Is there no sin in it?

I came back tonight from a lovely evening out with a friend to get an email from the guy who lives below me asking if I’d mind writing our landlord with an anonymous complaint about a couple on the second floor who has been fighting violently on a regular basis late at night. I was more than happy to do so, having heard them myself from the fourth floor (and being a sort of landlord-contact for the building), but it also brought up a lot of questions for me.

A long time ago, I was in a relationship with someone who fought a lot. He seems to have been someone with borderline personality disorder, or something very like it, because every time I spent time with anyone else, male or female, he’d use it as an excuse to start a fight. And I don’t mean low-key fights; I mean the kind where he ended up trying to commit suicide in the middle of it and I’d have to resort to extreme measures to get him to stop. I remember wishing someone would complain to the police or the landlord about it so he would get some perspective on the fact that he and I were not the only people on the planet. It was not reasonable for two people who claimed to love each other to be involved in violent altercations on a regular basis.

But in general, I’m rather disinclined to high-pitched arguments of any kind. I don’t scream when I’m angry, and I don’t hit unless in self-defense. In the rest of my relationships, I’ve been almost pathologically disinclined to fight about anything. Either I try to understand where someone’s coming from or I break off the relationship with them. Nothing’s worth screaming about, and certainly nothing’s worth violence.

My parents were fighters, and usually about things that mattered. They didn’t fight about petty shit, but when my father was unconscionably disrespectful toward my mom, she’d scream about it. Mom was a screamer, and yelled at us on a regular basis, sometimes all day. I grew to feel that yelling was a bad way of dealing with problems, and became a very quiet kid. I went through a period of screaming back at my mom in retaliation, but it always rung false; I felt like I was using some strange mode that wasn’t my own in order to mirror what she was doing back to her.

In romantic relationships, I’m weirdly passive about any kind of fighting. If something truly serious is wrong, I’ll discuss it in calm terms, or I will bow out of the conversation altogether. Max was often unreasonable (in that recently-divorced crazy way), and my response was to treat him like a crazy person. I’d just bow out of dealing with him for a while.

Oh, I sit around congratulating myself on how cool-tempered I am and how slow I am to blowing up. But it also means that everything in my relationships is either something I can deal with with utter sang-froid and accept or something that will end the relationship. There is no screamy middle. We can either negotiate it with a cool head or it’s something that makes the relationship end.

I am told by people who manage longer-term relationships than I do that fighting is part of the thing. You blow up, raise one another’s blood pressure, fuck, and then turn to one another renewed in devotion and desire. Having been in the position of watching fights with a lover escalate again and again into violence against one another, I don’t envy them. I simply don’t want to fight with volume. I’ll state my point calmly, or, if I can’t, I’ll leave.

Am I nuts? Is my disinclination to fight a failure of imagination, or wherewithal? Why is it so hard for me to understand something that seems to be a regular part of romantic discourse for so many people?

Note: I’ll tell a funny anecdote about Max and me. When we were on a weekend vacation to Montauk, we stayed in a hotel that must have had only one other set of guests, it being very off-season for tourism there, when the town almost completely shuts down. Everything was quiet and abandoned. But the room next to us had a couple in it who were yelling like hell at each other. Neither of us were fighters—imagine two simpering cowards who’d been dating for two years in utter peace—and when we heard these two people screaming at each other, we kept picking up the phone to call the cops. Surely one of them would murder the other, we suggested. How could people go on and on like that without committing murder?

We called the hotel desk instead and talked to them about the fight, and about our anxiety for the woman, who seemed to be taking the brunt of the accusations. “Please, sir, do SOMETHING!” The hotel guy seemed bored. “Sure, uh, we’ll check it out.”

Of course, the fight resolved itself and everyone went to bed. At some point, Max asked if I’d seen The Conversation. I hadn’t yet, but have now. How strange it was to realize that what was probably another couple’s normal tone of aggressive discourse was so foreign to us. It wasn’t that our relationship was so very wonderful or that we never had anything to argue about, but that the very tone of voice they used filled both of us (both of us being previously abused by violent partners) with fear, while for them, it might have been perfectly normal, and even stimulating.

Josh at Aqueduct has asked if I have a response to this Venkatesan whatnot, published as a narrative of emotional instability here, blogged about by SEK here, and responded to by Josh here. I’ve recently written (and discussed in comments) the phenomenon of the prof who expects total subservience at all times, and that, IME, this has tended to be women of about Venkatesan’s age.

I agree with Josh that it’s shameful that there’s been (as there is always) a gleefully cruel response to this article, considering that we’re obviously dealing with a totally disturbed person here. The narrative is a familiar one to a lot of academics: you begin realizing that the day-to-day difficulties of your job don’t seem to affect your maler, whiter, straighter colleagues, and suddenly, you start seeing slights everywhere.

And yes, the slights are genuinely there. And yes, they’re amplified because you’re a woman, and/or a person of color, and/or queer. Most of the people I’ve talked to in my cohort end up resigning themselves to the added challenge as much as they can. Sometimes a student’s prejudice can be confronted productively. Sometimes it’s just scary.

