I'm normally prone to shameless bragging about being a resident of Cambridge. But not this week. I love my black lesbian mayor, I love our biodiesel city works trucks, our $25K per child per year in our schools, but I also love Henry Louis Gates Jr, and I love the integration and diversity we have here.
So I am sad that this man, who walks with a cane, who I have seen getting in and out of his white Infinity with his wide eyes and friendly smile, seemed like a threat - to his own neighbor.
I live two doors down from a Mosque, it's the most beautiful building in the neighborhood, I love hearing the chants and trance-like calls to prayer while I'm gardening. Mostly I love that it has existed here peacefully, no one has defaced, picketed, or seemed to want that mosque to do anything but serve its congregants as it sees fit. That is what Cambridge has always been about.
I know my neighbors, if I saw one of them trying to get into their house, while I might be puzzled, my first reaction would be to see if they needed help. I remember my latino brother being followed around stores by suspicious racists clerks when we were teeenagers. I remember imagining them thinking "no Latino could be dressed that nicely without doing something illegal to pay for it." Dr. Gates is a sixty year old man who exudes honor and dignity, I have seen him around our town and thought "that's what I love about living here, I bump into stereotype shatter-ers on every corner."
The biggest anomaly though is the police officer's refusal to apologize. I just don't understand who would be injured by this apology aside from a white man's ego. Yes I am sure he got angry, even hostile, and the whole city will if an apology doesn't come soon. Let's think about it. A white man in uniform (a uniform used as a tool to abuse folks of color for centuries) is interrogating you on the doorstep of the home you own, I'd get loud, I'd feel threatened, and if I were a black man, I'd have a hard time not feeling the swell of centuries of oppression manifest in that moment to criminalize what couldn't have been more innocent and pedestrian. White folks who wear uniforms that endow them with power, who carry weapons they are allowed to use, need to be conscious of the legacy they portray in that uniform. I assure you Dr. Gates spends every day of his life conscientious about the legacy of his physical appearance and his responsibility to carry it with honor. If for no other reason, that is what merits an apology, that Dr. Gates needed to think in that moment, needed to for his survival, about his blackness in this ivory tower neighborhood, about his blackness when confronted by a white male cop, and the officer clearly used his white privilege to claim that race had nothing to do with it.
I am concerned for Dr. Gates that his neighbor who's vigilance was so misguided will be hard to live beside. I hope she can be engaged in this conversation, and that all us white folks who live here can be better neighbors and feel the privilege and opportunity that is is to live around folks who all look different from each other.
Let me say that in a more dilute manner: equal rights for my people and our families is a no-brainer to me. I cannot fathom, why on earth, with the copious hate, violence, need, and injustice in the world, some people would focus their energies on denying the recognition of some kinds of love. This just blows my mind and I simply lack the capacities to comprehend it.
Meanwhile, I do believe that, as MLK said, the arc of history is always toward justice. I believe in the sovereignty of law, I believe our constitution has lasted for reasons pertaining to its flexibility, and effective design. I believe that love conquers hate, cliche as it sounds. I believe in self-determinism, and that what you call a family, and what I call a family, don't need to be the same, but that the law needs to make room for all ways we mean that word.
Now, a disclaimer: I'm no fan of marriage. My family broke up too late but in a nasty, ugly way. I do not believe marriage made us a family nor that a divorce unbound what made us strong. In my perfect world, there would be no marriage or civil unions, people who wanted legal recognition of their relationships would hire a lawyer to construct such an agreement (if only there was a way to make this universally accessible regardless of economic privilege). But let's be honest, we are really far from that, like, eons from it. So let's get back to reality, shall we?
My feelings about LGBTQ family rights are relatively unrelated to my feelings about the CA supreme court's decision. Here's the Prop 8 concern that is eating away at me: never before have the courts validated the idea that fundamental civil rights of a minority should be voted in or out of existence by the majority. As my brilliant friend said to me in an email today, if slavery were put to a vote and we were (as the white, privileged people we are) slave owners, would we have voted for abolition? Probably not, it wouldn't have been in our self-interest. But it wouldn't make it right just because it passed a vote, obviously!
