Jen and I got married in Maine on July 9. it was beautiful and green and family oriented and full of birds. It was really really gorgeous. 


We're not gonna talk about the part where Jen and I and several of our guests had the stomach flu. Lets just look at the pretty pictures. 





 and...








We are freakin' adorable. Even with the stomach flu.


So that wedding was gorgeous, but that wedding wasn't legal. But YAY, NYC had just legalized same-sex marriage a few weeks before Wedding the First. When we got home, we had another wedding, a legal wedding. Since we had just been through the big traditional wedding, we were happy to do something a little more low key and out of the ordinary for Wedding the Second. I saw a tweet about the popup chapel event in central park and threw our name in to be part of the event. And so we were married again, in the middle of manhattan. I truly do HEART new york, so this was really exciting. 


And we were still adorable. 








and SEXY










I love jen and I love getting married! 


I'm going to do a more organized post about all the hard work we put into Wedding the First and the cute things we made, cause I was pretty obsessed with googling "wedding birdhouse escort cards" for a while, and I'd love to see my own wedding birdhouse escort cards come up on future searches. 


Ohhhhhh yeah blog, I'm BACK. You brought me a wife! I love you!

 I havent blogged in about a gazillion years. Here's what's up:

I'm getting married this week! In Maine. Pretty pretty. 

I'm getting married later in July! In New York. LEGAL LEGAL.

My job is sometimes ok, it's pretty cool when I'm in high powered meetings. 

My job is sometimes boring, it's lame when I'm like, all I do is throw out your old trash papers.

We're moving in the fall. Staying in Inwood, at least that's the plan. 

Soooo. EVerything's all different, but basically, sameawesomesame. :)

In recent years, my posting on LJ has grown infrequent. I'm just not as willing to spill the details of my personal life as I was in my early 20s. Plus, my life is comparatively boring - less random makeouts, more taking the dog to the vet. Who wants to read that? 

I still do love LJ for some of friends and communities it connects me to, but I have been messing around with new solutions for my blogging needs. I've decided that I really want to have less of a personal blog and more of a critical one - I want to fangirl out and apply my half-baked, queer theories to popular culture. So I've started a new blog called Queer for Theory.

I hope you'll come over and read it. I transferred some of my old posts over there, ones that already did have this critical lens. At the moment its a lot of posts about television, because the teen girl tv I love has been so GAY this week. But movies, books, comics, theater will be covered too. Basically, I'll continue to consume media and overanalyze it in a way I hope is entertaining and edifying. 

That sounds so boring, damn. But really, it'll be fun. Girl of the Week trophies will be awarded! The patriarchy will be undermined! And it's pink!

 I got tickets to the Glee Live tour. I was kind of feeling shady about it, cause I figured it's gonna be all tweens and my motivations for wanting to go do include wanting to see Glee Boobs Live...but one of my classiest friends said he went last year and it was awesome. And then, I was on the subway yesterday listening to Firework (Katy Perry version, not glee version) and it hit me, not unlike a firework, that yes, teens and tweens will be at Glee Live but given the fact that Glee is the gayest thing to ever air on televison, many of them will be...GAY T(W)EENS!. And then I got superpsyched because I really want to see today's little queers in their natural habitat. This makes me feel like I should have gotten tickets to the Long Island show, because if my high school is any indication, Long Island produces more gays per capita than any other place in the United States...but the Jersey venue where I have tickets has slightly more seats, which can only mean slightly more gay. Which means SLIGHTLY MORE AWESOME. 

I'm actually not only idly interested in the childrenz. I've been writing a lot more lately and I'm setting myself some serious goals for my production of fiction. I've realize that I don't suck, especially at writing YA. I also realized last year that YA is all over the map, from awesome stuff to the shockingly bad, and there's a real lacuna when it comes to anything abut queer chicks. So I'm aiming for that, and it's honestly been easier than I thought to get some work flowing. So I have something to write about that I am excited about and amused by and some people to write for, and I'm feeling motivated. Plot continues to be a problem that I suck at solving, but I've found some strategies to help me address this, and I know that if I work more, I'll find more ways forward that work. Its great, writing is like a fun game now. Hope that will last for a while. 

What else? I've been working out...like a BOSS. I go to the gym at least 3 times a week, do a lot of running, some lifting. This week someone from the awesome ladies book club that my friend Sara started mentioned The Shred, Jillian Michael's workout video on itunes, and I started that too. In part this time for attention to fitness is a function of my un-employedness. But the wedding is coming up, I need to go try on dresses at the end of the month and that helps focus my attention more than a little. I'm not particularly vain, but of course I wanna look bangin'. If I want my wedding to be known for anything, I want it to be the copious tears everyone shed at the amazingness of our love, and the blinding hotness of two brides coming down the aisle. 

