C and I had brunch at French Roast on the Upper West Side today with my old friend S and her husband. I don’t see S nearly as much as I’d like to. It’s so hard in New York to sustain attention on anything that isn’t right in front of your face at the moment.
S is a playwright. We used to live next door to each other on East 10th Street, back when I was with J and she was single. She watched our cats when we were on tour, and she sang in the “Cowgirl Chorus,” Y’all’s backup choir, for many years. She met and married her husband some time during my hiatus from New York, so I don’t know him well, but he was, until a couple years ago when he left to start his own business, an attorney at the same firm that C is an associate with now. Artists marrying lawyers.
Afterwards, C and I took the train down to Chelsea Market to look for a few goodies to add to the gift bags that C’s mother is putting in the hotel rooms of our out-of-town wedding guests. Apparently this is a thing people do: the hotel gift bag. (My first experience of it was at the wedding of C’s cousin’s son in Savannah recently. In our room we found a bag with bottled water, ibuprofen, and an assortment of snacks. I particularly enjoyed the cheese straws.) C’s mom has picked out a few items already, but we want to add a couple New York-ish things, too. We found some Brooklyn-made “spicy pickle flavor” potato chips (OK, I hate the word, but yes, they’re “artisanal”) and bought a bag to sample. They’re tasty.
C’s family is wedding-crazy. Which is good because I didn’t know the first thing about how all this stuff works. Until I started to contemplate my own, I found weddings very creepy. And, well, I can’t say that I don’t still think most of them are. The difference I guess in my thinking is that, while weddings in general are likely to be pretty revolting, mine is of course going to be wonderful.
I don’t mean to say that my family isn’t super-excited and helpful, too, but it’s hard to compete with the resume of my in-laws-to-be. I know I’ve said this a few times, so I apologize if it’s becoming tedious, but the size and degree of involvement in each other’s lives of C’s family is seriously like nothing I’ve encountered except in 19th-century novels. These folks have been to a lot of weddings. They know the drill.
And C’s brother is also getting married this year, in the fall (just a regular heterosexual wedding) so it’s a wedding frenzy for the C clan.
Everyone asks how the planning and preparation is going. I think we’re more or less on top of it. C bought my ring yesterday. It’s very similar to his engagement ring, a vintage gold band with a stylized orange blossom design. Most of our invitations went out a couple weeks ago, and the last few -- I didn’t have addresses for some people and I’m a terrible procrastinator, but the protocol says 6 weeks in advance so we’re still within the bounds of good wedding form -- will go out tomorrow morning.
We spent a good part of the afternoon yesterday planning the ceremony. The Unitarian Universalist minister who is officiating, though she stressed that we can do anything we want, gave us a binder arranged “Chinese menu style,” as she said, with several choices for each section: welcoming the guests, readings, the homily, declaration of intent, vows, etc. based on a traditional Protestant wedding order of service.
My inclination all along has been to make our wedding as traditional as possible. I want our guests to feel safely oriented, to know that, while we are two men, it’s just a wedding. I want to hear the phrases we all know, like “dearly beloved,” and “for better, for worse,” and “by the power vested in me by the State of New York” (that’s my favorite), and “do you take this man?” and “I do.”
We made all our choices, and I think it’s going to be lovely and touching. We only stumbled twice. First, when I showed C the poem I wanted someone to read right after the processional, during a simple ritual in which our parents will light a candle together to begin the ceremony. It’s one of several poems Harold Pinter wrote for his wife Antonia Fraser. (I just finished reading her memoir of their marriage.) It’s a beautiful, short and evocative poem about being and staying in love.
C hated it. He found it precious and obscure and thought it read like a Christopher Guest-style parody of itself. I was crushed -- because I loved the poem and thought it was perfect for our wedding but also because now I will never love it in the same easy way I did before.
I doubt that any skill is more necessary to cultivate in order to have and sustain a marriage than the ability to not take your partner’s difference in taste personally, to shake off the hurt feelings, and to move on, so the parents’ candle ritual will happen in silence, which in the end, because the purpose of the candle ritual is to create a mood of reverence and sacredness, is much better than would have been muddying the moment with a poem.
The other disagreement was about the prayer we chose. We both love the St. Francis of Assisi blessing (“God, make ___ and ____ channels of your peace, that where there is hatred they may bring love, where there is hurt may they bring the spirit of forgiveness, where there is doubt, faith, where there is despair, hope, etc.”). I wanted to leave out the “God,” at the beginning in order to make it more universal, less alienating and more meaningful to our non-believing friends and family.
We argued heatedly. His argument is that “God” is a universal word. It means whatever notion someone might have of what God is. True. When I hear the word now, I translate it as something along the lines of “the goodness in all creation,” or “the creative force,” or simply, “love.” But, as a lifelong agnostic, getting to that sense of equanimity about the word has not been easy after decades of feeling threatened and manipulated by it. The fact is that most of the time when you hear the word God in the public sphere it’s in the context of making someone feel less than or outside of the group of people who hold similar views about what is godly and what is ungodly. My God is not the God who hates homosexuals and disobedient women and foreigners and artists and communists and prostitutes and free-thinkers and homeless people and the poor.
C feels it would be aggressive to edit the prayer. I feel it’s aggressive not to. The word is in there twice. We took out one of them. We’ll both get over it.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Respondez-vous sil vous plait.
I got in some serious hot water with my last post -- which was not an installment of the Marriage Chronicles but a screed against the Catholic Church. I offended two people who are very important to me: C’s brother and my friend M in Syracuse. I know more about my friend’s -- who has a long history of peace activism, prison ministry, and social justice work, and whose home is now a Catholic Worker House devoted mostly to hospice care for people with AIDS -- than I do about C’s brother’s faith, but I am certain they are very different types of Catholic. Regardless, they are both deep believers and they were both offended, and, looking more closely at my words in light of their reactions, I was embarrassed by my lack of nuance.
I want to talk about the wedding, so I won’t try to recast my argument here and now except to address one thing. Religious folks often respond to agnostics’ or atheists’ criticism of their beliefs and institutions by saying, “you just don’t understand faith.” What I want to say is that I absolutely do understand faith. I might not have faith in a particular story or institution, but I have a deep, unshakable faith that human beings are good and that our ultimate purpose is to figure out how to love each other and the world we live in as best and as much as we can. I doubt these things every day, which is why I know I have faith in them. My anger at religious institutions comes from that faith, not from some desire to tear people down or be right or smarter or to get attention. Just wanted to say that.
OK, the wedding: RSVPs are trickling in. We invited about 95 people and we have room for 75, maybe 80.
When we first started talking about a wedding, we both said we wanted something small, “just family and close friends.” The picture I had in my head was maybe 20 or 30 people. But everyone on the list is someone we couldn’t imagine not inviting, and there are still many I feel terrible about leaving off the list. As we all know C’s family is huge. He had to leave out whole branches of it. I don’t have a lot of family besides my mom and dad and siblings, but after all the traveling and moving around I’ve done, and just being so damn old, I have dear friends everywhere.
Time and geography played a part in the selection. I gave preference to friends who’ve been more present in my life lately, leaving out some whom I’ve been very close to at one time or another but don’t keep in touch with as much any more. And I invited friends from New York who are more likely to be able to come over friends whom I care just as much about but who live far away.
