Give me strength.

Since I got back from taking the written part of my comprehensive exams I have been madly doing tons of laundry (including the drapes) because of all of the CO2 residue all over my apt. It is after midnight & I still have 2 loads of clothes to go & I have been ironing these damn curtains for like an hour. I take a little break to blog & then I check my Faculty email. I hope you are sitting down (in the days of the iPad, you never know...)

Here is the subject line:
"concerning my absentance on jueves el ocho del abril del dos mil y diez y uno.(april 8 2011)"
Followed by:

haha i totally don't know the how to say :concerning my absentance (YES! TWICE!!) on , in spainsh (I think this means Spanish). well, my major is fine arts (as opposed to, say, Spelling??) and friday (Capital F) we had a field trip in the french quater (French Quarter, I think). I have a note for you , but its says till 1:30 but by the time i got to school i  missed your class. I have a hard copy too but this is what the note said:

Followed by some note I won't bore you with here.

So thats the note.. I understand if you do not accept it being that i forgot to get this before (you can figure out Underline but not Capitalize??) the field trip, but i did think i was going to make it to class.

sorry for missing class and making you read all of this.

I posted back a little missive with a subject line of  "........................."

Hola D....
Regarding your ABSENCE on el jueves el ocho de abril de dos mil ONCE, I will need a hard copy signed by Professor A. or an email directly from him/her.

Hasta pronto
El Profe

I feel bad for using Spanglish but this was about as civil as I could be after inhaling this damn spray starch....

Inspiration is where you find it..

I was walking down Amnesia Lane with an old friend via FB messaging & his words inspired me to tell this story. Here is the last paragraph of his message:
Today, I am the perfect me. The perfect summation of my past and my goals for the future. Without them, I would not be who I am. Without those friends, I would not be who I am.

I guess you could say I was still walking Wildways until probably MG 02. I had been off the scene & just working cater waiter jobs since Xmas but I decided to tempt fate & happened to run into my evil ginger tranny snaggle-puss ex-roommate Summer, who walked up to me & slapped my face in 735. Chaos ensued, no police were called but I walked away from the fruit loop for good. I didn't step foot near that corner unless I was coming to or from work & even then I trod very cautiously. By Labor Day, I'd been blessed enough to have met a boyfriend who helped finance not only my 1st year at UNO but also spending money for my trip to LA for the taping of The Weakest Link (Aug 28th, the 1st Thursday of my 1st semester).
Well, I'm sure you know how that part went. (& If not, I'll attach a link)
So when I got back to NOLA, it was Southern Decadence. I worked a beer bar out of the doors of the Bourbon Orleans & made a Fortune (for me) & was feelin good after several months of sobriety & success.

All of this elation was tempered (not to say devastated) by a call from my landlady that Monday, informing me that my neighbors had reported dead dogs in the back yard. I said "hunh???" You see, around this time I had acquired a biracial vegetarian stripper cokehead whom I'll call Betti Spaghetti. What she didn't tell me after we met (thru a cokehead cabdriver neighbor of mine) was that she was bringing a dog along. Well, the long & the short is that the dog had had puppies in the backyard & Betti was supposed to be getting rid of them to other strippers. I never even looked in the backyard the whole weekend because the curtains were always closed & I guess I took it for granted the dogs, like her, were gone. What I discovered was altogether more gruesome. I went back there to find where there had been 7 puppies & 1 mama, there were 2 puppies barking in the corner of the yard with the mama on a chain & the bodies of 2 puppies that had clearly been eaten close to her. I still do not know to this day where the other 3 puppies are.
So, after feeling like I'm in the middle of the worst nightmare of my life, I call the SPCA.

