FoxyJ decided a few months ago that she's just not that into her PhD program. She enjoys the classes and does very well in them, but she just doesn't care about getting a PhD that much and a PhD program is the kind of thing you have to care about if you're going to commit all the time and effort required. More than anything, I think she's felt that at this point in her life she wants to focus on being a mom more than on being a student. As she worked through her feelings about school, I was resistant to the idea of her dropping out, mostly for stupid reasons, but also because I worried that she was giving up on something that mattered to her out of a sense of Mormony obligation to be a stay-at-home mom. She assured me this was not the case and I promised that I would support her in whatever she chose to do.
The growing certainty of Foxy leaving the PhD program meant we would need another source of income (she has a nice stipend), so a couple months ago I started looking for full-time employment. At a point where I had already been struggling with depression, this process proved enormously stressful. In the first place, the current economic climate is a horrible one to be looking for a job in--I've applied for several jobs, most of which I was more than qualified for, and not gotten a single interview. In the second place, I really enjoy my current job and am hesitant to give it up. It's only part-time but it pays very well, it allows me a lot of time at home with my family, and it requires very little creative energy, which is a big deal to me because writing is very important to me and I like having as much creative energy as possible for the few hours a week I have time to write. In the third place, the thought of moving to a new city for the third time in three years was a sickening thought. I'm tired of starting over from scratch.
Feeling overwhelmed by all of this, a couple weeks ago I asked Foxy if she wouldn't consider staying in school for just one more year so that we could remain in our current comfortable (for me) situation long enough at least to see what comes of the novel I'm currently revising in hopes of publishing and establishing something like a writing career. She didn't like this idea and I realized a couple days later that it's not fair to ask her to do something she doesn't want to for the sake of saving me from doing something I don't want to. And then I found a solution that makes both of us happy: Utah.
Neither Foxy or I am crazy about Utah as a place to live, but we have a lot of family and friends there and, having lived there for about ten years of each of our lives, it's familiar and comfortable. We'd been talking for a while about how we missed being close to family and maybe we'd be willing to live in Utah again to make that happen. Also, it's much cheaper to live in Utah than in California, which means I can keep my current job and either Foxy or I will just need to find something part-time to supplement that income--she's hoping to teach at UVU. There aren't a lot of full-time prospects in Utah right now because everyone has a hiring freeze, but sooner or later something will come up, perhaps at the library I worked at for three years and would love to go back to, and we'll settle into something more permanent. Above all, the thought of moving back to Utah doesn't make me want to curl into a ball and hide. As an added bonus, our daughter, who is tired of being jerked around and would have otherwise hated the idea of moving yet again, is excited about being closer to her cousins.
So to our Utah friends and family: We're excited to see you in June.
To our California friends: Sorry. We love you. We'll visit.
Showing posts with label 650 _0 Change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 650 _0 Change. Show all posts
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Changing Plans
According to the original plan, we would have been in Utah by now. We were supposed to be out of student family housing by the end of June so we made plans to load up our moving cubes on June 28th, then drive to Utah while all our stuff got shipped to Sacramento, where it'll be stored until we get there in August. The only problem is that we neglected to inform the moving cube people of this plan early enough, and as it turns out a lot of people move at the end of June. In a college town--imagine that.
So the earliest they could get us a moving cube was the first weekend of July, but sorry, they don't do deliveries on Saturdays, so nothing till Monday the 7th. So I begged and pleaded with the student family housing people, and they reluctantly agreed to let me pay rent for an extra week. Meanwhile, I've been stressing about moving on a Monday because it's hard to get people to help during the middle of a weekday and my job requires me to work four hours a day Monday thru Friday, which is kind of hard to do when I'm driving across Idaho.
Then today the moving cube people called and said Hey guess what we can deliver your cubes on Saturday how do you feel about that? So with two days' notice we're moving our moving day up by two days and, as it turns out, both Foxy and I are happy about it. We were at the point where we couldn't do much more packing until it was closer to zero hour anyway, and as much as we'll miss Seattle and our friends here, we're ready to get this move--at least the first part of it--out of the way.
Incidentally, if you live in the Seattle area and are looking for something to do Saturday afternoon, say between 3:30 and 6:30, shoot me an email and I'll see if I can find something for you.
So the earliest they could get us a moving cube was the first weekend of July, but sorry, they don't do deliveries on Saturdays, so nothing till Monday the 7th. So I begged and pleaded with the student family housing people, and they reluctantly agreed to let me pay rent for an extra week. Meanwhile, I've been stressing about moving on a Monday because it's hard to get people to help during the middle of a weekday and my job requires me to work four hours a day Monday thru Friday, which is kind of hard to do when I'm driving across Idaho.
