Returning to Blogging

I went away from blogging. I think it had a lot to do with the level of denial needed to get through our life at the moment. Well, at least denial about the financial part of our life. I have this beautiful, amazing, funny child and a loving, wonderful wife and we have a roof over our head. Most days this is what I focus on and I let a lot of the little details of how our life has changed in the last nine month slip away. Writing concentrates the mind on the details and I've been taking a holiday of sorts. However, I think it may be time to stop with the holiday. So I'm back and we'll see how this goes.

A great deal has happened in the last year. X has grown from a tiny newborn baby
to a big one year old.


I went back to work for six days before being laid off in the middle of February. I have been a SAHM for X's first year, although this was not a choice I made but just how life happened. I would not trade this year home with him for anything, but I would trade the way I got there.

Emily has officially entered the academic job market, applying for quite a few jobs. It is exciting, yet nerve wracking, waiting to hear if/where we will be moving this coming school year. This job hunt has the effect of putting aspects of our lives on hold. I look forward to being able to move forward decisively at some point.

We are recipients of multiply types of state aid. X is on Medicaid and he and I are on WIC (because according to the state, I am a single mother), although now that he just turned a year, WIC is now just for him. I have been receiving unemployment benefits since February which are due to run out in the middle of January. When that happens our family will suddenly qualify for food stamps and more free health care, which is good because the COBRA subsidy for my health insurance runs out December 1st and I REALLY can't afford the COBRA insurance without it.

So this is our life right now. Well, at least a small portion of it.

24 Hours in Pictures

The Katester informs me that there's this thing? Where you take a photo every hour you're awake of a day? One of the bloggers she reads said we should do it? Yeah, so I did it.

Here is:
FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, IN CRAPPY CAMERAPHONE PHOTOS

MIDNIGHT

We're watching a lot of TV these days that comes on late at night. A Daily Show (not The Daily Show; The Daily Show has writers, A Daily Show has Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver fuckin' around without a script), followed by multiple re-runs of Sex and the City, followed by the midnight Simpsons episode, and by the time we've worked through all of that the 2 AM X-Files is on...It's pretty terrible for us. Plus, Uncle's schedule keeps having him get in around 12:30...so we just stay up to be together. So this is what midnight looks like in our house: my wife, in her fleece pajama pants and robe that my mom got her for Christmas, clutching that remote like her life depends on it.

ONE AM

My comprehensive exams start in a week: Friday the First. For those not in academia, comps are a series of absurd hoops that grad students need to jump through; they ensure that you have a basic grounding in the core texts of your field, and they compel you to spend a whole weekend of your life writing pointless essays. Because of this, I'm spending all my time lately reading articles I don't find particularly interesting, so I can write pointless essays about them in a week's time. 32 pages worth of pointless essays. On the left is an article by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan about democratic consolodation. On the right is my EndNote entry for said article. On the couch in the background you can see Sara's leg.

TWO AM

Oh, and did I mention our projected insem date is somewhere between Monday the fourth (the last day of my exam) and Wednesday the sixth? So we're a little obsessed. At 2 AM the wife felt the need to read to me about insemination timing.

I coulda done a three AM shot, but it would have been of me in bed in the dark, trying to fall asleep.

EIGHT AM

Kate had to leave for work early, so I got up to see her off, pack her lunch, and generally be wifelike. After she left, I picked up her bathrobe and put it on. I've been doing that a lot lately. This is a bathroom-mirror shot, if you can't tell.

NINE AM

Incidentally, all of the shots from this point forward? Could have been mirrors of the one AM shot. Instead, I photographed other things. There was some sort of Serious Cat Dramatics happening in the house this morning; I think there were more squirrels than usual on the back porch. Both Wicket and Sara kept tearing back and forth between back door and kitchen window with puffy tails. These R Srius Cats.

TEN AM

Because every morning needs some Dana Scully in it. Her hair looks so freakin' good in the ninth season, which is funny because the show is breaking my heart. Why even bother pretending it's the X-Files without some Mulder/Scully longing gazes and witty repartee? And Invisible Mulder? Not cute. I CAN HAS VISIBLE MULDER NOW PLZ. (Funny, I think that's what Scully's thinking the whole season, too.)

ELEVEN AM.

Finally I get around to breakfast. The smoothie of the week is strawberries, blackstrap molasses, maple syrup, soy milk, and plain cow's-milk yogurt. It's not disgusting, and it's healthy. Apparently.

NOON
Time to get dressed. I bought that shirt at the beach last weekend. This is roughly my fashion MO on school-or-other-official-days: ribbed tank top, button down shirt, sweater over top if it's cold enough, cool looking jeans. Hair alternates between up in a bun and clipped, and pulled in a low pony-tail. I like up better, but pony-tail is winning these days because 1) cold=hats=hair should be down and b) my hair is just a little too long and I run a severe risk of a big poof of hair puffing up like a rooster's comb. Need a haircut.

ONE PM

Workin' on the train. A different article this time. Also I kept having to pause in my reading to dance in my seat to "Dirt Off Your Shoulders," which is only recently on my iPod.

TWO PM

And I arrive at 'Snice, a vegetarian/vegan coffee shop in the West Village. I was meeting my exam study group. We are a motley bunch: different regional foci, different theoretical foci, different tastes in caffeinated beverages. You can see the edges of them through the glass. I got the seat by the door. It was cold.

