I've got a few relatives who, for various reasons, can't explicitly know that I'm gay. This usually isn't much of a problem because we see each other rarely at best. I've got my own thing going on two states away from them, and since they don't use Facebook, ne'er the twain do meet. It's a fairly common arrangement: they have the class not to try to set me up with nice Italian boys, and I have the class not to mount the dinner table like Edmund Hilary taking the summit of Everest, screaming "I AM A MIGHTY, MIGHTY BULLDYKE AND I HAVE SEX WITH WOMEN" and stabbing the pot roast with a labrys.
Which would be awkward because I'm coupled up now and my life is really very mundane. Our greatest daily excitement is the question of the relative healthiness of eggs over bagels. There's no way I could do justice to the initial screaming and stabbing of the pot roast. In this type of situation, the last thing you want is to be a disappointment.
Then, of course, having broken the rules of our gentlepeoples' agreement, I would expect to be forcibly tied to a chair in a neat local cafe as a nice Italian dentist sits across the table, white-knuckling his coffee mug and desperately wishing to be anywhere else. But frankly, a lot of my really engaged relatives are too busy to really follow through on this anymore, and I'd hate to go through the whole charade just to determine that we are all in exactly the same positions as before, except all now possessed of uncomfortable knowledge about one another.
Additionally, most of my relatives simply do not care at the moment. However, were they to be dragged into a gross family drama surrounding the gay, their resentment would be magnificent to behold.
So I remain mum. (Mostly.) It's not that bad. But I must admit one thing: it grated my cheese somewhat when one relative, a very sweet person whom I respect a lot and who presumably knows what's up, and who is undoubtably struggling to keep the peace and say the right thing to their touchy dyke relation, referred to my lovely girlfriend as my "roommate."
Alas! My aching heart. How could I have communicated my irrational distress? Of all the words my beloved relative could possibly have chosen to describe my relationship, this was the only one that could have so efficiently reduced it to a by-product of the prevailing socioeconomic situation, yet at the time, there was no way to address this. I writhed. My relative writhed. Everyone was unhappy.
This must never happen again. I shall educate the world.
These are some alternate word choices that I would have found acceptable under the circumstances:
Friend
Lady friend
Special friend
Very special friend
Advanced options include, but are not limited to:
Hetero life partner
Totally straight helpmeet
Platonic paramour
Highly involved cat co-parent
Ironic wife
All of those, I would like to stress, are extra credit.
Perhaps this attention to a very minor detail seems silly when you consider what LGBTs of previous generations went through at family gatherings. That's because it actually is silly. (I have found that most things that really matter to people are silly.) But, luckily, two days out, I'm beginning to see the funny side of being the Christmas lesbian. Like Santa, I bring gifts, gorge myself on cookies, and escape before anyone knows what happened. Like Krampus, I terrify everyone with the possibility that I will be offended.
Really, I have the most fun.
But next year, my family meets my beguiling girlfriend. Frankly, as a woman whose chosen profession is to be nice to people, she's much better equipped to handle a Christmas lesbian situation than I, the aggressive and occasionally paranoid writer-librarian, have ever been. Depending on circumstances, it's possible that she will end up having even more fun than I do. Stay tuned, friends.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Monday, December 23, 2013
On Charity
A woman stopped me in the grocery store today and asked for a ride home. Immediately, I started running down my checklist.
1. Who?
A puffy, middle-aged woman in a somewhat shabby coat, her makeup old, her wallet full of five ones, a five, receipts, various cards, and a ten that she slipped into a side pocket like a street magician with a gold watch. Her ride, a coworker from the toy store, had been shoehorned into a longer shift. She was stuck.
2. What?
A ride home. Just to Salem. In a car that she assumed (or hoped) I had, with the gas she assumed (or hoped) I'd previously pumped, to a place she assumed (or hoped) I knew about. Just a ride, with nobody waiting at the end to take my stuff. Just a quick fifteen-minute hop over to the next town, her and me alone through the dark and slick and chilly streets of the cold Christmas night and its dispassionate police cars moving like unblinking fish among the kelplike lines of the roadway. Just a journey through the night. People never realize how personal that is. Intimate, even. The road at night is a line between a world where you live and a world where your car slips off the road and vanishes. I don't drive around with just anyone.
3. Where?
Salem courthouse - difficult enough to get to at the best of times, this imposing structure is located on a one-way street in the heart of the traffic morass that is downtown Salem. It is also exactly one block from my home. Coincidence chills me much more than purposeful appropriation of my data. Google has my address, but this woman was not Google. Had someone pointed me out? Did she know me? Do I still radiate that special marginal-person vibe that so often accompanies knowledge of courthouse locations? Worst of all - horror of horrors - did she actually live in my neighborhood? Her recently expired drivers' license located her in a town on the other side of the Merrimack Valley. Born 1969. Organ donor. She looked happier in her ID photo.