The man on the phone is absolutely retarded. I'm sure I was a little...unnerved but he was totally unhelpful & when I told him what street I lived on "Grand Route St. John" this man tells me "We don't serve St. John Parish, this is Orleans only" I asked to speak to a supervisor. Well, maybe I yelled a little bit. The supervisor was pretty brusque as well & when I explained my situation as calmly as I could (which is to say probably not much) & I remember telling this woman "I just don't know what to do. I can't bring these animals up inside my house as they are crawling with fleas but I can't leave them out there, I'm scared there are going to be more dead dogs in the back yard when I wake up & this idiot man who answered the phone is too stupid to know that my street is not a parish--" and then Miss Woman cut me off & said I was being abusive & then this ho HUNG UP ON ME.
I called back but those dirty mofos turned on the answering machine so I left them some hysterical message about being afraid of more dead dogs in the back yard.

I called my boyfriend in hysterics & like he had the presence of mind to come by with garbage bags & food for the mama dog. Thank God he actually had the fortitude to pick the lil dead darlings up, I was absolutely petrified to touch them. He fed the living puppies and kinda separated them from the mama dog, but there was no kind of kennel or anything & I didn't have anything like that so I think they dogs must have stayed the night out there because the SPCA didn't come out until the next day, around 1 PM.

My bitchy quasi-twin straight couple neighbors (more on these 2 in another blog) woke me up, banging on my door & questioning me about the dogs & I told them I didn't know when the SPCA would be there. They were really ugly with me (like these were my dogs in the 1st place anyway) like I should have taken care of them & I told them I didn't even know they were still there but they weren't hearing it. They were hoarders & had some chicken wire & so set up a lil cage on their side of the porch & took these poor flea ridden lil puppies up there & when the SPCA got there, it looked like they'd had them up there for awhile. The SPCA people were rude at best and didn't really seem like they were buying the whole Betti Spaghetti story (again, another blog, just relax) but it was the truth & I stuck with it. All I remember about them is that they took a report from what little information I could give them. I had her real name & the name of whichever skeezy bar it was she said she was working at but I don't think it was a whole lot to go on.
I never have seen Miss Spaghetti  again. She called once & said she'd found a new place to live and that she'd be by for her stuff the next day (i.e. when I would be in class) & when I got home there was like a pyramidal stack of her boxes up in my living room. I got a call from her that night, saying that the cabdriver wanted to charge her a $40 moving fee (i'm sure she had better, shall we say, more  jaw-grinding plans for that $40) and that she'd be by once she got a ride. A day later I guess that ho never found a ride bc I put all her boxes out on the street to let them be picked up like the trash she was.

My elation about the whole Weakest Link affair was pretty crushed the following Monday, when I was arrested on a warrant for a weed charge I had previously been told was dropped, but that truly is another story.

Geez grrl I really didn't set out to tell you all this, but I'm glad I did. It is all inspired by the last paragraph of your message. I honestly cried when I read those words, for they are to live by. They are the best expression of where I am at most days. Without this (and so many other tragedies) I could never have experienced the dimensions of Fierceness that I have achieved, am achieving & will continue to achieve.

Praise Bless.

A Fiery adventure with a Happy Ending...

So this morning I had planned to leave him quite early to go to campus & study before my conversation class at 4:30 but instead I got involved with Facebook & returning emails. So I was in my bedroom when I heard an electric type buzzing noise (like the kind you hear when a transformer or something goes out) like Buzz--BUZZ--buzz, and I looked in the living room & I saw a light in the corner of the room gettin brighter & darker & I thought, "There's no lamp right there!" and I ran into the living room and saw smoke coming from behind my sofa, the one that's under the window. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to grab the fire extinguisher from under my sink & I ran back into the living room, and I pulled the couch away from the wall to see exactly what was burning, (thinking I'd forgotten to unplug my heating pad or some equally absurd thing) & the electrical cord from my AC window unit was plugged into a circuit breaker-type, single plug extension cord (same voltage as the plug in the wall) and that's what was on fire, where the two cords were plugged in. I put the fire out with a couple of generous sprays of the fire extinguisher but the smoke got everywhere (not to mention CO2 dust, ugh). Just as all of this is going on I got a phone call from one of my supervisors at Tulane, asking me some question about scheduling training. I was like "I'm in the middle of an electrical fire, I will have to talk to you later!"
Since the fire was out, I called my landlady to tell her what was happening & she had heard the electrical noise & she was asking me about that. She came up (along with our gardener, to have a look at things, and he pulled the couch further away from the wall & we noted the burnt up carpet & the burnt spot on the back of the couch. She got her son (who is a contractor & our general handyman, I guess you could say) to come have a look at it and he was kinda freaked that the circuit breaker didn't work. I was freaked about it too, especially considering that the air conditioner wasn't even on! In fact, I don't think I have turned it on in several days. I am so grateful that I had drawn the curtains last night, and had them up in the tiebacks, or else they'd have gone up in no time flat.