So I've been completely avoiding my live journal. I want to write, but there's just a lot going on. Wedding plans, unemployment, all kinds of fun. 

I'm going to try to get back in the swing of updating though. It's nice to have a record, its cathartic to write things down. It's funny though, now that everyone's on the internet all the time, it's so much harder to write than 7 or 8 years ago when I first started this blog. I think one of the things I have always liked most about the internet is anonymous new friends, expression without intimacy. Now everyone's all always up in your status update. Since I'm looking for a job, the professional repercussions of that are on my mind. 

I actually created a secret twitter account so my evil twin can say all the things I want to say but don't want to get in trouble for. Catch me if you can. 

It's well established that Glee is the gayest thing on two legs these days. Its fabulous, its great, it's educational for the masses and I cry like a baby over Kurt's dad fierce and  protective love for his out gay (gaygaygay) son. 

But Glee is also giving us a far less out, far more complicated queer story in the relationship between cheerleaders Brittany and Santana. As a former teen girl who liked girls but didn't know what to do with that (and, I can't lie, as a current woman who likes girls in cheerleading skirts) I'm getting fascinated by the depiction of their connection, and by the fan response to it. 

Just so we're all on the same page, a little recap. Brittany and Santana are cheerleaders, which in the Glee world means they're cool and popular. They're inseparable. Brittany is unintentionally hilarious, dim but sweet. Santana is quicker and far meaner. She's arguably the bitchiest teenager on the show, but until recently she has never been mean to Brittany, and always stuck up for her and used her bitchiness to get Brittany what she wants.   

They always sit together. They often hold hands or lock pinkies. They cuddle each other in public. 

Thus far, all of this is well within the realm of what girls can do while being just good friends. Needless to say, the reaction would be markedly different if two good guy friends were snuggling up in class. 

So lets get to the sex. Brittany claims to have hooked up with everyone in school "girls, boys, even the janitor..." Santana is slightly more choosy, blatent about using sex for social status and personal pleasure. To that end, she's got an on and off sexual relationship with Puck, a school jock and popular bad boy.

Brittany and Santana also hook up with each other. It's clear they've done this publicly, for guys' attention or to get things from guys. One plotline centers around them asking Finn to take them - together - out on a date. Santana breaks it down for him, "You buy us dinner, we make out in front of you. It's the best deal ever." But its also clear that  a)they  have taken it beyond just an attention getting makeout session to a more developed sexual interaction, b)they both enjoy their sexual connection and c)  there is an ongoing and private element to it. In one episode when Santana says "Sex isn't dating." Brittany adds "If it were, Santana and I would be dating." Santana seems surprised that Brittany mentioned their sex to others. They others blink a little but let the comment slide past. 

So, B and S have a romantic friendship and an ongoing sexual relationship. But they're not read as gay. They're not getting slushied in the hallway or having heartfelt chats with their parents about their sexuality. They're somehow allowed by others and by themselves to have these connections within the existing heteronormative high school social system. 

Exactly why that is is debatable. Having written a whole big thesis on related themes, and having been a lesbian for years and years, my understanding is that it's really easy to intentionally or unintentionally misrecognize female homosexuality. This is both because sex is, for the vast majority of people, defined as penetrative sex, and because women and girls are often affectionate with each other without being sexual. So unless girls or women work very hard to make their connection clear as a romantic AND sexual one, people can take it in one of many ways, as we see here in the Brittana relationship - anything from admiration to good friendship to ploy for male attention. 

And this isn't only an external misreading, its an internal one as well. Brittany and Santana seem not to think too deeply about their connection because when they do,they have a hard time sorting out exactly what their feelings for each other might signify. This is definitely analogous to my personal coming out experiences; I long time coming out because although I had intense romantic feelings for and attraction to girls and women from the time I was about 12 years old,  it took me until I was about 19 to really understand that those were sexual feelings as well and then a few more years to act on them. I wasn't particularly sheltered and I'm definitely not stupid. But female desire is not externally signified, and without any basis for comparison within my own body and mind, it took years for enough of my own responses to aggregate to the point where they were undeniable and linked to my understanding of what culturally signified a lesbian identity. Whereas I talk to my guy friends and they're like, "Yeah, I knew when I was 8. I got a boner watching He-Man."

Along those lines, I think this isn't necessarily just an issue of female homosexuality, but an issue about  recognition and ownership of female sexuality in general. How and when do straight girls know they're straight? Is it before or after they have sex? A relationship? 

