Boundaries II.

I titled that last post "Boundaries" because I was going to write about my sister but then I got waylaid with Todd Haynes and never got there. The subjects of Z, Todd Haynes, and my sister were related in several ways.

Z is my guinea pig for a new way of relating to loved ones that I suspect is better than any other way. I've not kept anything from him. And even the stuff that I would have been tempted to keep from him, like my feelings about him, he has read here, so even that barrier is broken. So, though our friendship has been in some ways superficial because we don't spend a lot of time together, it is complete, clean. We can be present, in the present, with each other, because there's no debris from the past clogging things up. I don't edit myself with Z and he still likes me, and that is a powerful lesson. I try to take that lesson into the other relationships in my life, and for the most part it improves them.

It's complicated in older relationships, though, because I have a history of having edited what I've shared with them. There is that debris. So, when I tell a friend something about me he didn't know, I am not only telling him that particular thing (which I probably kept from him because I thought he might not like me if he knew), I am also telling him that I've kept a secret from him. This has been a pattern -- presenting an incomplete picture of myself because I fear being rejected, then getting angry because "you don't know me!" -- and I aim to stop it. This blog helps. The artist in me naturally wants to approach it as a literary project, and that helps me to not limit what I write.

I found out last week that my sister has been reading my blog. I had a feeling. When I started this, I didn't tell anyone for a while. I wanted it to be anonymous at first, so I could get used to the freedom. Since my family knows more about me than anyone because our relationships cover more years, I suppose there's also more they don't know. And even though, in recent years, I've tried to be more open with them, share more of my life with them, I see them once maybe twice a year. I want them to know all about me, but how to do you do that when the conversation is so limited?

I imagine most people don't talk openly with their parents about their sex lives. (I have a good friend in Syracuse who is very close to his fairly conservative Italian Catholic mother and will talk about any sexual subject in front of her, sometime just to make her blush, but I envy their openness, and I especially envy their sense of humor about the discomfort). Part of this reticence is appropriate I guess. There are, I suppose, valid reasons for setting different boundaries in different relationships, different rules regarding what of ourselves we share with which people. Some things are legitimately private, I guess, maybe especially between adults and children. I guess. Mostly I think the whole boundaries thing is just an excuse for keeping secrets.

My difficulty, so much of my life, being honest about sex was some combination of an intense discomfort associated with nakedness because my parents are Midwestern and modest and sexually conservative (my parents never talked to me about sex, no birds and bees, nothing, and I feel for them, I understand how it happens, but still -- what kind of message does that send to a kid?) and a deep shame that my emerging sexual feelings were about boys. (As far as training in how to disguise and dissemble sexual feelings, my teenage years were like boot camp.) To my never-ending annoyance, that particular shame can still be very fresh all these decades later, like, for instance, when I strike up a friendship with a guy in one of my classes and I dread the moment in casual conversation when I'm going to be faced with revealing or avoiding revealing that I am a homosexual. It's as simple as being asked, "Do you have a girlfriend?" and having to decide, "Do I really want to deal with this person's discomfort right now?" I get so fucking weary of that. (This a great example of how this pattern starts, with that first little lie which later is the secret -- why didn't you tell me that before?)

So, though it made me a little woozy for a while to know that my sister was reading this stuff, I was glad. It's like mining, you can only get so deep with a pickaxe and shovel (Christmas visits, the occasional email or phone call) -- sometimes you have to blast a big hole to get somewhere.

Boundaries.

Last week, or maybe the week before, I had dinner with Z and his new boyfriend, R. We hadn't seen each other in a while. I missed him. He suggested dinner, the three of us, which I jumped at because I didn't (or thought I didn't) make a good impression when I met R a while back, and I was glad for another chance. So we had dinner, very nice. R is a sweet man, and it made me happy (in a sort of maternal way) to see them hold hands as they walked into the restaurant, to see their affection for each other, to see how much R cares about Z. Happy, as in sad. Because it used to be me holding Z's hand and it used to be me who Z looked at with affection (it's not maternal any more, is it?). Am I entitled to feel wistful about a man I more or less pushed away because I didn't want the attachment? (My opinion about that kind of love is like my opinion about God: It would be nice, but c'mon, really, you can't be serious.)

