October 2007

How many Americans get to say that they have proudly attended their gay sister’s wedding ceremony with full family in attendance? Now, how many get to see it TWICE, with TWO sisters, in a single year? My family, that’s who. It has been a banner year for courageous love in the Finn family.

I have the joy and privilege of being the baby sister of two extraordinary, strong, intelligent, remarkable women named Maggie and Joanie. Our family is large enough that they experienced being gay in America across two generations: Joanie came of age in the late 50s, and Maggie in the early 70s. But each of them also was born too soon to be fully embraced as they are at the age when that makes all the difference in your self-esteem, your choices in life, and your happiness.

They were each forced into taking undesirable forks in the road to bury their love. In Joanie’s case, she fell in love with Annie in college in 1960. Not a good time for lesbian love, for sure. I remember Annie as a very young girl. I remember her being around, and how happy Joanie was at that time. Joanie was always artsy, and I remember her being the epitome of what, to me, was a beatnick (for the record, beatnicks remain in my mind much, much cooler than hippies could ever hope to be — I think it was all the booze, the poetry, the cigarette smoke, and the black clothing).

Annie was fun and down to earth. She helped to care for me as a baby, and I have impressions of her inside me. Apparently, I was told, Joanie and Annie used to take me into the bed to comfort me when I was crying. My mom was kind of a heavy sleeper, what with all the Canadian Club and all So they would step in to feed me or hold me during the night.

At one point, Annie just disappeared. Joanie got married in 1966 to a man we all thought to be strangely cold and conservative — nothing like the free, disorganized, serendipitous spirit that lived inside our Joanie. She lived a quiet life in a sub-division in Bucks County, Pennsylvania where they raised their one son, and where Joanie, a faithful Catholic, taught theology at an all-girls’ Catholic school. Annie at some point disappeared. It was as though I had lost a fifth sister, and I never quite understood why she was gone. Apparently, she had become a nurse anesthesiologist, joined the Army, and went to Vietnam. She also married, but the marriage was short-lived. I found all this out later on.

Flash forward to the year 1998. Joanie’s son was married the year before. I got a call from Joanie that she was leaving her husband after 32 years of being deeply unhappy and troubled, but waiting for her son to be settled. She was leaving him to return to Annie. They had loved each other all those years.

I never knew all the details, but when Joanie told me this, it all felt right. It all made perfect sense. Annie WAS my fifth sister afterall, and the intuition of a little child can be frightfully accurate, or so I am learning from my son. I always knew that Joanie loved Annie.

This week, I finally got to see them take their vows in New Jersey, one of the states that has had the compassion, and the foresight, to allow civil unions for gay people. My brother Peter wrote an amazing blessing, talking about the eternal love of God and of our late parents, all of whom were looking on Joanie and Annie with pride, support, and deep love. I was bawling, and so was my sister, Maggie, herself legally married in Massachusetts to her precious Joy this past March. What an amazing day this was.

I’ve been to straight weddings all my life, even held a few of my own :), but nothing compares to Joanie and Annie, in their own living room, standing and facing each other with honesty and abiding love, promising their lives with no cultural mandate to do so, as is the case with all of us in the straight mainstream. Their love is the kind you fight for, that you do as an act of courage. You can’t hide in the security and stability of a gay marriage the way you can in a straight one, if that’s why you marry. There is no template no “Gay Bride” magazine, no Filene’s basement rush of the lesbian brides. These folks are pioneers, and they pave the way not just for open gay love, but for the rights and dignity of humanity in all its God-made shapes, sizes, stripes, colors, and desires. Theirs is a love that takes courage, not compliance, and I am so proud that two of my sisters have the fortitude to be open in the world with who they are. They make it easier for everyone who is different in any way.

Joanie, Maggie, Annie, and Joy. I love all of you so very, very much. Thanks for being who you are — I am more because of you.

I’m swirling with all kinds of thoughts and conflicting feelings about this conference. It will take some time to digest, but, the overall mood here this year is not a hopeful one. The distorted lens of my considerable social anxiety aside, the lack of hope seems driven by the convergence of a few forces in this country, and in higher education, that seem to be colliding, or colluding, to make the whole atmosphere a major bummer.

