August 2007

I’m someone with few boundaries, which is probably not a good thing on a social level. However, my boundarilessness (word? why not!) manifests sometimes in being able to make connections among things that seem disparate. Some folks I work with would call that “alchemy” and simple mathematics would then say that if I can make chemical reactions in my own head, then imagine all the other reactions that can be created by knocking heads (and hearts) with others. Perhaps the synthesis of a new world.

I think that is what is happening in our day and age. The age of private thought gave way to the 90s age of expository autobiography, performance artists I used to follow like Karen Finley (pure genius) and Annie Sprinkle (completely insane), and the celebrity tell-alls about their rehab experiences. I rode the crest of that one, writing a one-woman show about women and body image called “Busy Being Beautiful,” which was pointed squarely at the complicated relationship I had with my father, and ultimately myself. I found through that experience, and other performance experiences, that the more personal I got, the more universal the experience appeared to be. I think a teacher in design school told me that once, but I didn’t believe her.

Lots of my expository, boundary-hopping navel-gazing writing and performances made me realize that the tree, while falling in the woods, does NOT make a sound until someone else hears it. I guess J.D. Salinger may feel otherwise, but, for me, the audience made the message come full circle, and led to more writing. The writing, and its witness, made for more writing.

In this regard, blogging has been kind of a natural for me as I have met minds and people online that I would otherwise not have met. And the small talk is eliminated — I meet them while talking about all that is near and dear to me (at that moment, anyway). But professional blogging is hard because things in my personal and professional life seem so related that separating them seems to defeat the purpose of the way I synthesize ideas. So, I opt for the personal blog and, in this particular post, will try, lamely, to speak to a revelation I am having about the “aha” connections I am having between participation in social networking technologies in both my personal and professional lives. For what it’s worth. Tree falling.

I recently posted about my discoveries regarding being a new Christian discovering the tense, and to me, inscrutable, relationship many Christians have with the issue of homosexuality. That post yielded interesting results.

I don’t get close to folks easily. So, although I am quite fond of the lion’s share of folks at my new church, I am also at arms distance with them in a lot of ways. I am conscious, in most contexts, that I’m a bit of an oddball. That blog post resulted in folks I had never even spoken with more than a couple of minutes coming up to me and hugging me at church last night. Folks telling me some deep secrets of their lives. Folks inviting me to lunch, wanting a ride home to talk. The minister’s wife telling me, very pointedly and angrily that I CANNOT LEAVE.

I didn’t blog about this issue to get folks to beg me to stay. I didn’t think of getting folks to do anything, really. I see much of what I do as leaving no footprint behind, as though my guardian angel rolls up the carpet behind me wherever I go so no one will see my mark anywhere. I had not intended to make a “mark,” but in the hearts of some folks, something happened with this little post. The non-homophobes at church appear to be coming out of the closet, and I’m feeling a new calling.

I’m not sure that a performance, which begs for “approval”, would have yielded this generous and thoughtful a response. The popular misconception that technology is depersonalizing the human exchange seems to have been stood on its ear. What may have happened was that, by eliminating the vulnerability of the face-to-face, more genuine feelings ideas were able to be shared.

Now, I would not extend that to online porn, adult chat and other substitutes for real experience. I’m talking about a new experience altogether: asynchronous communication with the world, emanating from a point in time selected by me, hitting others at points in time when they happen or seek to be there, and seeing what bounces back and is spawned as a result of the social risk.

We are working at my job on a grant for creating an environment for learning that is self-directed, iterative, and full of possibilities for these kinds of unanticipated alchemies. All to get to the sweet spot in the mind that characterizes that moment when something is learned, when transformation occurs.

I can’t get to that place, where the little British kids clap their hands in joy to the near-ecstatic chemical reaction, without trudging through all the subconscious soil of my complete mind, boundariless, from gays to Christ, bathroom stalls to baptism. It’s all one big thing in me, one big bubble theory of the messy ALL bouncing up against the other bubbles out there, sometimes merging, sometimes bouncing away.

And that’s why I can’t sustain a professional blog.

Larry Craig. The whole story has devolved from it’s opening low point to the usual discussion where “gay” and “homosexual” are being equated with perversion. The public just LOVES the mens’ bathroom thing. It’s dirty and embarassing — just the way America feels about sex in general.