I am even more grateful for my friend & classmate Estefanía. Not long after all this business was over, she called to offer me a ride to school. I told her what had just happened & she was like Scarlett O'Hara to me. She was so kind--she picked up lunch for us & when she came over & saw the dust all over the place, she said, "After we get finished eating, I'm gonna help you clean up in here." What a Life Saver!!!

Believe me when I tell you every single surface in both rooms was coated with varying depths of white CO2 dust & ash. Ugh. This gal was a trooper. We both cleaned in the living room, but pretty soon I had to get out of her way & start cleaning off all these smiley face things on my computer desk. Every time I looked in the other room, she was slinging furniture all over the place, frantically dusting & vacuuming everything in sight. We must have dusted & re-dusted my entertainment center at least 3 times because there was so much dust all up in my curtains. Double ugh. We took down all those things & oh Lord we were some busy little worker bees!

I really can't thank her enough. Well, her & her ADD meds. I didn't take any, but I kinda got the buzz by osmosis, if you know what I mean. There is no way I would have had the oomph to get done half of the stuff we got done in about 3 or 4 hours by myself. We were a bit late to class (& I'm sure smelled of residual smoke) but we still made it!

Life is so strange. Here I am, on the verge of taking my comprehensive exams for my MA next week, about to receive another award & graduate & go on to the next amazing chapter &  I could have been on the streets, if not for my internet addiction & quick thinking. & My house would still be looking like Cocaine Paradise, if not for the Amazing Estefanía!!!

This is how I should know that I am, quite frankly, Too Blessed To Be Stressed!

Fun with make up tests!

So this student who sent me the deranged email from the previous blog found me in the copy room during my office hours yesterday (which kinda blows his/her excuse about a doctor's appointment, btw) and it really was a good thing I was copying the tests I was about to administer so I didn't have to look at him/her in the face.
--Did you get my email, Don?
--Yes.
--Is that cool if I come during your office hours for that retake.
--Yes. (still staring at the copy machine)
--I was just wondering if you got my email.
--Yes. (continue staring at the copy machine as it proceeds to have a nervous breakdown in sympathy as the paper jams)
--OK I wasn't really sure I sent it to the right email.
--I'll see you Wednesday, the copy machine is going crazy.

Fast-Forward to my office hours today. They begin at 1 & class is at two. Crazy Student breezes in to my office (where another student is taking a makeup as well), waving around this piece of paper, saying "I was making a copy of this for" (umm, the last time you saw me I was at a copy machine, I'm pretty sure I could have made a copy, paper jams tend not to have long-term damage) I took this person outside & questioned him/her about the logic involved with showing up 15 minutes late. I got a blank stare followed by:
--Well, I didn't realize you were such a stickler for punctuality. I figured I could just take the test real fast & then see you in class.
--What you are not understanding here is that our class starts at 2. This means you will have to take the test "real fast" & then I will have to grade it "real fast" so you can make an informed decision about whether or not you are going to drop this class. What I am not understanding is why you weren't here earlier. If it were me in this situation, I promise you I would have been here 15 minutes earlier, STUDYING. Perhaps with those notecards I mentioned in class.

You have no idea how glad I was that the next thing I heard was not "What are notecards?"