THREE PM

'Snice has the most amazing freakin' cupcakes. They're vegan and covered with icing like I used to eat out of the can that I kept by my bed when I was a kid. We almost had them be the cupcakes at our wedding (for our gluten-eating guests), but the vanilla ones are healthy-looking: you know, they look like they have nutritional value. We didn't want to scare our guests, so we went with Crumbs' less healthy-looking but almost as yummy cupcakes. But I got one today. And a Cuban with soy ham and lots of mustard. And a large hot chocolate, which had entirely too like chocolate in it. Basically, I want liquid chocolate pudding.

FOUR PM

Once something passes two hours in length, unless it has a lot of shiny bells and whistles, I've lost my attention span. This is my "I'm done studying for my exam today" face. Taken in the bathroom at 'Snice. Luckily, we broke up the session about 20 minutes later.

FIVE PM

I got home around 5:30 to a very exciting piece of mail: my very first journal article is published! My copies have arrived! It's a graduate-student women's studies journal; the article is the first published thing I've gotten out of my undergrad thesis. That was my squee of the day.

SIX PM

My evening needed some Dana Scully in it, too. On second thought, those Doggett and Reyes kids are OK. I like there being Mexicans on TV, even when they're played by white girls. And there's a baby around. But still. I CAN HAZ. Etc.

SEVEN PM

Kate gets home from her super-stressful day, and we have to go out tonight (more on that below). Dinner is tomato soup with shredded cheese melted on top. This is a loser's way out of a meal, but she will eat it and it contains vegetables and/or fruit.

EIGHT PM

Our evening was spent at the Park Slope Food Co-op, where we've been members since we moved to the city. It's the largest member-run co-op in the country; there are about 30 paid employees, and 14000 active members, who all work one shift a month (roughly) and do all the major work of the store, from stocking to checkout to designing the newspaper and running the office. Kate's shift started at eight-thirty, but mine didn't start until 9, so I grabbed some much-needed groceries in the break. In this basket: cream cheese, frozen peas, soy milk, tortilla chips, peanut butter, and other necessaries.

NINE PM

Then I took my place at the cash register. Checking out groceries and taking payment are different jobs at the co-op, in order to reduce the number of people who handle cash. I handle cash. We just got a new system, that makes our lives much easier.

TEN PM

Providing plenty of time to do my homework. This is for class, not for exams. It hurt my brain due to the dumb. Sigh.

ELEVEN PM

Then we took the bus home. And came home. And watched TV (not the X-Files: I want her to stay married to me, after all). And ate cheese puffs. And blogged. (Photos not included of that. No one wants to see my in my little brother's red hoodie and blue cotton panties. Not even my wife; she hates this hoodie.)

Kate promises to do this soon...on a day when she won't just be taking photos of what she's watching on TV all day, which is what tomorrow is expected to be.

I See Straight People: Or, How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Political Science

I promised the wife I'd post today, so she could have a day off. I had one post planned, but it's not happening. (Aw, hell, it's an anonymous blog, right? I've got what we call "the crazies" round our parts. It involves a lot of not going to sleep, which wears on the braincells. The other post takes thought; this one is stream of consciousness)

I'm away in Arizona, participating in a big academic thing (which is going well, despite the crazies). However, this has been an interesting opportunity to ponder my position within the academy, for a lot of reasons: who do I say who my advisor is? What does it mean that I go to such a crazy school? Is my dissertation actually interesting to anyone?

And, more than anything, why the *fuck* is the discipline of political science so full of straight people?

In computer terms, there's something called 'pinging,' where you send off a signal from one computer to another to make sure the connection is there. (This is probably old hat to most of you, but is a relatively recent discovery for me, Mac user since 1996.) In any case, when I get into a group of people of unknown queerness, I start pinging desperately. I talk about my wife. I talk about queer organizing. I talk about gay bars. God help me, I make tedious sexual innuendo where appropriate. *ping* I say. *queersoverherepleaseletmeknowi'mnotalone*. *ping*

I remember this feeling from Model UN in college; traveling with the team, there was always a strangeness about spending so much time in that straight world. I said at the Model UN banquet my senior year that I appreciated the team for giving me my only consistent contact with straight people, and not only was it the laughline of the evening, it was so resoundingly true that it was a little suprising. And now I'm amidst a bunch of poli sci PhD candidates, including, amazingly enough, a fellow alum of that Model UN team. And I'm pinging. I think I've told more people about our plans to have kids in the last week than I did in the two months before hand. *ppingfuturelesbianmomoverhereping* I've said the words 'my wife' and 'our wedding' at least ten times a day. *pingareyououtthereping* I'm dressing as butchly as I can, which is, unfortuately, not that butch. *pingdykeintanktopoverhereping*

And nothing. NOTHING. I'm pinging like a motherfucker and the closest thing I've gotten to a result is a very nice straight boy with a queer girlfriend (he happens to share my taste in bad TV and sushi, so it's not a total wash). I'm seeing butch girls with short hair and nose rings talk about their husbands, effeminate boys using pool cues as proxies to convince me of something I don't really care about. I'm seeing a huge thunderous mountain of straight people. I'm sick of it.

So, yes, I'm happy there's a growing conversation here about having spouses and kids and how to make academia work while still having a family. And I'm happy that I'm here--there's no way I could not be. But I'm tired of pinging. I'm tired of trying. I am tired of straightness. I want to go home.