Over dinner, we talked about aGLIFF -- the gay film festival here, last month. Life in a Box was in it, in 2005. I think they've had a lot of administrative problems, I'm not sure what-all, but the staff has turned over a couple times in the last few years. In my opinion, the programming is uneven and frustrating, but these queer festivals have an impossible mandate -- they have to please such wildly different tastes. They have to program a certain number of silly shirtless boy films (Eating Out, etc.) to please the suburban gay men who actually buy tickets and make donations to the festival while maintaining some artistic credibility for snobs like me who complain about the lowbrow programming.

(I kicked myself plenty of times for not choosing a shirtless boy still from Life in a Box to promote it at the queer festivals. There are plenty of shirtless shots in Life in a Box. It hardly matters what the film is about, if the still in the program shows a shirtless boy, the lines are long. But then you have the problem of an audience expecting something your film is not going to provide. Maybe I'm second-guessing. Maybe all they're expecting is a flash of skin, and they don't care what the rest of the film is about. And maybe it's good that the shirtless promo shots bring the suburban gay male crowd to the theater to see some more serious work. And how condescending was that last sentence?)

Anyway, Z and R said that they'd seen only one film in this year's festival, and they hated it, they thought it was the worst thing they'd ever seen. I asked what it was. It was Poison.

"Poison? Todd Haynes? Prison sex? Spitting?"

"That's the one."

"That's one of my all-time favorite films."

Now, I've already disproved the movie test. And I would not think poorly of someone who doesn't like Poison. Even though I'm a huge admirer of Todd Haynes, I don't always love his films, and Poison is a difficult film. His films are often too cerebral for me, and it's hard to get past the thick layer of style to whatever emotional content is underneath. But still I think he's a real artist. (Though I'm sure it's come out in dribs and drabs here, someday I will put together some working version of my argument that real artists deserve regard whether we like their work or not.) I gave Z and R a little background on Todd Haynes and Poison. I wasn't trying to try to change their minds, but I felt compelled to offer some context for their reaction. I don't think they were looking for context, they just hated the film. Which is fine.

What was jarring though, is that Z said and R agreed that he doesn't like sad films. They don't interest him, he doesn't want to watch them. I live for sad films. And sad books, and sad songs, and sad plays. Sad pictures. Sad people. Sad weather, sad dogs, sad days. I had not really thought of it in such simple terms before that conversation. I feel cheated if there's no sadness in a movie. Happy is fine too, but only because it makes sad sadder.

Regardless of what we know about the movie test, and even though we had a really nice dinner and the conversation about the film was not awkward or uncomfortable, it emphasized to me how separate I am from the two of them, how separate I am now from Z.

Grandma.

I had a haunting dream about my grandmother several nights ago. I'd forgotten about it till just now when I found written on the pad by my bed, "grandma dream letter. I am dying, I am dead, etc." There's not much more that I remember of the dream, just the strange, slightly terrifying but exciting feeling of reading a letter that I knew was from my grandmother somewhere on her way out of earthly consciousness.

My grandmother was 97 when she died a few years ago. She and I had been close when I was young. At the time, she lived in Waukegan, Illinois, the town where my mother and father met and married and where I was born. Actually, my mother lived on a farm in Gurnee, and I think they got married in a church in Lake Forest or one of the other little farm towns around there, before that whole area turned from small farms to suburban sprawl. But my father lived in Waukegan with his mother.

Waukegan was, maybe still is, a slightly seedy town on Lake Michigan. There's a Navy training base there. Grandma lived alone in an apartment downtown. (She and my grandfather had divorced and then he died in the early 60s and she didn't remarry.) The block always seemed to be lit up bright even at night, and bustling with sailors and other people in fancy clothes. There was a candy store on the first floor where we bought caramel corn sometimes. You had to push a button downstairs and wait for her to buzz you in, which I thought was very glamorous. I'm sure those visits, my grandmother's apartment with the pegboard wall covered top to bottom with her oil paintings, like a studio in Paris -- she painted, some original but mostly copies of Impressionist landscapes and such, which she sold -- car horns, bits of overheard conversation on the street below, I'm sure that's when I fell in love with city life. She used to say to me, conspiratorially, "You and I are city folks, aren't we?" A couple of times, I was allowed to visit her for a few days by myself, and we'd go out for Chinese or, if we had dinner at home, she'd make sandwiches with tinned sardines, or we'd eat crackers with processed cheese that came in a jelly jar. I was in heaven.

