Everything But The Gay

This blog entry will be a blatant violation of my “scholarly” self—it will describe a severe disconnect between my academic, professional beliefs and my personal preferences. So allow me this disclaimer, in the words of America’s great gay poet, Walt Whitman:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

My scholarly self believes in queer. I believe that any absolute can easily be undermined, any essentialized identity can easily be queered—in fact, I believe that queered identities are more common than absolute identities. As an academic, I believe in transcending binary thinking. I believe that we are never either one thing or another—we all occupy shifting positions along any conceivable spectrum: gay-straight, male-female, masculine-feminine, intelligent-ignorant, neat-messy. You get the idea. I truly believe that if more people on this earth understood and promoted these ideas, as a human race, we would have far fewer problems than we do now.

That’s what I want for the human race, for the world—I want everyone to accept and celebrate diversity and difference, to fight for inclusion, to open themselves up to the possibilities of difference.

As for myself, I want a man.

Let me be more specific—I want a masculine man. I want a man who reeks of testosterone. I want a man who looks, acts, sounds, smells, and feels like a man. I want a man whose body is covered with hair in all the places where you’d expect a man’s body to be covered in hair. I want a man who loves sports, theater, film, literature, music—culture of all kinds, really—who loves to cook, kiss, cuddle, and do romantic, thoughtful things for me. I want a man whose identity and behavior encompasses the full range of masculine, whose every cell permeates the various dimensions of masculinity. I want a man who’s more of a man than I am.

Usually, when I encounter a man who approximates this idealized vision of mine, that man turns out to be straight, which means—to me—that he’s not quite masculine enough for me. My idealized vision of masculinity is a masculinity that desires masculinity—a gay masculinity, so to speak. Most of the men that I’m attracted to fall just short of this—they’re Everything But The Gay.

Now I know that these desires are heretical to my queer sensibilities and that I am making myself vulnerable to accusations of heteronormative complicity—but I ask you—isn’t admitting these desires, these desires that counter the fluid ideations of queered identity—isn’t that admission a pretty queer thing to do?

Worry Wart (Part I)

For someone who hates to waste time as much as I do, I sure do spend a great many hours worrying. It would be quite easy to blame this absolutely useless habit on my mother (aka The Intergalactic Queen of Fretonia), but I’m past the age of 25 and no longer entitled to attribute my poor habits to parental influence.

I’ve learned to do a fairly good job of hiding my worry, but I confess that I worry about everything. My job involves—nay, requires—that I worry about a great many things: did the students all submit their applications on time? did the students meet all the requirements for student teaching? did I order all the transcripts I need? did the corporation office receive the student teaching applications that I sent them? did all the necessary parties sign the student teaching agreements in all the right places? did the students complete all the necessary paperwork for the school corporation where they’re student teaching? The litany of worries does not end.

Despite my skill in masking my worry, I do indeed worry about everything. No concern transcends my worry—no potentiality is too great or too insignificant to escape my mental preoccupation: will I be able to wake up early enough tomorrow to make it to the gym? will I have enough money in my savings account to for the next über-expensive car repair that I know is lurking around the corner just waiting to foil my holiday plans or my secret desire to finally buy myself a laptop computer? will I be able to complete my revisions in time to submit this article for publication? will I have enough milk left for my coffee in the morning? will the hot guy get voted off Survivor this week? will I have enough time in my life to read all the books and watch all the movies and TV series that I want to?

OK—you get the picture. So here’s my strategy—in order to become the (Relatively) Worry-Free Me I Could Be, I am going to attempt to divide and conquer my worry. First division: worries about what other people can/should/did do vs. worries about what I can/should/will do. Once I cudgel my brains enough to convince myself that there is absolutely nothing I can do to control what others will do (free will is more than just a philosophical construct), I will have sliced my worries in half. Then I can devise some way to divide the remaining worries. I’ll keep you posted.

Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty

Although I fancy myself an intellectual, a man of substance, a person concerned with important issues of character and integrity, one undeniable fact makes me a hypocrite—I am fatally attracted to physical beauty. No matter how hard I try or how much my brain tells me that a man’s character, soul, intelligence, kindness, humanity, etc. are much, much more important that his physical beauty, I am unable to see past the packaging and accord more value to the substance beneath the surface.

I don’t know why this is so, any more than I know why my eyes are hazel or why I prefer chocolate over vanilla, but I fear that my obsession with pulchritude will ultimately cost me dearly. I have been in love three times in my life, and each time I fell in love, the primary attraction was physical, compounded and intensified by the deep admiration I developed for the man’s character, wit, integrity, etc. (but this deep admiration came about only after I had ascertained that the guy’s physical beauty had me entirely enthralled). I know that it would never have occurred in reverse—never would I have become enamored of the guy’s substance first and afterwards come to appreciate his outer beauty. My interest is easily thwarted by a low level of physical beauty.

Not only does this preoccupation lead me to suspect that I am far shallower than I would care to admit, but I also fear that it has cost me in the game of love. Every one of the three beautiful men whom I have loved, whom I have thought the world of, who have made me feel heights of ecstasy and passion heretofore unimaginable—every one of them has broken my heart. Not one of them loved me with the same intensity I felt for him. My refusal to settle for a man whom I consider less than utterly breathtakingly beautiful might very well be the cause of the absence of romantic love in my life. Yet I persist. I want to be the guy who is wise enough to know that true love transcends physical beauty—but I don’t know how to be that guy. For me, physical beauty—and the tactile sensations that accompany my interaction with it—represent bliss. I cling, perhaps stubbornly, to John Keats’ argument:

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all  

    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

Patience

I love myself unconditionally—anyone who’s known me for longer than a week can attest to that. But I’m critical enough of myself to know what my flaws are. Now, I don’t have many, but the ones that I do have are doozies. I’ll start by discussing what I perceive as my greatest character flaw—my impatience.

I hate to wait, since most waiting is a waste of time. Yes, modern technology has greatly diminished the amount of time we waste by waiting, and it can help fill the time we waste by waiting (for example, as I’m waiting in line at the grocery store “customer care” counter to reload my shopping card and my wait is prolonged because the person in front of me must complete five forms to wire money to her relatives in Omaha—and she insists on completing all five forms right at the counter where I need to transact my business...during this time, I can check my email on my iPhone). I suspect my antipathy toward time spent waiting stems from other people’s lack of preparation to do something they should be fully prepared to do. Lemme give you a fer’instance—I browse through Borders and locate the item I want to purchase. As I get in line to pay, I approach the checkout counter with my Borders Rewards card out, my coupon and my debit card ready. The person in front of me has, of course, an armful of books, magazines, CDs, and DVDs. She approaches the counter, piles her items in front of the cashier, and stares vapidly as if she has no clue what the next step in this schema could be. The cashier patiently begins to guide her through the checkout process:

“Hi. Did you find everything you were looking for?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have a Borders Rewards card?”

“Oh, yeah.”

The increasingly annoying customer then begins to rummage through her microwave oven-sized purse. After three rather thorough searches, she announces that she doesn’t have her card with her—shocking, I know—so the cashier looks up her account using her phone number, which yields no results until Annoying Customer remembers that she recently changed her phone number, so the account is probably still listed under her old number. Once this matter is resolved, the customer produces a coupon and insists on using it on an unusually expensive magazine. The cashier politely informs her that coupons may not be used on magazines. In fact, it says so right there on the coupon. Annoying Customer becomes flustered, huffs and puffs for a few moments, then consents to use the coupon toward one of the books she’s purchasing.

