Celebrating Your Favorite Sea Beastie

Happy Narwhalentine's Day, y'all!

NARWHALS!

The Second Annual GCG Pop Culture Awards

Are canceled, because fuck you, entertainment industry. You're a bunch of craven, pusillanimous money-grubbers, recycling the same old garbage, reinforcing the same hegemonic narratives. You're a bunch of soulless suits who stifle genuine artistic expression in service of the bottom line. You suppress important voices and interesting stories so that you can maintain your profit-driven empire and, in so doing, perpetuate the kyriarchal status quo. You churn out meaningless sequel after crappy reboot, all empty fodder for the entertainment-industrial complex. Any flicker of art or soul or resistance is crushed under the jackboot of the massive money-machine that is big studios.

In your relentless pursuit of ultra-capitalism, moreover, you have proved yourself myopic and cowardly in the extreme. Once again you've utterly failed (ironically enough) to adapt to the demands of the consumer and the changing modes of production and distribution. Your opposition to the unstoppable forward march of technology reveals you to be a tantrum-throwing child, a bully, and an utter fool.

Inevitably, things are changing, and you're too busy screaming and throwing your toys at us consumers to take advantage of it. The real artists – the people with something to say, who are motivated by the Muses and not solely by Mammon – are adapting. They're taking their art and message straight to the people. They're utilizing the almighty power of the internet to raise funds and awareness for their projects, and to distribute their creations directly to the fans.

Unlike you, they're harnessing this awesome new power. Unlike you, they accept the change and work with it. You, entertainment industry, are King Canute, frantically flinging your last shreds of integrity into the sea in the vain hope that it might hold back the tide. You're shitting yourself in terror, and I for one welcome the day – surely imminent now – when the sea of change finally drowns you.

(And the best movie of 2011 was Attack the Block, and the best TV show of 2011 was Community, both of which have of course been totally sidelined by the aesthetically and morally bankrupt gatekeepers of the industry.)

The Super Bowl, Glee, And Pop-Culture Obligations

Few things on this earth interest me less than watching sports. It just does not engage me in the slightest. On the one hand, you have a bunch of (often overpaid) (almost invariably dude-type) humans chasing after a ball for 90 minutes or so; on the other hand, you have LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE IN EXISTENCE, and the former cannot possibly compete for my attention.

American football perhaps tops the list of Sports I Do Not Care About. Friends have gamely attempted to explain the rules to me, but such endeavors always put my brain in a jellified stupor quicker than Of Grammatology and a letter from the bank combined. Sports terminology is my personal soporific.

So you can understand why I anticipated my first Super Bowl with some trepidation. In fact, I looked on wistfully as a friend of mine offered a marvelous piece of counter-programming in the form of “Buffy Bowl”; but I just couldn't not participate in arguably the biggest cultural event in the US calendar.

As it turned out, I had a pretty excellent time. Beer, food, beer, friends, beer, yelling at commercials for being offensive kyriarchal clusterfucks, and beer are some of my favorite things, so I barely even noticed that there was a sport going on. It turns out there's enough of a surrounding circus that you can be reasonably entertained without paying the slightest attention to the game. (Also, it's apparently socially acceptable to be mortal as a newt by like 4pm on Super Bowl Sunday.)

I doubt I could summarize the goings-on better than Liss (except to reiterate: OMG NICKI MINAJ, be still my beating heart), nor get my feminist outrage on better than Fannie, so I won't try. What's interesting to me is my own feeling that, as a pop-culture connoisseur, I absolutely had to experience this event.

You see, this same weekend, I made official my breakup with Glee. I unliked it on Facebook and deleted the unwatched episodes that have been accumulating since October. For a couple of years, much as I would criticize it, Glee was essential viewing for me. The pop-culture buzz, the detailed analysis, the sense of witnessing a significant event in early-twenty-first-century television – it was irresistible. And yet, by the time season three started, the feeling of icy dread that accompanied each episode far outweighed the anticipation of conversation around it. The sheer awfulness of the show had, in my judgment, at last surpassed its cultural relevance.