A few years after my parents married and my brother and I were both born within a couple years, my father got a job in Indiana and we moved. It was only a few hours drive, but back then moving 4 hours away was like moving to China, so we went from seeing Grandma frequently to seeing her once or twice a year. When she would visit my family, first in Indianapolis and then in the little college town where we moved when I was 12, she would get us kids all dressed and take us out "bumming." We'd window shop all afternoon and then have a "hamburg" at the Woolworth's counter. She wouldn't go out of the house without putting on a dress and dark red lipstick.

Soon after I left for college and then New York, she moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. She had other family in that area and I think it was where she grew up, though my knowledge of her biography, or my father's for that matter, is pretty vague, but it meant that we saw very little of her. For years, she took the Greyhound down to Indiana every Christmas, but as she got older she did that less and less. She wouldn't fly. I got busy with my life. We wrote letters, she sent packages of weird stuff, used Christmas decorations, odd expired snacks, knick-knacks.

Four or five years before she died, when I hadn't seen her in several years, J and I planned a leg of our tour in southern Minnesota so we could visit her -- by this time she had moved from her high-rise apartment to an assisted living facility. J and I had been playing shows in retirement homes, so she booked us a gig at her place. I don't know why this was the only time we did that; seems like it would have been the natural thing to do since we were traveling all over the Midwest anyway, to book shows in that area more regularly so I could see her during those last years of her life, but that was the only time we did it. (As I look at that last sentence, I have to laugh, because so much in those years of Y'all, in retrospect, looks like needless chaos, and it seems as though a few small changes in our organization would have made things much more sensible and functional, but we were flying by the seat of our pants and always, always our life consisted of about 20% more than we could manage.)

Anyway, we did a show for Grandma and all her little old lady friends at the retirement home. She wore her Y'all t-shirt all day and beamed through the whole show. She and J hit it off instantly. J has a thing for little old ladies, and Grandma has a thing for tall, handsome men. (I'm not sure what she made of him in his green lace dress on stage, but to be honest, I'm not sure what any of the old folks we performed for made of that. They enjoyed the show, and that's what's important.) I'm not exaggerating when I say that watching her and J laugh together -- I have pictures to remind me -- is one of my sweetest memories, one of the high points of my whole life. We spent two days there, and it was the last time I saw her.

My parents visited her more regularly those last years. She became more and more frail, though I don't think there was any particular health problem besides the fact that she was very, very old. Eventually she moved to the nursing wing of the home, and she began to withdraw. My parents were with her shortly before she died. My mother described her to me later as just sort of curled up at the foot of her bed, and I don't remember if these were the words my mother used, but the image I took is of her almost turning inside out, trying to disappear. It's an image that haunts me.

There's so much more I could write about Grandma, and I imagine I will -- I feel her living spirit in me every day -- but that's enough for now.

Tsk. Tsk.

I can be picky about language. But I'm also usually ready, before most of my bookish friends, to throw in the towel when a certain "incorrect" usage becomes common.

Like the disappearance of the word "whom," or like "they" and "their" as genderless singular pronouns, since "zhe" and "herm" never really caught on. I'm slowly getting used to that. I don't like the role of pursed-lipped school marm, but I do appreciate precision in written and spoken language, so it can be a hard call. When do you give up?

I think I see "loose" used for "lose" more and more often. In fact, I think I see this more often than I actually see the word "lose" written. And now I'm starting to notice that people use "lead" instead of "led." These are both spelling rather than syntax issues, and I tend to be even less resistant to spelling irregularities. Sometimes I even like them. I like "thru" and "tho." I like "tonite." English could certainly stand some housecleaning in the spelling department. Lose/loose and led/lead types of problems are inevitable when your language has more exceptions than rules. Still, it's jarring, because in my head, "Did you lose your sweater?" is very different from "Did you loose your sweater?"

Hair on the Face.

Word is that mustaches are making a comeback. That's infuriating news, because I thought I had finally settled on some facial hair that I wouldn't have to shave off after a year or two because everyone else was sporting it too.

