I Had No Idea.

I'm writing a paper on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, and Carnal Knowledge (3 films by Mike Nichols) and what they say about marriage in the late 60s and early 70s, and while I was doing research I ran across this:

Here We Go!

I took the GRE today, the last day of classes and the audio portion of my Spanish final is tomorrow, and Saturday we're moving!

The GRE was not bad. I got 740 on the verbal section, 610 on the math. I assume the verbal score is pretty good and the math score is just okay, but I'm not really sure. Does anybody know what the numbers mean? (I got a 610 math score on my SAT, too, when I was in high school.) There's a writing section, which I kind of enjoyed -- I won't have the score on that for a few weeks. The "test center" was a small, very hot and dry room full of computer cubicles. I liked taking the test on a computer. It was much better than the fill in the bubble tests. Those drive me crazy -- I can't see the bubbles very clearly because the rooms are always poorly lit and my eyes are bad.

So, over the next week and a half, I'll write a 15-page paper and take 3 finals. Then I have a few days off. I'm flying to Indiana to visit my family the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve. Then probably off to New York. There's going to be a showcase production of my Lizzie Borden show in mid-February, and they'll be auditioning in early January. Lordy.

Drifting Too Far From the Shore.

First it was going to be very non-traditional: poblano chiles stuffed with ricotta custard and herbs, creamed chard, potatoes and sweet potatoes roasted together (I cut them in chunks, toss in garlic, salt and pepper, and olive oil and roast till they're very slightly golden), and crispy-fried polenta with an ancho-chipotle sauce. I made one concession to tradition -- sage dressing. Because I love it and Thanksgiving is the only occasion I have to make it or eat it. Oh, and J was going to make his famous Grand Marnier cranberry sauce.

I was looking for some kind of vegetarian entree -- I'm not a vegetarian, but J is and our kitchen is. But it seemed like we had invited more meat-eaters than vegetarians, so I thought about roasting a turkey (another thing I love but hardly ever get to eat) but J was obviously uncomfortable about the idea when I brought it up, so, after giving it some thought I dropped it for the simple reason that I don't want an uncomfortable Thanksgiving. Who does? In the meantime, I had come across a recipe for a mushroom barley pie with a puff pastry crust. It's pretty easy, sounds festive and delicious, so I put that on the menu for our entree.

I thought, since we were having the bready pie thing, I'd drop the dressing. But when I told J that, he said, "Well then I'm not going to make cranberries." I said, "Why?" and he said, "Because it goes with the dressing." I wasn't willing to go without the cranberry sauce, so I put the dressing back on the menu. And then I started thinking about succotash, which wasn't a family tradition for me (the recipe came from a restaurant I worked at in my twenties in New York called Mike's Bar & Grill on 10th Ave and 46th St.), but I had been making it for Thanksgivings on and off since the 80s, when my ex-boyfriend B and I had dinners for sometimes as many as 25 people at our apartment in Ft. Greene. It's really simple and so good: just corn and baby lima beans, butter, cream, and red pepper. And I was thinking how something really nice about Thanksgiving is that you eat stuff you usually don't have occasion to eat. So the succotash was back on the menu.

And then last night as I was drifting off to sleep, I realized that if we have dressing, we need gravy. No turkey, but I can make a really good mushroom gravy by deglazing the pan after I sautee the mushrooms for the pie. And if we have gravy, we'll all be thinking, "Where are the mashed potatoes?" So, this morning, I'm thinking that I'll roast the sweet potatoes alone and do mashed potatoes. And we didn't get the chard I expected from our CSA last week, so instead I'm going to sautee green beans, which might be vaguely suggestive of the notorious green bean casserole (which I love, and I used to make a great scratch version of it, but I've already got too much stuff in the oven).

Somehow, except for the lack of turkey, I'm back to a pretty traditional Thanksgiving dinner. (I will not however puree the sweet potatoes and bake them with marshmallows.) I'm still going to make the fried polenta, but as an appetizer. And the stuffed poblanos have evolved into a roasted poblano and goat cheese appetizer. So at least my appetizers are not traditional.

Why Not Boycott California?

Why haven't the marriage activists proposed a boycott of California? They're picketing Mormon churches (like that'll get the Mormons to change their minds about homosexuality); I've heard lots of calls to boycott the state of Utah. It wasn't Utah who voted for Prop. 8, it was California.

In the early 90s, Colorado passed an anti-gay law, activists organized a boycott of the state, and I remember it being pretty effective. The amount of money gay and lesbian tourists and businesspeople spend in California must be awesome. A boycott of California would be epic, it would get lots of attention. Why has no one suggested it?

Ding-dong.

Before all this hoopla, the institution of marriage was on its way out anyway. (Maybe it still is.) The women's movement mortally wounded it in the 70s, and it was dying a natural death, being replaced by a variety of family structures. We all know the statistics: most marriages end in divorce, almost half of children are born to unmarried women (whether single or co-habitating with the child's father). As "alternative" families became the norm, there likely would have been a shift in public policy regarding families. Marriage could not have held onto its privileged status forever, because it no longer reflects the reality of most family arrangements. We should have let marriage die. Instead, we've spurred a national marriage revival.