I am still not entirely clear why the challenge to Prop 8 is being pursued ex post facto, and how much that is a part of the 6 affirming decisions handed down today. That aside, I feel strongly that from a legal, diction, and logical stance, there was simply no right choice on this matter. Is it an amendment or a revision? Well, that depends on whether you are looking at the scope of constitution-editing, or the impact of those edits, and who on earth can objectively say which lens is proper? No one can. But here's the thing: all legal cases are precedent. This one says, resoundingly, that a group of citizens in the majority can put the civil rights of the minority on a ballot, appeal to the masses, and repeal the rights of the less privileged with a simple majority. I am terrified, not so much about the fate of LGBTQ family rights as I know that soon the tide will turn, but that our highest courts are setting precedent that the agents of oppression can wield legal power to further oppress their targets. It is resoundingly clear that our courts exist to interpret the law, and the law exists to protect the weak, and today, the courts interpreted the law in a very hard instance without considering the impact it has on the power of people with privilege to oppress people without it. We never would have ended segregation, slavery, or voter inequality through ballot measures, and the courts should know better than to enact ballots propositions as a means to decide issues of social justice and civil rights.
Take a look:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-mutchnick/my-daughters-have-no-moth_b_170614.html
My reaction to Max Mutchnick's self-affirming little piece mirrors so much that I find hard to articulate about LGBT parenting. In a nutshell - it pisses me off. My boss and I often use the term "good people, working hard" to describe failures in inner-city education: people working long hours, with good intentions, but not changing systems, just spinning their wheels, feeling better about themselves. That's pretty much my impression of Max Mutchnick's brand of gay parenting: good people, trying hard. But you know what? Stop patting yourselves on the back, do a little self-assessment, and stop asking for everyone's approval and admiration. Honestly.
Yes, of course it is uncomfortable to think or talk about the fact that a women you don't know carried your beautiful, adored children, and even stranger that the egg with half of their DNA came out of an online shopping experience. These things are uncomfortable to think about because we were raised with a story about how we would create children that doesn't match up with the choices we ended up having. Yes, yes it is awkward, uncomfortable, and hard. So... you call her an oven?!?! Good move. It makes total sense. I mean, who wouldn't, in the face of confronting the frontier of non-traditional family creation (that you chose, mind you), choose to use derogatory and mocking language to describe it, right? And then, after you take a lot of heat for it, go back online and write a piece defending your diction as "distance regulating" - an adaptive way of managing the uncomfortable intimacy and weight of this woman's role in your life. Oh man... this one makes my blood boil - this is a privilege shit show that you are actually proud to star in because you think you have a defense for everything. So the bottom line is this - she has a place in your life that you can't really handle, ok, get some help with that. But - she has a role in your daughters' life too, a big, scary anonymous one. They have to figure out how to make meaning and get comfortable with her as an unknown, and so... you do too.
Let's look at some other uncomfortable things out there: A woman sold her eggs online, knowing she created wanted children, but never knowing if they were born healthy, or to whom, or anything about their future lives. What do you think she refers to you as, Mr. Mutchnick? I'm guessing it's far less offensive than your term for the surrogate, and just, per chance, that it acknowledges all the hard, weird, honest things about this, and that probably, she just calls you the parent. Imagine that. No "distance regulation" - just real wrestling with it for what it is. Then we have the surrogate, a woman who gave over her body, energy, emotions, and wellness to give you the children she'd never see grow up - on purpose. We're not talking about Juno here, this is someone who chose to offer this; pure intentional selflessness, not coincidental symbiosis. Do we think she didn't fall asleep talking to her belly during her pregnancy, telling the babies that they would be loved and cared for, often heartbroken in confronting that it would not be her to provide that? When you have two babies growing inside you for 9 months, "distance regulation" is a bit of a hard thing to achieve. No, instead of avoiding and distancing yourself from the hard reality of these family making ways, you go toward it, sit with it, swallow it, and move through it. It becomes a part of your story and of who you are and your job is to find a way to make that a part of you that you are proud of. This is the necessary work of family making.