One of the things I’m most looking forward to is bringing all these people together. Not just mixing C’s world with mine, but mixing together all the worlds within my world. It makes me smile to think of my parents hanging out with my friend M and his partner who have the Catholic Worker house in Syracuse where I stayed so many times during the years when I was touring. So many people who’ve been such an important part of my life for so many years have not met each other.
And that reminds me that we still have to decide where everyone sits for the reception dinner. I have this vision of stimulating conversation based on groups of people with mutual interests but possibly different points of view and life experiences, but whenever I spend a few moments thinking about who to put with whom I get a little crazy. We want people to meet new people but we also want to seat people who know each other together and not separate families.
C and I decided that we will sit at a table with just our parents, since there seemed to be no other clear line of cutoff short of having 30 people and their kids at our table. Everyone says not to worry too much about where we’re seated because we won’t spend much time sitting.
I’ve started reading up on Istanbul for the honeymoon. We booked a cruise from Istanbul to Venice, and we have a day and a half in Istanbul before the boat leaves. I bought a book called Strolling Through Istanbul (the maps are impossible to read on the Kindle) and another called American Writers in Istanbul. I’ve never been to that part of the world. I’ve never taken a cruise (though I’ve taken a 14-hour ferry ride from Aberdeen, Scotland to the Shetland Islands, one of the most thrilling and memorable things I’ve ever done), but I love the idea of being stuck on a boat with very few decisions to make. I don’t know if it’s a personality trait of mine or if I’ve just reached a point in life where I’m wearing of making decisions but the idea of being free of it is immensely appealing.
Cross-posted at The Bilerico Project.
I want to talk about the wedding, so I won’t try to recast my argument here and now except to address one thing. Religious folks often respond to agnostics’ or atheists’ criticism of their beliefs and institutions by saying, “you just don’t understand faith.” What I want to say is that I absolutely do understand faith. I might not have faith in a particular story or institution, but I have a deep, unshakable faith that human beings are good and that our ultimate purpose is to figure out how to love each other and the world we live in as best and as much as we can. I doubt these things every day, which is why I know I have faith in them. My anger at religious institutions comes from that faith, not from some desire to tear people down or be right or smarter or to get attention. Just wanted to say that.
OK, the wedding: RSVPs are trickling in. We invited about 95 people and we have room for 75, maybe 80.
When we first started talking about a wedding, we both said we wanted something small, “just family and close friends.” The picture I had in my head was maybe 20 or 30 people. But everyone on the list is someone we couldn’t imagine not inviting, and there are still many I feel terrible about leaving off the list. As we all know C’s family is huge. He had to leave out whole branches of it. I don’t have a lot of family besides my mom and dad and siblings, but after all the traveling and moving around I’ve done, and just being so damn old, I have dear friends everywhere.
Time and geography played a part in the selection. I gave preference to friends who’ve been more present in my life lately, leaving out some whom I’ve been very close to at one time or another but don’t keep in touch with as much any more. And I invited friends from New York who are more likely to be able to come over friends whom I care just as much about but who live far away.
One of the things I’m most looking forward to is bringing all these people together. Not just mixing C’s world with mine, but mixing together all the worlds within my world. It makes me smile to think of my parents hanging out with my friend M and his partner who have the Catholic Worker house in Syracuse where I stayed so many times during the years when I was touring. So many people who’ve been such an important part of my life for so many years have not met each other.
And that reminds me that we still have to decide where everyone sits for the reception dinner. I have this vision of stimulating conversation based on groups of people with mutual interests but possibly different points of view and life experiences, but whenever I spend a few moments thinking about who to put with whom I get a little crazy. We want people to meet new people but we also want to seat people who know each other together and not separate families.
C and I decided that we will sit at a table with just our parents, since there seemed to be no other clear line of cutoff short of having 30 people and their kids at our table. Everyone says not to worry too much about where we’re seated because we won’t spend much time sitting.
I’ve started reading up on Istanbul for the honeymoon. We booked a cruise from Istanbul to Venice, and we have a day and a half in Istanbul before the boat leaves. I bought a book called Strolling Through Istanbul (the maps are impossible to read on the Kindle) and another called American Writers in Istanbul. I’ve never been to that part of the world. I’ve never taken a cruise (though I’ve taken a 14-hour ferry ride from Aberdeen, Scotland to the Shetland Islands, one of the most thrilling and memorable things I’ve ever done), but I love the idea of being stuck on a boat with very few decisions to make. I don’t know if it’s a personality trait of mine or if I’ve just reached a point in life where I’m wearing of making decisions but the idea of being free of it is immensely appealing.
Cross-posted at The Bilerico Project.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
There Will Be No Chicken Dance.
My work schedule is Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, so I have a mini-weekend in the middle of the week. Wednesdays are often booked up in advance with meetings to do with the business of my latest theater project, my Lizzie Borden musical which is entering a new production phase, and doctor’s appointments -- until recently I hadn’t had health insurance for many years, so I’ve been making up for lost time with eye surgery, treatment of various skin problems, dentist visits, etc.
But some Wednesdays are all mine, and I relish the glimpses of a life that is productive, fulfilling, and whole. Last week I spent the whole day writing my last blog post. I’d had all these changing and unfolding thoughts about marriage which I hadn’t had time to organize and write down and post until last Wednesday and it all came flowing out. When that happens -- or on an even bigger scale, like when I spent 2 weeks at MacDowell Colony last fall writing pages and pages of the stories I’d been storing in my head for years -- it’s both gratifying (to finally have it down on paper and see that I am still capable of producing good work) and disheartening (to see so starkly how prolific I would be if I could devote every day to this work instead of a day job).
But then maybe if I was sitting here every day writing at a more measured pace, I would miss the pleasure that comes with finally letting it all out like a good piss after you’ve been holding it in the car for too long.
I have a chicken simmering on the stove which this afternoon will become, among other things, tortilla soup. I just spent an hour composing a draft of our New York Times wedding announcement. I am going to devote a couple hours to the theater piece I began at MacDowell, and either before or after that I plan to search for poetry that we might use in our wedding ceremony and do a little research on Istanbul because we’ll be there for a day and a half before our honeymoon cruise departs.
We mailed our invitations Monday, so I guess many of them will have arrived by now. They contain information about our “wedding web site,” which has travel and lodging information for guests and a link to our gift registry. It has taken me a while to get used to the idea of a gift registry. My family and friends have been so generous throughout my starving artist life, lending me a hand when I’ve needed it over the years. To ask them now to buy me stuff just because I’m getting married makes me uncomfortable. But the first question many of them have asked when I’ve announced our marriage is “Where are you registered?” so maybe I have to accept the fact that this is the protocol. This is the world I live in now.
Last week our cake topper arrived by FedEx. We bought it on ebay. We didn’t like many that we found online. Some were just too silly (like one with one of the grooms climbing up the side of the cake) or mix and match grooms standing side by side but not relating to each other in any way. Lots of them looked like children, and a surprising number were made from Fisher Price “little people” painted to look like grooms. Dressing up dolls and children to look like adults creeps me out. We finally found one that looked like two fairly generic men, one with his arms around the other, in simple tuxes.
We were surprised when we opened the box to see just how gay they were. Like super-gay, Platonic ideal of gay-gay. The picture online didn’t show their pursed-mouth, pink lipstick and rouge faces and fey expressions. They look like stoned lesbians. I bought some acrylic paints on my way home from work yesterday so I can tone down their makeup and paint their jackets dark green and their ties pale yellow, like the ones we’ll be wearing. Don’t hate – I love fey boys and lipstick lesbians. I just want the cake topper to look sort of like us.
