Emergent Design for nonprofits I: problem statements

For a while I've been frustrated with certain aspects of the work I do. I feel increasingly less effective, work increasingly more, and itch for something completely different. Having read half of the article "Emergent design and learning environments: Building on indigenous knowledge" by D. Cavallo (from IBM Systems Journal, v.39, no.3&4, 2000. pp.768-781), I feel not-so-much-qualified but at-least-enabled to start talking about this. Among other things, Cavallo points out that educational reforms often get lost because of the "grammar of school," by which he means the ways of talking about and understanding what an educational/learning environment is officially supposed to be. He lays out some principles (which I'm not finished reading) and gives some concrete examples of a different approach he calls Emergent Design.


In my work (nonprofit social service programs), I think we face the same issue: stuck in the grammar of nonprofits or the grammar of social services, we are increasingly less effective as the need goes up and thus the amount of work and organizing goes up - while at the same time there is an illusion of scarcity of resources & increased competition for financial resources via grants and contracts. Maybe it's time to think differently. This is my way of trying to think about this. If anyone reads this, and if anyone reading this works in a similar field or is familiar with emergent design, please feel free to comment on this.


I'll start by naming some of the concerns I see:


1. Perception of Diminishing Resources: Money is less available to nonprofits. Individual donors are giving less. Foundations have less resources. Government budgets are shrinking. Yet with unemployment higher, more people with more skills are looking for work, and/or for opportunities to keep their skills current, and/or for a switch to a more meaningful career. Additionally, monetary wealth is still being generated and it's going somewhere.


2. Increasing need: Higher unemployment, noticeable increases in the price of basics like food, gas, and housing. Greater numbers of people falling below the poverty line. Workers taking on increasing workloads as staff size shrinks. This results in, for example, reduced quality of services, reduces responsiveness to shifting or individualized needs, increased risk of staff burnout, an often frantic work environment, etc. See Laura van Dernoot Lipsky w/ Connie Burke, Trauma Stewardship, for example.


3. The Volunteer Problem: How to find, train, retain, and create a feeling of fulfillment for volunteers. This occurs within a system where some people are paid to get volunteers to do unpaid work. There is a perception of unfairness in this system. It also potentially undercuts the happiness of the volunteer unless there's a good process for matching volunteer talents, skills, and desires with the needs of the volunteer position. Not to mention that there is a cost for the volunteer - in transportation, for example, and loss of time spent doing something else economically productive. Not to mention that volunteers are feeling the same pinches I've already mentioned.


4. The EBI Paradigm: While evidence-based interventions are an important component of service delivery, the underlying assumption is that an intervention is a template that can be overlaid across a broad array of organizations - a top-down approach that may or may not work, based on the correct alignment of all kinds of factors within an organization.


5. The Professionalization of Social Services: Let's be clear - I benefit from this system. I applaud the approach that pays people to (in my view) do the work of our society. I believe that our moral/ethical duty as a society is to care for those who are (a) unable to care for themselves due to disability, injury, etc.; and/or (b) need assistance because they are on the receiving end of social ills like labor exploitation, racial injustice, and the like. I believe that we as a society are in - or nearly in - a position to provide basic services like food assistance, medical care, etc. to those who for whatever reason need it. In the same way that we hire fire fighters, teachers, and others, we hire social service providers to do the work of the collective community. However, as we do that, we have created a professional class of providers which can set up a structure that can be inaccessible to consumers/clients by creating a "grammar of social services" and a set of unquestioned ideas about how social services should be run. I'm not saying this is all bad, but it does seem to have some unintended negative outcomes.


6. The Provider-Client Paradigm: Similarly, the professionalization sets up a dynamic where there are providers and those who receive the service. Like nearly all dualisms, this creates a lopsided power dynamic. Such a power dynamic, coupled with some of the other things above, can make a pretty hot mess. Including power struggles, superiority complex, perceptions of dependency, and all kinds of other manipulations on both sides. Let me be clear - I'm not blaming individuals within this system. This is a problem with the system itself and people, regardless of their good intentions, can sometimes fall victim to this stuff because everybody is really just trying to get by the best way they know how. Consumers and providers are just trying to get their needs met. Yes this doesn't excuse individual abuses, but I want to keep my focus on the system right now.


That's what I'm thinking about, as I'm reading. Feel free to pass along suggestions. I know I'm not the only one - and judging by the date on the article, I'm coming rather late to the game here.