I saw a blog that equated this downfall with Gov. McGreevey’s and find that to be an unfortunate comparison. Jim McGreevey’s homosexuality played out in an affair with another man he knew intimately over a period of time. Since this revelation, his prompt and humble resignation, he has become an Episcopalian (the Catholic church refused him communion, naturally!), and is now pursuing a life as an Episcopalian priest. This is a person who failed his family for certain, and himself in many ways, but who clearly knew he was gay, admitted he was gay, and built a new life in acceptance of the truth of who he was.

Senator Craig, on the other hand, appears to suffer from sex addiction, manifesting in this case with another male. The fact that it is with someone of the same sex, to me, is incidental. When I went to design school in the early 1980s, in the Village, some guys I knew had casual gay sex because it was easy and uncomplicated, and the behavior of college men can manifest in sex addiction lots of times — call them prisoners of hormones, but, some hotly pursued co-eds, and some hung out at the downtown baths (before Mayor Koch closed them). Many continued on to be openly homosexual in their later relationships, but some ultimately found themselves to be straight. The healthy ones of either stripe went on from the hormonally-charged sexual experimentations of college to happy lives and lasting relationships.

The reasons behind Senator Craig’s behaviors are known only to him. He may be gay — only he knows. But the way we frame this entire encounter as a “homosexual” or “gay” thing is based on our view of what homosexuality is: a sickness, a perversion, a bad thing. As with Bill Clinton, where we wink-wink, nudge-nudged about Monica’s kneepads, we are concentrating on this as a sexual issue. But, this is one case where the cigar is more than a cigar (pardon the visual pun). That is, we are not having the higher level discussion about sexual addiction — porn, rape, prostitution, habitual infidelity — why it’s so prevalent, and what it’s doing to us as a people. I am not moralizing here, because addiction is sickness, and sickness is not a moral issue.

The fact that sexuality is always viewed, in the public forum, through a lens of morality, rather than psychological health, is unfortunate. It has created an artificial polarity that substitutes for the real conversation: Why can so many of us not stop hurting ourselves, our bodies, our psyches, and each other, just for a few minutes of physical release? I do not feel at all self-righteously vindicated because it’s a Republican conservative that got caught in his addiction. I’m sad for him, and for us, and for our very deeply buried understanding of what it is to be human, for our inability to extend our paltry compassion into a pitiful scene in a men’s bathroom stall.

A man hurt himself, his family, and maybe others, and it’s tragic. I’d think that even if he never understands how sad it all is.

Let me lay this familiar Christian thing on ya — how’s this for being all preachy:

John 8:1-11.

Romans 1? DON’T GET ME STARTED!

I gotta tell you, the vocabulary of elementary school is rushing back to me now that Blake is starting Kindergarten. Also rushing back to me is the authority hierarchies of those prim ladies in the office, the ones that you had hoped never to see when you were a kid. They were the ones you saw if you were waiting for the principal, or because they were calling your mom to let her know to bring in your gym shorts, which you, of course, forgot.

From the parental position, the whole thing seems so darned silly, and I wonder how Blake sees the lady behind the desk in the office. This morning, he began reverting to his preschool ways, fighting about getting dressed, fighting about eating breakfast, fighting about putting on shoes, complaining that the socks had “lumpy stuff” at the toes, having to take away toys to get him to concentrate on the task at hand. Sigh.

We still live on the other side of the county from the school he’s attending, and will for the next two weeks, so the delay tactics take a toll on our arriving on time. The traffic on Rio Road in the morning just screams “bad city planning,” and now, this telecommuter is seeing what all the fuss in the Daily Progress has been about. The roads here are so underdesigned it makes Fredericksburg look well-planned by comparison.

You know the joke about Virginians changing a lightbulb, right? How many does it take? Five. One to change the bulb, and four others to talk about how great the old bulb was. No new roads anytime soon, I’d wager.

Speaking of “old bulbs,” all of this morning’s wrangling got us a Tardy Slip. When asked by the prim lady, “And why is he late.” My response was, “He’s five years old.” “Okay…running late,” she says, and folds the carbonless slip neatly at the perforations, handing it to me with a smile. I had to wear a visitors sticker to bring him to his class — Like the scarlet letter for bad, bad parents who can’t get their 5-year old dressed on time.

It’s gonna be a great year.

Ever take an online personality test? I was intrigued by what I saw at Wags Outside (one of my favorite C’ville Blogs) so did the same thing. I never know if this stuff is self-perpetuating, but, I always come out with similar results on these things, and am never surprised. At any rate, here I am:

Anyone who knows me personally would probably not be surprised. It’s funny that the Multiple Intelligences test lists careers I’ve already had (Architecture, Graphic/Web Design, Musician) OR one I’d like to have: Philosopher/Theologian.