And I admit that I’ve felt afraid in the classroom. Here I am, this smart, confident woman with eight years of teaching experience, and there are times when I’ve been scared to go to work because I know one of my students is going to come to my office hours and try to talk about his rape fantasies. Or I know that one of my classes has a strong homophobic contingent who are going to giggle in the corner when we talk about violence against gays and I’m going to have to maintain extraordinary poise if I want to make that into a worthwhile confrontation. Sometimes I’m in control of that anxiety enough to handle it really well. Sometimes I’m not, and I know I’ll be judged far more harshly for it than a white straight dude would be.

And while many of my peers have developed extremely sophisticated maneuvers for dealing with prejudice in the classroom, there are a few who can’t cope with the anxiety that results from being the target of that kind of hostility. And that anxiety tends to be coupled with thoughts like, “If I were a man,” or “If I were white,” or “If I were straight…,” because the difficulties that arise from being in a hostile profession are compounded by perceived minority status. Students won’t simply sit back and say “It’s a shame he’s not a more exciting teacher”; they’ll tend to escalate the problem because they want to see the less-than-perfect prof fail.

Add to that even a touch of emotional instability, which is as common in the academy as in any other profession, and watch the wolves circle. Anxiety multiplies itself. And the rest of the profession is eager to wash its hands of you. Those who have been able to master that anxiety don’t want to cop to having been there, and those who haven’t had to face it think you’re delusional. It’s much easier to be the colleague of Venkatesan’s who rolls his eyes and gossips about her failures than it is to commiserate and offer her professional advice. It doesn’t improve the situation for Venkatesan or her students, it doesn’t reduce the anxiety that’s leading to increasingly paranoid behavior, and it doesn’t make the department any safer. The right thing to do about it, apparently, is to publish an exposé of her increasingly irrational behavior that stands as a warning to all departments who might think about hiring a prof who is a minority and might not meet the gold standard of Model Minority Member.

I’m not sure any one of us is innocent of passive-aggression against people with anxieties about whether they’re being treated “fairly” by the profession. Someone who repeatedly says, “If I were a man,” etc. seems to be arguing that what every non-straight-white-dude achieves in the academy is something magical. And in extreme cases of someone I found deeply unlikable, I’ve thought to myself, “No, it’s not because you’re a woman. Really, it’s because you’re a simpering whiny bitch who thinks having read a few books entitles you to eternal protection from the same day-to-day shit everyone in the whole world learns to deal with. Buck the fuck up.”

But what the Venkatesan situation makes me realize is that it’s those of us who manage to stay relatively unwounded by hostility who are the delusional ones. People in Venkatesan’s department do seem to hate her, as do her students. Some of it seems to be a response to her failure to be a sensitive or generous teacher and colleague, but, sure, it’s probably compounded by racism and sexism, which are inescapable. But what we seem to expect of minority academics is that they stop seeing systems of oppression as affecting them. I don’t tend to complain about being a woman in academia because I maintain the delusional hope that my students can learn to abandon their prejudices if I say and do everything right, if I never feed their suspicion that they’re somehow beating me down with it. I can never act like a victim, even when I am one, because no one hates anything more than a victim who calls attention to their victimization.

The most common thing I discuss with any of my students wanting to go to graduate school is that they can’t imagine that entering the academic profession means they’ll be free from any of the bullshit they’d get anywhere else. Getting graduate degrees will not protect them from racism, homophobia, sexism, or any other kind of prejudice. They’ll be just as scrutinized and mocked for disabilities, lack of beauty, emotional difficulties, poverty, vocal tics, clothing, personality, hair, and whatever else as they would be in any other job. And it’s also work that makes one hyper-aware of discrimination and oppression, and that will compound whatever other anxieties they have about being treated unfairly. They might not have health insurance that covers therapy or psych meds, and their work will follow them home every single night.

I never say, as my friends often do, that it’s a bad choice. Grad school is an excellent choice for people who have enormous resources of confidence and poise in the face of anxiety-producing situations. Sometimes I’m that person, and sometimes I’m not. I wish the profession were all it purports to be, a safe haven for smart people who don’t fit in. (This is what my students seem to fantasize it will be, anyway.) But it’s not. As I’ve often whispered to myself while wandering around at conferences, “What a nest of vipers we are.”

Ogged is making me think about how much NYC has changed my perception of kindness. As several of us suggest in that thread, New Yorkers are constantly doing little favors for people. They hold open doors, carry strollers up subway stairs, help with a heavy bag, alert you to unzipped bags or visible money, and so forth, all the time. But, unlike Midwesterners, who occasionally do that sort of stuff, they don’t treat it like it’s a big deal. They’re not looking for profuse thanks or a new friend; they just want you to stop blocking foot traffic or encouraging crime because that makes the city a bit more livable for all of us. As many people as might be out to exploit your weaknesses, there are also a lot of people who want to help you get along more smoothly. It is no big whoop.

As Liz offers in that thread, this coldness about very kind interpersonal interactions is key to keeping us all moving. The guy who solicitously and smilingly offers to help you wants something from you. Don’t accept the offer! The gruff dude who sighs as he yanks your bag over the turnstile is just trying to get by. Denying people eye contact is an important way of making it clear that you’re not going to pester the person you’re helping, or expect outrageous thanks. One sees thousands of people in a day, and to form any kind of intimate connection with those people is fucking exhausting. I did that, to a small extent, when I first moved here, not yet mastering the art of gruff non-eye-contact, and it wore my little soul down to a nub.