I didn’t want a cake topper at all, at first. I thought it was gauche or too kitschy or something, but I changed my mind. I also didn’t want dancing at the reception. I was horrified by the possibility of the chicken dance at my wedding. But my friend T reminded me that, regardless of the fact that I don’t like dancing, people want to dance at a wedding reception. They want to cut loose and drink a little too much and have fun. Of course. Why would you not want two grooms on top of your wedding cake and dancing at your reception? I swear sometimes I don’t know what I’m thinking. (The band we hired plays 1920s and 30s jazz. There will be no chicken dance.)
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Finding Freedom Where I Least Expected It.
C and I sat down Sunday afternoon to address invitations. We started with our parents. C said they should be addressed, for example, “Mr. and Mrs. Scott Cheslik.”
“Only if we want to really piss off my mom,” I said, thinking he was kidding. C has a very dry sense of humor, and it can be hard to tell sometimes.
“But that’s the way it’s done on a formal invitation.”
“That was the way it was done 50 years ago. There was something called the women’s movement in the 70s which changed all that.”
“But she took his name.”
“Not his first name. When you address a married couple that way, you erase the wife’s identity.”
And so on. If, for some reason, you ever want to uncover all the deep-seated ways in which you and your partner are different from each other, plan a wedding.
I should take some blame for his suggestion. I’ve insisted that everything about our wedding adhere to tradition as much as possible, enjoying the realization that the more conventional we make it, the more subversive it becomes with a same-sex couple at its center. Invitations on fancy paper with gold edges and elegant Victorian script are more arresting, I think, when the two names are both male, than something more unconventional, more “gay,” like rainbows and Comic Sans.
I want a real wedding, and I want a real marriage.
I’m starting to believe (call me a reactionary -- more on that later) that one of the reasons marriage made so little sense to me all those years is because it has been so watered down, and it makes me uncomfortable to admit that much of that watering down is the effect of reforms brought about by the women’s movement (changes in property ownership laws, no-fault divorce, etc.) which have been embraced because they make the institution more fair to women but also I would argue embraced because they make the whole thing easier (it’s easy to make a commitment you know is easy to get out of) and humans are always looking for ways to avoid hard work.
The truth, though, is that I find myself at this moment terribly confused. Most of the things I’ve believed about marriage all my adult life (beliefs which became more and more solid as marriage became more and more applicable for homosexuals) are shifting, dissolving, turning over in my head.
To be clear, I am absolutely certain about what’s happening in my own life. I haven’t for a moment doubted that I want to marry C and devote the rest of my life to him and our relationship. Whenever we disagree about something or if I get exasperated with him for whatever silly reason, he says, joking, “Having second thoughts?” And I say, not joking, “Nope.”
I was sure even before he was.
Though (and maybe because) he’s a firm believer in the virtue of marriage, he hesitated. He didn’t want our marriage to be a political statement, but one that had the same status as a heterosexual marriage, one that his family and community would celebrate and support just like any other.
Though we’re probably some ways away from federal recognition of same-sex marriages, and though C and I will be “unmarried” when we visit our families in Indiana and North Carolina, where discrimination is the law, and though homosexuals getting married will never, at least for the duration of our lives, not be a political statement, New York’s legalization of gay marriage last fall, and C’s conservative family’s outpouring of joy and support upon the news of our engagement, has been enough to sway him.
What I am uncertain about is what my change in attitude toward marriage implies more broadly, or even if it must. Well, I guess it must. The personal is political.
I am still just as critical of marriage as ever in the sense that I have been since I was about 16 and was introduced to a feminist argument against marriage by a radical librarian I worked for at an after-school job in high school, an argument that showed me that our happily-ever-after myth obscured the fact that, for many, marriage brought subjugation, invisibility, disenfranchisement, not to mention loneliness, stultifying boredom, and the expectation of strict conformity.
So when gay and lesbian activists in the 90s began agitating for “marriage equality,” I couldn’t imagine why we would want that when we had made so much headway already in imagining and creating a richer world of relationships, families, communities. (And let’s give this some context. Andrew Sullivan’s argument for same-sex marriage was the first I encountered, and it came along with his cheerleading for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was hard not to see those things, as well as speaking out for the right of homosexuals to serve openly in the military, as all parts of a conservative agenda.) To my mind it was a question of liberation or inclusion and I chose liberation.
It wasn’t long then before the marriage/military campaign began to obliterate so many other of our struggles, like employment nondiscrimination, education, teen homelessness and suicide, HIV prevention and treatment. And the fact remains that “marriage equality” is a deeply misleading, political phrase. Marriage equality doesn’t mean that everyone is equal, it means that all married people are equally privileged. It means that if there are benefits given to married people, unmarried people aren’t getting them.
Marriage is not something you just decide whether or not to do. An extraordinary confluence of events has to occur not just in one person’s life but in conjunction with another person’s life whom one miraculously encounters at the perfect moment when desire, means of support, temperament, strength and discipline to resist destructive temptations, selflessness enough to devote one’s life to another and at the same time maintain the strength of one’s own identity, all align with the couple’s simple ability to communicate, forgive each other’s imperfections, and get along. Getting married is not a choice. It’s a miracle. And there are many, many people for whom it doesn’t happen.
The argument is that marriage is an ideal. It’s not just getting married that benefits society, but holding up marriage as an ideal, aspiring to marriage, cultivates the qualities that are needed for marriage but that benefit society at large: honesty, integrity, empathy, altruism, community-mindedness.
Besides the fairness issue, there’s the more general question regarding freedom versus conformity. Does privileging marriage over other domestic arrangements, other types of families, limit possibility? Is it an authoritarian intrusion, an imposition of an oppressive norm into what should be personal questions (who we live with, who we have intimate relationships with)? Or does encouraging a relationship based on lifetime monogamy and a promise of unconditional love and support have the potential to create stable, healthy communities? Does it create its own kind of freedom, the freedom to be our best selves, a freedom which is engendered by the security and stability of marriage?
I don’t know.
I could say something like, “Well, both can be true,” and maybe so, but I am still left with the question of which attitude brings about the greater good. Which attitude allows for more freedom, more light and possibility, creativity, love? Which points toward a better way of living together as human beings? Which lets us be the best we can be and lets us encourage the best in those around us? Which allows us to take the best care of each other? As I see it, these are the important questions, and I don’t know the answers. I just don’t know.
I have fallen in love (a concept I have interrogated nearly to death in the past but that now seems so simple and beyond reproach) fallen in love with a man for whom these questions have easy, self-evident answers.
He points to the example of his parents’ long, successful marriage and his loving, supportive family that is so clearly its emanation. When I’ve wanted examples of “what marriage is” I’ve turned to Britney Spears, Newt Gingrich, “Bridezilla,” the Catholic Church’s hypocrisy and cynicism, divorce statistics, and the use of fairy-tale sentimentalism by corporations to turn the wedding into a nauseating consumer frenzy. I’ve had the same object lesson in my parents, but somehow I think I considered their rock-solid marriage and my wonderful family who have all these years given me a base upon which to build a creative, productive, love-filled life, I considered that an aberration. A marriage that managed to produce a greater good in spite of its being a marriage.