Most importantly: your daughters. Two women came together, literally, in the most intimate, generous ways, to create these girls, and these women are absent, unknown, and mysterious. Someday these girls will grow up and may chose to become parents, and they'll confront things not even the most loving fathers could fathom. They'll come to love the babies that grow in their bellies and wonder what it was like for their surrogate to go through the pregnancy knowing they weren't her babies. They'll give birth and imagine that at the moment their babies are placed in their arms, they were being taken to a new family. Distance regulation won't be an option. They'll have empathy for the women who helped bring them into the world, and so, shouldn't you? They'll grow up looking in the mirror wondering who's nose they have, where they got their long eyelashes, etc, they have a long, constant, uncomfortable relationships with these unknown women, because they are part of them. If their dads can model handling that relationship that nobody knows how to have, it just might be less scary for them.
So, congratulations on your beautiful daughters, Mr. Mutchnick. I hope they feel as blessed to have gay dads as I do. I hope mostly though, that your journey into and through parenting is a more humble one. Where you realize that your daughters' journeys may dictate where you must go, that evasion may no longer work, and that doing hard work for them will make you all better people and a better family. Thanks for being visible as a gay dad, but don't feel the need to say you know how to do this, that you aren't making mistakes, and that you won't. You really fucked up calling someone an oven. Big time. Don't use a fancy term to justify it. When your presence as a gay parent is one who can't be flawed as every straight parent out there, you make it hard for our families. All families are flawed and none earn the right to parent based on merit. So get over it, and get over yourself. See, its not about you, it's about your daughters. You may need, and have the privilege, to create distance. However, distance is not something your daughters have the privilege of creating, this is in their blood. They deserve fathers who can recognize that this is a complex, intimate, impossible relationship to navigate, and navigating it is the only choice. That sometimes you'll make immature jokes as a coping mechanism, and that you need to take responsibility when you do, unpack where that is coming from, go towards it, don't cover it up with witty banter, own it.
I also find that lately many of my friends are complaining about not feeling well and about weight management. Aside from becoming veggie or vegan, they seem to lack strategies, and often have disappointing, if not dangerous, results. I think there is a case of nutrition ignorance going around - I have become a little dogmatic about high fiber, fresh, mineral-driven nutrition, out with you junk food vegans! Salsa and corn chips do not a wholesome dinner make! I've been reading Gillian McKeith books and raiding the bulk food bins at the co-op, taking more supplements and brewing more homemade tea blends from herbs I gathered up at Christina's Spices. I've opened more than a half a dozen young coconuts in the past couple of weeks to make raw pad thai I am scarcely willing to share even though I want everyone to know how satisfying and delicious raw vegan food can be. Yum yum yum. I feel like a raw glutton (although I'm not going raw again, not on my current schedule anyhow - just as raw as I can manage), being sinfully good to both my tastebuds and my poor winterized digestive enzyme reservoirs.
Here's today's adventure in anti-winter cuisine:
Breakfast - my daily smoothie
1 Tbsp ground flax
1 tbsp hemp protein powder plus fiber
1 thick slice of banana
3 frozen strawberries
1/4 C frozen blueberries
1 Tbsp lime juice
1/2 C soy milk
1/4 C soy yogurt
Throw it all in a blender and blitz until smooth, like summer in a glass. Also, it has a full color range, green hemp, blue and red berries, brown flax, etc. Tons of fiber, protein, omega 3's and delicious to boot. All with some milk thistle seed and dandelion tea to kick my liver into high gear. Talk about something to get out of bed for, I love the mauve of this smoothie so much I painted the bathroom in my last apartment the same color. Delish.
Lunch - delicious raw salad plate:
A scoop of tofu curry salad
- 1 package extra firm tofu (you could sub 2 cups of cashews soaked for 2 hours then ground to a crumbled texture in a food processor to keep it raw)
- 1/3 C finely chopped of each: celery, green apple, raisins, and red onion
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 C soy yogurt
- 2 tsp raw agave nectar
- 2 tbsp raw cider vinegar
- Juice of one blood orange
- 2 tbsp curry paste
Salad
-Wild arugula
-Organic pea shoots
-Half an avocado
-Sliced red pepper
-Sliced red and green cabbage
-Sprouted sunflower and pumpkin seeds (an incidental leftover from my aduki bean patties last week)
-Dressed with Braggs raw ginger sesame dressing
Another raw rainbow plate! This was so tasty that my cat, Basil, actually licked my plate clean after I had to fight her off to allow me to finish eating the food!