The criteria we use for judging which pop-culture phenomena are worthy of our time and attention are subtle and strange. I absolutely believe that popular culture is worthy of close study and analysis: that this study can reveal all manner of truths about a given society – how it functions, what it values, what narratives it tells about itself and how these narratives perpetuate or challenge existing systems of domination and oppression. However, no one has the time or energy to be a consumer of all the popular culture from which we can learn these things. I know that everyone makes choices and compromises, but I still find myself second-guessing my own judgments about pop culture. Since I jumped ship on Glee, I understand that it's aired an episode dealing with gay teen sex, and has another forthcoming in which Brittana will actually, you know, do something. These are arguably watershed moments in pop-culture representations of homosexuality in the US, and maybe by bailing when I did I am missing out on something culturally important. I guess my question is:

To what extent are you obligated to engage with something you hate in order to study its sociocultural impact?

On Offense (Or: How I Learned To Be An Asshole)

Recently, I offended someone.

This is, shockingly enough, not a new experience for me, but it got me thinking: what do we mean when we talk about giving (or taking) offense? In thrashing it out with Joel (who, incidentally, is one of the best conversationalists I know, and if you aren't fortunate enough to know them in meat-life you should at least be reading their blog), I realized that there are really two rather different things conflated in the term “offended”.

On the one hand, I am easily offended – by the perpetuation, deliberate or unthinking, of the assorted kyriarchal -isms that comprise the dominant culture where I live.

On the other hand, I am almost impossible to offend – by personal insults, viciously sarcastic banter, slurs on my taste in entertainment, and the like.

See the difference? In the first case, my being offended is not actually the point. The point is that systemic injustice is being perpetuated; my taking offense is merely a manifestation of outrage at injustice, which is the real Bad Thing. The second case, however, turns on personal sensitivity: the Bad Thing here is my hurt feelings.

Collapsing all distinction between these two modes of being offended is problematic. It's what I did as an asshole young teen awash in unexamined privilege, dismissing all instances of people being offended as the hurt fee-fees of oversensitive whiners.

But completely separating the two modes of offense isn't too great either, and I think that's what I've been doing more recently. In my zeal to fight the power, I've been separating offendedness into wheat and tares: being offended at -isms is legitimate and righteous, but personal sensitivity constitutes an illegitimate form of offendedness. Of course, on a very basic level this separation makes no sense at all, because -isms hurt people. The two forms of offendedness are not identical, but they are intertwined.

At a formative age, I learned the hard way to not have hurt feelings. If you let your hurt feelings show, you gave the people trying to hurt you the satisfaction of a job well done, and encouraged them to keep at it. Better to repress those feelings. Better to hide in the library, fade into the background, turn invisible. Better to try not to have feelings at all, and if you must have them, have them in the novels you read, the diaries and poems and stories you write, the secret world in your head to which you retreat in every idle moment.

I was a child with a tenuous grasp on theory of mind as it was, so “hurt feelings are a weakness and a failing” was not the most helpful lesson for my preteen self to learn. As much as I've tried since then to unlearn everything I absorbed from the kids who made my life so hellish for that couple of years, those things are an insidious part of who I am. (I am worthless. Nobody could ever like me. Showing hurt feelings means they've won.) My brain knows that hurt feelings are a perfectly legitimate reaction to insults and sarcasm, but my gut still dismisses them as weakness, oversensitivity, invalid.

I am, my many past and present failures in this field notwithstanding, getting pretty practiced at battling the kyriarchy. Even though I don't always combat them when and how I should, I have at least gotten quite sensitive to the pervasive presence of -isms all around me.

But I am still not at all sensitive to individuals' hurt feelings. Many times, my personal insensitivity has caused offense, and sometimes I haven't even understood how. What I've realized from this latest incident is that I am drawing an artificial dualism that cannot be maintained. Systemic injustice can cause hurt feelings. Personal insensitivity can cause hurt feelings. Most of the time, it's kind of both.

I will never, I think, be a very sensitive person. I'm too callused by my childhood experiences to be hurt by a bit of mockery or rudeness; but I will fight my tendency to assume that everyone else is too. I will bear in mind that what looks to me like personal sensitivity might well be influenced by a systemic injustice that my privilege has blocked from my view. I will remind myself that, even though a certain joke or comment wouldn't be hurtful me, it might well hurt somebody else, and that doesn't mean that person is oversensitive or somehow in the wrong for feeling that way.

I will learn. I will get better at this.

Jesus Beat Me Up

(A short story of the fictional variety. Please note that I do not share my narrator's conception of "virginity".)