Six Kinds of Sky

Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction by Luis Alberto Urrea

This collection reminds me that one of my favorite genres is farce. When it's done well, farce makes you laugh at the situations without turning away from the hard realities it describes. This book does that - makes me laugh and almost cry at the same time. While I don't know much about the realities of Mexican-US border life, I suspect that the underlying realities that Urrea describes are actually as stark and unjust, even if the actual people are not as broadly drawn, as slapstick, as he writes them. His descriptions of American missionaries are perfect! I'll be reading more of his books. View all my reviews >>

The Good Dance: Dakar/Brooklyn

Review for The Good Dance: Dakar/Brooklyn

Reggie Wilson & Andrea Ouamba / Fist & Heel Performance Group and Compagnie 1er Temps

April 3, 2010 at YBCA

Most collaborations I see are all about the love of working together. Artists share compliments and tributes with each other in a general lovefest. Dakar/Brooklyn was something much more complicated and beautiful. While it was obvious the two choreographers and the two companies worked well together – and had tremendous respect, and trust for each other – this work showed a more complicated view of collaboration.

The dances were full of conflict, frustration, and even violence. Imitation, correction, disjunction, domination, and even lynching figured into the piece – even as beautiy, grace, lyricism, and intimate collaboration also threaded through the series of dances. Witness the direct and muscular challenges between dancers of all sizes, the almost fighting that happened at some points – and at the same time, other moments in which couples and trios of dancers climbed, held, swung, and morphed their bodies together into singular creatures.

Given that these artists are portraying not only their own collaboration, but a complicated history of continental African and disaporic (especially American) African people. This tone was apparent from the beginning dance, a single dancer looking back and trying to imitate a series of singles and couples dancing together. Her own movements were more graceful in comparison with the crispness of those she imitated. Yet she showed her frustration in trying to adapt her own style and body in imitation of the others.

This show was not beautiful in the traditional sense, but more beautiful in the variety of bodies, styles, and combinations. The water bottles glistened magically in a rather obscure reference to…the Mississippi and Congo Rivers, concerns about potable water, the waves and floods of influence, or the work of building up and tearing down?

The wide-open set, spare and harshly lit to the point that flying sweat and dust were visibly part of the mix, added to this feeling of a spacious ground for the complicated nature of collaboration. Reggie Wilson’s role as a sort of fatherly narrator and caretaker added an interesting and welcome addition to highlight the often-hidden role of the choreographer. Andreya Ouamba’s role was made more subtle, but no less powerful, by not identifying himself until near the end, when he walked among the sprawled bodies of the dancers, speaking in another language – and dance the final, almost-awkward duet with Mr. Wilson.

As someone unfamiliar with the language of dance, as well as possessing little knowledge about the African diaspora, I found the piece to be uncomfortable in a good way. Rather than a feel-good back-to-Africa piece, this one portrayed how histories of separation, violence, romanticism, paternalism, slavery, and co-optation leave a legacy on bodies and movement. One of the poignant references throughout all the pieces portrayed dancers lynching each other and lynching themselves. Toward the end, dancers donned gauzy costumes that seemed to reference the American Southern gentry, a surprisingly emotional reference to the cultural histories that hang around all of us – sometimes hampering movement and sometimes providing a strange enhancement to the performance.

On the evening I was there, the audience seemed to not know what to do with the performance. It was certainly uncomfortable for me as a progressive white person to see the embodied truths portrayed directly in front of my eyes – the effects of history and culture on bodies, and the difficulties as well as possibilities inherent in partnership. And perhaps more difficult – the imperfect relations between the many peoples in Africa and their disasporic kin.

Ode to the Muse, in the voice of my ancestors

I will make you a useful painting.
It will keep you warm at night.
It will dry your dishes, dust your table,
And praise God, it will
Not be too prideful.
It will not be extravagant
Or brightly colored or adorned.
People will not admire it -
Or at least I will not
Acknowledge their praise.
I will make it in tiny pieces,
After all my duties are done,
A few minutes while boiling
The potatoes, rocking the baby,
And praising God, I will
Not be too happy painting it.
Useful - putting food on the table,
Teaching my kids, planting crops,
I will first use the paint to
Paint my neighbor's barns
And use the leftovers
If there are any,
For my useful painting.

(part of The Artist's Way exercises, 11 Jan 2010)

Wedding 3: magnolias

Yesterday I spent a little time walking through the SF Botanical Garden and the Conservatory of Flowers. I sat under a magnolia tree - all sharp edges and sticks, no leaves, and a ton of buds as big as my fist, and big white and pink flowers, the size of my open hand. It felt embarrassing, obscene, ridiculous. It felt unnecessary, that these big, pretty flowers would be blooming on a tree with no leaves. It seemed impractical.

And then I realized that beauty is practical. Without knowing a ton about botanical science, I know that the flowers are a means of survival for the trees. Not that there is only one definition of beauty, but that it is profoundly important to have beauty, joy, and love. I wondered if I was deluding myself, or being silly, trying to scratch out a life lesson from a magnolia tree.

The truth is, I am being silly and ridiculous and deluded. I could also say that the tree was bred to be like that, that in nature the tree wouldn't have so many crazy blooms, and that the flowers drained energy from the tree, and that the water used to keep it alive might be better used to improve life somewhere that they're suffering a drought. I could say that it's just a tree, and not a religious lesson or a philosophical treatise.