Dinner (cooked all morning) Aduki bean chili
- 2 tsp olive oil
- 1 spanish onion chopped
- 1 red onion chopped
- 1/2 leek, rinsed and chopped
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 Summer squash, chopped
- 1 red bell pepper, chopped
- 1 fresh tomato, chopped
- 1 can San Marzano tomatoes, chopped, plus canning liquid
- 4 C sprouted aduki beans
- 1 package extra firm tofu
- 3 C filtered water
- Salt, cayenne pepper, cajun blackening dust, pepper etc, to taste.
Saute the onions, leek, and garlic with oil and spices until softened, add squash until soft, then add everything else and simmer until stew-ish and thick. Serve with fresh avocado slices and sprouted aduki beans on top.
Snacks? You bet. Juiced spinach, grapefruit, watercress and a little cilantro this morning to take all my supplements with (fish oil, grapefruit seed extract, milk thistle seed capsules, and digestive enzymes). Mid-afternoon may be an aduki bean burrito (heat aduki beans in a pot with salsa, throw them on a corn tortilla, top with fresh greens and sliced avocado, roll up and eat!), or some of the gorgeous blood oranges I bought yesterday with a sliced champagne mango (so happy to see those at the stores again!). Since fruit is best eaten without protein, carbs or veggies, it makes a perfect between-meals snack.
Just because it is too delicious to keep a secret, here's the raw pad thai recipe:
Noodles (toss them together in a large bowl)
- meat scraped from 2 young coconuts, sliced into thin strips or "noodles"
- sprouts
- long thin strips of:
- red pepper
- fuji apple
- green cabbage
Dressing
- 1/4 C raw almond butter
- 3 tbsp bragg's liquid aminos
- juice of 1 lemon
- 1 clove garlic
- 1/2 tsp agave nectar or honey (optional, I leave it out)
- a few shavings of fresh ginger
- a slice of a jalapeno pepper
Blend the dressing ingredients in a blender then pour over the salad and toss until evenly coated. I could eat this everyday, Shura calls it ambrosia, I am too busy eating it to bother describing it.
Does it sound like I'm on a summer produce kick? I am. I am kicking my cold and my winter slump to boot. I'm also getting giddy about traveling to Italy in May and taking a cooking class at our villa in Umbria, I have never had a kitchen to use while in Italy, so I can't wait to prepare food for everyone there. Mangiamo cibo grezzo!
Ok, several events in the last 24 hours have been a bit jarring... finding out your cousin is getting divorced by having a bbc article emailed to you about it notwhistanding, the 4:30 am alarm clock, the 20 degree drop since yesterday, etc... but this Wahington Post headline makes me crazy "
GOP SEES STIMULUS OPPOSITION AS CHANCE FOR "REBIRTH"
What?!?!So now they're this pheonix rising from the still smoldering ashes of partisanship, rigid adherence to failed economic strategies (ahem, tax cuts tax cuts and nothing but tax cuts), and a refusal to invest in new infrastructure on the wings of partisanship, rigid adherence to failed economic strategies (ahem, tax cuts tax cuts and nothing but tax cuts), and a refusal to invest in new infrastructure? WTF?!
This is so surreal. I can't take it. My favorite quotation was the Senator who said "we are beginning to find our voice." This is too much, it hurts. Shouting the same old rhetoric, but this time from the sidelines, feels like a new experience huh? Amazing what a little change of perspective can do to the same old ideas.
Oh, and by the way, happy 6th birthday Adahlou! I love you tons!
It's been a while. Four months and a day to be exact. My bad.
Things have been anything but uneventful, in fact a little too big and significant to try to capture in this format. Here's my quick list of life since I last wrote:
Obama, Prop 8, trip to SF and the gorgeous bay, brother and his fiance break up, figuring out how to bake gluten free bread, getting ready to leave my job, looking for what's next, dad having surgery, relatives visiting from Italy, cousin's album released, cousin in Egypt has new baby, lots of dental work (finally fixed my smile!), diagnosed with scoliosis, Anna gets married, I get my first Tarot reading (I'm good with it - future looks good), and I figure out what I want to do with my life. Phew! So there it is. See? Too much, too much.