I lost the unthinking faith of my childhood when I got old enough to start thinking critically; not in the sudden, momentous way one loses a wallet or one's virginity, but in the gradual, trickling fashion one loses the memories of a long-dead grandparent, which fade each day they're left unthought of until nothing remains but a vague sense of past warmth, so distant and dim it might have happened to a character in a book you once read. That's how it was with me and Jesus.

If there is a God, he/she/they/it must surely curse puberty as its greatest enemy. How many of us, after a decade or so of trusting now-I-lay-mes, abandon the cold comfort of prayer for the more tangible nighttime consolations (and much more immediate gratification) of masturbation? How many of us, in the earth-shattering self-absorption of our changing bodies and developing minds, put away thoughts of the divine along with all our other childish things? How many of us, with the new-found cynicism of the morbid young teenager, declare religion a false hope for children and the feeble-minded, and commit to a far more sophisticated preoccupation with existentialism, Bauhaus, and still more masturbation?

I'm extrapolating, of course. If puberty was for everyone the Christ-killer it was for me, this world would have no priests, no street-corner God-botherers, no thoughtful theologians; and I no longer subscribe to the adolescent arrogance that once convinced me all priests and God-botherers and theologians were stunted creatures arrested in a childhood state of denial. Truth be told, these days I envy the God-botherers their faith. I admire the strength of will it takes to believe in anything other than the abyss. When I hear them speak of experiencing God's love, of “just knowing” something is out there, of having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, I no longer snort in derision; instead, I find myself wishing I knew how to convince myself that any of this was true. I wonder if a large segment of humanity really does have access to a plane of existence that is closed to me. And then I wonder if I had my shot at finding it, and I blew it.

It happened at about 3:07am on Wednesday, July 11^th, 2007, a few hundred feet shy of the rim of Mt Kilimanjaro. I was climbing with a group of friends from university. This was the final day of our ascent, and we had risen shortly after midnight to tackle the steep scree slope that was to take us to Gillman's Point by sunrise, and from there along the crater rim to the highest point in Africa. I never made it as far as the rim.

At 16,000 feet, the air was thin and bitterly cold. Every breath seemed to empty me of more oxygen than it took in, and each step up the treacherous slope was punishing to my lungs and body. “Do Your Ears Hang Low” was looping incessantly and infuriatingly in my head. On top of all that, altitude sickness had been targeting me with a vengeance since Horombo.

For the third time within half an hour, I stumbled to my knees behind a rock to vomit up what little was left in my stomach. Even through the thermal layers, I could feel the sharp icy scree digging into my legs as a fresh paroxysm convulsed me forward onto my gloved hands. For a moment I rested there on my hands and knees, sucking the last little chunks of vomit from between my teeth and spitting them into the shameful little patch of dark brown bile. Gasping in lungfuls of thin, piercing air, I wiped the involuntary tears from my eyes onto my shoulder, and that was when Jesus appeared to me.

He was barefoot in jeans and a Penn State T-shirt, and even in my miserable state I knew that was impossible, but I barely had a second to register that thought before he kicked me in the face.

More in surprise than pain, I reeled backward. Jesus stepped calmly forward and kicked me again, this time in the stomach. Through all my layers, it barely hurt, but I was so weakened by altitude and exhaustion that the force of the kick sent me sprawling.

His face inscrutable, Jesus leaned over and grabbed me by the throat. My gloved hands scrabbled uselessly at his bare one, as with steely grip he hauled me up and slammed me against the big rock. Everything swam as I fought for even the too-thin air surrounding me, and then Jesus' fist smashed into my nose.

My whole head rang with shrapnel from the explosion of pain. The stupid song was still repeating, amped up to a screaming volume in my ears, as Jesus punched me in the face, again and again; weirdly, exactly in time with “Do Your Ears Hang Low”.

When I felt pummeled to the limit of my endurance, sure that one more punch would tear through my skull like tissue paper, Jesus suddenly let go. Dazed, plummeting toward unconsciousness, I slid back to the ground. From my pulverized face, I looked up at the figure – who did not seem to have exerted himself at all – with one thought filling my mind: What the fuck?

Jesus smiled mildly, delivered one final kick to my crotch, and sauntered away down the mountainside.

A moment later, the guide found me, curled up and bleeding, too tired and hurt even to weep. He and my friend Terry between them got me back down to Kibo Hut, and nobody ever mentioned the bruises that discolored my face for weeks afterward. At times I wondered if anyone else could even see them.