Then today the moving cube people called and said Hey guess what we can deliver your cubes on Saturday how do you feel about that? So with two days' notice we're moving our moving day up by two days and, as it turns out, both Foxy and I are happy about it. We were at the point where we couldn't do much more packing until it was closer to zero hour anyway, and as much as we'll miss Seattle and our friends here, we're ready to get this move--at least the first part of it--out of the way.
Incidentally, if you live in the Seattle area and are looking for something to do Saturday afternoon, say between 3:30 and 6:30, shoot me an email and I'll see if I can find something for you.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Transorientation
Modern gender theory distinguishes between sex and gender, defining the former as "the physiological, functional, and psychological differences that distinguish the female and the male," and the latter as "sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture." Sex, in other words, is something you're born with, while gender is a lot more mutable. We refer to people whose gender identity (man or woman) is not the one traditionally associated with their sex (male or female) as transgendered.
I would propose, and I'm not the first to do so, that there is a similar relationship between sexual orientation and sexual identity. Like sex, orientation--what sex or gender you are attracted to--is something you're born with; you're heterosexual, homosexual, or whatever, and that's unlikely to change, short of some kind of as-yet-unknown orientation reassignment surgery. Sexual identity, on the other hand, is more like gender in that there are many ways to express one's sexuality and these do not necessarily correspond to one's orientation. We might call an individual who is born homosexual but for whatever reasons identifies as straight (or, for that matter, one who is born heterosexual but identifies as gay or lesbian) transoriented or transorientational (I'm undecided on which term I like better).
I have never had any question about my gender identity. I was born male and I identify as a man. I have spent much of my life, though, figuring out my sexual identity. For many years I did not call myself gay because of the LDS Church's counsel that people who experience same-sex attraction should not identify themselves by those feelings. Then a few years ago, even though I was still actively LDS and married to a woman, I began to call myself--both in private and in public--gay. The words "I am gay," this self-identifying speech act, relieved me of years of built-up pressure from refusing to acknowledge this important aspect of my identity. Some people questioned the prudence of putting so much energy into building a gay identity while trying to maintain a straight marriage, while others questioned my right to call myself gay when in fact my actions and lifestyle were completely straight, but I insisted that the word could mean whatever I wanted it to, and when I called myself gay I meant that I was attracted to men, nothing more, nothing less.
I still maintain that language means whatever the speaker intends it to mean (or, conversely, whatever the listener understands it to mean), but in the past month as I've rededicated myself to a marriage to a partner who happens to be a woman, I've begun to question the value of identifying myself as gay. There is no doubt that my inborn orientation is homosexual--I am sexually aroused by men. But the life I live, for all intents and purposes, is straight--the only romantic or sexual partner I've ever had or intend to have is a woman. Still, I'm not comfortable calling myself straight. Beyond the fact that I'm attracted to people who have a certain kind of reproductive organs, I feel that much of my inner life, my thoughts, and the way I experience the world are more like those of a gay man than those of a straight man. I have found, for example, that I tend to relate better to gay men than to straight men (with some notable exceptions).
One of the strongest arguments against homosexual people being in straight marriages is that we aren't being authentic to our true selves. Many, indeed, find the sacrifice of authenticity too much to make the marriage worth it. To be clear, I'm not staying married because I'm stronger or nobler than anyone else, or for that matter, because I'm less authentic; I'm staying married because I realized that for me, the sacrifice of giving up the marriage was greater than the
sacrifice of giving up what I might have had otherwise. I believe FoxyJ feels similarly about the sacrifices she's required to make to stay in the marriage versus the sacrifices she'd have to make to end the marriage. Other people consider the same options and come to different conclusions. Every individual has his or her own values, priorities, and life situation; I can only act according to my own. La Agrado, a transvestite character in Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother speaks beautifully of the more literal cost she's paid to become a woman: "Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, ma'am. And one can't be stingy with these things because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed of being."
My motivations for choosing a straight life have been called into question before because by birth I am a member of an underprivileged class and I am trying to pass, as it were, for a member of the privileged class. Perhaps it is for this same reason that while society tends to view male-born women as amusing, female-born men tend to be seen as threatening. Rest assured, my class-conscious friends, I have no interest in being part of a privileged class; I'm much too enamored of the idea of Mr. Fob the Oppressed. This is, to be honest, one of the less-than-noble reasons I cling to the label gay. What it comes down to, though, is that the person I'm in love with, am married to, and want to be married to is a woman.