But that's also deluded and silly. So I get my choice of what to be deluded about. I get to choose the connections I see between things in the world. That's one of the miracles of consciousness - I get to make connections out of the chaos of life. Maybe I'm wrong sometimes, but I get that choice, and I get to create the measuring stick to decide when I'm right or wrong. I get to say, for example, that I'm right when the produce of the connections is joy, love, and healing. I get to say that the magnolia tree teaches me something deep about the importance of joy and beauty and God.

Wedding 2

So maybe I won't be doing quite so much blogging as I thought. Every time I think of doing it, it feels like a task instead of something to look forward to. And I have quite enough tasks, thank you. It's funny how planning a wedding is a lot like another part-time job. A little more fun, a little better payoff - but I don't get paid for this. And I already work 40 hours a week plus commute.

Who knows how often I'll write. I'm also doing The Artist Way by Julia Cameron. It's a 12 week 'creative recovery' program that helps jumpstart my creative outlets, with a spiritual bent that coincides nicely with what I'm getting from the East Bay Church of Religious Science. I'm enjoying it so far, thought it shoves my face in a lot of things that I like to use as excuses for not being more creative and authentic, or as interesting as I actually am.

Today, in one of the exercises, I came across this idea that I've sort of held onto without realizing it. One of the exercises had me list 5 reasons I can't really believe in a supportive God (ie the God or force in the universe that created me uniquely, loves me, wants me to succeed, exults in my creativity, and is the source of abundance and joy). One of the things I wrote was "The God of my childhood keeps beating up this loving, gender-less movement that is a loving God. The loving God just seems like a weakling."

Ahem, can I get an amen about the monotheistic religious roots of violence? Remember Prof. Kuan's lessons about the ancient vision of God in Genesis and Exodus?

This relates also to those relatives' negative reactions I wrote about earlier. Their disapproval, their refusal to acknowledge (even if not agreeing with) that my relationship with my partner is a source of joy (not to mention a multiplication of love and a fertile soil for the good work we both do in the world) - that refusal is a slap in the face of that ever-loving, joyful God I believe in. There's a stubborn, brutish insistence that there is One Right Way, and that Way is vengeful, jealous, manipulative - the distant father-figure God, whose approval you always seek and never actually achieve.

But honestly, are fear and hatred, condemnation and joy-killing actually stronger than love, joy, creativity, passion, and the diversity of creation? I weighed it out in my mind. After all (as the film A Single Man pointed out) fear is a strong motivator. It causes us to buy toothpaste and breath spray, to assent to policies that hurt us or our neighbors. Fear breeds a certain kind of allegiance - if not loyalty. Hatred and condemnation, along with determined joy-squelching, do work well in psychological manipulation. It reduces people to mute livestock - who don't show their true colors, their authenticity, and who don't really live real lives. That's powerful.

But isn't love powerful, too? Love multiplies, builds goodwill, and feeds joy. Then again, so does fear. Fear infects. It builds acquiescence, and feeds uniformity. Like fascism.

I guess in the end, I'm not sure if love is more powerful. It is for me. Whatever feeds joy must be more powerful than whatever feeds acquiescence and conformity. Love spreads out like a growing plant. Fear pulls in toward itself like the sea building a tsnuami. So I guess that's why I'm getting married, or how I want to orient my life. I need to remind myself how to choose love and joy, and how to resist fear by acts of creativity, using the unique gifts that equip me to do the job.

wedding 1

After watching half of Julie & Julia, as you might expect I am not only inspired to cook, but also to blog. This happens at the same time as we come upon 50 days til our wedding. Since the Prop 8 challenge trial is happening right now, and since I'm overwhelmed by the responses we've received for our wedding, I want to share a little of the journey we're on. It will help me sort through my thoughts & emotions a little bit.

Yesterday was a marathon of shopping - to the point that I was cranky at the end. But the end result is my partner looks stunning, and I think I'll look nice too. We need a few alterations, but we're on track for clothing.

A significant number of relatives have responded negatively to the invitation. I'll explore that later. A more significant number of friends have responded so positively that it makes me cry in gratitude. We are receiving so much help and support - and I'm reminded that we're surrounded by people who are happy to celebrate with us (and commiserate with the tough things). What a wonderful place to be.

We're well on our way to mapping out the ceremony and the chapel design - as well as building our potluck reception (so many friends who are excellent cooks!).

I'm excited to see what happens when all of these elements - friends, family, food, spirit, joy, and most of all love - come together on the vernal equinox!

Illegal

A while back, a relative asked about my upcoming marriage, "Isn't that illegal?"

Aside from revealing some of the foundational differences between her perspective on sexuality and mine, it also made me think about the meaning of "illegal" anyway. Then last week I read an article about immigration and deportation in ColorLines magazine (http://colorlines.com/article.php?ID=618).

The introduction mentions that Obama has begun calling undocumented residents in the US as "illegal." It called up that memory again, of my "illegal" relationship.