I can barely believe I’m saying this – 2 years ago I would have labeled this line of thought reactionary and dangerous – but I have no doubt that the best way to spend the rest of my life is in a sexually exclusive, till-death-do-us-part relationship with this man who wants the same thing and wants it with me. The vow of permanence, the no-exit of it, is what makes it desirable, what makes it even possible. I wouldn’t consider it otherwise. It is what allows me to relax into its arms. It is what allows me to experience it as an opening up rather than a shutting down of possibilities. I don’t have to worry when we fight what it means about our future. What it means is that we better talk it out now because forever is a long time to live with resentment caused by an argument about washing the dishes.
I am 50 years old. I have been in relationships that were beautiful and intense, that lasted years, with the most wonderful men, relationships for which I have no regrets but on the contrary have deep gratitude and appreciation, but they ended, and I have no interest in endings any more. I’ve said that, though I love cats and miss having them around, I don’t want any more cats because I watched 4 of them die and I can’t do it again. I can’t do it again.
I don’t want a contingent relationship, I don’t want a commitment that’s good until one of us falls in love with someone else or feels restless or bored or trapped, or until we “grow apart.” It’s a marriage. If we grow apart, we’ll grow the fuck back together.
I know for a fact that my change in attitude has something to do with my age. I could not have made this commitment, I could not have felt this way, wanted this, when I was 25, or 35, or 45. I know exactly what I’m putting aside for this, and I know I’m done with it.
We decided to address the invitations, “Mr. Scott & Mrs. Sharon Cheslik”, etc. Still formal, but not sexist. We didn’t go with the more feminist “Ms.” but opted for “Miss” and “Mrs.”, not being able to come up with why it’s so terrible to acknowledge a woman’s marital status.
This is kind of funny: we’ve toyed with the idea of changing our names after we’re married, but if he took my name and we were to go with the older, formal convention, we would be Mr. and Mr. Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer. In other words, I would be Mr. Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer and he would be Mr. Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer. Maybe homosexuals are not, as the charge goes, changing the definition of marriage, but we’re forcing a second look and that can’t be a bad thing.
“Only if we want to really piss off my mom,” I said, thinking he was kidding. C has a very dry sense of humor, and it can be hard to tell sometimes.
“But that’s the way it’s done on a formal invitation.”
“That was the way it was done 50 years ago. There was something called the women’s movement in the 70s which changed all that.”
“But she took his name.”
“Not his first name. When you address a married couple that way, you erase the wife’s identity.”
And so on. If, for some reason, you ever want to uncover all the deep-seated ways in which you and your partner are different from each other, plan a wedding.
I should take some blame for his suggestion. I’ve insisted that everything about our wedding adhere to tradition as much as possible, enjoying the realization that the more conventional we make it, the more subversive it becomes with a same-sex couple at its center. Invitations on fancy paper with gold edges and elegant Victorian script are more arresting, I think, when the two names are both male, than something more unconventional, more “gay,” like rainbows and Comic Sans.
I want a real wedding, and I want a real marriage.
I’m starting to believe (call me a reactionary -- more on that later) that one of the reasons marriage made so little sense to me all those years is because it has been so watered down, and it makes me uncomfortable to admit that much of that watering down is the effect of reforms brought about by the women’s movement (changes in property ownership laws, no-fault divorce, etc.) which have been embraced because they make the institution more fair to women but also I would argue embraced because they make the whole thing easier (it’s easy to make a commitment you know is easy to get out of) and humans are always looking for ways to avoid hard work.
The truth, though, is that I find myself at this moment terribly confused. Most of the things I’ve believed about marriage all my adult life (beliefs which became more and more solid as marriage became more and more applicable for homosexuals) are shifting, dissolving, turning over in my head.
To be clear, I am absolutely certain about what’s happening in my own life. I haven’t for a moment doubted that I want to marry C and devote the rest of my life to him and our relationship. Whenever we disagree about something or if I get exasperated with him for whatever silly reason, he says, joking, “Having second thoughts?” And I say, not joking, “Nope.”
I was sure even before he was.
Though (and maybe because) he’s a firm believer in the virtue of marriage, he hesitated. He didn’t want our marriage to be a political statement, but one that had the same status as a heterosexual marriage, one that his family and community would celebrate and support just like any other.
Though we’re probably some ways away from federal recognition of same-sex marriages, and though C and I will be “unmarried” when we visit our families in Indiana and North Carolina, where discrimination is the law, and though homosexuals getting married will never, at least for the duration of our lives, not be a political statement, New York’s legalization of gay marriage last fall, and C’s conservative family’s outpouring of joy and support upon the news of our engagement, has been enough to sway him.
What I am uncertain about is what my change in attitude toward marriage implies more broadly, or even if it must. Well, I guess it must. The personal is political.
I am still just as critical of marriage as ever in the sense that I have been since I was about 16 and was introduced to a feminist argument against marriage by a radical librarian I worked for at an after-school job in high school, an argument that showed me that our happily-ever-after myth obscured the fact that, for many, marriage brought subjugation, invisibility, disenfranchisement, not to mention loneliness, stultifying boredom, and the expectation of strict conformity.
So when gay and lesbian activists in the 90s began agitating for “marriage equality,” I couldn’t imagine why we would want that when we had made so much headway already in imagining and creating a richer world of relationships, families, communities. (And let’s give this some context. Andrew Sullivan’s argument for same-sex marriage was the first I encountered, and it came along with his cheerleading for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was hard not to see those things, as well as speaking out for the right of homosexuals to serve openly in the military, as all parts of a conservative agenda.) To my mind it was a question of liberation or inclusion and I chose liberation.
It wasn’t long then before the marriage/military campaign began to obliterate so many other of our struggles, like employment nondiscrimination, education, teen homelessness and suicide, HIV prevention and treatment. And the fact remains that “marriage equality” is a deeply misleading, political phrase. Marriage equality doesn’t mean that everyone is equal, it means that all married people are equally privileged. It means that if there are benefits given to married people, unmarried people aren’t getting them.
Marriage is not something you just decide whether or not to do. An extraordinary confluence of events has to occur not just in one person’s life but in conjunction with another person’s life whom one miraculously encounters at the perfect moment when desire, means of support, temperament, strength and discipline to resist destructive temptations, selflessness enough to devote one’s life to another and at the same time maintain the strength of one’s own identity, all align with the couple’s simple ability to communicate, forgive each other’s imperfections, and get along. Getting married is not a choice. It’s a miracle. And there are many, many people for whom it doesn’t happen.
The argument is that marriage is an ideal. It’s not just getting married that benefits society, but holding up marriage as an ideal, aspiring to marriage, cultivates the qualities that are needed for marriage but that benefit society at large: honesty, integrity, empathy, altruism, community-mindedness.
Besides the fairness issue, there’s the more general question regarding freedom versus conformity. Does privileging marriage over other domestic arrangements, other types of families, limit possibility? Is it an authoritarian intrusion, an imposition of an oppressive norm into what should be personal questions (who we live with, who we have intimate relationships with)? Or does encouraging a relationship based on lifetime monogamy and a promise of unconditional love and support have the potential to create stable, healthy communities? Does it create its own kind of freedom, the freedom to be our best selves, a freedom which is engendered by the security and stability of marriage?
I don’t know.