As I mentioned over there, the first thing that strikes me when I leave the city is the insanely eager friendliness of restaurant staff. On one hand, you have the dead-eyed teen who intones cheery phrases like a parrot: “How y’all doin’! That’s greaaaaaaat! Is this table OK fer y’all? Greaaaaaat. Perrrrfect. K’I getchall some drinks, or set y’all up with some appetizers? Just water? Superrrrrrrr. Have y’all been here before? First time? Let me tell ya how this works.” Unfortunately, I’ve noticed the creep of this sort of corporate superlativeness into even very fine restaurants here, especially in Brooklyn. I always want to respond that nothing about this dining experience is so different from other forms of eating that I really need an explanation of the existence of the menu, which has words on it that I can read, and that the disingenuousness of proclaiming my choice of water as a beverage to be “super” makes me hate and distrust you.

In general, that smiley this-little-light-of-mine friendliness makes me think, “What do you want from me?” When it comes from someone slightly less dead-eyed and soul-crushing, I feel somewhat baffled and unsure of how to proceed. I think, she really seems to care about whether I’m enjoying my salad. How can I express this? Generally, I end up saying a bright “Thank you!” whenever she does anything. Filling water, clearing plates, asking how things are, pouring coffee, bringing pepper. “THANK YOU!” She seems nice, and really eager to discover whether we’re having a life-altering experience or not. It’s hard to deny her a little disingenuousness of my own.

Things really get confusing when the genuine-seeming waitstaff or retail clerk is terribly attractive. Or course there are terribly attractive service industry people all over New York, but they tend to be not only the regular kind of cold and surly, but with an added hauteur that says, “I just came from a photo shoot for Dior. Are you seriously going to look me in the eye?” I don’t think there’s a single time I’ve visited my hometown in the past five years when I haven’t been convinced that the ridiculously hot waiter or store clerk was absolutely in love with me. They speak in a low voice, look me in the eyes, smile intimately, laugh at my jokes, share conspiratorial glances with my mother—the whole thing! Wow, I think, that Express sales guy wanted to marry my ass.

And it’s compounded, I’m sure, by the fact that I am so easily suckered by it. I’m pretty cool when I think someone likes me, so I flirt back very subtly, offer a few charmingly deadpan lines, give the wry Bambi eye. How exhausting, to go through all this emotional drama every time I get a coffee or a skirt, especially while visiting a city I don’t live in! Alas, they’re just doing their job. In the Midwest, one learns to be suspicious of genuine-feeling flirtation from salesmen because one gets it so often. In NYC, that kind of behavior would seem gauche.

The punchline to this is my mother. When she visited me in Brooklyn, I was coming from work and had to meet her at a coffee shop near my apartment. There she was, with someone’s baby on her lap and a pile of flyers next to her. In the thirty minutes she’d waited for me, she’d held five babies, made best friends with a Chasidic rebbe, charmed the shit out of some local dads, and told her life story to everyone in the café. When she got up to leave, all the young dudes behind the counter called out a friendly goodbye, using her first name.

It’s true that my mom is pretty damn charming. She’s cute in a non-threatening way, has very bright intense eyes, and a gorgeous accent—Deep South softened by a Plains neutrality. And New Yorkers are just totally slain; they have no defense against her. On the subway, in restaurants, it wasn’t five minutes before strangers asked her questions about where she’s from, what she’s doing in NYC, and so forth. At first, I thought it was just the accent—New Yorkers are remarkably ignorant of non-hillbilly-sounding Southern talk—but I think it was her earnest openness to engagement. It’s just not done here.

And of course, Mom found New York to be unfriendly, stressful, dangerous, and infuriating. She was so exhausted when she got home that she vowed never to visit me here again.

Flavia has a post up that is eerily similar to something I’ve been thinking about over the last week. Down to almost the nearest detail, this is what I’ve been pondering. The bad college boyfriend, the idolized high school chum who drifted away, the recent long-term ex who had a lot to do with who I am now, the wondering to what degree it’s reasonable to continue to see the effects of all these past friends and lovers on my attitudes. All of it.

You should read her whole post, but I really like where she talks about the ways that one’s own relationship-ghosts are often doubled by the relationship-ghosts of the people we date. We’re not only constantly trying to decide whether to learn from or discard the lessons of the weirdos we come in contact with; we’re also managing their own hauntings as well. It’s very hard for me to tell the difference, when dating, between someone who is really mean and hurtful and someone who is mean and hurtful because they haven’t yet stopped expecting me to be like other people they’ve been with. Or perhaps the problem is that, even in the latter case, it’s so difficult to divorce oneself from the painful past that one shuttles between treating a partner as an individual person and as a symbol of their gender.

Probably the worst thing Max ever did to me was a year into our relationship, when he refused to speak to me for a month. Things were going along fine, as far as I knew. We had a date for one Sunday evening, so I headed over to his house. I rang the doorbell, and there was no answer. Knowing the doorbell was shitty and that Max often sat in the backyard, went out for groceries, or got caught up while ferrying the kids to their mom’s place, I called his cell. It was off. So I waited for a bit. I had a book with me, so I read for thirty minutes and rang again. No answer. I waited a little longer, tried one more time, and then went home. It was too weird.

I began to worry that something was wrong with him or the kids. It was so uncharacteristic of him that I had to assume something had happened. I went home and emailed him, asking what was up. I got no response. A week later, I got a few lines saying that he had been home at the time, heard me ringing the doorbell, decided not to answer for some perverse reason, and then, when I rang again, he decided I had gone psychotic and was stalking him. I wrote, “You’re notoriously unreliable about being home when you’ve told me to come over. I have to sit and wait on your porch all the time.” He said that it was creepy that I didn’t just go home after ringing the doorbell once and that he didn’t want to talk to me for a while. I said it was creepy that he was sitting inside with his phone off not answering the door.

