Luckily, Hall Government was cancelled tonight so that the love birds amongst us could spend the evening fornicating, and the rest of us learned about and composed erotic fiction in the Main Lounge (a joint section between Creative Writing and Sex, Sexuality & Gender — it’s a hit every year). You’d think the cancelled meeting would allow for plenty of free time, but somehow I ended up still awake at 1:30, blogging instead of sleeping… I should really work on that, considering I wake up at 6:30 during the week…

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I’m late with this post, and although I don’t seem to have much to do these days I haven’t slept since yesterday and I’m feeling anxious about nothing, as usual. I’ve managed to finally perfect my list of resolutions, though, and this photo is one of the 52 self-portraits I’m supposedly going to take this year (I once attempted the 365 project and made it to day 3, so we’ll see). The editing here was simple enough to do, and the main difficulty I had was actually posing for the shots – the last clone I added in was of me pulling my hair up, a last-minute decision that replaced another clone sitting on the left side of the couch. I shot this one by mistake, but I soon realized it was the only shot that added depth to the image. All the other clones are posed in alignment with the couch, as I was more focused on the actions of each clone, making them look in communication with one another, etc. than anything else. So, I went with the random back-turned, hair-fixing clone. Once I finally replace my ink cartrige, I’ll print this for one of my journals – I promised myself that by the end of the year, I’ll compile the entire 52 weeks project into a 2010 book (even though I have 2 unfinished journals still to work on from previous years).

And now for the resolutions in their entirety (well, minus some others that I’m not going to post):

1. Read 50 books – my standard challenge. I’m on my third book of the year, having just finished Wasted by Marya Hornbacher and The Freedom Writers Diaries with Erin Gruwell. The second I enjoyed (despite my concerns about its authenticity and racial implications), and the first I’m not sure I’d recommend (seems like she wrote the memoir prematurely), though the parts that irked me the most were admittedly due to personal bias.

Also, I’m going to figure out why my booklog isn’t working so the books I read will actually show up somewhere on this site…

2. The 52 weeks project – explained above (Flickr group: here).

3. Finish the journal I’ve been “working on” (read: watching collect dust) and start my 2010 book.

4. Work on some of my eating habits and remember to take my vitamins/calcium… doc says it builds strong bones, who knew?

5. Sleep.

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Venus (my mom): Move out of my way. I have to get my plantain out of the refrigerator.
Me: Why do you put them in the refrigerator?
Venus: If I leave them out, they get too smushy.
Me: …you mean ripe?
Venus: Well, I like to eat them when they’re still green-ish. Otherwise they start to taste too sweet, and you know me, I’m sweet enough already.
Me: So… you eat it raw? In your salad?
Venus: How are you supposed to eat it?
Me: You typically fry it…
Venus: Well, I like to use it in my salad instead of the regular bananas. They’re too sweet.
Me: Of course. Because everyone puts bananas in their salads.
Venus: Are you making fun of me?

My lunch was a version of Todd’s Waldorf Salad, which consisted of an apple, half an avocado, a few tomato slices, and cayenne pepper. Normally, I get made fun of for this. The next time someone comments on the weirdness of my eating habits, let this serve as proof that I have evolved significantly from my Venusian roots. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about… my mother believes she’s from Venus. (No, seriously. She signs her e-mails from ~Venus~)

Video coming soon.

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I feel much differently about holidays — it doesn’t count as a real Thanksgiving until folding chairs are brought out to fit everyone at the table, until at least 3 dishes break, or until at least one child throws a fit over being forced to eat vegetables. Kayla, knowing this, graciously offered to come fetch me on Thanksgiving day and bring me over to her house, where a real Thanksgiving dinner was being held. I ate far too much, engaged in a number of awkward conversations with a strange and non-related guest who apparently teaches photography, pretended to understand football, and became the newest crush of Kayla’s 5-year-old brother. So, all in all, it was the best holiday I’ve had in a long time.

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I visited my high school on Friday — a trip that’s always followed by a frantic search for old photos, essays, projects, and whatever else I can find as I subject my friends to cheesy anecdotes and a list of complaints about changes I do not approve of (a maroon carpet, really?). What I found last night were these photograms, made during my senior year with whatever jewelry I was wearing that day in the fall of 2007 and the help of a pen flashlight from my Harriet the Spy phase. If you’re wondering why I was still carrying around my spy gear at age 17, take this as a hint that you should never have private conversations within earshot of me…

So, in the midst of a rant about the class registration process, I mentioned to my former photo teacher that I’m taking Digital Storytelling next semester, a class he was already familiar with, as the new film course at Prep is apparently an offshoot of some of the Literature & Technology courses at the Writers House. They created this course with the help of the former chair of our English department at Rutgers, whose daughter I had just met, randomly, in the art studio… and I’m now absolutely certain of my theory that when you graduate from Rutgers Prep, the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon is cut to just half that. I’m hoping that next time I visit, I can meet a student who is somehow related to Mariah Carey. In the meantime, I’ll begin composing my list of reasons why I’d make a better spouse than Nick Cannon.