Most interesting is the “Introverted.” I am actually a bit of a chatterbox and “social”, but, anyone close to me knows that what is real is kept close to the vest. The rest is the Actor in me (one of my possible careers, apparently).

I am keenly aware that my minister links to my blog from his, The Farthest Shore. As such, I feel kind of hesitant at times to express some of my thoughts about faith. But, sometimes I feel that being an agitator, and making folks uneasy, comes so easily to me that it must have something to do with my mission in life. So, here goes.

When I came upon a clarity of faith earlier this year, my main obstacle was skepticism about the resurrection. I transcended that one through a lot of prayer, reading, discussion and more prayer. It felt and feels right, and I haven’t looked back and doubted.

How that faith has played out in my choice of church membership, however, is something I now grapple with. I became a member of a moderate Baptist congregation whose members, while belonging to another church in town, rejected membership in the Southern Baptist Convention due to its requirement for Baptist churches to promise adherence to a specific creed which was fundamentalist and socially conservative in its nature. The Baptist history is one that eschews one-size-fits-all creeds, and there were enough progressive folks in the church at the time that they broke off to form the church I have joined.

Now that the pink cloud of being baptized has kind of dissipated, I am thinking less of my own journey than about that of others, particularly those folks who feel unwelcomed in a Christian church of any stripe due to the perceived, and actual, intolerance for homosexuals. “The Great Commission” is what the older church folks call it — this is Christ’s call to bring others into faith, and it’s what gives more annoying Christians to the tendency to place silly tracts in your hands, and ask you if you are saved. A neighbor of mine in Fredericksburg was particularly anxious to convert me because I was a Unitarian Universalist, and she thought that I was a member of the Unification Church (aka, a “Moonie”). Maybe it’s because I was from NYC and hung out a lot at airports…just kidding. I didn’t try to divest her of this belief because I thought it was really funny.

I was brought to this church by a progressive couple who lives here in Charlottesville. I felt more comfortable with the folks here who seemed to be receptive to my talking in my usual in-your-face way about things. Or else it’s the Virginia “smile in your face and hate you in private” approach — another thing I don’t mess anymore with because, like my misguided neighbor, I think it’s really funny.

At the same time, what’s not funny is what’s not being said. If they left the other church to avoid adherence to a creed, and if the Baptist way is to come to your own faith, why are homosexuals not visible in the congregation? They could be there, but there’s a “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of feeling about it. I got some feedback, privately, from a couple of folks about the likelihood we could join AWAB (The Association of Welcoming & Affirming Baptists) as a congregation. The response from both, in short, was, to paraphrase, “not bloody likely.”

I’m troubled that I didn’t do my homework before joining this church, and wonder why I’d want to bring anyone into a congregation that does not openly support homosexuals. My two gay sisters would have to be closeted to avoid being shunned by some members. How can I stay, and how stupid have I been not to have really understood.

I’m left with the age-old conundrum: Do I leave to find a more welcoming corner of the world, or agitate from within what I find to be a broken interpretation of Christ’s love? In all honesty, I don’t know the answer to that question. Despite this bit of marketing fluff, I know from experience that in the Unitarian Universalist faith, Christian faith is openly mocked (so much for the “first principle”), so there’s no going back there for me. In the Christian tradition, homosexual “practice” (how the CBF refers to homosexual orientation) is shunned. Where do I belong afterall, and how “great” is the commission that would deny Christ the opportunity to have dinner at the house of an openly “practicing” (ugh!) homosexual.

I always THOUGHT Zaccheus was gay

Well, when I least expected it, we found a house. THE house. It’s in Hollymead, and it was built in 1979. It’s like a storybook cottage with a gazebo and fish pond in the back yard. Instead of killing ourselves trying to buy it now, we simply asked the owner if we could rent it until we sell our house in Fredericksburg, and they said yes. All has gone well since, including Blake LOVING Hollymead school.

If it were Noel and I, we would probably opt to live either in the city, or deep in the country in a house we build for ourselves. But, having a child, things like cul-de-sacs, community pools, and a good school district carry more weight.

I simply love this house, and hope that our family will stay there for a long, long time.

Tomorrow, my son Blake goes for his first day of Kindergarten. We have spent the last few days together — an unusual occurrence since he’s been in day care. I wanted him to leave day care for a bit so that he could have some transition time, and I could drink in all of him before this momentous moment when he is sent into the big school with the big kids and the big packpacks. I wanted him to be grounded in a sure thing, in knowing that his mom is at home for him all day, loving him, missing him, and not being able to wait until he comes home.

