa. Or...not painting nails, actually, and going in an oddly color-coordinated foursome to buy ice cream with all my froomies.
I wrote my Junior Year fall independent work on Tales of the City, which is all about the families you choose. By senior year the froomies and I had fallen into (and laughingly constructed) a 50s nuclear family dynamic (complete with entertaining skeletons in the closet): I was the dad (bug-killing, with a British man named Julian on the side), CC was the mom (frequently absentee and baked-goods-providing), HaHa was the oldest daughter (aloof, patient, a woman of mystery), and Roommate J was the baby.
Another major theme of Tales of the City: "Mona used to say that she could get by just fine without a lover as long as she had five good friends."
Any way you slice it, I had family by my side at graduation, and they weren't just the two people snapping pictures, related to me. (Although while we're on that subject, I made it my personal mission to see how many times I could get the de Plume waterworks flowing over the course of the three-day extravaganza and I think I set a personal record.)
Other things that happened that made it difficult to leave Princeton: I had access to a car for a total of four semesters and with it I was able to feel more at home in the wider community than I had before; I saw the sun rising and setting over fields on Quaker Road that became my favorite Princeton view; I went to prison, and it changed my life; I wrote a triumphant thesis and did original work; I started to come up with my own, practical definition of the humanities (working manifesto title: The Universal in the Particular--and would you really want to live in a world without them?); I cried when Shirley Tilghman told my class to make service and education their mission since it might just be mine; I learned how to stop being a rockstar and how to become a BAMF instead; I won the first of several bets; I made playlists, organized trips, and became a road warrior; I developed a fashion sense; I started a Christmas card recipient list; I learned how to disagree; I began compiling a list of role models; I ate Olives cookies; I ogled hot grad students (although, hello, Chicago!); I attended free midnight movies; I got taken down a peg and raised up three; I discovered the addictive properties of being a small fish in a big pond for the first time in my life; I fell into the NYC honey trap; I had my teapot confiscated freshman year and I still want it back.
Were they the best four years of my life? How can I possibly answer that? Probably not, and that's as it should be. To continue my Tales of the City thread, I think I'll agree with Mrs. Madrigal and say that my favorite year hasn't happened yet. These were a great four years, though, and they exceeded almost every expectation I had. Thank you, CC. Thank you, HaHa. Thank YOU, Roommate J. And thank you, Princeton.

I didn't watch any TV between Wishbone and The West Wing. I didn't listen to any music on the radio beyond the oldies and public radio stations until I was a freshman in high school. Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, I've managed to develop a healthy appreciation of pop culture in my late teens and early twenties. I recently read somewhere else that someone hadn't grown up with pop music, she had grown into it.
I think part of the reason I enjoy Top 40, and hip-hop, and rock, and basically everything but heavy metal and country (there are some exceptions, of course) so much is that, no, the lyrics are not always searing commentaries on the vagaries of human existence and, yes, sometimes an artist will rhyme "baby," "day," and "pain," (but hey, it's slant rhyme), but in every song I like there's something that touches me. There's either the sound I can't get out of my head or that one lyric that makes me want to sing along in the car, or that makes my heart clench up.
Sometimes it just comes down to what makes you want to plug in your iPod and go jogging, or throw your hands up in the air and dance around while you're home for fall break and making cookies, or cry without a real reason. Sometimes even the tritest lyrics have a kernel of truth; that's how they get to be clichés.
(And then there's Coldplay. They constantly do all of the above to me, and yet I don't feel the need to defend them. There's substance in their lyrics, and they can sing too.)
I started thinking about this so much because of my family's Top 500 Songs compilation, and the fact that if we each made our own Top 500s they would be completely different lists, perhaps not even recognizable as related to the other, original list. Probably, this would be the most true of my list. I won't try and see--I don't have that kind of time--but here, without shame, are some lyrics in fairly mainstream songs that make me pause and think, or laugh.

"I throw my hands up in the air sometimes." "I think that she knows." "That boy is a monster; he ate my heart." "Well you may be a lover but you ain't no dancer." "Please, please, don't leave me." "I live by the river." "Oooh, you set my soul alight." "Life is a mystery." "I'd like to make myself believe that planet Earth turns slowly." "Can you meet me halfway, right at the borderline? That's where I'm gonna wait for you." "What we gonna have: dessert or disaster?" "If I don't say this now, I will surely break. [...] I'll look after you." "Why does love always feel like a battlefield? Guess you better go and get your armor." "Tell your boyfriend, if he says he's got beef, that I'm a vegetarian and I ain't fucking scared of him." "You try making me wait, but it feels all right as long as something's happening."