What exactly is illegal about undocumented workers and their families in the US? It's not the work they do, that supports daily life for the rest of us. It's not their spending money to meet their needs, which supports the economy. It's not even their physical, human existence in our communities. What's illegal is their existence without the stamp of approval from the administration that acts on behalf of this country. To me, it's the same for LGBT people. It's not our participation in the daily life of this country. It's not our love for each other. What's illegal is that we exist without the stamp of approval from our fellow community members.

Yes, we should work to find ways that all people who live here can be documented - for their protection and access to the benefits of living as part of our society. But the answer is not to withhold approval. That doesn't make anyone go away. It just makes them go underground. Which, let me say, benefits those who do get the stamp of approval. My share of the benefits of living in the US get divided by fewer people because the undocumented people don't get to share them. I get to benefit from their work across the spectrum of employment - from lower prices that result from unfairly (and illegally) low wages and substandard working conditions.

In the same way, straight people (those who participate in socially acceptable relationships) get access to a wide spectrum of images and supports for their relationships, while those of us "illegals" get messages that our relationships aren't "real" or "correct," and that our struggles to experience love and relationships are inherently flawed. The result is that when we experience relationship struggles, it's because we're deviant. When hetero folks experience relationships struggles, it's because they're relationship struggles.

I'm sure there are flaws in the ways I'm comparing undocumented residents and workers in the US with undocumented relationships and sexuality. But I also think there are some important similarities that create common causes for support for each other.

When, Why, and How I Realized I'm Gay and Chose to Accept It

I recently received an email from a relative who asked when, why, how, etc. I became gay. This is my answer, and I wanted to post it because it relates to what I want to write about in my next post.

--------

"So here's my answer to your question of when, why, how, etc. I realized that I'm gay and chose to accept it:
In college I was exposed to many different perspectives, and to an environment where we could engage with each other about them. This was different from my experience growing up in a place where there was one right perspective and many wrong ones, even if people disagreed on what the right and wrong perspectives were. In college I met people (mostly straight people, and a few gay ones) who articulated perspectives that shared my values but not my rules. I came to see that the way I believed in God as a child (a God who made rules that I could not understand and could not live up to, and who punished and shamed me because I could not meet those impossibly high ideals) was not the God that I experienced every day in my life (a God who affirms my worth as a human being, who takes great pleasure and joy in Creation, and who asks me first to love my neighbor, myself, and the earth - and to understand my life values and ethics from that perspective). In the middle of this, I realized that I was attracted to some men as well as some women. I came to understand that I can engage my desire for love & intimacy (and my desires for creativity, joy, relationships, learning, etc.) by measuring my actions with my values - asking how my choices reflect and increase the love, joy, and grace that are divine gifts given to everyone who chooses to accept them. Like anyone learning and growing into emotional maturity, I had some relationships that met my values, and others that didn't. I had friends and mentors who helped me sift through my choices, actions, and experiences.

These values and life experiences are what led me to commit to a relationship with my partner and accept my sexuality as it is. This relationship continues to provide a foundation for my work in the world, addressing conditions that hurt others, stifle joy, and increase hatred & distrust rather than love - and helping provide an example for others in engaging with deep love, compassion, and joy in existence. Our relationship is a gift that increases love and joy in the world and does not hurt others in the process.
How did you come to engage and accept your desire for love, intimacy, and companionship in your relationship?"

fear ---> moral outrage

So last night we went to see Inglorious Basterds. Aside from being visually stunning quite often, surprisingly funny at times, interestingly written, very precisely timed for suspense and maximum impact, and well-acted by a number of people in it -- I never want to see another Quentin Tarantino movie again. I can't handle it. Not surprising - I don't do well with lots of graphic violence. It also raised some uncomfortable issues about justification and entitlement to revenge. And in this case, quite a parallel process, poetic justice kind of revenge, given the historical context it refers to. Questions I can't answer, which is a great thing.

But therewas a scene closer to the end that triggered something inside me. It was visceral terror - I thought I was going to throw up, I was trembling, and my hands and arms felt tingly. It was very physical, and I'm not entirely sure why. I stayed in my seat until the end (which I'm glad about, because I didn't want that scene to be the last I saw). I left the theater quickly and crossed the street. I intensely did not want to see any of my fellow theater-goers except my partner, and I didn't want to hear anyone making any comments about it. I felt disgusted, horrified, and deeply disturbed. And moved very quickly into moral condemnation. I did not want to know of anyone who found the film entertaining. I did not want to hear anyone say they liked it. I precluded my partner's comments about whether or not he liked it, and consumed our world with my experience of fear and moral condemnation.

This morning, I'm much more settled, but left with better awareness of this move from visceral fear to moral outrage and condemnation. I think it says a lot about human experience and how we've come to understand morality and fear. What triggers and justifies moral tirades - at a deeper level than simple discomfort with what is unfamiliar? When moral outrage spurts up somewhere, maybe now I'm better equipped to look for the bodily fears behind it. I don't have anything more to say about it right now...but there it is.

