Be and Breathe.
Yesterday I got into NYU. Today, I caught myself thinking “Well now I can say I got into NYU.” But honestly, who cares if I got into NYU? It only really matters if I go there. Because who do you know in real life that ever says, “Well I went to such and such school, but I GOT INTO Yale.” No one.
The judgment-saturated culture of my town has gotten to me, and I’ve been tricked into judging myself the way they judge me. Here, in upper-middle class, white bread, organic, whole foods, Prius-Audi America, if you don’t go to a school that sounds impressive, you don’t matter.
“Oh hey John, how’s Tisch? And hi Ginger, how are you liking Harvard? But wait, where do you go again, Sarah? Oh, right, Temple. I’ve never heard of it. You know, that’s too bad. And I know I was your teacher for four years, but now that you don’t go to Northwestern or Carnegie Mellon, I can’t brag about you to the parents. Oh look! There goes the last fuck I gave about you.”
Great. Thanks.
So I got into NYU. But I also got into Webster. Webster might have a better program. And it is more competitive. But I got into NYU, and for some reason, that’s something I want people to know. I even put it up on Facebook. Something like 130 people “liked” it. Because people have heard of NYU. And no matter how competitive or impressive or amazing Webster University is, no one knows it exists, and its name means nothing.
Why does it matter so much that my university be recognizable? Who cares? A lot of people, apparently. Because when I tell people I’m choosing between Webster and NYU, they automatically, without waiting to hear what Webster is, and without fail, say, “Go to NYU.”
Should I care? I mean, I do care. Obviously. But should I? Because I think choosing a school based solely on reputation is a little like marrying a famous person because they’re famous. That’s a bad reason to get married. You should get married for love. So if I think I love one of the schools, that’s a good reason to go there, right?
The truth is, right now I can only know what I hear, and read, and guess. I may love a school based on some facts, the feeling I get on campus, and the classes I’ll be taking. But that’s puppy love. I won’t really know either school until I attend one. After a year of school, I’ve learned enough to know that the college you think you go to at orientation, and the college you go to halfway through the first semester, are two very different animals.
In any case, I have a decision to make. By June 7th, no less. And I hope I’ll make the right one, and not let the labels of my town’s culture influence me. Because hopefully, someday, that judgment won’t matter to me. Someday the opinions of others might no longer effect how I look at myself, or how I make my choices. Someday, once high school is far enough behind me.
Surviving Your First Summer Home From College
Day 1:
Arrive home, broke and exhausted on mother’s day: buy your mother
flowers… With her credit card.
Spend the morning with your family, realize you didn’t miss as much as
it felt like you did.
Realize by the afternoon that for the first time in months, you aren’t
stressed about work you have to do.
Look through your phone for friends to hang out with, and feel shitty
when you realize the only recent conversations are with college
friends.
Text everyone you like from home, in an attempt to prove to yourself
that you do, in fact, have friends. Awkwardness ensues.
Wonder what to do with your free time.
Watch a lot of Doctor Who.
Realize how pathetically typical you are, attempt to make plans only
to remember once again that you are broke.
Hang out with your friends whos’ college lives all sound funner and
cleaner and cooler than yours.
Return home to this…
… In your room, realize how much unnecessary junk you have.
Clambor, naked (because you can’t find where you packed your pajamas),
across the room to the bed.
Lie down.
Luxuriate.
Remember that this is what a real bed feels like.
Go to sleep for 11 hours.
Day 2:
Wake up later than expected, eat leftovers for breakfast
Get surprised by the cleaning lady, awkwardly try to apologize for the
state of your room.
Watch Doctor Who for an embarrassing amount of time
Realize again that you are pathetic.
Go upstairs to get dressed and do something useful like begin tackling your room
Discover that the cleaning lady has independently organized it for you.
Consider taking credit for it when your mother asks, decide not to.
Get dressed, go out to lunch with old friends to discuss a band they
seem excited about forming.
Order a water, and pretend you’ve eaten. Because you’re broke.
Wonder silently if you’ve changed, or if they think you’ve changed,
note that they haven’t.