Other things that have been going on are that:
My love affair with a doppio espresso with soymilk has been deepened by my new espresso maker.
I'm trying really hard not to eat dairy, but home-made soy yogurt isn't working out.... wildwood soy yogurt is my new friend.
I feel awesome when I am dairy-free.
I love my friends madly.
My couch (aka Bette Porter) still seems like the best purchase ever. I spilled Indian food on her pale gray upholstery and that resilient thing...she bounced right back. Love her - sexy, curvy, firm, classic, perfect.
It's hitting me that I am going to Italy in three months, I can't wait! Oooooh, yay. Yay Italy. Yay for this trip.
Phone drama! Got the google phone, hated it, returned it, stalling in indecision, thinking about the Iphone, wondering when the exclusive contract with AT&T ends, my phone dies, bought a cheapo to tide me over while I am paralyzed in a rare bout of indecision.
Met my cousin's celeb wife. What an interesting Xmas dinner.
Adah turns 6 tomorrow. Whoah! Whoah.
Sleeping isn't going so well, going to an ENT to see if my deviated septum is the culprit. I miss being rested.
Realizing that I have an extreme salt addiction and truly lack a sweet tooth. Everything is too sweet for me: cashews, squash, yams, pears, ick. I put obnoxious amounts of salt in everything I cook...love love love it. This isn't new, just coming to terms with it.
I love my house. It's been a year and a month and I love it more all the time.
Holy snow!!!!! So much...the love/hate relationship with winter continues.
So, there is is, nothing particularly newsworthy, but never a boring life nonetheless. I resolved not to make resolutions this year, but just to try to live a little better, whatever that looks like. No promises about writing more often/regularly etc.... but I think 4 months without writing is a one-timer. Time for a doppio...
We drove up to Brattleboro around 4 on Saturday and headed for the co-op to get a bite to eat, and then made our way onto Marlboro. Pulling off 91 at exit 1 in Vermont brought back a rush, more for Shura than for me. She fell in love and had her first child there, and as we drove by the grocery store she was reminded of going there at 11 pm to get ice cream with Bruce, and standing on the cart while he pushed her around the store. We drove by the house where Adah was born and where she and Bruce lived while they started a family that is now changing.
On to Marlboro: we missed the turn off route 9 for MacArthur road (we were going to Jason MacArthur's house, it is still that small of a town), so we debated if we should turn around or continue on to South road and make our way back on the dirt road through Marlboro called Ames Hill. We opted for the latter and as soon as the choice was made I knew we couldn't avoid going to campus and having a look around. Shura pulled the car up to the dining hall and out walked a group of students, the first of which had a head of spikey dreadlocks sticking out in every direction. I burst into laughter wondering a- how did she and I ever fit in here, or did we? and b- how much have we changed since? Inside the dining hall were postings for the things that made it seem like it will never change: Elizabethan Fencing, Feminism on Campus, and the town meeting minutes and selectboard meeting minutes. We checked the old cookie drawer but it was empty, not even crumbs - even for someone who can't eat cookies, that was a devastating blow to my memory of Marlboro traditions.
We got back on the South Road, turned onto Ames Hill and bumped along to Fox Road, then Stark Road, and finally to MacArthur Road. We drove right by the driveway and had to back up to see the wooden sign that read "Harvest Party" to know which driveway to turn down. We couldn't stop laughing at ourselves as we held hands and walked up the dirt driveway, stumbling over rocks and roots, nearly falling into the stream on the side of the driveway. It never gets that dark in the city - we were out of practice on it, as well as dirt road driving, all of it.
Walking into Jason and Lauren's house, the long flowy layers everyone wore, the smokey smell and dry heat of the wood stove, the ages of the kids and adults ranging from newborns to 80 year olds, we thought about how long it had been since we lived with woodstoves, in houses built by the residents, and on farmland. It was a little bit of a shock to realize that four years after we'd moved away, starting our urban lives, and become entrenched in the pace of city living, so many of our friends had stayed mostly the same. They've stayed in rural Southeastern Vermont, bought land and built their own homes, married and had kids, but still belong to the co-op, attend the same contra dances, and lectures at the college. We spent hours in the back yard being warmed by the bonfire, watching the sparks fly up and blend in with a starrier sky than I have seen in ages, talking with Tristan and Julia about the final stages of construction on their new house.
