QUEER THURSDAYS AT NEW COLLEGE >>

In April, Sarah and I went to a film and discussion series at the New College of California called "Queer Thursdays at New College." Two New College students decided to put on a series of four screenings of queer film and video as part of a project they were working for a class.

Since, the New College is the school I am most interested in attending for my MFA, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to see a glimpse of the school. We could only make it to two of the Thursdays.

One Thursday we went to see Forbidden Love: Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives by Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie; it was documentary about lesbian sexuality in Canada during the 1950s and 60s. The second Thursday featured a local gay Chicano documentarian named Valentin Aguirre and his two works Wanted Alive: Teresita, La Campesina (about a transgender singer and performer) and Viva 16! (a portrait of SF 16th Street in the Mission district, once the hub of gay Latino nightlife).

I had a really good time at both screenings. And I had forgotten how much I enjoyed being in a peer discussion. Sarah commented after the first night that she had never seen me in the "scholar" setting and that I carried myself in a very different way; I seemed interested, invested, confident, speaking with authority. I guess once a student always a student.

I know I have to go back to school. I want to complete my Master's work. I have looked into doing an MFA in Poetics and Writing at the New College of California. I really like the school's focus on community and social consciousness. I have gotten an application. However, I'm still very gun shy. I have some fears to put to rest (at least assuage) before I can jump back into school. Obviously, one of the most important things to me, my teaching, requires me to complete a graduate education. I cannot teach at the University level without a minimum of an MFA (and not to mention publishing). I can barely muster myself to write an informal letter update to my friends and family. How am I going to write a personal statement? Put together a cogent portfolio? Participate fully in a writing workshop?

MAY 6, 2000 >>

My millenium birthday. Not that I've turned 1,000 years old (though sometimes I may feel like I have). Turning thirty. 30. Three-zero. The final stone in the mountain (molehill? funerary cairn?) of adultdom. Suffice it to say I was very reluctant to give up my twenty-something status. I think something deep, deep inside of me really didn't want to leave my twenties just quite yet. I think it has to do with the fact that I was such a serious kid growing up. I didn't loosen up till way into my undergraduate college years. And finally and most significantly I didn't come out till I was twenty-five. In "out years," I am still an adolescent in a lot of ways. Though, the maturity curve is turns sharply upward with each year away from those momentous, rainbow-filled coming out days. I think I masochistically liked being twenty-something with all of its social perks and angst and youthful status and irresponsibility and irreverence and anarchy and drama. Besides, I hadn't been on The Real World yet (to be mentioned later in some detail).

I actually had a very good thirtieth birthday. I created a very smashing invitation to drinks at POW. I invited a handful of the overall people I had any connection with to a small dinner at the apartment. I invited my sister and her boyfriend Ben, Rob and Murphy, Nathan and Wendy (Collin couldn't make it), Barrett (a coworker of mine), and Roman and Angie. Of course, I cooked; I love cooking for friends. It made me very happy. I made a vegetarian potato lasagna. I made chicken breasts stuffed with apples and thyme poached in applesauce. We also had salad and homemade bruschetta. Sarah provided the birthday cake. I played 80s music while we talked and ate. Dinner was a success.

After dinner, most of us piled on to the #14 bus and headed to POW. Sadly, the night before, May 5, was Cinco de Mayo -- a very big deal in the Mission. Most of us had already had too many margaritas the night before to truly savor the night at POW. But, we managed and I didn't have to pay for any drinks that night.

I joked constantly for a couple of weeks that I was "hurtling towards death." I really don't think it has to do with the fact that I've gotten older per se, but more with the idea I have in my head about where I should be and who I should be at the age of thirty. In other words, had I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish? Had I done the things I wanted to do? I had achieved the success I wanted to achieve? Of course, these time tables are purely socially constructed, but it doesn't lessen the sting any. I kept saying to myself, I'm thirty and I have no career, no money, no significant other, no family, independence from my parents. The list continues. But how much of that is just the illusion of the American dream? How much of it is what I really deep down want for myself?

I remember when I was in junior high. I told myself that I would finish my first book by the time I was twenty-one. As the years passed, that deadline got pushed farther and farther back till it reached the nice round age of thirty. Now that I'm 30, have I written my first book? I said no -- I have no novel to speak of, no publishing contract, no check in the mail. Suddenly, writing Archaea, my live-action role-playing game, was nothing; suddenly, self-publishing Lost One Found One, my chapbook of poems, was nothing; suddenly, writing Tellings, a monumental 348-page pen-and-paper RPG, was nothing. I didn't feel they counted because they weren't "professionally" published or "widely" read or known. But they do count. Very much so. A fact I must remind myself of everyday.

Somewhere along the way, I lost an incredible amount of confidence and surety. And I think at the center of the spider's web of insecurity lies a number of events, life changes: my mother's death, graduate school, coming out, leaving the nest. I consider these events every day in my waking hours and in my dreams. They are all interconnected, pulling and turning and touching one another as if connected by wires or mobile arms or neurons. Remarkably enough I still know what I want to do with my life, what avocations I cherish, and what dreams I will always believe. I just don't know how to get there from here. And I'm torturously terrified of taking the first step, any step.