*"Dynamite," Taio Cruz; "Lovestoned," Justin Timberlake; "Monster," Lady Gaga; "Helter Skelter," The Beatles; "Please Don't Leave Me," P!nk; "London Calling," The Clash; "Supermassive Black Hole," Muse; "Like A Prayer," Madonna; "Fireflies," Owl City; "Meet Me Halfway," Black Eyed Peas; "Knock You Down," Keri Hilson; "Look After You," The Fray; "Battlefield," Jordin Sparks; "Don't Trust Me," 3OH!3; "Tribulations," LCD Soundsystem

Roommate J and I have been exchanging page-long e-mails since the summer began. At first they were just updates, funny observations, movie recommendations. Lately they've bounded into the realm of advice, council, and hard-hitting questions about life the universe and everything. If someone asks you a question in person, you blurt out the first thing you think of. This is why oral historians and journalists like to interview people in person. There's definitely value in recording a gut reaction, but, I gotta say, I think Roommate J and I have made more progress on looking at our lives, and where we're going from here, answering each others' written questions and writing responses than a whole year of thinking would yield.
There's something about going back over the e-mails, finding pieces of advice I've given her and what I've written in response to her oft-written question, "What are you doing next?" that frees me up to put together these pieces of text in something resembling a plan.
I started the summer a little lost. (Not Six Feet Under lost, but de Plume lost.) I haven't answered all the questions I drove away from my junior year at Princeton with--nor have I put all my thoughts down in those e-mails--but I've come out the other end of our exchange (which is about to be put on hiatus as Roommate J goes off to visit China and see the mountain of all mountains with her family) with a bit more of a sense of what's important to me, what's worth fighting for, and what's worth leaving behind as I move forward in my life.
I've never been one to spew thoughts out into the air--even my most Irish family members have a mysterious WASPiness to them--but I've discovered recently that if I start typing in Gmail it can be difficult to stop. And typing leads to ideas and ideas lead to thinking and thinking leads to planning.
It should have been obvious (there have been posts, a lot of posts, on this blog like that), but sometimes even I need to be told twice.

May as well start with prison tutoring.

On the one hand, you're a piece of meat. I mean, you know that when you sign up for it, if you're female and young, you're signing up for getting stared at. In the world outside the prison, people noticing you follows several stages, starting at indifference and moving up through perception to interest and sometimes on to staring and talking and in very rare cases to whistling or lewd comments. In prison, the first few stages are either cut out or there's some special supplement they put in the food that gives the inmates the magical power to go from zero to sixty in under a second and run through indifference, perception, and interest in the time it takes me to register their presence in the hallway or the classroom.
Staring is the norm, as was made abundantly clear to me on my first day, when the education director took Fellow Tutor A and I on a tour of our classrooms and every head in the place snapped in our direction when she opened the door to let us meet the teachers. "They're young and they're horny," she told us with a fairly thick Jersey accent (she's awesome), "and if the wall were a woman they would stare at that."
It wasn't as if I wasn't expecting all of this. I may not have watched Oz (and I don't plan to until I'm done with this gig), but I know about prison logistics and I know about guys in their late teens and early twenties and I'm not an idiot.
Even when it was fairly obvious to me on that first day of orientation that there were guys in the corner whispering about Fellow Tutor A and I in Spanish, I didn't mind that much. In the real world, I wouldn't put up with that kind of thing, but prison, I told myself (and I still believe) is an already imperfect system and you have to take it as it comes and choose your battles wisely.
The battle I eventually chose was the Great Definitions Battle of April 2010.
Most of the time I spent tutoring, I tutored math. The teacher likes math, the inmates like math, and even though I usually hate it more than any other subject (except maybe chemistry--and that only because I'm counting physics as glorified math), I found myself liking math too because it's easier to teach students who like a subject than students who are barely putting in the effort. Grammar, I found, was not a fun subject to teach, and if I thought about it in terms of French I could definitely identify. How do you tell people who have been communicating perfectly well for over fifteen years that they're doing it wrong? Obviously as an English major I want people to be able to use the English language in ways that highlight its beauty and complexity, but that's in the real world.
But, then again, these classes are all about the real world. One of the subjects the teacher spent time on was Career Education, after all, and Career Education is focused on what the students could possibly do once they've been released. The grammar and the math (as much as it pains me to say it), those are for the real world too, as well as for their advancement within the prison school system.
So grammar is complicated. It's hard for the prisoners and it's hard for me to reconcile my sympathy for them with my love of the language, with my separation of the prison system from the real world, with my growing realization that teaching prisoners is more important, more of a last-ditch attempt, than teaching almost any other group of people in the country.
But I digress. Back to the Great Definitions Battle of April 2010.
I had determined that math was easy to teach, but I was still excited when they started doing spelling. Vocab! That was something I had always been interested in. So I sat expectantly in my corner, waiting for someone to break the ice and raise his hand and ask for help. Pretty soon, the guy sitting closest to me looked up from his dictionary and said, "I don't get this."
Spelling is really great, from a tutor's point of view, because the students are asked to use sixteen words in a sentence and sometimes they don't understand the definitions, and that's where you come in. So I slid over expectantly.
He passed me the dictionary and pointed to the word "boycott." The definition was pretty convoluted, so I said, "Okay, boycott. Well, it's like the bus boycotts during the Civil Rights Movement. When people stopped riding the bus."
He stared at me like I had a hole in my head.
Until then, my tutoring had taken the form of helping them get through the worksheet, making sure they understood enough to do well in the class. When this guy made it clear to me that he didn't know about the bus boycotts, I launched into a whole, wholly unrelated to spelling, explanation. (During this explanation, I found myself hovering over whether to say "black" or "African American" in this context, to...an African American man, but that's another story, for another very long post.) I didn't care whether he knew how to spell boycott or not, I just wanted him to know what a boycott was and why it was important to the history of the country.
This was my last day of tutoring for the semester, and until that moment I hadn't hit my stride. Listening to Roommate J talking about her experiences tutoring, I was sure I was doing something wrong, not making enough of an effort to get to know my students (although I had at least ten more than her, so that wasn't a very logical worry), not circulating enough, something. Explaining boycott, though, I knew I was doing something right. The student was listening, nodding, understanding what the word meant. And I wasn't shy (something I spend enough time fighting in the outside world), or nervous, or unsure I was being taken seriously. I chose the right battle and there I was, discovering the right tone to take as a tutor for inmates. Until then, I wasn't sure I would tutor again the following semester. Now I know that I will.

