Let's Scare the Hell Out of the Kids. C'mon, It'll Be Fun.

Will someone please explain to me what's good about Santa Claus?

Poor Me.

Last week my right pectoral muscle was a little sore, but I didn't think anything of it because since I've been working out every day I get sore now and then. But on Wednesday, I was bench-pressing my little 20 pounds (I spend half my time at the gym removing other people's weights) and after I finished my first set and reached up to start my second set, I felt a sharp pain just to the side of my sternum. I sat there for a few minutes, thinking it would subside, but it got worse and worse, and finally I gave up and went home.

It still hurts. It's a bit better, but it still hurts. I haven't been back to the gym since. Yesterday, I decided that I would go and spend some time on the elliptical machine, just to keep in the habit of going there every day, but my chest hurt and I was feeling crappy, so I blew it off. (I took Nyquil three nights in a row because my coughing was keeping me awake; Nyquil always makes me feel sleepy all the next day.) But I think the main reason I was feeling pissy is that I was just mad about my gym routine being interrupted. Since I started in mid-September, I have worked out religiously 5 days a week. I only missed two days that whole time. I had just begun to really notice a change in the shape of my body, and I was enjoying it.

Since I'm such a novice at this working out thing, I thought I'd look for some advice on what to do about my injury. I found a couple of web sites, one of them called Real Jock (a "gay fitness community"), or something like that. I couldn't find any information about healing from injuries, but they have hookup ads. (You can't be a gay anything without hookup ads, and besides, we're all working out so that we can have more sex anyway, right? so why not put it all on the same web site. Now I'm even more annoyed.)

The Reason for the Season.

Today was the last day of classes. My only Friday class is (was) Biology at 9, so I came home afterwards, had an early lunch, and went back to the library to get a head start on preparing for my English final. Usually when I study at the library, I sit in a big common area on the first floor where there are lots of comfy leather couches and chairs, but today that area was crowded so I ventured up into the stacks and found a study carrel. When I emerged at 5:30, it was dusk already, and, as I walked out onto the big open plaza in front of the library, despite the fact that it's 75 degrees out, the particular light at that time of day blindsided me with Christmas melancholy.

Whereas for the first 40-some years of my life, Christmas was an anchor, a moment of absolute predictability and the purest rest I got all year, in the last several years it has become an emotional tangle that may never work itself out. Christmastime feels like a big hole in the middle of the calendar. It's not what it used to be, it's not what I wish it were, it's sort of nothing but memory and sadness.

The first concrete thought I had when I walked out of the library -- after that wave of indistinct nostalgia -- was of my second winter in New York. My first winter there, I was in school (1981), but I dropped out after a year and got a job at Pearl Paint on Canal Street, unloading trucks and stocking shelves. Because I spent most of the work day going back and forth from the overheated store to the frigid street, and because I smoked like a chimney and didn't sleep enough, I caught a bad cold which turned into bronchitis which, because I didn't have health insurance, turned into pneumonia. Late one night when I was coughing so hard I could hardly breath, my roommate and a guy I was dating at the time took me to the emergency room at Beth Israel a few blocks up 1st Avenue. If I remember right, that was the first (and only, until recently) year that I didn't spend Christmas with my family in Indiana. I couldn't afford the trip.

(I'm sure the reason that experience came to mind is that I have a mild cough today, due to allergies, and a few days ago I strained a chest muscle at the gym and it still hurts. The combination of the two unrelated symptoms echoes -- faintly -- the feeling of pneumonia.)

I should say that I don't think I ever celebrated Christmas, really. We called it that, and we celebrated on the 25th, but my family was not religious. My mother attends a Unitarian Universalist church now, and she and my dad were Catholic when they were younger, but ours was a secular household. Christmas was about the tree, snow, lights, candles, food. We didn't use the word, but it was a pagan holiday at our house. We celebrated the Solstice.

When J and I had a more traditional relationship (at least in the eyes of my family), we went together to Indiana every year. And my brother's longtime companion would be there, and my sister's husband. My mother baked insane quantities of cookies (she still does). We spent long evenings talking and eating. We went out for Chinese food on Christmas Eve and came home and exchanged gifts. Many years, it was the one time that we were all together.