It would have been much easier to work for stronger support of domestic partnerhips. We would have had as allies all the people whose families are left out when marriage is privileged. Domestic partnership was already an idea most people were comfortable with. We could have let people who want traditional marriage have it, but fought to extend to all families the privileges that marriage now receives.

The tragedy is that, now that the gay establishment has made so much noise about marriage, it's too late to turn back and try something else. The traditional marriage people have dug in their heels. The very people that the gay marriage advocates think should be their natural allies -- social conservatives who believe that marriage is the backbone of a stable society -- are the people most dead set against them. You will always hit a brick wall with those people. The gays say, "But don't you understand? We want to be respectable, just like you," and the God-people reply, "I'm sorry, you can't. It's against the Bible." And there it sits.

(Did I already post this? Pretty interesting group of signatories.)

And Another Thing...

I guess the real nut of what bothers me about government privileging marriage over other family structures is that it attempts to regulate sexual behavior. Only if you have this narrowly proscribed type of sexual relationship (or at least profess to) do you officially exist as a household. Anything else is invalid.

Stripped (rightly so, because they are also the things that made it oppressive, mostly for women) of all the things that made it meaningful as an institution for community stability -- the strict gender roles, the more or less compulsory children, the near-impossibility of divorce -- there's nothing left of marriage except the being in love part, the sex part. And that's what bothers me about the same-sex marriage campaign, that it is based on the sentiment that everyone should have the right to marry the person they fall in love with. Why? Maybe we should have the right to marry the person or persons we commit ourselves to nurture and support unconditionally forever. Maybe. But the person we fall in love with? Why?

MFA not MRS.

I've been on my high horse this afternoon, leaving long comments on various blogs. I had a grueling week of exams which are all done now and went fairly well, so I feel tremendously relieved tonight and still full of useless nervous energy. When J gets home from yoga, I think we'll smoke some weed and watch The Bicycle Thief which came from Netflix today.

I'm so tired of studying!

I was telling my sister in an email yesterday that I'm kind of over this undergrad thing. I'll have to summon some energy from god-knows-where to push through the final semester and a summer I have left before I get my Bachelor's degree. I'm sure this feeling is brought about this fall by the process of applying for grad school, which reminds me what this whole expedition was about in the first place and I can't wait to get into filmmaking! I do love reading and learning etc., but memorizing pages and pages of arcane science facts is getting a tad tedious. Now except for finals, I'm done with exams. I have two papers to write. Writing papers stresses me out a bit too, but it's a very different stress than exam stress. It's a type of stress I enjoy because I feel like something is actually being accomplished. Whereas, 80% of what I memorized for the Biology exam I took this morning, I have already forgotten.

Anyway, back to my high horse. Adding to the general feeling of irritation the last week has been all the complaining about how we shouldn't really be too happy about Obama's election because after all California voted to take marriage rights away from homosexuals. I'm not totally insensitive to the fact that this is in some way a serious civil rights defeat. But as you know, I'm not a fan of how the marriage fight now dominates the gay and lesbian rights movement. There was a good post on The New Gay, one of the blogs I read, which provoked me to be maybe a little more articulate than I usually am about this issue, so I thought I'd paste my comment here for you. But I recommend reading the post and the comments there to get a good idea of how this issue flies lately in "the community."

Here's my comment:

Thanks for this post. I hope it provokes some good discussion. I feel like, when people start talking about gay marriage there's this assumption that of course it's what we all want or should want, and I'm always the one in the room going, "Um..."

Some time in the 90's the gay and lesbian movement took a really sharp right turn. First we were fighting for a bigger definition of family, then suddenly we were fighting to make it as narrow as possible. I think the reason marriage captured the imagination of the gay civil rights movement is that it touches on a very basic human insecurity, a fear of being alone. A fear which is exacerbated by growing up homosexual, especially for older generations whose only queer role models were reststop trolls. (I use that expression with the utmost affection!) We all want to believe in the myth of Mr. Right or Ms. Right, Prince Charming, we all want to flip through bridal magazines and dream about a fairy tale life full of sweet love, and oh my god how will I ever get to wear a white dress and marry the man of my dreams if it's illegal!

I think it would be more fair, more progressive (and, just as importantly, more palatable to the mainstream) to be fighting for the rights of ALL families, unmarried heterosexual partners, homosexual partners, and all the varieties of families that aren't structured around a sexual relationship (elderly sisters who share a home, a disabled person and his or her caretaker, friends who live together communally long-term, single parents with kids ...). All these relationships should have the benefits and societal support that civil marriage has now.

I say it all the time to my friends (who usually just roll their eyes at me) and I'll say it again. Marriage is a fundamentally conservative institution. It is conservative people who promote it (Andrew Sullivan, Dan Savage, etc.) in order to create a world in THEIR image. But as an institution, it's been broken for a long time. It doesn't even work for straight couples. Why do you want it?