I'm still a piece of meat, though, even in my regulation, over-sized, bright yellow volunteer t-shirt.
The guy I explained "boycott" to was the guy who had complimented me on my shoes the week before--"Nice chucks."--and who was a frequent starer. Yes, I picked my battles, and yes, I said the staring didn't really phase me at first. After a while, though, it began to. Roommate J, when I mentioned this to her, didn't feel the same way, hadn't had the same experiences. I didn't object to being viewed sexually per se--that, like I said, I had totally expected and accepted--but it began to wear on me, week after week, to be seen as just one thing: just what I look like, that hot chick who comes in Monday mornings and helps out in Ms. T's room and sometimes scoots over close to help with math problems (oh, and she has nice chucks), and all the assumptions that come with it. It feels like you're being taken advantage of, and that's never good.
I guess it's appropriate that I was in prison when I came to the conclusion that the most dispiriting, horrible feeling is being looked at like you're not a person. This happens to prisoners all the time, after all, both in prison and in "the real world."
So it's a learning experience. Duh. That's why everyone's there. Fellow Tutor A might be there purely out of the goodness of her heart (she's that kind of person), but I'm there because I wanted to learn more, and lend a hand while I was at it.

Both those goals have been met, in ways I couldn't possibly have predicted in January, and this time next year I'll probably know even more about life, inside and out.

Today is the Day of Silence. In the words of their website (http://dayofsilence.org/content/getinformation_faq.html), “The Day of Silence is a student-led national event that brings attention to anti-LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender] name-calling, bullying and harassment in schools. Students from middle school to college take some form of a vow of silence in an effort to encourage schools and classmates to address the problem of anti-LGBT behavior. The event is designed to illustrate the silencing effect of this bullying and harassment on LGBT students and those perceived to be LGBT.”
I have participated in the Day of Silence every year since the beginning of high school, and today I woke up to my alarm at 7:45 and woke up Roommate J and the visiting prefrosh, all the while talking, and headed over to McCarter to hear Ban Ki-moon speak. And then I came back to the dorm and opened the New York Times online as saw this article (http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/who-are-you-calling-gay/) and realized what day it was.
It’s too late for me to stop talking, but I felt last year that that tactic---especially in a college setting where it’s remarkably easy to not say a thing all day long without having to explain why or what it is you’re standing for---left a lot to be desired. I wrote about it for my final essay in my Nonviolence in Theory and Practice, concluding that, yes, silent protest is an effective tactic. For me, however, (a detail I left out of the article) the level of non-speech required for the Day of Silence is not that much above my regular daily dose so as to feel all that effective. I support the Day of Silence wholeheartedly, especially in high schools where silence on a Friday actually means something, but my own participation in it has become irrelevant.