Anyway, on Glee they recently took a step to do what it took me so long to do - connect Brittany and Santana's sexual and romantic relationship to lesbian culture. Brittany seems to be beginning to recognize that her feelings for Santana are more than friendship, and that she feels attraction to other girls and women (Brittany Spears and Coach Beiste's boobs). During a scene where the two were shown kissing on Brittany's bed, Brittany asked Santana if she'd sing a duet with her, Melissa Etheridge's Come to My Window.  Santana recoiled from the possibility of making such a publicly lesbian statement. She denied having any feelings for Brittany, and insisted that she only hooks up with her because her preferred sexual partner, Puck, is locked up in juvvie. The refusal saddens Brittany, who then tries to make Santana jealous by pairing up with a boy for her duet instead. Santana's confusion and jealousy, and confusion at her own jealousy becomes evident in the rest of the episode. Meanwhile, Brittany is just plain lonely. 

I have no idea how they'll resolve this. These two girls could end up leaving this relationship behind and living entirely straight, they could come out in rapturous lesbian love with each other, or they could identify as bi, regardless of where their relationship ends up. It seems like Brittany is at least bisexual, with strong lesbian leanings and Santana could be straight even though she maybe sort of loves a girl. The fact that all these options are on the table is very queer. 

But the funny thing is, where everyone knows about the gay male issues on Glee, only queer (female?) viewers seem to see and respond to the depth of the queerness in the Brittany/Santana relationship. From my admittedly limited exploration of fan sites and message boards and lesbian media outlets, young lesbian/bi and queer girls and have been reading the Brittany/Santana relationship as Brittana from their first hugs and cuddles, all along, a legitimate entity on its own that they can easily recognize as simultaneously friendship, romantic relationship  and sexual relationship based on their own experiences and attractions and desires. Meanwhile, straight viewers and straight media outlets don't seem to have noticed much at all, or if they have, its usually read as a sham connection, created for male attention only. Even when they were depicted making out alone, a british paper covered it as covered it as "a reason for the lads to be gleeful."

So there's three levels of misrecognition for Brittany and Santana - internal, external diagetic (within the world of the show) and external non-diagetic (outside the world of the show). That's complicated queerness, and even though its sort of awesome that its being smuggled in on prime time TV, I think it would be interesting to see what happens if at least one of the characters starts to push back on that system, and attempt for her female/female desires to be correctly recognized. Although it seems that this is what Brittany wants, its a tough endeavor, and maybe they'll just drop it all and make Brittany go for the wheelchair kid instead. 

I certainly hope not. But in the meantime, thank God for fanfic, where you can recognize anything any way you damn well please. 

Started a new job last Monday. Enjoying it very much so far. Doing some reference desk, responsible for some instruction, and working on a big archive project for the college archive. The archive project is the most interesting part, but also the toughest. I've been talking to some of my colleagues from school, and they gave me some very helpful ideas...I've been working on putting them together into a useful solution. I can do it. Right?

My job is at a catholic college in a very tree lined part of brooklyn. I dig it. My commute is long - but I kind of like that. Sometimes Jen and I ride the train together, we have coffee and a nice morning chat. Or when I'm on my own I can read a lot, or write a lot. Its a good easing into the day process time.

This all sounds so boring...I guess I'm just in a period of establishing a routine, after all these years of such a bizarre work schedule. There's still a little of that, cause the library is only part time. But I do feel like things are more settled now for me, which I'm glad about. I feel like I can bring some focus back to other parts of my life, like writing, like organizing my home, like my social life.

Yesterday I had a bbq for my birthday - it was a gorgeous day and the sangria flowed like...wine? When I blew out the candles I wished that everything would always be like this. But I'm not afraid to tell my wish because I know that it can never come true like that. Everything will never be like this again.

 We went to see The Kids are All Right last night with my my and co.  I was really intrigued by this movie for several reasons -  1. I'm a lesbian. I'm a lesbian in a long term relationship. I'm a lesbian in a long term relationship trying to have children using anonymous donor sperm. So this movie, about lesbians in a long(er) term relationship and their children conceived using anonymous donor sperm and what happens to them was of interest to me. 2. Julianne Moore is cool. 3. The media was nonstop talking about it -  or at least the liberal bullshitters I spend my time with were - Slate, NY times, NPR, Dan Savage, After Ellen... Almost everyone loved the movie, but almost everyone had something to say about the...problematic plot development that I'll discuss under the cut. So of course I was going to see the movie,  I have plenty of thoughts about all depictions of lesbians in popular culture, and this movie seemed to be sparking some debate about the ideas I spend so much time with.  But I was sort of cringy about it at the same time, with themes so close to home, I felt more trepidation than usual heading into the theater. The fact that I was actually nervous about seeing this film just shows how uncommon it is for me to watch a story that depicts my life or something like it in a public/family setting. 
( Read more... )

 I've started meditating. I've done it before, once or twice in a group, guided situation, and then a few times sort of half assed using a podcast to attempt to get my flying anxiety under control (which sort of worked). I am trying now to make it an every day thing, just like 15, 20 minutes a day.

