Summing Up 2013

1. What did you do in 2013 that you'd never done before?
Watched Florida State with the ACC championship. Taught a class of PhD students. Insanity.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't think I actually did. I had resolved to write two chapters of my book, but instead I decided to send a chapter out for publication and work on another article. These things have worked out, so now I will turn back to the book in 2014. I did resolve to get much better at French, and I have definitely done that. Resolution for 2014, though, is to get back into shape. I have let myself gain some winter weight at the end of 2013.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes! My friends Danny & Ashley had a beautiful baby girl named Arlene Gail. She is gorgeous. And my friends Jill & Mike had a son just a couple days ago named Emerson Allen. I get to meet him in March.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
My dear friend Irma lost her canine companion Texas. We also lost one of the most important people in Queer Theory this year: José Esteban Muñoz. Both deaths were truly heartbreaking.

5. What countries did you visit?
None this year.

6. What would you like to have in 2014 that you lacked in 2013?
I need a place I can call home. Moving around like a nomad is fine, and the schools where I have been working have been fun, helpful, educational, and exciting. But I'd like to start dwelling somewhere.

7. What dates from 2013 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Bill & Meghan's wedding, of course! It was August 31st and it was a weekend of splendiforous events.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Insanity!

9. What was your biggest failure?
My failure to find a tenure-track position for 2013-2014. It all is working out, of course, but it felt awful at the time. The job market is no fun, y'all.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing too horrible.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
A ticket to the ACC championship game in Charlotte, NC on December 7th. Go Noles!

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
I have been so proud of my sons Dayne and Jordan this year. They are doing their thing: working hard and making lives and careers for themselves in new cities.
Edward Snowden and anyone else who fights the multiple apparatuses of the State.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
The U.S. Congress, as usual. What a bunch of idiots.
The State of Florida.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Paying off my car, which I finally did last month.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Visiting California. Seeing Arlene for the first time. Hanging out with Cruz and Sofia. Meghan and Bill's wedding. The annual meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research in Dallas (so many good friends!).

16. What song will always remind you of 2013?
Robin Thicke, T.I., and Pharrell's "Blurred Lines".  

I feel so lucky

You wanna hug me

What rhymes with "hug me"?

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? Happier.
b) thinner or fatter? Fatter.
c) richer or poorer? Richer.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Okay, this is crazy, but my favorite things to do are read and watch movies. I wish I could manage to do those things way more than I do. I am becoming more of an introvert as I get older, and reading and seeing films feed me in a particular way that I find comforting and exciting. At this stage in my career, I am not allowed to read as much as I'd like: I am supposed to be publishing, which means I have to write more and read less.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Evaluating myself based upon the often arbitrary demands of the current job market. I also wish I spent less time in meetings run by people who do not value other people's time.
I also wish I'd done less complaining about the demands of the current job market. And less complaining in general. (Except for all the complaining I've done about people who don't value the time of others. Those complaints are merited.)

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
In California! I'm here right now, in fact. It is warm and I am comfortable and happy, baking cookies, hanging out with my parents, visiting with my friends, playing with my sobrinos, and going to the cinema with my sister.

21. Did you fall in love in 2013?
Nope.

22. How many one-night stands?
Four. Three were awesome; the other one wasn't bad per se, but I only did it because I knew it would be a fun story to tell later.

23. What was your favorite TV program?
Orange Is the New Black.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
A couple of truly heinous students. Yes.

25. What was the best book you read?
The first two volumes of Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove. I'm almost finished with the third, The Guermantes Way. I'm listening to this epically long novel on audiobook in the translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, and it is enriching my life considerably.
I would also recommend Boccaccio's Decameron from the fourteenth century, which I finally read. It reads very swiftly and is endlessly entertaining.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
I know nothing about music, but I spent my year listening to Justin Timberlake and James Blake.

27. What was the best piece of theatre you saw?
Back to Back Theatre's Ganesh versus the Third Reich
John Tiffany's production of The Glass Menagerie with Cherry Jones and Brian J. Smith is a close runner-up. I saw it at the the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge.
(But honestly I didn't go to the theatre very much this year.)