I could say something like, “Well, both can be true,” and maybe so, but I am still left with the question of which attitude brings about the greater good. Which attitude allows for more freedom, more light and possibility, creativity, love? Which points toward a better way of living together as human beings? Which lets us be the best we can be and lets us encourage the best in those around us? Which allows us to take the best care of each other? As I see it, these are the important questions, and I don’t know the answers. I just don’t know.
I have fallen in love (a concept I have interrogated nearly to death in the past but that now seems so simple and beyond reproach) fallen in love with a man for whom these questions have easy, self-evident answers.
He points to the example of his parents’ long, successful marriage and his loving, supportive family that is so clearly its emanation. When I’ve wanted examples of “what marriage is” I’ve turned to Britney Spears, Newt Gingrich, “Bridezilla,” the Catholic Church’s hypocrisy and cynicism, divorce statistics, and the use of fairy-tale sentimentalism by corporations to turn the wedding into a nauseating consumer frenzy. I’ve had the same object lesson in my parents, but somehow I think I considered their rock-solid marriage and my wonderful family who have all these years given me a base upon which to build a creative, productive, love-filled life, I considered that an aberration. A marriage that managed to produce a greater good in spite of its being a marriage.
I can barely believe I’m saying this – 2 years ago I would have labeled this line of thought reactionary and dangerous – but I have no doubt that the best way to spend the rest of my life is in a sexually exclusive, till-death-do-us-part relationship with this man who wants the same thing and wants it with me. The vow of permanence, the no-exit of it, is what makes it desirable, what makes it even possible. I wouldn’t consider it otherwise. It is what allows me to relax into its arms. It is what allows me to experience it as an opening up rather than a shutting down of possibilities. I don’t have to worry when we fight what it means about our future. What it means is that we better talk it out now because forever is a long time to live with resentment caused by an argument about washing the dishes.
I am 50 years old. I have been in relationships that were beautiful and intense, that lasted years, with the most wonderful men, relationships for which I have no regrets but on the contrary have deep gratitude and appreciation, but they ended, and I have no interest in endings any more. I’ve said that, though I love cats and miss having them around, I don’t want any more cats because I watched 4 of them die and I can’t do it again. I can’t do it again.
I don’t want a contingent relationship, I don’t want a commitment that’s good until one of us falls in love with someone else or feels restless or bored or trapped, or until we “grow apart.” It’s a marriage. If we grow apart, we’ll grow the fuck back together.
I know for a fact that my change in attitude has something to do with my age. I could not have made this commitment, I could not have felt this way, wanted this, when I was 25, or 35, or 45. I know exactly what I’m putting aside for this, and I know I’m done with it.
We decided to address the invitations, “Mr. Scott & Mrs. Sharon Cheslik”, etc. Still formal, but not sexist. We didn’t go with the more feminist “Ms.” but opted for “Miss” and “Mrs.”, not being able to come up with why it’s so terrible to acknowledge a woman’s marital status.
This is kind of funny: we’ve toyed with the idea of changing our names after we’re married, but if he took my name and we were to go with the older, formal convention, we would be Mr. and Mr. Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer. In other words, I would be Mr. Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer and he would be Mr. Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer. Maybe homosexuals are not, as the charge goes, changing the definition of marriage, but we’re forcing a second look and that can’t be a bad thing.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Family Values.
I mentioned that one of the unexpected effects of planning a wedding is the increased contact with my family -- though I wonder why I would have been surprised -- and not just contact but a sort of unstudied outpouring of happiness for us that has been deeply moving. Being cc’ed on the email correspondence among our two sisters and my dear friend of 35 years as they worked together to pick out “groomswoman” dresses brought me pleasure beyond words. It was such a simple, beautiful demonstration of what people always say weddings are about but I never accepted as a thing uncluttered by gender politics and all the ugly stuff about marriage (power, control, property, money): the joining of 2 families.
I thought my family was close, but C’s family is off the hook. The smallest pretext, say, a Super Bowl party, will have C’s mom pulling out the air mattresses while dozens of them, aunts and uncles and their kids twice removed, drop everything to drive great distances just to spend a weekend on top of each other. I was frankly a little freaked out at first, but they’ve been so good to me I can’t resist.
For my part, I was lucky if I saw my family (which by the way is quite a bit smaller, just my parents and two siblings) twice a year. I love my parents dearly but from the time I was a teenager it’s been crucial to me to establish a life of my own, separate from them. I and my brother and sister all have created lives for ourselves that are very different from each other’s and different from my parents’. They encouraged our independence. Maybe it’s something about getting older, but this wedding bringing my family closer to me feels very, very nice.
I must here add what I think is a significant complicating factor (not just in talking about C’s and my family dynamics but as part of the conversation regarding how queer people’s relationships with their families become “normalized”): C’s family places great importance on everyone being an active part of each other’s lives, being “there for each other,” not just recognizing birthdays and other occasions, but calling each other frequently, sharing the details. I think this comes from a sense of duty, but I don’t mean that word in the cold sense of hollowly performing actions out of habit or tradition. Their loyalty and affection for each other run deep and true.
However, even though when they’re together the conversation never stops, they avoid certain topics. Namely, religion and politics. C’s parents, as near as I can make out from what C tells me and from stray bits of conversation that make it through the filter, are Reagan Republicans, which is to say that their conservatism comes from their religious convictions and a belief that America was better in the 1950s. C’s father is a strict Catholic, strict meaning the Pope is always right, and his brother is, too. I don’t know this because they’ve told me. We’ve never talked about it.
My family, though we certainly don’t love each other less, don’t spend as much time together. There are whole swaths of our lives that we don’t share with each other. We’re independent. I correspond with my mom by email regularly, but I don’t even know when my parents’ wedding anniversary is -- they’ve always celebrated privately. My brother and sister and I are close but we don’t share every detail of our lives with each other.
Yet, when we’re together we talk (this is, when we talk -- it’s not unusual for one or all of us to just sit quietly reading when we get together) we often talk about politics and religion. My mom is a die-hard Indiana liberal from way back. I grew up in the midst of racist, homophobic, misogynistic Bible-thumpers and my mom’s resistance to them. I don’t agree with her on everything -- my parents are more conservative than I am on some issues, like immigration -- but that makes the conversation more interesting. Our opposition to religious conservatives binds us, and we all enjoy the conversation.
I was discomfitted, and am still from time to time, by C’s family’s ability to chat all day long and skirt these topics. For me, every conversation eventually wants to lead to politics, and I’m usually anxious to get there, so avoiding these topics with C’s family is tricky, it interrupts the flow of ideas. For me.
I don’t want to come to overbroad conclusions, but my family, with my League of Women Voters mom at the center (though I have to say my mother is a perplexing creature politically: some of my earliest memories of her are of discussions regarding the necessity of the Equal Rights Amendment, but she’s always taken an extremely dim view of divorce) defined ourselves in opposition. We were agnostics in the Bible belt. I grew up watching my mother organize our neighborhood to fight racist practices of realtors in the late 60s. We were surrounded by people who not only disagreed with us but who actively, as we saw it, opposed our freedom. Possibly we couldn’t afford to avoid the hard subjects.
C’s family, on the other hand, are religious conservatives in North Carolina. They are comfortably in the majority. Perhaps there’s no need to talk about politics or religion when everyone within hearing distance agrees with you.
Okay, I’ve come to overbroad conclusions. This is a blog. Everything I say is subject to dissent. I’m open to critique.