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Tonight, Demarest co-sponsored its second LGBT Shabbat dinner with Hillel, and this time Kesher (the Reform group within Hillel) and Kol Halayla (the Jewish a cappella group on campus) also got involved. Last year we were ecstatic that about 30 or 40 people showed up, and this year, our attendance doubled. I don’t know if it was because of advertising, because we did a better job of reaching out to various communities on campus, or because the timing was just right (a week after our unified protest against the Westboro Baptist Church), but either way, it was a huge success.

Rachel, on the left, is a high school friend who is active in Hillel and played a big part in organizing the event. Next to her is Kenny, yet another friend from high school, who ran the service. We soon realized that altogether, there were 5 Rutgers Prep alumni in the room at once, spanning across 4 different years (Adam left before the picture was taken). Considering our high school is only a few miles down the road from our campus, this probably doesn’t seem so exceptional, but when you consider the fact that my graduating class consisted of about 80 students, it’s rather impressive.

As Kenny ran the service, he talked about the relationship between his Jewish identity and his gay identity, so there were lots of different ideas thrown out about how to interpret Leviticus, how to approach various laws from the perspective of the Reform movement, and how to rectify one’s sexuality and religion. On one level I understood the idea of wanting to break away from religion because of its intolerance of homosexuality while feeling a longing for the culture and beliefs that we all grew up with, but to some extent I’ve always struggled with the very idea of returning to my “Jewish roots” — mainly because I don’t have any. I was raised Catholic until a couple of years past my first communion, only turning to Judaism out of curiosity and as some bizarre act of rebellion in middle school. (Rebellion is clearly something I failed miserably at — while other girls were piercing their bellybuttons in the bathroom and making out with boys at the municipal grounds, I was enrolling in Hebrew school and becoming a vegetarian. In some of my more daring moves, I stole chocolate and engaged in political debate with my parents.)

So, once my mother converted to Judaism and became more interested in the study of it, that turned me away entirely. It still does, even as I become more interested in Jewish culture, largely because she uses religion to stand in place of her family… by no coincidence did her interest in Judaism coincide with her father’s death — and even more directly, her actual conversion coincided with her ultimate decision that “those people” (meaning her mother and sisters) were not a part of her family. I think that’s why it always upsets me to see her lighting the Shabbat candles alone and saying the prayers by herself, because these are such family-oriented practices that seem completely out of place at our kitchen table. That’s where I’m left unsure of what it means to have Jewish roots, because I’ve always been more interested in the culture and community than anything else, and that’s where conversion becomes an extremely controversial topic within the (ethnically) Jewish community, as it’s not really possible to “convert” to a culture…

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These photos are from this morning, when the Westboro Baptist Church — the hate group known for protesting Matthew Shepard’s funeral and soldiers’ funerals around the country — came to campus to picket outside of Rutgers Hillel. Almost everyone on campus was anticipating their visit, so Hillel has been rounding up different religious organizations, queer organizations, and music groups on campus for the past couple of weeks to help organize a counter-protest in the form of a rally against hate. Despite the rain, it was a huge success — the a capella groups, the unified diversity speeches, and the mass amount of cheering drowned out the WBC completely…

To begin with, there was a lot of debate surrounding the WBC’s visit and how our community should respond. Immediately I thought of Romaine Patterson’s Angel Action and the impact of such a creative and positive response to the WBC… some wanted to merely treat it as a joke, others wanted to throw a dance party noiseout, and still others wanted to completely ignore them, believing that to be our safest bet. Thankfully, Hillel put together a very well thought out program that took attention away from WBC rather than emphasizing their visit, which I hope makes an impact on those who argued against any sort of recognition of their visit. For one thing, it wasn’t practical — regardless of whether or not anyone organizes around the WBC, signs like “God hates fags” and “the Jews killed Jesus” and “thank God for dead soldiers” generally attract a lot of attention. One way or another, a mass of people would have circled around them, and when the WBC has the chance to provoke unprepared and unsuspecting bystanders, they take the opportunity to attack and then sue them for their engagement, alleging verbal and/or physical attacks. The fact that their entire organization is built around verbal and visual displays of violence doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the outcome of these lawsuits, which usually result in funding for the WBC. Thankfully, we didn’t run into any such problems, and all in all, I’d say the event was a complete success — in fact, I only have one photo where the WBC is actually visible, because the 1,200 participating supporters of Hillel completely blocked them out. They gave up fairly early, but our rally continued.

A lot of people, I think, are actually glad that the WBC came to Rutgers. If nothing else, their extremism provides us with a unique opportunity to build alliances between groups of people with a long history of dividedness between them, and I hope that sense of unity will stay with us.

