This photo was taken in the most sacred place in all of Demarest. It’s hard to explain this particular tradition to those who are unfamiliar with my dorm, and to avoid divulging too much information to those whose jobs are to keep this place so secure, I will leave it at this: we are the first generation of Demarites to reach this place in the past four years, and it probably will not be done again for quite some time. I have to avoid posting any of the (better) pictures that reveal what this place is and who is in it, but it was amazing to see some of the things that were written in this place, some of it dating back to the 1950′s. Unfortunately, days after this success, we learned of a tragedy in the dorm that affected our community in a way I’ve never seen before. On Thursday night, our friend and beloved Demarite took his own life.

I chose this particular photo for an entry about my friend because when we reached this sacred place, I noticed one psalm in particular that was written on the wall: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” (Psalms 30:5) My friends know that I’m not one to quote the Bible as anything that is meaningful to me, but that psalm has always struck me as particularly moving, and I know it is something that Onion wholeheartedly believed. In spite of everything, Onion was the most positive and outwardly optimistic person I’ve ever known — and when I say that Onion lived to cheer people up, it’s not just something to say. I remember distinctly the times we counted attendance sheets and request forms in e-board meetings and always stopped at his name to mention how wonderful, how involved, how dedicated, and how sweet he was. There was never anything Onion wasn’t willing to do for a friend or neighbor. It’s hard to think back now on how suffocating it must have been for him to live every single day for another person, because he never even let on about the difficulties going on in his life. The few personal struggles in his that we were privy to, he seemed to handle with ease. I know it’s pointless and vain to look for warning signs after the fact, but it’s so difficult to think back on every memory I have of him and realize that he was never as happy as he seemed, and that every smile and every hug he ever gave to me was for me, and not for him. We always question the people who look more upset and more depressed than usual, and never think to worry about the people who don’t seem capable of expressing any sort of negative emotion at all.

I don’t really know how to begin explaining what we’ve been going through these past few days or what our response has been. It’s just hard to believe that something like this could happen in our own home, and I don’t think I’ve ever lost someone in quite the same way before. When someone passes away in a place like Demarest, there’s hardly a single person in the entire community that isn’t affected. We all grieve together. We go to bed and wake up with a hundred people who are all crying with us. It wasn’t until hours later that I realized life was still going on outside of the dorm, and that it was a regular Thursday night of drinking and partying and everything else. It’s almost assaulting to finally walk out into that after an experience like we had. I can’t even write about how I found out because it was such a horrifying realization when it finally clicked for me, and all I could think about was finding Kayla… never mind trying to fathom how this could happen to someone like Onion. But returning to normalcy, I’m realizing, is even more frightening. I’ve slept in Kayla’s room for two nights, avoided the dining hall, avoided leaving Demarest at all, and cried with people I don’t think I’ve ever had close relationships with at all. I think we’re all getting over the initial shock of it together, and I’m amazed at how supportive our entire community has been, but it’s not easy to know how to grieve when someone passes away like this. I do know that we’re all lucky to have known Onion, and for now, that and the support of our Demarest family is what’s getting us by.

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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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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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It’s interesting how we date photos when we’re unsure of when they were taken. There’s age estimation (if my little brother was just born, it was around 1993 or 1994); clothing style (as in what was my mother thinking when she put that on?); hairstyle (I haven’t cut my hair short in years); location (the Bahamas vacation was in 1997, the Virginia vacation a few years later…); and unfortunately, in my family, the most helpful of all is our timeline of family drama. The sudden absence of my mother’s side of the family occurs circa winter 1996, the reappearance of my grandma marks the year my grandpa died in 2001, and my aunt and cousins make their way into our lives in 2003, the year my uncle died. Shortly after that, another feud, and my grandma, aunts, uncle and cousins once again disappear from our photographs.

When my grandma died earlier this summer, my family made sure to include my brothers and me in the services, despite the tension with my mother that has caused us to remain estranged from the family for a number of years. I can’t even begin to express how grateful I am for that. Even so, the pictures at my grandma’s wake managed to tell the story well enough — there were pictures of our cousins at all ages up until now, but I cease to exist along with my brothers about eight years ago.

It’s more complicated than that, of course, and far too complex for anyone in my family to even understand well enough to explain, but the point is that we (my mother, my brothers and I) have been relatively close with certain family members at various points of our lives, and not on speaking terms at all at other points in our lives. To be honest, it’s probably not a great idea for me to even write about this online. I’ve gotten in trouble for things I’ve written about my family in the past — that is, during the times when we actually were speaking to them — but the truth is that I’m still dealing with a lot of complicated emotions when it comes to this. Anytime I ever said anything even remotely negative about my family, it was a cry for attention from people I was conditioned to hate — and though I never did hate them, I certainly had a lot of misplaced anger combined with feelings of abandonment and guilt over something that was never my fault.

That’s where my attachment to these pictures comes in. They’re not just about my memories; they’re about my idealizations, my long-standing desperation for a normal relationship with my family, my attachment issues in general, and my fear of being unstable. Growing up, I always clung to memories of old times in hopes that I had the power to fix my family and restore it to the way we were. You couldn’t call it perfection, obviously — years of silence don’t begin out of nowhere — but it certainly wasn’t anything like this. And it’s something I still remember fondly, in spite of everything.

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“They had this ‘cocktail hour’ thing and none of it was really my kind of food. It was, you know, chicken wings and all that bullshit. So I just went and took some raw carrots.” I think she considers this ‘indulging.’

“Oh, god. Then we walked into this crowded room and all I could hear was this noise. Unbelievable noise. It was so loud. I think the kids call it music.” She was serious, and highly confused by what was coming out of the speakers. She was even more confused by the dancing that accompanied this music.

“These girls, you know, were all wearing these dresses and pulling them up. Strapless dresses in the winter. And they are thirteen. It was ridiculous.” This included a mess of rather interesting hand motions that I think were supposed to mimic the act of pulling up one’s dress.

“There was this man sitting across from us, and he was just groping some woman. Groping her. I mean, he practically had his fingers up her ass.” No comment.

“But at least they had an open bar. I had club soda.” Clearly, my mother is one party animal.

Note: I’m not being cruel. She reads this blog, and she will laugh. If she didn’t read this blog, I’d be sure to include a picture of what she was wearing. Now that is entertainment.

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