So I had this person sit & take the test & SURPRISE: an F. S/He sat there & watched me grade the test. I couldn't look at him/her then either. After I wrote the 48 on the page I handed the test back & said, "I really don't know what to say about this that I haven't already said. I honestly do my very best to try to make this material comprehensible but this is clearly not the time for you to be taking this class."
More blank staring & then a sort of hangdog look & then "Ok, then, see you around."

Needless to say this person was absent from class but, last time I checked online, has still not dropped the class.

In other news, here is the latest gem from my inbox, from a different student:

Buenas noches Dr. Ray,

I would have liked to speak with you in person in regards with my grades but since I procrastinated, I can't do so and I sincerely apologize for that. I understand that I've made a lot of poor grades (i.e I have failed everything and never done any homework). since I started this class. And I was wondering, if possible, by doing all of the assignments and voice recordings, along with doing exceptional on the next few tests that I would end up with a possible C? I'm not even sure if I'm asking too much for even a C. I was hoping to get an insight with you on whether or not I should just drop this class. Thank you for your time

 

Ok. Now this I can deal with.

& I thought the notecard questions were insolent...

Here is another awesome email from one of my lil brainiacs. This person actually sent this to me twice, 1st as a reply to a mass email I sent a week ago & the second time as a stand-alone message. Neither time did /she actually sign it. In case you are wondering why s/he calls me "Don," it is because I often sign my emails "Don Samuel"--i.e. it is a title & not my 1st name. I'm not sure this person knows this or not. Please understand that this is a student who didn't come to the midterm (nor send an email or call ahead) and just popped back into class the following Wednesday. I offered to let him/her take a make-up on Friday, s/he agreed. When I arrived Friday, guess what s/he was sitting around doing at this desk in the Foreign Languages Office? If you guessed "studying," You're Dead Wrong. S/he was Texting. TEXTING!! Needless to say, s/he was CLEARLY not ready to take the midterm, so I allowed him/her until Monday to prepare. This is also someone who hasn't passed ANYTHING besides one quiz (and I think I was probably drunk when i graded it, so it's most likely a mistake on my part than studying on his/hers). S/he scraped by on the midterm & decided NOT to drop the class (against my advice). So now, without any further ado, comes this (file it under: give an inch & they try to take a mile)

Hey Don

  Check it out. I just got word that I have a doctors (doctor's, you mean) appointment for Monday at 2:30pm. (Our class is at 2:00pm) Its (It's or it is) really difficult for me to get these appoinments so I have to go when they fit me in. I know we have a test on Monday and I am trying to do better then the stunt I pulled during the exam and let you know as soon as I know. (Have YOU ever heard of a doctor's office that gave out appointments on Sunday??) I will be able to provide a doctors excuse from their office. If your (you're or you are) not cool with letting me make up the test I respect that as you have already done it once (actually twice, if you think about it) but I want you to let me know the verdict. (No, you really don't) I resent (re-sent, you mean?) it cause (because, you mean) I did not change the subject in the reply email and I did not want you to think I was that lazy. (TOO LATE)

This is me again. Le Sigh. I haven't answered this yet. I would appreciate some suggestions here. I am completely at a loss. Every time I try, I just end up typing "PLEASE DROP THIS CLASS & STOP MAKING ME GRADE THIS NONSENSE YOU ARE NOT EVEN TRYING TO STUDY" or some variant thereof.....

"In My Skin"--A Movie Review. (Spoilers)

"Dans ma peau" ("In My Skin") is a French film from the mind of Marina de Van, who wrote, directed and starred in this horrific tale of self-annihilation. Before I go any further let me state this clearly: PLEASE DO NOT WATCH THIS FILM. I cannot in good conscience advise any friend/foe/stranger who stumbles across this blog to see this. I watched it several days ago & quite frankly have been trying to forget it ever since. I watched it at home on an average size TV, I don't believe I would have made it through watching it in a cinema.