Feel guilty for being busy all year, and not keeping in touch.
Realize they were busy as well. Feel less guilty.
Go home, watch more Doctor Who
Cancel plans with your sister, because getting pedicures costs money,
and you’re broke. Watch Bones on the couch with her instead.
Eat leftovers for lunch, while watching Doctor Who.
Help mom with dinner.
Introduce eleven-year-old brother to Doctor Who.
Family movie time.
Go to bed, thinking about how relationships can be preserved for
months, exactly as they are, even when the people involved in them
keep growing and changing.
Realize your college friends will be different the next time you see
them. But so will you.
Hope that the friendships stay the same.
Day 3:
Realize your room has devolved into a state worse than its original
state, due to the mornings of searching through suitcases for clothes.
Think about cleaning it.
Don’t.
Go to help out at mom’s classroom, get messy in art supplies with 5-8
year olds.
Get introduced all day as the girl with a bright future.
Begin to get excited about that future.
Come home exhausted, watch Doctor Who.
Spend the rest of the afternoon eating and napping
Try to ignore the state of your room.
By evening, realize that you have officially become a lazy bum.
Accept it.
Take pride in it.
As you lay in bed in the midst of your messy, cramped, obstacle course
of a room, feel lucky to be able to own so much damn stuff.
And begin planning how to get rid of it.
Temple University, The Zombie Apocalypse
Yesterday Peabody Hall was emptied of its residents. Well, most of them. Because of travel technicalities, I’m staying until Friday afternoon. I’m currently camping out in my own room. No lights, no sheets, no pillow, just a suitcase full of clothes, my sleeping bag, and me. The thing about Peabody is, the building is really old, and the rooms have no lights except the little ones in the vanity mirrors. Turns out, it gets REALLY dark at night. I’m regretting not getting the light in my mirror fixed all year.
Now, you’d think living in an empty dorm is kind of fun… but it’s more like living in a ghost town. The doors in the hall which were once decorated are now blank. Where there used to be giggles, loud pop music, gangster rap, and girls fighting with boyfriends or each other, there is only emptiness and silence. The people are all gone now. There are only seafoam green matresses left behind. No one roaming the hallways, no one sitting in the lounge. It’s spooky. My roommate and I thought our empty room looked like a cell in an insane asylum, so we decided to turn it into a B-Movie horror film insane asylum, hence the sign on the wall.
…Which I’m starting to find less funny… in the dark, in North Philly, all alone…
When you get out into the hallways, if for instance you are determined to make the loney trek to the bathroom, it begins to look more like a dorm…
Post zombie apocalypse. Not only is it creepily silent and empty, there is also trash, and abandoned posessions everywhere, dotting the hallway, overflowing out of trash cans, hanging on doorknobs. It’s as if everyone grabbed all their most vital posessions, threw the rest in the hall, and evacuated.
Oh wait, that is what happened.
If you wait until nightfall, and make your way past the leftover food outside room 314, hop over the discarded single pantiehoe in the middle of the floor across from room 309, clambor past the overflowing mountain of trash inside the bathroom door, and tip-toe quietly enough to the sinks, the zombies might not hear you, and you might survive to see another lonely day. But be careful, if you make any noise… You could run into…
A ZOMBIE!!!!
Why (Queer) Theater is Important
“Gay” is a dirty word. In our schools, on our streets, in our homes, people are still using “gay” as an insult, despite years of crusading for acceptance from the LGBTQ community. Government officials have spoken up for equal rights, pop culture and media icons have voiced their support, but for all the positive noise made, there is still hate woven into the social consciousness of our country. So what contribution can queer theater make, in a society where we go to great lengths to close our hearts and minds to opinions different from our own? How can entertainment, art or media change anything when our government is deliberately engineered to prevent legislation for change from being passed with any haste whatsoever?