28. What did you want and get?
To be published in a top-tier journal. The article isn't out yet, but it will be soon. And I am finished with all of my edits, including extensive conversations with the copy-editor.
 
29. What did you want and not get?
I really was hoping for a job last year, and I did not get one. The 2014 season is a whole different ballgame, though. Things look great.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?
The Great Beauty followed by Blue Is the Warmest Color

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
My friends Katie, Viktor, and Yasser took me out to a restaurant in White River Junction, and then we had beers at an underground dive bar there afterward. It was very very nice.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
A nicer kitchen.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2013?
Dress up. Always dress up. A pair of great shoes has the power to separate you from the city you might be consigned to live in.

34. What kept you sane?
Rounds of Say the Same Thing with Deborah and Jordan.
Chats with Patrick McKelvey, Kate Bredeson, and Joe Cermatori.
After-work drinks with my colleagues at Florida State.
Shopping trips with my mother.
Hikes in Virginia, New Hampshire, and Vermont with Caleb.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Chris Messina

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
Politics in the U.S. is broken. I have been yelling about it for what feels like at least ten years, but the Congress just gets worse. The thing I paid attention to the most this year was the trial of George Zimmerman. It felt like a kind of Floridian Dreyfus Case: I would rather cross the street than speak  to someone who thought George Zimmerman ought to go free.

37. Whom did you miss?
This year was another year of missing everyone. I divided my time between Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire, and traveled all over. So I missed my friends in Los Angeles, missed my friends in New York, my friends in Seattle, my friends in Tallahassee, and my friends in Lynchburg.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Katie Bland

39. Tell us a valuable life-lesson you learned in 2013:
A couple of really important things:
1) I thought by switching careers from performance to something else I was moving into a less cutthroat career path. Not true. Finding a job is difficult no matter what you're doing. So if you want to be a performer, work hard and keep doing it. I wasn't cut out to be a performer, and my new career path is a much better one for my sensibilities, but trying to get a good job is exactly like auditioning and constantly facing rejection.

2) Friendships are great. Focus as much as you can on the ones who are around you every day. The ones from earlier in your life won't go away completely, they will just change in level of importance. I learned this year that for extroverts, being around people is energizing, but for introverts, being around people saps energy from us and being alone rebuilds our stores of energy. I have a lot of great friends, and I am very very grateful for them, but I have started to become closer and closer to friends around whom I feel more energized, relaxed, and encouraged.

3) Say yes to challenges or things that might seem a little difficult. Some of my favorite experiences this year (the ACC game, the Capitol Truffle Collection, traveling to Virginia for Sonnets and Chocolates) have been from deciding to do something whole-hog that actually was kinda inconvenient.

40. Share an important quote from 2013:
How dreary a monotony must pervade those people's lives who, from indolence or timidity, drive in their carriages straight to the doors of friends whom they have got to know without having first dreamt of knowing them, without ever daring on the way to stop and examine what arouses their desire.
—À la Recherche, volume 2

The Warmest Color - A Queer Forum

I asked a couple of fellow queers to have a little conversation with me about Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle). Here it is:

Aaron: I can start since I loved it. I think it is the best thing I've seen this year. And I think there are numerous reasons for that. I think what stood out to me most was Abdellatif Kechiche's emphasis on pleasure - eating gets lots of screentime. I loved that. I was also, obviously, in love with the way blue itself is simply everywhere in the movie.

Ms. Exarchopoulos & Ms. Seydoux

Blayze: I adored this film overall. A combination of a coming-of-age tale and a love story, the intensity and brutally honest story telling is what makes it successful. The tight close ups on Adèle to mark her journey, the sound design of the sex scenes (sweet Jesus), and even the length of the film itself add an incredible, tangible vitality to a perhaps simple plot. And yes, Aaron. The pleasure from food and eating was very effective. I loved it.