De Van is the French 21st-century cinema Sylvia Plath, and even goes so far as to name her protagonist "Esther" (If you haven't read  "The Bell Jar," Please do) a 20something who goes to a house party with a friend/co-worker where she wanders off into the woods & cuts her leg quite severely on a piece of scrap metal. She doesn't notice it until much later, after she gets back to the party & even then she goes out for coffee afterwards before seeking medical attention. The doctor (played by de Van's brother, Adrien) is shocked that she didn't notice it--as are her bourgeois, older boyfriend Vincent (Laurent Lucas) and the aforementioned Sandrine (Léa Drucker). Esther is fascinated by the cut and one day at her market research job she has a report to revise on a strict deadline and a terrible case of writer's block. What does our heroine do? Surely not pop a Vyvance & power through. Instead, she heads for the building's boiler room where she takes something sharp out of a tool box & proceeds to cut up on her stitches. Somehow she manages to not bleed to death & the next time we see her, she is at her desk, typing a lot faster than I am now.  She later goes to Sandrine at her desk (who is busy & bitchy--how French!) and asks her to go out for a coffee. When Sandrine rejects her offer & says she's busy Esher tells her about her self-mutliation in a puzzled yet elated tone. By the time Sandrine has caught on to how serious it is, Esther clearly feels rejected and rescinds the coffee invite & heads back to her desk.
As the film progresses we watch as Esther becomes increasingly disconnected from her body, turning it into an erotic object which she is compelled to cut. The film is shot mostly in a very naturalistic style, but there is one scene so starkly surrealistic as to be Cronenburg-esque. She is being groomed for a big position (in favor of Sandrine) and attends a business dinner with her boss and some clients. As they exchange comments on various European capitals where they have lived, Miss Crazy decides to gulp down several glasses of wine and proceeds to perceive her forearm as a disconnected prosthetic that she can't control. So she screws it back in & under the table, stabs this thing. Yes, at dinner. With people sitting around, not even noticing what she is up to. She is quite pointedly rude to them, only giving simple, brief answers to questions and when the dinner is over Susy Slicer is off to a hotel where we are treated to her continued mutilation as an erotic act. There is a shot where she is laying back, holding her leg over her face, cutting  into it & letting the blood just flow all over her face that positively made me nauseous.
Afterwards, she stages a car accident and Vincent, somehow allows himself to hope in vain that she isn't lying about the whole thing.
By the end of the film, she is on her way to work, but instead goes to another hotel room, with a Polaroid camera and a knife & we just know what is coming next. Interestingly, the camera angles change to show us just how disconnected she is--we are seeing things from her POV but through a split-screen that would have done Brian de Palma proud--as she cuts & photographs herself. Around this point, the DVD I had stopped working & I have never been so relieved in my whole life!! I tried to watch it on my computer, but Praise Be, I will never have to see the end! Of course I know by the end this ho dies--there is no room for any hope here.  I was pleased that the commentary was also subtitled & my French is strong enough not to need them for the dialogue, so I was able to read what the director said without having to watch this nightmare twice.

Reading over this, I am struck again by the parallels with Plath. "Lady Lazarus" springs to mind:
"The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see/Them unwrap me hand and foot--The big strip tease." Although I can't imagine anyone wanting any popcorn while watching this horror show, I think you get my drift here.
Just in case you missed what I was saying earlier, PLEASE DO NOT WATCH THIS. This is far worse than Human Centipede. This woman is scarier than Freddy, Jason, or anyone else & has given me nightmares you would not believe. I am only hoping that now that I have written about this, I will not have this awful thing on my mind any longer. I truly hope no one else has to go through this ordeal.

No Fats, No Fems??? Bitch, Please!

So I understand I am not the first heavyset sissy to complain about the so-called "Adonis Factor." For the 2 straight ppl who will read this blog & not be familiar with this term, in gay personals (whether print or online) you will often see ads that contain the phrase "No fats, No fems" or something equivalent. Usually these profiles read something along the lines of "VGL athletic, masc seeking same" with varying degrees of fervency about the respect for the masculine paradigm. "No Nellies" "Don't be a fag" "your a man--act like it."