Three things converged to change everything: 1) The last year and a half before J and I separated, we had a third partner, R. My mom had a hard time with it. J and R and I were together for about 17 months, which spanned one Christmas. My mother told me that I couldn't bring both J and R home that year. I'll save the whole story for another day and just say that it was a very painful time in my relationship with my mother. (We avoided the issue by booking a high paying gig in Aspen on Christmas. They put us up in a ritzy hotel, and I spent a very surreal Christmas Eve, sitting in an outdoor jacuzzi surrounded by snow.)

I don't want to create the impression that my mother is an intolerant monster. There's too much evidence to the contrary. She was the one I learned tolerance from. Some of my earliest memories are of her organizing neighborhood association meetings in the early 70s to fight racist realtors in Indianapolis when black families started moving into our neighborhood and everybody started moving out. Maybe because I grew up in such a liberal family -- when I was 20 and still hadn't come out, my impatient mother left a book called something like "How to Talk to Your Gay Son" in a magazine rack in the family room where I would see it -- maybe because my mother always spoke out against intolerance and bigotry and small mindedness, is why it was such a blow when she refused to accept my unconventional relationship.

The result was that for the first time in my life, my chosen family was not automatically incorporated into my biological family. My whole notion of family, something that had never given me a moment of tension, was blown apart. Further complicating things in the succeeding years, J and I separated for a few years but now we live together again. Though our relationship was in many ways not much like a traditional marriage, in some ways it was. But now, who knows what it is? J ignores Christmas altogether -- his super-religious family ruined it for him, which I think is why he enjoyed my family Christmas so much back then.

(The first year after we separated, J and I took a road trip to Florida for Christmas. On the way, we stopped at a hostel in southern Georgia where all the sleeping cabins are treehouses in a swamp, and then we drove down and spent Christmas Day in Key West.)

The other two trends that have changed things are 2) my sister has three young boys, so their Christmas is now all about Santa Claus, etc. She and her family live close to my mom and dad, but a lot of their celebration centers around the kids, naturally, so logistically it's not effortless like it was when we all just converged at my mom and dad's house. And 3) I get more and more uncomfortable with exchanging gifts. My family is not too crazy with it, but as I've simplified my life (and gotten poorer) over the years, Christmas throws the contrast into relief and I'm never quite sure how to deal with it. I always end up feeling judgmental and ungrateful, so I just avoid it.

Lately, I've been thinking about my ex-boyfriend B, who I was with in my twenties. He's a Christmas fanatic -- and an atheist as far as I know -- but we always had a huge tree and lots of lights in our Brooklyn apartment. Christmas music playing all the time, the good stuff, like Waverly Consort or Emmylou Harris's Christmas album. I loved it. Maybe I should go spend Christmas with him. I wonder how his partner would feel about that? Or maybe I should track down that sweet guy who took me to the hospital and sat with me and rubbed my back while I coughed in the waiting room for 8 hours until a doctor saw me. We only dated for a few weeks. All I remember is that his name was Paul. I wonder what he's doing for Christmas.

One Movement.

I don't have any ACT UP pictures, but here's a picture of me at the NOW "March for Women's Lives" in Washington in 1989. I have the same haircut and glasses again. Maybe I should get a black leather bomber jacket, too.

World AIDS Day.

One of my classes -- for those who haven't been keeping up -- is Biology of AIDS. It has been fascinating and difficult, and I'm so glad I took it. We started in September with chemistry, the nature of chemical bonds, moving on to genetics into cell biology, the immune system, microorganisms and viruses, epidemiology, and on into public health and drug therapy and research, and prevention efforts.

On Friday, we had a guest lecturer from the University health service (whatever it's called) who spent last summer in Tanzania, volunteering with a group doing HIV prevention and treatment education in a small village. She gave a presentation about the experience. She showed lots of slides of the Tanzanians she lived and worked with, along the lines of National Geographic photos, beautiful traditional African dress, ebony skin, big smiles, and lots of dust. At the end, she showed a few short video clips of the villagers singing and dancing.