A month later, he invited me to meet up with him at the Botanic Gardens for the Sakura Matsuri (which had been our second date, a year earlier), where he apologized and explained that he doesn’t know how to deal with reasonable, patient people, having been married to someone with borderline personality disorder for ten years. I responded that it was a shitty thing to do to me, but I calmly accepted his apology and tentatively started seeing him again. I didn’t contact him anymore, almost at all, after that. For the next year and a half, the relationship was entirely in his hands. If he wanted to see me, fine, but he’d never accuse me of being “needy” again.

Jackmormon asked me last week why I put up with that treatment. I said it was because the sex was good, which is true, but there were other reasons. Most of all, the fact was that I didn’t “need” him. I expressed affection and concern for him that first year because I felt them. Upon learning that he responded to any signs of tenderness with hate and fear, I realized it wasn’t going to be a very long-term thing, but he did offer me plenty of affection, tenderness, and concern. As long as I didn’t love him too much, he loved me all I could want. In the long run, I think it was in part a good relationship for me. He was extremely supportive of my work, thought everything in the world of me as a scholar and an ethical person, gave good advice, was welcoming to my friends, and offered me a place to be where I knew I was respected and cared for. I learned how to graciously accept breakfasts in bed, though he never learned how to be gracious when I offered the same.

What Flavia’s post made me realize is that I am not only carrying around the ghosts of having dated guys who were totally mean to me, but I’m also dealing with all their stereotypes of women and relationships, too. I don’t just expect the men that I date to be duplicitous, insecure, demanding, suspicious, and hypersensitive; I expect that they anticipate in me unpredictable anger, material acquisitiveness, intellectual passivity, and sexual frigidity. And I don’t mean to say that I expect to find these things and be outraged by them. I mean that I expect to find them, am calm when I do, and impressed when I don’t.

What I don’t want to end up happening is that I come to see these failures of character as the only romantic modes of discourse I know how to participate in. Max’s grand failure as a partner was not simply that he was an asshole, but that he didn’t know how to tolerate a partner who wasn’t an asshole. As long as I was kind, thoughtful, and demonstrative, he was baffled and terrified. He didn’t think I could possibly love him, and while it seemed amazingly wonderful to him for a few months, he never could reconcile his imagination to it as a reality. And so I was robbed of my right to be loving to him, which is somehow even worse than being robbed of love.

I don’t want to do that to people. I don’t want to constantly circumscribe all my relationships with the hardened suspicion that they’re going to turn out just like all the others. I don’t want to deny anyone I love the right to be loving to me, or to deny myself the right to be kind out of a fear that they’ll assume I want something in return. I often find myself caught on the horns of this dilemma about my past. Is it there for me to learn from, so that I will better know how to evade situations that will make me feel bad? Or is it a stumbling block to the possibilities of growth and change? It’s neither, of course. It’s just the past, and it is meaningless.

Having spring break two weeks before the end of the semester was sucky from the front end, when I was sitting around, boiling with jealousy at every tanned face uncrinkled from the crinkles of constant stress. I could only have conversations about teaching or research. I’d sit on the phone with my mother in near-complete silence, erming and umming about a few things that happened in class that day.

And I wasn’t super-great at the work I was doing, either. I was too tired to give my full energy to my dear students, who were waning on their own. I was barely keeping up with email, meetings, grading, class prep, feeding myself, sleeping, etc. I’d quit drinking, mostly, because I really needed the full potential of my brain most of the time to keep all this crap in check.

Then, spring break. A week with my parents, and then five days left to my own devices. I didn’t respond to emails. I watched television. I avoided books, and mostly dodged having conversations with anyone about anything difficult or abstract. I got a pinch of a tan, bought some cute spring heels and a new skirt, and was generally idle. It wasn’t totally relaxing, of course, because I knew I’d come back and still have oral examinations coming up, billions of papers to grade, divebombing students to tend to, and all that whatnot.

What I have come back to (and this might be PMS-related, I hope), is a feeling of deep irritability and incapacity. One positive effect of all that stress was that I had learned to be very zen about the day-to-day irritations of life. Now, I’m, like, fucking OUTRAGED at how rude people are all the time. My students are doing that super-annoying thing where they haven’t been in class for a few weeks, and then suddenly email me informing me that they will probably fail but it’s my job to pass them because they’re English majors (or because they’re not English majors), and maybe I should invent some extra assignments for them so they won’t have to take the final exam, which would just be, like, totally unfair to make them take because they’re getting married in a few weeks, just after graduation, so attending class and taking notes wasn’t in the cards for them this semester.

Or when I was carrying huge boxes full of cheese through the Co-op yesterday and people would block off the entire aisle with their cart and body and not respond when I politely asked to get by because they were trying to decide whether they wanted their almonds tamari-roasted or plain. One person even ran into me, causing me to drop the box and scatter its contents all over the ground.

Or on the train, when someone who could very easily sit two seats away must sit next to me, touching my leg and humming over my work. Or the guy at the coffeeshop who interrupted my thoughts 47 thousand times to inform me that the oldies music playing was from HIS iPod, and did I like it? Encroaching behavior in public places is making me wild with rage.