So its been three days, and I am feeling good that I have successfully taken time to meditate every one of those days. Its difficult, but I am getting somewhere. The first day I was just like, woah my ideas are making crazy shapes in my mind! They are all small and wiggly! This is hard! But I got my shit together and eventually things did calm down a bit. Yesterday I hardly had any time, but I gave it a shot anyway. It wasn't the most successful attempt, but I am glad I took the time out anyway. Even 10 minutes of quiet with no internet, no phone, no mass transit, no other people is a huge deal for me these days.

Today I finished took care of the laundry and the emails and everything I needed to address, and then really took the time to get down to business. It took a while for me to settle down of course, but I did get into a more meditative state. When I got there though, I had some complicated feelings. One of the feelings was triumph and excitement, look at me, I'm totally doing it!!! But that was distracting of course. I tried to pass through that and focus on breathing. And then...I just felt...a lot of feelings. I teared up. I wasn't sad, I haven't been sad. But I was...in that moment when I was finally quiet, I really felt overwhelmed. By nothing in particular and by everything in existence. 

I'm not trying to be new agey or anything, I'm just trying to be healthy and relax. But I'm intrigued by what I apparently don't know about how I feel. 

 We went down to DC/MD this weekend. My cousin eric got married on Saturday - congratulations Erin and Eric! Jen and I had to bring the dogs, so we ended up staying in a dog-friendly hotel in DC. 

On friday we visited Jen's friend Laura and her family. She and her wife have two adorable daughters, ages about 3 and 6 months. The older one is super girly, her closet was literally overflowing with pink dresses and Disney princess garb, total cuteness.The baby was just all eyes and chompy mouth, such a sweetie face. We had a lovely time, and some revamped Dominos pizza with them. Then we headed back to the hotel, and Jen's friend Frank came by, bringing with him Jen's friend/ex Jennifer and her wife, and wife's sister. Surprise surprise, they were pregnant too! Twins! It was lesbian mom extravaganza day. 

I have to admit, I had moment. We've been trying for a while, and it was just...it was just a lot to see other people already so far down the road adhead of me, when we've been planning this and working on this for like, over 2 years now. Still, we're in a hiatus period of TTC at the moment, and I'm not only OK with that, I've been really happy and relaxed and satisfied with our lives at the moment (job hunt nonwithstanding). But that doesn't change the fact that I do want to get pregnant soon, and I do want to have a baby, soon, and yeah, it was just a moment.  I almost gave in to it. I thought about going to the bathroom to get weepy. But I just didn't find the moment to excuse myself, and in a moment the moment passed. I had a lovely time, and tasty fried chicken and that night I had a dream, and I don't know what it was about, but I woke up so happy. 

Saturday morning we got up early to get ready and leave for the wedding. The wedding was in Maryland, about an hour away. The church was so cute. We said hi to all my family, and met Erin's family. Pretty traditional catholic ceremony. The bride looked lovely. The groom looked nervous at first, but then proud and happy. Then on to the reception. Snagged some mimosas for me and Jen. Got down to talking Lamarckian evolution and epigenetics with my cousins. Love being part of a weird and smart family. I liked that the reception didn't have fixed seating, so we could go around and talk to everyone in turn. 

After the reception. we spent some time with my family. They all went swimming and we hung out by the pool and chatted. There was a square dancing competition at the hotel, and Jen got invited to join a square. She declined. 

Back in DC that night, we found that the dogs had been good good girls at the hotel. We took them out for a long walk and picked up thai for dinner. 

I really like DC. I feel like its a city I could live in, which is kind of a huge deal for a die hard new yorker like me. Apparently I'm rude there though, asking counter people to multitask... but whatever, I like having an edge. 

Saturday night we saw Frank again and met his boyfriend. Then sleepy sleep. Up this morning relatively late. Another long walk, cause I wanted to go to Teaism, which had been really good last time I was in DC. This time however, it kinda sucked and Jen was grumpy. We fixed her up with an egg mcmuffin to compensate for time lost. Checked out, got the car, hit the road. 

It took forever to get home. At a rest stop Jen read my mind and brought me the fixins of a root beer float. We jammed to musicals, and the dogs were too exhausted to make much trouble. My mom, also stuck in traffic with my cousins, called and blared gangsta rap for us when we answered. We considered calling back with a response song, but we couldn't decide between Fiona Apple's version of Across the Universe and Rufus Wainwright's version of Across the Universe.