'reality'

I haven't been writing because I fell down a deep hole called "two part-time jobs with small nonprofit agencies." I will emerge eventually, but probably not for a couple more weeks.

In the meantime, I wanted to write about a person I saw during the part of one of my jobs where I meet with HIV+ people who are eligible for some of the services we offer. I met with a person who was quite religious in conversation and very cautious about personal details. They revealed that they had once been almost dead from 'cancer' and that a very close 'loved one' had died recently. The usually language of partner, lover, boyfriend, AIDS, gay, and all of that was completely absent, except for the times when I referred to my own life & experiences.

As I pondered my pastoral diagnosis (this is not part of my job explicitly, but it's behind many of the things I do), I considered what goals I might identify for this person. Primarily I thought about what it means to 'face reality.' The reality for this (as least partially homosexual) person is that they have HIV and their partner died from it. The reality is that they don't receive certain helpful services because they don't wish at this point to publicly identify with the diagnosis. But that's not the only reality.

It's also a reality that their family (from what I gather) is not particularly accepting of same-sex desire, nor of HIV status. Their religious community isn't either. And perhaps most importantly, this person is not particularly comfortable with the labels I just described. Instead, they have found ways to talk around this cancer, the burden of grief of watching friends and a lover die from it - and knowing that they also have the diagnosis.

I think about the many ways I find to talk around certain things in my life - what things I let slide under assumptions, and what kind of language I use to frame my life, depending on the audience. How important is it to make someone agree with my version of reality?

I guess at this point it seems more important to support their survival. If they refuse to get treatment, for example, or if they seem too isolated and depressed, then I might find ways to help them get access to treatment and social support. But who am I to mess with the structure of their self-understanding? Maybe as I get to know this person (who was delightful & interesting to talk to, and who gave me a hug when I left), my perspective will change. But in the meantime, I'm struck with my own impulse to "make" them describe their reality in terms I would use - rather than let them structure it in ways that work for them.

"those people" who make "those choices"

It's been a few weeks since I sent a letter to my extended family, confirming the rumors that I am gay and that I'm getting married. It was a prelude to sending save-the-date cards, and eventually our wedding invitations. A relative had suggested that it might be better to send a letter before the cards, since I hadn't really talked with most of them directly about my sexuality.

To be honest, I expected mostly silence. That's part of the culture where I come from: controversial or potentially divisive issues are met first with silence (perhaps in the hope that they'll go away or resolve themselves on their own - a reaction that crosses over into physical ailments like cancer, I might add). I had hoped, against my experience growing up, that a few might, like one member of my family, say "I'm glad you're happy" or even "I'm excited to meet your partner." I didn't ask for a response, and I provided my contact information explicitly for dialogue, but not for condemnation.

I have received two responses. One clearly stated that their values do not support my marriage, and the other carefully drew. The common thread among both was a curious distancing of "the issue." Neither mentioned homosexuality, or even sexuality at all. It was like they were discussing not me, but a vague unnamed issue. They spoke of "people who make the decisions you speak of" and "the actions you describe." That was a surprise.

I'm not clear if it was politeness or evasion. Perhaps it was an attempt to frame things differently. We were not talking anymore about my relationship, but about decisions and actions that I take. It's a subtle difference, but it's at the heart of a lot of the religious back-and-forth about sexuality. It's important for opponents of gayness to frame it as a "lifestyle" or a choice. I realized that this enables condemnation of what people "choose to do," while ignoring underlying circumstances. The underlying circumstance for me is that I do not choose who I am attracted to. I adamantly emphasize that I choose to act on those attractions, sometimes, in the framework of a loving relationship with my partner [and I do not condemn those who act on their attractions in other, consensual ways - or who choose not to act on them, based on their values].

It's been interesting to read these letters and consider how personal relationships are impacted by political and religious perspectives and language. I doubt if it is easy for most of my relatives to grapple with values that may seem to be in conflict: a religious perspective that places sexuality itself in a suspect category of desires and bodily pleasure, and a religious perspective that values family and community [and its underlying diversity]. What is the breaking point where a person rejects another person from family and community for their difference? And what does that person choose to ignore or silence rather than reject? And what, among the great, glorious diversity of creation, does that person embrace?

not the problem

Today someone asked me whether or not I thought my parents were to blame for my being gay.

First off: No. My parents did not make me gay (or prevent me from becoming heterosexual).

Second off, the question presumes that being gay is somehow maladjusted. That somehow, they did something "wrong" (were 'absent,' or 'spoiled' their child, for example) and their child ended up with this 'disorder.' The truth is that my sexuality is not disordered, but just a fact of my life, like having brown hair and ten toes. So the premise of the theory is wrong to start with.