4. Why?
The busses are gone. She said she had no money for a cab (obviously a lie) and couldn't get money from the bank until the morning (also possibly a lie, considering that her bank and credit cards were in full view.) So as for why, well, I have no idea. I imagine the story is fairly complicated. But at least it probably didn't involve me unconscious in a gutter sans computer, reader, smartphone and mic. The one or two con artists I think I've run into had their stories in very meticulous shape, and their patter and costume were Broadway-ready. In fact, that's how I ended up picking them out. If they were. (They were.)
5. How?
On one hand, I could give her the ride home. But once I'd determined she wasn't a threat, I felt both oddly disappointed and uncomfortably close to her. Without her own knowledge, she was gushing personal details - the newness of her poverty, the emptiness of her left hand, the naiive and ill-advised search for Samaritans. A driver's license without a car. An education without a job. I did not want to know this woman. I did not want the burden of her gratitude and humiliation. I couldn't bring back her greenhouse or assuage her weight fears. I couldn't give her a ride home.
That's how I overran her protests and shoved the bill into her hands and refused her request for my name. That's how I hightailed it like a coward, clenching my teeth until I felt fairly confident that I'd made a clean getaway. That's how I came to write tonight; slightly poorer, not at all a better person, and thankfully bereft of the responsibility that comes with knowing more about someone than they tell you.
Maybe she was a con artist after all.
1. Who?
A puffy, middle-aged woman in a somewhat shabby coat, her makeup old, her wallet full of five ones, a five, receipts, various cards, and a ten that she slipped into a side pocket like a street magician with a gold watch. Her ride, a coworker from the toy store, had been shoehorned into a longer shift. She was stuck.
2. What?
A ride home. Just to Salem. In a car that she assumed (or hoped) I had, with the gas she assumed (or hoped) I'd previously pumped, to a place she assumed (or hoped) I knew about. Just a ride, with nobody waiting at the end to take my stuff. Just a quick fifteen-minute hop over to the next town, her and me alone through the dark and slick and chilly streets of the cold Christmas night and its dispassionate police cars moving like unblinking fish among the kelplike lines of the roadway. Just a journey through the night. People never realize how personal that is. Intimate, even. The road at night is a line between a world where you live and a world where your car slips off the road and vanishes. I don't drive around with just anyone.
3. Where?
Salem courthouse - difficult enough to get to at the best of times, this imposing structure is located on a one-way street in the heart of the traffic morass that is downtown Salem. It is also exactly one block from my home. Coincidence chills me much more than purposeful appropriation of my data. Google has my address, but this woman was not Google. Had someone pointed me out? Did she know me? Do I still radiate that special marginal-person vibe that so often accompanies knowledge of courthouse locations? Worst of all - horror of horrors - did she actually live in my neighborhood? Her recently expired drivers' license located her in a town on the other side of the Merrimack Valley. Born 1969. Organ donor. She looked happier in her ID photo.
4. Why?
The busses are gone. She said she had no money for a cab (obviously a lie) and couldn't get money from the bank until the morning (also possibly a lie, considering that her bank and credit cards were in full view.) So as for why, well, I have no idea. I imagine the story is fairly complicated. But at least it probably didn't involve me unconscious in a gutter sans computer, reader, smartphone and mic. The one or two con artists I think I've run into had their stories in very meticulous shape, and their patter and costume were Broadway-ready. In fact, that's how I ended up picking them out. If they were. (They were.)
5. How?
On one hand, I could give her the ride home. But once I'd determined she wasn't a threat, I felt both oddly disappointed and uncomfortably close to her. Without her own knowledge, she was gushing personal details - the newness of her poverty, the emptiness of her left hand, the naiive and ill-advised search for Samaritans. A driver's license without a car. An education without a job. I did not want to know this woman. I did not want the burden of her gratitude and humiliation. I couldn't bring back her greenhouse or assuage her weight fears. I couldn't give her a ride home.
That's how I overran her protests and shoved the bill into her hands and refused her request for my name. That's how I hightailed it like a coward, clenching my teeth until I felt fairly confident that I'd made a clean getaway. That's how I came to write tonight; slightly poorer, not at all a better person, and thankfully bereft of the responsibility that comes with knowing more about someone than they tell you.
Maybe she was a con artist after all.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
December With Flowers
December came and never left
The birds came back and brought the sun
The flowers shook their manes and roared silently at the baking rocks and unsleeping lizards who didn't care that it was still December.
We walked barefoot in the grass and got ticks.
Some of us took summer jobs as camp counselors, fell in love,
Sunburned through the smell of skin, swam nude, dreamed of snow.