Our country and our culture are old-fashioned, closed-minded, and hesitant towards progress. We reject ideas and people that are different as “radical” and “crazy”. And from our humble beginnings, this country has had a history of hate and discrimination. The truth is, you can replace the subject of queer discrimination in this argument with gender discrimination, race discrimination, disability discrimination, or inequality of any kind. The story of LGBTQ acceptance and equality is not unfamiliar, and has had a similar relationship to theater as many other human rights struggles in history. Because of this, the question becomes: what contribution can theater make, in the movement for human rights?
A friend of mine made the point that it takes longer for people to accept things they cannot see. Historically, the fight for civil rights for African Americans was long and hard, but the fight to eliminate anti-Semitism (although earlier, and not so much in this country) was longer. People were prejudiced against African Americans, but they weren’t necessarily afraid of them. They couldn’t hide that they were black. But in the beginnings of the Holocaust, anti-Semites were not only discriminatory towards Jews, they were afraid of them. Why? Because Jews looked like everyone else. There was no skin color acting as a sign above their heads screaming “I’m different!” In response, German legislation required that all Jewish people wear yellow Stars of David on their clothing at all times, making them identifiable. The climate during the U.S.’s “Red Scare” was similar to the feelings anti-Semites had towards Jews. Because the “other” in this situation wasn’t visibly different, they were not as easily identifiable, and therefore, scarier. I believe this fear is a key factor in the homophobia plaguing our society. When people don’t understand homosexuality, and dislike homosexuals because they’re different, it’s even more uncomfortable for them to realize that this “other” is made up of people they might know. People get scared when they can’t fit others into neat little boxes with labels on them.
But how do groups who have been historically discriminated against become accepted? Often it’s difficult to pinpoint the factors that specifically helped reverse the oppression. There’s truly no way to know whether theater is a positive motivator for change. But we do know that theater helps make groups of people who feel invisible, visible. What theater does for queer people today is that it shows positive, and increasingly more realistic images of queer people. And when society is scared of the “other”, it’s usually because they don’t understand them.
At the same time, theater doesn’t work miracles. No Roman-Catholic, Republican attorney from Virginia who considers same-sex marriage to be comparable to bestiality is going to reform his ideas about homosexuality after watching a rousing production of “The Laramie Project”, let alone go to the play at all. Theater isn’t a political tool that can radically change ideas. Theater is, however, a social tool, that can make noise for groups who are too quiet, and paint a reflection of real people’s human experiences. Theater can remind theatergoers that some people are less privileged than they are. Theater doesn’t change people, people change people.
When someone writes a play like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and it gets recognized and publicized on an international level, it’s because it tells a good story. But when Tony Kushner’s play inspires audience members to make changes in their own lives and the lives of others, that’s proof that theater has the power to do more than just entertain. We can’t know for sure the extent to which theater has caused actual change in society, but we can know that it’s helped make queer people, and all sorts of oppressed minorities more visible in society by telling their stories, and reminding theatergoers that their personal experience isn’t necessarily the same as everyone else’s.
No matter how many plays we write, no matter how many laws we change, there has always been, and will always be a minority. And it’s easy to discriminate against that minority. It’s in the way our country operates. Until we stop teaching hate in schools and homes and on TV, we will continue watching children of prejudiced parents grow into prejudiced adults.
The role of queer theater is not one of radical change, or instant equality. Its role is a slow, determined march towards recognition and relatability. The power that theater holds is that it can take dry political arguments or social issues and bring them to life through storytelling. Theater is a form of entertainment, yes, but it can be a tool in its capacity to inspire. In the end, we know theater will not change the hatred towards any group. But it might just inspire people to change it.
Semicolon
In the third grade, I remember;
We learned punctuation.
Timothy liked the exclamation point best,
He shouted about it from the trampoline at recess.
Jennifer was a question mark girl;
Her dark bangs swinging, soft.
Andy chose the period.
Definite, strong, closed;
Even Carol’s punctuation was popular,
The comma; quick like her little red shoes
On the playground, running, running away.
But I; I had to be the strange one.
Forever the in-between girl,
Distinguished in my loneliness,
Apart from al the other grammars.
The semicolon girl,
Just a pause, a blip,
An indecisive clause of words.
Hazel, not quite finished…