These include fiscal difficulties within state and federal budgets, the emphasis on disaster planning (I attended a session on how to keep classes going when there is a pandemic), the general sense that the federal government gives not a hoot about higher ed (except with regards to security policies and public image), and the publication of the Spellings Report that exposes how U.S. higher education is falling behind other industrialized countries. So, there’s not a general “festive” feeling here this year. I, for one, wonder if I’ll even have this job a year from now. I’m sure others feel the same. But, we plow ahead regardless.

Amidst the collective ennui, tonight is the annual conference festive event night. Last year, it was a genuine Texas ho-down in Dallas, complete with fighting mechanical iguanas, lots of beans and cole slaw, and folks unpacking their western wear for a night on the town (of course, mobile devices were lodged in the historical location of the six-shooter — these are geeks afterall). This year, in Seattle, home of the Boeing corporation, the theme is flight. They are holding a big party at the aviation museum, complete with flight simulators. Nothing says to me “don’t go” more than a bunch of geeks lining up to experience a flight simulator.

So what am I doing tonight? I checked out the online list of nearby AA meetings. I’ll go to one, then take myself to dinner and go back to the hotel. This is largely how I lived in NY — the nightlife thing never really appealed to me. Clubs and parties are just too loud to have a good conversation, and I get all awkward when I am plopped into a party-labeled container with the mandate to have fun. I preferred, in the good old days, cuddling up with a bottle of Johnny Walker, or even some disgustingly sweet Sambuca if that’s all we had in the liquor cabinet, and hopefully some Tylenol 3’s hoarded from a previous back injury or dental procedure or something, and falling asleep in front of the TV. Nothing much has changed in these more than 14 years of sobriety except that I can take my sober mind and body to a meeting and fully be present with no mandate for ANYTHING except to stay sober another day.

Then I can go back to my bed and fall asleep in front of the TV (hopefully the “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” marathon). Some things never change.

I’m at the annual Educause conference in Seattle. On the flight out, I read a book that our minister gave to us called “Making Room for Life.” It’s about quite a few social ills in our middle-class American pursuit of happiness. One of the phenomena it refers to is “crowded loneliness.” I must say, at this conference, I always feel the impact of that.

First of all, it’s all IT people, so the social skills are not dripping from every pore. Most discussions I eavesdrop on seem to embody complaints about those awful “users” or colleagues that aren’t doing their jobs. IT folks like to complain. I think that, in general, people within these “vertical” partitions that we call fields, industries, or disciplines have a tendency to bond around complaining. I have a huge problem with the judging/complaining habit, in just about every context, because I have a regrettable arrogance that says I know better than everyone else. I can be a real jerk — I’m working on it.

The “I know better” phenomenon is part of the anxiety of computing in general. You don’t want to be caught not knowing. I just went to a session where folks at Duke are doing what I want to be doing, and I had that pang of “I wish I had begun it first!”

The purpose of conferences, as far as I can tell, is to acknowledge and foster communities of thought through exchanging ideas. It feels also a little like show-and-tell, which is fine. Being seen and listened to for a job well done is a perk of presenting at a conference, and I like to hear what others are doing, my insecurities aside.

The overall feeling inside of me, however, is that I’m not hooked in to things as well as everyone else. I don’t know how to ferret out the vendors whose products are useful from those who are useless. Everyone evangelizes for their pet technology, or approach, or philosophy. I worry that my war stories are irrelevant. I worry that I’m short of the cutting — no, bleeding — edge and should know more. Folks that are here from my institution are really hooked into the whole professional community thing. They have a language, and a short hand, with folks of like mind. I, on the other hand, seem to always have a personal language that is not understood much outside of my head. As at a job interview, I feel not quite right, not quite good enough, not able to make myself understood by others.

So, I sit with my laptop, make notes, check email, listen, and walk through the mobs of folks grabbing free swag from the unbelievably extravagant vendor booths. I’m grateful I’m not wearing a corporate colored polo shirt asking someone to sit through a presentation to vie for a chance at a free Starbucks gift card. I have a momentary feeling of being better than THAT person, anyway. And then I remember that feeling superior is not very useful. It’s just as alienating as feeling beneath everyone. I think, at some point, I’d just like to feel like I belong, and not this crowded loneliness with a few thousand IT colleagues surrounding me, lining up for the box lunch, and retreating into quiet corners to check email and remind ourselves that somewhere, someone needs us.

Well, I’m going back for more swag. I had my eye on some pink T-Shirts at the Best Buy booth.

