Too Many Feelings

First Impressions of Earth

Finished the rough draft of my First Impressions of Earth album Friday night. Making it available exclusively to attendees of tonight’s mini-ORG. Here is the track listing:

1. First Impressions of Earth (1:41)

2. Among Your Kind (4:40) *

3. Outbreak (6:35)

4. These Flowers are Dead (Oh My God) (2:44)

5. Heart Murmurs (3:19) *

6. The Freedom to Believe in Unreal Things (3:04) *

7. Continuous Elevators (3:41)

8. Without You I’m Nothing (2:47)

* Features the cello talents of Christopher Carroll

I need technical feedback on mastering this album. I also want to know if you like it. If you don’t like it, well, I’m not sorry.

Letter to Billy Tipton

Billy, I feel weak for being lonely.

She’s too busy with graduate school and the rest of her rotation lately. I am doubting this polyamory counter-dogma when it requires so much flexible time and energy reserves. One is hard enough. Let nothing be compulsory, my friend.

I’ve spent my whole life surrounded by straight men, looking for allies, and I keep winding up exhausted. I become cornered into The Complicated Girlfriend while they sit pretty on the comfortable end of the binaries and say, “It’s cool, I don’t pick my friends based on that kind of stuff”, but they’ll never divulge any doubt. I secretly think most people are far more queer than they know. Only the fags understand us, Billy, though no matter how much I insist that I belong among them, it won’t make them take me home.

Frank and I were sitting in an Indian restraunt when he asked me, “Do you ever feel like you don’t have anything in common with anyone around you?” I thought about my apple shape and high androgen levels and seriously considered the length desparity between my ring and pointer fingers as one possible origin for the canyons between the experiences I can relate to and what is expected of me. When I’m wired this way they get a daughter who asks her father to march in the pride parade waving a sign that says “I love my gay son”.

But it’s dangerous to think it’s all so scientific.

Frank and I ate dinner and I studied the square of his jaw and his big, capable hands. I wanted him right then and feared him, too, and wanted to inhabit a body like his as well. What if it’s all the same thing? What if we’ve just internalized that mister equals fully human and we feel fully human so we must be misters ourselves?

But it’s dangerous to think it’s all so socialized.

Billy, I know when you died, your wife denied ever really knowing you. I want to know who was in denial, anyway. Was it you or her or everyone else who would have found you inconceivable if they knew? I want to know what half of the world is honest and what half we can leave behind. I want answers, Tipton. Somebody make sense of this, now, immediately, so we can move on. Now, Bill, before it gets dangerous.

Thanksgiving

Last year, for Thanksgiving, I wrote a snarky poem about the ceaseless drama of my culturally Catholic family dynamic. This year, as I’m sliding into veganism, I chewed my tofurky and thought about colonialism and how snarky liberals make jokes about not accepting blankets from strangers, even though the incidident being alluded two happened two hundred years after the so-called first Thanksgiving. Still, it didn’t become what it was until Lincoln made it so, and the whole holiday has more to do with the Civil War than anything else. Well, except that now it’s about I don’t even know what.

For myself, and probably for many of us, it’s about the awkwardness of togetherness with a blood family I love but struggle to have much to talk about with. My cousin Charlotte, who is in the 6th grade, asked me why I wasn’t eating meat right before we all sat down for dinner. I told her it was complex and now wasn’t the time. I left the room when my uncle was concluding a monologue about flaky female boy scout leaders with the trite old “wisdom” that “women and men are just different, they just are”. He’s probably my favorite uncle, but as far as safe spaces for gender variance and radicalism go, my house is not one. It’s not a source of resentment, it just means I kind of… hid in my room reading most of the day.

For the last few years, I’ve also been questioned about my goals and plans for the rest of college and beyond. Last year, Uncle Steve wanted a detailed itinerary. I don’t have one. It is my nuclear upper middle class upbringing which has allowed for me to believe that, for the most part, everything will work out, something good will happen, it will happen naturally, and planning too meticulously is restrictive and will only lead to dissapointment when real life inevitably takes one in another direction. Of course, there are lots of paths which lead people to this attitude. For me, I know that my parent’s unquestionable love for one another and dedication to parenting in combination with material comfort and financial security has led me here. They put me in a project-based elementary school with parent-teacher conferences instead of grades, where we called our teachers by their first names, and students sat at circular tables instead of rows of desks. Learning, cooperation, fun, and creativity were valued above numbers on papers. I had an extremely happy childhood despite being incredibly weird and for lack of a regular group of friends. And now I’m in SIM.

So here I am, questioning institutions like marriage, public schooling, class privilege, and so on. I don’t think success and happiness through institutions is particularly common, though. Who knows. I’m probably just another radical brat— silver spoon and a paper plate.

But I was trying to get back to the topic of goals in life. So let’s get to that, hm?

“What are you going to do with your life?”

“I’m gonna get what I want!”

Which means focusing on textiles, print, theater, literature, puppetry, performance, video, sound, light, and installation. And, more than anything, submerging myself in musical training and coming back with a vengeance. I want a voice that isn’t just nice and capable, but is truly powerful. I want mad accordion and piano skills. I have no idea how to finance any of these things. I suppose I better hold tight to that job at Whole Foods.

I want to find love, in some form or another. I don’t think monogamy is realistic, but I also really do want a “primary partner”. The marriage and wedding industrial complex severely creeps me out, but… maybe I can be convinced. As long as “wedding” translates enthusiastically on my partner’s behalf to “naked fire circle with everyone we love and a lot of snacks and singing and also in the woods”, and “marriage” doesn’t mean I somehow end up doing the dishes all the time.

I don’t want to have my own children. I almost definitely want to be involved in the lives of specific children, however. Queer Uncle LadyMan.

I want to stay healthy and chemically balanced. When I don’t stay active or eat right, I feel it immediately and the effects last for a while. I need to take care of my body. I need to fight the short daylights and and cold winds and find ways to keep all that lovely serotonin flowing without medication. The only pill I rely on is my birth control, thank goodness. I don’t even drink coffee. I’ve never touched a cigarette except to put it in my ear for comic effect.

I want to be a good friend. I want to have good friends.

Are there really good or bad people?

Probably not, but some love is nurishing and some is poisonous.

I think we are all we have, and if we are not taking care of each other, we have lost track of what is important.

And that’s it for today’s middle class pseudo-philosophical pandering.