Now begins the quest for a form of payment. Brace yourself for this one—in this age of electronic everything, this customer whips out a checkbook. Now I ask you, who the heck uses a personal check to make in-person retail purchases nowadays? OK, let me be gracious enough to understand that the use of technology might surpass the capacity of this diaper-wearing dinosaur’s intellect—but, please—if you insist on using a check, could you save a few minutes of my life and start writing the check BEFORE you reach the counter? Let’s look at all the information you can fill in before you know the exact amount of your purchase: date, “payable to,” and signature. When you get to the checkout counter, you can be ready with your check mostly completed, except for the total amount due. But no—I ask for too much. Annoying Customer must engage in her check-writing ritual, which involves locating the “right” pen, calibrating its ink, meticulously executing her penmanship, entering the check information in her register, calculating her new balance, carefully tearing the check from the pad, and ceremoniously handing the check to the cashier as if she were bestowing upon her the Holy Grail itself.  But alas, Annoying Customer has entered the wrong date on the check, so she must repeat the ritual.

I fume silently but noticeably. Once Annoying Customer’s transaction is complete, a full 10 minutes have elapsed. I have passed the point of fury, and I am now simply bemused. When I approach the counter with all items ready to complete the transaction swiftly and efficiently, the cashier—who recognizes me because I’m a regular customer—chuckles, and we share the tacit irony of the moment.

As I leave the store (approximately two minutes later), I wonder how much of my life has been wasted waiting for other people to complete tasks they should have been able to complete in less than half the time it takes them. Of course, there’s no way to tell, so I decide I’d rather not waste the time trying to figure it out.

Some Context

Considering my level of vanity, I knew it would be only a matter of time before I decided to start a blog.

The two epiphanies that precipitated this blog’s inception, however, were somewhat frightening. One was quite sudden, and the other has been mounting for quite some time. I’ll start with the sudden epiphany.

Two days ago, I awoke craving Funny Bones.  These deliciously unhealthy snack cakes are indigenous to the East Coast (where I grew up), and I haven’t enjoyed their peanut buttery, chocolaty gooiness in a number of years. This craving sparked a suspicion that I was experiencing a midlife crisis—which, from one perspective, would be a good thing, since the logical conclusion would be that I will live to be 90. Not too shabby for a guy who used to smoke a pack a day for twenty years and survived a thoracotomy (brought on by a severe case of pneumonia) one year ago. Then I reconsidered and realized that the first half of my life has gone unblogumented, so I thought I should begin blogumenting my life.

The other epiphany was borderline terrifying—and led me to name this blog as I did. You see, there are certain places in my daily life that are part of my routine. Besides the obvious places that are common to most people’s lives (home and the workplace), I spend a great deal of my time at the gym (specifically, the Colby Fitness center on the Purdue campus), at the Borders in West Lafayette, and at Panera in Wabash Landing (also in West Lafayette). I can also frequently be found grabbing a quick lunch at the HTM cafeteria in Stone Hall on the Purdue campus. As any astute observer of humankind knows, one often encounters the same people in a specific location if one visits that location at approximately the same time of day regularly. For example, when I’m at the gym at 5:30 AM on weekday mornings, on many days I will see the same people who share my freakishly early gym routine. This kind of repeated encounter is to be expected and may even, to a certain degree, provide comfort and familiarity. However, I began to notice one person in particular at every one of my usual haunts—at the gym, at the cafeteria, at Borders, at Panera—everywhere I go, I see this person. Now, I do not suspect that this person is a stalker or that he has any kind of unhealthy interest in me. I simply fear that he represents The Me I Could Be. He shares many of my habits and preferences. He certainly seems to like the same kinds of places as I do. So why am I so terrified that I might evolve into this person? Because he is hideous. If I were Dorian Gray, this guy could be my picture. He is old, he wears thick eyeglasses, he is decrepit, he has a malformed head, he is unattractive, and he is rude. He is everything I could be—if I were to let myself go and neglect the care and nurturing of my mind, body, and soul. So I have resolved to do everything in my power to assure that Decrepit Old Rude Guy does not represent The Me I Could Be. I have constructed an image in my mind of The Me I Could Be—indeed, The Me I WANT To Be. And writing this blog is part of that vision.

Am I overreacting? Perhaps. I do have a bit of the drama queen in me. But I’m not taking any chances.