We woke up the next morning as Jason was ladling cream off the top of a jug of raw un-homogenized milk for our coffee (from Lilac Ridge Farm just up the road), the woodstove being rekindled by Lauren to warm up the now chilled house, and smoke rising from the smoldering pile of branches in the backyard. We got in the car and made our way up to Waterbury where Shura ran her forst 1/2 marathon and I shivered awaiting her return, not feeling remotely down on myself for my lack of interest in running. Back into the car, I drove her minivan back to Boston with a pit stop at Trader Joe's and said goodbye as I turned in for a night of readying myself for the impending DOE site visit. I took a bath to rid myself of the chill in my bones and couldn't quite stop marveling at how different my life is now, but how thankful I am to still have those friends. It was a treat like no other to reconnect with old friends, but especially to have so many hours out of cell range in a car with a friend who's life has made some changes in parallel to mine to look back on my path with her.
At one point driving North Shura said she needed to remind herself to let the land in, and let the beauty to affect her psyche, since she's been so defended from her emotions lately. I felt so far from that goal in the car, my calculated eye monitoring every change in the pace of traffic, worrying about tomorrow, and refusing to let my guard down. I think though, a few days out, that I really did escape this weekend, I feel like I spent 24 hours somewhere else entirely, and I miss it.
This has been a bone of contention I've held with the entire world for a long time now: why oh why, are laundromats such god-awful horrid places where no one in their right mind would want to spend their precious evenings and weekends?
There is no way to multi-task at a laundromat. Okay okay... when I was in grad school or college it was the perfect place to discipline myself, or rather, strand myself, with a book that I was dreading to read. More often than not however, I find the laundromat to be creepy, dirty, and basically the last place on earth I want to be detained for three or four hours.
I have been wondering why no one has made an awesome laundromat for years now. I had an idea for one I wanted to name the sit and spin, it would be a coffee bar/lounge with free wifi during the day, and a bar at night, there would be great music, comfy couches, and yummy cookies and snacks. Sadly, I learned that there already is a sit and spin in SF, and it is such a disappointment, it just your average dingy laundromat.
My second idea was the yogamat. It would be a place where 45-minute long exercise classes started every hour on the hour and there would be a juice bar with free wifi, and washers and dryers of course. You could put in your wash, join the next class and be done in time to move the laundry forward, then you could jump back into another class or hang out at the juice bar until the dry cycle is all done!
I just need a funder, but I think I am onto something here. I have to disclose that I have moved up in the world and have my very own washer and dryer in my condo. So why do I care about the laundromess of the world? Well, I always utilized my local wash, dry and fold service since I just couldn't stand to spend a precious Saturday in that god-forsaken place called the laundromat. Moreover, my friends now use my washer and dryer from time to time. I don't mind it at all, I just feel badly that their choice, when I'm not around to shelter them while they launder, is to shell out a dollar a pound for wash, dry and fold service, or to sacrifice and entire afternoon to the scornful laundromat gods. Just today Megan was hoping to hang out and do her laundry, but I have plans for the afternoon and evening. I feel badly that I can't accommodate her, but more badly that I know the dingy fate that awaits her on such a gorgeous day, not to metion the last weekend day before our students come back :(
During the L word season I'd tivo the HD version of the show and Bekah would come over to watch and do her laundry, but during summer its hard to offer my friends a weekend afternoon when I am interested in being here for a few hours. Maybe my contribution to the world won't be letting my friends do their laundry here, or creating good schools for inner-city youth, or creating community for queerspawn, but creating laundromats that are fun, productive places to be.
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Lightfoot Letters said:
Good Post....but don't confuse a headline with reality. The oldest ideas are from Hoover and FDR which you probably will... read more
on Rebirth?!?! -
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Aw it makes me smile to hear about your day. And I got to talk to you today, so perfect... read more
on Over it.