We met his teacher the other night. I’ve been crying off and on for weeks about this. I can’t believe my little guy, only 5 lbs, 10 oz when I first held him, is now going to school. Now my little, fragile baby in the NICU is all legs and hair with a big, goofy toothless grin and an unbelievable sense of humor.

His greatest hope is that the school will “put on shows.” The two visits we’ve had to the school had him running to the auditorium to get up on the stage and “do a show.” He does shows in the shower, opening up the curtain to begin the show, which comprises his dancing around and singing incomprehensible syllables at the top of his lungs. He will interject, occassionally, the name of a character, yelling something like “Sponge Bob Show!” which will, retroactively, become the title of the piece. Senseless, pure, loud joy.

I took Blake from the hands of the nurses in the NICU. The last time I had to let him go to another was when he was about 15 months old, and I knew I could no longer afford to hire babysitters at home while I worked. I had to put him in day care. That was tremendously painful, and has taken years to adjust. Just in time to place him in the hands of the larger world.

My son is on the verge of negotiating his place in life within a larger context, and I can’t stop time. I will miss the sweetness of these years, before the written word becomes important, when all was impulse, when I could cushion him from the big hurts. He enters the world where girls break your heart, boys act with aggression and he’ll have to respond, where someone will someday mention that because he’s adopted he is less than they are.

I pray that his soul doesn’t crush under the weight of all he has to carry along with that backpack: being biracial, having been adopted, having white parents. Those things will soon have meaning, meaning that could be used to hurt him. I pray for my son on this, the entry into the powerful beauty and ugliness that is a world shaped more by language than sensation. Blake says, “Mommy, you’re always with me. You’re in my heart.”

I just may cry myself to sleep tonight.

Blake, I love you so.

When I was born in 1959, my Dad was the administrator of the Jersey City Medical Center. That was a plum political appointment he received in the days of the John Kenny mayoralty in the early 50s. Anyone that knows about the history of the Irish mob in Jersey City knows that these administrations that appointed my Dad were corrupt at the core. Years later, when I was in 5th grade, my father was called to testify, my Godfather, Frank, (apparently, known then as the “bagman”) squealed like a canary, and there was a big worry in our family that my father would lose his pension simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The irony of the whole thing is that my Dad lost his job in 1961 under Thomas Gangemi because he wouldn’t participate in their games of awarding contracts to the mayors connected contractors. Well, that all came out, and he kept his pension afterall. But I have to say, my Dad had major b%#@s to stand up for his principles when he had 8 mouths to feed and a job with unbelievable perks that my Mother was loathe to lose.

Getting to the perks, and the context of my birth 48 years go today…

We lived in a penthouse apartment on the top floor of the Pollack Hospital*. We had maids, nannies, and a button in the floor in the dining room that my Mom could just push with her foot to call the serving folks in during dinner. The view was spectacular — as my Mom used to say, “The Statue of Liberty was so close you felt like you could reach out and touch her.” Free car, including the 1949 Ford that became my brother Tom’s first entree into the world of auto restoration, still a big hobby with him.

And it was a medical center, so, there were several hospitals clustered together. The Pollack was right next door to the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital. There was a tunnel connecting the two buildings.

Approximately biannually during the 1950s, an orderly would ascend with a wheelchair to the penthouse apartment in the Pollack hospital, get my mother, and descend to the tunnel, and wheel her down the tunnel hallway to the Margaret Hague hospital. Family legend says that, as the years progressed, folks in the hallway would announce “Mrs. Finn coming down” as though there were a standing protocol to manage this regular and predictable event.

My mom took her last wheelchair ride on August 21, 1959. She rode back in the wheelchair with me in her arms. When she brought me up to see my siblings, they were playing with a dog they had rescued from the street while she was in the hospital. She announced, “Kids! You have a baby sister!”

My brother Mike said, “So what! WE have a dog!”

Such was my auspicious entry into the world.

Thanks, Mom, for taking that last ride, for putting in the years. Thanks Dad for standing up for what was right, even if it meant the end of an era for our family. Thank you both for bringing me and all of us into the world.

*The Pollack Hospital, in those days, was a tuberculosis hospital. The ziggurat shape allowed for solariums on each floor. For years, my father’s mantra was “Get sleep, or you will get TB.” The Pollack is now a condo.

