55. rococco

The past few months have been… busy. I was temping at a small company in Minnetonka that I fear was possibly engaging in unethical business practices. Originally the assignment began in October and was for only a few weeks, but then stretched out to the end of the year and then indefinitely until I was told last week that they’d hired someone full-time for the position I was filling in for. That’s the reality of temping though, and I really didn’t want to commute to Minnetonka every day, especially now that gas prices are climbing again.

The past month also saw a long bout of depression that has been off and on since the middle of December. Part of it is that I feel adrift spiritually now that I officially no longer belong to either fundamentalism or evangelicalism. I went to a Christian college, took courses in the Bible and theology, grew up in the church, attended a mainline fundamentalist congregation for several years; but now I just can’t take any of it as seriously as I used to. I don’t believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God (though I still think it’s inspired to an extent); that everything is as black and white as I was taught growing up; or that God is keeping your permanent sin record and on Judgement Day will weigh your heart before the Ammut-like maw of Hell. I just can’t buy it anymore.

However, the implication of this new strain of though is that most of what I’ve believed most of my life is invalid. I guess you could say I’m grieving the death of this old “fundamentalist” me, and wondering what it is that I do believe. It’s all very dizzying.

Another aspect of the depression is the sheer loneliness I’ve been feeling, along with the series of disastrous dates I’ve been on lately. I’m nearly 28, and starting to wonder if I’ll ever be truly loved or understood by another person. Yes, my friends and family love me, but I want to adore and be adored by the guy I spend my life with. And I’m starting to fear that may never happen.

Thus, the trend of sadness.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy 2011.

53. journaling

Hi friends. Sorry, it’s been a while so any readership I once had has probably drifted on to more active pastures. As far as a quick update for those of you who care, I’m currently temping at a company in Minnetonka processing mail and customer rebates and for a couple of weeks while their receptionist is out sick. It’s thrilling. But it’s a job.

Let’s see, what else. I’m in the middle of the fall piano teaching semester and being challenged by my more advanced students, and am feeling slightly inadequate. But it’s good, and keeping me honest.

I’m gearing up for this year’s NaNoWriMo, trying to work on a few other short stories before NNWM commences, and kicking around two plot ideas for the Big Write. Got a few leads, but we’ll see what happens come November 1st. 50,000 words in 30 days. If the math is correct (and yes, I can do basic math, friends), if I consistently write about 1,700 words a day I should be able to meet the challenge, with extra time left over for editing. But for sure it’s going to kick my ass. Writing short stories is one thing; being able to hold a reader’s interest for an entire novel is a horse of quite a different colour. If you’d like to add me as a writing buddy, please do! My user page can be found here.

As you might have gathered from my last post, I’m venturing into queer theory and gender studies. Sociology and psychology have always been serious passions of mine, which led to my becoming a storyteller; but given some recent conversations I’ve had over the past couple of months, GLBT studies is (are?) becoming a real area of research interest for me, especially coming at it from a Christian perspective. I want to be able to better understand and articulate my own experience and relate it to my faith, as well as really plumb the depths of my own experience, put it into context, and not take anything for granted; challenge my assumptions—or, as Rumi put it, plow the earth and get moving.

My entry point was suggested by my friend Sand who writes over at his blog, FuckTheory: Judith Butler’s seminal treatise, “Gender Trouble.” I just started it today and haven’t even finished the preface yet, and am already astounded. She writes at the beginning (this is her writing in 1999 on the original 1990 text):

As I wrote it, I understood myself to be in an embattled and oppositional relation to certain forms of feminism, even as I understood the text to be part of feminism itself. I was writing in the tradition of immanent critique that seeks to provoke critical examination of the basic vocabulary of the movement of thought to which it belongs . . . In 1989 I was most concerned to criticize a pervasive heterosexual assumption in feminist literary theory . . . It seemed to me, and continues to see, that feminism ought to be careful not to idealize certain expressions of gender that, in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion.

This very much echoes my current sentiments about the gay rights movement right now, that a good part of the movement has a dominant heterosexual framing.

So that’s the start. I’m also getting into Eve Sedgwick’s “Between Men.” This feels like learning to read all over again.