Faggots like this kill me. (& PS Yes I get to use this word. When you have had to clean this word in white spraypaint off your mailbox & the blacktop street in front of your house, so can you) Are we all so far into this case of institutionalized Stockholm Syndrome that we fetishize our oppressor & utterly reject ANY behavior that deviates from the ironclad rules of masculinity? Is it masochism on the part of the bottoms & revenge on the part of the tops?

Needless to say, these are not the guys I hook up with. I might be able to pull off some butch fraud via chat but honestly if one of these dudes came over here the jig would be up b4 I said a word. After all , when you reach the top of my steps the 1st thing you see is a picture of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. And as you look around there is a window dedicated to WW in my kitchen as well as several altars to Hello Kitty, not to mention the set of Smiley Face knicknacks on my computer desk in front of my bed. So the kitsch factor alone of my house would completely give away the game so to speak.

But let's get down to brass tacks: It really doesn't take all that much work to pass for straight: most of the time it just means you have to speak as if you had a lobotomy in words of 2 or less syllables. "Sup bro?" "aight man," sometimes while wearing a baseball cap at a jaunty angle. I often feel like sending these faggots a message like: "I don't know if you know this, but no matter how thug/butch/masc you may think you are, there is nothing butch about suckin dick, Stupid. If it wasn't for visible sissies & drag/trans ppl opening the door for ALL OF US, this website would be ILLEGAL." But then again, I'm on these cruisy websites too. I guess you have to expect & accept a certain amount of this sort of shallowness in the online gay community--which is really the only facet of the gay community I see lately. Well, that & the Logo Channel.

It's strange, when I was 18 or so & just coming out, I think the only thing I really knew about myself was that I was gay--mainly because it seemed like no one in school ever let me forget it--so I completely threw myself into the shark pit that is the so-called gay community (read: Bar Scene) here in NOLA. I was out at the corner of Bourbon & St Ann practically every night of the week for YEARS. & when I wasn't out there, I was planning my next trip. I found it wasn't what I expected: no gay fairy godmothers, no one special guy who caught my eye & won my heart, really just a lot of other kids and a few older people (AIDS killed so much of the generation before me, all of the people who could have--should have been our role models were taken away from us) and all of us were on something or things. From booze to cocaine to X to LSD to Special K to the pharm cabinet & any & every combination thereof. All of us looking for something & usually afraid to say what it really was, so we'd substitute "I wanna bump" for "I want someone who will love & respect me & empower me to live my own truth."

But I stayed there. I found that the "no fats, no fems" rule doesn't apply if you stay out late enough or get high enough. I won't say I didn't have fun (I certainly had more sorts of fun than the law allows) or make a few good friends along the way. But for a long time now, gay bars and debauched excess don't have the appeal they used to. So I guess I'll stick to the cruisy websites & the dwindling hope that one day the body fascists will understand that we are all more than just labels. Not just masc or fem or top or bottom or dom or sub or whatever. As long as we adhere to this artificial standard of what makes a man a man we are all dimished.

Fetishizing so-called "real men" (who, by definition want women & not men) is based on the misogynistic idea that whatever is male is good & whatever is female is bad. It is a symptom of an ingrained self-hatred. When we find a "real man" who will deign to have some sexual contact with us, it generally ends one of 2 ways: 1. After a while he gets tired of it & goes back to his girlfriend/wife or 2 we sabotage it in some way because we find ourselves disgusted by him on some level for not being "manly" enough. Sometimes there is option 3--where we become the revolving door out of the closet & then Mr. Straight Man starts sucking every dick in the Zip Code, but there you have it. The story always ends up the same, with you sittin up late in front of your computer, drinkin Bluberi Stoli & cranberry, feeling sorry for yourself & blogging....