Others began to walk, sometimes together and sometimes in small groups,
Talking quietly about December
And never losing that holiday feeling that comes after the presents are open and before everyone has gone home.
The birds came back and brought the sun
The flowers shook their manes and roared silently at the baking rocks and unsleeping lizards who didn't care that it was still December.
We walked barefoot in the grass and got ticks.
Some of us took summer jobs as camp counselors, fell in love,
Sunburned through the smell of skin, swam nude, dreamed of snow.
Others began to walk, sometimes together and sometimes in small groups,
Talking quietly about December
And never losing that holiday feeling that comes after the presents are open and before everyone has gone home.
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Events of the Present Day
So this past week, two big things happened. First, the radio stations exploded into an unwelcome cacophony of new Christmas music. I mean, I have nothing against new music or against Christmas, but to introduce me to these songs for the space of two weeks before brutally culling them seems cruel. Morally abandoned, even. Like delicate poinsettias, those hothouse Christmas songs don't stand a chance in the cold, incipient January.
The other thing was an acne outbreak. I'm approaching thirty and I still have fairly serious acne. The reason for this is that, for reasons baffling to science and magic alike, I am incapable of processing milk and milk products, including milk chocolate.
I fucking love milk chocolate.
There is no way I'm giving up milk chocolate in the name of beautiful, clear skin that I might - might - get to enjoy for another whole ten years. What would I nosh on without chocolate? Cabbage leaves? Carrots? No. These will not yield the sweet, savory satisfaction, the creamy ecstasy, the mood-soothing magic of the humble yet vauntable chocolate. Upon my honor as an American, as a free woman, as a writer possessed with the emotional intensity of a million suns, I will not relent! May pustules cover my entire face before I relinquish the delectable chocolate pretzels!
Thus, by way of my very own internally generated idiocy, am I regularly mistaken for a sixteen year old boy.
Other stuff happened too. First, my beautiful and talented girlfriend gained admittance to a university of fine repute whose graduate credentials will catapult her to well-deserved greatness! Hooray, my lady! Hooray! Hooray!
Also, I write for this fantastic indie book review magazine, Foreword Reviews. Turns out, they have a quarterly paper edition. Neat! Turns out they also featured my review of the excellent and hilarious Brittle Star by Rod Val Moore in a spotlight. Double neat!
A word about Moore. This guy has some serious talent and deserves attention, because the next thing you know, he'll be teaching your workshop on incorporated satire and you'll find yourself wondering how you never got the man's autograph before he turned into a writer's writer and all that. (Gosh do I wish he had a blog.) I've never read his other book, Igloo Among Palms, but it's high on my list, as is the upcoming Juniper Prize-winning History of Hands. Go read him!
But to conclude, here's some of my other review stuff. Some of it is wonderful, some of it is fabulous, all of it is 100% Product of Anna. I am a veritable fountain of, well, criticism.
God help me when I finally publish something of my own.
The other thing was an acne outbreak. I'm approaching thirty and I still have fairly serious acne. The reason for this is that, for reasons baffling to science and magic alike, I am incapable of processing milk and milk products, including milk chocolate.
I fucking love milk chocolate.
There is no way I'm giving up milk chocolate in the name of beautiful, clear skin that I might - might - get to enjoy for another whole ten years. What would I nosh on without chocolate? Cabbage leaves? Carrots? No. These will not yield the sweet, savory satisfaction, the creamy ecstasy, the mood-soothing magic of the humble yet vauntable chocolate. Upon my honor as an American, as a free woman, as a writer possessed with the emotional intensity of a million suns, I will not relent! May pustules cover my entire face before I relinquish the delectable chocolate pretzels!
Thus, by way of my very own internally generated idiocy, am I regularly mistaken for a sixteen year old boy.
Other stuff happened too. First, my beautiful and talented girlfriend gained admittance to a university of fine repute whose graduate credentials will catapult her to well-deserved greatness! Hooray, my lady! Hooray! Hooray!
Also, I write for this fantastic indie book review magazine, Foreword Reviews. Turns out, they have a quarterly paper edition. Neat! Turns out they also featured my review of the excellent and hilarious Brittle Star by Rod Val Moore in a spotlight. Double neat!
A word about Moore. This guy has some serious talent and deserves attention, because the next thing you know, he'll be teaching your workshop on incorporated satire and you'll find yourself wondering how you never got the man's autograph before he turned into a writer's writer and all that. (Gosh do I wish he had a blog.) I've never read his other book, Igloo Among Palms, but it's high on my list, as is the upcoming Juniper Prize-winning History of Hands. Go read him!
But to conclude, here's some of my other review stuff. Some of it is wonderful, some of it is fabulous, all of it is 100% Product of Anna. I am a veritable fountain of, well, criticism.
God help me when I finally publish something of my own.
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