I like facial hair, but I don't have a lot of choices because most of my beard is patchy and thin. It's thick enough on my chin and upper lip, so for a while I had a goatee. But the whiskers on my chin grow sideways, so I looked like the bottom half of my head was caught in a windstorm while the upper half remained undisturbed. I gave up and shaved it off, but I left the mustache, at first because I thought it was funny, but then I decided it was kind of sexy -- and nobody had mustaches, at least not last year -- so I kept it.

Before the goatee, I had that little patch under the lip for many, many years. I thought it suited me. I resisted shaving it off when it became popular, but eventually it got so ubiquitous I couldn't stand it any more.

It's not like I need to make a huge statement or anything, but I do like to appear a little unusual. I think it's because of my shyness. Because I have trouble actually talking to new people, I need to telegraph something about me with my appearance. And I just like facial hair. I like it on other men, I like it on myself. It's manly, and I like that.

Pee-Shy.

I promise I won't turn this blog into a dream journal, but this one was so weird and disturbing and funny that I can't not write it down.

I was moving back to New York and moving back in with my friend JG on E. 10th St. (JG was my first roommate in New York. We went to Parsons together. I lived with her from 1981 to 1983 and again, after leaving my first long-term relationship, broke and desperate, from 1990 to 1992. We were very close, but she was one of a handful of women I knew in college and immediately after with whom I had difficult friendships. I was always falling short of their expectations of me.) In the dream, the situation felt very precarious and I felt emotionally fragile. J dropped me off there with only a small suitcase and, I think, one box, and he drove away.

I had barely arrived and set down my stuff. I was going to pee when JG walked into the room and said "What are you doing?" I said I was going to pee, and she said she had to go too. (There were two toilets in the living room.) I turned around and saw that she was completely naked. This in itself wasn't a surprise; JG was often naked. She liked being naked. What was a surprise is that she had a big honkin' pink shlong. I tried to swallow my shock, and I tried unsuccessfully to urinate (I've gotten very pee-shy in my old age).

When she was done, we were standing in the kitchen talking, and I said something like, "I see you have a penis now." And she said, "Right, and you're going to be giving me some." I said, "Some what?" "Blowjobs! I'll give you some too." I said, "No! Absolutely not. That's not what this is about. I'm not going to do that." She looked terribly wounded, and she ran away. She started moving her stuff back into the bedroom that she had cleared out for me.

I was suddenly really, really upset and scared. I decided to call J and ask him to come get me, but my cell phone wouldn't work. I kept punching "8," which is the speed dial for J, but when I would press "Call," it would go to another menu. Every time I tried it, something different would happen. (I don't know J's number by heart to just dial it.) I kept trying and trying and trying. I knew that I had no place to go. I woke up.

When I went back to sleep later, I returned to the dream. I was still in JG's apartment. There was a party. I was avoiding her and covertly trying to arrange to get the hell out. Our mutual friend from Parsons, F, was there. We were leaning against a wall in the bedroom talking. (He was one of those boys in college who become really aggravating to their friends because they take forEVer to come out even though everybody already knows. Those boys are usually Catholic, aren't they?) I was trying to get him to give me his phone number, but I sensed that he didn't want to give it to me. I had an escape plan in my head that required his number. I was coming on to him, salaciously, considering we were at a party and surrounded by people holding cocktails and talking.

One More Day.

I usually think the whole Mercury-in-retrograde thing is pretty silly. Like El Niño, it turns into an explanation of every little inconvenience or difficulty that happens to occur. As if these things don't happen all the time without an astrological excuse. But tell that to my cell phone, which I think must be watching the calender, because about three times a year it goes haywire.

I think my friends have gotten the message that I hate talking on the phone, and nobody calls me any more. I have the cheapest plan available which I think is 400 minutes, and still I only use about 150 of them. My phone gets more use as my alarm clock. Two days ago, instead of snoozing for 6 minutes like it's supposed to, it snoozed for an hour and a half. Seriously, it still said "snoozing" on the screen when I woke up with barely enough time to get to class. And this morning, though it was set for 6:30, like always, it went off at 1:59. When I went to reset it, it was still set for 6:30.

According to this web site that J sent me, today is the last day of this period of Mercury in retrograde, and the last four days, including today, are supposed to be the worst.