Kirsten: I thought this movie was the most successful in its telling of Adèle's initial discovery of her sexuality. The emotionless sex with that dude, the kiss on the stairs at her school, and that beautiful fantasy sex scene were all really succinct and powerful moments. After that first act of the movie, it kind of lost my love. What I liked about the first lesbian sex scene – the one where she's masturbating and fantasizing about Emma – and didn't like about the later sex scenes was the psychological element of sex. We had a point of view in that initial lesbian sex scene. The marathon sex sessions later in the movie felt kind of toothless. Also, simpleton that I am, the jumps in time were kind of confusing. I felt like I didn't know enough about the characters to feel for any of them. And I didn't like the eating stuff. I liked that Adèle was kind of a mess, but I did not like that she ate like a savage.

Blayze: My biggest problem with the film is actually hearing interviews from the two actresses (Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux) and their "approach" to playing these queer characters. But I was completely swept up in the movie to care too much.

Aaron: I haven't read anything about the actresses, though I loved them both. But what about queerness in the film? I thought that the film seemed to understand desire as multifarious, and approached pleasure in an interesting way. If Adèle doesn't enjoy sex with Thomas (the Jérémie Laheurte character) that doesn't mean she wouldn't enjoy it with Samir (Salim Kechiouche) or Antoine (Benjamin Siksou), right? To say nothing of the pleasure of flirting or kissing or other pleasures that needn't necessarily be gendered. I think the reason I was so taken by the (as Kirsten calls them) "marathon" sex sequences (and there were also a great many of them) was that this, for me, is the awakening into sexuality and personhood. And in real life that awakening doesn't happen instantly (as it does in so many movies) but it takes a while, and it happens during sex – which can be a lot of work, incidentally. It is also a kind of accretion. One gets used to having sex, and things begin to make a kind of sense, right?

Kirsten: Yeah, I can get behind that idea. Coming into oneself as a queer-identified person has to involve sex. That's an important thing to recognize. That's what's awesome and awful about being queer. Sex is front and center.

Blayze: I also loved that her awakening was gradual. I don't know if I buy that their first sexual experience was all that natural for Adèle, but it definitely verified her queerness at least at that carnal level. It is front and center as Kirsten put it.

Aaron: Right. Not "natural". Not at all. It's not about insisting on a naturalness, but rather on a gradual awakening. And I feel like we do see this in movies about straight people every once in a while (I am thinking particularly of Monster's Ball and Unfaithful), but rarely in movies about queer people. In other words, although sex is front and center in terms of coming into queerness, it is often elided or euphemized in film.

Ms. Exarchopoulos & Mr. Laheurte

Kirsten: Absolutely. Blue Is the Warmest Color does confront that piece of queerness well. Just in the fact that they show all that sex. But about her being with men later in the film, while I like that her sexual expression is fluid and driven by her vulnerability, it always annoys me when a woman in a lesbian relationship cheats with a man.

Aaron: Yes, of course. Me too. Although I was so mad at Emma at that point, particularly because Emma made it seem like cheating with Lise (i.e. cheating with a woman) is somehow better/cleaner/purer than cheating with a man. That whole part was really cruel.

Kristen: I know! Frankly, I didn't like Emma very much throughout the film, but I really hated her when she threw out Adèle right on the spot. Also, why did she meet her at a restaurant later when she was in a happy relationship? And later, why invite Adèle to the art show? Typical lesbian psychological bullshit.

Blayze: I don't know if Emma implies that cheating doesn't count as much with a woman – I think she throws her out and gets so incredibly cruel because she is simply hypocritical in the moment. This is a great love for both of them, and the cheating hurts more when it's you that are cheated on, not vice versa. Emma's reaction is human, not specifically because she's a lesbian.

Kirsten: Also, what the fuck about oysters?

Aaron: Ha! What do you mean What the fuck about oysters?

Kirsten: It's an ongoing tongue-in-cheek thing about the texture of oysters being like eating "something else". All the forty-something lesbians in the audience cackled with delight. Leading me to worry about what's going to happen to my vagina as I age...

Aaron: Hahaha. But they're tasty!

Blayze: Can I also just say that I hate that it all ends with her being chased by a man?

Aaron: But it doesn't! It ends with her walking away. No?

Blayze: I'm just still cracking up over this oyster conversation...