It’s been over 7 years since I left the corporate world in NYC where I worked for years in the corporate identity and communications field. When I was transplanted into the much slower pace of Fredericksburg, VA in 2000, and became part of the technology administration of a public institution, I began to awaken at the way the real world handles communications. What an education, and not of the higher variety.

I remember in 1996 dealing with the audit of a major international financial corporation (name withheld due to confidentiality issues) to assess their communications practices worldwide: 97 countries, each with its own in-house marketing communications offices scattered about. Folks armed with MS Word, Powerpoint, Pagemaker, Photoshop, and a lot of undisciplined imagination churning out disjointed, decidedly non-corporate stuff that just horrified the decidedly anal and controlling Wharton-graduate communications professionals I was working for at the time. Yes, we all agreed: this process must be stopped. And stop it we did, with internationally-based focus groups, logo studies, visual identity systems, and lots and lots of new regulations to stop folks from using bean-people clip art on flyers and spontaneously created, hideous one-color brochures displayed at the branches. We had timelines for rollouts, priorities for which countries came first, when the unified branch signage would be installed, when the marketing communications would be completed, how the implementation would take place, how to handle all the different languages to speak in one clean, crisp, corporate voice.

Flash now to 2007, where I’m at the end of a 6-year run as Web Communications Director for a publicly-funded state institution of higher education. Starting the job in 2001, I vowed to whip the place into shape, facing horrified faculty as I began my 6-year campaign to standardize their Web site down to the department level. It’s not generally done in higher ed, but, what did I know? I was a wet-behind-the-ears corporate devil used to working with folks to eliminate all idiosyncratic communications practices from the face of the earth. So, I plowed ahead, made friends, made enemies, and, by December 2006, made the entire University Web site, down to the department level, look all the same. I handed it off to the new Webmaster, and moved on to fry bigger fish at this same place.

The process of doing this was interesting in that as I transformed the University’s Web presence, the University transformed me. I learned that the standardization that I advocated for in the public Web communications realm was indeed appropriate, but that the conversation about what the Web is changed from early 2001 to late 2006. The impulses of the faculty to initially publish disjointed personal pages and syllabi under the rubric of “departmental Web site” was a valid impulse, but the notion of “departmental Web site” had to be redefined in order for the value of the personal/idiosyncratic/creative use of the Web to be relegated to more appropriate, and fruitful, arenas. In other words, the value of the personal use of the Web needed a bigger container than the University Web site, which is really an online brochure for the University, and aside from some dumb little features that folks like to add sometimes (like “send a postcard” or “chat with an admissions advisor”), these sites really can’t be much else. And, as Stuart Smalley would say, “That’s…okay.”

Colleagues of mine who are much better at understanding the environment for the idiosyncratic voice and higher education culture, thanks to Web 2.0 and a great deal of genius, now have the tools and the knowledge they need to create larger, more expansive Web voices for students and faculty that transcend the brochureware of University Web sites. In time, with the infinite possibilities by things like RSS and XML, they may even, if the new Webmaster is visionary and daring enough, begin to cross-pollinate spontaneously.

So, with all of these wonderful changes, I now have a new naivete: I think Web 2.0 tools are so easy that even your grandmother can use them. Of course they would want to abandon their MS word flyers and clip art for blogs, text messaging, Google calendars, RSS, and the like. The bubble of corporate communications in NYC has given way to my living in the bubble of visionary higher education Web 2.0 thinking.

I am a hopeless utopian to the core.

Maybe it was all those years in Catholic School uniforms, but I have this really strange feeling that everyone is painted with the same brush as me, which, given how strange I am, is really strange indeed. So, when I see folks still making flyers with tear-offs, keeping records in binders, sending home piles of stuff from my son’s elementary school when I haven’t had time to go through the previous week’s piles of stuff from my son’s elementary school, I am naively non-plussed at just how few folks in the real world occupy this idealistic mindset of mine that somehow, productivity and efficiency will trump legacy thinking and old habits. But, alas, there are still plenty of folks my age and younger who are comfortable referring to themselves as “technology-challenged” with a laugh.

I can’t get inside that mindset, or why folks wear technological ignorance as a badge of honor, and I clearly have to work on my tendency to judge them. But, I once again tilt at windmills, this time with less of a vision of corporate uniformity than one of personal empowerment through new generations of technologies that give the little guy a big voice. When you’ve got the world at your feet for free, why in the world would you still have a “flyers committee” on the PTO and a standing relationship with the local copy shop? Paper has its place, for sure, but is there a way to challenge it without making some poor secretary feel like you’re trying to take away her job rather than improve it?