For The Last Time, He Is Not My Boyfriend

I grew up with two brothers who are more or less the best people I know, so it's perhaps predictable that all my life I have tended to form very close friendships with dude-type humans. Equally predictably, all my life I have had to combat the constant “tee-hee, it's like you're dating” juvenilia from those around me.

In kindergarten and first grade: Hal is not my boyfriend, Marshall is not my boyfriend, Davis is not my boyfriend (actually he kind of was, but we were six or seven).

In prep school: George is not my boyfriend, Gregory is not my boyfriend, Nikit is not my boyfriend.

In high school: Eystein is not my boyfriend, Chris is not my boyfriend (and if I sort of wanted him to be, it was a very confusing time in my life and I was working a lot of stuff out).

In university: Sam is not my boyfriend (though if I had a pound for every time someone legitimately thought he was, I could easily pay off my student debt).

In grad school: Tyler is not my boyfriend, and would you all please stop saying that he is?

Maybe the first couple of times it was funny, on account of the sheer outlandishness of the whole idea. But with enough repetition it becomes, frankly, problematic.

Constant reassertion of a bullshit heteropatriarchal narrative, in such a way that any objections can be countered with “jeez, can't you take a joke?”, is a time-honored bullying tactic of the Heteropatriarchy Police.

I know you all still think it's funny. But to me it's starting to feel as though the Heteropatriarchy Police are saying, “Hm, two single opposite-sex humans are spending a lot of time together, but with 0% chance of romance on either side. We'd better put a stop to this before the whole bullshit heteropatriarchy collapses! Everyone, quick, start mercilessly pummeling them with the language of romance so they get the message that their friendship as it is is not okay.”

I hate what this narrative says about the power differentials of gender and sexuality. I know if we were both dudes, or both women – or probably even if he were the gay one and I the breeder – we wouldn't get anywhere near this amount of teasing. And I hate what it says about the supreme importance of romantic relationships in our society. I know we only get this much teasing because we're both single. For comparison, I recently mentioned my friend JT to my little brother (who, lest we forget, is one of the best people I know); my brother said in a jokey voice, “Is he your boyfriend?”, but when I said, “He's married,” my brother dropped the entire subject. So apparently a friend's marital status can end the “is he your boyfriend” jokes, but the basic fact of my, you know, sexuality can't? A marriage certificate allows two opposite-sex people to be platonic friends, but the fact that one of them is gay doesn't?

Why does the concept of a very deep, meaningful, 100% platonic friendship between a dude-person and a lady-person blow so many people's minds? Hell, even if I was straight we could still have this sort of friendship. It's not like we're inventing the wheel here. There's even a TV Tropes page for our relationship. Truth be told, I expect better from the denizens of a campus that prides itself on its inclusivity, queerness, and all-round challenging of the kyriarchy.

In conclusion, take your bullshit heteropatriarchal narrative and shove it up your arses.

You Are A Boring, Selfish Jerk

It's a fundamental tenet of my theology and my anthropology that admitting you are a boring, selfish jerk is the first step on the lifelong road to not being a boring, selfish jerk.

The trouble is, sometimes I find myself unable to take any other steps.

When I haven't written anything in a while, it's usually because I've been getting bogged down in self-recrimination. There's no point. I have nothing to say. God, I am such a boring, selfish jerk.

External validation doesn't really help. In fact, my psyche can get quite creative in trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of, say, having many awesome friends whilst knowing myself to be a boring, selfish jerk. At best, I am cheered that I have at last developed some ability to pretend to other humans that I am not (entirely) a boring, selfish jerk.

After all, what is human interaction but a continuous endeavor to pretend to one another that we are not (or, to put it less cynically, to try not to be) boring, selfish jerks?

And how am I supposed to live out the sacred mantra Be True To Yourself when even I can't stand my true self?

I think seminary probably has a higher-than-average concentration of people who loathe themselves. I think an acute awareness of and furious frustration with your own total depravity can be a very powerful motivating factor to orient yourself toward the Ultimate.

Sometimes, though, it swamps you. It's not that life doesn't go on. It's not that you don't still have plenty to enjoy and be grateful for. It's just that you go about it all stooped under the consuming burden of self-knowledge. And what are you supposed to do with that?

What do you do with all that self-loathing?