My primary form of expression is fiction writing. That’s been the case since fifth grade, at least. If it seems that here are a lot of gay characters in my stories and plays (and soon, hopefully, TV shows) that’s because there are a lot of gay characters in my stories and plays. Well spotted. There are, as far as I can tell, a couple of reasons for this. The first is my conscious decision to use my fiction to, among other things, educate. By having gay characters that are, along with my straight characters, realistic and non-stereotypic I hope to normalize a sexuality that may not be familiar to all of my readers. My second reason is that when I write I draw on the people I know, which also explains all my French characters, my Catholic characters, my Asian characters, and my midwestern characters. Also the fact that I recently wrote a story about Mabel the switchboard operator in Walden, Colorado. She and her maybe-platonic-maybe-more affair with Westy, the owner of the cabin, is a large part of family lore.
What really interested me about the intersection of the Day of Silence and the New York Times article---which, for those of you who haven’t read it, addresses the tendency, particularly among middle and high schoolers, to use words like “gay” or “queer” or, most offensively “fag” in disparaging ways, even when they are describing someone or something who is not, in fact, gay---is the focus on speech and its effects. The Day of Silence draws attention to the inability of some to speak about themselves openly. The Times article talks about people whose ignorance takes on a harmful verbal dimension. In both cases, your decision to speak out or remain silent can literally make a life or death difference to someone else.
I, and many like-minded people I know, try to operate under the assumption that we never know everything about the people who are listening to us. Envision making a racist joke in racially mixed company. Who in their right mind would do that? Now imagine making the same joke in a racially homogeneous group. With the proper disclaimers (“I’m not a racist, but…” “Listen to this really funny joke! It’s pretty horrible, though…”) you might go though with it. (Or you might not. I don’t pretend to know that about you). I remember when I was in seventh grade, my mom told me a story about a situation like this while we were sitting in the car waiting for my piano lesson to start. A biracial woman who mostly took after her Caucasian parent was at a party like the second one I described. When someone made the joke, she went up to them and explained why she was offended and why anyone could have been.
The point is that, even more than race (and then, obviously, not all the time as that story attests) it is impossible to know everything about a person’s sexuality at one glance. The same goes for their politics or their medical history or their religious affiliation. Sure there are ways to outwardly manifest those things (wearing a gay pride pin or an Obama button or a Star of David, for instance), but for the most part these are things that are not as clear as a person’s ethnicity or gender (and even that can be an area of uncertainty). The point is that you never know who’s listening. When you use “gay” as a synonym for stupid (or tell Mormon joke, or a Catholic joke) you have no way of telling who among your listeners is inwardly cringing, or retreating a little farther within themselves.
The point is, there’s no need for silence, but there is a need to think before you speak. It is completely absurd, to me, that an entire group of people is reviled for a fact of life over which they have no control and shouldn’t have to change even if they could.
So yes, I am a proud ally of the LGBT community and I intend to write more and do more and, most importantly, say more.

And now it is time for my bike ride. The weather is lovely. Have an excellent weekend!

Two days ago I put to rest two entertainment obsessions: Dorothy Dunnett's 8-book House of Niccolo series (and by extension The Lymond Chronicles, her closely related 6-book series), and The Wire.
I can't recommend either enough, although, realistically, I can imagine watching The Wire as an easier undertaking for most of you; I've been reading Dorothy Dunnett since freshman year of high school (with hiatuses, obviously).
At any rate, having spent as much time thinking about these two series as I have, I was bound to, in the words of my mother and mothers everywhere, learn something. Therefore, below, I present ten things I learned from each series. Enjoy.

Things I Have Learned From The Wire:
1) Have a hobby. Make miniature furniture or become a Honey Nut Cheerio connoisseur, for example.
2) Grown men are not the only scary people out there. Women and little kids are equally capable of terrifying behavior.
3) Sometimes, a dog is just a dog.
4) If you leave Charm City, Garrison Keillor will automatically come on the radio, and who wants that?
5) Robin Hood's got nothing on Omar Little, not even style (have you seen his PJs?).
6) Don't start a relationship with McNulty. (Or Kima. Or Bunk. Or D'Angelo. Or Nick. In fact, just stick with Freamon, okay? Or latter-season Prez.)
7) Middle School is, in fact, the worst place in the world. You've always suspected you were right.
8) Academia, unlike armed robbery, will never, ever, look good in prime time.
9) Gus Triandos needs some love.
10)No one thing can be fixed. It's everything changes, or nothing does.

Things I Have Learned From Dorothy Dunnett:
1) It's all about paternity: fourteen books of who's related to who and who's whose son. A Renaissance-flavored episode of Maury, if you will.
2) The main character, on some level, knows everything, and has always known.
3) There can only be one good, handsome man.
4) Little kids are adorable, perceptive, and doomed. When your author obviously has a cap on the number of cute little kids there can be at one time, avoid having a favorite.
5) Eight books worth of drama can, in fact, be chalked up to one old man's misplaced homophobia. This is only one of many reasons why homophobia is BAD.
6) Smart women save the day every time.
7) Don't play chess. Just don't.
8) Settling for marrying your one true love's doppelganger never works. Never, ever.
9) Disguises rock. Drunken disguises rock even harder.
10) "Yunitsa" is a term of endearment. It also means heifer, but that's neither here nor there.