She said that they sang and danced on and off all day long, at the drop of a hat. Any time there was a lull in activity, they spontaneously began singing. The video clips unexpectedly moved me. It's easy, and I guess dangerous in a way, to romanticize that sort of thing, to trivialize, to condescend -- "Look at the charming natives" -- but the images filled me with the same longing I feel sometimes for a kind of generalized Appalachian past when people got out banjos or a jaw harp and sang songs on the front porch at night. Maybe it's eighty percent nostalgia, but I think there's some amount of blood memory in that longing, a yearning that gets more intense as our modern world spins us farther and farther from each other, community, family, god.

(And of course I feel profoundly conflicted about any longing I might feel for a "natural" community, because those traditional structures have not, at least not those in my particular European lineage, been kind to sexual deviants, which is probably why as a teenager I began to run screaming from anything that looked like traditional community or family.)

After her presentation, she handed out little embroidered red ribbon stickers and "safe sex kits" -- small ziplock bags with condoms and lube and information about STDs. Maybe I was emotionally primed by the video of the African villagers, but those safe sex kits really got me. They reminded me of the mid-80s, when it was so exhilarating to finally know what was causing AIDS and how it could be prevented, and we all had a feeling of solidarity and purpose, because, now that they knew what caused it, it was only a matter of time before there would be a vaccine or a cure, and until then we would keep having great sex because we had this new exotic sexy device called a condom -- "safe sex is hot sex!" Condoms were everywhere it seemed, handfuls of them, big bowls full, like candy everywhere you looked. And the burst of activism was powerful and exciting -- all those demonstrations and marches and the boys in their cutoff jeans and ACT UP t-shirts, shouting.

I remember when we all rode in buses to somewhere in Maryland or Virginia, to demonstrate outside the FDA headquarters building in 1988. (I only know the year because I looked it up. My recollection is a little foggy.) One of our slogans at that time was something to the effect that more Americans had died of AIDS than died in Vietnam, which was some 40,000, I think, and at the time we were terribly indignant and saddened by such an impossibly high number. Blows my mind.

Twenty-five years later -- and I've just taken this course and learned that the nature of this virus is such that it's difficult to imagine there ever being anything as neat and clean as a vaccine or cure -- they're still handing out "safe sex kits," trying to get college students to use condoms, and I'm 46 and still trying to keep it together, still trying not to get infected.

Last Night, I Couldn't ...

I took me two hours to get to sleep last night, and then I couldn't stay asleep. I woke up 4 times to pee. Completely unpredictable. I should have been sleepy when I went to bed at 11:30 -- I get up at 5:30 a.m. on Mondays -- but I wasn't. I had slept extra-soundly the previous three nights, so maybe I was just all rested up. I woke up (again) at 5, but, instead of getting up and doing something, I lay in bed till 6 and tortured myself trying to figure out my cash flow for the next two months.

I slept some, I know, because I dreamed that I was in the back seat of a car with my English professor trying to come up with an instance of female bisexuality in Southern literature.

Enchanted.

J and I are Amy Adams's biggest fans, so we couldn't wait to see Enchanted. I think the word I see most often used to describe her is "incandescent," and she is. The rest of the cast is great too, but I could barely keep track of what was going on in the scenes she's not in, because my mind was going c'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon until she reappeared.

Most of the reviews I've read this morning, the positive ones anyway, say that Amy Adams makes the movie. She certainly lights it up, but it's a pretty interesting film for other reasons, too. The big musical numbers are hilarious and thrilling. Each new layer of Busby Berkeley nonsense they added on to the Central Park number made me laugh hard and I still teared up at the end. Is it ironic? Or is it us? Is the production number in Central Park any more ironic than Clang, Clang, Clang Went the Trolley?

There are obvious clues that you're not supposed to take it too seriously, like when the princess summons the rats and cockroaches to help her, Cinderella style, clean the lawyer's apartment. But the song they sing is the real deal. You know because Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz wrote it. It is, simultaneously, the thing and a parody of the thing. I'm sure there's a fancy-schmancy word for that. Postmodernism?

But in the end the movie, like a cat that falls out the window and does a couple of flips but lands on its feet, turns out to be selling the regressive Disney happily-ever-after fantasy after all. Which -- because I was thinking how'd you do that? instead of oh, please! -- ends up being satisfying instead of infuriating.

Why is it that, even when you know it's a load of crap, it's so much fun to believe it for a couple hours? It may only be because I want so badly for Amy Adams to be happy.