I’ve strayed, but what I wanted to convey here is how much pleasure I’ve gotten from the interaction with our families while we plan our wedding, seeing how much it means to them, how much joy our love and commitment brings to them, how much I look forward to them meeting each other and becoming one family surrounding and supporting us.
I’m not oblivious to how this narrative fits neatly with the conservative argument for gay marriage (eloquently, and maybe first?, laid out by Andrew Sullivan in Virtually Normal, the manifesto of the modern gay rights movement though not many will cop to it because of their issues with Sullivan’s politics): if you allow queer people to be folded into their families through marriage, give queer people’s families a familiar structure through which to support our relationships, you will strengthen and stabilize our relationships and allow us to be full members of our families and hence our communities, etc. I get it. It would be easy to look at my changing circumstances as just a natural bending toward a conservative world-view that so often happens as people age and stability becomes more important, but I dont think that’s the case.
My plan was to chronicle the preparation for my wedding, not to wax abstractly about the deep thoughts in my brain. But I thought, since I’ve been such a vocal opponent of the gay marriage campaign I should share a bit of what’s going on in my head.
On my facebook page, I posted a link to my last post here about my wedding. Among the congratulations there was a comment from a friend back in Austin who said, “He's read all your old posts, right? I'm sure you had a wrestling match in your head about this.” By which he means, "um, what gives?" Wresting match is right.
I sat down to share some of that mental wresting and now I’ve written two pages and I’ve barely touched it. So I will take up this discussion of politics in the next post and just tell you that,
1) we got our wedding invitations this week. They’re beautiful. Old-fashioned script on cream card stock with a gold beveled edge. We went through proofs of 2 or 3 different fonts before settling on this one. I wanted something that looks handwritten but most of the script fonts looked too feminine. I wanted something that looked like the Gettysburg Address. We’re inviting about 95 people and expect about 75 to come.
2) We got the proofs of our engagement photos. Seriously. Engagement photos. We needed something for our wedding web site. And we want an announcement in the New York Times. Not just an announcement, I want the big “Vows” story. If I’m going to get married, I want the whole hog.
I thought my family was close, but C’s family is off the hook. The smallest pretext, say, a Super Bowl party, will have C’s mom pulling out the air mattresses while dozens of them, aunts and uncles and their kids twice removed, drop everything to drive great distances just to spend a weekend on top of each other. I was frankly a little freaked out at first, but they’ve been so good to me I can’t resist.
For my part, I was lucky if I saw my family (which by the way is quite a bit smaller, just my parents and two siblings) twice a year. I love my parents dearly but from the time I was a teenager it’s been crucial to me to establish a life of my own, separate from them. I and my brother and sister all have created lives for ourselves that are very different from each other’s and different from my parents’. They encouraged our independence. Maybe it’s something about getting older, but this wedding bringing my family closer to me feels very, very nice.
I must here add what I think is a significant complicating factor (not just in talking about C’s and my family dynamics but as part of the conversation regarding how queer people’s relationships with their families become “normalized”): C’s family places great importance on everyone being an active part of each other’s lives, being “there for each other,” not just recognizing birthdays and other occasions, but calling each other frequently, sharing the details. I think this comes from a sense of duty, but I don’t mean that word in the cold sense of hollowly performing actions out of habit or tradition. Their loyalty and affection for each other run deep and true.
However, even though when they’re together the conversation never stops, they avoid certain topics. Namely, religion and politics. C’s parents, as near as I can make out from what C tells me and from stray bits of conversation that make it through the filter, are Reagan Republicans, which is to say that their conservatism comes from their religious convictions and a belief that America was better in the 1950s. C’s father is a strict Catholic, strict meaning the Pope is always right, and his brother is, too. I don’t know this because they’ve told me. We’ve never talked about it.
My family, though we certainly don’t love each other less, don’t spend as much time together. There are whole swaths of our lives that we don’t share with each other. We’re independent. I correspond with my mom by email regularly, but I don’t even know when my parents’ wedding anniversary is -- they’ve always celebrated privately. My brother and sister and I are close but we don’t share every detail of our lives with each other.
Yet, when we’re together we talk (this is, when we talk -- it’s not unusual for one or all of us to just sit quietly reading when we get together) we often talk about politics and religion. My mom is a die-hard Indiana liberal from way back. I grew up in the midst of racist, homophobic, misogynistic Bible-thumpers and my mom’s resistance to them. I don’t agree with her on everything -- my parents are more conservative than I am on some issues, like immigration -- but that makes the conversation more interesting. Our opposition to religious conservatives binds us, and we all enjoy the conversation.
I was discomfitted, and am still from time to time, by C’s family’s ability to chat all day long and skirt these topics. For me, every conversation eventually wants to lead to politics, and I’m usually anxious to get there, so avoiding these topics with C’s family is tricky, it interrupts the flow of ideas. For me.
I don’t want to come to overbroad conclusions, but my family, with my League of Women Voters mom at the center (though I have to say my mother is a perplexing creature politically: some of my earliest memories of her are of discussions regarding the necessity of the Equal Rights Amendment, but she’s always taken an extremely dim view of divorce) defined ourselves in opposition. We were agnostics in the Bible belt. I grew up watching my mother organize our neighborhood to fight racist practices of realtors in the late 60s. We were surrounded by people who not only disagreed with us but who actively, as we saw it, opposed our freedom. Possibly we couldn’t afford to avoid the hard subjects.
C’s family, on the other hand, are religious conservatives in North Carolina. They are comfortably in the majority. Perhaps there’s no need to talk about politics or religion when everyone within hearing distance agrees with you.
Okay, I’ve come to overbroad conclusions. This is a blog. Everything I say is subject to dissent. I’m open to critique.
I’ve strayed, but what I wanted to convey here is how much pleasure I’ve gotten from the interaction with our families while we plan our wedding, seeing how much it means to them, how much joy our love and commitment brings to them, how much I look forward to them meeting each other and becoming one family surrounding and supporting us.
I’m not oblivious to how this narrative fits neatly with the conservative argument for gay marriage (eloquently, and maybe first?, laid out by Andrew Sullivan in Virtually Normal, the manifesto of the modern gay rights movement though not many will cop to it because of their issues with Sullivan’s politics): if you allow queer people to be folded into their families through marriage, give queer people’s families a familiar structure through which to support our relationships, you will strengthen and stabilize our relationships and allow us to be full members of our families and hence our communities, etc. I get it. It would be easy to look at my changing circumstances as just a natural bending toward a conservative world-view that so often happens as people age and stability becomes more important, but I dont think that’s the case.
My plan was to chronicle the preparation for my wedding, not to wax abstractly about the deep thoughts in my brain. But I thought, since I’ve been such a vocal opponent of the gay marriage campaign I should share a bit of what’s going on in my head.
On my facebook page, I posted a link to my last post here about my wedding. Among the congratulations there was a comment from a friend back in Austin who said, “He's read all your old posts, right? I'm sure you had a wrestling match in your head about this.” By which he means, "um, what gives?" Wresting match is right.
I sat down to share some of that mental wresting and now I’ve written two pages and I’ve barely touched it. So I will take up this discussion of politics in the next post and just tell you that,
1) we got our wedding invitations this week. They’re beautiful. Old-fashioned script on cream card stock with a gold beveled edge. We went through proofs of 2 or 3 different fonts before settling on this one. I wanted something that looks handwritten but most of the script fonts looked too feminine. I wanted something that looked like the Gettysburg Address. We’re inviting about 95 people and expect about 75 to come.