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At Damian’s suggestion, we embarked on this pumpkin-picking excursion early today — and although it involved waking up at the ungodly hour of 10 a.m. on a Saturday, enlisting the help of our hall director and other drivers in the building to help make the trip, and sliding around in the mud and rain searching for pumpkins all morning, the outing was a definite success. Out of my group, Kayla drove, meaning an appropriate mix of showtunes and country music on the way to the farm, where RJ, as expected, found the largest pumpkin he could (aside from the $50 monstrosity sitting in front of the register). Dan was far more interested in the deformed pumpkins and even more phallic-looking gourds, while I spent most of my time looking through the baskets of mini pumpkins for the cutest one, contemplating the possibility of cooking pumpkin seeds in the microwave. (In my household, anything involving actual cooking is strictly frowned upon — but I’ve escaped from inheriting at least some of my mother’s foodisms, as the only thing she really eats other than raw vegetables is buffalo, something I’m not so inclined to try…)

After buying our pumpkins, Kayla, RJ, Dan, Liz and I set off for the dollar store, where everyone bought lights for their Jack-O-Lanterns. Once again, our purchases pretty accurately summed us up as a group, with Kayla buying a raincoat for Dexter, RJ getting a whole pile of useless items that will somehow, one day, come in handy, and Dan finding yet another black hat to add to his collection of all black clothing. I, of course, was more interested in the candy aisle, while Liz seemed to be the only one who could remember what we actually came in for.

Clearly, we’re an interesting bunch of people.

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Here is my proud bed-racing team from the Charity Bed Race event that Demarest Hall participated in tonight. On the bed, from left to right, we have RJ, Dan, and Andrew (whose breasts looked fabulous — even better than they did during our drag show last year, when he wore the pink bra I lent to him from the picture on the right). Finally, squatting down, we have Catherine, who led our team to victory in the first round.

As outreach coordinator in our dorm (sorry, “residence hall” — apparently “dorm” sounds like a prison), I signed us up for this event and pitched the idea of a drag theme for our dorm. It was a subtler version of my original suggestion, “Free our Bathrooms,” which was a response to the housing administration “taking away” our gender neutral bathrooms this year, despite the fact that gender-free bathrooms have been a part of our dorm’s culture for years (largely because of the queer presence here, but also for the convenience of all residents, as we pride ourselves on having a very active and tight-knit community, and regulating which bathrooms students can use in a place they consider to be their home is absurd). However, a charity event didn’t seem like the appropriate venue for such antagonism, so we ditched the toilet seat and went with a giant purple penis modeled after the now infamous Power Penis Vibe. I’ll save the story behind that one for another time.

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This photo was taken at Passion Puddle, located on the border of the Cook and Douglass campuses at Rutgers (you can’t see the lake itself too well in this photo, but I only had a few minutes before the bus left, and at the time I was busy taking some freshmen on “vacation” — an activity that involves a Saturday afternoon bus ride to Sears, where we enjoy napping on real beds for a few hours). According to legend, when a male from Cook College and a female from Douglass College hold hands and walk around the water three times, they will soon become engaged. This myth seems to have been slightly modified since the merging of all undergraduate liberal arts colleges at Rutgers and changed simply to a male and a female — though I don’t think we’ve progressed to the point of incorporating same-sex hand-holding into the passing of the legend. I’m not sure I mind being left out, of course, because Passion Puddle is primarily known for another myth involving the very unromantic excavation of a body from the bottom of the lake, which leads me, in a very morbid transition, to Virginia Woolf…

This past week I finished reading Mrs. Dalloway for the second time in one of my courses, and during a class discussion, the subject of food was brought up in relation to the way Virginia Woolf’s anorexia seems to affect the meaning attached food in her writing. The passage we spoke about involved Miss Kilman eating a pink cake — Woolf’s description of this act is unmistakably resentful, with Miss Kilman’s eating directly paired with her own feelings of worthlessness and the narrator’s repulsive depiction of her. The image of food itself, though, is somewhat glorified — there’s a subtle sense of indulgence in the very hateful way she writes about food, with great care taken to describe in detail the way Miss Kilman speaks while handling her food, and finally swallows the last bit of her eclair, and then wipes the chocolate from her fingers, and then finishes with a cup of tea. A friend once jokingly suggested that the reason anorexic women so often work around food or otherwise aspire to go onto culinary school is because “it’s like porn for them” — and I think that’s the kind of withheld desire evident in Woolf’s writing… that there is something almost pornographic about the experience of watching someone eating while personally abstaining from food. When a person spends so much time thinking about and obsessing over food, I think that obsession can manifest itself in all sorts of ways, whether it be through one’s profession, writing, or artwork… I’m thinking Fiona Apple’s The First Taste provides an interesting musical comparison to Woolf (or perhaps Paper Bag, with its more blatant references to hunger and loneliness).

What I also wonder about, though, is the presence of Elizabeth in the pink cake scene, and how her relationship with her mother, Clarissa, might complicate Woolf’s ideas about food. It seems to lend to to the idea that eating disorders often develop out of an inadequate relationship with a woman’s mother, which would certainly make sense in Woolf’s case, given her mother’s death at such an early age. Either way I think that understanding Woolf’s relationship to food adds another dimension to the novel I hadn’t picked up on before now…

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