Oh my God, I’m so easily peeved right now, and I don’t think I can blame it all on hormonal issues. I think my brain was overclocked really horribly working on the problems of keeping my day-to-day life together, and then, right before it was about to solve a lot of things, I accidentally bumped the reset button. Now I’m trying to remember what I did with a set of grades, or what I was going to talk about in class, or why I needed to include certain books on my orals lists, or whom I was supposed to email about a meeting, and I’m stumped. Nothing in there but goo.

It’s especially frustrating because I thought the break would make me a bit smarter and more able to attack these problems. But, as it turns out, these problems are just really really hard, and they weren’t just hard because I was so tired. Now that I’ve rested my brain a bit, I come back and find I’m going to have to crank all the works back up again, and there’s really no end in sight until July. June will be the cruelest month.

I’m teaching a popular comic novel in my class right now. Written by a white, upper-class, well-educated man, it makes mild fun of a great many social types, mostly his own, but employs a lot of joking that requires some level of familiarity with the sort of literary and religious texts that would be commonly read by people of his own social standing. Part of the reason I included it was that my class is a survey that teaches a great many of the texts referenced in it, so I thought they’d be particularly eager to laugh at jokes they can only get, in a sense, because of their participation in my class. It’s a reward for having learned the material, to make them realize that they are a part of a community that has the privilege to make light of literature.

And almost all of them have been defending the text vehemently. I try to show the parts where it’s subtly racist or misogynist, because that’s also my job, while we also laugh together at the comic genius of this or that bit. A couple of students are just crazy about it. I’ve been getting emails all semester from students reading ahead, thanking me SO MUCH for assigning it. Today, I even received a touching phone call in my office from a student who missed today’s class, as he was out of the country, because he wanted to chat about how deeply he was enjoying the book and to express regret that he’d missed the discussion.

But comedy’s a tricky thing. While other texts we’ve read have probably offended or been boring to a few students, they still tend to feel like they can participate in discussion. They can point out the text’s flaws or inconsistencies, or make whatever complaints they have about style, and those serve as a good starting point for discussion. This aspect has been brought up, and it’s troubling; how do the rest of us deal with it? Is it a true flaw? Does it allow for some other possibility? Is it offensive? Does it overwhelm the rest of our reading of it? I tend to feel like complaining about texts is a great way to isolate moments in literature and ask fruitful questions about them.

With a comic text, however, the students who don’t like it have the deadened looks on their faces usually reserved for not having done the reading. I’ll point out a particular moment in the novel, and inevitably, someone will burst out with, “Oh my God, I love this part” or a few quiet “Hee hee”’s. Comedy can create a sort of policing effect in groups, because those who “get it” feel like insiders (which is the point, after all, especially of this referential type of humor) and those who don’t find it funny, for whatever reason, get silenced.

I began to feel like this might be happening, so I did a bit of a lecture today on the rules of comic narrative, how it’s structured, how language play and referentiality confer a kind of status on the willing reader, and how humor in general serves to create and manage communities. I talked about how humor often serves to eviscerate sentimentalities about abstractions like love, God, morality, society, and even language. “Are there people here who aren’t enjoying this book very much?”

One middle-aged woman in the front row shook her head with wide-open eyes. Another woman in the back gave me a significant glare. “What is bothering you about it?” Silence. “Do you feel there’s a sort of in-groupiness here?”

“It offers nothing significant,” the woman in the front suggested. “There’s no worldview here or statement about human relationships or anything, and he’s misusing all this literature. What is the point?”

“I’m really doubtful that there is one. It’s doing something, but not constructing a meaningful or deep worldview, no.”

“Hmph. It’s just not meaningful about reality. It’s all talking, for no reason, and nothing significant is actually happening.”

“What about you in the back?”

(long pause) “I realized early on that I wasn’t going to find this funny, all this joking around about stuff, so I started thinking about my pathological psychology text and what it would say about these people. They’re crazy. They’re isolated, misogynist, classist maniacs.”

“Ha! Yeah, I think that’s about right.” Some other students jumped in to defend the book, arguing that these aren’t realistic characters, that it’s all for a good laugh, and that meaninglessness is important. Basically, they were trying to call their classmates humorless.

Being humorless is basically just about the worst insult ever. If you’re humorless about something that’s important to you, there’s no fix for it. You can’t suddenly just say, “Oh, yeah, I see now; it’s a joke! So it’s funny!” I offered the example of my dad’s favorite sitcom, which deeply disgusts me. Every time he wants me to watch it with him, I beg him to see how totally unfunny it is, that every single joke in it is at the expense of women and how stupid and slutty they are. “But it’s funny!” he argues, “…and women are kinda stupid sometimes, some women, you know, not you, but some women.” One male student immediately identified the show and agreed, “It’s pretty damn funny if you’re a guy, I’m sorry to say.”

As I was riding home with the NQAO, we were talking about the privilege of being able to laugh at everything. If you’re comfortably privileged, presumably white, straight, male and bourgeois, you have the right to laugh at everything, even humor not created for you. There is no danger of losing your status in society, not actually, so you can laugh at Dave Chapelle and think about how totally awesome you are for being able to laugh at stereotypes of white people. It’s never going to hurt you. But you can also laugh at stereotypes of women, minorities, or queer, disabled, impoverished or incarcerated people because you know it can never be used against you. There’s no reason to get all humorless about anything.