Third, the question presumes that because being gay is a problem, someone must be guilty. This is what makes me the most angry. The theory is a recipe for endless tortured guilt on the part of parents. They can't go back and correct anything, and they can't move beyond the terrible thing they might have done to result in this horrible condition (which is, by my reckoning, a loving, committed relationship in which my partner and I are building a household and a family together, and a base from which we do good things in the world). My parents did the best they could raising me and my siblings - they made some mistakes and did a lot of things right - and I dare anyone to say they made me gay, or my siblings heterosexual, by their parenting skills!

Fourth, there are plenty of examples of kids who grew up with absent fathers and/or mothers who babied their sons in which the children turned out to be heterosexual. Just as there are many gay people who had loving, present fathers and mothers who were strict with them. My partner, in fact, was spoiled by his father, and his mother was very strict with him.

Fifth, here's what impact my parents did have on my relationship: They helped (along with an entire community and extended family of people) form my values. They raised me to think independently, to value loving relationships, and not to let myself be hurt by others. They taught me to be generous with others, careful with my money, and to care about those who are vulnerable. They taught me to deeply consider my spirituality and values. They taught me to be practical but fed my imagination, to be strong but to express my emotions. They taught me to cook, to study, and to be committed to my partner. They taught me to be tough, and to endure in difficult times. I am grateful for these things, and if you want to blame them for that, go ahead.

My friend Miak posted this link on his facebook page: Homophobia is Not Just Another Point of View, and it makes an important point. The post is about NYU Law School hiring a visiting faculty member from Singapore, who is an expert on constitutional law, human rights, and the UN convention to end all discrimination against women, but who is publicly and actively homophobic. To her credit, she's pithy, if mistaken, about it: "Diversity is not an excuse for perversity," and comparing anal sex to trying to drink with a straw up your nose. (Let's pretend for the moment that straight people don't also have anal sex, and let's not try to pick through what she's trying to say about the purpose of sex with this metaphor.) I was struck by one student's defense that anti-gay laws are the only point where she "lets her religion cloud her rationality," because she's actually got a lot of good things to say about constitutional law and human rights. The blogger linked above clears through a lot of my kneejerk responses. Of course a wide variety of perspectives should be engaged in law school. Of course a person's anti-homosexual stance shouldn't cloud other gifts and wisdom she has to offer. But can I trust someone who wants to impose her brand of morality on the whole system, while still upholding constitutional law and human rights? Does human rights become a pissing contest for whose moral view trumps the others? It's not okay to discriminate against women even if your religion says so, but it's okay to discriminate against gays because my religion says so.

This blogger cuts through that. Homophobia is not "just another viewpoint among many." It has serious consequences (see, for example, the article the other day on the severe rate of HIV infections among gay men across Africa, tied directly to homophobia and mistreatment.) It also muddies the question about morality in a diverse system. What ties people together in a nation? There are values and perspectives that can do so, or at least the dialogue about them can do so. But when it becomes the values of one God or one moral system that erases all others, that's a problem. And, most importantly, as the blogger points out, everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but with that entitlement comes the right to engage with others about them, especially in disagreement. It's not that this visiting professor shouldn't come to NYU, but that she can't pretend to be a victim because others are questioning her authority and viewpoint, based on her outspoken and emphatic homophobia. If she puts herself out in a particular point of view, she can't insulate herself from those who wish to engage with her about it.

And I take this to heart, considering my own points of view, and when I feel the need to insulate or strike back with a personal insult when someone disagrees with me. I get the urge, but I also think it's important to engage with it rather than run away.

in the wrong line of work

Yesterday after a rather frustrating day of job searches in which everyone wanted at couple of years' experience in the field (which wasn't my own), my browser did something that blanked out the online job history I had just completed for a job. That's when I stopped for the day.

Sometimes job hunting makes me

feel like a goldfish in a sushi bar.

I'm a fish,

But nobody wants to put me in sushi.

I might be golden,

And have fluttery fins,

But my body of experience is

too small,

To fit into the pretty little rolls

Chef Craigslist is dishing up today.

But today is a new day,

And someone once sang that

to a goldfish,

The little plastic castle is a

surprise every time.

here's what made me cry this week

Thanks to my Queering the Use of the Bible class, I was given this:

Tiramisu Wedding Cake

by Kathy Skaggs (a really wonderful Kentucky? poet who is a friend of the professor's)

We called him nathan

the Old Testament name for gift

patiently slicing each layer of wedding cake into thirds

our family's best gift to the future.

Her father named her Vrushali

wife of Vedic Lord Karna

grating organic semi-sweet chocolate he tells us

"I found the recipe on the internet and Nathan does the rest."

And here they are

and here we are

manicured pedicured starched pressed

peeled layered laminated

fluffed and blow-dried.

A wedding cake awaits us

assembled through one hundred and four painstaking steps

from cream cheese Kahlua espresso

whipping cream chocolate fresh berries

and much much more.