2) We got the proofs of our engagement photos. Seriously. Engagement photos. We needed something for our wedding web site. And we want an announcement in the New York Times. Not just an announcement, I want the big “Vows” story. If I’m going to get married, I want the whole hog.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
I'm Getting Married in May.
Last Saturday C and I drove a Zipcar up to Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York to taste appetizers and cake that the chef prepared for us. We have to choose two, maybe three, appetizers for the cocktail hour, and of course only one cake.
We both loved the mini-lamb chop with rosemary, no question. We both also loved the parmesan and artichoke-filled phyllo pastry and the tuna carpaccio with shaved fennel, but C thought many of our guests would be put off by raw fish, so he suggested we should go with the pastry. I liked the combination of the lamb with the cold tuna, rather than two hot appetizers, and I thought enough of our guests would find it as delicious as we did, and those who didn’t, well, there would be cheese and crudités. We don’t have to decide right now.
The cake was easy. We knew all along we wanted a chocolate cake, so we had the chef create different configurations of various types of chocolate cake with different frostings and ganaches. We decided on a chocolate sponge cake with Italian buttercream filling and an orange-infused ganache frosting. It will be a three or four-tiered cake (no pillars) decorated with fresh flowers.
I am getting married in May. We chose Mohonk Mountain House, a sprawling 19th century resort hotel nestled in the foothills of the Catskills, because our families are coming from all over and we wanted to show off our beautiful state where there are gorgeous mountains and lakes and rivers and gay people can get married.
The last couple of months have been a frenzy of planning, and I’ve wanted so badly to blog through what feels like a remarkable time in my life, and in the life of our state, our nation, and our community. But of course the more stuff there is going on that I want to write about the less time there is to write. The blogger’s dilemma. But I’m going to give it my best shot, try diligently to chronicle the lead up to this crazy event.
Also on Saturday we had lunch with the minister who will be officiating the ceremony and the woman who will be doing the flowers. It was one of the most enjoyable weekends I’ve had in years. Sunday morning I baked scones and we ate them in bed with the New York Times. Sunday evening, I baked an apple pie. We needed a day of indulgence. We’ve been dieting in an effort to look good in our tuxedos on our wedding day. (Now I know why brides have a reputation for being cranky. They’re starving.) In between, C shopped online for ties for our groomsmen, we found and ordered a two-groom cake topper, and I created a wedding web site. (I emailed the link to both our moms so they could proofread and give us feedback on the site before we send out invitations. They both immediately signed the “guestbook” telling us how glad they are we found each other, how much they love us, and how excited they are about the wedding. One of the best things about this whole proceeding is that I’ve been in much more frequent contact with my parents and siblings.)
I will end this post here. I find the main obstacle to regular blogging is setting my expectations too high. There's much to write about, but I don't have to write about all of it tonight. This is a wildly joyful time for me. But also strange and complicated. I don’t think I would believe any homosexual who told me his or her thoughts about marriage were not complicated, and I hope that as I narrate this episode I can tease out some of those tangled threads.
Right now I have to think of stuff to put on our gift registry. When you say you’re getting married, people want to buy you stuff.
We both loved the mini-lamb chop with rosemary, no question. We both also loved the parmesan and artichoke-filled phyllo pastry and the tuna carpaccio with shaved fennel, but C thought many of our guests would be put off by raw fish, so he suggested we should go with the pastry. I liked the combination of the lamb with the cold tuna, rather than two hot appetizers, and I thought enough of our guests would find it as delicious as we did, and those who didn’t, well, there would be cheese and crudités. We don’t have to decide right now.
The cake was easy. We knew all along we wanted a chocolate cake, so we had the chef create different configurations of various types of chocolate cake with different frostings and ganaches. We decided on a chocolate sponge cake with Italian buttercream filling and an orange-infused ganache frosting. It will be a three or four-tiered cake (no pillars) decorated with fresh flowers.
I am getting married in May. We chose Mohonk Mountain House, a sprawling 19th century resort hotel nestled in the foothills of the Catskills, because our families are coming from all over and we wanted to show off our beautiful state where there are gorgeous mountains and lakes and rivers and gay people can get married.
The last couple of months have been a frenzy of planning, and I’ve wanted so badly to blog through what feels like a remarkable time in my life, and in the life of our state, our nation, and our community. But of course the more stuff there is going on that I want to write about the less time there is to write. The blogger’s dilemma. But I’m going to give it my best shot, try diligently to chronicle the lead up to this crazy event.
Also on Saturday we had lunch with the minister who will be officiating the ceremony and the woman who will be doing the flowers. It was one of the most enjoyable weekends I’ve had in years. Sunday morning I baked scones and we ate them in bed with the New York Times. Sunday evening, I baked an apple pie. We needed a day of indulgence. We’ve been dieting in an effort to look good in our tuxedos on our wedding day. (Now I know why brides have a reputation for being cranky. They’re starving.) In between, C shopped online for ties for our groomsmen, we found and ordered a two-groom cake topper, and I created a wedding web site. (I emailed the link to both our moms so they could proofread and give us feedback on the site before we send out invitations. They both immediately signed the “guestbook” telling us how glad they are we found each other, how much they love us, and how excited they are about the wedding. One of the best things about this whole proceeding is that I’ve been in much more frequent contact with my parents and siblings.)
I will end this post here. I find the main obstacle to regular blogging is setting my expectations too high. There's much to write about, but I don't have to write about all of it tonight. This is a wildly joyful time for me. But also strange and complicated. I don’t think I would believe any homosexual who told me his or her thoughts about marriage were not complicated, and I hope that as I narrate this episode I can tease out some of those tangled threads.
Right now I have to think of stuff to put on our gift registry. When you say you’re getting married, people want to buy you stuff.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
The Weekend.
Things I did this weekend:
1. C and I went to Target, which oddly enough is about a 7-minute walk from our apartment, across the river to the Bronx, for laundry detergent, a cover for my Kindle, a plastic-coated whisk that I can use in the no-stick pans, dental floss, paper towels, and a couple other things I can't remember any more.
2. I installed the curtain "hold-backs" that I ordered from Home Depot. I ordered and paid for 4 pairs but they sent 8 pairs. No idea why. Because of the design of the curtain rods, it was difficult and took some time to open and close the drapes. Our windows open onto a 10-flight stairway that goes up from Broadway to our neighborhood in Inwood, and the stairs are flanked with streetlights, so curtains that close are necessary. Now, we can just hook them on the little things when we want them open and let them go when we want them closed. I can't tell you how much stress that relieved for me. Silly, I know.
3. I organized the office. I had ordered a bunch of stuff from the Container Store (my new retail crush): a wire hanging shelf so I have extra room for towels and napkins in the kitchen cabinet, another wire shelf for the freezer so everything doesn't slide out onto the floor when you open it, and 8 plastic bins to stack on the shelves in the office so all the little stuff we store in there can be stowed neatly instead of piled on the floor. The office is actually now a comfortable, attractive room where I can write. That's huge. Before, it felt like a garage.
3. I used my favorite Xmas present to convert an old recording of my first full-length musical, an adaptation of Frankenstein, from audio cassette to digital files. (I have a box full of cassettes of my pre-CD/internet/GarageBand work to convert. The machine is called a Tape2USB II, made by Grace Digital Audio and it's super-easy to use.)