The privilege of laughter is a very intensely felt one to those who don’t always have that privilege, and are in constant danger of being accused of humorlessness. The retort from the privileged is, “Hey, I can laugh at jokes about my people written by your people! Why can’t you?” It’s hard to laugh at a punchline you’ve heard in less comical situations, as the reason that you won’t be hired, that someone doesn’t want to talk to you anymore, or that you’re about to get the shit kicked out of you. And I don’t mean to get all huffy about the humorless accusation, because I’ve been on both ends of it myself. I tell a joke I think is above board, and suddenly I see someone turn their eyes away. I’ve othered them without having any idea I was doing it.

“Fuck you, it’s only a joke. You can’t take a joke?” It’s been said to me more times than I can remember, but I have to admit I’ve thought it myself. It’s really difficult, when you have the privilege to laugh at something, to remember that there’s always someone who doesn’t share that privilege. All comedy creates communities, and it does so not just by drawing in, but also by keeping out.

What I find particularly interesting as test-cases here is the audience of comedy by, for, and about less-privileged groups. I’m not just talking about racial humor, queer humor, or women’s humor. Personally, I’ve long been a fan of making jokes out of my own most painful experiences. With really tight friends, I can do that, and know they share both my pain and the release that comes with mocking my pain. I don’t know what I’d do without it. But what do we make of that privileged community that prides itself on laughing along with this kind of humor because it validates their own racist/sexist/homophobic/violent expectations? Are we suspicious of the audiences who share in the in-joke and use it as an excuse to make the same observations about a less-privileged group themselves? I certainly am, but not to the point that I’d say it’s a bad idea to broadcast minority humor of various kinds. It just makes me feel really disgusted when Whitey quotes a bunch of funny things he heard Chris Rock say about “how black people are.”

I didn’t realize just how deeply anti-family I was until yesterday. Jackmormon and I finished out a lovely day at the Botanic Gardens doing some disturbed-looking paintings of cherry blossoms by going to her apartment for tea and cookies. While JM played consummate hostess, I picked out some hymns on the piano. The Episcopal hymnal had some oldies-but-goodies in it, and then I moved on to the Mormon hymnal. The lyrics were really unfamiliar to this ex-Baptist, and I commented on it. JM popped over to sing me one of the most fundamentally Mormon of all hymns, “Families Can Be Together Forever.” It sounds like this.

I was horrified in a really intense way. “I always want to be / with my own family / And the Lord has shown me how I can!” I checked the signs of kneejerkism in myself. Was I merely creeped out by the possibility of spending eternity with my own personal family? Or was there something deeper going on in my rejection of this as theology?

“Mormons are, um, really into families, aren’t they?” I recounted one of my favorite anecdotes from SSW about a family who discovered their cousin was gay, and after much worrying about his exclusion from the heavenly table of their family, the patriarch tearfully acknowledged that he’d rather be with his family apart from the heavenly table than sit at the table without him. (I think I have that story right—maybe not.) At the time, I thought it was really moving, but JM filled in with the theory that, for many Mormons, family itself becomes even more important than religious adherence. Even if you take the Mormon out of Mormonism, you’ll never separate him from his family. And I find that touching when I notice it in formerly-Mormon friends! So what weirded me out about this hymn?

See, Baptists are really touchy about the afterlife. At least traditionally, there’s not a lot of talk about what to expect, beyond a direct relationship with God, the joy of which will make everyone forget what life was like while they were still separated from him. When people die, the comforting line is not “And you’ll see grandma face-to-face and talk to her when you die!” No one is converted by a promise of seeing loved ones again in heaven, because Baptists are pretty sure no one will care who their family members were or what their petty earthly sorrows were about once they’re in the presence of God. “Don’t weep for your Grandma, because she’s with the Lord now!” means that she doesn’t care that she’s left us behind, and we won’t care when we get to heaven either.

This is a pretty strategic and purposeful doctrine, I think, in that Baptist conversion narratives tend to be most powerful when someone leaves their family for Jesus. “My father was an abusive alcoholic and my mother never loved me! But Jesus will never abandon me!” In this bone-chilling narrative of an evangelical revival camp (link via some Unfogged comment I can’t find), the whole process of coming closer to the Lord is repeatedly ratting out your rotten family for having made you suffer in ways that make you want more Jesus in your life, ironically thanking them for having wounded you so horribly that you realize you need God’s love.

Now that’s a narrative I remember hearing in church. It was never “Come closer to God so you can hang out with your folks forever and ever.” It was “Aren’t your parents terrible people who don’t really love you? Doesn’t that make you wish someone would care for you always? Jesus will!” The possibility of heaven was always depicted as an erotic coupling, forever and ever, between the Church (the Bride) and Jesus (the Bridegroom). And he’s up there laying out rose petals and a hot bubble bath for you so when you die you can finally get all the spiritual loving you’ve been hankering for. No mention of where Grandma fits into my coupling with Christ.

Now, there’s a reason for the importance of marriage for Baptists, but it’s not, as it is for Mormons, about getting more family to fit at your table. It’s to give you practice at being in a holy eternal marriage with God. The metaphor works backwards, so husbands are supposed to totally bring it for their virginal wives so they can be reminded of the deep-down loving Jesus will give us in heaven. Any questions about how the language of constant eternal eroto-spiritual congress as reward for Christianity affects the evangelical mind? Heard of any sex scandals lately? Any Baptist teens giving blowjobs to Youth Group boys at camp?