We celebrate their wedding

in Sanskrit and English

with Beethoven punch and wine

poetry promises candles and flowers

mingled with our joy

and the most elaborate wedding cake

the world has ever seen.

We have driven and flown here

from New Jersey Florida and Texas

India Russia and central Kentucky

cross country across town across the state and around the world

from southern hillsides downtown streets and suburban cul-de-sacs

a community assembled

as painstakingly as a tiramisu wedding cake.

We have given them sheets and food processors

cards flowers hugs

good wishes and a crystal punch bowl

but these are not the real gifts.

The real gifts began before today

and continue long after the honeymoon.

We have given them history and hope

advice and comfort

we have lent them our money our ear and our truck

we have laughed with them and cried with them.

Today is just a symbol a moment

today we will rejoice we'll laugh and dance

and disassemble wedding cake.

Tomorrow the real work begins

the real gift of friendship and marriage continues

as we depart to our homes and our workplaces

to math conferences and Al-Anon meetings

unpacking and repacking and working off wedding cake

we take this responsibility with us:

It takes a whole community to support a marriage.

(from The Poet Laureate of People Who Hate Poetry - by Kathy Skaggs, Time Barn Books, Nashville, 2007).

outsmarted again by my mother-in-law!

Today, as I was making pancakes as my mother-in-law prepared to move back home. This involved cleaning and showing me all the six different brooms, brushes, vacuums, etc that she used to clean the floor and carpets (she loves to clean, which I try very hard to understand but often fail). I asked if it was really useful to keep so many different cleaning tools.

She replied, "You see, it's like your cooking. You are whisking the egg whites with a whisk, but couldn't you just use a fork?" I looked around at my bowls and whisks and spatulas and spoons and measuring cups, and I realized all their jobs could be done with a spoon, fork, knife, and cup.

Outsmarted by Mama again!

privacy

My partner and I have been talking about privacy and confidentiality when it comes to online stuff. How much do you share about your personal life, and how much do you consider your online "persona" when you post things? Do you think about who else may be seeing it, and unintended consequences?

My partner is a much more private person, where I am less concerned about that. The way I grew up, secrets and "privacy" ended up being prisons where I couldn't talk about my experience and reach out to others for help. So when I hear about privacy boundaries, I want to push on them. Why is it important to be private? I want to know.

At the same time, I am definitely guilty of saying too much, of revealing too much on my blog or on facebook, which I assume only friends and family read - but anyone can, searching on google.

So where's the line? As my friend Erica has said, usually you find a boundary when you stumble over it.

I'm curious what other people think about how they write about personal things online.

violence & responsibility

Last night we learned that a friend of ours got attacked by some gay men who had heard a rumor that he had transitioned. Our friend is healing well, which we're grateful for.

Obviously this made me feel disturbed and angry. I'm still mulling over my thoughts and responses - but I have a few things to say about it already.

What is it with men that we need to do violence against each other anyway? I struggle to understand how this rumor could lead someone to violence anyway. It reminds me how much violence is related to fear of the unknown and a need to prove oneself by dominating or denying someone else. We teach this as a culture, from our foreign policy down to our voting, and even sometimes our "sex" lives. I use sex in quotation marks because the intimate, vulnerable act of sex is the opposite of an act of violation. I'm reminded that men sometimes say women are "emotional" or "too carried away by emotion," but what do you call it when a man lets his emotions of anger or fear lead him to violence? And what possible gain is it, to commit violence like this, when it simply leads to more fear and anger? Where does this cycle stop?

What makes me even more livid is that it was gay men who did it. Gay men, who know that even in the Bay Area we are at risk for violence against us for not fitting the dominant mold of masculinity. Over and over, James Baldwin's analysis rings in my head: there are two categories of response to oppression. The first is to strive to get back into the norm, and the second is to find common cause with others who are oppressed. Too often, I think gay people, especially those of us who can "fit in" pretty well, take the first option. If we can just widen the circle a little bit, we think, we'll be okay - safe, happy, and smiled upon. The underbelly of this is that it continues to stand on the same principles of exclusion and violence. I learned early in my feminist education, and in my own life experience, that this simply doesn't work.

Gay men who seek to be included back into the fold of normative masculinity are cutting their nose off to spite their face. If we strive only to "be just like you [hetero men]" we lose. We sacrifice, if not a part of ourselves, then a part of who "we" are in a larger sense.

Even more, I have criticism for the gay men who buy into the norm of masculinity. These are the guys who idolize big muscles, big penises and overt, even violence, masculinity. I use idolize very consciously - meaning those who make a god or a savior of these things. It's not the attraction to these traits that I see as the problem, but the unconscious results. The implication is that a man who doesn't have a specific size and shape of anatomy is somehow not "really" a man. That kind of thinking is just a breath away from the implication that a man who has sex with a man is not "really" a man. That kind of violence is a violence against oneself as well as against other people. We have to create a culture where this isn't the kneejerk response to someone who doesn't fit our idea of what someone is "supposed" to be.