I was driving Blake home last night from Fredericksburg to Charlottesville. We had spent the day visiting our old neighborhood, and he had a chance to play with his first, and still only, “girlfriend,” Brianna. He fell asleep in the car with an old iBook on his lap, watching Monsters, Inc. He had a wonderful day.

Because he was sleeping, I didn’t turn on the radio. Driving on unlit Rte. 20 at night time lacking the distraction of a strangers’ voice made my mind wander. That can be a painful thing, depending on my state of mind. It was, indeed, a painful thing. With a little context and background, here is the navel-gazing truth about my thoughts on that long, dark drive.

We still own our home in Fredericksburg because we were unable to sell it 18 months ago when we had to quickly move to Charlottesville at the beginning of the semester. We rented it, and the real estate market is now sleep-losingly bad. Our tenants had at first talked about buying. They’re not talking about that anymore. So, we have to put it on the market, and we’re scared we’re going to lose our shirts. But, we have to sell because we have to move on and get a house in Charlottesville. There is very little chance, with my husband in a PhD program for the next 4 (or 5!) years, and his eventual desire to teach and do research at a research University, that we will ever live in Fredericksburg again. That “crunch” feeling, between the rock and the hard place, is pretty much on my mind 24/7. Regrets abound.

But, so it is, and my listening to the scary broadcasts and talk shows on NPR have made my worries worse. The financial markets are so emotional, and the entire economy right now seems like a big hammer waiting to hit us all very, very hard.

Which gets me to the feeling in the car. I have a coping mechanism that, for some therapists and psychiatrists is a red flag. When I feel crunched like this, I fantasize about suicide. Now, I won’t do it because of Blake, but I fantasize about how it would happen. It’s usually a sudden-impact kind of thing: crashing my car into concrete wall, shooting myself in the head, or, better still, getting shot in head by a sniper. The fantasy is followed by a beat of utter peace. My non-existence, and the release of my soul to some other place where a mortgage does not rule my life, seems like utter bliss. That beat is followed by the realization that Blake would be motherless, and it goes no further. Not to mention that, for all my theological mumbo jumbo, I still harbor a deep, dark fear that I will go to hell. But that’s an appendage from my Catholic upbringing, and I just take for granted that some brain cells have been permanently wired with this connection. I wave to it every now and then.

Okay, so I die. What next? Last night, for the first time, I tried to figure out what it would be like simply to cease existing. I get crushed in the car in a second, and I simply stop being. Wow. I never really considered that possibility.

Our beliefs about the afterlife, however heartfelt, are at best speculation. Those who study Christian scripture have some guidance about things, but I would not call Christ’s words very clear on this topic. His talk about his father’s kingdom are interpreted broadly as an after-life heaven, but I don’t really see that explicitly in the text, so I guess I’m not sure. What if this life was it. What if that’s the gift from God. What if his kingdom has been here all the time, like a parallel universe to the one we choose to see, but we have not opened our eyes to it. What if, when we leave this place, we are simply not there anymore.

My mind goes to the inevitable question, “Why life at all?.” So western of me, really, to want an eternal narrative pinned to my existence to give it meaning. Humans love that meaning thing — always have, even way back when we made the sun a god. We can’t stand to have things not be metaphorical in some way. So, our very lives become metaphor for meaning.

Now, I’m not being nihilistic here (I know, I spoke of suicide, but bear with me on this thought). I’m not saying “what a tragedy” if I cease existing. It’s just weird.

In AA, there is a saying, “Recovering alcoholics are the only people who get a gift, and think they deserve a medal for it.” Sometimes, that’s what the conventionally-conceived heaven thing feels like. Like a reward for the blessing of life itself. It’s a funny thing, really, that we feel we deserve eternal bliss just for being given the gift of life and believing in the right thing at the right time. We are a weird people, indeed. Why is the life itself not gift enough?

In light of this possibility, I need to re-frame what my life means right now. Does the utter greatness of God make my corporeal existence simply a tool in some greater plan? Why does Cathy have to live beyond this plane in any way to give the whole human experience some meaning? And if I don’t, what then?

I have no answer. But, I did have a beautiful son sleeping in the back with the iBook sliding off the side of his booster seat, onto the box holding the remains of his largely uneaten happy meal (he just wanted the toy). In those little snores were all the meaning I needed. If I cease existing, he lives on with my love in his heart forever. For now, that is enough to give the whole journey meaning. The rest, barring the most educated and faithful human speculation being true, is up to God.

PS - I’m not going to kill myself anytime soon