I wonder, what does the language of family do to eroticism among Mormon communities? Does it just repress all the language of constant hysterical orgasm that floods all evangelical talk? Any Catholic thoughts about this? I’m not really conversant with the Catholic idea of heaven w/r/t family and sex.

Last, night, I woke from terrible nightmares three separate times. Each time, I simply could not distinguish between reality and dream; I woke fully convinced that it was just later on the same day when these terrible things had happened, and I couldn’t correct this feeling.

The first time was around 4am. In the dream, my mother and I were in her car having the argument to end all arguments, in which she accused me bitterly of a bunch of things that were, in fact, true. Finally, at a stop light, I jumped out and ran. I found myself in a strange city, in the dark, with no money or phone, wandering around, completely lost. When I woke, it was as if somehow I’d ended up back in my apartment, but with no memory of how I’d gotten there, knowing that I’d have to confront my mother all over again. I went back to sleep still certain that all this had happened.

At 6am, I woke bolt upright from a dream in which a person who has mildly, passive-aggressively pursued me for the past four years had figured out a way to manipulate me into fucking him, through blackmail or something equally gross. Worse still, other people were around to watch this exchange and I was filled with humiliation and dread. IRL, he’s not a bad guy, and is even rather attractive, but not a personality type I deal with well—sort of sidelong and crudely insinuating in his comments, jealous of my attention to others, disingenuously friendly. In the dream of course, all these mild attributes amounted to abject terror and loathing. I woke up in a cold sweat, angry and nervous, and unable to shake it.

At 10am, I woke from the most ominous dream of all. I’m due to meet up socially this evening with someone I met in a professional context last month, and I’ve been looking forward to it, not really knowing how that will go. Like all new acquaintances, I’ve sort of idealized him as nice and smart and friendly, while also remembering that my relationships with straight, single men have been pretty disastrous throughout my whole life. That is, I do really well with men who are in stable relationships, as I’m a nice, non-threatening, but loving friend who gets along well with male friends’ wives and girlfriends. But, historically, the single straight men in my life have a way of pushing and pulling at me until I’m worn out by them, making absolute claims on my attention and time without offering me any reliable resource of their own attention and time. Mostly, though, I’ve decided to be cool about it and assume this guy won’t be weird to me. I am condemned to hope’s delusive mine like everyone else.

In the dream, though, I decided to prepare to go out by going to a cafe to read celebrity magazines in my pajamas. (I never do these things, BTW.) I’m sitting at an outside table, reading some crap about Lindsay Lohan or something when I look down at my watch and see it’s half an hour past when I was supposed to meet this guy, and I sort of panic. I’m always on time, every time, to everything, as my friends will attest; I’m creepily punctual. I look down and see I’m wearing pajama shorts and no bra, and I haven’t showered. I look at my phone and see that he’s called, so I immediately call back, explaining that this has never happened before, but I seem to have flaked on the time and desperately need to shower before leaving, but could we possibly meet up later in the evening or this weekend? “All I’ll say is that this shows who you truly are.” What? No, really, I’m just in break mode and obviously a little scattered and stressed and… “Listen, if you respect me so little as not even to show up, how could you think I’d still want to see you?” But, um, I just flaked, and I’m really sorry, and I was looking forward to hanging out with you and… “Just, nevermind, okay? Never. Mind.”

And I woke up thinking, “You dick.” Inauspicious, sure, but I think dreams like these help to process the worst-case scenarios that I refuse to acknowledge while blithely humming through a disappointing and risk-filled life. My mom asked me while I was home this week how I go on meeting people and trying to make new friends when I’ve had so many pathetic disappointments and betrayals. I think marriage was, for her, a way of guaranteeing that she never had to make friends again, and that, if she chose to be vulnerable to new people, it was a choice, made without the fragility of loneliness that makes people like me such an easy target for manipulation.

Max used to meditate at length on what my “problem” was, and it usually ran toward theories that people want to stake claims on little pieces of me. Because I’m a somewhat unpredictable and diffusely interested person, it’s easier to try to be absolutely intimate with a little part of me than it is to try to get to know me. A girlfriend I hadn’t seen in a few years recently said my “problem” was that I was so interested in things, like my work, that my friends confuse an interest in my interest with an interest in the thing I’m interested in, pretending to care about the crap I care about as a way of absorbing some of that intense attention obliquely. My mother’s theory about my “problem” is that, when I’m talking to someone, I make them feel like they’re the only person in the world who matters, and that people will do anything to get more of that feeling, even if they’re not interested in me or my well-being otherwise.

Time, of course, tells who is trustworthy, and some of my best friends are people who have grown on me, slowly, over many years. I guess that’s why I don’t totally retreat into myself, or try not to. There’s just too much evidence that having new people in my life is a net good. Anxiety’s a bitch, though.

So at least two dozen of you emailed me while I was gone, asking for a password so you could read all my now-secret writings, which would imply that my post warning you that I was about to take the blog down for the week went unread. I just took it down so I wouldn’t be tempted to moderate anything while on my trip home. And I didn’t! I even managed to avoid responding to email!

But now I’ve returned, with five more free days before I begin teaching again. I have a great deal to read for exams, but I also plan to do a little painting, a little drinking, a little chitchat with colleagues and friends. The weather is so beautiful I’m considering heading to the park to cast myself at full length upon the ground.