Why do folks like legacy thinking more than the opportunity to sit at the table where the whole world is feasting? Really — I want to know.

I looked up from my seat on the “pity pot” long enough to notice that there’s a proliferation of sign men in Charlottesville these days. These are the men who are hired to hold loud signs about “blowout closeout selling to the bare walls one day only” events at local stores. They stand on the corner holding the signs as traffic passes by.

I suppose the idea is that these folks don’t constitute permanent signs and violations to the zoning code since they can run away if the police come? In New York City, we had these guys, too, but they usually tried to put a flier in your hand, or wore sandwich boards saying things like “girls girls girls” or “men’s suits”.

In both instances, the man is reduced to a movable sign, an object, not a man. I know that digging ditches used to be the top metaphor for having reached the bottom of human dignity in work, but this practice of making men into movable objects is abhorrent to me. I won’t patronize any place that uses human beings in this way. These are grown men, usually men of color, probably struggling to make ends meet. They could be standing there with a makeshift sign asking for money in their own pockets, but instead they are trying to do things legitimately, and I am sad that this is the best work they can find. Sad for them, and sad for us. Seeing these guys makes me want to cry.

There are times when I think we have forgotten how to be human. This is one of them.

These are hard times for me, for reasons too numerous to mention, and probably beyond the boundaries of what makes a blog a blog, and a personal conversation a personal conversation.

My Catholic upbringing tells me always to look at those who have it harder. When I used to complain about my fat legs, my mom used to say, “Thank God you have 2 legs that can walk.” Of course, that was massively irritating when you were looking for a little commiseration on something as important as my all-to-ample thighs, but, that was my Mom, and how I was brought up.

So amidst all these travails, I’ve looked around and thought, “It could be worse.” The serenity prayer asks you to “accept the things [I] cannot change.” So, you do that, and then there’s this beat, this moment, where there is nothing. No fulfilled wish, no alternate outcome. It’s a void, it’s unyielding and silent, and it’s scary. If you accept the unacceptable, then what?

The void has to be filled. I think lots of us fill it with lots and lots of things. I know I do. Usually with tears or food, but I’m so darned sick these days that tears are all I have. And Aciphex.

Then I remember AA, and “making a gratitude list.” We used to joke about how the old-timers would turn to some poor addict who was detoxing and tell him to “make a gratitude list.” For sure, some situations are a bit more acute than others, and writing a list is not top-of-mind when you’ve got tremors. But, a gratitude list is something that keeps you from becoming one of those sniveling, privileged white people who think it’s a crisis when there’s s scratch on their late-model car. So, here’s my gratitude list for today (by the way, gratitude lists are ALWAYS made in a spirit of utter resentment and annoyance — I am no Pollyanna, believe me):

• I have the most extraordinary son on the planet that I love with all my heart
• I have a 38-year old husband who looks like Johnny Depp and is a brilliant, emerging neuroscientist
• I’m relatively attractive for a 48-year old lady
• My son told me this morning, “You’re so pretty, and you’re so beautiful, and I love you!”
• We were approved by Homeland Security this week to adopt a child from Ethiopia
• I’m not as sick as I was 2 days ago
• People from my church stepped in and helped us move our stuff and watch Blake when I was sick (great, open-minded church — check it out)
• The tenants in our house have kept it spotless
• I loved watching Blake walk up the street this morning to catch the bus, with his huge backpack, his Hollymead school green polo shirt and long white socks and two Pop Tarts in his hand
• I lost a little weight while I was sick (still teetering on the edge between size 6 and 8, but, it’ll do)
• I no longer live in an apartment so Blake has his own yard
• I’m going to see my sister Joanie have her civil union in New Jersey in a couple of weeks — I love her and Annie so much
• I have a good safe car
• I can afford to eat today
• I can afford electricity, cable tv, broadband internet, rent and a mortgage
• I have seven brothers and sisters that are simply extraordinary, if imperfect like me
• I have a steady job that gives me the ability to think creatively and work on flexible terms
• I have two legs that work
• I was raised by the most unique mother that ever walked the planet earth
• I’m still alive

Thank you God for another day.