Summer 2009 Commentary

Overview

I taught middle school students during my second summer with Breakthrough Collaborative. At the end of my internship, I questioned whether or not I was suited to come back to teach a third summer. After Breakthrough ended, I focused more on improving my dancing. I took a summer intensive class in San Francisco with the Funksters, Funkanometry’s youth team. Toward the end of the intensive, Trung and I broke up (for reasons still not mentioned). For the rest of the summer, I continue dancing and rebuilding a friendship with Trung.

General Comments

Being the beginning of my new blog, this season laid down all the basic groundwork of my life. I introduced some of the most important people to me, my parents, the Oakridge crew (Peter, Black John, and Miranda, who are prominent in flashbacks), and of course, Trung. I really wanted to capture who I was, personality-wise, before I started writing more about the issues and drama drama drama that I faced in both the present and past. We got that I was a cold hard realist who’s always tough on himself, I was wishy-washy regarding how much of my “gay identity” I was comfortable with, I had trouble letting go, I was doubting my dreams of being a French teacher, I had a self-deprecating, satirical sense of humor, and I tended to bottle up feelings.

I also attempted to write about my beliefs about fate, but honestly, those entries turned out disastrous because I didn’t even understand my own beliefs. That’s why I scrapped the whole fate concept in the final entry of the season (though I would eventually bring it back almost one year later.)

Fall 2009 is when my life really starts to pick up momentum as dancing started to really matter for auditions, I made choices regarding my future career aspirations, and continued to have ups and downs with my friendship with Trung.

Select Entry Commentary

“The Family Disappointment”

Nothing’s too special about this one, honestly, but I guess I could call it iconic or a milestone because the entry’s flashback tells how I came out to my parents, which sets up for a lot of the conflicts with my parents in my flashbacks and in the present. Also noteworthy is that I mention a second family disappointment, but I don’t actually elaborate on what it was (the first being my coming out and the second being my choosing dance over tennis). I reveal a few months later in “Photo Album 2008” the second family disappointment.

“This Stud”

The very first tagline of my new blog was “So Incendiary.” I originally intended to have more entries like this one where I satirized or made fun of some particularly issue (in this case, it was one regarding myself, my working out, and my blog). I found it hard to do that with every entry, however, so I eventually ditched the “So Incendiary” tagline, and this entry would be the only purely comedic entry for a while.

“Antiphony”

Yeah, I know, this was a very disappointing entry that offered very little information about a huge breakup of a 20-month relationship. The only thing you got was a flashback that could hardly be considered an interpretative hint.

“Call Me Ishmael” & “In Our Hearts’ Honeymoon”

The titles of both these entries are taken from lines in Moby Dick, which, I guess is a good book but I’ve never read it; I just knew it had to do with a whale, and these two entries revolved around my stuffed animal blue whale Op. “Call Me Ishmael” is unique in that it’s strictly an entry of reposted flashbacks, setting up for the following entry. I think “In Our Hearts’ Honeymoon” is really strong for all the words and the emotions that are unspoken. It definitely began a trend for entries where I reported simply on actions and dialogue and not on my thoughts and emotions, yet still I was able to convey them anyway. I didn’t have to explicitly explain the status of my friendship with Trung in this entry because the mending of Mop at the end symbolizes everything you need to know.

“My Lie” & “My Life”

Instead of the usual flashbacks, I decided to throw in flashforwards for the final entry of the season. Even though they’re make-believe, there’s still a lot of truth in them. Everything that happens in these “flash-forwards” is based off of what I used to want and what I currently see happening in the far future. I could’ve made an entry whining about things like, “Years ago I used to dream of being a French teacher and raising a kid with a loved one,” and, “Realistically now I see myself working whatever damn available teaching job there is, and having nothing—no lover, no parents, no good place to live, no where to go with dancing—I will probably try to adopt a kid in a desperate attempt to fulfill what remnants remained of my dreams.” But those would just be more angry rants, so I figured, why not create stories out of them?

I wrote both these entries side by side so that I could make sure that paralleled each other in certain ways while still obviously differing from each other. I’m a teacher in both entries, but while all my students love me in “My Lie,” they all hate me in “My Life.” I get secret letters from my students in both entries, one’s fan mail and the other is hate. In “My Lie,” I’m deeply and emotionally invested in my teaching job, and in “My Life,” I don’t give a fuck. One particular parallel that I hope someone caught was my treatment of the baby in the “My Lie” and my treatment of the adoption letter in “My Life.”

“My Lie”: “I scooped her up and held her in my arms, bouncing her gently. She looked up at me and cooed merrily...I ran my fingers through her soft baby hair and kissed her lightly on the forehead.”

“My Life”: “I gently scooped up the envelope and held it before me. As though I was caressing it, I ran my fingertips down its side, careful not to bend it, not to bruise it, and gradually, I brought it up to my face and kissed it lightly.”

Yeah, not a coincidence. This was set up to further emphasize the importance of that adoption letter to me, and maybe you can interpret as a hint to what the letter says.

“My Lie” might just seem like a ridiculous perfect ending, and it is—completely independent of everything of my blog—it is. But when you take the ending and ask what it says about how I felt about myself at the time I wrote the entry, the answer’s not too pretty, because the ending reveals that this person who I’m raising a child with and who I clearly love might actually be not a guy, but a woman. Ultimately though, it’s ambiguous.

One notable difference between the two entries is the absence of dance in “My Lie” and its inclusion in “My Life.” That’s because “My Lie” is supposed to be a projection of the dreams I had in high school, before I started dancing, while “My Life” is supposed to be a projection of where I was headed based on where I was standing at the time I wrote the entry, and that time included dancing. “My Life” suggests that dancing took priority over my life, and I pursued it to the point where I sacrificed my other dreams and my relationship with my mother. This is all based off on how, during my first year in college, I was worried that I cared too much about dancing and not enough about French (later discussed in the following season).

My Life is just, really, really over the top tragic. It represents the worst of how my life could possibly turn out. The letter from the adoption agency could have very well been a rejection, and hell, how much vodka did I drink in my apartment right before leaving on a more-than-one-hour-in-traffic drive down to San Jose? I was probably buzzing, maybe even full on drunk. I can’t even handle more than a beer right now, and I don’t see myself building tolerance in the next fifteen years. But, I still tried to end on a positive note, being able to see the Golden Gate Bridge sign “brilliantly” through the fog. It’s settling, but the feelings of uneasiness should still be there. Oh yeah, that was supposed to be another twist—I was living in San Francisco, not in San Jose, hence me saying that I “chased my dreams too far, literally” and “[My mom and I] hadn’t talked since the day I left.”

As fun as make-believe is, “My Lie” and “My Life” ultimately establishes what I’d be tackling the following season, issues with my French major, dance, passion for teaching, and my broken relationship.