The trip went very well, with the usual patterns of minor dismay. I got to see Tonks and family (which was lovely), went fishing with my father, and shopped for spices, paintbrushes, and shoes with my mom. Their dog continues to be eerily intense and energetic at the rather old age of 14. I slept like death every night.

My mom and I mostly got along well, as we do, by talking of nothing but the present moment. If we watched a movie, we discussed that movie. If we were outside, we spoke about the weather and the colors of flowers and grass. One of the tricks I’ve learned from her for getting along with anyone is to concentrate intensely on now, and not to drift into speculation, abstraction, or narration. I’m fine with it, and it’s a good skill to practice. She doesn’t like to be reminded that I know people other than herself, or that I have a different memory of things from her own. Whenever I am about to visit with Tonks or go home to Brooklyn, she becomes wildly testy and then mournful.

The strangest things set it off, too. Last night, we ended up watching some late-night program about a couple whose daughter had become a heroin addict. The narrative of the whole show was that there must be a cause, but that the parents had done everything right, and that there must be a solution, if only science could figure it out. This sort of thing pisses me off, since, of course, it doesn’t really matter what the cause is or who can be blamed, or if the parents were perfect in every way, or whatever. One got the distinct impression that everyone would be greatly relieved if it turned out that the daughter had been molested by a neighbor or something, because then there would be someone to point a finger at, as if that would stop her suffering.

My mom took my argument to be an indictment of the parents and launched into an argument that there is simply something about children that is tragically born into them to make them miserable, and that as a parent, all one can do is make all the right decisions and hope for the best. But some children are just going to grow up to be drug addicts, and maybe that’s how they avoid killing themselves.

I offered that, in my own suicidal prepubescence, I’d made myself a deal that if I ever got the hankering to off myself, I’d just run away instead. I never figured drugs would help anything, but disappearing would take some of the pressure off if I felt overwhelmed. Mom responded that she’d rather I not speak of such things, calmly or not, because it’s too difficult for her to hear about them. “You can’t imagine how hard it is to be a parent, doing everything you know to be right, and watch your child be suicidal anyway.”

“Well, Mom,” I responded, “I’m sure it was difficult to know what to do in that case, but I would offer that, while being my parent was hard, it was also quite hard to be me during those years, me being the suicidal one.”

“You obviously don’t understand how painful it is to know you’re doing everything right and still see your child suffer from her own emotional problems.” I decided to let that one go. There are moments when my mother remembers that she was not a kind mother when I was a child, that she screamed all day long, threw dramatic fits ending in her walking out the front door in tears, and cursed and threatened me when I asked for psychiatric care. Most of the time, it’s clear that she’s blocked it out, and that blocking it out has a lot to do with her grasp on mental stability now. It shocks me that she can confront herself with stories on TV of children doing self-harm and feel totally detached from them, enough to pity the poor, perfect parents saddled with a mentally ill child.

But the past is the past. I just gave her a hug and went up to my room, where I lived from the ages of ten to seventeen. For eleven years, I’ve come back to visit and stayed in that room, which is decorated with memorabilia of plays I was in and strewn with all my childish notebooks and sketchbooks full of bad poetry and worse portraits. I never see any of that stuff. Like my mom, I’ve perfected the art of the now in moments of stress. I go into that room and never touch the photo albums, the notebooks, the boxes of joke-presents and folded notes from girlfriends. It’s too humiliating to look at them.

But last night, for the first time since I lived at home, I started to poke through those old shelves. I found pictures of each of my four college boyfriends, all of whom should look really young to me but don’t. I found pictures from theater camp my freshman year of high school, when my hair was really fluffy and I wore jean shorts. I looked at hundreds of little cartoon drawings I did during class and the thousands of limericks and haiku my friend Natalie and I wrote instead of whispering at each other. I went through a photo album and stole a few pictures out of it. Me, at age three, with my arm around my five-year-old brother’s shoulder, both of us dressed for Easter, in front of a cherry tree. Me, at age four, in a tennis dress, trying to hold my camouflaged brother’s hand while we wait for the bus on my first day of school. My friends and I at our senior prom after-party, all of them looking natural and happy in their pose while I awkwardly crouch in the upper corner of the shot.

An artfully posed shot on campus with a few college friends in 1998. The guy next to me in the photo would coldly ignore my obvious flirtation for two years before drunkenly threatening to beat up a boyfriend of mine, asserting that I’d always been his and always would be. The callow sense of entitlement that lies just beyond pointless withholding would grow to become the most commonly reinforced stereotype I hold about masculinity.

Three of my guy friends and I horsing around on a couch in a dorm after a performance of a play in 1999. J, seated on the left, is manic with glee. D, seated on the right, smiles nervously. B is on all fours, suspended over their laps, eyes closed with drunken laughter. I am lying on my back with my head on D’s lap, tilted toward the camera, my hair coated in white shoe polish, and my face either totally high or just calm and happy and at peace.

I pulled all these photos because I’d totally forgotten that any of these moments ever happened.

I’m headed out of town for a week, so here in a few hours, I’m going to make the whole blog private until I get back. My plan is to spend the week with my family watching TV and reading books for orals, and not thinking at all about anything, so I’d feel a lot more comfortable with this here thing turned off. I am coming back! I just need a few days off from maintaining things here.