Tim and another friend Liz and I wrote and staged Frankenstein in 1991. It was too quick (we wrote, rehearsed, opened, and closed the show all in about 9 weeks), and we were too inexperienced, and it didn't come together. Half the audience walked out every night at intermission, and I can't blame them. It just wasn't ready. The experience was eye-opening and heartbreaking, and we sort of never looked back.
But now, there might be some people interested in developing it, so I pulled it out. The recording is not great, the performances are awful -- I don't want to badmouth the very talented and game group of actors we worked with, but they were mostly as naive as we were about the challenges of a full-length musical -- and musically and lyrically it's a mess, but there's an atmosphere and a complex emotionality to the piece, not to mention the power of the story, that shows through and is still very affecting. It would take a lot of work, a serious overhaul, but it would be worth the effort. Remember that's what happened with Lizzie Borden. It was very old work that had receded into memory, but it was revived by people who saw its potential and created opportunities for us to re-write it and find a new audience for it.
4. C and I watched the Republican debates. It's mesmerizing, watching the old Reagan alliance of hard-hearted rich people and Christian reality-deniers fall apart before our very eyes. When Ron Paul is the sanest person in the room, you're in trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Please don't let any of these clowns and monsters get elected president.
Also from the Container Store, I bought a sliding contraption with recycling bins that will fit in one of our narrow kitchen cabinets, so we can get our paper, plastic, and metal recyclables out of the office and hidden away. I had a ridiculous confrontation with our landlord recently about garbage, which I lost but only because he holds all the cards, so I would rather the recycling bins not be out in the open to remind me daily of my economic powerlessness.
Owners of residential buildings in New York with more than 3 units (ours has 4) are required to provide an area and containers for their tenants to put their garbage and recyclables, and they are required to put the containers in front of the building on designated days to be picked up by the city. Our landlord does not do any of this. He expects the tenants to keep everything in our apartment until pick up day (3 times a week for trash, once a week for recycling) and then bag it and take it to the curb ourselves. It's not such a burden to deal with our own trash, but I think certain responsibilities come with ownership and the landlord should keep his end of the bargain. There's plenty of room in front of the house for garbage and recycling bins, so why should we have to store refuse in our apartments?
A few weeks ago, he sent us a note saying that he'd been fined for some improperly sorted garbage (recyclable stuff in with the regular trash) and asked us to be more careful. I wrote back saying that it was not likely us, since we're very vigilant about recycling, but that if he would provide containers for his tenants' garbage and recycling it might be easier for him to manage it. He told me that he's not a superintendent and doesn't do garbage, that part of the charm of living in a small building is dealing with your own garbage, and that if we didn't like it there were alternatives. He actually said that.
He's defying the law, but we of course have no leverage. We could insist, report him to the city, make a stink, but he could turn off our heat, refuse to make repairs, double our rent, make our lives miserable in any number of ways.
1. C and I went to Target, which oddly enough is about a 7-minute walk from our apartment, across the river to the Bronx, for laundry detergent, a cover for my Kindle, a plastic-coated whisk that I can use in the no-stick pans, dental floss, paper towels, and a couple other things I can't remember any more.
2. I installed the curtain "hold-backs" that I ordered from Home Depot. I ordered and paid for 4 pairs but they sent 8 pairs. No idea why. Because of the design of the curtain rods, it was difficult and took some time to open and close the drapes. Our windows open onto a 10-flight stairway that goes up from Broadway to our neighborhood in Inwood, and the stairs are flanked with streetlights, so curtains that close are necessary. Now, we can just hook them on the little things when we want them open and let them go when we want them closed. I can't tell you how much stress that relieved for me. Silly, I know.
3. I organized the office. I had ordered a bunch of stuff from the Container Store (my new retail crush): a wire hanging shelf so I have extra room for towels and napkins in the kitchen cabinet, another wire shelf for the freezer so everything doesn't slide out onto the floor when you open it, and 8 plastic bins to stack on the shelves in the office so all the little stuff we store in there can be stowed neatly instead of piled on the floor. The office is actually now a comfortable, attractive room where I can write. That's huge. Before, it felt like a garage.
3. I used my favorite Xmas present to convert an old recording of my first full-length musical, an adaptation of Frankenstein, from audio cassette to digital files. (I have a box full of cassettes of my pre-CD/internet/GarageBand work to convert. The machine is called a Tape2USB II, made by Grace Digital Audio and it's super-easy to use.)
Tim and another friend Liz and I wrote and staged Frankenstein in 1991. It was too quick (we wrote, rehearsed, opened, and closed the show all in about 9 weeks), and we were too inexperienced, and it didn't come together. Half the audience walked out every night at intermission, and I can't blame them. It just wasn't ready. The experience was eye-opening and heartbreaking, and we sort of never looked back.
But now, there might be some people interested in developing it, so I pulled it out. The recording is not great, the performances are awful -- I don't want to badmouth the very talented and game group of actors we worked with, but they were mostly as naive as we were about the challenges of a full-length musical -- and musically and lyrically it's a mess, but there's an atmosphere and a complex emotionality to the piece, not to mention the power of the story, that shows through and is still very affecting. It would take a lot of work, a serious overhaul, but it would be worth the effort. Remember that's what happened with Lizzie Borden. It was very old work that had receded into memory, but it was revived by people who saw its potential and created opportunities for us to re-write it and find a new audience for it.
4. C and I watched the Republican debates. It's mesmerizing, watching the old Reagan alliance of hard-hearted rich people and Christian reality-deniers fall apart before our very eyes. When Ron Paul is the sanest person in the room, you're in trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Please don't let any of these clowns and monsters get elected president.
***
Also from the Container Store, I bought a sliding contraption with recycling bins that will fit in one of our narrow kitchen cabinets, so we can get our paper, plastic, and metal recyclables out of the office and hidden away. I had a ridiculous confrontation with our landlord recently about garbage, which I lost but only because he holds all the cards, so I would rather the recycling bins not be out in the open to remind me daily of my economic powerlessness.
Owners of residential buildings in New York with more than 3 units (ours has 4) are required to provide an area and containers for their tenants to put their garbage and recyclables, and they are required to put the containers in front of the building on designated days to be picked up by the city. Our landlord does not do any of this. He expects the tenants to keep everything in our apartment until pick up day (3 times a week for trash, once a week for recycling) and then bag it and take it to the curb ourselves. It's not such a burden to deal with our own trash, but I think certain responsibilities come with ownership and the landlord should keep his end of the bargain. There's plenty of room in front of the house for garbage and recycling bins, so why should we have to store refuse in our apartments?
A few weeks ago, he sent us a note saying that he'd been fined for some improperly sorted garbage (recyclable stuff in with the regular trash) and asked us to be more careful. I wrote back saying that it was not likely us, since we're very vigilant about recycling, but that if he would provide containers for his tenants' garbage and recycling it might be easier for him to manage it. He told me that he's not a superintendent and doesn't do garbage, that part of the charm of living in a small building is dealing with your own garbage, and that if we didn't like it there were alternatives. He actually said that.
He's defying the law, but we of course have no leverage. We could insist, report him to the city, make a stink, but he could turn off our heat, refuse to make repairs, double our rent, make our lives miserable in any number of ways.
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