Perhaps more than anything, I feel that to call myself straight without any qualifiers would be to pretend I'm something I'm not, to ignore the fact that, like a male-born transsexual in the process of becoming a woman, I'm a work in progress. So I won't call myself straight, but I'm not sure gay accurately describes me either. I'll try transoriented on for size and see how it fits.
I would propose, and I'm not the first to do so, that there is a similar relationship between sexual orientation and sexual identity. Like sex, orientation--what sex or gender you are attracted to--is something you're born with; you're heterosexual, homosexual, or whatever, and that's unlikely to change, short of some kind of as-yet-unknown orientation reassignment surgery. Sexual identity, on the other hand, is more like gender in that there are many ways to express one's sexuality and these do not necessarily correspond to one's orientation. We might call an individual who is born homosexual but for whatever reasons identifies as straight (or, for that matter, one who is born heterosexual but identifies as gay or lesbian) transoriented or transorientational (I'm undecided on which term I like better).
I have never had any question about my gender identity. I was born male and I identify as a man. I have spent much of my life, though, figuring out my sexual identity. For many years I did not call myself gay because of the LDS Church's counsel that people who experience same-sex attraction should not identify themselves by those feelings. Then a few years ago, even though I was still actively LDS and married to a woman, I began to call myself--both in private and in public--gay. The words "I am gay," this self-identifying speech act, relieved me of years of built-up pressure from refusing to acknowledge this important aspect of my identity. Some people questioned the prudence of putting so much energy into building a gay identity while trying to maintain a straight marriage, while others questioned my right to call myself gay when in fact my actions and lifestyle were completely straight, but I insisted that the word could mean whatever I wanted it to, and when I called myself gay I meant that I was attracted to men, nothing more, nothing less.
I still maintain that language means whatever the speaker intends it to mean (or, conversely, whatever the listener understands it to mean), but in the past month as I've rededicated myself to a marriage to a partner who happens to be a woman, I've begun to question the value of identifying myself as gay. There is no doubt that my inborn orientation is homosexual--I am sexually aroused by men. But the life I live, for all intents and purposes, is straight--the only romantic or sexual partner I've ever had or intend to have is a woman. Still, I'm not comfortable calling myself straight. Beyond the fact that I'm attracted to people who have a certain kind of reproductive organs, I feel that much of my inner life, my thoughts, and the way I experience the world are more like those of a gay man than those of a straight man. I have found, for example, that I tend to relate better to gay men than to straight men (with some notable exceptions).
One of the strongest arguments against homosexual people being in straight marriages is that we aren't being authentic to our true selves. Many, indeed, find the sacrifice of authenticity too much to make the marriage worth it. To be clear, I'm not staying married because I'm stronger or nobler than anyone else, or for that matter, because I'm less authentic; I'm staying married because I realized that for me, the sacrifice of giving up the marriage was greater than the
sacrifice of giving up what I might have had otherwise. I believe FoxyJ feels similarly about the sacrifices she's required to make to stay in the marriage versus the sacrifices she'd have to make to end the marriage. Other people consider the same options and come to different conclusions. Every individual has his or her own values, priorities, and life situation; I can only act according to my own. La Agrado, a transvestite character in Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother speaks beautifully of the more literal cost she's paid to become a woman: "Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, ma'am. And one can't be stingy with these things because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed of being."My motivations for choosing a straight life have been called into question before because by birth I am a member of an underprivileged class and I am trying to pass, as it were, for a member of the privileged class. Perhaps it is for this same reason that while society tends to view male-born women as amusing, female-born men tend to be seen as threatening. Rest assured, my class-conscious friends, I have no interest in being part of a privileged class; I'm much too enamored of the idea of Mr. Fob the Oppressed. This is, to be honest, one of the less-than-noble reasons I cling to the label gay. What it comes down to, though, is that the person I'm in love with, am married to, and want to be married to is a woman.
Perhaps more than anything, I feel that to call myself straight without any qualifiers would be to pretend I'm something I'm not, to ignore the fact that, like a male-born transsexual in the process of becoming a woman, I'm a work in progress. So I won't call myself straight, but I'm not sure gay accurately describes me either. I'll try transoriented on for size and see how it fits.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Spare Any Change?