I don't know what happened in that attack - who these gay men were, or what their motivations were. But I do know that I am implicated here. When I reinforce the idea that some men are more "men" that others, based on arbitrary traits like that, I do violence against myself and others. When I try to be just like the norm, or try to stretch the norm just enough so I can fit in again, I commit violence against myself and other people. It has to stop somewhere. So let's make it stop here.

Food, Inc., Foreign Policy, and Kansas

Last week my partner and I went to see the documentary Food, Inc., about the industrialized food system and how it's hurting people, the planet, the poor, and the economy itself.

Much of the film was revealing for him, who had seen it a few days earlier at a childhood obesity prevention conference. Hardly any of it was new information for me, having grown up in an agricultural small town in Kansas, with a father who managed an agricultural coop and a mother who worked in a nursing home kitchen. We were not hippie people, but we had a big garden and raised & butchered chickens every year - along with the occasional lambs and pigs, which we drove (in our '54 Chevy pickup) to the slaughterhouse. My mom refused to buy supermarket meats because they just didn't taste good. I was too young to remember the Farm Crisis of the 80s, but financial ruin always hovered on the edge of most people's vision. Talking about the weather wasn't small talk because the economy depended on the weather system that provided good crops or bad. I remember my dad shaking his head over the idea of farm subsidies that paid us per acre NOT to plant. I remember when I realized that good crops didn't necessarily mean good money because more crops flooding the market translated into lower price per bushel. I remember countless times when my mom worried about the overspray from the fields drifting into our garden. We learned to read labels because my dad was allergic to corn - and almost everything had corn syrup in it.

Living in California, I hear more and more from my mom about this or that person with cancer. Young people with brain tumors. Mothers with pancreatic cancer. Breast Cancer, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer. When my Grammy died, I angrily asked why no one draws the connection between pesticides and cancer that disfigured her face so her glasses didn't sit right when she was lying there in the casket. No on has an answer because we all depend on those chemicals.

Frankly, the industrial food system is much worse now than then. Visiting my dad in Iowa, I asked why farmers used genetically modified crops and a pesticide that killed EVERYTHING but the seed containing a certain gene. Didn't that scare them? He drove me past fields of even, perfectly green rows, and then fields that were uneven (signaling less yield when harvesting) and weeds here and there. That's all the argument you need, he said, even in Central and South American countries that outlaw GMOs - because the farmers see neighboring countries with perfect fields, and the illegal market grows.

Growing up, I didn't make the connections between that and foreign policy, or with the e.coli outbreaks at fast food restaurants (where we rarely ate anyway, because it was unhealthy, and not really that tasty compared to home cooking).

I learned more about this in college. I saw the commodities market in the Midwest (and, for example, among coffee farmers in Ethiopia) where equality among producers meant exploitation on the part of the buyers.

I'm also reading a book about the violence of a belief system that sees one's own nation as "God's chosen people" over all others. I read about false capitalism based on large corporations that can leverage their assets to put small ones out of business (remember, the free market depends on equality or small distinctions between companies). I read about structural adjustment programs in industrializing countries, in which aid money is tied to "helpful" economic policies that put the countries further into debt (ie, forcing farmers to grow commodity crops like corn, tobacco, and coffee, instead of food crops that feed the region). In the film, they talked about how farmers in Mexico, encouraged to grow corn for the international market, went out of business because small farmers everywhere tried to sell their corn, ensuring lots of corn for low prices. These farmers then come north to work at industrial food factories, where they are picked off and deported by immigration enforcement. Attention: these farmers are punished, but the corporations that hire them run smoothly, neither threatened by the immigration enforcement officers nor by work stoppage due to worker deportation. Odd.

And by the way: cheap food, usually manufactured with nutrient-low ingredients, adjusts people's palates to salt and fat instead of flavor. There's also a piece about economic markets in low-income areas (West Oakland, for example) where there are plenty of liquor stores and fast food joints - but astonishingly few grocery stores that sell fresh produce. Thus people with less income (often due to economic policies that exploit their labor and pay low wages) get diabetes, obesity, and poor health. Considering that, don't forget the racist dynamics of how that happens.

Anyway, this film is worth seeing - and worth weighing your values around the environment, fair worker policies, and the food system. It's not always possible to live perfectly, but it's always possible to live better and make better choices. In college, one of my best friends Sam and I used to talk about the knee-jerk anti-corporate mentality. He points out that corporations have the money to pay good wages, set labor standards, pay good health benefits, and a host of other really helpful things. The key is not to dismantle them, but to reinforce human values in their actions. I like the cooperative system where small entities can organize to leverage their power and negotiate on a slightly better playing field with multinational buyers. But it's complicated.

I think I've written enough here for today. Check out the movie and learn a little more from places like The People's Grocery in West Oakland.