A Linear Collage of Scattered Thoughts
I wrote “Getting Out” as a somewhat naive twenty-four-year-old. Now I return, in theory a wise and mature twenty-five-year-old. Inevitably, I’ll find whatever I write here equally naive a year from now. I don’t know whether this is a function of being young, human, or simply me.--Ben Christensen, 2005
It's wonderful, Ben, to see you wrestling with these fundamental questions of librarianship, to see you stewing over them in your head. What we're looking for in a supervisor, though, is someone who's already asked the questions and then settled on some answers. We need someone who can say with confidence, "This is what needs to happen!"--Library Division Manager, 2005
Today my opponent continued his pattern of twisting in the wind. He apparently woke up this morning and has now decided, no, we should not have invaded Iraq, after just last month saying he would have voted for force even knowing everything we know today.--George W. Bush, 2004
Anything that's not growing is dead, so we better be changing. You know, people say to me, "She's changing. The money's changing her." I say, "The money's not changing me, I'm changing because that's a natural part of life." We're all supposed to change. Who wakes up and is the same way tomorrow, and the day after that? Nobody is!--Lauryn Hill, 2001
Keep Changing.--L The Ardent Mormon, 2006
The ability to change our minds is what makes us human.--Therapist, 2007
Friday, May 04, 2007
Transference
This quarter I am assessing transfer applicants (as opposed to incoming freshmen). One of the things we ask applicants to do is explain why they want to transfer here from their current college or university. A good number of the students coming from four-year schools--particularly elsewhere in Washington--talk about wanting to come to Seattle for its cultural diversity, in opposition to the homogeny of their current school. Surely many of these applicants are merely saying what they think we want to hear, but I believe some of them are genuine, and I find this intriguing.
After growing up in Hawaii, I was quite bothered by the utter lack of diversity at BYU. At first it made me uneasy and eventually it just became one more thing to make fun of. There were, in fact, a lot of things that bothered me about BYU, but I wouldn't have seriously considered transferring for any of them. College, after all, is only four years, and then it's done. To be honest, though, I don't think it's just that cultural diversity is less important to me than it is to these transfer applicants who are willing to uproot their lives for it.
I like to think that I'm not averse to change, that indeed I thrive on it. This is true to the extent that I like new things. I like, for example, living in a new home, getting used to the new layout and my new routine. On the other hand, I loathe the idea of moving. It is not so much the change I thrive on as the result of the change. The change itself is generally an annoyance at best and a traumatic experience at worst. As much as change means leaving bad things behind for better things, it also always--always--means leaving good things behind. I hate leaving good things behind.
As much as I disliked Utah and was frustrated by my job there, I might never have left if not for FoxyJ's firm insistence that yes, we need to get out of Utah (Foxy was also backed up by her mom, who doesn't believe anyone should live in Utah). I was excited by the thought of living in Seattle and getting an MLIS, but I hated the thought of leaving the stability of my jobs and my friends and my siblings. As I've mentioned before, though, looking back now I have no regrets about making the move. Yes, I miss all those things and people I loved in Utah, but I know that I am where I need to be now (and, lest we think this is all about me, I think FoxyJ is glad she's in Seattle, most days, but you can ask her whether or not that's true). Seattle is a great place to live, I have good jobs here, I'm enjoying my program, and I have good friends.
And, most importantly, Seattle has cultural diversity. Because it's all about diversity.
After growing up in Hawaii, I was quite bothered by the utter lack of diversity at BYU. At first it made me uneasy and eventually it just became one more thing to make fun of. There were, in fact, a lot of things that bothered me about BYU, but I wouldn't have seriously considered transferring for any of them. College, after all, is only four years, and then it's done. To be honest, though, I don't think it's just that cultural diversity is less important to me than it is to these transfer applicants who are willing to uproot their lives for it.
I like to think that I'm not averse to change, that indeed I thrive on it. This is true to the extent that I like new things. I like, for example, living in a new home, getting used to the new layout and my new routine. On the other hand, I loathe the idea of moving. It is not so much the change I thrive on as the result of the change. The change itself is generally an annoyance at best and a traumatic experience at worst. As much as change means leaving bad things behind for better things, it also always--always--means leaving good things behind. I hate leaving good things behind.
As much as I disliked Utah and was frustrated by my job there, I might never have left if not for FoxyJ's firm insistence that yes, we need to get out of Utah (Foxy was also backed up by her mom, who doesn't believe anyone should live in Utah). I was excited by the thought of living in Seattle and getting an MLIS, but I hated the thought of leaving the stability of my jobs and my friends and my siblings. As I've mentioned before, though, looking back now I have no regrets about making the move. Yes, I miss all those things and people I loved in Utah, but I know that I am where I need to be now (and, lest we think this is all about me, I think FoxyJ is glad she's in Seattle, most days, but you can ask her whether or not that's true). Seattle is a great place to live, I have good jobs here, I'm enjoying my program, and I have good friends.
And, most importantly, Seattle has cultural diversity. Because it's all about diversity.
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